THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Don't Forget Afghanistan

Don't Forget Afghanistan

Waheed, the Afghan Warrior, continues to provide updates about the state of affairs in Afghanistan. The society has become a lot more open-minded, and traditional mores are followed out of respect instead of fear:

The people are feeling free - women can go to work. Some women wear burkhas and some women not, but they are no longer forced to wear burkhas, it's their choice. School girls and college girls put a little scarf on their heads. The people of some provinces are still facing problems with their kids' education and hospitals. In some villages there are no health clinics and drinking water. There are still some clashes in southern provinces but the central provinces and northern are quite calm.

Afghans learn English as they know its an international language. Especially in the capital Kabul, there are almost 1500 English courses where thousands of girls and boys learn English at school. English teaching starts from Year 7, but most students still go to English classes after school because they think they can learn better. As I mentioned in my first blog, it's the first time that we have four TV channels in the capital, Kabul. Also there are cable networks so that people who can afford it get cable connection. Afghan TV channels also have good programs. There is a channel called "Tolo TV" which is the youngsters favorite channel. It plays music like Arabic, Indian, Turkish, English. Also they have nice sports channels and play movies every night. We have female and male announcers in all channels and female singers after the new election held last year.

Despite the positives, of course, Afghanistan is still a Third World nation:

Food is very expensive for the people. Beside some rich people, most people eat meat once per week. Milk, bread, sugar, and cooking oil prices are very high for people, especially for the civil servants. A government worker makes 2000 afghani a month and one kilo of sheep meat is 200 afghani while one kilo of cow's meat costs 140 Afghani. A liter of diesel fuel costs 26 Afghani and a liter of petrol fuel costs between 24 and 27 afghani. Most people buy second hand clothes because the price of new clothes and shoes is very expensive. A teacher can not buy a coat for 1500 afghani because a teacher (e.g. a high school teacher) makes only 3000 afghani a month. The US dollar price in afghani is one $US dollar equals to 48 afghani. The price keeps changing every day - sometime s one US dollar equals 50 afghani.

So it is impossible for most people to buy meat every day, or even 3 times a week, because the salary of a government worker is equal to the price of 10 kilos of meat. Only those people who work for foreign organizations make much more than the government officials. Food price is not the only problem in Afghanistan - the taxi rents are very high too. Although there are many public busses, they are not enough to solve the people's problems because the population of Kabul city is over 3 million people, and since the fall of the Taliban almost two million people have returned to Kabul. Some refugees who are homeless live under tents. Almost 50% of people are homeless in Kabul and they ask the government to build shelters for them. Many people sold their houses during the 1992 war and during the Taliban regime and they spent their money while they were in Pakistan and Iran during that time. They sold their houses for really cheap prices because the situation was really bad and now their houses are 10 times more than the price they sold them at, so the people hope that the new government will issue some land to homeless people, but its unclear when that will happen.

At least they feel free, and they can make choices. In order to ensure that Afghanistan has a fighting chance, the world must not forget her. It is here that the liberal aspects of Western civilization can best help, with aid, support, and relief. Under the Coalition's watchful eyes, the chances that some local thug can hoard all the aid and thus hijack the relief process is minimal. Remember that it is America's duty to continue supporting fledgling democracies instead of funneling aid to dictatorships, as Victor Davis Hanson points out:

Sooner rather than later, Americans must also face the embarrassing fact that giving billions to the Egyptian dictator Mubarak, providing good-behavior money to the king of Jordan, and now giving jets to a Pakistani autocrat are all in the long-term as damaging to the United States' efforts to reform the Middle East as they are in the present smoothing the ruffled feathers of hurt strongmen.

The next problem we face is not that we have pushed democracy too abruptly in once-hostile lands, but that we have not pushed it enough into so-called friendly territory. It is, of course, dangerous to promote democracy in the Middle East, but more dangerous still to pause in our efforts, and, finally, most dangerous of all to quit before seeing this bold gambit through to its logical end — an end that alone will end the pathologies that led to September 11.

Hitch would be proud.

If you're looking to be more active in your participation, considering giving to the Red Cross, which has a number of projects in Afghanistan.

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

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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

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Don't Forget Afghanistan

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