The magic of monarchy

The "renegade" members of the British Royal family -- Harry and Meghan -- are much in the news these days, so I thought the following essay by a fellow psychologist might be of interest:

Republican politician, Jason Smith has criticized The Duke and Duchess of Sussex for dabbling in American politics. I agree with him.

The British Monarchy is politically neutral, so for political campaigning the Duke and Duchess of Sussex should be stripped of all their royal titles.

The Duchess is a rabid leftist; she had no intention of supporting Prince Harry in his role as a prince of England; she drew him from his family and his country and she is now drawing him into political commentary as well. She is a witch, and he appears bewitched.

The British Monarchy is traditionally apolitical; it “reigns but does not rule”. And there is good reason for that. People are naturally inclined to adore and idolise those with prestige, and the British Royal Family provide a focus or target for people’s natural inclination to adore and idolise.

And being politically neutral the Royal Family draws the British public’s emotional adoration and idealism away from politics, thereby enabling the public to more rationally assess their voting options in government elections.

With their adoration directed toward politically neutral personages, people are better able to direct their intellectual functions to the voting process. Adoration and political judgement are thereby made separate within the voter and across the voting public. And that separation of adoration and political judgement not only makes the voter more rational, it also makes the population more stable and government more stable. Great political lurches left and right driven by adoration are reduced.

As an analogy; in a democratic constitutional monarchy as in the British system, the government directs the country forward with adjustments left and right, as a rudder directs a boat, and the Monarchy stabilises the country as the keel stabilises the boat, without which there would be too much lurching and drifting left and right with each adjustment of the rudder.

The USA does not have such a system of separating adoration from politics. Without a royal family, US celebrities have become the focus or targets of the American people’s natural tendency to adore and idolise, and celebrities are nearly all leftist campaigners.

There is reason celebrities are nearly all leftist. Most celebrities are natural actors and attention seekers. Celebrities are very image conscious people, as are all lefties. Lefties try their best to be seen as society’s good people. They want to feel good and look good.

The British people may like and admire their actors but they do not adore and idolise them like the Americans do theirs. And that is largely due to the British having the Royal Family. American celebrities suck up public adoration and direct it leftward, and that is a significant impairment on sensible American voting.

And there is a reason why American celebrities do not keep their leftism to themselves but feel an irresistible need to campaign. It is because leftism is more than just emotionalism; leftism is elitism. It is a psychological elitist syndrome. Leftists believe they know best how society should be, that they kow best what should be allowed and what should be banned, they know best how other people should live, what their opinions and thoughts should be, how they should speak, even which words they should be allowed to say and not say. You cannot get more elitist than that.

And elitism and authoritarianism always go together. That is why leftists always coerce others by any means to comply with leftist expectations. Conservatives just want to be left alone to live our lives without leftists continually telling us how to be, think, and speak.

I see only two possible solutions for the mixture of adoration and politics that exists in the USA, both of which are far out. Either the USA disallows its celebrities commenting on political matters, which will not happen, or the USA and Britain unite as one country thus enabling the US publics' need to adore to be directed to the Royal Family and away from politicians and leftist celebrities. But there would need to be an extraordinary series of events and social changes for anything that to happen.

It seems that for the foreseeable future America, like a ship with a rudder but with no keel, will continue its great emotional lurches left and right.

Candace Owens Leads BLEXIT March to the White House, Trump Welcomes Crowd

Conservative commentator and activist Candance Owens led a peaceful Back the Blue rally in Washington, D.C. on Saturday. The author of Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation is encouraging minorities to leave the Democratic Party and support President Trump. Owens and her supporters traveled to the White House where President Trump addressed the crowd in his first public event since contracting the Wuhan coronavirus.

"There is not a time that Black Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Brazilian Americans need to find their voice more," Owens told the large crowd. "I know it can be scary. I know what it's like when you look at your own friends and your own family and people that you've grown up with and they tell you that you're crazy and that you're a racist but ... if the left wins, we are not going to recognize this country anymore."

"They are looking to foster race hate. When they see a crowd like this, this makes them nervous," said Owens.

Owens and the rally-goers then marched to the White House where President Trump attended his first public event since contracting the Wuhan coronavirus.

"Democrats have run nearly every inner city in America ... for a hundred years and their policies have delivered nothing but calamity, poverty, and trouble," Trump told the crowd. "Sleepy Joe Biden has betrayed Black and Latino Americans ... for half a century. Shipping your jobs to China ... opening your borders to mass illegal immigration ... trapping us in endless foreign wars ... and selling you out to the rich, globalist, Wall Street donors. Black and Latino Americans are rejecting the radical socialist left and they are embracing our pro-jobs, pro-worker, pro-police .. and pro-American agenda."

The liberal media only covered the event to accuse Owens of paying supporters to be there. The media believes as Joe Biden does: "you ain't black" if you support President Trump.

Owens' event was peaceful, in sharp contrast to left-wing gatherings. Has the media ever investigated who's been paying Antifa and the Black Lives Matter thugs to trash our cities?

SOURCE

Treat Women Equally By Treating Them Differently?

Let’s face it, there is nothing that won’t offend a Democrat. They get up every morning actively seeking something to bother them after waking up in a cold sweat and dreaming of microaggressions. They aren’t normal people; you wouldn’t wish their lives on your worst enemy, you also wouldn’t have to because they already have them. Liberals being miserable is nothing new, they’ve just gotten more forceful in projecting their misery on everyone else. If they get their way in the election, they’ll be able to mandate their misery and punish those who don’t comply. How that will manifest itself is always on display, just flip on MSNBC or CNN for two minutes and you’ll see it.

This week’s examples are about sexism, which at least is a nice change of pace from Democrats calling everyone racist.

Since its inception, feminism told everyone they were fighting for equality. That’s a noble goal. It’s also one the feminists achieved, whether they want to admit it or not (and they don’t want to admit it because there’s no money or power in admitting it). But equality brought with it something unexpected and inconvenient – literal equality.

No one is screaming about how women can’t be this, that, or the other thing anymore. There are more women in college today than men, for example. But with that success came expectations, particularly that men could treat women the way men treat other men. As we see regularly, that’s not allowed.

College professors demand more women authors to be taught rather than the classics written by men. Museums want to display more female artists, and the list goes on and on. No one dare say to women, "write better books, create better art, and produce classics."

The same demand for preferential treatment was on display in the vice-presidential debate. Mike Pence committed the “sin” of treating Kamala Harris like he has treated other men he has debated. Rather than being applauded, or better yet simply unremarked upon, for treating Harris as an equal, Pence was accused of “mansplaining,” a made-up crime to perpetuate the progressive feminist grift.

The truth of the matter is feminists, leftists, and pretty much anyone claiming to be pursing equality are actually seeking preferential treatment. No one wants to be “treated equally” because, on average, people treat each other pretty poorly.

I’m not saying we’re abusive to each other, though some can be. Mostly we simply don’t care. We don’t care about people we don’t know. We don’t wish them ill. It’s not like we walk around cursing the strangers we pass in our heads; we just simply don’t give them a second thought.

It’s not wrong when people pretend not to notice someone begging for money at an intersection or step over an unconscious homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk. It’s human nature. We only have so much bandwidth. What isn’t human nature is pretending to seek equality while demanding special treatment.

Should a woman never be interrupted by a man? That’s not equality. Yet, it’s what the self-professed seekers of equality demanded this week. It’s what they demand every week and every day of every week.

What the left demands publicly and how they pursue it are incompatible. They’re also destructive.

The Governor of Michigan blamed President Trump for an alleged plot to kidnap her by a group whose members, it turns out, include people who hate the president and attended Black Lives Matter protests (figure that one out). Trump said mean things about her, so she lied and said they were inspired by him, which was enough for her to claim victim status. It had to be Trump’s fault because Trump hates women, and Gretchen Whitmer is a woman. The media eagerly parroted her lies as fact, not mentioning the unpopularity of her own decisions and abuses as governor (declared such by the state’s Supreme Court).

Two weeks earlier, a woman mailed the poison ricin to the White House hoping to kill the president. You likely never heard of it. One event, thankfully, never made it past the planning stage. The other happened. The president’s criticisms were blamed for what happened in Michigan, four years of relentless slanders, accusing Trump of being everything from a puppet of Russia to Hitler reincarnated. The slanders, repeated endlessly on two cable “news” outlets, were not even considered to be a possible inspiration for an assassination attempt against the president.

When progressive “Bernie Bro” James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republicans practicing baseball because of an endless stream of “reports” claiming their health care plan would lead to the deaths of 10,000 people per year, the leftist media moved on before Congressman Steve Scalise was off life support. It was inconvenient to the narrative that Republican rhetoric leads to violence, so after three days it was like it never even happened.

One side gets treated one way, the other treated differently. You can call that a lot of things, none of which are equality.

Equality is not what Democrats want, and it’s not what they would ever accept. Democrats are above criticism and not responsible for anything. Everything is the fault of Republicans, even when the evidence clearly shows it isn't. Repeating Gretchen Whitmer’s whining about Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t make her lies true. Complaining about Kamala Harris being interrupted “because she’s a woman” doesn’t change the fact that she was interrupted not because of which bathroom she uses but for the lies she uses. Demanding equality while insisting on being treated differently does not make liberal women victims. It makes Democrats hypocrites.

SOURCE

Australia: Leftist judge wants more controls on the media

A High Court judge has come out swinging at the freedom of the press but his comments reek of a misunderstanding to the media’s role and his words should not go unchallenged, writes Des Houghton.

High Court judge Pat Keane has savaged the media, and suggested new laws to curb its powers.

And he has taken a swipe at the media industry’s Right-to-Know campaign, following the Australian Federal Police raid on journalist Annika Smethurst, cynically suggesting the crusade was motivated by “dollar signs”.

Keane goes further, saying that “it would not be surprising” if the High Court accepted a tort (a civil wrong) of invasion of privacy. He quotes from records that show judges favour protecting an individual’s private life “free from the prying eyes, ears and publications of others”.

His outspoken comments came in his Griffith Law School Michael Whincop memorial lecture. It was a scholarly, entertaining and dangerous speech in which he quoted some of civilisation’s greatest thinkers including Plato, Socrates, Sigmund Freud and Thomas Jefferson, and jurists like Louis D Brandeis, one of the great figures of the United States Supreme Court.

Keane said the electronic and print media cared little for the private lives of citizens.

“Should the law aid individuals to profit from the commercialisation of their intimate moments?” he asked.

Keane said drawing “satisfactory boundaries” between our private and public lives is one of the great challenges of Western civilisation.

Really?

He added: “The position taken by the media in Smethurst is a reminder, if one were needed, that, when the owners of the media are faced with a choice between the right to know and the right to privacy, they can be expected to favour the right with the dollar signs attached - and that will be so wherever one might think the balance of the public interests lies. The legitimate self-interest whose energy we need to harness is the interest that all of us have as citizens.

“It is definitely not the interest of media outlets, such as Fox News, which lies in pandering to the prejudices of its audience and stoking their distrust and disapproval of their fellow citizens.”

And others will see Fox as a bulwark against the increasingly left-wing media bias in the US led by the New York Times that routinely stokes distrust and disapproval against Republicans.

I could say that the ABC also stokes distrust and disapproval as it panders to the green-left.

Keane says laws to protect privacy had been “hit and miss”.

For me, his comments reek of a misunderstanding to the media’s role. His words should not go unchallenged.

True, the media sometimes does intrude. But it does not do so unless there is a strong public interest.

Much of the reporting of the intimate affairs of celebrities comes from the stage and screen and sporting luminaries themselves. They crave the limelight.

They frequently leak to the media because publicity feeds their egos and their bank balance.

Those of us who lead comparatively humdrum lives may find their trivialities an entertaining distraction. There is no crime in that. Not everyone spends their days off reading Plato, Your Honour.

While the media should not pander to the basest of instincts, nor should it be expected to change human nature and stifle an inquiring mind.

Paradoxically, much of the salacious gossip and scandal Keane seems to be complaining about comes directly from juicy court cases presided over by his fellow judges. There is an especially rich serving of the most intimate detail delivered weekly by Appeal Court judges of the Supreme Court as they forensically analyse the evidence.

More scandal, spice, humiliation and shame is delivered in Parliament in the time-honoured ritual of bucket-tipping.

In journalism, muckraking is a most noble art.

Keane puts a persuasive intellectual case, but an impractical one.

This is odd for a man who obviously has a brain the size of a planet.

He grew up in dreary, working-class Wilston in inner-city Brisbane and attended St Joseph’s Gregory Terrace where he was (of course) dux of the college. At the University of Queensland he won the university medal and then a scholarship to Oxford where he won the Vinerian prize for outstanding scholarship.

Later he was appointed Queensland Solicitor-General then a judge of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court.

Next he was appointed Chief Justice of the Federal court of Australia before ascending to the High Court in 2012.

The Australian reported in November 2012 that he was “a Labor man” and a friend of Kevin Rudd, although his appointments met with bipartisan support.

Keane spoke just as Crime and Corruption Chief Alan MacSporran ludicrously suggested that the media be gagged from reporting on matters he was investigating. I found his comments astonishing and arrogant.

Are MacSporran and Keane suggesting we curtail free speech, and therefore your right to know? I’ll quote Jefferson back at them: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

MacSporran already has extraordinary powers of investigation. He can drag innocent people from the street and compel them to give evidence in a so-called Star Chamber court that the media is forbidden from covering. What would life be like without a free press? Perhaps we should go to China or Russia to find out.

However, tensions between the media and the judiciary may not be a bad thing.

For all their legal smarts, I have a hunch that Keane and MacSporran know very little about journalism or the million wrongs we right every year.

Any more restrictions on the press would kill investigative journalism. A shackled press would not have uncovered the Watergate case that toppled Richard Nixon. Senator Ted Kennedy would not have been exposed as the Chappaquiddick Island coward who fled the scene and tried to cover up his part in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Without intrusive journalism, The Sunday Times in England would not have exposed the cover-up of the thalidomide children who were born with shocking deformities.

Without dangerous and meddling journalism, The Courier-Mail would not have exposed the corruption in the Bjelke-Petersen era that forced the Fitzgerald Inquiry which led to the Police Commissioner and several Cabinet ministers being sent to jail.

But MacSporran and Keane ought to reflect on what they are suggesting. They want to edit our papers, just as bureaucrats do in China.

Could MacSporran’s gag proposal be in breach of the new Human Rights Act that guarantees my freedom of thought and freedom of expression?

As irksome as it might sound to the MacSporran and Keane, they are often in the same boat as journalists. This is because journalists, judges and police ultimately strive to serve the same ideals.

If the press is seen to have too much power, so are the courts.

There is dangerous, totalitarian thinking in the belief that the media can somehow be “managed”.

The independence of the judiciary is paramount, as is the independence of journalism.

In protecting the citizenry from wrongdoing and injustice, may I humbly suggest, Your Honour, that the intrusive media quite often does a better job than your courts.

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.
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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.
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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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