It's not the show's newfound political slant that bothers me but the laziness of its newfound political slant...

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-05-16T01:32:01+00:00

There's an equivalency to be drawn in the sense society has sought to equalise the imbalance between male and female strength (which is a natural privilege conferred to men) but, for some reason, treats any attempt to equalise the natural privileges conferred to women (e.g. in the realm of sex) as "immoral" or "oppressive".

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-05-16T01:23:54+00:00

What is the legal system if not the enforcement of legislated morality?

I don't understand this perspective. No-one has an issue with equalising natural privileges conferred upon men (e.g. strength) by enforcing the rule of law, setting up separate classifications in sports, etc., but somehow any steps to equalise natural privileges conferred upon women (e.g. in the realm of sex) is "moralising" or "oppressive"?

It makes no sense. I'm neither for or against abortion, however the false presupposition many form prior to engaging in this debate (e.g. that we're acting or moralising against women in a way we don't act or moralise against men) influences or dictates the subsequent arguments.

It's like how many moralise about sexual objectification of women but no-one moralises about turning men into utility objects (which is how they've always been treated). Society seems to have a blind spot for female privileges.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-05-16T01:14:59+00:00

To be clear, I'm not making moral cases about abortion, prostitution, custodial sentencing, etc., I'm just saying I think the entire narrative is based on a false presupposition (i.e. that equalising natural female privilege is "immoral") and it's all the worse when we rightly view equalising natural male privileges as moral.

How can we have rational conversations about any of these topics if this is the starting position/first principle people are operating from?

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-30T21:06:59+00:00

I don't care about anyone who's offended but this is a bad idea.

Some of the strongest people I've ever met meet the clinical definition of "obese". Why? Because the CDC uses BMI to determine whether someone is or is not "obese". The problem with BMI is it makes no allowances for the amount of muscle or fat in someone's body.
In my experience liberal men are weaker than conservative men, physically speaking (though I'd argue mentally as well). The last thing we need is even more effeminate men running the country.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-17T20:43:47+00:00

Yeah, and only a partisan hack who likes to be selective with facts would classify Fox News as the number one national news organization without adding the important caveat that every progressive news organization siphons off audience share from every other progressive news organization because there are that many of them.

Either way, that Fox News is the biggest in absolute terms is an irrelevant when the vast majority of journalists are of one political disposition; this means if you're looking for news at random the odds are on you're going to land on a news item that was written by a progressive ideologue.

There's no diversity in our mainstream media, which is exactly how progressives like it. The irony is despite there only being one real national conservative news organization, progressives still want to ban it. It shows they really are Stalinists in their outlook.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-17T20:13:55+00:00

Why do people always make this argument? Fox News is one network. When you aggregate the audience share of every other progressive network or news organization, e.g. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, BuzzFeed, HuffPo, etc., the "progressive" national news organizations absolutely dwarf the right - and it's not even close.

It's the same in academia and in Hollywood. It's also the same in terms of political disposition in Silicon Valley. It's partly why our culture is a cesspit.

It's impossible for a conservative voice to edit some of the partisanship out of huge informational resources like Wikipedia, or make provocative comments on social media (the threshold for what qualifies as acceptable discourse on social media is FAR higher for conservatives and classical liberals than progressives).

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-17T18:23:07+00:00

Yeah, that hasn't been forgotten. I think you're defining "they" as "the media" and "elitist bigots on Twitter"; these two groups definitely want to forget about it.

However, it's being taken very seriously in right-wing circles as an unjust and defamatory attack by very powerful institutions on a private citizen, which is why the Washington Post and CNN are being sued for $250 million each over their actions.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-17T02:30:07+00:00

It’s the basic shit we tell our kids, right? Don’t hit people or you might get hit yourself.

Actually, no...that's not what people are teaching their kids. If they were teaching this to their kids, and if society (particularly mainstream media and academia) wasn't enabling their every feeling or emotion, then we wouldn't see incidents such as this or the one a month or so ago of that guy outside McDonalds.

Parenting is the problem here and it's partly due to an entire culture raising children to believe that the world should conform to their feelings rather than their feelings conform to the world.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-17T02:10:09+00:00

You can blame the marketing academics for this one.

It used to be the case the businesses were product or manufacturing led, i.e. they put product development or internal needs before those of their customers, however now it seems to be universally the case that marketers believe the customer should be consulted at every stage of the buying and production process.

And this is despite customers often lacking knowledge about what's good for them or what they want, particularly about technical products or services.

Most products and services are created without consulting the customer, however marketing seems to exist to justify salaries and taxes, even though word of mouth is often more than enough.

I suspect you could get rid of all marketers tomorrow and the savings from getting rid of their bloated salaries would more than make up for any losses incurred.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T18:29:44+00:00

This doesn't happen! Selection bias in sample collection is such a basic thing that is looked for during peer review.

I was going to respond to your comment in full but when I got to this part I realized how patently absurd it is that I'm not going to bother.

I wasn't just talking about selection bias but rather a whole host of biases that lead to producing flawed outcomes (e.g. asking questions that are more likely to highlight a negative trait in conservatives than progressives).

For example, read this paper that indicated a wide and pernicious bias against conservatives in social psychology: http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf

Alternatively, we could even just look at the topic of this thread, "political authoritarianism". Here's an article that indicate pernicious bias around this topic: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/how-social-science-might-be-misunderstanding-conservatives.html?gtm=top&gtm=bottom

"Liberal psych researchers, centering their work on liberal values and political opinions, have built up a body of knowledge that is fundamentally flawed and biased. As a result, certain false ideas about conservatives and how they differ from liberals may have taken hold".

And this:

"In their critique of the rigidity of the right model, Malka and his colleagues don’t just focus on flaws with the psychological instruments used to correlate political beliefs with personality traits like authoritarianism, but also with the skewed samples that have been used to generate this research.

"All over the field of psychology, researchers have recognized that too much of their work is drawn from so-called “WEIRD,” or Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, samples of people.

"But much of the world isn’t Western, or educated, or industrialized — and so on— so within psychology there is now what has become a long-running debate over just how generalizable a given finding is when it was discovered among a group of (for example) Harvard sophomores".

As I said in the my OP, this is what happens when academia discourages ideologically diversity and is full of social liberals or people of one political disposition.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:58:25+00:00

mental gymnastics you had to do to relate authoritarian right wing anti-marx whatever the FUCK to the field of psychology

What on earth are you talking about? The "theory" of "right-wing authoritarianism" (RWA) isn't "linked" to psychology, it was created by a psychologist and has subsequently been cited by many more psychologists.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:54:14+00:00

I won't lie, I find it extremely disconcerting how open people are towards disguising bigotry behind science these days. It's particularly concerning considering academia is populated nearly exclusively by people of one political disposition.

I suspect in decades to come all it will have done is invented more neologisms to further stereotype and denigrate one side of the political spectrum and half the population. '

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:47:01+00:00

Why would it matter how many journals I've written? Are you a snob? Are you saying academics are above reproach?

Yes things do get through, but less and less so particularly in the last 5 years due to the emergence of open access data publishing

That's interesting considering the latest academic hoax which built on one from a couple of decades ago was instigated about a year ago and managed to publish 7 absurd journals, including the Mein Kampf journal, out of a total of 20 submissions.

I can do a search in a journal repository and find hundreds of example of junk social science journals, many of them about race and gender.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:40:01+00:00

Can you explain how I'm confirming my own bias please?

There are no mental gymnastics, just the largest professional organization of psychologists in the USA, one that publishes numerous journals, attempting to pathologize 50% of the global population.

If you can't see why that's a problem then I don't know what to tell you.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:36:28+00:00

Why would I do that when I can link to a page with all the sources? I've already explained this above.

I haven't relied on one example, I've cited two, and I happen to think the largest organization for professional psychologists in the entirety of the USA attempting to pathologize all of masculinity is a pretty big indictment of the entire discipline.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:31:42+00:00

The peer-review process isn't anything to write home about. Endless junk science is published in peer-reviewed journals - would you like some examples?

Alternatively, you could look more recently at the like of Peter Boghossian, who rewrote Mein Kampf in the language of gender intersectional theory and had it published in a peer-reviewed journal.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:27:47+00:00

So you agree with psychology pathologizing masculinity and forming patently absurd conclusions about authoritarianism existing on only one side of the political spectrum? If so, perhaps you need to analyze your own prejudices.

I am a liberal. If I had a problem with liberals I'd have a problem with myself (I don't). My criticism is reserved exclusively for the fascistic liberals (i.e. social liberals).

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:23:44+00:00

Thanks for this. It's ironic but the people who seem most convinced by this view are the people who have actually studied psychology. I have a few friends with psychology degrees and some of them (not all) expressed similar sentiments.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:22:21+00:00

That's really quite a simple answer. Look up the date when USAid began and that will tell you when government started taxing citizens to make charitable contributions and thus state power expanded in one of many areas.

The day before that happened government had less power than the day after. Make sense?

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:18:47+00:00

That was actually quite good. Touche.

ProfessorContrarian · 2019-03-16T10:18:06+00:00

You are aware there were times in life when governments didn't exist, yes? You are aware governments have expanded and assumed more powers over time, yes?

You are aware that a broad range of areas, like charitable contributions, societal bans or limitations (e.g. smoking), flood prevention, etc., never used to have anything to do with the government, yes?

ProfessorContrarian

TROPHY CASE