Category Archives: Pseudoscience

The Republican Reagan Epiphany

Ann Coulter, Democrats, Political Philosophy, Pseudoscience, Republicans, Ron Paul, States' Rights

“Southerners are extremely patriotic,” said Ann Coulter on Fox News Business, while explaining the phenomenon of a Southern Democrat (like Rick Perry), who has always been far more conservative than the northern Republican. “[Southern Democrats] were not going to remain with the party of George McGovern,” observed Coulter, who is, arguably, the Republican Party’s most powerful and most devoted pundit.

That’s a little deceptive. Is it at all possible that the much-maligned Southern Democrat has found it hard to join the party of Abraham Lincoln? Perish the thought!

Ann Coulter says, correctly—and at last—that Ronald Reagan should not be held up as “the touchstone for every [other Republican] candidate.” If only Ms. Coulter was capable of arriving at a similar epiphany about Lincoln, but that would demand too much by way of philosophical integrity.

UPDATE II: Public Enema # 1 (Bum Doctors Spread AIDS)

Africa, Etiquette, Healthcare, Pseudoscience, Reason, South-Africa

It is one thing to have voodoo for values, but what about a sense of propriety?

The N2 is a major highway in South Africa that starts in my hometown of Cape Town. A repulsed reporter at The Daily Voice snapped images of a traditional “healer” administering a treatment for bewitchment alongside the road, in full view of motorists careening down the highways. The shameless sangoma (witch doctor), whose fees are probably reimbursed by the medical scheme (in the New South Africa), elaborated on his methods. Prepare to be repulsed (if you click on the image).

“Liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, and by the removal of tyrants. … the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. … (From Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.)

UPDATED I (Sept. 5): Gray Falcon, AKA historian Nebojsa Malic—one of the top authorities in the US on the Balkans (if you want the truth)—has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on Amazon. Do read Mr. Malic’s insights, titled “A cautionary tale beyond black and white.”

UPDATE II: The common, communal and irrational practice described above should help explain to the perpetually perplexed West why the spread of AIDS/HIV is so hard to curtail in Africa. You know that the bum “doctor” does not use disposable equipment. Nor does he have an autoclave with which to sterilize his home-made enema.

Perforations are bound to happen. Infection likely to follow.

UPDATED: Engorged Organisms & The Porn Aestehtic

Aesthetics, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

The genus Rep. Anthony Weiner, an “engorged organism” indigenous to DC, has an exotic-looking, ravishing mate. (Full image posted below.) But men—at least American men—prefer what I’ve termed (in “Sluts Galore”) the porn aestehtic:

Ideas about feminine beauty are bust. The sublime 1350 B.C. bust of Queen Nefertiti showcases her fine cheekbones and graceful neck. Her Western contemporary look-a-like, down to the perfectly shaped dainty face, was Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve embodied the French ideal of female beauty, immortalized in the bust of Marianne.
But forget these regal beauties; they, apparently, have nothing on the double-chinned, large, flat expanses that make up Britney Spears’ crude mug. Nefertiti, Hepburn, Deneuve—your patrician pulchritude no longer excites the “porn generation”; the sly, weasel-like looks of a Paris Hilton do.
The culture’s aesthetic preferences are now shaped by the basest of instincts. I call it the porn aesthetic, another example of which is Hue Hefner’s harem of hos. The three kept creatures are currently starring in a reality show called “The Girls Next Door” …

MORE…

UPDATE: The addiction excuse is just that: an excuse and an error. (Read “Evil, Not Ill.”) The liberal establishment—it includes Republicans and Democrats—has accepted that all bad behavior is a disease. From lying to murder: every bit of human nastiness is said to be a biological-based disorder. The premise for this conceit is the Rousseauist notion that humans are all equally good and would remain pristine if not for external agents, namely biological or societal forces. The problem is, as I have shown in my writing, and Dr. Thomas Szasz has done over the course of half a century: there is no basis for this claim—not in biology, much less in morality.

I quote from “Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.

UPDATED: ‘Likes’ As a Proxy for Populairty on WND

Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Internet, Media, Pseudoscience, Reason

My colleague Vox Day takes a columnist’s number of “Likes” on WND as a proxy for readership of that particular WND column. The problem with this analysis in my case is this: Vox Day’s weblog doesn’t have Facebook interface. Mine does. Many of my readers come first to Barely a Blog and will click the “Like” on the column’s blog post, rather than (or in addition to) clicking on WND’s full version of the column on its site, which these readers still read on WND. Some read the column on both sites and don’t click “Like.” (All readers of this space are encouraged to click the “Like” icons on both the BAB and the WND posts.)

For example, on WND, the column “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?” has earned 56 “Likes,” as Vox has noted. But on Barely a Blog the post excerpting the same column has garnered 100 “Likes.” To the extent that the reader’s propensity to “Like” is statistically significant—and I doubt it—BAB “Likes” go toward my WND readership, since blog “Likers” almost always read the column in full on WND. (I only post the column to IlanaMercer.com a couple of days after the WND posting.)

Given that my blog interfaces with Facebook, Vox would have to factor in the “Likes” a WND column notice gets on Barely a Blog before he makes a definitive statement about the “Likes” on WND as a proxy for the WND column’s popularity.

Of course, my column’s existence has always been in peril, so far be it from me to claim popularity for it. This is as good a time as any to remind readers to support “Return to Reason” by clicking on the “Like” icons both on BAB and on WND.com.

If you like posts about this stuff, check out my old Alexa debunk. Alexa would have become far more accurate since I wrote “RANK INTERNET RATINGS.” This is because most of us no longer dial up to get an internet connection and thus no longer receive a new IP address each time we click on a site. The same person dialing up many times daily, yet being reflected as a new IP address each time: that’s what made for the promiscuous early Alexa readings.

UPDATE: Robert is right: The reader’s “Like” habits are too full of statistical holes to indicate very much. I almost never click “Like” when I read a column.

Kerry, the other thing patrons of this site can do to support this writer’s work is to review “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” on Amazon.