THE HIGH INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS AT UCLA PSYCHOLOGY

The official blurb: "The department of Psychology, one of the largest and most productive departments in the nation, is housed in Franz Hall. Its state-of-the-art facilities, numerous resources and renowned faculty provide ample opportunity for innovative research. Many departmental faculty and researchers are recipients of over $14 million in annual extramural funding, and are acknowledged leaders in their fields. Their scientific contributions, combined with the campus' remarkable growth and Los Angeles' cultural vibrancy, have hastened the University's emergence as a world-class research institution - the anchor of Southern California's intellectual and scientific achievement."

One of the people whom UCLA employs to teach "non-experimental methods" (meaning mainly questionnaire research) is Kevin Binning (kbinning@ucla.edu). Binning is the author of the piece of "research" that I alluded to on 16th. I made some perfectly proper scientific criticisms of it and forwarded the link to Binning. The result was a stream of emails from him that showed virtually no interest in discussing any academic or scholarly issues but which were heavily laden with ad hominem abuse and aspersions. In one such gem he called me a "dirty old man". What a high-powered intellectual! But readers don't have to take my word for Binning's intellectual level. The link to his work that I originally put up now leads to new content. It now says: "To Dr. Ray: I can just imagine you sitting there pathetically trying to ruin my research to help compensate for your own failures in the field. What a joke you are" -- which is pure abuse: No argument, no attempt to answer my criticisms and nothing else of an intellectual character. How Leftist!

There is another comment on standards at UCLA psychology here

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ELSEWHERE

Straight talk about the Left from Australia's Foreign Minister: "Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has accused Labor leaders from John Curtin and Gough Whitlam to Mark Latham of appeasement of Nazi Germany, communist Russia and Saddam Hussein, and provided a philosophical justification for invading Iraq and helping to free East Timor. Curtin had refused to join a wartime government with Robert Menzies and repeatedly said Australia did not have a role when the Italians invaded Abyssinia or when Hitler threatened to annexe Czechoslovak territory, Mr Downer said. "In a time when bipartisanship was imperative in the national interest, Curtin had chosen from 1935 on to placate the international socialists, pacificists and anti-conscripts within his own party," Mr Downer said in a major speech last night. "Even as late as the Munich crisis of September 1938, Curtin persisted with a policy of isolationism and failed to acknowledge the threat posed by Nazism." The Foreign Minister accused current Labor leader Kim Beazley of adopting "a little Australia" policy consistent with a "pattern of weak Labor leadership nationally, particularly on the issues of appeasement, isolationism and shirking international treaty obligations". In a scathing critique of Curtin - Labor's wartime prime minister - and a damning judgment on Mr Whitlam over the Baltic states and Mr Latham over Iraq, Mr Downer said: "Only the Coalition is unequivocally committed to supporting the global struggle for freedom." He charges Mr Whitlam with a "shameless sellout" of the captive Baltic nations of the Soviet Union: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Labor was a party that was happy to seek donations from the Baathist regime of Iraq during the 1970s, he said".

Leftists are so prone to calling everyone from President Bush down a "Nazi" that it has mostly lost meaning now but one usage which is still very offensive is their constant comparison of Israel to the Nazi State. This article shows that it is nothing to do with anything the State of Israel has ever done as it dates back to before the foundation of the modern-day State of Israel.

Illegal aliens: Democrats stumped: "Hillary gets it. Hillary Clinton says she's against illegal immigration. And she would fine employers who hire illegal aliens. Pundits say the Democratic senator from New York is using this hot-button issue to position herself for the 2008 presidential election. It's a way to hit Republicans from the right. Polls show huge majorities of both Republicans and Democrats oppose illegal immigration -- and are frustrated that President Bush won't do a thing to stop it. But this issue does not belong to the right. Or it shouldn't. Illegal immigration hurts most liberal causes. It depresses wages, crushes unions, and kills all hope for universal health coverage. Progressives have to understand that there can be little social justice in an unregulated labor market." Reliapundit thinks that border control can be made to work too.

Cheat Seeking Missiles has a rather appalling example of how kids are being brainwashed into supporting Greenie causes.

Dutch tolerance: "When the editor of one of America's leading gay magazines visited the world's gay capital a fortnight ago, he assumed that he would be safe. But as Chris Crain, editor of the Washington Blade, was walking hand in hand with his boyfriend near one of the gay districts in Amsterdam, two men standing on a street corner spat at his face. He stopped to ask why, was called a "fag" and suddenly the two youths turned into seven. Surrounded, Mr Crain was kicked to the ground by the gang and ended up in hospital with a broken nose and badly bruised face. His attackers were Moroccan youths, blamed by Dutch gay rights groups for a disturbing rise of gay-bashing, as conservative Islamic culture clashes with Dutch liberalism."

Where's the Leftist media outrage? "Grandsons are condemned to life-long terms as slave laborers alongside their grandfathers, both equally helpless in the brutal surroundings. Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers. This is not the story of an age of slavery from centuries past or of a survivor of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. It is what is happening at this moment inside the gulags of North Korea"

Europe as a model of what NOT to do: "Is the European "social model" doomed? It's a question that comes up with increasing frequency as unemployment across Western Europe has climbed into the double digits and economic growth has ground to a virtual halt across much of the Continent... A fundamental change occurred in Europe between the salad days of the 1950s and '60s and today, and Europe never recovered. In a word, the 1970s happened. In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe, just slightly above the U.S. level of 25%. In 2002, U.S. taxes ate 26% of the economy, but in Europe spending had climbed to 42%, a 50% increase. Over the same period, unemployment in Western Europe has risen from less than 3% to 8% today, and to nearly 9% for the 12 countries in the euro zone."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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