Red Death - The Horrors Of Communism

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You could consider both cultural inventors Karl Marx and Benjamin Franklin.
I think this is a good comparison, the life, the way the man Karl Marx actually lived and his values vs

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA2lCBJu2Gg[/youtube]

the life, the way the man Benjamin Franklin actually lived and his values. If you look at the higher resolution Poor Richards Almanac Illustrated you can get a clear vision of Franklin's values.




Benjamin also invented other useful things too like bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and a simple odometer. He seemed to spend his life doing useful and helpful things for others. It is the opposite of how Karl Marx lived and what communism does.

Most people in communist countries agree with the results of Franklin's legacy as they value most highly the small peace of paper with Benjamin Franklin's picture on it,



Communism sometimes seems very appealing to those in abject poverty. Favelas and other semi self rule ghettos operate by justifying violence. This is driven by envy and jealousy sustained by intimidation and fear. Narcotic potions are often offered to others to give an artificial sense of motivation where they can feel accomplishment and ambition.

The opposite is non violence based on confidence and satisfaction sustained by service and self sacrifice. Problems to remedy are often used to give others a sense of motivation where they can feel accomplishment and ambition.

This is an ad hominem attack.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BURI0PBUtsU[/youtube]

My grievance with Molyneaux's critique is less that he tries to expose him as a hypocrite but more he is saying that the reason he hated capitalism is because he was an unsuccessful capitalist.

Its like saying i cant write a book criticising serial killers unless i was a successful murderer myself.

Not only is this critique of Marx purely ad hominem, it is also subjective at best and in some case,s for example the case of Frederick and Helen Demuth slanderous. The argument he hated capitalism simply because he was hopeless at managing money and needed to turn to usury for financial aid and that this explanation for his attacks on capitalism some how makes his theories and intellectual treatises null and void, is pathetic. His actual ideology hardly gets a mention in this diatribe.

Seriously people if you are going to post please find something a bit more objective and accurate. He may not have been the best provider, he may have relied on the gifts of others to make ends meet (he would have seen his work as necessary for the betteremnt of society and would have regarded it as WORK), he may have left debts all over the place, but this does not lessen the body of intellectual work that he produced.

As to having boils, well that about wraps it up for any intellectual credibility Marx may have had

Come on LKL. that Guttmacher stuff is nonsense. They do some good statistics collection but their social science is total rubbish, about as likely to find the truth as a polluter is to discover the realities of climate change. As a general rule, never trust a study that does not include discussion of previous literature (which clearly shows the opposite) or omitted variable bias. I mean the study you put forward does not even discuss correlation or endogeneity between their own variables or see to create a comparative framework between the laws themselves. The main reason is that they did not really want to look all that hard.

This is what good methodology looks like and even they had to use dummy variables to produce a coherent model. https://www.law.upenn.edu/fac/jklick/14ALER457.pdf



Most of the Chinese policy makers want NK to be more organized and less violent. All they are interested in is their vast natural resources.

Guttmacher is pretty well-regarded in the medical and public health community. I've only ever seen the occasional pro-life person claim otherwise.

Due respect to The American Law and Economics Association, but maybe they should stick to law and economics.

That statement shows off a lack of knowledge about how social science is conducted. The economics methodology is taking over large areas of social science. Hypothesis testing and formal models are the future, its why I had to retrain in econ and game theory for eighteen months. You won't have much luck getting a tenure track gig in the US in most areas of social science without training that exact sort of research methodology.

Guttmacher's work is good on data collection but poor on analysis. To be honest, I have more or less given up on pro-life and pro-choice analysis of data sets because they are all so highly politicized. The entire field has more or less departed from anything I would recognize as contemporary best practice in research methodology.

This is all well and good, I like the idea of taking the subjective observations out of social interactions and replacing it with Objective observations, hey this would resolve the Marxist = Stalinist debate once and for all. I however have major reservations, eg How the heck can you get accurate, objective results in social 'science'? For starters how can you repeat a social experiment? HOw can you ensure the data is recorded correctly or interpreted accurately?

Academically speaking, I can only talk within my own areas of study and methodology (security studies and international relations). I have used game theory, specifically modified stag hunt games to explore cooperation in international relations. Run the game among actors (like former decision makers) enough times and you get a pattern emerging.

In pursuit of objective results in IR theory, you take the hardest data possible, like numbers of tanks, guns and soldiers. You then take a number of engagements that have the same variables and explore how they change when you fix all but one of them. Once you have those variables and understand the relationship between them, you can use them to evaluate specific instances of success and failure. Using such a model you can do really objective and revolutionary things. For example, Stephen Biddle used formal models to show that in reality, the method of military success has not changed since 1914, overturning a century of thought on the subject (http://www.amazon.com/Military-Power-Ex ... 0691128022).

This book is the gold standard in IR research these days. It sort of kill the careers of a generation of scholars but hey, thats the price of progress. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5458.html

Your misgivings are right on the money, the issue in variable testing is endogeneity, you need to be able to find variables where causation can be established. You can still do research on endogenous variables but the sort of conclusion you can reach from them is limited. The work really ought to search for grounds for causal inference, if you can do that, you can do objective research in social science. What you don't want to do is exclude variables and research like the study LKL cited did.

Selecting on the dependent variable http://www.nyu.edu/classes/nbeck/q2/geddes.pdf

I'm pleased to hear that the social sciences are getting harder, but that doesn't change the fact that you made an ad-hominem attack on a medically respected institute based on disliking their results.

Here's another suggestion about why abortion rates might be falling under Obama
http://www.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/ ... -years.pdf

A summary of a non-Guttmacher, non-CDC analysis of birth control and abortion rates:
http://www.livescience.com/23726-birth- ... -rate.html
quote:

To drag this hijack, kicking and screaming, back to the OP, what both of the above links suggest is that the socialistic practices of government-assisted health care, free birth control, and poverty assistance lower the rate of abortions and thus (for someone who thinks that abortion is murder) save lives.

I made an attack on their methodology and explained why I have a problem with it. I also have the same issue with pro-life studies, in fact I would suggest that the topic is so politicised that no good research is even possible. Everyone criticised Regererus, some for drawing conclusions he didn't make, some justifiably looked at his methodology and judged it sloppy. Everyone who did so failed to notice that the same new organisations sledging him, were reporting studies with less standards of methodology as obvious demonstrations of fact done by top researchers. The truth is that almost no one is doing good research in the area. As for the study you posted, I could not find it in the journals so I can't comment on it.



I would agree with that statement but conversely I also think that broad state based abortion on demand drives the rate up too. Socialism can be both good and bad for public health, it is just another tool in the range of suggested solutions that societies can use to address issues.

I'm sure this will probably come off as completely out of touch with time and the thread itself because I'm not commenting on 11th page comments but rather giving a commentary on something at the front - way too late I know but it's just bothering me too much not to.

People are bringing up 'No true Scotsman' with respect to the claim by people pro-Communism that any mass movement that's caused genocides, starving of farmers whose lands were to be appropriated, or similar liquidation of non-consenting parties is not true Communism - that true Communism has never been tested because it's never been tried. One particular member even wrote a thread about the use of 'No True Scotsman' over the issue.

I don't think 'No true Scotsman' is the right way to explain it. I think a much closer analogy to this line of thinking is a different sort of, I suppose you could call it a fallacy but really more of a dirty trick, is what I'll call Infinite Regress. In atheism/theism debates both sides claim the other has it - ie. atheists claim that Christians put God out beyond the point of any examination (yes, there are many other kinds of beliefs in many different gods/goddesses but it almost comes down around here to that) while Christians would claim that atheists do the same thing by claiming multiverses that push the issue of origins completely outside the boundaries of what we can examine.

The thing that immediately comes to my mind when I hear pro-Communists saying what was mentioned above - that Communism has never been tried and hence it's a dream they still hold onto, I've watched Islamic shows where both parties - interviewee and intervewer were pro-Caliphate and they say the EXACT same thing, that is any place where Islamic caliphate has undermined human rights or made a worse environment wasn't true caliphate and the same clerics or imams who claimed this claimed that the most likely last time for Islamic caliphate to have been done right was back in the 12th century somewhere in the Saudi peninsula or something similar. I can't verify whether they have more to go on that the Communists do, maybe their written history from that period is that good that they'd have a lot to say on it but, I'd swear you'd hear more about that from prominent western scholars right about now who were studying to try and figure out alternative government models - if what they had in 12th century Arabia was that good.

My point being - No true Scotsman can be a symptom of infinite regress but really infinite regress is when someone holds onto a belief so stubbornly that they willfully push it off beyond the event horizon of fallsifiability into territory that's utterly unexamineable. That's what it is when people claim Communism hasn't been tried - that's what they tell themselves and in turn tell us. At least they're not being inauthentic in telling us something that they don't believe but, clearly, you can see the faith basis of it and just how much the 'on pure faith' is pushed.

Dude, your example of a 'good' study was a theoretical paper (just so you know, just because a theory is described by a mathematical formula, doesn't make it a scientific theory. Assigning "c" to represent the "cost of sex" does not make the cost of sex actually measurable. Off the top of my head, I can think of several factors that would be more relevant to GC rates than availability of abortion, which tend to coincide with availability or absence of abortion, and which the study does not appear to take into account based on a quick read (better treatments for STDs; increasing availability of multiple non-condom methods of contraception, with fewer side-effects than older methods; changes in attitudes towards sexual behavior; presence or absence of sex ed; etc). As for predictive value of any single given factor, I give you xkcd:

Every variable within the underlined section is subject to the problem of endogeneity. But please, continue to lecture me about methodology, preferably with web comics.



Umm... they admitted to the limits of what they can prove in their paper and listed where they used dummy variables (and their reasons for doing so). That is how you should do social sciences, you recognise the limits of your findings and shape the conclusion appropriately. They created significant sections on omitted variables and constructed their model from that point. I listed it as a good example of social science, because it has its methodology right, whereas the studies you linked to simply drew conclusions without even creating a framework for unpacking their variables, discussing the variables they omitted or engaging in a discussion of where their research fits within the literature. It fits the definition of what Geddes was criticising in the second article linked to in my last post (http://www.nyu.edu/classes/nbeck/q2/geddes.pdf).

really? You're saying that the Guttmacher study was preemptively selective based on the outcomes it wanted? That's accusing them of fraud, not accusing them of a bad study.

As for the discussions that were omitted, the study was not meant to be that exhaustive. I don't know about social sciences, but medical and biological studies very rarely extrapolate out, speculate, or draw more than the thinest of conclusions based only on the specific data in their specific results. Doing so is, in fact, seen as sloppiness, evidence of bias, and suggestive of delusions of grandeur; it's what marks, for example, some of the worst evo-psych studies and is part of why actual evolutionary biologists loathe evo-psych.

A good biological study might have a title along the lines of, 'Microarachnid populations in soil samples taken before and after a fire in Willits National Forest show statistically significant variation in both diversity and number,' There will be no discussion of mites in other forests, though there might be discussion of pre-and-post fire mite populations in the same forest, by a different researcher. There will be very little to no discussion about the positive or negative impacts of fire or fire management, though there might be mention about how mites populations in that forest have been shown to correlate with some other species in the area.

Another example might be something like, 'Late administration of Tamiflu produces no reduction in fever severity or duration in Intensive Care patients with confirmed positive influenza tests at XYZ hospital during the 2013 flu season.' There will be no suggestion that doctors not administer Tamiflu late, or even the suggestion that Tamiflu doesn't work late; the specific conclusion is only that it has no effect on fever when administered late in the course of the disease. There will be no discussion of other treatments for flu. There will be no discussion of Tamiflu utility when administered early in the course of the disease. Readers are expected to have enough of a background to put this one data point into an appropriate slot in their knowledge base.

Wrt. endogeneity: yes and no; you need to control for those factors. Simply pretending that they don't exist might make for pretty, tidy, clean-looking graphs, but doesn't make your results represent reality. The real world doesn't work with nice, tidy cause/result functions.

They're the research arm of a lobby group, of course they only research what they want to discover. Bias is written into its charter, everything they undertake from there, is selection bias. Don't feign shock. They could theoretically be objective, even if they are biased and they could produce good research but from the look of their studies, I can't say their methodology is all that rigourous. The Hoover Institute does research into right of centre political ideas, its biased but they try to be objective within their mission. Guttmacher seems to do the same with their statistics collection but their research based on that appears woeful.



Sure, but if all you want to report is a relationship between variables, you cannot then conclude that one of them is causing the other. Further, you still have no excuse for failing to place your work within the academic literature, especially if it disagrees with you.



Only acceptable if the background delivers a decisive result, if there is disagreement, you need to fit the research into the wider context. But peer-review is a flawed system, it mostly works but it is open to exploitation.



You use dummy to estimate the values of variables to control for a lack of data. However, when dealing with obvious endogeneity you simply have to accept that you cannot say anything causal. Its not about making things neat and tidy but about actually having the sort of evidence you need to reach a conclusion. When you have such a relationship between variables, you can tease them out a bit to see how the correlation holds up when evidence shifts. If it moves from weak to strong correlation, once you have dealt with the possibility of omitted variables, you have some grounds for arguing in favour of a potentially causal relationship.... No Guttmacher study that I have ever read, even bothered to be so intellectually rigorous.