Hispanics vote Democrat because of economic concerns and health care, not immigration

Though it is persistently asserted by self-proclaimed 'Latino activists'*, media types, and Establishment Republicans alike that taking a restrictionist stance on immigration is to commit political hara kiri, Hispanics are not particularly concerned with immigration (and to the extent that they do care, their opinions are far more ambiguous than the casual observer has been led to believe).Pew just released the results of a survey on Hispanics in...

As I proudly stand up next to you?

Reading Jared Taylor's most recent book, White Identity, I wondered how the seemingly endless number of examples provided to illustrate how widespread the disdain for the United States as a European-descended country is among non-whites translated into opinions offered by a representative sampling of the US population. Taylor's tone is thoughtful and sober, yet the book's content--intentionally or not--surely inflames racialist passions in many who...

Nihilistic Manosphere

In an argument with Ferd, OneSTDV characterizes the so-called Manosphere as nihilistic. Well, the GSS offers some insight into nihilism, so let's look at what it has to tell us.The following tables display mean nihilism scores from the years 1998 and 2008, computed by taking participant responses to the 5-point scaled GSS item on perceived lack of purpose in life and inverting the averages for ease of reader comprehension. The higher the score,...

The left's manly intelligence (distribution)

In a blatant but understandable attempt to gain electoral advantage (anything that makes voting more restrictive benefits Republicans, and anything that makes it easier to do benefits Democrats), the Justice Department rejected South Carolina's version of a voter-ID law requiring putative citizens to produce proof that they are indeed citizens eligible to vote in their respective state and federal elections:The Obama administration entered the fierce...

She got shot, and... it's more than you ever did!

OneSTDV captures the societal shift away from celebrating accomplishment and towards celebrating suffering in discussing Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords and the coverage surrounding the Loughner shooting and her recovery from it. The PC orthodoxy leverages (and pushes for) this shifting to prop up favored groups at the bottom and minimize the laudatory attention that should rightly be given to those of great accomplishment. This inherently...

A few comments on the Republican presidential nomination

With Herman Cain out, race isn't an issue in the Republican presidential nominating process. It never was among voters, of course, as GOP voters are overwhelmingly white. Age, educational attainment, income, sex, and religious affiliation are still there, but of the polling data I've combed through, the only characteristic outside of political orientation (is the respondent a conservative, moderate, or liberal Republican?) and support or lack thereof...

Trust and violence

Agnostic has been marshaling a sundry series of posts that trace how shifts in the rate of violent crime are associated with changes in the behaviors and culture of broader society, from the rise and fall of shorts' length (heh) to disappearance and resurrection of drive-ins.Initially, I figured, understandably enough, that trust levels would tend to rise as violent crime...

Mexican fatalism

I don't tap into the World Values Survey nearly as often as I'd ideally like to because it's more difficult to trust than the GSS is. Sometimes the problems are apparently just coding errors, but often the issues involve representative sampling (or the lack thereof), confusion in translation, or something else. Exacerbating this challenge, it's tougher for me to use my intuition as a first approximation of whether or not the results are flawed when...

It's a typical report in these typical times

Typical NPR reporter and pundit Mara Liasson filed a typical NPR story on the role of immigration in the GOP's presidential nomination process. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are said to differ starkly in their positions on immigration. To Liasson's (and Romney's!) credit, this is fairly accurate and goes largely unreported most of the time:As for Gingrich, the predictions that his remarks on immigration would prove toxic to Republican voters haven't...

Don't risk eating crow

Sam Harris' post (via RP) detailing practical steps to take and things to think about to minimize one's risk of becoming a victim of physical violence is a worthwhile read. A snippet: Take this maxim to heart: Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do.At the risk of invoking the naturalistic fallacy, I'll point out that Harris' prudent advice is not just applicable to humans, but exists...

If you don't let yourself fail, you're going to fail

It's my understanding that the media mass exhorting people to stick to this or that various difficult diet and exercise routine is incalculably large, and a google search confirms as much. I've never so much as glanced at it, let alone dived in, though, because for whatever reason--propitious or not--physical prowess has at least since high school been incorrigibly desirable to me. I've never smoked, drank, or used other illicit drugs, largely because...

White, Caucasian, or Anglo?

Take lessons in class and character from Steve Sailer. He graciously praises Andrew Sullivan, who has shown no compunction in the past for nailing people to the wall for political incorrectness in the past, for a qualified public defense of HBD realities with regards to average IQ differences between different groups. That's laudable intellectual leadership on Steve's part.Facetiously,...

Who's the $#@!ing nihilist around here?!

From City Slickers to The Great Labowski and from The Purpose Driven Life to The Selfish Gene, the question of purpose in life is not just one for philosophers, theologians, and psychologists--it has strong popular appeal as well.It's perhaps easiest to define purpose by looking at its absence. The Inductivist recently reported on nihilism (as defined by agreeing with the statement that "life does not serve any purpose") and ethnicity, and that post...

Locke Cole's proviso

NES and SNES era rpgs are close to my heart, an inseparable part of my childhood. Hey, we're talking about the early nineties here, so I could've been doing a lot worse. As I'm always happy to point out, these games are the reason why I knew, as a third grader, what the words "zenith", "troglodyte", and "mercurial" meant.While I was going through high school and college, always...

The protocols of religious Jewish advocacy groups in the US

In a recent report on religious advocacy groups in the US, Pew lists the top 40 organizations by advocacy expenditures and policy makers and other government agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, AIPAC comes in at number one.The top 40 groups account for 85% of all dollars spent by religious groups for the purpose of influence peddling. Because I tend to use the term "neocon" disparagingly, it follows that I must harbor an envious hatred of Jews...

Which division is the NFL's best?

The NFC North is arguably (in sports, what's inarguable, after all?) the best division in the NFL this year. There's a good chance both of the conference's wild card teams will come from it if Detroit is able to steal a big win against the Saints next week and Hanie is able to make things happen the way Cutler does. If the Packers are able to protect Rodgers against the Giant's front four in East Rutherford, it's not difficult to see Green Bay going...

AE on facebook

To avoid privacy issues and still maintain an effortless archival system, I've created an Audacious Epigone facebook account. When I initially began using facebook for blog archiving, the social network still required a unique university email address to be tied to each account to keep it from becoming a myspace where spam accounts proliferated. That was sufficient (and effortless), but awhile back, the privacy settings that had kept the archives...

More on the demographics of mental health

In the previous post, we looked at the likelihood to have received treatment for a mental health problem by political orientation based on GSS data. It turns out that self-described political liberals are twice as likely to have been treated for mental health issues as conservatives are, with moderates falling in between*. This spurred several intriguing comments that I'll turn to the GSS again to address.Firstly, the inevitable racial issue. An...

Conservatives are mentally healthier than liberals

Ed Tom Kowalsky asks:I've often wondered if mental illness is more common among those who self identify as liberal than those who self identify as conservative. I suspect the answer is a resounding "yes," but I don't know if there is solid evidence justifying my suspicion.I'm not familiar with the relevant science, but a bit of googling turns up some survey results showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats are to describe themselves...

Old Republican white men know what's going on in the world

Over the last four years, I've tracked the results of Pew's "News IQ" quizzes that are periodically administered to a random sample of around 1,000 Americans. A couple of remarkably consistent results are how men are better informed than women are and that the average American is far less informed than readers of this and similar blogs are.Unfortunately, as honest as Pew is when it comes to the reports it commissions, politically correct acts of...

Sayonara sucker

A couple of months ago, I experienced a personal first--a wart on the inside of my right pinky finger. Never having had to deal with such a hideous thing before, I just ignored it for several weeks. It was small and only noticeable at all when my fingers were spread out. I'd heard that the solution involved freezing it off, which isn't something I figured I'd be able to do on my own, and it wasn't something I was going to bring to the attention of...

Ness misses home

When I was growing up, my family's moves around the country paralleled my dad's climb up the corporate ladder. Homesickness became an all-too-familiar status ailment of my childhood. I'd spend the first several months in a new state yearning to be back in the one from which we'd just come, and spend the last several months there dreading the next move to to yet another place....