European Politics
- Thread starter Forostar
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Black Wizard
Pleb Hunter
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Big win in first round of Presidential elections for anti-populist lawyer in Slovakia @Black Wizard @GhostofCain
Black Wizard
Pleb Hunter
That's not the EU Parliament elections.
D
Deleted member 7164
Guest
Sorry Foro for the late reply. It is not the same, the parties need to give out PM candidates before the election. In Spanish case apparently it gets voted in by the parliament after the elections. Here a party X with leader A wins over Y and leader B, A will get auto mandate to construct a cabinet as prime minister. In Spain if I get correctly there are no leaders, after elections X will have a majority in the parliament so they can vote in their leader A as PM, who is prior to that just a holder of the parliament seat.
Dr. Eddies Wingman
Brighter than thousand_suns
Wonder what put Norway in 1st in the "Planet and climate" category. Being a large exporter of oil and gas, I would expect us to score lower here. But I guess we're good at lining the pockets of climate-focused NGOs worldwide ... and paying tropical countries good money for preserving rain-forest ... only to see them chop it down anyway.
Maybe it's the very friendly tax policy towards electric cars?
GhostofCain
Ancient Mariner
That’s nice. Let’s hope the rest of Europe follows suit.
Black Wizard
Pleb Hunter
@Forostar
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47648086
Dutch populist vote surge costs PM Rutte senate majority
The governing centre-right coalition in the Netherlands has lost its senate majority after a populist party surged in provincial elections.
The anti-immigration Forum for Democracy is set to win most votes and have as many seats in the upper house as Prime Minister Mark Rutte's party.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47648086
Dutch populist vote surge costs PM Rutte senate majority
The governing centre-right coalition in the Netherlands has lost its senate majority after a populist party surged in provincial elections.
The anti-immigration Forum for Democracy is set to win most votes and have as many seats in the upper house as Prime Minister Mark Rutte's party.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
It is sickening if you realize what people have voted for. "Enjoy" this good article everybody (1 year old but still relevant):
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/20/the-new-dutch-disease-is-white-nationalism/
The New Dutch Disease Is White Nationalism
An upstart far-right party in the Netherlands threatens to entrench xenophobia in one of Europe’s most progressive countries.
As voters in the Netherlands gear up for local elections, to be held across the country on March 21, the old adage that all politics are local is being turned on its head. For the Dutch, the opposite is equally true: Local politics are national. Since all cities and towns vote on the same day, prominent national politicians intrude, elevating mundane local elections that used to center on debates about bicycle paths and garbage collection into a national spectacle.
After last year’s nasty campaign that involved sitting Prime Minister Mark Rutte arguing that his rival Geert Wilders, the leader of the nativist Party for Freedom (PVV), would plunge the Netherlands into chaos and Wilders countering that not a single Dutch citizen believed Rutte anymore, the incumbent Rutte defeated Wilders in the March 2017 national election. The results were welcomed by European leaders such as Angela Merkel as a “good day for democracy.” But, as more critical observers have noted, Rutte’s win wasn’t a definitive victory for sensible centrism; indeed, he managed to triumph over the Dutch far-right by moving consistently further to the right himself — by dog whistling to anti-immigration voters and adopting positions similar to Wilders’s own.
If the biggest electoral headline from the Netherlands a year ago was Rutte’s success in fending off a challenge from Wilders, the less trumpeted but equally noteworthy news was the success of a new player in town — the self-styled far-right intellectual-turned-politician Thierry Baudet. Presenting himself to his audience on at least one occasion draped over a grand piano, Baudet, who is 35, combines a sentimental attachment to European high culture with the spirit of an online culture warrior. He has expressed support for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both of whom he views as strong leaders. He has also cast doubt on investigations showing that Russia was responsible for the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet over Ukraine that killed nearly 200 Dutch citizens.
With a talent for manufactured outrage and victimhood, Baudet exemplifies the politics of the 21st century. Last year, banking on the irresistibility of his persona to journalists, Baudet’s Forum for Democracy (FvD), a think tank reconfigured as a political party, entered parliament with two out of 150 seats — a modest but remarkable result for a party that didn’t exist in the previous election. Since then, Baudet has captivated the Dutch in the same way that Wilders benefited from the media’s obsessive attention to his every move since he founded his own party in 2006.
Baudet’s two-man party has, in recent polls, tied or even overtaken Wilders’s PVV, drawing voters from among Wilders’s supporters as well as Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). The local elections will be the first big test for Baudet and the FvD, which is fielding candidates in the Netherlands’ two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
The predictions look promising for the FvD. If the polls are correct, Baudet will achieve something that Wilders has never managed nor attempted — to secure a foothold in Amsterdam’s city council. Because Amsterdam is known to have a political culture and electorate that are predominantly leftist, the PVV simply never bothered fielding candidates there, fearing that it would not win any seats and might be humiliated. However, the FvD may win as many as four seats in a city that has long thought of itself as the “Republic of Amsterdam,” bucking the racist and nativist sentiments that have swept the rest of the country — much like the Californian cities that have defiantly resisted Trump’s policies.
Many Dutch politicians and journalists have long hoped that once Wilders ran out of steam, the problem of nativist populism would fade from the scene. Baudet, however, plays a long game. He is building an ideology for the 21st century that seeks to re-establish the nation-state in the form that 19th-century Europeans imagined for it while simultaneously ridding the political space of both internal and external enemies. Liberated from European bureaucrats, Muslim immigrants, and feminists alike, it is the culture war of the American alt-right cloaked in the garb of European intellectual history
Baudet’s FvD is different from Wilders’s PVV in several ways. First, there is a distinct difference in style. The PVV has long been characterized as populist, and it depends on leeching off and perpetuating popular frustration to win votes. Though the PVV has been consistent in the harshly Islamophobic content of its rhetoric, its ideological grounding always seemed hodgepodge at best, oscillating between the paranoid style of its chief ideologue, Martin Bosma (a Dutch David Horowitz of sorts), and naked opportunism.
In contrast, the FvD likes to think of itself as a party that has a solid intellectual grounding. (It was recently announced that Paul Cliteur, a well-known professor at Leiden University, will head the party’s “scientific institute.”) Long before entering politics, Baudet donned the cloak of the public intellectual, penning polemics on topics including modern art and the European Union, often repeating on loop that it was all connected to oikophobia. Baudet defines this term, taken from the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton, as a “pathological aversion” to the national home. Oikophobia, he insists, is destroying the nation-state through its concerted support for feminism, cultural Marxism, modern art, immigration, the European Union, and whatever else can be cast as the vague yet menacing bogeyman of the paranoid right.
This focus on an omnipresent and all-encompassing threat is the second shift from Wilders’s immigration-centric form of politics. The two men have a past working relationship, and Baudet has advised PVV politicians behind the scenes. However, when it comes to ideology, Baudet casts a far wider net. The hallmark of Wilders’s platform is a mix of nationalist kitsch and calculated cruelty toward the country’s Muslim population and immigrants, couched in the language of civil war. Wilders offers Dutch voters a form of politics based on persecution and perpetual resentment of immigrants and minorities. And while his rhetoric has escalated to even more rabid extremes in response to the electoral threat Baudet represents, there is also something impotent about it. Baudet, though equally obsessed with Islam, is reinventing the nativist platform in a way that anyone familiar with the American alt-right will instantly recognize; it is a political brand built around an imagined assault on ethnically white people and their culture — and the need to fight back. Significantly, Baudet is also popular among a sizable section of the younger generation — much more so than Wilders ever was.
Finally, Baudet represents a break with recent Dutch political culture. In many ways, he seems to channel the legacy of Pim Fortuyn, the iconic populist politician murdered in 2002. Fortuyn carried the torch of the Dutch tradition of anti-clericalism. In the 20th century, anti-clericalists targeted the church’s influence on Dutch society; it was only logical that this tradition of extreme secularism would set its sights on Islam next. And while Baudet seems to play a role very similar to Fortuyn — that of the dandy intellectual, able to upset and fluster his opponents with a flurry of theatrics and eloquence — his ideology represents the next chapter in the ever-escalating nativist resentment that has the Netherlands in its grip.
Where Wilders introduced a religious crusader’s fanaticism to the debate about Islam, Baudet is casting himself as the country’s lone defender of Western culture and as a champion of white people in particular. Even before entering politics, Baudet spoke of wanting to ensure that Europe remained “predominantly white and culturally as it is.” Last year, he claimed that Dutch society was being “diluted homeopathically” by an influx of refugees and migrants. He attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to mass migration (a myth long since debunked by scholars but popular on the far-right), explaining that the marble busts of Roman emperors in museums “look like us” but that modern-day Italians clearly look very different. In other words, immigration and ethnic mixing are the harbinger of political decay.
Baudet has suggested that the West suffers from an “autoimmune disease,” turning the body politic against itself and that “malicious, aggressive elements are being introduced in unheard numbers into our societal body.” He defended a mob smashing windows and threatening politicians at a local town hall meeting about taking in refugees as an “act of self-defense” against an “injection of criminality.”
Baudet consistently uses rhetoric that conjures the people as an organic being, poisoned by both external and internal enemies — language that clearly resembles that of fascist intellectuals in the early 20th century who were obsessed with the ethnic hygiene of their society. It is worth recalling that after the fascist intellectuals came the politicians who decided that this language needed to be matched by policy.
Most of the time, Baudet chooses his words carefully. In the speech to launch his political party, he called for the restoration and protection of “Boreal Europe.” To most listeners, the term seemed archaic and quaint. Boreal Europe stems from the myth that Europeans are of Aryan and polar descent and is used to envision an ethnically white space north of the line from Gibraltar to Vladivostok.
But the term also has a clear political lineage. It appeared on the margins of French intellectual life right after World War II and was popularized from the 1980s onward by the French ethno-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and father of its current leader, Marine Le Pen. Apart from his French inspirations, Baudet is cozy with American thinkers of the racist right: A few months ago, he sat down for a long dinner with Jared Taylor, the self-proclaimed race realist and proponent of scientific racism.
Whenever Baudet is called out, he is quick to play innocent — but he never quite convinces. Two weeks ago, one of his party’s top candidates in Amsterdam stepped down after having repeatedly suggested that black people simply have a lower IQ than white people and arguing that same-sex marriage had rendered society less intelligent (the claim being that gay people are smarter than straight people and that the marriages they used to settle for at least produced smart babies). Pressed for comment, Baudet made contradictory statements, refused to disavow his candidate, and insisted that differing IQ scores among different races were simply a matter of scientific fact.
In the Netherlands, vulgar racism is widely considered unacceptable. But Baudet’s brand of matter-of-fact racism, which consists of claims about the natural differences among entire ethnic or racial populations, often derived from bad science and discredited theories, is on the rise. Add that to the idea that white Europe is moribund due to the twin assaults of migration and cultural self-loathing and you end up with a dangerous mix — an ideologically coherent worldview.
More troubling is the fact that this worldview is gaining mainstream legitimacy. Several Dutch media outlets ran articles and reports on Baudet’s claims about IQ as if they were a legitimate academic debate. Indeed, the FvD is spearheading a culture war that targets a population that has in recent years been receptive to the aggressive political proselytizing of Wilders. For such voters, Baudet’s party represents the logical next step.
In the early 2000s, the Netherlands was one of the first countries, along with Austria, to experience the rise of anti-establishment populism. Now, as the country witnesses the umpteenth wave of further radicalization, it is once again becoming the bellwether of Europe.
Local elections may seem insignificant, but they are now the primary battleground where openly racist politics and politicians, cloaked in eloquence and intellectual pretension, are establishing electoral footholds and hijacking Dutch political debate. Those concerned about the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism and white supremacist politics in Europe should pay attention. Thierry Baudet’s rise to national prominence signals more darkness to come.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/20/the-new-dutch-disease-is-white-nationalism/
The New Dutch Disease Is White Nationalism
An upstart far-right party in the Netherlands threatens to entrench xenophobia in one of Europe’s most progressive countries.
As voters in the Netherlands gear up for local elections, to be held across the country on March 21, the old adage that all politics are local is being turned on its head. For the Dutch, the opposite is equally true: Local politics are national. Since all cities and towns vote on the same day, prominent national politicians intrude, elevating mundane local elections that used to center on debates about bicycle paths and garbage collection into a national spectacle.
After last year’s nasty campaign that involved sitting Prime Minister Mark Rutte arguing that his rival Geert Wilders, the leader of the nativist Party for Freedom (PVV), would plunge the Netherlands into chaos and Wilders countering that not a single Dutch citizen believed Rutte anymore, the incumbent Rutte defeated Wilders in the March 2017 national election. The results were welcomed by European leaders such as Angela Merkel as a “good day for democracy.” But, as more critical observers have noted, Rutte’s win wasn’t a definitive victory for sensible centrism; indeed, he managed to triumph over the Dutch far-right by moving consistently further to the right himself — by dog whistling to anti-immigration voters and adopting positions similar to Wilders’s own.
If the biggest electoral headline from the Netherlands a year ago was Rutte’s success in fending off a challenge from Wilders, the less trumpeted but equally noteworthy news was the success of a new player in town — the self-styled far-right intellectual-turned-politician Thierry Baudet. Presenting himself to his audience on at least one occasion draped over a grand piano, Baudet, who is 35, combines a sentimental attachment to European high culture with the spirit of an online culture warrior. He has expressed support for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both of whom he views as strong leaders. He has also cast doubt on investigations showing that Russia was responsible for the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet over Ukraine that killed nearly 200 Dutch citizens.
With a talent for manufactured outrage and victimhood, Baudet exemplifies the politics of the 21st century. Last year, banking on the irresistibility of his persona to journalists, Baudet’s Forum for Democracy (FvD), a think tank reconfigured as a political party, entered parliament with two out of 150 seats — a modest but remarkable result for a party that didn’t exist in the previous election. Since then, Baudet has captivated the Dutch in the same way that Wilders benefited from the media’s obsessive attention to his every move since he founded his own party in 2006.
Baudet’s two-man party has, in recent polls, tied or even overtaken Wilders’s PVV, drawing voters from among Wilders’s supporters as well as Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). The local elections will be the first big test for Baudet and the FvD, which is fielding candidates in the Netherlands’ two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
The predictions look promising for the FvD. If the polls are correct, Baudet will achieve something that Wilders has never managed nor attempted — to secure a foothold in Amsterdam’s city council. Because Amsterdam is known to have a political culture and electorate that are predominantly leftist, the PVV simply never bothered fielding candidates there, fearing that it would not win any seats and might be humiliated. However, the FvD may win as many as four seats in a city that has long thought of itself as the “Republic of Amsterdam,” bucking the racist and nativist sentiments that have swept the rest of the country — much like the Californian cities that have defiantly resisted Trump’s policies.
Many Dutch politicians and journalists have long hoped that once Wilders ran out of steam, the problem of nativist populism would fade from the scene. Baudet, however, plays a long game. He is building an ideology for the 21st century that seeks to re-establish the nation-state in the form that 19th-century Europeans imagined for it while simultaneously ridding the political space of both internal and external enemies. Liberated from European bureaucrats, Muslim immigrants, and feminists alike, it is the culture war of the American alt-right cloaked in the garb of European intellectual history
Baudet’s FvD is different from Wilders’s PVV in several ways. First, there is a distinct difference in style. The PVV has long been characterized as populist, and it depends on leeching off and perpetuating popular frustration to win votes. Though the PVV has been consistent in the harshly Islamophobic content of its rhetoric, its ideological grounding always seemed hodgepodge at best, oscillating between the paranoid style of its chief ideologue, Martin Bosma (a Dutch David Horowitz of sorts), and naked opportunism.
In contrast, the FvD likes to think of itself as a party that has a solid intellectual grounding. (It was recently announced that Paul Cliteur, a well-known professor at Leiden University, will head the party’s “scientific institute.”) Long before entering politics, Baudet donned the cloak of the public intellectual, penning polemics on topics including modern art and the European Union, often repeating on loop that it was all connected to oikophobia. Baudet defines this term, taken from the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton, as a “pathological aversion” to the national home. Oikophobia, he insists, is destroying the nation-state through its concerted support for feminism, cultural Marxism, modern art, immigration, the European Union, and whatever else can be cast as the vague yet menacing bogeyman of the paranoid right.
This focus on an omnipresent and all-encompassing threat is the second shift from Wilders’s immigration-centric form of politics. The two men have a past working relationship, and Baudet has advised PVV politicians behind the scenes. However, when it comes to ideology, Baudet casts a far wider net. The hallmark of Wilders’s platform is a mix of nationalist kitsch and calculated cruelty toward the country’s Muslim population and immigrants, couched in the language of civil war. Wilders offers Dutch voters a form of politics based on persecution and perpetual resentment of immigrants and minorities. And while his rhetoric has escalated to even more rabid extremes in response to the electoral threat Baudet represents, there is also something impotent about it. Baudet, though equally obsessed with Islam, is reinventing the nativist platform in a way that anyone familiar with the American alt-right will instantly recognize; it is a political brand built around an imagined assault on ethnically white people and their culture — and the need to fight back. Significantly, Baudet is also popular among a sizable section of the younger generation — much more so than Wilders ever was.
Finally, Baudet represents a break with recent Dutch political culture. In many ways, he seems to channel the legacy of Pim Fortuyn, the iconic populist politician murdered in 2002. Fortuyn carried the torch of the Dutch tradition of anti-clericalism. In the 20th century, anti-clericalists targeted the church’s influence on Dutch society; it was only logical that this tradition of extreme secularism would set its sights on Islam next. And while Baudet seems to play a role very similar to Fortuyn — that of the dandy intellectual, able to upset and fluster his opponents with a flurry of theatrics and eloquence — his ideology represents the next chapter in the ever-escalating nativist resentment that has the Netherlands in its grip.
Where Wilders introduced a religious crusader’s fanaticism to the debate about Islam, Baudet is casting himself as the country’s lone defender of Western culture and as a champion of white people in particular. Even before entering politics, Baudet spoke of wanting to ensure that Europe remained “predominantly white and culturally as it is.” Last year, he claimed that Dutch society was being “diluted homeopathically” by an influx of refugees and migrants. He attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to mass migration (a myth long since debunked by scholars but popular on the far-right), explaining that the marble busts of Roman emperors in museums “look like us” but that modern-day Italians clearly look very different. In other words, immigration and ethnic mixing are the harbinger of political decay.
Baudet has suggested that the West suffers from an “autoimmune disease,” turning the body politic against itself and that “malicious, aggressive elements are being introduced in unheard numbers into our societal body.” He defended a mob smashing windows and threatening politicians at a local town hall meeting about taking in refugees as an “act of self-defense” against an “injection of criminality.”
Baudet consistently uses rhetoric that conjures the people as an organic being, poisoned by both external and internal enemies — language that clearly resembles that of fascist intellectuals in the early 20th century who were obsessed with the ethnic hygiene of their society. It is worth recalling that after the fascist intellectuals came the politicians who decided that this language needed to be matched by policy.
Most of the time, Baudet chooses his words carefully. In the speech to launch his political party, he called for the restoration and protection of “Boreal Europe.” To most listeners, the term seemed archaic and quaint. Boreal Europe stems from the myth that Europeans are of Aryan and polar descent and is used to envision an ethnically white space north of the line from Gibraltar to Vladivostok.
But the term also has a clear political lineage. It appeared on the margins of French intellectual life right after World War II and was popularized from the 1980s onward by the French ethno-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and father of its current leader, Marine Le Pen. Apart from his French inspirations, Baudet is cozy with American thinkers of the racist right: A few months ago, he sat down for a long dinner with Jared Taylor, the self-proclaimed race realist and proponent of scientific racism.
Whenever Baudet is called out, he is quick to play innocent — but he never quite convinces. Two weeks ago, one of his party’s top candidates in Amsterdam stepped down after having repeatedly suggested that black people simply have a lower IQ than white people and arguing that same-sex marriage had rendered society less intelligent (the claim being that gay people are smarter than straight people and that the marriages they used to settle for at least produced smart babies). Pressed for comment, Baudet made contradictory statements, refused to disavow his candidate, and insisted that differing IQ scores among different races were simply a matter of scientific fact.
In the Netherlands, vulgar racism is widely considered unacceptable. But Baudet’s brand of matter-of-fact racism, which consists of claims about the natural differences among entire ethnic or racial populations, often derived from bad science and discredited theories, is on the rise. Add that to the idea that white Europe is moribund due to the twin assaults of migration and cultural self-loathing and you end up with a dangerous mix — an ideologically coherent worldview.
More troubling is the fact that this worldview is gaining mainstream legitimacy. Several Dutch media outlets ran articles and reports on Baudet’s claims about IQ as if they were a legitimate academic debate. Indeed, the FvD is spearheading a culture war that targets a population that has in recent years been receptive to the aggressive political proselytizing of Wilders. For such voters, Baudet’s party represents the logical next step.
In the early 2000s, the Netherlands was one of the first countries, along with Austria, to experience the rise of anti-establishment populism. Now, as the country witnesses the umpteenth wave of further radicalization, it is once again becoming the bellwether of Europe.
Local elections may seem insignificant, but they are now the primary battleground where openly racist politics and politicians, cloaked in eloquence and intellectual pretension, are establishing electoral footholds and hijacking Dutch political debate. Those concerned about the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism and white supremacist politics in Europe should pay attention. Thierry Baudet’s rise to national prominence signals more darkness to come.
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D
Deleted member 7164
Guest
It is clear to me that a significant part of Dutch society leans to the right. As such the leftists and centrists will have to take their fears into account if they don't want far right to get those votes. Uncontrolled immigration is a problem. The waves of immigration that happened came from areas European powers helped to destabilize, from Kosovo over Syria to Libya.
But bellwether? Hardly, it's not the same case everywhere. The people from the western countries such as the Netherlands, France, and Germany will have a counter-reaction to the pressures in life they perceive bad politics brought upon them, and start looking at populistic options. Others such as Poland and Hungary are intristicly nationalistic affairs.
Remember that Austria also had a "neo nazi" in power 15-20 years ago.
But bellwether? Hardly, it's not the same case everywhere. The people from the western countries such as the Netherlands, France, and Germany will have a counter-reaction to the pressures in life they perceive bad politics brought upon them, and start looking at populistic options. Others such as Poland and Hungary are intristicly nationalistic affairs.
Remember that Austria also had a "neo nazi" in power 15-20 years ago.
The Flash
Dennis Wilcock did 9/11
I think the concern is that it may not be sustainable in the long run. Welfare state and mass immigration from socioeconomically underdeveloped regions do come at odds with each other. I think moderate politicians have done a disservice to themselves and their communities by ignoring the significance of the issue for too long and letting the populists take advantage of the increasing unease among the native population.
D
Deleted member 7164
Guest
Well I'm on your side on this one but that's not what those voters think. Besides I don't believe it is a racial thing as opposed to nationalistic thing. Any concerns that Flash rightfully mentioned would be off if your/our politicians told exactly how many immigrants and why are they coming. For instance, one can take only as many under the humanitarian umbrella. You need to have sort of an integration plan for the others. The open borders policy and millions of refugees are seen as something opposed to the security and stability people want in average EU country.
Again, I don't think the immigration can be the downfall of advanced Dutch economy in any way so I don't agree with those right wingers of yours. These people also wrongly propagate the notion that a couple of million of random people can rip the EU from inside which is absurd since our economies and our societies are much stronger than the ill fated right wingers want it to be, but alas for some it's really though. Italy for example, where the poorest regions are the most affected.
The Flash
Dennis Wilcock did 9/11
Touchy subject due to its possible political implications, as seen in the case of Baudet, and I do feel a bit uneasy about addressing this in a politics thread, but this indeed is a legitimate academic debate and it's insincere to portray it as not being so.
Region based IQ studies do find differences between different regions in terms of average IQ. The results vary, but there's a consistent pattern of East Asians > Ashkenazi Jews > Europeans > Southeast Asians > Middle Easterners > Central Americans > Sub-Saharan Africans. The gaps in between vary based on the study and there have been refutations of the data and metholodogy involved for each study. There being gaps is a consistent finding, however. I do need to underline that this is about averages, though.
The contentious issue is the degree of genetic determinism. Researchers such as Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Richard Herrnstein, Linda Gottfredsson, Thomas Bouchard believe that genetic reasons cause most of the difference with environmental factors also coming into play, while researchers such as Richard Nisbett, James R. Flynn, Jelte Wicherts, Nicholas Mackintosh, Eric Turkheimer, Richard Lewontin believe that environmental factors such as nutrition, infectious disease and early mental stimulation may explain the entire gap. Earl B. Hunt is more in between in the debate.
Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Another huge item is climate change policy. Left wing parties made a big deal of the measures while they are not so big that masses of people will become poor from the costs. Baudet takes their story, as in huge measures, says it costs a lot and people believe that.
My point: fake news and lies and populist underbelly stories are told in such a way that a lot of people believe it. That is the danger.
My point: fake news and lies and populist underbelly stories are told in such a way that a lot of people believe it. That is the danger.
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I think regional IQ differences speak to the assumptions of intelligence made by those who defined the IQ examination styles. It goes without saying that such designers were overwhelmingly white and Western.
The Flash
Dennis Wilcock did 9/11
That point has been argued before, most notably by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. There's scientific consensus on there being a general intelligence factor, having been tested across unrelated cognitive ability tests and performance measures and shown a consistent correlation. Psychologists generally considered Gould's arguments as politically charged and unscientific. I don't think the white and Western argument makes much sense, as regional IQ differences don't favor Europeans. East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews consistently rank higher than Europeans on average.
All that aside, my point is that there being regional differences in IQ is a scientific fact regardless of its implications and causes, and the debate around this being the case is hotly contested in academic circles, especially in regard to whether these differences can change over time depending on environmental circumstances. So the article misrepresents the academic situation.
D
Deleted member 7164
Guest
Sorry I can't take anything outside of natural sciences as a fact. Gravity is a fact, the notion that Croats live in Croatia is a fact made up by people. In this manner I'd correct your sentence from fact to scientific consensus and regional differences in IQ to regional difference in IQ test result. The latter change would also open up the venue for Jew/Asian bias where they have a slight advantage but due to cultural facts they perform significantly better (because they train for IQ tests) or just deal with different kind of tests.
Second, the cognitive ability tests cover only a portion of human intelligence as any fast systematic thinking containing a big quantity of factors is only reflected by pattern matching tests which require training under base 10 system. Change the base and you'll see IQs fluctuate. The end result is a difference of 6 points between the highest ranking nation and the highest ranking European nation. Of course, the test isn't standardized to pit statistically meaningful populations of both countries "against" eachother, it counts in local reported tests. So take those two into account, systematic errors of IQ tests where we cannot properly implement a true multi-step abstract problem as a simple test question that can be templated into a series of questions with varying difficulty, and errors in test procedure, and you can see those 6 points go either way.
The Flash
Dennis Wilcock did 9/11
I won't disagree with this correction, it's semantics anyway.
This line of thinking seems shaky to me. Jews and Asians training for IQ tests, or at least in a way that is clearly more frequent than Europeans, is a very dubious claim. Different kinds of tests also falls flat, as the results (the ranking, not necessarily the exact averages) have been successfully recreated in immigrant populations within a single country, the USA, that is.
The findings of IQ-testing is based on factor analysis of correlations of different standardized tests. They are then tested if the results can be recreated. It's not as shallow as collecting different singular tests from different populations and reaching a conclusion. Now, this sort of methodological flaw has haunted some prominent IQ-testing research, Richard Lynn being the biggest offender, but as I've said before, it's the gaps and exact averages that have shown to be inconsistent, not there being differences between different regions or said differences being hierarchically consistent. I think the consistent correlations of IQ and academic performance is something to pay attention to and I don't have a legitimate reason to doubt the scientific consensus on the matter.
There have also been correlations with brain activity or content and general intelligence factor, though obviously they are subject to the causation vs correlation issue. Still, for reference:
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