Discussion and Debate Community Thread

[Kritias]

Lol, because they were discovered by a twitter account that posts the most ridiculous real papers that actually have passed peer-review in order to make fun of them. The journals didn't figure it out themselves, it was people who mock their publications.

Or, like in this case, where the paper was retracted hours after it was published by the journal. You'd be shocked to know the true volume of retractions and self-retractions every year. Which also goes to show you, no matter what, fakes get caught in the end. Also, there's a three-step peer-review: pre-publication, post-publication (usually a couple of years since the paper has been published), periodic review (after contrary findings for internal consistency).

Two journalists, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, who have long been covering health and health care reporting, founded the blog Retraction Watch, a searchable database including more than 18,000 retracted papers and conference abstracts dating back to the 1970s. The number of articles retracted by journals has increased 10-fold during the previous 10 years. As for the absolute quantity, China has reached 8,837 between 2003 and 2016, almost four times that of the second country, US.

It's interesting that since the rise of privately owned journals, peer-review has taken a hit. You can see the problem in a climate change research here, where:

According to the editorial, the journal asked three additional experts to review Köhler’s critical commentary; all three “supported the fundamental concerns raised,” noting that the 2017 paper “contains many mistakes, misconceptions and omissions and ignores a vast body of scholarly literature on the subject.” The experts also recommended the paper be withdrawn. Ultimately, the journal decided not to retract the paper, and instead: … let it remain to stimulate further discussion about such a highly charged and contentious topic. It was also felt that although the implementation of the peer review of this paper had failed, no unethical action has been found in its publication.

Again, most of the researches I cite come from the 30s and 50s, are considered the classics in the field with decades to be debunked - and haven't.

[sumskilz]

Or, like in this case, where the paper was retracted hours after it was published by the journal.

A study which employed fake empirical data is drastically different than a paper that makes an argument about an abstract concept, but again, I don't know what you're referring to specifically. Social theory has largely trended toward antipositivism for generations now. Science is by definition positivist.

[Cope]

A study which employed fake empirical data is drastically different than paper that makes an argument about an abstract concept, but again, I don't know what you're referring to specifically. Social theory has largely trended toward antipositivism for generations now. Science is by definition positivist.

He was trying to sustain the assertion that only white people can be racist. Here is half of the conversation that was cut out of the GF thread. You can see how rigorously academic his response to my refutation was.

[sumskilz]

He was trying to sustain the assertion that only white people can be racist. Here is half of the conversation that was cut out of the GF thread. You can see how rigorously academic his response to my refutation was.

Oh, I see... Yeah, that's obviously ideological.

[Kritias]

I don't know what you're referring to specifically, but studies aren't pulled from publication when they're disproven. Usually only if they're fraudulent. Plus, social theory isn't really science, so the peer-review process tends to be an ideological circle jerk.

Of course they are retracted. Here's a case in point. As to whether social sciences are really a 'science' or not, this is a HUGE discussion.

You claimed to critique the notion that everyone who disagrees with regressive conservatives is a cultural marxist. Called this notion a “load of ,” in fact. Only problem is, no one in this conversation has endorsed the notion that everyone who disagrees with regressive conservatives is a cultural marxist.

Equally, persistently accusing me (and others) of "ignorance" or "bigotry" is a poor mask for your Marxist radicalism. We can all see that your sole intention is to impugn western societies rather than to initiate a reasonable dialogue.

I clearly mean Cope calling me a radical marxist - even worse than what he calls the rioters, since they're plain old cultural marxists while I am a radical one! Please, stop misinterpreting me - any further attempt to do so will give you this post as a reply.

Told you.

It IS true and it does not make academic research impossible for one very simple reason: if I write a paper, everything in it is until peer reviewed and I successfully defend my findings in front of a specialist board. This is how academic research is done. This is the reason why nobody remembers the life's work of phonies such as the 20th century marixst scholars and the life work of frenologists lies in the dustbin of history.


Quoting someone does not make that person right. Somebody else sharing your opinion does not make you right. If I write a book saying the moon is made out of feta, and you quote it here it does not make my book scientific research or even remotely correct. The only way an opinion becomes fact is by proof. You can quote as many scholars as you want, unless they are fully reviewed by a unbiased board it means jack .




Passing yourself as an authority figure and dropping names means unless
a. those names are widely known to be right on the subject
b. you prove in the same post that those works were peer reviewed by an unbiased board.

Well, (a) they are widely known to be right on the subject, (b) they have been peer reviewed by the top publications like the British Journal of Sociology and the American Journal of Sociology (both extremely conservative publications) and are still used to this day. Werner Sobart, on the other hand, while widely popular until 1920 has been completely disappeared from any publication since the 1950s. The sources I have used, mostly Weberian writers like Weber himself and W.E.B Dubois but also the Frankfurt school are still used today and if you check the British Journal of Sociology you will find articles still using these sources as recently as this month and the last six months.

He was trying to sustain the assertion that only white people can be racist. Here is half of the conversation that was cut out of the GF thread. You can see how rigorously academic his response to my refutation was.

How can you even get that wrong? The discussion started because Settra called black people racists. I proved to you that the ideology of racism started in Western Europe and is a unique construct to it since racism places the white man at the top of the perceived races. It's a theory that supported the political expedience of colonialism and is known as scientific racism. Bigotry and prejudice which characterizes white and non-white people is a different concept. As is nationalism, and religious persecutions which you used to say everybody is racist. It's extremely disconcerting when there's people who, upon hearing that black lives matter decide to call them racist, as if they supported even once they are superior to any other race.

1. Bigotry [noun]: Intolerance to those who hold different opinions.
2. Prejudice [noun]: Dislike, hostility, or unjust behaviour deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions.
3. Racism [noun]: The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities especially so as to classify them as superior or inferior to each other.
4. Nationalism [noun]: identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.
5. Persecution [noun]: hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of political or religious beliefs; oppression.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Told you.

I’ll consider this random interjection your concession that there is nothing of substance behind your claim that your interlocutors are calling everyone who disagrees with regressive conservatives “cultural marxists.”

I told you:

Again, your semantic umbrage with the use of the term “cultural marxism” was demonstrated to be an empty deflection you’re using to disparage condemnation of vandalism and violence; this after your attempts to excuse and rationalize the latter by conflating it with “all political creeds uniting under the cause of anti-racism” fell flat. If you so strongly repudiate a colloquialism typically used to describe these kinds of equivocations, perhaps you shouldn’t engage in them.

[Sir Adrian]

Nothing toxic about not liking the Confederacy or statues honoring them. Their legacy carried on in the form of Jim Crow. A legacy that shouldn't be honored.


No. Their legacy should not be honored. Its caused enough problems for this country.

There's a lot toxic about rewriting history to suit your own political interests, even if those interests are good on paper.

You're not honoring anybody's legacy with a statue. Statues can be memorials, warnings, reminders. The people of the blatic still have statues of Lenin as a reminder of the dangers of unleashed leftism, ignoring russia and cultural maxism in general. And yes, demolishing statues for political reasons is cultural marxism. It was one of the main methods of indoctrination oulined by Lenin in "What is to be done", as a foot in the door for further censure of cultural aspects of life eventually leading to complete brainwashing.

the Frankfurt school

Stop. You admit to basing your arguments on a completely discredited current supported by the ing KGB as part of the 5th column operations in the west? Really man. You need to rethink your outlook on life because right now you sound like a communist who desperately wants the good days back.

[Kritias]

There's a lot toxic about rewriting history to suit your own political interests, even if those interests are good on paper.

You're not honoring anybody's legacy with a statue. Statues can be memorials, warnings, reminders. The people of the Baltic still have statues of Lenin as a reminder of the dangers of unleashed leftism, ignoring russia and cultural maxism in general. And yes, demolishing statues for political reasons is cultural marxism. It was one of the main methods of indoctrination oulined by Lenin in "What is to be done", as a foot in the door for further censure of cultural aspects of life eventually leading to complete brainwashing.



Stop. You admit to basing your arguments on a completely discredited current supported by the ing KGB as part of the 5th column operations in the west? Really man. You need to rethink your outlook on life because right now you sound like a communist who desperately wants the good days back.

In case anybody doesn't know, the whole KGB 5th column operation in the West theory is the precursor to the cultural marxism conspiracy theory today, which has been the topic of discussion today. Unfortunately, William Lind who began this idea with his Fourth Generation Warfare theory, has also been accused of the following:

In an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bill Berkowitz describes Lind as a key proponent and popularizer of the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory—a theory which alleges that a cabal of Jewish-German philosophers have seized control over American culture and have been using that control to systematically subvert American values. Because the supposed architects of the putative Frankfurt School plot are Jewish, and because many proponents of the theory emphasize the supposed conspirators' Judaism or even blame Judaism for the conspiracy, Berkowitz and the SPLC characterize the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory as anti-Semitic. According to the SPLC, in 1999 Lind wrote, "The real damage to race relations in the South came, not from slavery, but Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won."

Which, to be fair about Lind, isn't even his own idea. Because this is the original idea Settra just dropped like a bomb and some of you have been rehashing all day long.

Woops.

Also, I just got elevated from radical marxist to communist. Plus rep for talking dirty to me! Red scare until the sun goes out!

[Vanoi]

There's a lot toxic about rewriting history to suit your own political interests, even if those interests are good on paper.

Statues aren't history. You aren't rewriting anything here. People learn history through books which no one is advocating that we change.

You're not honoring anybody's legacy with a statue. Statues can be memorials, warnings, reminders. The people of the blatic still have statues of Lenin as a reminder of the dangers of unleashed leftism, ignoring russia and cultural maxism in general. And yes, demolishing statues for political reasons is cultural marxism. It was one of the main methods of indoctrination oulined by Lenin in "What is to be done", as a foot in the door for further censure of cultural aspects of life eventually leading to complete brainwashing.

You do know almost every single statue was built between the 1880s and 1930s right? Its an era where the Lost Cause movement rose up along with a resurgence of the KKK and the creation of Jim Crow laws. Memorials to the Civil War do exist and i don't mind them at all. But these sratues were rebuilt to honor them specfically when they were Confederates. It coincides with the Lost Cause movement which tried to romanticize and plain out re-write history about slavery, the South, and the Civil War in general.

[Abdülmecid I]

I wouldn't bother too much, Kritias. We live in a post-modernist society, where reality and knowledge are so relative that they can easily be bent to suit your own preconceived ideas. What if Lenin actually died a couple of years before the foundation of the philosophical school, which established supposedly established the idea of cultural Marxism? What if the last statue of Lenin in the Baltic Republics has been demolished since 1993? What if we use a random buzzword to demonise a random group and then claim that said label was irrelevant and insubstantial? All these are minor details that should not distract us from the fact that the statue of Winston Churchill received an egg on its face is an irrefutable sign of the threat posed by Bolshevik agitators against the western civilisation and our free-market prosperity. As the monumental "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" article demonstrated, if science doesn't accommodate our perceptions, so much worse for the science, I am afraid.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

While anglo-american ultraconservatives are whining about statues, Orban is whining about the borders of Hungary after the treaty of Trianon of 1920.

https://balkaninsight.com/2020/05/07...neighbourhood/

It seems to me, that not "cultural marxists" are the real promoters of historical revisionism but ultraconservatives themselves.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Statues aren't history. You aren't rewriting anything here. People learn history through books which no one is advocating that we change.

You heard it here first folks, time to toss the Pieta into the Tiber and rig the Parthenon with tnt. History only comes from books! This is a typically leftist perspective. Books can be revisionist in nature which allows them to rewrite history, even whitewash it. Ironically, it's this sort of revisionism that allowed Democrats to popularize the lost cause movement at all. At this point this is just a big cya effort, isn't it? There's actual value in being able to understand history. Move the statues to museums to stand as an eternal monument to the Democrats: the party of slavery.

[Sir Adrian]

I wouldn't bother too much, Kritias. We live in a post-modernist society, where reality and knowledge are so relative that they can easily be bent to suit your own preconceived ideas. What if Lenin actually died a couple of years before the foundation of the philosophical school, which established supposedly established the idea of cultural Marxism? What if the last statue of Lenin in the Baltic Republics has been demolished since 1993? What if we use a random buzzword to demonise a random group and then claim that said label was irrelevant and insubstantial? All these are minor details that should not distract us from the fact that the statue of Winston Churchill received an egg on its face is an irrefutable sign of the threat posed by Bolshevik agitators against the western civilisation and our free-market prosperity. As the monumental "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" article demonstrated, if science doesn't accommodate our perceptions, so much worse for the science, I am afraid.

Be coy all you want but deep down you know I am right. Demolishing cultural objects like statues, ornaments, etc is the first step on a dark road of censorship. That's how it has always started.

Statues aren't history. You aren't rewriting anything here. People learn history through books which no one is advocating that we change.

That's blatantly false. There two sources of history: secondary aka fluid sources (books, tales, legends, etc) and primary sources (material culture, artifacts, art, statuary, etc). Books are secondary sources specifically because they are unreliable and do not teach you even a thousandth as a monument does.

no one is advocating that we change.

Yet. Give it time.

[Vanoi]

You heard it here first folks, time to toss the Pieta into the Tiber and rig the Parthenon with tnt. History only comes from books! This is a typically leftist perspective. Books can be revisionist in nature which allows them to rewrite history, even whitewash it. Ironically, it's this sort of revisionism that allowed Democrats to popularize the lost cause movement at all. At this point this is just a big cya effort, isn't it? There's actual value in being able to understand history. Move the statues to museums to stand as an eternal monument to the Democrats: the party of slavery.

Not gonna change one bit that these statues aren't historical nor the fact you can learn history through a variety of means.

And the Lost Cause movement came about because they wanted to re-write history to favor the South. Revisionist books didn't birth the movement. Ex-Confederates did that.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Your definition of historical is wrong, and you know it.

[Kritias]

Be coy all you want but deep down you know I am right. Demolishing cultural objects like statues, ornaments, etc is the first on a dark road of censorship. That's how it had always started.

Or, and this might also be a real possibility here -- you're over-exaggerating what has been going on. Also don't forget that the system we currently live under was also brought about (at least in the Continent) with extreme violence and destruction of cultural and religious objects. I mean the French Revolution. Would you say that this was a bad outcome, too?

[Pontifex Maximus]

Yes?

[Kritias]

Yes?

I have the utmost respect for feudalism, too. At least they knew how to deal with the peasants.

That's blatantly false. There two sources of history: secondary aka fluid sources (books, tales, legends, etc) and primary sources (material culture, artifacts, art, statuary, etc). Books are secondary sources specifically because they are unreliable and do not teach you even a thousandth as a monument does.

So... For some decades after Napoleon went to Egypt, people saw the pyramids and wondered what brilliant culture had made these things, right? Problem was, the only source describing this culture was the Bible, so people generally distrusted the Egyptians. But then, a few texts were deciphered, right? And this whole craze starts and everybody wanted to learn more about Egypt! This period is called Egyptomania. Then there was this thing, with text on it, called the Rosetta stone, right? And in 1822 there was this guy who deciphered it! And this trend lasted on and off until the 1930s! This short story proves to you that monuments by themselves tell you nothing of substance. So, you're wrong.

Also, here:

Primary sources include documents or artifacts created by a witness to or participant in an event. They can be firsthand testimony or evidence created during the time period that you are studying.

Primary sources may include diaries, letters, interviews, oral histories, photographs, newspaper articles, government documents, poems, novels, plays, and music. The collection and analysis of primary sources is central to historical research.

[Abdülmecid I]

Just a small note to correct a couple of misconceptions about historical methodology. Literary sources can perfectly be considered primary, in case they directly transmit information about an event, without any intermediary. Take for example, Xenophon's Anabasis, state archives or the memoirs of Napoleonic generals. Others, like, for instance, Diodorus' Historical Library or Arrian's Anabasis, can also be treated as primary sources, as we have lost access to the original sources of information. The reliability and amount of information they provide are completely irrelevant in determining whether a source is considered primary or secondary. Moreover, it's incredibly naive to believe that the material sources are more objective than books. This observation could be true for some types of evidence, like pottery or layers of destruction, but it's definitely inaccurate, in what concerns iconographic material. Coins, statues and reliefs are as likely to reflect official propaganda as the royal, apologetic inscriptions.

In our case, Confederate statues and their commemorative plaques are more useful for studying the Lost Cause movement than Lee's aristocratic pose as a cavalry connoisseur. Generally speaking, statues are more indicative of a municipal council's willingness to spend public money in works of dubious taste than the society's relationship with its perceived past.

[Pontifex Maximus]

So not supporting the French revolution is supporting feudalism? False equivalency alarm