Smear the queer

The equals sign has become almost ubiquitous as the supreme court considers the issue of same-sex marriage. Why are gay rights so chic at the moment?

Putatively fighting for equality is always an easy way to obtain cheap grace.

Additionally, though, I suspect it is because the same-sex marriage crusade feels purer than other potential civil rights crusades do. A black guy who hasn't accomplished much of anything has been twice elected to the presidency in large part because he is black. Affirmative action and racial quotas give non-whites all kinds of special privileges that result in, ceteris paribus, NAMs being favored over whites of equal ability. Anyone who has spent any time in the corporate world knows that rather than there being a glass ceiling keeping minorities and women down, managers fall all over themselves in an effort to lift up and promote people who will make the workforce more demographically diverse. The contemporary struggle for gay rights, in contrast, is perceived as truly being about egalitarianism.
 

Perhaps at some point in the future SWPLs will begin to have some misgivings about having possibly pushed the gay rights ratchet too far as well, but we haven't reached that point yet. The pickings are slimmer than they were half a century ago when it comes to finding victim groups to shed a tear for, but the tree isn't bare yet.

Menthol preference by race

Some follow up on the previous post looking at racial distributions of smokers of the top cigarette brands in the US. Firstly, a couple of commenters asserted that Parliaments are the SWPL brand of choice. Here's the breakdown:

Primarily white with a nice Asian showing and a correspondingly weak NAM share. Looks like we have a winner. Rescued pit bulls suffer secondhand smoke from Newports and then from Parliaments, poor creatures.

Secondly, Billy Bob noted the accusation that by disguising the harshness of cigarette smoke, menthol-flavored cigarettes encourage younger people to take up the vice who might otherwise not if their options were limited to non-menthol options. The FDA applied the same line of reasoning when it banned the sale of other flavored cigarettes in 2009.

Fortunately, the NSHDU survey asked participants whether they've primarily smoked menthols or non-menthols in the past month. Cross referencing these responses to the age ranges of said respondents allows us to look at the relationship of age and menthol preference among smokers. The following graph shows the percentages of smokers who primarily smoked menthols in the last month by age range (and specific age, to the extent the survey data allows for it to be reported). To avoid racial confounding, only non-Hispanic whites are considered:

Tough to argue with the claim that younger smokers are relatively more inclined towards menthols than older (and, by extension, more veteran) smokers are. There is some expected noise, especially among 12 and 13 year-olds, but the trend is clear. The question of whether or not young smokers who take up menthols would be willing to smoke non-menthols at the same age remains, but surely some portion of them would not be apt to do so. Seems plausible to presume that banning menthols would reduce smoking rates (obviously), but more importantly, would disproportionately reduce smoking rates among young people.

There is a racial component to the question of banning menthols, of course. Namely, blacks of all ages are far more likely to smoke menthols than non-blacks are. The following graph shows the menthol/non-menthol distribution of smokers by race:

The idea of banning menthols is akin to prosecuting crack cocaine more aggressively than powder cocaine, and that sets off all kinds of PC alarm bells.

National Survey on Health and Drug Use variables used: CIG30MEN, AGE2, CIG30BR2(120), NEWRACE2(1)(2)(3)(4-5)(6)(7)

Pugilistic pit bulls

Roissy's perspicacious, if deliberately provocative (it's who he is, after all), post on pit bulls and the bleeding heart SWPL instinct to apologize for (if Tookie was a dog, he'd look like this) and adopt them got me into a heated facebook conversation. Opposition to Roissy's post took two familiar forms; 1) Exceptions to the rule ("My family's three year old pit bull is the most lovable dog ever."), and 2) External factors ("It's all about how they are socialized and raised. Any dog can be made vicious by an irresponsible owner. Rottweilers and German Shepherds used to be thought of as the most dangerous dogs, now pit bulls are.").

Different breeds of dogs do not all share the same propensity for violent behavior. Statistics show that pit bulls kill more people than does every other kind of breed of dog combined. Yes, part of that is a consequence of the way pit bulls are often raised, but the reason they're raised to be fighters is because they are the breed most naturally suited to fight. Even if, for sake of argument, propensity for violence is assumed to be identical across breeds, when a pit bull snaps, it can very well be lethal. When a dachshund does, it's essentially harmless and just sort of funny. Further, pit bulls notoriously give little or no warning prior to attacking, unlike virtually all other dog breeds, which bark, growl, and assess their targets before lunging.

Humans aren't great at thinking in terms of probabilities. Of course most pit bulls are not going to seriously injury people (or other dogs)--the nice pit bull story isn't even the exception that proves the rule, because it's more the rule than it is the exception, but the fact remains that though they are in an absolute sense unlikely to injure or kill people, they are more likely to do it than any other breed is, by a long shot. In absolute numbers, Rottweilers are the second most lethal dog breed, and huskies (or wolf-dogs, depending on how prevalent the incorrect identification of wolf-dogs as huskies is) are third.

Regarding irresponsible owners, there are reasons certain animals are outlawed in most cities. Take tigers as an extreme example. Blaming a tiger's reckless owner after it rips my face off doesn't change the fact that my face has been ripped off. If that same irresponsible owner had a pug instead, I'd be just fine. There exists a spectrum, and pit bulls are as far to the dangerous end of the spectrum as dogs get.

The assertion that pit bulls are the new rottweilers or new German shepherds is difficult to square with the fact that the former breed is (and appears to have been for as long as records have been kept) considerably less common than the latter two breeds are. According to the American Kennel Club, in 2012 German Shepherds were the second most widely owned breed, Rottweilers were ninth, and pit bulls were 76th. These stats rely on registration data, and presumably pit bull owners (present company of SWPLs who are the target of Roissy's derision excluded) tend not to be the types of people who do civically-minded things like registering a pet, obeying federal drug laws, or joining the PTA. Still, it is clear that despite being less common than other potentially dangerous dogs, pit bulls cause a lot more absolute harm than other problematic breeds do.

The same sort of thinking that makes people jump to the defense of pit bulls is the sort of thinking that leads them to defend hip hop culture, oppose racial profiling, support open borders, etc.

Allow me to excerpt one of Roissy's many golden lines:

Not content with leaving ill-bred animals alone, and apparently incapable of enjoying the simple pleasure of normal dogs like labs without experiencing an existential crisis, the pitbull has become the newest cause celebre for urban SWPLs who can’t make it through a day without a pat on the back from their fellow missionaries.

For fun, I took a gander at Google trends' results for the terms "labradors" and "pitbulls" (understanding that the compound word should actually be two separate words, but also aware of the fact that "pitbulls" is more commonly searched on than is "pit bulls", and cognizant that the 'musician' who uses the singular form of the word requires that both terms be searched on in the plural) by state. The following table ranks states by labrador preference, which is calculated by simply taking a state's search index (on a relative scale from 0-100, the higher the number the more frequent the search term is) for labradors and subtracting from it the state's search index for pitbulls:

State	Labs
1. New Hampshire	69
2. Montana	67
3. Maine	62
4. Alaska	59
5. South Dakota	54
6. Vermont	47
7. Connecticut	46
8. Idaho	36
8. Oregon	36
10. Massachusetts	34
10. North Dakota	34
10. Wyoming	34
13. Wisconsin	33
14. Colorado	31
15. Iowa	29
16. Minnesota	28
16. Washington	28
18. Rhode Island	27
19. Pennsylvania	23
20. Maryland	18
21. Nebraska	17
21. Ohio	17
23. New Jersey	16
24. Missouri	14
25. Utah	13
26. Kansas	8
27. Virginia	8
28. New York	5
29. West Virginia	5
30. Delaware	4
30. Oklahoma	4
32. Michigan	1
33. California	0
34. Indiana	(1)
35. Kentucky	(3)
36. Arizona	(5)
36. Illinois	(5)
36. New Mexico	(5)
36. Tennessee	(5)
40. Nevada	(6)
41. Hawaii	(8)
42. North Carolina	(11)
43. Arkansas	(14)
44. Florida	(15)
45. South Carolina	(19)
46. Alabama	(20)
47. Georgia	(29)
47. Texas	(29)
49. Lousiana	(42)
50. Mississippi	(56)

A cartographical representation is available here. Head north for civilization, south for barbarism.

Weather aside, this ranking could almost double for a listing of the nation's nicest places to live in. The correlations between a state's estimated average IQ and its labrador preference is .77 (p less than .01) and between a state's homicide rate and its labrador preference is an inverse .72 (p less than .01).

Racial composition of smokers of top cigarette brands in the US

Journey into my head for a moment to take a gander at the cigarette brand stereotypes I hold.

To the extent that SWPLs still smoke cigarettes, they smoke Camels, especially Turkish blends. Blacks love menthol, and Newport is the premier menthol brand (Kool isn't the Pepsi to Newport's Coke, it's the 7 Up). Hispanics, especially the short, brown ones who know less English than you know Spanish, have an affinity for the gaucho/cowboy image--makes them feel a bit more at home, or at least better about being away from it. Pall Mall is the non-generic brand of choice for white trash. Doral is the more multicultural non-generic choice of the poor proles. Winston is a classier Marlboro.

Now let's put the tagline into action and validate these conceptions to the extent that they're worthy of validation. The following graphs show the racial breakdown of smokers of the top six most popular cigarette brands in the US as of 2011. Data comes from the National Survey on Health and Drug Use and the CDC:

Marlboro has the largest Hispanic share of the big brands. So far, so good.

Yeah, that one was easy. You really have to have your head in the sand or live a life in which you rarely come into contact with the lower rungs of society not to realize that Newports are as black a brand as are Air Jordans and Church's Chicken. Yes, Barack Obama purportedly used to smoke Marlboros, not Newports. That shouldn't come as a surprise (though I would've guessed he smoked Camels).

Difficult to tell from racial composition alone. It's not the whitest brand, but it is the least black brand, which is a fairly good indication that it's yuppie stuff.

So white. But these are the wrong kind of white people. They're apt to call these things "pell mells" or in some other way butcher the pronunciation of such a simple rhyming phrase.

Winston is the brand that most closely mirrors old stock America.

Okay, maybe Doral more closely mirrors old stock America than Winston does. Perhaps I need to claibrate a little--Winston is the classier Doral.

National Survey on Health and Drug Use variables used: CIG30BR2(104, 107, 115, 118, 119, 126), NEWRACE2(1)(2)(3)(4-5)(6)(7)

SWPL state, prole state

As an interesting aside to the previous post, there are only two states where those making at least six figures voted more heavily for Obama than those earning five figures or less did. They are the SWPL states of Oregon and Colorado. Portland, of course, is often noted for its distinction as the US' most SWPL city. And I've been to Estes Park.

Taking the Democratic-Republican margin among high income earners and comparing it to the same margin among low income earners is probably a fairly decent way of assessing state-level SWPLness, actually. I'm sure there are more direct measures that would be superior to that approach, however.

Where white conservatives and NAMs find common ground

There are those on the right who, attuned to the (liberal) zeitgeist, attempt to bring NAMs into their political ranks by emphasizing the putative social conservatism of blacks and Hispanics. Rick Santorum recently illustrated this, and the late Richard Nadler epitomized it.

As the US becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural, our democratic system will increasingly turn into a spoils system, where votes are determined by the demographic characteristics of the candidates in question, who, once elected, will use their power to redistribute wealth away from out-group members to the in-group members who elected them. Even at the federal level, where this is less of an issue than it is at more local levels of government, it is certainly detectable.

While that is related to this post's purpose, the focus should be on the data. The following table shows the percentages of SWPLS (liberal and very liberal whites), white conservatives (conservative and very conservative whites), and NAMs (blacks and Hispanics) who agree with a host of political and social statements. The 20 items are broken up into four categories; those in which SWPLs and NAMs are on the same page, those in which NAMs fall midway between SWPLs and white conservatives, those in which whites of all political persuasions are lined up against NAMs, and those in which white conservatives and NAMs are aligned against SWPLs. For contemporary relevancy, all responses are from 2000 onward:

SWPLs and NAMs agree	SWPLs	WhtCons	NAMs
The death penalty should be given to those who commit murder	50.4	84.8	48.2
Pornography should be made illegal	19.8	52.2	33.1
Expresses a great deal of confidence in the US military	36.3	67.8	42.9
Favors increases nuclear power generation in the US	66.4	86.6	50.0
The government should spend more on health care	85.5	59.5	87.7
Immigration into the US should be increased	14.9	6.7	11.9
The government should raise taxes to reduce income inequality	67.5	24.0	55.6
NAMs fall in between SWPLs and white conservatives
The government should spend more to protect the environment	79.7	26.6	55.9
The government should spend more on the military	15.2	55.7	38.4
The government should spend more on culture and the arts	48.1	6.2	31.0
Background checks should be required for gun ownership	87.0	70.5	79.9
Environmental threats are exaggerated	14.9	67.5	32.5
Whites band together against NAMs
Special preferences should be given to minorities in hiring decisions	22.8	6.1	37.9
The government should spend more on unemployment benefits	34.3	20.1	54.5
White conservatives and NAMs agree
A woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason	69.7	21.8	35.3
Marijuana should be legalized	66.4	22.6	31.7
Same sex marriage should be allowed	81.5	14.5	28.7
Prayer should be permissible in public schools	35.3	68.9	68.2
It is okay to spank a child for disciplinary purposes	52.3	81.0	77.4
Terminal patients should be allowed to die if they choose to do so	86.3	50.4	53.4

Even though white conservatives and NAMs are more closely aligned with one another than either is with SWPLs on multiple social issues, pocketbook concerns trump moral values, especially among those who are not affluent, and of course NAMs disproportionately are not. SWPLs want to take from whites and give to NAMs to achieve social justice and NAMs want to take from whites and give to themselves to realize a higher material standard of living. Even on issues that are not of great interest to NAMs, like the arts (a liberal cause) and the military (a conservative cause), NAMs tend to favor more spending than the opposing white group does. Politically, the best strategy for Republicans is probably to highlight Democratic attitudes on things like religion, drug legalization*, and abortion and hope that reduces NAM voters' enthusiasm for going out and voting.

GSS variables used: RACECEN(1)(2, 15-16), POLVIEWS(1-2)(6-7), YEAR(2000-2010), ABANY, GRASS, MARHOMO, PRAYER, SPANKING, LETDIE1, SPENVIRO, SPARMS, GUNSALES, GRNEXAGG, AFFACT, SPUNEMP, CAPPUN, EQWLTH, PORNLAW, SPARTS, SPHLTH, CONARMY, LETIN, NUKEELEC

* Because of its pervasiveness among the (largely NAM) underclass, lots of whites presume that non-whites are amenable to the idea of decriminalizing drug use. I've spent enough time around blacks to know that among those who aren't users, the stuff is not smiled upon. Blacks living in the hood see its consequences firsthand and they don't like it anymore than you or I do.

IQ by religion

In the six years I've been digging around in the GSS, and the countless times I've converted group wordsum averages into IQ estimates, I've never applied the method to get an IQ figure for Jewish respondents. The question of Jewish identity (is it religious, ethnic, ancestral, or something else?) inevitably causes some amount of measurement dissatisfaction when a broad survey like the GSS is used. Also, Jews tend to do especially well on the verbal aspects of IQ testing (which is all the wordsum test captures), while giving a more mediocre performance on visuo-spatial reasoning. But if I made the perfect an enemy of the good, this blog wouldn't exist.

The following table shows IQ estimates for the eight religious classifications that had a sample size of at least 40. The IQ scores are derived by setting the white mean wordsum score to correspond to an IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. To avoid language fluency issues, only respondents born in the US are included:

Religion	IQ
Judaism	110.8
Buddhism	108.1
None	102.6
Other	101.9
Catholicism	101.2
Protestantism	98.7
Interdenominationalism*	98.0
Christian (non-denominational)	97.1

Not quite the one standard deviation advantage that Ashkenazi Jews are elsewhere found to have over white gentiles, but some of these Jews are Sephardic and other ancestrally Jewish but irreligious respondents presumably identified themselves as having no religion.

The high Buddhist score is not simply the result of well-off Asian practitioners. It is, as Christian Lander has identified, a favorite for "spiritual" SWPLs who recoil at the idea of adopting an occidental belief system. More than half of the self-described Buddhists are white.

Like we see in the case of conservatives and liberals versus moderates, non-denominational Christians score lower than Protestants or Catholics. Those who are more intellectually committed tend to be more intelligent than those who opt for the undefined, uncontroversial label.

* Interdenominationalism is a Christian/Jewish hybrid, similar to (although not necessarily synonymous with) messianic Judaism.

GSS variables used: RELIG, BORN(1), WORDSUM

IQ and the best countries in the world

I'm late on this, but the relationship highlighted is hardly time sensitive. A month ago, Newsweek compiled an international list of 100 countries deemed by the magazine as "a study health, education, economy, and politics" to "rank the globe's true national champions". Newsweek looked at statistics falling into one of five different headings; education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism, and political environment. The criteria used to come up with the rankings are good--this is a solid objective measure of which countries are the best (and worst) places in the world to live in. The only significant shortcoming in the rankings is the absence of some of the most authoritarian nations (North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma), presumbly due to the insufficiency of available data in those countries.

The following table shows best countries index scores on the y-axis and aggregate IQ scores from Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and Global Inequality.


The correlation between the two is a vigorous .85 (p=0). That is, 73% of a country's Newsweek best countries score is 'explainable' by its average IQ. Nothing new for HBD-realists to see here. Communism has a deleterious effect on a country's attractiveness. Removing Russia, China (the conspicuous outlier at 105 IQ but an index score of only 62.1), and the seven former Soviet states included from the list bumps the correlation up even higher to .88.

How do the editors and staff at Newsweek, being the left-leaning, Establishment publication that it is, justify constructing such a list? Well, for one it gets attention. But, as Steve Sailer has explained, it's not particularly exciting because it's so predictable. Western Europe is at the top, followed closely by East Asia. Eastern Europe comes next, with Central Asia, South America, and the Middle East vying for spots in the middle. Sub-Saharan Africa is at the bottom.

Maybe those at Newsweek and their like-minded SWPL readers enjoy seeing a list of best places in the world that keeps the US and even Canada out of the top ten. That begs for a retort about how the US has much more of the bottom countries in it than Finland or Sweden do. It probably wouldn't be a bad bet to make that if Minnesota were included in the rankings as the 101st entrant, Minnesotans would give the Finns a run for their money.

I'm reasonably certain that's where we're at

By nitpicking, I'm opening the door for "pot calling the kettle black" and SWPL quips. Further, I'm of the opinion that commentators who add substantively meaningless phrases designed to show humility when making assertions are unnecessarily making their readers read more than they need to. We know you're not the ultimate arbiter of all things to all people. It's your take based on the reason you've employed, the data you've marshaled, and the passion you've embedded in your delivery. The "in my opinion, ..." is stating what is already assumed unless you've indicated otherwise.

That said, I listened to two podcasts today, one via EconTalk with Bryan Caplan and the other via AltRight Radio with Trace Mayer. Caplan said (starts at 54:25) the following in a discussion about F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit:

It's not that businesses need certainty about the rules, but a reasonable amount
of certainty.

A "reasonable amount of certainty"? The standard definition of certain being "free from doubt or reservation; confident; sure", the question of certainty is a dichotomous one. Something is either certain or it is uncertain; it cannot be somewhat certain.

In a span of less than 40 minutes, Mayer demonstrates poor English language usage not just once, or only twice, but thrice, in each case saying "...that's where we are at" instead of "that's where we are".

While we're on the topic, a couple other frequent errors I regularly come across:

- "Nevermind" instead of "never mind". The former is close to an antonym of the latter. Used correctly, it is approaching obsolescence. Parenthetically, I was made aware of this several months ago by an astute reader who called me out on my frequent use of "nevermind" when I meant "never mind".

- "Peruse" as an indication of brevity when it should be expressing the giving of great attention to detail. When I peruse an article, I'm not just skimming it but instead am reading through it thoroughly.

And yes, despite being guilty of it, I'm aware that freely switching between first-, second-, and third-person is considered bad, er, poor form.

* In the Steveosphere, that is. In the texting and Facebook worlds, these complaints would be dwarfed by far more elementary mistakes such as the use of "your" as the contraction of "you are" and "there" as the contraction of "they are".

Testing the faith of ignorant blacks

A friend recently told me in his Spring anthropology 101 class at KU during, the state's flagship public university, the professor, in briefly outlining earth's histoical timeline, condescendingly joked that the alternative view is that dinosaur fossils do not actually date from at least 65 million years ago, but are instead there to test the faith. SWPL gold!

How I wish I could've been present to interject that blacks are considerably more likely to believe that God created man within the last 10,000 years than whites are. In fact, according to the results from a GSS question asked in 2004, a majority of blacks (56%, compared to 41% of whites) profess that belief rather than either of the other possible responses, both of which have something to do with evolution. So are we learning today, professor, that most blacks are ignorant?

Squirm, squirm!

GSS variables used: RACECEN1, CREATION