Comment

Comment by Neal 15 hours ago

I would have to agree.

Comment by Lester Unega Waya yesterday

On the Boston bombing, the question it raises is why the police department did not prevent it.

Comment by Lester Unega Waya yesterday

Neal.

The rational don't buy into conspiracy theories. The most famous and still ongoing conspiracy theories is the 'witchcraft is evil' theory. Because of the idiots who bought into the conspiracy theory is why about 280 million people were burnt at the stake.

Comment by Neal yesterday

People believe in all kinds of ridiculousness.

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

Illustration by Matt Dorfman
By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER
Published: May 21, 2013 18 Comments

In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and the manhunt came to a close, the speculation didn’t cease. It took a new form. A sampling: Maybe the brothers Tsarnaev were just patsies, fall guys set up to take the heat for a mysterious Saudi with high-level connections; or maybe they were innocent, but instead of the Saudis, the actual bomber had acted on behalf of a rogue branch of our own government; or what if the Tsarnaevs were behind the attacks, but were secretly working for a larger organization?

Crazy as these theories are, those propagating them are not — they’re quite normal, in fact. But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. And it’s very likely that this isn’t the only news story that makes you feel as if shadowy forces are behind major world events.

“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.

As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1965 book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories, especially those involving meddlesome foreigners, are a favorite pastime in this nation. Americans have always had the sneaking suspicion that somebody was out to get us — be it Freemasons, Catholics or communists. But in recent years, it seems as if every tragedy comes with a round of yarn-spinning, as the Web fills with stories about “false flag” attacks and “crisis actors” — not mere theorizing but arguments for the existence of a completely alternate version of reality.

NYT

Comment by doone on May 16, 2013 at 12:15pm

Racism In The World

MAY 16 2013 @ 11:56AM

First you have to find a measurement for racial prejudice. I think Swedish researchers hit upon a rather good data point:

The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)

Leave that fascinating parenthesis behind for a moment and what do we find? Max Fisher’s map above shows us. And the racist, imperialist Western powers turn out to be among the most tolerant. Money quote:

People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

And the most racist? India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong. There’s also one stand-out of racial intolerance in Europe: France. Duh. My favorite line from Max’s piece:

The Middle East not so tolerant.

I might also note that one common factor in the most prejudiced countries seems like Islam to me, with India and Hong Kong And Vietnam the obvious exceptions.

Comment by doone on May 15, 2013 at 9:43am

Failed States

MAY 15 2013 @ 7:33AM

After examining Ukraine’s depopulation, Edward Hugh asks “whether it is not possible that some countries will actually die, in the sense of becoming totally unsustainable, and whether or not the international community doesn’t need to start thinking about a country resolution mechanism somewhat along the lines of the one which has been so recently debated in Europe for dealing with failed banks.” Joshua Keating ponders this:

I suspect that even in the bleakest, Children of Men-style population scenarios, most countries would fight to the bitter end before surrendering their sovereignty. The exception might be places like Ukraine that have a relatively recent experience as part of a larger geopolitical entity and a large ethnic population with ties to a neighboring country.

A country couldn’t be liquidated quite as neatly as a company — even if the state goes away, there’s still a chunk of land and some people living on it to deal with. The main obstacle to countries being “dissolved” may be that other countries may not want to take on the responsibility of dealing with them — what country really wants to take on a new sparsely populated, economically stagnant region?

Comment by doone on May 14, 2013 at 2:05pm

The EU And Its Nations

MAY 14 2013 @ 1:34PM

A fascinating graphic from Pew’s new report on the EU:

Good to see the Brits are still focused on the real threat. But Germany is obviously becoming more isolated in the EU. What we are seeing is an almost text-book case of why conservatives can be smarter than liberals. The EU is in so many ways a wonderful development. It has fostered democracy, made another European war unimaginable, and generated growth and trade. But it has always been to my mind a utopian project because the actual human beings who live in Europe do not identify with the supra-state against their actual nation-state. The nation state seems to me to be the least worst unit of democratic accountability – drawing on ineffable bonds of solidarity, history and a scale that is actually manageable. To pretend that isn’t the case, or to try to impose some new form of identity, along with a new, abstract and cold currency, was always going to end in tears. It appears we are now at the stage when the whole project itself is being reconsidered:

First, attitudes towards the EU are getting worse. While there is always going to be some noise in these kind of data, the consistency of the negative changes is noticeable. What I think is potentially most important are the two countries (France and Spain) where we’ve gone from significant majorities with a favorable view of the EU to majorities without a favorable view.

Comment by Neal on May 13, 2013 at 8:07pm

Easy to believe that northern and western MI are a bit hateful, it's the conservative parts of the state. Surprisingly the UP kind of rocks. =)

Comment by doone on May 13, 2013 at 12:12pm

Geography of hate against gays, races, and the disabled

May 13, 2013 04:18 am

In a follow-up to their map of racist tweets towards Barack Obama, the folks at Floating Sheep took a more rigorous route to get around the challenges of sentimen.... Over 150,000 geotagged tweets against races, sexuality, and disabled were manually classified and mapped.

All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative. Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, California has the highest absolute number of tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map. So when viewing the map at a broad scale, it’s best not to be covered with the blue smog of hate, as even the lower end of the scale includes the presence of hateful tweeting activity.

Hard to believe this stuff is still around. It looks like I might want to stay clear of some parts of Virginia.

Comment by doone on May 10, 2013 at 10:02am

BARACK THE BUCK-PASSER

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

I think I have finally figured out the essence of Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy. In a word, he is a "buck-passer." And despite my objections to some of what he is done, I think this approach reveals both a sound grasp of realpolitik and an appreciation of America's highly favorable geopolitical position. 

In particular, the bedrock foundation of Obama's foreign policy is his recognition that the United States is very, very secure. That statement doesn't mean we have no interests elsewhere, but none of them are truly imminent or vital and thus they don't require overzealous, precipitous, or heroic responses. There's no peer competitor out there (yet) and apart from the very small risk of nuclear terrorism, there's hardly anything that could happen anywhere in the world that would put U.S. territory or U.S. citizens at serious risk. We will inevitably face occasional tragedies like the recent Boston bombing, but the actual risk that such dangers pose is far less than many other problems (traffic fatalities, industrial accidents, hurricanes, etc.), no matter how much they get hyped by the terror industry and our over-caffeinated media.

Instead, the greatest risk we face as a nation are self-inflicted wounds like the Iraq and Afghan wars or the long-term decline arising from a failue to invest wisely here at home. Recognizing these realities, Obama has reacted slowly and in a measured way to most international events.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:39 AM | Permalink

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