Theoremic Academiosia

This study should be nominated for an Ignoble prize. I'll get right on it!

I notice it's another piece of carp from the State Pen.

Wow! Deep. Real deep. Like, profound.

But,the fact that most terrorists are not protestant,they tend to belong to a non-Christian faith,should never be mentioned.
Nothing to see here folks ,it's all in your mind.

And was the study written by Michael Man?

Make that "Mann". Sorry.

It all hinges on whatcha call hate...

Like voter ID and property rights.....or driving a Buick....

Wow. What utter rot.

As "insightful" as this "well-researched study":

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/187.full.pdf+html

"the researchers proposed ... that Walmart's ""Protestant values" of thrift and savings constitute a form of what's called religious priming -- the use of words or phrases to encourage certain attitudes and behaviours -- and that religious priming is linked to racism and intolerance."

See? Austerity is racist. A true progressive must spend like a sailor on shore leave.

America is so screwed.

Another example of those who live in the world of words and make-believe theory pronouncing on the real world.

They mustn't teach into stats at Penn State. On page 1 it says Correlation does not equal causation. Was Michael Mann the supervisor of the study?

This "acadamic thesis" is nothing more then a ginned up version of South Park Season 8 episode 9...Something Wal-Mart This Way Comes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_Way_Comes

Incidently, that episode is eight years old...these idiots are getting thesis ideas from decade old satire...pathetic.

See how racist America is because of Walmart! I say we do away with all these hate selling Walmarts, and get back to the peace and love of small mom and pop stores of 1950's Birmingham Alabama.

Syncrodox, at least "South Park" was trying to be funny. These guys drank the Kool-Aid and came out with a "study".

Make that "Mann". Sorry.

Posted by: John Lewis at April 28, 2012 10:53 PM

Man, Mann . . . Scam, Scamm.

We understand what you meant.

Make that "Mann". Sorry.

Posted by: John Lewis at April 28, 2012 10:53 PM

Man, Mann . . . Scam, Scamm.

We understand what you meant.

Hehe.. heavy bolshevism!

Did you know that the number of commie profs in a U.S. county is "significantly correlated with the number of hate groups in the area?"

Wal-Mart is a Chinese wholesale warehouse, you buy, you by from China.

It’s Liberal Progressive, all Mao Tse-tung and the wonderful Cultural Revolution, meets Apple’s sweatshop safety nets to stop employee suicides...... and that unfortunate thing that happened in Tibet that the left “feels” sorry for if you turn the “politically reflecting emotion mirror” at the right angle.

Need a kidney? No problem, just don’t let the little yellow bastards sink their teeth into Alberta’s oil sands. Well.......unless Liberal Progressive Alison Redford sells it to them on behalf of the UN, then it’s eco friendly sort of ok.

Jim Flaherty uses the "n-word".

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2012/04/28/19691321.html

And with good reason.

Wrong thread ↑
oops

The study, by Stephan J. Goetz et al., of Penn State University, appeared in the _Social Science Quarterly_, which is behind a pay wall; hence I was not able to read it. However, based on the summary publicly available at the journal website and journalists' reports on it here and there, the authors seem to jump straight from their rather superficial correlation analysis not only to posit a cause-and-effect relationship between Wal-Mart sitings and area hate groups. Perhaps more tellingly, they relied on the notoriously Cultural-Marxist "social justice" advocacy group, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for its data.

Since the SPLC considers any number of socially conservative organizations, like the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, and the National Organization for Marriage to be hate groups (largely on the basis of their opposition to the untrammeled mainstreaming of homosexual sodomy and the universal imposition of same-sex marriage "rights," which, I guess, puts them on a par with the Ku-Klux-Klan and the Black Legion), you can gauge the tendentiousness of the study.

wow.. confirmation bias in the extreme.

White sheets are cheaper at Wal*Mart.

Penn State. Where they treasure Michael Mann and cover up for him ... and diddle little boys.

Clean up your own shit first Professors!

I'd rather have a Wal-Mart in the neighborhood than a climate fraud/pedophile haven like Penn State.

Thanks for that, Carlos (1:18). It's to laugh that Goetz et al actually used data from the SPLC, who recently deemed Sultan Knish, the superb one-man blog of the eminently reasonable and level-headed Daniel Greenfield, to be a hate group.

The fact that the members of organizations that the SPLC defines as hate groups (the American Family Association, the National Organization for Marriage, and, presumably, actual hate groups, like neo-nazis) are largely white easily explains the (pre-biased) correlation between Walmarts and "hate groups": Walmarts, which have a huge footprint, are almost always located in the more suburban areas away from the downtown core, i.e. they're located where whitey is more likely to live, and not in the downtown areas where blacks (and liberals) are overrepresented, so if you define conservative, predominantly Caucasian organizations as "hate groups" you're obviously going to find a correlation between "hate groups" and Walmarts.

"Protestant values of thrift" leading to "religious priming" which leads to more hate groups -- this sort of gloriously useless theorizing is just softer-than-soft-science garbage built out of other garbage.

Gotta love the newswire media and their deliveries of the latest findings of "science."

Every time I think they can't get any more rediculous, they do.

The presence of big-box retail stores erodes a community's social fabric.

I live in a town of around 10,000 and we had been held hostage by the local business owners who controlled the town council. they continually blocked any chains from setting up shop here.

We started a letter writing campaign to Walmart and over half the town wrote demanding a store.

With this the council could not refuse them any more and there power was broken. The influx of of new businesses was fantastic and more people are employed because of it.

You might say Walmart strengthened our community's social fabric.

I remember when a democrat congressman named Colonel, a democrat sherriff named bubba, and their complicit democrat newspaper publisher named skeeter used to get up to race baiting and klanning a county. I guess the democrats are upset that wall mart took over their meme.

I would expect that any Mere Citizen could give them criteria that would correlate FAR better with "hate group" numbers than the quantity of WalMarts. But then Mere Citizens' definition of "hate groups" are probably different than that of these "researchers"...

"Calls to Walmart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters were not immediately returned."

When crazy people leave messages on my machine, I don't call back either...

I would go so far as to agree that the big boxes have gutted the town center of many a small city in the US. As to hate groups, these morons think the Rotary Club is a hate group.

Additionally, I doubt this Goetz idiot could even design a study that untangles all the marketing issues from race demographics. Thats why they treat correlation as causation, they aren't smart enough to do it properly.

We'll have to stop giving anesthetics at the hospital; they're plainly causing appendicitis.

It's pure nonsense, just sophistry. It's easy to hide nonsense just by setting it up in a logical infrastructure.

So, if you set up your words in a structure of cause and effect, that structure 'forces' the superficial words to take on the validity of the structure.

To say that thrift and saving, ie, living within your means is a religious rather than logical and reasonable decision - nonsense.

There's a nice little book called 'How to Lie with Statistics'. One chapter is called: Post Hoc Rides Again.
"There are two clocks which keep perfect time. When 'a' points to the hour 'b' strikes. Did a cause b to strike?

The fallacy is: If B follows A, then A has caused B. [Fallacy of both false correlation and causation and affirming the consequent).

You can find false correlations between anything; number of students in college and number of inmates in prisons. Ratio of professors to ratio of increases in cases of insanity.

What is sad is that the paper was actually published.

I did my own study.

Turns out, the geographic proximity to Penn State increases the rate of pedophile football coaches that are allowed to abuse children under the noses of college management. Who knew?

I don't like the appearance of big box stores either - but for an entirely different reason that the demented paranoia of the leftard academics.

The big box retailers are the number one conduit for cheap Chinese goods into the North American markets. Local producers and retailers cannot compete with Chinese goods because they have taxes, union wages, environmental regs/costs, to pay. Chinese producers don't.

Big Box stores accelerate the collapse of North American industry. But the reality is the big box stores cater to a growing segment of society who cannot afford to pay for goods manufactured here. There is a grown economic class of consumers who were once middle and upper middle class who were purged in the last few economic storms which saw North America deindustrializing and large businesses collapsing due to credit melt down, bank failures, import competition - it left a large work force out of work who are now either not fully employed or under employed and living on far less than before - these are the consumers who the big box discount retailers target.

Perhaps if we had insisted that an individual\s tax burden be lightened during critical economic down turns many local businesses, industries and skilled work forces could have survived.

Big box stores are only filling a market void left by failed local business - that business failed as the direct result of government interference in markets, economy and trade. I can’t blame Wal-Mart for capitalizing on the new bargain outlet economy.

In the fine statistical manner used in this study, Stephan, meet Bernhard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz

Occam - I agree; I'm not against the big box stores. They are handy; everything is there, rather than going shop to shop.

I blame the unions and govt regulations and taxes, all of which you mentioned, in this transformation. The unions effectively made it impossible to produce low cost, efficient goods here - and thus, their production moved to China and India etc. Plus, the environmental regulations have decimated industrial production, while doing nothing for the environment. And, taxes have dealt the final blow to manufacturing.

So, I don't blame Walmart and the other stores; the blame has to be place on us, our unions and government.

If big box stores are linked to racism and intolerance, why do I see Walmart employees from different ethnic groups whenever I shop there?

"I would go so far as to agree that the big boxes have gutted the town center of many a small city in the US"

As someone who grew up in Kelowna, I can tell you the malls that kept being built farther and farther from the downtown core caused the trouble long before big box stores even existed.

I find this all rather curious. I work sometimes with a chap in physics at Penn State, and have spent considerable time in State College (I have never met Michael Mann, thank God, though his office is near the physics department). It is one of the straightest parts of the world. Possibly there is a naivety which allows kiddy-diddling to happen. State College also has at least one WalMart which is very good, with a fresh produce section which is particularly notable. The former President of Penn State, Graham Spanier, is someone truly obnoxious. I will say no more for fear of charges of libel.

Someone seems to be putting KoolAde in the State College water supply.

ET @ 12:54, bingo! This is what killed the chain and hoist company in St. Catharines, Ontario that I did cost accounting for in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ETF tools also bit the dust for the same reason. Most of the products these companies manufactured are now made in China and shipped here to Canadian Tire, Walmart et al.

Such skewed logic is what appeals to the CHRC. Under section 13 - Wal Mart could be potentially be sued for "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt." according to the writers misleading correlation and causation theory.

As for big box retailers,they have changed the fabric of cities and towns. Way back in the day, each city and town was unique with their own brand of grocery and hardware stores, pharmacy, clothing, restaurants etc.,now they are all pretty much clones of each other.

Yawwwwwn ............. pretty much the same as non-news reporting in the MSM.

Does anyone actually expect anything better from out universities these days?

No.

I would have thought Penn State had enough on its' hands falsifying results, training orangutans to write code for Michael Mann, and setting up the first Department of Pederasty Studies on the planet.

did Micheal More Moore also go to Pen state????

We have a local Loblaws that I normally shop at. Last week I priced Cottonelle toilet paper there at $21, Kellogs cereal $7.29 and sardines at $1.27 = $29.56. The same products at Walmart $9.47 on sale,$5.98,$.77 = $16.22.

The Bay has better quality clothes at just as cheap prices so it pays to shop around.

Walmart is ruthless in its price demands so local manufacturing has a very hard time in making any profit supplying them.

"....the use of words or phrases to encourage certain attitudes and behaviours"

And the Left never, ever does THAT, right??

Reginald @1:21.. HAHAHA!

1:41... Still HAHAHA!