Pat on the butt too much for Pats' fans

As a complement to Jayman's recent post on state laws regarding corporal punishment, I'll note that blacks express the greatest support for the practice as a means of disciplining children. Additional positive correlates include being male, politically conservative, and of modest intelligence. The GSS item doesn't specify who the spanker is, though it's reasonable to assume that much of the time the respondent has a parent in mind--if the question specifically inquired about opinions on schools using corporal punishment, the approval rates would surely be lower across the board.

One of Jayman's recurring themes is to employ an American Nations paradigm when evaluating social phenomena. The GSS doesn't allow quite that level of granularity, but it does break survey participants up by census region. The percentages of respondents who either "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement "It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking". For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. Here is a map of said regions for those who are unfamiliar with them:

Region	%Spank
1) East South Central	85.9
2) South Atlantic	80.0
3) West South Central	78.5
4) East North Central	72.9
5) Mountain	71.8
6) West North Central	71.4
7) Mid Atlantic	68.2
8) Pacific	64.1
9) New England	46.9

Most acceptable in the South, least so in the Northeast. Embers of the Civil War burn on.

And the same, by reported ethnicity. Minimum sample size of 50, though N is much exceeds that for most groups:

Ethnicity	%Spank
1) African	84.5
2) "American"	81.5
3) Native American	79.0
4) Scottish	78.5
5) Puerto Rican	78.3
6) Dutch	74.9
7) English/Welsh	73.3
8) German	73.1
9) French	71.3
10) Spanish	71.1
11) Mexican	69.0
12) Irish	68.4
13) Filipino	64.5
14) Swedish	63.3
15) Italian	63.0
16) Chinese	61.6
17) Norwegian	61.3
18) Indian (dot)	59.7
19) Russian	59.4
20) Czechoslovakian	58.1

White liberals, black rednecks. Those who refer to themselves as "American" are largely Scottish, and unsurprisingly express attitudes similar to those who consider the highlands to be an ancestral homeland. Most people in the US of Russian national descent are Jewish, not little Putins. No idea about the Slavs!

Parenthetically, regarding the question of ethnicity, people much smarter and far more perspicacious than myself have said that in the contemporary US it is basically meaningless. Perhaps as a biological marker, okay, though it does track geographically and it seems to provide some insight into cultural characteristics. My working assumption is to treat it as good--or at least useful--information, and not an enemy of the perfect even if it falls well short of being as much.

Finally, in the comments section of Jayman's post, there is some incredulity about the use of corporal punishment among readers who are from states where it is legal. I suspect that in these states it occurs almost exclusively in private schools, though few if any of the state laws distinguish between public and private in questions of the legal permissibility of the practice.

GSS variables used: SPANKING(1-2)(3-4), YEAR(2000-2012), REGION, ETHNIC(1)(5)(6)(7)(10)(11)(14)(15)(17)(18)(19)(20)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(30)(31)(97)

Those disapproving of Obama more intelligent than those approving of him!

Although the 2012 GSS did not include any questions on presidential voting plans for the same year, the survey did sneak in a question on presidential approval, querying respondents on whether they approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling the job of president. Because it's fun and often causes people to make fools of themselves, here are IQ estimates derived from wordsum scores for those approving and disapproving of Obama's performance, presuming an average national IQ of 98 and a standard deviation of 15:

Approve -- 97.7
Disapprove -- 98.5

A nation divided. Race, of course, is a confounding factor. When only non-Hispanic whites are considered:

Approve -- 101.5
Disapprove -- 99.3

Per usual, white leftists could appear more credible in the supercilious scorn they have for their bigoted brethren if they acknowledged as much. Since they're afraid to do so, however, let it be known that Obama's supporters aren't quite as intelligent as his detractors are!

More insightfully, the GSS results provide a useful illustration of what the Derb terms "classic class conflict: the top and the bottom against the middle". The following graph shows Obama's approval/disapproval numbers among members of five categories in which respondents are classified based on their wordsum scores*:

If only I could remain stuck in the middle with you. Unfortunately, stasis appears to be a dream of the past, not the way of the future.

GSS variables used: PRESPOP, WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), RACECEN1(1)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%).

Trayvon Martin Day

The administration of Carrick high school in Pittsburgh planned and subsequently scrapped "Trayvon Martin Day" in which students would be encouraged to wear hoodies in celebration and remembrance of the dead teenager. The school stepped back after opposition from several parents who publicly expressed concerns over the day, specifically with the consequences it would bring to students who chose not to participate.

If this were a school on Martin Luther King boulevard or in a plush area of Belmont, there would likely still be media 'controversy' surrounding the proposed honorific day, but visceral fears for the safety of the students from parents at said schools probably wouldn't be a part of it.

Why so much worry about violent fallout among the student body at Carrick? Diversity. In addition to strength, it's also social combustibility! A pie chart of the racial composition of Carrick's student body:

Residuals are 5% two or more races, 1% Hispanic, 1% Asian. Despite Zimmerman's Hispanic heritage, his persecution and the coverage surrounding it operated upon the old binary racial template of oppressed black America under the thumb of oppressive white America. Too fitting.

And the school's unsurprising scholastic profile (Carrick students' proficiency rates, Pennsylvania's statewide proficiency rates):

Math -- 38%, 60%
Reading -- 57%, 68%

Science -- 16%, 42%

Writing -- 80%, 83%

Cruel caricaturing of Derb Towners

See if you are able to detect something sinister about the following typical write-up of an up-and-coming community organizer and activist:

Brooks has appeared at the National Press Club in Washington and hosted web seminars with Cornel West, a similarly polished promoter of what West calls "color consciousness", and Julian Bond, who has spent his life promoting African-American rights and culture. Brooks has spoken before A Better Chance, a job placement group that once took credit for chalking "African-American pride" around the campus of Oberlin College. 

I couldn't, but based on the tone of the entire article, I feel like there must be something terrible lurking here.

And then there is this, which will surely blow your mind. It certainly did mine:

Why don’t people behave in more racially conscious ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with white nationalists.

That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for separatist goals is hampered by a dislike of separatists.

Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.”

While the findings are lamentable, it's encouraging to see major media outlets such as Salon drawing attention to the inherent unfairness in these sorts of mendacious, bigoted portrayals of reformers merely promoting social change like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.

Endovelicus

Granting the general political ineptitude of Republican pols and the continual creep of executive power at the expense of congressional restraint, why isn't the riposte to the assertion that the 2012 presidential election was a referendum on Obamacare that the GOP won the house? Every congressional district in the country had an election on the same night, and Republicans came out 33 bodies ahead, the vast majority of the victors having incorporated opposition to Obamacare as part of their campaign platforms (is there a single one who did not?).

Obamacare was passed by a Democratically-controlled House and Senate, but by the time the question of funding had come around, the public's dissatisfaction with the law had served as a catalyst for a return to divided government. The stupid party would be able to strike an oh so sought after moderate pose by claiming that the American people are divided on the question, and consequently the law should be put to a national referendum, or, in a more republican style, people should be allowed to opt out entirely for the first year or something similar.

I'd love a red pill review of Obamacare, and of the state of health care in the US more generally (this is a solicitation--please feel free to oblige in the comments). Much like our mutually exclusive national ideals of liberty and equality, our simultaneous insistence upon providing everyone access to the best health care available and also on making health care affordable for all tells me the whole enterprise is hopelessly saturated in a thick paste of contradictory, quixotic nonsense that conceals the perpetual, mendacious special interest plundering that is taking place on the inside.

I attempt to take a citizenist perspective on the issues of the day, but I scarcely feel like I can make out the top letter of the chart when it comes to this byzantine subject. Thus handicapped, I'm reduced to free market utilitarian analogies and firsthand experiences. Regarding the former, imagine how expensive and inefficient auto insurance, care, and usage would be if insurance companies footed the bill for every driver's flat tire, fuel up, and rim upgrade, or, even more profligately, if private auto insurance was abolished and instead all a person had to do was provide a driver's license to have these services performed, or if a home insurance provider was required to indiscriminately sell a home insurance policy to a home owner whose house had just burned down.

As far as personal experience goes, the head of my company's benefits department has earnestly told me that if one of our employees requests reimbursement for a pack of condoms, the affordable care act requires us to pay up. With a doc in the box that completely covers me and my family without my having to (directly!) pay a dime, I'm sensitive to concerns over--outright hostility to, really--the law's implementation among our corporate brain trust. I've been fortunate not to have ever fallen ill in the decade I've been an employee, but with a baby on the way, I've finally started trying to get to work on some long overdue homework.

Other questions linger. Will other companies follow the lead of Walgreens, UPS, and IBM and begin dumping their employees onto the public exchanges in the future, bringing about an effective socialization of health care in the US? Will the seemingly inexorable trend away from a national norm of working for a living necessitate the separation of health insurance and employment?

Nigeria had fewer people than Chicago when I was a wee lad

The Pew Research Center is an honest organization that provides often interesting and useful data on social issues, public opinion and demographic trends. That assertion, though, needs to be qualified by pointing out that Pew is honest by way of commission, while it is often less so by way of omission. The center regularly conducts a survey entitled "News IQ" in which American adults are surveyed on their knowledge of current events.

If I recall correctly, Pew originally included racial breakdowns in the quiz results, though it stopped doing so several years ago and it looks as though Pew only maintains the most recent results on its site. Now it appears as though a stop to breaking down results by sex is imminent. Report results from the latest survey only separate out male and female responses for three questions that specifically have to do with women (tragically, men performed better on all three!). However, after completing the quiz online, results are broken down by sex, age, and educational attainment.

While men performed better on the three ostensibly girl power questions (identifying Marissa Mayer, the percentage of congress critters who are female, and female college graduation rates), women actually outscored men on two of the thirteen items, the two concerning subjects of elevated interest to many women--same-sex marriage and educational curricula. While sexless feminists might be interested in female figures engaged in traditionally masculine pursuits, most women are far more interested in traditionally (and biologically) feminine concerns like social inclusion and nurturing.

If Pew stops reporting results by sex, we're left with age (fairly predictable question by question and a dead giveaway overall), education (more obvious than the outcome of a Globetrotters-Generals game), and party affiliation (almost indistinguishable this time around).

One age-related result does catch the eye:

Percentages who correctly answered "Nigeria" by age range:

18-29 -- 47%
30-49 -- 45%
50-64 -- 43%
65+ -- 29%

The question is multiple choice with four possible answers, so old fogies are essentially oblivious to the specific differences in rates of fertility between various different countries in the world. You don't have to care about demographics for demographics to care about you, of course.

Here come the Saxons

While there may be a mainstream publication that is more zealously in favor of open borders than the WSJ is, I'm unaware of its existence. So it's a relief to see a letters to the editor section that looks like this in response to Ellis island paeans by a renowned beltway insider like Michael Barone:

Hostility across the board, with the exception of the ethnic activist writing in an official capacity to express solidarity with the thrust of the piece while complaining that 19th century Chinese immigrants to the US were passed over in Barone's xenophilic celebration of settlers.

I say "relief" rather than "hopeful" or "encouraging" because despite popular opposition to continued unchecked immigration, it continues mostly unabated by anything more than economic conditions within the US and the sending countries.