A simplistic test, only 10 questions, and some of the possible responses are very very close to each other. In spite of that, I managed to retain my normal centrist position, slightly leaning conservative-statist.

http://www.nolanchart.com/survey.php

satoshi kanazawa came out w/ a study last week that finds liberals, atheists, and male sexual exclusivity are linked to IQ. kanazawa is an evo psych guy and has some pretty kooky ideas, but his kookiness in this case only extends to how he thinks this came about and not the numbers indicating who has higher IQ.

frankly, i don’t understand the stated evo psych reasoning which says that these views would have hurt our ancestors in the past but now serve to “move the species forward” and are “evolutionarily novel.” well wtf does that mean? just b/c something is new, it’s mostly smarter ppl that will do it? eh, i suppose so, but not a strong argument. so i’m skipping over that. the important thing here is the numbers.

Very liberal IQ (socially, not economically) = 106
Very conservative IQ = 95

Not at all religious IQ = 103
Very religious IQ = 97

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more results from gallup. asians are more moderate and liberal than most americans. they are also less religous, but that mostly just goes along w/ being more liberal. we can’t tell from this information what age groups and generation the respondents are from unfortunately, but overall asians are definitely more lefty than righty.

link was first seen at 8asians.

Surprise surprise.

according to gallup. saw this first at inductivist.

i hate to sound like rush limbaugh, but there is certainly a part of me that is callous to the suffering going on in haiti. haiti has been a basketcase for it’s entire history after independence, except for the times it has been occupied/controlled by outside powers. it’s people eat dirt cookies on a regular basis.

if our purpose is to take over the country, we’d be supporting people like this:

“The Haitian government has been here for a while, and they give us nothing. The United States should take over the country,” said Andrelita Laguerre, shepherding four children and a grandchild at the camp. “Most of my friends expect the United States to take over. I wish!” [bold emphasis is mine]

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“Physicians will not be bullied into bankruptcy. Our system needs reform, but what’s being hammered out in Washington is not the answer.

Two weeks ago the Mayo Clinic shocked the nation when it closed the doors of one of its Arizona clinics to patients on Medicare. Just this past June President Obama himself praised Mayo as a model of medical efficiency noting that Mayo gives “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” If Mayo feels compelled to walk away from this government-run program, others will surely follow. The nation must understand why.”

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so the economist has an article up written by geoffrey miller, an evolutionary psychologist. he makes some rather stark observations.

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

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i have recently became aware that liberals exist who have looked at the available data and have become convinced of the reality of hbd. one of these liberals is now struggling to reconcile hbd views and liberalism.

i appreciate this effort b/c i’ve stated previously that if liberals ignore this area of inquiry, they automatically cede the intellectual ground to conservatives and outright racists. i say this even though i’m not a liberal. i just happen to value divergent points of view as long as they are based on evidence and not ignorance, even if that evidence points to reality being pretty ugly. but what of asian-americans that might hold hbd views?

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dan chung did some time-lapse photography of the 60th anniversary parade.

China’s 60th Anniversary national day – timelapse and slow motion – 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

it was a pretty parade, but i mean really… china, get w/ the fucking times. stuff like this makes it look to the world like you’re still stuck in the 1950s. except for the girls in red. just cut the midriff out of those costumes and whoa, i could watch that all day.

…a greedy corrupt official?

Ah, Chinese kids are soo cute…

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/world/asia/22journalists.html?_r=2&hpw

“But here in South Korea, human rights advocates, bloggers and Christian pastors are accusing them of needlessly endangering the very people they tried to cover: North Korean refugees and the activists who help them.”

jason richwine, a writer for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute or AEI, has an article up about how he would change immigration policy.

he goes over some of the ground i’ve mentioned here such as diversity being a killer of community bonds, even between ppl of the same race. he goes on to suggest that immigration policy should change to that of canada’s or australia’s which imports by skill and not family relation.

i don’t have any objection to a change policy which emphasizes IQ over all else, and in fact i’ve supported that position for a long time. but i’m not sure that it will foster much greater community bonding. at best it seems like it would only mitigate an increase in crime. (more…)

i don’t say this much, but thank freaking god.

oh yeah baby. u just don’t know.

this is something that i decided to look up after a discussion w/ AL47. we wondered how nationalism differed from the east to the west and i realized i had seen the information somewhere before. it was probably on gnxp but i wanted to look the information up myself.

so here i’ve put the results of the world values survey up for selected nations from the east and west. i would’ve put all of them on one table, but our blog formatting cuts it off unfortunately. (more…)