Anyone taking on face value nearly anything coming out of academia over the last few decades is guilty of committing intellectual malfeasance–Or, just plain too stupid to be taken seriously. Much of the really outre stuff they’ve come up with can be refuted simply through the application of some common sense, and comparison to personal experience.

It’s like the classic bullshit put out by such artistes of the form like Grossman and S.L.A. Marshall. Were one to stop and think about it, the idea that the junior leadership and the percentage of guys who were supposedly doing all the fighting would somehow overlook the fact that 85% of their peers and subordinate’s weren’t doing squat in the fight…? Yeah, right; pull the other one. There’s no way you could effectively hide “combat avoidance” from your boss, or your left and right flank peers. And, if you think that PFC Jones is going to take it kindly that you hung back and didn’t do anything effective, while he moved forward into fire…? Again, think about it: Were what Grossman and Marshall said true, then the question is, where the hell were all the retributive casualties caused by guys like PFC Jones coming back and demonstrating their utter lack of appreciation for the lack of support they were getting from the “non-participant 85%”.

Things that just don’t make sense, reported to us by academia…? Generally, they likely ain’t true facts, either.

The most recent search on Google was this one (from a few days ago):

Renowned Stanford Prison Experiment ‘faked’ by participants
By Sarah Swain

One of the most renowned psychological experiments ever done has been called a fake by people involved in it.

The Stanford Prison Experiment involved young professor Philip Zimbardo mounting a test at Californian University Stanford’s Psychology department in 1971 to explore the psychological effects of perceived power, within the setting of a fake prison.

He wanted to find out what happens when you; “put good people in an evil place – does humanity win over evil or does evil triumph?”.

However the experiment, which inspired a Hollywood movie, was shut down after six days because the ‘guards’ became so “sadistic” and the prisoners showed signs of “extreme stress.”

[...]

But now a report published by website Medium sees participants confirm claims over the past almost 50 years that all was not quite as it seemed.

It confirms claims Zimbardo pushed participants towards the results he wanted, something he has disputed.

‘Guards’ and ‘prisoners’ have also explained their behaviours wasn’t natural.

[...]

One of the ‘guards’, Dave Eshelman who was dubbed John Wayne for his fake Southern Accent, has admitted he simply wanted the experiment to succeed.

“I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” he said. “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I’d do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona.”

The doubt cast over the study is nothing new.

American Psychologist called it flawed as early as 1975.

Wowsers. I had no idea. It’s always listed in those ‘top 10 psychological experiments’ pages you see every year, so I just assumed it was all legit. Aren’t psychologists and other professionals supposed to scrutinise these studies (peer review and all)? I guess not.

I read the other day, don’t have link, that the whole thing was faked. Just another leftist cooking the books to push his view.

Maybe a mixture of all three. Or, not–I won’t rule out that she was like Kinsey, interested in normalizing the perverse, and justifying her sexual fetishes.

There’s a lot of weirdness that goes on when you subject social behavior and society in general to research. There’s the observer effect, and then there’s the complete misunderstanding of what the observer is seeing.

One thing I saw, and which explained a lot of the supposed “Polynesian sexual permissiveness” was that these were generally small (genetically), isolated populations. Whenever some “strange” showed up, you had to grab as much of it as you could, for the sake of genetic diversity–So, customs and society evolved to support that. And, when the Europeans showed up, all that carefully balanced cultural tradition and genetics went to hell in a handbasket in very short order.

Whenever you find a feature of a society or a custom, you have to first step back and analyze it from the standpoint of “What purpose does this serve…?”, because there is little to no chance at all that a custom or behavior will remain after generations–Unless it serves a purpose. You may not like the purpose, but there is something there, or it wouldn’t still be practiced. Failure to comprehend this fact is something that most SJW types and the cultural Marxists fail to comprehend, and it is the rock upon which all their carefully-laid plans for perfecting man run aground.

The academic should understand that to really understand the truth of violence, they need to go out where real violence actually exists, like a Somali pirate crew, or an organization like MS-13. Studying those groups might tell us something, but odds are that the academic doing the study wouldn’t return to tell us anything at all…

That’s one of the interesting points about watching documentaries by non-experts, e.g. ‘Ross Kemp Extreme World’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Kemp:_Extreme_World), they give the common sense observations to situations rather than highly abstracted theories that they learnt in a book.

And when you remember that studying people is a two way street, the academic types don’t always get a good rapport with the people they are trying to understand/study, and so they end up misunderstanding those people.
Like anthropologists who go to live with and study hunter gatherers, they don’t really interact with the people in the same way a normal human would, and so they end up with a false representation of hunter-gatherer lifestlye. The biggest culprit of course being Margaret Mead who totally misunderstood the young girls she was speaking to.

Anyway, to continue on to what I was getting at, the confusion about what they’re really doing extends backwards and forwards from academia: The academic thinks they’re modeling violence when they study middle- and upper-class frat boys, and fails to recognize the limitations of their study group. The blithe extension they then make to the rest of humanity…? Part and parcel of their limited world-view. Most of them truly think that the rest of the world is just like them, only that they insist on talking funny.

It’s a lot like with Marx: Dude was a lazy-ass POS who never did shit in his life, and his entire philosophical construct is based around that. He has projected himself outward onto the rest of the human race, and the unfortunate fact was that the self-image he had was direly out of alignment with reality. He saw himself as this selfless advocate for the working man, never recognizing that he was actually setting conditions for their degradation. Or, maybe he did, and was just a really slick con man.

Either way, the essential error is in failing to recognize reality and then aligning one’s conduct with that. The academic should understand that to really understand the truth of violence, they need to go out where real violence actually exists, like a Somali pirate crew, or an organization like MS-13. Studying those groups might tell us something, but odds are that the academic doing the study wouldn’t return to tell us anything at all…

One of the most common markers for me, when trying to recognize an “expert” on a given subject…? They’re usually really, really confused about what the hell they think they are doing. You see this all the time in failed companies and other organizations–They think their product is Widget “A”, when what they’re actually selling is that which Widget “A” enables or does.

See, for example, all of the really spectacular business failures–All of them managed and guided by the self-declared “experts” in the room. You’d almost think that there was something fundamentally wrong with the model we’re using for organizing ourselves, and getting things done. But, no… That would be too simple, so we keep setting up our little commissions, bureaucracies, and hierarchies, then marching them off of cliffs. Surprising how hard that ground is, once you hit bottom…

I’m starting to wonder whether Grossman is a symptom of something a bit deeper than just being a well-meaning deluded dilettante parvenu of violence…

From what I’ve read it’s a tendency of many ‘experts’ (i.e. middle-class academics) to run experiments on people just like them: middle class, high IQ, wealthy-ish, typically white, and completely ignore the rest of society, especially the scary elements. Psychologists are the worst at this. Famously Philip Zimbardo and his ‘prisoner experiment’ when he extrapolated his findings of a small, very select group of people, and applied it to the rest of humanity. I’d wager he’d get different results if he filled ran two experiments: one with Sierra Leoneon child soldiers, and one with Japanese herbivore men.

Those cute little middle-class wannabe thugs are going to discover that all their little chest-puffing BS counts for nothing, when dealing with the product of the MS-13 subculture, or some batch of off-duty Rangers that are actually skilled and experienced at inflicting violence on others, and who also possess little to no restraint when encountering the precious little darlings that are the subject of this sort of “academic study”. Which is precisely why this sort of thing is so damn dangerous–People are going to pay attention to this, and try to use these “lessons” out in the real world, and then subsequently get their asses handed to them.

Academic theory is all well and good, but what I’ve found is that when you try to actually apply any of that carefully reasoned willful stupidity out in the real world, the results are rarely what you’ve been led to expect. As a “leadership practitioner” coming up the enlisted ranks in the Army, and being someone who put great weight on what the “experts” told me in all their tomes of esoteric knowledge back in the beginning…? I think most of these idjits need a swift boot to the head, more than anything. And, when they try to implement their brilliant plans in the real world, that’s usually precisely what they get.

For examples, see the homeless policies in places like Seattle…

As long as we keep this in mind, the article is useful for understanding certain very specific types of confrontation, which just happen to be very prevalent in US society these days.

As for North Korea… does that regime not consist entirely of scions of rank and privilege? They’re a nasty sort of people, and it’s useful to know what particular nasty sort of people they are, because there are many nasty sorts of people, best dealt with via different methods.