Revisiting The French, Socialism, and Suicide

I just received an anonymous comment on a post of 2009 entitled The French, Socialism, and Suicide.  Given that the French have decided to dive even more deeply into the socialist abyss in the last week with the election of a Socialist Party President, Francois Hollande, it is good to bring attention back to this post.  It is about the not surprising relationship between self-control and self-responsibility and depression and a need for escape, hence drug use, including excessive use of alcohol, and suicide.  Of course, thinking about these effects is also useful heading into our own election cycle in which the Democrat Socialist Party candidate Obama attempts winning a second term so he can push the United States further down the socialist road.

I also want to share the very typical comment from what is most likely an affronted socialist.  The comment was:

Anonymous said...

Kind of a late response but do you know what objective means?

Also do you really have a Ph.D. or are you a Dr like Dr Pepper is a Dr?

The question about the meaning of objective is standard fare for anyone who is an Objectivist.  The fact that the comment was anonymous is also most typical.  The questioning of my academic credentials is also part of the formula.  My response was:

The French have decided to dive even more deeply into the socialist abyss in the last week, so it is good to bring attention back to this post.

This anonymous comment is very typical of a broad class of comment that I usually get from leftists. One cannot actually tell that this comment is leftist due to its lack of content relevant to my observations and evaluations. It is, however, clearly from someone not happy with my comments and given the nature of those comments, it is most likely to be from a leftist.

Their comments are most often anonymous, probably due to a lack of confidence that they could stand up in a rational discussion. Such a lack of confidence also explains the lack of even a single counterargument. Instead, an attack upon my credentials is very common.

The leftist has a very high respect for academic credentials and is appalled to think that someone might have such a credential and yet have a worldview at odds with his own. Academia is supposed to be in lockstep solidarity with the socialists, so it is an affront if someone actually studied and did research well enough to earn a Ph.D. in some field (physics) and yet did not fall into the lockstep ranks of comrades. Such a person must be expelled from the pool of experts and authorities, so one must assume he is an imposter.

Never mind the fact that the argument from authority is a well-known logical and rhetorical fallacy. The left has a high reverence for authority, so long as the authority is a socialist. This is one of the main reasons why academia as it became so dominantly socialist also has come to be so devoid of creative and rigorously analytical thinking. It is why the universities are losing their value as a training ground for objective and independent-minded thinkers. The left has come to shrink from meaningful confrontation with its enemies because it cannot make its own case.

I give the commenter some credit for humor though. I laughed at his Dr. Pepper analogy, though I have some suspicion this also is a standard format that I just have not experienced before. It is perhaps not an original joke, but I enjoyed that as a twist on the tiresome questioning of my credentials.

Yet, those credentials do nothing to make or break any of the numbers I quoted on suicide or drinking and drug use. The argument is king, even should I be Dr. Pepper. They also do not change the nature of man and the deleterious effects of socialism upon mankind.