“THE POOR”

I’m no Theodore Dalrymple but ....

In this blog I talk almost exclusively about Leftists and very rarely say anything about myself except in connection with my academic journal articles. A point I have made clear on a number of occasions, however, is that I think it makes a difference that I generally speak from a lot of experience rather than from theory. This also applies to comments I make about “the poor” (or “underprivileged” in Leftist jargon).

One of the great Leftist themes is their “compassion” for the poor. But from what they say it is clear that the average dreaming Leftist intellectual knows only as much about the poor as he can imagine from the comfort of a well-paid middle class job and general middle-class background. I however was born into a working-class family (my father was a lumberjack) so I have always been perfectly familiar and at ease with the poorer members of my society and been able to speak to them using their own idioms, concepts, values and characteristic beliefs. I actually have to make some effort to write this blog in international English as my natural tendency is to express myself in the vivid Australian vernacular. If I were writing this blog solely for an Australian working class audience, for instance, I would be able to convey very accurately my impression of Leftists by saying that they are people who are always “bunging on an act”, who are not “fair dinkum” and who are always “big-noting” themselves -- but I doubt very much that such terms would be universally understood in the way intended. All three terms are, by the way, expressions of extreme contempt among Australian working class people.

Because my background made it possible, I did for a couple of years not so long ago own and run a large boarding house in one of Brisbane’s poorest suburbs (Ipswich). My tenants were almost exclusively long-term unemployed and, yes, I did accept black tenants. The law was of absolutely no use in managing such people. The previous owner of the place was an “outsider” and had experienced financial disaster as a result. Because I understood the type of people I had as tenants, however, I WAS able to manage them and made good money out of the business. And I would not have been able to eject “campers”, single-handedly clear a room full of interlopers or physically throw out druggies if I had not always known the right psychological buttons to push. I always did such tasks with impunity even though I am not physically imposing and even though I was often dealing with hardened criminals. My psychology was practical as well as theoretical -- largely because it was founded on an intimate understanding of the people I was dealing with. If anybody thinks they know the Australian underclass better than I do, I would like to see them do the sort of thing I did without getting their head punched in.

So what were my tenants like? Foolish. Few if any, for instance, were keen shoppers. Almost all would buy a lot of their food and other requirements from nearby service stations and “convenience” stores even though prices there were up to 50% higher than at the supermarket only a short walk further down the road. If that does not tell you that a lot of poverty is self-inflicted, I do not know what would.

And dishonesty and criminality were rife among them. They were always stealing from one-another. Anybody who had anything of value in his room was very unwise to walk out of his room without locking the door behind him. They WERE often unwise of course so there was an awful lot of “lost” money and property among them. If that does not tell you that poverty is closely associated with moral breakdown, I do not know what would.

And despite the fact that all of them lived entirely from welfare payment to welfare payment, all of them could afford to drink (alcohol) and smoke. On “payday”, there was a regular parade of cardboard boxes of “Fruity Lexia” (a cheap but pleasant Australian white wine) into the premises. If that does not tell you that they were not really poor I do not know what would.

Maybe I will say later how I think the welfare system should be reformed in the light of what “the poor” really are like.

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Eugenics -- comment from a reader: "If we simply didn't subsidize "the stupid" they would voluntarily reduce their numbers. Housing, Food Stamps, Medicaid, Free Education do not increase the numbers of "high IQ" people - high IQ people are functioning quite well without any of that" It is certainly true that the welfare state has brought natural selection to a grinding halt.

I have noted previously the recent Asian claim that Australia will not be accepted in Asia until its population is predominantly Asian -- an obviously racist claim. View from the Right thinks the claim shows that a policy of non-discrimination in racial matters is futile and should be abandoned.

I normally agree with articles on "Townhall" but this guy sounds like a bureacrat. He wants heavy penaties for the young guy who showed the whole of America how useless their bureacratized airport security is. I think the kid deserves a medal. It is the honchos at airport security that should be in jail.

A horror story about bureaucratized medicine in New Zealand. You would not wish it on a dog. By contrast, I need surgery for skin cancer pretty often and I get it within weeks when I ask for it under my private health insurance here in Australia. I encounter no bureaucracy at all. I don’t even have a preliminary consultation. I just ring up the plastic surgeon’s receptionist, book myself in for a procedure and turn up on the day arranged. I go straight into the plastic surgeon’s private operating theatre and he does the job forthwith. No fuss at all and a trivial out of pocket expense. And if it looks an easy job I get my GP to do the slicing. I have to book him only a couple of days in advance and he costs me nothing at all. No bureaucracy with him either. Just one appointment and it’s all over. Why anybody would have any other system I do not know.

I have just put up here a news release from the UK Libertarian Alliance which condemns the proposed EU ban on “Transplant tourism”. The idea being that people who need (say) a kidney transplant but who cannot get one in their own country must be forbidden from going to any other country to get what they need! It sounds a lot like the Berlin wall to me.

A very popular analytical technique in psychology and sociology is factor analysis. It mostly seems to be used in an attempt to get statistical mathematics to do your thinking for you. In my latest academic upload (here or here) I point out that it is often misused.

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SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIRD-WORLD BLACKS

A reader writes

I read with interest your paper on Indian farmers and IQ. This took me back to my own PhD (done at a major Australian university) on malnutrition among kids in Papua New Guinea in the mid 1980s. I spent 18 months in the bush.

One of my more interesting observations after this period of time was that kids with dumb parents tended to be more malnourished than kids with intelligent parents. My three thesis supervisors were horrified when I proposed to write about it. As I had not used any psychometric tools to test my idea, I was able to be convinced that I should let it drop. Their motivations however, were driven more out of political correctness than anything else.

I subsequently presented a short paper at a conference on a different aspect of my research. I discussed what villagers were doing with their cash cropping money. No-one had ever done a whole-of-village study at that time in PNG. I found that nearly half of all money was spent on alcohol.

I was treated like a leper by old New Guinea academic hands and development studies academics because I had broken a taboo -- it was not appropriate to talk about these kinds of social problems in polite academic circles -- the only true turf was the anti-Western cum Marxist explanation for nutritional and economic inequality. Needless to say, I got my PhD then quickly abandoned any hope of a career in academia. There is no place there for people who are not seriously Left-wing.

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I noted a couple of days ago how free trade is a great potential weapon against terrorism so it is good to see that Australian economist (and blogger) Alex Robson has won the Independent Institute's essay prize for an analysis of Cobden's view that the spread of business promotes international peace and freedom. Alex concludes: “Most of the formal theoretical work and empirical studies support Cobden's position”. Alex also had a thoughtful article about the death penalty published recently. Quote: “Emory University economists recently found that each additional execution in the US in 1996 resulted in 18 fewer murders”

Mike Tremoglie also pulls apart the arguments of a death penalty opponent. As I have said elsewhere (PDF), I personally think that the police are so crooked that it would be hard to find evidence convincing enough for something as final as the death penalty. Police corruption is an unending scandal here in Australia. The Police chief himself went to jail not so long ago in my home State of Queensland. And the Amirault case does not do much to inspire confidence in the procedures of American justice either.

A long and very well-informed article on global warming here. Excerpt: "So what is the global warming debate about? It's about the proposition that human use of fossil fuels has contributed significantly to the past century's warming, and that expected future warming may have catastrophic global consequences. But hard evidence for this human contribution simply does not exist; the evidence we have is suggestive at best. Does that mean the human effects are not occurring? Not necessarily. But media coverage of global warming has been so alarmist that it fails to convey how flimsy the evidence really is."

The Weathermen underground Leftist saboteurs of the 60s were clearly driven by gigantic egos. THEY knew what was best for us!

"World Food Day, which is Thursday, seems an appropriate occasion to consider both where our food comes from and also who's hungry in the world. The two topics are connected. Poor nations need to export food to the US and other rich nations, if they're to have half a chance of alleviating poverty there. But rich nations are making it difficult for them to do so. Poor nations don't have much industry, but they do have farms. The corn, wheat, cotton, sugar, rice and dairy products they produce are just about the only things many of them have to trade for what they need from the rest of the world."

There is an aticle in The Statesman which claims (satirically) that “Diana and Elvis shot JFK”. That does summarize well the difficulty many people have with coming to terms with the complexity of the real world -- which makes them good customers for the vicious oversimplifications of the Left.

One consequence of GWB’s big spending: “Some libertarians in good standing are actually thinking of voting Democratic."

The temporary home of Peter Cuthbertson's "Conservative Commentary" seems to have become rather permanent -- for those who follow British politics closely. He seems to be writing up his diary of the recent Conservative party conference at the moment. He seems to have found some signs of life there.

The Carnival of the Vanities has arrived again.

The Wicked one thinks Malaysia’s Mahathir is wrong about the Jews but not stupid.

My latest academic upload (here or here) provides a way of doing objective research into environmentalism and reveals that support for environmental issues is very widespread in the community.

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THE SWISS ARE GETTING FED UP WITH UNWANTED IMMIGRANTS TOO

If it is proper that a person is allowed to say whom he welcomes into his own house, it is equally proper that a nation welcome into its own country only those whom it chooses

The recent big gains of the Volkspartei ("People's Party" or SVP) in the Swiss elections seems to be mainly a protest about unwanted immigrants. This sounds familiar: "You must bear in mind that Switzerland has one of the highest levels [per capita] of foreigners in Europe," Ackermann said. "It is near 20 percent of the population, and a lot of people have the impression that no other party [apart from the SVP] is really representing their interests." Ackermann said that in some inner-city areas, there are some schools which have few Swiss children in their classes, and that scares the local people. He also says that the hostility of the Swiss community is directed not at normal guest-workers, nor at genuine refugees, but at the illegal immigrants who are seen as taking advantage of the Swiss social-security system"

I doubt that there is any people who have welcomed proportionately more immigrants into their midst than Australians but they recently gave their government a big victory because of its successful crackdown on illegal immigration -- so to equate a desire for immigration control with xenophobia or racism runs completely against the evidence. On the evidence of deeds, Australians are arguably the least xenophobic nation on earth. The wish for restricted immigration is basically a desire to ensure that the society continues to function as well as it does without disruption from people who do not respect or share its norms, values and customs.

And the claim that Australia will not be accepted in Asia until our population is at least 50% Asian is clearly racist itself. And the low types that Australia DOES let in at times is truly amazing.

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Hitler is alive and well in Malaysia: “An unrepentant Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad repeated Tuesday his belief that Jews rule the world” And Canada’s position on such statements? “They're not acceptable, we don't tolerate them, we don't countenance them at all” -- but he did not deny that they are true! In other words, Mahathir is right but naughty to say it.

The WSJ has a big coverage of antisemitism among U.S. Democrats.

Wow! Australia has come to an agreement with China that looks like the first part of a free-trade agreement. It will be great both for Australia’s prosperity and security but what a dilemma it will pose for the Australian Left! To criticize it will be to criticize a Communist country! Erk! The great Leftist taboo!

How times change: General Motors is about to start building Cadillacs in China!

Oh dear! Bitchy, bitchy! “Even pathetic old prunes have their moment in the glare of the gossip mags”

The US Left is worried that half the blue collar workers back Bush. Showing how little respect they really have for the average man, they explain it by saying that blue-collar workers are so dumb that they just like the Bush he-man image. Yet Nixon was no he-man and he actually got a majority of the blue-collar votes. What the Leftists just cannot face is that people might be able to see how bad for the country their policies are.

Jeff Jacoby says: "Americans have been dying at the hands of Palestinian Arab terrorists for decades, yet the US government and media rarely if ever portray Yasser Arafat and his lieutenants as avowed enemies of the United States. The State Department does not demand the extradition of Palestinian killers of Americans, not even when the killers' identities and whereabouts are known"

A libertarian reader thinks that the "do not call" list is a bad idea: "it is really quite worthless - there are poor enforcement mechanisms, and the only effect will be to fine smaller companies that misuse it to lower competition with larger companies. And politicians and charities will still have free rein. Worst of all - in the US telemarketers pay about 40% of long distance bills - and those who have put these people out of business are going to be in for a big surprise when their phone costs skyrocket. I feel about the same about popups - erasing them is simpler than tracking them down, etc.. And I just love to talk to some of the telemarketers - like to refuse to tell them my race, etc. It is really entertaining at times. For my answering machine, I announce that the message is limited to one minute and I have a quick erase button. No problem at all."

The Wicked one is very cynical about New Yorkers but impressed by their policing.

One of the most basic features of conservative thinking is that human society is too complex to be governed by simple rules and theories -- so change must be of a careful, step-by-step nature if unintended consequences are to be avoided. Such a rejection of simplistic theories goes back at least as far as the French Revolution and the writings of Edmund Burke. So it is amusing that, for the last 50 years and more, psychologists have been trying to prove the opposite of this historical truth. They have been trying to prove that it is conservatives who are characterized by simplistic thinking -- the very thing that conservatives have historically rejected! That it is the Left who are the lovers of simplistic theories is however amply evident in the writings of psychologists themselves -- which is what one would expect given the overwhelmingly Leftist orientation of psychologists. I devoted most of my 20 years of writing for the academic journals to pointing out instance after instance of such simplistic thinking -- constantly showing that people are far more complex than the theories popular among psychologists allow. My latest academic upload (see here or here) is just a minor example of that. I show that attitudes to death are much more complex than is usually believed.

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AGATHA CHRISTIE

As someone who has read and enjoyed just about all the Agatha Christie novels, I was pleased to see that Johann Hari finds a lot of good things to say about her instead of dismissing her in the usual way as just another writer of “Whodunits”. She does of course evoke in her novels the orderly world of British middle-class life as she knew it and Hari recognizes that such scenarios are attractive.

But his claim that she was propagandizing for a world of “Burkean conservatism” is fanciful. She just used the world she knew best for her backdrops. She used Iraq and Egypt as backdrops too (her husband was an archaeologist) so does that mean she was defending Islam?

What Hari is really attacking is a straw man. He claims that Burkean conservatives believe in a natural, immutable order of things -- which is balderdash. What they DO believe in is a largely immutable human nature -- and there is any amount of evidence for that view.

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IRAQ

A very good summary here of why the war in Iraq was fully justified. It answers all the critics in a very brief and to-the-point manner under the heading: "Uncovering the Truth About Going to War".

A prominent Australian Leftist says: “Whatever one may think about the decision to use military force in Iraq, and whatever doubts one may have about whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the people of Iraq are better off now than they were under Hussein's rule” And he goes on to give figures showing how far Iraq has progressed in recent months.

There is a slightly heartening article about the Arab world here. Apparently some Arab thinkers realize why the Arab world is so backward and getting worse. And lots of Arabs are listening to them. See also here

Being an oil exporter (something Iraq isn't as yet) is not necessarily the bonanza it is popularly portrayed. In fact many mid-East non-oil states outperform the oil states. Getting something for nothing is not as good as it seems.

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Some interesting history: The Pledge of Allegiance was originally a socialist idea designed to thwart Federalism. I am an atheist so people are welcome to pledge or not to their heart’s content as far as I am concerned. I wouldn’t bother anybody about it one way or the other. I was however a Christian fundamentalist in my teens and used to refuse to utter the daily pledge of allegiance to Queen and country that was then customary in Australian schools. As far as I was concerned at that time, my only allegiance was to God. But nobody really bothered me about it. They just thought I was a nut. A reader recently made a good point to me when he said that a lot of the opposition to the U.S. pledge is probably coming from atheists who are insecure in their atheism. I think the main motive for the opposition is just the usual Leftist attention-seeking, however. If they can upset ordinary people they will.

In response to my post yesterday about the “Do not call” list, one reader had an interesting response: “Not everyone who claims to hate telemarketers actually refuses to buy from or donate to them when called. The fact that the telemarketers oppose the list tells me the success rate with people on the list is high enough that it is profitable to keep calling them”.

Government “protection” being useless as usual: "Five undercover agents of the US Department of Homeland Security posing as passengers last week carried weapons through several security checkpoints at Logan International Airport without being detected. ... [A] source who works in security at Logan said the undercover agents, who work for the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, brought knives, a bomb, and a gun in carry-on baggage through several checkpoints at different terminals without being stopped."

Australia: "Victoria's hate laws were thrown into question yesterday when a judge said they might be in conflict with the Australian constitution. ... The constitution does not explicitly guarantee freedom of speech, but in two recent cases -- involving former New Zealand prime minister David Lange and animal rights activist Laurie Levy -- the High Court has ruled on rights to political free speech."

This writer thinks that sexual liberation has made it too easy for guys and too hard for women.

Here’s a lesson that GWB seems slow to learn: Free Trade can be a potent weapon against terrorism.

Chris Brand has answered some of the attacks made on a Danish psychologist who recently called for a VOLUNTARY eugenics program.

In my latest academic upload I take just one page to shoot down a claim by a Leftist Canadian psychologist that Australians are particularly “authoritarian” (see here and here). In his reply to my article, he admitted that he had made up (in his words “estimated”) a key statistic that he had used. Why am I not surprised? For more on the way Leftist academics make “facts” up see Windschuttle’s work and the Bellesiles affair. But the slightest hint of anything irregular in research that conservatives quote causes instantaneous condemnation of all concerned, as Chris Brand notes about the “Burt Affair”. Burt was in fact remarkably accurate in his once-disputed conclusions.

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REPORT FROM INDIA

My latest academic upload (see here or here) is a report of some research carried out in India among a large group of Indian village farmers. My Indian co-author and I looked at the claim that third-world farmers fail to modernize and improve their output because of "resistance to change". We found that attitude to change had nothing to do with it. It was the more intelligent and more highly motivated farmers who modernized and prospered. That naughty old IQ that the Leftists hate was at work again! How inconvenient that all men are unequal!

We know that Leftists also see "resistance to change" as what underlies conservatism -- even though James Lindgren shows from the public opinion poll data that it clearly is not. Leftists themselves are so hungry for change that they tend to see resistance to change under every bed, as it were. They cannot grasp that change as such it is just not a big issue for most people.

I might also note the unusually high quality of the data gathered by my Sikh collaborator in the Indian farmer study. He not only went out and interviewed real live Indian farmers but he sampled carefully those he interviewed and ended up doing a total of 300 interviews -- each of which took 4 hours! I cannot think of a single piece of Western research that was as thoroughly done. Handing out a bunch of questionnaires to your students (or playing tricks on your students) is the usual “research” method of Western psychologists.

It tends to show how shameful it is that research reported in Indian social science journals is almost universally ignored by allegedly "anti-racist" Western psychologists. Deeds speak louder than words! I myself do cite Indian sources. I cited five in the Indian farmer study alone. I can be slightly understanding that American and British psychologists fail to cite relevant sources in German but the Indians even go to the trouble of reporting their findings in English and still get ignored!

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SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines are strange beasts. You can enter the same search term day after day and get radically different results each time. A relatively recently-posted document gets treated in a particularly erratic way. One day the search engine will "find" it and the next day not. Where Google is concerned, it seems to take at least a month until a new document is regularly "found". I have been keeping a eye on the three critiques I recently wrote which demolish three bodies of Leftist writing about the psychology of conservatism. I would hope that anybody taking an interest in any of the "research" concerned would be certain to see my critique of it. I got particularly good results last night. On a Yahoo search using the terms social dominance orientation and Alain Van Hiel, my critique was the second document the search returned in both cases. I hope the ranking eventually settles down like that. Google also found my article on need for closure for the first time yesterday but it came in as about the 70th document on that search. It should move up as they find more links to it, however. This article explains some of the mystery behind Google’s erratic results in the first month.

It is hard to believe but some foolish French firm has just sued Google over the way Google uses its name in search results. If I were running Google I would just bar ANY results for the name of that firm. That would cause a quick change of tune.

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A reader has pointed out that the “Townhall” story about cyclamates that I linked to yesterday was incorrect. Despite all the evidence, the FDA has not yet lifted the ban -- though cyclamates are legal in Canada. So US diabetics have been deprived of the sweetener that worked best for many of them.

If you can judge an issue by those who oppose it, guns should be pretty safe in the US. This moronic anti-gun website gives the ban on cyclamates as an example of why government regulation is a good thing!

Since the NYT ran this story, I assume that it is supposed to embarrass Republicans: “Top California Democrat Makes a Surprising Revelation: He Voted for Schwarzenegger”. The implication being that Arnie is not really a conservative, I guess. But Priorities and Frivolities has another explanation.

Even socialists have to face reality eventually: “German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has announced that retirement pensions will be frozen next year as part of reforms to the country's over-burdened benefits system. A weary-looking Mr Schroeder revealed the decision after five hour long talks”

An extraordinary story here for those who have an IVF child (as I do) or who are still trying.

John Moore has a good summary of the movement to give convicted criminals the vote. Criminals are “a natural Democrat constituency”!

Newmark has the sort of intelligent question that we often seem to get only from economists: "Puzzle: why do many telemarketers oppose the Do Not Call list? Telemarketers know they have to place many, many calls to find one poor sucker they can fleece. Why shouldn't they welcome the government's help in narrowing the search?"

There is an unusual Japanese blog called "Shitfit" (!) that consists just of links without any commentary. It makes Haiku look verbose. But a lot of the links are interesting, though.

The Wicked one has an amusing “Letter from a farm kid” with a good sting in the tail.

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THEODORE DALRYMPLE AND THE BRITISH UNDERCLASS

Few readers of this blog will be unaware of the writings of British prison doctor “Theodore Dalrymple” (Anthony Daniels). There is a review of his latest book
here which goes on to compare the British and American situations. It concludes that, as in Britain, U.S. Leftists create and perpetuate social ills: "Here in America, the liberal Great Society programs of the Johnson White House continue to reward the destruction of the family and essentially addict the poor to welfare like it was crack cocaine. When reformers suggest that able-bodied, unemployed public housing residents perform community service in exchange for their housing, it is the liberal elites that join the chorus comparing this simple and logical measure to slavery. Rather than promoting behavior that encourages productivity and civility, these people seem willing to perpetuate the problem. Whether it's in England or here in America, these are prime examples of what I call liberal-elitist guilt. Left-leaning intellectuals who don't want to appear racist or close-minded view behavior they themselves would condemn in their family as "understandable" when it's exhibited in minorities, immigrants or poor whites. Excusing such behavior makes them believe they are showing solidarity with the disadvantaged, and it serves to enhance their own sense of moral superiority.”

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I mentioned yesterday the story from The Guardian about a moronic “briefing note” that allegedly emanated from someone in the White House. I note that the U.S. Embassy in Australia has denied that it was issued under White House authority: “The White House issued no such memo”

Nice to have friends: China too now seems to like Australia.

I think this says it all about gun control: “Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.), along with 22 Democrats and 40 Republicans as co-sponsors, has introduced legislation to guarantee residents of Washington their Second Amendment right to bear firearms in their homes and businesses. The legislation seeks to lift Washington's gun ban - one of the strictest in America - which forbids law-abiding citizens from possessing handguns. (Even rifles are allowed only on an extremely limited basis.) "The District of Columbia is a failed laboratory experiment for gun control," Souder says. "It has one of the most comprehensive bans on firearms in the nation, and it also has one of the highest violent-crime rates in the nation. "In fact, in 2002 it had the highest per-capita crime rate of any city in the nation. This is not a coincidence. The simple fact is, when law-abiding citizens are forbidden by their government from protecting themselves, they become easy prey for those to whom a gun ban is just one more law to break."

Your friendly bureaucratic protector: “The FDA goes through this sort of backtracking from time to time. They did it with artificial sweeteners, for example, back in the 1970's. First they banned a sweetener called cyclamates, convinced by the testimony of a few rats that it was a carcinogen. Then the tests came back and it turned out that cyclamates were substantially less likely to cause cancer than saccharine, its main competitor at the time. Red-faced, the FDA put cyclamates back on the approved list..... The cyclamates, Alar and silicone breast implant cases represent the human tendency toward a superstitious fear of the new and strange, a tendency which persists even in these enlightened times”

This article points out that making education ever more available to more and more people at lower and lower cost to them is basically a bottomless pit. Education is such a popular cause however that nobody seems to know how put a stop to the crazy spiral involved. That most of the extra credentials earned are meaningless bits of paper and that some of them actually reduce a person’s employability, nobody wants to admit: “Americans, it seems, have never been better educated. Between 1970 and 2000 the number of individuals enrolled in institutions of higher learning increased from about 8.5 million to 15.3 million. Likewise, from 1971 to 2001, the percentage of 25- to 29-year olds in the United States holding at least a bachelor's degree rose 71 percent. So why, as Congress prepares to reauthorize the federal law governing higher education, are policy makers so unhappy?"

According to the national convention delegate surveys... "60% of first-time white delegates at the [1992] Democratic convention in New York City either claimed no attachment to religion or displayed the minimal attachment by attending worship services 'a few times a year' or less. About 5% of first-time delegates at the Republican convention in Houston identified themselves as secularists." That’s a huge gap -- 60% versus 5% being irreligious. The USA really is in the middle of a religious war with only the conservatives defending the rights and values of traditional Christians. I guess competing religions do tend to be intolerant of one-another and there is no doubt that socialism has many of the characteristics of a messianic religion. Stanley Kurtz has a particularly persuasive treatment of Leftism as a religion in National Review.

Jeff Jacoby explains why the “Nobel” Peace Prize is just a political football. It is not even awarded by the same country that awards the other Nobel prizes.

As is now well-known, psychologists Jost, Kruglanski & Co. summarized past psychological research as showing that conservatives are “dogmatic” -- which is a clearly derogatory description (even more derogatory if you realize that psychologists equate “dogmatism” with “closed-mindedness”). Under pressure from public ridicule over their article (particularly over their identifying Communist tyrants such as Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives), Kruglanski and Jost did back off their claims considerably in a newspaper article, saying: "but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity -- all of which may be liabilities" I wrote a similar conclusion nearly 30 years ago as a result of one of my studies of dogmatism (just uploaded here and here): “We might, in other words, have to take care lest we on one hand condemn as dogmatic, what is in fact a highly adaptive need for simplification, and on the other tolerate as open-minded the merely vacuous”

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WHY THE LEFTIST INTELLIGENTSIA HATE SUCCESS

Thomas Sowell says: “It used to be said that nothing succeeds like success. Today, nothing draws fire like success.... A whole vocabulary has grown up among the intelligentsia to downplay or dismiss the achievements that create our standard of living and the longevity that allows us to enjoy it more fully. Where some achieve more than others, that is not seen as a special contribution to society that should be appreciated but as a grievance to be resented by others, in the name of equality.
Achievements are called "advantages" or "privileges."... Why is it that achievements -- whether in medicine, business, literature or wherever -- draw such negative reactions? Eric Hoffer may have put his finger on it when he said: "Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words." There is little or no role left for these self-important word-mongers when pharmaceutical companies, Wal-Mart, cops, and others do the things that make our lives better. The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.

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Another misleading headline: “Largest ever study finds GM crops 'harm wildlife'“ If you read the details all they found was that some insects were less common around some crops. And it was the weeds around the crops that made the difference, not the crops themselves. Big deal! A more accurate headline would have been “Weeds are a good thing” -- but that would have just produced laughter.

Wow! Here’s an angle on the Staten Island ferry accident I didn’t know about. New Yorker Fresh Bilge writes: “It appears that the operators hired an older man of dubious merit, placed him in command too soon, and lacked enough responsible personnel to deal with the moment of crisis. I would like to know more about the management of the Staten Island ferry system. This sounds like an affirmative action accident to me.”

A good summary here of the “briefing note” put out to journalists by some moronic White House staffer in connection with the forthcoming visit to Australia of GWB. Many Americans must be embarrassed at the obviously low intellectual level of their bureaucracy. Giving the Guardian good cause to laugh at you is not exactly clever. It’s all a pretty good comment on the shambles that is American education. No doubt the klutz who wrote the crap had a degree of some kind.

Bloody wars between rival Muslim groups have come to Australia. New South Wales Premier Bob Carr spoke for many Australians when he commented on it: “My message is simple: obey the law in Australia or ship out of Australia ... "We're not going to see, step by step, our civilisation dragged back to medieval standards of revenge cycles. Simple as that." Personal Independence Day has more on the subject under his heading “Pot calls kettle black” -- where he looks at the hypocrisy in the predictable calls for gun control that have arisen out of the matter.

In another post Personal Independence Day is just a little scathing about Noam Chomsky -- comparing our Noam unfavourably with a chimpanzee etc. He is still not as scathing about Noam as linguist Marc Miyake, however. Marc has the advantage over Noam of actually knowing a lot of languages and points out that Noam’s linguistic ideas are about as well-founded and as coherent as his political ideas. How surprising that a Leftist professor should actually not know much about his own subject! Who needs facts when you have got theories?

It looks like the schism in the U.S. Episcopal church is underway. No prizes for guessing which of the two new branches will attract the big congregations.

A pungent Ann Coulter comment: "The reason any conservative's failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It's an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites."

The Wicked one has a post on love that will give you the best laugh you have had all day -- money-back guarantee.

Further to my post yesterday pointing out that Mussolini was philosemitic for many years until his alliance with Hitler forced him to change course, I thought I might also mention that Musso was not the only Fascist with such views. Most people have probably forgotten that prewar Britain had a large Fascist movement too -- under the socially prominent Sir Oswald Mosley (the King came to his wedding!). And Sir Oswald initially used to EXPEL from the British Union of Fascists anybody who made antisemitic utterances! When his meetings came under constant attack from Jewish Leftists, however, he had something of a rethink. So, far from proving the association between nationalism and racism that Leftists love to assert, even Fascism itself shows that there is no such necessary association. For their times, most of the major Fascist leaders were actually fairly enlightened about the Jews.

As readers of this blog will by now be well aware, psychologists have been studying conservatism for many years in a hook-or-by-crook effort to show that conservatism is a sign of psychological deficiency of some sort. Their efforts are however regularly undermined by their own Leftist arrogance. They are so sure that they KNOW what is the case that the “proofs” they offer for their contentions are of the most careless kind. They are “proofs” which lack the most elementary scientific precautions. A case in point is one of the indexes of conservatism that they regularly use -- the Wilson C-scale. I have just uploaded another of my articles on this scale -- see here or here -- in which I point out yet again that this scale does, on a minority of occasions, seriously malfunction. Any real scientist who is shown evidence that his chief measuring instument is prone to give false readings on some occasions would either abandon it or test it for accuracy on every occasion that he used it. To test the C-scale in such a way whenever it was used would be easy but I have yet to read an article in the political psychology literature that does so. You are expected to take the accuracy of their findings on faith! What clowns!

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FASCISM AND THE JEWS

In their usual simplistic way, Leftists almost invariably equate Hitler’s German Nazism with Mussolini’s Italian Fascism. The facts are however very different and I have just posted some large extracts from a Jewish academic journal that show how different historically Fascism and Nazism were. Both Hitler and Mussolini combined Leftism with nationalism but there the similarities end. Far from being antisemitic, for instance, Mussolini repeatedly made effusively philo-Semitic speeches and finally reversed course only out of a desire to curry favour with Hitler. Even after he had finally passed antisemitic laws, however, Italy remained one of the safest places in Europe for Jews to be. All these facts are well-known to historians of the period but Leftist rhetoric regularly ignores such facts. Strictly speaking, a Fascist is actually someone who favours Jews! But you would never guess that from hearing any modern-day Leftist speak. For all their pompous talk about the subject, Leftist “intellectuals” generally know as much about racism as they do about Fascism ... which is very little indeed. I have been reading the textbooks and journal articles of academic psychology (which is overwhelmingly Leftist) for 40 years and have yet to find Fascism associated with anything but ANTIsemitism! Such total ignorance of history among those who are supposedly THE experts on racism! Read what the psychologists do not know here

Further references:

Herzer, I. (1989) The Italian refuge: Rescue of Jews during the holocaust. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press

Steinberg, J. (1990) All or nothing: The Axis and the holocaust London: Routledge.

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ELSEWHERE

"Two things...have staggered me....The first has been the dangers that have so swiftly come upon us in a few years, and have been transforming our position and the whole outlook of the world. Secondly, I have been staggered by the failure of the House of Commons to react effectively against those dangers." --Winston Churchill, 1936 ++ "All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into darkness....We have sustained a defeat without a war." --Winston Churchill, 1938. The first sentence could of course have been about the USA today. Fortunately, Bush and Blair have heeded the warning of the past and have not just sat around “negotiating” the way the British and French of the 1930s did. (Via The Federalist.

Miranda Devine points out that it is bad roads which are the major cause of traffic accidents and that speed cameras do nothing to improve safety -- despite government claims to the contrary.

There is a huge collection of Democrat quotes about Iraq dating from the Clinton years here. When GWB says something it is “lies”. When Democrats say the same thing it is cause for cheering!

Chicago as Little Mexico. For mile after mile nobody speaks English.

Thomas Sowell spells out the real political reasons why Democrats oppose vouchers. Hint: It has nothing to do with “compassion” for blacks or any other poorly schooled kids.

The small business regulatory swamp: "Perhaps the most destructive result of regulation is the effect on the poorest of our citizens. In our inner city, there is no shortage of needs ... no shortage of business opportunities to provide needed services and products ... but the complexity of starting a small business can be completely overwhelming ... so difficult, even with a great idea, that it makes a poor job or welfare look like the only reasonable choices."

This link summarises some of the work of "Austrian" economist Bill Hutt. He is particularly good on the destructive effects of labor unions.

Mike Tremoglie has been really listening to what the advocates of socialized medicine for America say: “It would be a grievous error to believe that the current proponents of a single payer healthcare system are concerned with anything other than ideology. I reached this conclusion after attending the annual National Managed Healthcare Congress conference in Washington D.C. in April 1993....”

The things you learn! Libertarian though I am, I did NOT know that Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum!. (Via Marc Miyake)

Amusing: A very arty blogger has got both myself and The Wicked one on her blogroll under the heading: “evil lynx to monitor for safety's sake”. I like it!

Michelle Malkin has a good comment on the racial preoccupations of the New York Times. A thinly disguised dislike of smart Indians is included, it seems.

The Oct 8th post on the blog of the National Association of Scholars has a good comment about the incoherence and irresponsibility of mainstream modern psychology. I like one of their earlier posts so much that I have it up permanently here.

I uploaded yesterday a brief report of one aspect of my “anthropological” study of neo-Nazis. I have uploaded today the main report. See here or here. The article may seem a little long but, like most anthropological studies, it is the product of many years of observation (seven years in this case) so there is much to report. Readers may be struck by the many similarities between the neo-Nazis of the 60s and early 70s that I describe and the Green-Left of today. I do make frequent references to Nazism in my writings, but I think that this report shows that I do so from a background of more extensive and intensive study of the phenomenon than any other writer in the social sciences. After reading my article you may understand my derision of the typical Leftist “research” into the causes of Nazism -- which consists of handing out a bunch of questionnaires to whatever group of university students that happens to be around at the time (!).

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THE "DEATH" OF BRITISH CONSERVATISM

An Anglocentric diagnosis of why the British Conservatives are so hopeless:

"The Tories claimed to be the party of one nation, representing the interests of all social groups; in the twentieth century, they accused Labour of being 'narrow' and 'sectional'. More often than not, British voters believed them. The Tories were in government, either alone or in coalition, for around 70 years of the twentieth century.... Today's Conservative Party is caught between outmoded traditions and an uncertain future.... When the Tories try pragmatically to adopt the methods and vocabulary of New Labour, though, this often has an even worse effect. For a start, they risk alienating the core upon which they depend. And to everyone else, this approach seems fake and empty.... But while Thatcherism played a role, the collapse of the Tory Party was one part of the story of the collapse of left v right politics - an event that occurred the world over. It was the international defeat of the left, capped by the break-up of the Soviet Union, that revealed the malaise of the right. The right had principally defined itself in terms of what it was against (hence Thatcher's war against the 'enemy within'), rather than what it was for. Once it lost its enemy, the right was left without a mission or direction.... The Tory Party, the most rooted political institution in British history, is now the most rootless. The leadership leaps on to any passing bandwagon, opportunistically trying to score points.

There are some interesting points in the above diagnosis but what it overlooks is that conservatism is alive and well elsewhere -- in the USA and Australia. The British Tories just have to adopt similar policies to those of American Republicans (e.g. tough on crime) and Australia's John Howard (e.g. tough on illegal immigrants) and they too could do well again. They just have to find a non-jellyfish to lead them.

As Chris Brand noted recently:

"On the eve of the UK 'Conservative' Party's annual conference, a nationwide (Populus) poll told them how to win back voters (Times, 4 x 03). Asked what would make them vote Conservative, 46% of Brits said "proposing much tougher sentencing for convicted criminals" and 43% said "presenting a clear plan to reduce the number of asylum-seekers entering Britain." By contrast, only 9% of voters said they would be impressed by "radical policies to restructure the National Health Service" and only 22% were interested in "measures to support marriage and the traditional family.""

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ELSEWHERE

Mike Tremoglie lists some of the lies the Left tell in their efforts to discredit Columbus Day.

An excellent post on the WSJ about the connection between education and vote. It seems that far more Californian college graduates voted for Arnie than for anyone else! Only those with higher degrees tended overall to be Democrat but even there the split on recall was not far off 50/50. The WSJ calls the postgrad Democrats “overeducated”. I would call them “out of this world”.

Where have I heard something like this before? “President Hu Jintao, who was at the launch base for the liftoff, called it "the glory of our great motherland," ... "The party and the people will never forget those who have set up the outstanding merit in the space industry for the motherland, the people and the nation," Hu said”. If you replace “motherland” with “Fatherland” ....

Some interesting recent articles on Think Israel. Examples: “WHY THE PEACE PROCESS CAN'T WORK AND SHOULD BE ABANDONED" by Robert Locke; "THERE IS ONLY A MILITARY SOLUTION" by Ariel Natan Pasko.

Traditional Episcopalian Bill Murchison comments: “With a certain kind of Anglican, anything goes -- except, perhaps, orthodox Christianity. If you're Anglican, you're expected to claim the right to theological speculation, whether or not you run afoul of the creeds and the Scriptures.”

Interested Participant has a good post about frivolous lawsuits and an idea about how to stop the egotists wasting people’s time.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with lots of good reading.

Because of a communication breakdown, I posted yesterday (post now deleted) some of James Lindgren’s notes on the psychology of conservatism. I thought that I should publish them anonymously but in fact it was not his wish that they be published anonymously. A revised version of his notes is now here. I understand that we have even more of his excellent work on this topic to look forward to in the future.

One of Lindgren’s points is that it is Leftists who are superstitious, not conservatives (contrary to what the “Berkeley Study” claimed). Yesterday’s WSJ has some more poll data in confirmation of that: “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they believe in reincarnation (by 14 percentage points), in astrology (by 14 points), in ghosts (by eight points) and UFOs (by five points)”

I have always been interested in the full range of the social sciences (which is how at one time I came to be teaching both psychology and economics) and anthropology has always been part of that interest. In my student days, therefore, I thought I would make good use of the anthropologist’s most usual research method (participant observation) to study the topic I have always been interested in most -- politics. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group “from the outside” -- You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it. I took this to heart and promptly joined a great range of political groups from the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society on one hand (Communist Front) to the local neo-Nazi group on the other. It was only the neo-Nazis, however, that I found much original to say about so I wrote up a total of three papers about them for publication in three Jewish social science journals. Today’s academic upload is one of the papers concerned. See here or here. In it, I address the usual Leftist theory that both conservatives and racists are prone to oversimplified thinking. I point out that, to the contrary, neo-Nazis are prone to very complex thinking -- since their view of the world is contradicted on every hand.

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FROM BROOKES NEWS

The late Jim Cairns was no friend of liberty. Jim Cairns is dead. Nevertheless, the man who supported every rotten communist regime you can think of is being painted by his political mates and leftwing media admirers as a friend of liberty.
Did the Wilsons setup Bush? The media frenzy over the alleged outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee, could be taking a new turn. Circumstantial evidence now suggests that Plame and her hubby, Joe Wilson, are not only using the incident to embarrass the Bush administration but they planned to embarrass it some time ago.
Schwarznegger and the hypocrisy of the Australian press. The scorn that the Australian media poured on Schwarznegger and the speed at which they repeated every accusation and vicious piece of gossip that would blacken his name has had the salutary effect of revealing just how hypocritical, prejudiced, dishonest and morally bankrupt many of our journalists are.
Green lies and nuclear energy. Greens are lying about the so-called dangers of nuclear energy.
Supermarkets are still super: defending supermarkets. Since the 1920s the size of firms has caused much confusion in neo-classical economics, giving birth to the myth that competition means plenty of firms selling the same product in the same market.

Details here

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LEFTIST HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

“Historical revisionism” is a term usually applied to attempts to portray Hitler as a broadly normal German leader and to question the extent of his crimes. Leftists try to gain kudos for themselves by frothing at the mouth over such attempts. But they in fact are the biggest revisionists of all -- as Peter Hitchens notes. He is rightly horrified that the true history of Britain is not now being taught in British schools:

"A schools video produced last year on the Forties barely gives a walk-on part to Winston Churchill, a man who is being steadily written out of modern history because he does not fit the fashionable myth that the Tories sympathised with the Nazis and the Left were the only people who opposed Hitler....

LABOUR'S role in the rise of Hitler was to consistently vote against the rearmament measures which narrowly saved this country from slavery in 1940. Stalin's insane orders to the German Communist Party, to refuse to co-operate with the Social Democrats, virtually ensured the Nazis would come to power in 1933.

This would be mirrored, six years later, in the joint victory parade staged by Nazi and Red Army troops in the then-Polish city of Brest, and the efficient supply of Soviet oil to Germany which fuelled the Nazi Blitzkrieg and the bombers which tore the heart out of London.

But millions of supposedly educated people know nothing of this, and are unaware that the one country which behaved with honour and courage when the fate of the world was being decided was Britain."

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.ELSEWHERE

"It's hard work being a left-wing kook these days. On top of anti- globalization demonstrations and anti-war protests, there is always some new issue to organize. This month it is 'Take Back Your Time Day,' scheduled for Oct. 24. Originated by the rabidly left-wing Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University, the goal of this effort is to force employers to give workers more paid time off."

Dennis Prager has a good point: “Whatever your politics, you have to be oblivious to reality to deny that America today is torn by ideological divisions as deep as those of the Civil War era. We are, in fact, in the midst of the Second American Civil War.”

Green crooks: “Now comes a study, "Green-Peace, Dirty Money: Tax Violations in the World of non-Profits," from Public Interest Watch demonstrating the importance of scrutinizing non-profits. PIW charges the activist environmental group Greenpeace with misusing tax-exempt donations for political purposes. Greenpeace, it says, is "the most egregious offender we reviewed"“

I am pleased to see that Frank Furedi, one of my fellow-graduates from the University of Sydney Psychology Department, has a new book out. It's a good one too: Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age. There is a review here: "With its criticisms of the 'growth industry' of counselling and the spread of concepts such as 'self-esteem', the book has received strong interest across the political spectrum in the UK, and will be welcomed on both sides of the Atlantic by people disturbed by aspects of our shrink society".

Leftists are so frantically opposed to the existing "system" in society that they have long been fascinated by the fact that conservatives do accept legitimate forms of authority in society. The Leftists are convinced that this must be deeply psychopathological and have been trying for the last 50 years to prove it -- without success. My latest academic upload is about this. I in fact had only a minor role in the paper concerned -- I helped an elderly colleague to write up some data to which he already had access. The sample was a high quality one -- a random sample of a large city -- and the major finding was that neither pro-authority nor anti-authority views showed any correlation with psychopathology that was worth speaking about -- except for one thing: Anti-authority people were much less intelligent! Needless to say, no Leftist to my knowledge has ever acknowledged THAT finding! See here or here.

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PERSONAL INDEPENDENCE DAY

Personal Independence Day seems to be the blogosphere's very own conservative anthropologist. As you may have guessed, most anthropologists are very Leftist. I have even heard some of them still defending Margaret Mead -- on the grounds that what she said SHOULD have been right!

As my older readers may recollect, a great favourite of the Left in the 1970s was the "Tasaday" -- a "lost" primitive tribe in the Philippines that was found to be very gentle and unwarlike. They were supposed to have all sorts of lessons for us wicked warlike Westerners. In case you are wondering why you have not heard of the Tasaday lately, it is because the whole thing was another total hoax. Personal Independence Day has the link. The whole "lost tribe" story was a pretty transparent lie from the beginning -- they lived only 3 hours walk from a regular Philippino village, for instance -- but the Left are past-masters at believing only what they want to believe and Leftists LOVE the "noble savage" myth. The fact of the matter is that the kindest, gentlest society that has ever existed on the earth is modern Western society -- but any Leftist intellectual worth his salt would rather die than admit that.

Personal Independence Day has much more on how primitive tribes in fact exploit credulous Western romanticists.

Personal Independence Day can't spell "galah", though. For U.S. readers, the galah is a colourful Australian parrot that has become a byword for stupidity because of its suicidal behaviour on some occasions. So "galah" is a popular Australian term of abuse for foolish or credulous people. Particularly cynical Australians have been known to mispronounce “a gala occasion” as “a galah occasion”. The real galahs exist in huge flocks in Australia's inland and are regarded by many country people as a great pest because of the way they damage crops. But bird-fanciers in the USA and Europe pay $1,000 or more for just one galah. The reason for such a stupid situation is "environmental protection". Need I say more? The Greenies are galahs too.

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ELSEWHERE

Oh, Wow! The BBC runs true to form in its alleged series on capitalism. It first asks where capitalism fits into people’s “search for meaning”? What rot! Blind Freddy knows that capitalism is a search for wealth. Then it asks did capitalism triumph over Communism? Only the BBC would doubt it. Finally it asks how we can find relevance for Marx’s ideas now that Communism is dead? So who cares?

Feisty Russian Christians: "The Russian Orthodox Church has demolished a chapel where a priest conducted a 'marriage' ceremony between two men. The Chapel of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was torn down apparently after local churchmen decided it had been defiled. The marriage of Denis Gogolyev and Mikhail Morozev in Nizhny Novgorod scandalized the Orthodox Church and created outrage among ordinary Russians." Nigeria’s Anglicans take their faith seriously too. And the Archbishop of Sydney is none to happy with homosexuality in the church either: “Dr Jensen said the holiness of churches in the Anglican communion had been put at risk by developments in Britain, the United States and Canada, and it was "absolutely inevitable that major divisive consequences will follow"

More reasons why the U.S. State Department should be “nuked”. The WSJ thinks the State Department is pretty disgusting too.

Is the myth cracking? "Events at a recent scientific conference in Moscow represent an important and dramatic change in the worldwide debate over global warming. Several distinguished scientists who spoke at the World Climate Change Conference in Moscow last week shattered claims that the science is settled and any consensus that the Kyoto Protocol would serve any useful purpose."

Organ transplants: Jeff Jacoby says that PAYING for organs would save lives.

Michael Darby is back online here with a big range of posts. His article on De Soto and what makes capitalism work is particularly interesting but he also points to the politicization of Oxfam (supposedly a charity) etc. The French get a rocket too. And there is the usual sad news from Zimbabwe.

John Moore has put up a big post on PC Watch showing how American librarians -- those supposed proud enemies of censorship -- in fact heavily censor conservative books. I noted here that the main organization of American librarians is in fact a Leftist anti-Christian group.

Chris Brand notes that racial profiling is routinely practiced in American medicine -- because the races really are different -- despite the current Leftist propaganda to the contrary. He also notes fresh evidence showing once again that low IQ people have poorer health. A healthy brain seems to go with a healthy body, funnily enough!

I have recently expanded my article in which I disembowel the trashy Leftist theory about conservative “Social dominance orientation”. My conclusion to the article: “So, rather amusingly, it seems that psychologists who find fault with conservatives can do so only by ignoring large swathes of the relevant literature”. I have just done a Google search on the term “Social dominance orientation” and my article already comes up tenth so I think that theory will sicken and die from now on.

My latest academic upload is about the idea of social deference as a factor influencing vote. I show that it is normal to look for evidence of ability in political candidates. Many Leftists seem to think that only social class should matter. See here or here.

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ACADEME TRIES TO CATCH UP

The launch of a new academic journal on the internet with the awkward name, “Public Library of Science Biology” seems to have made a bit of a splash as an “alternative” source of scientific information. There is no sign of it abandoning the usual academic Leftist orientation, though.

Internet-only academic journals are not at all new, of course, though few of them have much prestige. All academic journals are a bit of a waste of time these days, however. They are only useful for credentialling -- showing that a scientist can write at a standard that is approved by his/her peers. Particularly in the fast moving sciences, most communication is via the internet. Google is the first step for ANYONE researching a topic these days so scientific results and analysis that are up on the net will get 1,000 times more attention than something that exists only in the pages of an academic journal. Until I put my academic papers on the net I had got no enquiries about them for years. Now I find that graduate students email me about them regularly. I did briefly consider submitting to an academic journal my recent demolition of Van Hiel’s misleading work on the psychology of conservatism but that would have meant a 2-year wait until it appeared on the net and even then most journals put their files up in that accursed slow-loading PDF format which most Googlers look at only as a last resort. So instead, I put the article into the fastest-loading format there is (hand-coded html), took ten seconds to post the article in my personal webspace and now anybody googling the name “Alain Van Hiel” will be looking at my critique of his work in very short order. An infinitely better way of circulating information! And it also means that any of my fellow-bloggers who would like to help snooker Leftist misinformation can link to my article and help push it up the Google page-rankings.

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AN UNHAPPY VICTORIAN

The one really Leftist government in Australia is the government of the State of Victoria led by Steve Bracks. They seem to have come up with a rather nasty new idea recently. A reader writes:

"Last week Bracks had the new idea of placing speeding cameras on country roads to shake down speeding motorists. Now this is where it gets interesting: It is not the same regular shake-down. Oh no! If you are caught under this new system you will be hit with multiple fines. They are planning to place several cameras along country roads that will help to calculate the average speed. If a person is caught traveling above the average speed they will cop multiple fines and lose several more points. We now have a police force in Victoria that has been unable to solve twenty murders of slugs who belonged to organized crime rackets because the Police Commissioner is more concerned about "diversity" in the force and catching speeding motorists than about serious crimes. "Diversity" is important to her because, as an open lesbian (fat and ugly to normal people), she believes that we need a different type of police force than we had in the past!"

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ELSEWHERE

Thomas Sowell notes that the Democrats are now the party of the rich: “The time is long overdue to get rid of the outdated notion that liberal Democrats represent ordinary people. They represent such special interests as trial lawyers who keep our courts clogged with frivolous lawsuits, busybody environmentalists who think the government should force other people to live the way the greens want them to live, and of course the teachers' unions who think schools exist to provide their members with jobs.”

Schwarzenegger as a rejuvenator of conservative economic policies: “Schwarzenegger's pro-business stance is a startling change -- not only for the Golden State, but for the nation. Politicians in both parties ran from supporting business in the aftermath of the highly publicized corporate scandals. But the essential Schwarzenegger fact is this: He believes that business creates jobs. He also understands that rising incomes from job growth will create a stable revenue base for the state budget”

The "global warming" religion overlooks a lot -- not least the BENEFICIAL effects of increased atmospheric CO2: "Attempts to reduce the rate of rise of the air's CO2 content will seriously impair our ability to feed humanity fifty years from now, while maintaining sufficient land to support what currently remains of earth's natural ecosystems"

Interesting NYT article compares Bush's Iraq aid plan to the Marshall plan.

Islamism, whose proponents favor an Islamic state, appears to be losing ground in Indonesia, not gaining it.

Another Anglican diocese is trying desperately to get rid of the Bible-believing Christians in its congregations: “The Anglican Church in Melbourne has backed the immediate ordination of female bishops.”

Apparently Italy is now sending back planeloads of illegal immigrants to where they came from. It can be done! (link via The Wog).

The Wicked one has another joke about the French

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I attack the usual Leftist arguments for unrestricted immigration. Rather nastily, I use the Leftists’ own moral relativism against them! The paper was written in 1972 and I predicted at the time that a big increase in Asian immigration into Australia would give rise to an anti-Asian backlash. Australia DID allow a large increase in East Asian immigration after I wrote and my prophecy was fulfilled in the emergence in Australia in recent years of an electorally significant political party with an explicit policy of reducing Asian immigration (the “One Nation” party). Probably because East Asians are in general an intrinsically inoffensive people (“more sinned against than sinning”) the backlash has, however, taken no other significant form.

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ARROGANT LEFTIST ELITES ARE OK!

The WSJ reports that Leftists not only think that they are smarter (though without any proof of it) but also think that this gives them the right to dictate to the rest of the population -- which is very much what the Leftist eugenicists of the 1920s and 1930s thought. And THAT school of thought gave rise to Adolf Hitler:

“It's been nine years since Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein published "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life", in which they argued that American society has become stratified along lines of intelligence, so that a "cognitive elite", consisting of people with high IQs, enjoy levels of wealth and power far disproportionate to their numbers.

What's fascinating is that liberals, who denounced Murray and Herrnstein over the racial aspect of their book, seem to view rule by the cognitive elite as the natural order of things. And of course they think that THEY are the cognitive elite. We saw this in Jonathan Chait's Bush-hating cover story last month in The New Republic (which was, but is no longer, available online), in which Chait opined that the "striving, educated elite" views the President, because of his success despite his "dullness," as "an affront to the values of the liberal meritocracy." Yet in 1994 TNR devoted an entire issue to a series of essays on "The Bell Curve"; views ranged from harsh criticism to furious denunciation....

Consider this post from the Angry Left Web site DemocraticUnderground.com: “I would dare to assume that most of us here are in the upper 1%-20% of the population intelligence-wise. We must come to the realization that the majority of the population is in the lower 80% to 99% percent of the bell-curve. WE are not the norm. The Republicans understand that the average American is not very bright. They cater and pander to the masses. The Democratic Party tries to appeal to the population about "issues" that these people just don't understand”.”

The Left no doubt have in mind as proof of their intelligence the large numbers of University Professors who are Leftists (particularly in the Humanities) and the resulting Leftist tendencies of many highly educated people. I know it is very naughty of me to burst bubbles but, last time I looked, the pay of the average Professor was about the same as the pay of the average truck-driver. How smart is that? REALLY smart people go into business!

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ELSEWHERE

Michael Shermer at Scientific American is saying that the old Rousseauian "noble savage" dogma so beloved of the Left has had its day. Anybody who knows anything about anthropology knows how noble many primitive tribes are NOT -- despite the lies of the Leftist Margaret Mead.

How to create unemployment in one easy lesson: "Economic libertarians focus on the fallacy of minimum-wage legislation because the issue serves as a window through which to observe the very soul of a policy world view. It is the pons asinorum of the relationship between economics and politics. If the free market works -- meaning the existence of exchange under private property and contract enforcement -- then there is no need for such laws ..."

The story from someone who infiltrated Al Qaeda "The members of the network emerge as a bunch of inadequates and infantile fanatics, although they are not the less fearsome for that."

Cultural protectionism (the mania for “local content” much heard of almost everywhere outside the USA when TV programming is discussed) will probably get blown away by broadband internet. This basically anti-American idea will be thwarted by a technology that gives people the means to choose for themselves.

John Paulos has an interesting article about the large number of 'Brights' (non-religious people) in the USA: ”It should go without saying, but won't, that there are in this country not only millions of Brights, but millions of religious people who are bright, just as there are very many of both who are not”. He does however think that non-religious people are an under-recognized group.

Nick Queen, webmaster of Patriot Paradox is wanting to start a new feature on his site called Top Ten Most Dangerous Liberals of the Week. He aims to have Conservative bloggers vote for their Top Ten with a qualifying reason. Once they vote, most likely by a post on their blog, the votes will be tallied on Patriot Paradox.

I see that I have got a link from another Portuguese-language blog. This one is all in Portuguese, though -- no English-language quotes at all.

Chris Brand reports similarites between the brains of creative people and schizophrenics.

The Wicked one is having a bit of a laugh at the alternative medicine brigade.

I mentioned yesterday an absurd academic article by Eckhardt that purported to analyze militarism on the basis of responses by a group of Quakers. Eckhardt replied to my article and I have uploaded here (or here) my rejoinder to that. I show that he is deceptive in describing his own data and point out evidence that peaceniks such as himself “project” onto conservatives things that are really true of themselves. So I have been pointing to Freudian “projection” as a feature of Leftist psychology for over 30 years now. Eckhardt also misrepresents my study by saying that I showed only that people who like the Army are well-adjusted to it. I point out that I was in fact studying the adjustment of conscripts generally -- BEFORE they went into the Army.

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MILITARISTIC QUAKERS!

The tricks that Leftist psychologists get up to in a desperate attempt to defend their totally inadequate understanding of the world are normally pretty laughable but some are more laughable than others. My latest academic upload (see here or here) takes as its starting point an article by one William Eckhardt that must be a favourite candidate for the most laughable piece of “research” ever published in an academic journal. Eckhardt wrote an article that purported to be a study of militarism. So who did Eckhardt interview for his study of militarism -- Army personnel? Former Nazis? Far-Rightists? Believers in Imperialism? Vietnam “Hawks”? Guerillas? Spanish Falangists? He interviewed none of those. He interviewed a group of 46 QUAKERS! And it goes downhill from there. I did my best to be polite about it at the time but it was not easy.

It would actually have made more sense to do a study of pacifism using a sample of generals from the Oberkommando der Werhrmacht. Military men do at least normally have a healthy understanding of the horrors of war.

As bad is most likely to be driven out by better, I proceeded to do a study of my own which DID include Army personnel. I defined militarism as a liking for the Army and surveyed an intake of conscripts into the Australian army. I found that militarists were more racially tolerant than others (contrary to Eckhardt), that militarists were better adjusted than others (contrary to Eckhardt) and that people who wanted more equality in society were less well-adjusted than others (contrary to Eckhardt). There was a slight tendency for conservatives also to be better adjusted and for conservatives to approve of the Army.

If psychology were a science, my study would have been pretty fatal to the old Marxist theory that conservatives are maladjusted “authoritarians” but no psychologist to my knowledge took the slightest bit of notice of my findings. The Marxist theory is believed to this day.

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