You wanna?

“it’s dubious to lump together everything from computer sciences to architecture”

Does nobody read history, even intellectual history? There are books written on this stuff. Lots of them [Google book search: modernism+technology+utopia/ engineering+utopia] So what’s left to learn from the paper? Contra Seth F. and nearly every other critic, including badger, it’s not that it’s obviously “wrong” it’s that it’s results are so toweringly overshadowed by what it ignores that defenses of it end up a defense of myopia. That’s all henry is defending and the same for you engels. Adding everything you all ignore would make for an interesting discussion. [Google book search: modernism+technology+postcolonialism]
I’m out.

Let me put it this way: I don’t think it’s worth my time to write-up a long quasi-paper. If what I and others have already written doesn’t convince you that at least there’s some sort of reasonable critique, I think it’s way past the point of diminishing returns going forward. You are free to believe that because I’m not going to put even more time and energy into this, that I am “bluster” and can’t back it up. It’s just not worth it for me to try to refute that, sorry.

No, it doesn’t, as explained in #37 and #47 above.

some of the data points given are arguably simply wrong

Which ones? And why are they fatal to the paper’s reasoning?

the discussion of alternate explanations didn’t consider internal-promotion and was inconsistent with the very broad definition in the first place

This might be interesting if you were to elaborate; as it stands, it’s hard to know what you mean.

I think one could gather a fairly detailed reubttal going through the comments of both threads, but that it’s just ignored.

Repeating your opinion over and over again (with CAPITAL LETTERS and italics) without attempting to seriously defend it is not very convincing. I’ve looked through the last thread. Most of Badger’s and Seth’s comments—as on other occasions—don’t make whole a lot of sense to me and I am afraid that on this occasion yours don’t seem a lot clearer. But if there really is a clear and devastating criticism of Gambetti’s methods buried in there somewhere, why don’t you just say what it is? Otherwise some people might draw the conclusion that you don’t really know what you are talking about and are just trying to bluster your way through.

Does it not count to say Hamas isn’t like small suicide cells, that it’s dubious to lump together everything from computer sciences to architecture, that some of the data points given are arguably simply wrong, that the discussion of alternate explanations didn’t consider internal-promotion and was inconsistent with the very broad definition in the first place. AND SO ON.

I think one could gather a fairly detailed reubttal going through the comments of both threads, but that it’s just ignored.

Not the drink, the pilots.

Was there a shortage of women in Japanese culture, or something?

This whole “competing for women” idea is stupid. Suicide attacks are epidemic in Islamic fundamentalism for the same reason that teenage suicide was an epidemic among in the USA in the 1980’s. For the same reason why carjackings were epidemic in Los Angeles in the 1980’s too. For the same reason why dot-com stocks were epidemic in the 1990’s. Why totalitarianism was epidemic throughout the world in the 1930’s. Why free-market capitalism is epidemic throughout the world now. Why acid rock was so popular in the 1960’s. Why tulips were so popular in Holland in the 1600’s. Why idiotic internet memes—like this one—circulate and catch fire. Come on!!

There is no “rational explanation”. Humans are social creatures who carry a high risk of stupid mob behavior. Trends. Fads. Swarms.

I’ll bet the spread of Islamic suicide bombing displays the same kind of propogation curve as any other kind of human mob/swarm/meme behaviour.

Henry you’re a refugee from what was until very recently the most backwards country in Western Europe. Talk about religious fundamentalism. Jayzus! [Jaezuz?] But all by yourself you made yourself… a modern man. Unlike the others you broke free, free from tradition, free from the past. You’re an individual. Why? Because you say so.
And if you weren’t so fucking afraid of history you’d know how fucking predictable it all is.

Experience gets trimmed down, subordinated to a technical functionalism

This seems to me to be about as true, or as false, of any visual medium, as it is of MPEG in particular. There’s technical functionalism in oil painting too, and painters work with models of human vision when they mix colours. Whether this amounts to trimming down, or subordination, I’m not so sure.

We estimate that the average share of engineers among the total male working population in the countries of our sample, weighted by the number of cases per country, is about 3.5 per cent. If we leave out Singapore, a country with an extraordinarily high number of engineers, the share is 2.1 per cent. By contrast, even if we include all missing values in the denominator, engineers are still about 19 per cent of our total sample (78/404). This means that the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.

I have long argued—including in this article on Hizbullah, or this article on the women’s organizations of Hamas—that the bedrock of the political strength of well-organized Islamist organizations like Hamas or Hizbullah has been their ability to build sturdy, resilient civilian mass organizations covering all sectors of society—rather than merely their creation of the (much smaller) armed organizations whose activities seem to get most of the coverage in the western media.

Well now, the Hamas women have played a hugely important role in defusing the latest crisis in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.The author among other things is a Quaker.