"Psychosociocracy"?

Any totalitarianism contradicting the existence of human choice and thus of responsibility and morality, at least as expedient, generally operating via causal claims where the alleged effect follows the alleged cause far far less than even fifty percent of the time.

Historical examples include Marxism and Nazism, but more important are the contemporary doctor states based on the pseudosciences psychology and sociology and the pseudomedicine psychiatry, the first and third of which latter represent unnecessary, parasitic, morally-expedient and totalitarian "shadow sciences" and perversions of the real science and medicine neurology, and the second of which represents a similarly unnecessary, parasitic, morally-expedient and totalitarian "shadow science" and perversion of the science history.


Keywords: doctor state, history, Marxism, Nazism, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, psychosociocracy, sociology, totalitarianism, totalitarian studies

The Sins Against the Fathers (and the Mothers)

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given a test of mental ability at the age of 10 months and then again at the age of 2. By studying the performance of identical versus fraternal twins, the scientists could tease out the relative importance of factors such as genetics and the home environment. Because the infants came from households across the socioeconomic spectrum, it also was possible to see how wealth influenced test scores.

When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.

The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for nearly 50% of all variation in mental ability. (The scientists made this conclusion based on the fact that identical twins performed much more similarly than fraternal twins.) The home environment was a distant second. For parents, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.

Children from wealthy households get all the advantages that money can buy, from music lessons to SAT tutors. Although parents might fret over the details of such advantages—is it better to play the piano or the violin?—these details are mostly insignificant, subject to the law of diminishing returns. As the science blogger Razib Kahn notes, "When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains."

These results capture the stunning developmental inequalities that set in almost immediately, so that even the mental ability of 2-year-olds can be profoundly affected by the socio-economic status of their parents. As a result, their genetic potential is held back.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090020541379588.html

Single inductive studies should be treated with great caution, especially in politically-charged subjects, but this study is rather more evidence for than against the notion that you don't need to use anything like the alcohol-poisoning of fetuses depicted in Brave New World to neurologically impair and engineer an underclass.

Ironically, the quoted Wall Street Journal article is headlined "Why Rich Parents Don't Matter" . . . .


Keywords: child abuse, child slavery, plutocracy

And Just Who Are More Likely to Smoke Pot, Anyway, Conservatives or Liberals?

Look, we understood we could not make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it.

John Ehrlichman
Nixon White House Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs
Quoted in Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors (1997)


Similarly, opium Prohibition was initiated as an anti-Chinese measure in the US in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and marijuana and cocaine Prohibition as an anti-black measure in the 1930s—although jobs did of course have to be found for the boys from the Prohibition Bureau . . . .


Keywords: BNDD, DEA, Doctor State, EPA, FDA, Drug War, Marijuana War, Police State, Prohibition, psychosociocracy, smoking, succession, theocracy, tobacco, Tobacco War, totalitarianism, totalitarian studies