Note to Liberals: You're Not Smarter Than Everyone Else. Really.
A chart dramatically demonstrating that Bush voters are much dumber than Gore voters is making its way through all the chic liberal circles right now. I know, because it ended up in my Inbox through one of the charming "academic" lists that I subscribe to as a humanities graduate student (I'm going to withhold the name of the responsible party - who also happens to be a blogger and should know better - for reasons that will soon become clear). It's also making its way through the blogosphere. The chart is, of course, a complete hoax.
First, I love it how liberals will embrace IQ tests when it suits their purposes. But when you try to argue that smarter kids should be tracked differently in school than their peers, it suddenly becomes all about EQ and OQ and whatever other feel good "every child is as good as every other child" pseudo-science is fashionable that week. But that's not the point. The point is that liberals want so badly to believe that Bush voters are stupid that they'll neglect even basic fact-checking when encountering something that should set off their bullshit detector. They want to believe that they're smarter so badly that they'll unquestionably accept anything that tells them so.
Listen, I'm not here to psychoanalyze. But maybe (just maybe) a few too many of these kids were raised by a Mommy who, no matter how awkward they were in Little League or how badly they failed socially, always stroked their hair and told them how much smarter and brighter and better they were then everyone else. And maybe (just maybe) now that they're failing at the federal level, losing at the state level, and getting demolished at the local level - maybe they're still looking a little bit for that reassurance.
The alternative is that they're so blindly arrogant that they can't even conceptualize the possibility that people may have legitimate disagreements with them. "It can't be that we're wrong - it must be that they're stupid." Could they really be that myopic? As it says at the bottom of this IQ chart, come to your own conclusions.
First, I love it how liberals will embrace IQ tests when it suits their purposes. But when you try to argue that smarter kids should be tracked differently in school than their peers, it suddenly becomes all about EQ and OQ and whatever other feel good "every child is as good as every other child" pseudo-science is fashionable that week. But that's not the point. The point is that liberals want so badly to believe that Bush voters are stupid that they'll neglect even basic fact-checking when encountering something that should set off their bullshit detector. They want to believe that they're smarter so badly that they'll unquestionably accept anything that tells them so.
Listen, I'm not here to psychoanalyze. But maybe (just maybe) a few too many of these kids were raised by a Mommy who, no matter how awkward they were in Little League or how badly they failed socially, always stroked their hair and told them how much smarter and brighter and better they were then everyone else. And maybe (just maybe) now that they're failing at the federal level, losing at the state level, and getting demolished at the local level - maybe they're still looking a little bit for that reassurance.
The alternative is that they're so blindly arrogant that they can't even conceptualize the possibility that people may have legitimate disagreements with them. "It can't be that we're wrong - it must be that they're stupid." Could they really be that myopic? As it says at the bottom of this IQ chart, come to your own conclusions.
