Mooney the spinner 


Chris Mooney is a journalist who has popularized some hoary old  Leftist theories about the psychology of politics.  I was researching and writing about those theories when they were still "hot" so I know a bit about them.  My most relevant academic journal articles on the subject are listed here.  Needless to say, I found that the theories concerned did not stand up under  rigorous testing.

Mooney's recent article "Liberals and conservatives don't just vote differently. They think differently" has attracted some attention so, although I have had a few laughs at  Mooney's work before (See here and here), I thought I might add just a few more comments.

For a start, Mooney's work is actually more balanced than what Leftist psychologists themselves have usually said.  Mooney can see that a trait ascribed to conservatives can be both a good and a bad thing,  which many Leftist psychologists routinely ignored.   So what Mooney does is to take a finding which could be read either way and "spin" it so that it makes Leftists look better than conservatives.   So one of the things I do is to "unspin" such judgments.

But first a few excerpts from Mooney:

There's now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.

Perhaps most important, liberals consistently score higher on a personality measure called "openness to experience," one of the "Big Five" personality traits, which are easily assessed through standard questionnaires. That means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants and vacation spots - and new ideas.

Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open - less exploratory, less in need of change - and more "conscientious," a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to change - in the famous words of William F. Buckley Jr., a desire to stand "athwart history, yelling `Stop!'?"

Now consider another related trait implicated in our divide over reality: the "need for cognitive closure." This describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for closure tends to seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to consider new information. Those who have this trait can also be expected to spend less time processing information than those who are driven by different motivations, such as achieving accuracy.

A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals, which is precisely what you would expect in light of the strong relationship between liberalism and openness. "The finding is very robust," explained Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist who has pioneered research in this area and worked to develop a scale for measuring the need for closure.

More here

I can't help laughing at Mooney's acceptance of the absurd Kruglanski work.  You can read my close look at it here.  I think I show pretty clearly that the Kruglanski questionnaire measures infantilism rather than need for closure,  with Leftists being the infantile ones.  And in the same paper I refer to the work of Van Hiel,  one of the believers  in "Openness".  Van Hiel  actually put some hard work into testing the theory that Leftists are more open.  Rather embarrassingly,  his findings were mostly the opposite of what his theory said.  So the claim that Leftists are more "open" rests on sand.

And yet there may be something in it.  I did some reseach using proper random sampling (a rarity among psychologists) that found Leftists to be "sensation seekers".  That's not too different a concept from "openness" but just spins the opposite way.  It makes Leftists look shallow  rather than conservatives. 

So the Mooney writings should not disturb conservatives in any way.  The underlying facts are no discredit to conservatives at all.

  More media deception




I note that Norway killer Breivik's clenched-fist Communist salute is universally being described in the media as "Right wing".  Right wing Communism?  It has been the Communist salute for around a century and Leftist journalists would be well aware of that.  They have probably even seen examples of it at Leftist rallies in the USA in recent times.  But for the media white can be black if it can be used to attack conservatives

There is NO Right-wing salute.  Both the  Communist and the Fascist salutes are Leftist.  The man who invented the Fasicist salute  -- Mussolini -- was a prominent Marxist theoretician.  And if Hitler's socialist worker's party (NSDAP) was Right wing, it sure was a strange socialist worker's party.  More on that here

Breivik flashed the same salute on day 2 of his trial as well.  An interesting excerpt from today's testimony:

Breivik has disclosed how much he admires al-Qaeda. He described them as the "most successful revolutionary force in the world" and praised their "cult of martyrdom". He also said that he expected his rampage last July to be ended by a bullet from the security forces. "22 July was a so-called suicide attack. I didn't expect to survive that day," he said.

It is becoming increasingly clear that he sees himself as a revolutionary or a martyr  rather than as being subservient to any ideology.  How else to explain that he hates Muslims but admires Al-Qaeda?

 At the risk of being seen as knowing what I am talking about, perhaps I should mention that on July 25, 2011 I described Breivik's actions as "pure Al Qaida"

Are conservatives lazy thinkers?
 

An article by Eidelman et al. claims that they are and it has predictably got a fair bit of attention from Left-leaning journalists.

I noted the article at the beginning of this month and dismissed it out of hand on the grounds that its taxonomy was wrong:  Eidelman had no idea of what conservatives actually think.

 Leftist  psychologists generally seem to consider it beneath them to talk to such despised people as conservatives so form their impression of conservatism from some simplistic stereotype that has built up among them over the years, a stereotype which is almost wholly wrong.  So when they think they are studying conservatism they are not.

I subsequently had a short correspondence with Eidelman but he simply stuck to his definition.  I pointed him to  my huge historical survey of what conservatism is but he offered no evidence for his view. Evidence is optional  among Leftists.

And the more closely I look at his paper the more evident it becomes that my initial critique was correct.  He relies, for instance, on the Kerlinger questionnaire about ideology.  But what Kerlinger found was that Leftism and Rightism, far from being opposed, are actually unrelated to one-another.  In other words, half of all conservatives are Leftists  -- which makes no sense at all.  Kerlinger had no idea of what conservatism is either. 

To put my critique into psychometric terms the measures of conservatism used by Eidelman are simply not valid:  They do not measure what they purport to measure. 

I could  go on with yet more swingeing criticisms (e.g. lack of  sampling) but what's the point?  Eidelman's work is clearly useless for proving anything.

The genetics of politics



After my broad-ranging comments on the psychology of politics yesterday,  I thought I might focus in a little more on  the major factor behind one's political stance:  genetics.  I saw the ground-breaking 1986 article by Martin & Jardine on the heritability of politics as soon as it came out (I had a chapter in the same book) so ever since then I have been pointing out  how strong is the genetic influence on  political stance.  What is not yet clear is WHICH genes are involved and exactly what is inherited. 

One fairly straightforward study from a couple of years ago is worth a mention.  It ties in nicely with something I found in 1984  -- that Leftists tend to be sensation seekers.  They are restless  people in search of anything new and different.  This can of course lead directly to a desire for change  -- which is of course a central feature of Leftist thinking.  They are always wanting to change something.

People with left wing views may have their political opinions controlled by a "liberal gene", according to scientists.

The research suggests that some people have an inherent bias against conservative thinking, that is independent of their education or upbringing.

The effect is caused by a neurotransmitter in the brain called DRD4 which could be stimulated by the novelty value of left of centre opinions, say US researchers.

In people who are naturally outgoing, the feature encourages them to seek out companions with unconventional views as they grow up.

This in turn means they tend to form less conventional political viewpoints as adults, according to the study by the University of California and Harvard.

The research, based on 2,000 Americans, is published in the Journal of Politics.  It found those with a strain of the DRD4 gene seek out "novelty" - such as people and lifestyles which are different to the ones they are used to.  This leads them to have more liberal political opinions, it found.

The person's age, ethnicity, gender or culture appeared to make no difference - it was the gene which counts.

DRD4 is controlled by dopamine which affects the way the brain deals with emotions, pleasure and pain and can therefore influence personality traits.

UC Professor James Fowler said: "It is the crucial interaction of two factors - the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence - that is associated with being more liberal.  "These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience."

SOURCE

That study is of course far from the end of the story.  There are indications of other genes being involved as well.  But it clearly has some  explanatory power.

  The Psychology of Politics


Psychologists have been trying to explain why people have the political opinions they do since the 1930s at least, and that  industry is still going strong.

Because psychologists are mainly Left-leaning, however, most of the explanations have been ludicrous.  The psychologists concerned  mostly seem to have been  governed by a manic desire to prove that conservatives are deranged, and in their desperate attempts to prove that, they have thrown all plausibility and scientific caution to the winds.  See here for a short and rather hilarious history of the main effort in that direction.

There has recently emerged however one psychologist who really does seem to want to understand.  Proving conservatives mad is clearly not his dominating ambition.  He actually studies real conservative thought instead of constructing a straw-man caricature of it  -- which is what most psychologists do.   And his discoveries seem to have had some influence on him.  He even says that they have led him from being a liberal to being a centrist.

And you can see why when you look at his findings.  He finds that conservatives are the ones who make complex moral judgments while Leftists make very simple ones  -- which is the diametric opposite of what Leftists usually say about conservatives.

He is still learning, however, so has in my view missed a major point in his research.  Much of what he says is reasonable but he has one large blind spot.  His name is  Jonathan Haidt and I reproduce below a few excerpts from a large essay by him which has just gone online.  After the excerpts I will point out what I think he has failed to consider.  I have myself had over 200 articles on political psychology published in the academic journals so it is possible that I have come across some things that he has not.

In the last 10 years we psychologists have discovered a great deal about the origins of ideology and why ideology makes it so hard for people to understand, respect, and accept each other. This research partly confirms what Gilbert and Sullivan said in the light opera Iolanthe: “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!” But the story is more interesting than that.

Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But while social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left), and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.

So for most of the late 20th century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.

But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of the same genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything. What’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.

We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your religiosity; and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: Genetics explains between one-third and one-half of the variability among people in their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.

How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues emerged only in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults?

After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, 15 researchers, led by Penn State political scientist Peter K. Hatemi, found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to the functioning of neurotransmitters, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear. This finding, published in The Journal of Politics last October, fits well with many studies showing that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise. Other studies have focused on genes related to receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been tied to sensation seeking and openness to experience, among the best-established correlates of liberalism.

Was old Karl right?


Marx pointed out that communism could easily be presented as Christian and the mainstream churches are mostly Left-leaning.  Even Papal encyclicals make some concessions to socialist thinking.  See both "De rerum novarum" and "Centesimus annus".

In that context a recent report from Britain is not inherently surprising.  The Guardian summarizes:

People with faith are far more likely to take left-of-centre positions on a range of issues, including immigration and equality.  The research, revealed in a new report by the thinktank Demos, undermines the widely held view that members of religious groups are more likely to have conservative tendencies.

The Demos report suggests that the example of the outgoing archbishop of Canterbury, who combines deeply held progressive beliefs with his religious convictions, is not unusual.

"Rowan Williams may be far more representative of the religious community than many have suggested," said Jonathan Birdwell, the author of the report. "Progressives should sit up and take note. Their natural allies may look more like the archbishop of Canterbury than Richard Dawkins."

The report found that 55% of people with faith placed themselves on the left of politics, compared with 40% who placed themselves on the right. The report also suggests that people with faith are more likely to value equality over freedom than their non-religious counterparts. It discloses that 41% of people with religious views prioritise equality over freedom, compared with 36% of those without faith.

The report, based on an analysis of the European Values Study, also finds evidence that people who belong to a religious organisation are more likely to say they are very interested in politics, to have signed a petition and to have participated in a demonstration.

There are some large caveats to be attached to that report, however.  England is  generally an irreligious country and the survey was based on the 13% who report that they belong to a church.  It did not ask which church, how often the respondents went to church, or how strong are their religious beliefs. Usual Sunday Attendance at church in England  is less than one million out of a total population of about 55 million -- which is about 2%  (to be generous)  -- so we see some gap between the 13% and the 2%

And even that 2% is no indication of religiosity.  Attendance at the Church of England in particular is often motivated by broadly social reasons rather than by  any real religious convictions.  And any influence the C of E had would be of a Leftist character  -- as is shown by their totally unbiblical acceptance of homosexual and female clergy.

So what does the survey tell us about religion in Britain?  Very little, I am afraid. It's entirely possible, though not probable, that all the genuinely religious people in England are conservative.

Ve vill make you happy!  Whether you like it or not 


This new Green/Left proposal (below) seems faintly reasonable at first.  Is not happiness in some sense the bottom line for all of us?   The idea that the government can make us happy is the funny bit. All the government departments I know of are much better at provoking rage!

But, aside from that, an even bigger fly in the proto-Fascist ointment is that happiness is largely dispositional.  We are pretty much born with a pre-set level of happiness and departures from it are both rare and temporary. A common clinical observation is proof of that:  Even people who have suffered catastrophic injuries  -- such as paraplegics -- seem to bounce back to their original level of happiness after a couple of  years.  Some people (mainly conservatives) are born happy and positive and some others (Leftists) are born miseries and whiners.

And if you think I am just making propaganda in saying that, I'm not.  Surveys of various sorts always show that conservatives are happier.  Just one small example here, for instance.

And the whole concept of happiness is surprisingly suspect anyway.  German and English are closely related languages and yet German just has no word for happiness.  The nearest they can come is to say that they are "lucky" (gluecklich). 

That was borne home to me forcefully many years ago when I was talking to an old Jewish gent who had escaped Hitler and ended up in Australia.  He was glad to be alive but missed the vibrant cultural life he had known in prewar Germany.  We spoke in English but he  was aware that I knew some German so when I asked him a how he felt about his escape to Australia he replied:  "Gluecklich I am but happy I am not".

And I would be surprised if other languages did not have similar difficulties of translation.  I say more about the considerable body of happiness research here

Are you happy? Are Canadians happy, or at least happier than the Americans or the French or the Taiwanese? Would you like to be happier?

At the United Nations on Monday, they took a major step toward a global strategy to enhance your happiness status, and the happiness of everybody else in the world. It’s the new role for governments across the planet. If the UN has its way, the state’s major objective will be to boost your sense of well-being and improve how you feel about your life.

It all began in 1972 in the landlocked Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (pop. 700,000) when King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced that his Buddhist country (GDP per capita US$5,500) would thereafter pursue economic progress guided not by the harsh and dehumanizing concept of Gross National Product, but by the warm and humanistic principles of Gross National Happiness.

Almost 40 years later in New York on Monday, under the auspices of the Kingdom of the United Nations, the high priests of economic interventionism and wealth redistribution moved one step closer to turning Gross National Happiness into a global paradigm.

They issued a report — the World Happiness Report. They staged a conference — Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. And they fashioned a declaration — Realizing a World of Sustainable Well-being and Happiness.

The declaration is in turn intended to become part of “a long-term reference framework” for the coming Rio +20 Earth Summit, a grand replay in June this year of Maurice Strong’s 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

At Rio +20, the UN activists hope to change the direction of world economic policy-making. Production goals and measures based on dollars and yen are out. Happiness measures are in — even though the concepts, happiness and “subjective well-being,” remain vacuous bits of quasi-religious sophistry.

The opening paragraphs of Monday’s World Happiness Report — written by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute — set out the transcendental mindset required to deal with the mind-blowing idea of Gross National Happiness or its equivalent.

One of the amazing characteristics of the happiness paradigm as described by Mr. Sachs and others is how remarkably similar its conclusions are to the old interventionism and redistribution policies of the traditional left.

It’s as if the high priests of Occupy the Planet and the Green Apocalypse — having run their old socialist and environmental engines into the ground — have stumbled across a new set of rationalizations and slogans.

To no surprise, with 65/309 as a mandate, the Monday meeting in New York produced a radical declaration calling for the overthrow of the “current economic paradigm” to take into account finite global resource limits and the emerging science of well-being and happiness.

What that means, aside from the same old nitty-gritty policies such as more government job creation, is nothing less than a “redesign of the world economy” and the overthrow of existing economic ideas to be replaced by the pursuit of happiness as defined by the United Nations, not by individuals.

More HERE

Media distortion bears fruit as Harvard academic laps it up without checking



The following paragraph was written by Nancy Gertner, a retired US District Court judge, and a professor at Harvard Law School: 

"Nothing prevents the Sanford police from critically evaluating Zimmerman’s account, as police do in so many situations, and concluding that it was contradicted by the girlfriend’s account, by 911 tapes of other bystanders shortly before the killing, that it makes no sense for Martin to start a fight since Zimmerman obviously had a gun in a holster, was substantially larger than Martin, since the encounter took place close to where Martin was staying and he was moments away from safety."

She's accepted uncritically the relevance of all those pretty media pictures showing Martin when he was about 12 years old.  She really thinks that Zimmerman was the tall one  -- when in fact Martin was 6" taller than Zimmerman. 

What a clown she is! If that's what passes for proper judicial scrutiny at Harvard,  we are all in big trouble.  Anybody who appeared before when she was a judge and lost his case should take a screenshot of her original article above and use it to petition for a re-opening of his case. 

I've got a question for the learned lady.  What would she feel if she found the guy in the photo below looking down on her on a dark night?



Because that's a picture of the 17 year old 6'3" Trayvon Martin that Zimmerman encountered.  And don't forget that it is she, not I who said that height is important.

The first time I saw the media pictures of Martin and then read his age I smelt a rat.  Blind Freddy would know that a normal black male would be at or near full physical maturity at age 17 -- as  Martin indeed was -- so why were they showing pictures of what looked like a 12-year-old kid?  Easy answer:  The whole thing is a media beatup designed to sell newspapers. And people lacking in critical thinking ability  -- such as Harvard faculty -- fell for it hook line and sinker. 

And if you think it's not a beatup consider the two cases below for contrast: 



Shawn Tyson (above) was sentenced this week for murdering two white British tourists in Florida. No rallies against violence and no charges of racism. Tyson even referred to his victims as "crackers" so it was a clear hate crime.

Terry Moore, 32, was beaten this week by a mob of black males. Again, no rallies against racism; no public outpouring of support for the victim. Such black-on-White violence is the norm and only rarely makes it to anything but local headlines.

QED

Happy days are here again;  The sky is blue, let's cheer again!


The sort of election result that conservatives can normally only  dream about has just  happened in my home State of Queensland.  The conservatives obliterated the outgoing Leftist government -- with a provisional 75 seats in the parliament for the conservatives versus only 6 for the Leftists.

Much was owed to the charismatic leader of the conservatives, Campbell Newman.  I know him slightly and have always been impressed by his helpful attitude.  He is a former military man too,  a graduate of Duntroon, Australia's equivalent of West Point.  He reached the rank of major during his service.  So he knows about decisiveness and leadership.

My State is now in good hands.  It is bigger than California and Texas combined so it is of some significance. It has gigantic natural resources, particularly coal

The first thing Newman said in his victory speech was "Thank you for voting for change"  So much for the puerile Leftist claim that conservatives are opposed to change.  It is only Leftist changes that they oppose.

  Are Catholics less creative?




The article below has only recently been brought to my attention.  It claims that Catholics are less creative.  I guess Leonardo, Titian, Tintoretto, Canaletto, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Puccini etc don't count.  The claim is too silly for me to look at the article in detail so I will content myself with making one general point:  There is no such thing as a general factor of creativity.  It's all domain-specific, and usually VERY domain specific.  Great painters don't make great composers and vice versa.  I, for instance, have a small gift for writing publishable (and published) academic journal articles but I couldn't write a novel for nuts.  So the article below purports to examine something that does not exist.   You can speak of creativity in a narrowly-defined field only.  Overall creativity does not exist.

Cross-national Comparisons of Catholic-Protestant Creativity Differences

By CHARLES MARINO

It has been argued that personality factors associated with authoritarianism-dogmatism are antithetical to creativity. This study attempts to determine if these findings can be demonstrated in real or naturally occurring groups and if they are affected by socio-political contexts. The groups compared are matched samples of Roman Catholic and Protestant students from the United States, Northern Ireland, Eire and Scotland. Psychological evidence of relatively high authoritarianism in Roman Catholics and sociological indications of relatively low creative production by Roman Catholics lead to the general hypothesis that Catholic students will perform less well on mental ability tests of creativity factors.

A two-way analysis of variance design (country v. religion) is employed to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that there are large and statistically significant differences between Catholic and Protestant students in the U.S. and Northern Ireland. Catholic students in these countries evidenced less originality, ideational fluency and spontaneous flexibility than Protestants. There were generally no differences between the groups in Eire and Scotland. It is concluded that the antithesis of dogmatism-authoritarianism to creativity can be demonstrated in naturally occurring groups and that these differences are affected by the socio-political contexts in which the groups exist.

British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Volume 10, Issue 2, pages 132–137, June 1971

  Blood pressure drug 'reduces in-built racism'



This is another dubious exercise with the IAT.  The test detects "racism" in people who are often vehemently anti-racist so the simple conclusion from that is that it is not valid.  It does not measure what it purports to measure.  To say it measures "implicit" racism is just faith and contrary to the evidence

What actually happened in the study below could have been that the drug slowed people down mentally and made them more inaccurate or sloppy in their sorting task.

I  threw together some time ago a collection of skeptical academic comments on the IAT here.  The test may measure something but we cannot be sure what.  It could even measure caution about being racist.  Journal abstract included below

A common heart disease drug may have the unusual side-effect of combating racism, a new study suggests.  The beta-blocker drug can reduce 'subconscious' racism, the Oxford University study found.

Researchers found that people who took propranolol scored significantly lower on a standard test used to detect subconscious racial attitudes, than those who took a placebo.

Propranolol is most often used to reduce high blood pressure by lowering the heart rate, as well as angina and irregular heartbeat. It is also used to manage the physical symptoms of anxiety, and control migraine.

It is thought to work by blocking activation of the peripheral 'autonomic' nervous system, and in areas of the brain involved with formulating emotional responses, including fear, called the amygdalae.

The researchers believe propranolol reduces racial bias because such subconscious thoughts are triggered by that autonomic nervous system.

Their small study took 36 white student volunteers, gave half a single 40mg dose of propranolol and half a placebo, and asked them all to undertake the Implicit Association Test - designed to test "subtle and spontaneous biased behaviour" - two hours later.

The test requires participants to visually sort particular words like 'joy' ,'evil', 'happy' and 'glorious', as well as black and white faces, into the correct categories.

Sylvia Terbeck, lead author of the study, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, said: "Our results offer new evidence about the processes in the brain that shape implicit racial bias.

"Implicit racial bias can occur even in people with a sincere belief in equality.  "Given the key role that such implicit attitudes appear to play in discrimination against other ethnic groups, and the widespread use of propranolol for medical purposes, our findings are also of considerable ethical interest."

Professor Julian Savulescu, of the university's Faculty of Philosophy, and a co-author of the study, said: "Such research raises the tantalising possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs, a possibility that requires careful ethical analysis.

"Biological research aiming to make people morally better has a dark history. And propranolol is not a pill to cure racism. But given that many people are already using drugs like propranolol which have 'moral' side effects, we at least need to better understand what these effects are."

But Dr Chris Chambers, from Cardiff University's School of Psychology, said the results should be treated with "extreme caution".  He said: "We don't know whether the drug influenced racial attitudes only or whether it altered implicit brain systems more generally. And we can't rule out the possibility that the effects were due to the drug incidentally reducing heart rate.

"So although interesting, in my view these preliminary results are a long way from suggesting that propranolol specifically influences racial attitudes."

SOURCE

Propranolol reduces implicit negative racial bias

By Terbeck S et al.

Abstract   

BACKGROUND: Implicit negative attitudes towards other races are important in certain kinds of prejudicial social behaviour. Emotional mechanisms are thought to be involved in mediating implicit "outgroup" bias but there is little evidence concerning the underlying neurobiology. The aim of the present study was to examine the role of noradrenergic mechanisms in the generation of implicit racial attitudes.

METHODS: Healthy volunteers (n=36) of white ethnic origin, received a single oral dose of the β-adrenoceptor antagonist, propranolol (40 mg), in a randomised, double-blind, parallel group, placebo-controlled, design. Participants completed an explicit measure of prejudice and the racial implicit association test (IAT), 1-2 h after propranolol administration.

RESULTS: Relative to placebo, propranolol significantly lowered heart rate and abolished implicit racial bias, without affecting the measure of explicit racial prejudice. Propranolol did not affect subjective mood.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that β-adrenoceptors play a role in the expression of implicit racial attitudes suggesting that noradrenaline-related emotional mechanisms may mediate negative racial bias. Our findings may also have practical importance given that propranolol is a widely used drug. However, further studies will be needed to examine whether a similar effect can be demonstrated in the course of clinical treatment.

SOURCE

Were the Nazis mad?


Below is a blurb I have received about a new book.  I will add a few comments at the foot of it

HERF, JEFFREY: The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During
World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press)

Historians once wrote about the Final Solution and World War II as if they were distinct events. Jeffrey Herf demonstrates, however, that in Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi leaders’ minds, the Holocaust and Second World War were part of a single “war against the Jews.”

“International Jewry,” the Nazis believed, was a conspiracy operating behind the scenes, dominating Soviet, British and American government policy. The “eternal Jew,” Hitler claimed, stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin alike. How else could one explain the alliance of these ideological foes?

Of course, there is no evidence to support the claim that the United States and Great Britain were ruled by Jews. As for the Bolsheviks, Herf documents that at no time did Jews constitute more than 5% of the Communist Party. Nazi propaganda about Jewish domination, Herf concludes, was a “complete fantasy.”

Yet the Nazis believed their fantasy. The assumption that they did not is based on an optimistic belief in the power of human rationality, and a devaluation of the human capacity for delusion. Herf shows how German ideology and propaganda were held together by a gigantic persecution mania, or paranoid myth.

It is certainly true that Hitler was obsessed with the  the Jews but if he was mad ("Paranoid" in the blurb above) so are most Leftists today and so in fact is current American "anti-discrimination" law.  The fact is that in prewar Germany,  Jews had a "disproportionate" presence in the leadership of almost all sections of society -- as indeed they do in the USA and Britain today.  Hitler viewed this disproportion as evidence of unfairness supported by a racist conspiracy and was irate about it,  very irate. 

But American Leftists use exactly the same logic in seeing "disproportionate" numbers of blacks in various occupations as evidence of  racist conspiracy.  Indeed, "disproportion" is all by itself taken as evidence of discrimination and firms and organizations are REQUIRED to bring the proportion of blacks among  their employees up to the population average.  Fire departments, for instance, are not allowed to employ firefighters who are all white,  regardless of the skills and knowledge that the various candidates for employment might have.

Hitler's solution to the "problem" was obviously more drastic than  the legal harassment that American Leftists have instituted but the thinking is the same.  It is ideologically warped thinking but it is not insane.

And one of Hitler's major aims concerned the Jews only incidentally:  The Drang nach Osten in search of Lebensraum.  Like the Greenies of today,  Hitler thought Germany was running out of resources and that in the foreseeable future it might not be able to feed all its population.  So he wanted to push to the East and grab Russian land to supply Germany with the resources it needed.  So are the Greenies insane?  Their assumptions are the same as Hitler's.

And it was a reasonable puzzle for Hitler to work out how come the semi-Fascist Roosevelt, the Conservative Churchill and the Bolshevik Stalin all united against him.  What did they have in common?  To say it was the Jews provided a unifying explanation.  It was a simple explanation and a wrong one but simple explanations are popular to this day.  Obama's claim that America's problems are all due to the rich "not paying their fair share" is also simple but wrong.

So from the blurb it seems to me that the writer's explanation of Hitler's motivation is also simple but wrong.  Hitler in fact had complex motivations.  I say far more about how normal Hitler's views  were in the prewar world here.  Nobody else liked Jews at that time either.

The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind


The above is the title of a 2008 academic journal article by  Carney,  Jost,  Gosling and  Potter.  I can't remember commenting on it previously so better late than never.

It regurgitates an approximately 80 year old theory that Leftists are more "open" to experience and conservatives are not.  I found something similar in my own research.  I found that Leftists were sensation-seekers across the board. They even liked the sensations offered by the consumer society.

But being "open to experience" and being "sensation seekers" are broadly opposite in tone, however.  The same behaviour could merit either description depending on your point of view and your value set.  The same behaviour could also   merit either condemnation or praise  depending on your point of view and value set.   Carney et al might perhaps have delved into that a bit but  were really concerned only to document the politics/personality comparison.  And the reason they worked so hard at it is that the previous psychological research on the relationship is pretty inconclusive.

And one reason why it is inconclusive is that nearly all the so-called "research" on the subject is based on handing out a bunch of questionnaires to college students in the classes you teach.  A poorer environment in which to study conservatism would be hard to imagine! 

In that connection I found the following report from Carney et al amusing:  "In the context of the experimental situation, conservatives behaved in a more detached and disengaged manner in general. Although this behavior was not indicative of  conscientiousness, it did reflect the kind of withdrawn, reserved,   inhibited, and even rigid interaction style".

If Carney et al.  had the slightest inking of sociological sophistication, they would have understood that finding very well.  A conservative in the far-Left environment of an American university would have every reason to act in a withdrawn manner.  A conservative speaking his  mind in that setting could bring no end of trouble down on his head!

But Carney et al  were apparently unfazed by all that and did the usual:  handed out a bunch of questionnaires to college students  as the basis for their research.  So I have to confess amusement at their findings.  On the "sample" they used which had most demographic variety,  their set of personality measures accounted for only 4% of the variance in social conservatism.  To portray that in another way,  if you had 100 people who were open to experience, 52 would be Leftists and 48 would be conservatives.   Knowing a person's personality gave you essentially zero chance of guessing their social conservatism, in other words.

The authors hyped their findings way beyond that but that 4%  is their most well-founded result.

My study on the subject was based on a proper random sample of the general population so  if it is people at large that we are talking about, we do well to look  at the results there.  I also found correlations that explained little of the variance in political attitudes.  So the various versions of "openness" have been a red herring when it comes to explaining political stance.  And my study looked at actual vote, as well as  one's political self-description  -- which is a big step beyond what Carney et al did.  And what did I find?  I found that personality gave ZERO prediction of vote!

Leftist psychologists have been grinding away at that "liberals are more open" theme for decades.  They desperately want it to be true but it isn't!  It is other personality types that we will have to look at to predict vote.  How about tendency to rage?  The amount of rage that we conservative bloggers get directed at us from Leftists answers that question without need for further research, I think.

JOHN 8:58 does not necessarily mean what it seems  


"Jesus said unto them, "truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am". (RSV).

This scripture is routinely compared to Exodus 3:14, where we read of Yahweh: "God said unto Moses, "I AM WHO I AM". And he said "Say this to the people of Israel, "I AM has sent me to you"". (RSV). 

Just a few notes:  The Exodus statement was made in response to a request from Moses for God to identify himself.  And the reply (understandably?) "I am who I am" is  simply impatient.   I believe that I myself have at times said "I am who I am" in response to certain challenges.  And  the second part, "I am has sent me", just carries on the impatience of God with Moses's request for identification.   But God gives in to Moses in the next verse and identifies himself as "Yahweh", the traditional god of the Hebrews.  So while the theologians have made much of this passage, it is hardly the claim to uniqueness that they often assert.  It just shows that the Hebrew god was a rather human figure who got impatient with people not knowing who he was -- and who handed out carved stone tablets and various other things.

Moving on to John 8:58 and the expression "I am" there:  The Greek expression Jesus used here is "Ego eimi" -- which is the first person singular form of the verb "to be" in Greek.  Its meaning is not however as straightforward in Greek as it is in its English counterpart.  It is  quite imprecise and can be translated in a number of ways.  Even in that particular passage, translators differ on their rendering of it. Some authorities suggest "I have been" but the suggestion I like best is "I am he".  That translation fits the text best, it seems to me.  He was, after all, answering the enquiry, "Have you seen Abraham?".  And in other passages of the NT (e.g. John 14:9) "eimi" is routinely translated as "have been".

So Jesus was certainly claiming to be an ancient being but the statements in Exodus and John are clearly not comparable.  And in fact the case and tense structures of Hebrew and Greek are very different so any exact comparability would in any event be fanciful.

What Jesus actually said in his native Aramaic, we can only guess of course.  We have only John's  report in Greek.

For what it is worth, John would have been well aware of the ancient and widely used translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek -- The Septuagint -- and the Septuagint renders Exodus 3:14 as “EGO EIMI HO OHN,” meaning “I am the being” or "I am the one",  so again comparability between the two texts is lost. If John had seen Jesus's Aramaic words as a reference  to Exodus 3:14, he would presumably have translated them into Greek in the same way that the ancient Jewish translators behind the Septuagint did.

That John in fact chose a Greek expression that is capable of at least two different meanings is however well in keeping with his Gnostic tendencies.  Gnosticism (the pretence of secret knowledge) was around long before Christ and it did eventually infect Christianity.  There were various gnostic Christian sects from the second century on.  John, however, does appear to have written quite late in the first century so may perhaps be regarded as the first of the Christian Gnostics.  The book of  Revelations, in particular, reads very much like a Gnostic text, with its constant use of symbolism. 

So  John took advantage of the various uses of "eimi"  to make one of his  Gnostic  utterances.  Compare John 1:1, where his clever use of an anarthrous predicate also leads most Greekless  people into thinking he is saying more than he is.  He was obviously a very competent Greek stylist.

So John was not being deceitful in using the the words he did.  He was just being vague  -- perhaps with the aim of saying that REAL Christians would be able to untangle the intended  meaning, which is a very Gnostic thing to do.  And at the time that was probably no difficulty.  But with the impossibility  of exactly translating all Greek tenses into languages with different verb structures, misunderstandings have certainly developed.

As someone who has often battled with translating German into English (which are after all two closely related languages) I am confident in saying  in fact that ALL translations are only approximations.  I comment on that at greater length here.  On some occasions you do have to study the original texts  to get an accurate sense of the passage.

I can't resist adding a few more comments about the Septuagint. The Torah section of it (including Exodus) is quite ancient and the oldest surviving manuscripts of the OT are in fact mostly of the Septuagint.  And there are quite a few places where the Septuagint and the Masoretic (Hebrew) text differ in meaning, though the differences are not usually greatly important. 

It used to be automatic among Bible translators to prefer the Masoretic renderings and dismiss the Septuagint as "freely" translated.  A widely held view among textual scholars these days, however,  holds that the Septuagint was based  on a pre-Masoretic version of the Hebrew text and that its renderings are therefore at least as likely to represent the lost original texts as are the Masoretic renderings.  In which case the less enigmatic Septuagint rendering of Exodus 3:14 might reasonably be preferred. So YHWH might originally have been recorded as saying not "I am who I am" but rather something like “I am the being” or "I am the one".

Note finally that the apostle Paul normally quoted from the Septuagint in his epistles.  How's that for a headspinner? 

I would think that in the circumstances a really serious Christian Bible student (are there any left?) would be heading out to buy himself a copy of the Septuagint with an accompanying English translation.  I do myself own such a volume but it is quite old so I doubt that it is still in print anywhere.  For what it is worth, however, it was published by Samuel Bagster and Sons of London in 1879.  Bagster had a most comprehensive range of Bible study aids but with the decline of Biblical scholarship they have now gone out of business.  There is however a translation only here that sounds useful.  The most "official" translation of the Septuagint at the moment is here but I don't like the assumptions underlying it at all at all.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa


As my scripture blog shows, the version of Christianity that has always impressed me most is the one I find in the New Testament.  I have always been vaguely offended by the pagan accretions that have been tacked onto the original gospel:  The Doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the immortal soul, the cross, Sun-day worship, Christmas, Easter etc.

But I think I was wrong.  With the exception of the Trinity, those pagan accretions were deliberately adopted because they already had a power over the hearts of men.  So they strengthened the religion and helped it to survive as a vehicle for the original teachings.  Perhaps without  those pagan accretions the original Gospel might have been lost.  As it is the original first century documents (of the New Testament) have survived and are still there for us to read and accept or not as our hearts and minds guide us.

So the grand buildings, the splendid vestments, the ecclesiastical processions, the "bells and smells" of Catholicism and Anglicanism are probably something to be thankful for,  far away though they be from the original Christian congregations of the apostolic era.

BOOK REVIEW: for The Reptile with a Conscience by Nathan Cofnas. Paperback. pp. 523.Available from The Ulster Institute for Social Research. Review by J.J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

One of Einstein's more famous sayings is: "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong". That single experiment would now appear to have been done so is Einstein now old hat?  Far from it.  Just as Einstein's relativity subsumed Newton's mechanics, so the next generation of physics will have to cope with the observations that came from Einstein's work.

A failure that Einstein himself acknowledged was his failure to devise a "unified field theory".  Einsten was of course Jewish so it is interesting that another brilliant Jewish writer, Nathan Cofnas, HAS attempted a "unified field theory".  But this theory is not about physics.  It is about ideology.  Nathan has presented us with a theory that accounts for both religion and politics as being from the same rootstock.

And I can even tell you very simply what that theory is.  Nathan points something out that seems obvious when you hear it but nobody previously seems to have thought of it.  He takes Adam Smith's famous theory of markets  -- the invisible hand -- and points out that religious people also see an invisible hand in the world about them:  The hand of God.

You don't have to think about that for long, however, to start saying "Yes but ...".  And that is why Nathan has written his book.  He presents his theory in a much more subtle and careful way than my crude generalization above and proceeds to answer all the "Yes buts ..".  He fleshes out how he believes both conservative thinking and Judeo/Christian thinking arise.

But this is not a book for scholars, philosophers and ideologues only.  It does something that anybody interested in modern  politics needs badly:  It gives an systematic  answer to the old Leftist retort to all facts and arguments that they dislike:  "There's no such thing as right and wrong, anyway".  The crazy thing about that assertion of course is that the same Leftists who say that will say in almost the same breath that racism or anything done by George W Bush is wrong.  They contradict their own assertion almost as soon as they make it.  So it is not only conservatives but Leftists too who need to get their minds clear on what is right/wrong and where that right/wrong comes from.  And Nathan helps us greatly with that.

But WHY do Leftist deny right and wrong when it suits them?  Doing so makes all their OWN doctrines, policies and beliefs look like empty vapour.  It's a strange thing to do.  So:   The reason they do it is because most analytical philosophers say the same thing.  And as John Maynard Keynes once said:  "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

Analytical philosophers say:  "If there is this objective property of "rightness", how do we detect it and where is it?  Do we lift up a stone somewhere and find it there?  And that challenge has proved hard to answer.  Just what IS rightness and how do we know it is right?

In recent times, however, an answer to that has begun to emerge:  We know some things are right because we have rightness instincts.  Rightness IS located somewhere.  It is located in our long evolution as social beings. It is somewhere in our primitive "reptilian" brain.  But the "Yes, buts ..." come thick and fast to that proposition, as it is obvious that our higher brain (where "conscience" is located) has a role too and can make some things seem right to one person that another person sees as wrong.  So how do we sort THAT mess out?  Nathan goes through it systematically for us and leaves even atheists like me confident that there IS such a thing as a real right and wrong.

Nathan's book will not be the final answer on all the questions it addresses but, like Einstein's theory of relativity, future discussions in the field will have to take account of his arguments if  they are to be well-informed.

"Der Schwed"  -- yesterday and today


During the 30 years war of the 17th century  Gustav Adolf den store (Gustavus Adophus) led his Swedish troops to many great victories in Europe.  Without him the Protestant cause may well  have lost out to the Catholic South.  His armies were at the time simply referred to as "Der Schwed" (the Swede), though they would have referred to themselves as the "Svea". 

So we see that the Swedish martial spirit did not die out with the Vikings of the 11th  century (Swedish Vikings mostly sailed up rivers into what we now know as Russia.  It was left to the Norwegians and Danes to harass Britain and Western Europe).

And, strange as it seems in the light of their constant peacenikery of the 20th century,  that spirit is still alive today.  For good reasons the proximity of Russia gives everybody at the Eastern end of the Baltic the heebie-jeebies.  Going by their invariant and very successful form since the 11th century,  we would expect the English to deal with such a  peril by forming alliances with other countries.  Not so the Swedes.  They cherish their independence.  And they can realistically do that because of confidence in their military.   They have been prepared to fight Russia alone if need be.  The Finns did it under Mannerheim in the early stages of WWII so they have a successful example to go by. But the Swedish military has to be independent too -- so we come to the Swedish defence industries. 

With a population about the same size as Israel, it is amazing what the Swedish defence industries have produced. The famous Bofors  gun was used for antiaircraft defence by BOTH sides in WWII and is still in use today.  And Bofors are not sitting on their laurels.   I could go on to talk about Swedish military aircraft and submarines but I  think that for the moment I will just say a few words  about Bofors.

Aside from nuclear weapons, the most fearsome thing about the old Soviet Union was their vast fleet of tanks.  And Bofors produced an answer to that in the form of the BILL1, a fearsome antitank missile.  Bofors turned out tens of thousands of them,  quite enough to wipe out the entire Soviet tank fleet with a bit of luck.    It is a guided missile that flies just a bit ABOVE the tank and fires a shaped charge down onto the turret of the  tank at just the right time -- the turret being  a tank's weakest point.  That must be a considerable challenge to the missile's controller but the Swedes must be  confident that trained operators can pull it off.  Below is a video of it in action:



(Note:  Some mischievous person has been circulating the above video together with a claim that it shows an Israeli missile using white phosphorous to destroy a Syrian tank.  Israel has been much criticized for its limited use of white phosphorous in Gaza but insists that it only used phosphorous in accordance with the laws of war.  Using it in an anti-tank weapon would heap criticism on Israel so the false claim attached to the above video is malicious)

And to keep up with advances in tank technology Bofors have produced a BILL2 missile that is even more capable than BILL1.  (The "B" stands for Bofors)

It seems sad that such an apparently effective weapon is not held in the arsenals of Western countries but Swedish neutrality forbids it.  Only a few other "neutral" countries such as Austria and Brazil have it.  So Sweden has had to bear all the costs of developing and deploying the weapon by itself -- a considerable challenge.  Most armament  manufacturers are keen to sell their stuff to all and sundry  -- to help defray the development costs.

And even if Sweden did decide to sell BILL2 more widely, it might not get much uptake.  I remember when I was in the Australian Army during the Vietnam war, we deployed the   prime Swedish antitank weapon of the day, the Carl Gustav.  But as soon as we entered the Vietnam war, the Swedes stopped supplying ammo for it!  Tanks featured little in the Vietnam war so it was not a great setback but it was a salutary lesson in being careful about the source of supply of your weaponry.  The Swedes have no worries on that score.

IQ, conservatism and racism



On 22nd January I commented on claims by two Canadian psychologists to the effect that conservatives and racists have low IQs.  One look at the study told me that it was brainless so I just reproduced the journal abstract and pointed out two of the things that made it brainless.  I didn't see any point in a detailed look at the paper.

The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard.  Monbiot's entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives,  with the most amusing point being that after Leftists  telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article.  The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.  

I want to say more about just one of them:  The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable.  That is however a matter of degree and of purpose.  They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect.  In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood.  So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life!  So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim.  The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however,  The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however.  The second  article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed.  Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results.  The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible.   They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large. 

So statistical significance is irrelevant.  It is other forms of significance we have to look at.  Let me put it this way:  What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives.  Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to "racism".  The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial.  Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that.  The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure.  So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago:  That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is.  A much noted paper in the field even identified  Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives!   Can you get any madder than that?  So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that "conservatives" AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance).   How clueless can you get?  What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives.  They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them.  It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think. 

By contrast, I am a conservative so  a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not:  Provided a substantial prediction of vote.  See here.  So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless.  The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with  conservatism.  I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For  reference, the Canadian study is:  "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact"  by Gordon Hodson and   Michael A. Busseri

Deep dishonor in America's Leftist academe


The Humanities faculty at Durham's Duke University have demonstrated bigoted anti-white attitudes that are perfectly mainstream among such faculty at American universities. An amazing total of 88 of them signed the now notorious condemnation of the innocent Duke lacrosse players before the players had even appeared in court, let alone been convicted. Their hatred of American society immediately blasted away the centuries of wisdom which said "innocent until proven guilty". And the wisdom of that maxim was shown when the players were found NOT guilty.

So what is still going on at Duke can reasonably be extrapolated to at least the Humanities departments of America's universities and colleges. And that is not pretty.

One of the Lacrosse players who was NOT accused by the pathetic Crystal Gail Mangum was nonetheless caught up in the blast and suspended by the university at roughly the same time as the other players. He is now suing. As you can read here, Ryan McFadyen is arguably the person who behaved with greatest honor in the whole affair. He certainly behaved with greater honor than prosecutor Nifong or Durham police -- who tried to suborn him into giving false evidence. There is another glimpse of his character here.

And when McFadyen refused to be intimidated into giving false evidence, Nifong and the police must have realized that he had put them into a dangerous position. Fabricating evidence is a crime with severe penalties. So they immediately went all-out to blacken his name. And that blackening still shows up today in that he has become something of a hate figure to many.

So he is now suing over that defamation and the illegal and improper behaviour of all concerned in the matter.

The trial has however produced some document disclosures that reveal the full depth of the moral depravity of senior Duke U officials. The documents contain bombshell emails from Duke President Brodhead and others suggesting that Duke's primary concern was to protect its PR, even if that meant sacrificing innocent students.

In documents submitted February 3 by Plaintiffs' lawyers, President Brodhead is quoted in an email sent very early in the case to other Duke staff:

“Friends: a difficult question is, how can we support our lacrosse players at a devastatingly hard time without seeming to lend aid and comfort to their version of the story? We can’t do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they behaved with honor. The central admin can't, nor can Athletics.”

And Joe Alleva, then of the Duke Athletic Dept., also testified during his deposition on January 20, 2012, that he made positive and truthful statements about Plaintiffs and their teammates’ character at the University’s press conference on March 28, 2006.

Mr. Alleva testified that he was “crucified” immediately afterwards for making those statements by President Brodhead himself and in front of the Crisis Management Team, all of whom knew how “off-message” Mr. Alleva’s truthful, positive statements about plaintiffs were.

Alleva was the one who later told Duke lacrosse coach Pressler that "it's not about the truth" any longer; that the case was about the interest groups and the integrity (reputation) of the university. (Hence the title of coach Pressler's book, "It's not about the truth").

Or as Robert K. Steel (then chairman of Duke's Board of Trustees) said in explaining why Duke would not be defending its falsely-accused students: "Sometimes people have to suffer for the good of the organization". More details here

You would think that all the exposure of their moral depravity might have created some caution among Duke faculty about race-related matters. It does not appear to have done so. Just a few days ago I ran a large excerpt from an article which summarized the Arcidiacono affair. I will simply refer readers to there for a treatment of that little explosion of rage and hate. See HERE for the full article. Having their warped view of America threatened is intolerable to Duke's Leftist Mafia.

No Leftist will admit it of course but I cannot see why Duke should be regarded as atypical. I don't think there is anything especially poisonous in the air at North Carolina. I think we have seen coming to the surface at Duke what is smouldering away beneath the surface at most of America's universities and colleges. They are true heirs of Stalin and the ghastly Soviet Union. They are a nest of vipers.

Whine! whine! whine! Would YOU be devastated if you found that most physicists are men?


In a profoundly unscientific article, two female physicists are apparently deeply disturbed by the reality concerned. Under the heading "Women in physics: A tale of limits" Rachel Ivie and Casey Langer Tesfaye have written a long screed that can be summarized with both brevity and accuracy by a very fashionable whine: "We bin discriminated against".

A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don't.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by "the dog that didn't bark", however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of course disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it -- thus violating one of the most fundamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can't see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with "equality". They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.