I don't buy it. Ron Paul is so
anti-Federal Reserve that he WOULD say that, though. He might be the
willing servant of Goldman Sachs or George Soros, though. If any
company came through the investment problems smelling like a rose, it
would be Goldman Sachs. And, oddly enough, the Treasury Secretary once
worked at Goldman Sachs.
Purely a coincidence, I'm sure. **COUGH**
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people
do is a swine."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 4/12/2010 8:59 PM, [email protected] wrote:
David :
About Ron Paul, I caught a snippet of commentary that I was unable to
follow through
on Fox. But it seems as if he is saying that Obama as socialist
is inaccurate, a better
term might be plutocrat. That is, RP's view, Obama is the
willing servant
of Wall Street and shares their values. Sounds plausible even
if, yes,
this snippet hardly is the last word, and there is more to the
story.
Billy
=================================================
In a message dated 4/12/2010 6:49:26 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes: Billy,
It may well be 90 %.
It's real bad when the legislation stinks to the heavens so much that
Dr. No (Ron Paul) seems to have the good sense to vote against just
about everything.
The bad news is that he would vote against even good things
(sometimes).
I know, Ron Paul and good sense in the same sentence. That's how bad it
is.
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people
do is a swine."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 4/12/2010 1:41 AM, [email protected] wrote:
David :
Not much for me to disagree with in your e-mail.
As for illegal immigration, as you know, I'm solidly in the
same camp as you are.
I'd nuance it if it was possible, and not worry about 90% of
our Asian immigrants,
who at very high levels become model citizens in the first
generation.
And while I have zero against Latinos, in cases I have very
positive feelings,
I'd like to see the wall 20 feet thick and a mile high and
extend into
the ocean in the West and into the Gulf in the East. Like,
enough of this
nonsense, we cannot absorb millions and millions of still
more poor people
with little more than unskilled labor abilities. There must
be limitations.
But I gotta tell you, if half the population of Japan wanted
to make the move,
I'd be all for it.
Only 60 % of Congress seems out of touch to you ?
What are you, some kind of screaming liberal ?
Seems closer to 90 % to me.
Billy
======================================================
In a message dated 4/11/2010 10:09:44 P.M. Pacific Daylight
Time, [email protected]
writes: Billy,
I'm sure there are phobias on the Right. Do you think I'm that stupid?
I must be part of that "population" you reference. For every
neanderthal conservative there appears to be an equal and opposite
Hollywood or New York airhead. Take Alec Baldwin (please!).
One that's often credited is xenophobia, when, truth be told, they are
only xenophobic to illegal "xenos." I am reminded of the conversation
on O'Reilly where Geraldo Rivera kept dropping the word "illegal" from
"illegal immigrant" or "illegal immigration' when restating Michelle
Malkin's position every time Michelle Malkin had it in there. If one
does that, then OK, I'm xenophobic. Too bad he cannot even repeat
things back accurately. Maybe he needs a hearing aid. That, or he's
only hearing what he wants to hear.
A good 60 % of Congress seems out of touch to me.
There's a poll out where 66 % of Americans and 81 % of likely voters
thinks that we are overtaxed. 74 % of the politicians think that we are
not.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/97426/
Full poll with links: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/taxes/april_2010/66_say_america_is_overtaxed
The bias on the right is fundamentally against so called "progressive"
thought as it has been manifested in the current media and political
culture. We don't think that just because the word "progress" is in
there that "progressive" is necessarily in favor of "progress."
Progress down "The Road to Serfdom" perhaps (F. A. von Hayek), but
otherwise, no.
Republicans have arrogance and hubris, and were punished by the voters
at the polls in 2006 and 2008. They were only replaced by a Democratic
majority with the same issues. Hence many feel that they whole lot of
them need to be tossed. While I don't think that all the truth is on
the right, I do believe that more truth is there than has been
articulated by this President and Congress concerning the bills that
they have enacted into law. Socialist Greece is having budget issues,
Iceland already went bankrupt (I think), and other European "Social
Democracies" face the same issues. Now why does this administration
seem to want to rush headlong towards the same destination?
Yes, evangelical preachers are fond of the passage where "nobody comes
to the Father but by Me," but I don't think that they should presume to
know what God will do with those who have never heard.
I have Open Theism sympathies. Not necessarily full agreement, but I'm
no flaming five point Calvinist. The resurgence of Calvinism in
Southern Baptist circles concerns me greatly.
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people
do is a swine."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 4/11/2010 10:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
David :
One helluva good article. I have other uses for it besides chewing the
fat here at Centroids.
However, there is just a tenny-weeny little bitty
problem.
Are Conservatives necessarily non-phobic themselves ?
And as a corollary, are all Liberals exactly the same ?
Not hardly.
Take one of the "Comments" to the article by Dan G.
Do conservatives have the Absolute Truth ? I kinda
don't think so.
Indeed, while some conservatives are among my heroes,
others strike
me as terribly out to lunch, like, say, the late Jerry
Falwell, or Danforth Quayle.
I mean, there is a type of conservative who is
simplistic to the point of being a simpleton.
And its not just a few, its a population.
Again, don't get me wrong, others are among the smartest
people alive : George Will, say,
or Charles Krauthammer. But to deny that there are
several million utter naifs
among conservatives would be like denying that the Sun
rises in the East.
Its a rule of mine, sort of an 11th Commandment, to
always look for some
counterpart illness on the Right is you are criticizing
the Left, and vice versa.
The illness might not be equally bad, but you'll always
find something, guaranteed.
Why ? Because the L/ R paradigms are no better than
partly based on truth and good.
There necessarily are trade-offs either L or R. That
sets up dynamics of denial
and contradiction. That, in turn, leads to some sort of
psychological problems.
In this case, OK, liberal narcissism is a serious
matter. The article, which is damned good,
nonetheless misses some important points, among them the
fact that the very act
of exposing a bias / phobia on the Left inevitably
points to something similar
on the Right. In short, to cure one you need to also
cure the other. They are linked.
So, what are the phobias on the Right that are mirror
images of narcissism ?
One, I think, is the all too common conviction that
conservatives have all truth,
liberals have none and are 100 % evil. Even if, these
days, I believe that
( actual ) conservatives have maybe 65% of truth, or no
worse than 55%,
that still leaves liberals with a decent percentage to
call their own.
Any given candidate may, in my opinion, be operating at
better than 70 %..
R or L. even if mostly this applies to conservatives in
2010, still, no way
that I can say the other guy has zero to contribute.
Are Evangelical beliefs the whole truth and nothing but
the truth ?
You are more than welcome to believe this is so, but
maybe you would
grant that people of goof faith, Jews or Buddhists for
example,
may take a different view with some justification.
But as some preachers have ( rightly ) understood,
this concession results in some degree of ecumenism
and personal need for a less doctrinaire Christian
theology.
For me this is a Great Good. For die-hards it is the
opposite.
Well, much more that could be said, but to get a basic
idea across.
Billy
===========================================
Interesting article, even
though it was a bit clinical.
Liberals hate us because we know there is something bigger and more
important than ourselves.
When there is no absolute truth in your life, any action, no matter how
discusting, pleasurable, or destructive can be rationalized.
I've suggested on other AT
threads that Leftists are not atheists or agnostics, though they may
claim to be. They are ego-theists. They believe they are gods. They
foist upon themselves an aura of intellectual and moral superiority
that is much more insufferable than anything I've ever seen from anyone
who claims to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. They suffer from mankind's
true original sin; excessive pride. Unfortunately, once one is so
immersed in this false pride (or secular humanism, in the words of Dr.
Tyler) it is nearly impossible to reach them with the true Gospel so
that they may be saved. Believe me, I've tried. Paul the Apostle says
it much better than I:
"For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave
thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish
hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became
fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to
look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God
gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity
for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the
truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things, rather
than the Creator - who is forever praised. Amen." - Romans 1:21-25 NIV
In a message dated 4/11/2010 6:56:08 P.M. Pacific
Daylight Time, [email protected]
writes: Interesting, and not the least bit surprising.
At least from where I sit.
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people
do is a swine."--P.
J. O’Rourke
April 11, 2010
Liberal Narcissism and Anti-Christian Phobia
By Deborah C. Tyler
Americans
have always expected national television broadcasters to steer clear of
degrading epithets. On April 14, 2009, CNN's Anderson Cooper
established a new low in television journalism when he labeled millions
of Americans in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term. Other
mainstream media journalists and personalities gleefully followed suit.
There was no outcry from the "anti-hate community." Many liberals do
not merely tolerate contumelies against conservatives, but they delight
in them.
In the
years after World War II, psychologists (many of whom were European
Jews who had escaped Nazism) intensively studied how fascist and
authoritarian states could bring ordinary people to commit
extraordinary crimes against minorities. The two dominant personality
theories of the twentieth century, the Freudian and Adlerian
psychoanalytic models, provided theoretical frameworks for
understanding bigotry and fascism as forms of individual and collective
neurotic delusions. The Freudian model attributed these neuroses to a
frustrated "will to pleasure," while Adler pointed to an unhealthy
_expression_ of the "will to power" over others.
For the
most part, psychologists today deny or ignore anti-Christian prejudice
in the American conversation. This is because psychologists are
overwhelming politically liberal and spiritually humanist. In social
science, bias in is bias out. In addition, America's dominant
psychological model, behaviorism, has always been anti-theoretical and
has not produced an integrated theory of personality equal in influence
to either Freud or Adler.
Although
Freud and Adler agreed on the existence of unconscious fear as the core
of neurotic anxiety, they had different explanations for it.
Freud posited that bigotry arises when a child internalizes the
prejudices of the father in order to resolve unconscious sexual
conflicts in the process of superego formation. This thwarted "will to
pleasure" is projected as hatred onto a scapegoat minority. Culturally,
fear becomes fascistic, involving rigid group conformity against a
common enemy. Freud's model is obsolete. Anderson Cooper, and the
Manhattan micro-niche he typifies, is not anxiously reacting to an
overbearing father-figure. It is the extreme opposite. Mr. Cooper is
the son of a fantastically permissive brand of humanism. The only thing
he has to feel guilty about is guilt itself.
But the
Freudian model does have utility in one dimension. The aggression
resulting from thwarted narcissism is gratified when projected onto a
devalued minority -- e.g., Tea Party participants. The core phobia is
that non-approving conservatives are thwarting the "will to pleasure."
The need for perfect admiration and approval is the hallmark of
narcissism, which is by definition insatiable. Narcissistic pleasure is
the precursor to inevitable narcissistic rage. In the narcissistic
liberal imagination, Christian conservatives stand in the way of a
human heaven of sexual freedom.
Alfred
Adler coined the term "inferiority complex." He held that the neurotic
complex arises from harm inherent in the "will to power" over others.
His model explains liberal prejudice as an overreaction against
unconscious self-doubt that projects intellectual, moral, and cultural
inferiority onto others. Uppity and unmanageable conservatives, who,
oblivious to their own stupidity, doggedly stand up for their inferior
beliefs anger the narcissistic liberal.
Applying
either Freudian or Adlerian analysis to liberal phobic structure
requires updating the concept of individual anxiety, or neurosis, to
the contemporary concept of group-based social phobia. Both Freud and
Adler were middle-class Jewish men who assumed that neurosis developed
in reaction to imbalances in the paternalistic nuclear family -- the
only normative child-rearing form either had ever seen.
In 1980,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III
dropped neurosis as a diagnosis and replaced it with culturally based
phobias. The father-led nuclear family was no longer the social
structure for incorporating values, morals, and role expectations.
"Inadequacy adjustment" in relation to that family system was no longer
the source of mental imbalance. Values, norms, and the power of social
conditioning were moving outside the home and into the hands of
"experts," government schools, universities, and mass media -- in other
words, liberals.
Liberal
phobic structure is a fascinating innovation in the history of
prejudice and cultural fascism. It is a dread of specific forms of
sin-cognizant religious belief.
Both
anti-Christian phobia and narcissism result from the humanist denial of
sin, heaven, and hell. Liberals believe the narcissogenic idea that
they create their own heaven or hell on earth. The denial of
God-defined sin leads to self-deification and the anxious business of
high-stakes, self-directed life-styling. Liberals live with their eyes
glued to mass media to learn what is and isn't sin this season. People
who believe that such behavior can lead to a nasty outcome beyond this
life are detested. Although liberals accuse Christians of being
homophobic, true Christians are hellphobic. Regardless of
religious self-identification, people who are betting their immortal
souls on a denial of sin and its effects beyond this life have to be
crazy not to be phobic.
Every
permanent theistic religion of the last seven thousand years --
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam --
provides an understanding that spiritual wastefulness is sin. These
religions seek to protect people from the consequences of sin beyond
this life. Traditions that assume reincarnation, such as Hinduism and
Buddhism, teach that sinfulness in one life leads to suffering in the
next. Religions that do not incorporate reincarnation, such as Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, explain life as a fleeting preparation before
divine judgment.
The
pathognomic sign that the liberal reaction to sin-cognizant belief
systems is a symptom of phobic complex is that it selectively rejects
the teachings of its own traditions -- Judaism and especially
Christianity. These cultural heritages pose a threat to the liberal
wills to pleasure and power. Liberal phobia includes a complex
delusional system that exempts some sin-cognizant religions. For
example, liberals adore their own version of a morally permissive,
designer Buddhism. Nor are they phobic toward Islam, which is based on
fiercely sin-cognizant scripture. Liberals maintain mechanisms of
denial regarding Islam that rise to the level of psychotic
dissociation.
G.K.
Chesterton wrote, "Bigots are people who have no convictions at all."
Screaming-meemies like Keith Olbermann, Rosie O'Donnell, Sean Penn, Janeane
Garofalo, and all the porn-thumping preachers railing against the
sin of sin-cognizance are the voices of the new cultural fascists,
spittle-flinging celebrities unconsciously raging against their own
fear.
I recently
evaluated a 53-year-old man who has been unable to recover
psychologically or physically from what appeared to be a minor
accident. He was born into a devout Christian family in a small
Midwestern town. He was also born gay. At about 30, he adopted a gay
mode of life. His family continued to love him, but they did not alter
their religious beliefs. When he discovered in 1990 that both he and
his partner had contracted HIV, his family took this as a sign of the
sinfulness of his lifestyle. This man's friends, counselors,
therapists, and humanistic-Christian pastors have for twenty years
encouraged him to believe that his family is bigoted. His family has
visited him through the years. They sit in the front room and do not
stay the night. He acquired a settled resentment toward his people and
never went home again. By the grace of God, he and his partner have
survived for twenty years, while all of their friends have died.
Ironically, he believes that this is because his family back home is
praying for him. This man moved from an unyielding belief system based
in divine forgiveness to a man-made culture that does not seem to value
it.
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