Fraud in Psychological Research

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A NYTimes article (“Fraud seen as a red flag for psychology research“) discusses the case of scientific fraud involving a Dutch social psychologist, Diederik Stapel. This is an amazingly egregious example of fraud by a psychologist well-known for his leftist views. Stapel got his Ph.D. in 1997 but managed to crank out 150 research papers and 24 book chapters in that short period. A recent paper of his, published in the very prestigious Science, “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination” included two lab studies and three field studies. This study had a wonderfully liberal conclusion—that racial discrimination would be increased in chaotic environments because people have a tendency to simplify their cognitive processing in such environments.

The NYTimes article notes,

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.

“The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found,” said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well.” Read more

Remembering Douglas Reed

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Douglas Reed

Douglas Reed (1895–1976), British author and journalist, was a penetrating and clear-eyed witness to the course of events in Europe and the West following the First World War. He served in the trenches in that war, and afterwards became a correspondent in the then-arising telephone news services. “I began to pick up the tricks of the journalist’s trade,” he writes in Insanity Fair, the book that made him famous. Insanity Fair was published April 1, 1938 and was a great success. Six months later Reed reported in a Postscript: “Now… on October 1st, I am sitting in Belgrade and read in my newspapers that the book is in its 28th edition and that it has been banned in Germany, and all around me is the tragedy that I have foretold you, the tragedy of faith betrayed… moving with gathering speed.”

There were few tricks either in his moral sense or his prose style. He possessed a rare capacity, seemingly extinct in journalists today, which was a refusal to be deceived. This is a character of the will rather than of the intellect. But he was intellectual astute and had a graceful and highly literary prose style. The titles of many of his works speak to this literary flair: Insanity Fair (1938), Disgrace Abounding (1939), A Prophet At Home (1941), Lest We Regret (1943), From Smoke to Smother (1948).

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Anti-Defamation League blasts Buchanan and Edwards

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The ironically named Anti-Defamation League arrived fashionably late to the “Bash Pat Buchanan and James Edwards party” today by issuing a press release to all media outlets that is littered with malevolent and unwarranted personal attacks.

New York, NY, November 2, 2011 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) voiced grave concern today that Pat Buchanan, a political analyst for MSNBC, continues to openly express anti-Semitic, racist and anti-immigrant views.

In a 2009 report, “Patrick Buchanan: Unrepentant Bigot,” ADL said that Buchanan’s increasingly bigoted worldview is identical to those of self-declared “white nationalists.” Buchanan has repeatedly demonized Jews and minorities and has openly affiliated with white supremacists. He has also claimed that the sovereignty of the United States is being undermined by Israeli control and Mexican incursion.

In his new book, Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan blames the disintegration of the U.S. on its racial diversity and bemoans the destruction of white, Christian America. Read more

Notes on Holland: The Mauro Case

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Holland has seen a slow but steady restriction on immigration since the so-called Fortuyn-revolt of 2002, but the Left is constantly fighting back by bringing up cases of individual ‘asylum seekers’ to gain sympathy from the public. The latest case is that one of the Angolan boy Mauro Manuel.

Mauro Manuel with his Dutch foster parents

Manuel Mauro was born on November 18 1992 in Angola and as a 9-year old boy he was put on a plane to Europe by his mother. In the beginning he was fostered by his half-sister but after several months he was dropped at a police station where he was registered as an “unaccompanied minor asylum seeker.” In this short description of his life so far we can see all the failings which characterize Black societies: fatherless families, mothers abandoning superfluous children for a new partner and eventually a call upon White institutions to prop the whole thing up. (See also Joe Webb’s current TOO article “Addicted to helping non-Whites“.) Mauro was placed in a White foster family which has raised him as their own.

In many aspects Mauro’s youth mirrors that of Barack Obama. Barack’s father left his mother when he was two, Barack’s leftist mother dumped him at the age of ten in favor of a new partner and he was eventually fostered by his White grandparents.

Since his arrival in Holland Mauro has tried to be classified as an asylum seeker but eventually failed in 2007. Nevertheless he has not given up in the hope that the public will pity him so that the government feels forced to give him a residence permit. Read more

The U.S. Military Buildup in the Persian Gulf: Neocon Policies Are Alive and Well

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Although the neocons certainly oppose the withdrawal from Iraq, there are certainly some consolations. As Glenn Greenwald points out at Salon,

The U.S. has Iran completely encircled. It has over 100,000 troops in the nation on Iran’s eastern border (Afghanistan, where, just incidentally, the U.S. continued through this year to turn over detainees to a prison notorious for torture) and has occupied the nation on Iran’s western border (Iraq) for eight years, and will continue to maintain a “small army” of private contractors and CIA officials after it “withdraws.” The U.S. continuously flies drone aircraft over and drops bombs on the nation on Iran’s southeastern border (Pakistan). Its NATO ally (Turkey) is situated on Iran’s northwestern border. The U.S. has troops stationed in multiple countries just a few hundred miles across the Persian Gulf from Iran, virtually all of which are client states. The U.S. has its Fifth Fleet stationed in a country less than 500 miles from Iran (Bahrain) containing“US warships and contingents of U.S. Marines.” And the U.S. routinely arms Iran’s two most virulent rivals (Israel and Saudi Arabia) with sophisticated weaponry.

Greenwald rightly points to  the ludicrousness of Hilary Clinton’s statement:

“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.

Apparently, the U.S. doesn’t count as outside interference, perhaps because the Obama administration considers the entire area to be American territory. Read more

Hitler, Ibsen, and Political Theater

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To what extent was the Nazi movement suffused with pure theater? What explains the fascina­tion that Nazi symbols and Adolf Hitler himself had for millions, then and even today? Classic theater in Europe, especially drama, has always been viewed as serious literature, and Germany to this day has more theaters than any other country in the world. During the National Socialist period the Nazi Party made great use of theatri­cal techni­ques to embellish Party events.

In Ibsen and Hitler, Steven F. Sage assesses the impact Henrik Ibsen’s plays had on the develop­ment of Adolf Hitler’s Welt­an­schauung and place in history.  Sage, who completed the book as a scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, must be read with caution because he moves rapidly from Hitler’s appreciation of Ibsen’s plays, especially Emperor and Galilean, which is factual and convincing, to what the author considers the dictator’s slavish obsession and identification with the playwright’s other plots and characters, which is far less convincing. Always mindful that this book has been written to further traduce the National Socialist leaders of the period, nonetheless much of the material intro­duced is new to the American reader and well worth examining.

Ibsen and Hitler argues that there are much more than coincidental similarities between the characters and plot lines in Ibsen’s plays and the policies and speeches of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, textual analysis of passages from Hitler’s speeches and passages in the plays reveals parallels that could hardly be accidental. The three Ibsen plays upon which Sage bases his study are: Emperor and Galilean, The Master Builder, and An Enemy of the People. Emperor and Galilean tells the story of Julian the Apostate, a nephew of the Christian emperor Constantine the Great, and his foiled attempt to reinstate paganism in the Roman Empire. Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his magnum opus. It was first published in Norway in 1873 and was translated into German in 1899. Read more

The Neocon’s Defeat in Iraq: On to Iran

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The Obama Administration’s announcement of a complete troop withdrawal from Iraq is a stunning defeat for the neocons. The neocon plan was an indefinite military presence in Iraq on the model of the continuing American military bases in Japan and Germany after WWII. Obviously, Iran is a big winner, at least for now, with an ally in the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq.

Of great interest is whether Iraq will maintain the democratic institutions established by the Americans. In the long run, I suspect that from the viewpoint of the neocons, the operation certainly bought time — the time needed for Iraq to rebuild and once again pose a danger to Israeli interests. Read more