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HomeShop at BookSurgeEducationGuidance & OrientationThe Disinformation Cycle: Hoaxes, Delusions, Security Beliefs, and Compulsory Mediocrity |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 3 customer reviews )
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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Angry and more than a bit superficial... May 23, 2005
By Rory Coker
About 283 pages of continual, if witty, ranting can wear even the sympathetic reader down. This volume's contents jump a bit disorientingly from topic to topic, and its purpose mainly seems to be to preserve a number of short articles that appeared in various obscure publications.
"Compulsive Playacting" deals with the cultural and pseudoscientific manifestations of the universal human tendency to love to pretend to be someone else... to play a different part on life's theater stage. "Hypnotism" is a topic the author really understands inside and out, due to his years of travelling with stage hypnotists in Canada and Australia. "Recovered Memories" explores the cultural consequences, some quite dreadful, of "therapist-guided" playacting. "Mediocrer than Thou" seems inspired mainly by the author's experiences within higher education, particularly within colleges of education. "My Alien Can Lick Your Alien" deals very briefly and superficially with the familiar myths of UFOs and flying saucers. "Psychics and Other Time Travellers" deals equally briefly and casually with fortune tellers, psychics and prophets-for-hire. "Come In, Sucker" is a catch-all chapter covering a wide range of other pseudoscience, from Scientology to Velikovski and the Bermuda Triangle, with each particular pseudoscience summarized and dismissed in typically a single paragraph or so.
"The Rise of the Mediocracy" deals with the 20th Century restructuring of society so that leaders and decision makers now tend to be selected for exceptional stupidity and incompetence. The book was, alas, written too long ago to make use of the current US presidential administration as a paradigm case. "Conspiracies and Cover-Ups" takes a look at very successful, real conspiracies that are therefore totally unknown to most folks, versus the very familiar supposed conspiracies that are known to everyone! Strange how that works! "Six of... Half a dozen of..." is another catch-all chapter that covers a large number of unrelated topics in pseudoscience, while sympathetically and contrarily reviving a forgotten bit of pseudoanthropology, the "aquatic ape". Other chapters deal with the pseudosciences of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis; quack medicine and "alternative therapies"; the origins of sexual taboos; competition among religious cults; yet more "psychic" pseudoscience; the pseudoscience of the "insanity plea"; the evolution of television programming from the late-1950s "vast wasteland" to the current "toxic waste dump"; and, finally the origins of some of the more popular religions (and here, the author is something of an expert, having researched these origins for his Ph. D., and having dealt with them at much greater length in previous publications).
As I mentioned at the start, the book's tone is that of witty but angry rant. Readers not already on the author's side of the arguments would, if they ever were to pick up the book, put it back down after a few paragraphs. The author's pet hatreds, K-12 educational pseudoscience, college of education faculty, lawyers, politicians, and trade unions, come in for pounding at every opportunity, and it's not that these targets don't deserve hard punches, but rather that extreme reader-fatigue due to repetition and seeming random jumping from topic to topic makes one feel the book was edited by a rock-video director with overwhelming personal issues!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 John A Henderson MD Dec 02, 2005
By John A. Henderson
This is a great book for anyone who can separate fact from fiction on this subject.
4 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Your Freedoms are on Fire! Mar 24, 2003
By Jack Truett
Dr. Harwood's MUST READ (and certifiable)exposures of just how Americans and Canadians are being purposely "dumbed down" to a point they no longer can prevent or control a Government/Church marriage. The Doctor is NOT some alarmist crying in public places that "...THE SKY IS FALLING...THE SKY IS FALLING...RUN FOR YOU LIVES...." An expert in Biblical History and the evolution of Deity Belief and Worship, the man offers step by step proof of his warnings in a very readable,interesting, and provable style. This book should be required reading for every Highschool and University Student on this continent....and YOU should become thoroughly acquainted with ALL of its chapters and warnings. It is YOUR freedoms that are being ripped away from you at an ever increasing rate. This is NOT a book that you'll scan quickly thru then forget it while it gathers dust on a shelf somewhere.
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