THE PSYCHOLOGIST : The left side of the blogosphere

The left side of the blogosphere

...really, really doesn't like the fact that Iraq have free elections. Here's what I saw on some left-wing blogs over the past 3-4 days:

Daily Kos
- Mocking comparison to Vietnam, implying that the Iraq war will continue for a long time.
- Without a single fact, Kos claims the elections could've been staged, and it's not a success to have 8 million people vote.
- Ignoring all the work done in Iraq, more doomsday predictions and "it's taking too long" complaints.
- Blames the right-wing and Bush for pretty much everything, using Iraq as an example, once again, without a single fact to support the argument.
- Claims the election will be a failure because of low turnout. Interestingly enough, in newer posts the turnout no longer matters as to whether the election is a success or not.
- A sizable group, but still a minority of a minority group may boycott the election, thus making it a joke of an election.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? Zero.

Eschaton
Hmm. Three very short posts about the election, all of which consist of quotes from one woman, with no real commentary, no context, no links, nothing. Eschaton really doesn't want to cover the elections.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? Zero.

Juan Cole
- A news round-up of only the most negative news he could find on the Iraq elections, from the usual leftist news sources.
- A doomsday prediction that the election will make things worse for Iraq, including bringing more terrorism.
- Claims, without any basis or fact to support them, that the elections are rigged, and not true democracy, with a stab at Bush in the process.
- A Zogby poll is presented as fact, because it attacks America and makes the elections look a lot worse than they actually are. No mention of positive polls. Not even a mention of how wrong Zogby was in the past.
- Every other post on Iraq is about dead soldiers.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? Zero.

AnonymousLefty
- Claims the election will be a sham because of security situations. This however failed to materialise.
- Claims it's not actually democracy and there's not much of a choice, so it's hard to see why so many Iraqis got excited about it, despite it being democracy.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? Zero.

John Quiggin
- Disparages Bush, the Coalition, Allawi, the Pentagon, but at least claims the elections were mostly successful.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? One.

Troppo Armadillo
Not a thing.

Tim Lambert (Deltoid)
Not a thing.

Niall Cook
Again, not a thing.

Darpism
Still, not a thing.

Oliver Willis
- Claims that the election will cause another tyrannical despot, and uses Osama Bin Laden as his first example...?
- This election is potentially the start of the invasion of Iran.
- The Iraqi election isn't "honest, safe [or] real", and will cause another September 11.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? Zero.

Talking Points Memo
- Despite the apparent widespread hatred of the US, it was a fairly successful election.
Positive mentions of Iraq, Bush, the Iraqi people or democracy? One.

So let's do the maths. 11 left-wing blogs had 4 days to post positive things about Iraq in the lead-up to, during, and directly after the historic elections. However not only were a large number of left-wing blogs not interested in the elections, but the ones that were seemed almost entirely interested in labelling it a sham. The positive left-wing blogs made one post that hardly covered anything on the topic, and have not spoken about it since.

Not one left-wing blog I read mentioned they were happy for the Iraqi people - the majority thought the election was rigged/a sham, yet provided absolutely no evidence for it, other than a bunch of Sunnis exercising their democratic right not to vote.

Maybe the left hates democracy and freedom in Iraq, maybe they don't. But if they don't hate it, they're doing a Herculean effort in covering up their support for a free Iraq.

(Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights