Us vs Them, continued

You may have seen a graph charting a correlation between the average IQ by state and which presidential candidate that state voted for. The evidence implies that only an idiot would vote for Bush. You won’t find a lot of argument from me. If you need to catch up you can start with gurton’s post.

Following that path for a bit you find that the graph seems to have actually originated during the 2000 elections, with Kerry’s name replacing Gore’s. For what it’s worth I’ll point out that it doesn’t really make much difference for the sake of this illustration because the 2004 election mirrored the results of the last election in every way that counts. Who cares if it’s a reprint, is what I’m saying.

Further reading reveals that even the original graph seems to be rather heavily manipulated. The scores seem to vary far more than should be allowed by the laws of averaging. If IQ is measured on a scale of 200, with 100 being average, the rules say that mediation should only be by a range of 30 points, and for an entire state’s population to be 30 points higher on average than another state is pretty far-fetched. If I was going for a punchline here I’d say, “especially in America”. Ba-dum-bump.

A bit of research soon exposes the graph to be nothing more than a convenient arrangement of stats. And everyone knows that stats can be manipulated to prove anything. Or at least 65% of you know that.

One of gurton’s readers took issue with his post, decrying foul and fraud and all that. And while I appreciate the helpful link pointing out the debunking I can’t help but feel that, once again, the point has been missed. Bush is a short-sighted Americentric trigger-happy cowboy, and voting for him is the equivalent of telling the rest of the world, which America claims to be defending for Democracy, to fuck off.

Our blogs use a brilliantly helpful bit of software called MT Blacklist, which lets admin-types block commenting from various sources in various ways (to combat blog-spamming), and it looks like gurton’s reader has found himself prevented from commenting further because his name closely resembles someone I routinely bar from commenting on my own blog. Can’t be helped, unfortunately. A collective pool is what makes Blacklist work and I’m not about to change it.

At any rate, I only mention this because this reader, thinking he was being censored, was angered enough by gurton’s post that he went to some pains to email gurton and me. I’ll leave it up to gurton to respond to the portion directed to him. If you have by now clicked on the link above and got yourself caught up then I can safely get on with the story, addressing this reader here:

DJ: So by your logic it seems to me that you are
implying that simply claiming information is correct
(despite actual truth) makes one credible and/or an
unsuken boat, but to do some investigation and
critical thinking into possibly false and/or poorly
build arguments while making opinionated claims (such
as “white liberals don’t really think much about
nonwhites”) makes one not credible and a “sunk boat”?

Um. No. That’s not what I’m saying. I think if you were interested in intelligent debate you wouldn’t waste our time (yours or mine) by swinging that bat. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that all I was saying is that while it’s great to debunk false statements you don’t get to be a saint when you reveal yourself to be just as fallible as everyone else. Making such a sweeping and obviously grossly inaccurate judgement as “white liberals don’t really think much about nonwhites” just comes across as projection. The stereotype, after all, is that it’s the conservatives who don’t care about non-whites except as cheap labour and a threat to their women-folk. The white liberals are the ones who are stereotypically guilty of sympathetic racism, bending over backwards to run to the aid of the downtrodden coloured man.

As for myself I think any politician has a responsibility to ensure that his mandate best reflects the needs of society on the largest scale possible. If America is going to claim to be the Protector of Earth and the World Democracy Police then America should start acting in the best interest of the world at large instead of the same old short-sighted masturbation that funds and trains future terrorists. The Boss doesn’t get the luxury of Us Versus Them anymore.

Graph or no graph, you’d have to be an idiot to vote for Bush.

– dj

And now for some pointed levity.