The psychology of hate

Sandro Galea has come along way since his origins in Malta.  He has authored over 800 academic publications and is now Dean of the School of Public Health at Boston university, a large private university with a strong research orientation.  He is a registered do-gooder, having spent some time in his youth "helping" the benighted people of New Guinea.

Below is a press release announcing his talk on hate.  I will have some comments at the foot of it.


Global experts to examine hate as a public health issue

Professor Sandro Galea, a global expert on public health, talks about the under-represented topic of hate as a contributing factor in health and health equity.

The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre (the Prevention Centre) hosts world-leader in research and discourse on public health, Professor Sandro Galea from Boston University. Professor Galea will lead the conversation on hate as a public health issue at an event on 30 September 2019.

His research shows that hate is a contributor to poor physical and mental health at both the level of the individual and then at societal level.

“Hate such as the kind we witnessed in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence is like a disease, spreading among populations and undermining health in a manner eerily similar to that of a pathogen,” said Professor Galea.

“When a society is infected by hate, it is not hard to see how it can affect our bodies and minds. Being hated is stressful. It makes a person fear for her safety, resent her lack of respect, and worry about what the future holds for herself and her family. People who feel hated are more likely to experience major depression, and the fruits of hate – prejudice, discrimination, segregation, and interpersonal antagonism – sicken and kill Americans every day,” he said.

“Chronic disease, mental illness and drug use,” said Professor Galea. “None of these can be successfully addressed without discussing the injustice and racism that may be at their source. No matter how great our hospitals or advanced our technology, health is limited by the world in which people live.”

“The first step is to change the way we talk about health at a grassroots as well as at a policy level. Seeing health for what it is – a result of factors embedded in everyday life – is just as important as investing in a new hospital or MRI machine.”


So what a fine person Professor Galea is -- talking about what is undoubtedly an important issue.  As I often put up on my blogs news articles about hate, I was greatly interested to hear of him.  I looked forward to seeing his research on the subject. So I checked his list of publications on ResearhGate but, lo and behold, I could not find any!  There were articles in the popular press which consisted largely of bloviation and virtue signalling but that was it. He does do proper scientific articles but not on hate.

Nonetheless, I do agree with him that hate is toxic.  But I also think he is missing the elephant in the room.  And what a big elephant it is!  A veritable mammoth.  We see a virtual  torrent of hate being poured out constantly at Donald J. Trump by the Left. The disapproval of Third World immigration coming from the Right is very pale stuff compared with the hate that seems to come from every pore of the Left.  Hate is what they do these days. They seem to hate just about everything.

And it seems clear that their chronic hate has completely deranged the Left, if the recent Democrat primary debates are anything to go by.  Most of the policy proposals put forward there seem completely out of touch with reality.  And loss of reality contact is the prime symptom of psychosis.

The hate motivation of the Left is all too obvious to need much research but I am sure Prof. Galea could find something to research there if he got serious about the topic.

I give below a moderate and balanced comment on the current political scene from a prominent Leftist commentator.  The Right would have a hard job of matching it.  But perhaps Prof. Galea could find an example of a prominent conservative being so eloquent:



The way the Left describe as hate even the mildest expression of disapproval coming from conservatives is an example of projection that Freud would celebrate.  The Left assume that others have hearts as black as theirs -- JR






Writer Freaks Out Over People Eating Delicious Chick-fil-A: 'They’re Eating Fried Chicken SPITEFULLY!'

A Canadian publication, The Star, has printed an unintentionally hilarious editorial by a very disgruntled LGBTQWTF writer, Andrew Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler is very upset. His outrage and dismay have been caused by your love of delicious chicken from Chick-fil-A. How dare you??? In an essay entitled “Chick-fil-A is ideologically opposed to my existence,” Wheeler rails against the insensitivity of people who love chicken and waffle fries because it hurts his feelings, or something.


"This past weekend I saw something that made me unexpectedly queasy; a young woman slurping soda out of a fast food cup.It upset me because it was a Chick-fil-A cup.

Chick-fil-A is an anti-LGBTQ2 organization, not just because the founder publicly opposed same-sex marriage (he believed in a “biblical definition of marriage,” which doesn’t exist), but because company profits are donated to charities that oppress and marginalize queer people, especially queer youth."


I don’t know what LGBTQ2 is, and I don’t want to know. What I do know is that Wheeler here has never read a Bible. If he had bothered to even try, he wouldn’t have had far to go. The definition of marriage is in the very first book, in the second chapter: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24  It’s not hard to discern what this means.

What it doesn’t say is what bothers people like Wheeler the most. It does not say “Therefore a man (or non-binary trans-alien furry) shall leave his fathers or mothers and hold fast to the otherkin of his choice.” Now THAT is not in there. Despite that, your personal and deeply held beliefs must change to satisfy this whiny guy.


"Chick-fil-A is ideologically opposed to my existence | The Star
Buy a meal from Chick-fil-A and it will use your money to increase the suffering of queer kids."


Luckily for Wheeler, none of us want to force him to read or believe the Bible, like he wants to force us to stop reading and believing it. We just want our chicken sandwiches and diet lemonade without having to wade through screaming protesters. (Although, as he points out, that won’t stop us either.)

LGBTQ2 activists protested Chick-fil-A’s opening on Friday, but people were happy to cross the protest line. Some also tried to tell the protesters that they weren’t bad people. A lady yelled, “You think I’m homophobic? I have gay friends.” One man told me he voted for Trudeau. A smirking guy hiding behind large sunglasses insisted that McDonald’s is just as bad.

I bet it would make Wheeler’s head explode if I told him that I have gay friends... who eat at Chick-fil-A! And they don’t hate themselves, they just love fried chicken. But I will agree with Wheeler that the smirking guy should be arrested. Where does he think he is? A free country? It’s Canada.

Wheeler went on to expose the real goal of Chick-fil-A, which is not to provide excellent and cheerful service with a side of the best dipping sauce on earth, but a dastardly plan to hurt gay children. “Buy a meal from them, and they’ll use your money to increase the suffering of queer kids,” claims Wheeler. There really are people who think that Chick-fil-A executives sit around a smoke-filled board room devising ways to make gay children suffer. This has to be some kind of mental illness. Wheeler continued, “I will not support a company that is ideologically opposed to my existence, and that uses the money spent there to campaign against my existence.”

That would be a surprise to the survivors of the Pulse Nightclub in Florida who were met by Chick-fil-A workers handing out free food and bottled water in the aftermath of the shooting. Or the protesters who staged a kiss-in at a Chick-fil-A and were offered free lemonade. It’s almost as if Chick-fil-A wants to serve everyone some of its scrumptious offerings.

But maybe it’s not the company that Wheeler really has a problem with. No. I think it’s you. Your’e an a-hole.

Of course, people are not just going to Chick-fil-A to eat fried chicken. They’re eating fried chicken spitefully. They’re defiantly standing in line with all the other freethinkers because they’ve been asked not to. They know that going to Chick-fil-A hurts queer people, but they’ve never thought much about queer people before and they’re not going to start now. It’s a strange form of identity politics where the identity is “a--hole.” The line to get into Chick-fil-A is the a--hole pride parade.

This is the whole reason why the LGBTQWTF mafia is never going to win over rational people. They want to force you to agree with them on every single issue and they think they’re going to get there by insulting and canceling you. If you don’t celebrate their existence (instead of ignoring the attention-seeking activists) they want you punished, silenced, shut down, shamed, and unable to put food on the table. Wheeler has these inner fears that people hate him and don’t want him to exist and so he acts in a way that makes normal people hate him and not want him to exist. It’s not because he’s gay. It’s because he’s the a-hole who can’t even let people like a chicken restaurant of their choice.

When it comes down to it, there are lots of people who have lots of beliefs that are foreign to us. They’re allowed to have them. And it’s none of my business what those beliefs are. I wish a bunch of people didn’t exist, like communists and those people at the mall who try to put a straightening iron in my hair as I’m walking by. And yes, the LGBTQWTF outrage mob. I wish they didn’t exist, mostly because they are the ones hurting queer kids.

They are making it very difficult for the majority of straight people to give a crap about the plight of gay people. Most of us just want them to shut up now and get back in the closet because they're annoying. When you try to shame people for eating chicken, you’re not being a good ambassador for your cause. In fact, this kind of behavior only increases the division between us and reinforces the belief that giving in to any demands by the Lavender Mafia is signing our own death warrant.

SOURCE






The Good News the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Report

John Stossel

I rarely watch cable news anymore. It’s all hysteria, all the time.

CNN: “We are destroying the planet.”

MSNBC: “The middle class is disappearing!”

President Donald Trump says drug trafficking “is worse than ever!”

I’m glad my favorite magazine, Reason, cuts through the gloom and tells us the truth:

There is less war and more food. We live healthier and longer lives. HIV will soon be history. We are increasingly free to be whoever we are and love whom we want. Even work has become more pleasant.

It’s a surprising message, since most journalists tell us everything’s terrible.

“They’re wrong,” says Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason’s editor-in-chief, in my new video.

Why is the media so negative?

Mangu-Ward says evolution wired us to see a world in which things are bad. “If you are a caveman who hears a little rustling in the weeds and you say, ‘Oh, it’s probably fine’ and the other guy says, ‘It’s probably a tiger!’ that’s the guy who lives. That guy was our ancestor.”

So today, as life gets better, my profession wins clicks and ratings points by hyping whatever makes us afraid. Reporters ignore gradual improvement and, sometimes, miracles.

“We live in a world of reliable miracles,” says Mangu-Ward. “When I’m having a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs … hearing-impaired people getting cochlear implants turned on for the first time … paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting their first pair of coke-bottle glasses … things that, in another era, would have caused the founding of an entire religion!”

Even food is better. Meatless meat tastes as good as meat from an animal because “people want to make money by selling you a burger that didn’t hurt a cow,” says Mangu-Ward.

OK, so science moves forward, but how will we pay for it? News anchors tell us “the middle class is shrinking.”

That’s true, says Mangu-Ward, “because people are getting richer!” A chart in Reason shows that Americans moving out of the middle class mostly moved up. There are more high-income people than ever before and fewer low-income households.

Another Reason article points out that “pestilence, war, famine and death are all on the decline.” You wouldn’t know it from other news sources, but it’s true. Deaths from war have declined dramatically.

I pushed back, pointing out that American life expectancy dropped recently. Suicide among white men is up about 40%.

“Still, overall, that is the tiniest blip,” said Mangu-Ward. “People are living longer, healthier lives.”

Even work got better.

“If you watch the news, you would think absolutely everyone [in] America is laboring in an Amazon factory, crying while they fill boxes. That’s just not, on average, what work looks like,” says Mangu-Ward.

“A couple hundred years ago, work was dangerous. It was very easy to die at work,” she reminds us. “Work was extremely boring, even for people that had good jobs. Jobs are pretty interesting now, and they mostly don’t kill you, and we should be grateful for that.”

Reason’s writers aren’t dumb. They don’t pretend everything is rosy.

The magazine includes reporting on “the terrifying rise of authoritarian populism,” threats to a free internet, and worries that “Americans aren’t saving nearly enough.” But Reason is the rare publication that also points out good news.

When looking at that, Mangu-Ward sees a pattern.

“Everything that’s bad is politics; everything that’s good is the market.”

Markets allow every individual a choice. Products and services must improve, or you won’t buy them. That’s why market competition brings us gradual improvements.

Politics, by contrast, gives us just two choices. Then it forces everyone to obey whatever the majority chose.

“At Reason [we] describe why everyone should have less power over each other … because people are going to make mistakes and hurt each other. Better that they shouldn’t do it with the force of the state behind them,” concludes Mangu-Ward.

She suspects life will continue to get better “if we can just manage to keep politicians from screwing it up.”

SOURCE






What I love about McDonald’s

Ignore the snobs – Maccy D’s is a sociable, diverse and nice place to hang out.

Like the village inhabited by Asterix and Obelix, the British county of Rutland styles itself as the last part of the country to have resisted invasion and occupation by a mighty empire. For Rutland is the only county in Britain not to have a branch of McDonald’s, in a Britain that boasts 1,249 outlets, ever since the first Golden Arches arrived on these shores in 1974.

Until now. McDonald’s could soon achieve total domination. Rutland County Council is now considering plans for a drive-through McDonald’s restaurant in Oakham, the pretty market town. And not everybody is happy about this. The plans have attracted more than 50 objections from locals, with many fearing McDonald’s would not be in keeping with the farmers’ market and gourmet restaurants.

Others have complained about the ‘obvious eyesore of a high-profile golden arch’ or the detrimental effect on house prices. One protestor told The Times: ‘It’s a shame the council have bowed to the big corporations. It doesn’t suit our town and our way of living . It will be an eyesore and attract the wrong sort of people.’

Whoa… Say that again? ‘The wrong sort of people’? This man’s comment may not be representative of your average anti-McDonald’s type, but it does hint at a truth: that behind all the fine anti-corporation sermonising, certain posh, middle-class, usually left-wing types dislike McDonald’s because it is where poor people go. That’s where the ghastly proletariat hang out and gorge on their revolting, greasy fare.

I often wonder whether people who make fun of Wetherspoons have ever been to one. Likewise, I ask myself whether people who berate and demonise McDonald’s have been in one of the restaurants. I often go to McDonald’s in Canterbury, Folkestone and London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, and, while the restaurants can get smelly, the atmosphere is usually genial and with a mixed demographic. You see office workers, builders, schoolkids and tourists, all eating side by side. You see all races. The staff are nearly always unfailingly polite. The coffee is great value. In a society that purports to celebrate tolerance and inclusivity, McDonald’s is an exemplar.

In a society that also constantly frets that teenagers spend too much time alone on social media, getting bullied, being prematurely sexualised or being made to feel ever-more insecure about their bodies, it is worth keeping in mind that McDonald’s functions as a social arena for teenagers to interact and hang out with each other. This may be a pain if you’re trying to get a good value coffee at 4pm, but surely it is overall a good thing.

The well-to-do, health-conscious middle classes will point you to the deleterious effect to one’s body of eating McDonald’s and other fast food. The chain is still recovering from Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s three times a day for 30 days, with dire effects upon himself. Conclusion? Fast food is junk food.

Yet this was false science. If you ate nothing but salad for a month, or nothing but fruit for a month, you would also emerge a sorry state, deprived of protein and iron. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the occasional McDonald’s as part of a balanced diet. There is no such thing as junk food. There is only junk diet.

Sure, a McDonald’s probably wouldn’t be in keeping with the appearance of Rutland’s pretty market towns, but the planned outlet is on the bypass in Oakham, which isn’t going to affect traffic.

Rutland’s well-to-do should really lighten up and lose the snobbish Asterix complex.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.

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