Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Liberal Pollsters & Media Collude To Skew Polls

Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Media, Pseudoscience

As I told a despondent pal and the spouse, not for a minute did I believe polls that depicted a flight to Hillary Clinton’s camp in the wake of Orlando. The opposite. Lying liberal pollsters and their media enablers were just doing what they always do: oversampling Democrats and liberal voting blocs. This Sierra Rayne at American Thinker confirms. “Corrected Gravis poll has Trump well out in front of Clinton at national level”:

After an onslaught of highly liberal biased polls against Donald Trump during the past week, it was refreshing to see an only modestly biased poll – in relative terms – released on Saturday by Gravis.

In its biased form, the poll shows Trump only 2% behind Hillary Clinton in the head-to-head matchup, far below the ridiculously large Clinton leads of up to 12% that Bloomberg and other leftist media outlets have been oozing of late.

But once we correct for biases in this Gravis poll, Trump is undoubtedly now well out in front of Clinton.

In the poll’s demographics, 40% of respondents said they were Democrats compared to just 33% who were Republicans. This 7% Democrat advantage is almost assuredly about 6% above where it should be – meaning Clinton’s narrow 2% lead should likely be upward of at least a 4% deficit behind Trump.

Further evidence of liberal bias in the poll comes from questions about Tea Party support, abortion, religious affiliation, and education.

Just 11% of those surveyed said they were members of the Tea Party. This value should be about 17%, suggesting – as with the party affiliation – about a 6% liberal bias.

The poll also shows a 17% advantage to pro-choice over pro-life, well above the known 6% spread in favor of pro-choice. This signifies a major liberal bias in the demographics, as the pro-choice side has not had an advantage larger than 10% since the 1990s.

When it comes to religious affiliation, the poll oversampled Muslims (2% versus 1%) and Catholics (25% versus less than 21%) and looks to have massively undersampled Evangelicals (10% versus 25%), resulting in more liberal bias. Evangelicals will vote dominantly for Trump, whereas Muslims and many Catholics are likely to lean toward Clinton.

A full 50% of the poll’s respondents had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 34% in reality, introducing more liberal bias.

Based on the full range of liberal biases present, a reasonable estimate of Trump’s actual lead over Clinton is in the range of at least 5% once the polling data is corrected.

MORE (Warning: sticky site).

UPDATED: Tired Of Sickening, Statist, San Bernadino Cliches? Here’s Another

Islam, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Terrorism, The State

Tired of the vomit-inducing San Bernadino cliches yet? An example is the one where the community is “struggling to understand …” This nonsense is designed, subconsciously at least, to suggest there is no rational explanation for the murders of the 14. However, every sentient human being in this country knows what happens when two followers of the radical Prophet Mohammad, living in your midst, decide to act on his teachings and examples.

“Don’t play into terrorist hands” is another cliches that comes to mind. Cretin Kelly of the eponymous Kelly File embodied this statistical, statist stupidity when she exhorted her fans, on 12/4, to go out and frolic because each and everyone’s chances of being victimized by a Jihadi are minuscule. Go have fun, Kelly grimaced dementedly.

Statistics are funny things: insignificant probabilities, in this case an attack on each one of us, are insignificant until they happen to YOU or ME. To live with that consideration is a disgusting way of suggesting lives lost are, in the grand scheme, insignificant. This And-The-Band-Played-On mentality is relied upon by the state to continue its errant policies.

Only if you are shocked to your core by Jihad in the workplace and retreat/disinvest/quit frolicking like a moron; will the statists in charge get scared of your wrath, The People’s wrath.

Don’t play into the hands of state terrorists is what I’d suggest.

UPDATE (12/7): The president’s (12/6) version of “Don’t play into the hands of ISIS and that’s what ISIS wants us to do”: “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.”

[SNIP]

Hmmm:
How do these asses know what ISIS wants?
Are they simply ass-uming?
Could these idiots be using reverse psychology with you to get you do play their game? “Oh, prez says ISIS wants me to stay away from Muslims who look menacing. So let me do the opposite and embrace he who would kill me.”

Prez keeps saying don’t do x, because ISIS wants you to do it. Well, if ISIS wants you to do what in your estimation is best for you–perhaps ISIS is right and the president is WRONG. I’m just trying to show you Obama is messing with you.

UPDATE III: Is Justin Trudeau a Trauma Victim? (Left-Liberal Discourse)

Addiction, BAB's A List, Canada, Drug War, Education, Etiquette, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Justin Trudeau is no genius, but he seems to limp along despite what some would consider a traumatic childhood. This Barely a Blog exclusive features Stanton Peele, America’s leading, liberal addiction counterculturist, and fellow crusader against the Drug War.

Is Justin Trudeau a Trauma Victim?
By Stanton Peele

Justin Trudeau seems to be a highly successful survivor of what might be considered a traumatic childhood.

I am often cited for my opposition to famed Vancouver addiction doctor Gabor Maté’s trauma theory of addiction—that all addiction can be traced back to childhood trauma, and vice versa. Maté believes such trauma causes permanent brain damage. I find Gabor’s theory reductive, pessimistic, and fatalistic. Most people, after all, outgrow their childhood traumas, as they do their addictions. (I have argued with Gabor about all of this.)

This debate was brought to mind for me by Justin Trudeau’s election as Canada’s prime minister. Mr. Trudeau, after all, didn’t have a happy childhood. We know this because his mother has written about their fractured family life. Margaret Trudeau, herself the daughter of a Vancouver MP, was depicted as a flower-child. She met Pierre Trudeau when she was 18 and he was the Minister of Defense. She married the much older Mr. Trudeau when she was 22 after Pierre became PM.

Her married experience was deeply unhappy. Despite remaining married for 13 years and having three children together, the couple were habitually at odds; they separated after a half-dozen years of marriage and Margret pursued for a time a jet-set lifestyle. Margaret was often at loose ends both during the marriage and afterwards, as she has described in several memoirs, and was hospitalized for “mental illness.”

There are perhaps three theories for Margaret’s psychological problems: that mental disorders have nothing to do with people’s life experience or personality but are simply inbred, that she was always flighty and unstable. Or, finally, that being in a high-profile marriage with a stern, controlling man thirty years her senior was the worst possible situation for someone with Margaret’s disposition. Or maybe it was all three.

“From the day I became Mrs. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a glass panel was gently lowered into place around me, like a patient in a mental hospital who is no longer considered able to make decisions and who cannot be exposed to a harsh light.”

Not very good to hear, or to experience, coming from your mother.

But Justin seems to have weathered this all rather well. In fact, he seems to be the beneficiary of both his parents’ distinctive assets. In the first place, you need to be intelligent and ambitious to become prime minister of a major nation. [Presumably, Stanton, what you say would apply, by logical extension, to George Bush and other dynastic rulers? Justin Trudeau is a rich boy like Jeb Bush, born to privilege, including easy access to the office of PM—ILANA.]

Yet Justin wears these traits well. He doesn’t seem to think of himself as above everyone else (an attitude his father often conveyed). He, as observers have noted, meets and mingles with everybody and considers every citizen and resident of Canada a person on par with himself. This openness and absence of inflated self-importance would seem to come from his mother.

Margaret Trudeau has weathered her own storms, as she wrote in her most recent memoir, published in 2015, The Time of My Life: Choosing a Vibrant, Joyful Future. I know everyone, Canadian or otherwise, has good feelings about this resolution for Mrs. Trudeau. It seems that people are often able to find their own successful level given the opportunity and support to do so.

Meanwhile, Justin’s becoming PM must be quite a source of pride and achievement for her. The two remain extremely close: a picture of an adoring mother and her newly elected son gazing lovingly at one another affirm this impression. (Pierre died ten years ago.)

For his part, Justin does not present himself as an injured victim, the unhappy product of an unhappy marriage. He seems to have born these stresses, thrust on him as a child through absolutely no desire or effort of his own, without resentment. True, he didn’t immediately rise to the top of society, first working as a bouncer, a boxer, a Santa-shopper, and a snowboard instructor before entering politics. [So would you and yours bounce around the world in a zen-like state if you had the family fortune to fall back on—ILANA.]

On the other hand, becoming Canada’s Prime Minister at age 43 (his father was elected at age 48) doesn’t exactly put him in the slow lane, either. Justin has never given the impression that he feels like an abandoned child, or the son of broken marriage or a traumatic childhood. He seems to recognize and appreciate, rather, that he had a privileged upbringing involving parents with disparate, but distinctive, gifts.

It’s all a matter of outlook, isn’t it?

In particular, Justin didn’t become a drug addict. Rather, unlike the scion of another famous political family who opposes pot legalization due to his own drug problems, Patrick Kennedy, Justin favors marijuana legalization. This attitude too seems to have come from his mother. Margaret was once charged with possession of marijuana for having a package of weed delivered to her home. “I took to marijuana like a duck took to water,” she said.

I don’t think she smokes now.

***
Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., is the author (with Ilse Thompson) of Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict. His Life Process Program is available online. His book Addiction-Proof Your Child is a model for the emerging area of harm reduction in addiction prevention. Stanton has been innovating in the addiction field since writing Love and Addiction with Archie Brodsky, He has been a pioneer in noting addiction across substances and activities, in creating harm reduction therapy, and in the nondisease understanding of addiction, as well as in formulating practical, life-management approaches to treatment and self-help. He has published 12 books, and has won career awards from the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies and Drug Policy Alliance. His website is www.peele.net

UPDATE I: Response to Facebook comments:

We libertarians apply the same set of principles without bias to the political class. Justin Trudeau is manifestly moronic, as is “W” (Jeb is not nearly as dumb as “W” and Justin). All are entitled brats. So what if Justin’s mom and dad fought. Let them all decamp to Africa to experience real suffering. Stanton Peele is, however, hardcore in Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control. A very rigorous book.

UPDATE II: Unable, or unprepared, to courteously address my readers, as to the uneven standards implied in a column submitted by himself to Barely a Blog, Stanton Peele writes:

Liana – Can you remove the piece from your website? It was a bad match, I fear.

The snootiness.

My reply:

The name is ILANA.

And no—not after the time spent inputting, adding links (as you, Stanton, did not provide HTML code) and editing text.

One would think you’d be more appreciative of the feature and the generous mention and promotion of your seminal book, Diseasing.

Unseemly behavior.

ILANA Mercer
Author, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Columnist, WND’s longest-standing, paleolibertarian weekly column,
Contributor, The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine & UK’s Libertarian Alliance,
Fellow, Jerusalem Institute for market Studies (JIMS)
www.ilanamercer.com

UPDATE III (11/1): Jack Kerwick uses precision-guided words and phrases—a “scandalous degree of unprofessionalism and hyper-emotionality,” “academic conformity,” “abuse of power”—to describe the anti-intellectual atmosphere during his Ph.D “sentence” at Temple University, dominated by left-liberals who won’t brook dissent (like the encounter above).

Conservatives for Abolishing the Fact of Evil

Conservatism, Ethics, Media, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason

“Conservatives For Abolishing The Fact Of Evil” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.

“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would allude to “goon violence.”

“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”

In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.

Their cure for goon violence: Bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.

Democrats concur: If someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters? Yes he did.

But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry. …

… Read the rest on The Unz Review.