TOUCH AND GO !

It's time for Dr. Sanity to practice a few touch and go's around the mental health blogsphere--or "psychosphere" if you prefer! What follows are some of the topics my fellow mental health professionals are blogging about.

If you read only one thought-provoking post today, make it this one from Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos, from which I will quote just a tantalizing bit:

A while back, I wrote a post entitled Divorce American Style, discussing how the American political system historically bifurcated into two parties more or less mirroring the archetypal maternal and paternal spheres. As it evolved, the Republican party came to represent masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining strict rules (“law and order”), standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father--that is, conserving what had been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they.
[...]
The Democratic party, on the other hand, came to represent the realm of maternal nurturance--compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies and do not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general).

I'm betting you won't be able to stop reading.

Next, we'll hop on over to Dr. Helen, who analyzes the latest anti-Republican research study, and questions the reliability and validity of this "unbiased" research. Are all social "scientists" Democrats, I wonder? (see Bob's post for some discussion of why this might be!)

ShrinkWrapped reminds us that "The Clock is Ticking", as he evaluates the anger at the Danes for daring to publish some cartoons of Mohammed; and has some sobering thoughts about the coming clash of civilizations. Sigmund, Carl & Alfred also have some thoughts on Muslim rage at these cartoons.

Next we fly over to GM's Corner, where GM Roper wonders why the wounding of an American newsman suddenly makes the Iraq war "real"--as if the injuries and deaths of the brave American troops or the victims of Saddam's brutality are somehow less significant than someone in the news business.

Neo-neocon has a wonderful post that looks at the difference between deliberately targeting innocent people versus accepting the reality that sometimes innocent people will die even when you try to minimize such damage:

In other words, terrorists rely on people such as Jonathan Steele to ignore the fact that they (unlike soldiers, for example) purposely live among families, women, and children. This is a win/win situation for the terrorists: it either affords them protection because it plays on the opposition's reluctance to kill innocents (an opposition of which they are fully aware, by the way, although they may mouth words to the contrary); or, in the event of an attack, they count on the fact that deaths of such innocents will lead many in the West (such as our hero Jonathan Steele) to draw a moral equivalence between Israel and terrorists. Win/win, as I said.

The narcissistic "drift" of a Hillary presidency is the topic of discussion at the Assistant Village Idiot.

Amazingly, Shrinkette has discovered the secret of why we sing in the shower!

We make one last touch and go at Psych Pundit, who is dealing with the "Mind-Body Problem"; and then it is time to make our last landing for the day.