Best Cities For Liberals & Conservatives

Livability has compiled a list of the best places to live if you are liberal or conservative. Via press release:

Our editors, working with advisory board member Kevin Stolarick, Ph.D, (the founding research director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management) and using data from several geographies, gauged the ideological skew of the congressional representation of a city. They utilized nonpartisan watchdog GovTrack’s analysis of the members of the House of Representatives on a conservative/liberal spectrum. Then, using data from Esri, editors looked at how residents of each city self-report their own political leanings on a five-point scale from very liberal to very conservative. The last piece of the political puzzle was the splits in the vote during the 2012 presidential election. In addition, our editors asked Experian Marketing Services to help create a basket of goods -- one restaurant, one automotive brand, one magazine, one retailer and one TV show – that are heavily favored by one end of the political spectrum or another. They then backtracked and found areas where people uses those goods and services to a high degree.

Email Of The Day

Just in from a reader:

"I have often thought that your website, rather than 'making us aware' of the crazy voices on the right, actually enables and helps them by giving them the attention. this NY Times article says exactly what I mean."

Here's an excerpt from the reader's link:

The real problem is that liberals, both on an institutional and a personal level, have chosen to treat for-profit propaganda as news. In so doing, we have helped redefine liberalism as an essentially reactionary movement. Rather than initiating discussion, or advocating for more humane policy, we react to the most vile and nihilistic voices on the right. Media outlets like MSNBC and The Huffington Post often justify their coverage of these voices by claiming to serve as watchdogs. It would be more accurate to think of them as de facto loudspeakers for conservative agitprop. The demagogues of the world, after all, derive power solely from their ability to provoke reaction. Those liberals (like me) who take the bait, are to blame for their outsize influence.

It's a criticism that I've heard for years. Obviously I disagree. Giving JMG blog time to festering idiots like Bryan Fischer, who is heard daily on 200+ radio stations and who regularly keynotes major national GOP events such as CPAC, scarcely increases his "influence."

A Message From GOProud

Liberals Are Mentally Ill

So says a new book being flogged by World Net Daily.

Just when liberal-leftists thought it was finally "their time" to lead center-right America, kicking and screaming, into a stifling socialist "utopia," a veteran psychiatrist is making a powerful case that the "hope-and-change" ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder. For more than 40 years, Rossiter has diagnosed and treated over 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases, both state and federal, as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist retained by numerous public offices, courts and private attorneys. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago. Rossiter explains with great clarity why the kind of liberalism being displayed by Barack Obama can only be understood as a psychological disorder. "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Rossiter. "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

Study: Liberals & Atheists Are Smarter

A study from the London School of Economics and Political Science has concluded that folks who identity themselves as liberals and atheists tend to have a slightly higher IQ than the general population. A higher IQ is also predictive of "sexual exclusivity" among men, but not women.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points -- and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be. The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. "It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people -- people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower -- are likely to be the ones to do that." Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.

The study looked at a large sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which began with adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The participants were interviewed as 18- to 28-year-olds from 2001 to 2002. The study also looked at the General Social Survey, another cross-national data collection source.

(Tipped by JMG reader Monica)