patrick.net

...the esteemed American Psychological Association has endorsed pseudoscientific leftist ideas like toxic masculinity and white privilege.

The media promotes a Sex and the City lifestyle, while ignoring the fact that the show’s writer, Candace Bushnell, said she regrets choosing a career over children and is now ‘truly alone’.

This is despite number of premarital partners longitudinally predicting substance abuse (Ramrakha et al., 2013), and some research suggesting that frequency of casual sex predicts suicidal thoughts later in life (Sandberg-Thoma and Dush, 2013).

Anyway, the narrative is clear: right-wing bad, left-wing good. ...

...the issue here is the weight of focus on conservatism compared to liberalism — unsurprising, given that liberals outnumber conservatives in psychology academia by a ratio of 14:1 (Duarte et al., 2015). Indeed, a search on Google Scholar returns almost six times as many results for ‘right-wing violence’ as it does for ‘left-wing violence’. As radical Marxists burn, loot and murder across the US, would anyone seriously argue that leftist violence is not equally worthy of study? ...

Firstly, the modern self-identified strain of ‘liberalism’ is explicitly correlated with mental illness. Studies of the mentally ill have found that they tend to vote less conservative and more liberal (Howard and Anthony, 1977; Kelly, 2014) . One paper, for example, found that 78 percent of mental illness outpatients in Germany preferred liberal political candidates, compared to just 56 percent of the general public. More recently, Kirkegaard (2020) analyzed the General Social Survey data and found that extreme liberals had a 150 percent increase in the rate of mental illness compared to moderates. ...

A disorder called the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) sheds some light. Miller and colleagues (2001) reported on a 63-year-old patient who was conservative before developing bvFTD. She then became ‘politically opinionated’ about her anti-conservative political beliefs, to the point of confronting strangers; she started dressing in a more casual manner; and she developed an interest in animal rights; altering her preference for collecting jewelry to collecting stuffed animals. ...

But when liberal altruism becomes pathological, it can also be at the subject’s own expense. For example, a survey by the American National Election Studies in 2018 asked respondents to rate how warm they felt towards their own race compared to others. All groups were biased in favor of their own except for one: white liberals, who feel warmer to others than to their own people. In other words, in contrast to all other groups, white liberals put others above themselves. ...

This prostration before other groups introduces the third trait that defines pathological liberalism: low self-esteem. Die-hard liberals seem to live in a world of self-loathing: they believe they are born dirty thanks to new varieties of ‘original sin’; and they never recognize the good things their history has contributed, instead campaigning to actively ‘dismantle’ their own culture. Their protests are invariably forms of self-abuse or self-abasement, like lying in front of traffic or getting on their knees.