‘morning rehctub,

Labor/Greens supporters have a common and well documented technique for handling criticism. They do indeed acknowledge their disastrous policy failures and the damage to our society and economy.

They do this indirectly by saying well, this mob are “just as bad”. This seeks to bring the current government down to the same failed level as the ALP/Greens efforts. What they are actually saying is OK, they were a disaster but the current government is just as bad.

This then leaves the way open for the “laying of blame” and criticism of the government whilst offering mitigation and avoiding analysis for their own failed policies. Simples!

As prime examples we have mikk who tells us that the ALP/Greens were indeed “idiots” but it was all Murdoch’s fault.

Aussieboy’s classic offers the familiar “They are all as bad” and just for good measure we should scrap the lot including the constitution. A bit of positive reinforcement there.

Suseonline is waiting for LNP supporters to join her in blaming the LNP for ALP disasters (assumption close, the LNP are at fault not the ALP).

Poirot gets first prize for getting everything into one sentence.

<< Don't try and shift the blame for this reprehensible mendacious con job of a govt...just because you're finally twigging that they're lying bunch of scoundrels with no clue >>. Brilliant, I rest my case.

Talking about no clue Poirot. I doubt there will be a DD because TA will get what he wants without it however, it is worth considering as a possibility for about March 2015. By which time the PUP will have self combusted, the ALP will be wearing the full consequences of the RC, the trade unions will be facing governance corporatization and TA will have most of the runs on the board that he needs.

You and the rest of the fellow travelers have only one response to your predicament, squawk

spindoc,
I have managers who are like our OLO Lefties, no clue, no solutions, just lots of spending, on them ! My immediate EO is so incompetent it belies belief yet he thinks he is so clever even though the show is failing left right & centre. His line manager in turn consults him for sorting out problems by consulting the very bureaucrat who IS the problem ?? He is a staunch Labor supporter who adds insult to injury. I really don't understand why Qld Premier Newman hasn't cancelled all their contracts which are so obviously based on party loyalty rather than any professional merit. Now as we get into a new budget year these incompetents are already working on tactics to continue syphoning funds by way of mismanagement & make it look like it is the Coalition's doing. Well Coalition, get rid of those money wasting labor cronies & start building the country again.

‘morning Indie,

You offer some interesting points. So what is it that causes otherwise intelligent people, often well educated, to respond to emotive or ideological stimulus and to avoid critical thinking? Why is it that their “beliefs” dominate their responses?

The answer is that there is another form of “intelligence” that dominates, it is called EQ or emotional intelligence.

We tend to regard those with high IQ’s as being intelligent but this is not he full story. As many corporations now acknowledge in recruitment, they test for both IQ and EQ. The purpose being to determine a balance in both. Their main concern is the identification of well developed IQ and EQ that does not dominate.

A dominant IQ can limit the ability to apply pragmatic solutions whereas a dominant EQ prevents even the identification of a problem. This is because a dominant EQ is driven by moral/value propositions and is therefore “blind” to any informed sources outside their self-referential network.

What we often see on OLO is people who clearly have a high IQ and in many cases are well educated however, due to their dominant social driver, their EQ, they fail in most endeavors that require analysis, critical thinking, people management, strategic thinking and implementation.

This also explains their predisposition to the use of “someone else’s” ideas, they have to borrow cliché’s and rhetoric because they are incapable of generating original thought.

It is sad but this is not a failure of our education system, it is entirely of their own making.

spindoc,
I have had a lot & I mean a lot of dealings with so-called educated & intelligent people. The problem starts with education for education's sake not for merit's sake. In order to make our education system look efficient they have lowered the standard year by year ever since the Goaf. We now have people with a degree who can't change the wheel on a car or who can't add up in their head without a calculator. Many can't even spell but they're educated & therefore deemed intelligent. The resumé factor is another one in job selection. Most have resumè written by someone else & so incredibly couloured in yet those on the selection panels are too blind & incompetent to judge hence we have so moany incompetent bureaucrats in the Public Service. They always consult experts rather than people who know. So, when you have morons on the selection panel they're obviously selecting fellow morons for the available positions. The Peter principle is reigning supreme.

‘morning Indie,

I was both an employee and an employer in my corporate life. I worked for US multi-nationals for much of my working life. In Australia my division and direct reports for Pac-Rim operations included Canada, PRC, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Australia and NZ, plus associated territories.

As my base, Australia posed significant “educational” issues. We learned that many Australian “qualifications” from universities were not worth the paper they were written on. This was based on the direct comparison with education standards and values on offer from equivalent international tertiary qualifications within my region.

Within the technical domain we had great success with Australian degree’s. In marketing, sales, humanities, arts and sociology, the products of university education was utterly abysmal. We would import from within the region rather than try to employ Australian graduates.

I remember interviewing potential Australian graduates from about 1982 onwards and can testify to the deterioration in educational standards from that point onwards. We even interviewed university “academics” in order to try to understand why the Australian “product” was failing so dismally. We rapidly came to the conclusion that academics were part of the problem rather than the solution.

We concluded that many Australian qualifications were based on values that had absolutely no relevance to employment prospects. I well remember the battles I had with HR departments as they tried to convince us Australian humanities degrees had something to offer.

The acid test is always comparative and this never stacked up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence Mixed model[edit]The model introduced by Daniel Goleman[32] focuses on EI as a wide array of competencies and skills that drive leadership performance. Goleman's model outlines five main EI constructs (for more details see "What Makes A Leader" by Daniel Goleman, best of Harvard Business Review 1998):

1. Self-awareness – the ability to know one's emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values and goals and recognize their impact on others while using gut feelings to guide decisions.
2. Self-regulation – involves controlling or redirecting one's disruptive emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.
3. Social skill – managing relationships to move people in the desired direction

4. Empathy - considering other people's feelings especially when making decisions
5. Motivation - being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement.Goleman includes a set of emotional competencies within each construct of EI.

Emotional competencies are not innate talents, but rather learned capabilities that must be worked on and can be developed to achieve outstanding performance. Goleman posits that individuals are born with a general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning emotional competencies.

None of these assess intelligence, abilities, or skills (as their authors often claim), but rather, they are limited measures of trait emotional intelligence.

The TEIQue provides an operationalization for the model of Petrides and colleagues, that conceptualizes EI in terms of personality.= The test encompasses 15 subscales organized under four factors: well-being, self-control, emotionality, and sociability.

The researchers also found TEIQue scores were unrelated to nonverbal reasoning (Raven's matrices),..

As expected, TEIQue scores were positively related to some of the Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness) as well as inversely related to others (alexithymia, neuroticism).