This is pretty funny, or pretty dismal, depending on how you look at it. Somebody called Lyle Rossiter, who some conservatives are calling a 'top psychiatrist' and an 'eminent doctor', that 'Liberals are clinically mad'. If you follow the link you'll see he's written a book about it, subtitled 'The psychological causes of political madness.' Here's a quote from Rossiter:
'A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population - as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state - as liberals do.'
Riiight... It's LIBERALS who ignore the individual! Silly me. I thought denying women rights over their own bodies and equal pay and arguing that hetero-marriage is the only right choice for everyone was more deindividualising than fighting for those freedoms, but I stand corrected.
Of course, the guys over at Conservapedia are loving it. I would highly recommend looking at it if you want to laugh and cry at the same time at the idiocy of its authors, who've answered to Wikipedia, which they believe is liberal-biased. I can't help thinking they're doing their cause more harm than good. What depresses me most is it isn't even a hoax.
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Conservipedia makes me sad with the world.
Without actually critiquing the conclusions of the article, which would take far too long, it's interesting to note what a useless statement Dr. Rossiter is making. Basically, people who disagree with me are mentally ill, and can't even be reasoned with. What a great way to eliminate even the possibility of meaningful discourse. What a great way to justify just sitting around patting each other on the back and refusing to even talk to those who disagree: because after all, they're mentally ill.
For a supposed intellectual, the attitude is really condescending. There are far more educated, intelligent people than the good doctor who have been liberals. He might want to consider that he's just missing something.
How is it against human nature to help other humans? As far as I was aware, most research suggests that primates live in closely knit social communities. It's not about having a parent, it's about tossing some fruit to the other chimps who can't make it up to the fruit. Do they suggest that we not help the truly "weak" (in terms of ability to survive in a state of nature) members of our species, such as those missing limbs, or those who are mentally disabled?
It's just so stupid. What does a book like this do? It makes all the conservatives nod their heads and go "I knew I was right." It makes the scientific community laugh their collective asses off that someone actually suggested this. And it makes liberals go, wtf? 53% of voters voted for Obama...over half of our voters are clinically messed up! Oh noes!
It's almost comical to see how social conservatives just keep recycling the same old themes. Remember that in the Victoria era a woman who expressed dissatisfaction with her marriage could be deemed mentally incompetent and institutionalized by her husband with no questions asked. When will they come up with something new already?
To be fair, which this article doesn't deserve in the first place... most of the talking points are referring to people in lower economic brackets receiving government aid, and things like the financial bailout.
I am of two minds about that. I don't like suffering, and so I want to help people who need help. But if you keep doing that, the practice eventually becomes unsustainable. You can't encourage weakness. It's bad for the overall expansion of the economy. It's a difficult question, which is why this a controversial issue.
The most reliable predictor of one's socio-economic status is the socio-economic status of their parents. Although the American Dream would have us believe otherwise, "talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic" can only get you so far, if they can get you anywhere. Anti-poverty initiatives are partially about alleviating "suffering" but they're also about lowering the barriers of socio-economic stratification.
People aren't poor because they're weak. Lots of people have to work hard just to keep their heads above water. Welfare doesn't encourage weakness, most people would rather be self-reliant, but the avenues to self-reliance are cut off to them.
I agree with most of your points. But just because welfare doesn't usually encourage apathy doesn't mean that it never does. Some people will become burdens by just having kids and sitting on welfare. That's a lower proportion, but like you pointed out, parent's social class is a great predictor of children's future. So now you have whole generations of people for whom growing up, having lots of kids, and then letting the government pay for them is what they are in turn teaching their kids.
I don't see many options between "let them starve" and "pay them so their kids don't starve" which is why I support welfare type social programs. But that doesn't mean there might not be a better way.
I think the "other way" would be combining welfare with really pro-active programs to make good jobs and education accessible. I think one of the problems is that with the post-industrial economy, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the proliferation of part-time/irregular jobs, there aren't a lot of options available to people on public assistance. If the choice is between running hard to stand still by holding down multiple shitty jobs, or living off public assistance, and maybe doing some under-the-table work to supplement that income, what are people going to choose? Without making real opportunities for social mobility available, I think people would easily become discouraged, lose faith in "the system", and see the state as something that they might as well take advantage of because it isn't doing anything else for them.
When families are on welfare for generations, I think it's more indicative of systemic or institutionalized barriers to mobility, which may include the way public assistance is managed, but not indicative of a problem with social assistance itself.
An anecdote: One of my professors had a friend who was on welfare, and attending law school. The government changed, made massive cuts to welfare and imposed stronger restrictions/oversight on people who were welfare recipients. As a result, my professor's friend had to drop out (either she wasn't allowed to use public assistance money to pay tuition, or she wasn't eligible for student financial assistance because she was already receiving public assistance, I forget). And now, many years later, she is still on welfare. When she could have been a lawyer.
The problem wasn't the fact that she was on welfare, but that the welfare program was managed in such a way as to reinforce barriers to mobility.
I maintain that reality has a liberal bias.
I regret that this type of thing neither makes me laugh nor cry, it just makes steam pour out of my ears and makes me yell at my computer, "Why are people so STUPID!!!"
deep breath.
I do not get it. We should not have to fight to have equal rights because we all are living in the same world, why can't we all do the same thing?
Methinks the good doctor is suffering from Authoritarian Personality Disorder...
This is too perfect:
1) A compulsion to categorize, label, measure, and control other human beings.
3) A grandiose sense of self-importance, i.e. feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. Believes he/she knows the psychological and spiritual functionings of others. A persistent belief that he or she is "special" in the sense that he or she is "a healer", "has all the answers", has more knowledge about the mind than others, etc.
4) A fascination with writing and embellishing disparaging fictions about others.
5) A delusion that all people with whom he/she comes into contact are "sick", accompanied by a need to talk about that "sickness" in a compulsive manner.
10) Unconsciously projects his/her own unresolved psychological issues onto others within his/her care.
... and the list goes on!! :)
Source:
Cluster D Personality Disorders
301.92 Authoritarian Personality Disorder
http://familyrightsassociation.com/social_work/authoritarian_personality.htm
I think you're mad... at the author. You need a verb in the second sentence, like "wrote" or "stated". :) I know I typed really quickly when motivated by tremendous annoyance. Or pissed off, even.
So the people that think our society could do better to help it own citizens and think we shouldn't spend enormous sums of money engaging in warfare are clinically insane, then what's the deal with the people that believe dinosaur bones were put on earth by Satan to trick the faithful? May we at least label them delusional?
I would recommend everyone to take a page out of a Molly Ivins book regarding labels: never let anyone else define your politics for you.
I checked out conservapedia and was pretty disgusted by their article on feminism, among others. So, since conservapedia has the same format as wikipedia, where you can sign in to add or take away from articles, I did a little "tweaking" to the feminism article. I'm not good with html, so it's not perfect, but it's better than it was. http://www.conservapedia.com/Feminism check it out, if they haven't changed it back already. I don't know how sharp their moderators are...and while I admit that it's a little immature to overrule those who disagree with you in such an overt fashion (like I did), it felt good. Besides, the original article was not accurate, and very misogynist. It had all this crap about how feminists think all men are rapists. It was unbelievable.
It seems to me that they are trying to put a right and wrong to politics.. .like being a liberal you are not looking out for the best in your country.. i don't know i just don't understand after all these years why people are still so narrow minded.
He's saying that liberal POLITICS are clinically mad, not liberals themselves- or at least, only insomuch as they expect these policies to work (his argument being that they won't). This is sort of insane in itself, since a government is not a human brain and shouldn't really function like one.
He also seems to have a pretty biased view of liberal policies in the first place, going on the whole 'welfare queens' rant, which is when I stop listening to people.
It's funny, but a lot of liberals (like me) are convinced that the media and society has a conservative bias, and conservatives think the exact opposite. I've kind of come to the conclusion that a lot of people are liberal when it comes to themselves, but have conservative rules for everyone else. How many times do you come across people who think THEY have the right to go out and have a good time, but when someone does it and gets raped, she shouldn't have been doing that? It's 'one rule for me, one rule for everyone else' or 'do as I say, not as I do'. I'm not really talking about the Limbaughs or the Coulters so much, more the normal people you'd find in a nightclub or a bar, who a lot of people would consider to be liberal. But when spoken to, they have completely conservative attitudes to everyone else: they see nothing wrong with harrassing a woman who's wearing a short skirt or something. Or they think they should be able to force a woman to make a choice regarding pregnancy. So I'm convinced there are very few people I'd consider TRUE committed conservatives, who are sincere and believe in it enough to practise what they preach.
It's WingNutDaily -- what did you expect? But be comforted in the knowledge that the "article" is serving as an advertisement for a book published by WND.
Hannah, I'm afraid your edits to the Conservapedia had been reverted within ten minutes. They're quite protective of their bias.
indeed it's been completely returned to what they like it being. sad how much they go after
Now they're arguing that we are the crazy ones because we believe in equality!!?? This is just sad.