Brief Politico Therapies: A Tour of the Psych-Bloggers

It has been a while since I last toured the Psych bloggers, those intrepid bunch of mental health professionals as we take a look at their take on politics, the human condition and anything else that catches my eye. Our usual bunch of suspects include: Dr. Helen, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, neo-neocon, Assistant Village Idiot, One Cosmos (Gagdad Bob), Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, Its About Them, and Dr. John Jay Ray (from his PC Watch blog).

This week, we begin with Dr. Sanity who provides us with Stuffing Vietnam Down The Throats of the Left:

Personally I rather liked that Bush used their own rhetoric against them the other day, and challenged their unwillingness to admit what the consequences of pulling out of Vietnam really were for this country....They didn't like it, did they? As far as I'm concerned, that means he hit a bullseye.

Indeed!

Sigmund Carl and Alfred, my favorite three-in-one blogger gives us "Mother Teresa's Blessing of Struggle:"

Firstly, to be human, by definition, is to be something other than God. That means that we cannot be expected to always understand God or His intent. By design, God may exclude or preclude us from ever ‘getting it.’ That includes Mother Teresa.When we accept our ‘humaness,’ we are accepting our imperfections. As humans, we are not blessed with perfection. We are blessed with something far greater- free will. And, we are blessed with doubt.

Doubt is indeed a blessing, perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts to His Creation, because every time we overcome that doubt and behave in a way that honors God, we have chosen to honor both Him and us. Only those that have experienced darkness can experience and appreciate light and the ability to see both the beauty and the dangers of our surroundings. In fact, if we do not acknowledge that darkness even exists, we can never see and appreciate the light.

Dr. James Sutton, one of my favorite new friends, reminds us that blaming the thermometer for the weather is a no-no:

Blaming a child for the problems of a poorly functioning family or classroom is like blaming a thermometer for the weather.

Neo-neocon hides her face behind a green apple, but she is always forth-coming with wisdom. Deciding to move, gives us two very moving posts. Letting go and moving on is not always easy:

But for now, it’s time to say goodbye. Not to friends here; I assume we’ll see each other again, although not as often as before. At least for a while, till I make a bigger move.

But to the garden. Actually, I started saying goodbye as soon as I knew the house had sold.

And:

In the end, everything becomes garbage. The odd objects I hadn’t been quite sure about, the Christmas cactus and the slightly underachieving toaster oven and the plastic baskets for laundry—out, out, I say! Garbage all.

Dr. Helen takes a look at Domestic Violence and notes that it isn't always the woman getting beat up.

By focusing only on men, women never get the help they need to reduce violence. The false notion that men perpetrate the majority of domestic violence and women are on the receiving end just doesn't seem to be holding up in study after study.

Psych-blogger the Assistant Village Idiot is a clinical social worker in the New England region (New Hampshire if you must know) and has a bredth of interests that span, well, span the orgins of words, to whether or not the works of J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis were similar or dissimilar in "What Tolkein Disliked About Narnia:"

JRR Tolkien believed that myth and symbolism kept much of meaning provided by the reader, while allegory was a demand by the author to read symbols in a particular way. For this reason he "cordially dislike[d] allegory in all its forms," and thought Lewis had strayed well into allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien also disliked any mixing of mythologies, believing that a work should retain a consistent background flavor. Thus, Lewis's dryads, centaurs, and Silenus struck him as at odds with the more Northern flavor provided by the dwarves and ettins.

Shrinkwrapped has two exceptional posts up, both of which are connected so I'll exerpt both (and don't even think of reading one with out reading the second - its that important. The first, "A Recurrent Theme: On Moderate Muslims:"

Even if there is no such thing as Moderate Islam it is in our best interests (and the Muslim World's best interests) to act as if the distinction is valid."

followed by "On Moderate Muslims, Continued:"

Over the last few days, in response to my post A Recurrent Theme: On Moderate Muslims there has been another in a series of fairly intense and well thought out discussions concerning the existence or non-existence of Moderate Muslims. The tone has been civil throughout though those who suggest that Islam is irredeemably violent and immoderate sometimes come close to a nihilistic position."

Yesterday, Gagdad Bob writing in One Cosmos posted "Let's Play Who's The Victim?!" which I think is an extraordinarily brilliant post because it expresses whole heartedly what I have been thinking since the Senator Craig fiasco came about.

One of the appeals of leftism is that you can never be called a hypocrite. That is, if you have no standards, then there is no standard by which to judge you.

Why then are leftists so incredibly, gleefully judgmental? Because, as Polanyi pointed out, one of the defining characteristics of leftism is the subversion of traditional morality. But since you cannot eliminate the moral impulse, it ends up becoming unhinged, that is, uncontained by any transcendent moral boundaries. Therefore, the moral impulse "fuses," as it were, with what is below instead of what is above, and becomes a dangerous vehicle of the most base passions. This is why leftism is associated with the greatest mass murderers of all time -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al.

In a lengthy essay entitled Hitler Was a Socialist, John J. Ray makes reference to the notoriously "slippery standards" of the left, writing that they "have no fixed principles. If a principle suits their rhetorical needs of today they will proclaim their loyalty to it -- and then cheerfully adopt the opposite principle tomorrow if that happens to suit the rhetorical needs of that day."

Posted by GM Roper at September 2, 2007 06:43 PM | TrackBack