I find it highly interesting that the Left accepts genetics in relation to the following propositions:
1) gay people are born that way
2) and now, conservative people are born that way, that is, stupider than liberal-minded people

but that
3) race is just a social construct.
4) intelligence is not largely hereditary.

Can you square this circle?

A new study from Brock University, whose results are published in the Daily Mail, says that conservative children are less intelligent than liberal children, and their intelligence seems to have been determined by the degree of conformity to doctrines of racial tolerance.

You can skip this excerpt from the article or read it as you please:

Together, the well-established theoretical and empirical links between lower g and greater right-wing ideology and between greater right-wing ideology and heightened prejudice
suggest a mediating mechanism (Baron & Kenny, 1986) by which lower g may be associated with greater prejudice. We propose a model (see Fig. 1) in which lower g predicts greater right-wing ideology (Path a) and greater right-wing ideology predicts more prejudicial attitudes (Path b). Furthermore, although we expected that lower g itself predicts greater prejudice (Path c), we hypothesized that this association is facilitated in large part by right-wing ideology (i.e., through Path a and Path b). Therefore, we expected that if right-wing ideology  (i.e., the mediator) is included in the predictive model, the anticipated negative direct effect between g and prejudice (Path c′) will be substantially attenuated or statistically nonsignificant; such a finding would support a significant negative indirect effect (the product of Paths a and b; Shrout & Bolger, 2002). Thus, individuals with lower cognitive ability may be more attracted to right-wing ideologies that promote coherence and order, and because such ideologies emphasize the maintenance of the status quo, they may foster greater outgroup
prejudice.

Ahem, gentlemen.

People who oppose the drowning of white western societies in a sea of Muslims or blacks are dumber because…(fill in the blanks)

People with lower general intelligence (g) favour social coherence? What might be the matter with social coherence? 

“Conservative ideologies or value systems are not necessarily characterized by prejudice, and social conservatives do not “value” negative evaluations of out-groups. Instead, conservative ideologies contribute to negative out-group evaluations. Not only do cognitive abilities predict each of these constructs, but our analyses reveal that right-wing ideologies and contact with out-groups go a long way in explaining the relation between mental ability and prejudice.

To the contrary, contact with out-groups goes a long way to explaining what we may find offensive in their behaviour, viz honour killimgs.

The authors conclude:

In conclusion, our investigation establishes that cognitive ability is a reliable predictor of prejudice. Understanding the causes of intergroup bias is the first step toward ultimately addressing social inequalities and negativity toward outgroups. Exposing right-wing conservative ideology and intergroup contact as mechanisms through which personal intelligence may influence prejudice represents a fundamental advance in developing such an understanding.

First, I defy you to parse the last sentence.

Exposing ideology…and contact .. as mechanism through which… intelligence may influence prejudice…represents an …advance.

Does that make any sense? Never mind, that is the least of their offences to reason.

However, the major unexamined premise of their article is that there seems to be no real world out there in which out-groups and in-groups live, act, put out grabage, or not, act peaceably, or not, work hard, or not, tolerate differences, or not. The second premise is that right-wing ideologies are the sole sources of prejudice.

Of course, prejudice cannot be explained solely by intelligence, ideology, or intergroup contact. Prejudice has complex origins, including personal factors, such as ignorance and a lack of empathy (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008), and social factors, such as resource competition and intergroup hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Yet some factors, such as the ability to adopt alternative perspectives, might be driven by mental capacity, given that contact with out-groups is mentally demanding (Richeson & Shelton, 2003).

The learned authors would be surprised to learn that most of what is called prejudice is fact-driven: actual experience with people of different classes, religions, languages, and cultures builds up a body of experience that guides the person in his next encounter with persons of that group. Most stereotypes are accurate, but incomplete, and everybody but academics recognizes this. Most people operate on sterotypes until theyget better data, and then work on the better data. That does not mean I am prejudiced for or against Armenians if I think they are industrious and commercial-minded; I have met enough of them to know.

The last unexamined premise is that of the outgroup and the ingroup. In the case of this article, the authors clearly share the view that the average white Briton is the in-group and the blacks, muslims, gays and others are the outgroups. But who says? The outgroups have had enormous legal privileges at their disposal in the form of anti-discrimination enforcement in Britain. The merest outburst on a public bus the other month by Emma West, some young white woman, against all the foreigners taking up space on welfare resulted in her children being seized by the state.

Here we see the results of clever men writing clever articles demonstrating a complete incapacity to see beyond their prejudices.

This offended Big Dyke, the person who controls the political line that homosexual behaviour is not merely behaviour, but an ineradicable biological condition, existing from conception or at least month 6 in the womb. Nixon was sent to thought correction camp, and when she emerged, she was heard to say that

“While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact.”

Actually it’s both, Cynthia. Mostly sexual activity is a series of choices and actions, but the Left would have us believe it is an inherent genetic condition. Indeed whether we believe it or not, that is the line that all Left-thinking people have to follow.

As Jim Goad writes in the always entertaining Taki’s Magazine:

” as an inveterate mocker of leftist contradictions, I will note that the SAME people who are INSISTING homosexuality is entirely genetic are precisely those who for generations now have denied and dismissed the idea that “race” or “gender” are anything more than “social constructs.” When it comes to race and gender, they will only accept environmental explanations; but when it comes to what you do with your naughty bits, they will only permit biological alibis. For race and gender, it’s 100% “nurture”; for sexuality, it’s 100% nature. Like always, they make no sense. But I enjoy watching how they struggle to fit straight pegs into gay holes.

For my part I share Goad’s amusement that the Gay Left believes that political and social tolerance will be greater if the rest of society come to believe that gayness is a biological condition rather than a choice, and yet at the same time they shout and scream that race is a social construct, so that tolerance will be greater on that ground.

Moreover, what  is the matter with a free market in sexual choice? Very probably they fear free choice  here as much as they fear it everywhere else. My God, if people were actually free to choose their sexual partners, who knows what could happen? Gays going straight! Straights going gay! Worse, no one would give a damn!  Curiously, they share the same fear of free choice here as religious and social conservatives. Which brings the intriguing question into focus: is the Left just a godless form of religious and social conservative? It bears thinking about,

You think, like a good Canadian, that such a thing is a disaster, right? Wrong, wrong ,wrong.

Go to the Dominican Republic. You cannot walk along a country road for a hundred yards without a jeep, jitney, motorized tricycle, motorbike, or taxi offering you transport. Wait half an hour and a country bus will take you to town. No public transport. No unionized workers. Few if any fixed routes, except for inter-city travel. Everything is coordinated by cell phones. The poor get around quite well, as there is transport for every budget. Air-conditioned taxi for the rich. A plywood bench in a Toyota pick-up truck for the poor. The rear seat of a motorcycle for anyone.

Imagine what “public” transport would be like in Ottawa if there were no public sector providing it.   The first effect would be a vast reduction in large buses, driving around at all hours of day and night, mostly empty. Have you ever thought how soviet that is, that tons of moving vehicle are used to transport two, three, or six people, all the while chewing up diesel fuel, by a unionized worker approaching a meltdown of rage? I invite you to look at large near-empty buses at any hour of day as a symptom of socialist planning, not market failure.

In a capitalist transport system, vehicles would be appropriately sized to the human traffic. Very few buses would be the full-sized monsters of main traffic routes.     Jitneys, car-pools, taxis, and mini-buses would pick people up from suburban homes and take them to assembly points, where large air-conditioned coaches would take them to downtown offices.

The system would be coordinated by cell-phones between drivers, by some measure of common ownership of vehicles, and by computers.     Vertical integration between the smallest providers and the largest, and horizontal integration across the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, would probably be impossible. Only government licensing would create the shortages that would result in higher fares. So don’t restrict the number of licences in the transport businesses, just licence the drivers in the same way that all people are.

Such a system would be near impossible to monopolize. Free entry and exit.

Instead, what do we have? Legal monopolies on transport, held by city councils. Large labour unions. The public held hostage to sullen unionized drivers. Overcrowded buses. Poor service.

Why should you not be able to phone a jitney cruising your section of suburbia for a lift to the nearest mall or shopping strip, where you would transfer to a smaller bus, and then to a larger coach if you were going more than ten miles. This would be the normal pattern of public transport if it were privatized. It is time to unleash the Lebanese, the Sikhs and like entrepreneurial clans and nations and let them solve the problem of coordination.  OC Transpo is just a socialist planner. Abolish it.

Don’t hold your breath.

His article was entitled “Ontario patients’ time is infinite, and worth nothing”. It related the fact that line-ups are used to ration medical attention for everything and anything. It is the soviet face of Canadian medicare. The patient’s time is worth nothing.

The failure to keep up with the business methods of even 15 years ago is more and more apparent. If the motor vehicle bureaus of  this country ran on the same paper-based record system, governments would have lost elections for the failure to modernize. Why does medicine get a free pass?

My own doctor is completely uncomputerized. This means that:

1) appointments can only be made by telephone. Lose the paper recording your appointment, write it down in the wrong place, call at the wrong time, and the appointment cannot be made or is lost.

2) reminders, if any, are by telephone, wasting the secretaries’ time and mine.

3) if my medical records are kept anywhere, they are on manuscript pages, or on  printed pages of  paper recording the results of medical tests .

4) results of medical tests are not available to me, in at least two ways. They are on paper, which makes copying more expensive than it needs to be. But, worse, I do not have a right them, it would seem. They appear to be property of the physician, rather than of the patient. Consequently, on the basis of records I have not seen, my physician might feel authorized to call for  dietary changes  (say). The validity of his advice cannot be tested against any other norms, opinions, or medical standards  unless I have the relevant information. All I have is his word for it. If I write down the test scores, say blood pressure and cholesterol, I had better bring a pen and paper. If I refer my case to another opinion, I suppose a physical transfer of paper files must occur, at further waste of time and money.

5) My doctor’s office has no way of taking money, except in cash.  The first thing that would be done in a capitalist doctor’s office, which you know from visiting your dentist, is to install credit and debit card machines.

Occasionally it takes foreign travel to make one realize what a backwater this country can be. Just as Cuba has gradually gone to ruin, the gentle pace of falling behind is imperceptible until some event forces one’s attention to our obsolescence. Even my lawyer will send me documents by email.  My doctor does not have a computer. Just think about that for a moment.

Moreover, why are there waiting rooms? Because waiting is a way of queuing for service, which is a way of imposing a user fee. It is rationing by way of wasting the customer’s time rather than by price.

Imagine medicine without waiting rooms.

That is medicine on a properly business-like basis.

The left will mount the expected disinformation campaign to confuse people that “honour killings” are just a general part of violence against women, the cure for which is greater social intervention in private lives by police and the ‘caring’ professions, plus more social spending on the same client groups.

The appeal in the Shafia case will attempt to throw sand in everyone’s eyes in this regard, seeking to de-legitimate the analysis of honour killing.

Aisha Gill, in the Guardian, writes the following confused nonsense, which will be a template for the Left to avoid the issue of Islam:

“Yet, by focusing on the subject of honour, such violence is too often explained away by cultural stereotypes – allowing society to dismiss these cases as something that only happens in minority communities with their “outdated” notions of justice. This allows us to completely overlook that, first and foremost, these cases are of violence against women, and the concept of honour is being used to legitimate the continued oppression of women.”

The two ideas are perfectly consistent. We are completely aware that the vast majority of honour crimes are Muslim in origin, followed by Hindus enforcing caste sensitivities. This is not a “stereotype”; this is an observation of fact. And yes, we are completely aware that these murders are intended to control women and prevent them from marrying whom they love or choose.

She goes on:

There is a tendency in the west to see so-called honour killings as exclusively related to specific cultural traditions. [Yes, we do, because they are] They are often depicted as culturally specific to Muslim communities although they are not, in fact, restricted to any particular religion, culture, type of society or social stratum[The lack of restriction does not affect the fact that they are disproportionately committed by Muslims] In its report on harmful practices, for instance, the charity Imkaan reported a case of a Traveller woman forced to leave her community due to “honour-based violence”.

Now watch the sand being thrown in your eyes in what follows:

“Yet there is a widespread belief that honour is no longer as important in western societies, what with their emphasis on individual rights and legality. However, the modern-day importance of “honour” should not be so quickly cast aside. In the UK data from the British Crime Survey 2009/2010 suggests that nearly a million women experience at least one incident of domestic abuse each year, while close to 10,000 women are sexually assaulted every week – how many of these cases relate to the “honour” of the perpetrators being allegedly besmirched by victims and survivors?” [You do it too, you nasty white people!]

Merely by asking a fatuous question does not turn interpersonal violence, even male-female violence,  into a culturally approved tradition of killing daughters who consort with males in any way before marriage. Honour killing is the enforcement of the idea that the penalty for unchastity is gruesome death of the daughters, sisters, or other females relatives,even if the unchastity was involuntary, such as rape, especially incestuous rape. Further, these killings are approved by other female members of the family. The last honour killings in Western societies died out in the 1840s, and they were called duels, exclusively fought by successful males of equal rank in formalized contests of bravery.

Watch how  Aisha Gill’s specious analysis shifts the blame from tribalism and Islam to feminism in the following:

“Tackling “honour” killings requires a shift in political thinking. Instead of regarding them as a cultural tradition common to a range of “backward” societies, the issue needs to be seen in the context of violence against women and the inequality found throughout society.

Instead of soft-pedalling the Islamic, Hindu and tribal nature of the phenomenon, let us call it by its true name: barbarism. Why are we importing these people?

Liberal natural resources critic David McGuinty on Tuesday highlighted Redford’s call for a national energy strategy, saying she’s raising some important questions about where the country is headed on energy development.

However, what has been absent from the discussion so far, is how greenhouse gas reductions will be factored into any pan-Canadian approach, he said.

“Is it possible that we would have a national energy policy or strategy, without addressing greenhouse gases?” McGuinty told the Tory-dominated House of Commons natural resources committee.”

Of course,  any energy policy focussed on greenhouse gases would not be an energy policy, it would be a policy predicated on a superstition, like a witchcraft policy, or obsolete scientific conceptions, like phlogiston. What is the federal government doing about phlogiston? Nothing. It does not exist.

And for those who may be unaware, the Liberal energy critic in the federal parliament is the brother of the Ontario Premier in the provincial legislature, the one who is pursuing a disastrous policy of windmill generation, shutting down coal plants,  and higher prices for consumers.

I have to keep reminding myself of Duggan’s Dew’s comment: “Dalwhinnie! 100 is the average IQ, not the bottom!”.

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

Shouldn’t the rectal exam be directed solely toward the partners of gay men, because they are the only ones who could be injured there with a misdirected and extended erection? In this age of debt it is important to cut cost.

The issue for me is the time gap between the first real evidence the thing was a fraud, and the abandonment of policies in places like Ontario that were predicated on a global warming that is not happening, and if happening, not caused by man’s CO2 emissions.

I cite, for example, the comment by Falsum to the blog posting Inconvenient Facts posted yesterday. The report by scientists appeared in the Daily Mail. Falsum wrote:

The Daily Mail? Seriously? That newspaper has slightly less credibility than the average 14 year-old youtube commenter. The scientific community is agreed that global warming is real, that we are causing it, and that it will be catastrophic if we do not do anything.

Hack journalism does nothing to change that. Try again when you find an article in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.

 What the  article said – which evidently Falsum did not bother to read, was that the British Met Office had realeased the data. The first paragraphs were:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit is the source of the Climategate email hacking scandal.

In Falsum we find the complete believer, confident that the science is on his side, and not afraid to say so. The last time he thought through the issue must have been four or five years ago, because he has missed everything since.

 What has fascinated me is the several-year-long gap between the first publication of the emails that showed the whole thing was a vicious academic game played for keeps (Climategate 1, in 2009), and the spread of this realization slowly slowly through the intelligentsia until now.

Consider Ontario for example, where the provincial government has been pursuing a policy spending billions on wind farms and coal plant shutdowns, paid for by large increases in electricity rates. The opposition leader Tim Hudak dare not attack the theory behind Premier McGuinty’s folly because to do so would offend the state of believed ignorance in the Ontario media.

Wikipedia entries on the subject of Climategate are fully controlled by warmists to this day.

Climategate 1 occurred in 2009. It exposed all the doubts and lack of facts of the perpetrators of the carboin myth for all to see. A cascade of toothless inquiries since, led by warmists,  has exonerated the perpetrators.

 Yet anyone with a few hours of time on their hands and the inclination to read into a subject can find convenient summaries of the emails in question.

We are in the presence of a believed mythology. Man bad. Gaia good. Spaceship earth being plundered and ravaged by insensitive male boors. Imminent doom from CO2 emissions. Redemption through atonement to Gaia.

It took many decades for communism to be exposed.

Capitalism bad. Capitalists evil. Working man good. All power to the working man through the revolutionary appartus of the Party. The Party knows the outcome of history, and it must temporarily assume dictatorial powers, but only until the work of socialism is complete, when we shall all be free and equal and living in a man-created paradise.

Communism had the advantage of a huge captive state, a ruthless regime of terror and victory in WW2. It was a vastly successful ideology that held a third of the world in thrall to a primitive Gnostic superstition. It lingers in North Korea, which is a theme park of xenophobic failure and starvation.

By contrast the climate thing has all the features of leftism without the bother of Marxist economic claptrap. The climate thing carries on with its own regime of intimidation inside universities, hysteria in the media, mathematical modeling that is fact-free and cannot even predict the past, and government subsidies. Its influence today vies with communism in the 1930s. Will it die soon, or will it take another few decades for most average informed people to realize it was a scam?

 And will it die suddenly, or just peter out?

 That the whole warmist fantasy will fail is not in doubt. But the average person of good conscience has neither the time nor the motivation to inquire too deeply into it, and so drastically mistaken measures are undertaken in all western economies by fools like McGuinty on  behalf of Gaianism, the latest Gnostic outbreak.

We can only hope that the learning cycle will be faster and less murderous this time with Gaianism than it was with communism.

Applications to British universities are down after the government allowed universities to raise their fees. 

The Telegraph reports:

“The number of British students applying to university has plummeted by almost 44,000 following a sharp rise in tuition fees, according to new figures.”

An official with the universities’ association says:

“The more detailed analysis of application rates for young people takes account of population changes. This shows a fall of just one percentage point in the application rate in England, with little change across the rest of the UK.

“Our analysis shows that decreases in demand are slightly larger in more advantaged groups than in the disadvantaged groups.

“Widely expressed concerns about recent changes in HE funding arrangements having a disproportionate effect on more disadvantaged groups are not borne out by these data.”

“The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.“

I used to think that there was global warming – just a bit, but that we were not causing it. Now it seems that even that idea is false.

Men, argues McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt, both individually and collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to the changed role of men.

“The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our re-imagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.”

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former prosecuting attorney and he is  very clear on the concept of Islam.

“The primary race leaves me despairing. While Romney has the proven record to be an effective administrator, a quality lacking utterly in the White House now, his campaign has been inept and tone-deaf. I had hoped he would refine his economic message after New Hampshire by taking up Santorum’s down-to-earth pitch to Reagan Democrats but he has come across as only more vague.

“I have followed Newt Gingrich since I was in university. He has an impressive intellect and is a lethal opponent in any debate. He is also a wilfully destructive narcissist, as demonstrated over several decades of professional and personal misadventure. The capacity of politicos and primary voters to ignore that is disturbing. As I mused to a friend, do we really want to replace Obama with a latter-day Ludwig II?

“Gingrich is punching the right red-meat voter buttons: indignation at an ineffective Obama and a callous media elite, contempt for Washington, and praise for self-reliance and common sense. Indeed, any decent GOP candidate should be embracing these. Sadly, it is being done by a preening ego with a volume of baggage befitting a traveling Saudi prince.

“I suspect that Romney is going to lose Florida and then we head into the territory of a brokered convention. Let’s just pray for a result such that we can say of the White House, like Tangina the psychic from “Poltergeist”, “This house is clean.”"

For myself, I look forward to the possibility that Romney will find some passion, but I doubt it. I have met several old-stock Mormons, and to the extent one can generalize about the personality type summoned forth by a religion, Romney’s WASPy blandness seems altogether typical. Good citizens, but bland by choice.

In his challenge, issued in a Time Magazine interview last week, Buffett promises to match voluntary contributions aimed at reducing the deficit by “all Republican members of Congress, and I’ll even go three for one with (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell.”

Unbeknownst to him Rep. Scott Rigell, a Republican representing Virginia, “makes it a practice to donate 15 percent of his Congressional salary ‘to pay down the debt.’ That amounted to $23,103.33 in 2011 and about $26,100 in 2012.” So Warren Buffett, who made $62,855,038 in 2010 the last year for which the data is available,  will be writing a check made out to the United States Treasury for 0.00078% of his 2010 income.

What happened to the “match voluntary contributions”? Oh don’t be silly, he is matching the dollar amount, not the percentage amount. Just remember the drill, as a Democrat when proposing higher taxes you compare the percent amount between different tax brackets but when you have to pay up you compare the dollar amount.

No word  on when Buffett will send a cheque for the remaining $9,379,052.37, so that he can match Rep. Rigell’s contribution. No word either if Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway, which owes just over $1 billion in taxes going back to 2002, has decided to help out in reducing the deficit by paying up.