Chart Art - FBI-Style

September 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

The FBI is teaching its counter-terrorism agents that Islam is an inherently violent religion.  So are the followers of Islam.  Not just the extremists and radicals, but the mainstream. 

There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology. . . .The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.

Wired  got hold of the training materials.  The Times has more today, including a section of the report that describes Muhammad as “a cult leader for a small inner circle.” (How small? Twelve perhaps?)  He also “employed torture to extract information.”*

An FBI PowerPoint slide has a graph with the data to support its assertions.


The graph clearly shows that followers of the Torah and the Bible have gotten progressively less violent since 1400 BC, while followers of the Koran flatline starting around 620 AD and remain just as violent as ever.

Unfortunately, the creators of the chart do not say how they operationalized “violent” and “non-violent.”  But since the title of the presentation is “Militancy Considerations,” it might have something to do with military, para-military, and quasi-military violence.  When it comes to quantities of death, destruction, and injury, these overwhelm other types of violence. 

I must confess that my knowledge of history is sadly wanting, and I was educated before liberals imposed all this global, multicultural nonsense on schools, so I know nothing about wars that might have happened among Muslims during the period in question.  What I was taught was that the really big wars, the important wars, the wars that killed the most people, were mostly affairs among followers of the Bible.  Some of these were so big that they were called “World Wars” even though followers of the Qur’an had very low levels of participation.  Some of these wars lasted quite a long time – thirty years, a hundred years.  I was also taught that in the important violence that did involve Muslims – i.e., the Crusades** – it was the followers of the Bible who were doing most of the killing. 

Perhaps those with a more knowledge of Muslim militant violence can provide the data.


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* To be fair, the FBI seems to have been innocent of any of the torture that took place during the Bush years.  That was all done by the military and the CIA – and by the non-Christian governments to which the Bush administration outsourced the work. 

** Followers of the Bible crusading to “take back our city” from a Muslim-led regime may have familiar overtones.

Two Worthwhile Links.

September 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

• Call for Philip Morris.   Researchers in the UK have done interviews with 5,500 kids (11 - 16) focusing on their attitudes about cigarette marketing.  Now Philip Morris is trying to use the Freedom of Information to get all the raw data.

• Who do you trust?   Why do people accept expertise in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences feel free to form their own opinions?  Robin Hanson asked the question.  Sean Carroll at Discover answers it.  Hanson’s question is about economics, but much of what Carroll says is relevant to sociology.  Besides, he includes a clip of the Stand-up Economist.

Home Team Advantage

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you’re looking for an example of the Lake Wobegon effect (“all the children are above average”), you can’t do much better than this one.  It’s almost literal.

The survey didn’t ask about the children.  It asked about schools – schools in general and your local school.  As with “Congress / my Congressional rep,” people rated America’s schools as only so-so.  Barely a fifth of respondents gave America’s schools an above-average grade.  But when people rated their own local schools, 46% gave B’s and A’s.  The effect was even stronger among the affluent (upper tenth of the income distribution for their state) and among teachers.

The findings about the affluent are no surprise, nor are their perceptions skewed.  Schools in wealthy neighborhoods really are above average.  What’s surprising is that only 47% of the wealthy gave their local schools an above-average grade. 

The teachers, though, are presumably a representative sample, yet 64% of their schools are above average.  I can think of two explanations for the generosity of the grades they assign their own schools:

• Self-enhancement.  Teachers have a personal stake in the rating of schools generally.  They have an even larger stake in the rating of their own school.
• Familiarity.  We feel more comfortable with the familiar.  (On crime, people feel safer in their own neighborhoods, even the people who live in high-crime neighborhoods.)  So we rate familiar things more charitably.  For teachers, schools are something they’re very familiar with, especially their local schools.

[Research by Howell, Peterson, and West reported here.
HT: Jonathan Robinson at The Monkey Cage]

The Sweet Smell of “The Help”

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white auds . . .

So begins Variety’s take on “The Help.”

Really?  White auds, yes.  But is this movie really about black empowerment? 

Years ago, I speculated here that all American films were about success.  O.K. not all of them, of course, but many of them – even movies that seem to be about something else. Love and romance, for example. Or race relations. 

Variety continues

 “The Help” personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963. . .

Civil rights?  As I’m sure others have pointed out, “The Help” is civil rights lite if at all.  It does personalize things. That’s what movies are good at. They’re not so good at showing us larger structures and forces. “The Help” not only reduces political and social issues to the individual level, but even the individuals seem less like real people than like caricatures.  It’s all very simple – good guys and bad guys. Or in this case good women and bad women (men in this film are an afterthought).  Bad woman really – just one, the mean girl (Hilly). The other white women may be a tad ignorant, but they’re well-intentioned. And the black women are nearly perfect. 

As is typical in American films, all conflict is external. Nobody has to face any truly difficult problems or dilemmas that have only imperfect solutions.  Right and wrong are simple and clear.* That’s the way we like our movies.

But what “The Help” is really about is success.  The central character is the White girl Skeeter, and the story that arches over everything else is her career.  The problems and triumphs are the ones she faces in her pursuit of success – landing a job, getting an idea for a book, securing the cooperation of the help, keeping the work a secret, writing the book, meeting her deadline.  She plugs away, finishes the book, and sees it become a best-seller.  Ultimately she moves on and up to the New York literary world. 

It’s The Little Engine The Could chugging through Mississippi, and it requires about the same depth of thought.**  If you do see this movie, when you’re done, go watch “Nothing But a Man” (your local library should have a copy) for a grown-up version of the South in the early sixties. It also has a much better soundtrack. 

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* A minor sub-plot that takes a few minutes of screen time involves a real moral dilemma faced by Skeeter’s mother. She too turns out just fine. 

** The movie does have its virtues.  It looks good, and some of the actors are excellent (Viola Davis will probably get an Oscar nomination; maybe Allison Janney too).  It was made without big names and without special effects, so it cost a pittance by Hollywood standards.  It has brought in $130 million gross and counting, five times its cost, so maybe it will nudge Hollywoods’s blockbuster mentality, and we’ll get more small films.