Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries voted on by conservatives

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Japher
How was Mein Kampf destructive?

Probably due to the brain cells one loses while reading it. Otherwise, it's clearly just on the list so they could lump in Marxism with Nazism.

In fact, looking at the overall list, this is their modus operandi. They don't bother to explain how any of the books have actually harmed us. They're just lumping their favorite punching bags (and a few bizarre choices) together with stuff people obviously find repugnant for a guilt-by-association effect.

[St Leo]

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

...
Kinsey's most prominent detractor is currently Judith A. Reisman, head of RSVPAmerica. Reisman alleges that Kinsey and his staff sexually abused children to produce some of the data in the Kinsey Reports. Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft claims that the subject of child/adult sexual interaction was deliberately chosen by Kinsey's opponents to discredit him because of the emotions surrounding it: "In recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone?" The Kinsey institute also maintains that Kinsey's information on child sexuality derives from the thousands of interviews conducted with adults through his work on the Kinsey Reports and denies having involved children.

The Family Research Council (FRC) is another notable detractor. The FRC is a religious organization which wields substantial political clout among conservatives in the United States. The FRC echoes Judith Reisman's claims of child/adult sexual interaction in their video The Children of Table 34, but that issue is not their primary focus. The FRC is primarily concerned with Kinsey's work on sexual orientation and homosexuality. Kinsey proposed that people do not fall into the categories of exclusive heterosexuality or exclusive homosexuality, but that most are between these extremes in a continuum of sexual orientations with homo- and heterosexuality at the extremes and bisexuality at the midpoint. The FRC sees Kinsey's work as a force that seeks to legitimize homosexuality, a sexual orientation the organization strongly opposes.
...

How predictable.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Dextrose
Yes, I know, I must be part of the religious right trying to impose my medieval morality on you. Too bad I am an atheist and last I checked morality wasn't created by God or by any number of the false relgions out there. It was created by the human ability to discern right from wrong and contemplate ideas of good and evil. All you moral relativists out there that say Kinsey wasn't evil and that there is no such thing as evil are simply in denial of a human trait that precedes religion itself.

Holy Strawman, Batman! What a rant!

So who here said there was no such thing as evil?

In fact, did Kinsey ever say there was no such as evil?

Allegations that Kinsey was evil are as preposterous as ones that he is a "saint." Of course, since I've never heard anyone claim he was a saint, I'd have to say your hyperbole is the more strident here.

The evidence is Kinsey's book is vastly anecdotal from people he asked to write in. He explicitly stated this in his book.

http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/controversy%202.htm

"Allegations against Alfred Kinsey and his research on children's sexual responses, as reported in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, were first made in 1981 by Dr. Judith Reisman. She subsequently enlarged on these ideas in a book written jointly with Edward Eichel and published in 1990 (Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud). When The Kinsey Institute responded, Reisman filed suit in 1991 against The Kinsey Institute, then director June Reinisch, and Indiana University, alleging defamation of character and slander. In September 1993, Reisman's lawyer withdrew from the case, and in June 1994 the court dismissed Reisman's case with prejudice (which means that Reisman is prohibited from refiling the suit)."

The article goes on to a point-by-point rebuttal of the claims made about Kinsey's research. In short, the allegations that he experimented on children are bogus.

You may be an atheist, but you're also an unthinking pawn of the Religious Right which is bashing Kinsey's work sans evidence, a tactic that is itself part of their assault on sex education, tolerance of sexual diversity and the removal of the guv'mint from our bedrooms.

[chequita guevara]

The Anarchist Cookbook is far more dangerous than any of these other books. Try following some of those recipes and you could die.

Aleister Crowley wrote a book with traps in it, so that people who try and use some of the magic he put in it will accidentally blow themselves up.

Then, of course, there are books like the Bible and the Koran, in whose names untold millions have died.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

After Kinsey's death his private papers revealed that much of his reseach was falsified. He would use a single anecdotal source and claim it was a statistical "study."

Cite?

There are people who say his studies weren't reliable, but that he deliberately falsified it?

Imran, this information is over a decade old. One quick google turns up more material than can be presented in this format.

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
The article goes on to a point-by-point rebuttal of the claims made about Kinsey's research. In short, the allegations that he experimented on children are bogus.

You may be an atheist, but you're also an unthinking pawn of the Religious Right which is bashing Kinsey's work sans evidence, a tactic that is itself part of their assault on sex education, tolerance of sexual diversity and the removal of the guv'mint from our bedrooms.

Meh. Collapse of a defamation suit against Kinsey Institute directors means nothing. The Kinsey website's Response to Controversy does not respond to Reisman's allegations and documented facts. If you actually go to Kinsey and the Homosexual Revolution Reisman documents admissions from Dr. Gebhard (Kinsey's successor) that the data was obtained by "trained" pedophiles who reported their "findings" to the Kinsey Institute. This is corroborated recently in this article:

In its 1998 response [1] to the core allegations made by Reisman, Kinsey Institute director John Bancroft stated that the data on children in tables 31-34 of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male came largely from the journal of one adult "omniphile ", who had illegal sexual interaction with these children. The man's journal started in 1917, long before the Kinsey Reports. Bancroft further stated that Kinsey explicitly pointed out the illegality of the man's actions, but that he granted his source anonymity. In addition, Bancroft reiterated the Kinsey Institute's claim that Kinsey never had any sexual interaction with children, nor did he employ others to do so, and that he interviewed children in the presence of their parents.

Bancroft admitted in 1995 that 9 other sources cited by Kinsey may have been made up to preserve the anonymity of the predator posthumously identified as Rex King and one Dr. Fritz Von Balluseck. Kinsey encouraged, in writing, King and Von Balluseck to continue sending material, "rejoiced" that their efforts would be preserved for "science," and admonished them to caution lest they be caught and his source(s) dry up. Von Balluseck was convicted in 1957 of rape and murder of a 10 year old girl.

The tables are presented as data obtained objectively, whereas in reality the observations are almost entirely the product of two intensely depraved individuals. Kinsey extrapolates from the presented data in a manner which is appropriate only for statistically valid sampling. There are also films and audio tapes of his "interview" technique with hundreds of volunteers in which Kinsey badgered with leading questions and dismissed answers that didn't correspond to his agenda.

That is where the study is falsified. In any other field a man like Kinsey would rightly be ostrasized. While it is not said that Kinsey personally engaged in experimentation on children he unquestionably abetted two sadistic pedophiles in their experimentation on children. The presiding judge at Von Balluseck's trial lamented that Kinsey could not be charged under German law.

Kinsey is presented as a family man but was a closet homosexual, voyeur, and sadomasochist who explored "into the abyss with regard to incest and child molestation," says Pulitzer finalist biographer James H. Jones. It is unclear whether that curiosity extended beyond the vicarious enjoyment through his sources. Kinsey died in part from a chronic infection of his testicles due to his masochistic practices.

There is no vast right-wing conspiracy against Kinsey, rather a vast liberal cover-up of fraudulent science to support bad public policy.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by The Emperor Fabulous

Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits

Wait...they don't?

I think that means they agree with that completely, right?

[Spiffor]

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

[Spiffor]

[BlackCat]

The worst thing is that they haven't mentioned the real dangerous books such as the bible and other kinds of religious scriptures, but of course, it's a list made of people that could be suspected of being religious.

[Agathon]

Again... I repeat, people get annoyed when I describe these people as phucktards. Why?

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Agathon
Again... I repeat, people get annoyed when I describe these people as phucktards. Why?

I don't want to offend you, but one reason could be that dictionary.com doesn't know the word ?

[Agathon]

wait for Shi to tell us that the Bible has resulted in less deaths.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Straybow
The Kinsey website's Response to Controversy does not respond to Reisman's allegations and documented facts. If you actually go to Kinsey and the Homosexual Revolution Reisman documents admissions from Dr. Gebhard (Kinsey's successor) that the data was obtained by "trained" pedophiles who reported their "findings" to the Kinsey Institute. This is corroborated recently in this article:

The Kinsey website does address those points, had you bothered to look deeper:

http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/cont-akchild.html

Allegation about Dr. Kinsey
Although controversy hounded Kinsey and his work from the start, little attention was paid to the data he presented about children until the late 1980s, when a Judith Reisman started the allegation that Kinsey, to obtain his evidence, was criminally involved in the sexual abuse of children. This allegation, in slightly modified forms, has persisted as the main plank in the case of those on the Religious Right who seek to discredit Kinsey. In recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone? What are the relevant facts as far as Kinsey as concerned?

Refutation of Allegation
From my first day as Director of the Kinsey Institute in 1995, I was confronted by such allegations and the need to rebut them. Kinsey never carried out experiments on the sexual responses of children; neither did he employ or train anyone else to do so for him. However, some reasonable people were being troubled by repeated allegations that he did, particularly because some of the details seemed hard to account for. The focus of the attacks was data presented in Tables 31 through 34 in the Male volume, reporting various aspects of orgasm observed in pre-adolescent boys ranging in age from 2 months to 15 years.

Having commented on the extent to which adults had recalled orgasmic experiences from their own childhoods, Kinsey pointed out that such recall might well be vague or inaccurate, particularly of an experience which the child may not have understood at the time. He was, therefore, especially interested in information obtained from those of his interviewees who had observed orgasms occurring in children.

Whereas he had some information of this kind from parents and teachers simply observing children, he obtained more from men who had been sexually involved with young boys and who had in the process observed their orgasms. Having therefore made it clear that he was referring to adults who had been involved in illegal sexual interactions with children, he went on to say, "nine of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which they have put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self-masturbation, or were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults." 50

Tables 31-34 are based on these 317 boys; Table 32 gives details of the speed of orgasm (timed with a second hand or stopwatch), whereas Tables 33 and 34 give details about multiple orgasms. Thus, an understandable concern was raised: How could such information be obtained in a sufficiently systematic manner to allow tabulation of the findings? Hence the allegations that either Kinsey or members of the Institute staff made these observations, or that they trained child molesters to make observations for them.

Source of Data in Tables 31-34
I decided to check on the sources of this information and found that, without any doubt, all of the information reported in Tables 31-34 came from the carefully documented records of one man. From 1917 until the time that Kinsey interviewed him in the mid-1940s, this man had kept notes on a vast array of sexual experiences, involving not only children but adults of both sexes.

Kinsey was clearly impressed by the systematic way he kept his records, and regarded them as of considerable scientific interest. Clearly, his description in the book of the source of this data was misleading, in that he implied that it had come from several men rather than one, although it is likely that information elsewhere in this chapter, on the descriptions of different types of orgasm, was obtained in part from some of these other nine men.

I do not know why Kinsey was unclear on this point; it was obviously not to conceal the origin of the information from criminal sexual involvement with children, because that was already quite clear. Maybe it was to conceal the single source, which otherwise might have attracted attention to this one man with possible demands for his identification (demands which have now occurred even though he is long dead). It would be typical of Kinsey to be more concerned about protecting the anonymity of his research subjects (and convincing the reader of the scientific value of the information) than protecting himself from the allegations that eventually followed.

Orgasm Data
Kinsey, with his primary interest in variability, was also intrigued by the various ways in which orgasm was experienced. In the Male volume, 51 he combines evidence provided from the above source on 196 pre-adolescent boys with descriptions obtained from adults or their partners to produce a list of six different types of orgasm.

Two of these types involve signs which in other circumstances would be regarded as distress, such as sobbing or crying or hypersensitivity around orgasm which results in "violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive pleasure from the situation...[and] quickly return to complete the experience, or have a second experience." 52

As these descriptions were applied to pre-adolescent boys as well as adults, they have been taken by some to indicate that these children were being tortured. It would never have occurred to Kinsey that responses associated with orgasm, whether in a child or an adult would be interpreted in that way, as he clearly saw the orgasm as the culmination of pleasurable stimulation.

Caution about Data in Tables 31-34
In retrospect Kinsey's judgment in not anticipating such misinterpretations, and in placing so much emphasis on this one man's evidence, can be questioned. This extremely active 'omniphile,' who may have self-justified his sexual career as 'a contribution to knowledge' by keeping such detailed records, can be likened to two other individuals in the literature: the anonymous author of My Secret Life, who, toward the end of the nineteenth century, gave detailed descriptions of numerous sexual encounters, many involving young girls; and an Australian man who kept detailed records of his sexual encounters with many hundreds of boys around the age of puberty. He was the subject of a book called The Man They Called a Monster. 53 The author, Paul Wilson, interviewed many of the men who, as boys, had previously been involved with "the Monster," and to a remarkable extent they corroborated the man's original accounts.

Nevertheless, such sources of information should properly be treated with great caution. Ironically, the evidence presented in Tables 31-34 leaves us with some fundamental scientific questions and, not surprisingly, there has been virtually no further evidence to answer them. We know, from the accounts of adults about their own childhoods, that a proportion of pre-adolescent children experience orgasm, though we do not know what proportion, or whether most or all children have the physiological capacity for orgasm pre-pubertally. That in itself is of considerable interest.

If only a proportion of children are capable of orgasm, what relevance has that to later sexual development?
Do children who are capable or orgasm show a different pattern of sexual development than those who are not?
And if, in some pre-adolescent boys, multiple orgasm is possible, what is the mechanism at puberty that largely eliminates this capacity?
It is questions such as these which interested Kinsey so much in these particular findings, and encouraged him to share the information with the scientific community. However much Kinsey's scientific curiosity may have misled him, he did nothing wrong, 'criminal,' or 'fraudulent.' Some have criticized him for not reporting this man to the police. Any tendency to do such a thing, with this research subject or any other, would have been contrary to the whole ethical basis of his project, in which he persuaded people to share their sexual secrets in return for a guarantee of confidentiality.
Kinsey's Conclusions about Childhood Sexual Development
What conclusions did Kinsey reach about childhood sexual development? Physiological responses, which at a later age would be experienced as sexual, appeared to occur in a proportion of very young children. Kinsey didn't know what proportion of children were capable of such physiological responses, and we still don't know. Kinsey qualified the evidence he presented on the 317 pre-pubertal boys by emphasizing that this was a select group of "more or less uninhibited boys" and not representative of boys in general. 54

Kinsey 'interviewed' a number of small children from 2 to 5 years old in the presence of a parent. His method of doing this is described 55 and involved techniques widely used today by child psychologists. Kinsey never analyzed and reported the data he obtained in this way (this was to be the topic of a separate study and book), though he commented on certain observations. He concluded that "attitudes in respect to nudity, to anatomic differences between the sexes, ... to verbal references to sex ... are developed at very early ages." 56.

Social class differences in sexual attitudes were already apparent at these early ages, 57 and parents clearly played an important role in shaping these early attitudes, which influenced the child's later reactions to sexually relevant experiences. Sexual play between children, which was reported by a substantial proportion of his subjects, mostly occurred between the ages of 8 and 13, 58 and at those ages "children are the most frequent agents for the transmission of sexual mores." 59 Kinsey saw the changes in sexual mores and behaviors that occur in society as mainly dependent of "departures made by pre-adolescent and adolescent children from the patterns of their parents."60

As far as sexual contacts between children and adults are concerned, Kinsey states, "There are as yet insufficient data ... for reaching general conclusions on the significance of such contacts." 61 Questions about such experiences were not routinely asked of males; of the females, 24% of the women reported such experiences, with a little less than half of them involving sexual touching of some kind. 62. This can be compared to the 17% of the women reporting "sexual touching" experiences during childhood in a recent US survey. 63 Kinsey, however, played down the consequences of such experiences. Whereas 80% of his females subjects who had reported some form of sexual encounter with adults "had been emotionally upset or frightened by their contact," only a "small portion had been seriously disturbed." 64 In the recent US survey, 65 70% of the women who had been sexually touched reported that the experience had affected their lives.

Kinsey was inclined to the view that more harm resulted form the societal reaction to the adult-child experiences, than the sexual contact per se. 66 Before commenting on these conclusions of Kinsey, my own views should be made clear. Hopefully, doing so will reduce the likelihood of my being accused of favoring child-adult sexual contacts. In the current climate of opinion, any statement that does not condemn all forms of child-adult sex with unqualified horror, is liable to be interpreted as being in favor of child-adult sex. I believe that all children should be protected from sexual exploitation by adults or adolescents, and any such exploitation should be against the law. The damage caused to a child by such activity varies considerably, however. I would agree with Kinsey that in many cases, the reaction of the family, the social services, and police to -- and the legal consequences of -- such an event can cause the child more psychological harm than the sexual episode itself. It is therefore important that the potential for such harm is borne in mind by those reacting to such episodes. There is, however, an important distinction between episodes which involve relative strangers and those involving close family members, particularly parents. In the latter cases there are major additional factors involving betrayal of trust, threat to the family structure, and overwhelming feelings of responsibility in the child that can cause considerable psychological havoc. Kinsey did not attempt to make such a distinction in the cases he encountered. According to Table 147 in the Kinsey Data, 67 10% of the first pre-pubertal experiences with an adult involved parent, grandparent, uncle, or inlaws. The term 'incest' seems to have been used by Kinsey and his colleagues, in its literal sense, to refer to sexual intercourse involving family members. The data presented with the term 'incest' involve only post-pubertal family members, 68 apart from a passing reference to incestuous contacts between pre-adolescent children. 69 The term 'incest' does not appear in the Female volume. It is however, important to acknowledge, as Kinsey does, that at least some children experience sexual interest and pleasure during these contacts. The widespread tendency to assume that children are asexual can have two unfortunate consequences: children who do exhibit any form of sexual expression are assumed to have been sexually abused; and any child victim of sexual abuse who actually experienced sexual pleasure at some stage of the abuse experience may believe, when confronted with the assumed asexuality of childhood, that she or he was abnormal and perhaps therefore responsible for the abuse. This is one important mechanism leading to sexual problems later in life in childhood sexual-abuse victims.

Sexual Welfare of Children
It is reasonable to conclude that Kinsey's concerns about the sexual welfare of children had more to do with the effects that negative, inhibitory, guilt-provoking influences might have on sexual well-being and happiness during adulthood than on the consequences of childhood sexual experiences per se, whether autoerotic, involving other children, or involving adults. How he would have reacted to the more recent evidence of long-term adverse sequelae of childhood sexual abuse we obviously cannot say, except to conclude, with some confidence, that if the evidence indicated that any particular type of sexual activity in childhood caused problems either at the time or later in adult sexual life, he would have been opposed to it.

And more:

http://www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/about/cont-95jb.html

The article states that Alfred Kinsey's conclusions on the sexuality of young children were based not on scientific study, but on the secret history of a single pedophile. Kinsey, in fact, used several sources of information. The most substantial was adults recalling sexual responses in their own childhoods. He also used the reported observations of a few adults who had sexual experiences with children, and he made this source clear in the book. What was not clear in the book is that the information in Table 34 came from one of these men, not three or four, as the book implied.

I'd be curious to see any substantiation of the claims that Kinsey encouraged these men to continue molesting children. In fact, Bancroft points out that Kinsey was clear to them that molesting children was illegal, which is hardly the same thing as admonishing them not to get caught.

BTW, also according to the Institute, Von Balluseck's information was never actually used by Kinsey in any of his publications.

I'll also add that Reisman is about the equivalent of Dr. Laura. She opposed the SCOTUS decision to overturn the sodomy bans, has expressed her open hatred for homosexuals and is basically a right-wing bedfellow of Focus on the Family and other such right-wing ilk. She's hardly an unbiased researcher herself.

[Dextrose]

Straybow you are officially my hero.

I love how you liberal looneys constantly harp on christianity (while majority of the time you stick up for the poor Muslims who are a peace loving religion...) and degrade everything American and everything traditional and then you call everyone idiots when they don't elect the guy you want. Funny how that works...not that I'm asking you to change or anything. I rather enjoy seeing Republicans control everything in the country and watching liberals flounder in their own rhetoric. Carry on.

[Boris Godunov]

So is Dextrose the DL for Maud'dib, or vice-versa? I swear, I can't tell these right-wing bots from one another.