Mangled Thoughts

The collectivist assumption is unmistakable. Individuals, and their dignity, and their real rights are mere inconvenient facts.

To justify economic sabotage through carbon taxation, the Rudd Cabinet is using the same fallacious economic arguments the Centre of Independent Studies resorted to in its position paper. This is not all that is common between them.

The CIS, in a nasty bit of specious moralising, asserted the measures will change behaviour in beneficial ways and this must be good. For Hayekians, as they style themselves, they are even blind to the modest tenor of this – statism, authoritarianism and the subjection of the individual to the “knowers” of what is good and true. Surprise, surprise, the Rudd Cabinet is shouting from the rooftops, “Our ‘grand plan’ will change the behaviour of mere oafs in desirable ways.”

These days, not many will recognise “the knowers” in an early heretical cult, the gnostics. It suffices to mention the most destructive ‘philosophy’ in history, platonism.

The new slogan is rooted in the pseudo-philosophical and pseduo-scientific tripe of Behaviourism(1). Reduced, it is no more than; man is a mere beast to be herded around and, when uncooperative to the cattle masters, whipped in the right direction. The founder of behaviourism, John Watson, declared:

The behaviourist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.

Others who hold man is only a species of dumb beast include Brendan Nelson and Bob Brown. Bob Brown believes that because of the evolution of man, apes are our ancestors and cousins. Wrong! Man is entirely distinct. Once he emerged, he was neither an ape nor anything close to any beast. Man is unique.

The behaviourist claim is distinct from the infantile notion of natural man – whether “savage noble” (Hobbes) or “noble savage” (Rousseau). Yet, it is rather serviceable to the latter. The grotesque notion of the natural man (and in any case there is no such thing as ‘nature’ fullstop) is the buttress of the also vile notion that Civilisation is counter to what man truly is. On this stinking pile of detritus was raised the claim, civilised man is ‘alienated’ from his ‘true self’. To the rectification of this horrifying condition the twin pseudo-sciences sociology and psychology (the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ man) were raised and much more bunk in the name of philosophy spewed out.

The ‘natural man’ and ‘alienation’ fuelled notions on which, for example, Hegel and Marx built their destructive ‘philosophies’. It was most useful for the central planners, the original word for socialism. It leant a seductive, mystical edge of propaganda appeal to their superstition. In Germany, after the springboard of socialism, Bismarck’s Statism, the bundle of stinks reared its ugly head in nationalism.

It shows not only the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left. It shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the “Right” that they accept even that nonsense. How bad is this?

They have only conceded territory to those they pretend to attack, the Left. Security firms don’t buy defanged guard dogs but for some weird reason donors to the CIS and IPA do. Thus the ‘freedom fighting Right’ see nothing wrong with the bestial claim.

It is a devestating concession. It not only, for example, gives oxygen to the likes of Brown, and Rudd. It’s a grim twist his parents were Jews and escaped the Nazi regime, because Peter Singer’s position warrants comparisons that even the New Age Greeny site, Wikipedia, cannot ignore, though it tars them as the mutterings of ‘right wing’ nasties.

The stem of the vulgar use of ‘person’ is the soup summed up above. There are clerics, left and right, who attack the individual as a horrible ideological nostrum. It is not, the individual is real.

The usage of person is a perversion of language to attack the dignity and rights of the individual and it is also a collectivist term, with or without organistic notions. Those clerics hold the organistic notion that the person is subjective perception only.The person is an aspect, incarnated into mere concrete bodies, of some ethereal One. This is heresy all the way down against the Christian faith. It is false in science. It belongs to protean dictator Plato and his dear ‘Mastah’ Socrates, and was the kernel of gnosticism.

Singer unites the term with bestiality. Thus he took the next step, equating man and beasts, with personality the justification of a ‘beast’s’ life and ‘rights’. It is also his justification for abortion.

The reality is, at conception the individual is complete. Conception is a big bang erupting into a new, as it were, creation, which is complete in the instant. What then ensues is the articulation of what is complete, the genetic load, the ‘physical laws’ of this new man into not simply into bones and flesh.

Articulation continues until death. No-one is the same as they were even in a fraction of a second ago and there is more to this than flesh and bone. Each man constantly changes because also the brain constantly alters - learn a language and a new galaxy forms. So, to quote the following:

there is really very little original in Singer’s sickening views. Moreover, the comparison with Nazi Germany is fully justified. In 1920 Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life was published in Germany. Authored by a Professor Karl Binding in collaboration with Dr Alfred Hoche, the book categorised those who were to be killed — all for the greater good.

Hoche and Binding’s ideas became respectable in Weimar Germany and provided the Nazi’s with the intellectual reasoning for their war of extermination against the senile, the retarded, the disabled, etc. And it was the Churches that stood up against this tide of barbarism, not leftwing journalists.

With prejudiced journalists it is… what they leave out that matters…[thus] Romei. He gave the impression that Singer’s views on infanticide only extend to “deformed” babies, as if that made a difference — but in fact they extend to all babies…

in [Singer’s] own words: “What the Nazis did was a totally different thing. They called their program euthanasia but it was not euthanasia because it was not for the good of the infants involved.”

But murdering people for their own good was part of the Nazi euthanasia program, as Hitler’s decree of the 1 September 1939 authorising euthanasia made clear:

“Reichleiter Bouhler and Dr Brandt are hereby instructed to extend the authority of physicians designated by name in such a manner that those who are, as far as it is humanly possible to judge, incurably sick may, after the most scrupulous assessment of their state of health, be granted a merciful death.”
The Nazis argued that society had a moral obligation to relieve parents of the suffering and distress that severely handicapped children imposed on them. This statement destroys Singer’s criticism…

There are very few in the Church today who would be capable of what some very apostolic and tough Bishops did, stood against the Nazi regime, and rounded on parishioners who shirked and cowered from drawing their own conclusions - as one Bishop observed of what some were ‘confessing’ (I’ll relate this in another item).

It must not be forgotten, there are some in the ‘Right’ pumping ‘legalised’ euthenasia, professing the same compassionate reasons. Jeff Kennett is a No.1 bump ‘em off proponent. Is this accidental?

To gauge, Kennett is an adherent of the beasty school too. His favourite term is to call everyone below him “units”. ‘Yes, Mr./Mrs. Unit Beast…ahem. When you’re 65 you’ll be miserable and so here’s the solution…consider a sudden career change. I can put your name down for a new fertiliser business.’

Of those who claim to be Christian, they have a second problem. The slogan, ‘We must change people’s behaviour for the good of all’, is anti-Christian. It is against fundamental principles of the faith and they are summed up in the creed, encapsulated in the pivot the bound doctrines of Christ and Trinity. One term of that pins the scholastic expression - what is of man is proper to man and what is of God… They did not, nor did many fathers before them, right back to the Apostolic writers, make the mistakes, very crude blunders at that, many in the name of Christ and many in the name of Liberty commit today.

The “Right” take pride in being “pragmatists” and “realists” (As Lonergan mused, realism is a conviction of the naive). Blundering garbage is o.k when it is they who pontificate, to the digust of genuine Liberals, and to the joy of the Left and Kevin “Mussolini” Rudd. In the mean-time, before Co2 taxation, The New Slogan is invoked by politicians in each tier of Government to justify each new intervention they dream up that wipes out more real rights, freedoms and simultaneously loads more fiscal expense on mere dumb beasts.

The real ‘beasts’ are all too visible.

(1) Psychology - pseudo-philosophy repackaged in junk science. To those who object, a reply in continued:

“Mental disabilities” and “mental health” are meaningless nonsense words. The reason is that they are rubbery, vague expressions. Dementia is another such word that is totally useless. In Victoria, it is used as an excuse, by the Eexcutive, to rob many Victorians of their Rights and property, through the agencies OPA and STO. The record is truly shocking, it is heinous.

‘Dementia’ and the other two vulgar expressions cover depression. Anyone who is having a difficult time can feel depressed and many do. Anyone can feel severely depressed in the face of major difficulties, and many do. What is called depression is related in ethnographies of primitive tribes - it is the record of misery of those locked up in a narrow, closed world. The indidividual is subordinate. There is no escape.

The brain is very intricate. As an example, neuro-scientists have confirmed what many suspected, aesthetics is crucial for the brain. Beauty, elegance in music, art, architecture, and indeed of true theory in science and, dare it be said, economics, are not accidental, not capricious. It is fundamental to what the brain does and how it continually develops.

When someone recoils from an example of the brutalist school of art (in ‘yer’ face, ugly realism and the attached preachy riders such as, ‘this is the nasty capitalist West for you’), or the hideous Bauhaus movement on which many a tower of despair was erected called ‘council estates’, they are right to do so.

What would be the exception? When depression is generated from a neurological flaw. If I am not mistaken, that is the account of ‘bi-polar depression’. Currently, bi-polar depression is checked with drugs. This indicates the neurological explanation is not found, it remains a mystery. Indeed, neuro-science has only touched the surface, as it were, of the brain. I had a discussion with a psychiatrist on such questions, and put the question, but why resort to psychology? His answer: ‘We are in the dark’. The reply, ‘and you darken it again with it.’

I appreciate bi-polar must be very unpleasant to endure. Yet, those who have it must get on with their lives. The drugs enable them to do so. Just as schizophrenia is real but still a mystery.

In contrast to these examples, while neuro-science is still discovering the universe called the brain, there has also been much progress. The result is conditions that can be rectified by routine surgical procedures. Indeed, there is a chilling case of the Victorian Government ignoring such instances in order to seize control of targets and their property through the STO and the OPA.

The KGB, during the Cold War, used psychiatry as a weapon. By it, they were able to have effective Cold War Warriors in the West locked up in psychiatric hospitals in the West.

A recent report related the findings of a longitudinal study. Psychological counselling for victims and witnesses to an horrific incident arrested their recovery from trauma. The identified problem is, it interferes with the brain’s action. “Grief counselling” does more damage than good is the finding.

The healing game
There’s mounting evidence that “debriefing” trauma victims doesn’t work — and may even make them worse. So why is it still so widely used? Mark Whittaker reports.

The first scientific studies were showing that debriefing did not prevent PTSD and might actually make it worse

A couple of techniques described are fundamental to a prescribed requirement of new clerics in seminaries and ‘theological colleges’, “Pastoral Counselling”. It is nasty stuff to observe in action. So, for example;

a formalised process in which the person talks through what they’ve experienced, their thoughts, their reactions and the symptoms they have suffered, before being educated on what they might suffer down the track.

Yes, Sir, that it is - “It was clinical law that went right back to Freud.” Gad, Sir, there might be at that:

“That was pretty scary – it went against everything that I believed,” recalls Kenardy. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, we’d better watch ourselves, there may be something that’s detrimental here.’”

As also “memory regression”, by which fictions can be coaxed by the ‘counsellor’ as real as real memories. It is invention of the past. This was used in the US and the UK, during the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s with sadistic force.

Men and women were convicted of serious crimes they did not commit on the strength of such ‘memories’ of ‘victims’. Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno was an infamous sadist who destroyed many through this technique. It came to a halt in the US and UK when the penny finally dropped and it occurred when it dragged in ‘institutional’ figures and politicians smelt electoral suicide. Sadly, it was too late for all those and their families who were ruined by the bastards.

Artificial Intelligence is a bogus science, the aim was to build a computer that is the same as the brain. There are die-hards still trying to prove up the dead matter. Amusingly, some of the notions were drawn upon by psychologists and thus, for example, those engaged in ‘rehabilitation’ of criminals expressed it as “re-programming the mind”. I fell off my chair studying those papers laughing, and it’s a not an unreasonable bet the lucky crims couldn’t believe their luck as in; it most likely made it easier for recidivists to convince parole boards to release them.

The point is, it is glaringly obvious, as neuro-science advances, psychology ‘interprets’ new gains within its ‘philosophical’ assumptions, they re-arrange the deck chairs. This is not science - noting shifting the posts is also a constant in the pushing of the Green Co2 lie (they have to ‘constantly’ because of the sheer mountain of evidence poured out daily demolishing the lie). This is true of very basic propositions such as a strict physicalist account of man:

Man is physics manifested; man is action. No oversimplification is involved, unlike the odd notions of the beasty brigade.The universe simply is - unexplained explainers do not do any work. To the contrary, they contradict the laws of physics, this is assuredly a powerful rejection of theistic accounts (Copplestone underestimated the force of it and was punished for his mistake in his encounters with Bertrand Russell).

What have psychologists made of it? They have ‘interpreted it’ as a variation on behaviourism (readers can google university sites to verify this). This is wrong as is mind-body dualism is completely false. One can appreciate why they made the adjustment; physics pops the pyscho-babble balloon, shows it for what it is, appallingly bad philosophy.

Man is very intricate. While there has been great progress in neuro-science, those in the field point out that they have only barely explored the amazing universe called the brain.

My image of the brain is as a mirror to the universe, chaotic, multi-valanced, spontaneous interactions, formations yeilding a structure that puts computers in their place, trivial.

This is what is also neat about genuine free markets and genuine free market economic theory: The former is true, the latter is sound, and is physics manifested. The elegance of genuine free market economics attests this, in contrast to:

The ugliness of keynesianism and ‘perfect competition’ - fictions describing nothing but how to bring on disaster after disaster. Thus, the likes of the CIS, and they reflect what is imparted in the Universities as market economics. They are brutalist schools of economics. It would be consistent of them to believe the bestial slogan but, hypocritically and as the diseased Left, they mean everyone else but themselves. Though Brendan Nelson is an exception to ‘their rule’. He seems to accept that he is Mary’s Little great big beastie Lamb - ‘Baaaaaaaaaaa’.

I stick by my claim, psychology and sociology have little to do with science. Their pseudo-philosophical assumptions are agreeable to statists in government and it is they who have proliferated them at great expense to taxpayers. This is not to trivialise genuine problems, but inadequate and worse explanations do a disservice, and can cover commission of abuses and worse - as in Victoria.

Sociology does no work at all. The subjects it supposedly covers is superiorly executed in core fields, economics, law, history, languages. Sociological explanations are worse than inadequate. They are inane trivilialisations of many matters. The account if history is entirely false as well as inane, beginning with the rubbish civilisation was invented when there was the first government, a king. Their motto, ‘man is a herd animal’ sums it up, sewerage undiluted.