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There’s a paper floating around [PDF, 935 KB] alleging that Barack Obama is hypnotizing his followers using the techniques of “Neurolinguistic programming”, aka NLP.

You know, it’s tempting. Obama has captured so many otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated, well meaning people, and convinced them to believe things that simply do not hold up when examined closely (or even casually). At the same time, he’s managed to keep people, including virtually the entire press corp, from examining closely not only his ideas, but his past associates, words, and actions.

Discredited socialist, central-planner politics aside, I find Obama profoundly creepy, and don’t really understand what people see in him.

I absolutely agree that “this unaccomplished man’s unnatural and irrational rise to the highest office in the world [is] suspicious and frightening”.

However, scanning through this paper — no. I can’t easily identify it, but it has the faint reek of crank to it. The crowded formatting, the lack of a by-line on the first page, the exhortation to read the table of contents….

The command to “READ THIS DOCUMENT IN ORDER, FROM BEGINNING TO END, AS DEFINITIONS ARE BUILT ON TOP OF ONE-ANOTHER, AND UNDERSTANDING OF THESE DEFINITIONS IS NECESSARY TO FOLLOW LATER INTERPRETATIONS AND ANALYSIS”.

Sigh. All-caps, in an extra-large typeface. It might as well have more than three exclamation points at the end, the inarguable sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head!!!!

There’s the desperate footer, “EXPOSING OBAMA’S DECEPTION MAY BE THE ONLY WAY TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY”. Again, note the all-caps.

Then there’s this video:

Here’s the give-away: many, many vaguely threatening clips of Obama, but not one clip of him actually speaking, nothing demonstrating the techniques allegedly in use.

Notice the oddly cadenced narration (”Why, it’s almost as if the narrator wants to hypnotize us to bypass our rational…Oh.”), and the vaguely threatening background music straight from the X-Files.

Oh, yes, Hitler and his rallies put in an extended appearance.

Not proof that this is crackpot work, but there’s simply too many signs to take it seriously.

Obama is indeed a dangerous demagogue, but he is using techniques that have been used for centuries, not some weird modern mind-control.

Via M. Simon’s Classical Values. I do recommend Simon’s article on “The Cult of Personality” at his other blog, Power and Control.

Update:
The Language Log has another skeptical article on Obama and NLP, with excellent comments on the history of NLP.

Yesterday, I mentioned the Cloward-Piven “strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis”, and “[hastening] the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse”.

Today, Myrhaf cautions that we should remain skeptical of thinking Obama is “The Cloward-Piven Candidate“:

Simpson’s theory reminds me of the John Birch Society’s old ways of finding a communist conspiracy behind, well, everything. As Ayn Rand wrote, the Birchers don’t understand the role of philosophy. Those who hold the same philosophic premises will tend to want the same political policies. Those who do not understand the role of philosophy in man’s life think conspiracy theories are at work.

None of my reservations refute the idea that there are radical groups out there that want to replace capitalism with socialism. No question, these leftist radicals exist, they have infiltrated to the heart of the Democrat Party, and Obama has had connections with these groups all his life, starting with his hard-line communist father. But the goals and machinations of the radical left are not the fundamental explanation of America’s stumbling from crisis to crisis toward socialism. No, at the root of the problem is the philosophy of altruism, which leads to government intervention in the economy to help the “little guy,” and which — rather conveniently for the acolytes of Cloward-Piven — does not care if its programs make the world actually better. With altruism, intentions are always more important than results.

[My emphasis.]

Read the whole thing, and read the comments as well.

What I’m taking from this, aside from a bracing hand against my chest, preventing me from leaping off Conspiracy Cliff, is that McCain will not save us from socialism, either. He, too, has bought into the altruistic philosophy, as have most voters since FDR, and therefore the entire government. The debate is no longer whether or not, but how much and where.

This is extremely depressing: it means that we can’t expose the conspiracy, root it out, and save ourselves. It means that we’re swimming in it, that it’s endemic, that we ourselves are members.

That there may, in short, be no way out.

We’re not talking here about personal altruism, meaning you’re willing to help others at your own expense.

We’re talking about government altruism, meaning that you know who the disadvantaged are and what they need better than they themselves do, you’re going to give it to them whether they want it or not, and you’re willing to take as much money from everyone else as necessary to make it happen.

No good. No bueno por ca-ca.

Anyone worth talking to knows Hanlon’s Razor:

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

Now I find Beck’s Razor:

n. The practice, on an internet discussion thread, of making substantive comments in a confrontational and insulting manner as a means of sorting the other participants into those who can understand the substance and those who only see the tone and the form.

Edwin Leap says the most important thing you will read today:

…The modern emergency department is a kind of social sciences laboratory.  In fact, about 30 years into the existence of the specialty of emergency medicine, I feel comfortable saying that we have shown.with remarkable precision that the more radical social revolutions of the 20th century were shameful, stunning failures.  And the reason I can say it is not based on carefully designed studies, or because I’ve observed it from the comfort of the ivory tower of academia, but because I, and many others like me, treat the casualties of those social revolutions day, after day, after day.  Some examples, you ask?

• Drug use is normal, good, relaxing and enlightening.
• Sex is natural and anyone who tries to limit sex is an old fashioned prude
• The way to fix poverty is to give services, food and money to them, so that they will feel compelled to improve themselves
• Families can be defined in any way, family integrity is over-rated and men are entirely unnecessary for a proper home!
• Religion is an impedance to modern thought, and we need to be liberated from it by the clear, crystal light of pure science.

The mantra of ‘free love’ that began in the 60’s wasn’t about liberation; it was about enslavement to the desires of those who started it and who wanted no restraint on their behavior.
…
Do you know why I see children who are anxious and afraid? Do you know why children seek each other out for sex, and have children of their own at such young ages? Because they are terrified. Why is that? They lack the peace of safe and stable families. They lack the boundaries and discipline, born of love, that proper families give. They want the protection, wisdom, affection of a man and woman, together for the long haul. Without those things, we see what we do in the ER; teen mothers, teen fathers, irresponsible parents shifting sexual alliances from week to week, month to month, moving in with lovers and moving away from them.

Read the whole thing. I excerpt here only the barest whiff of the rotting corpse he wants taken off life support.

As noted in comments there, ERs have a huge selection bias. Also, I believe there’s a big difference between condemning bad behavior socially, and punishing it with the law. Sure, drugs are bad, but the War on Drugs is even worse, because it deprives even the sober of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the attitudes Leap describes are real. My generation, the hippie generation, the peace and love and grooviness generation, is to blame, and we will go down in history as social traitors who destroyed, in only one or two generations, the richest, freest, most powerful nation that has ever been.

===

I cannot resist adding: Obama and his party whole-heartedly embrace the attitudes and policies Leap excoriates. The eyes of Palin, her running mate, and their party leaders, are clouded by decades of socialist, feel-good pap, but they dimly perceive the truth (McCain, of course, survived years of the tender, loving instruction of Obama’s idols), and they are struggling, however weakly, to campaign on the twin pillars of liberty and duty.

From Eliezer Yudkowsky at the very challenging and stimulating Overcoming Bias:

This fallacy gets its name from an ancient sci-fi TV show, which I never saw myself, but was reported to me by a reputable source (some guy at an SF convention).  Anyone knows the exact reference, do leave a comment.

So the good guys are battling the evil aliens.  Occasionally, the good guys have to fly through an asteroid belt.  As we all know, asteroid belts are as crowded as a New York parking lot, so their ship has to carefully dodge the asteroids.  The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids.

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it.  The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever.  “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!”  So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize.

And from there, Yudkowsky goes on to discuss the quicksand foundations of psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Well worth the time and skull sweat.

One mild demurrer: If you look over at my Categories, you’ll see that I deride psychology as “Witch Doctoring”. This is in response to claims that psychology is in any way a science; it is not, because it lacks underlying mechanisms and testable hypotheses.

However, it’s easy to ridicule the field in hindsight, without viewing it in its historical context.

Imagine, to use the opening metaphor, that you live on a ship, have been raised on a ship, where nobody has ever been in the bridge; indeed, no one even knows the bridge exists. The ship simply flies around the universe, completely out of control. The origins of the ship, and the technology and science underlying its operation, have been forgotten so long ago, no one even remembers the ideas of technology and science. It is not unreasonable that all sorts of bizarre superstitions should arise as to how to direct the flight of the ship.

Then one day an ignorant, superstitious, but curious savage, fellow by the name of Freud, finds this rusted-shut hatch….

Sounds like a great idea for a science fiction story, eh? The idea of a colonial ship carrying crew and passengers who have forgotten their origins is indeed a popular one, although I don’t recall this particular issue being explored.

A couple of the best examples are Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination, and Gene Wolf’s tetralogy Book of the Long Sun (Actually, a long cycle of novels). There’s another novel (which I read in high school, so pre-1972) about a militaristic religion, with enforcers based on the Spanish Inquisition, deliberately set up to control the population of a colony ship; damned if I can remember its title or author, though. Then there’s The Starlost, a disasterous TV series disowned by its creator, Harlan Ellison.

The Power of Dill Compels You:

PZ Meyers at Pharyngula sez:

Christianity is like sticking [forks] in your face and your rectum and plugging them into a wall socket. Your insides will smoke and sizzle, you’ll glow, sparks will shoot out of you, and you’ll become a cooked vegetable.

Ooo-kay, then.

“Don’t try this at home.” Right, so much for all those living-room Bible study groups, then.

Via Overcoming Bias.

“Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don’t kid yourself.”
– Frank Zappa, Burnt Weenie Sandwich

Now read this, over at Overcoming The Bias:

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black.  It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Damn straight, Skippy.

I know people who simply refuse to like anything they hear on Top 40 radio, simply because it’s popular, and they can’t tolerate along with the crowd.

Shakespeare’s bad, because, you know, he’s a cultural icon.

Most of them are against the war in Iraq, because, you know, they’re questioning authority. They’re speaking truth to power. They’re out on the edge.

‘Scuse, please, but they’re credulous starry-eyed sheep. Avowed skeptics and inclusive multi-culturists, they’re bowing down before the most racist, sexist, close-minded, anti-progressive religious cult to come along in the past thousand years, a cult that openly promises to enslave or kill them. They’re trying to elect a presidential candidate from the Chicago Machine they’re treating like the Messiah. Meanwhile, if I can keep from vomiting on the voting machine, I’ll vote for this guy.

I know, vaguely, what wearing the clown suit feels like, because I’ve come out to “liberal” friends and family as a gun owner. My advocacy of possessing a tool that would allow me to actually resist tyranny made me a pariah to folks who are very strident in their rebelliousness. (I probably also wore the clown suit a lot in school, but wasn’t aware of it. I don’t think that counts. Hm, I did almost start a fad for carrying Slinkies around, but the teachers put a stop to that, because they’re so damn noisy. Does that count?)

And mind, by the standards of the linked article, I’m still not a true rebel, because I didn’t figure out, on my own, how crucial the right to keep and bear arms really is; I picked it up from a chance conversation back in ‘76, and had it reinforced by Gharlane of Eddore, a nut job science fiction fan posting in the Babylon Five usenet forums.

I’m giving up on trying to be a rebel. I swear, from here on out, not to care how popular or unpopular my positions are, but only whether or not I feel they’re right. If I conform, too damn bad.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast.  Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see.  I would totally have worn a clown suit to school.  My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either!  It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.  That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.  Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them.  You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker.  It’s not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way.

So I liked Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. So sue me.

[update]

Holy. Crap.

Overcoming Bias is a serious trip, particularly if you’ve let yourself get intellectually lazy. It’s a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes. Very, very strongly recommended.

I can tell I need to spend some time at the Rathouse, reading papers by and about Karl Popper, known to me by his principle of falsifiability in regards to the scientific method; and F.A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, an examination of individualism versus statism.

Following links in the Hayek section leads to Hayek explaining “Why I am not a Conservative“, which says very clearly something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining: preferring small government and individual liberty does not make me a conservative.

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a need for a “brake on the vehicle of progress,”[3] I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.

There’s a problem here in the U.S. with political terminology: the word “liberal” no longer means what it used to mean, and is now being used to decidedly illiberal ends. There’s a good explanation of this in Serfdom, which I plan to put up shortly.

Anyway, I wanted to get the Rathouse link up, for my own use if no one else’s.

Via a Samizdata link to a quote from W.W. Bartley:

Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.

This refers to the Popperian dogma that the essence of the scientific method is not proving things correct, but proving things wrong, i.e, “throwing out the trash”. A scientific hypothesis is a proposed explanation for which you can specify the evidence that would require you to discard the hypothesis. A good example of a non-Popperian hypothesis would be Creationism: there may very well be a God, and He may very well have created the world–but because He could, in principle, manipulate the evidence using powers beyond the ken of science, creationism cannot be scientific, even if it is true.

Via the Anchoress, one of the many amazing talks presented by TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor talks about how she received enlightenment on the morning she had a stroke.