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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ELSEWHERE

I knew that the smokers would strike back after my recent mention that they are more likely to be wackos. Here is one comment: "I do recall some study made the news a while ago, although I cannot now find them on the web, that tobacco actually alleviated symptoms of schizophrenia. As well, I once had a tenant who told me that he chain-smoked for that very reason (for whatever that is worth). Still it is not unreasonable to suggest that maybe schizophrenics smoke because they are schizophrenic (and it alleviates symptoms)rather than to suggest that smoking is a symptom, or even a cause. After all, do we not all die after a life-long addiction to dioxide? And an excess of oxygen can also cause cellular damage."

Jeff Jacoby too has now come out slugging at the way most of the media have misrepresented the recent report on Iraqi WMDs.

Maybe Australia’s ABC (public broadcaster) has learnt a tiny bit from the recent debacle at its British equivalent (the BBC). It has just admitted that ONE of its programs was biased about the Iraq war. Very big of them! The finding of bias was by “an independent panel” which was “appointed by the ABC board” (!).

Margaret Snyder compares American "liberalism" with Communism and Fascism and concludes: "So it is that liberalism has taken away the self-respect of whole classes of people. It has done so by the same elitist mentality that characterized the two vilest socialisms of the twentieth century. Most people who consider themselves liberals consider their motives to be pure, and I don't doubt that they are. But by their attitudes and policies, they encourage dependency on the state and ultimately do much more harm than good."

This is from 8 months back but a sensible column in the Guardian is a bit of a rarity so I can't help quoting it. Nick Cohen notes how the Left cheerfully allied itself with the Islamic fundamentalists to oppose the Iraq invasion and comments: "The absence of principle is matched only by the absence of intelligence. What is the Left offering Iraq? It has no strategy other than the continuation of a brutal status quo. It can't support the Iraqi democrats because they say Saddam can only be overthrown by violence. It can't support the Iraqi Kurds because they agree. It has been reduced to allying with religious bigots". But who ever said the Left had principles?

Leftists often claim St. Francis of Assisi as one of their own -- because of his vow of poverty. That vow was solely for religious reasons however and it was in fact the disciples of St. Francis who first put together what we now recognize as the theory of capitalism and free markets!

Admiral Carey puts the boot into the U.S. Iraq skeptics: "Yet it certainly appears to me that we have men and women dying in Iraq and Afghanistan right now that in some instances are facing this danger because these enemy actions are being inadvertently encouraged by public statements made by some of their fellow citizens."

Arafat was trained and for many years bankrolled by the KGB.

It's an article of faith among Leftists that FDR rescued America from the great Depression. If you look at some of his absurd policies, however, it is clear that he PROLONGED it rather than cured it. Previous depressions where the government did nothing ended much sooner.

Research shows 'negative' political campaign advertising works better than positive adverts. This research seems to reinforce the findings of the public choice school of economists who argue that people have more incentive to make a reasoned choice in the private marketplace than under traditional democratic political rules, thus markets more closely resemble 'ideal democracies' than do modern states.

Speaking of Schwarzenegger’s victory, Henninger notes: “23% of blacks voted Republican, as did 41% of Hispanics. That this should happen once under any circumstances is extraordinary” and argues that it shows a Rightwards shift in American politics generally.

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LE FROGS ENCORE

In response to my recent post about French attitudes, a reader emailed me a few of his own experiences with these delightful people:

"In the early 90's I worked for a French Investment Bank in New York which was supposed to be the "most International" of all the French banks. This meant that we local hires had first hand dealings with the archetypal French upper crust snob. It was very amusing watching these guys at work. They all wore the same clothes, had the same mannerisms and were usually not very good at their jobs because they all seemed to practice "the cover your ass" outlook towards work.

Because they were French expats they were not on the same compensation as the locals which bothered them no end. It was difficult for them to understand how they could be paid less ( they didn't work very hard) despite the fact that their jobs were " guaranteed for life. Locals could be fired at a moment's notice in New York. Political intrigue was their most important daily workhabit. Honestly, most of them reminded me of Inspector Clouseau as they frequently argued points that made no sense.

I once discussed the reasons for the high French unemployment rate with a high level executive who was visiting. He told me that most influential French did not think there was such a high unemployment ( at the time the rate was 10%) rate in France for which he gave the following account: Of the 3 million unemployed in France 1 million were in the latter part of their working life (middle aged) who would not be able to ever find a job but were well looked after by the state. One million were Arabs or North Africans who were considered sh.t who would never be offered a job by French companies. The last one million were French youth and it was this group which was the most worrying. He said that the true French unemployment rate were the 1 million youth and that was not a really high number anyway.

This is how these people thought and that's why France will change only when there is a revolution. The hatred they have for the US could be easily seen at the time -- though then manifested in another way. At the time they thought the Americans were simply a country full of stupid people and of lesser social ranking than the French.”

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THE GIPPER

In response to my recent note about Ronald Reagan’s unforgettable speech at the time of the “Challenger” disaster Four Right Wing Wackos kindly sent me a link to the transcript of the speech. It still moves me to tears. And to have seen that good and dignified man himself giving it.....

In the wacky world of Leftist intellectuals, conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. So by that criterion, it looks like Reagan was NOT a conservative. He said: "'Status quo,' you know, that is Latin for 'the mess we're in.'" But if the Gipper was not a conservative, who would be?

The Leftist smear that Reagan was just an actor and a puppet with no ideas of his own is refuted eloquently in the book of Reagan’s own handwritten notes reviewed briefly here

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ELSEWHERE

Ann Coulter responds to the Leftist accusations about her “Lies” and shows who the real deceivers are.

In another one of his gargantuan posts, Captain Clueless spells out his view of why Leftists often seem hypocritical and self-contradictory. I would summarize it much more simply by saying that Leftists have no real principles so will say anything that they think sounds good at the time in the hope that doing so will get them power or influence. As a man who voted for Al Gore, however, the good Captain is trying to make it sound better than that. At least he now realizes that Leftists have no respect for democracy.

Good stuff! The American Anglican Council has in effect called for a schism with the Episcopal Church over the un-Biblical doctrines of the Episcopal leadership (homsexual bishops etc). A schism could get a lot of genuine Christians among the church membership out from under the influence of their atheist bishops.

Watcher of Weasels has an interesting feature: They put up lists of recommended posts from other blogs. Seeing I have made the list, I respect their judgement!

Australian blogger, Personal Independence Day has a BIG post about immigration and xenophobia. He shows that, despite Australia’s tough treatment of illegal immigrants, Australians are no-more anti-immigrant than people from most other countries and that Australian attitudes have become MORE anti-immigrant since the big postwar immigration influx began.

Chris Brand's is still posting up a storm at the moment so I have transferred some more of his recent posts here for convenience. He has an interesting comment about how many self-made millionaires are dyslectic.

China Hand is back in Australia on vacation and outraged at the cost of dentistry here. But the fillings he got in China fell out! He is now looking for a middle way.

The Wicked one has come out in favour of the Vatican’s stance on condoms!

My latest academic upload again points to the generally unscientific culture that prevails in academic psychology. See here or here.

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FROM ACADEME

I have posted another extract from an academic journal article here. It shows that there is such a thing as a religious personality. I wonder where I fit into that? I was very evangelical in my teens and still love religious music (particularly Bach) but I have been an atheist since I was 19. No doubt someone will say that conservatism is now my religion but I think I am a conservative precisely because I am skeptical. I need evidence before I accept things -- unlike Leftists who seem to regard evidence as an inconvenience. I think Leftism is the religious end of the political spectrum -- though people of other religions do of course have political views too. The anarcho-capitalist extreme of libertarianism can be pretty religious at times too in my judgment.

There is a blog called Marginal Revolution run by a couple of economists which has some excellent posts. Their comment on the current panic about loss of jobs in American manufacturing (under the Oct 4th heading "Manufacturing Fallacies") has this pointed conclusion: "Job destruction" is a vital aspect of progress. If we had not destroyed millions of farm jobs most of us would still be working in agriculture today." And their Oct. 6th post under the apt heading "Doomsday Scenarios collide" is a great comment on the nutty extrapolations that the Greenies go in for. One of the bloggers concerned has also written an excellent survey of the socialist roots of antisemitism

The flippant Chris Lawrence does a bit of straight shooting about the widespread ignorance of statistics among "social scientists": "Frankly, a lot of the stats you see in top-flight journals are flaming crap _ among the sins: misspecified models, attempts to make inferences that aren't supported by the actual econometric model, acceptance of key hypotheses based on marginally significant p values, use of absurdly small samples, failure to engage in any post-estimation diagnostics." To that I would add treating your source of data as a sort of black-box -- without looking at what is in the box.

There is a powerful expose here of the rampant Stalinism still common among the current crop of American historians. Now that the Soviets are long gone, American historians are still defending them -- and teaching their students that Communist spys were the good guys and America evil. I hope nobody reading this is paying for their kid to study history at a major American university!

Tobacco smoking has now been found to correlate with schizotypal and borderline personality traits Not good! Most jailbirds smoke. Tobacco is the currency in jail. There also appears to be a (negative) relationship between smoking and intelligence. Note that we are talking only about a correlation here, however. It does not mean that ALL smokers are fruitcakes. Reference: Kolliakou, A. & Joseph, S. (2000) "Further evidence that tobacco smoking correlates with schizotypal and borderline personality traits". Personality and Individual Differences, 29 (1), 191-194.

My own latest academic upload is of technical interest only but it is part of my refutation of the still-common Leftist claim that conservatives have "authoritarian" personalities. (They don't -- but they are not as hostile to existing authorities as Leftists are). See here or here.

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ELSEWHERE

How nice that all the last-minute Leftist lies about Schwarzenegger failed utterly in their object. As everybody knows, the last Hollywood actor to become Governor of California was Ronald Reagan so let us hope for great things from Arnold too.

Murray Soupcoff has another blast at the rich and righteous -- under the headline: "Lifestyles of the rich and hypocritical"

Left-leaning magazine "The Atlantic" has a surprisingly sensible article on poverty: "Since the mid-1990s, almost everyone has accepted that welfare should be linked to work. Only the most reactionary of liberals want to go back to providing cash as a substitute for employment. The new consensus is a good thing, because it matches a new reality. No feasible amount of cash assistance could solve America's poverty problem, even in principle. The problem has changed. It has become more behavioral than economic."

A good comment here about how most of the media have misrepresented the recent official report about Iraqi WMDs.

One of the most basic principles of natural justice is that we are not responsible for the deeds of other people. Under U.S. "environmental" law that principle no longer exists. You can be jailed for something someone else did while you were home in bed. I'm not kidding! Greenies really are haters of people and their hate is now law in many ways.

Atheist though I am, I rather liked the Pope's recent address to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He comes across as a great Christian pastor and his veiled warning about the Anglican attitude to homosexuality ("new and serious difficulties have arisen on the path to unity") was no less than his duty as guardian of church traditions and teachings.

Amusing that Leftists now want to censor sexy advertisements -- on “feminist” grounds of course. All women are equal too, it seems, so attractive women should be hidden away as much as possible, apparently.

I have just transferred some more of Chris Brand's recent posts here for convenience. He notes some of the brain physiology that correlates with IQ and has a big post on the call for voluntary eugenics in Denmark.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

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RACE-RELATED:

A comment from a reader on the recent affirmative action parody at Southern Methodist University where blacks were offered cheaper cookies: "It doesn't surprise me that SMU shut down that bake sale. I've visited the campus there many times; sitting in on lectures and talking to some of the PoliSci faculty. I almost went there for my degree simply because it is such a prominent school, but realized after the first semester that I wasn't learning anything - I was being indoctrinated. Views from the "right" are NOT tolerated; students expressing conservative viewpoints are openly ridiculed in the classroom by instructors and then pointedly ignored."

Sowell says: "The most dramatic rise of blacks out of poverty occurred before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That's right -- before. But politicians, activists and the intelligentsia have spread so much propaganda that many Americans, black and white, are unaware of the facts" He also points out that he and many other blacks got their university degrees long BEFORE Affirmative action.

Mike Tremoglie reminds us of an excellent story: "Liberals like to call conservatives racist, sexist and homophobic. What is unusual is for the media to note that liberals often do not abide by their own rules. During Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation hearings, GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch asked her if a company located in a mostly minority area would be considered guilty of discrimination if it did not employ the same percentage of minorities as were in the general population. Ginsburg replied that it would be. Hatch then informed Ginsburg that her staff was mostly white, although she was an employer in the mostly black city of Washington, D.C. Ginsburg exemplifies liberal hypocrisy. The rules are meant for others, not them. It is perfectly fine for a white liberal judge to allege that a small-business owner is discriminating. But the judge can do the same thing without thinking twice."

Writing in a widely-read academic journal, Wickett, Vernon & Lee (2000) show that cranial capacity (how big your brain is) is a strong predictor of 'g' (general intelligence) and Rushton & Ankney (2000) also show that cranial capacity is lower among blacks. Cranial capacity is not the whole story, of course. As Burns, Nettelbeck & Cooper (2000) and many others show, the speed of the brain's electrical response to stimulation is a major physical factor behind IQ.

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LE FROGS

Two points in a recent George Will article that I agree with: Pakistan may now be the most dangerous breeding-ground for Islamic terrorists; and French nationalists (whom Will dubiously describes as “Fascists”) are just as anti-American as the French Left, though for different reasons. Chirac is after all a Rightist in French terms. The world-dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture really burns up ALL the French.

The French socialist government passed a law in 1998 reducing everybody’s working hours to 35 hours per week -- but everybody still had to get the same pay as when they worked 40 hours per week, of course! With the usual socialist logic, that was supposed to reduce unemployment. As any economist could have told them, it increased unemployment. France now has an unemployment rate 50% higher than the USA. And the French think that they are so much wiser than Americans!! They are now trying to do a U-turn on the policy.

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ELSEWHERE

What Fun! A new study by psychiatrist Robert Spitzer (who helped to have homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental illnesses in 1973) says that homosexual gay men and women can be transformed into heterosexuals through psychotherapy. The report is that, of 200 homosexuals and lesbians given the treatment, 78 per cent of males and 95 per cent of females reported a change in their sexuality. Huffing and puffing from the Left now underway!

I liked this headline: “Priest defrocked for gay wedding”

Jeff Jacoby has some good answers to the current attacks on Rush Limbaugh.

The U.S. State Dept. continues to defy belief. As the WSJ points out, it has links to famous American speeches on its site -- including speeches by Jimmy peanut and Mrs Clinton but nothing by the Gipper! I personally remember being deeply moved by the speech I saw President Reagan give on TV immediately after the U.S. first lost a space shuttle and remember thinking how lucky America was to have such a wonderful President at that time who knew how to help heal the wound of such a tragic event. I will never forget that speech.

I mentioned yesterday the body of research by psychologist Alain Van Hiel which purported to show conservatives to be maladjusted in various ways. I was quite kind in my comments about him because I think he has been naive rather than dishonest. If you want to see how easy it is to completely wipe the floor with Leftist psychologists, however, have a look at this demolition of an article written by a psychologist from the People’s Republic of Berkeley. It has been reproduced by several other people on their websites so they too obviously think it is a pretty effective put-down.

I have not been able to contact Jim Lindgren, Prof. of Law at Northwestern University, for ages. Last I heard a few months ago he was off for a fortnight’s vacation in Switzerland. Does anybody know if he is languishing in a Swiss dungeon or something?

My latest academic upload shows that the type of conservatism most psychologists connect with racism is in fact uncorrelated with racism when fairly measured. See here or here.

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VAN HIEL’S PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSERVATISM

For over 50 years now the Holy Grail of academic political psychologists has been to find evidence of psychological inadequacy among conservatives. It has been a fool’s errand. All the supposed “proofs” collapse once they are subjected to critical examination (See Ray, 1983, 1988, 1990, 2003a & b; Ray & Najman, 1987). But the effort goes on.

The person leading the charge at the moment is someone I mentioned yesterday -- the Belgian psychologist Alain Van Hiel. He is pouring out articles on the subject at a great rate at the moment. Van Hiel is a bit different from his predecessors, however. Most psychologists simply hand out a bunch of questionnaires to their own students to gather “proof” of their theories. This is so laughable as to show that there is no sincere quest for the truth there. All they are really doing is saying that they KNOW what the truth is and any “evidence” at all will do to demonstrate the correctness of their ideas. Van Hiel, however, does real research. He goes out into the highways and byways for his surveys in addition to surveying his students. So I credit Van Hiel as a sincere seeker after truth.

He is however greatly handicapped by what has gone before him. He does not appear to be a psychometrician so rather than design his own scales (sets of questions), he constantly uses scales devised by his un-serious predecessors. This means that all his hard work has essentially gone for naught. His data is only as good as the scales he uses and those scales are pretty laughable. I have dissected two of the scales concerned in recent days (The Kruglanski “Need for closure” scale and the Sidanius “Social dominance Orientation” scale) so you only have to scroll down this page to see what a nonsense are the sort of scales that the unfortunate Van Hiel has to rely on.

I have written a full academic critique of four of Van Hiel’s recent articles here (or here) for those who want to pursue the topic in greater depth. For his own sake, I hope Van Hiel turns to more fruitful outlets for his energies in the future.

Incidentally, most of the scales devised by Left-leaning political psychologists (see e.g. Ray, 1983 & 1990) are so poorly conceived that they end up showing negligible correlation with vote in the general population -- i.e. supposedly “Rightist” statements are just as often agreed to by people who vote for Leftist political parties as by people who vote for Rightist political parties. How embarrassing! The scales that I devise however, generally work very well -- providing correlations of up to .56 with vote (Ray & Wilson, 1976; Ray, 1984a &b). In other words, the results show that I DO know what the factors are that influence political stance in the general population, whereas the Leftist psychologists do not.

References
Ray, J.J. (1983). Half of all authoritarians are Left-wing: A reply to Eysenck and Stone. Political Psychology, 4, 139-144.
Ray, J.J. (1984a) Combining demographic and attitude variables to predict vote. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 145-146.
Ray, J.J. (1984b) Attitude to abortion, attitude to life and conservatism in Australia. Sociology & Social Research 68, 236-246.
Ray, J.J. (1988) Cognitive style as a predictor of authoritarianism, conservatism and racism: A fantasy in many movements. Political Psychology 9, 303-308.
Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.
Ray, J.J. (2003a) Academic fakers. FrontPage Magazine, 27 August.
Ray, J.J. (2003b) Social dominance orientation: Theory or artifact?
Ray, J.J. & Najman, J.M. (1987) Neoconservatism, mental health and attitude to death. Personality & Individual Differences, 8, 277-279.
Ray, J.J. & Wilson, R.S. (1976) Social conservatism in Australia. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Sociology 12(3), 255-257.




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More Leftist "compassion": "Riot police in Rome used batons and teargas to beat back hundreds of anti-globalization protesters at a demonstration on Saturday during a meeting of European Union leaders. Scores of police charged the demonstrators after being hit by stones and bottles as they tried to maintain security at the EU conference where leaders met to discuss the bloc's proposed new constitution. Several demonstrators and two policemen were injured. One elderly man was taken away in an ambulance with a deep gash to his head and blood pouring down his face. Police said they had detained 13 protesters."

Being extremely pro-Indian, I am delighted to see that U.S.-Indian co-operation is forging ahead so rapidly under GWB: "India and the US are set to sign a pathbreaking new agreement on cooperation in high-technology, space launch equipment, civilian nuclear energy and missile defence over the next couple of weeks."

Surprise, Surprise! "The plight of many Afghan women has barely improved in the two years since the ouster of the Taliban regime, with forced marriages, rapes and domestic violence still occurring frequently, Amnesty International said." I guess Afghanistan must be Islamic!

About flaming time! "The State Department said Syria "must cease harboring terrorists and make a clean break from those responsible for planning and directing terrorist action from Syrian soil."

The Wicked one is pretty cynical about obesity.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is an attempt to explain some basic psychometric concepts simply. Not for the general reader.

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THE KRUGLANSKI FOLLIES: IS A BABY THE IDEAL PERSON?

One of the authors of the notorious "Berkeley study" of conservative psychology called "Political conservatism as motivated social cognition" was a confused soul (officially called a “Distinguished University Professor”) named Arie Kruglanski. He has for a long time been pushing the line that conservatives have a need for a simplistic view of the world. He calls it "Need for Closure" and says that such needs are a sign of psychological maladjustment or weakness. Many other psychologists agree with him (e.g. Kossowska & Van Hiel, 2003). So let us look at the set of statements that Kruglanski (Kruglanski, Webster & Klem, 1993) uses to detect good or bad mental health. For copyright reasons I cannot reproduce them all but a few excerpts tell the story well enough. Here are some of the allegedly "unhealthy" statements:

I find that a well ordered life with regular hours suits my temperament.
I feel uncomfortable when I don't understand the reason why an event occurred in my life.
I don't like to go into a situation without knowing what I can expect from it.
When I am confused about an important issue, I feel very upset.
I usually make important decisions quickly and confidently
I don't like to be with people who are capable of unexpected actions.
I dislike it when a person's statement could mean many different things
I'd rather know bad news than stay in a state of uncertainty.

I would call all of the above statements expressions of normal, healthy, adult attitudes myself. So let's look at what Kruglanski thinks is particularly healthy:

When I go shopping, I have difficulty deciding exactly what it is that I want.
I tend to put off making important decisions until the last possible moment
I would describe myself as indecisive.
My personal space is usually messy and disorganized
I tend to struggle with most decisions

So being a messy, indecisive and disorganized ditherer is healthy! Clearly, capable confident, can-do people are what Kruglanski dislikes and babyish, helpless people are his ideal. I suppose the more babyish we are the easier it is for others to push us around and make our decisions for us -- and Leftists like that. There is another critique pointing out that Kruglanski does not know what he is doing in Neuberg et al. (1997) and my demolition of the Jost et al (2003) study is here.

One point I might also mention here is that Jost, Kruglanski & Co were much enamoured of Glenn Wilson’s 1973 book, The psychology of conservatism. I actually wrote chapter 2 of that book so I know a bit about it. The theory Glenn put forward at that time was that conservatives have a greater fear of uncertainty than Leftists. So one would think that conservatives would be more fearful overall. There is a lot of uncertainty in this world. The EVIDENCE is, however, that conservatives are no more fearful than anybody else. Kruglanski & Co would no doubt argue that the lack of overall fearfulness among conservatives is because conservatives have adopted successful strategies to deal with their fears but isn’t it odd that there is NO SIGN of such greater fear except via the sort of hokum I have pilloried above?

Finally, for a bit of humour, I might mention some findings of that very hard-working Belgian psychologist Alain Van Hiel. He recently joined with a Polish colleague to test the Kruglanski scale in both Belgium and Poland (Kossowsk & Van Hiel, 2003). He found that “Need for closure” was RIGHTIST in one country and LEFTIST in the other! As Robert Burns said: “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley!”

I can’t help it: I’ve got to mention another amusing Van Hiel finding (Van Hiel, Kossowska & Mervielde, 2000). Because he is such a hard worker, Van Hiel went the trouble of testing out a Kruglanski-type theory on a group of people who were actually interested in politics. He used a scale of “Openness to ideas” and expected that Rightists would be less open to ideas but it turned out that it was the LEFTISTS who were closed-minded! Embarrassing!

References
Jost, J.T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A.W., & Sulloway, F.J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.
Kossowska, M. & Van Hiel, A. (2003) The Relationship Between Need for Closure and Conservative Beliefs in Western and Eastern Europe. Political Psychology 24 (3) 501.
Kruglanski, A.W., Webster, D.M., & Klem, A. (1993). Motivated resistance and openness in the presence or absence of prior information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 23-35
Neuberg, S.L., West, S.G., Judice, T.N., & Thompson, M.M. (1997). On dimensionality, discriminant validity, and the role of psychometric analyses in personality theory and measurement: Reply to Kruglanski et al.'s (1997) defense of the Need for Closure Scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1017-1029.
Van Hiel, A., Kossowska, M. & Mervielde, I. (2000) The relationship between Openness to Experience and political ideology. Personality and Individual Differences 28 (4), 741-751

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There is an article here which traces the lack of happiness in modern society to a set of generally Leftist values that have become prevalent nowadays: "Radical individualism is familiar in contemporary values. "Do your own thing", "Seek you own bliss", "Challenge authority", "If it feels good, do it", "Shun conformity", "Don't force your values on others", "Assert your personal rights", "Protect your privacy", "Cut taxes and raise executive pay" (personal income takes priority over the common good), "To love others, first love yourself", "Listen to your own heart", "Prefer solo spirituality to communal religion", "Be self-sufficient", "Expect others likewise to believe in themselves and to make it on their own_": such slogans define the heart of social individualism" The authors present a lot of evidence that we are now less happy than we used to be but I myself suspect that a lot of it is just a matter of higher expectations these days. You can live in Bangladesh and be as happy as a clam if your expectations are low. It does appear that conservatives are happier, though.

I have just transferred some more of Chris Brand's recent posts here for convenience. He says that minorities are now OVER-represented on British TV.

The Wicked one says that poverty in the Western world is mostly mythical.

For my latest academic upload, I have made my recent critical observations on social dominance orientation into a short article. See here or here.

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