Category Archives: Propaganda

UPDATED: The Ferguson Report: The Best Of Pseudoscience (‘Disparate Impact Gambit’)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Race, Racism

If, as TAWE (The Ass With Ears) would have it, and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report “evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement”—then, by logical extension, the Civil Rights Movement was spawned by not much at all. Since we know this to be untrue, what do you suppose is missing from the Ferguson report, according to which there exists “‘a pattern or practice of’ racial bias in both policing and the court system, searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and interference with the free expression rights of all peaceful protesters”?

“African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system,” the report asserts.

Here’s what’s going on: To advance propaganda, pseudoscience must be deployed. After all, the Idiocracy will be none the wiser. Yes, black are more likely to be stopped by law enforcement than whites. But the Ferguson report fails to control for the fact that there are differences in rates of offense between blacks and whites (and Asian, by the way, who’re conveniently omitted from the “disparate impact” formula used by our racism-spotters).

Via InvestorsBusinessDaily:

“The Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, explains that differences in traffic stops can simply be attributed to ‘differences in offending.'”

But federal data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that blacks violate traffic laws at higher rates than whites in every offense, including driving with an invalid license.
Yet Holder makes it sound as if Ferguson police target blacks at random for stops for no other reason than “driving while black,” and then pile on the tickets. …

It is one thing to demand that traffic and other laws be repealed because blacks are more likely to fall foul of them. (I certainly think drug laws should be repealed together with all unjust laws, irrespective.) But it is quite another thing to shout racism when blacks are stopped more frequently, because cops are obliged to enforce laws against offenders. People are sick of it.

UPDATE: The brilliant Heather Mac Donald on “The Disparate Impact Gambit”:

… Disparate-impact analysis obviates the need to find intentional discrimination in a civil-rights case; a policy or practice can be wholly color-blind, but if, in its application, it falls more heavily on a particular racial group, it is illegal under certain federal regulations. A job requirement that employees have a high-school degree is a classic example of a policy that has a disparate impact, if the high-school-degree requirement disqualifies more blacks than whites for the job. Never mind that the employer applies his job threshold without racial bias, he can be held liable for racial discrimination anyway if he is unable to justify the high-school requirement as a business necessity.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of disparate-impact theory against schools for their disciplinary practices has been a disaster for classroom safety and order. That school-discipline crusade has meant that schools cannot remove unruly black students from the classroom under neutral behavioral codes without triggering potential legal liability, simply because more black students violate those codes. But as destructive as the application of disparate-impact theory to school authority has been, applying it broadly to law enforcement is a recipe for anarchy. There are few criminal laws that do not have a disparate impact on blacks, because the black crime rate is more elevated than the white crime rate.

MORE Mac Donald.

UPDATED: Ron Paul On Ukraine (Questioning The Media Monolith)

Foreign Policy, libertarianism, Propaganda, Ron Paul, Russia

Ron Paul chronicles what went down between Kiev, the Kremlin and the confederacy of knaves in DC. He asks:

“What if John McCain had stayed home and worried about his constituents in Arizona instead of non-constituents 6,000 miles away? What if the other US and EU politicians had done the same? What if Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt had focused on actual diplomacy instead of regime change?”

The history of meddling and regime change:

It was one year ago last weekend that a violent coup overthrew the legally elected government of Ukraine. That coup was not only supported by US and EU governments — much of it was actually planned by them. Looking back at the events that led to the overthrow it is clear that without foreign intervention Ukraine would not be in its current, seemingly hopeless situation.

By the end of 2013, Ukraine’s economy was in ruins. The government was desperate for an economic bailout and then-president Yanukovych first looked west to the US and EU before deciding to accept an offer of help from Russia. Residents of south and east Ukraine, who largely speak Russian and trade extensively with Russia were pleased with the decision. West Ukrainians who identify with Poland and Europe began to protest. Ukraine is a deeply divided country and the president came from the eastern region.

At this point the conflict was just another chapter in Ukraine’s difficult post-Soviet history. There was bound to be some discontent over the decision, but if there had been no foreign intervention in support of the protests you would likely not be reading this column today. The problem may well have solved itself in due time rather than escalated into a full-out civil war. But the interventionists in the US and EU won out again, and their interventionist project has been a disaster.

The protests at the end of 2013 grew more dramatic and violent and soon a steady stream of US and EU politicians were openly participating, as protesters called for the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Senator John McCain made several visits to Kiev and even addressed the crowd to encourage them.

Imagine if a foreign leader like Putin or Assad came to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the Obama Administration!

As we soon found out from a leaked telephone call, the US ambassador in Kiev and Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, were making detailed plans for a new government in Kiev after the legal government was overthrown with their assistance. …

MORE.

David Warsh, proprietor of economicprincipals.com, also questions the media monolith:

… Notice anything funny about this narrative? Putin is always the impulsive actor, never the one who is acted upon. He is never reacting to anything that NATO or the Americans do.

There is nothing here about NATO expansion. Nothing about the brief 2008 war with Georgia. Nothing about the continuing controversy about who fired the shots on Kiev’s Maidan square, nothing about the phone call by US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, taped by the Russians at the height of the crisis; nothing about the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea. Nothing about the sanctions imposed on the Russians since the crisis began. Nothing about the Ukrainian army offensives in the southeast. Nothing about the Ukrainian vote to join NATO that may have triggered the January offensive. Nothing to note that all this is happening on Russia’s doorstep. Is it any wonder Putin is “doubling down”?

The scariest thing of all is that it may be Putin who has been telling the fundamental truth all along: NATO expansion in Georgia Ukraine is unacceptable to him and Russia is willing to go to war to rule it out. He’s been improvising, all right, but often in response to probes – Ukrainian, European, US. For a fuller argument along these lines, see Gordon Hahn’s illuminating commentary on The American Education of Vladimir Putin, by Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, which appears in The Atlantic for February. …

MORE.

UPDATED: Adam Kokesh In ‘Amerofantacy’ Land

Iraq, Just War, libertarianism, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

Adam Kokesh the soldier returned from Iraq and sobered up. Now, Kokesh is truly fighting for authentic American liberties. But does the Idiocracy even have an inkling what freedom is, any longer? Are Americans as stupid as the small and select sample interviewed by Kokesh for the YouTube clip “The Truth About American Sniper from An Iraq Combat Veteran”? Judging from the mantra mouthed throughout the exchange with viewers of American Sniper—“Navy SEAL Chris-Kyle-was-fighting-for-our-freedom”—the answer is, “Yes, they are.”

After writing for the North American market for almost 20 years—and certainly since I became persona non grata among Republicans for exposing their war propaganda—I suspect the courageous Adam Kokesh is fighting a losing battle.

But so am I.

UPDATE: Chris Kyle, Worse Than Just A Bad Ass.

Jack Kerwick does an exhaustive job of “sorting out truth from myth” about Chris Kyle. Wow. I didn’t know the half of it: “Once we are swept up in hero-worship—or maybe its idolatry—reason, facts, logic, evidence, and, most importantly, considerations of fundamental fairness and decency are all too easily swept away.”

Kerwick, moreover, cites one A.J. Delgado, who made short work of Kyle on no less a mainstream publication than National Review.

So why the hysteria over those who refuse to hero-worship this guy?

UPDATE II: Pseudoscience Bolsters Violence-Against-Women Claims

Feminism, Gender, Propaganda, Pseudoscience

“Sub-Science Bolsters Violence-Against-Women Claims” was penned in the late 1990s. It dealt with a subject few questioned at the time: the pseudoscience that undergirds the violence-against-women claims and attendant policy in Canada. You know: the one-in-four women are assaulted rot, etc.

In particular, the column questioned the reliability and validity of the 1993 StatsCan Violence Against Women survey, together with other equally outrageous surveys like the CanPan, which propped up the inflated numbers nobody questioned; the same numbers advocates bandy about and politicians rely on for drafting policy and plumping for resources.

Wendy McElroy schools us on the “statistical myths” that pervade the rape-is-rampant claims, stateside. There’s a lot that goes into skewing data; starting with “deeply biased researchers,” to proceeding from a “false premise or assumption,” to using biased and small samples whose selection is further biased by paying participants, to the general pitfalls of survey methodology (leading questions have always been a big problem; surveys are dodgy on many counts).

Having done years of statistics at a good school (a non-American, South-African-before-“freedom” university), this is all simple, straightforward research methodology.

In the realm of “never admit there is sound contradicting evidence,” this tidbit is particularly interesting:

“Federal data estimate that about one in five women becomes the victim of sexual assault while in college, most of which is committed by assailants known to the victim” (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control 2012).

The 1-in-5 figure has been exhaustively debunked for many months and should be rendered unresurrectable by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report (12/14) that found the actual rate of rape to be 0.61 percent per year – or 6.1 per 1,000 students.

MORE.

By the way, like their liberal sisters, conservative teletarts also cite these bogus statistics.

UPDATE I (1/26): A must read: “Gender Studies, an Aberrant Ideology” by Steve Moxon, contributor to the great Quarterly Review.

UPDATE II: Gender Studies is not only an aberrant ideology, but I doubt very much that it qualifies as an intellectual discipline, a thing the ancient Greeks thought up. Gender Studies is an intellectual aberration.