This short essay will attempt a Psychological analysis of what it is to be a blogger.
In no way will it pertain to be a definitive rendering of the Psychology behind blogging. Perhaps Bloggers decide to blog for different reasons. Perhaps also there are some converging aspects to the minds of bloggers.
Peter Black has given a thorough examination of the potential that blogging has. Highlighting the Internet as a new media where people can engage others.
Bloggers are expressive people. They are the modern Samuel Pepys and Dorothy Wordsworths. Blogging is slightly different in that the blog owner has power over the feedback. His blog is published instantly after its writing. Diarists such as Pepys would have to confer with the publisher over certain content. The blogger is all on his or her own. Bloggers are there own editors. They have to be fully confident in what what they are conveying.
This control has liberated certain politicians and commentators to engage with the general public and other members of this informal network. With a mish mash of psychological motives.
Altruism to convey information. Education to give the readers a knowledge that they would not
have attained. Also to publicise and promote themselves.
There are psychological aspects. Bloggers more often show sublimation than any other defence mechanism. A type of Catharsis . A way of tackling conflicting emotions into positive writing.
Another Freudian defence mechanism that many bloggers use is dissociation. By taking a pseudonym a blogger is temporarily removed from his/her real identity. The life challenges are temporarily removed and ones lifes dilemmas are on hold. The alter-ego provides a release. It also provides protection to the blog owner.
Intellectualization is another Freudian defence mechanism . The intellectual qualities of blogging and the channeling of ones mind bring a release to the randomness and uncontrollability of the real world. One is in control of the blog to be written in hand. The real world is blocked out.
Another defence mechanism is Passive Aggression. Blogging and especially political blogging is an avenue to confront obstructionist powers such as government . It also lets bloggers of certain political orientation squabble with others from different parties. Without coming to blows or breaking social mores or Laws. Blogging allows ones frustrations to be voiced in the United Kingdom. We have Freedom of Speech. Blogging is a way of utilising this freedom.
Projectionis another defence mechanism that is relevant to Bloggers and Blogging. We may project certain attributes onto others that we are feeling ourselves. This is unconscious. It could be said that this is relevant. Sometimes in the comments .
Blogging can bring antidotes to our Psychodynamic selves. Blogging does demand certain restraints in our communication. Lucidity is vital when Blogging.
Blogging also gives an avenue for Introspection. We often read our own Blogs over and over. We may deliberate upon the events leading to a particular blog.
I have tried to give one Bloggers examination of the psychological aspects of blogging. It is only one short interpretation but I believe it to be the first analysis to understanding the Psychology behind Bloggers and their Blogs.
Octuplets grandma: Unmarried mom conceived all 14 babies in vitro, obsessed with having kids
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON , Associated Press
Last update: January 31, 2009 - 9:41 AM
LOS ANGELES - The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.
Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.
"It can't go on any longer," she said in a phone interview Friday. "She's got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn't want to get married."
Nadya Suleman, 33, gave birth Monday in nearby Bellflower. She was expected to remain in the hospital for at least a few more days, and her newborns for at least a month.
A spokeswoman at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center said the babies were doing well and seven were breathing unassisted.
While her daughter recovers, Angela Suleman is taking care of the other six children, ages 2 through 7, at the family home in Whittier, about 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
She said she warned her daughter that when she gets home from the hospital, "I'm going to be gone."
Angela Suleman said her daughter always had trouble conceiving and underwent in vitro fertilization treatments because her fallopian tubes are "plugged up."
There were frozen embryos left over after her previous pregnancies and her daughter didn't want them destroyed, so she decided to have more children.
Her mother and doctors have said the woman was told she had the option to abort some of the embryos and, later, the fetuses. She refused.
Her mother said she does not believe her daughter will have any more children.
"She doesn't have any more (frozen embryos), so it's over now," she said. "It has to be."
Nadya Suleman wanted to have children since she was a teenager, "but luckily she couldn't," her mother said.
"Instead of becoming a kindergarten teacher or something, she started having them, but not the normal way," he mother said.
Her daughter's obsession with children caused Angela Suleman considerable stress, so she sought help from a psychologist, who told her to order her daughter out of the house.
"Maybe she wouldn't have had so many kids then, but she is a grown woman," Angela Suleman said. "I feel responsible and I didn't want to throw her out."
Yolanda Garcia, 49, of Whittier, said she helped care for Nadya Suleman's autistic son three years ago.
"From what I could tell back then, she was pretty happy with herself, saying she liked having kids and she wanted 12 kids in all," Garcia told the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
"She told me that all of her kids were through in vitro, and I said 'Gosh, how can you afford that and go to school at the same time?"' she added. "And she said it's because she got paid for it."
Garcia said she did not ask for details.
Nadya Suleman holds a 2006 degree in child and adolescent development from California State University, Fullerton, and as late as last spring she was studying for a master's degree in counseling, college spokeswoman Paula Selleck told the Press-Telegram.
Her fertility doctor has not been identified. Her mother told the Los Angeles Times all the children came from the same sperm donor but she declined to identify him.
Birth certificates reviewed by The Associated Press identify a David Solomon as the father for the four oldest children. Certificates for the other children were not immediately available.
The news that the octuplets' mother already had six children sparked an ethical debate. Some medical experts were disturbed to hear that she was offered fertility treatment, and troubled by the possibility that she was implanted with so many embryos.
Others worried that she would be overwhelmed trying to raise so many children and would end up relying on public support.
The eight babies — six boys and two girls — were delivered by Cesarean section weighing between 1 pound, 8 ounces and 3 pounds, 4 ounces. Forty-six physicians and staff assisted in the deliveries.
Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 27, 2009
WASHINGTON
As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.
Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?
Now that we’re nationalizing, couldn’t we fire any obtuse bankers and auto executives who cling to perks and bonuses even as the economy is following John Thain down his antique commode?
How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)
The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.
The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.
Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.
“They woke up pretty quickly,” says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit. “Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.”
Senator Levin said that the financiers will not be able to change their warped mentality, but will have to be reined in by Geithner’s new leashes. “I have no confidence that they intend or desire to change,” Levin told me. “These bankers got away with murder, and it’s obscene that close to nothing is being asked of financial institutions. I get incensed at the thought that a bank that’s getting billions of dollars in taxpayer money is out there buying fancy new airplanes.”
New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, always gratifying on the issue of clawing back money from the greedy creeps on Wall Street, on Tuesday subpoenaed Thain, the former Merrill Lynch chief executive, over $4 billion in bonuses he handed out as the failing firm was bought by Bank of America.
In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Thain used the specious, contemptible reasoning that other executives use to rationalize why they’re keeping their bonuses as profits are plunging.
“If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.
Hello? They destroyed the franchise. Let’s call their bluff. Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.
Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”
Does that mean you can only throw used parchment in it or is it made of parchment? It’s psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.
Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.’s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.
Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?
“Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,” Thain replied. “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.”
Did it have a desk and a phone?
How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) — and not as perps?
Meaning, it was spewed by a clown in the media circus to kick a familiar sequence into motion: angry denunciation by bloggers, pundits and supporters of President Barack Obama (the ''he'' whose failure is hoped), followed by Rush Limbaugh refusing to retract a word, a courageous truth teller who will not be moved. And, trailing behind, like the folks with brooms trail the elephants in the circus parade, Limbaugh's devotees, complaining that their hero has been misquoted, misunderstood or otherwise mistreated. ``What Rush meant was . . . yadda yadda yadda.''
A calculated outrage.
And knowing this, knowing how frequently and adroitly media are manipulated by self-promoting media clowns who defame conservatism by calling themselves conservative, one is tempted to let the statement pass, to make its way unimpeded to the dustbin like so many other manufactured controversies. But occasionally, it's necessary to intercept one of them and hold it up to the light.
This is one of those times. Not because what Limbaugh said on his radio program a few days before the inauguration was an outrage -- outrage is the point, remember? -- but rather, because of what the thing he said says about him and his fellow clowns.
``I hope he fails.''
Do you ever say that about your president if you are an American who loves your country? Would you say it about George W. Bush, who was disastrous; about Bill Clinton, who was slimy; about Jimmy Carter, who was inept; about Richard Nixon, who was crooked? You may think he's going to fail, yes. You may warn he's going to fail, yes.
But do you ever hope he fails? Knowing his failure is the country's failure? Isn't that, well . . . disloyal?
The irony is that Limbaugh and the other clowns would have you believe they are bedrock defenders of this country, that they love it more than the rest of us, more than anything.
That's a lie. Limbaugh just told us so, emphatically.
It's not the country they love. It's the attention. The ideology, their perversion of conservatism, is but a means toward that end.
Yes, an observer might point out that it's counterproductive to give them attention while decrying their love of attention. But, as already noted, occasionally the clowns spew something that cannot, and ought not, be ignored.
Ideological division is nothing new to politics. But has ideology ever taken quite the seat of prominence it now enjoys? Have people ever been quite so prone to regard their ideological identity as more important than their national identity? The last 30 years are rare in that regard, if not unique.
``I hope he fails?!''
So that, what? The defamation of conservatism Limbaugh represents will stand vindicated? The Republicans will pick up a few seats in the midterm election? Limbaugh's ''side'' -- his word -- will score points?
A sense of mission
Is this only a game, then? No lives at stake, no future on the line, no planet in the balance? Just a game?
I hope he bricks this free throw.
I hope he fumbles that pass.
I hope he fails.
And to hell with the country.
The country doesn't matter. The ''side'' does. And Limbaugh's side seems angry in power and angry out. It's as if anger is all they really have.
Barack Obama was elected in large part on a promise to carry the nation past anger, past the notion that either party has a monopoly on wisdom, past the belief that ideology is identity. He was elected because people want a sense of mission that makes them feel like Americans again.
If he is successful, Limbaugh and the other clowns will face tough sledding in a radically different world. Small wonder he is so eager to strangle this presidency in its infancy. And need it even be said?
President-elect Barack Obama hopes to create 2.5 million new jobs as a result of his stimulus package. He does not propose raising taxes on anyone, including the wealthy, until 2011. He has warned the auto industry that the U.S. will not save it from declaring bankruptcy unless the Big Three can come up with a detailed plan of how they will prevent future problems. He showed intelligence when he recruited seasoned economists to form the nucleus of his recovery team.
This all sounds wonderful, but it falls far short of the teeth-rattling first 99 days of the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt put together a "brain trust" to help him hammer out the quickest, best way to stabilize the banking system and reduce the 23 percent unemployment rate, print more money and put trust back into the hearts of frightened Americans.
Roosevelt enacted nine major pieces of legislation during his first 99 days in office. Then he enacted another seven major relief measures during his second 100 days in office. Among those created by this historic legislation was the CCC, the FDIC and the ending of the gold standard. Roosevelt had definite plans to get America's economy moving again.
Maybe it's not fair to compare Obama's stimulus package to Roosevelt's "New Deal," because the problems today are not as severe as they were in 1933. However, I still wish Obama's ideas were more detailed.
We will reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House." --THE 2000 REPUBLICAN PLATFORM
But they never did. eight years later, the barricades remain. It was a phony issue, of course--just another stick with which to beat Bill Clinton, who closed the road at the insistence of the Secret Service. In an interview with PBS a month after Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney stated the obvious: "Pennsylvania Avenue ought to stay closed because, as a fact, if somebody were to detonate a truck bomb in front of the White House, it would probably level the White House, and that is unacceptable."
Sept. 11 is the excuse for many of the Bush Administration's failures and disappointments. It is also the basis for the one great claim made on George W. Bush's behalf: At least he has protected us from terrorism. In the seven years since that day, there has not been another foreign-terrorist attack on the American homeland. The trouble is that there were no foreign-terrorist attacks on the American homeland in the seven years before 9/11 either.
The risk of another terrorist attack didn't increase on 9/11--only our awareness of the risk. The Bush Administration took office mocking the concern that someone might blow up the White House but soon enough was echoing that concern.
The platform on which Bush entered the presidency eight years ago comes from a lost world, in which even the party out of power saw an America of unthreatened prosperity and security. "Yesterday's wildest dreams are today's realities, and there is no limit on the promise of tomorrow," the GOP said. The biggest foreign policy challenge America faced in 2000, according to this party document, was to avoid misusing our enormous power.
"Earlier generations defended America through great trials," the platform declared. Then it quoted the Republican nominee, Bush, on the importance of showing the "modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." Even enthusiasts of Bush's foreign policy would not describe it as displaying the humility of true greatness. More like the pugnacity of lost greatness. All that talk of one superpower--us--bestriding a "unipolar" world seems as dated as Seinfeld reruns.
The measure of Bush's failure as President is not his broken promises or unmet goals. All politicians break their promises, and none achieve the goals of their soaring rhetoric. But Bush stands out for abandoning the promises and goals that got him elected, taking up the opposite ones and then failing to keep or meet those.
In 2000 Bush excoriated his predecessor for launching wars without an "exit strategy." In 2008 he leaves his successor a war that has already lasted for years longer than America's involvement in World War II, with no exit in sight. Bush got elected warning against using U.S. troops for "nation-building"--meaning any goal beyond immediate military necessity. Then once in office, he promised to bring democracy to the entire Middle East and ended up destroying Iraq as a nation in the name of saving it.
Bush leaves the stage still justifying his Iraq disaster on the grounds that prewar intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He acknowledges that this intelligence was wrong but maintains he relied on it in good faith. Who cares? What matters is whether there were WMD, not how sincerely he believed there were. WMD were how he justified the war. How do you explain to families of the war dead why a war must go on for years after even the man who started it thinks starting it was based on a mistake?
The current economic calamity was a bolt from the blue to many who should have known better, but only one of them had been in charge for the previous eight years. Only one spent much of that time bragging about how swell everything was, thanks to him. Many shared the heedless assumption that there was no limit on how much government or individuals could borrow, but only one turned record surpluses into record deficits. And only one lectured us, Reagan-style, about burdensome government and then, almost casually, expanded government's role in the economy more than any President since F.D.R.: taking over banks and bailing out the auto companies.
O.K., but didn't he do anything right? Well, he came up with serious money to treat AIDS and malaria in Africa. He used the bully pulpit to embrace Muslims in the great post-9/11 American bear hug, when there was real danger of the opposite reaction. And you could say that Bush's disastrous presidency vindicates democracy. Let's not forget that, in 2000, more people voted for the other guy.
