Wednesday, April 30, 2008

OBAMA 'S MORAL RELATIVE [ISM]

"Crazy Uncle"? I suspect that the Reverend Wright is Obama's true moral relative. Just recently he sought "daily to imitate" Wright's faith. And, he knew that Wright would never be able to stand up to "vetting"; that's why in April, 2007 Wright had this to say:
"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Mr. Wright said with a shrug. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen."



But, as I've said before, for the postmodern Democrats whose moral compass points whichever way the wind of public opinion is blowing--and Obama is about the most perfect postmodern candidate you are going to come across in this race--Obama knew it was time to rewrite his past association with the bigoted pastor.



[Cartoons by Lisa Benson and by Michael Ramirez]

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

THE SANITY SQUAD ON "The Arab Mind" LAST NIGHT

Click to listen:

ORWELLIAN TIMES

Victor Davis Hanson has it absolutely correct:

One of the strangest things about the NAACP Wright pseudo-scientific speech on learning, and its enthusiastic CNN coverage and analysis, was the abject racialism of Wright. It was sort of an inverse Bell-Curve presentation, based on assumed DNA differences.

His convoluted explanation of African-American right-brain 'oral' culture as more creative, musical, and spontaneous versus European left-brain traditional analysis could never have been given by someone white to that audience without justifiably earning booing and catcalls.

Three comments: this was just the sort of racist 'genetic' difference that most Americans learned to shun, now apparently quite acceptable again, and part of the mainstream.

Second, there is no evidence that so-called Europeans could not "rap" or create an oral literature as well as Africans — remember, oral poetry as we know it , began with bards like Homer somewhere in the southeastern Aegean and continued into modern times in the Balkans.

Three, some of the most accomplished speakers of English and analytical thinkers are African-Americans, a fact everyone immediately recognizes from what they read and with whom they speak.

In short, Wright's speech on black-right brainers, white-left brainers — replete with bogus stereotypes and crude voice imitations — was about as racist as they come and at one time antithetical to what the NAACP was once all about. Again, the Obama campaign and its appendages have set back racial relations a generation.


The other day, Mark Steyn, wrote about how the leftist Australian columnist Pamela Bone who recently died of cancer and who came to question some of the behavior and rhetoric of her side of the political aisle. She asked:

Why, in short, have Left and Right changed places?


Good question, Pamela. Because certainly your side of the political spectrum has managed to betray everything they ever claimed they stood for.

Today’s political left pretty much stands for nothing—not freedom, not equal opportunity; not individual rights; not peace and certainly not social justice or brotherhood. Trying to right the wrongs and injustices of the world is truly ethical and noble goal, but something happened on the road to that beautiful utopia. The left made a wrong turn and got lost--somewhere in the vicinity of Vietnam, I suspect.

At this very moment, every issue ardently supported by the left, and almost all of the behavior exhibited by the left is completely antithetical to classical liberal philosophies. There is no longer a commitment to personal liberty or to freedom. The Left is far too busy to promote freedom for the common man or woman, because their time is taken up supporting the bigotry and hate of Reverend Wrights. They are far too preoccupied in advocating freedom and tolerance for tyrants and dictators who oppress the common man; and in lionizing and protecting terrorists who kill the common man; not to mention heralding religious fanatics who subjugate the common woman.

I wrote:

The classical liberal tradition is now almost exclusively upheld by what are called “conservatives”. Once “liberal” was synonymous with the “left”. No longer.

What we have witnessed over the 30- 45 years since the Left ascended to dominate political thought in the mid 20th century, is its rapid and unprecedented decline into wholesale intellectual and moral bankruptcy. The noble values and ideals they once stood for have been abandoned; and almost as if a surreal cosmic joke was being played on them, they have—without even noticing!-- embraced the exact opposite of what they once stood for.

Where once they stood for freedom; they now enable dictatorships and apologize for tyrants. Where once they sought to bring justice to the world; they now defend horrific acts of mass murder and enslavement. Where once they rightly demanded equal opportunity, they have embraced all kinds of racial quotas and discriminatory practices and demand equality of outcome. Where once they sought to empower the weak; they are now instrumental in maintaining and expanding their victimhood.

After all, how can you be a “champion of the oppressed” unless you maintain and nurture an oppressed class that will always require your services to help them?


Jeremiah Wright and his ilk are actually extremely necessary to the left's ultimate political agenda. Candidates like Obama who embrace Wright's ideas are now at the forefront of the party and given standing ovations and superstar status for their vapid promises and vague rhetoric. Moral relativism has become a true art form in leftist intellectual circles; and rational thought and truth are both decried as oppressive and restraining to humanity. Bigotry and racism are considered good when practiced by the clueless morons of the left--because they mean well and only seek to right wrongs and bring about social justice in the earnestly desired utopia they can still see in their mind's eye but which seems to be so damn elusive in the real world. If only we'd all do as they say.

In short, the left has embraced the ideology of nothingness; they are now the pimps and apologists for terrorists; and they speak the empty rhetoric of a brave, new world.

Orwellian times, indeed.

Monday, April 28, 2008

THE SANITY SQUAD LIVE TONIGHT! THE ARAB MIND

Tonight's Sanity Squad Podcast will focus on a discussion of the excellent series written by ShrinkWrapped on "THE ARAB MIND".


Please join Siggy, Shrinkwrapped, Neo and me for what promises to be an exciting and in-depth psychological discussion of both the individual and cultural psychological underpinnings of much of the dysfunctional, violent and oppressive behavior that seems to be an inherent aspect of Arab/Islamic populations.


Click on the button below to listen live:

Listen to The Sanity Squad on internet talk radio

The call in number is is (646) 716-9116. Showtime is a 8 PM tonight.

CREEPING SHARIA & CREEPING LEFTISM

From City Journal:

Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.

An example of Western self-censorship: Belgian officials prohibited Shark, by David Cerny, depicting Saddam Hussein as an aquatic predator.Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.


Read it all.

As we silence artists, writers and critics of Islam; give Islamic customs special preference in our public schools, gyms and even our public bathrooms, we are only paving the way for our own cultural destruction. We are not tolerating their cultural practices, we are suborning our own so as not to give them offense. And, much of this behavior comes about because of an unconscious fear of their violence and threat of violence.

Thus we surrender Western civilization, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Organizations like CAIR are nothing more than an advance recon units for Al Qaeda-style jihad, disguised as self-righteous and terribly oppressed muslim moderates crying that Islamophobia is the root cause of their unhappiness. They have taken the pulse of the enemy infidel, and know that it is weak--particularly on the left.

They must be disabused of the notion that their crusade to obtain special status for Islam under the law--by eliminating free speech protections--has any chance of success. Only the the useful PC idiots of the left are sympathetic with their efforts, but that is exactly the problem.

Both CAIR and the left have made a mockery of our most precious freedoms and the think they can get away with it. But in Europe and here, they are only succeeding in hardening the resolve of people like myself to actively oppose their coercive and cynical manipulation of our free society.

Once upon a time, I could have cared less about Islam and what any Muslim believed or how they lived--as long as they left me alone. Now I have a strange and compelling desire (my "difficulty dealing with authority" personality, I guess) to organize groups to "Flush the Quran" and write mockingly of the idiotic prophet to whom they have sold their souls and the even more idiotic religious leaders who are steeped in paranoia and ignorance.

All sorts of possible non-PC civil disobedience flash through my mind; because quite frankly, submission has never been either a personal trait; nor a common American character trait.

Islam may find our lack of faith in Allah disturbing, but they have no magical powers to make me or anyone else conform to their religion unless we ourselves give it to them.

It is time to firmly reject this creeping sharia and tell the primitive throwbacks who demand us to submit to their medieval ways to take their religious beliefs and religious law an stick them where the sun don't shine.

And, for the record, I feel the same way about anyone who expects me to behave as if I were a member of their religious cult. Screw that. Civilization has come a long way, baby.

As for the creeping leftism that supports, encourages and enables this slow destruction of our values and freedoms in the name of 'multiculturalism' and 'peace' and all things politically correct--you people already have a lot to answer for; and sometime soon, you will either have to come to terms with the fear and hate that motivates your appeasement; or you will finally have to admit that the submission and selflessness offered by Islam is the religion you have been searching for all along.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES

Image hosted by Photobucket.com Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry
**NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Freud was right! Or, maybe it was just a plot by those evil Zionists.... Hamas has the evidence! Because they lost their manhood a while back.

2. Just a lost Lutheran sect. Not a crime? Well, to leftists and terrorists it is.... Axis of Evil? Turns out there was one after all..heh heh.

3. 155mm Hope and Laser-Guided Change - Obama's foreign policy vindicated! Throwing Syria a lifeline? I thought Jimmy did that?

4. Obama at the Exodus Distractions? No, the magic is dissipating under the harsh glare of reality. And you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. How gauche! But they can always play the race card against you know whos.

5. Whiffleball. Disappearing names....Morality is a survival skill they never learned.

6. Speaking of malajusted men, his words were 'twisted'. Yes, very. So what's the poor MSM to do? They fear the second coming! Reductio ad Obamum. Absurd! Wright on estrogen?

7. A holy relic goes on sale at ebay. Historical revisionism at its finest!

8. He's thrilled to be anywhere with high ratings! But he deserves some R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Shocking new revelations about McCain!

9. How low can the Dems go? Pretty low.

10. What if all the candidates were Simpsons characters?

11. Shouting for Gaia.....For those who aren't aware of it, "in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers" is called...logic. Besides, there's no use worrying about global warming anyway!

12. Do. Not. Look. We warned you. Islamic Rage Boy meets Abercrombie and Fitch. We warned you.

13. Sheesh...how the mighty have fallen! Needy or greedy? You decide! DON'T do this at home!

14. Black market bacon? Fair tax lite. And so, the fascist food wars begin.... Stop snacking and use your brain! And don't drink the water.

15. Another TV movie in the making! Polygamist or Poly-GAMIST?

16. Searching for a new BBF? NOC.

17. Definitely NOT insane...but it is extremely good news! Congratulations, GM!

***************************************
Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:


Heard the Word of Blog?

Saturday, April 26, 2008

ALWAYS GOOD FOR A LAUGH

Whenever I can't think of anyting to post, I head over to MEMRI to look at what the great intellectual minds of the Middle East are saying. I always find something rather astonishing that can makes me once again contemplate the vast time warp of centuries that separates Western civilization from Islam. Here's something that caught my attention this morning:
Saudi Cleric Muhammad Al-Munajid Warns: Freedom of Speech Might Lead to Freedom of Belief: "Some of these heretics say: 'Islam is not the private property of anyone.' So what do they want? They say: 'No sect has a monopoly on Islam.' So what do they want? They say: 'We want to issue rulings.' Someone who is ignorant, who does not know any Arabic, or who has no knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence wants to issue rulings?! They say: 'We reinterpret the texts.' There is a very dangerous conspiracy against the religion of Islam in newspapers and in what these people say. A journalist, or one of those lowlifes, wants to... These people are a mixture of Western, local, and imported ideologies, but they want to express their views with regard to religious rulings. This is the prerogative of religious scholars, not of ignorant people - the prerogative of knowledgeable people, not of fools or heretics.

[...]

"The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not, and on whether Judaism and Christianity are false or not. In other words, they want to open up everything for debate. Now they want to open up all issues for debate. That's it.

"It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief. So where's the conspiracy? They say: Let's have freedom of thought in Islam. Well, what do they want?

"They say: I think, therefore I want to express my thoughts. I want to express myself, I want to talk and say, for example, that there are loopholes in Islam, or that Christianity is the truth.

"Then they will talk about freedom of belief, and say that anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants... If you want to become an apostate - go ahead. You like Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem. That's what freedom of belief is all about. They want freedom of everything. What they want is very dangerous.


Freedom of thought? What a concept. Freedom of belief? Ohhhh, too dangerous.

And then there's this kind of thing, too, from Islamic "scientists"....

[NOTE: Sorry for the light posting, but I have to work today :) ]

Friday, April 25, 2008

BIO FOOLS & COMPASSIONATE ENVIRONMENTALISTS



"Compassionate environmentalist" is probably the #1 oxymoron of the day. And, Lord knows, there are a fair number of morons disguised as people who want to 'save' the planet.

Speaking of biofools, Mark Steyn reports how Obama is proud of his accomplishments in this area. Figures. This is the kind of "change" we can definitely believe in.

AYERS AND HIS COHORTS ARE WHAT'S WRONG WITH EDUCATION TODAY

Sol Stern has an article in City Journal which reminds us what "Obama's Real Bill Ayers Problem" actually is:

Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

Betsy notes:

Think of the problems that we have today in teaching literacy and basic math skills. Would any of those problems be ameliorated by teaching "social justice and liberation?" And Ayers isn't a pariah among the educrat crowd. Instead, he has a leadership role.

A while back, Siggy had an astonishing series of quotes related to this matter that everyone should check out. Scroll down and read what some of our "finest" educators and psychiatrists have said over the last 50 years about education. If you can make it though to the last quote, then you will begin to realize why K-12 education has evolved into K-12 indoctrination--indoctrination into the leftist mindset.

Here are just three examples:

“…a student attains ‘higher order thinking’ when he no longer believes in right or wrong“. “A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student’s fixed beliefs. …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.” - Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist, in “Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives”, p. 185, 1956

“This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable.”- Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE)-1964

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

Or, how about this one, from the source of the quotes cited by Siggy:

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810


Fichte was instrumental in creating the "climate of collectivism" in philosophy (as Stephen Hicks has referred to it) that prevailed in Germany during the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. In this counter-enlightenment climate, the state was worshipped as the source of all reality and that which brought meaning to life. Hegel, building on Kant, Rosseau and Fichte, would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses--all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx, who transformed Hegel's "dialectic of Spirit" into an economic and social system that depended on godless dialectic of "oppressors vs oppressed." The right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state and were less willing to abandon a deity. For more than a 100 years, the two camps have been battling it out, each trying to impose their utopian vision onto the human species.

Both Hegelian offshoots summarily dispensed with free will and human freedom; and between them, they brought forth the philosophical abomination that we now call "postmodernism".

The 20th century was the battleground where the two totalitarian branches of the collectivist philosophers vied for spiritual and physical control over humanity. The amount of death, destruction and misery they ushered in is perhaps unprecedented in human history.

By the mid-20th century, the right-wing, or nationalist, Hegelians, or national socialists (Nazis) had been defeated by an alliance of the left-wing Hegelians and those who stood for human freedom and democracy. By the end of the century, the social systems favored by the Hegelians of the left had been exposed to the world for the lie and deception it was.

But, in this new century, both utopian systems have been given new life by recruiting a potent new ally in their attempts to control the minds of men. That ally is postmodern philosophy and rhetoric, which I have written about multiple times.

This 18th century philosophical rise of collectivism is still playing itself out several hundred years later in the competing ideologies of our own time. The most important battlefield in this war in our time is the educational system, from kindergarden through college, where strenuous efforts are being made by the remnants of both types of collectivists to claim the minds of the next generation.

Even 5-year olds and younger children are not too young for collectivist propaganda to be inculcated. Destroy free will; inoculate them with political correctness; treat the "insanity" of their attachment to parents, the Judeo-Christian tradition; or their country--i.e., all traditional Western values that brought civilization, individual freedom and economic progress; achieve a "higher order" of thought by showing them there is no right or wrong; good or evil.

After that, what will be left? The tyranny of the Collective; or the State; or of Allah or some other god, hungry to devour the mind of man.

Today's political left likes to think they are so different from those Hegelian "fascists" of the 20th century. They appear to have a serious mental block, particularly when they speak so disparagingly of the National Socialist Party (better known as the "Nazis") who were simply one faction of Hegelians (socialists) who happened to be ascendent over the other faction (communists) vying for power at the time. Clearly they are victims of their own educational nihilism; and by lobotomizing themselves they have failed to recognize that there is no essential philosophical difference between the collectivist left and the collectivist right. Both are vying for absolute power as they preach the gospel of moral relativism and postmodernism.

In "The Dictatorship of the Do-Gooders and Soul Murder" I discussed how the "social justice" advocates of today's collectivists have taken over our K-12 education system and are determinedly undermining American values with their politically correct, multicultural and anti-capitalist curriculum. I wrote:

Make no mistake about it, what those teachers are doing is indoctrinating their students minds into an unquestioning obedience to the collective.

While our popular culture refrains sensitively from portraying Islamofascists as villians in movies out of political correctness (yet another aspect of socialism's quest for "social justice"); it does not hesitate to make businessmen evil and malignant oppressors of the innocent. Individualism, the pursuit of profit, and private property is always bad and everyone must bow to the will of the collective. Islam (the name even means "submit"), even in all its terrorist varieties, does very well by this perverted moral standard.

One very harmful result of this sorry educational situation is that there are few people--even among those who stalwartly defend the free market, who understand and appreciate the essential morality of capitalism. Certainly our children, taught by ideological purists like the ones above who are leftover from the 20th century debacle of socialist/communist tyranny--never even have a chance to rationally consider any ideas not approved by their aggressively collectivist teachers, so intent at quashing those aspects of human nature they don't like.

This is child abuse, pure and simple. It is indoctrination. It is the willful manipulation of young minds which cannot never be allowed to develop even the capability of thinking for themselves. And these perverts call it "social justice."

In fact there is nothing that is "just" about it. It represents the worse kind of oppression with the goal of enslaving the human mind. And enslavement is exactly what is required to establish their socialist utopia, since it refuses to acknowledge the reality of human nature.

Socialist ideologues like those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, their pathetic system-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced--cannot function in a real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.

On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.

Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.

Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants like the ones above have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.

The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.

The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all.

If one's actions are coerced by the state or religion, or both; if human activity is indoctrinated, legislated, regulated and ordained down to the last minute detail--particularly to the degree we see in other countries of the world (e.g., Cuba, China, most Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, and now in Venezuela--then how can it possibly be argued that one's actions are moral? Human behavior under such systems is not voluntarily chosen, but actively coerced.

Morality, though, must always be a matter of choice, not mandate.

One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.

Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.


Taking the mind of a child and feeding it exclusively on your ideological pablum is not only the most cruel and abusive of behaviors; it also ensures that such a mind becomes cognitively stunted and morally impaired (much like the minds of teachers so steeped in ideological bullshit like Bill Ayers and his cohorts from the 'loving' 60's, who so proudly and caually approve of oppression and violence toward those who disagree with them).

All totalitarian/collectivist idealogues will casually and deliberately use and brainwash children. Whether it is Fidel and his communist indoctrination in Cuban schools or the mirror image of the Palestinian's using a Mickey Mouse look-alike to make little children comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews. Both are not above the atrocious behavior of hiding behind children and using them as their shields. Parents thourougly schooled in the collectivist propaganda will happily send their children to blow themselves up for Allah and celebrate when they are successful; and all of them know full well that decent people are repulsed at the idea of retaliating against innocents. But the collectivist--both right and left--could care less about the harm their despicable behavior does to the souls of the children who are used or brainwashed in such a manner. For them the individual, whether a child or adult, has no meaning except insofar as they can advance the ideology. Their total worth is only equivalent to their willingness to be fodder for the good the "cause."

Modern-day educators of Ayers ilk; psychologists, and assorted self-esteem gurus, multiculturalists, and PC policemen are the natural-born heirs of Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Stalin and Hitler-- and many others who have refined and advanced the postmodern irrationality. They are the ones who are in charge of educating your children into the accepted dogmas that now are espoused by the left in this country.of political correctness and multicultural religion. They are the people who are determined to 'Impeach Bush and Cheney'--or declared clinically mentally ill; they are determined to undermine American values; to portray Republicans and conservatives as absolute evil. By this behavior they signal how desperately afraid they are that there are still many individuals and pockets of the population who are willing to think outside of the ideological box they have created and who have not been fully lobotomized by their educational system.

Only those whose brains have been damaged by a defective educational system to begin with could adhere on the one hand to a philosophy advocating moral relativism and subjectivism with unapologetic dogmatic absolutism.

Progressing from education to indoctrination, postmodernism has ushered in an age of educational nihilism that seeks to destroy the minds of the next generation of Americans. The good news is that the biggest impediment to their grandiose plans is that they earlier suceeded in destroying their own minds on the bullshit they now force-feed the children of today.

What is outrageous is that anyone--anyone who is capable of thinking anyway--could take postmodern, brain-damaged and unapologetically violent collectivists like Ayers seriously, let alone grant him the authority to teach children of any age.

That a major Presidential candidate does is extremely alarming.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF WAR

There was an interesting "exposé" in the news the other day, which I'm sure will receive a lot of attention by the lefty blogs--intent as they are in always bruiting the evil of the US military.

It never occurs to them that they themselves represent at least one of the reasons why military personnel are sometimes unable to come to terms with the actions they are called upon to do in war.

Such self-reflection on the part of the plitical left would require insight, honesty, and integrity--none of which are in abundance on that side of the political spectrum these days.

Throughout history war has always resulted in a significant psychological cost to the men (and now women) who are members of the military. The Iraq war is no different.

A few years ago, there was a fairly balanced article in the LA Times which looked at some of the psychiatric problems being seen in Iraqi war veterans:
A study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found that 15.6% of Marines and 17.1% of soldiers surveyed after they returned from Iraq suffered major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder — a debilitating, sometimes lifelong change in the brain's chemistry that can include flashbacks, sleep disorders, panic attacks, violent outbursts, acute anxiety and emotional numbness....


When you think of psychiatric disorders along a spectrum from "biological" to "psychosocial", there are some people who are biologically resiliant and not subject to psychiatric illness under most "normally" stressful situations.

But war is not "normally" stressful.

It is stressful like no other situation for a living being. And that is why even the biologically resiliant may develop problems; not to mention those who might be more physiologically prone to depression or anxiety or psychosis.

Combat stress disorders — named and renamed but strikingly alike — have ruined lives following every war in history. Homer's Achilles may have suffered from some form of it. Combat stress was documented in the late 19th century after the Franco-Prussian War. After the Civil War, doctors called the condition "nostalgia," or "soldiers heart." In World War I, soldiers were said to suffer 'shell shock'; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue or battle fatigue. But it wasn't until 1985 that the American Psychiatric Assn. finally gave a name to the condition that had sent tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans into lives of homelessness, crime or despair

After WWI, the military got the idea of placing psychiatrists and mental health professionals near to the front line to deal immediately with some of these stress disorders. It seemed to work better and prevent some of the longer-term problems. After the immediate intervention, they were either returned to the front, or sent back for longer treatment. You might remember the 1963 movie "Captain Newman, M.D.", starring Gregory Peck, which was about a military psychiatrist who ran a mental ward during WWII.

During the Korean War, the M.A.S.H. units and military facilities near the front also had psychiatrists attached to them. Nowadays, of course, the pharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions are considerably better than they were in the middle of last century. The faster one can intervene with those soldiers at risk, the better--before they can injure themselves or others. Reportedly there have been a number of suicides by soldiers while in Iraq, and this is an indication that there is not sufficient mental health support at the front lines; especially since even one suicide is too many. The problem reported in the article above relates to mental health support after a soldier returns home.

Vietnam popularized the term "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD), which was originally used to describe the stress syndrome noted in its veterans when they returned home (but which described symptoms that every veteran of every war in history was likely aware of). It was estimated that maybe 30% of Vietnam vets had some symptoms of this disorder, which is now well-described in the literature and also applicable to people in traumatic situations other than war.

Whether one volunteers for military service or is drafted, there is no doubt that war is hell, and that it dramatically, intensely, and sometimes irrevocably impacts body, mind, and soul.

I have always suspected that PTSD is more likely common in wars like Vietnam, where many of the soldiers were not there voluntarily; and where they returned to the U.S.--not to acclaim and pride--but to rather frequent displays of disgust and even hate from the very people they believed they were serving.

I would not underestimate this latter reality as a major reason why many veterans of Iraq are unable to fully come to terms with their service. Even if you believe you are doing and have done the right thing, being constantly belittled and demonized for it by a large percentage of the population is at best daunting, at worse, depressing; and the stigma they place upon you (spitting on you in airports, is one small example; accusing you of 'crimes against humanity' is a larger one) can shake you to your soul.

The political left has transformed their hate and disgust of all things military into a true art form--along the lines of Alicia Shvart's performance art, to be sure, but nevertheless an art form. Even more so today than during Vietnam, the heroes serving voluntarily in Iraq are aware of the daily insults and denigration that is made of their service. They may believe in what they are doing, but as a psychiatrist, I can attest to the damaging effects of the left's righteous "support" of the troops, as well as the "patriotism" of people like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink and so on, ad nauseum.



[images from Zombie]

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

THE NEO-MARXISTS' GREATEST FEAR

Stanley Kurtz has gone through the sermons of Barack Obama's minister and father-figure:
Wright is not merely saying that there are tragic disparities between wealth in the West and in the rest of the world. Wright appears to believe that the capitalist system itself creates and depends upon the poverty and hunger of the "black and brown one-half or two-thirds of the globe." In effect, Wright believes that just as slavery supported the capitalist economy of early America, capitalism today depends upon the de facto slavery of Third World oppression. We can see this in the following passage from Wright’s 2005 essay, "The Continuing Legacy of Samuel DeWitt Proctor:"
[This is] an age of "prosperity preachers," who operate as if we live in a cultural vacuum. The garbage being proclaimed as the gospel by the prosperity pimps preaches capitalism as being synonymous with Christianity. It also preaches the philosophy of Adam Smith as if Smith’s philosophy were the theology of an almighty Savior!

Capitalism as made manifest in the "New World" depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the "Two-Thirds World" under oppression. That heresy has nothing to do with the message of the man from Galilee, a Capernaum carpenter who had no place to lay his head, and that heresy is completely oblivious of the culture that produced the gospel and the culture of Africans living in the American diaspora.

Dr. Proctor taught that cultural relevance is crucial if we are to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of being faithful to the gospel of Adam Smith. We are descendants of Africa, not England. We have a culture that is not English. We are descendants of Africa, not Europe. We have a culture that is African in origin–not European. The Bible we preach came from a culture that was not English or European. Rightly dividing the Word of Truth means taking seriously the culture that produced that Word.

So one of the famous passages from the "Audacity" sermon would appear to betoken a broader view that holds capitalism to be a fundamentally evil and exploitative phenomenon, both alien to African culture and literally damaging to contemporary Africans and the broader diaspora of Africans around the world.


These are the ideas that are mother's (father's?) milk to the likes of Obama, the leftist candidate--the intellectual food on which he was raised.

Obama is clever, however. He can't come out and actually say these things in public. But I think he believes them.

Someone not so very clever--rather stupid, in fact--has let his Marxist enthusiasm for controlling the world overcome his fundamental lack of judgment:
Bolivian President Evo Morales has told a UN forum that capitalism should be scrapped if the planet is to be saved from the effects of climate change.

"If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system," he said.

Opening an UN meeting in New York on the rights of indigenous people, he also said the development of biofuels harmed the world's poorest people.

The forum's theme is the global impact of climate change on native people.

Mr Morales gave the keynote address at the opening of the seventh session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.


Obviously, Morales has not researched the environmental destruction of the Soviet regime and its axis powers..


It shouldn't come as any surprise that the thing most feared by today's neo-Marxists is capitalism.

They are right to fear it, because capitalism works in the real world; while communism, socialism and all the utopian variants thereof do not.

Capitalism creates wealth and slowly but surely cures poverty; while their own ideology, instead of 'redistributing' wealth, redistributes poverty. Capitalism embraces freedom and cannot function optimally without it; while their ideology must have increasing control over even the smallest things in people's lives.

Capitalism is good for the soul, while their ideology destroys the soul.

In every empirical test in the real world, capitalism has worked better than socialism or communism or any Marxist ideology. The last century once and for all completely debunked all the original Marxist claims about socialism's supposed superiority.

--Instead of exploiting people, capitalism has empowered them, while Marx's theories made them poor, miserable, and oppressed.
--Instead of increasing poverty, capitalism has mostly eliminated it. The rich get richer indeed; but the poor get richer, too. Under socialism’s yoke, everyone becomes poorer--except, of course, the corrupt (see Cuba, Venezuela, etc. etc.).
--Instead of being more humane and peaceful, socialists and communists who gain control of a country have led that country to dictatorship and oppression; and then became aggressive and violent toward other countries as they attempt to externalize blame for their own economic and political failures.

The confrontation between capitalism and socialism in the last century was only the most recent in a long series of historical battles between the forces of freedom and individualism on the one hand; and the forces of tyranny and collectivism on the other.

The social engineers of the left, motivated as they are by their creative utopian aspirations--expressed by the desire to impose (forcibly, if necessary) universal peace, social justice and brotherhood upon humanity--are completely oblivious to the malignant side of their own natures. Both they and the capitalist entrepreneurs of the right who they despise so vehemently are both driven by the darker human emotions: envy, greed and a need to dominate others.

However, there remains an extremely crucial difference between them:

The do-gooder leftist in all the various ideological incarnations--the antiwar crowd, the environmental crowd, the communists, socialists, and assorted collectivists--offers the rationale that he does what he does for the "common good" and for "social justice", "peace" and "brotherhood". His high-minded, self-righteous rhetoric justifies (to him anyway) imposing his will and beliefs on others for their own good; and he will not hesitate to use whatever coercive capablity he has at hand to get others to do what he wants and what he says.

The capitalist, on the other hand, is overtly out to pursue his own selfish profit, and understands he must use persuasion. That is, he must convince people that his ideas and the products of his mind are better than all the rest so that they will be willing to part with their hard-earned money to possess them. His desire for power over others is manifested in an indirect manner because people must want what he has to offer and believe that they will benefit from an interaction with him.

There is no parallel social limitations on the behavior of the leftist. This tyrant wannabe does not feel the need to convince others of the veracity or even the effectiveness of his ideas; nor does he accept defeat when others are not interested or resist their implementation. He knows in his heart what is best for everyone, and he will use coercion if necessary. He will not allow options; nor will he permit others do do what they think is right for themselves. Their feelings or concerns are a matter of complete indifference to him. Only his own matter.

The leftist's desire for power is direct and absolute; and this is a direct consequence of his utopian ideology.

And there is no area of your life which will escape his intrusive psychopathology, because he justifies it by saying he is really doing it for your sake.

Just listen carefully to the rhetoric of the Obamas, Clintons, Evos, Hugos, Jeremiahs, and all the other neo-Marxists in their various disguises and incarnations.

DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE !

I kinda like things the way they are going....




[more cartoons by Gary Varvel]

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

"A TRIUMPH OF POSTMODERN POLITICS'

Quote of the day from Mark Steyn:
Mrs Clinton's advanced from hurling china to obliterating Iran:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

The point presumably is not that anyone in the Democratic base wants to totally obliterate Iran (whose leadership has, after all, endorsed Obama) but that your willingness to pretend you want to reassures the base that, come the general, you're not going to be this season's neo-McGovernik fall-guy getting Swiftboated as an arugulan wimp. The Dem contest is a triumph of post-modern politics.



There is a common pattern present in the discourse of both the Democratic Presidential candidates: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.

Barack Obama intoned yesterday, that:
"I don't want to just end the war, I want to end the mindset that got us into war. I want to initiate diplomacy. [President Richard] Nixon understood" the importance of diplomacy, Mr. Obama said, as did Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, he asserted.

"I have said we will meet not just with our friends but with our enemies. I was criticized for saying that by McCain, Clinton" and by President George W. Bush, he said. "We should remember what John Kennedy said: we should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate.


Obama must be talking about the Jimmy Carter option (which, as I recall he denounced the other day--but only to a group of Jewish leaders)? I would note that even dhimmi Jimmy was aghast at the idea of meeting with Osama Bin Laden, though I'm not sure why, given his essential narcissistic take on world affairs and his unshakable belief that Jimmy Carter is more righteous than anyone else on the planet.

Now, by way of contrast to the contradictory discourses of Clinton and Obama, here is someone is willing to face reality:
History will hand down its own judgments. But right now it's for us to live and write that history, in the choices we make and the promises we keep. And we can be proud of our country. The world is often untidy and dangerous. But for millions who suffer under tyranny, or who struggle to maintain newly won freedom, there would be little hope without the active commitment of the United States.

As much as a nation of influence, we're also a nation of character. And that sets us apart from so many other great powers in history –- from ancient empires to the expansionist regimes of the last century. We're a superpower that has moral commitments and ideals that we not only proclaim, but that we act upon. Today, in a tough fight, we are turning events toward victory. And the world will be a better place because of what the United States of America did.


Don't waste your time looking for any sense in the contradictory demands, promises and rhetoric of the political postmodernists--better known as the Democrats.

Being a postmodernist means never having to face reality.

ACTING ON SOFT INTELLIGENCE: A Personal Parable

Sometimes all you have to go on is "soft" intelligence in making life or death decisions.

As a psychiatrist, I am often called on by society's laws to make a decision if a person is "suicidal or homicidal"-- either of which indicates that hospitalization is in order. How does one make that judgement? Especially when many patients with mental illness are not particularly cooperative and deny that they have any problem to begin with.

Well, it is an extremely difficult task and a great responsibillity. I happen to think that everyone is ultimately responsible for their own behavior; but I am also aware that I am in a position to intervene to save someone's life--at least in the short term. So I take the responsibility very seriously.

Sometimes people TELL me that they are having feelings of wanting to kill themselves; and they tell me the details of how they'd go about it. Occasionally, some patients will confide in me their desire to kill a specific person. This kind of honesty and self-awareness makes my job a bit easier. But most of the time I have to act on "soft intelligence".

What do I mean by that? Well, most of the time I have to take many little things into consideration:

-How honest do I think a person is being with me in regard to their feelings and intent?
-How honest have they been with me and/or others in the past?
-Do they have a history of ACTING on suicidal or homicidal feelings in the past? (one of the most significant predictors of future actions are past actions)
-Are they trying to manipulate me (either (1) they WANT to be hospitalized and have no real intent to harm themselves or others; or( 2) they DON'T WANT to be hospitalized because they have real intent to harm themselves or others. I look especially hard at those who I think might be "shining me on"
-Do they have the means to actually hurt themselves (e.g., if they have a plan to shoot themselves or someone else--do they actually have a gun at home? or access to a gun?
-How seriously do their family and friends take the possibility of their suicidality or homicidality?
-How impulsive are they now? How impulsive have they been in the past?

The above list does not include all the considerations and factors that come into play in my assessment, but they are some of the primary ones. A particular person might not meet ALL the criteria above; and each case is different, depending on the situation. I see many people who are what we call "chronically suicidal"--meaning that they express suicidal ideation all the time. When do you hospitalize them, and when do you not?

The truth of all these situations is actually quite painful, and it is that if a person really wants to kill themselves, they will succeed eventually. I have hospitalized suicidal individuals who when they were finally discharged because they were doing so well, went out and committed suicide successfully.

I have hospitalized people involuntarily who convinced a judge that they were not suicidal or homicidal. The judge released them, and they killed themselves or someone else.

But, I have also known many people for whom an intervention--even an involuntary hospitalization -- resulted in their abandoning for good their suicidal or homicidal plans.

Since people's lives are at stake, I try to err on the side of caution in most cases. The potential consequences are very high, and earlier in my career, I was a bit overwhelmed by the responsibility. I will admit that in the last 30 years, I have made mistakes. Sometimes I hospitalized someone against their will who really had no intention of hurting themselves or someone else. My judgement was incorrect about their homicidality or suicidality. The worse consequence of that situation was that the patient hated me and refused to ever see me again.

OK, I can live with that.

But it has also gone the other way. I remember when I didn't hospitalize a patient of mine, because she didn't have the past history of trying to kill herself; had never been suicidal before; and was seemingly cooperative in therapy. In addition, she didn't seem severely depressed any of the times I saw her; and she was always willing to contract with me for safety. I was an intern at the time and somewhat inexperienced. I was uncertain what to do, but finally decided to believe the person when she said she didn't really have any "plan" to kill herself--and I really couldn't see that she had any real intent.

But to my horror, that person not only killed herself the next day, but she killed her best friend --another patient of mine.

If I had acted two lives would have been saved. Perhaps I could have only delayed what happened if I had acted when I had the chance. I don't know. I will never know.

A person--even a psychiatrist--can only in the end be responsible for their own actions--not for others'. Since that time I have studied all that there is to know about predicting suicide. I have tried to hone that "instinct" that makes a person aware that someone is not telling the truth. I think I am pretty good at it, and I have come to trust my instinct in these situations. Now, if I have any doubt; if I find myself not quite convinced that a person will be safe, then I go with the doubt.

Because I am completely sure only of this: If I have the opportunity to do something to save a life, then I must do it.

I cannot know the future and I cannot know how someone will behave in the future. But I can use all available information I have at that one point in time; and my own professional skills and experience to the best of my ability to assess each situation individually. I can balance and weigh the hard and soft evidence--and sometimes it is only the soft evidence that I have to work with; balance and weigh the risks and benefits; and make the best decision possible at that moment.

And if I am to make a mistake in the future; I want it always to be on the side of saving lives.

(reprinted from 2006)

Monday, April 21, 2008

SANITY SQUAD LIVE TONIGHT !

Please join us for another Sanity Squad podcast this evening at 8:00 pm! Siggy, Shrinkwrapped, Neo and I will be discussing the future of Hillary Clinton after tomorrow's primary---Hillary, The Spoiler?; and we will once again summarize the reasons why Jimmy Carter was not only the worst sitting President of the US, but is the worst ex-President in history--Jimmy Carter, amoral traitor, or mere idiot?. The Squad should provide some new psychological insights!

Who knows what else, or who else, will be caught in the glare of our psychological spotlight!

Click on the button below to listen live:

Listen to The Sanity Squad on internet talk radio

The call in number is is (646) 716-9116. Showtime is a 8 PM tonight.

PARANOID PERFECTION

Here is a political cartoon that pretty much exemplifies the paranoid mindset that is rampant in this country at the moment:

Why in the world would anyone think that the President and Vice President of the United States of America would be in a conspiracy with Islamofascists who openly state their intention of destroying both our country and our way of life? To what purpose? What could possibly be gained?

Don't expect a rational response to such questions. Questions like that only elicit further complicated conspiracy theories that are constructed around all of the shibboleths of the left (many of which have evolved into dogma since 9/11)--anti-capitalism; multilateralism; multiculturalism; poverty; victims of US imperialism; anti-Americanism etc. etc. If you put all the conspiracy theories together you will find a concatenation of bizarre and often contradictory components that should make any reasonably intelligent person roll on the floor with hoots of laughter.

Not only are such a beliefs perfect examples of the depths of insanity to which the liberal left has sunk; but the various theories of Bush's evil possess all the hallmarks of the intense political paranoia that highlights almost all of the left's behavior since 9/11.

When they aren't outright denying the reality of 9/11; they are downplaying its significance or snidely suggesting that it is not a big deal historically speaking; and that the war on terror--particularly the Iraqi battlefield-- shouldn't even be on the priority list of things to do.

As the years go by, it is simple human nature to forget the events of that horrific day. Gerard Vanderleun comments, as he talks about Pope Benedict's blessing of Ground Zero, "I often think, as so many of us do, that that terrible morning in New York City is behind me, far away now and fading ever faster as the years roll by. And then.... it all comes back...."

In the last six and a half years, there has not been a single action by the Bush administration in the war on Islamofascism that has not been deliberately undermined and actively opposed, spun, and exploited for political gain on their part. They seem particularly confused about events in Basra with the Sadr militia. Perhaps as Wretchard points out, "The NYT wonders why the media-consensus "winner" simply refuses to "win". Maybe it's because he isn't winning at all, but losing."

Talk about being in a Vietnam-type quagmire--the Democrats, the political left, and their media outlets are solidly stuck in that Vietnam era mindset where they can't see anything but defeat and humiliation for the US. They wish, anyway.

The Democrats and their liberal left members maintain that it is Bush and his supporters that are playing fast and loose with politics; and that they are using fear to manipulate America so that they can establish a fascist/theocratic state.

We're still waiting for that imposition of theocracy by the BushHitler. He better hurry since he only has a few months in office left.

Meanwhile, since that tack came to naught, the latest attempts to undermine all things Bush have been moving forward on the economic front:
Depressing” is the adjective we’re hearing a lot when it comes to the U.S. economy....

The suggestion behind such talk is that the current situation isn’t merely depressing. It is that the slowdown is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. You almost expect Senators Obama and Clinton to repeat the lines from President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of 75 years ago: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The analogy is absurd. This economy is to the Great Depression what an April drizzle is to Hurricane Katrina. So far, the Dow has declined about 12% from its record high of last fall. In the Depression, it dropped more than 80%. Unemployment is about 5%. In the Depression it was 25%.

Maybe 2% of mortgages are in trouble, and abandoned homes line some parts of Cleveland Heights. During the Depression, more than half of Cleveland was underwater. Today, one big bank has collapsed. In 1931, 1,400 banks collapsed.

Even a comparison with more recent periods is a stretch.

Today, everyone is concerned about the consequences of the Bear Stearns rescue. On the right, critics argue that the Federal Reserve’s decision to make funds available to Bear created moral hazard on a scale that can bring down our markets. These critics forget that in 1984 Washington actually nationalized a big bank. That bank was the nation’s seventh largest, Continental Illinois. Yet the Reagan Revolution didn’t stall.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dow languished in the 800s for a period longer than it takes to collect a college degree. Unemployment in 1982 was close to 10%. Yet you didn’t hear too much talk about the New Deal or FDR’s speeches.

So why so dark this time?


Why? Because the war is going well. What better way to further undermine it--in an election year, too!--than to suggest that it is behind every major and minor economic woe any group anywhere in the country may be experiencing. But it's not.

Let's look for a moment at what the Democrats and the left have been doing. Referring to NSA programs that target international terrorists communications into the U.S. as "domestic spying"; comparisons of Bush to Hitler; that he is a terrorist himself, even worse than Bin Laden; the attitude that Guantanamo exemplifies the evil of the US; that US tortures innocents; that Iraq is another Vietnam; that modern Christianity is as much a threat to the West as the fanaticism of Islam; exploiting military deaths and suggesting that Iraq is the "worst" mistake in US history; insisting that Americans' civil rights have been shredded by this administration; etc. etc. ad infinitum--all of these examples of the fundamental hysteria that drives the left and its use of fear to manipulate the public.

Common sense is completely lost in all the histrionics of doom and defeat. After creating the atmospher of gloom and hopelessness; they then push a candidate who promises to bring about "hope and change" through defeat and surrender. As Wretchard says,
It seems inconceivable that any new President would throw everything away as worthless and start from scratch. And yet that is essentially what two out of three Presidential candidates plan to do in Iraq. This makes sense within the context of their accepted narrative. But as Sadr's loss of Basra should suggest, it may be worth considering whether that narrative is no longer operative.


It may be worth considering, but it isn't something that the political left and the Democrats are in the least interested in doing. They are in it for power (something they routinely accuse the Bush/Cheney Administration of...can you say "projection"?).

It is impossible for them to believe that anyone in politics would not play the game to maximize their hold on power (since that is what they would do if they were in power); and might actually take action because it is the right thing to do; or that it might be important for national security or in the national interest of America. What a concept!

All their rationalizations and rhetoric represent a classic case of projection, pure and simple. It has consistently been the antiwar lunatics of the left and their Democratic voices in Congress, who have --both consciously and unconsciously--aided and abetted the murderous activities of the Islamofascists; and not Bush or Cheney, contrary to the depiction in the cartoon at the beginning of this post.

In order to justify in their own minds the contempt they have toward their own country, they must constantly accuse the Republican in the White House--who is the recipient of the left's unadulterated hatred-- of behavior for which they themselves are guilty.

That is how perfect paranoia develops.

Here are some ways that paranoia and projection work in the real world:

  • You consider yourself a "peaceful" and non-violent person. Yet you feel violently angry at someone or some situation. This does not fit in with your image of yourself. With projection, you deny your own rage and insist that it is the other person who is going to attack you or has angry feelings towards you. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESULT: you don't have to acknowledge your own angry feelings which are unacceptable to you; and instead can attribute them to someone else.

  • You are a successful person. But deep down you feel unworthy of your success or guilty of your talent or wealth. Instead of acknowledging this and trying to understand and deal with the origins of such painful self-recrimination (did you cheat others to obtain your wealth? Are you faking talent? Have poor self-esteem?); you begin to think that others are criticizing you and trying to impede your success. Or, alternately you engage in self-defeating or self-destructive behavior that you blame on someone else. Or, you take the position that wealth is evil or all talent is undeserved and extol mediocrity or poverty as morally superior in order to compensate for your guilt. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESULT: you don't have to deal with the reason behind your guilt and unworthiness; and can attribute such critical attacks on you to someone else or denouncing others with talent and wealth makes you feel worthy. For examples of this you can pretty much pick all of the Hollywood elite or many successful businessmen (George Soros comes to mind).

  • You are an unsuccessful person or feel a failure in life. You have some shame and/or humiliation about your situation. Instead of dealing with what you are doing that makes you unsuccessful, you attribute your lack of success to the actions of some individual or group who is acting against you. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESULT: you don't have to take responsibility for your situation or acknowledge that your own actions brought you to it. It is not your fault, but someone else's. This is the mechanism behind most racist, sexist, homophobic and/or antisemitic behavior the world over. Islam, in particular, seems to specialize in this type of thinking about the Jews onto whom they project all their own inadequacies.


  • Of course, fear can be a healthy human emotion. There is a reason that human beings experience suspicion, distrust and hyper- vigilance. That reason is because there is REAL danger in the world. Our ancestors in the caves knew this to be true. They lived with continual danger just to survive every minute of every day. Being able to logically "connect the dots" and extract meaning from the evidence of one's senses is a necessity for survival. Those who did not have this psychological capacity surely died out long ago.

    But the tools of the truly paranoid individual who uses a fundamentally paranoid style that one can see dramatised in much political discourse these days are denial, distortion, and projection--all of which I write about frequently on this blog.

    When used by an adult to cope with the real world, all of these psychological defenses are almost always pathological and very dysfunctional.

    Those individuals who use these three primitive psychological defenses rearrange external reality (so that actual reality may be avoided); for an observer, the users of these mechanisms frequently appear crazy or insane. These are known as the "psychotic" defenses, common in overt psychosis, in dreams, and throughout childhood.

    Denial is a refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening. There are examples of denial being adaptive (for example, it might be adaptive for a person who has a terminal illness to use some degree of denial). But for the most part, denial is only useful as a short-term strategy, to permit a person to come to terms with reality. As a long-term strategy to protect self-identity, it is potentially lethal--since the person or group that uses it extensively is blinded to the real danger that might be out there.

    Distortion is a gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs. The ongoing and bizarre accusations against the evil genius Karl Rove are typical of the distortion of the paranoid style. The most recent example is the accusation by the denizens of the Democratic Underground that the Osama tape was masterminded by Rove to justify the President's authorization of the NSA to intercept terrorist communications.

    In a free society, it is reasonable to raise concerns about the trade-offs during a war of increased security and decreased freedom in some areas; and how far is it appropriate or necessary to go--balancing risks and benefits. But the paranoid left will not allow a rational discussion of this issue and insist that free speech is being taken away and that the President is mad with power. It is more to the point to say that they are mad with impotence.

    You might notice that the left today are so obsessed with controlling the speech of those who disagree with them (they refer to such speech as "hate" speech and generally accuse you of being "hate-filled"); that they are unable to recognize, let alone take responsibility for the hatred and anger that they are experiencing. Attributing their own feelings to others is much more acceptable since it allows them to continue to believe that they are champions of free speech; calm and rational ("reality-based"); when the greatest threats to free speech originate in their own policies which they demand be forced onto others; and the greatest threat to peace is in their own unacknowledged rage.

    Granted that the conservative right--especially sometimes the religious right--suffer from the same paranoid style at times and can be equally obnoxious with wanting to force their policies and beliefs onto others. That this is so, does not take the liberal left off the hook for their unbelievably childish and incredibly foolish paranoid attempts to manipulate political rhetoric in a time of war; in a manner that enables our enemies to exploit exposed faultlines in American politics--and to do it solely for their own personal political gain.

    When you try to engage them in discussion, the paranoid person will simply emote and vent his rage because he feels dispossessed, impotent and irrelevant--and bitter.

    Two-way communication is next to impossible. Eventually, the paranoid will develop a conspiracy theory to explain away their feelings of rage and impotence and seek to punish the person or group they blame for their situation. You can see this in almost every thread at the Democratic Underground if you are so inclined to read them. You can see it in the inflammatory and over-the-top rhetoric that has characterized the presidential primaries.

    It is easy to see how all these psychological manipulations work together to keep a person or a group insulated from reality. We witness such behavior all around us these days. It has a mindless quality that is indifferent to the societal damage that it wreaks.

    If the conservative right were able to develop a sense of insight and terminate the paranoid streak that ran through all its thinking in the 50's and 60's; then so too can the political left.

    What is so dangerous at this particular time in history, is that the left seems to be escalating their paranoia instead of containing it. The entire world is in the midst of a potentially deadly crisis, brought on by a dangerous and lethal strain of Islamism that the paranoid left refuses to acknowledge. They are only able to see the conservative right as the enemies they have to deal with, and are blind to the real danger.

    This is worse than delusional. This is potentially life-threatening for American society.

    Paranoia, projection, denial and distortion can be banished though the development of insight and self awareness. When these defense mechanisms are being used, some inner reality is distorting outer reality. It is the inner reality that has to be understood before a person can have control over their bias, prejudices and histrionic and rageful tendencies; which are the major stumbling blocks to a full grasp of reality. Only be taking down such impediments will this country optimally deal with dangerous world of the 21st century.

    The conservative right wing of American politics may once have been the predominant users of the paranoid style in the 60's. But today it is the left and all its ridiculous conspiracy theories that are the hallmark of paranoia and projection. This keeps them hopelessly mired in the past and deeply afraid of the future.

    Just because you call yourself "progressive" and "reality-based" is hardly a guarantee of either; particularly when your political rhetoric and behavior reflects a perfect paranoia.

    Sunday, April 20, 2008

    CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES


    [Click on the image for yet another outrageous insanity...or, is it progressive art?]

    Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

    Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry

    **NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

    REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!

    1. The "patriarchal heteronormative"? As opposed to what? Matriarchal homodeviance? multicultured fascist paranoia? But in progressive art, religion is far too controversial to be depicted. So much for creative expression.

    2. At least those matriarchs are raising the next generation of Jimmy Carters. He's the man who invented one-party peace talks. Look up his definition in the dictionary. He's on his "No Terrorist Left Behind" tour.

    3. I think OBL would donate to their cause. He's got millions. For a country that doesn't have any to begin with, they sure kill a lot.

    4. A "lack of socially responsible programming"....oh, boy. What will they do with South Park?

    5. He's a twoofor! A fine portrait of a natural born boozer? Portrait of a champ versus a chump.

    6. A Republican comedian! Who knew? Now McCain comes under fire for his "bitter" comments.

    7. Guns and God? Hell yes. Butsome people are just snobs! Just a little warning for the Democratic Presidential rivals.... STOEP it now, before it's too late! I'm more worried though about the kind of President he would make.

    8. Did ya hear the one about the con artist running for President? He's going to the Big [white] House. Advice for explaining association with unrepentant terrorists.

    9. Al Franken is a big, fat corporate tax deadbeat. Sounds like a good book!

    10. He's only doin' what comes naturally...and so is the media; or, doesn't character count at all? F'em! An endorsement from hell.

    11. What breasts! What thighs! And he ain't talkin' bout KFC.

    12. The evolution of man and woman. Men just can't stomach the facts! Sex and visual aggression.

    13. The TV tag lines of yesteryear.

    14. For some it would be helpful if this surgical procedure came with a new brain....ummmm maybe this would help the lawyers? Not-so-noble savages after all.

    15. The next time one of those bitter common "people" complain to you about the cost of a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs, lay this on them! Every market disaster can be blamed on chemicals!

    16. The bottom of the absurdity well. The absolute rock bottom. Could this be the beginning of an infinite regression: liveblogging the live bloggers, blogging the debate live?

    17. Poets may disagree about April, but April is a month for patriots.

    18. Sometimes "do whatever the f*** you want" doesn't mean what you think.

    19. Sports fans don't have a sense of humor...especially when they order sports merchandise, I guess.


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    Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

    If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:

    Heard the Word of Blog?

    Saturday, April 19, 2008

    BENEDICT WEIGHS IN ON CULTURAL RELATIVISM

    From Pope Benedict's UN speech yesterday:
    "This reference to human dignity, which is the foundation and goal of the responsibility to protect, leads us to the theme we are specifically focusing upon this year, which marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document was the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person at the heart of institutions, laws and the workings of society, and to consider the human person essential for the world of culture, religion and science. Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity. It is evident, though, that the rights recognized and expounded in the Declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God's creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks. This great variety of viewpoints must not be allowed to obscure the fact that not only rights are universal, but so too is the human person, the subject of those rights."

    Well said.

    By the way, after reading the Pope's message at the UN, I was kind of surprised at the way it was being reported. Turns out, the AP made up some things and spun some other things that he said. Benedict did not deliver quite the "socialist-US bashing manifesto' they might like you to believe.

    Pope Benedict, I think, is pretty clear that human rights and human freedom are the key issues that must be addressed in the world today. He is particularly concerned about freedom of religion and that countries where this is restricted are violating human rights (who might he be talking about, I wonder? Hmmmm.).

    If we want to see the consequences of leftist socialism-lite, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism, then we need only look at how easily Europe and the leftists in this country have surrendered the fundamental values of Western civilization to the shrill (and violent) demands of Islamic fanatics--all done in the spirit of multicultural tolerance and politically correct compassion.

    Europe, having given up any objective standard by which to mediate the vastly different perspectives and feelings of its varied populations; having abandoned reason altogether in favor of the expression of feelings no matter how destructive or unreasonable; and, finally, having endlessly touted the critical importance and essential need to "belong" to one's race, tribe, religion or group first and foremost; the outcome is what Stephen Hicks refers to as "group balkinization" --with all its inevitable and inescapable conflict.

    That politically correct road which the left has taken us all down--billed as the path to peace and harmony--has instead led to a land dominated by emotions; a place where barbarism of the most primal sort is tolerated and excused; and where the human rights that the Pope talks about have been all but abandoned.

    And, why should we be surprised at this destination? Why would peaceful coexistence be expected to result from a movement that has done everything in its power to eradicate universalism and undermine the very idea of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and foist multiculturalism and tribalism into the public consciousness?

    The Pope lauds the UN for its stand on basic human rights, but the words of the UN are often a far cry from its actions in the real world. All one has to do is take a look at the membership of the UN's own 'Human Rights' committee to see how far that organization has distanced itself from reality.: the worse human rights offenders in the world are given a platform with which to trumpet their own bigotry and oppression.

    And the world yawns.

    But this is a natural consequence of multiculturalism and the dogma of political correctness. Multiculturalism after all celebrates--not belonging to the family of humanity--but to one's sexual, racial, ethnic, or religious identity above all else. Political correctness simply provides the eggshells that everyone can walk around on so as to not offend the feelings in other groups (unless, of course, you belong to that one particular culture that is given a pass because of its unique evil; and for which offending is obligatory--you know which culture that is, don't you?)

    Like many ideas of the left, including multiculturalism, what you wind up with is exactly the opposite of what was promised.

    Other false promises were the claims that socialism and communism made about eliminating poverty and ushering in "social justice". What these ideologies were good at was delivering misery instead of happiness; poverty instead of wealth; enslavement instead of freedom. So it is no surprise that the dogma of multiculturalism and political correctness, instead of harmony, have resulted in lethal discord.

    The surrender of 2500 years of Enlightenment values has slowly brought to all of Europe an almost-impenetrable intellectual and moral darkness. Here in the New World, we need to recognize what is happening there, before that same darkness envelops and paralyzes us.

    On this issue, Pope Benedict has been a voice crying out in the wilderness and a beacon of moral clarity.