Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Try to stay focused

Focus.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Robert, I no longer have the time or inclination to assemble and lay out researched arguments here. It's like showing a Powerpoint presentation to a monkey house.

Dean's book is based on two major studies.

First is the study in 1950 led by Theodor Adorno. In TV interviews Dean refers to this as a "fifty year study," implying falsely that this is work that has been going on consistently for fifty years. To the best of my knowledge, he never names the study in the interviews.

The second, and most influential, is the work of Bob Altemeyer, much more recently done.

Altemeyer's results are seriously flawed. His survey questions are laughably biased. He has no understanding of the concepts "right wing" compared to "conservatism." He finds that there is no "left-wing authortiarianism" since he simply redefines the vast world of communist totalitarianism as "right wing." So the leftists are off the hook.

His solutions? Behavioral and social engineering by the State. Go figure.

You can research the objections to his work in psychology journals yourself, if you want. I'm not going to the trouble of assembling links.

I'll throw you one for free. If "right wing" and "authoritarianism" are synonyms, who the heck are all those Second Amendment nuts running around with guns? Which political end of the spectrum thinks the government is bad?

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