Wolf Howling: psychology

Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The "Really Destructive Maniacs"

From Dr. Sanity:

At least the selfish narcissist is limited in the chaos and havoc he wreaks. But, the "really destructive maniacs of this world" are the ones who do it for your own good.

The more benign form of this type of narcissism - but equally as insidious - is the left's core belief that society can and should be perfected by government regulation.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Big Nanny: The Intersection of Orwell & Global Warming In The UK

Dr. Richard North at EU Referendum has posted a a very unsetteling history of the efforts being made by the UK government to influence Brits into believing that man-caused global warming is a reality and to change their lifestyles because of it. Dr. North itemizates the research funded by the UK government to that end since about 2005. It comes out to $33 million spent on marketing and psychological studies. As he concludes, while none of this will be seen as sinister by the AGW crowd, "the idea that our government is spending our money changing our behaviour – especially on such a contentious issue where there is no popular enthusiasm for the changes sought – is getting far too close to Big Brother for comfort."

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Projections, Thuggery & Racism Of The Left

One of the keys to understanding the left is how they invariably resort to 'projection.' By projection, I mean they foist their own shortcomings and failings onto others, then criticize them for acting with such base motivations. Projection is psychiatric term that Dr. Sanity explains in detail here.
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The above was the opening line of a post I had decided to craft in light of statements by Pelosi and others on the left to the effect that those people who show up at town hall meeting and embarrass Dems with tough questions are mere thugs, controlled by evil Republicans and an insurance industry motivated purely by . . . dare I say it . . . "profit" [shudder]. Knowing that Dr. Sanity has explained the concept of projection on multiple occasions in her previous posts, I went to her site to run down a link. And what should I find but . . . . a posting she did on Thursday that hits many of the key points on which I intended to expound. I won't repeat them. Do read her post.

The only things that I would add are in regards to Paul Krugman and Cynthia Tucker of the AJC, both of whom play casually play the race card on the protesters of Obama's economic and health care programs. Krugman opined in the NYT that the people who are protesting are being manipulated by disingenuous special interests following "a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites." Tucker, a black opinion columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, opined on Hardball that "45 to 65% of the people who appear at these [protests] are people who will never be comfortable with the idea of a black president."

It is more than a bit ironic that they should make their statements the day after the beating of a black conservative, Kenneth Gladney, who was protesting the Obama socialized health care plan outside of a Democratic townhall meeting in Missouri. Gladney was beaten by Obama-supporting SEIU thugs. Gateway Pundit has the videos and story on that incident here, here, here, here and here. But I digress.

I know of nothing that would support either Krugman's or Tucker's statement. Indeed, I know of no racially motivated backlash to the election of Obama occurring anywhere in the U.S. Perhaps I missed the reporting on such events in the NYT or the Washington Post, two notoriously conservative news organizations who might well repress such facts if they existed. In many respects what Krugman and Tucker say is nothing more than the classic 'blood libel' of labeling any opposition that somehow involves a black person, in this case Obama, as being racially motivated, wholly irrespective of the facts. But the more I think about it, the more seems also a form of projection.

As I wrote here, you will find racism nowhere more ensconced today - and historically - than on the left. That could be the loud and horrific reverse racism of Jerimiah Wright and his ilk of race baiters, the equally vile but far more nuanced reverse racism of academia and exponents of "critical race theory," the casual reverse racism of a Justice Sotomayor, or the many adherents of whatever ethnicity to the left's identity politics - an inherently racist philosophy that holds that blacks - and every other victim group - are victims of white (male) wrongdoing and are incapable of competing with white males on a level playing field. Nowhere was this more apparent than in reaction to the Supreme Court's Ricci decision.

Krugman is a deeply committed member of the far left - and thus it is not surprising to see Krugman view the world through an identity politics lens. While no one I know in conservative circles entertains even the tiniest iota of animus towards Obama because of his skin color - it is utterly meaningless - I have no doubt that many on the far left, for whom race and other indicators of victim class are paramount, should project their beliefs onto conservatives and other protesters. As to Tucker, it is much the same. I dare say she could not give a single instance of a person at a single protest who is motivated by race. But in her world - and I read her columns regularly - it is safe to say that she views race as a paramount issue. The fact that Obama was elected President has not ameliorated her racial paradigm - nor Krugman's - but rather just shifted it a little. As Tucker sees it - if you do not support Obama in each and every one of his radical proposals, then race must be at the heart of it - because that is how she views the world. For such people as her - and Henry Louis Gates of recent "beer summit" fame - if something happens that they do not like and a white person is involved, then racism must be involved.

I lived 32 years in a distinctly uncloistered and racially mixed world, working with, for, under, and over blacks and minorities of all stripes until I saw my first example of true eye-popping racism. I remember it vividly. It was watching perhaps one of the most vile speeches I have ever heard. The speaker was Louis Farrakhan. His targets were whites and Jews. It was utterly despicable and so alien to all that I had seen and known, that I actually started asking my black friends about him. Of the probably ten that I asked, only one even said that he knew who Farrakhan was - and that Farrakhan was an evil nutter of the first order.

In my world, which was the military up til then and awhile afterwards, neither racism nor reverse racism existed in any form that I had ever observed. When I match my personal observations up to that point against what I see in the political world of today, it is apparent that there is a huge disconnect between reality in working class America, where racism is far more the anomaly than the norm, and the political class, where race is a means of stoking passion and obtaining power. Obama promised to end all of that. To the contrary, he seems only to have thrown fuel onto the fire.

Friday, August 8, 2008

Today’s Links – The Hanibal Lecter Edition: Psychology, Crime & Law - 8 August 2008

Today we take a stroll through the blogs and websites dealing with psychology, crime and law, all below the fold,.

The Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI recently released a very interesting report - Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspective For Investigators.

At the Crim Prof Blog, federal prosecutors are coming under ever greater threats of violence. Following a survey done after three murders of U.S. attorneys since 2001, 46 percent of U.S. attorneys said they had been threatened or assaulted due to their job, and 81 percent said someone in their office had been threatened. They are seeking weapons permits, special alarm systems for their houses and secure parking.

There is a fascinating post at the Psychology of Deception blog on a recent study of increasing cognitive load to provide more cues to veracity. In essence, having a person tell you their story in reverse order makes it significantly more likely that you will be able to determine whether they are telling the truth or not.

At Overlawyered, the Brits are considering show trials of energy executives who dispute the dogma of global warming.

In Britain, a police inspector blogs on three hoodies who tossed a woman onto a set of railroad tracks after she told them that they should stop smoking. Britain has become averse to punishing criminals.

Dr. Helen blogs on being prepared for disaster or crime – as opposed to blissful ignorance and living in a hermetically sealed bomb shelter.

In Psychology and Crime news – researchers studying bees in an attempt to sting serial killers.

Geographic profiling is explained at the Forensic Psychology blog.

White Collar criminal investigator Tracy Coenen blogs on California’s determination that YourTravelBiz.com is a giant pyramid scheme. As an aside, so is Social Security as its currently set up, its just that we can’t prosecute Congress for that one.

Sigmund, Carl & Alfred blogs on yet another left wing idea whose unintended consequences are to injure those they seek to help. This time its "fair trade" coffee.

White Collar Crime Prof blogs on the jailing of Detroit’s Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick for violation of bond by travelling to Canada, ostensibly on city business.

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Iran on the Couch

There is a fascinating round table discussion at FrontPage Magazine of the Khomeinist theocracy’s major crackdown on morals. One of round table participants is psychologist and political analyst, Nancy Korbin, who opines:

Terrorists always tell you what they are going to do and they do it. Ahmadinejad and his cronies should be taken seriously. Yet, they are also tone deaf. The list of vices is extremely revealing. They lack psychological insight and are clueless about reverse psychology.

They are purity obsessed, which means that they seek control of the "other," whom they experience as female, even if the enemy is male. They seek to strip the "other" of all senses -- throwing them back into a kind of autistic state of utter terror.

But the list shows that cracks are appearing in the Shia Islamist code. The mass, the Iranian domestic opposition, is huge and the Islamists won’t be able to maintain control. Mr. Schippert is right in that we should have done more, but better late than never.

The potential for political violence arising out of the nuclear agenda of the Shia repeats the pattern of getting away with murder literally. Rarely have limits been set. They have no boundaries. Such grandiosity and omnipotence is a lethal mix with their perpetual victimhood that they did not get the inheritance from the Prophet Muhammad, their deprivation in southern Lebanon and a peculiar recalcitrant anti-Semitism.

Seeking the annihilation of the Jew as Ultimate Other embodies the obsession for purity. The belief is that if a Jew goes out in the rain, the Jew contaminates the water. Coupled with Shia apocalyptic thinking, it is a horrific hysteria.
I used to joke in the clinic about how to diagnose hysteria in a Latin culture and now I add Shia culture. No wonder why they have been in Latin America for so long. . .

Ahmadinejad’s political paranoia is classic paranoia dressed up in Iranian Revolutionary rhetoric. Paranoia is about being obsessed with the female body while seeking a fictional purity of the prenatal mother. They can not reconcile that they are born from their mother’s contaminated/devalued female body. Unity and purity mean pre-birth, the antithesis to the apocalyptic. In the code of the maternal, "nuclear" means unity and purity with the mother through fusion. When dealing with the reality of nuclear weapons, such an unconscious seeks annihilation.
Alas we are left with not only the list of vices but a growing list of Sunni Jihadi proxies, expressed by the troubling Iran-Hamas Alliance (Meyrav Wurmser, in Focus: Gaza, Fall 2007, p. 24-26). While Israel is the stepping stone for going global, they will ultimately turn on their proxies. In my crystal ball I don’t see an effective truth and reconciliation conference occurring between Shias and Sunnis in the near future – precisely because Muslim women are not able to participate on an equal footing and they are at the eye of this unspoken Shia Islamist storm.

Read the article here. Other participants with worthy comments include Robert Spencer. Iran’s theocracy came to power on the piety of Ayatollah Khomenei. But over the last thirty years, the vast wealth of the nation has gone into the pockets of these pious clerics and their praetorian guard, the IRGC, while a booming population has become both secularized and disillusioned. It is a mark of the ineffectiveness of our clandestine services and political leadership that we have, apparently, been unable to mine this field of discontent. The school solution to Iran is not an American military strike to end the nuclear threat, but fanning the flames of another Iranian revolution.