THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Leftist hate speech

Leftists are by far the main users of hate speech. The torrent of hate speech pouring out at Trump and his supporters is totally unambiguous. It cannot be mistaken as anything but hate. Yet the accusations of hate speech that are normally directed by Leftists at others are rarely directed at utterances that express hate. A sincere Christian who opposes homosexual marriage is not acting out of hate but rather out of faith in the unambiguous teachings of his holy book. It is simply a libel to say that the Christian is acting out of hate.

But what is wrong with hate speech anyway? U.S. courts have decreed that hate speech is constitutionally protected free speech. And most people give at least lip service to the desirability of free speech. The basic answer coming from the Left is that hate speech leads to hate crimes. But no evidence is normally quoted for that assertion. The only scientific study of the theory that I could find I have previously noted here. The finding was that there was a weak tendency of hate speech against immigrants to go with attacks on immigrants -- but even there it was not at all clear that the speech was the cause of the attacks.

Occasionally a report emerges about a political conservative attacking someone in conjunction with pro-Trump speech -- as here -- but they are exceedingly rare.

And what about the (say) 100 million other people who heard Trump's alleged hate speech and did not assault anybody? Doesn't that prove that Trump's speech is wonderfully safe and that hate speech does not cause hate crime? If hate speech does not lead to hate crime in 100 million cases, what more evidence do we need to conclude that hate speech does not cause hate crimes?

We do have to look at ALL the evidence, of course. Not that any Leftist ever does. Reality is so far inconsistent with Leftist beliefs that they would become conservatives if they let themselves consider all the evidence.

And what evidence do we have that the men would have behaved differently if they had not heard Trump? There is none. It is just a claim. Trump could be just an excuse for an inclination to violence.

And how can we base any generalization on one instance? It's because we can't that we have statistics. If lots of people had gone out and bashed illegals after hearing The Donald, the Left might have a case. But as it is, one swallow doesn't make a summer.

Collective hate speech

There is however one sort of hate speech that undoubtedly leads to violence: Not hate speech by one individual but collective hate speech. History has many examples of that: The Nazi condemnation of Jews and the Holocaust; the Ku Klux Klan hatred of blacks and the lynching of some of them etc. If there is a widespread campaign of hate directed at one subset of people, that can generate physical attacks on that group. And note that both the Ku Klux Klan and Hitler were on the Left. Hitler was a socialist and the 1924 Democratic National Convention was so dominated by the Klan that it was referred to as the "Klanbake" convention.

And history is repeating itself right now. There is a concerted campaign of hate pouring out of most of the media directed at Donald Trump and his supporters. And violence in response is already happening. The violence is so far mostly trivial, with the major effect being discrimination against conservatives in many ways -- refusing to serve them in restaurants etc. But such is the volume of hate that history tells us to expect more serious attacks in due course. Some leading Democrats, such as Maxine Waters, have gone very close to urging it.

Another current form of collective hate speech is hatred of the police, as encouraged by Obama -- "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon" -- and very recently continued by Elizabeth Warren. Clashes with police by blacks are now routinely blamed by blacks on the police -- not on black thugs. Hate speech against the police is now epidemic among blacks. And the result? Several police have been shot and killed. Collective hate against the police has indisputably led to real violence there.

And to some extent whites generally have been subjected to hate from the Left -- with claims of "white privilege" etc. There is no clear example of that so far leading to attacks on whites but, again, history leads us to expect that they will come. Many attacks on whites by blacks in connection with mugging, home-invasions etc. are probably in part motivated by hate but such attacks were going on long before the current campaign condemning whites emanating from the Left.

Where whites do suffer from Leftist anger is in discrimination: Being knocked back from a job or college enrolment because a less qualified black must be given preference. Leftists condemn discrimination but they are by far the biggest practitioners of it -- JR

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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

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