THE PSYCHOLOGIST : An Australian news roundup

An Australian news roundup

Conservative wimp: "The Liberal MP charged with selling the Howard Government's message on multiculturalism has been embarrassed by his own branch members distributing the cartoon of Mohammed that sparked deadly protests worldwide. Andrew Robb, the federal member for the Victorian seat of Goldstein and recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, confirmed yesterday that he demanded action after his Brighton party branch distributed the offending images. The 200-strong Brighton branch published the offending cartoons in an email newsletter just days before violent protests over the images in Nigeria in which 16 people were killed. Mr Robb, who coincidentally spent yesterday in talks with Muslim leaders in Canberra, told The Australian that email distribution of the Mohammed cartoons was "offensive". In a letter to Victorian Liberal Party state director Julian Sheezel, Mr Robb, a former federal Liberal Party director, demanded "appropriate action" be taken over the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. "It's provocative and offensive. I feel strongly that the attachment runs counter to the advice of the Prime Minister that the right to freedom of speech is an essential right, but one which must be exercised responsibly and sensitively," he wrote.

Yuk! Single white feminist seeks Aussie mate: "Two things you need to know about Maureen Dowd: first, she's single-handedly responsible for raising feminism from the dead. Second, the defining drive in her life has been the search for the elusive Australian male. I know this because the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times - and now internationally bestselling author - said so yesterday. In Sydney to promote her book Are Men Necessary? (the question mark, she emphasises, "is really very important"), Dowd is still bemused and amused by the feminist frenzy that followed the publication last year of her witty and anarchic look at the gender tangle. Women didn't get the irony at all, she says with eyebrows arched, "but men - they saw the mischief, and the fun". The trouble is, she drawls, "feminists didn't know they were dead, and they resented me telling them this. Although my book does seem to have given them new life"... "If only they knew," she says. "When I was 20, I fell in love with an Australian hotel manager in Dublin called Rowan. After that, I wanted to emigrate to Australia but my parents made me go home instead. "Now I'm here at last. And if they can take a strong, sassy, saucy woman, Australian men should please apply"

Sex criminals face 'indefinite sentences': "Women and children will be protected by new laws enabling authorities to keep serious sex offenders behind bars indefinitely, NSW Premier Morris Iemma says. Under legislation to be introduced during parliament's current sittings, applications can be made to the Supreme Court to extend prison sentences for the state's most dangerous sexual predators if they pose a community threat. Mr Iemma said the government was taking a tough stance against criminals who demonstrated no hope of rehabilitation. "It is about protecting the innocent and the vulnerable in our community, particularly women and children," Mr Iemma said. "There is a category of criminal that refuses to show remorse or participate in rehabilitation programs and threatens continuing sexually predatory behaviour on release." Mr Iemma refused to say how many prisoners would be subject to the new laws. He said under the legislation, now operating in both Victoria and Queensland, the Supreme Court would be able to order continued detention or the extended supervision of people outside of prison.

Incorrect to mention ethnic politics "Health Minister Tony Abbott has been forced to withdraw comments after asking whether there were any Australians left in the Labor Party. Opposition MPs booed and jeered in Question Time after Mr Abbott referred to Cambodian, Vietnamese, Spanish and Greek Labor Party members - then asked where the Australians were. A day after defending multiculturalism in a newspaper column, Mr Abbott questioned the ethnic branch-stacking in the Victorian ALP, where several sitting members in safe seats are facing preselection challenges. Labor's Bob Sercombe yesterday pulled out of the pre-selection race for his seat of Maribyrnong, conceding he could not win. Six other MPs also face challenges, including Simon Crean who is under pressure from union boss Martin Pakula in the Melbourne seat of Hotham. "Mr Pakula may be very appealing to Cambodian speaking people who are just two per cent of the electorate of Hotham but they're 30 per cent of the Labor pre-selectors of Hotham," Mr Abbott said. "I'm reading in The Australian last Friday, he's (Mr Crean) still got the Greek branches but he's lost the Spanish branches and he's lost the Vietnamese branches as well as the Cambodian branches. "And I couldn't help but think - are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?"

Pole dancers shafted: "A tax crackdown on pole dancers has suprised some - because they say payments are mainly made by credit cards. More than 50 pole dancing clubs have been contacted by the Australian Tax Office as part of blitz on Australia's estimated $18 billion black economy. Some of the clubs received "unannounced visits" as part of the crackdown. The owner of Twin Peeks Lingerie Restaurant in Woolloomooloo, Sharon, said her clientele - mainly businessmen - used credit cards to pay for a $95 dinner and show. "With us it's mostly credit cards, not cash - cash is definitely not a large portion. "We were audited by the tax office last year and it was fine.... Another source, who has been in the adult entertainment industry for almost 20 years, said she and her colleagues all paid tax. "I've done a lot of different things in that time. I've done full body massage, full service sex work, lingerie waitressing, jelly wrestling, group striptease, pole dancing and bachelor birthday parties. I've paid tax on all of it," said the 34-year-old, who asked not to be named. "To the best of my knowledge all of the (adult industry) companies pay tax. I don't know about the working girls on the street (but) all of the companies pay tax." An ATO spokeswoman said the adult industry had been classified "high-risk" by the cash economy compliance team. during its 2004-05 program.

(For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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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

An Australian news roundup

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