General CE Chat

Federal elections in Germany ("Mecklenburg-Vorpommern"):
AfD (anti islam party) reaches about 21% of the votes (didn´t exist 4 years ago) and is now second strongest party in the state. All other parties lost a couple of percentages. It won´t have any impact on the government (both in the state or on the federal level), but it is quite alarming. Especially for the conservative party. Other parties are spouting all the nonsense that they did in the past. Lets see what happens when the dust settles and if anyone is willing to learn the lesson.



 
The SFO is going for three ex-Tesco execs over their accounting black hole. Showing some teeth maybe.
 
@2cents
http://lobelog.com/islams-lesser-muslims-when-khuda-became-allah/

In 1985 a curious thing happened: a prominent Pakistani talk-show host bid her audience farewell with the words Allah Hafiz. It was an awkward substitution. The Urdu word for goodbye was actually Khuda Hafiz (meaning God be with you), using the Persian word for God, Khuda, not the Arabic one, Allah. The new term was pushed on the populace in the midst of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization campaign of the late 1970s and 1980s, the extremes of which Pakistani society had never before witnessed. Zia overhauled large swathes of the Pakistan Penal Code to resemble Saudi-style justice, leaving human rights activists and religious minorities aghast. Even the national language, revered for its poetry, would not be spared. And yet, though bars and cabarets shut down overnight and women were told to cover up, it would take two decades for the stubborn Khuda to decisively die off, and let Allah reign.
Click to expand...

It's happening (happened?) in India too in the last 4-5 years.
 
another state election in Germany (Berlin).
The AfD with another strong result, while conservatives and social-democrats took a heavy beating. The liberals are back in the parliament and the extreme left was also able to win a couple of points. The left-wing parties won enough seats to govern together.
 
PedroMendez said:
another state election in Germany (Berlin).
The AfD with another strong result, while conservatives and social-democrats took a heavy beating. The liberals are back in the parliament and the extreme left was also able to win a couple of points. The left-wing parties won enough seats to govern together.
Click to expand...

What's the interpretation of this in terms of where German politics might be headed in the near future?
 
PedroMendez said:
another state election in Germany (Berlin).
The AfD with another strong result, while conservatives and social-democrats took a heavy beating. The liberals are back in the parliament and the extreme left was also able to win a couple of points. The left-wing parties won enough seats to govern together.
Click to expand...



Surely SPD would never ally with Die Linke? They had the chance to rule nationally with a SD-red-green alliance and rejected it...
 
Jippy said:
What's the interpretation of this in terms of where German politics might be headed in the near future?
Click to expand...

Hard to say. The AfD (anti-immigration/anti-islam) party will continue to have success as long as migration situation continues to be an issue. The general election is in 2017. They´ll certainly get into parliament but it is too early to say how much % they can get (I expect something between 10%-20%). It is hard for the government to change the course when it comes to refugees; they are kind of committed. The CSU (Bavarian conservative party) is trying to take a stance on a cap for refugees/migrants. I wouldn´t be surprised if something like that gets passed, but more as symbol than anything else. Merkel isn´t undisputed anymore (internally), but there are only few other viable alternatives and nobody will challenge her openly yet.

The AfD wins voters from all other parties (including from the left-leaning parties) and if they get a good result in 2017, anything but an extension of a "Große Koalition" (coalition between conservatives and social democrats) could be impossible.
The SPD was imo clearly looking for a left-wing coalition, but I doubt SPD + Green Party + DieLinke will win enough seats for that. CDU+FDP won´t be enough and nobody will cooperate with the AfD. CDU + GreenParty + FDP might be an option but these cross-spectrum three way coalitions are unlikely (despite Conservatives and Green party openly talking about potentially cooperating in a government)
So I expect a continuation of the current government with more or less the same policies. It is a bit odd, because the results for the AfD are quite significant, but no party really knows how to deal with that (despite name calling).

berbatrick said:
Surely SPD would never ally with Die Linke? They had the chance to rule nationally with a SD-red-green alliance and rejected it...
Click to expand...

They will in Berlin. They have no choice, because their current coalition with the conservatives lost their majority. They already had an alliance with DieLinke on the federal level, so that is nothing new. Overall they are imo clearlty interested in opening themselves up for this option on the national level as well.
 
PedroMendez said:
Hard to say. The AfD (anti-immigration/anti-islam) party will continue to have success as long as migration situation continues to be an issue. The general election is in 2017. They´ll certainly get into parliament but it is too early to say how much % they can get (I expect something between 10%-20%). It is hard for the government to change the course when it comes to refugees; they are kind of committed. The CSU (Bavarian conservative party) is trying to take a stance on a cap for refugees/migrants. I wouldn´t be surprised if something like that gets passed, but more as symbol than anything else. Merkel isn´t undisputed anymore (internally), but there are only few other viable alternatives and nobody will challenge her openly yet.

The AfD wins voters from all other parties (including from the left-leaning parties) and if they get a good result in 2017, anything but an extension of a "Große Koalition" (coalition between conservatives and social democrats) could be impossible.
The SPD was imo clearly looking for a left-wing coalition, but I doubt SPD + Green Party + DieLinke will win enough seats for that. CDU+FDP won´t be enough and nobody will cooperate with the AfD. CDU + GreenParty + FDP might be an option but these cross-spectrum three way coalitions are unlikely (despite Conservatives and Green party openly talking about potentially cooperating in a government)
So I expect a continuation of the current government with more or less the same policies. It is a bit odd, because the results for the AfD are quite significant, but no party really knows how to deal with that (despite name calling).



They will in Berlin. They have no choice, because their current coalition with the conservatives lost their majority. They already had an alliance with DieLinke on the federal level, so that is nothing new. Overall they are imo clearlty interested in opening themselves up for this option on the national level as well.
Click to expand...
Would anyone really form a coalition with the AfD? They sound like your version of Ukip tbh. Sadly, it's no great surprise that their stock has risen given Merkel's action.
 
Jippy said:
Would anyone really form a coalition with the AfD? They sound like your version of Ukip tbh. Sadly, it's no great surprise that their stock has risen given Merkel's action.
Click to expand...

no. they are seen as pariah.
They are more or less like Ukip. They have a "funny" history. They were founded by a economic professor to oppose the Euro-Greece deals. This guy (Bernd Lucke) wasn´t a right-winger at all; he was a former CDU member who really tried to talk about this issue (the flaws of the Euro and european policy). He repeated his academic arguments, but everyone (including the media) treated him like some kind of neo-nazi. It was insane. Yet over time more and more disenfranchised right-wingers joined the party and took it over. Lucke and the other guys, who cared about economic issues left and now this party is genuinely far-far-far right, with a lot of connections to horrible people/groups.
The whole thing might have never happened, if the public would have treated Lucke in a reasonable and fair way.
 
PedroMendez said:
no. they are seen as pariah.
They are more or less like Ukip. They have a "funny" history. They were founded by a economic professor to oppose the Euro-Greece deals. This guy (Bernd Lucke) wasn´t a right-winger at all; he was a former CDU member who really tried to talk about this issue (the flaws of the Euro and european policy). He repeated his academic arguments, but everyone (including the media) treated him like some kind of neo-nazi. It was insane. Yet over time more and more disenfranchised right-wingers joined the party and took it over. Lucke and the other guys, who cared about economic issues left and now this party is genuinely far-far-far right, with a lot of connections to horrible people/groups.
The whole thing might have never happened, if the public would have treated Lucke in a reasonable and fair way.
Click to expand...
God, wasn't Hitler initially mocked, to draw a melodramatic comparison? Ukip was seen as a joke tbf, with plenty of nutty racists, but its growing support ultimately led to the referendum and where we are now.
I have always loved visiting Germany and do fear the long-term impact of Merkel's open door policy.
 
Despite the AfD winning a big share, they´ll never participate in any government and overall there is a lot of public discussion about opposing racism. The civil society is largely united against right-wing nutter and they have still a long way to go, to have any political impact. The legacy of WWII is still very much alive (which is a good thing) and there is a strong awareness about the dangers of right-wing nationalists ingrained in modern German culture. As bad as it is in Germany, I am much more worried about France.
 
@2cents @PedroMendez @Kaos
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/when-humanitarianism-became-imperialism/

If we are to overcome the legacy of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, we can no longer pretend that the PDPA and the Soviet occupation forces were a viable alternative to the mujahidin. The only politics that offers a way out of the dilemma of contemporary Third World sovereignty is an internationalism that recognizes that its subjects are political actors, not just suffering subjects; that the repression launched by struggling secularist regimes undermines secularism just as it invites intervention; that the beneficiaries of Western intervention are to be found in Moscow, Riyadh, Arlington, and Islamabad, not Homs and Benghazi; and that the struggles of global refugee diasporas are coextensive with the domestic political communities they were forced to leave behind.
Click to expand...

I thought this was a fantastic article about western intervention and the problem with the "other" side (which a lot of people have a reflex to support).
 
berbatrick said:
@2cents @PedroMendez @Kaos
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/when-humanitarianism-became-imperialism/



I thought this was a fantastic article about western intervention and the problem with the "other" side (which a lot of people have a reflex to support).
Click to expand...

A solid informative article.

Though 'support' for the other side isn't always a instinctive reflex brought about through opposing western intervention, 'support' isn't even the right term for it since that insinuates an ideological sympathy for them.

I personally care very little for Putin and the Russians, in fact outside of this conflict I'd say my views of them are more unfavourable than favourable. I don't even like the Syrian regime, I've disliked the Assad family before and will continue to do so, I've made it very clear the only horse I'm backing in this race is the Kurdish one. But looking at this objectively, the only buffer right now to the US and her Arab allies acting with impunity is Russia's role in this conflict. If the US - Turkey - Gulf Arab axis had its way then Syria would become an extremist cesspit, swapping a secular breed of oppression with that of an hardline Islamist breed. Now as a Kurd and staunch secularist, no prizes for guessing which necessary evil I'm more inclined towards.

So my 'support' or inclination towards the other side is more out of pragmatic necessity as opposed to ideological sympathy or anti-Americanism.
 
berbatrick said:
@2cents @PedroMendez @Kaos
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/when-humanitarianism-became-imperialism/



I thought this was a fantastic article about western intervention and the problem with the "other" side (which a lot of people have a reflex to support).
Click to expand...
good article.

That part needs to be highlighted:

(...)Instead, what justifies intervention is solidarity between human beings as suffering victims of repression, a claim so powerful and universal that it is held to override any talk about the efficacy of past interventions or the plan for what happens after a regime is overthrown. (...)
Click to expand...
 
berbatrick said:
@2cents @PedroMendez @Kaos
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/when-humanitarianism-became-imperialism/



I thought this was a fantastic article about western intervention and the problem with the "other" side (which a lot of people have a reflex to support).
Click to expand...

Thanks, I enjoyed that one, and it kind of helps me to clarify in my mind the kind of interventions I can live with, accepting that superpower interventions are inevitable in places like the ME, or 60/70s SE Asia. A good example would be the Gulf War, if it could have been shorn of the post-war appeals to the Shi'a and Kurds to rise up - a short, sharp intervention based on readily identifiable and achievable national interests. Of course even the propaganda of that war played into the humanitarian ethos described in that article, but thankfully the goals and actions of the coalition never reflected it (unlike in 2003). Vague attempts at nation-building, reforming the politics of an entire region, or 'humanitarianism', are a recipe for the type of disasters we've seen since 9/11. Which is why I like this bit:

"A politics that demands we think about interests and outcomes before we allow ourselves to be pressed into action by urgent moral appeals would restore politics to a climate long dominated by the depoliticizing discourse of suffering."​

It reminds me of this great quote by the Iraqi-Jewish [conservative] historian Elie Kedourie:

The power of chance, the accident of personality, the ritual of tradition, and the passions of men are always at work to mock benevolence and denature its contrivances. It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests. They must not cumber themselves with historical dogmas, or chase illusions in that maze of double talk which western political vocabulary has extended over the whole world.​

On the other hand, I've maintained all along that, in the case of Syria and Iraq, and the other Arab states, nothing has been more damaging to secularism in the region than the nature of those avowedly secular regimes themselves, Syria and Iraq in particular being Soviet client states throughout the Cold War. So for that reason, while I can understand why the likes of @Kaos or my Iraqi in-laws are willing to support Assad (with varying degrees of enthusiasm - my wife's family are far more gung-ho than @Kaos) in this particular conflict, it's impossible for me to see anything which the regime might be able to claim as 'victory' constituting any kind of actual solution to the problems at hand. At the same time, I can be rightly criticized for being unable to come up with any alternatives myself.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/w...uman-rights-investigate-rape.html?src=mv&_r=0

Police Sex Abuse Case Is Bad News for Mexico’s Leader

MEXICO CITY — International human rights officials are demanding an investigation into the brutal sexual assaults of 11 Mexican women during protests a decade ago — an inquiry that would take aim at President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was the governor in charge at the time of the attacks.
(…)
The case was brought by 11 women to the international commission, which found that the police tortured them sexually. The women — a mix of merchants, students and activists — were raped, beaten, penetrated with metal objects, robbed and humiliated, made to sing aloud to entertain the police. One was forced to perform oral sex on multiple officers. After the women were imprisoned, days passed before they were given proper medical examinations, the commission found.
(…)
The commission suggests that the state government under Mr. Peña Nieto had sought to minimize and even cover up the events. Perhaps the most lurid example is whom the government chose to prosecute: Rather than go after the police who committed the sexual torture, the state initially prosecuted the women instead. Five were imprisoned for a year or more, on charges like blocking traffic, detentions the commission found arbitrary.
Days after the episode, the state denied the accusations of the women, essentially calling them liars. Mr. Peña Nieto told a local newspaper at the time that it was a known tactic of radical groups to have women make accusations of sexual violence to discredit the government. Others in his administration made similar claims.
(…)
Since then, while the government has acknowledged the veracity of the accusations, not a single person has been convicted of any crime related to the assaults in Atenco. Most recently, five doctors charged with ignoring evidence of sexual abuse had their cases dismissed.
(…)
Click to expand...

Overall pretty grim. Pretty bad advertisement for humanity. So regardless of who wins the US election, Mexico will continue to have the bigger cnut as president.
 
http://publicintellectualsproject.m...rs-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/



I've seen the figure quoted about peace gradually taking over in the 20th century due to globalisation/capitalism/powerful states a lot of times and was always curious...this part of this very long article comprehensively demolishes that argument.
“Percentage of deaths in warfare in nonstate and state societies” (49), a bar diagram that purports to show the various odds that a “person died at the hands of another person rather than passing away of natural causes” at different times and places in history.

Against the belief that “humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions,” and that the “world we made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably,” (xxi) ideas that he identifies with “romantic” writers such as Rousseau, Pinker argues that a “logic of violence” pervades human affairs, and that humans spent almost their entire life on the planet trapped in a violent world.

In Figure 2-2, Pinker purports to illustrate this grand scheme. He does this by comparing the percentages of violent deaths from 39 graves he identifies with “nonstate” societies, and the percentages in eight “state” societies. Needless to say, the reported percentages in the 39 “nonstate” graves, on average, are dramatically higher than in the “state” societies. Pinker then provides the lesson that he wants us to learn from Figure 2-2: “The major cleft in the graph”—that is, between the higher and lower percentages of deaths caused by violence—“separates the anarchical [nonstate] bands and tribes from the governed states.”

Revealing is the cavalier attitude that he takes towards his data, and the huge fudge-factors he entertains. He offers a 0-to-60 percent range for the bodies recovered from one subset of 21 “nonstate” graves he labels “Prehistoric,” and claims that this series of estimates that are literally all over the map can be reduced to a meaningful final average of 15 percent. Similarly, he offers a 14 percent average for violent deaths among the 8 graves he designates as “Hunter-gatherers,” and a 24.5 percent average for the 10 “Hunter-horticulturalists” graves.

But were the bodies that Pinker alleges can be associated with violent deaths combat-related deaths, sacrifices, or accidents? Were the artifacts recovered with these bodies evidence of weapons or other kinds of tools? In cases when they are clearly weapons, were they also causes of death or the purely symbolic accoutrements of burial? Indeed, in one careful assessment of “Pinker’s List” of the 21 “Prehistoric” graves, the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson concludes that this list “consists of cherry-picked cases with high casualties,” and that in passing-off these “highly unusual cases” as representative of “prehistory,” Pinker distorts “war’s antiquity and lethality.”

He argues that the violent potential for which he believes the components of human intelligence and the emotions had been naturally selected over evolutionary time have been softened or “pacified” by the development of permanent human settlements (cities) and the centralized authorities that governed them during the past 10,000 to 12,000 years. The “logic of the Leviathan” displaced the “logic of violence” wherever central authorities took hold.

But in one of the rare informed reviews of this “trite Hobbesian message,” the anthropologist Douglas P. Fry argued that Pinker’s history of violence and war is upside-down. “[T]the archaeological facts speak clearly,” Fry noted, “showing for particular geographic areas exactly when war began. And in all cases this was recent, not ancient activity—occurring after complex forms of social organization supplanted nomadic hunting and gathering.” Among the “artifices of civilization” we must count war.
...
“[T]he enduring moral trend of the [20th] century,” he writes, “was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II.” Proving this point, and proving that the massive death toll, suffering, and destruction associated with the Second World War does not blow-holes in his declining-violence/“better-angels” narrative, are two of the purposes of the longest chapter in his book, “The Long Peace.”

Adapted from the work of the “atrocitologist” Matthew White, the table lists 21 “hemoclysms” (“blood floods”), attributes each one to a “cause” (e.g., the Second World War, the Fall of Rome), provides an estimated death toll for each one, and adjusts these estimates from the world’s population at the time of each “hemoclysm,” up to their “mid-20th century equivalent”—the world’s population as of 1950, when it stood at roughly 2.5 billion people.

Pinker insists that adjusted-rankings are needed to correct for two illusions. “The first is that while the 20th century certainly had more violent deaths than earlier ones, it also had more people.” The other is what he calls “historical myopia” (also “availability bias”): The further in the past an era is from our own, the fewer details we know about it. Taking the An Lushan Revolt, Pinker claims that it would have cost the lives of 429,000,000 people, adjusted from the world’s population around 750 AD to 1950. As Pinker credits World War II with an unadjusted 55,000,000 deaths, this means that by his reckoning, World War II was only one-eighth as lethal as the An Lushan Revolt. Hence our technologically more advanced modern era has not been the most violent after all. Our thinking is rife with “illusions.”

But once again serious problems abound with Pinker’s reasoning and data. In what sense are his earlier destructive events genuinely and consistently events? Whereas World War II is relatively easy for us to define, four of Pinker’s higher-ranking “hemoclysms” span multiple centuries—the Mideast Slave Trade, the Fall of Rome, the Annihilation of the American Indians, and the Atlantic Slave Trade. If this is how he wants us to think about “violence,” then we should also enumerate the structural violence of the kind that Sen and Drèze analyze, and that takes into account the human losses which follow from the policy actions and inactions of the global capitalist structures, but which Pinker passes over because it falls outside his conception of violence.

As another one of the rare critical reviews of Pinker’s book to have appeared in an establishment source put the matter: “Pinker plays down the technical ability of modern societies to support greater numbers of human lives. If carrying capacity increases faster than mass murder, this looks like moral improvement on the charts, but it might mean only that fertilizers and antibiotics are outpacing machine guns and machetes—for now.” And nuclear weapons.

This brings us to the third figure that we want to examine: Figure 5-3, “100 worst wars and atrocities of human history.”

In his treatment of this scatter plot of 100 datapoints, Pinker’s discussion is perhaps the most dishonest in his book. Based on Matthew White’s list of the “one hundred events with the largest man-made death tolls,” and arranged in chronological order from the earliest to the most recent, Pinker introduces one crucial change in White’s numbers: Pinker adjusts each reported death toll to its percentage of the world’s population around the time the event occurred.


Thus Figure 5-3 plots ten events that in Pinker’s adjusted rankings turn out to be more lethal than the 1st and 2nd World Wars. “Circled dots [at the very top of this figure] represent events with death rates higher than the 20th century world wars,” Pinker explains: From left to right, these are associated with the Xin Dynasty (9-24 A.D.), the Three Kingdoms of China (189-280), the Fall of the Western Roman Empire (395-455), the An Lushan Revolt (755-763), the reign of Genghis Khan (1206-1257), the Mideast Slave Trade (7th-19th centuries), the reign of Timur Lenk (1370-1405), the Atlantic Slave Trade (1452-1807), the Fall of the Ming Dynasty (1635-1662), and the Conquest of the Americas (1492-).

In his discussion of Figure 5-3, Pinker writes that the “cloud of data tapers rightward and downward into smaller and smaller conflicts for years that are closer to the present,” and he asks: “How can we explain this funnel?” (198) But in asking this question, Pinker is admitting that Figure 5-3 shows that a greater number of “hemoclysms” have occurred in the recent past than in the distant past, with their frequency accelerating over the past 100-200 years. Simply looking at what Pinker calls the “funnel,” in the lower right-hand-corner, below the 100 deaths per 100,000 line, we can see that roughly one-half of this graph’s total of 100 datapoints are plotted there. This means that Figure 5-3 shows the opposite of what Pinker contends it does: The frequency and absolute levels of violence have been increasing into the modern era, as more and more datapoints cluster there. This is what explains the “funnel.”

And poor Pinker cannot explain what went wrong. So once again he resorts to our alleged “historical myopia.” (198) He quotes the speculation of Matthew White: “Maybe the only reason it appears that so many were killed in the past 200 years is because we have more records from that period.”

For Pinker, war simply must have been more frequent and more lethal in the distant past than in the modern era. When the 100 datapoints of his own graph not only fail to show this, but show the opposite, they must be explained-away as the result of “historical myopia”—and Pinker dismisses Figure 5-3 even as he hangs onto it. In the words of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Pinker’s excuses are “not even wrong.”
 
For the first time we can see the numbers on which the agreement depends, and their logic is inescapable. Governments can either meet their international commitments or allow the prospecting and development of new fossil fuel reserves. They cannot do both.

The Paris agreement, struck by 200 nations in December, pledged to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels”, and aspired to limit it to 1.5C. So what does this mean? Thanks to a report by Oil Change International, we can now answer this question with a degree of precision.

Using the industry’s own figures, it shows that burning the oil, gas and coal in the fields and mines that is already either in production or being developed, is likely to take the global temperature rise beyond 2C. And even if all coal mining were to be shut down today, the oil and gas lined up so far would take it past 1.5C. The notion that we can open any new reserves, whether by fracking for gas, drilling for oil or digging for coal, without scuppering the Paris commitments is simply untenable.

This is not an extreme precautionary case. Quite the opposite, in fact: the report uses the hazard assessment adopted by the United Nations. This means a 66% chance of preventing 2C of global warming and a 50% chance of preventing 1.5C – an assumption of risk that in any other field would be regarded as reckless.

Even so, to prevent the odds from becoming any worse, a 2C target means that we can use only around 85% of the fossil fuel that’s currently good to go, while a 1.5C target means we can extract little more than a third (the figures are explained by the US environmentalist Bill McKibben in an article in New Republic). So what’s the point of developing new reserves if the Paris agreement precludes the full extraction of those already in production?
Click to expand...

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels
 
http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/9/160384


Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor methods results partly from incentives that favour them, leading to the natural selection of bad science. This dynamic requires no conscious strategizing—no deliberate cheating nor loafing—by scientists, only that publication is a principal factor for career advancement. Some normative methods of analysis have almost certainly been selected to further publication instead of discovery. In order to improve the culture of science, a shift must be made away from correcting misunderstandings and towards rewarding understanding. We support this argument with empirical evidence and computational modelling. We first present a 60-year meta-analysis of statistical power in the behavioural sciences and show that power has not improved despite repeated demonstrations of the necessity of increasing power. To demonstrate the logical consequences of structural incentives, we then present a dynamic model of scientific communities in which competing laboratories investigate novel or previously published hypotheses using culturally transmitted research methods. As in the real world, successful labs produce more ‘progeny,’ such that their methods are more often copied and their students are more likely to start labs of their own. Selection for high output leads to poorer methods and increasingly high false discovery rates. We additionally show that replication slows but does not stop the process of methodological deterioration. Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level.
Click to expand...
 
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...black-hawk-down’-america-back-war-somalia-17930

Somalia is almost the perfect case study for failed military interventions. It has almost everything. Our politicians (and our resident war-enthusiasts) should pay a lot more attention to this ongoing cluster-feck, where one failed attempt follows another and usually things turn out worse. But sometimes ignoring reality is just more comfortable.

Somalia going wrong? Afghanistan failing? Libya turning into a failed-state? Iraq still ravaged by internal conflict? *Doesn’t matter next time we’ll get it right!*
 
You must log in or register to reply here.