ELSEWHERE

This article of 12th by Dennis Prager scores some good goals: "Many liberal positions have been wreaking havoc on America and the world. How, then, can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions? There are many reasons, but the two greatest may be naivete and narcissism. At the heart of liberalism is the naive belief that people are basically good. As a result of this belief, liberals rarely blame people for the evil they do. Instead, they blame economics, parents, capitalism, racism, and anything else that can let the individual off the hook.... The second major source of modern liberalism is narcissism..." Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

What arrogant elitist bastards! "A scientific panel recommended against smallpox vaccinations for the general public"

Someone should ask them why so many Canadians go to the U.S. for their medical treatment: "More than 7,000 doctors, including two former surgeons general, called for universal health insurance for the United States on Tuesday, saying it would not only be more fair, but would be cheaper and more efficient than the current patchwork system"

Some Leftist hypocrite writes of Iraq's "New Tyranny": "Now sex and drugs are freely available on the street, writes Paul McGeough in Baghdad." How Awful!

Do ideas have consequences? The Bali terrorists' lawyers are actually quoting from Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" as evidence for the defence. That Moore is a chronic liar and twister of the truth obviously needs to be publicized as much as possible. But there are so many Leftist lies ....

This list of best and worst books still holds up well.

After 9/11, dissent was "stifled," claimed the academic left. Nonsense, says Jean Bethke Elshtain. It was any reasoned religious support for the Iraq war that was marginalized... What actually has been stifled is any analysis of the religious motivations of the enemy.

The Wicked one has a couple of posts about what the new EU constitution says and what it looks set to do to Britain.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THE SIMPLISTIC LEFT

When the Berkeley study of conservatism first appeared, I noted how rich it was for Leftists to accuse others of being simplistic in their thinking. A good example of Leftist simplistic thinking is given here: "Creating better living standards for the poor is not as easy as passing minimum wage laws that may actually lead to fewer work opportunities, for instance. Such laws are simple-minded."

And, right on cue, we see this in yesterday's Los Angeles Times: ""What price are we, as Americans, willing to put on human worth, on safety, decent medical care and hope? If a minimum-wage increase isn't passed, Congress will have decided that $5.15 an hour is that price_a number that should bring shame to anyone who truly cares about those barely existing below the poverty line," writes Douglas MacKinnon. As FEE asks in response: "If government can really raise wages, why not set the minimum to $75,000 a year?" All that high minimum wages do, of course, is to destroy jobs and create unemployment for the poor. But that old, old lesson is still too complicated for our Leftist brainboxes.

******************************************

CONSERVATIVE EUGENICS?

Further to my recent posts on eugenics, I should note that Steven Levitt's work suggests that the old Leftist eugenics program of reducing the birth rate (via abortion) among the "lower classes" was not totally misconceived. Levitt's findings seem to show that making voluntary abortion available to poorer mothers reduces the crime rate years later. He is at pains of course to indicate that his empirical findings are not an endorsement of either eugenics or abortion. Slate featured a 3 day correspondence between him and Steve Sailer dealing with the issue.

Given the traditional conservative regard for individual liberty, it seems to me that the only eugenics programs that conservatives could justify would be voluntary ones -- such as the large material incentives to reproduce that the Singapore government offers to highly educated Singaporean women. Christian conservatives, however, tend to regard all reproduction as God-given so would oppose even voluntary eugenic programs that limited reproduction -- such as the Woodhil Foundation programs that pay crack-addicted mothers to undertake contraception.

Leftists, however, oppose the Woodhill programs because they are voluntary and privately-funded. They like such matters to be in the hands of the State (i.e. under their control).

And the problem of a self-perpetuating and substantially criminal underclass does not need to be addressed by eugenics. It can be addressed by addressing its major causes -- such as the over-generous welfare system that the Leftists have created in their hunger for praise.

I have mentioned previously that the famous peacenik and anti-nuclear campaigner Bertrand Russell was a keen advocate of State-enforced eugenics. A reader has written in with more rather surprising information about the 3rd Earl Russell. I have posted it here (or here) under the heading: "Peacenik Bertie -- The authoritarian eugenicist". One rather wonders what Earl Russell would have done if he had been in control of Germany in the 1930s. Perhaps history would not have changed much.

**************************

ELSEWHERE

FEE points out that many conservatives fear that the Iraq invasion is making America into an empire -- which conservatives of course oppose. I really cannot understand that fear at all. Is there anyone in America who does not want American troops out of that rathole as soon as possible?

A good article here on the old folly of protectionism: "When New Jersey lawmakers learned last fall that the company managing the state's child-welfare office had moved its call center to India, they were outraged. Within weeks, the state Senate passed a bill requiring all workers for government contractors to be U.S. citizens."

There's a lot of truth in the top comic of August 11 on American Realpolitik.

Disgraceful. Australia's University of Newcastle is still covering up their greedy abuse of academic standards. These arrogant bureaucrats are responsible to no-one and they know it.

Making the Canadians eat crow! "Prime Minister Jean Chretien was urged on Monday to lead talks with U.S. officials to try to get a ban on imports of Canadian cattle lifted" They are very quick to take any nutty health scare seriously but don’t like it when the USA does it.

A useful short review of the North Korean horror is to be found here

Leftist crooks fattening themselves at the public trough really are disgusting. It's their "compassion", you see. What racketeers!

Walter Williams points out that South African style race-classification boards are the inevitable result of any race spoils system -- such as the U. Michigan admission system recently endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Either that or widespread racial fraud with almost anybody claiming "minority" status.

And to show what a good psychologist I am I have just put up an optical illusion that applies to men only. See towards the the bottom of my picture page

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

Blogger.com seem to be having big troubles at the moment so I could be rendered unable to post here at any time. So keep an eye on my mirror sites if my daily post here does not appear around the usual time.

MORE ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The recent call by Australia's Prime Minister to consider reinstatement of the death penalty for serious crime has of course enlivened debate on the issue here in Australia. An Australian reader writes:

Michael Duffy also notes that elite and media attitudes to capital punishment differ markedly from popular opinion.

Back in 1975 Isaac Ehrlich published a pioneer study "The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment -- A Question of Life and Death" that highlighted the crime prevention benefits of capital punishment. His paper is online here (PDF).

Ehrlich's views have been summarised in more digestible form by Slate columnist Steven Landsburg: "Increase the number of executions by 1 percent (which amounts to increasing the severity of the average punishment) and (again to a very rough approximation) the murder rate falls by about half a percent."

Landsburg is at pains to point out that Ehrlich sees increasing the probability of convictions as the best deterrent against crime: "That's not to say that punishments don't matter. Executions may be a less-effective deterrent than convictions, but they are nevertheless an extremely powerful deterrent; according to Ehrlich's numbers, one additional execution ...could well have prevented over 20 murders."

On a similar theme economist Steven Levitt, a rising star in the economics world, has provided a statistical model that reinforces the common sense belief that hiring more police reduces crime, something a large chunk of our intellectual class dispute: "Each additional police officer is estimated to eliminate eight to ten serious crimes. Existing estimates of the costs of crime suggest that the social benefit of reduced crime is approximately $100,000 per officer per year, implying that the current number of police is below the optimal level." See here.

When it comes to capital punishment, of course the perspective of economists and social scientists is different from that of theologians and priests. This evangelical Christian site says:

"..capital punishment (was) never specifically removed or replaced in the Bible. While some would argue that the New Testament ethic replaces the Old Testament ethic, there is no instance in which a replacement ethic is introduced. As we have already seen, Jesus and the disciples never disturb the Old Testament standard of capital punishment. The Apostle Paul teaches that we are to live by grace with one another, but also teaches that we are to obey human government that bears the sword. Capital punishment is taught in both the Old Testament and the New Testament."

So of course most Australian churches oppose it!”

As I have long made clear (PDF), I personally oppose the death penalty purely because I think our police are too crooked for us to have enough confidence in a guilty verdict. Most Australian States seem to have police in jail at the moment as a result of corruption convictions and some notorious cases of police fabrication of evidence appear never to have been punished (e.g. the Mannix case - PDF).

******************************

FROM BROOKES NEWS:

Australian protectionist shoots himself in the head. A socialist ideologue resorts to abuse and gross misrepresentations to defend his protectionist ideology.
The Bush strategy that beat bin Laden and destroyed Saddam. The Democrats, i.e., the Copperhead Party, and their media friends are deliberately undermining the Bush strategy that destroyed the Taliban, bin Laden and the vile Saddam, by trying to turn the American people against the war. Their actions border on treason.
Phillip Adams and the moral bankruptcy of the left. Phillip Adams pathological attacks on Prime Minister Howard, particularly over the toppling of Saddam, serve to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of the left.

Details here

****************************

ELSEWHERE

The Australian intellectualoids at work: “A taxpayer-funded website encourages young Australian-Palestinians to become virtual rock throwers in a mockery of Middle East violence. Players can write messages of hate on a website "rock" and watch as a young man loads it into a slingshot before firing it into the distance. The website heads a list of controversial projects bankrolled by the Australia Council for the Arts.”

Hopeful: “Under pressure from economic problems, internal violence and the United States' success in toppling Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq, Saudi Arabia is embarking on a series of reforms that many Saudis hope will lead to the most sweeping political change since the kingdom's founding.... “

John Moore has promised us more posts about the hijinks of the US politically correct brigade on PC Watch. He also follows up on my comments about the revived Zero Population Growth crowd.

China Hand reports on the chaotic graduation ceremonies at the college where he teaches. Apparently such ceremonies go down very well in China. He also has a post under the heading: “China’s farmers are on the move”.

The Wicked one has got some good funnies up at the moment.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is an attempt to find out if there are any particular psychological characteristics of environmentalists. The survey was however of the general population rather than of committed Greenies and since almost everyone thinks that a nice clean environment is a good thing, there was little to characterize those who were pro-environment. It was however found that people who were strongly in favour of environmental protection also tended to be strongly in favour of consumer protection.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THE LEFTIST ROOTS OF EUGENICS

My post about Hitler’s eugenics making him simply a typical Leftist of his times has energized one reader to comment as follows:

“You are right to point out the socialist roots of eugenics. Bertrand Russell was a true believer in the eugenic State and even saw socialised medicine as a key step in imposing State planning over procreation. In a letter to his first wife, feminist Alys Pearsall Smith, about socialism and “the woman question,” for example, he writes:

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child — this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."

(Quoted from here)

The few critics of eugenics in the early 20th century were mainly conservatives and Christians like G.K. Chesterton who saw eugenic planning as just another arm of the wider campaign to impose a "scientific" socialist planning. In fact Chesterton subtitled his anti-eugenics tract "Eugenics and Other Evils" as: "An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State".

Modern commentators usually emphasise the "racist" (or more accurately "racialist") dimensions of the eugenics program and manage to wholly white out the socialist element. This is an example, not only of our intellectual class's pro-socialist bias, but of anachronistic thinking, projecting current attitudes back through time.

In the early part of the century socialists had no qualms about racialist thinking as anyone who reads Karl Marx no doubt knows. Of course this kind of thinking was commonplace then, however the marriage of socialism and racialism certainly gave birth to Nazism, probably the most violent and virulent form of racialism ever experienced. Most current critics of Nazism only blame one of it's parents!

The racialist thinking of the eugenic socialists was quite "scientific" and progressive in it's day, much as 'global warming' is seen as scientific and progressive today. At that time "group selection" models of evolution were dominant, and it was quite common to see "race" as the group being selected. It was really only in the 1960s that these models of evolution were really overturned.

Thankfully the obvious evils of Nazism forced many socialists to rethink their racialism, unfortunately leaving their loving faith in State supremacy and social engineering firmly intact. That Stalin's State equalled or exceeded Hitler in violence under the cloak of international brotherhood was frankly ignored. In fact many on the left have now commenced a new crusade in the name of anti-racism and multiculturalism. However laudable these goals, the implementation often bulldozes individual rights and autonomy, just as the old eugenicist planners did.

Many of the eugenics true believers continued on postwar moving into campaigns for legalised abortion, planned parenthood and population control. In fact some conservative critics have highlighted the racist roots of much of the liberal pro-abortion movement.

In the scientific world it is not impossible to imagine a swing back to group selectionism. Many "sensitive" commentators attack neo-Darwinism and individual selectionism as "reductionist" and thus bad. And the old idea of race is certainly not scientifically dead. The real question is, if these scientific concepts revive, will the socialists return to their old habits? And will the supporters of individual freedom be strong enough to stop them?”

And eugenics of a sort IS back on the Left: The Zero Population Growth nutters are back with their “people are pollution” attitudes! Only this time they want to HALVE our population! And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960’s again -- including Paul Ehrlich (if ever a surname was a misnomer that is: “ehrlich” is German for “honest”). The abject failure of their earlier prophecies -- e.g. that we would all be doomed by the 1970s -- has not dampened them down a bit. As “Spiked” points out in reply however, “Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand.” But the doomsters ignore history, of course. They even ignore the present! The world’s population has never been so large -- and prosperity worldwide has never been so great. Even India and China are forging ahead now that they have unleashed capitalism.

********************************

ELSEWHERE

An excellent story here about what reality did to a far-Left Jew. It is sad that it needs reality as harsh as that to dislodge the simplistic prejudices of Leftists.

In response to my post yesterday about the warning labels that the State of California is sticking on almost everything, Matthew Cowie asks when they are going to start putting warning labels on vegetables too? As we know, even “organic” vegetables contain lots of carcinogens! And that Califoria air must be pretty carcinogenic too -- with all its pollution -- so maybe we will see warnings on their tourist brochures soon?

We’ve got to ban swimming pools!. In the U.S., three times more children drown per year in domestic swimming pools than die from gun use. And if we look at the number of guns there are in the U.S. versus the number of pools there are, the pools are 100 times more deadly. How can the do-gooders wriggle out of that one? (Answer: They won’t try. They are not interested in logic -- only in inflating their own egos).

The July 23rd post here (or here) has a good send-up of how important “diversity” is.

A good treatment here of the controversy over GWB’s truthful comment that there was some evidence Saddam had obtained uranium from Niger.

Article on how badly the war on terrorism is going in SE Asia.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL LEFT

I have just posted one of my academic articles here (or here) that was published under the title “The psychopathology of the political Left”. It is a bit of a wonder the article was ever published -- though it was published in a very obscure journal. The article was originally written (during my anarcho-capitalist days) as a talk delivered to a 1985 conference of psychologists devoted to the topic of authoritarianism but it is written in a fairly breezy style that should make it fairly readable for non-psychologists.

The article points to evidence of many sorts of pathology among Leftists but principally seizes on the finding about politics that psychologists most like -- and turns that finding on its head. Psychologists very much like the often-repeated finding that conservatives approve of conventional sources of authority (such as the law, the police, the army etc) more than Leftists do and claim this as constituting the chief psychopathology of the Right. The Right are said to be “authoritarian” and all sorts of extravagant inferences are drawn from that.

I point out however that this finding is really evidence that Leftists are unable to admit to their real motivations -- as there is no doubt that Leftists everywhere are great imposers of authority on other people. What leftists say about their attitudes and what they actually do are opposites! And any denial of motives is generally regarded as pretty pathological by psychologists!

**************************************

ELSEWHERE

Orwell’s Thoughtcrime has arrived in Australia. A man is being prosecuted for writing “pornographic” thoughts in his private diary! Is anyone now safe?

Australia’s Prime Minister wants to reintroduce the death penalty. At least it shows that he is a true champion of democracy. For many years big majorites in ALL Western countries have wanted a death penalty but elite domination of politics has thwarted that wish in most places.

Pardon my boggled mind: A female illegal immigrant to the USA has just got to make an accusation that her American partner has beaten her and she automatically gets legal permanent resident status. A great way to encourage false accusations!

It always amazes me that Hitler’s eugenics ideas are supposed to be proof of his Rightism. In Hitler’s day eugenics was a mainstream Leftist enthusiasm. As Chris Brand points out: “Eugenics was supported in the early twentieth century by such liberal-left luminaries as the radical playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, the then-Liberal Winston Churchill, the Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane and anti-authoritarian Brave New World author Aldous Huxley. The chief opposition to eugenics came from religious groups.” And Chris might also have mentioned the American “Progressives” of the 1930s whom Hitler warmly praised for their ideas about the genetic inferiority of Jews. See here.

There is now a “Harvard Study” which proves that “liberal” American newspapers are much less biased than conservative ones. The absurdity and bias of the “study” is shown at length here.

An excellent article by Jeff Jacoby about Ward Connerly, the black American who wants America not to discriminate on the grounds of race -- and how the Leftists of the “Race industry” hate him.

“After 19 months of terror attacks - including suicide bombings, knife and gun attacks, drive-by shootings and home intrusions - about three quarters of Israelis are showing signs of traumatic stress, researchers have found.” The researchers also found, however, that the great majority are still functioning well. I wonder if I would?

Great news: "Scientists have developed a fast-acting Ebola vaccine that protects monkeys after a single shot”.

"The foremost meaningless warning label is: 'This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and/or birth defects or other reproductive harm.' Thanks to California's Proposition 65 law, that boilerplate warning has been slapped on everything from chain saws and power mowers to fishing rods. ... Essentially anything containing one of several hundred 'known carcinogens' is required to bear the warning -- regardless of quantity, or the chance that anyone might actually get sick." Pretty good, really. It ensures that the warnings will be treated like the mere noise that they are.

Here is William A Niskanen's quite balanced analysis of Reaganomics. Niskanen was a senior Reagan official

Who said this? "The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrence to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system, and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes”. GWB? Reagan? Eisenhower? No. It was JFK.

Julian Sorrenson has a new placard idea for the Leftist demonstrators who opposed the liberation of Iraq: “No war for justice” -- because that is what their attitudes add up to.

There is a rather appalling but not exactly surprising post on PC Watch (post of 8th.) under the heading: “Clinical Psychology: Another Totalitarianism of the Left?” And that heading is not my idea.

The Wicked one thinks GWB is an odd type of conservative.

****************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

“CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP”

Now that they have found that they cannot abolish private business, the Left are trying to weaken it as much as they can by way of regulation and other means. Their idea that businesses should be “good corporate citizens” is part of their attack:

Corporate Citizenship: A Tax in Disguise: "The first problem with enforced Corporate Social Responsibility is that it is economically inefficient. In a free market, companies maximize profit by moving resources from a low to a high value; providing what consumers want. In contrast, if action has to be forced by regulation then governments mandate that resources be spent on services that the public does not value, or does not value highly enough to voluntarily pay the full cost. Resources are therefore diverted into lower-value outputs, leading to a reduction in overall welfare. This is done for the benefit of politicians, bureaucrats or their supporting pressure groups."

Milton Friedman probably said it all in this classic article from the 1970s: The social responsibility of business is to make profits

************************************

HOW PSYCHOLOGISTS ASSESS CONSERVATISM OF ATTITUDES

Psychologists normally obtain a score for how conservative a person is by adding together the number of allegedly “conservative” statements he agrees with and the number of allegedly “liberal” statements he disagrees with. Deciding which statements to present as representing “conservative” or “liberal” views is however a major issue which is commonly resolved with great deal of arbitrariness.

I have noted previously how the measure of conservatism principally relied on by the Berkeley group has shown fairly laughable characteristics on some occasions -- with people who tend to assent to allegedly “conservative” statements also tending to assent to allegedly “leftist” statements! The implication of that result is that the items in the questionnaire are very poorly chosen and do not in fact represent distinctively conservative and liberal views to the people answering the questions.

If psychology were a science, one would have thought that a result as anomalous as that -- particularly when published in a widely-circulated academic journal -- would have caused all subsequent academic users of the questionnaire concerned to at least examine the correlation between the liberal and conservative items in their data. As far as I can see, however, nobody did. I therefore wrote to a large range of other users of the questionnaire and asked for copies of their raw data so that I could carry out the requisite analyses myself. There were only six fellow-psychologists who responded to my request -- mostly people with whom I had some prior acquaintance.

The results are reported in my post of 7th. here (or here). I found that the questionnaire was not uniformly unsatisfactory -- it did work as it was supposed to on the small sampling of occasions concerned. Such a finding does of course constitute some warrant for continued confidence in the usefulness of the questionnaire. That highly unsatisfactory correlations (such as the significant positive correlation between supposedly opposed items mentioned previously) can also be obtained, even with students, does mean, however, that the many studies which fail to report the correlation between the “liberal” and “conservative” items continue to be of dubious meaning. Accepting their results at face value is therefore a matter of faith rather than of science.

*********************************

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

A Christian rehabilitation program for criminals is now shown as having failed. But that’s no indictment of Christians. A high-minded Leftish rehabilitation program has also recently been shown to fail in Britain. Keeping criminals in prison longer (See also here) is the only thing that provably helps to protect us from them -- something that I have advocated (PDF) for many years. And if that makes me “punitive”, then I am in good company.

"Since Blair's 1997 total ban on armed self-defense, things have gone from bad to worse. 'You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York,' avers Malcolm. 'Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them ... A study found American burglars fear armed homeowners more than the police.' The most dangerous burglaries -- the kind that occur when people are at home -- are much rarer in the U.S. ... only 13 percent, in contrast to 53 percent in England."

****************************

ELSEWHERE

Students for Academic Freedom is a site worth a look if you think that American universities should be something other than extreme Left political organizations.

There is a post on PC Watch (post of 7th.) about why the conflict between Islam and the West is NOT a clash of civilizations.

Interested Participant has found a Leftist site that is as explicit as can be about their destructive and disruptive motives. Lenin and his Bolsheviks still live among us!

The Wicked one has just put up a really agonizing joke.

****************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

GETTING THE MARXISTS OUT OF LITERARY STUDIES

This wide ranging interview with economically-sophisticated literary critic Paul Cantor (PDF) is quite fascinating for anyone interested in literature. He shows that the current Marxist monopoly on literary criticism can easily be dismantled. Cantor highlights the elitist reasons artists (mostly second raters), dislike the market economy. In contrast he points out that a surprising number of the world's genuine greats, Shakespeare included, were really quite entrepreneurial. Cantor also points out that although socialism is dead in Economics departments of universities around the world, the Marxist tradition lives on among the literary and cultural critics who of course have no obligation to be practical. And did you know that Percy Bysshe Shelley championed laissez faire economics?

*****************************

ELSEWHERE

A little birdie tells me that Prof. Jim Lindgren is having a lot of fun preparing his comprehensive reply to the Berkeley “study” of conservatism. It is such an absurd study that it is hard not to have fun with it.

Those naughty tests! It seems that Boston’s $156,560 per year superintendent of Schools, Wilfredo T. Laboy, has been unable to pass a basic English proficiency exam three times so far. Ironically, Laboy had suspended, without pay, two dozen teachers for failing a similar test. Laboy called the test "stupid."

We all now know that there are no criminals any more: “Manhattan, New York, Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro cleared a New York City cardiologist of “forcible touching" charges relating to his opening a female patient's gown and kissing her breasts because the pressure used to kiss "is nothing more than the friction inevitably produced by the meeting of two skin surfaces during touching," whatever that has to do with the charge. (Via Jerry Lerman).

More short-sighted prostituting of of standards revealed at an Australian university. Seeing I got my doctorate from the University concerned, that does annoy me personally. If a businessman had engaged in the same sort of deception in chasing a dollar, he would be in court by now.

The homosexual bishop elected by American Anglicans is probably a good thing on the whole. It will make clear to real Christians that they need to change their church and leave the Episcopalians to the unbelieving feel-good brigade.

A good spoof treatment of Leftism as a psychiatric disorder.

Is exporting art and archaeological artifacts from the Middle East and Mediterranean areas to museums in Britain and the USA really a form of cultural imperialism? It certainly has often proved to be a better way of protecting the artifacts concerned.

"One of the most widespread harms caused by unreasonable malpractice awards is an increase in the cost of medicine. According to the Heritage Foundation, malpractice insurance rates for some providers went up as much as 30 percent in 2001. As awards by judges and juries get larger, malpractice insurance companies are forced to raise their premiums. Many of these price increases get passed on to the patient."

Apparently Joe Stalin noted what a fervent anti-Communist John Wayne was and ordered him to be assasinated! Yet more Leftist “compassion”.

"Some 67 companies already have been driven into bankruptcy by claims both legitimate and spurious. More than 200,000 asbestos tort claims are pending nationwide against more than 8,000 corporations. Many of the defendant companies never made asbestos products. The Senate measure would end those lawsuits and protect firms against any future suits asbestos victims might bring." I go along with that. The value created by many years of hard work by company employess should not end up as a honeypot for lawyers.

Leftist Todd Gitlin has recognised the same problem that conservative Gerald Henderson noted in the Sydney Morning Herald. It is no good complaining about "US unilateralism" when the alternative is toothless, do-nothing "internationalism". The trouble is Gitlin doesn't recognise how 'pie in the sky' all the alternatives are.

Of course the US would be happy for 'the international community' to intervene in world trouble-spots and not rely on Washington, but "let George do it" is easier! A better assessment of how much different countries are willing to pay for internationalism is shown by who pays what percentage of the UN budget.

There is a sanctimonious article here about Australian native blacks that picks up on the worst hand-wringing excesses of the Australian Left and says that all that is still not enough to make up for past injustices. He somehow forgets to mention that the Australian blacks looked very much like dying out until the Australian welfare state was introduced after WW2 and that there are now probably more of them around than there were when white men first arrived.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THOSE MEDIEVAL POLLUTERS

Greenies are very quick to talk about the earth's climate but seem to know nothing of its history. Does any Greenie know of the "medieval warm period" that the Vikings exploited to colonise Iceland, Greenland and perhaps America? Was that caused by industrial pollution too? Since even the steam engine had not been invented then, it certainly was not. New data has now shown clearly that the medieval warming was a global event. It was a major climatic event even in Antarctica, and it produced climatic effects that far surpass any that have been manifest there throughout the past century of purported "unprecedented" global warming.

**********************************

MORE PROBLEMS FOR THE GREENIES

The Pope has come out in favour of genetically modified crops -- correctly seeing them as a big help in feeding the hungry. His Holiness has often been a critic of capitalism so his intervention in the matter may help to convince a few waverers.

"Despite assurances from the United Nations and the World Health Organization that there is no evidence of any danger from the crops ... the EU maintains that biotech crops are unsafe to eat and destructive to the environment. However, these exaggerated claims emphasize the speculative risks wealthy Europeans foresee, and can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment."

One of the best weapons against bioterrorism may be a healthy biotech industry, bioremediation may also prove to be a useful weapon against pollution.

Wayne Lusvardi says that pandering to rich environmentalists is behind California’s budget crisis.

Useful Fools lists a whole heap of the illogicalities in “global warming” arguments. He also shows here how extensive are the parallels between environmentalism and religion.

***************************

THE AUSTRALIAN SCENE

American universities are not the only breeding grounds for educated stupidity. Australian universities have abandoned standards wholesale to lure fee-paying students from Asia. What do they think is going to happen when it gets widely known how worthless their degrees now are? But the universities concerned are of course run by government bureaucrats rather than by businessmen so why should they care about the future?

Historian Daniel Mandel shows clearly how hopelessly biased Australia’s public broadcaster (the ABC) is: Every bit as bad as Britain’s famously Leftist BBC. That does help to explain why the Australian government is freezing their funding.

This article about a day of mourning in Australia is a very good evocation of how unimportant formal religion generally is here -- and a testimony to how civil and decent Australia nonethless is.

*******************************

ELSEWHERE

A rare flash of realism from the NYT: The atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaski is widely supported by Japanese historians as a great gift for peace. Another “wicked USA” story falls apart when ALL the evidence is looked at.

Who cares who teaches this B.S. anyway? "An Ohio school district has scrapped its plan to assign a certified white teacher for a combined black-history and U.S.-government course because a black instructor was not certified to teach government, The Washington Times has learned. 'The black teacher is going to teach the course, and he will also teach government’

"Has Congress ever had the guts to cut spending? Yup. During the mid- 1990s is did just that, no thanks to Bill Clinton.

"A few days ago, the Senate passed an energy bill that is 5 parts corporate welfare to 1 part Soviet-style central planning. An example of the latter aspect is a provision ordering power companies to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewable fuels. While environmentalists are giddy over it, they should think again -- a renewable energy mandate will harm, not help, both the economy and the environment. Here's the basic problem: Renewable energy is simply far more expensive than energy produced from natural gas or coal."

"University campuses are strongholds of left liberalism where Constitutionally-protected rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, are routinely violated. This September, make sure the students you care for pack protection of their civil liberties in with clothing and reference books. This is essential for students who are male, white, conservative, openly Christian, or from affluent families."

"For reasons that defy understanding, opponents of school voucher programs have resurrected a thoroughly defeated argument -- namely, that the use of public funds for tuition at religious schools is unconstitutional. ... Moreover, the arguments put forward by the NEA run counter to recent Supreme Court precedent in Zelman v. Simmons- Harris, which upheld a school voucher plan in Cleveland ..."

The Wicked one has a post showing why public transport is a heap of nonsense.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME

There have now been some nasty findings for the "Paedophiles under the bed" crowd who have caused so much hurt to so many innocent people. Chris Brand notes:

"A Harvard psychologist has discovered that people who as adults suddenly find themselves 'recalling' childhood abuse are also more likely to invent 'memories' under laboratory conditions. Researcher Susan Clancy presented words like 'jam', 'sour' and 'salt' and then asked later whether words like 'sweet' had been on the list. 'Abuse recallers' were more likely to 'remember' the new words - as also were people who report having being abducted by aliens."

*****************************

ON BROOKES NEWS

America's media bigots. Note the knee-jerk reaction of these media personalities, their willingness to immediately assume the worst of Bush, not even bothering to checkout their prejudiced assumptions. Can anyone honestly tell me these hacks are not bigoted?
The origins of media dishonesty. Shocking reporting about the Bush presidency and the war on terrorism has led some people to once again wonder why most reporters pursue a left-wing line, even to the detriment of the truth as well as logic and common sense.
It's not the CIA that's guilty but certain members of Congress. Well, Congress has released it's report on the 9/11 atrocity. And guess what? Not a single member of Congress was condemned for contributing to this mass terrorist attack. Not even those who had assiduously worked to paralyse our intelligence agencies.
Why does Australia's media still love Clinton and hate Reagan and Bush? The moral impostors are Thomas Sowell's self-anointed. What matters to them is whether you share their left-wing view of the world. If so, then this exonerates you of any wrongdoing because at least your heart is in the right place, unlike evil conservatives.

Details here

*************************

ELSEWHERE

Australian wine exports soared 15 per cent last financial year to $2.4 billion. Sales to the US soared 55 per cent in 2002/03 to 173.6 million litres, while sales to Europe and Britain increased 11.2 per cent to 289.7 million litres. Funny that! Do the French make wine or something?

I have not said much about the “homosexual marriage” issue so far because it does not seem to be much of an issue here in Australia -- though our Prime Minister has just said that he is agin it. There is a widespread feeling in Australia that even an orthodox marriage is “just a piece of paper” and that it is the relationship between the two people concerned that really matters. So whether homosexuals get a piece of paper or not does not seem to matter much either.

It looks like the British are finally getting the message across that they are getting sick of the flood of immigrants coming in that their government seems to lack the will to stop. Both Australia and Britain are islands so there would seem to be no physical reason why their immigration controls cannot be as effective as ours.

I made brief mention recently of the heretical view that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. There are some pretty powerful defences of the orhodox view here here and here. I myself incline to the orthodox view as far as AIDS in the Western world is concerned but AIDS in Africa is another matter. They seem to call almost any unexplained illness AIDS there -- mostly without even checking whether HIV is present. South African President Mbeki’s skepticism about the role of HIV is highly understandable in the circumstances.

It looks like the ridiculous “race is a myth” ideology is now interfering with attempts to help African Americans with their very real health problems.

Jeff Jacoby has looked at what is actually in the famous “road-map” for Middle East peace and has some surprises for people who rely on the mainstream media for reports about it.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has got very tedious and repetitive in his barely-disguised anti-Americanism but if anybody still thinks he should be taken seriously, there is a pretty good dismantling of some of his sillier claims here

The Independent Institute gathered the nation’s leading global warming experts to unveil findings on climate change. The speakers, each internationally recognized as authorities on climate change, address historical changes in climate, the effect of these changes on urban mortality and the interplay of science and politics in the current EPA report. The conclusion? “Critical portions of science in [official] reports are misleading, inaccurate, unreliable, or simply wrong. However, that is not an indictment of the individuals involved, but is rather more symptomatic of the nature of science when funded by a government leviathan.”

The Wicked one defends both Ann Coulter and Senator Joe McCarthy.

A recent post on PC Watch asks whether all laughter might not become politically incorrect soon. And mirrors are looking dubious too.

In the latest upload of my published academic articles here (or here) I again show how poor is the evidence that psychologists rely on for their attacks on conservatives.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THE THIRD STORY

The third story in my triology about the civilized approach to government in the Anglo-Saxon world of the past is about England just after World War II. A Central European refugee had been given asylum in Britain but was in a category where he had to have some sort of residence permit which needed renewing from time to time. There came a time, however, when he inadvertently let his permit run out. So he got a visit from the local Bobby (policeman) early one morning. This of course struck terror into him. Under both the Nazi and Communist regimes he had known, having your papers out of order led to immediate jailing at the least. So a policeman was terminally dangerous. The conversation went something like:

BOBBY: "Mr X, I have come around because your permit to stay in Britain has expired."

MR X: "I beg of you to forgive me. It must have slipped my mind."

BOBBY: "That's all right. I have to come by here on my way home tonight so give me your old permit and I will drop you in a new one on my way past tonight".

As the Bobby rode off on his bicycle, funny helmet and all, Mr X still could not believe his senses.

That story brings tears to my eyes too. How much we have lost! I doubt that such a thing would happen in modern-day Britain. In modern-day Britain (and Australia) we have "welfare" workers raiding homes to seize children from their parents on the basis of mere speculation. Truly abusive parents, however, are routinely allowed to keep control of their children. "Social Worker" and "Gestapo" seem to mean much the same thing nowadays.

***************************

MAKE IT A TETRALOGY

Just to show that all is not lost as far as civility in Anglo-Saxon politics is concerned, let me tell a fourth story from much more recent times:

This is a story that Australian Prime Minister John Howard told in his victory speech in the 1996 Australian Federal Election. Howard said that like everyone else that day he had had to line up in order to cast his vote. (Casting a vote in Australia at the time did often require some patience. A 20 minute wait was not unknown). He found himself standing in a line behind a man whom he saw holding a Labor Party "How-to-Vote" card. The man turned around, saw the future Prime Minister standing behind him and said, "Hello. Nice to meet you. But I am still not going to vote for you". John Howard then said on national TV that that incident typified for him what Australia is all about. I have to agree. In how many other countries would a future Prime Minister find himself in that humble and humbled position AND BE GLAD OF IT? It also showed John Howard as a sensitive and thinking man in being appreciative of the civil and yet "no nonsense" society we have here in Australia.

******************************

MORE ON THE BERKELEY FOLLIES

In the latest upload of my published academic articles here (or here) I report some more findings about the conservatism questionnaire principally relied on in the research that the Berkeley group summarized. It turns out that lots of the supposedly “conservative” statements in the questionnaire are agreed to by liberals and vice versa. Its liberal items correlate positively with its conservative items instead of the expected negative correlation. It provides a self-contradictory index of conservatism, in other words. Good one! And my article pointing that out has been there in the academic psychology literature for all to see for over 30 years! I would say that the Berkeley work gives new meaning to the term “junk science” except that it is not science of any kind -- not even junk science.

***************************

ELSEWHERE

Maybe I am being too cynical about the current allegations against Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi. I know and love Italians with all their faults and there is no doubt that by our icy Northern European standards they are chronically corrupt. Berlusconi is of course a conservative but it might be noted that the corruption concerned also involves a former socialist Prime Minister of Italy -- Bettino Craxi. Berlusconi stands accused of little more than being an Italian in my view.

A faboulous story here about what haapened to 150 of the white farmers the brutal dictator Mugabe kicked out of Zimbabwe. They moved operations to neighbouring Zambia and just that tiny group of 150 have now turned Zambia into a food-exporting country -- in comparison with the starvation in Zimbabwe.

Under the heading Zuechtungsideen ("Breeding ideas") the leading German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has just given Chris Brand some free publicity. The review was of course condemnatory but it did manage to give a useful summary of the points he makes about race and IQ along the way. Truth will out eventually.

This article on energy policy shows that fuel shortages and price leaps are almost entirely created by government meddling. There does seem to be one form of government intervention that helps, though: Oil prices fell a lot when the US invaded Iraq -- even while Iraqi production was completely cut off. Might it be that US military intervention in the region has put all the oil-exporters on their best behaviour?

There is a play being put on in Australia at the moment that is trying to drum up sympathy for illegal Muslim immigrants that the Australian government has imprisoned until it is established whether any of them are legitimate refugees. Djira, which is “Arabic for the sacred obligation to look after and protect one's neighbours”, is the title of the play. Djira sure explains 9/11, I guess. It takes those Muslims to give us lessons on how to be humane!

I inadvertently wandered onto Angela Bell’s old site recently. She’s got some good posts there, even though they’re a month old.

The Wicked one has a big collection of amusing follies.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THE SECOND STORY

I told the first story yesterday about how civilized politics used to be in the Anglo-Saxon countries. When the rest of the world was having bloody revolutions and the like, we were drifting gently along by comparison.

Today's story concerns that great character of New Zealand politics, Robert Muldoon -- conservative Prime Minister from 1975 to 1984. The story was included in his autobiography, My way:

There was a time during his Prime Ministership when Maori radicals were particularly unhappy with him (though many Maori gang members loved him) and there had been bomb threats made against him. So a police guard was mounted on Vogel House, where N.Z. Prime Ministers live. This being New Zealand, however, the policeman finished work at 7pm and went home! So about 10 pm one night there was a knock on the door at Vogel house and there was nobody there to answer it but Muldoon and his family. So what did our Rob do? He answered the door personally! When he did so he found three big Maoris standing there. Were they there to assault him? What did they say? They said: "Rob, we saw your light on so we just dropped in to wish you goodnight." They then all shook hands amid smiles all round and went off waving goodbye.

That story still makes me weep. It does show something of Muldoon's guts but it mainly makes me regret that such a civil society is now virtually impossible almost anywhere.

***********************************

A GREAT CONSERVATIVE

My post yesterday about a great conservative -- Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies -- has stirred one of my readers to point out how influential on the world stage he was up until his retirement in 1966. See here.

I am myself a great fan of Menzies and something I always find amusing is the way commentators recognize his greatness but are puzzled that they can never think of anything much he that actually achieved. But that is of course the whole point. Menzies was such a strong figure that he did what very few politicians can do -- he successfully resisted the pressures from almost all special-interest groups to legislate in favour of them at the expense of the community as a whole. Doing nothing was his great achievement. The torrent of legislation to which all governments subject us was a comparative trickle under Menzies. He generally resisted the urge to meddle. And under him Australia was peaceful, calm and secure -- with unemployment negligible and living standards steadily rising. Contracts were enforced, criminals were punished and taxation was a fraction of what it is now. There was welfare for those who really needed it and there were scholarships that enabled children from working-class backgrounds to go to university if they had the ability. I myself was a recipient of one such scholarship. My father was a lumberjack who thought that even secondary education was a waste of time. So Australian conservatives only have to remember the world of Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s to realize that their ideal of a much smaller and fairer government is far from an impossible dream.

*****************************

ELSEWHERE

An interesting article here by a libertarian homosexual on how homosexuals have rapidly morphed from being an oppressed group to being a totally intolerant oppressor group.

A saner Catholic tradition: "The Scholastics demonstrated that a concern for the poor and for mercy on the unfortunate does not require spurning the market. In fact, it was these very concerns that led them to study carefully the nature of property and market exchange. They found that the market is a powerful institution for improving the lot of the common worker and respect for private property provides opportunities for charity."

"HIV does not cause AIDS". That was one of the most startling pieces of information to come out of the 21st Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, held recently in Phoenix, Arizona July 19. Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr. an attender at the meeting, said, 'It's a shocking statement but it will very likely prove to be true'

There is an interesting short biography of Tony Blair here which portrays him as a genuine idealist rather than a cynical power-freak. I am inclined to agree with that.

There are two articles here and here which give some details about the untruths peddled by the charming Michael Moore

Senate President John Andrews, R-Centennial, said getting criminals off the street and protecting the public is a vital function of government. .... half the male prisoners in Colorado -- and nearly three-fourths of female inmates -- are serving time for nonviolent offenses. He said drug offenses continue to be the most prevalent crime, with 3,691 inmates behind bars for some type of drug offense on June 30, 2002." I have always advocated (PDF) that we would be a lot safer to give only token sentences to non-violent offenders so we can keep the violent ones inside a lot longer.

Amusing: A vegetarian diet similar to what apes eat greatly lowers your cholesterol. But is it "good" or "bad" cholesterol? You can never win with these diets.

The Wicked one explains why we oldies should all be dead according to the do-gooders.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I take a skeptical look at psychology’s famous California ‘F’ scale (invented by the Marxist Adorno and his colleagues). It was a questionnaire originally invented to help explain racism but now virtually abandoned for that task. It is however still popular among Leftists as an instrument that apparently discredits conservatives if you ignore most of the evidence about it. I show that it is best explicable as an index of old-fashioned attitudes and that its correlation with racism simply shows that it is now old-fashioned to avow openly racist attitudes.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

THREE STORIES

I have three stories to tell which illustrate how civilized Anglo-Saxon politics once were -- stories from New Zealand, Australia and Britain. All of them seem to be true stories but if they are not they should be. Today’s story concerns Australia’s redoubtable conservative Prime Minister Menzies. The time was the early 1950s and the height of the Communist scare. Many conservatives thought the government was not doing enough to combat Communism and some senior Ministers in the Menzies government agreed. Menzies was however a notable lawyer by profession and declared that a recent High Court case limiting Parliament’s powers in the matter had to be respected. This was felt to be an inadequate response so a triumvirate of senior Ministers got together and decided that Menzies had to be deposed, a State of Emergency declared, the Communist party banned and a major expansion of the armed forces undertaken. They decided to deliver an ultimatum to this effect to Menzies himself. Menzies was too imposing a figure simply to be bypassed. They decided to make a surprise call on Menzies one Saturday afternoon. Saturday afternoon in Australia of that era was a time when NOTHING happened. The shops were closed and, if there were no major sporting event happening, people just pottered in the garden, took rubbish to the dump or took a big nap to catch up on sleep missed during the week.

The triumvirs arrived at the Prime Ministerial residence and, as well-known figures, were immediately ushered into the presence of the great man. And what was the great man doing at the time? He was in the greenhouse transplanting tomato seedlings so there would be a good crop for the kitchen! It was the sort of hobby activity any Australian might be doing on a Saturday afternoon in that era. Its sheer normalness and ordinariness did however undermine the resolve of the plotters and Menzies, being a wily old bird, probably realized that something was in the wind so continued to engage them in conversation about tomatoes, the seasons and gardening. When he had finished his transplanting, Menzies asked them to take afternoon tea with him -- which they of course accepted.

During tea Menzies asked them to what he owed the privilege of their visit but with all momentum lost by then all one of them could do was to say weakly that they had come to seek his views on the Communist menace. Being famously quick-witted, Menzies told them that he just that day had come to a major decision on the matter. He had decided to hold a referendum on banning the Communist party. As a referendum is an impeccably proper democratic procedure they could hardly argue -- though all those present would have been aware that referenda are normally lost in Australia. And so the rebels went empty away -- foiled by tomato seedlings.

The referendum was of course held -- and it was lost.

The story was relayed to me many years ago as “inside knowledge” by someone who was in a position to have such knowledge so I have no way of verifying it but I think it conveys very well the sheer mundane safety of Anglo-Saxon political life as it used to be -- the very opposite of the high drama that plagues politics in most of the rest of the world.

******************************

ELSEWHERE

It now seems clear that the BBC did invent its claims about British government deception over Iraq. But I guess we all knew that they are now little more than a Leftist propaganda machine feeding off a public who are given no choice about funding them.

Who said National Socialism died with Hitler? Nobody doubts that the Irish Republican Army is nationalist but they are proud to proclaim their socialism too. See here. Leftist thugs and murderers: How unusual! Nothing changes.

As always, nobody can sum reality up like Hayek: “A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers”.

"A Zogby International opinion poll, conducted June 18-21 and released by the Galen Institute, found overwhelming public support for private-sector options in Medicare ... as well as fear the complex drug benefit crafted by the Senate could be worse than the coverage many seniors now have. The poll suggests voters would like the option of enrolling in private plans to provide overall health coverage in Medicare

More British injustice: “In June 2003, a judge in Nottingham, UK, ruled that Brendon Fearon was entitled to sue Martin for damages arising from the leg injury he suffered while burgling Martin's farmhouse.”

From the Federalist: "We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did." --Thomas Sowell

There is an excellent post by Randy Barnett, a law professor, here (post of 23rd.) that points out how lying just seems to come naturally to the Left. Excerpt: “Persons on the Left create in their minds a false world in which to live -- a world that better suits their preconceptions. They are not content to disagree with the goals of their opposition.... They must make up facts about the world that fit their theories.”

Andrew Bolt’s columns are mainly aimed at exposing the dishonesty of the Australian Left but what he says applies elsewhere pretty well too. His article on the International Criminal Court certainly shows how wise GWB was to have no part of it.

The Wicked one has a post on Republican Party socialism.

If anybody has not read the Neal Boortz commencement speech, they are missing a fun dig at Leftist groupthink and “compassion”.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at the constant Leftist claim (“Tell a big enough lie often enough ....”) that they are more “compassionate”. If Dr. Goebbels was right one would expect some compassionate people to be taken in by the Leftist claim and so vote for a Leftist party. I surveyed the supporters of three political parties, a socialist party, a moderate conservative party and an avowedly capitalist party. Compassionate people were just as likely to vote for one of the conservative parties as they were for the Leftist party. Fortunately, it would seem that the Leftist “compassion” claim is widely disbelieved. I wonder why? Perhaps, “You can fool all of the people .....”

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

..

ANOTHER UNICORN!

I pointed out recently that the “Intolerance of ambiguity” concept much beloved by the Berkeley group as a means of trashing conservatives is essentially a “unicorn” concept -- no such trait or consistent tendency to behave actually exists. The same person will tolerate ambiguity in one situation but not in another.

It turns out that “attitude to authority” is another such unicorn. An integral part of the orthodox but perverse Leftist claim that conservatives are “authoritarian” is the assumption that acceptance of one sort of authority generalizes to accepting all sorts of authority. For a long time I myself took that assumption as read -- but then the evidence began to pile up.

Much of the evidence concerned is given in Ray & Lovejoy (1990) and more can be found towards the end of my paper here under the heading: How general is attitude to authority?. What the evidence shows is that correlations between attitudes to different types of authority vary from population to population and that attitudes to what would seem like very similar instances of authority sometimes correlate very little.

So it seems that people are very discriminating in what authorities they will accept. Accepting the respect-worthiness of one authority in one field does not at all automatically imply that you will respect all authorites. It will all depend on the circumstances. Conservatives, for instance, have traditionally shown more respect than Leftists for the law and for teachers but the recent antics of the U.S. Supreme Court over affirmative action and the fanatical Leftism of the NEA would almost certainly reveal a much diminished respect for both if a survey were taken among conservatives today.

And Leftists themselves are a prime example of how attitudes to authority can be highly differentiated. Respect for the President of the United States at the moment is undoubtedly zero among virtually all Leftists but the utterances of Fidel Castro are on the other hand still treated like gold. And there was never any shortage of Leftist admirers for the terminally authoritarian Joe Stalin. And what is the basic Leftist program if it is not to replace all the existing "powers that be" with a Leftist regime that will have all-pervasive authority over all spheres of life? Leftists reject much existing authority vigorously -- but only because they want to replace it with another much more powerful governmental authority of their own. The claim that they are generally anti-authority is a joke.

So the whole Leftist claim that accepting one authority is part of a general tendency to accept all authorities is in fact worse than a unicorm concept. It is arrant nonsense. So the old Leftist claim that conservatives are chronic worshippers of authority as such falls flat. NOBODY is -- or at least no significant part of the population is.

Paul Walfield makes the reasonable point that for people who claim to oppose stereotyping, the Berkeley psychologists sure are good at stereotyping conservatives. A bit like the Leftist passion for “diversity” on campus -- a “diversity” that somehow excludes almost entirely any conservatives from the faculty of social science and humanities schools. What hypocrites!

******************************

ELSEWHERE

What a truly evil idea: “The national register of pedophiles could be broadened to include suspects, not just convicted child sex offenders”. A great way of condemning the innocent! Even lots of those who are convicted are subsequently cleared when it becomes clear how much of the evidence against them was manufactured by do-gooders who are sure that they KNOW. Go back over some of the stories on Richard Webster’s site to get an idea of the horrors that have been inflicted on innocent people in the past by governments because of the hysterical approach to paedophilia.

Amazing! Government employees being held accountable: “Rail chiefs are facing criminal charges in the wake of damning reports that catalogue a work culture that neglected safety and left passenger lives at risk”. I bet nothing will happen in the end, though.

GOP Socialism: "Yesterday, four Senate Republicans .... unveiled a plan to grant Amtrak $12 billion in operating funds”. Passenger rail is dead in most of the world. Why can’t they let it die?

I certainly do not agree with compulsory vaccinations but I agree that the scares about the MMR vaccine are junk. There is now a ton of evidence that MMR recipients have no more illness of any kind than anybody else. There is no doubt that for some people facts just do not matter. I feel sorry for their kids though.

Typical government parasites: When high school students in Beaver County got sick of seeing pollution in the park, they decided to do something about it, and volunteers from the Blackhawk High School recycling club removed the tires. Now union employees of the Beaver County Public Works Department want to be paid for the cleanup."

Like the good Northern Englishman that I gather he is (Murray is an old Borderer name) Iain Murray has a paen to cricket on his blog. As a fellow devotee of Sir Henry Newbolt, I have to agree with him but his American readers must be a bit stunned. Iain also says that Prison works. No argument on that one.

Useful Fools has some praise of Randall Parker's blogs that I would like to echo. Randall always has heaps of meaty stuff to read. I blog a lot too but I am retired. Randall actually works as well.

PC Watch reports that even Apartheid can be politically correct if you can claim enough victimhood.

In today’s upload of one of my published academic papers here (or here) I again look at the claim that psychological authoritarianism can only be found among Rightists. On this occasion, rather than question the definition of authoritarianism, I simply show that whatever definition you adopt -- even the most incoherent one -- it is still easy to find evidence of psychological authoritarianism among Leftists.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************

LEFT, RIGHT, OOPS!

I have set out at length here (or here) the historical evidence in favour of the view that Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian and that the political authoritarianism of the 20th century was overwhelmingly Leftist in origin. Does that mean that there is no Rightist authoritarianism? Of course not. Conservatism is intrinsically suspicious of government power, authority and control but there are nonetheless some conservatives who want to use government authority for their own ends -- with some Christian conservatives in particular often attempting to impose Christian practices (Sabbath observance etc.) on everyone else.

Most psychologists, however, tell exactly the opposite story. They are wedded to the view that authoritarianism is intrinsically Rightist. But can they prove it? As the literature surveyed by the Berkeley group shows, they have spent over 50 years trying to do so. Amusingly, however, all their attempts have foundered on their inability to find any way of detecting authoritarianism among conservatives. For decades they relied on the California ‘F’ questionnaire (invented by the Marxist Adorno and his colleagues) to provide an index of authoritarianism but the evidence that the ‘F’ questionnaire does NOT provide an index of authoritarianism eventually became so overwhelming (Altemeyer, 1981; Ray, 1990) that it has now generally been abandoned. Instead, research in recent years has focused on the Altemeyer RWA questionnaire. The RWA stand for Right Wing Authoritarianism. Yet Altemeyer himself (1988, p. 239) baldly states that Right Wing Authoritarians as detected by his questionnaire, “show little preference in general for any political party”! Get it? What he is reporting is that people who show up as Rightist according to his RWA questionnaire turn out to be just as likely to vote Leftist as Rightist! So this last best hope of the conservative-bashers is not in fact an index of ANYTHING Rightist. How can people be Rightist if they vote for Leftist parties? What a circus! And THAT is the sort of psychology your taxpayer dollars are paying for.

(See also here).

References
ADORNO,T.W., FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, E., LEVINSON, D.J. & SANFORD, R.N.
(1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper
ALTEMEYER, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University Manitoba Press.
ALTEMEYER, R. (1988) Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
RAY, J.J. (1990) The old-fashioned personality. Human Relations, 43, 997-1015.



****************************

ELSEWHERE

Joke! Joke! (I hope): "Federal and local prosecutors will take to the airwaves Friday to try to make neighborhoods safer by convincing criminals that using guns carries a far higher personal cost -- a long, no-parole federal prison term -- than they might realize.

"State governors and legislators believe that ... their governments are now 'doing more with less.' The evidence, however, suggests just the opposite: States are doing less with more. The cost of state and local government services is rising along with spending in such a manner that inflation-adjusted state services are declining, but the states and localities are absorbing an increasing portion of our total output."

A Democrat view of “Green” voters that I rather like: “Older, white, left bourgeoisie, tenured and cocooned in the carapace of self-righteous satisfaction”. He is just peeved because they siphon off Democrat votes of course. He is only being jaundiced, however, in saying that Greenies have no influence. In fact, BOTH major parties pander to them. It takes a Leftist not to see that.

This article points out how overwhelming the Asian, Indian and Jewish presence is at the top of America’s scientific and engineering research tree and asks why. The politically motivated dumbing down of American education would seem to be one answer. Education in India and China still has standards and the USA imports the results of that. Pity about bright American kids, though.

There is a good sendup by Michelle Malkin of the “reparations” shakedown here

There is a good short article on Daniel Pipes here which points out that far from being an Islamophobe, he makes a sharp distinction between moderate Islam and the Islamic extremists -- which is why a lot of Islamic organizers hate him.

The French sure get a big serve in Front Page.

Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated: "New York City's tough gun- control laws did not prevent the City Hall shooting, [legislator Richard H.] Black said. 'Firearms regulations disarm the decent citizen,' he said." How much evidence does the anti-gun lobby need before they realize that it is only the crooks that they are helping?

Dextroblog is another conservative who is pretty disgruntled about the way government keeps growing even under GOP administrations.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again here

The Wicked one definitely has the best jokes. See particularly his post of 28th.

I put online yesterday one of the two academic papers of mine that were cited by the Berkeley group. How they can think that such a tendency as mental rigidity or intolerance of ambiguity exists after reading the vast array of evidence that I marshall there against such an idea escapes me. See here or here.

*********************************

Comments? Email me here or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

**********************************