THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Bell Curve Politics and the Inkblot

Bell Curve Politics and the Inkblot

It looks like Haloscan is still having problems, but luckily (or unluckily depending on your point of view) I can still post to the website, and I wanted to comment on JR’s posting “Obama as a Rorschack Inkblot”. The article provides some interesting insight into how political campaigns are conducted, often avoiding issues and logical arguments in favor of emotional appeals. The one taking place in the USA is a particularly good example of playing to emotion rather than addressing the issues. Instead of discussing the most important issues of the day, the political strategies seem to be playing to the lower half of the intelligence bell curve, intentionally appealing to the ignorant portion of society. It’s what I like to call ‘Bell Curve Politics’.

The idea of Bell Curve Politics is that half the population is of below average intelligence and the party that plays best to the ignorant and stupid has an advantage in being elected because these people are more easily duped. These people are not interested in reality, facts, the issues, or logical arguments, but are more interested in and susceptible to appeals to their feelings and self esteem.

This is why you get contradictory comments from Obama supporters since they see what ever they want. This is why they say things like, he will “say `no' to a lot of this government spending”, when he has already proposed about $290 billion in additional yearly spending. Or they say things like, he has a “policy - it's my favourite - ooh, I can't remember right now." These people are nearly brain dead. They think he “can do anything”, that he’ll solve all their problems, but don’t bother to ask them how because they haven't got a clue. It’s not about issues, facts, or logical arguments, it’s about feelings. Obama is just “a likable guy and he inspires people”, which is of course how a lot of Germans felt about Hitler.

Conservatives have a natural difficulty in dealing with these sorts of people because of the conservative tendency to focus on history, facts and logical argument. But logical arguments are wasted on the lower half of the Bell Curve, they are simply not interested in thinking and would rather live in a feel good dream world (like Cuba), even when that world has repeatedly been proven not to exist (this is often referred to by liberals as being "nuanced"). Conservatives have already lost most of the lower half of the Bell Curve before they ever begin to present their arguments because arguments based in reality are not what people want to hear or think about. They want to feel good.

This is not to say that there are no smart liberals or few dumb conservatives (and of course there are many people who are ignorant by choice), but when trying to win an election it is much easier to win if you already have the stupid on your side. So, by playing to these people, talking about “change” and “hope”, but saying little of substance, you can win over a huge chunk of the population. In turn, this makes it less necessary to win a large amount of the people on the upper half of the Bell Curve who are thinking about the issues, certainly it's not needed to win a majority. And without the need to win over the upper half, there is no need for well reasoned and thoughtful arguments to support you positions, which allows one to avoid many issues and facts altogether. This suits the leftists well, whose policies have failed over and over, are detrimental to the cause of freedom, and which ultimately end up hurting everyone.

Want to understand political campaigns? Look to the Bell Curve.

P.S. "The Bell Curve" refers to a book by by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray dealing with intellegence, which argued that in the future, society would be devided not by race, but by intellegence. Don't get too hung up in the analogy, in reallity most people are in the mid section of the Bell Curve and it doesn't mean they are dumb.

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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

Bell Curve Politics and the Inkblot

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