Fresh from the...

“Nothing you didn’t already know” department.

Here's a little gem you can origami into a fetching Holiday Chapeaux for your favorite inbred Red State sterno sipper.

Then affix to their head “Crown of Thorns”-style with a staple gun while you explain, “Ok, now you’re oppressed. Get it? This is what being victimized actually feels like.”

Of course they won’t get it. They never get it.

Because they are, in fact, just plain nuts (And has emphasis been added by me? Oh, Hell yes.)

Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; A01

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.

"He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."

Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.

…
Several experts said they are unsure whether bias can be pathological. Solomon, for instance, is uncomfortable with the idea. But they agreed that psychiatry has been inattentive to the effects of prejudice on mental health and illness.

…
Advocates for the new diagnosis also say most candidates for treatment, such as the man Solomon treated, are not criminals or violent offenders. Rather, they are like the young woman in Los Angeles who thought Jews were diseased and would infect her --she carried out compulsive cleansing rituals and hit her head to drive away her obsessions. She realized she needed help but was afraid her therapist would be Jewish, said Dunbar, a Los Angeles psychologist who has amassed several case studies and treated several dozen patients for racial paranoia and other forms of what he considers pathological bias.

Another patient was a waiter so hostile to black people that he flung plates on the table when he served black patrons and got fired from multiple jobs.

A third patient was a Vietnam War veteran who was so fearful of Asians that he avoided social situations where he might meet them, Dunbar said.

"When I see someone who won't see a physician because they're Jewish, or who can't sit in a restaurant because there are Asians, or feels threatened by homosexuals in the workplace, the party line in mental health says, 'This is not our problem,' " the psychologist said. "If it's not our problem, whose problem is it?"

…
"They are delusional," said Alvin F. Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has long advocated such a diagnosis. "They imagine people are going to do all kinds of bad things and hurt them, and feel they have to do something to protect themselves."

…
But Poussaint said there is a difference between ordinary prejudice and pathological bias -- the same distinction that psychiatrists make between sadness and depression. All people experience sadness, anxiety and fear, but extreme, disabling forms of these emotions are called disorders.

While people with ordinary prejudice try very hard to conceal their biases, Solomon said, her homophobic patient had no embarrassment about his attitude toward gays. Dunbar said people with pathological prejudice often lack filtering capabilities. As a result, he said, they face problems at work and home.

"Everyone is inculcated with stereotypes and biases with cultural issues, but some individuals not only hold beliefs that are very rigid, but they are part of a psychological problem," Dunbar said.

The psychologist said he has helped such patients with talk therapy, which encourages patients to question the basis for their beliefs, and by steering them toward medications such as antipsychotics.

The woman with the bias against Jews did not overcome her prejudice, Dunbar said, but she learned to control her fear response in social settings. The patient with hostility against African Americans realized his beliefs were "stupid."

Solomon discovered she was most effective dealing with the homophobic man when she was nonjudgmental. When he claimed there were more gays and lesbians than ever before, she presented him with data showing there was no such shift.

At those times, she reported in a case study, the patient would say, "I know, I know." He would recognize that he was not being logical, but then get angry and return to the same patterns of obsession. Solomon did not identify the man because of patient confidentiality.
…

Because I am a pragmatist and a good progressive, I want to understand why a guy on the “el” would pull a knife on me for the same reason I think we should understand avian flu and global warming: because I really want to live in a world with fewer muggers and pandemics and hurricanes, and because only a child or a pinhead can possibly believe that you can wish or pray or bomb problems away.

However…

In real-time, as the guy on the “el” flashes the blade – or the mental patient starts screaming “I have a bomb!” on an aircraft -- I am supremely uninterested in
his sad story and troubled life.

I am interested in bringing immediately to bear whatever will drop him like a sack of hammers, and if you ever step into a real fight thinking “I’ll only use exactly enough force to disable this poor, confused man”, you are either a damn fool or a Krav Maga master.

Which is why, as interested in the pathology of the Fundy and the Segregationist and the Homophobe as I may be in the abstract sense, in the right-now-real-world, I’m not interested in their problems.

I am interested only in driving a stake through their dead and desiccated hearts and hauling their hateful and deranged ideologies to the Ghenna of history and burying them – unmarked and unmourned – in a concrete and lead-lined crypt, 500 miles below the most godforsaken spot on the floor of Death Valley.

Once they are kept at all times – by police order – 1,000 yards away from the levers of power, we can quibble about exactly why they are such hapless fucknuts, and what can be done to medicate them into health or extinction.

But in the here and now, would anyone have the slightest problem picking the rightard who demonstrates this behavior...

…the patient would say, "I know, I know." He would recognize that he was not being logical, but then get angry and return to the same patterns of obsession.

...out of a political lineup?

Does anyone not get that he has his own teevee network?

His own string of Hate Radio stations echoing his bigotry back to him coast-to-coast at 100,000 decibels?

His own newspapers?

His own political party?

His own publishing industry?

His own, private Congress?

His own, Dobson-Seal-of-Approveal White House?

His own Religion?

His own God?

And that he has all of these things -- and more -- specifically and explicitly because “Moderate” Republicans have used him as the means to seize political power? Pandered to and lap-danced and tongue-kissed these scumbags year after year after year after year.

And now, thanks to the aid and comfort that the Brooks’ and Friedmans of this world have given to these enemies of democracy, the LGFers, Humes, DeLays and Falwells have been given a free hand to build their Bridge to the 13th Century.

Then strap that notorious lesbian couple -- Lady Liberty and Blind Justice -- into red-white-and-blue burkas, and force-march them across it.