Only in California
The Berkeley professors who published that silly attack on conservatives a few weeks ago, now claim that conservatives are too stupid to understand what they really meant. Read:
Apparently without reading our original articles or attempting to contact any of us, many commentators and syndicated columnists, including Ann Coulter and Cal Thomas — George Will [op-ed, Aug. 10] apparently read but misunderstood our work) — assumed that such a psychological analysis of ideology entails a judgment that conservatism must be abnormal, pathological or even the result of mental illness. The British media seem to have settled on the highly stigmatized and equally inaccurate term “neuroses.” All of this reflects a crude and outdated perception of psychological research.
Whomever knows, I’m no fan of Coulter or Thomas. But if Kruglanski and Jost weren’t making the point everyone thinks they were trying to make, then why did they preface their paper with a George Will line taken out of context? Read from Will on August 10:
The professors’ paper is adorned with this epigraph:
“Conservatism is a demanding mistress and is giving me a migraine.”
– George F. Will
A “mistress” who is “demanding”? Freud, call your office. The epigraph is from “Bunts,” a book of baseball essays, from an essay concerning what conservatives should think about the designated hitter.
Only in Berkeley, I suppose, is it considered proper to get defensive when you’re properly understood.
I read the original pile of stinking cow-dung, not just the press release. I understood it just fine: a prime example of the blatant misuse of statistics by researchers to reinforce one’s preconceived notions of how the world works.
Frankly they ought to do the decent thing and retract the whole article.
shrug. press release was way, way more inflamatory than the text itself. not that the text was anywhere near perfect, as it hinged on a non-specific definition of conservative that shifted depending on the study. but i’m sure you could do the same thing with liberal and get similar results, lumping chomsky with che with stalin and pol pot.
scientific? of course not. social science can’t get around the language barrier, like it or not. a real survey study? well, yes.
jb: I’m a social scientist. I know what good social science looks like, and this isn’t good social science. The statistical analysis in the piece was absolutely abysmal, even leaving aside my general objection to meta-analysis (which works far better with medical case-control studies than it does in circumstances where the operationalizations of the key variables shift dramatically between the underlying studies).
It was a sad day when universities stopped teaching basic skills in reasoning, verification, and validation of scientific data in favor of propaganda. You can find more examples of pseudo-science in sites such as http://www.junkscience.com.
Is this all that liberals have got left? “Conservatives are stupid, nyah nyah!” And they wonder why they’re no longer in power in the Presidency, Congress, or state governorships. If liberal academia has a neurotic meltdown, it’s bye bye time.
To warp an analogy, they’re alienating members of the choir by preaching this kind of nonsense. If they think this is convincing anyone, they’re in deep, deep trouble.
The only way the left has stayed in power for lo these many decades is that they didn’t make themselves clear. Their BS
was you’re not smart or educated enough to understand their complex reasoning, see blatherings of Derrida or Chomsky,
Richard Pryor’s joke about the man who, when his wife found him in bed with another woman, asked, Who do you believe me or your lying eyes?
Lots of people believed them and not what their eyes and ears told them.
Their cover is blown now.