and its not innocent. If you don't learn from your mistakes, you did not make a mistake, you intended to have happen what you made happen.

They do not mean well. They want the poverty, despair, death, and destruction their policies create. If this were not so, their words and actions, no matter how contradictory and apparently pathological, would not lead to that end so consistently and for so long a time.
A. Rational Human | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 8:40 am | #

ARH - I think that many of the leaders (especially the political leaders) cynically and maliciously know exactly what they are doing and don't care because their conscious goal is to accumulate power at any cost. But the vast majority of the "useful idiots" are exactly that..idiots, who never ever question the BS that's being fed to them because it fits in with their psychological perception of themselves as "caring" and "compassionate" people. They never question their own motivations, or the consequences of their behavior. It's enough for them to "feel good" about themselves. My goal is to make some of them think and possibly develop some insight in this blog.
Dr. Sanity | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 10:11 am | #

Dr.
I believe you do that extremely well, and this post is just one more excellent example. I copy and forward many of your posts to friends and family members (mostly 'trapped' in the education/indoctrination system) in an effort to 'exercise' their minds. Most are so busy with living (taking care of kids while working and all things necessary to just 'live'), that they only get to watch 10 or 15 minutes of 'news' most of which only reinforce and confirm the delusional 'feelings' that are presented constantly and continually each and every day! They become 'brainwashed' into to 'believing' instead of 'thinking', because it is much easier to do. Keep up your efforts! I believe you are doing an 'excellent' job.
Mark J | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 11:28 am | #

Pace Kirchick,there is nothing new
about the leftist attack on neocons.
These leftists are the heirs of an earlier generation who labelled as "fascist" anyone who disagreed with them; and those attacks began when Joe McCarthy was in grade school. Taking McCarthy as the starting point indicates a poor grasp of history, and that is the charitable interpretation.
Joseph B | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 12:32 pm | #

The term "neoconservative" is somewhat misleading, as neoconservatives are not actually conservatives, but right-liberals.
Islam skeptic | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 5:01 pm | #

The anti-abort regimentarians led by Limbaugh nationally and here by Dr Sanity have managed to turn the word "liberal" to denote some kind of virused sub-filth (many libs are just that).

"Neocon" does not have the same, completely neagative connotation; it kind of means 'greedy chickenhawk' aka scurrilous coward. That fits.
There's plenty of McCarthyism to go around on both sides of the degenerate isle.
Ronald Booboo Lane | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 6:22 pm | #

Dr. Sanity: My goal is to make some of them think and possibly develop some insight in this blog.

A very noble goal but, I fear, its mostly hopeless. Yet, if anyone can do it, you have a better chance than most.

I suggest there are very few honestly ignorant useful idiots. They got where they are by malignant choice after malignant choice since childhood. They gained a perverse payoff with each decision. They are so beholden to their malignant choices there is but a vanishing chance of recovery.

The required intellectual therapy takes as much or more effort on the part of the patient than does psychotherapy. It also takes an intellectual honesty they have never practiced nor even suspect can exist.

Their entire network of assumptions, presumptions, conceptualizations, and fundamental axioms must be questioned, tested, reformed, and restructured. Its so much easier to go with the crowd who's promising manna by taxing the rich and plundering all the evil global corporations. A life of never expending any intellectual effort will assure the intellectual work will never be done.

Add to the above, the consequent emotional pathology, the prognosis is hopeless. The most we can hope for is to aid the few who are struggling to escape the entanglement of their self built intellectual swamp.
Lionell Griffith | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 6:51 pm | #

Lefties know full well somethings amiss with their ideology. I just don't think most of them can connect it to the obvious issue of pop culture dictating to them what are allowable perceptions and feelings.

Seems to me a red flag should go off in someones head, when people not being willing to pay for their middle class neighbor's childs healthcare, somehow gets defined as being against helping out poor kids.
SteveH | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 7:19 pm | #

Potheads are always hotheads. I was, and now I'm not. Hence, I am a neo-con, by definition. That's my perception, and I would never have been able to perceive it, until I quit being a pothead. It's probably the same for the majority of the loudest of the leftists.
jOjOEofArcadia | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 8:03 pm | #

Booboo: Advocating taking action against your obvious foes does not make you a "scurrilous coward". It might actually indicate a sense of realism.
snoring citizen | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 9:29 pm | #

Dr. Sanity:
I admire your goal and think it is an attainable one for many you are trying to reach. There are those who seem so far gone that it may be hopeless, but many others who are simply brainwashed. I was a lefty in college but realize now that it was my naivete and idealism that made me fall for the lies of the left. I actually believed that they wanted the best for people. I've been a conservative for awhile now - and I don't think your efforts are in vain.
As an optimist, I really can't imagine giving up. Your insightful posts always make me think and I bet you have many readers from the other side who have their reality tested every time they read you. p.s. hope you are feeling well again soon!
CarpeDiem | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 10:35 pm | #

The "patients" prefer sensation over thought. They get swept away by emotional currents, especially hate- the rabid hunger to destroy the "other." The herd is the self. They all make the same noises over and over. Pleasure is the goal. Gratification comes from the outside/in. Therapy? Or the Dog Whisperer?
Katina | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 10:43 pm | #

It's hard to belive that Sen Lieberman was the VP nominee of the Democratic party. Now they've thrown him out.

As with you, Dr, I disagre with his domestic policies. But he's one of my heroes for his clear-sighted thinking on foreign policy.
Tom the Redhunter | Email | Homepage | 11.10.07 - 10:47 pm | #

How would these psychological criteria apply to a group?

The left as a group seems to demonstrate many of these characteristics.

Would the pressure of group think inhibit the individual's attempts at self-examination?
WillPower | Email | Homepage | 11.11.07 - 12:56 am | #

Tom the Red Hunter wrote:
"It's hard to belive that Sen Lieberman was the VP nominee of the Democratic party. Now they've thrown him out."

Yes, it is amazing how quickly this has happened, if not simply, that it's happened.

I've just returned from a dinner party with friends from graduate school. All leaning left-er and left-er, each time I see them.

But I do not think Dr. Sanity's efforts are in vain, because we know others read this web page because of the e-mail she's discussed here before. There are no doubt those who are reading who don't respond...perhaps because they're not quite ready to go head to head with the good doctor. I think that as long as they're reading, the seed of wisdom is being planted.
Kelly L. Norman | Email | Homepage | 11.11.07 - 2:40 am | #

Whats ironic is we're called neocons as if we're the ones "new".

Aint nothing new about regular folks except that we tend to notice things like the dems VP candidate just 7 years ago is ousted for his lack of progressive radicalism.

JFK wouldn't recognise the democrat party, but his thinking along with ours is the "new" threat?

Hmmmmmm
SteveH | Email | Homepage | 11.11.07 - 5:29 am | #

SteveH: Whats ironic is we're called neocons as if we're the ones "new".

Its easy for them. In their way of thinking (I don't have a better word for it), history is recreated every moment so there is no need to remember it. One can simply make it up on the fly. Hence, if they want to think our position, our ideals, our values are "new", they feel that makes them new. Their mental equation is that a thing its name so change the name and you change the thing. For them, we are what they say we are and what we actually are is irrelevant.

This lack of past or future also explains why the consequences of their actions never enter into their calculations of what to do next. Their actions are in the unreachable past and the consequences are in the unreachable future. Their goal is to "make a difference" and "affect change". Questions of how, what, and why are thought impractical and are immediately discarded.

See Bill and Hillery Clinton for instructive detail.
A. Rational Human | Email | Homepage | 11.11.07 - 7:08 am | #

snoring sit:

There are no "foes." It's been symbiosis since the very beginnng of our hx. Lou "The Populist Dodds is right about the essential twinship of both 'store-bought' parties (Will Rogers talked about it back in the 1930's).Other than on corporate greed and a polite anti-illegal immigrationism, Lou is wrong on everything himself.


The so-called "Drive-Bys" are just as much the corporates as anyone else. Who pays their bills? Fellow corporates. Who loves immgration? Corporates. Who wants the status quo? Global Corporatists, both Dem and Repub.
Ronald Booboo Lane | Email | Homepage | 11.11.07 - 5:04 pm | #

I caught a sound byte this weekend about the $15B 'Motivation Industry'. Employers use these 'tools' (and I do mean TOOLS) to encourage workers to, well, work. A company I frequently do business with (think shoes) showed a 'motivation tool' that looked like a kindergarten dress up parade.
Talk about perpetual adolescence!!
We're in trouble because most folks don't HAVE a reality.
xqqme | Email | Homepage | 11.12.07 - 11:41 am | #

We used to make shoes in the U.S. Now we build Wal Marts.
Ronald Booboo Lane | Email | Homepage | 11.13.07 - 12:02 am | #

I was looking around the Internet for some interesting information on discourse so I was excited to read your blog. However, the sad thing is, this is just another right. As a moderate, I have been disheartened by the angry and grossly inaccurate things I've been getting from my right leaning friends. The emails, especially, border on hysteria and when I check out the facts, they are wrong. So, Dr., extremist on both sides are destroying healthy discourse as well as being able to effectively solve problems in this country. I was hoping you'd offer solutions but your text was just the same old thing veiled by touting your degree, your expertise as a psychiatrist and I am sorely disappointed. I will keep hunting to find an actual unbiased article.
Lynn Landry | Email | Homepage | 07.10.08 - 4:41 pm | #