THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Some Australian news

Some Australian news

Attractive cricket promotion

What the bloody hell does Richie Benaud think of this? The doyen of cricket is joined by bikini babe Lara Bingle - clad in parochial green and gold togs and cricket pads - in Channel 9's new Ashes campaign. "So, where the bloody hell are you?'' Bingle says in the promo, coining her Tourism Australia catchcry to attract viewers to the series. Benaud's thoughts are simple. "Marvellous,'' he says.

Source

Respect the US, urges Murdoch

Anti-Americanism is on the rise in Australia, fuelled by the unpopularity of the Iraq war among young people, Rupert Murdoch said last night. Speaking in Sydney, Mr Murdoch warned Australians against allowing doubts about the US administration to fester into an irrational antipathy that saw America as a greater threat to world peace than al-Qaeda. "Australians must resist and reject the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe," said Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of the publisher of NEWS.com.au.

Addressing a star-studded audience, including Prime Minister John Howard, at the inaugural American Australian Association benefit dinner, Mr Murdoch said America had to work to address criticisms that it took Australia too much for granted "and not come calling only when in need". "Australian sentiment is thankfully nowhere near Europe's level of hostility - but it could get there, and it mustn't," Mr Murdoch said. "In the coming century America will find Asia more important than ever - and its alliance with Australia more useful than ever."

He spoke about the importance of finding new sources of energy to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change and to lessen dependence on oil "whose profits in some instances help to finance terror and prop up hostile regimes".

Political, business and academic leaders joined media and sporting personalities including golfer Greg Norman, designer Collette Dinnigan and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann at the dinner. Lachlan Murdoch and wife Sarah shared a table with family members, while PBL chairman James Packer and partner Erica Baxter sat with PBL bosses. The benefit dinner honoured Mr Murdoch for his contribution to Australian-American relations and launched the new United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Mr Murdoch said the centre, an initiative between the American Australian Association and the Federal Government, would "raise awareness, dispel myths, groom new leaders" and increase ties between the two countries.

Source

The great Patrick White massacre is about to be unleashed

Australian homosexual author Patrick White got a Nobel prize for literature. Most people who try to read his novels wonder why. The satire below by Alex Dobes refers to a recent discovery of some of White's unpublished work

The discovery of Patrick White's rough drafts just shows that there's a good and bad side to everything. The five people in the world who actually read Patrick White novels will be pleased, but spare a thought for the English literature PhDs toiling away in the essay factories of India. The last time the English department at Sydney University set a Patrick White essay topic, the whole student body hopped on the internet and desperately offered their credit card numbers to anyone who could take away the pain. The Indian essay mills happily took up the offer.

The only problem was their burnout rate was horrendous. The essay companies tried to outsource the work to Burma, but the military censors there refused to believe that anyone would seriously publish such tripe, and assumed that the text must contain secretly coded instructions on how to overthrow the regime. Twenty PhDs had to make a dash for the Thai border.

Once across the border, the Burmese PhDs applied for refugee entry to Australia. The Minister for Immigration applied the "Patrick White clause" of the immigration regulations. Just as former employees of the Australian Army in Vietnam are given special consideration for entry to Australia after their release from Vietnamese prison camps, the minister is able to grant indulgence to foreigners who have read a Patrick White novel, particularly if they did this in a professional capacity. They, too, have suffered for Australia. (According to the same regulations, anyone who has read more than eight White novels is considered unsuitable, and shipped straight back to whichever mental home they escaped from.)

Naturally the 15 refugees didn't want to go anywhere near a literature faculty. Nor could they work in a bookshop, because there was always the danger of reading about Patrick White by accident - he even crops up in a Barry Humphries poem. So they went into advertising but, their minds still damaged, the Burmese could only produce gibberish like "Carlton. The beer that's made from beer."

So this Patrick White rough draft discovery could turn into a massacre. English departments will discover a rich source of essay topics, and the poor Indians will not know what hit them. Think of reading not just a Patrick White novel, but a Patrick White novel with diatribes against Malcolm Fraser, misanthropic asides about former friends, and complaints about traffic noise in Centennial Park. I am setting up a foundation to aid victims. I am happy to forward your donation, after deducting a small administration fee.

Source

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

No comments:

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

Some Australian news

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive