Lewes Forum thread

Fascinating piece in, of all places, the Daily Mail which strongly suggests a link between low intelligence and right wing political views.

I thought everybody knew that !!

Now now, DFL. I was doing my best to present this objectively.

Oops, yes sorry about that, mustn't lead Paul (you know who) et al astray !!

What's neat is that the BTL comments on the Daily Heil piece confirm the conclusions of the research rather well.

They do, don't they? I confess that did make me laugh.

It does help explain the financial crisis the banks got us into: The Masters of the Universe with their 'I'll leave the country if you don't give me my bonus'.

That's so funny... and in the Mail too. The comments are icing on the cake.

I've always felt any left/right leanings had a fair bit to do with imagination. i.e. those on the right tended to lack it.
There's also empathy. Those on the right don't tend to have much of this either.

Paul Newman and observer are both pretty good examples.

Given that many of those who use this forum frequently dispense anti- Daily Mail comments why suddenly is this piece so easily accepted? I do not read the Mail and will not on this accasion, I do not believe it to give a balanced view. Not really on to accept those pieces one agrees with and reject those we do not, in this case a shrouded attack on the right. Does anyone really believe that right wing policital tendencies indicate low-intelligence?

'Does anyone really believe that right wing policital tendencies indicate low-intelligence?'
No, not among the rich, whose interest right-wing politics exists to protect. But I always wonder why ordinary people support right-wing politics. I understand why racists do, but anyone else...?

It's a Brock University of Canada study published in the journal Psychological Science. The Daily Mail picked it up, as well as many other newspapers. You can read the study for yourself if you don't trust the Mail to get it right. Obviously doesn't mean all right-wingers are stupid and all liberals are bright, but the reasons they suggest for the link between low intelligence and conservative views have a certain logic to them and the sample size of the groups studied was certainly big enough to take seriously. Certainly good for a smile, and I have a few friends to forward the article to!

Here's another interesting example someone mentioned the other day: 'The great puzzle of US politics - which the journalist Thomas Frank tries to unravel in his new book, Pity the Billionaire - is that the agenda is dictated by those who want an even more extreme version of pro-market policies that have patently failed.' I blame the ordinary people who support them because, presumably, they're too slow to see what's going on.

JRSussex, I considered that and before I posted the first link I did the research that Independent Thinker did and tracked down other reports in other media of the same study. If I could have posted two links in the same OP I would probably have included both, but in the end I favoured the Daily Mail article on the basis that it does seem to me to be a paper for the hard of thinking and that consequently many would be reading the piece. The quality of some of the debate in the comments appended suggest that the hard of thinking are indeed somewhat challenged by it...

Clifford - Your post (16.36) I appreciate the reasoning behind your comment, the answer may be that those who grew up in true poverty bear in mind some of the politicians decisions made by those who "represented" the working class of this country. The Labour party who were no different to the Tory's and Liberals in that they all, in the main, got rich irrespective of the many hard times that we the working class had to endure. I would never vote Labour again, they are the most hypocritical of the lot in their pretence of caring for the working class. One of the most recent examples is John Prescott, "I will never go into the House of Lords". He stuck by that right up until he was given the opportunity to do so.

jrsussex: completely agree with you about Labour. But I'm one of those people who think they have been a right-wing party since the flurry of welfare statism in the 1940s. 'Right-wing' in this case meaning a capitalist party.

Phew, someone has over done it with the eau de preen ( and there is no debate about who thinks they are the cleverest is there.) There have been two great post war governments Attlees and Thatchers .Only the insufferably smug tribal left refuse to see the merit of both.The conservatives now are those who think institutions designed for the 1940s are right for today. True Labour have been good at big state planning but taken overall...left to Labour Britain would have been an Atlantic East Germany , left to the Conservatives it would have been more like America.The East German state did lots of good thing and Labour made that end its explicit objective for most of the 20th century. I know which I prefer.
On the supposed IQ of the left ,well there have been surveys and Conservative voters shade Labour. Liberals and Greens are ahead but thats because they are exclusively middle-class. Allowing for class the Liberals and Greens are dangerously stupid and this is compounded by a sort of quasi religious faith in their rightness .That is why I feel( in proper humility) I have to make a case, with evidence. SQ Clifford and the rest of the babblers just tell us how they feel.
How do you feel about that ? Please ,express yourselves , its all good .

What does 'tribal mean?

It means people who still live in caves Clifford, or they would do if the Tories had their way ! Although, and I hate to say this, I sort of sympathise with what PN says !! I do believe that a lot of Labourites are hypocritical, for example Kinnock, Prescott etc., and under Blair, labour were DEFINITELY a Tory government. But the bottom line for me is, never mind who has what IQ, when is any government going to start sorting this country out, get people back to work, or if not, at least provide some form of support ?

Mr Newman says: " I have to make a case, with evidence" but provides zero evidence when he asserts - "there have been surveys and Conservative voters shade Labour etc .. " - in contrast the original post provided a link to the evidence in question. It is possible to investigate whether the methodology and conclusions of study in question are of good quality, but with Paul's claims we have no way of checking unless he provides the evidence that makes his case.

Bloke, think PN is referring to a study from 2008 which contrasted how people voted in 2001 with their IQ aged 10 (which they got from a 1970 study). Which saw the Greens and Lib Dems 5 IQ points ahead of Labour and Tory voters (who were .7 of a point apart), with the BNP a further 5 points behind. Of course people vote for all kinds of reasons that aren't associated with left/right views. Tribal loyalty, "time for a change", that kind of thing, but interesting to see a 10 point difference between LD/Greens and BNP which matches up with the recent study so looks like PN has helped show that there really is something to it.

Eau de preen eh Paul? What, because I gave a list of things I value achieved by left of centre governments?
I'm interested that you'd rather live in America than Europe. I wouldn't. America is teetering on the edge of disaster driven by a deluded sense of its importance in the world, an absolutely unsustainable consumption of fossil fuel (5 times what is sustainable in fact) and a vast debt to China. It has some of the worst unbreachable social divisions anywhere in the world, a political system which is - certainly on the right - almost entirely based on pedigree and/or extraordinary sums of money, and a health "system" which bankrupts huge numbers of ordinary people. In fact, the indices for the poor are really horrible: bad education, bad housing, early death and very little chance of emerging from that. My guess is that the American dream is more like a nightmare for a huge number of people.

Hate to quibble, SQ, but families are still sometimes split up if they're homeless. If their local council finds them intentionally homeless (eg, because of rent arrears), and they don't manage to find friends or relatives they can stay with when they're chucked out of their temporary accommodation as a result of the "intentional" decision, the children are occasionally taken into care on child protection grounds.
And although you can't be evictedn without a court order, getting that is still a formality as the assured shorthold tenancy does not allow any defence to a notice seeking permission.
No prizes for guessing which PM brought those in!

Fair enough, ACT. Still, we're not back in Cathy Come Home territory quite yet.

I know this will provoke howls of derision from the usual quarters, but this article by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian today is the funniest thing I've read in ages so I'll risk the taunts.

You should get out more SQ , takes a special kind of dumb to read the words East Germany and conjure the glories of European civilisation ( achieved under conditions of legendary capitalist aggression. The US comparison is idiotic on mobility given its geographical spread ethnic diversity ( and a number of other special features) and only America saved Europe from the military dictatorships favoured by you. Even given all this our mobility is worse , compounded by our highly redistributive tax and welfare system and as for debts the US is vastly better placed than we are

Gasp ...you are complaining about pedigree in the right of American politics because of a few figure head families .Mandelson( Morrison), Milliband ( Ralph) Toynbee, Benn , Dunwoody have you any idea how incestuous the left is ? Thats the joke .
Incidentally the US economy is recovering faster than sclerotic Europe which is turning, continent wide on the left who (in between patting their own backs on how much money they spent) bankrupted us all). ..and we are go , it was the bankers... no it was not ! It was government spending in a boom they let rip.

And it takes a very special kind of idiocy to (a) pose the choice "East Germany" or "America" and then (b) assume that my thumbnail sketch of the some of the social problems which exist in America suggests that I would favour East Germany. You set up the false dichotomy; I simply ignored it.

You've typically skipped over all the reasons that America is showing every sign of becoming a failing state, not least the fact that it's entirely in hock to China and seems to be incapable of confronting that. At the moment the Republican rhetoric is all about "lowering taxes" and "making America great again": that's BS, frankly. (62% of all bankruptcies in 2009 were because of unpaid medical bills. How is that possible in the "land of the free"?)

I have no problem at all with members of the same family sharing their values with their children; don't be so silly. I do have a problem with people like Dubbya ascending to the Presidency of the US as if by divine right when in any normal democratic process he have had trouble being selected as a candidate for parish council, let alone being elected. And the present Republican contest is causing even the doughtiest defenders of US democracy real concern when it's quite clear that whoever has the deepest pockets will win the race. The message is very obvious: in the US unless you have money (and a lot of it) you have no power, no voice and very little chance of changing that.

Please note: do not infer that because I think the US is chasing a delusion fuelled by cynical politicos, rabid right-wing media and an appalling grasp of world affairs in the general population I am favouring some other communist Utopia. I am not.

Paul, if the bankers had nothing to do with it why do we own RBS now?

Paul Newman writes, 'Incidentally the US economy is recovering faster than sclerotic Europe...'

You know why that is? Because while Europe has gone in for austerity, the US has continued spending. This is interesting:

'The UK tightened, the US didn't - and from there, two roads diverged.

The recent publication of a slew of economic data finally closed the case. US GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2011 was +0.7 per cent, compared to -0.2 per cent for the UK. The unemployment situation is improving in the US and getting worse in the UK, as is consumer and business confidence and consumer spending. Manufacturing employment is growing in the US and as President Obama made clear in his State of the Union address, the car industry in Detroit is growing again. Manufacturing employment in the UK is down 25,000 on the year. The CBI industrial trends fell, as did the distributive trades surveys, which painted a less-than-rosy picture of where the retail sector is heading in 2012.'

Clifford the dollar is a reserve currency, the balance of risks is different and the increasing demand by borrowing has a cost aside form the obvious one of running out of money and creditors patience. Over borrowing was how we got here not how we get out. Give me strength ...
SQ - People like you deserve a world without America, just imagine it . You think Ed Milliband got to be Leader of the Labour Party because of his values? It was Union money and contacts His first job was working for Tony Benn !America is Continent not country , at the top it becomes symbolic but the American open system is workld`s away form the old lady`s armpit of insiders the Labour Party practice. I could go on ,look at eh egalitarian Guardian(porn for parasites). Toynbee( niece of a Earle) obviously but I like Seamus( apollogist for Stalin) Milne ,whose father was , of course Alistair Milne head of the British Bolshevik Corporation.
Oh yes dragged themselves up by the bootstraps that lot and having never had to stuggle for anything themslelves they are sooo generous with money made by people who work for it
I don`t care what you think you favour.

oh for gods sake stop paul..can't you see you sound like a raving nutter..were you at the port ?
SQ don't reply hes obviously discredited himself with that tirade of bilge.

Paul, if you've ever read any of my posts you'd notice I've no time for the Labour party or the Milibands. I must admit, though, I did enjoy your desperate answer. Looks like the contradictions of capitalism are really beginning to get you down. Buck up. At least we share an enthusiasm for rugby so all is not lost.

Don't worry Bastian: I've backed slowly away with no sudden movements.

Boo hoo , the girls are whspering about me (probably about their high IQs
.. )

Whilst I'm not a fan of anyone boasting about their intelligence ( as, thankfully, nobody on this thread has done) Tories boasting about their ignorance are even more nauseating.

The right's obsession with monetarism, economic liberalism and deregulation Is like a dog returning to its vomit.