THE PSYCHOLOGIST : A Tree By Any Other Name...

A Tree By Any Other Name...

I wasn't going to weigh in on the Christmas tree vs holiday tree kerfuffle but since the story has generated so much attention and since I've been discussing the issue on blogs and forums all over cyberspace I may as well put pen to paper as it were.

Of course by now we all how the City of Boston suddenly found itself on centre stage after its decision to erect a holiday tree. Then just the other day Rideau Hall spokeswoman Lucie Brosseau said,

"At Rideau Hall, we will be putting up a holiday tree as we find it reflects the traditions of many cultures, and it is inclusive."

After a call from the Ottawa Citizen the decision makers at Rideau Hall quickly changed their minds. A spokesman for Governor-General Michaelle Jean declared the whole thing a mistake and that the Christmas tree is a Christmas tree afterall.

Even here in good ole Winterpeg we are not immune to such absurdity. Thanks to a series of columns by Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Sun, officials at The Forks have decided to use the traditional name for the tree on display there. Last year the folks at the popular and historic Forks saw fit to proudly declare their tree a holiday tree. After a series of scathing articles by Brodbeck, which resulted in a public outcry, the good people at the Forks decided that they didn't want a repeat this year and so common sense prevailed.

The same thing happened a few years earlier when Manitoba's NDP government erected its own holiday tree at the Legislature. This too was short lived due to public anger.

Is it wrong to call a Christmas tree a holiday tree? Aren't we suppose to be living in a multi-cultural society where we are tolerant of all beliefs and faiths? The semantics involved here is not the problem. It is merely a symptom of a much larger problem. Political correctness has run amok in this country. Why must we continue to alter/amend/change our own traditions/customs/beliefs to accommodate various small sectors of our society? Why is wrong for us to want to hold onto the practices we believe are right?

This has nothing to do with race or religion. It has everything to do with a way of life we have enjoyed for generations. And that way of life is made up of the various little customs and traditions we enjoy today regardless of how silly or trivial they may seem out of context. The buzz word of multi-culturalism is tolerance. How did we come to be intolerant by expecting the tolerance of others? As my good friends over at United Right asked,

"If I were to permanently emigrate by choice, to say Sri Lanka, then I would embrace their culture, and try to adapt, and I would raise my family in Sri Lankan ways. To do otherwise, I would have to ask myself, why did I move here?"

UR explains further,

Canada is a great country, and welcomes people of all faiths and nationalities. That said, first and foremost, there has to be a sense of being "Canadian" and a pride in that, or else we will quickly find ourselves embracing the same nihilism as Europe. And ripe for the plucking by any other group with more entrenched and aggressive beliefs.

I think that sums it up quite nicely. I have several Muslim friends, one from West Africa and several others from Jordan. They have been living here for several years with the hopes of attaining citizenship. They are not offended when I wish them a Merry Christmas. Hell, they even join us in our celebrations! And they have taught me much about their own beliefs and customs. I would never be so presumptuous as to demand they change their customs, even if it is simply a matter of semantics, so that said customs are more palatable to me. Nor would I move to Jordan and demand they change the name of Ramadan because it offends my Christian beliefs.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of multi-culturalism but there is everything wrong with the way it is practiced in this country. In our zeal to be politically correct we are more than ready to flush down the toilet our own traditions. And that is wrong. To quote UR again,

Regrettably, that is the Liberal Party view of Canada. Divide and conquer. Multiculturalism is not about tolerance and understanding, it is about dividing people into tribes, all the better to manipulate them through their isolation and home grown hatreds.

And that is exactly what it has come down to.

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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

A Tree By Any Other Name...

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