RECYCLING MISINFORMATION ABOUT CONSERVATIVES

Some psychologists at Berkeley have just done a big rehash job on the last 50 years of conservative-bashing in the psychology literature. The rehash seems to have attracted a bit of attention in the blogosphere (e.g. here and here and here and here) so I guess I should point out a few things that people might not generally be aware of. Since I have had many articles on the psychology of conservatism published in the academic journals, I might be considered a relevant expert.

For a start, there is nothing new in it. It is the same old refrain that the Marxist Adorno and his collaborators said in their 1950 book: “The authoritarian personality”. Yet that book must have some sort of record for the amount of criticism it has attracted. In the first half of his 1981 book Right-wing authoritarianism Bob Altemeyer summarized the criticism that had been made of it in the psychological literature up to about 1973 and concluded that the Adorno work just could not prove what it purported to prove. Altemeyer, however, then went on to do some research of his own that was in some ways even more ludicrous.

The latest Berkeley rehash is remarkable for its quantity versus quality approach. They seem to agree with the dictum of Dr. Goebbels that if you tell a big enough lie often enough people will believe it. In the Berkeley case the fact that almost all psychologists have been saying the same thing about conservatives seems to be taken as good proof that what they are saying is correct. A survey taken in Galileo’s day would have concluded with equal vehemence that the earth is flat. The Berkeley group seem to have given little or no weight to the fact that psychologists are overwhelmingly Leftist and so lean over backwards to find fault with conservatives. In other words, a survey of biased “science” has just produced more biased “science”!


What would have been much more productive would have been to look at the criticisms that have been made of the orthodoxy. Let me take just one example. The Berkeley group say that one of the five characteristics of conservatives is “Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity”. This is a straight rehash of the old 1950 Marxist nonsense and ignores heaps of evidence that such general traits as intolerance of ambiguity and psychological rigidity simply do not exist. People who are rigid about one thing will probably not be rigid about other things. My paper here sets out the evidence for that at some length. And much the same goes for dogmatism. Maybe there are people who are in fact generally dogmatic but psychologists have not yet succeeded in finding a way to pick them out. Milton Rokeach in 1960 wrote a book that purported to offer a way of picking out dogmatic people but there is now plenty of evidence that the questionnaire he used for that purpose simply does not work. It is an “invalid scale” in psychometrician’s jargon.

So the Berkeley findings can best be summarized in terms of an old computer saying: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

For those who would like to see some of the data that the Berkeley results do not take into account, I list below some of my academic journal articles on the question. The best counterblast of all, however, is probably my article here which (Surprise, Surprise!) the most relevant psychology journal refused to print! Isn’t that a good way to get consensus? Just refuse to print anything that does not suit your biases! No wonder the Berkeley group found great unanimity in the the publications they surveyed!

Listed below are just those of my relevant publications that are available online. Most of the relevant articles are still only available from university libraries. More compehensive listings of relevant articles can be found here and here.

REFERENCES

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.



Ray, J.J. (1979) Does authoritarianism of personality go with conservatism? "Australian Journal of Psychology 31, 9-14.



Ray, J.J. (1979) Authoritarianism in Australia, England and Scotland. Journal of Social Psychology 108, 271-272.



Ray, J.J. (1979) The authoritarian as measured by a personality scale Solid citizen or misfit? J. Clinical Psychology 35, 744-746.



Ray, J.J. (1979) Is the Dogmatism scale irreversible? South African Journal of Psychology 9, 104-107.



Ray, J.J. (1980) Authoritarianism in California 30 years later -- with some cross-cultural comparisons. Journal of Social Psychology, 111, 9-17.



Ray, J.J. (1980) Authoritarian tolerance. Journal of Social Psychology, 111, 303-304.



Ray, J.J. (1980) Authoritarianism and hostility. Journal of Social Psychology, 112, 307-308.



Ray, J.J. (1984) Political radicals as sensation seekers. J. Social Psychology 122, 293-294.



Ray, J.J. (1984). Half of all racists are Left-wing. Political Psychology, 5, 227-236.



Ray, J.J. (1987) Conservatism and attitude to love: An empirical rebuttal of Eisler & Loye. Personality & Individual Differences, 8, 731-732.



Ray, J.J. (1989) The scientific study of ideology is too often more ideological than scientific. Personality & Individual Differences, 10, 331-336.



Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.



Ray, J.J. (1990) Racism, conservatism and social class in Australia: With German, Californian and South African comparisons. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 187-189.



Ray, J.J. (1990) The old-fashioned personality. Human Relations, 43, 997-1015.



Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Duckitt's theory. Political Psychology, 11, 629-632.



Ray, J.J. (1991) Are conservatives despairing? Rejoinder to Petersen & Wilkinson. Personality & Individual Differences, 12(5), 501.



Ray, J.J. (1991) Authoritarianism is a dodo: Comment on Scheepers, Felling & Peters. European Sociological Review, 7, 73-75.



Ray, J.J. (1998) On not seeing what you do not want to see: Meloen, Van Der Linden & De Witte on authoritarianism. Political Psychology, Vol. 19, Issue 4, 659-661.



Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1982) Conservatism, attitude to abortion and Maccoby's biophilia. Journal of Social Psychology, 118, 143-144.



Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.



Ray, J.J. & Najman, J.M. (1987) Neoconservatism, mental health and attitude to death. Personality & Individual Differences, 8, 277-279.



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Gross hypocrisy and Leftist bias in Wikipedia: Altemeyer

Revised and updated

I put up some information on the Wikipedia page for Bob Altemeyer.  Altemeyer is a particularly witless Leftist psychologist who made large and derogatory claims  about conservatives that he later had to retract.  But there was nothing on his Wikipedia page about that retraction.  So I put up a brief account of that.  What I put up was wholly scholarly and fully referenced -- just what Wikipedia says it wants.  But criticism of Leftists is not allowed of course, so my contribution was deleted after only a few days.

I imagine that they will find some quibble to justify their deletion of my entry but I am pretty sure that the outcome would have been different had I praised brainless Bob. Anyway, after a couple of run-ins with them, I have no confidence in being able to navigate my way onto Wikipedia again -- so I am putting up below what I originally submitted to Wikipedia. Altemeyer is an unusual name so a Google search on that name should still find my comments, whether the Wikipedians like it or not:

The centerpiece of Altemeyer's research is a questionnaire he designed called the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. If you get a high score on it you are allegedly revealed as a Right-Wing Authoritarian. A major problem with the RWA scale is revealed, however, when we find that it identifies the Communists of the old Soviet Union as right-wing.  But if they are right-wing who is left wing? 

His confusion arises from his apparent  definition of conservatism as "opposed to change".  That definition is however politically naive.  Conservatives from Burke onward have never been opposed to change as such but rather opposed to changes desired and enacted by Leftists.  Is Donald Trump opposed to change? The current Left/Right polarity is between conservatives who want less government control and Leftists who want more of that.  Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance.

In detail: The decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA ("Right Wing Authoritarianism") scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being Rightist to being a predictor of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists!

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority. See:

    Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

    Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.

    Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365

    McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010

MORE

What I said above was designed to be acceptable encyclopedic writing but I can go further than that.  I can offer a more extended critique of Altemeyer's work.  And continued critique would seem to be needed.  The RWA scale is still widely used in psychological research and generally seems to be used without any awareness of the invalidity of the instrument.  It is still commonly paraded as a measure of something right-wing, which it clearly is not.  So I think a more extended consideration of what it measures is called-for.

In the beginning

In one sense, what it measures is perfectly clear;  It measures the old 1950 Adorno  conception of authoritarianism -- in which Marxist theoretician Theodor  Adorno and his friends claimed to have discovered a "new anthropological type": The authoritarian.  Authoritarians were conservative, racist, both dominant and submissive, rigid in their thinking, "intolerant of ambiguity",  and a product of bad relationships with their father. The authoritarian was just a maladjusted psychological mess generally. Adorno did not claim that all conservatives were authoritarian but it became generally assumed that they were. Leftists just loved the idea.

It was clear early on -- even to Altemeyer -- that the F scale which the Adorno team devised to measure their conception of authoritarianism was fatally flawed.  But that did not dent the great appeal that the Adorno theory had for Leftists.  And Altemeyer was one who drank the Kool-Aid.  He swallowed the Adorno theory hook, line and sinker.  His project was to devise a better measure of the concept rather than to question the concept.  The RWA scale was his replacement for the old F scale

But it was very much like the F scale.  Its items consisted of aggressively worded versions of popular sayings from the past.  Pflaum (1964) had shown that you could create a parallel form of the F scale by gathering together sayings that had been popular during the pre-war "Progressive" era.  Progressive ideas dominated American life throughout the first half of the 20th century so ideas that were popular at that time were also progressive or at least compatible with progressivism.

The Progressive era

But what were progressive ideas?  The ideas do not sound progressive now.  The great hero of the progressive era was Teddy Roosevelt.  He even founded his own "progressive" party (often referred to as the "Bull Moose" party).

So what did TR believe in? He believed in battleships (he built lots of them) and that war is a purifying force for a nation.  He had many ideas that sound "Right wing" these days, largely because modern-day progressives tend to reject them. See here and here for a fuller account of the American "Progressive" era.

And Adorno, Pflaum and Altemeyer all created collections of the old Progressive ideas and proudly presented them as being both authoritarian and "Right-wing".  That conservatives had been in opposition throughout almost the whole of the Progressive era was ignored.  The wars of conquest (Cuba, the Philippines etc) waged under the aegis of TR were met with conservative isolationism.  And the big government ideas of FDR were solidly opposed by conservatives of the day.

After WWII

So in the immediate post-war era we had the strange spectacle of pre-war Leftist ideas being presented as conservative. And most Leftists bit the bullet.  Pre-war Progressive ideas had been shared by another prominent socialist of the pre-war period, Adolf Hitler, so it was urgent to distance post-war Leftists from his ideas.  And what better way to do that than to try to pin such ideas onto conservatives?  In 1950 all Leftists would have been be aware that Hitlers ideas had also largely been their own until recently  but Leftists can pivot on a dime when it suits them so Leftist psychologists did just that.

So it is true that the RWA scale statements do reflect authoritarianism -- but it is the authoritarianism of the pre-war Left.  Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian.  In Mr Obama's famous words, Leftists aim to "fundamentally transform" their society.  And it was not the geography or topography of America that  Obama was talking about.  It was the American people.  He wanted to make them do things that they would not normally do (like pay more in taxes) and to stop them from doing things that they would normally do (like mock homosexuals).  Whether or not you agree with the desirability of his program, the point is that it was inescapably authoritarian.  It aimed to dictate behavior.  Conservatives do have some authoritarian impulses at times (restricting abortion etc) but Leftism is authoritarian root and branch.  Telling other people what to do and making them do it is the whole of their program.

Looking inside the black box

So what do conservatives do when confronted with RWA statements?  Because of the old fashioned content of the items they may agree with some of them.  Conservatives tend to have some respect for things of the past.  But that agreement will not be politically relevant. That they can see something in the old ideas will not tell you anything about their likely choices on the current political scene. The old ideas are not at issue so will not influence current choices.

Leftists, on the other hand, will tend to reject most of the statements as something they now disagree with -- but  will rightly see them as not of current political relevance now so will not relate them to current political choices. Their attitude to the old items will not influence their currtent choices.  So neither their agreement nor disagreement with the statements will predict their current political choices. And it doesn't.  The scale is an exercise in political irrelevance.

So from both sides of politics you will have agreement with the statements that is not of current relevance -- and that shows in the fact that conservatives and Leftists are not demarcated by agreement with the scale items.  It  explains why big scorers on the RWA scale are just as likely to be on the Left as on the Right.  It is just not a scale of current political relevance.   Some of the items may touch on what are still current issues but the aggressive way they are expressed will not be supported by either conservatives or Leftists -- e.g. items supporting oppression of homosexuals would be generally rejected by both sides.

So the RWA scale measures an old-fashioned form of LEFTISM but not anything of current political relevance. Which is why the scale does not correlate with current political preferences in (for example) American Presidential elections.  A lot of high scorers would have voted for Mr. Obama.

And it also explains why high RWA scorers in Russia today tend to be members or former members of the Communist party.  In Russia today, Communism IS old-fashioned Leftism

Reference:

Pflaum, J. (1964) Development and evaluation of equivalent forms of the F scale. "Psychol. Reports" 15, 663-669. 

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The left should focus on lifting poor people up, not tearing rich people down

But they get their buzz out of hating the rich

Today’s progressives love touting themselves as champions of the working class. And to them, there’s no better way of doing so than through their anti-rich rhetoric.

Take the response to former Starbucks CEO and billionaire Howard Schultz announcing he was considering running for US president in 2020.

There are many criticisms to be made of Schultz’s pitch. He has tried to present himself as a relatable ‘self-made’ man. But it’s likely most Americans would relate more to the barista behind a Starbucks counter than the self-described ‘rags to riches’ former CEO of the company.

Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and others have also suggested that Schultz running as a centrist independent would actually help Trump.

But progressive lawmakers, some of whom are millionaires themselves, have chosen to hit out at Schultz’s personal wealth.

Massachusetts senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren attacked the billionaire for thinking he could ‘buy the presidency’. She is worth $4.7million, making her the 69th wealthiest person in Congress according to Roll Call.

However you feel about Schultz’s potential candidacy, his wealth is beside the point. But this line of attack reveals that many progressives have become myopically obsessed with the super wealthy recently.

Freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently agreed to the notion that a system allowing billionaires to exist is ‘immoral’. This comes shortly after her proposal to raise the marginal tax rate on incomes over $10million to between 60 and 70 per cent.

Warren has been pushing similar ideas. She wants to create an annual tax on the ultra-wealthy, with a two per cent tax on those making $50million or more and up to three per cent on billionaires.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is also back in the game, introducing a bill that would tax estates of those who inherit more than $3.5million and reinstate the 77 per cent estate-tax rate on wealth over $1 billion.

These progressive superstars constantly talk up the corruption of the one per cent. But this only helps to hide the fact that most of the policies they are pushing for would actually hurt working Americans.

The popular idea of a Green New Deal, which aims to fight the growing threat of climate change by investing in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, would no doubt kill thousands of jobs in the fossil-fuel industry. Those blue-collar jobs, which are already scarce, often define the community they serve and would be gone forever if the plan was ever implemented.

The ones pushing for these radical climate-change policies often deflect the concerns over lost jobs with claims that cleaner, more environmentally friendly jobs would be right there waiting for workers. Little do they see how dispensable that makes many of the affected blue-collar workers feel.

The idea of tuition-free college is another favourite proposal of progressives.

They claim it would give everyone an equal opportunity to get a university education. But they fail to recognise other pathways to success, particularly in the skilled trades, which are often more economically beneficial in the long run.

Progressive politicians’ focus on free college only really makes sense when you consider that their supporters are more likely to be found on a university campus than in a manufacturing plant.

The estimated cost of Sanders’ original free-college plan was about $47 billion a year, to be paid for by a speculation tax, also known as a ‘Robin Hood tax’, which would place a levy on every stock, bond or derivative sold in the US.

But, amid the push to tax the rich to fund preposterous entitlement programmes, you barely hear any ideas from progressives like childcare tax credits or paid sick leave. Nor do you see many progressives fighting for workers to be able to collectively bargain.

They are pushing policies that would bring down the rich instead of policies that would improve life for working-class Americans.

In the end, it is only elite progressives who have this obsessive wealth complex. Struggling Americans aren’t sitting around every day thinking about how much they despise the one per cent. They’re too busy trying to pay bills, pay back loans, and put food on the table.

SOURCE 

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Gross hypocrisy and Leftist bias in Wikipedia: Altemeyer

I put up some information on the Wikipedia page for Bob Altemeyer.  Altemeyer is a particularly witless Leftist psychologist who made large and derogatory claims  about conservatives that he later had to retract.  But there was nothing on his Wikipedia page about that retraction.  So I put up a brief account of that.  What I put up was wholly scholarly and fully referenced -- just what Wikipedia says it wants.  But criticism of Leftists is not allowed of course, so my contribution was deleted after only a few days.

I imagine that they will find some quibble to justify their deletion of my entry but I am pretty sure that the outcome would have been different had  I praised brainless Bob.  Anyway, after a couple of run-ins with them,  I have no confidence in being able to navigate my way onto Wikipedia again -- so I am putting up below what I originally submitted to Wikipedia.  Altemeyer is an unusual name so a Google search on that name should still find my comments, whether the Wikipedians like it or not:

A major problem with Altemeyer's work is revealed when we find that his RWA measuring instrument identifies the Communists of the old Soviet Union as right-wing.  But if they are right-wing who is left wing? His confusion arises from his apparent  definition of conservatism as "opposed to change".  That definition is however politically naive.  Conservatives from Burke onward have never been opposed to change as such but rather opposed to changes desired and enacted by Leftists.  The current Left/Right polarity is between conservatives who want less government control and Leftists who want more of that.  Altemeyer seems to be unaware of that so his work has no current political relevance.

In detail: The decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists!

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority. See:

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.

Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365

McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010

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An Obama Crime Wave Spreads Across America

Fueled by this president's anti-police policies and race-baiting rhetoric, thugs are attacking cops and terrorizing major cities. Horrible violence is breaking out all over. We are witnessing a national crime wave.

Law enforcement expects to see an escalation in criminal activity over the summer. Already we've seen a disturbing trend in May, including:

* The deadliest month Baltimore has seen in more than 15 years, with almost 30 shootings and nine deaths just over the holiday weekend. That makes well over 100 murders this year, compared with 71 at this time last year, the fastest the city has reached 100 homicides since 2007.

* Any time Baltimore officers respond to calls on the city's west side, scene of the Freddie Gray riots, as many as 50 people threaten them, Police Chief Anthony Batts says. "We have to send out multiple units just to do basic police work," he said. "It makes it very difficult to follow up on violence that takes place there."

* In Melbourne, Fla., likewise, police have reported mobs surrounding and striking cops trying to handcuff suspects in two separate cases in the past two weeks.

* A similar spike in violence was reported in Chicago, where 12 people were killed and at least 44 — including a 4-year-old girl — wounded in mostly gang-related shootings over the Memorial Day weekend.

* In Manhattan, 16 people have been murdered this year, a 45% jump over the same period last year, while the number of shooting victims nearly doubled, from 33 to 61. That doesn't include a rash of Central Park muggings, subway assaults and vandalism.

* In the nation's capital, the so-called "D.C. Mansion Murders" have gripped the city, which is suffering a similar surge in homicides.

V In Omaha, Neb., a white female police officer was shot and killed by a black gang member as she tried to serve him a felony arrest warrant.

* A New Orleans housing authority cop, also white, was gunned down as he sat in his patrol car — the first on-duty death in the department's history.

* In Rio Rancho, N.M., another white police officer was gunned down after pulling over a gang member during a traffic stop — the first officer shot and killed in the line of duty in the department's 34-year history.

Victims can blame the crime surge on politicians who give criminals "space" to break the law. Who order cops to stop "stop and frisks." Who tie their hands while giving thugs license to loot and kill.

SOURCE

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It's socialism, not deodorant, that starves the poor

by Jeff Jacoby

WHAT THIS country needs, says Bernie Sanders, is less deodorant.

The 73-year-old senator from Vermont, now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told CNBC's John Harwood in an interview on Tuesday that because American consumers can choose from so many brands of personal-care products, kids are going to bed with empty bellies.

Will this deodorant aisle be history when Bernie Sanders is president?

"You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country," Sanders lamented. He didn't explain exactly how the profusion of toiletries and athletic footwear leads to childhood hunger, but for the only self-described socialist in Congress, it is no doubt a matter of faith that the abundance of capitalism must generate poverty and undernourishment.

In the real world, the opposite is true: Hunger and deprivation are rarest where markets and trade are freest. Food in America couldn't possibly be more plentiful; no one starves because too many economic resources are being channeled into marketing Old Spice instead of oatmeal. But in the socialist delusion, centralized control is always preferable to voluntary enterprise. Better that government czars should decide what is produced, and impose their plan from above. After all, when buyers and sellers are left free to choose for themselves, grocery and department store aisles fill up with "too many" goods that consumers desire to buy. And that's not the worst of it: In the process of fulfilling those desires, some capitalists may be getting wealthy.

Sanders's suggestion that more kids would eat if only deodorant came in fewer varieties was roundly mocked. Wherever his collectivist ideology has been enforced, however, the consequences — shortages, rationing, bare shelves, long lines, grinding austerity — are anything but funny.

Unlike John F. Kennedy, who argued that a rising tide lifts all boats, socialist true believers care far less about growing the economy than about decreasing the gap between rich and poor. "If the changes that you envision ... were to result in a more equitable distribution of income but less economic growth," Sanders was asked in the CNBC interview, "is that trade-off worth making?" Yes, he said at once. "The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages.... You can't just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems."

How easy it is to pooh-pooh "growth for the sake of growth" when you're an American politician who makes a good salary and never has to worry about where his next meal will come from. But for the world's destitute — for those who struggle daily just to hold body and soul together — economic growth spells salvation. Sanders has spent decades railing against the rich and bewailing the plight of the poor. Yet for lifting hungry and needy people out of poverty, no force on earth comes close to the growth fueled by free markets and trade.

On Wednesday, one day after Sanders kicked off his White House campaign, the United Nations reported that hunger still afflicts about 795 million people around the globe, or about one out of every nine human beings. As great a challenge as that is, it represents an amazing decrease in the number of undernourished people over the past 25 years. Even though the world's population has grown by 1.9 billion since 1990, there are 216 million fewer men, women, and children threatened by hunger today than there were then. For the first time, we can realistically envision the end of starvation as a global scourge.

Thanks to advances in agricultural science — especially the famous "Green Revolution" for which the American biologist Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — it is possible to grow enough food to feed a world with 7 billion people. But it takes the dynamism and productivity of markets, and the prosperity ignited by trade, to make that food available and affordable to the great majority of the human family.

Perhaps Sanders doesn't grasp that, but the UN agency most concerned with feeding the hungry does.

"Economic growth is necessary for alleviating poverty and reducing hunger and malnutrition," emphasizes the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the new hunger report. "Countries that become richer are less susceptible to food insecurity."

Blasting greedy billionaires and sneering at the multiplicity of deodorant brands "when children are hungry" appeals to a slice of the electorate. But populist rhetoric from a "humorless aging hippie peacenik Socialist" (as Sanders was once described in a New York Times Magazine profile) doesn't fill empty food bowls. Market economies do.

"Markets that function well are important for promoting food security and nutrition," the UN report says. "Markets ... ensure food availability."

From China to Tanzania, from North Korea to the Soviet Union, socialism over the past century condemned countless children — and their parents — to hunger, malnutrition, and famine. Deodorant never hurt a soul.

SOURCE

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Federal land management bureaucrats warned

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told two federal land officials, “I come bearing good news. I think if your employees keep up the arrogance, keep denying access to the land then very soon we’ll be able to dramatically cut your employees back and start turning those powers over to the states.”

Gohmert’s comments came during a Joint Legislative Hearing "To protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing, and shooting, and for other purposes” in late May.

Deputy Director of Operations for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Steve Ellis and Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Leslie Weldon testified at the hearing and heard complaints about denial of access onto National Forest Service and BLM land from sportsmen and law enforcement.

“Today, I wanted to take advantage of your presence here by letting you know things I’ve been hearing,” Gohmert said. “About the arrogance of people on U.S. Forest Service land and (Dept. of) Interior land – national forests - even from law enforcement, they say it’s just gotten tougher and tougher to deal with arrogant people on the national forests. Not getting access when they need it, not working with local law enforcement. And that’s been really helpful to me.”

“Some of us have been pushing for a while- let’s just dramatically cut back the U.S. Forest Service, the BLM, the Department of Interior and let each state manage the federal land within it’s boundaries.”

Gohmert later added, “I guess maybe from your standpoint it might be seen as a warning, from my standpoint it’s really good news that the arrogance of both of your employees are ultimately going to allow us to get the next president, Republican or Democrat, to end up eventually signing legislation that lets our states  - they’ll do a much better job at managing your land then your departments have been doing.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The ultimate feat of projection:  Leftist academics describe conservatives as being like Leftist academics

That's a bit hard to get your head around, isn't it?  After years of reading and researching in political psychology, I have only just realized it fully myself.  Projection consists of seeing your own faults in others and Leftists do it all the time.  So it is interesting that the major academic Leftist account of what a bad lot conservatives are should list characteristics that are actually very prominent in Leftists themselves. And as Leftists the academics partake of those characteristics too.

It all started with a 1950 book under the lead-authorship of noted Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno (born Theodor Wiesengrund), a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany.  The book was called "The authoritarian personality" and had a theme only a Marxist could love:  The claim that it was conservatives, not Leftists who were authoritarian.

And that claim was made just after the socialist Hitler had been defeated and the vast Soviet tyranny was straddling the Northern half of Eurasia -- a Communist  empire that stretched from Leningrad on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific.  That was a big blob of authoritarianism to overlook.

But in typical Leftist style, Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were not concerned with actual on the ground reality.  They were concerned with POTENTIAL or theoretical authoritarianism.  And where would one look for that?  To conservatives of course.  To people who are skeptical of authority and who believe in democracy and the rule of law.  Apparently that makes sense in some weird Freudian sort of way.  And Adorno loved Freud nearly as much as he loved that great hater, Karl Marx.

When Adorno arrived in the USA he saw much that he thought was reminiscent of Hitler's Germany.  There were a lot of rather tough-minded social attitudes about.  He was right about that.  America at the time was at the tail end of a long dominance by "Progressives", with eugenics being widely accepted and practiced and Jews being kept at arm's length and away from much that was desirable in America -- such as enrollment at Harvard.  The Progressives and Hitler differed not so much in attitudes but in the fact that Hitler applied those attitudes with German thoroughness.

The idea of war as a purification of the human spirit and territorial conquest being a source of national glory had rather gone off the boil in America by that time but Hitler learnt those ideas off an American President who had been world-famous in Hitler's youth:  Theodore Roosevelt, the man who was instrumental in the American conquest of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.  TR himself rather went off those ideas when one of his sons died in WWI but those ideas were still widely respected in America.  TR was a great Progressive.  He even founded a short-lived Progressive party and he personally remained widely respected and admired in America.

So you could see why Adorno feared a Nazi uprising in America.  The ideology was there.  But Adorno was a European.  He didn't understand the Anglo-Saxon temperament, traditions or ideas about government.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had already gone as far as he could in enacting Progressivism in America and there was no chance that Americans would accept a Hitler-like regime.  Shortly after the Adorno book was published, Americans elected the conservative "Ike" (Eisenhower) to the Presidency, with Richard Milhous Nixon as Vice president.  Ike of course had made his name by playing a major role in the destruction of Nazism.

So how did Adorno & Co. put flesh on their naive fears about Americans?  They resorted to their old friend Sigmund Freud. Freud had told a merry tale about how a stern father could psychologically ruin a son for life (In Freud's era a stern father was thought to be rather a good thing) and Adorno had the brilliant idea that a son's relationship with his father was a relationship with an authority figure.  Therefore Freud's ideas told us all about our attitude to authoritarian governments. Despite much contrary evidence, that idea lives on to this day in the world of a-historical Leftist psychologists such as George Lakoff and Karen Stenner. See here for some of the research evidence that contradicts that neo-Freudian theorizing.

Anyway, from their Freudian ideas Adorno & Co deduced a whole series of personal characteristics that would be found in a pro-authority person.  He would show conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intellectualism, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, an admiration of power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. Later authors would amplify that to say that the authoritarian would be rigid, closed minded and dogmatic in his beliefs, intolerant of ambiguity, not open to experience or novelty.

So there you have the typical conservative, a thoroughly bad egg!  But is that true?  No.  Every one of those characterizations has been found unsupported in subsequent research.  The first half of Altemeyer's 1981 book "Right-Wing Authoritarianism" gives a pretty thorough coverage of the contrary research. I see that a copy of that book is going for $499 on Amazon.  I should sell my copy.  Altemeyer's publisher, the University of Manitoba Press, sent me my copy for free.

Many of my academic publications also test and find wanting the Adorno theories.

So are there any real persons who fit the Adorno picture of villainy?  Was Adorno's picture of the authoritarian based on any real group of people?  I think it was.  It was actually a picture of what leftist academics are like.  Adorno and his merry men (and one woman) were making the classic mistake of judging other people by themselves.  They thought others thought like they thought.  Let me illustrate that by some contemporary examples.

Rigidity:  Academics are amazingly rigid in their adherence to Leftist ideas.  Particularly in the social sciences, a conservative is as rare as hen's teeth.  You just don't get anywhere in academe unless you are a Leftist.  And that lockstep Leftist ideology in academe also shows a conventionalism and a lack of openness to novelty and diversity.

Authoritarian submission: And how about  subservience to authority?  When those dreadful climate "deniers" (heretics) put forward facts that indicate that there is nothing out of the ordinary going on in the global climate, how do devotees of the climate cult respond?  Do they question the facts or point to alternative facts?  Almost never.  They appeal to authority. They simply say that 97% of scientists accept global warming and that is good enough for them.  They have an absurd respect for the current outpourings of scientists, quite oblivious of the 180 degree turns that scientific "wisdom" periodically undergoes.  Whether or not dietary fat is good for you is a current example of that. They appeal to an authority with feet of clay

And they certainly overlook that the paper by Cook et al. from which the 97% claim originates in fact quite plainly said that only ONE THIRD of the scientific papers surveyed took any position on global warming.  Two thirds of the papers did NOT give support to the global warming theory.

Cook et al. were rather peeved by that lack of support so sent out a questionnaire to the non-confirming scientists to see what they thought.  Only 14% of the scientists surveyed even bothered to answer the questionnaire, however, so that tells its own story. It's all plainly there in the paper's abstract.  Read it for yourself here.

Closed-mindedness: So there is much faith invested in the claim that "The science" supports global warming. The adherence by Leftist academics to the global warming theory is therefore a good instance of conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, closed-mindedness and dogmatism.

Power and toughness: And when it comes to an admiration of power and toughness, what could be a clearer example of that than their unwavering support of international Communism?  They shilled for the Soviets until Ronald Reagan caused the regime to implode and to this day they have never ceased to find Fidel Castro admirable, a man who lived like an old-fashioned Spanish grandee while his people scraped by on minimal rations.

Exaggerated concern about sex: And what about an exaggerated concern about sexual matters?  Is not that a pretty good description of modern-day feminism?  Feminists deny basic biology and ascribe all the world's ailments to "patriarchy".  They judge everything and everybody by what you have between your legs.  They are completely obsessed with the importance of sex (or "gender" in their coy terminology).

Destructiveness:  And what could be more destructive than the chaos unleashed on American health insurance by Obamacare?  Under the pretext of making health insurance more affordable, Obamacare has in fact made it unaffordable for many.  Many employers have dropped health insurance for their workers as no longer affordable by them and skyrocketing deductibles have made many Americans effectively uninsured even if they are nominally covered.  When your deductible is $10,000 you have for most instances no useful insurance cover whatsoever.

Cynicism: And there is certainly vast cynicism in the Leftist response to Mr Trump.  Mr Trump is certainly a flawed character in some ways but we all are. Does the Left give any credence to the thought that Mr Trump might be on to something valuable and important?  Roughly half of Americans think he is but the Left greet his ideas with uniform hostility.  That he has brought American unemployment down to a near-record low (3.9%) and has proven to be a Prince of Peace in the Korean confrontation they can only greet with denial. There is no openness to new ideas in the Leftist response to President Trump, just unwavering cynicism and complete intolerance of ambiguity.

Authoritarian aggression: And how about authoritarian aggression?  What do we call it when Leftists (students abetted and encouraged by their Leftist professors) use all means they can to chase conservative speakers off university campuses?  They do a job not dissimilar to Hitler's brownshirts.  As well as being thoroughly intolerant, rigid and doctrinaire it is thoroughly tyrannical and often explicitly violent.

Intolerance: And when it comes to tolerance and openness to different ideas, what do we make of the constant censorship of conservative speech on social media?  It's a bit more sophisticated than book-burning but not by much.

I could go on but I think it is clear that the proto-Nazi leaders in America today are Leftist academics, not conservatives.

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You probably have to have a Christian or Jewish background to understand how emotional this is

Vice President Mike Pence revealed on Thursday that one of the Americans who was released from North Korea handed him a note that was very inspirational.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump, Pence, and many members of the administration arrived at the airport to greet the three Americans— Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk — who were held captive in North Korea.

Pence, a devout Christian himself, tweeted a picture of a handwritten note that one of the Americans handed him at the airport.

It’s unclear which of the three men wrote the note, but it features the 126th Psalm from the Bible.

"It was an amazing moment I’ll never forget… when 3 Americans stepped onto the tarmac at @JBA_NAFW & gave me a signed personal note with Psalm 126 on the back. “When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion…” To these men of faith & courage – God bless you & welcome home!"  — Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 10, 2018

Here’s the full verse:

"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”

What an amazing story, which the media has refused to report on. This personifies the power of faith and God, which helped at least one of these brave Americans get through an incredibly difficult time.

SOURCE

Their Lord has done great work among the people of Korea. Of 2014, about 30% of the South Korean population is Christian -- and growing

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Democrats' War on Capitalism
 
Hillary Clinton recently offered yet another reason why she lost her second consecutive race for the presidency: capitalism.

At the Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City, Clinton was asked whether her self-proclaimed “capitalist” stance hurt her during the 2016 presidential primary season. “It’s hard to know,” she said, “but I mean, if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked, ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability,’ you know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh, my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’”

Clinton’s right. Being a Democrat and a “capitalist” is an increasingly untenable position for a politician. Polls show that today’s Democratic Party and capitalism appear to be on a collision course. A November 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll found that 56 percent of Democratic primary voters said they held a positive view of socialism. A Morning Consult/Politico survey in June 2017 asked if a hypothetical replacement for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi should be a socialist or capitalist. More Democrats opted for socialism, with 35 percent saying it’s somewhat or very important that her replacement be a socialist, while only 31 percent said the same for a capitalist.

Indeed, one of the Democrats’ loudest voices, filmmaker Michael Moore, recently praised Karl Marx, the ideological godfather of communism. Moore tweeted: “Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down. You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie. You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could. … Though the rich have sought to distort him or even use him, time has shown that, in the end, Marx was actually mostly right & that the aristocrats, the slave owners, the bankers and Goldman Sachs were wrong… ‘Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!’” Tell that to the millions who died under communist repression in, among other places, China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia.

Perhaps no issue reflects this socialist view more than the Democrats’ push for “single-payer” health care. As a state senator, Barack Obama said: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. … A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” A few years later, then-presidential candidate Obama reiterated his stance, that if “starting from scratch” he’d have a single-payer system.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean called the so-called “public option” the endgame: “I think while someday we may end up with a single-payer system, it’s clear that we’re not going to do it all at once, so I think both candidates’ [Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s] health care plans are a big step forward.”

Former Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid also said that he, too, wants to get to “single-payer.” The Las Vegas Sun reported in 2013: “In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans,” wrote the Sun, “and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. … ‘What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,’ Reid said. When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: ‘Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.’”

The “you didn’t build that” Left does not recognize the relationship between prosperity and allowing people to keep what they produce to the fullest degree possible. By the end of eight years under President Obama, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, we had less “economic freedom.” The United States’ score on “economic freedom” — which looks at taxes and regulations, among other criteria — dropped to its lowest level in the 23 years since Heritage began publishing its annual rankings of 180 countries. It is no coincidence that this loss of economic freedom under Obama helped produce the worst American economic recovery since 1949.

Last week brought more good news for Democrats. A Rasmussen poll found that nearly half of American likely voters support a guaranteed government job for all. This is likely to become a central presidential campaign issue for Democrats in 2020. Democrats believe that there is a free lunch and that capitalists are stopping them from eating it.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump’s China tariffs could actually work

President Trump has officially picked a fight with China, announcing Thursday that the United States is imposing up to $60 billion in new tariffs on Chinese goods, along with additional restrictions on China’s ability to invest in US companies.

How China will respond is unclear. The Chinese government has sent mixed signals about its readiness to negotiate but also its willingness to retaliate, including against vulnerable sectors of US agriculture. Just the threat of a trade war was enough to rattle global markets and push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down over 700 points.

At its root, this is a fight about intellectual property: how US companies try to safeguard their innovations, and how China tries to get around those safeguards via reverse engineering, coercion, or even theft.

Pirated software is perhaps the most familiar example, so common across China that one trade group has estimated that as of 2015, 70 percent of software installed on Chinese personal computers was unlicensed.

But that’s only the beginning. Sometimes, the only way for US businesses to gain access to the Chinese market is by partnering with a local firm and handing over precious intellectual property — which could be anything from new manufacturing techniques to software algorithms. Refuse, and businesses can be subject to provisions of Chinese law that actually force dominant companies to license their treasured tech to competitors.

If that doesn’t work, China also engages in various forms of industrial espionage: hacking into US companies to gather sensitive information, or luring away employees who might pass along well-guarded details. Affected businesses span the economic gamut, from wind turbine programmers to semiconductor manufacturers to the makers of genetically modified seeds.

The full extent of these practices is hard to quantify, as is the cost to US businesses and consumers. There’s no central repository of incidents, and many of the companies affected might not even know they were infiltrated or exploited.

During Thursday’s announcement, Trump put the figure at “hundreds of billion of dollars,” though his administration later released a fact sheet estimating the annual cost from improper IP transfer at approximately $50 billion per year, or something closer to 0.25 percent of gross domestic product.

Yet whatever the exact number, the politics are potent — centered around a narrative of innovative US companies having their hard work stolen away by a foreign economic rival. It’s a neat fit with Trump’s longtime contention that the global trading system is rigged against America.

The question is: Can Trump’s plan for new tariffs and other pressures make a real difference?

As with all tariffs, there will be costs, including for consumers, who probably will have to pay more for some electronics gear. Those costs will only grow if China responds in kind, whether taxing select agricultural imports, placing further restrictions on new US businesses, or cutting cooperation with firms already on the ground in Shanghai or Beijing. Worries of this damaging tit-for-tat helped fuel Thursday’s stock sell-off.

But an escalating trade war isn’t inevitable. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he thought we would “end up negotiating these things rather than fighting over them.”

Just as important, China has also signaled a willingness to talk, suggesting that Trump’s gambit could work, creating some real, effective pressure that ultimately forces China to rethink its approach to US intellectual property rights.

Trump’s negotiating position was probably strengthened by his decision last week to reject a proposed takeover of the US telecom firm Qualcomm, for fear that it would give China too much control over wireless technology. If he could attract allies in Europe and around the world — many of whom share concerns about China’s lack of respect for intellectual property — that also would help, including by building broader support for another action Trump unveiled Thursday, a challenge against China at the World Trade Organization.

But here’s where Trump’s mercurial side becomes a liability. In recent weeks, he has angered key trading partners with the announcement of wide-reaching steel and aluminum tariffs — not to mention making himself look unprepared for sacrifice by saying trade wars are easy to win.

There may well be a deal out there on protecting US intellectual property, which this package of tariffs and other restrictions can help forge. All that’s required is for Trump to prove himself the deal-maker he has long claimed to be.

SOURCE 

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Authoritarianism for Me but Not for Thee

It's funny how projection works. These hysterical Democrats calling for President Trump's impeachment because of his dastardly "authoritarian tendencies" are the ones with authoritarian tendencies.

I'll bet you didn't know that the president commits an impeachable offense if his political opponents harbor an irrational fear that he has authoritarian tendencies — whether or not he has acted outside the scope of his constitutional authority, flouted the rule of law or done anything else that could be remotely construed as a high crime or misdemeanor. I didn't, either.

But doesn't it bother you just a little bit that the very people who are calling for Trump's removal because they don't like him or his policies want to put their own authoritarians in power, where they can actually flout the rule of law?

My chief complaint is not their hypocrisy, though it abounds among these sanctimonious progressives. It is that they are eager to twist the law to suit their political agenda while masquerading as sacred guardians of the Constitution.

Someone should ask these mob-thinking witch-hunters how they can contemplate impeachment without a colorable claim that Trump has committed an impeachable offense. Other than their incapacity for self-reflection, why are they demanding an official proceeding to remove the president based on what he stands for and things he says?

Granted, impeachment is largely a political matter, but riotous partisans shouldn't be allowed to just make things up and ignore the plain language of the Constitution and the historical background informing its provisions. Sure, liberal activists who can find an emanation and penumbra behind every constitutional rock can distort any constitutional provision beyond recognition. But would anyone but a rabid authoritarian pretend that the Framers intended "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" to include any lawful conduct or tweet that could be exploited in bad faith to overturn the democratic will of the voters?

The less likely it appears that Trump did anything improper with Russia the more desperate these Democratic authoritarians become. There is an inverse relationship between the amount of actual evidence against Trump and the intensity of the Democrats' impeachment rhetoric. Old adages endure for a reason, and the Democrats are quite familiar with this one: "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell."

Everywhere we look, Democrats are pounding the table and yelling like hell. On MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes," Sen. Bernie Sanders said Trump has "a strong authoritarian personality" and shows a "disrespect for democracy" in the U.S. His proof: Trump admires foreign dictators, and he disrespects democracy in terms of voter suppression, gerrymandering and his attacks on the media.

Well, I hate to tell you, Bernie, but one of the telltale signs of leftists these days is their adoration for dictators such as the Castros. I also regret to inform you that Barack Obama declared war on Fox News and conservative talk radio without a syllable of protest from you or your comrades. And gerrymandering? Really? Nevertheless, it's amusing for socialists to complain about authoritarianism when their lives are dedicated to consolidating governmental power to exercise authoritarian control over their subject citizens. But at least Sanders is not demanding impeachment — yet.

Liberal MSNBC host Brian Williams slammed Republicans for lacking the courage to discuss impeaching Trump. Unsurprisingly, the authoritarian-prone Williams didn't cite any impeachable offenses.

Campus Reform reports that Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is teaching a class that explores what impeachment and removal by other means might resemble in the Trump era. He has a new book coming out on the subject, and he was already calling for impeachment last May in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

In that essay, Tribe cited no impeachable misconduct on Trump's part. He just groused about the "emoluments clause" — give me a break — and that "ample reasons existed" to worry about Trump even before he fired FBI Director James Comey. Tribe argued that the nation couldn't afford to wait to begin impeachment proceedings. "To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation's fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader."

Soon after, Tribe said on MSNBC: "Letting him just sit out the time ... is too dangerous for the country. We have to start an impeachment investigation in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee now while the FBI continues to do its work."

Does that sound a bit authoritarian to you? Just begin the formal process to remove a sitting, duly elected president against whom there is no evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor. No big deal, right?

Not one member of the reckless cabal wildly calling for Trump's impeachment — which includes leftists and parts of the never-Trump right — can cite an actual abuse of authority by Trump, much less a high crime or misdemeanor. President Obama violated the Constitution and the rule of law for sport, and liberals didn't care.

For the left, this isn't about the Constitution, the rule of law or authoritarianism; it's about getting rid of Trump at any cost to the Constitution and the rule of law — and by any authoritarian means necessary.

SOURCE 

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John Brennan’s Thwarted Coup

As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.

It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

[Compare  what Lenin said in describing his fellow revolutionaries (Kautsky and others).  He spoke of "the full depth of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests". Old Communist Brennan even uses language reminscent of Lenin.  Leftists are expert at abuse, if nothing else]

America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.

Trump has said that the Russians are “laughing their asses off” over the turmoil caused by Obamagate. No doubt many of the laughs come at the sight of Brennan, a supporter of Soviet stooges like Gus Hall, conducting a de facto coup from the top of the CIA and then continuing it after his ouster. Who needs Gus Hall when John Brennan is around? This time the Russians don’t even have to pay for the anti-American activity.

Another hardcore leftist, Samantha Power, who spent the weeks after Trump’s victory rifling through intelligence picked up on his staff, found Brennan’s revolutionary tweet very inspiring. “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan,” she wrote. Sounded pretty dark and grave. But not to worry, she tweeted later. She just meant that the former CIA director was going to smite Trump with the power of his “eloquent voice.”

Out of power, these aging radicals can’t help themselves. They had their shot to stop Trump, they failed, and now they are furious. The adolescent coup talk grows more feverish with each passing day. We have a former CIA director calling for the overthrow of a duly elected president, a former attorney general (Eric Holder) calling for a “knife fight,” a Senate minority leader speaking ominously about what the intelligence community might do to Trump (“they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer has said), and assorted former FBI and CIA officials cheering for a coup, such as CNN’s Phil Mudd who says, “You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.”

In all this unhinged chatter, the partisan origins of Obamagate become clearer. The same anti-Trump hatred on display in their tweets and punditry drove the political espionage. James Kallstrom, the former FBI Assistant Director, notes that the “animus and malice” contained in Brennan’s tweet is “prima facie exposure of how he felt about Trump before the election.”

All the key figures in the decision to open up a probe on Trump wanted him to lose — from Brennan to Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump machinations included, according to the latest batch of texts with his mistress, plotting to manipulate a buddy on the FISA court. In one text, he wonders if he can finagle a meeting with his friend by inviting him to a “cocktail party.” The impropriety aforethought on display in that tweet is staggering, but of course the media has paid no attention to it, preoccupied as it is with Andrew McCabe’s retirement income.

McCabe, by the way, has removed all doubts about his capacity for partisan lying with his post-firing statement, which rests entirely upon it. With all of its anti-Trump special pleading, the statement reads like it was cobbled together by Rachel Maddow. Like so many other ruling-class frauds, McCabe seeks absolution for his perjury and leaking through liberal politics. I stand with the liberal powerful against Trump, you can’t touch me — that’s the upshot of his defense. Comey has taken the same tack. The title of his forthcoming book should be: How the Law Doesn’t Apply to the Self-Appointed Ruling Class.

What an amazing collection of entitled creeps, who long ago convinced themselves that the “rule of law” is identical to what they see as their sacred right to exercise power in any way they see fit. All the blather about Trump’s violation of the law is simply a projection of their own lawlessness. So far the coup has been thwarted. They had hoped to stop him in the campaign through political espionage. But that didn’t work. Then they tried to upend him through spying during the transition, holding out hope until the very last moment, as evidenced by Susan Rice penning her sham exculpatory note only after Trump’s swearing-in. Now they join Brennan in seeking to bury Trump in Mueller’s dustbin.

Trotsky would have understood the shorthand of all the tweets, polemics, and posturing perfectly. Nothing in this show trial bears any relationship to reality or justice. It is simply an expression of power politics, which doesn’t always end well for its exponents. As even an old Gus Hall supporter like John Brennan must know, and perhaps his fulminating panic indicates a dawning awareness of it, those who talk the loudest about their enemies heading for the ash heap of history often end up in it.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Altemeyer is still fundamentally confused

At least since 1950, Leftist psychologists have been fascinated by the concept of authoritarianism.  They have good reason to be.  The most authoritarian regimes in recent history have been socialist:  From the Communist Lenin, Stalin and Mao, through the national socialist Hitler to the ghastly Pol Pot.  So authoritarianism is in the bones of Leftists. We also see that orientation in their virtually universal refusal to condemn the gran lider of Cuba ("Great Leader", Fidel Castro) and their unrelenting attempts to fasten the bonds of regulation around  most aspects of life in the USA. And they are always eager to spend your money for you whether you want them to or not.

But authoritarianism is repugnant to most people gripped by it so the Left have a need to deny the authoritarianism which is innate to them.  They need to pretend to be something else.  And they are rather good at that. They pretend to be do-gooders even though most of what they do turns out badly.

Another very useful way of deflecting criticism is simply denial.  If you say often enough that you are not authoritarian, people might believe you.  And a very effective way of reinforcing such denials is of accusing your opponents of what is really true of yourself.  Freud called that "projection".  So Leftist psychologists have made great efforts to prove that conservatives are the authoritarian ones, not themselves.

That merry little scheme started with the work of Marxist theoretician Adorno in 1950 but foundered eventually on the poor evidence for the various Adorno assertions.  I cover that here.

The Adorno work was however refurbished from 1981 on by Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in Canada and I have pointed out from early on how sloppy Altemeyer's work is (e.g. here and here and here) .

Altemeyer has however continued to write books on authoritarianism and has gained a certain degree of notice outside academe,  particularly through the blog of Jonathan Turley.  Not much about Altemeyer's story has changed over the years but maybe there is by now a case for me to update a little my comments on his work.

Altemeyer has compiled a set of statements (the RWA scale) which in his view reflect "Right Wing Authoritarianism".  But he is very shifty about what he means by "right-wing".  Sometimes he refers to it as meaning conservative and at other times he admits that it is uncorrelated with vote for conservative political parties.

In other words his research is about conservatives who are as likely to vote Democrat as Republican!  A truly odd bunch!  The truth, I suspect, is that Altemeyer would not know a conservative if he fell over one. I have  no doubt that the Psychology Dept. at the University of Manitoba is the standard Leftist bubble that one expects of such Depts so strange beliefs about conservatives and much else could flourish in that environment.

So what the RWA scale really measures is anybody's guess.  I see it as measuring an old fashioned form of extreme conservatism that no longer has political relevance or, indeed, any relevance at all.  So the political relevance of Altemeyer's various research findings exists only in Altemeyer's imagination and need detain nobody for any time at all.

But if Altemeyer is vague about "right wing", he is quite clearly wrong about authoritarianism.  He makes it clear that it is not dictators he is talking about but rather their followers.  He claims that he is measuring a tendency for people to submit to authority.  But there is no such thing.  Nobody just respects authority per se.  Different people respect different authorities.  Altemeyer is convinced that conservatives in the USA are characterized by a respect for conventional authority.  Yet most American conservatives these days almost spit when they talk about the President, Congress and the Supreme Court.  Not much respect for the conventional authorities of America there!

And even the old mainline churches get short shrift among conservatives.  Conservatives tend to respect "rebel" evangelical churches, churches with a strong streak of independence.

Altemeyer has some awareness of the political  irreverence of American conservatives so to save his theory he nominates Rush Limbaugh and his ilk as authorities that conservatives respect.  But Limbaugh is no authority at all.  He is just a radio commentator!  People listen to him because they agree with him, not for any other reason.  In Altemeyer's world, agreeing with anybody is dangerous!

And it is not only in conservative politics that one finds an absence of a general tendency to respect authority.  I set out here some evidence from psychological research which shows that respect for authority in one field does not generalize to respect for authority in other fields.  That being so, Altemeyer is studying a unicorn (or perhaps more specifically, a chimera).

So wherever you look at Altemeyer's theories you find that he is not studying what he thinks he is studying.  He is studying something that exists only in his own imagination.

But a relatively recent work of his really puts the cap on his intellectual confusion.  He has written an extensive history and analysis of the Tea Party movement.  And he does get one thing right.  He notes that a lot of the Tea Partiers are evangelical Christians.

Even Altemeyer cannot avoid noticing however that Libertarians are prominent in the Tea Party movement too. So are Libertarians authoritarian? Good old Altemeyer sticks to his guns and says they are. He calls libertarians "The Other Authoritarian Personality". That people who comprehensively reject authoritative control over our lives are also submissive to authority must be one of the most crosseyed assertions in contemporary politics. Black might as well be white. Again Altemeyer is living in a little world of his own imagination.

Altemeyer also likes the "Social Dominance Orientation" theory of Pratto and Sidanius but I have pointed out the large holes in that some time ago.

Finally, the whole idea that you need to be a particular personality type to support an authoritarian regime is contrary to the evidence. Well-known experiments by both Milgram and Zimbardo showed vividly  that perfectly ordinary people can be conned into supporting extremely authoritarian actions and prewar writers such as Roberts and Heiden agree that by the late 30's Hitler was quite simply the most popular man in Germany. They LIKED his claim that they were a Herrenvolk (Master race)! His support ranged from the intelligentsia to the workers and, contrary to the usual Marxist piffle, the hard-core Nazis (the SA) were predominantly working class -- usually the more rebellious element of society.

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Oops, maybe government is tyrannical

By Marta H. Mossburg



Less than two weeks ago President Obama stood in front of graduates from The Ohio State University and told them to reject those who warn of government tyranny.

“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems,” he said.

To young, idealistic people his words likely sounded insightful — until last week. That’s when it became officially impossible to deny that the government abuses its power for political gain.

Practically overnight people labeled conspiracy theorists by the elite were proven prescient interpreters of how big government operates when news broke last Friday that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in their tax-exempt applications. The media pile on against the administration is so ferocious Fox News could run live feeds from its competitors without losing a beat.

It should be so because the partisan treatment of hundreds of groups is stunning.

Ginny Rapini saw the IRS in action firsthand. The volunteer coordinator for the NorCal Tea Party applied for 501(c)(4) status for her group in July 2009. In the spring of 2010 the IRS asked for more information. She sent in the information immediately but didn’t hear from the IRS again until January 2012, she said. At that point the agency sent the group a list of 19 questions, including a request for the names of donors, every email the group sent and minutes of each board meeting, with the requirement that everything be returned within two weeks or the agency would consider the application void, she said. She sent the IRS 3,000 pages of information prior to the deadline — but did not include the names of donors. “I think they wanted to intimidate me, but instead they made me mad,” said Rapini.

After Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) spoke about NorCal’s problems with the IRS on the floor of the House and wrote to the agency, she got a favorable response to her application in the summer of 2012 — three years after the initial request, not unlike many other organizations treated to years of silence in between harassing questions.

What makes the IRS’s actions even worse is that top officials knew about the inappropriate questioning of conservative groups since 2011 but didn’t say anything about it to Congress. Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, was fired earlier this week, and should be the first of a long line of people held accountable for the agency’s flagrant mistreatment of political opponents by one of the most powerful government agencies.

On top of the IRS scandal, the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week admitted to secretly taking records of incoming and outgoing calls on work and personal phones of Associated Press (AP) reporters, its main lines in New York, Washington and Hartford, CT., and for the AP number in the House of Representatives. It took records on more than 20 lines in total in April and May of 2012 — lines used by more than 100 journalists.

Asked by National Public Radio how many other news media phone records the DOJ had taken Attorney General Eric Holder said, “I’m not sure how many of those cases…I have actually signed off on…I take them very seriously.”

So, confidential sources are not confidential if the government wants to know who they are. Whistleblowers beware.

That all of this is happening as the IRS is in the middle of hiring potentially thousands of new employees to write and enforce ObamaCare regulations should make everyone afraid. It is also happening while the IRS is in the middle of creating a giant information center with other federal agencies called the Data Services Hub to assist with rolling out ObamaCare (See here) that will provide one stop shopping on everything but what color underwear someone is wearing for the day.

The government promises, “Protecting the privacy of individuals remains the highest priority.” But after the last week, Americans should know there is no guarantee of personal privacy with the government or impartiality in how their information is used. It should also put Americans on notice that their political party could determine the quality of their health care. Welcome to the real world, Ohio State graduates.

SOURCE

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Fight the Power

Mona Charen

It's plausible to grant that Obama himself did not know that IRS agents were targeting tea party groups, Jews and other -- one almost wants to write "enemies of the state" -- for audits, harassment and delay. If Obama understood the conservative critique of big government even a little, he would know that his lack of knowledge is expected. In fact, it's part of the problem. As David Axelrod put it, the government is just "too vast" for the president to control. Who would have thought?

Obviously the government has always been too large for any one person to control. But our brilliant founders arranged matters so that power would be diffuse. Interest would counter interest, branch would check branch and transparency would ensure accountability to the voters. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

The tea party movement -- those the IRS harassed -- dressed up as Founders, a rich irony. A good progressive, Obama finds Adams, Jefferson and Co. passe. He doesn't recognize the capacity of government to abuse power when in the proper (i.e. Democratic) hands -- or, more likely, doesn't care. His arrogance about his own good intentions for the "middle class" -- odd that he almost never speaks of the poor -- makes him contemptuous of those who agree with Madison that government power must always be carefully constrained.

You needn't believe that Barack Obama personally texted IRS agents and instructed them to harass conservatives to know that he disdains the constitutional order. The evidence is in the legislation he signed. Both the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank create boards with utterly (in the case of Dodd Frank) and nearly (in the case of Obamacare) unreviewable power. Both are the subjects of lawsuits challenging their constitutionality.

Dodd Frank (aka "Dodd Frankenstein") creates at least two panels that are insulated from Congress's power of the purse. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council derive their funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The president can appoint the director of the CFPB but can remove him only in very limited circumstances. The courts, which can normally overturn agency actions deemed "arbitrary or capricious," have limited review. The president highlighted his contempt for law by illegally naming the current director of CFPB as a "recess appointment" - when the Senate was not in recess.

The FSOC can declare firms "too big to fail" and thus obligate taxpayers for bailouts. The courts will have no say.

Under Obamacare, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is exempted from the notice and comment rules of federal agencies. IPAB dictates automatically become law unless Congress itself intervenes, but Congress has little time to do so and must vote by a three-fifths majority to modify an IPAB decision. The courts are not permitted to review its rulings.

Even abolishing IPAB has been made virtually impossible by the law.

At his Thursday press conference, Obama promised that if "there's a problem in government, we'll fix it." But his overweening signature legislation guarantees that power will be abused. Shielding government agencies from judicial and congressional review is an open invitation to the kind of misuse a wiser person would guard against. Wiser men did. They created our constitution, which Obama and his progressive allies flout.

SOURCE

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Still one of the funniest photos of all time


Vice-President Biden and a very startled official

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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