Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
First-time Visitors: Please visit Site Map and Disclaimer. Use"Back" to return here.
I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
In 2005, President Vladimir Putin of Russia called the breakup of the Soviet Union the "greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century." From the standpoint of a Russian nationalist or committed believer in communism, he might have been right. Even from the standpoint of the average Russian, he might have been right. Certainly Russians have experienced a great deal of hardship as a result of the reorganization of Russia.
Most Americans wouldn't have given a hill of beans about the Soviet Union except for one thing. Communism was a crackpot economic theory that predicted its own eventual world conquest, with the result that the Soviet Union sought to impose communism everywhere else. Without that issue, Russia would have been no more, and no less, a threat than China is now: a potential military and economic rival. Seeking allies and trying to install regimes more favorable to your own side is how the game is played. Trying to lock in decrepit police state regimes committed to a crank conspiracy theory of economics is another thing altogether. Locking in your citizens so they can't leave the sinking ship is a whole new quantum level of crazy.
So while the collapse of the Soviet Union may have been a tragedy from a variety of standpoints, the collapse of communism was a triumph for sanity and justice. Every positive thing even the most ardent communist wanted to do could have been accomplished without the prison camps, the informers, the suppression of religion, the stifling of criticism, and the sealed borders. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that Stalin, in one of his loopier moods, decreed the death penalty for any Russian who fled the country but then returned illegally once communism created a utopia. That was before it became obvious that once Russians fled, they hardly ever came back.)
If we ever decide we want to carve up another mountain someplace, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower will be on the short list of candidates to put there. The tragedy of these elections is not that Truman and Eisenhower won, it's how Dewey and Stevenson lost. (In view of recent history, one can only think of a time when we had elections that pitted candidates like Truman and Dewey or Eisenhower and Stevenson, and weep.)
Dewey, though he was a progressive Republican, was anathema to the left. He was sneeringly dismissed by Eleanor Roosevelt as looking like "the little man on the wedding cake," and very likely this snipe accounts for him being the last major Presidential candidate to have a mustache. But what is widely regarded as a fatal mistake happened when he was making a whistle stop speech and the engineer accidentally lurched the train forward while he was speaking. Dewey made a sarcastic remark which was widely quoted as an indication of his disdain for working people. Because workers are proud to be identified with klutziness? Because voters are only expected to select the leader of the Free World, not be mature enough to take criticism? Anyway, Dewey lost in that famous upset.
Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, was the last major party nominee to have two shots at the Presidency, in 1952 and 1956. The 1952 election was the first where television played a crucial role, and Eisenhower's team understood the new medium much more than Stevenson's. Most campaign managers preferred half hour broadcasts of speeches, and Stevenson didn't employ the medium especially well. In some cases he ran overtime (how could someone of his experience fail torehearse a speech?) and the broadcast simply cut out before he was done speaking. Eisenhower relied more on short ads stressing his popularity and grandfatherly image.
But one ad in particular starkly revealed the shape of things to come. Called "Campaign Double Talk," it consisted of a sideshow exhibit of a two headed man answering questions and giving contradictory opinions on major issues. It ran 54 seconds and consisted of three short exchanges. The ad is widely seen as "teachy" and a prime example of a strategy that alienated voters by portraying Stevenson as an aloof "egghead." But it had real substance. It dealt with real issues, at least in as much depth as you could in 54 seconds.
Speaking of the television ads during the campaign, Stevenson said "I think the American people will be shocked by such contempt for their intelligence. This isn’t Ivory Soap versus Palmolive." How wrong he was.
The result of the Dewey and Stevenson defeats was the unmistakable lesson that American voters would never elect someone who was clearly superior to themselves. Kissing babies and pretending to like local cuisine have always been part of political campaigns. But forget about ever electing a President who doesn't at least pretend to care about sports. Forget about electing a President who disdains appearance in favor of substance. We could elect a Rhodes Scholar (Bill Clinton) but not because he was a Rhodes Scholar. Barack Obama has gone on record as favoring a national college football playoff system because telling people to get a life and stop caring about something so trivial would be political suicide.
In 1987, Gary Hart, then one of the leaders in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, was spotted in Bimini sharing a yacht with a young model named Donna Rice. The yacht was appropriately named Monkey Business. A week later he dropped out of the race. In December, he attempted to re-enter the race but performed poorly in the primaries and soon quit for good.
The tragedy here is that Hart's attempt to re-enter the race was built around an attempt to focus attention on his stance on the issues rather than the Donna Rice monkey business, and the media wanted no part of anything so plebeian and prosaic. Neither did the voters. Another nail in the coffin of political campaigns based on substance. And a nail in the coffin of privacy for politicians. Henceforth we would have two choices: nonentities who did nothing in private or public not because they were virtuous, but because they were inert, and hypocrites who put up a good front until they were inevitably outed.
Hart has had a fairly productive career since then as college professor, author, and political consultant.
The story of the Troubles in Ireland is a convoluted one, and to be blunt, Protestant extremists like the detestable Ian Paisley precipitated it. But by 1970 the Provisional Irish Republican Army was engaging in random terror attacks on civilian targets.
The difference between the Catholic and Protestant militants is this: the Protestants were subject to nobody but themselves. The Catholics, in theory, were subject to the Vatican. The Vatican, in theory, has absolute power to dictate matters of conscience. Yet while the Church was frittering away its authority on a futile campaign to suppress contraception and a misguided effort to keep priests from marrying and women out of the priesthood, even as the shortage of priests was becoming ever more acute, it failed completely to use its authority to suppress Catholic violence in Ireland.
As soon as it became obvious that extremists in Ireland were engaging in terror attacks in the name of Catholicism, the Vatican should have stomped them down pitilessly. It should have excommunicated them, forbid any support to them under pain of excommunication and mortal sin, and demanded that anyone who wanted forgiveness should reveal everything he knew about terrorist activities to the authorities. Especially after it came to light that Irish extremists were forging links to other terrorist movements, the Vatican should have acted. As a last resort, the Vatican could have declared Northern Ireland, maybe even all of Ireland, under interdict. Basically, the Catholic Church would take its marbles and go home.
Would it have worked? Probably not. People have a marvelous ability to rationalize why religious commandments don't apply in their particular case. But it would have put the Vatican on the moral high ground, would have stripped away every scrap of pretense that the terrorism had any connection to the Church, and, just possibly, might have assuaged Protestant fears that they would be submerged in a Catholic state. Would extreme measures have lost Ireland to Catholicism? Maybe. Would it have been all that much of a loss?
jhgligt;iu
The Munich massacre of 1972, when Palestinian gunmen seized a dozen Israeli Olympic athletes, should have been a wakeup call to the West.
On the morning of December 27, 1985, four gunmen opened fire with assault rifles and grenades at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Italy, killing 16 people and wounding 99 others. Almost simultaneously, three terrorists in Vienna, Austria threw grenades into a crowd waiting to board an El Al flight. Two people were killed and 39 more wounded. All together, 18 people were killed and about 140 wounded. Four of the terrorists were killed and the other three captured. The Abu Nidal Organization claimed responsibility for the attacks, claiming they were retaliation for an Israeli attack on a Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia.
Return to Pseudoscience Index
Return to Professor Dutch's Home Page
Created 30 April 2008; Last Update 24 May, 2020
Not an official UW Green Bay site