| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Xomicron" |
| Date: |
31 Mar 2004 09:39:14 PM |
| Object: |
Re: Ray Fischer's War on Terrorism |
~ NADER 04 ~ <STOP_VOTING_FOR_CORRUPTION@wake_up.org> wrote in
news:92d10a745bd087d407d1a393057cb38f@news.teranews.com:
Daniel Horn wrote:
Psychologists have found the mentality of political conservatives
are motivated by fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance
of ambiguity, avoidance of uncertainty, resistance to change and
terror management, which leads to endorsement of inequality.
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf
We need psychologists to tell us that???
People like you who will believe anything.
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| User: "Osprey" |
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| Title: Re: Ray Fischer's War on Terrorism |
31 Mar 2004 09:50:51 PM |
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"Xomicron" <xomicron@wp.pl> wrote in message
news:Xns94BDE672E8BADxomicron@0.0.0.1...
~ NADER 04 ~ <STOP_VOTING_FOR_CORRUPTION@wake_up.org> wrote in
news:92d10a745bd087d407d1a393057cb38f@news.teranews.com:
Daniel Horn wrote:
Psychologists have found the mentality of political conservatives
are motivated by fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance
of ambiguity, avoidance of uncertainty, resistance to change and
terror management, which leads to endorsement of inequality.
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf
We need psychologists to tell us that???
People like you who will believe anything.
You notice how they like to lump people into one category.
There are strong conservatives
moderate conservatives
Here is what they don't want you to know though
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/mcnickle/s_147407.html
Liberal smear job might be psychological affliction
By Colin McNickle
Sunday, August 3, 2003
This just in! We conservatives not only are afflicted by something not far
from a psychological disease, but we're, well, Hitlerian. Or so professes a
"study" that claims to have exhaustively investigated conservatism on a
worldwide basis.
Hint: Linking conservatism (of all things) with Hitler (of all people)
should be your first clue that this study is garbage.
Four professors, in an exercise directed by the University of California at
Berkeley (where else?), say they reviewed 50 years of research literature
about the psychology of conservatism. They concluded that "at the core of
political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for
inequality."
Oh, yes, and "fear and aggression" are part of the "common" psychological
makeup of conservatism's practitioners, along with "dogmatism and
intolerance of ambiguity," "uncertainty avoidance," the "need for cognitive
closure" and "terror management."
This rubbish was published -- an amazing feat considering its guffaw
factor -- in Psychological Bulletin, the house organ of the American
Psychological Association.
This research marks the first synthesis of a vast amount of information
about conservatism, says UC-Berkeley visiting prof Frank Sulloway, one of
the study's authors. The result is an "elegant and unifying explanation" for
political conservatism under the rubric of motivated social cognition, he
adds in a university news release that had to be revised and re-released to
vet it of even more biases and shibboleths than were found in the study.
Actually, the "study" is further proof that liberals in the academy don't
have a clue. I'm not exactly sure what "motivated social cognition" is, but
use of such a psycho-babble term indicates to me that our Berkeley friends
have a little ignition problem, as in they're not firing on all cylinders.
Indeed, conservatives seek to conserve existing institutions. But that's not
based on some kind of psychological defect, for goodness sake. Stability is
a fundamental of republican government. But by the Berkeley study's
standards, fealty to the rule of law and the Constitution is somehow deviant
behavior.
"Tolerance for inequality"? What a distortion. Conservatives happen to
believe in equal opportunity. Berkeley liberals think "equal results" is a
synonym. If there aren't equal results, there isn't equality in their minds.
Equal opportunity is the backbone of free markets, which require failures in
order for there to be successes. Equal results, i.e., "leveling the playing
field" in order to "make everybody winners" actually makes everybody losers
and no less than wards of the state. It's the socialist model.
And then there's affirmative action. Envisioned (and enacted) as a way to
correct specific past cases of discrimination, it has become a Supreme
Court-sanctioned and twisted concept of discriminating against one race to
"remedy" past discrimination against another race, et al. Affirmation action
aficionados, usually liberals, often call affirmative action foes "racists."
So, those who oppose discrimination have a tolerance for inequality?
"Intolerance of ambiguity"? Try the rejection of moral relativism. Try the
rejection of "living constitutionalism." Try the rejection of fundamental
illogicality.
"Dogmatism"? If the Berkeley crowd is referring to the first dictionary
definition of the word, I'd wholeheartedly agree. For the rule of law,
fealty to the Constitution, devotion to equal opportunity and at least some
modicum of morality indeed are sound (if not required) tenets of a
republican society. But these Berkeley-sanctioned researchers mean it as
pejorative -- "a tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds."
And how perverted it is that anyone could view the base tenets of republican
society as something unproven.
But far and away the most offensive and wholly inaccurate notion is the
Berkeley study's repetition of the widely (and wildly) held liberal
shibboleth that conservatism somehow is Hitlerian.
From the revised news release touting the study: "Disparate conservatives
share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the authors said.
Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but
all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an
idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk show host Rush
Limbaugh can be described the same say, the authors commented in a published
reply to the article."
Let's set the record straight and earn the wrath of every
post-1960s-illeducated college history professor: Hitler and Mussolini were
not right-wing conservatives. Nor were they conservatives of any stripe.
Since when is Nazism and fascism -- each embracing socialism, each
influenced greatly by Marxist ideology -- conservative?
And pardon me, but given that liberals and Democrats have for so long been
so taken by both -- in their economic schemes and their repeated forays into
social re-engineering -- can any reasonable and modestly educated person
deny that it is they who actually are Hitler and Mussolini's ideological
compeers?
I think not.
The best contemporary and accessible definition of conservatism that I've
come across -- neither too pointy-headed nor too dumbed-down -- can be found
in the introduction by Jerry Z. Muller in his 1997 anthology of conservative
social and political thought:
"In the course of the 20th century, conservatism was defined not only by its
opposition to the radical left but by antipathy to the spread of the welfare
state and attempts to bring about economic redistribution, and by skepticism
regarding the solution of social problems through massive governmental
action."
Funny, but somehow I don't think Adolf and Benito sat around lamenting such
things.
If anybody has a psychological affliction worthy of serious couch time, it's
the Berkeley researchers who have perverted history to comport with their
very liberal, very sleazy smear job.
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