Dr. Sanity diagnoses a case of hysteria within the left blogosphere (It’s official, we are a police state…) over the FISA bill.

This histrionic post demonstrates exactly why it is impossible to engage members of the political and increasingly lunatic left in any sort of rational discussion about national security. It’s like trying to discuss responsibility with a self-indulgent and overly dramatic adolescent girl.

The angry teenager who just hates it when she doesn’t get her way, is particularly enraged when Mommy (usually on her side) goes along with Daddy; and we see that same dynamic rather frequently these days, as the narcissistic left raises the decibel level of their pouts and whines whenever their will is thwarted.

None of the rhetoric has anything remotely to do with reality; but all that is necessary for the left is to feel intensely that something is so, and for them it is.

We are living in a police state! Bush is Hitler! Christians are trying to impose a theocracy on America. We are being persecuted! Blah blah victims blah oppression blah fascist blah blah blah! And so on and so forth.

Which brings me to hysteria.

Hysteria is a concept characterized by a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms that result from dissociating one’s cognitive functioning from one’s emotion and/or behavior. The psychological defense that makes this happen is known as dissociation.

For the hysteric emotions are primary and are not subject to an objective reality.

Read the whole thing.

And the indignant leftwing blogger suggests that Dr. Sanity ought to be reported to the authorities.

26 ways of deluding yourself are detailed here. A highly practical instruction manual explaining exactly how to think like a liberal.

Andrew Sullivan must be pretty dense, it seems to me, if he doesn’t understand enough about his own personality, upbringing, and conversion experience to understand how he came to be a member of the contemporary subculture whose identity revolves around perverse sex.

I’m a fly fisherman myself, and I understand perfectly well what personality traits, what family circumstances, what sort of input from adults during childhood, what features of the activity itself, and what properties of the fly fishing subculture attracted me and caused me to become a member. If I were still in the Bay area, Andrew, I’d invite you to come over and recline on my couch and tell me your life story, and I feel nearly sure that I could clear it all up for you.

Your problem, old boy, is that, like virtually all contemporary gays, you have enthusiastically embraced the essentially bogus “mysterious, innate identity” model. The beauty of that model lies not in its scientific accuracy, but its moral and political utility. Once the homosexual identity is successfully portrayed as innate, it is thus inevitably established to be 1) natural, and 2) involuntary. The traditional religious and philosophical moral bases for condemnation are refuted, and the personal guilt associated with indulgence in what used to be called peccatum illud horribile inter christianos non nominandum, “the sin too horrible to be named among Christians,” is dispelled.

The epistemelogical difficulty you are experiencing is also very specifically connected to another conceptual fallacy, similarly contrived on essentially the same utilitarian basis. That being the systematic confusion of a (voluntary) behavior and cultural affiliation with an (involuntary) innate status.

One is no more born a homosexual than one is born a guitar player, stamp collector, or fly fisherman.

Life offers a myriad assortment of possible means of finding amusement, pleasure, and self expression, and more of less any avocation or pastime you select will be found to have a history, a body of previous devotees, a literature… a culture of its own. Not uncommonly, it is the culture, and the opportunity for the friendships and society of congenial persons of similar outlook and tastes which is more decisively attractive than the actual activity itself.

I am afraid, Andrew, that the inclination to your preferred avocation and cultural affiliation will always be found in a complex combination of personality, life experience, and the charms of that particular charismatic culture, in the mental and spiritual life of the individual, and not in the unconscious and involuntary interplay of material processes.

Before the blogosphere came along, I would never even have suspected that such a thing as a skeptical, rational, freedom-loving, Republican-voting alienist existed.

But I read Dr. Sanity and Shrinkwrapped regularly, who certainly thoroughly discredit my former naive assumptions that anyone associated with, or trained in, any form or species of the social sciences simply has to be some kind of leftist.

Dr. Joy Bliss, over at Maggie’s Farm, has a larger list than my own of the non-collectivist psychologically-inclined to which she has added a meditation on freedom and the psyche.

It has been a wonder to me that so many folks in the mind and soul-treating professions are so non-freedom-minded, when these professions are designed to free people from their inner demons which restrict their taking on life freely, cheerfully, and energetically, in the way they see fit, and taking their own chances and making their own choices – in free societies. Freedom is what they are all about, and why psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are never permitted in totalitarian states.

I need to keep an eye on this lady’s postings, and I believe I am going to arrange a new Psychology link category.