As far as religious freedom in Scandinavia goes, Hans Nielsen Hauge (d. 1824)  was imprisoned for most of ten years for preaching outside the church, and his theology was Lutheran fundamentalist. Many Haugeans migrated to the US. Likewise, dissenters in Holland were treated badly even though they were theologically orthodox, because they challenged the state monopoly, and they formed the core of the Michigan and Iowa Dutch colonies. 
 
On Chinese and Japanese tolerance and pluralism, they had a public-private religious distinction which confuses the issue from our point of view. The East Asian states had state religions which were nonparticipational but which believers in other religions had to repsect and defer to. By and large this only required paying taxes, respecting the Emperor,  and avoiding of certain sorts of challenges, claims,  symbols, and rhetoric, rather than anything more than that. But any public Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, or Christian challenge to the state's religious claims would be crushed mercilessly. 
 
There really wasn't a church-state division; the state was the church and the church was the state. But everyone was allowed to pracrtice a private, personal salvational religion as long as it didn't make public claims. 
 
Religious repression in China usually involved state issues, such as large amounts of church property not on the tax rolls, or perceived problems caused by (Muslim-dminated) international trade, or the perception of usurpation of state symbols and incitement of rebellion (the Yellow Turbans and many other sects).

My issues on this question comes from the ways in which the scientific knowledge is mmapped onto existing ethnic and class antagonisms. To me, interpreting Hispanic immigration into California (much less race relations in Alabama) primarily in terms of low-IQ vs. high-IQ gene pools is to miss a large part of the point of what's going on.

Has the reverse been shown -- that lifelong malnutrition plus lifelong lack of education and intellectual stimulation has no influence on IQ testing? (How long was the Dutch famine). Or that semi-literacy or illiteracy resulting from bad or no education has no influence on IQ testing?

Education vs. stimulation: some illiterates with no formal education live in stimulating environments -- e.g., multilingual kids who grow up running errands in a port city, changing currency in their heads, etc. Contrast: girls who spend their days grinding corn and pounding laundry on the rocks.

I think that if you go to Beijing or Shanghai you will find similiar "low-IQ / high-IQ" high/low crime ethnic contrasts without a racial difference. Possibly a dialect difference. Germans I know speak ill of the East Germans.

What I object to is your insistence on interpreting these situations primarily racially when there are historical non-genetic factors. Genetics is your stock in trade but you often seem historically uninformed, sometimes in principle (since all historical sciences are soft sciences to you).

In American politics you are taking sides in old ethnic antagonisms with a long history as such, which are in turn based on historical processes which go back centuries. I have never seen you display any interest, understanding, or very much knowledge of these factors.

In the case of immigration into California from Mexico and Central America, it goes along with a deliberate low-wage policy which goes back intermittently to the fifties. A whole economy of sub-minimum wage no-benefit part-time temp jobs has been created for people who will never have the chance to enter American life. This may support your anti-immigration view, but it undercuts the idea that IQ is the problem. How much difference would it make if the illegals speaking no English were from one of the poor provinces in China.

My argument was not specifically against the concept of race, but your explanation of everything by race and lack of knowledge or curiosity about the other factors.

I'm surprised that GNXP doesn't pay more attention to special ed. It's one of the real strains on the educational budget, and lawyers often get involved (if the parents have money). Sometimes you'll have one full-time staff per one or two students.

So proportionately more money is spent on kids who in some cases are completely uneducable. I personally believe that a special effort should be made where there can be results, but sometimes you really just have to say "there's not much we can do".

One of the reason for bad morale in the schools is blaming schools for problems kids have before they get to school. Not just disability, but major behavioral, emotional, and attitude problems.

Special ed is often gamed for various reasons -- to get rid of problem students, to get extral fed money, to keep test scores up.

Nobody like swing voters, but they run the show. There are two kinds. The one, ignorant kind I call whim voters or fluff voters. The other kind has a mix of issues which neither party fully support, e.g. gay anti-tax voters or pro-gun welfare-staters. Godless fits in the second group. I wouldn't call any of them leftist, but our terminologies are different.

And the Republicans don't have special interests? Yeah, sure.

I doubt Godless was asking for higher taxes. Bush has made no attempt to limit spending (he has a Republican Congress now), and his budget was far out of balance even before war costs were considered.

The Laugher Curve has hardly been validated by history. Reagan and Bush I both raised some taxes. As George Will grumbled, after 12 Republican years, in 1992 government was the same size. Will also gave good marks to Clinton, a semi-Republican -- as well he should have.

Hm. GC is "hard left"? Jesus.

I didn't read the particular article, but I'm pretty familiar with them. Neocons are extraordinarily realistic (amoral) about military force and extraordinarily anti-populist and anti-egalitarian. Some of the stuff they say is to accomodate themselves to American politics. They have no problems with saying one thing to the general public while intending something rather different. Unfortunately for themselves, this fact has leaked out. They generally believe (as does George Will) that the better folk have few obligations to their lessers.

Where people here probably disagree with them most is on their globalism. They don't really think that non-involvement is possible -- someone will fill the vacuum if we don't. They also have a strong devotion to Israel which is touchy to talk about.

I don't like them at all but I've read enough of their stuff that I end up explaining them a lot.

What Jimbo said. Some atheists are motivated more by anger than by skepticism. More power to them!

Most of the European countries still have state support for religion, producing a compromised and empaired church in which few believe very strongly. I'm not kidding. Some of the biggest church/state spearationists are conservative Christian groups (Baptists) who don't want the taint.

Solution: make the Episcopal church the state church.

Being able to eat anything you want whenever you want has the most to do with it. I often find myself eating out of boredom. Places where meals are scheduled and ritualized tend to have less random snacking, I think.

Peirce defined three kinds of investigation -- inductive, deductive, and abductive. Abduction is, as I understand, the formation of hypotheses, and is prior to any scientific work -- "the science of guessing" I think he called it. Pragmatists are, in my opinion, the best at understanding the chanciness and venturesomeness of science in its crucial beginning stages. Many philosophies of science start with the finished science and work backward to the starting point, but without recognizing that the bad guesses and false starts and dead ends were an essential part of the process. (At one point Kepler tried to use the mathematical ratios of the pentatonic scale to analyze the five visible planets. Didn't work).

Hansen is extremely interesting and has lots of ideas and also lots of issues. For example, he has a tremendous bias toward infantry and-to-hand combat (bayonets, pikes, lances, spears) and a bias against cavalry and cowardly long-range weapons like archery and other missiles. He also believes that Western ideas of equality are grounded in the Greek phalanx, as developed through tha Macedonians, Romans, Franks, Swiss, etc. (For him war is a political-existential source of meaning and order). As a reult of this, one of his histories has to jump from the last Roman battle to the early modern age (except for Charles Martel), since medieval warfare tended too much toward archery and cavalry. And while he believes that American military assertion is an affirmation of American democracy, increasingly we are moving toward a mercenary/professional military relying on long-range missile weapons and mobility -- not the kind of thing he found with the Greeks.

This is the kind of thing I'm pretty bad at. However, I think that it's something that lots of video-gaming would improve skills on. Some time ago I read that test scores for kids were flat over 2 decades except for "spatial imagination" or whatever they called it, where there was a significant improvement, I I think that video games was the reason.

I'm so old I remember "Pong", you know.

Seems like a typical case of disciplinary aggrandizement. Every discipline, sub-discipline, and research program claims to be the key to solving the riddle of the universe.

Inability to make testable predictions is characteristic of all discussions of history and human behavior. By and large the search for a deterministic social or psychological physics has been abandoned. When the dust settles evolutionary psychology will end up where the rest of them did -- some interesting insights, but not a deterministic science.

The author does not really enumerate the particular sociological theories he is rejecting, but he leaps in any case to the rejection of all sociological theories as such. From the excerpt it seems that the guy is a criminologist with an axe to grind (criminology is an applied field), and as such not too likely to come up with a powerful new statement of the relationship between psychology and sociology. His final sentence could be reversed: all psychological behavior manifests itself in a social context. (I am not an advocate of sociological determinism, btw).

In James Thurber (~1940 humorist) there was a Deep Thinker who would go around saying "The next world war will be fought, not over ideology or religion or gold or oil or territory, but -- phosphorus".

To the extent that media are not rich men's money-losing vanity mouthpieces (e.g. Rev. Moon's Washington Times), they tend to be run by people who have been promoted up from advertising sales. This is especially true of radio, but the Newhouse papers, for example, are overwhelmingly concerned with the bottom line rather than ideology or professionalism. (The rightward pull from advertising and management which tends to cancel the supposed liberal tendencies of reporters. Or do you think that maybe these opinion-leaders were *leftist* creationists?)

A LOT of the animus against Darwinism comes from its association with sexual liberation -- "We're all really just animals, let's behave animalistically!" (This, of course, is not based on careful observation of the sexual practices of animals, which vary a lot; mostly probably from watching dogs when a bitch is in heat).

And oddly, conservative Christians of the Texas type have integrated a complacent version of the Social-Darwinian Law of the Jungle into Christianity. (LA New Age conservatives also use the idea of karma to justify their privilege, though this is hardly a distortion of the original function of the doctrine).

The political and ethical interpretation of scientific ideas is a messy business.

There might be a clue in her answer: "Things are too orderly".

To me things seem pretty messy, but then I've been living away from Mommy and Daddy for several decades.

For me, creationism is a marker for a lot of other negative stuff. This relates to the vouchers / home school controversy too -- I think that it would be a disaster if the ~30% anti-evolution population ended up home-schooling their kids or educating them in church schools.

If evolution were to be taught in HS, even people who ended up not believing in evolution would end up knowing that many educated people, especially in biology, do believe in it. The complacent ignorance of devout Christians is hard to imagine if you haven't been involuntarily confronted with it.

My agenda is different than 90%-95% of the people here, but I think that secular, libertarian conservatives are playing with fire if they think they can join the religious right under the big tent.

Honest guys, PB isn't me trolling to make the right wing look bad. But you know, probably the problem a lot of you have is that you got too much education in public school. Goddamn shame your parents were all heathens.