Is Leftism/Liberalism a Mental Illness?

A fascinating piece on a blog that I have not previously visited 'Random Observations'. Do read the whole of the article it's interesting, here's an extract:

'Stephen Colbert is fond of asserting "Reality has a well known liberal bias." I've always had trouble seeing that — in economic terms, leftism embraces the fantastic. During the cold war, one could witness East and West Germany, side-by-side: same culture, same ethnicity, same landscape, even the same history — until a fateful choice between left-leaning and right-leaning economic systems. What a world of difference! (And similar observations could be made about China versus Hong Kong or Taiwan, North Korea versus the South, and so on.) Yet at that time, and since, in the face of such plain evidence, many insist we should live more like the East than the West.

The same could be said of the sciences, where today's most important scientific issue (so I am told) is global warming — by which people mean: (a) the world is warming, (b) the primary cause of that warming is man-made, (c) warming is bad, and (d) treaties like Kyoto will reverse said warming. Belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) requires every single one of these assertions to be provably true beyond any reasonable doubt.

Yet every single one of these points is either plainly false or easily contestable. (a) World temperature records haven't shown any significant warming for the last decade; (b) CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, and humanity doesn't seem to be the main driver behind atmospheric CO2; global temperature history shows warming (and cooling) trends long before human influence; (c) warming during the middle ages coincided with economic booms, prosperity, exploration, and innovation — far more people will die from cold on any given year than warmth; and (d) Europe signed Kyoto, whereas the US refused to ratify it — yet European CO2 levels have gone up far faster than the US.

What I'm saying in the previous paragraph is verifiable — yet where is the "liberal bias" there? The "liberal bias" seems to have been in the way the temperature records were massaged in places like the University of East Anglia, and the way computer models (which can show you anything you'd like) have been used as the foundation for transformative global economic policy.

The same could be said of many other beliefs favored by the left. Minimum wages seem to increase unemployment. Unilateral nuclear disarmament doesn't cause aggressor states to abandon their weapons out of shame. The left does far more to restrict and control speech than the right. A fetus, it turns out, is not merely a blob of tissue, somewhat akin to a fingernail. Price controls backfire. Public schools aren't starved for cash, and cash doesn't correlate with a good education. Gun control doesn't cause crime levels to plummet. And on and on and on.'

Go and read the rest...