I suppose I could just put up this heading from an article on the BBC’s website and let you work the rest out for yourself….
The psychopathic traits that make some prime ministers great
…but you might have been confused by that ‘great’…you would have thought…BBC….doing an article on psychopathic Prime Ministers….it’s got to be Thatcher…but they wouldn’t call her ‘great’…so maybe not…it couldn’t be Brown, he was a psychopath…but very, very far from ‘great.’…and the BBC refuse to mention him if at all possible anyway.
As they say…always go with your first instinct:
Churchill, Thatcher and their psychopathic tendencies?
Of all the Prime Ministers in all of British history….the BBC picks the two it most hates, both Tories…both representing everything about the world and Britain that the lefties of the BBC despise.
Apparently Thatcher and Churchill share traits with some of the most ‘dangerous, violent members of society‘…the criminal psychopath.
…But wait..it’s not all bad…you need to be a psychopath to be successful…you need to be able to take hard decisions and not care about the consequences for other people….that’s what makes a good PM.
All kind of a backhanded compliment from the BBC…they just couldn’t resist calling Thatcher a psychopath but had to dress it up a bit to make it ‘acceptable’ excusing it as a serious academic piece of work.
Did you know that Thatcher didn’t want to be liked or loved…she wasn’t kind, caring or cuddly….though that wasn’t at all the impression I got from all the biographical stuff that came out after her death…and Churchill seems the most unlikely psychopath enjoying the good things in life way too much to be so ruthlessly focussed and uncaring.
Personally I think the word ‘psychobabble’ was invented to explain stories just like this….though ‘load of old bollocks’ might have done just as well.
Good old BBC….never misses a trick.
Paranoia and weirdness of Harold Wilson.
Weirdness paranoia and attacking the garden girls and telephone staff with thrown moblies, let alone his designated drivers?…Gordon Brown as I recall.
Yet-nothing odd here, no sociopathic tendencies to see here folks?…
And this crapola from an Oxbridge gumby?
Why-it`s as if Gordon Brown was just a figment of our imaginations….not flash-just Gordon eh?
winston churchill drunk 2 bottles of whiskey a day to keep his sanity in world war 2,yes he was drunkard but a damm good wartime leader to boot ,margeret thathcer was a great wartime leader as welll aka the falklands war,her downfall came when she became drunk on the trappings of power,that was a shame,a damm shame.
Reminds me of the story told of President Lincoln when there was an attempt by a powerful politician to undermine one of his most successful Generals, Ulysses S Grant, by complaining that half of the time he was drunk out of his mind. Lincoln’s comment was that if he knew what brand of whiskey Grant drank he would send all his General a barrel so they could also be as successful.
“Good old BBC….never misses a trick”
Sums it up.
I wouldn’t let Blair off the hook entirely. But Brown? Inclined to think that he just isn’t that clever, in spite of what we were led to believe.
Nice how they got an actor to give his opinion as an authority on Churchill. I’m convinced.
Better than an edgy comedian I suppose.
Why not also Anthony Blair? My understanding is that ‘psychopath’ means, etymologically, someone with an illness [pathology] of the soul [psyche]. Blair’s psycho-passive/submissive mentality may have led him to:
(i) deliberately promote mass immigration to harm and even destroy the indigenous British people of whom he is one; (ii) spend money blindly on his preferred groups in a way such as to bring the country to its knees financially; (iii) involve Britain in the invasion and wrecking of Iraq and bring about terrorist reprisals; (iv) allow the EU to gain more and more undemocratic control of Britain.
My thoughts exactly.
and he surrendered our rebate
From Wikipedia – the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (“the psycho-diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess psychopathy”).
I can think of many politicians who tick far more boxes than either Churchill or Thatcher. Obama immediately springs to mind.
Factor 1: Personality “Aggressive narcissism”
Glibness/superficial charm
Grandiose sense of self-worth
Pathological lying
Cunning/manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
Callousness; lack of empathy
Failure to accept responsibility for his or her own actions
Factor 2: Case history “Socially deviant lifestyle.”
Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Parasitic lifestyle
Poor behavioral control
Lack of realistic long-term goals
Impulsivity
Irresponsibility
Juvenile delinquency
Early behavior problems
Revocation of conditional release
Traits not correlated with either factor
Promiscuous sexual behavior
Many short-term (marital) relationships
Criminal versatility
Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning (Item 21: a newly identified trait i.e., a person relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive)
we cant blame the socialist BBC for hating Churchill or Thatcher. Churchill got rid of the socialist workers party in Germany, and Thatcher got rid of soviet socialism in Russia
maybe one day the lefties at the beeb will understand socialism is evil and all who follow it are psychopaths
maybe one day the lefties at the beeb will understand socialism is evil and all who follow it are psychopaths.
As well as idiots.
Anyone who can be attached to an ideology that culled 150 million people in less then a century, has to be an idiot and a psychopath.
Do you people realize its because of socialism you have a welfare state, NHS, human rights, womens rights, free education.
Children don’t have clean chimmeys anymore aged 5.
I know alot of you middle aged daily mail readers, think Socialism is the worst ever thing but it isn’t.
You will find that the NHS featured prominently in the Conservative 1945 Manifesto. Don’t believe me? read it!
We don’t have ‘free education’ – I believe that at least some of my taxes go towards paying teachers, refurbishing buildings etc (typical socialist magic money tree philosophy)
We also have a welfare state that, far from being a last-chance support for those who need it, now pays benefits to half the population – no doubt you think it is free as well.
We had human rights well before signing up to the HCHR.
The British Government prohibited the use of children as sweeps in 1840 – but the fines were so low that the practice continued until 1864 – I believe that was before Socialism had been invented – and is certainly before the Labour party was formed.
Yes of cause your right.
I’m so wrong Socialism is really evil it is to blame for everything.
Its raining now, that’s Socialism fault.
Yep now you are getting it ! so we have you wrong ,socialism failed costing many lives and it’s raining !
thats because of the socialist ideology of global warming, sorry climate change, sorry extreme weather caused by nasty capitalism
So you have had your assertions debunked ! What next socialism abolished slavery ?
It’s not worth using facts to counter a socialist’s sweeping claims. They just can’t accept that their world view is wrong. I have the same problem with anti-Israel campaigners who scream that Israel is an apartheid state and that the Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel but who when faced with facts just scream that I am a Zionist Nazi.
Nice ageist bigotry there, Timmy. Do you have other unappealing prejudices as well?
The welfare state you have now is a good thing? Funny. Government-funded education existed before Socialism, and human rights have nothing to do with it, comrade. Socialism is not quite the worst thing ever, but it’s up there.
Now, now David: in Timmy’s world (which obv. doesn’t use punctuation or spellcheck BTW) ANYBODY who doesn’t agree with his narrow views is by definition middle-aged and a reader of the Mail (usually amusingly referred to as the ‘Daily Fail’ or ‘Daily Wail’, so marks off for you there, Timmy). They can thus be safely dismissed. The very thought that somebody of differing opinions might be his age and a non-Mail reader is too horrifying to contemplate as they would not then fit neatly inside Timmy’s Big Box Of Prejudices, causing terrible confusion to the junior leftie with consequent palpiations, migraines and bed-wetting.
Wonder which of our (renamed) resident trolls he is ?
I only read the Mail for the celeb bikini photos, honest!
Funny though from what I can see most of the mail obsessives are regular pro BBC trolls ? odd that !
I think you will find that it was the Liberals that brought in National Insurance back in 1911. And that the worlds first welfare state was brought in by Bismark in Germany in 1870 and the socialists were against it.
And when was the last time you had your chimney cleaned?
According to James Bartholomew’s excellent ‘The Welfare State We’re In ‘
The first manifestation of the welfare state was under Queen Elizabeth (the first)
The first child labour laws were brought in by the Victorians. As was mandatory universal education ,’the Foster act’, and schools were effectively nationalised by the Balfour Act of 1902 .Socialism, on the other hand, has been responsible for a lowering of educational standards in this country
Bartholomew also shows that the number of hospitals has consistently dropped since the establishment of NHS .A fact grudgingly conceded on BBC 4 documentary I watched last year
In fact its difficult to see what was achieved by Butler that wasn’t already being done
Apart from Stuffing the doctors mouths with gold and there by, buying their support ever since.
I’m no fan of the NHS and its Death Houses but I think you’ll find that the doctors’ mouths were already filled with gold before the NHS.
You’ll never find a poor Quack,
Nor should you. But before NHS they had to compete for ‘customers’
often company health schemes administered by trade unions
Hi Tim,
Did you ever get the feeling you crashed the wrong party?
When you reach middle age yourself (I have yet to achieve the distinction, personally but …) you will realise that the welfare state isn’t actually all that great (for reasons too many and detailed to mention here), that the NHS isn’t actually all that great (ditto), true human rights don’t require funding, ditto women’s rights (women are human too the last time I checked) and “free” education is far from free.
As for five year old chimney sweeps… damn, I wondered where the little bugger had got to.
Tim, do you remember the day the Berlin Wall fell? Do you remember the unbounded joy of the East Berliners leaving the utopian socialist society of the DDR (it had free healthcare as long as you did what you were told you know) and swapping theis paradise for the hellish capitalism of West Berlin? Perhaps not as this is something only old farts seem to remember.
Anyway Tim, I imagine if I was an adherant of a secular religion responsible for the brutal murders of hundreds of millions of people and human suffering of literally billions of people over a reign of horror lasting 90 years or so I would think a bit and consider the outrageous atrocities committed in the name of socialism. After all Nazism is righly a “hissing and a reproach amongst nations” but the ieologically motivated crimes of socialism never seem to make it to the surface of the average socialists’ [limited] consciousness. Why is it that so many socialists seem to be unaware of the crimes comitted in the name of this cuddly and lovely ideology?
As an authentic Dailiy Mail reader who has read a bit outside my ideological niche and travelled the world I know what else ‘socialism’ given humanity. Basically in plenty of places where socialists had untrammeled power anybody who was inconvenient or an obstacle or simply necessary as slave labour to assist socialism in its desire to re-build society to create a ‘utopia’ tended to end up starved, murdered, or worked to death, along with their families and indeed their entire ‘class’.
Reconstruction of society is still very much in vogue with socialists.
Anyway have a look at this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
“Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labour, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide.”
Perhaps it is because Socialists believe in their system “religiously” that so many of them make common cause with Islamic extremists– they recognise the same sort of fervour against the same sort of Western Culture targets. That the muzzers would behead that lot probably even sooner than they would the rest of us appears not to give the Lefties pause. Nobody remembers how the 1930’s Commies entered a non-aggression pact with their Socialist comrades of the Nationalist persuasion and how all of a sudden it became more important to bash the West than Germany, because, after all, it was the West who kept reminding everyone that while we might trust in God, we still had to keep our powder dry when it came to the expansionism of Germany, so it was the warmongering capitalists in the City who wanted war and the industrialists looking for sweetheart deals with the defence ministries. The irony of backing two “antithetical” forces to their own beliefs to go after a more heinous one simply shows either their hatred for us having blinded them, or somehow, they’ve rationalised it away by saying one enemy at a time, if you please.
Of course, when you’re the frog, you can always hope against hope that this scorpion is different to all the others, or that you can somehow figure a way out. It’s when you don’t even know you’re a frog and the other one is a scorpion who knows he’s one, that you get into real trouble.
TIm – I’d been to Poland three weeks ago, and the contrast with the pre-1989 Communist state is very striking.
The shops are as well-stocked as they are in the West, the transport systems are modern, and service in hotels and restaurants is nothing like as surly as it was in Communist times. The only drawback is that Poland has British-style traffic jams due to the large number of Audis, BMWs, Mercs, Fiats and Opels on the roads.
A sharp contrast to the days when shops had shortages and the only cars on offer were the ghastly FSO 1300 (an inferior Lada, itself a rip-off of a 1968 Fiat).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is worth reading on the joys of socialism. He knew better then most what life was like in a socialist utopia.
Another gem from Cliff Clavin.
I think that probably constitutes the most ill informed and puerile rant seen on this site for many a moon.
But for your information there is not one item on your list that has not been made more expensive, less efficient , more impractical or plain bloody stupid thanks to “socialism”.
As for children up chimney’s! Oh dear! Stick to the Ladybird history books.
The masthead picture brings it all back. Anyone else remember this ?
I remember him! He just seemed to vanish from the TV. Did he make the same mistake Carrot made and own up to being a Tory?
As with a lot of stuff that goes on in this country these days, I am left with the distinct feeling that it is all done in order to “take the mick” (to put it mildly).
In almost every poll of who the British think were the best Prime Ministers, (including some conducted by the BBC themselves) Thatcher and Churchill routinely appear in the top five (Churchill often placing first).
The personality traits mentioned would certainly apply to most people who do well in positions of responsibility and the whole thing could have just as easily have been phrased the other way: “Psychopaths exhibit the same personality traits of highly successful people”.
However, as you rightly point out, the BBC never misses a trick and of all the Prime Ministers we have had over the last seventy years or so, they just happened to choose two Conservative PMs who the British public generally admire greatly.
That said, I think a psychopath is actually morally superior to most politicians. At least he doesn’t pretend to be killing you for your own good!
I recall having seen a special on TV about a contract murderer with the sobriquet “The Ice Man” being interviewed by Dr Park Dietz, a so-called expert in the criminal mind, in which at one point the killer says to Dietz to the effect of “So I’m a paranoiac psychopath, would you say?” and Dietz replied that, while the killer could be described that way, in the killer’s “profession,” those were good things to be, in that it kept him alive and successful doing it for many a year (and as it turned out, it was really only happenstance he got caught eventually).
Don’t exactly know what that has to do with Prime Ministers, but I suppose there are unadmirable traits you must need to have to succeed in that sort of business, too.