Skalduggery

I answer, that it is assuming very much more. There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action: and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. ~J.S. Mill in “On Liberty”

I am a huge fan of John Stuart Mill –  despite the fact that he pretty much loathed conservatives. Classical liberals are the kind I like –  the ones that believed truth was ultimately subversive. But here, Mill is responding to the contention that it is essentially proper to “forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we regard as false and pernicious.” He defended free speech because he believed that truth would ultimately prevail, and that the market place of ideas is necessary because absolute certainty can rarely be found. Building that market place is a hard thing to do, maintaining that market place in the face of political ideology is a fearsome chore.

Why am I entertaining an entry like this? I’m hoping it’s close to a self-evident truth –  ask yourself why our current administration is so rabidly opposed to using words like terrorist, radical Islam, Jihadist, etc. Or for that matter, why policy wonks, politicians, and university administrators and department heads would tie research funds (any funding for that matter) to ideological purity? What in the world happened to Karl Popper’s notion of empirical falsification? Why are social scientists so loathe to actually seek contradictory evidence to a pet theory? I would suggest that it’s simply a matter of the left wanting to squelch honest debate and reasonable inquiry.

From a Spanish language newspaper, La Vanguardia, Woody Allen said, “it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.” Ok, that’s a nut case movie director… How about MSNBC’s Chris Matthews? You know, the guy that just won’t get off of Obama’s leg? “Why doesn’t the president go in there, nationalize an industry and get the job done for the people?” asks Matthews on Monday’s  Hardball. I don’t even feel like chasing down the New York Times editorial that suggested we should be more like China…

Why am I entertaining an entry like this? Because an online buddy sent me a flier that concerned the education of government workers about race. Why are blacks “over-represented” in prisons? Is the use of the death penalty discriminating against blacks? Is it possible that some test scores for advancing firemen actually reflected preparation for the test rather than discrimination against people of color? Is the received wisdom actually true? Or has the truth been squelched for the purpose of not permitting its refutation? Perhaps.

…the logic of validation in the social sciences is identical to that of the other sciences.

But you wouldn’t know this from social sciences as it is, by and large, practiced today… and while there is no doubt some good work being done in each of the social sciences, the general state of attempts to understand human behavior has degenerated to the point that it is far from clear that we are better off for their existence.

There are many reasons for this, but primary is the massive infusion of political ideology into the social sciences. Nearly all of the essays included here concern issues for which ideological desire has replaced curiosity as the prime mover.  ~Steven Goldberg in “Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences”

White Devil

Think about some of these and prepare to challenge your own assumptions about the received wisdom you walk around with each day. Let us see if the facts are worth finding. Let us see if we can search out the truth for the purpose of action. And to challenge some of the received wisdom of the day, here’s another video from Zonation over at PJTV concerning Blanco Diablo: Fear & Loathing & Hatred & Racism in Arizona. As usual, PJTV won’t let me embed their video, but take a trip over and watch Zo –  it’s a great bit of mockumentary.

And speaking of those white devils, there was a great article in The Weekly Standard a bit ago about “The Critical Trio” –  the chuckle heads from the Frankfort School –  that were pretty much opposed to “tolerance, democracy, and free speech.” I’ll close this bit of rant with his most excellent closing:

It is, perhaps, even more striking to observe the degree to which the group’s key thesis—the notion that the freedoms and prosperity offered by the United States and other advanced industrial societies are meaningless because they lack spiritual depth or, as Marcuse put it, are “one-dimensional”—has been taken up not by scholars eager to publish books about “late capitalism” but by true believers determined to destroy what some of them call “the Great Satan.”~James Seaton in “The Weekly Standard“