The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Need I remind you, Crissa, that America's Smartest City is in the South?

Sometimes I agree with the Daily Beast and sometimes I don't. But to be honest, I cannot for the life of me understand what the fuck the methodology of that article is or what they are attempting to show. I mean, don't get me wrong: Fresno is a hellhole. Just ask K: nothing good has ever come from Fresno. But while it does have an abysmally low college completion rate for California, it's still better than say, West Virgina.

-Username17

CatharzGodfoot wrote:I wouldn't know; I've managed to avoid both so far. But seriously, tit for tat won't show whether or not the South has a higher IQ than the North. I only posted the link out of civic pride.

First, some rules of the game. We only ranked metropolitan areas (the cities and their suburbs) of 1 million people or more, using Census data, with the definition of each greater metropolitan area defined by Nielsen. That gave us 55 in all. All data was then organized on a per-capita basis, so that a resident of Norfolk, Virginia, and New York, New York, had equal weight. We’re looking for the brainiest cities, not the biggest.

Then we divided the criteria into two halves: Half for education, and half for intellectual environment. The education half encompassed how many residents had bachelor’s degrees (35 percent weighting) and graduate degrees (15 percent). No credit was given for “some college,” or “some grad school”—we rewarded those who finished the race. The intellectual environmental half had three subparts. First, we looked at nonfiction book sales (25 percent), as tracked by Nielsen BookScan, the nation’s leading provider of accurate point-of-sale data, which tracks roughly 300,000 titles each week. We focused on nonfiction as an imperfect proxy for intellectual vigor, because overall sales are dominated by fiction works that, while entertaining, aren’t always particularly thought-provoking. We also measured the ratio of institutions of higher education (15 percent), as defined by the federal government—different than just measuring college degrees, this acknowledges that universities don’t just churn out diplomas, but instead drive the intellectual vigor of cities. Finally, many studies link intelligence and political engagement, so we weighed this, too, as measured by the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots in the last presidential election (10 percent). (Our relatively small weighting acknowledges that numerous other local factors can affect turnout.)

Once we had all these comparable, per-capita figures, we ranked the cities in each category, assigning 10 points to those near the very top, and 0 to the bottom, with scores allocated between in a broad bell curve. We then added the totals, and multiplied by two, which made for a perfect score of 200, a wash-out score of 0, and an average score right at 100—close to the exact parameters of a classic IQ test.

So behold, our first-ever rankings of America’s smartest cities, complete with The Daily Beast’s civic IQ total for each. It’s flawed, as all are such exercises, but also quite interesting and often telling. We intend to refine our methodology and welcome feedback.

FrankTrollman wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:Need I remind you, Crissa, that America's Smartest City is in the South?

Sometimes I agree with the Daily Beast and sometimes I don't. But to be honest, I cannot for the life of me understand what the fuck the methodology of that article is or what they are attempting to show. I mean, don't get me wrong: Fresno is a hellhole. Just ask K: nothing good has ever come from Fresno. But while it does have an abysmally low college completion rate for California, it's still better than say, West Virgina.

vdare wrote:VDARE.COM is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World...At a time when Americans were not made to feel guilty about their heritage, every school kid knew who she was.

vdare wrote:If the same paranoid logic {By which he means, supporting the interests of the racists that fund it I think} were applied to the opposition to Defend Colorado Now, we would learn that it includes Hispanic pressure groups like La Raza, which are essentially the creation of the Ford Foundation, founded by the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford, and assorted Marxist revolutionary wannabes. (Except that this would be true.)

vdare wrote:At least Flynn acknowledged that John Tanton, in many ways the Godfather of the immigration reform movement, really is a liberal environmentalist who worries about population pressures. I came to the immigration issue from the right—as a journalist writing for Forbes, National Review, even (say it ain’t so!) the immigration-crazed Wall Street Journal—and it was a revelation to me to learn that there are environmentalists who are not just refugee socialists looking for a new excuse to push people around, but who genuinely care about trees.

vdare wrote:Like the immigration reform movement in general, it is a coalition, agreed only on the need for immigration reduction.

vdare wrote:At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing [Virginia Dare's] name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.

vdare wrote: We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as “white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists.

wikipedia wrote:The Center for American Unity is an American non-profit educational organization dedicated to "preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century". In practice, this means a concern with "these emerging threats: mass immigration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, and affirmative action", which it views as threatening to the United States' survival "as a nation-state, the political expression of a distinct American people".

Parthenon wrote:The video its talking about is here.

Jilocasin wrote:Corporations having the capability to actually wage war?
Hell yes.

Maxus wrote:There might as well be.

They interpret the world in a vastly different way and have such a hugely different way to see it.

It's down to indoctrination, I guess.

If you're raised around, say, the far-right religious nut crowd, and grow up there, and don't ever associate with people who aren't like you, that leaves you very unprepared for the real world and colors how you see everything.

Draco_Argentum wrote:I figure this. The title of the paper the blog is referring to should tell you what to expect. "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions"

Kaelik wrote:

Draco_Argentum wrote:I figure this. The title of the paper the blog is referring to should tell you what to expect. "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions"

So what you are saying is that Crissa thinks I am more sexist because she can't find anything to prove it.

It makes so much sense.

[url=http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/if-congress-were-all-women.php wrote:Matthew Yglesias[/url]]It’s hard to know how to even evaluate that claim, but we can look at the question of what would happen if the 83 male senators all vanished one day and the 17 women ignored quorum rules and rushed ahead on their own. The answer, at least as measured by DW-NOMINATE scores is that the Senate would get much more liberal. The new most-conservative Senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a little bit less-conservative than your average Republican. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are the two least-conservative Republicans. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan who’s currently in the most liberal third of the Senate would become the median voter.