Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Blaming Colonialism Invalid, Even In Academe

Africa, Colonialism, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Pseudoscience, Racism, South-Africa, The West

Media, most in academe, and a distressing number of radical, uninformed libertarians have adopted the unidirectional, zero-sum analysis, whereby the West is depicted as the culprit in the plight of the undeveloped world.

The argument, as I’ve written, sees colonialism as our original sin; capitalism as our cardinal sin, and our so-called voracious system of production as a zero-sum game. To wit, the standards of living we enjoy come at the expense of Africa’s poor.

Of course, P.T. Bauer, the seminal thinker on development—and a genius in my opinion—has demonstrated analytically and empirically why this was never so.

Bad generally displaces good thinking in the market place of ideas. Still, and not that you’d know it, there’s a bit of good news on this front. Colonialism, dependency and racism—all highly politicized constructs—are beginning to be seen as humbugs, untrue and unhelpful, in explaining—and hence, helping—the Third World. What was once “conventional wisdom that brooked no dissent,” in the words of Lawrence E. Harrison, is rarely mentioned today in intellectually respectable quarters.

The intellectual mainstream, as always, is belatedly arriving at the truth—or rather, distancing itself from libels and lies.

I try to remain congruent and consistent as a classical liberal and a rightist. Therefore, equally important for my purposes is it to identify the roots of the analysis that implicates colonialism, dependency and racism in the plight of poor countries.

Where you see this among libertarians—you are also witnessing a Marxist-Leninist analysis, wildly popular (and oh so hackneyed) in universities. The Marxist-Leninist analysis of underdevelopment is tantamount to the rape of objective reality with political, theoretical, highly artificial constructs.

Writes Harrison, in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress: “For many, including some Africans, the statute of limitation on colonialism as an explanation for underdevelopment lapsed long ago. Moreover, four former colonies, two British (Hong Kong and Singapore) and two Japanese (South Korea and Taiwan) have vaulted into the First World.” …

“The racism/discrimination explanation of black underachievement is no longer viable fifty years later.” Hispanics have the dubious distinction of having usurped African-Americans in underachievement. Yet they have not endured discrimination as black once did, and no more so than have Chinese and Japanese immigrants who’re among the highest achievers in the US (other than Ashkenazi Jews).

This is not to condone colonialism, but is, rather, written in uncompromising fealty to reality.

Over to P. T. Bauer’s Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion:

“…Much of British colonial Africa was transformed during the colonial period. In the Gold coast there were about 3000 children at school in the early 1900s, whereas in the mid-1950s there were over half a million. In the early 1890s there were in the Gold Coast no railways or roads, but only a few jungle paths.” Transporting goods was by canoe.

Before colonialism, Sub-Saharan Africa was a subsistence economy, because of colonialism it became a monetized economy. Before colonialism, the absence of public security made investment impossible. After it, investment flowed. So too was scientific agriculture introduced by colonial administrations, or by “foreign private organizations and persons under the comparative security of colonial rule, and usually in the face of formidable obstacles.” (Bauer 1981, p. 167)

“In British West Africa public security and health improved out of all recognition…peaceful travel became possible; slavery and slave trading and famine were practically eliminated, and the incidence of the worst diseases reduced.” Mortality fell, population increased, communications and “peaceful contact within Africa and with the outside world” increased in British colonies.

I’ve been going through the authoritative work of liberal historian Hermann Giliomee. Imagine my surprise at seeing this unmistakable trend documented in Apartheid South Africa, and conceded during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s agonizing sittings. The African population’s longevity, education, and numbers were markedly increased under white minority rule. Naturally, to describe reality is not to condone apartheid.

Of course, all the above is predicated on the premise that development is good and fine. That’s the libertarian position, as I know it. To the extent the colonial disruption of the state of squalor, disease and death associated with lack of development is condemned—to that extent you have a Rousseauist worship of primitiveness and savagery.

Some radical lefties and libertarians might counter by saying that Africa’s poor did not elect to have these conditions, good and bad, foisted on them. Fair enough. However, once introduced to potable water, sanitation, transportation, and primary healthcare, few Africans wish to do without them. Human beings, poor especially, choose development freely; only pseudo-intellectuals sitting in plush apartments and offices depict squalor and sickness as idyllic and primordially peaceful.

When the affluent relinquish their earthly possessions to return to nature it is usually with the aid of sophisticated technology (check out Mother Earth’s Commode), and the option to be air-lifted to a hospital if the need arises.

Updated: The Shakedown of the Catholic Church

Christianity, Criminal Injustice, Law, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Sex

On the occasion of Pope Benedict being forced to publicly capitulate to the sexual abuse industry, I’m reposting a BAB post titled “Sex, God & Greed.”

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 lion share of the allegation, and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued, is American through-and-through.

The repressed memory mythology is an American invention. As I reminded readers in my “Defense of Hierarchy & the Catholic Church,” “this victim movement has done a great deal more than try and bankrupt the Church.”

‘SEX, GOD & GREED’

In 2003, Daniel Lyons, in Forbes, hashed out all there is to say about the sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. It’s worth revisiting this exceptional exposé, now that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, lamentably, has decided to capitulate, rather than fight a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Writes Lyons:

“….The focal point of this tort battle is the Catholic Church. The Church’s legal problems are worse even than most people realize: $1 billion in damages already paid out for the victims of pedophile priests, indications that the total will approach $5 billion before the crisis is over… The lawyers are lobbying states to lift the statute of limitations on sex abuse cases, letting them dredge up complaints that date back decades. Last year California, responding to the outcry over the rash of priest cases, suspended its statute of limitations on child sex abuse crimes for one year, opening the way for a deluge of new claims. A dozen other states are being pushed to loosen their laws.”

“’There is an absolute explosion of sexual abuse litigation, and there will continue to be. This is going to be a huge business,’ MacLeish, age 50, says. A Boston-based partner of the Miami law firm of GREENBERG TRAURIG (2002 billings: $465 million)…”

Lyons and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal are the only writers I know of to have pointed out how many of these class-action claims are, if not bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories. (See my “Repressed Memory Ruse”):

The repressed memory hoax “…relies on a controversial theory that has split the world of psychology into bitterly opposing camps for more than a decade: the notion that people can wipe out memories of severe trauma, then recover these repressed memories years later… Richard McNally, a Harvard psychology professor…. thinks recovered memories of trauma are questionable. He has conducted numerous studies on memory, particularly with sexual abuse victims. He says people don’t forget a trauma like anal rape. They might forget something like being fondled as a child, but that’s because the fondling was not traumatic, he argues. ‘It might be disgusting, upsetting—but not terrifying, not traumatic.’”

“McNally’s take on this subject has set off a hometown feud with Daniel Brown, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who is a leading proponent of recovered memory. The two archrivals have never met, engaging instead in a ‘battle of the books.’
In 1998, when Brown won an award for his 786-page tome, Memory, Trauma Treatment & the Law, McNally wrote a scathing review that criticized Brown’s methodology. In March of this year McNally published his own book, Remembering Trauma, in which he bashes repressed-memory theory and criticizes Brown’s work yet again.”

Update (April 20): To the extent that there was sexual abuse in the Church—and it was never as rampant as the $2 billion-worth of lawsuits suggests—it was mostly homosexually oriented. So sanctioning marriage would not have mitigated the abuse of small boys. I can’t imagine, moreover, that by sanctioning marriage, our reader recommends that the Catholic Church bless gay marriage.

All in all, lowering moral standards in response to a moral crisis is surely not a very elevated solution. The church, therefore, need not change its tradition of celibacy.

Update 3: Rev. Wright’s River Of Racism Will Run Through Washington

Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Pseudoscience, Racism, The West

What can I add belatedly to the debate over Obama’s spiritual adviser, other than that he sounds like Chris Rock, and is probably overcompensating for not looking like Kunta Kinte? (Say you haven’t missed me.)

Much-missed Mercerisms aside, what Boobus Americanus cheering for Obama needs to take away from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s words is not this or the other political message. Some of his statements have a core of truth; others are purely phantasmagoric.

What’s crucial here is the tenor of the message uttered by Obama’s mentor—it bespeaks a vile, vociferous, overwhelming hatred of whites.

Rev. Wright’s river of racism runs deep in America and manifests in, for example, violent crime against pale faces, as well as in an ideology that has slowly permeated all cultural products and institutions.

And it has now arrived at the White House.

The Obama presidency will bring this dark force to the White House—and don’t mistake me for claiming said abode has not been infested by the most demonic of forces. It has. Courtesy of the Clintons, the illiterate “poet” Maya Angelou—about whose oeuvre the Times Literary Supplement often has a hearty, cleverly-disguised laugh—became a national name. And worse, of course: Manufactured wars. Lies. Destruction of lives here and abroad.

However, with “Militant Mama Obama” prodding the president, whites will be the only group filled with more hate for Honky than are Michelle, her minister, and his many followers across hijacked American institutions.

I don’t mean whites of the liberal left variety pushing Obama. They love themselves, but do not consider that they are anything but a colorless, divine manifestation of justice on earth. I mean ordinary, self-effacing, brow-beaten, timid whites, who lose jobs daily to anointed “minorities,” and who’ve ceded historical truth to the minority’s “history from below.”

With Mama Obama prodding the president, history from below will blanket America. About the replacement of “the impartial, non-ideological study of American history and its heroic figures with ‘history from below,’” I wrote the following:

“This post-modern tradition regularly produces works the topics of which include, ‘Quilting Midwives during the Revolution.’ Or, ‘Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America.’ It seeks to obliterate memory of the “predominantly British Christian origins of the people who established the political order described by Thomas Jefferson as ‘a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, … derived from natural right and natural reason.’”

The establishment’s holy men are down with these humbugs. The corrupt media, as part of what I’ve dubbed the media-military-industrial-congressional complex, will proceed to propagate these perversions high-and-low.

Remember, when the Wright scandal percolated with great difficulty into cable’s quarters, that grizzled “newswoman” Anderson Cooper responded thus: “How do we make this go away?” Those were his words.

However, Rev. Wright’s wrongs are what the inimitable Diana West has dubbed an existential issue for Obama.

And for America.

Updated 1 (March 17): The chronically incurious media has fallen silent on investigating what may be the philosophical underpinnings of Obama—and certainly Mrs. Obama.

The impoverished argument according to which an anti-war candidate is being smeared has popped up here and there. This is in itself a smear—instead of investigating Obama’s worldview, those inquiring into this murky miasma are being discredited. Answer the questions; don’t cover them up!

It is not about what Rev. Wright said on this or the other date, and whether Obama was in the pews at the time; it’s about what he stands for with all his being, and whether the man he mentored holds the same despicable worldview about whites.

We are told by Time that Obama plans a major speech on race. He has indeed been very astute in subtly and genteelly ensuring any questions about His Illusiveness are framed as a racist. It appears Obama also plans to “explain” the black church. Read sanitize.

The pan-Africanism associated with Black Liberation Thinking has a proud tradition of fabrication—it invented an Afrocentric “Safari Scholarship” to finesse unpleasant historical realities:

“Afrocentric books such as Black Athena by Cornell’s Martin Bernal, Stolen Legacy by George G. M. James, and the school tracts known as the “Portland African-American Baseline Essays” [adopted in some American schools]…[claim] no less that thousands of years ago Egyptians-cum-blacks ‘flew in electroplated gold gliders, knew accurately the distance to the sun, and discovered the Theory of Evolution.’ According to Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese Afrocentrist, Africans invented everything from Judaism, to engineering, to astronomy, including dialectical materialism (although Marxism is no cause for inventor’s pride.)”

In the same essay I posed “one nagging question”:

“Afrocentrics claim that practically every reprehensible occurrence in history is the doing of the Great White and his linear thinking. Why, if Eurocentric culture is so horrible, would they want to lay claim to it? By coveting it, aren’t Afrocentrists providing the ultimate validation of Western Civilization?”

Obama is certainly a product of Western culture. Outrageous as it may seem to some, I’d like to know if he holds it and its originators in contempt.

Update 2: “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but because of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself.” This, from a press release courtesy of the Obama camp a year ago, when the senator was about to announce his candidacy. Back then, Obama intended to begin the event with a public invocation by Rev. Wright.

Where’s the pride now?

Update 3: The focus of most “analysis” vis-à-vis Obama and his preacher has revolved around whether the candidate has been sufficiently politic and strategic about his association with the repulsive Rev. Wright. He should have distanced himself from the man sooner goes this impoverished “argument.”

The tack tackles the patina of politics. Is Obama a sufficiently slimy operator to have slithered efficiently from under a tricky situation? Suppose he had come out swinging against Wright. That would not have obviated the only issue at hand here: does Obama too feel the filthy feelings Wright so obviously feels about white Americans; is Obama as rank a racist as Wright is.

There is no question that Obama has a deep bond with Wright; there is no question as to his loyalty to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The question as I posed it in this post is this: why has Obama been spiritually enmeshed in a church which holds such an unchristian, unevolved, hatful philosophy. Could it be that Obama doesn’t think Wright’s worldview is that hateful?

Updated: Foul Tom Friedman

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Pseudoscience

Thomas Friedman, the mustachioed crunchy-neocon, can’t go wrong. He was wrong about Iraq, but that didn’t come back to bite him. What’s a little war between friends? He purports to understand free market economics, yet, on the Late Night Show, he complained that not enough capitalists were developing green technologies—the most lucrative potential market there is, says Friedman.
Let’s see: Is this because capitalists are not as smart as Tom Friedman, a statist ponce who pimps for the powers that be? Naturally, Friedman is being holier than thou. Scientists are fiddling with green technologies all the time; industrialists, not so much, since the scientists have yet to find a way to make these technologies commercially viable.
The profit motive, Mr. Friedman, ensures resources are directed to their most efficient use. Technologies that aren’t commercially viable are too expensive; aren’t profitable and are, therefore, invariably wasteful—of the very resources they aim to preserve.
Friedman, who got behind the neoconservative Manifest Destiny, is hungry for a new National Greatness Agenda. I guess exporting democracy didn’t go that well. In the Green Agenda he sees “a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.” Hence his motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
“Reincarnation of the Reds” is more like it.
Americans have been fooled by the likes of Friedman, but the British Times Literary Supplement panned his last book—the reviewer had little good to say about Friedman’s reasoning.
As I’ve said, my only consolation is that the gangreens “are worried sick about the planet—genuinely…The Worry Factor may just increase the rate at which this particular invasive species falls off the earth.”
Come to think about it, the ethically challenged Friedman didn’t care much about the casualties of an unjust war; I’m sure he doesn’t lose sleep over alleged global warming.
Friedman’s grammar: he said “more fit,” and “more strong,” when he should have said “fitter and stronger.” And he polluted with a mouthful of cute coinages, such as “global weirding,” and by saying we should have an “earth race” (as opposed to an arms race, supposedly) with China. Puke.

Update (Feb 27): Cooling Trend. From “Daily Tech,” via WorldNetDaily:
“Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.”

Update II: George Reisman, Ph.D, sends along this apropos comment:

“As the ice thickens in the Arctic and in Antarctica and record cold temperatures are recorded practically across the world [SEE BELOW], so too does the ice thin—under the feet of the environmentalists and their global warming crusade. It may almost be time to begin speculating on what will follow global warming as the next great scare.”

George is referring to the appropriately humorous title of Sen. Inhofe’s circular: “Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way.” You can find a good collection of up-to-date articles here on the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.