Australian and immigrant but like Razib I end up rooting for the Roundheads against the Cavaliers, for the Protestants against the Catholics too. This despite being a raving atheist.  
 
And all things Latin including Latin American strike me cold. I don't like the culture, can't identify with it at all. My mind tends to associate 'Latin cultures', 'Catholicism' and royalism together. 
 
For me it's a dislike of hierarchy, pomp, bluebloods, aristocracy, excessive manneredness, perhaps also partly influenced by my Confucian family heritage which I tend to regard as having more commonalities re the worldly but puritanical streak and delayed gratification with Protestanism.

they used to be known as the Golden Hordes and struck terror into the hearts of the Roman and Chinese empires alike, originated somewhere in Central Asia ...

you know, zizka, i've been having doubts about vouchers and home schooling stuff simply because of the problem of people setting up madrassas in a multicultural western society, but you're right. it's something to think about. children are not self-made beings.

Duende Get off the mescalin please. Sounds like you need to get a fantasy novel out of your system.

I'm not sure where Godless, I or any other advocate of philosophical materialism has advocated 'instant gratification' and 'materialism' in the consumerist sense. You're simply conflating the two concepts. I suspect high IQ people find 'vulgar consumerism' too boring to provide much long term gratification. You're the one watching Geraldo or whatever the hell it is you watch, not us. Note that according to David Brooks' formulation, Boboism is to be distinguished from the sort of shallow consumerism you have in mind which is more typically the preference of your idealised proles.

what is this real individualism you speak of, Duende? it sounds like the sort of Rousseau-inflienced romanticised notion that produces suicide bombers rather than the sober but dynamic bourgeoise individualism that has served America well all this time.

"Last I checked, Stallman was an American..."

stallman even endorses Kucinch for President: http://www.stallman.org/

"Anyone who won't acknowledge Custer and his bloodthirsty gang of homicidal maniacs were justifiably and deservedly wiped out, or that the wrong party eventually triumphed in the larger struggle, is a knave or an idiot. "

Gee, Martin, don't tell us what you really think about people whi disagree

Hanno, calm down My sarcastic remark was aimed at the fact that I thought Martin had gratuitiously dropped some remark on Custer's last stand and all the knaves and idiots who love Custer when Razib's piece was mostly about the tendency to exaggerate the complicity of whites in genocide and about pointing out that some of the genocide was unintentionally caused. I have written my fair share on my blog on Aboriginal land rights so I don't think I can be accused of being blind to this stuff.

Incidentally I'm not Korean (not that there's anything wrong with being Korean, well, aside from the food) - this is the 3rd time I've been mistaken for Korean on this blog. I'm Chinese - Hakka on father's side, Hokkien on mother's,

Chris W - agreed. Most research suggests that drug addicts are basically self-medicators and are taking drugs to make up for chemical imbalances in their brains. Randall who is usually concerned about the effects of legislating against human nature, doesn't see the irony in being a hard line prohibitionist. I don't see legalisation as a solution but it's certainly a damned sight better than the opposite. When you add up the policing costs, property crime created, the fact that prohibition indirectly led to the development of crack cocaine (because of the incentives and profits provided to create a bigger bang for your buck) then even in a welfare state, a medical approach may be a lot less expensive.

Interesting - two econometricians won the economics prize and last year there was one experimental economist. the nobel is taking an empirical turn

"But within our lifetimes America will no longer be the land of the middle class, and we the cognitive elite will have to deal with low-IQ lynchmobs who see perfect freedom as their best shot at getting our cars and jewelry"

Your standard going to hell in a handbasket stuff mixed in a few platitudes worthy of astrology columns and a bit of wishful thinking about one's abilities. Tell me, where is your evidence that 'America will no longer be a land of the middle class'? Is social mobility declining? Granted, the tech boom has killed some jobs but it has killed jobs everywhere including Australia. This is a classic leftist prophecy that has been going on for years if not decades yet i'm not aware of the middle class shrinking substantially in america and its cultural satellites.

Incidentally your theory that blacks are so immoral even religion can't help their plight leaves much to be desired. I sometimes wonder whether the opposite may be the case. Could non-religious people be more moral because they are more reliant on their consciences and internally evolved belief systems to guide them in their moral behaviour? I mean, we all know about how devoutly Catholic members of the Italian Mafia can be. Somehow the picture comes into my head of a mafioso icing someone and then going to confession and having the slate wiped clean. There seems to be that same element of histrionic confession-redemption in evangelican protestant churches.

Sen, I simply find all this hysterical nonsense, the same has been said before about past generations of migrants like the poor irish masses who seem to have turned out alright. and no, i'm not convinced that poor mexicans are less intelligent - they come from much less meritocratic countries than the ones that the irish, etc fled from in the past.

godless - point taken, i guess i do have my ideological blinkers on this issue which i always forget to take off everytime certain people personalise the issue against certain groups

John Boil it down this way: I'm not at all convinced that fear of going to hell is really what drives even dumb people away from doing bad things. Duende referred to Japanese people and loss of face, etc - well I think fundamentally it's social pressures and good parenting that make people moral and in Japan that's just more explicit. In the US the churchgoing is assumed to go with the morality because of the afterlife and 'word of God' stuff but maybe the churchgoing goes along with the morality because of the everyday 'face to face' contact with the community stuff. So let's not have any of this either-or stuff - either we maintain a noble lie or the government has to educate us. What makes American churchgoers moral? They care about what their fellow churchgoers think, just like Japanese care about what Japanese think. Also people with a health self esteem care about what they think of themselves. I suspect a healthy self-esteem and/or contact with the community enough that you care what people think about you is what is correlated with moral behaviour

"H1B's are a way for industry to basically re-work labor standards with a specific group of workers"

Why should there even be labour standards in the first place, least of all for skilled workers?

"This is one of the ideas behind a nation; that there is a group of people that a nation's laws protects against the interests of other people in other nations."

This is an idea which hopefully will die a quick death once the Western capitalist civ meme infects everyone and we longer need to be worried about screening out terrorists:)

gee i wonder what that says about my parents who were culturally more malaysian than chinese, are literate in english but illiterate in chinese. i'm 2nd generation deprived!

Mr Obvious Do Jews who vote Democrat in the US vote in their 'socioeconomic interest'? Also note: "The same applies to the ***minority*** of Jews who vote ALP... them are concerned about other issues, such as Aboriginal rights, support for asylum seekers, and defending Medicare. "

why do you highlight 'minority' in the 2nd sentence but not the first?

Also note the point of the article is that Jews who vote Left in Australia do so mostly because of Israel. Do Jews in the US really vote Democrat and *against their socioeconomic interests* only because of Israel? The point is that even those who vote Left do so for different reasons in the 2 countries.

another question for Mr Obvious : just what the hell do you expect the *minority* of Jews, much less Armenians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, etc in Australia who vote left to be concerned about if not 'asylum seekers and aboriginal rights and medicare'? I mean what the hell do you expect from anyone who votes Left, jew or gentile?

I would suggest that Jews' advocacy of liberal immigration policies stem from essentially one thing: the Holocaust when more Jews could have been saved if immigration policies were more liberal. So the Jews are guilty not of sinister intentions but of applying the Golden Rule to peoples other than themselves - they look at your typical Middle eastern refugee and see the situation of their grandparents replicated.

Jon I know plenty of Jews like my boss who were outraged by the Australian government's treatment of Afghan refugees. My boss also happens to be strongly right wing economically, an atheist and pro-Israel. So tell me what do wealthy Jewish atheists have in common with Afghan Muslim refugees and how it would be in the self interest of the former to help the latter, if not for some sympathetic identification they feel - that 'they did the same thing to my relatives, never again'