Yellowstone? It’s the conservative syndrome, stupid
Frank Furedi below rightly points to the pervasive view among our Leftist elite that conservatives are psychologically defective. Research alleging to prove that has been going on since 1950 and I spent 20 years critiquing it, from 1970 to 1990.
Basically all the research concerned bent over backwards to prove its point and I was routinely able to show the big holes in it. If you know your psychometrics, the faults in such research are often glaring. Let me give an example by making a few comments about the Canadian article Furedi highlights -- called “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact”,
It purports to tell us about political conservatism. But it doesn't. I quote from the body of the article itself:
"socially conservative ideology was assessed in terms of respect for and submission to authority"
Respect for authority is conservative? The way the Left swallow "expert" pronouncements about global warming, the wonderfulness of homosexuality and the importance of transgenderism, I would have thought that respect for authority is a hallmark of the Left. You either conform to Leftist shibboleths these days or get "cancelled". No deviation from the party line is allowed: A very authoritarian system. And was Communism conservative? It was certainly very authoritarian.
And in any case respect for authority is an overgeneralization. There is basically no such thing. Different people respect different authorities at different times. A prime example is SCOTUS. For many years conservatives condemned it becauseof its rulings on homosexual marriage, abortion etc. Now the worm has turned and it is the Left who are furiously condemning SCOTUS and trying to undermine it. There is no doubt that SCOTUS is a major authority but that has nothing to do with respect for it. Respect for it is entirely due to whether its rulings favour the political Right or the political Left.
And the lack of coherence between attitudes that allegedly express attiutude to authority is borne out in the research in question. We read
"scale reliabilities ranged from .63 to .68".
That means nothing to the layman but to a psychometrician it means that the items in the questionnaire showed little correlation with one-another. It shows, in fact, that the questionaire was not suitable for the use it was applied to. A research instrument is normally held to have a minimal reliability of .75. Reliabilities in the .60 range show the scale to be suitable only as the preliminary form of a research insrument, not to be used until further refined
I knew what I would find before I looked up the article. I immediately went to the details of the measures used and knew that I would find junk. It's a common feature of such articles. So the article proves nothing about conservatives or anybody else. The journal editors were very indulgent to publish it, but no doubt they liked its conclusions
As far as Hollywood, Netflix and the American cultural establishment are concerned there is little point in taking conservatives seriously. They are seen and represented as basically hillbillies and rednecks who feed on a diet of kitsch and trashy reality shows. That is why the don’t know what to make of Yellowstone – one of the most watched cable series in the US.
Even the most bitter critic of conservative values cannot dismiss Yellowstone as trash. TV Guide refers to it as “prestige TV for conservatives” before adding that “prestige TV is for liberals”. TV Guide’s commentator correctly notes that “in the genre of conservative prestige drama, Yellowstone is almost alone”. That’s because Hollywood patronises conservatives to the point it seriously believes that conservatives lack the taste and artistic sensibility to appreciate prestige drama.
In the main, cultural critics have responded to Yellowstone by not responding to it. Since they are not interested in engaging with people who are not like them, they have ignored a program watched by tens of millions. Writing in Vanity Fair, one commentator wrote “Here’s to Yellowstone, the Most-Watched Show Everyone Isn’t Talking About”. The few critics that have bothered to review it can barely hide the contempt for a modern Western that extols traditional virtues and avoids the woke cliches much loved by Hollywood.
Writer Kathryn VanArendonk was seething with anger when she described the show as “a desperate and threatened appeal to American identity and white masculinity”. She acknowledges that she feels anger towards John Dutton, the main character in the show played by Kevin Costner, since he is “so blind to his privilege”.
That Yellowstone has become caught up in America’s culture war was acknowledged by The New York Times this week. One of its commentators, Tressie McMillan Cotton, noted “while liberal audiences mostly ignore it, this soapy conservative prestige television juggernaut is gobbling up audience share”. In an attempt to account for the culturally polarised reception to this show, she drew on academic expertise. As one expects, her expert, Clayton Rawlings, asserted that conservatives are narrow-minded people with limited cultural interests. He added that in contrast to liberals, “conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity”. Evidently prestige television is not for them.
Tragically, McMillan Cotton, like America’s cultural oligarchy, cannot maintain a distinction between art and politics. She treats Yellowstone as if it is a political advert for the Republican Party. She warns that the “show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future”. Almost imperceptibly, the fictional characters in a television drama are denounced for their lack of political vision. From her perspective the conservative folk who inhabit Yellowstone are just as bad as the ones that vote Republican. “They buy guns and hoard stolen power” is her concluding remark.
The cultural establishment that dominates the media landscape in the Anglo-American world actually believes conservatives are both aesthetically and morally inferior to people like them. In their fantasy world, the people not like them are in search of simplistic black-and-white answers. In private conversation they refer to people who watch Yellowstone as rednecks, Nascar dads, tabloid readers, who are likely to be crass, materialistic simplistic, sexist, racist and homophobic.
That is why Hollywood, Netflix and the television media tend to portray conservatives as unpleasant and not very nice people. Like Mr Garrison in South Park, they are not only small-minded and racist but are psychologically messed up. In typical conservative fashion, he refuses to acknowledge his emotional and psychological issues. Like many other fictional conservative characters, Mr Garrison is in denial.
Homer Simpson is a blue-collar conservative. Therefore, the producers of The Simpsons felt obliged to portray him as a bumbling and insensitive husband and father, who over the years has turned into a self-aggrandising fool. Fortunately, Homer’s psychological deficits are compensated for by his daughter, Lisa, who because she is very liberal must be portrayed as sensitive and emotionally literate.
The media is particularly unkind to conservative women. The abusive mother Adora Crellin in miniseries Sharp Objects is one of the most repulsive characters you are likely to encounter on your screen. She is cast in the role of a small-town, Southern conservative woman, whose Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome has led her to poison and kill daughter Marian.
But it is Sue Sylvester in Glee who more than anyone else offers an over-the-top caricature of a right-wing conservative woman. Her authoritarian personality coexists with a profound sense of personal insecurity and unrestrained narcissism. She exudes malice. That she calls for the abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the left’s favourite federal arts agency, signals that her politics are not only wrong but also sick.
As far as media culture is concerned, conservatives possess unattractive psychological characteristics. Typically, conservatives are portrayed as mediocre and undistinguished characters who possess outdated and often, repulsive sentiments. Predictably, woke media culture can draw on academic experts, particularly psychologists, to reinforce its anti-conservative prejudice.
If the numerous research papers recently published in psychology journals are to be believed, conservatives are sexually repressed, lacking in empathy and intensely conformist.
The invention of the unimaginative, humourless and intellectually challenged conservative originates from the 19th century. At the time, JS Mill, the 19th-century liberal philosopher, described the Conservative party as “the stupid party”.
He took great delight when he went a step further and stated that his attribution of intellectual inferiority was not merely directed at the party but also at people who possessed a conservative outlook. When criticised for his remark, Mill replied that “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative”.
In recent decades, Mill’s verdict about the inferiority of conservatives has been recast in the language of psychology. Numerous so-called studies have published research purporting to prove the intellectual inferiority of conservative people. An example of this form of tendentious research is the study published by two Canadian academics a decade ago. Titled “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact”, it suggests that stupid simpletons go on to become prejudiced right-wingers.
Some psychologists claim their research shows that socially conservative people feel more insecure than liberal. Others have discovered that liberals are far better at reorganising their thoughts in flexible ways than conservatives. Advocacy research claims to have discovered that “religious conservatives make poorer moral decisions than liberals”.
Some psychological studies have concluded liberals and conservatives differ in cognitive style. As you would expect, liberal cognitive styles are far more attractive than those of their conservative peers. “Liberals are more flexible, and tolerant of complexity and novelty, whereas conservatives are more rigid, are more resistant to change, and prefer clear answers,” argues one paper. Liberals also possess greater “neurocognitive sensitivity” to cues than their far more rigid conservative counterparts.
The representation of conservatives as less intelligent than their left-wing counterparts is frequently communicated by “research” on the so-called conservative syndrome. The flattering hypothesis of this syndrome is that conservatism and low cognitive ability are directly correlated.
A commentator in progressive magazine Mother Jones wrote in 2014, that “10 years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it’s becoming hard not to”. As it happens Hollywood has been talking about this for a very long time. Through its alliance with advocacy research, it has succeeded in constructing a stereotype that deprives conservatives of any redeeming features. That is why it has to either ignore or lay into Yellowstone.
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UK: Rishi Sunak blasts 'political correctness' among authorities who are 'scared of calling out' Asian child sex gangs as he promises new life sentence for groomers
Rishi Sunak has said that 'political correctness' is standing in the way of tackling child sex grooming gangs.
The former chancellor blasted authorities who are 'scared of calling out the fact that there's a particular group of people who are perpetuating these crimes'.
If he wins the Tory leadership contest, Mr Sunak vowed to force police to record the ethnicity of those involved and promised new life sentence for groomers.
An inquiry revealed that police failed to tackle widespread abuse by south Asian men in Telford for fear of looking 'politically incorrect'.
In an interview with GB News, the prime ministerial hopeful said: 'I have two young girls who are nine and 11, and I think for too long we just haven't focused on this issue.
'It's a horrific crime. It's far more pervasive across the country than actually we all realise.
'We all know the reason that people don't focus on it. It's because of political correctness and they're scared of calling out the fact that there's a particular group of people who are perpetuating these crimes, and I think that's wrong, and I want to change that as prime minister.'
He added: 'I want to make sure that all police forces record the ethnicity of those involved, which currently is not done because people don't want to do that.
'I want to create a brand new life sentence for those involved in grooming with very limited options for parole because I'm not going to let political correctness stand in the way of tackling this absolutely horrific crime.'
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Woke Airline Policies Threaten Safety, Workers Say
Hiring practices driven by diversity are 'a recipe for disaster'
Southwest Airlines Co. is basking in accolades for its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) efforts, award-winning customer service, and record-breaking quarterly revenues.
Behind the scenes of that rosy picture, heartaches are afflicting Southwest, called “the airline with Heart” because of its heart-shaped logo and a corporate culture steeped in “The Golden Rule,” treating others the same way they’d like to be treated.
But eight current Southwest employees, including three minorities, told The Epoch Times that “woke, leftist” DEI policies, as implemented, have tarnished the cherished Golden Rule principle, fractured a once-cohesive workforce, and, ultimately, may put safety at risk.
Faced with pandemic-related staffing shortages and pressure to add minorities, the company has changed the way it hires, trains, and disciplines workers—mostly to benefit less-qualified new hires representing the diversity rainbow, the employees say.
One Southwest flight attendant, a Hispanic female, said: “They are compromising safety for the sake of race, gender identity, and sexual preference … They’re risking people’s lives because of agendas.”
Southwest, one of America’s largest air carriers, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Similar issues have spread industry-wide, according to 10 airline employees who agreed to be interviewed. Four are pilots and six are flight attendants; most have 20 or more years of experience. All of them, including two American Airlines pilots, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.
While no one thinks the policies are causing an imminent threat of a plane falling out of the sky tomorrow, all of the interviewees agreed that each time a standard is lowered, or a less-qualified employee is hired, the risk that something can go horribly wrong inches forward a notch or two. In an industry that depends on a near-miracle integration of people, machinery, and computers, even a few deviations can culminate in catastrophe.
Still, some employees worry about what could happen if current trends continue to stress out and distract safety professionals. Said one flight attendant: “It’s a recipe for disaster. I just hope I’m not at work when it happens.”
Us-Versus-Them Mentality
While promoting diversity sounds like a great idea, the inclusionary policies have actually become exclusionary at Southwest, employees say. Disparate treatment has divided their ranks into two distinct camps: those with “desirable” or “approved” personal, social, or political characteristics—and those without.
Minorities or people with leftist political views, varying gender identities, and alternative sexual orientations appear to be given wide latitude. This “protected class” is allowed to bend or break rules, and new hires in these classifications may be given extra chances to pass required skills tests, the employees said.
At the same time, veteran workers—especially those who are white, heterosexual, and conservative—find themselves in the crosshairs for almost anything, including making a personal statement of religious or political beliefs, the Southwest workers said. Even minorities can be shifted into this targeted group if they espouse personal beliefs running counter to causes that the company supports.
“There are two sets of standards: One for us and one for them,” said an experienced flight attendant.
One of her colleagues said: “The company is trying to eliminate anybody who does not agree with their agenda. The last few years, anybody who speaks up against them, they want gone.” That flight attendant said she had no problems at work until she posted her Christian religious beliefs on her personal Facebook page, along with her support of President Donald Trump. A coworker reported the posts to Southwest, and the flight attendant said she has faced repercussions ever since.
She and others say the targeting of conservatives is common—and they point to the recently publicized case of fired Southwest flight attendant Charlene Carter as a prime example.
‘Targeted Assassinations’ of Conservatives
Last month, a federal jury in Texas awarded Carter more than $5 million after finding that Southwest wrongfully terminated her and that her union didn’t live up to its duty to represent her. The company fired Carter after she expressed her pro-life views to a union leader via social media and opposed the union’s pro-abortion activism.
The company supported the union’s political activism, Carter’s suit says, by accommodating work-shift changes for union members so they could participate in the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., in January 2017. Marchers were protesting Trump’s inauguration; one of the primary sponsors of the event was Planned Parenthood. Southwest also showed “solidarity” with the protesters by bathing its airplane cabins in pink lights on some D.C.-bound flights, Carter’s lawsuit says.
Documents in the case revealed that some union officials and political activists were singling out dissenting Southwest employees for “targeted assassinations,” meaning that they would try to get the company to fire them, using the company’s social media policy as a bludgeon.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Aug. 8, Carter, who lives near Denver, Colorado, said she can’t believe that some leaders of Transport Workers Union of America Local 556, who helped set her up to be fired, are still working for Southwest.
Carter also validated her coworkers’ concerns about the disparate treatment of employees who dare to oppose leftist agendas. “I think there are a ton of cases out there just like mine,” she said. Terminated employees from Southwest and other airlines have been continuously contacting Carter for help after learning about the July 14 verdict in her case.
Carter spent five years fighting in court; she thinks she was one of the first casualties of the erosion of Southwest’s unique corporate culture, which she witnessed during the latter part of her 20-plus years at the airline.
“We all loved our jobs; we all loved each other—our CoHearts, that’s what we called each other,” Carter said, pointing out that the airline’s stock ticker is LUV, a nod to its birthplace at Love Field, Texas.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/woke-airline-policies-threaten-safety-workers-say_4652851.html
*****************************************************Gender behind bars: Housing trans prisoners is not straight forward
Tanveer Ahmed
As a psychiatrist who visits jails, I’m concerned about biological men being placed in women-only facilities. We’ve been through heated debates about the trans issue in elite sport and in our schools, but prisoners are not a group that is flush with advocates.
Biological female prisoners are some of the most victimised people on Earth. The vast majority experience sexual abuse or physical violence, chaotic upbringings, foster care and many descend into drug abuse.
The policy self-declaration of gender identity hurts biological women. Yet it has been adopted in the bulk of Australian jails as an established norm in our criminal justice system, even though the principle has not yet been incorporated into common law.
This is not just the case in NSW, where the Daily Telegraph confirmed this month that there are three trans women in jails, but also in Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. Western Australia has no clear policy whereas South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland assess inmates on a case-by-case basis.
Definitive, uncontested figures about the size of the trans prison population are not available however a lawyer writing in Lawyer’s Weekly in November 2020 estimated that there may be as many as several hundred trans inmates in jails around the country. Whatever the number now, you can bet it will go up in parallel with the cultural zeitgeist. If referrals to a single gender clinic can go up by a factor of eighty, as they have done in Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital between 2011 and 2021, you can guarantee some of these individuals will filter through into our jails, especially given the markedly higher rates of mental illness trans people suffer, which automatically put them at greater risk of committing crimes.
Although jails have mostly adopted the policy that an individual’s declared gender identity should take priority over their biological sex, this is widely contested. One reason the policy should not be adopted is because it prioritises the wishes of those who identify as transgender over the rights of others, particularly biological females, not least their right to single-sex facilities. Why should the interests of a trans minority be put ahead of biological women? Why should the trans tail keep wagging the dog?
Sex remains the single biggest predictor of criminality. Ever since such statistics have been collected, for over a century, males make up around eighty per cent of offenders. But when it comes to sexual crimes, the figure is above ninety per cent.
The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that biological males who identify as trans women retain male patterns of criminality including a much higher risk of committing acts of sexual violence in jails. Furthermore, recording trans women as anything other than biological males has the potential to skew future data on criminality.
Female prisoners can be physically violent but much like society in general, aggression in women-only prisons is more likely to be relational, taking the form of damaging gossip or exclusion.
The environment in jails, especially among males, acquires a primitive edge. Inmates often organise themselves into tribes, often linked to their ethnicity. There are the Lebs, the Kooris, the whites, and the Islanders. Those that don’t fit neatly into the designated tribes try to make changes to do so. Inmates feel under threat and act in more primal ways. Conversion to Islam is one such way to ensure a degree of protection.
While the NSW Department of Corrections says that it considers security risks and assault-related crimes of the inmate, reserving the right to overturn the policy, the probability remains that trans women are at a much higher risk of committing a sex-based crime in jail. Britain’s the Prison Service estimates that trans women are five times more likely to carry out attacks in women’s prisons.
I don’t suggest the issue is clear cut. It never is with the trans debate. The calculus changes further if the inmates have had or are planning to have reassignment surgery.
I have assessed several clients who identify as trans women. None were incarcerated. All were terrified of being placed in male prisons for fear of being attacked. I am sympathetic to such fears. International studies show higher rates of trans females being attacked in male-only prisons. As a result, civil rights groups, such as the Human Rights Commission, are usually at the forefront of those advocating for inmates to be incarcerated according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Yet just last month, the state of New Jersey opted to alter its policy of treating its inmates on the grounds of their chosen gender identity in response to the discovery that a trans inmate, Demi Minor, had impregnated multiple inmates. Minor, who is serving thirty years for manslaughter, was housed in a women’s prison, following a court case mounted by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of another transgender prisoner who successfully sued the New Jersey prison administration in 2019 for preventing her placement in a women’s jail. Other US states and Britain are now reviewing their policies given the spiraling growth of the trans category in the wider population.
In a recent paper for British think tank, Policy Exchange, lawyer and feminist Maureen O’Hara outlined some of the risks I have alluded to, arguing in her conclusion: ‘All trans-identifying prisoners should be housed within the prison estate which aligns with their biological sex or housed in a separate unit which does not form part of the women’s estate if being housed in the general men’s estate is considered unsafe for them.’ Granted jails are overcrowded, and resources limit the extent to which the special needs of trans prisoners can be met with unique facilities, but such a recommendation should be strongly considered within our criminal justice system.
All people, even those who face serious charges or are guilty of serious crimes, should be treated with dignity and compassion but it’s time to reconsider housing prisoners based on their self-declared gender. By doing so we are the placing the rights of trans-identifying male-bodied offenders above those of women in fear of male violence.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/gender-behind-bars/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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