America as a Battered Woman.

Dude---I just stumbled upon this post of yours from long ago. It's a great read, but I was struck by how it applies to the left's current opposition to war against Iraq:

Oppositional defiance is technically a diagnostic term referring to a mental disorder of childhood and early adolescence in which, as the name implies, there is a defiant opposition to, and rebellion against, everything. Regardless of the technical usage, I can find no better words to describe the personality I see in left-wing adults. There is a defiant opposition to all rationality. No matter how correct or obvious something is, it is rejected with argument and denial. Concurrently, there is an ultimate destructive twist to everything this personality advocates, which seems to be a source of personal amusement, adherence to fashion, and feeling of personal cleverness. It seems as though this personality engages in a defiant destructiveness that it defies or dares other people to accept the challenge to do something about. It seems to practice a constant torment on immobilized individual victims and an immobilized society. The techniques of immobilization run the spectrum from employing improperly extended and misapplied moral principles in such a way as to produce, and then prey upon, people’s guilt (e.g. emphasis upon the unconditional forgiveness of Christianity exclusive of the recognition of religious discipline or the qualification of serious remorse¾ or accusations of hatred), to strategy as simple as demand for gun control to render victims helpless. In line with this is often the preaching of a social philosophy of passive non-violence which enables practitioners to practice subtle indirect forms of exquisite sadism while immobilizing angry retribution from victims.

The workings of this personality are sometimes part of a game played by fops who live for little else than party amusement. There is a component of negative attention seeking in which people¾ who would otherwise have nothing going for them¾ synthesize a personality for themselves and attain importance by being the center of aggravation. There is also a facet of demonstrating one’s intellectual prowess or superiority by victoriously arguing people into helplessly accepting the ridiculous or destructive. But the people who conduct such arguments don’t do so with true intellect, but with denial which they (in their primitive mental state) think is intellect. We have come to the dangerous point in this country where if you say there will be a full moon sometime this month, someone will say "no" and believe it makes them a certified intellectual while you stammer in exasperation. (In a foppish world where inane complexly circular denial to the point of mental disorder is considered a cute form of intellectual creativity, it’s easier to have a realistic conversation with an uneducated process schizophrenic than to have one with somebody at the master’s degree level or higher from a liberal college.) These are people who often displace the dissatisfaction from empty or dysfunctional personal lives into obsessive dissatisfaction with, or anger toward, society expressed through indirect intellectualized channels.

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