Category Archives: Pseudoscience

UPDATE II: “Inside [John Esposito’s] Islam”

Islam, Israel, Jihad, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Pseudoscience

Very little was said about sample size, data-collection methods and other crucial methodological matters during the screening, on PBS, of the documentary “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.”

“We have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers”: So goes a declamation on the website touting the program. This sounds a lot like advertising. You do learn that these stellar social scientists relied on the interview to collect this definitive information (which concludes that Muslims the world over are moderates). The interview is one of the least reliable tools in the social sciences. The questions asked and showcased, moreover, were most definitely leading questions. The answers people tend to give to loaded questions are usually bogus.

Other than Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, an A-list Islam apologist, “Inside Islam” introduced the viewer to emphatic, invested presenters of a one-sided view of the West as oblivious to Muslim opinion and aspirations.

I guess they had a valid point with respect to American foreign policy. You have to possess Olympian vanity to invade Muslim countries as America has done, with so little knowledge of the history of the people, the region and the outcome of prior such faith-based democratic missionizing.

However, the efforts of Dalia Mogahed, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies (also an Obama appointee), to sanitize Islam became quite ridiculous when she contended that her faith specifies a series of inalienable rights designed to protect the individual against the state.

Come again? More than a religion, Islam is a fully developed political system.

Mogahed was commandeering the language of the American Bill of Rights to ingratiate Islam on her audience. What has happened to the social sciences? In my days you ruled out activists.

In the same spirit of “scientific” detachment, another self-styled social scientist, who spoke at length on “Inside Islam,” ventured that Israel was a piece of the West left behind in Muslim lands; a sore reminder of this occupation. Our impartial researcher was voicing the radical opinions of the Helen-Thomas School of Thought.

My old Afrikaner lecturers—the ones who drilled me in statistics—would have barred both Mogahed and her colleague from designing or partaking in a study for fear of biasing the results.

There is a good chapter on the death of the social sciences in “WE ARE DOOMED.”

The social sciences are most certainly doomed.

UPDATE I (Jan. 1): Stephen raises an interesting point about pathological sexual repression. Sexual deprivation accounts for the accepted practice of rampant homosexuality among heterosexual Muslims prior to marriage.

UPDATE II: Actually, Mercer (Who Eats Nails For Breakfast) had softened momentarily to the excuse-making, psychologizing, school of thought on Islam. Larry Auster keeps us focused: “It’s because they’re sexually repressed–no, it’s because they lack democracy–no, it’s because they marry their cousins–no, it’s because they were ‘left behind’–no, it’s because of Israeli cruelty–no, it’s because of … Anything But Islam.”

David (Brooks) Discovers The Managerial State

Economy, Fascism, Old Right, Political Economy, Pseudoscience, Regulation, Socialism, The State

David Brooks, via Vox Day, makes a welcome discovery: The technocratic or Managerial State, a foundational concept among Old Right thinkers, Paul Gottfried, most recently. In my review of Gottfried’s superb After Liberalism, I explained:

The present managerial state certainly is not an instantiation of the liberalism of the American Founding Fathers. The post-revolution federal government was not to levy any taxes, and an expansion of its power required the consent of every sovereign state. “The American Revolution,” writes economist Murray Rothbard, “was against empire, taxation, trade monopoly, regulations, militarism and executive power,” all now implicitly embraced by the US and its Western allies.
Undergirding our public administration is an unyielding ideology bolstered by a monolith of toadying journalists and intellectuals. The dubious precepts of social psychology and the enforced “public philosophy” of pluralism have become means through which bureaucrats, educators and state-anointed experts embark on crusades against “prejudice”. Together with official multiculturalism they form an instrument of control, designed to privilege a certain position and to stigmatize those who think differently. By extension, speech codes, human rights legislation, employment quotas and other infringements, contradict the classical liberal espousal of rights to property and freedom of association.
“Unlike the communist garrison state or the Italian fascist “total state,” the managerial state succeeds by denying that it exercises power. It conceals its operation in the language of caring. But “behind the mission to sensitize and teach “human rights” lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and reshape people’s lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime,” cautions Gottfried, “must consider first and foremost the extent of its control—and the relative powerless of its critics.”

AFTER summarizing the Republican and Democratic expansion of “a vast national security bureaucracy,” and the latter’s bureaucracy accreting health care and financial reform laws, BROOKS concludes:

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.
This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.

Vox adds by alluding to the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist system:

“The Misean [sic] concept of central information deprivation – not to be confused with F.A. von Hayek’s later refinement – first foresaw and explained this certain failure not long after the Progressive era began, in a monograph entitled Economic Calculation In The Socialist Commonwealth, published in 1920.”

Update IV: Another Democratic (Or Demonic) Uprising

Christianity, Democracy, Ethics, Objectivism, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Sex

In 2008, on this space, I inquired naively, “Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the allegations and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued is American through-and-through.

But, two years hence, Americans can boast of one lucrative EXport, or shall I say SEXport!? The repressed memory mythology, and my priest-did-me syndrome have been adrift at sea, but have finally dropped an anchor across the pond.

My favorite Pope, Benedict XVI, has stood up admirably against the exported $2 billion lawsuit industry:

“Christ guides us towards goodness and does not let us be disarmed by ingratitude.” He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.

The Pope represents an aristocracy of the mind. The Catholic Church, in its wisdom, has put in place a much-needed hierarchy for the worshiping mass of humanity.

Against this, the religion of Democracy preaches the rule of the mob and the masses—in particular instituting the lowest common denominator in all spheres of life, from morals to aesthetics. The Catholic Church is among the last historical institutions where the masses are ministered to by their betters (mostly). The impetus and instinct to bleed it dry is a manifestation of a democratic—or is it demonic?—uprising. It is driven by those who’ve, in the Pope’s words, “fallen to the lowest, vulgar levels … into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”

Reread “SEX, GOD & GREED” by Daniel Lyons for a dissection of the veracity of the sexual abuse claims against the Church.

Update I: The “Another” of the post’s title alludes to the health care revolution, ushered in by the Obama coup.

Update II (March 30): What did I miss? Was there a priestly ritual murder? Plain murder? Boer murder? Evidence beyond hearsay of all the rest? You’d thinks so, wouldn’t you, at least from Schmidt’s hyperbole hereunder. I suggest, as I already have, the reading of Daniel Lyons’ “SEX, GOD & GREED.”

Update III: In reply to Hugo: Thanks for your always provocative posts. Still, it’s baffling to see an Objectivist poo-poo standards of evidence and due process—class action suits being but one legal emblem of the abuse of the principle of a case-by case adjudication.
Also perplexing is it to encounter an Objectivist, which I know Hugo to be, blame genocide in Rwanda on anyone other than the barbarians who, with malice aforethought, took machetes to their innocent neighbors (I was just revisiting that for my book).

Update IV (March 31): A discussion on Hardball with Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, of cover-ups and papal culpability. No discussion of the veracity and standards of the evidence, though.

It's Cool To Caricature Climagedon

Democrats, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Science

Jon-Stewart cool! Manipulating research to hide that Goddess Gaia has been cooling for the past decade has its humorous aspects—to a point. “Does it refute global warming?”, asks Stewart rhetorically. And he replies, “Of course not.” Stewart then takes aim at “denier” Sen. James Inhofe, and frames the errant global-warming activists who cooked the books as scientist who simply cut corners.

There are limits to the laughter ClimateGate will elicit on the Left. One doesn’t abandon a religion in one day, no matter the evidence.