Red Death - The Horrors Of Communism

Post Reply New Topic

Nowhere, never. Nor has true capitalism ever existed anywhere.

ruveyn

To everyone who says that communism never existed:

You are making some errors there. First, Guttmacher is the research arm of Planned Parenthood, which, while it is pro-access, is not pro-abortion. Second, even if they were pro-abortion, that would not mean that they deliberately distort their results. Third, even if they did deliberately distort their results - and I have never seen them accused of doing so in the medical community - it would not necessarily follow that this limited study is distorted. Here are the methods outlined:


Just where, in that description, do you see room for 'selective collection of data' in order to reflect a pre-arranged bias?

The study in question is being used to suggest, mainly, that the abortion regulations enacted by Republican state houses are *not* the cause of the decline, rather than that some other factor *is.* As you know, it is fairly easy to disprove a causal relationship.

Bolding mine.

I myself later suggested, based on other studies that I have read, that Obama's policy of defunding abstinence-only sex ed programs and support for wider access to birth control might have a positive relationship, but you can't lay that on Guttmacher.

Not sure what you mean by 'place your work within the academic literature': citing other works? Or publishing in a peer-reviewed journal? What medical or public health studies do you know of that suggest that the abortion rate is not declining, or that it has to do with state regs?


Sometimes there is disagreement, sometimes there is not; readers are expected to draw their own conclusions. If there are other studies that are nearly identical to the one being reported, then the authors might remark, 'this study supports Jin et. all in their 2010 work on the same subject,' or 'this study contradicts Jin et. all in their 2010 work on the same subject.'
Taking a position on an unsettled topic is not done in specific reports, or it's frowned upon if it is; it's done in the editorial pages, meetings, and review papers. The only time it *is* done is when the authors feel that their study is so rigorous, so conclusive, and so statistically strong that it is the last word on the subject and will be cited for decades. When Watson and Crick published their paper on the double helix structure of DNA, it was the final answer to a raging debate on the structure and copying method of the molecule, and they pretty much knew it. Still, their conclusion was the moderate, "It has not escaped our notice (13) that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
This, from one of the most important papers ever published in biology.

Peer review is definitely open to exploitation, especially as fields get more and more rarified, but I don't think that you can claim that such is at issue here.

No, you don't. You have to control the hell out of your study and you have to be really, really clever in your study design, and you have to caveat the hell out of your conclusions, buy it's not impossible to find at least partial causal relationships or feedback loops.

Yes. We agree I would argue the potential a little more strongly, but that's basically my understanding as well.
What you shouldn't do, though, is ignore the potentially endogenous factors completely when you're trying to find out whether or not some other factor is causal.
Guttmacher studies tend to be pretty limited in scope. My citation suggested exactly two things, neither of which was a positive causal claim: that abortion rates declined 13% between 2008 and 2011, and that more stringent state regulations on abortion were unlikely to be responsible for this claim.

That is a canned talking point.



I would agree with the first two points, which was pretty much in my last post, one can be biased and still objective. You just have to acknowledge your place in the debate, Guttmacher, as far as I am aware does not do that.



Their findings, in this case, are too broad. They seem to have done a good job of collecting statistics but comparing state based laws to national trend lines is just ridiculous when trying to find the effects of localisation. Rather, any local impacts will be masked due to the fact that they are not being controlled for. It is a massive dump on comparative politics research methodology. Just imagine some undergrad walks in and says to you 'I want to disqualify the impact of state based legislation by studying national trends before the state laws have mostly been enacted'.... You would ask them if they were high and rightfully so.

It is also obviously ridiculous to judge the impact of laws that are mid implementation, why do the study at all? Well obviously, because Guttmacher is a lobby group, they want to use their study as evidence that the laws are ineffective and lobby for their preferred ends. Which when one googles the study, is exactly how Guttmacher's affiliates used the study to lobby state legislatures.



Overly simplistic. If you have evidence that shows that reduced access to abortion keeps numbers down, then you need to discuss that in your work. Of course Guttmacher did not do that, because they do sloppy social science.



Yep... that is true... that is why it is so important to do a literature and metrology review of other studies when composing your own work...



If it is solidly endogenous, there is no causal relationship. You can control the variables but you need to limit your conclusions to a non causal relationship if the evidence cannot get you there. You do no ignore endogenous factors in research, that is obvious, but you do need to understand the limits of social science and developing conclusions.



We covered this above.

You may think so, but it is true. No one is "pro-abortion."

http://www.guttmacher.org/about/index.html

My impression was that they were reporting a decreasing national trend, and coincidentally ruled out some temporal, rather than spatial, effects, because the effects in question hadn't taken place during the study period. The report didn't state that such state legislation could never cause decreases in the rate of abortion; it said that they could not, temporally, be responsible for the decrease that they were reporting at this time. The report wasn't over-broad, it was more limited than you seem to think.


I would say, rather, they they wanted to pre-empt a claim from anti-abortion people claiming that the decline was due to the laws, by showing that the decline was well in effect before the laws.

No. The most they might have said, if they had such evidence, would be, 'This contradicts Smith & Smith, 2003,' or something along those lines, and they would not be obligated to include that unless they were deliberately thumbing their nose at Smith & Smith.


What? I said, 'this isn't done,' and you say, 'yes, you're right, it isn't done, that's why it's important that it's done.' That's how I read what you just said, anyway.

Yes. But that couldn't be said of any of the factors that I cited earlier.

The 'horrors of communism' here are more like the horrors of totalitarianism. A libertarian communist system would not have the same aggressive militarism or dictatorial totalitarian system. Totalitarian states, communist or not, tend to commit atrocities (for example, the Holocaust).
Also, I don't see many articles about the 'horrors of capitalism', with the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, the Scramble for Africa, and the Vietnam War as evidence.