THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Callin' Out Liars

Callin' Out Liars

There's a local (state-wide) radio talk show called "Voices of Montana" where people from around the state can argue the topics of the day. I listen when I can - not often, with my work - but I happened to be doing things in the shop and heard a couple guys on there who supposedly represented a "grass-roots movement" to promote fascist (my word) health care. I had to call "bullshit" on them and did so with the following email to station's studios:

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"The guests on Monday's show were snake-oil salesmen and propagandists for the progressives, despite their protestations to the contrary.
Follow the money. (the "clickable" links take you to the cited web pages.)

First, their parent organization's website lists their Congressional supporters:
Nearly ALL of them are left-wing nut-cases with names like waxman and markey (the same fools who "authored" the "Cap 'n' Tax" economy-killing bill);
lois capps (who once sponsored a bill to have taxpayers pay to have tattoos removed for criminals);
daniel inouye (whose timely call to the Treasury made sure that the bank in Hawaii he's PERSONALLY invested in got a decision reversed and received a few million out of the bail-out money);
then there's critters like jean-françois kerrì, carl levin, debbie stabenow, jack murtha, nadler, rangel, murtha, lautenburg, ellison, conyers,
...basically it's almost ONLY left-wing, pork-spending, big-taxing idiots on Capitol Hill who SUPPORT this mis-named "grass-roots" organization.

Next, their list of "coalition organizations" - their partners - include (sit down for this one):
ACORN and the SEIU (both under investigation)
AFL/CIO, UAW, Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
La Raza (the radical illegal immigrant group)
Planned Parenthood and Physicians for Reproductive Choice (proabortion)
Center for American Progress and MoveOn.org (george soros groups)

And yet they tried to pass themselves off as NON-partisan and "grassroots"?

Those guests undoubtedly came pre-equipped and well-rehearsed with copious notes (talking-points) specifically designed to pull the wool over our eyes while they yank the rug out from under the best medical system in the world.
Just follow the money.
Those guys are FAR from "non-partisan", and should have been called on it.

They led off with the "cutting red tape" canard, while saying that a "single payer system is off the table", yet kept going back to insisting on government intrusion (masked as "oversight") and a "public option".
I ask anyone to cite me ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE where government intrusion REDUCED RED TAPE!

They made statements like, "provide more options" - when there's ALREADY a few THOUSAND insurance options available. What they did NOT relate was the fact that in the House's CURRENT BILL, there's a provision that after the first of the year the bill is enacted, private insurance companies will NOT be allowed to write any NEW policies.
...can we say "government take-over-by-attrition"?

They made excuses like, "but, we're ALREADY paying for the uninsured", while somehow "neglecting" to mention the reason is that the government MANDATES IT and it's the government MAKING it more expensive!
Some doctors don't like to take on MedicAid patients, since the government TELLS them how much they'll get paid, regardless of their expenses and overhead.
For that matter, hospitals who get paid LESS for government-paid care STILL have to pay their electric bills, the staff, the janitors, outrageous malpractice insurance premiums, et al, so where do they have to make up the difference?
BY OVER-CHARGING THE PRIVATELY INSURED PEOPLE!

And let's not talk about the annual "Late-Life Alternative" counseling that's mandated for the elderly - yes, that really DOES mean what it sounds like - doubtless with Dr. Kavorkian as a "paid-volunteer" consultant.

That "covering the uninsured" is a straw-man argument, since - and you can find the statistics at askHeritage.org - roughly one-fifth of those "47 million" uninsured are young and healthy and CHOOSE not to pay for health insurance (or car or life or property insurance, either) because they're buying motorcycles and other toys; about another fifth are ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS; somewhere arount 19% are wealthy enough that they realize it's cheaper to simply pay cash or check for medical treatments, since most doctors give discounts under such circumstances; another fifth are already covered under various government programs but haven't applied for it; and the remainder MIGHT actually benefit from socialist medicine.

Hardly a "crisis".

Notice that they never really said much about WHO ACTUALLY PAYS for all this!
Anyone who says "the government" will pay for anything is overlooking one fact:
The government HAS NO MONEY!
The government has to TAKE the money from US - through "taxes, fees and surcharges" - in order to HAND IT OUT to anyone else!

What part of their morality says it's okay to STEAL from ME to pay for THEIR bills???

Call your CongressCritters and remind them that THEY work for US!
For that matter, since max-tax baucus is ram-rodding this abomination through his Finance Committee, I want to know if he will personally PLEDGE to put HIS NAME on it as the FIRST fool to sign up for this plan!

If he thinks its such a hot deal, let him do like John Hancock and boldly put HIS signature on it and take ownership of the FIRST of these national insurance policies!

Should he be unwilling to opt into the system that HE is pushing, then I say that WE follow his lead.
Don't sign on to this national health care "crisis".
It's a trap America might never emerge from.

If we want real reform, start with "Loser Pays" tort reform legislation, interstate "portability" of insurance, and LESS government intrusion.

And watch out for snake-oil salesmen."

TouchStone "

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It'll be interesting to listen to any responses that email gets - if they have time to read it.
The usual host is a guy named Dave Rye (although I think he should spell it "Wry"), a former soldier and teacher and a fair-minded gentleman overall. He usually makes a good faith attempt to read emails as well as allowing people to vent whatever opinions they choose.
He's even let me on - more than once! - when I've had the chance to call......

...and yes, I know I wrote murtha twice, but that's just because that slimy EX-Marine just pisses me the hell off with the way he corn-holes our troops. There's a special place in Hell for that critter....

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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

Callin' Out Liars

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