SUICIDES AND CONSERVATISM

Britain�s Leftist �Guardian� newspaper has just had a good chortle over the claim that the suicide rate in Britain and Australia is higher during periods when Conservatives are in government. They imply that conservatism is so bad for your mental health that it can make you suicide.

Shades of that old 1950s Marxist nonsense by Adorno and friends (still popular among psychologists) to the effect that conservatives have diseased �authoritarian� personalities! If you cannot beat conservatives in rational debate what could be better than a good old �ad hominem� response that says your opponent�s arguments are wrong simply because he personally is a bad lot? One might as well argue that all dog-owners are evil because Hitler loved dogs.

The statistics are of course shonky. The British study actually RULED OUT the period of the (Conservative) Heath government when suicide was low -- on the laughable grounds that Britain got natural gas about then and that made it too hard for many people to commit suicide. And even with that big fudge the pattern was still far from clear. As Katherine Mangu-Ward puts it in the �Daily Standard� of 30th September, 2002:

�Though the averages are higher for conservative administrations, when one looks at administrations individually, there are numerous exceptions to the supposed trend. For example, in addition to Heath, the suicide rate under Churchill was likewise low, while during Callaghan's Labour administration it was quite high�

Other standard points could and should be made -- such as the old truth that correlation does not prove causation -- but the real clincher that nobody seems to have mentioned yet is the time-period when suicides are usually lowest. Guess when that is? When the nation is at WAR! So that means that low suicides rates are necessarily good??? So we need more wars??? All suicides are truly tragic but like everything else there are swings and roundabouts. Clearly there is NO automatic inference we can draw about people�s overall wellbeing from suicide rates. Certainly, any claim that a low suicide rate indicates good times for the nation is laughable. On the other hand, if anybody wants to extend �Guardian� type logic to saying that being ruled by a Leftist government is about as good for you as having your country attacked by a foreign power, who am I to argue?


*******************


Speaking of �The Guardian�, the No. 1 Fisker of �The Guardian� is one of my favourite bloggers. He is also very unusual in keeping us up to date with the weird world of the French media (only for strong stomachs).


*******************


(Under the new heading: �ABORTION�)

Abortion is a difficult issue for conservatives. They seem to be fairly evenly divided about it. But Leftists are not. Leftists almost all seem to favour abortion. Why?

The key to understanding that is simple. When Leftists get into absolute power -- as they often did in the 20th Century -- we soon see what their �compassion� really adds up to. From Stalin to Pol Pot, Leftists showed that they do not care about human life at all. They murdered millions. So what are a few unborn babies to them? A mere bagatelle!

Rightists are divided because they are the only ones who genuinely care and it is a situation of conflict between the rights of the child and the rights of the mother.

I myself think it is patently obvious that abortion is murder. A baby that would survive if born premature is destroyed by an abortionist and we are told that no crime has been committed! Absurd.

But my libertarian instincts also tell me that coercion is not the way to stop abortion. I leave coercion to the Leftists. Paying mothers to have the baby would work a lot better. Good old capitalism again! A payment of (say) $10,000 to all mothers who produce a healthy baby should do the trick. And with the now catastrophically low birthrates in most of the developed world we probably need such an incentive scheme for all mothers anyway.

So conservatives should be helping to support and encourage reluctant mothers rather than threaten them with the law -- perhaps even setting up special, discreet, resort-style homes for them during their pregnancy.