Paradigms and Demographics: John Ray

Showing posts with label John Ray. Show all posts

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Are All Races Equally Intelligent - or - When is Knowledge, Knowledge

By John J. Ray (M.A., Ph.D.) This Appeared Here in 1972

There has recently been an extensive controversy in the psychology literature on the possible genetic base of racial differences in intelligence. This has been so acrimonious as to inspire the thought that the controversy itself forms an interesting case-study in the sociology of knowledge. I refer to the articles by Jensen (1968 and 1969) and Garrett (1969).

One outcome of these controversies is the apparently justified accusation by Jensen (1969b) that an important body of his colleagues (the members of the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) indulged in "propaganda" and disregard for the facts of the issue. Garrett (1969) makes similar observations. As Van den Haag (1969) points out, the cause of egalitarianism seems to have induced some remarkable failures of reasoning even among normally eminent social scientists. How may these phenomena be explained?

Study of Intelligence as the Hereditary Given

Before one can understand what is really going on in this controversy, it is necessary briefly to recapitulate some basic findings.

There is no doubt that American Negroes obtain lower average scores on standard intelligence tests than do American whites (Tyler, 1965, p. 306; Garrett; 1969). In fact the differences found are often so large and so regular in their incidence that this might be held to be one of the most impressive uniformities in the whole of psychological measurement.

To use Hebb's (1949) terminology there are two types of intelligence -- A and B. Intelligence A is the inborn, hereditary "given" whereas intelligence B is intelligence as measured, i.e. intelligence A plus some variable overlay of learned problem-solving strategies. It is mean differences across races in intelligence A that is of concern here.

Substitution of Ideology for Science

The way to assess differences in intelligence A is to control or equalize the influences and opportunities affecting the B Component. When this is done, differences remaining are attributable to intelligence A variations. Tanser (1939), Bruce (1940), and McQueen and Browning (1960) have carried out such studies where environmental influences on white and Negro groups have been controlled. All reported significant superiority of the white groups.

In spite of this, most psychologists (Tyler, 1965, 9, 300) continue to claim that there are no innate differences in intelligence between whites and Negroes. The usual reason advanced for adherence to this credo is that the tests used must in some way be unfair to non-members of the dominant white culture (even though the Negroes and whites of Tanser's study had attended the same schools since 1890!). If this claim is true, how does one explain the consistent finding (Pintner, 1931) that Chinese and Japanese school-children get average test scores equal to or above those of American whites? One is asked to believe that the tests are unfair to people who have sat in the same classrooms as whites but not unfair to Chinese and Japanese who have a totally different cultural background.

Why is it that psychologists, who are most in a position to observe racial differences in intelligence, resolutely refuse to believe the evidence before their eyes? The answer to this is, I believe, an instructive, if sad, incident in the sociology of knowledge. Often drawn to their profession by humane or humanitarian considerations, psychologists are so committed to the belief that whites and Negroes morally should be treated equally that they seem to conclude, albeit unconsciously, that the best way of securing this morally desirable end is to convince people that whites and Negroes in fact are ontologically equal. If the facts fell into line with this account, all would be well, but as it is, the present author would question whether any moral goal is ultimately well served by denying reality as it is. If there are native differences in intelligence, our strategy in pursuing humanitarian goals must presumably become more adaptive by a recognition of it.

This question of the ideology subscribed to by the scientist is also relevant to the question of what we accept as a criterion for evidence. There have been many attempts to construct "culture fair" tests but their application has not been successful in removing Negro-white differences. We must then at some point ask ourselves: "When do we stop?" When do we consider the case proved? When do we start to conclude that there might not after all be some real difference there that is not attributable to a measurement artifact? Given the impressive uniformity of the findings to date, it seems abundantly clear that the existence of a real difference between races would long ago have been considered to have been proven out of hand were it not for an ideological commitment to the opposite viewpoint.

When is Moral Moral?

Just how much ideology can cause even an outstanding psychologist to drift into self-deception is exemplified in the position taken by McElwain (1970). McElwain is head of the Department of Psychology at Australia's largest university (Queensland) and author of the definitive "Queensland Test" of Aboriginal intelligence. This test was normed and validated on Aboriginal groups themselves. It includes only those sub-tests which could be shown to discriminate within the Aboriginal population.

Although he does not appear to have committed himself in print, he has repeated to the present author in writing, an assertion often made to his students -- that when the Queensland test is given also to whites, a negative relationship between the discriminating power of a subtest within the Aboriginal population and the size of the gap between white and Aboriginal mean scores appears, i.e., as the test gets better so Aborigines rose closer to whites in average test scores. From this McElwain appears to suggest that if we got a really discriminating test, the difference between whites and Aborigines would disappear altogether.

Here, then, McElwain appears to commit the same fallacy in reverse that is so frequently alleged against tests normed and validated for whites! A test is designed specifically for an Aboriginal culture and yet whites still get higher scores on it! The amazing thing is that whites do not get lower scores on it. Of course the discriminating power and the size of the cross-racial gap are related.

As the test is more and more characteristically Aboriginal in specific background, so whites are more and more disadvantaged. A true comparison study of the question set by this paper using the Queensland's test would require that a group of whites be found who shared an environmental background similar to the Aborigine culture. In that case only, might mean scores on McElwain's test be reasonably compared across the two racial groups.

If racial differences exist how do we explain them? A possible explanation is the ecological one: different racial groups develop different areas of excellence according to the specific demands of their characteristic environment. In the harsh European climate, forethought (symbolic thought) has historically been essential to survival -- particularly through the long winters.

In Africa these same mental qualities have not had the same relative importance. Because of the more beneficient climate the importance of certain physical and psychomotor abilities has risen in comparison. In time the process of natural selection has ensured that these differentia became racially fixed. With the different characteristic environments of the white and Negro races, it would in fact be highly surprising to find similar levels in all abilities. What one would expect and what one does, I believe, find is that whites would be higher on cognitive abilities and Negroes higher on certain physical abilities.

Using the concept of a morality hierarchy proposed by Hampden-Turner and Whitten (1971) it might be said in fact that the attempt to deny the empirical findings of racial differences in intelligence in order to secure the moral goal of having all races treated equally represents a very low level of moral maturity. The person at the highest stage of moral development would presumably not need to have his moral resolve to treat people equally bolstered by assertions that people are equal anyhow. He would be anxious to do justice to the empirical findings in the awareness that they are essentially irrelevant to the moral decision he has made.

For the future then, humanitarian aims might perhaps best be served by abandoning the unlikely enterprise of proving all men equal. Instead, perhaps, we might concentrate on the question of what the difference between groups are -- and how differences might be used in the betterment of all.

Monday, January 2, 2023

A small note on the Tuskegee Syphilis study of the 1930s

Dr. John J. Ray September 22, 2011@ THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Editor's Note: For some reason P&D was hit from a link in THE Psychologist back to 2011. I went there to see what was of such interest from 11 years ago, and as usual, I never did find what it was but I did scroll down and found some interesting posts by John, who on occasion published some of my articles, and gave me permission to publish his work many years ago. I thought this was interesting as I assumed the narrative we've been force fed on this story for all these years was accurate. You may wish to peruse this blog @ The Psychologist. John also publishes, Greenie Watch and Dissecting Leftism. RK

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study has been widely condemned as an example of American racism -- and Leftists love it for that reason. It enables them to be "holier than thou". THEY would never do such an evil thing! It is usually portrayed as the U.S. government infecting black men with syphilis.

The truth is nothing of the sort, of course. The key fact that nobody seems to notice is that the study lasted for 40 years. 40 years? Shouldn't the men have died long before that? Once you ask that question, the truth begins to come out.

The men recruited for the study ALREADY HAD tertiary syphilis. And in the tertiary stage the disease has usually been naturally "beaten" in some way. In other words, most such patients are no longer ill and live on rather as if they had never been infected. THAT intriguing fact was what sparked the study. It was an attempt to get more information about the life history of tertiary syphilitics. Richard Shweder has all the details.

And the amusing thing is that the study was founded and carried out by "progressives". "Progressivism" was overwhelmingly dominant in pre-war America. And it wasn't even a government study initially. It was started by a private charity funded by the former chairman of Sears Roebuck, a Progressive Jew named Julius Rosenwald. A small excerpt from Wikipedia:

Julius Rosenwald, an American clothier, became part-owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1895, and eventually served as its president from 1908 to 1922, and chairman of its Board of Directors until his death in 1932.He became interested in social issues, especially education for African Americans, and provided funding through Dr. Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college (HBCU), prior to founding the fund....

The Rosenwald Fund was also one of the original backers of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. With support from the Rosenwald Fund, an ambitious program had begun to improve the health of African Americans in US southern states in 1928. Emphasis was on treating people with syphilis, then found at a high rate in poor African-American communities.

I am pointing that out in the hope that it will take one of the Leftists' toys away from them. Where other facts fail to penetrate their prejudiced brains, perhaps the fact that the study was the work of a "progressive" Jewish philanthropist might cause them to lose their erections.

Thursday, January 7, 2021

Australia’s national interest must be weighed when deporting refugees, court tells government

Judge sets aside Alan Tudge decision on Afghan man’s visa for failing to consider full consequences of breaching international obligations.

Paul Karp @Paul_Karp Mon 4 Jan 2021

The Morrison government has been warned it must consider the impact on Australia’s national interest of sending refugees back to their country of persecution after losing its bid to deport a convicted child sex offender. Last year the then-acting immigration minister, Alan Tudge, refused an Afghan man a safe haven enterprise visa on character grounds, despite acknowledging the risk he could be killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the federal court has set aside Tudge’s decision, ruling he failed to take into account the full ramifications of Australia breaching its international nonrefoulement obligations...........Tudge has appealed against that decision, in which Justice Geoffrey Flick said he had placed himself above the law and “engaged in conduct which can only be described as criminal”..........More Here....

My Take - So, let me see if I understand this line of thinking.

Vile immigrants who commit vile crimes against their host country's citizens can't be deported because they were vile in their country of origin, and may have to face the consequences of their vileness. So the host country now has to forever support these creatures in some way.

Did I miss something?

Editor's Note: This appeared in the John Ray's blog, THE PSYCHOLOGIST, on Thursday, 1/7/21 with his comment:

Judge says he is a better judge of Australia's national interest than our elected representatives are. Under international human rights law, the principle of non-refoulement guarantees that no one should be re-turned to a country where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm. But breaches of international law are common and this particular one would be unlikely to generate much angst anywhere. In any case the application of any law will be decided in conjunction with the particulars of the case so the outcome is never automatic.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Mr Trump's faults

By John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

The Left loathe and abhor Mr. Trump. The main reason for the torrent of verbal poison that they pour out at him is the way he has made America prosper. Almost from the moment his election win was announced in 2016, American multinationals started bring their money and their jobs back home. The American Left was trying all sorts of coercive measures to achieve that but all Mr Trump had to do was ask.

But America does not deserve to prosper according to the American Left. It is a deeply corrupt and racist country that lives off the sweat of the poor, according to the Left. So to them Mr Trump is doing the Devil's work, not that they would put it that way. To them, America deserves drastic reform, not prosperity.

They have to show some caution in expressing such hatred of their own country, however. America is still mostly a land of patriots and those deplorable patriots have a vote!

So the Left have to display their anger at Mr Trump in some other way. And Mr Trump provides plenty of fodder for that. His personal style is such that he has redefined what "presidential" means. During his run for the presidency, the Left mainly mocked his hair, but they have now found many other faults in him. He boasts, he gets facts wrong and he fires back at those who attack him. He is frankly childish.

Mr Trump's personal style is so unattractive that many American writers -- including some psychiatrists who should know better -- have "psychologized" him. They have purported to show that Mr Trump has symptoms of mental illness. That he is a "narcissist" almost goes without saying.

But here's the thing: Conservatives can see all those symptoms too. They can see that Mr Trump's personal style is a great departure from what used to be called presidential. At a minimum he lacks dignity.

But that does not bother Republican voters. They look beneath the surface to his radical policies and very much like what they see there. His approval rating among them is 94% at the moment. As an example of Trump supporters being alive to his faults, take this quote from something I put up yesterday;

Trump, to be sure, is a strange guy. I have never witnessed anyone more in love with himself. If there is a world's record for narcissism, he holds it. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's comment upon looking at himself in a mirror: "the beginning of a lifelong romance."

That does seem to me to be a reasonable statement but, being a psychologist, I want to put it into a larger context: Mr Trump actually needs to be like that. The torrent of attack and criticism that has been aimed at him would have crushed most people long ago. And yet, as far as we can see, it is all like water off a duck's back to him. To quote a popular metaphor, he "has got the hide of a rhinocerous'.

So you need someone with an extremely high level of self-regard and self confidence to survive what Donald Trump has survived. Narcissism can have a constructive place within the diversity of human society and Trump illustrates that. The great leap in prosperity that he has brought to America could not have been done by a more conventional man

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Finland versus the USA

By John Ray, Dissecting Leftism, Thursday, December 19, 2019

The NYT has a large article up under the heading: "Finland Is Our Capitalist Paradise". Finns pay huge taxes but business activity also thrives there they claim

The argument runs that Finns get most big-ticket items "free" for their taxes. The authors are particularly impressed with the free education and free hospitals. They claim that both are high quality.

And they write as if there is no free education and no free hospitals in the USA. Yet most Americans go to "free" local schools for their primary and secondary education and can go to government hospitals where they will be treated regardless of ability to pay. So where's the difference?

We have only the word of the authors that there is a difference in quality but I am prepared to concede that many American public schools are ratshit and that American public hospitals can often afford to provide little more than emergency care. So why is that? Can socialized services be better than private ones?

A big part of the American difficulty is that the population of the USA is so diverse. Many in that population would not even call themselves Americans. That contrasts with the small and homogeneous population of Finland. So the American population is orders of magnitude harder to manage than is Finland. So what works well in Finland might work much less well in the USA.

I cannot with any brevity take on all the claims in the NYT article so I just want to focus on one of the claims -- about the high quality of Finnish public hospitals. Like most Leftist writing, however, they will only tell you the good bits and ignore the bad bits.

I have no new information about Finnish healthcare but I live amid a similar system in Australia. We too have universal government health coverage. And the limitations of that are well known. Despite the free government healthcare available, 40% of Australians take out private health insurance. Now why would they do that?

They do it for two reasons: Access and quality. If you have any serious problems, the difficulty is getting yourself in front of the doctor. There are waiting lists for almost everything and even waiting lists to get on the waiting list! You could die while waiting and some do.

And the quality of treatment is public hospitals is poorer, if only because it is the private hospitals that have the latest machines. Even when the public sector has the machines they may not have the staff to operate them. There is for instance in Brisbane a public hospital hyperbaric chamber to treat divers with the bends but that hospital will simply refer distressed divers to a private hospital that has one.

Similarly, there are apparently PET scan machines for detecting cancer in the public sector but they are very expensive to use so most patients will be referred to one of the private PET clinics, where patients will pay out of their own pockets for the scan. My last PET scan (in a private hospital) was arranged with only a couple of days notice

So I doubt that Finnish hospitals are much better than that. I would be most surprised if Finns get the "no waiting" experience that is common in Australian private hospitals. And it is for access to such hospitals that Australians buy private health insurance

So that is a relevant comparison. Australians and Americans both are mainly of British and Northern European heritage and both have trouble coping with large "indigestible" minorities. If you want to know what free universal healthcare would look like in practice in America, look to Australia, not Finland.

The Australian system is not wholly bad. The immediate and mostly free access to your family doctor ("bulk billing") is certainly hard to beat. It is the hospitals that are the problem area.

This whole topic is a huge one so I am not going to go on to talk about American versus Finnish university education. But it is clear that American university education has gone off the rails in recent years and is getting worse rather than better. Finland might well be better. It might need Mr Trump to take an interest in American university education for it to have any hope of improvement.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

What does Russia want?

John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

I have just read a VERY long-winded article in the NYT which tries to answer the question above. When people write at such length it generally means that they don't have any clear answers but hope that by covering a lot of ground the answer will be in there somewhere. And such is certainly true of that article.

The answer has to be at the psychological level and some of the senior Russian officials the reporter interviewed did after a fashion tell the reporter what the answer was -- but she hardly seemed to notice it.

What Russians generally and also their leadership want is respect and acceptance that Russia is a great and important country. They are the world's largest country, stretching all the way across the Eurasian continent from the Baltic to the Pacific. And they have over the years made colossal contributions to the arts and sciences. So when Russia lost control over half of the territory that they had controlled in Soviet times they saw that as a humiliation.

So the Russian leadership tries to restore a sense of pride in their own people and gain the international attention and influence it had in the Soviet era. They do NOT see themselves as a failed state notable only for attempts at influencing American Federal elections.

It should not be forgotten that Russia had worldwide influence in the Soviet era. It even had great influence and respect in the USA. The Democratic party at that time were shills for the Soviets. The Donks did all they could to support Russia in any political controversy. They were among Russia's best friends.

Mr Putin would like some of that back. But instead he finds his country demonized -- criticized and marginalized on many fronts. Recovering ethnically Russian territory in the Crimea seems a heroic and historic achievement to Russians but America has renewed the cold war on Russia over it.

Mr Putin has been very restrained over events happening in his own backyard (e.g. the independence struggle in Eastern Ukraine) so it is clear that countries further West have nothing to fear from him. He will however take opportunities that present themselves to get Russia noticed. A more cordial atmosphere between Russia and the USA would make such adventures less likely. If America can remain friendly to the ghastly Saudis, friendship with Christian Russia should be no strain.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

The Scientific Alergy to the Truth

By John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

It is amazing to me how scientists and other academics so often prefer self-serving myths to reality -- despite the truth being in plain sight. I encountered that repeatedly during my research career in the late 20th century.

The biggest example of that pig-headedness in recent times is the absurd global warming theory. A majority of scientists seem to accept it as truth despite the evidence being so conclusively against it. Its central claim -- that CO2 in the atmosphere warms the earth -- is starkly contradicted by the "grand hiatus" from 1945 to 1975-- when over a 30 year period, CO2 levels leapt while temperature levels remained flat. That huge disconfirmation would be fatal to a truly scientific theory.

And from 1950 to the present day, academic psychologists are determined to believe that conservatives are in some way mentally defective. Psychiatrists, for instance, have never ceased "diagnosing" Mr Trump as mentally defective in some way, with NYC "shrink" Bandy Lee in the vanguard.

But perhaps the most extraordinary belief of academic psychologists -- going all the way back to 1950 --is the still frequent claim that conservatives are the "authoritarians" of the world, despite the immeasurably largest example of authoritarianism in the twentieth century being the ghastly Soviet system. Were the Soviets conservative?

And the old bit of Soviet disinformation to the effect that the National socialist ideology of Hitler's Germany was "Rightist" is still generally believed -- despite the fact that all of Hitler's major doctrines (antisemitism, eugenics, close government control of industry etc.) were characteristic of the Left in Hitler's day.

So it must come as no great surprise that a recent great breakthrough in historical scholarship should be greeted with academic disbelief. The Voynich manuscript (MS) has at last been convincingly and extensively deciphered. The MS was a vast work by medieval standards, with copious illustrations that should have given a highroad into the meaning of the text

But no-one could "crack" the meaning of the text. It appeared to be an alphabet of some sort but nobody knew how the letters sounded so their meaning remained unknown. Generations of scholars, cryptographers and computer experts had tried to "crack" the code involved, with nothing emerging that made sense of more than a few lines of the MS.

Than along came Gerard Cheshire, a young English linguist who claimed to have deciphered the whole thing after only 2 weeks of work -- by making some very simple assumptions. That was an enormous slight on the reputations of all the big names who had gone before him so was bound to be disbelieved. And it has been. Scholar after scholar has rubbished Cheshire's work.

Cheshire first circulated his findings in 2017 so he is aware of the criticisms of his work and has replied to them. But the criticisms are not at all fatal to his findings. Cheshire foolishly claimed that the pidgin Latin in which the MS was written was widely used in Europe. That is unlikely but not necessary to his argument. I would claim that it was a form of pidgin Latin that was used either in Italy or in Aragon, as Aragon dominated some parts of Italy in the Middle Ages. That the Pidgin Latin of Aragon might have absorbed some words from other pidgins of the times surely poses no difficulty.

A more serious criticism is that Cheshire's translations are to a degree speculative. They are. But that is normal in philology. Words change both their meanings and their forms over time and getting back to the particular meaning at a particular time is no easy matter. So all language reconstructions are to a degree speculative. There is even debate over the correct translation of some parts of Beowulf, which is written in Old English and is generally well-understood. And let us not forget the difficulties of translating even modern German words into modern English words adequately

But the journal article is the best evidence for Cheshire's claims. I wonder how many critics have actually read through the vast academic journal article concerned. I have. And I find it most impressive. Cheshire repeatedly shows that his interpretation of the "alphabet" used in the MS makes sense. He shows that the words produced by it are Latinate -- similar to other evolved versions of Latin.

Once he has transformed the MS words into our familiar Latin alphabet, however, he sometimes has to speculate on the meaning of the word at that particular time and place. And he makes a good fist of that. And he does that over and over again. And it is that repeated success that is so convicing. It shows that he has got the key to getting it right. If he were wrong he might get a few lucky hits but showing that his system works over and over again throughout the MS could only come from his understanding of the MS being correct.

So why are so many academics rubbishing his work? Jealousy, basically. That he did so easily what they agonizingly failed to do is a big blow to their self-esteem. And they want to avoid that blow by disbelieving it. Freud called it defensiveness.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

The Rohingya: Muslims whom nobody wants

By John Ray @ The Psychologist

Rohingya are mostly Bangladeshis who moved to Burma during the period when both countries were ruled by Britain. The Burmese had no say in it but tolerated in their midst people whom they regarded as foreigners. The Burmese are East Asian Buddhists, very different from the South Asian Rohingya.

During the British period all "Indians" did well and tended to ride roughshod over the native Burmese, often disrespecting Buddhist customs and holy places. The Burmese reasserted themselves after gaining their independence, however, and many Rohingya did not accept that. They could not take the sort of treatment that they had previously dished out. So in the usual Muslim way the Rohingya turned to acts of terrorism against the Burmese state, now called Myanmar. Muslims have long turned to acts of violence against "infidels" to get what they wanted.

It didn't work with the Burmese however. At the time Burma was a military dictatorship and still largely is. The Burmese rulers hit back hard and are still doing so. They now just want the little brown men permanently out of their peaceful Asian country.

Myanmar has however come under international pressure to halt their campaign because even the ancestral country of the Rohingya -- Bangladesh -- does not want them. Bangladesh is a Muslim country with theoretical Muslim duties of hospitality but NO Muslim country ever offers permanent resettlement to other Muslims. Only foolish Western countries let in a people with a history of religiously motivated violence. There are however many oil-rich Muslim countries who could conceivably be pressured into admitting them

Note that Myanmar also has a large non-Muslim population of immigrant Han Chinese, particularly in the North. There is no aggression against them. All men are not equal

The Prime minister of Myanmar is Aung San Suu Kyi, who gained international credit for her resistance to military rule. Her moral authority was crucial to causing the transition to civilian rule. The Rohingya issue has however led to pressure on her to renounce the oppressive policies against the Rohingya. She has not been responsive to that.

So what goes on in her mind about that? One can only speculate, but my speculation is that she is comfortable with the Han Chinese immigrants in the North because they look like Burmese and have the same Buddhist religion. The little brown men of the Rohingya with their horrible Arab religion evoke no sympathy from her, however. Buddhism and Islam could hardly be more different.

Women in physics: Why there’s a problem and how we can solve it

John Ray @ The Psychologist

The title above and the excerpt below show that people with nothing better to do are still chewing away at this old issue -- even though all the attempted "solutions" have failed -- as they admit below.

But the first issue is surely why it matters. There are many women in physics so clearly those who are inclined towards a physics career can have one if they give it priority. There is certainly a lot of official encouragement of it. So the issue is not whether women can contribute to physics. Many can and do. What is at issue is the PROPORTION of women in physics. So why does THAT matter? The proportion of women in physics is low but what is lost by that?

Feminists claim glibly that many valuable potential contributions to physics by women are not being made and see that as the loss to us all. But where is the evidence for that? Given that there are large numbers of women already in physics could it not be that those women who have a serious avocation for physics are already there? It certainly seems possible so the feminist claim seems nothing more than an unproven assertion. Some proof would be nice -- but I am not holding my breath.

But feminists are routinely uninterested in proof for their various assertions so my call for proof in this matter will cause eye-rolling only.

So the real motivation for concern would appear to be the old falsehood that all men are equal -- and women are just as equal. If that were true it would make some sense to expect equal representation of women in all occupations whatsoever. But it isn't true. All men are different, not equal and men and women are systematically different too. The fact that different proportions of men and women are found in almost all occupations is ample evidence of that. When do we let the evidence count?

And the relevant difference between men and women in physics is plain to see. Physics is math-intensive and women are woefully outnumbered in the top tiers of mathematical ability. The leptokurtic distribution of female IQ -- and mathematical ability in particular -- makes the small average difference between male and female mathematical ability translate into a large difference in absolute numbers at the top of the range. Some women have made and will continue to make significant contributions to physical knowledge and understanding but they will ALWAYS be a small minority in physics. Given the different abilities between men and women on average, it cannot be otherwise. Attempts to "solve" the difference are flailing at the wind. Flailing will continue to go on but it will be just as unsuccessful in the future as it has been in the past.

Finally, I must say something about the specific article below. They mention the paper by the terminally incorrect Alessandro Strumia. But in all the condemnations of his wickedness that I have seen (e.g. here), nobody mentions the powerful statistical evidence he presented. They content themselves with emotional reactions -- which is one of the things Strumia accused them of! Here is one of his graphs, showing how much more the work of male physicists is cited compared to the work of female physicists.

Citations are the normal criterion of excellence throughout academe. You can get a less extreme difference by including arXiv articles, as Hossenfelder does, but such articles are not not peer-reviewed so that one has to resort to them to elevate the work of women is in itself something of a defeat. Given their unknown quality, it seems likely that they are most often cited only to rebut them.

So how do the authors below reply to Strumia's careful research? By mentioning that only three woman had received the Nobel prize in physics in the 117-year history of that prize. I would have thought that that fact rather supported Strumia! But in any case, thinking that selected instances can invalidate an average is a profoundly unmathematical way of thinking so is in itself surely an example of why women rarely do well in physics. With friends like that ....

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

How did Britain acquire legal ownership of the Australian continent? Public land in Australia is to this day "Crown land"

By John Ray @ The Psychologist

"Black armband" historian Henry Reynolds is once again trying to make Australians guilty about their past. His contention below is that the British "stole" the land from the Aborigines. That is a popular view on the Left and among Aborigines themselves. In support of that view Reynolds sees the present ownership of Australia as being legally defective. It seems to be his view that a transfer of ownership of the land from Aborigines to the settlers can only legitimately be done by means of a treaty between the two parties.

But that is nonsense on stilts.

Throughout history, changes in ownership of territory have come about through armed conquest -- and Australia was no different. There was in fact little organized resistance from the Aborigines and the white men had guns. The British by and large took what land they wanted and shot anybody who attacked them. That does not sit well with the modern-day Left but it is what has happened throughout history.

It even happened at the hands of Leftists not so long ago. The seizure of Cuba by American "Progressives" such as Theodore Roosevelt did not happen as a result of a treaty with the Cubans. It occurred as a result of a successful war on the Spanish defenders of Cuba. And the concept of the Spanish conquistadores gaining ownership of Western hemisphere territory via a treaty with the natives is a huge laugh.

And Reynolds has clearly not taken account of the "Trail of Tears" in his account of American expansion -- which was done at the behest of Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic party. Jackson's policies have been criticized both at the time and subsequently but his territorial dispositions remain pretty much as he left them

And if we were to unwind past conquests, the result would be absurd. We would have to send the English back to where they came from in the South Baltic 1500 years ago and give Britannia back to the Welsh, Cornish and other Celtic groups who were there first.

Reynolds tries to strengthen his case by an emotional appeal. He speaks of the "horrors" that the British settlers inflicted on the Aborigines. And that is his schtick. He has been trying for years to make what was a generally peaceful settlement into a sort of holocaust.

But Keith Windschuttle has gone back to the early documents and shown that Reynolds exaggerates to an epic extent. But Reynolds is not letting go of his claims. He evidently NEEDS them to be true. And being now aged 80, his deceptions are his life's work. In his angry Leftist way, he hates his own society and wants to hurt it. He is an old fool. The acquisition of sovereignty over Australia by the British crown is a done deed and going back in history to question it on shallow legal grounds is simply anachronistic.

(Editor's Note: Although most Americans don't really know much about Australian history or even it's current events, I think that's a mistake as so many of the same issues arising here are being dealt with there. This is an issue that's not just about Australia. This is a worldwide endeavor by the left.

The left wants to make white settlers bad people, but European settlers were playing the same game everyone else in the world was playing, they just played it better than everyone else.

If you want to call them bad Christians, then you have a solid argument, since they espoused a philosophy that said they shouldn't be playing that game. But calling them bad people isn't appropriate, because that implies they were doing something different than the other people of the world were doing, and that's especially true regarding American Indians.

Oh, yes, one more thing. Andrew Jackson and his fellow Democrats were contemptible, because that was clearly an act of genocide based on greed. He and his supporters were bad Christians and bad human beings. That act was a crime against humanity. RK)

Monday, September 3, 2018

Vicious Leftist hate again

By John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

I have been saying for years now that the basic motivation of the Left is hate -- hate for the world about them and hate for their own country as part of that. They hate and want to destroy "the system" around them. Most people probably thought that what I said was a bit much but can anybody doubt it now, after witnessing the flood of hate that the Left have poured out at Mr. Trump and his supporters? There's another instance of it below.

And it's not just a few loonies doing it. It's across the board -- from restaurant owners to Congresscritters -- with big contributions from Hollywood, the media, the educational system and most of the bureaucracy. Fortunately, the military is always solidly conservative or else we might have had some sort of coup or revolution by now.

It just took a real conservative to come on the scene for the masks to fall. Mr. Trump's approval among Republican voters is now above 90% so Trumpism now IS American conservatism. The weak-kneed conservatives of the GOP in the past who allowed themselves to be abashed by Leftist flim-flam have now been left behind by history. We are now looking at a real Left-Right contest and we see that in their motivations the American Left is just as hate-fueled and murderous as the Left has always been, from the gory French revolution with its busy guillotines, to Stalin to Hitler and to Mao. The basic psychology of all Leftists is clearly the same.

The Leftist claim to be tolerant and compassionate was always a mask to enable them to gain dominance over others. Now that the dominance is being reversed, the resultant rage has caused all such pretenses to be sidelined. The Left are now revealed as the intolerant thugs and would-be murderers that they are. America has enemies within its ranks and, as such, conservatives are America's defenders. They must win or America will gradually become as shackled as any communist country. It was already developing that way until Trump came along and offered liberty from it.

And it's all so predictable if you know the classic Freudian defense mechanisms. A major such defense mechanism if you want to deny the existence of something is projection. You claim to see in others what is really true of yourself. And Leftists have for years been accusing conservatives of hate at the drop of a hat. And you don't even need to drop a hat, usually. So to see what is true of them you just have to look at what they have long said about conservatives. They attempt to deflect attention away from their own hate by claiming to see it in others

In speaking of Leftists, I am of course speaking of committed Leftists, not unwary people who are conned into voting for them at election time.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

More Marxism From John Ray

By John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

I have just put up on my Marx blog a new collection of "wisdom" from leading Marxists. It makes clear that Leftist violence is thoroughly intentional and central to Leftism. It is not at all the work of a radical "fringe" or "incidental" in some way.

Trump voters are all druggies

By John Ray @ Dissecting Leftism

That's how the more extreme media outlets will headline the latest piece of research in the medical journals. Source (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0450) But it aint so. A bit hard to know where to begin. I probably should start by congratulating the authors on their quite humble conclusions. They say nothing like my headline above. But, as Churchill said of Clement Attlee, they have much to be humble about.

They know and admit that their data is what statisticians call "ecological" (group based) but fail to mention that the correlations emerging from such data are usually much higher than what emerges in correlations using individual data. So their results are a poor guide to what individuals do.

And the fact that they had individual data but did not use it suggests that all relationships in the individual data were negligible, meaning that there was NO tendency for Trump voters to overuse prescription opiods. That is a highly critical interpretation but, in view of the revelations inspired by Ioannidis, that is actually a conservative conclusion. What Ioannidis showed can be summarized simply as "Medical researchers are crooks". Sad. And when an opportunity to bash Trump offers itself, the temptation to cheat could well be overwhelming.

But let me be charitable and assume that all the work was honestly done and all the relevant findings were reported. The big issue then with the research is the problem of control. Why was there greater use of prescription opioids in counties where the voters favoured Trump? The obvious explanation would be that Trump voters are poor and are tired of being looked down on by leading Democrats, who used to represent them (See Hillary's "deplorables"). So was that examined in the present study?

They made a good attempt at it and did find that socioeconomic variables explained two thirds of the relationship between Trump-voting and prescription opioid use. But they apparently had no data on income so they used rough proxies of it. Much error could flow from that. Better income data might have shown that opioid use was irrelevant and all the Trump voting could have been accounted for by income. I doubt that it was but the present research cannot exclude it.

On a technical note, they based their analysis on quintiles -- a common but disreputable technique. Why group your data when you can use it individually? I am afraid that the usual reason is that there is no overall relationship in the data. You can show a relationship only by throwing away three fifths of it. Sad.

Finally, let me point out that, even if we accept their findings, there are many possible interpretations of them. One that occurs to me is that Obamacare has made it more difficult for poor people to get treated for their ailments (overcrowded waiting rooms, doctors not taking welfare patients, doctors quitting medicine to go and play golf rather than spend half their day on paperwork etc.) and they blame that on the architects of Obamacare -- the Democrats. So Mr Trump's talk of dumping Obamacare would be attractive

And prescription opioids are only half the story It could be that the poor mainly use doctors to get their fix. Because of being poor, they cannot afford to buy from street dealers. So the Trump voters were actually more law abiding. I think Mr Trump might like that interpretation.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Church of Trump?

By John Ray, Dissecting Leftism Thursday, August 16, 2018 Australia time.

Editor's Note: This is John's reponse to this article by Alex Wagner. RK

I am not entirely sure whether it is a vice or a virtue but I often enjoy reading Leftist writing. They are so blind that they regularly give me a laugh. I suppose it is the psychologist in me. I want to see how their strange minds work.

And the most amusing thing about their response to Donald Trump is their total inability even to consider that he might have got some things right. That's just not an available explanation for them. So what do they do? They find something psychologically wrong with either Trump or his supporters. Leftists have been making such claims about conservatives at least since 1950 and have succeeded in convincing only themselves -- so they are like a dog returning to its vomit in trying the same strategy with Trump.

The first label they tried to stick on Trump and his supporters was the old 1950's claim that he is "authoritarian". But, since it is in fact they who constantly try to confine Americans within a straitjacket of endless regulations, that label had no adhesive power at all and seems now to have been abandoned. See here and here

So it is interesting that the latest explanation for Trump's success below has finally made some attempts to address reality.

She starts out with a litany of Trump's failures and scandals as she sees them and wonders why none of those failures seem to dent his popularity. That most of the failures are simply Trump's impatience with detail she does not consider. She certainly does not consider that not being a policy wonk might actually be an element in his popularity. Do policy wonks make attractive political candidates? Few of his voters are likely to be policy wonks so are probably happy with getting it broadly right in their own lives.

In fact, the little lady asserts that Trump supporters like Trump's simple slogans.

And then of course we see the typically Leftist malicious misattributions. No matter what Trump does, it is a product of racism, not some practical reason. And anything Trump does is wrong anyhow, even if Obama also did it.

Then she gets on to her big discovery: Trump makes his voters happy! Could it be that they enjoy his puncturing of the great Obama/Clinton balloon of Leftist pomposity and self-righteousnesss?

Could it be relief at Trump's attacks on the Leftist straitjacket of regulations and are relieved to hear common sense coming from the White House instead of hectoring?

No way! It's because of "tribalism" and because they don't go to church any more. Pesky that Trump supporters come from all races and all walks of life! Pesky that Trump has very broad church support and is himself openly Christian. Herman Cain tells us that 29% of blacks now support Trump. I wonder what tribe they belong to?

What the lady is doing is a familiar sleight of hand that any analytical philosopher can tell you about. "Tribalism" sounds like an explanation but is in fact a definition: To like Trump MAKES you part of a tribe, the Trump tribe. It is at best an observation. It explains nothing.

And the idea that lots of people are alienated from moralistic churches is surely true. But it is true mainly of the old mainstream churches. More evangelical churches are forgiving and make a big effort at outreach. Americans who are religious at all can usually find a church to suit them. The claim that Trump supporters are worshiping at some sort of new Trumpian religion -- when the religion at his rallies is plainly evangelical Christian -- is just a desperate attempt to look at what his real appeal is -- relief from Leftist tyranny and joy at having a President who makes sense to ordinary people

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Some Observations About Leftism

By John Ray @ The Psychologist

As a good academic, I first define my terms: A Leftist is a person who is so dissatisfied with the way things naturally are that he/she is prepared to use force to make people behave in ways that they otherwise would not. Leftists think that utopia can be coerced into existence -- so no dishonesty or brutality is beyond them in pursuit of that "noble" goal

Leftism is fundamentally authoritarian. Whether by revolution or by legislation, Leftists aim to change what people can and must do. When in 2008 Obama said that he wanted to "fundamentally transform" America, he was not talking about America's geography or topography but rather about American people. He wanted them to stop doing things that they wanted to do and make them do things that they did not want to do. Can you get a better definition of authoritarianism than that?

And note that an American President is elected to administer the law, not make it. That seems to have escaped Mr. Obama That Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian is not a new insight. It was well understood by none other than Friedrich Engels (Yes. THAT Engels). His excellent short essay On authority was written as a reproof to the dreamy Anarchist Left of his day. It concludes: "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means"

Evan Sayet: The Left sides "...invariably with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success." (t=5:35+ on video)

Some useful definitions:

If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

Leftists are classic weak characters. They dish out abuse by the bucketload but cannot take it when they get it back. Witness the Loughner hysteria.

Death taxes: You would expect a conscientious person, of whatever degree of intelligence, to reflect on the strange contradiction involved in denying people the right to unearned wealth, while supporting programs that give people unearned wealth. America is no longer the land of the free. It is now the land of the regulated -- though it is not alone in that, of course

The Leftist motto: "I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand" Why are Leftists always talking about hate? Because it fills their own hearts. Envy is a strong and widespread human emotion so there has alway been widespread support for policies of economic "levelling". Both the USA and the modern-day State of Israel were founded by communists but reality taught both societies that respect for the individual gave much better outcomes than levelling ideas. Sadly, there are many people in both societies in whom hatred for others is so strong that they are incapable of respect for the individual. The destructiveness of what they support causes them to call themselves many names in different times and places but they are the backbone of the political Left

The large number of rich Leftists suggests that, for them, envy is secondary. They are directly driven by hatred and scorn for many of the other people that they see about them. Hatred of others can be rooted in many things, not only in envy. But the haters come together as the Left. Leftists hate the world around them and want to change it: the people in it most particularly. Conservatives just want to be left alone to make their own decisions and follow their own values.

The failure of the Soviet experiment has definitely made the American Left more vicious and hate-filled than they were. The plain failure of what passed for ideas among them has enraged rather than humbled them. Ronald Reagan famously observed that the status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” So much for the vacant Leftist claim that conservatives are simply defenders of the status quo. They think that conservatives are as lacking in principles as they are.

The shallow thinkers of the Left sometimes claim that conservatives want to impose their own will on others in the matter of abortion. To make that claim is however to confuse religion with politics. Conservatives are in fact divided about their response to abortion. The REAL opposition to abortion is religious rather than political. And the church which has historically tended to support the LEFT -- the Roman Catholic church -- is the most fervent in the anti-abortion cause.

Conservatives are indeed the one side of politics to have moral qualms on the issue but they tend to seek a middle road in dealing with it. Taking the issue to the point of legal prohibitions is a religious doctrine rather than a conservative one -- and the religion concerned may or may not be characteristically conservative. More on that here

Some Leftist hatred arises from the fact that they blame "society" for their own personal problems and inadequacies, The Leftist hunger for change to the society that they hate leads to a hunger for control over other people. And they will do and say anything to get that control: "Power at any price". Leftist politicians are mostly self-aggrandizing crooks who gain power by deceiving the uninformed with snake-oil promises -- power which they invariably use to destroy. Destruction is all that they are good at. Destruction is what haters do.

Leftists are consistent only in their hate. They don't have principles. How can they when "there is no such thing as right and wrong"? All they have is postures, pretend-principles that can be changed as easily as one changes one's shirt A Leftist assumption: Making money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting money does. "Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money." --columnist Joe Sobran (1946-2010)

I often wonder why Leftists refer to conservatives as "wingnuts". A wingnut is a very useful device that adds versatility wherever it is used. Clearly, Leftists are not even good at abuse. Once they have accused their opponents of racism and Nazism, their cupboard is bare. Similarly, Leftists seem to think it is a devastating critique to refer to "Worldnet Daily" as "Worldnut Daily". The poverty of their argumentation is truly pitiful

The Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as right and wrong has a distinguished history. It was Pontius Pilate who said "What is truth?" (John 18:38). From a Christian viewpoint, the assertion is undoubtedly the Devil's gospel. "If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." - Ludwig von Mises

The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present. Because of their need to be different from the mainstream, Leftists are very good at pretending that sow's ears are silk purses. Among people who should know better, Leftism is a character defect. Leftists HATE success in others -- which is why notably successful societies such as the USA and Israel are hated and failures such as the Palestinians can do no wrong.

A Leftist's beliefs are all designed to pander to his ego. So when you have an argument with a Leftist, you are not really discussing the facts. You are threatening his self esteem. Which is why the normal Leftist response to challenge is mere abuse. Because of the fragility of a Leftist's ego, anything that threatens it is intolerable and provokes rage. So most Leftist blogs can be summarized in one sentence: "How DARE anybody question what I believe!". Rage and abuse substitute for an appeal to facts and reason.

Their threatened egos sometimes drive Leftists into quite desperate flights from reality. For instance, they often call Israel an "Apartheid state" -- when it is in fact the Arab states that practice Apartheid -- witness the severe restrictions on Christians in Saudi Arabia. There are no such restrictions in Israel. Because their beliefs serve their ego rather than reality, Leftists just KNOW what is good for us. Conservatives need evidence.

“Absolute certainty is the privilege of uneducated men and fanatics.” -- C.J. Keyser
"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus
"The falsification of History has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind." Rousseau
"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him" (Proverbs 26: 12). I think that sums up Leftists pretty well.
Eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is often quoted as saying: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

It was probably in fact said by his contemporary, J.B.S. Haldane. But regardless of authorship, it could well be a conservative credo not only about the cosmos but also about human beings and human society. Mankind is too complex to be summed up by simple rules and even complex rules are only approximations with many exceptions.

Politics is the only thing Leftists know about. They know nothing of economics, history or business. Their only expertise is in promoting feelings of grievance. Socialism makes the individual the slave of the state – capitalism frees them.

MESSAGE to Leftists: Even if you killed all conservatives tomorrow, you would just end up in another Soviet Union. Conservatives are all that stand between you and that dismal fate.

Many readers here will have noticed that what I say about Leftists sometimes sounds reminiscent of what Leftists say about conservatives. There is an excellent reason for that. Leftists are great "projectors" (people who see their own faults in others). So a good first step in finding out what is true of Leftists is to look at what they say about conservatives! They even accuse conservatives of projection (of course).

The research shows clearly that one's Left/Right stance is strongly genetically inherited but nobody knows just what specifically is inherited. What is inherited that makes people Leftist or Rightist? There is any amount of evidence that personality traits are strongly genetically inherited so my proposal is that hard-core Leftists are people who tend to let their emotions (including hatred and envy) run away with them and who are much more in need of seeing themselves as better than others -- two attributes that are probably related to one another. Such Leftists may be an evolutionary leftover from a more primitive past.

Leftists seem to believe that if someone like Al Gore says it, it must be right. They obviously have a strong need for an authority figure. The fact that the two most authoritarian regimes of the 20th century (Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) were socialist is thus no surprise. Leftists often accuse conservatives of being "authoritarian" but that is just part of their usual "projective" strategy -- seeing in others what is really true of themselves.

"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here. For roughly two centuries now, antisemitism has, throughout the Western world, been principally associated with Leftism (including the socialist Hitler) -- as it is to this day. See here.

Leftists call their hatred of Israel "Anti-Zionism" but Zionists are only a small minority in Israel

Some of the Leftist hatred of Israel is motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism (beliefs in Jewish "control" etc.) but most of it is just the regular Leftist hatred of success in others. And because the societies they inhabit do not give them the vast amount of recognition that their large but weak egos need, some of the most virulent haters of Israel and America live in those countries. So the hatred is the product of pathologically high self-esteem.

"With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan's premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society" -- Ann Coulter

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Politicians are in general only a little above average in intelligence so the idea that they can make better decisions for us that we can make ourselves is laughable

A quote from the late Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931–2005: "You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

A lesson in Australian: When an Australian calls someone a "big-noter", he is saying that the person is a chronic and rather pathetic seeker of admiration -- as in someone who often pulls out "big notes" (e.g. $100.00 bills) to pay for things, thus endeavouring to create the impression that he is rich. The term describes the mentality rather than the actual behavior with money and it aptly describes many Leftists. When they purport to show "compassion" by advocating things that cost themselves nothing (e.g. advocating more taxes on "the rich" to help "the poor"), an Australian might say that the Leftist is "big-noting himself". There is an example of the usage here. The term conveys contempt. There is a wise description of Australians generally here

Heritage is what survives death: Very rare and hence very valuable

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in) First to fight for right and freedom, And to keep our honor clean, It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

If any of the short observations above about Leftism seem wrong, note that they do not stand alone. The evidence for them is set out at great length in a MONOGRAPH on Leftism.

You can email me (John Ray) here (Hotmail address). In emailing me, you can address me as "John", "Jon", "Dr. Ray" or "JR" and that will be fine -- but my preference is for "JR"

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