THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Useless "Welcome to Country" ceremonies. A ‘Virtuous fad’

Useless "Welcome to Country" ceremonies. A ‘Virtuous fad’

I have never seen the point of this. Just because one's ancestors once lived in a place, does that give them any rights? There is no legal doctrine to that effect yet that seems to be what is implied. It is just another bit of Leftist racism as far as I can see

“It is hard to hear the softest of voices,” she wrote, “in a room filled with clamouring chatter. Only in silence can the quiet truly be heard.”

These words, which were published over the weekend, belong to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is the Indigenous Country Liberal Party senator for the Northern Territory and who went where few dare to tread in denouncing what she described as the virtue-signalling calls for Indigenous “voice” and “recognition”.

Ever sat through a Welcome to Country ceremony and wondered just what in real terms it contributed to the many challenges facing Indigenous women and children and thought that just maybe it was a piece of theatre designed to make everybody – individuals, corporations, governments, universities, councils – feel that they were making a contribution to “recognition”?

You might think it, but you dare not give voice to the thought for fear of being denounced as an uncaring, disrespectful racist. Senator Price does not run that risk and spoke for many, I suspect, when she wrote that Indigenous recognition has become “the latest virtuous fad”.

“On any given day in our nation you can be confronted with non-Indigenous Australians vying to have their virtues heard when they monotonously and mechanically pay their ‘respects to elders past, present and emerging’,” she wrote.

“Simultaneously, Australians with Indigenous heritage purport to be ‘proud’ members of some – or a number of – tribes belonging to fashionably termed ‘First Nations’.”

Her point is that it’s lovely to nod virtuously at such ceremonies while resisting the urge to look at your watch or check your phone, but something else entirely to do something about Indigenous social issues.

Politicians of all persuasions are quick to embrace such virtue signalling, but do little to combat the appalling level of physical violence and sexual assaults being perpetrated on Indigenous women and children at many times the rate of that in the non-Indigenous population.

There have been some horrific instances of domestic violence in Queensland and elsewhere in recent times and the issue has generated outrage, public outpourings of grief and demands for a more effective government action.

Senator Price puts this in an uncomfortable perspective when she says that her cousin was attacked with an axe for supporting her niece in a rape case against an Indigenous relative, an attack that was witnessed by schoolchildren.

If the attack had taken place in Brisbane or any capital city, she said, women would have taken to the streets demanding an end to what she described as this “patriarchy” – but nothing happened.

The electoral success of the Greens and Independents in the federal election has pushed climate change to the very forefront of the national debate. Younger voters and the well-educated and financially secure elite embraced the Greens and the allegedly independent teals as they might the latest in winter coats by Burberry.

In doing so did they ever pause for a moment and wonder just how large climate change concerns loom in the minds of Indigenous women and children who live in daily fear of being bashed or raped? Hardly, for as Senator Price opined, these victims are out of sight and mind to the virtue-signalling class. “These attacks cannot be fixed by ‘Welcome to Country or elders past, present and emerging’,” she says.

The superficially virtuous are also quick to champion the establishment of a separate Indigenous voice to federal parliament and a treaty with Indigenous people neither of which, as Price points out, make any reference to, suggest any solutions to, or even acknowledge the existence of the issue of violence and abuse.

Virtue, like talk, is cheap. It has replaced tree hugging as elements of our society proclaim their determination to save the planet while conveniently ignoring the issues that plague sections of our community.

Saving the planet is dead easy. You just cast your vote and all but bursting with virtue go home, put your feet up, pour a glass of vegan wine, turn on the reverse cycle aircon if it’s getting a bit chilly and relax – job done. It’s so much easier than confronting what Senator Price describes as raw and unpleasant truths.

The next time you sit through a Welcome to Country ceremony, you might ask yourself how deep your virtue runs. Talking the talk is one thing, but walking the walk is another

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/mike-oconnor/mike-oconnor-virtue-signalling-fails-to-confront-hard-truth/news-story/b69a6135bd64937f47d00cd12213bd45

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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

Useless "Welcome to Country" ceremonies. A ‘Virtuous fad’

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