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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium
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This article would have earth-shattering ramifications on the Democrat Party, the Government, Academia, and Mainline Protestantism if those institutions were capable of absorbing new information. Especially critical information:
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Scientist Sees Bias Within
JOHN TIERNEY February 7, 2011
SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
[big snip]
The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”
Dear readers, the good Dr. Haidt is right as was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. From The Washington Post :
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Here we are, another Black History Month: time to lionize great black men and women of the past. Twenty-eight days to praise the first African American to do this and the first African American who did that. Another month of looking back with pride - as we ignore the calamity in our midst.
When Black History Month was celebrated in 1950, according to State University of New York research, 77.7 percent of black families had two parents. As of January 2010, according to the Census Bureau, the share of two-parent families among African Americans had fallen to 38 percent.
We know that children, particularly young male African Americans, benefit from parental marriage and from having a father in the home. Today, the majority of black children are born to single, unmarried mothers.
Celebrate? Let's celebrate.
Three years ago, I wrote about young girls in our city who are not learning what they are really worth, young men who aren't being taught to treat young women with respect, and boys and girls who are learning how to make babies but not how to raise them ["A Tragedy That Is Ours to Stop," op-ed, July 19, 2008]. Those conditions, the column suggested, find expression in youth violence, child abuse and neglect, school dropout rates, and the steady stream of young men flowing into the city's detention facilities.
Boys get guns, girls get babies. To buttress that point, I referred to the Web site of the D.C. Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which posted maps from 2005 and 2006 identifying the location of juvenile arrests and births to 15- to 19-year-olds in the District. Neighborhoods plagued by youth violence, the maps showed, were the same neighborhoods where birth rates among teenagers were highest.
Fast-forward to 2008, the latest year for which the organization has such data. The statistics are updated, but little changed: The maps show that juvenile arrests and teen births are still clustered in the same areas of the city. The three jurisdictions leading in teen births and juvenile arrests were Wards 8, 7 and 5.
Ward 8, represented by D.C. Council member Marion Barry, is first, with a total of 1,487 teen births and juvenile arrests. Council member Yvette Alexander's Ward 7 ranks second with 1,386 combined teen births and juvenile arrests. Third place goes to Ward 5, represented by council member Harry Thomas Jr.; it racked up 1,186 teen births and juvenile arrests.
This isn't top-secret stuff. Nor is the pattern new. We don't need maps to tell us what the problem of teen births means to the city.
We know that most teenage mothers don't graduate from high school; that many of the youths in the juvenile justice system are born to unmarried teens; and that children of teenagers are twice as likely to be abused or neglected and more likely to wind up in foster care.
We know, too, that children of teenage parents are more likely to become teen parents themselves.
An intergenerational cycle of dysfunction is unfolding before our eyes, even as we spend time rhapsodizing about our past. No less discouraging is the response that has become ingrained.
Sixteen, unmarried and having a baby? No problem. Here are your food stamps, cash assistance and medical coverage. Can't be bothered with the kid? No sweat, there's foster care...
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Don't forget Mr. Colbert, the ingrained response from the dysfunctional Liberal Establishment towards anyone who has tried to call attention to the plight of the Black family since the 1960's - racist.
At this point it is criminal what has been done to the Black family by this country's Liberal Establishment's progressive social policies. Michael Barone wrote the following to me in a letter when he and I were discussing what happened to Detroit and why President Obama is being rejected by the voters:
When people asked me for the reason I switched from being a liberal (as I was when I was an intern for Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh in the riot summer of 1967) to a conservative, my one-word answer is "Detroit." We wanted to create something like a heaven on earth and instead created something much more like hell - with of course the principle sufferers being the people who were our intended beneficiaries."
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Liberalism is very good at creating hell-like existences for more than its intended beneficiaries.
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“They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” Dr. Haidt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpssl_ZfPCM
Disintegrated cities (Detroit), the fissile black family, plunging Black population in the country’s most liberal metropolis (San Fransisco), and Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics as the Black community’s surefire business opportunity. What portion of the population could have more to fear from liberalism than the black community? On this point, Liberalism is the Progressive’s KKK.
Posted by: George Pal | February 08, 2011 at 04:00 PM
"Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a 'tribal-moral community' united by 'sacred values' that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals."
This set me off in search of good pictures of witch doctors and I found some good ones here!
Liberan devil dancers:
http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=37505
Liberian witch doctor:
http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=37506
Careful, though. The Museum Syndicate site is total time-suck.
Posted by: MCNS | February 09, 2011 at 12:00 PM
A great many of the social sciences would merit the same criticism as, alas, would some of the "hard" sciences as well.
As with the establishment media at the height of its power, the most formidable power of the academy's dominant ideology is that it shapes what is, what can be discussed.
Posted by: Old Dominion Tory | February 09, 2011 at 12:37 PM