Comparing strong Republicans with strong Democrats, Carl finds that Republicans have a 5.48 IQ point advantage over Democrats. Broadening party affiliation to include moderate to merely leaning respondents still results in a Republican advantage of 3.47 IQ points and 2.47 IQ points respectively. Carl reconciles his findings with the social science literature that reports that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives by proposing that Americans with classically liberal beliefs are even smarter. Carl further reports that those who endorse both social conservatism and economic statism also have lower verbal IQ scores.
“Overall, my findings suggest that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans,” concludes Carl. If the dumb, I mean socially conservative, Republicans keep disrespecting us classical liberals, we’ll take our IQ points and go home.
As gratifying as Carl’s research findings are, it is still a deep puzzle to me why it apparently takes high intelligence to understand that the government should stay out of both the bedroom and the boardroom.
http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/13/are-conservatives-dumber-than-liberals
Climate science is looking simpler by the day. We know that there are quasi 30 year regimes – chaotic at the core – leading to warming and cooling in the 20th century. The last 2 full regimes – 1944 to 1998 – saw 0.4K of warming at a rate 0.07K/decade. It is quite unlikely that all the warming was anthropogenic CO2. Climate regime theory suggests non warming at the very least for decades. Nor is it guaranteed that the next shift will be to yet warmer. This is fundamentally at odds to the ‘realist’ meme.
Nor is it even guaranteed that the central meme of CO2 levels higher than for millions of years is more than an artifact of the ice core proxy.
But can the paroxysms of illogic – not the mention the tortuous syntax – revealed in every comment from these ‘realists’ be laid at the door of a mere lack of IQ points? It seems much more likely to go well beyond that to a psychopathology of progressive groupthink.
