THE PSYCHOLOGIST : An Australian news roundup

An Australian news roundup

Australian PM firmly against homosexual marriage

Prime Minister John Howard said today he had scuttled the ACT's homosexual unions law because it challenged a major characteristic of Australian society. "The Bill is plainly an attempt to mimic marriage under the misleading title of civil unions," Mr Howard told ABC radio. "We are not anti-homosexual people or gay and lesbian people, it is not a question of discriminating against them, it is a question of preserving as an institution in our society marriage as having a special character."

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said he would try to stop the Government using their constitutional powers to quash the territory's law. "Kerry Nettle on behalf of the Greens will move (a) disallowance (motion) in the Senate and that means there will be a vote, following a debate," Senator Brown told ABC radio. But Labor, which the Greens need for their motion to succeed, has not immediately offered their support to the plan. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said he would look at the ACT legislation before making a decision. "We will take a careful look at what the ACT has come out with and we will determine our position on the basis of that analysis," Mr Beazley told ABC radio....

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Turtle blocks $11 billion gas project

A little-known turtle has blocked - at least for now - Western Australia's much vaunted $11 billion Gorgon LNG project. WA's Environmental Protection Authority said today the huge gas export project on Barrow Island off WA's far north coast was environmentally unacceptable mainly because of the risk to the rare and threatened flatback turtle. It is the second time the EPA has rejected the Gorgon proposal, which was first rejected in July 2003. But WA Cabinet overrode the EPA decision in September 2003, allowing restricted access to Barrow Island to the project which is forecast to provide 6000 jobs and boost Australia's gross domestic product (GDP) by $2 billion.

Today EPA chairman Wally Cox said subsequent work done by the Gorgon joint venture partners - ExxonMobil, Shell and project operator Chevron - had highlighted the land and marine conservation values of the island and surrounding waters. "Flatback turtles in particular would be put at risk from the proposal with two of the most important nesting beaches located adjacent to the proposed LNG processing plant site and the materials off-loading facility," Dr Cox said. "There is very little science available on the life-cycle, behaviour and feeding habits of flatback turtles and as a consequence it is not possible at this time to identify management measures that would ensure ongoing survival of this Pilbara flatback turtle population. "As a result, the proposal in its present form cannot meet the EPA's environmental objectives and is considered environmentally unacceptable." ....

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Note the following comment from a nature site:

"Though we don't know for certain, the flatback turtle is probably the least threatened sea turtle with an annual nesting population of up to 10,000. It can be found near Indonesia and Papua New Guinea but only breeds on the north and northeastern coasts of Australia."

Public hospital negligence in Victoria

A top Victorian surgeon has blamed communication and system failures at the Royal Children's Hospital for a medical disaster that left a baby brain-damaged. Prof Paddy Dewan told a medical inquiry yesterday he was astounded not only that a toxic glucose dose was put in the boy's drip, but also that the treatment continued unchecked. The pediatric surgeon labelled the child's case an "unbelievable scenario" compounded by an overlap of medical and surgical unit care.

The Medical Practitioners' Board of Victoria is investigating unprofessional conduct claims against three doctors in the wake of the tragedy. Dr Lea Lee Foo, Dr Shobha Iyer and Dr David Tickell face potential penalties ranging from counselling to deregistration if found guilty. Dr Foo is accused of ordering the wrong intravenous drip fluid solution. The two others are accused of failing to properly examine the child and check his fluid treatment. The doctors deny being unprofessional.

The disciplinary hearing has been told the baby, who cannot be identified, suffered permanent brain damage after he was given a glucose solution 10 times stronger than advised. The boy was admitted suffering vomiting and was diagnosed with an abdominal problem that needed routine surgery. The drip was inserted in the early hours of September 19, 2001.

Source

Arrogant Victoria police refuse to accept high-quality ID

What hope does that give the rest of us? Do we now need to be tattooed to identify ourselves? At least they didn't shoot anybody this time, I suppose

Police say they would arrest the wrong person again after a set of "incredible coincidences" in their hunt for a con woman. Jodie Symes, 35, of Melbourne, was hauled off a flight to Sydney on Sunday after airline staff mistakenly identified her as wanted con artist Jodie Harris....

But Mrs Symes is seething over the incident. She said she was dozing on the plane while waiting for it to take off when three uniformed officers woke her. "[They said] 'Excuse me, ma'am,' [and] basically asked me to grab my luggage and exit the plane. I was thinking], 'My god. What has happened?' '' The police took her back into the terminal and told her they suspected she was Harris. Mrs Symes showed them her driving licence as well as photocopies of her birth certificate, marriage certificate and divorce papers, which she was carrying with her. "They then told me that wasn't good enough. They believed me to be this Jodie Harris and placed me under arrest as being her and I was read my rights.

She was then placed in the back of a police van and taken to a Melbourne police station where she was held for several hours. Police then looked at a tattoo on her ankle and thought they definitely had the con woman. "They claimed she had exactly the same ankle tattoo as myself.'' She then showed them a tattoo on her hip, which did not match those on Harris's body. "After showing a female detective a [tattoo] on my hip, about 10 minutes later or so she came in and was very apologetic about the mix-up that happened.''

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(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, 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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