http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GUN_VIOLENCE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-05-07-19-27-18DRAMATIC REDUCTION IN GUN HOMICIDES SINCE 1993.
Why does the public think they’re increasing when we’ve seen such a rapid decline?
Source date (UTC): 2013-05-08 10:45:00 UTC
IS SOCIOLOGY LEFTIST PROPAGANDA MASQUERADING AS SCIENCE?
(I love answering questions like this.)
Others have described the phenomenon imprecisely. I will have to try do better until someone does better than I:
1) Sociology relies on surveys which are almost always false, because of natural properties innate in human psychology and cognitive processes. Sociology relies upon experiments, the conditions of which have greater affect on the answers provided than the natural environment in which teh behavior would be demonstrated. So in effect, ANY TEST that you issue will bias towards collectivist results, even if people will ACT upon individual incentives in the actual circumstance. This is pretty obvious really.
2) Economics instead, relies upon demonstrated actions independent of tests. This is why economics has become the primary social science: we measure demonstrated actions rather than what people state they would do.
3) Behavioral psychology tries to reduce the problem of sociological testing by proving the indvalidity of social surveys and tests. The only valuable survey information appears to be voting records, which if detailed enough, like economic data, demonstrate what people actually do rather than what they say they will do in any given circumstance.
4) Sociology seems to attract people who are disproportionately subject to various collectivist biases, and the related cognitive biases. (Google ‘Common economic errors’, ‘Common Cognitive Biases’, “Common Social Cognitive Biases’.) We must remember, that the farther down the IQ scale you are, the more you must rely on the opinions, thoughts, and interpretations of otherse for your information. Every 15 points of IQ is about one standard deviation. That means people cannot really talk to each other easily across 15 points of difference and cannot even grasp each other’s world views or contexts, or implied causal relations at 30 points. THe predominance of science is improving this by repeated exposure
5) The output of these surveys and experiments produces biased and therefore false information and conclusions, but the people who conduct them have both a subconscious bias, a preferential interest, and a career interest, and a political interest in believing and promoting the false outputs. There is a market for this false information available in public intellectuals, politicians and organizers. This false information is used for political purposes, under the pretense of academic neutrality, and empirically supported truth – none of which are true either.
The public cannot understand this, the teachers use it because teachers are from the bottom 15% of graduating classes in intelligence, self select for the nurture bias, which is the source of left wing moral specialization, and must try to form homogeneity of interests among pupils with diverse backgrounds, and require justification for their actions. This is conversely why they cannot teach history or art history any longer, because this would require value judgements that distributed status signals to different members of a group that they seek to treat as homogenous family in order to control the room.
Statistically speaking, in any university department sociologists will have the lowest IQ distribution of any of the major disciplines, economists, mathematicians and medical doctors the highest distribution. (Michigan study).
For these reasons, the discipline of sociology is in fact, an unscientific tool of propaganda created, maintained, and used by the lowest IQ distribution in academia as a means of attepting to justify the failed communist, socialist, and now postmodernist ideology that seeks to compete against the natural sorting of people opportuntiy, income and political power behind those groups, families, and individuals with demonstrated meritocratic superiority in the market for goods, services, and military defense.
Harsh words.
True words.
The conservatives are correct.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 05:27:00 UTC
https://www.quora.com/Is-sociology-leftist-propaganda-masquerading-as-science
ECONOMIC FALLACY #4: SCIENTISTS AREN’T NEUTRAL
SCIENTISTS AND ACADEMICS ARE ADVOCATES OF EXTREMES, THEY ARE NOT NEUTRAL JUDGES
No need to explain this. The process of competition between ideas in the pursuit of status in the scientific community tends, over time, to produce relatively truthful results. But scientists cannot make the claim for neutrality, or that as individuals they even follow the scientific method. It is the market for status signals that produces the outcome, not the ethics of any particular scientist. In fact, it certainly looks like most grad students are vastly incompetent, most professors are not much better, and only the top one percent of people in any discipline are even close to accurate about anything that they publish. And those that are, are accurate because they are synthesists, of everyone’s work not advocates of their own.
Science is not what scientists claim it to be. Economists are as bad or worse.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-11 03:15:00 UTC
WHY CONSERVATIVES RETAIN POWER?
Liberals (the political wing of the Postmodernist Religion) rely on counter-factual IMMORAL arguments, while conservatives rely on counter-factual MORAL arguments. Everyone knows everyone’s arguments are counter-factual. The difference is that they vote for morality. Since liberal arguments are immorally counterfactual, the public rejects them.
The only reason democratic candidates win is the single female, single mother vote, because it is an rent-seeking demographic. Females are rent seekers. It is their reproductive strategy. They can rent seek against husbands, rent seek against tribes, and rent seek against the state. It is far easier to rent seek against the state than rent seek against a husband, because the number of alpha husbands is increasingly limited under commercial capitalism.
If not for the single mother, single woman vote, we would never have a liberal anything in this country.
This is the outcome of the feminist revolution and the attack on men and the nuclear family. As a response, the conservatives and libertarians (my side) hired the capitalists (on their own side) against the state – by giving them free reign to undermine the expansionist liberal movement, and the democratic socialist state. It has largely worked. Except that immigration has ruined the demographics anyway. So the liberal strategy has also won. That is why we are at a stalemate until one of these sides conquers the other.
And demographically, at least on the coasts, white people with the moral code of the nuclear family with high transaction costs in rural areas are going to lose the battle against rent seekers with low transaction costs in the urban centers.
I suspect the outcome isn’t going to be the idyllic star-trek future we envisioned. I could argue pretty effectively that the only solution is to break up the country into some permutation of the ‘nine nations of north america’, or at least the center vs, the coasts. This would create enormous opportunity, and eradicate the US debt structure.
But I suspect that such a rational outcome isn’t likely.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 08:55:00 UTC
THE LOGICAL CONTRADICTION IN THE POSTMODERN RELIGION
The modern histories of religion and socialism exhibit striking parallels in development.
1) Both religion and socialism started with a comprehensive vision that they believed to be true but not based on reason (various prophets; Rousseau)
2) Both visions were then challenged by visions based on rational epistemologies (early naturalist critics of religion; early liberal critics of socialism).
3) Both religion and socialism responded by saying that they could satisfy the criteria of reason (natural theology; scientific socialism).
4) Both religion and socialism then ran into serious problems of logic and evidence (Hume’s attacks on natural theology; Mises’s and Hayek’s attacks on socialist calculation).
5) Both then responded in turn by attacking reality and reason (Kant and Kierkegaard; postmodernists).
6) The prevailing skeptical and irrationalist epistemologies in academic philosophy thus provided the Left with a new strategy for responding to its crisis. Any attack on socialism in any form could be brushed aside, and the desire to believe in it reaffirmed.
7) [P]ostmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith. Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism.
If one is interested in truth, then one’s rational response to a failing theory is as follows:
1) One breaks the theory down to its constituent premises.
2) One questions its premises vigorously and checks the logic that integrates them.
3) One seeks out alternatives to the most questionable premises.
4) One accepts moral responsibility for any bad consequences of putting the false theory into practice.
This is not what we find in postmodern reflections on contemporary politics. Truth and rationality are subjected to attack, and the prevailing attitude about moral responsibility is again best stated by Rorty: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”
One could, after doing some philosophy, come to be a true believer in subjectivism and relativism. Accordingly, one could come to believe that reason is derivative, that will and desire rule, that society is a battle of competing wills, that words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance, and that all is fair in love and war. That is the position the Sophists argued 2400 years ago.
The only difference, then, between the Sophists and the postmodernists is whose side they are on. [The Sophists, marshalled] subjectivist and relativistic arguments in support of the political claim that justice is the interest of the stronger. The postmodernists—coming after two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of socialist theory—simply reverse that claim: Subjectivism and relativism are true, except that the postmodernists are on the side of the weaker and historically-oppressed groups. Justice – is the interest of the weaker.
– Hicks, Stephen R. C. (2010-10-19). Explaining Postmodernism
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 03:44:00 UTC
THE POSTMODERN RELIGION, AND ITS POLITICAL WING: LIBERALISM
The left is a kleptocracy, and its religion is postmodernism.
“In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims.
1) On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
2) On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
3) Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil.
4) Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
5) Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.
There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity.
Consider three more examples, this time of clashes between postmodernist theory and historical fact.
1) Postmodernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever, and that it is only in places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive.
2) They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.
3) They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.
In the modern world, Left-wing thought has been one of the major breeding grounds for destruction and nihilism. From the Reign of Terror to Lenin and Stalin, to Mao and Pol Pot, to the up-surge of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s, the far Left has exhibited repeatedly a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends and exhibited extreme frustration and rage when it has failed.”
– Excerpted from Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism, chapter six.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-07 03:10:00 UTC
https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-police-officer-determine-if-a-woman-is-lying
https://www.quora.com/What-reservations-do-you-have-about-liberal-principles
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND POSTMODERNISM?
CHRISTIANS (conservatives) keep their hands out of your pockets, and demand you behave ethically and morally in public – AND POSTMODERNISTS (liberals) put their hands into your pockets and that is their only demand.
That appears to be the only difference.
Source date (UTC): 2013-04-06 09:36:00 UTC