The rhetorical approach to selling eugenics

... is not to emphasize positive over negative iterations of the idea, or even, as I've done in the past, to focus on the consequent egalitarianism that these approaches, if put into practice, will presumably foster. No matter how delicately broached and amenably angled, it's inevitably received as being too harshly comparative, too judgmental, and we simply can't have that! Arguing that this guy should have five kids while this guy shouldn't have any is socially and politically intolerable in the contemporary Western world, irrespective of the merits of such an argument.

It needs to be about individual choice and self-improvement. Forget pushing (to a broad audience, anyway) for one group to do more procreating and another to do less of it. In vitro fertilization has come a long way in the last five decades, and embryo selection has progressed from being all about viability to include avoidance of undesirable traits, the most conspicuous of which is Down syndrome. And the inclusion of putatively desirable traits is somewhere just around the corner. Eugenics need not be about telling the best to breed more and the worst to breed less, but instead marketing it as a game anyone can play. If everyone begins systematically making the most of what they have, we get a rising tide raising all boats outcome.

Since we're on the subject of selling the idea of eugenics for public consumption, Razib Khan recently pointed out the seemingly obvious point (which I nonetheless have never explicitly acknowledged until he spelled it out for me) that eugenics, rather than being a way for the patricians to further distance themselves from the plebes, is actually a means of moving towards that good old American ideal of everyone having an equal--or at least less significantly unequal--shot:

Steve [Hsu] has much to lose in a selfish zero sum sense because he’s already rather assured of intelligent offspring. He’s smart. His wife is smart. Standard quantitative genetics implies that even if they regress to the mean his offspring will be quite bright. There may not be much more juice to squeeze out of that genetic background. It may be very different for a couple with more average endowments. So sorry to turn this upside down, but personal eugenics may in fact be a boon for the ugly, stupid, and psychologically unstable, because it gives them a opportunity to close much of the gap with those who were lucky in the genetic lottery. Some of you may object to terms such as “ugly,” “stupid,” or “psychological unstable.” But people with these issues have to deal with them in their day to day. One can make all the platitudes one wants to make about “inner beauty,” but very few people live by this ideal.

Anyhow, these rhetorical considerations are probably going to become moot in the future. Prospective parents are going to take advantage of technologies that give their children an edge in life regardless of braying from opinion makers. Elites can crow all they want about the need for racial and socioeconomic integration in schools; couples are still going to do their damnedest to get their own kids into the iciest, most affluent schools they are able to.

There is already good deal of conceptual acceptance of eugenic practices on the individual level, especially on the political left. From 2004, the most recent year in which the dichotomous question was posed, the percentages of GSS respondents who say they'd have an abortion or want their partners to have one if a test revealed "the baby has a serious genetic defect", by political orientation (n = 2,451):

Politics	Yes abort
Liberal	49.8%
Moderate	36.0%
Conservative	21.5%

Though the major media regularly treats eugenics as being under the aegis of the right, I suspect the subset of the right to which it actually applies is about as large as the population for which "secular right" is an accurate descriptor.

GSS variables used: GENEABRT, YEAR(2004), POLVIEWS(1-2)(3-5)(6-7)

Stabbing through the shroud at welfare and drug usage

I recall a couple years back reading about the state of Florida's implementation of a plan requiring aspiring recipients of welfare cash assistance (TANF, specifically) to take and pass a drug test to become eligible for said benefits. If successful, the state reimburses the welfare recipients for the cost of the drug test. If they fail, benefits are withheld and the test-takers are on the hook for the cost of having it administered.

Media coverage insinuated that drug usage among welfare recipients was, contrary to Florida governor Rick Scott's claim that welfare recipients have higher rates of drug use than non-recipients do, quite low--perhaps lower than that of the broader population--as less than 3% of those who went ahead and had a test administered on themselves failed to pass it clean. The hole in this implication, of course, is that many of those who qualify for welfare but have recently used drugs aren't going to drop the cash to take a drug test they know they're going to fail. One could make the argument that the more surprising result is that 1 in 40 willingly paid to have a drug test administered on themselves for no reason. Maybe they thought the test would fail, or perhaps these are people on the bottom rungs of the societal ladder and are consequently not well known for high conscientiousness or foresight.

There's a little bankshot in Scott's plan, as it disincentivizes drug usage among the poor while simultaneously reducing the number of people who are eligible to receive benefits by putting another hurdle in their way.

Since then, I stumbled across the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, with free online access available through the SDA interface. Unfortunately, the closest the study gets to querying respondents on welfare recipiency is whether or not they (or their families, for minors) are eligible for Medicaid (20% of participants said they were, 80% said they were not--I suspect those potentially eligible but who've never actually used Medicaid are mostly unaware of their eligibility or unwilling to take advantage of it for whatever reason, so I'd guess we're doing more than just proxying for low income here), and that question can only be cross referenced with "have you ever used X?" inquiries, not "have you used X in the last month?" questions.

Thus the following attempt to get a feel for whether welfare recipients are more or less likely to use illicit drugs than non-recipients are is a pretty rough approximation, but we work with what we have. To give participants a chance to have used the various stuff if so inclined to do so, I excluded respondents under the age of 20.

The percentages who have ever smoked marijuana by whether they are eligible or ineligible for Medicaid:

Weed	%Used
Eligible	41.5
Ineligible	44.9

Crack:

Crack	%Used
Eligible	36.7
Ineligible	21.1

Cocaine (powdered):

Coke	%Used
Eligible	17.9
Ineligible	16.2

Heroin:

Heroin	%Used
Eligible	3.7
Ineligible	1.7

LSD:

LSD	%Used
Eligible	60.6
Ineligible	65.6

Methamphetamine:

Meth	%Used
Eligible	61.8
Ineligible	52.5

Negligible differences between those eligible for Medicaid and those ineligible when it comes to weed and powdered cocaine, higher rates of having used crack, heroin, and meth among the eligible, and higher rates among the ineligible when it comes to having ever tripped on acid.

Crack is a black drug and meth is a white trash drug. Powdered cocaine and heroin are a little, uh, classier, acid is for the college-aged children of the middle class and the affluent who are on existential missions to find themselves, and weed is something people from all walks of life have used sometime in their adolescent and early adult years.

Parenthetically, if I'm able to use the data at hand to validate some of the stereotypes I'm asserting in the body of a post, I better do so. The percentages of respondents, by race, who've ever smoked crack:

Race	%Used
White	20.0
Black	51.0
Hispanic	17.1
Asian	28.0

And used meth:

Race	%Used
White	52.3
Black	47.8
Hispanic	55.9
Asian	63.6

GSS variables used: NEWRACE2, AGE2(9-17), MJEVER, COCEVER (fag!), CRKEVER, HEREVER (...better), LSD, METHDES

* I realize the usage figures for meth and LSD strain credulity, apparently being more experimented with than even marijuana. I'm unsure of why this is the case, but I doubled-checked the figures and that's what the results show, so take the meth data with a grain of your favorite substance. It's probably still worth noting the disparity between those eligible and ineligible for Medicaid, though.

++Addition++Dan shows how wildly off the meth (and by extension LSD) numbers are. The LSD and meth questions are grouped in under larger categories for hallucinogens and amphetamines, respectively, so it's probably "if you have ever used a hallucinogen, have you used LSD?", etc. Consequently, the racial distribution for meth use likely only applies to those who've used amphetamines of some kind. I'm fairly confident about the figures for the other drugs, though.

Fruitcakes and fertility

The correlation between the percentage of a state's population that identifies as LGBT and its fertility rate is an inverse .31 (p = .03). This modest relationship means that one-tenth of a state's fertility rate is 'attributable' to the proportional size of its LGBT population. Conjecturing irresponsibly, with about 3.5% of the population identifying as LGBT nationally, let's say one-third of that 10% queer push comes from the gays themselves and the other two-thirds comes from the environments they prefer and help create which are not especially conducive to procreative family formation.

Bureaucratic partisanship

With the admission by the IRS that it targeted Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny in their petitions for tax-exempt status and put red tape in their way to bog down their operations in the headlines, I thought it'd be a nice time to take a look at the party affiliations of  government (federal, state, and local) employees and compare them to the affiliations of the rest of the country that has yet to heed the Derb's advice. The following table shows the party affiliation distribution among those who work or have worked for the government and those who have not. For contemporary relevance and valid comparisons, only responses of those of working aged (18-65) who were surveyed between 2010-2012 are included (n = 3,144):

Party	Gov't	Private
Democrat	37.6%	30.3%
Independent	33.1%	44.8%
Republican	27.5%	22.1%
Third party	1.9%	2.7%

Government employees are more politically committed at both ends of the spectrum, which shouldn't come as that big of a surprise since their jobs are inextricably connected to politics in one way or another. Unfortunately we can't turn the tables and isolate IRS employees for particularly close scrutinizing, but I suspect that those whose jobs rely upon the collection of tax revenues are going to be more negatively predisposed towards groups supporting reduction in the taxing (and spending) power of leviathan than other people--and even other government employees--tend to be.

GSS variables used: YEAR(2010-2012), WRKGOVT, PARTYID(0-1)(2-4)(5-6)(7), AGE(18-65)

More men than women harassed in the military, often by other men

With the government-media complex highlighting sexual abuse in the US military as The Issue that now must be addressed straight, with gun control being a political loser, amnesty being undercut by the blatant immigration undertones of the Boston marathon bombing, and the taxing of online interstate sales having it's best chance of congressional approval if no one knows the critters are pushing it through--I thought I'd take a look at the primary source. With gays now being allowed to serve openly in the military, I also sensed an opportunity to cause some mischief.

The survey in question asks active duty personnel who have experienced "unwanted sexual contact" in the past year to focus on the most egregious incident when answering subsequent questions. Jumping out immediately is the fact that while the 2012 figure is higher than it was in 2010, results for 2006 are worse (as in a higher percentage of personnel reporting unwanted contact) than they were in either 2010 and 2012. This looks more like random year-to-year variation than an 'epidemic'. Personnel also report higher rates of unwanted sexual contact prior to becoming active duty military than they experienced after having enlisted. Lots of young, adventuresome singles in putatively stressful situations and there's less sexual harassment than there is in civilian life--when the percentage of people one comes into contact with who are potential sexual partners is often much lower than when on active duty--feels like a manufactured crisis to me.

Perhaps apprehensive that access to data broken down by sex of both offender and victim might give homophobes something to ream gays in the service with, data on offenders among female victims is reported but data on offenders for male victims is, inexplicably, not. The report simply reads "results for men are not reportable" (p32). Uh huh.

Fortunately, the data were broken out in 2010, and by employing a little algebra, we're able to glean from the latest report results from surveys conducted in previous years. The ratio of men-to-women who reported unwanted contact was nearly identical in both 2010 and 2012, with the latter showing an uptick of one-third more than 2010 for both men and women, so the following ratios almost certainly hold in 2012 even though I calculated them using data from 2010.

Things you're unlikely to see or hear reported from major media sources or pondered from the bully pulpit regarding sexual harassment among our active duty personnel:

- More men than women are on the receiving end of unwanted sexual contact--10,571 and 8,949 in 2010, respectively. Of course this is in absolute terms--women are still more likely to be victims of unwanted sexual contact than men are.

- According to the survey--conducted by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), operating under the Department of Defense--women are more than twice as likely as men are to perpetrate unwanted sexual contact, at least in situations in which the perpetrator(s) were of the same sex (a situation comprising 85% of all designated worst situations, the other 15% consisting of both men and women in a group making unwanted sexual contact with a victim). It strains credulity at first blush, but working from the tables provided on pages 34-36 and active duty personnel figures, we arrive at 12,326 total male offenders and 4,353 total female offenders* in an active duty service in which only about one-in-seven members are women. That translates to about 1 in 47 female personnel perpetrating unwanted sexual contact compared to just 1 in 95 male personnel doing so. Women are more likely to victimize and to be victimized than men are. Yet another reason that having them serve in the armed forces is such a swell idea.

- Relatedly, one-quarter (26%) of all unwanted sexual contact among active duty personnel involves women harrying men. One-half (52%) involves men getting after women, less than 1% consists of women sexually harassing other women, and the remaining cases (22%) involve men engaging in unwanted sexual contact with other men. I don't want my son's scout leader to be a gay guy or a woman. Heterosexual, please and thanks.

- Parenthetically, even if offending women in the military had a predilection for other female targets for their advances, it wouldn't be widely reported on. However, they don't. Offending women are more than eight times as likely to go after men as they are to go after women.

Beyond causing skepticism about the way the military goes about tracking sexual harassment, there are some potential story lines to go with these results--active duty women have clits as big as your di especially low digit ratios and the corresponding libidos to match, while men aren't that into these GI Janes. At least not for being red-blooded, mostly healthy trained killers, anyway.

Even less appealing, the number of active duty men who annually experience unwanted (homo)sexual contact from other men is in the high thousands (extrapolated to 6,307 in 2010, or around 8,500 in 2012). Yes, in our hypersensitive age, some non-trivial amount of identified unwanted contact--across all four offender-victim gender mixes--is innocuous badgering or having fun at someone else's expense, but still, like the priest abuse scandals that have 'rocked' the Catholic Church, there's a very real and very much downplayed homosexual element in play here.

* In reality, some of these offenders surely offended on more than one occasion and offenders may be individuals or members of an offending group, but the victims were not asked to identify the offenders by name, so for sake of clarity and consistency, I'm counting each offender as a separate individual. Consequently, these are lower-bound estimates of reported offender rates by sex.

Momma's in the kitchen, daddy's in the field

Upon further inspection it has come to my attention that the GSS is even more oblivious to PC etiquette than I gave the survey credit for. In 2012, it queried respondents on what they conceived of as the most ideal situation for a family with a young child to organize their family and work lives (and even more controversially, the question is written with the assumption that a "family" consists of one man and one woman married to each other). Despite all the putatively egalitarian feminist-inspired blathering about how parenting roles are fungible across sexes (and orientations), contemporary Americans trust biological realities more than they rely on the harping of the harpies. The distribution of responses among the broader population (n = 1,004):

Arrangement, all responses	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	39.7
Mother part-time, father full-time	41.6
Both full-time	11.3
Both part-time	6.8
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.5

Perhaps it's skewed heavily by the patriarchal enforcers of patriarchy, the patriarchs themselves. The response results, this time considering women only (n = 527):

Arrangement, women only	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	33.6
Mother part-time, father full-time	45.7
Both full-time	11.7
Both part-time	8.5
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.2
Father home, mother full-time	0.3

The vast majority--we're talking 4 out of 5--of Americans conceive of the ideal family environment being one in which a man works full-time and a woman works either part-time or not at all. It's as though they recognize some sort of special bond between a mother and the child her body spent nine devoted months bringing into the world.

Maybe the patriarchs have brainwashed their own barefoot wives slaving away in the kitchen into falling for the breadwinner-homemaker ideal, but what about women who think for themselves? Liberal women only (n = 130):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	23.1
Mother part-time, father full-time	48.4
Both full-time	12.9
Both part-time	15.0
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.6

Okay, but many of these women went through their formative years before third-wave feminism really got going. Let's see what the Sandra Fluke generation thinks. ... Oh, she's in her thirties? I got the impression that she was a college student or something. Ah, she recently graduated and will be starting her career soon. After a decade establishing herself professionally, she might even procreate one unaborted, down-free kid of her own, provided she outraces menopause or has her eggs frozen--soon. Anyway, the preferences of women under the age of thirty (n = 118):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	26.3
Mother part-time, father full-time	47.7
Both full-time	7.7
Both part-time	18.2
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	0.0

Not a single woman surveyed thought it desirable for a mother to spend more time working than her husband does. Suck the marrow from the men, let work drain their souls, not ours! Good for them.

Given their illegitimacy rates, welfare utilization rates, and their positions on marijuana legalization, one may be forgiven for scoffing at the neocon assertion that Hispanics are "natural conservatives", but he should also be willing to give credit where credit is due. They are even more traditional than their white, black, or yellow brothers and sisters are (n = 73):

Arrangement	Dist%
Mother home, father full-time	45.4
Mother part-time, father full-time	36.3
Both full-time	2.3
Both part-time	14.9
Father part-time, mother full-time	0.0
Father home, mother full-time	1.1

I'm throwing in with the plurality on this one, since our conceptual approach is one in which I'll assume the role of primary breadwinner/secondary caregiver and she the role of secondary breadwinner/primary caregiver. This is as good a time as any to pass along the happy news that my fiance and I are expecting a child just a few days before Christmas. No, I'm not so audacious as to herald the coming of a savior, but I am thrilled by the thought of combining birthday and Christmas into a super day in which (s)he gets 150% of what (s)he'd separately get on either day if the two gift glut days were further apart from one another, ha!

GSS variables used: FAMWKBST(1-6), SEX(2), RACECEN1(15-16), AGE(18-29), POLVIEWS(1-3)

Music and class

As someone who enjoys classical music's greatest hits but who has tried and failed on multiple occasions to find an opera without "rock" in front of it that he likes, I felt some validation in revisiting the GSS module in which respondents were queried on the genres of music they like and finding that opera isn't widely enjoyed by any major subset of the population.

Building on Inductivist's famous post where he examined estimated average IQ and musical tastes, the following table shows the percentages of people who said they either "very much like" or "like" (on a five point scale, the others being "mixed feelings", "dislike", and "dislike very much") by self-identified social class. The table is ordered by a classiness index*:

Class	Lower	Working	Middle	Upper
Classical	28.2	44.3	54.0	71.7
Show tunes/musicals	37.5	47.1	58.3	66.7
Big band	48.5	54.1	64.2	70.0
Jazz	43.8	48.8	53.1	59.8
Opera	15.7	17.9	23.5	30.0
Folk	40.2	42.6	45.7	52.1
Reggae	33.3	31.8	35.9	39.8
Contemporary rock	50.6	57.4	57.0	58.3
Latin	29.2	25.6	31.8	28.9
New age	16.1	16.5	19.1	17.1
Blues	56.0	55.1	57.3	54.4
Oldies	66.0	74.0	70.1	67.4
Rap	21.3	11.8	14.3	17.2
Easy listening	58.2	62.3	60.0	51.1
Heavy metal	19.5	13.2	10.8	6.7
Bluegrass	61.4	50.9	46.4	43.6
Gospel	66.4	64.1	53.0	41.3
Country	72.6	69.0	55.9	47.8

The data are from 1993, and over the intervening two decades the death of radio and rise of file sharing has fractured the contemporary music scene (and also fractured the utility of a term like genre to describe music) to the extent that it is probably difficult for casual listeners to identify who the new pioneers of sound are across various genres they don't actively keep themselves familiar with, but the categories are still generally recognizable today, even if many of the musicians who represent them are not.

Of the categories the wrong kinds of white people listen to--metal, bluegrass, country--the latter two are actually pretty popular across class lines, though they display an easily observable prole tilt.

Everyone likes oldies just as I expect I'll like hearing pop 40 stuff from the nineties and oughts when I'm in my later years even though I don't make an effort to hear them today. Nostalgia is potent and pleasurable.

If you want to be taken for a patrician rather than a pleb, make sure to have a ready answer for the question of who is the greatest composer of all time (if you're a lightweight like I am, just answer Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart and you should be fine).

Metal and rap aren't enjoyed by most people, which may go some way in explaining why those are the kinds of music you hear blaring from cars at a stoplight or from your neighbor's basement, as being into either of these marks someone as having 'unique' musical tastes and allows him to express his differentiation from the mainstream. Nor is opera, as aforementioned, widely listened to, leading to a sort of high brow, more tasteful figurative blaring among aficionados.

GSS variables used: CLASS, CLASSICL, MUSICALS, BIGBAND, JAZZ, OPERA, FOLK, REGGAE, CONROCK, LATIN, NEWAGE, BLUES, OLDIES, RAP, MOODEASY, HVYMETAL, BLUGRASS, GOSPEL, COUNTRY

* Computed by taking the percentage of upper class respondents who very much like/like (like) a genre and multiplying it by two, adding the percentage of middle class respondents who like it, subtracting the percentage of working class respondents who like it, and subtracting the percentage of lower class respondents who like it after multiplying that percentage by two.

Hatefact of the day

According to the CDC and the US Census, foreign-born residents living in the US are over 9 times more likely to have tuberculosis as native-born Americans are. Exotic disease is an aspect of diversity we don't celebrate enough!

Game and moral foundations

Roissy enjoys taking pot shots at yours truly and I'm happy to take them since they double the blog's web traffic whenever they land. Game isn't about male-to-male dominance, so what he'd have the cajones to say in person is immaterial. Most recently, he ribbed me for insinuating that the ultimate arbiter of alpha status among men is procreation.

The alpha/beta dichotomy (or alpha/beta/omega trichotomy, to complicate things a bit) strikes me as oversimplified, but the inherent simplicity is in many ways a feature rather than a bug. It facilitates the perception of a state of ceteris paribus in the reader that allows him to evaluate behaviors in a vacuum, the prescribed ones being characteristic of alphas, the proscribed ones being of betas, and the absence of any behavior at all being of omegas. Casanovas can still make bad moves and Aguecheeks are capable of making good ones. Making said good moves and avoiding bad ones is the primary pedagogical purpose of Game blogs, Roissy's being, in my estimation, the creme de la creme.

Digressing aside, beyond the difficulty in treating the terms as nouns given that they function better as adjectives, that's not exactly an accurate characterization. To the contrary, I've merely pointed out, while granting and subsequently employing Game terminology, that betas appear to do a better job passing along their genes than alphas do. Game philosophy is essentially existentialist and nihilistic, so the thought of avoiding ungrateful spawn to tend to and pay for shouldn't upset guys like Roissy, who would rather sit poolside than change diapers. Hard to deny that there's a lot of appeal to aspiring to such a lifestyle. While you may not care about reproduction, though, reproduction cares about you.

Conservatives, broadly defined, however, tend to operate on different premises. Bringing Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory into the mix, they put a lot more emphasis on the loyalty/betrayal aspect of morality than do PUAs, who tend towards liberalism (for a fuller profiling of alpha demographic characteristics, see here), and what could demonstrate more of a disregard for loyalty to one's own family (or nation, which is was more-or-less a very extended family) than blithely allowing the bloodline to be severed? The concept of duty has beta written all over it. Parenthetically, I've taken Haidt's self-identifying morality questionnaire and scored highest on the loyalty dimension.

Another dimension of morality that is close to the hearts of conservatives but held in lower esteem on the left is that of authority (the absence or undermining of which is subversion). Game operates on the premise that men should insinuate higher status than they are due, obfuscating the social order and creating a free rider problem, the societal costs for which betas must bear. Fake it until you make it. Maybe. Or more realistically, just fake it, period. Game is a way for guys who aren't where they'd like to be in terms of "money/looks/fame" to be (optimistically) or to convince themselves (cynically) that they are at least on par with, if not superior to, those who have more money, better looks, and greater fame than they do.

Beyond differences in moral perspectives, the prescription that every man can be king (which, in fairness, Roissy has tempered on multiple occasions, though it's often lost on his legions of commenters) seems to be at odds with biological realities (link via Ray Sawhill).

Game is founded on the premise that female detection mechanisms that have been honed by selection (natural and sexual) throughout human evolutionary history do a pretty crummy job at what they're commissioned to do. The degree to which they fail is open to debate--and as aforementioned, Roissy's assessment is more attuned to reality (they do an okay job, but they're far from precise) than those made by some of his more zealous minions (they basically don't exist)--but it's axiomatic that they are significantly flawed. 

This is in contrast to the detection mechanisms of men, which are far more perspicacious than those possessed by women are. Science has thrown a few wrenches into man's well-oiled machine with plastic surgery, breast enhancement, and the like, but prior to World War I, women were almost powerless to do much of anything to influence male detection mechanisms.

Finally, it's unclear to me why alphas should despise betas, since more betas means easier pickings and less competition for alphas (not to mention the fruits of civilization more generally), yet they seem to, quite viscerally. On the other hand, it's easy to see why betas should despise alphas.

Tangentially, Roissy should survey his readers on their political leanings. He's commissioned interactive polls on multiple occasions in the past, and while he's part of the dark enlightenment and presumably wouldn't self-describe as a leftist in any way, I'd suspect that he's to the right of most of his readership.

Door's open, come on in

As ridiculed as the slippery slope argument against same-sex marriage (polygamous/incestuous/bestial marriages will be next) has been by its proponents, there aren't many serious reasons to maintain that the definition of legal marriage will then, having expanded to include those of the same sex, stay put forever after. And so the institution will reclinate back to its own past, the only ubiquitous purpose it represents becoming legal (and by extension political among the upper crust) in nature as was often the case in antiquity.

Divorce rates show that contemporary marriage isn't about lifelong commitment. Open marriages show that it isn't even about serial long-term commitment. Same-sex marriage shows that it isn't about procreation. Be prepared, as Jeremy Irons suggested, to be shown that marriage isn't about romantic love, as a father marries his son to hand junior the family fortune free from government confiscation. Polygamy will show that marriage isn't about a special devotion to one other person, as marriages of convenience already illustrate.

Better contact the financial planner to see whether or not we should get married, whatever our situation and whoever we may be. Perhaps the next step after that will be to annul any differentiation in legal or taxation status marriage confers and be rid of the whole mess forever.

Foaming feminists

Roissy on feminism, anger, and how off-putting both are in a woman:

When was the last time you saw a happy feminist? Never. Anger and feminism are so inextricable that the phrase “angry feminist” has become redundant.

Though it's gathered some dust, having only been asked in 1996, the GSS queried respondents on whether or not they considered themselves feminists (one-fourth of women did, three-fourths did not). The survey also probed them on how often they'd felt angry at another person in the last week, as well as regularly asking participants to self-describe their levels of personal happiness. The percentages of (female) feminists and non-feminists who reported having been anger-free in the previous seven days and the percentages of women who reported having been angry at someone for more than half of the days in the last week:

Irascibility	Feminists	Ladies
No anger in last week	30.1%	37.3%
Angry 4+ days in last week	13.9%	12.0%

Of course, the screeching harpies whose opinions are open books no one wants to read are angry bitterness personified, but even among the rank-and-file, a tendency towards anger is evident. Hyperbolic, sure, but the stereotype Roissy's invoking is grounded in reality.

Parenthetically, one-in-nine men (N = 648) self-identified as feminists. There are more male feminists than there are male lefties?! Yikes.

GSS variables used: SEX(1)(2), FEMINIST, ANGRY(0)(4-7)

Better than one in a million, anyway

Why do those who write about Game tend to overestimate the prevalence of cuckoldry over the course of human history? Fairly recently, Roissy did just this without seemingly even realizing it. Commenting on a study showing a misattribution rate for putative biological fathers of around 1% in Germany, he deftly claimed that he wasn't surprised they were so low (!), and in fact would've estimated contemporary rates to be even lower:

I’m not here to argue that the 1% figure is wrong. In fact, the 1% figure is higher than I assumed. Look at it this way: That recorded 1% cuckoldry rate is more than 30 TIMES the US recorded rape rate of 0.03%. ... 

A flaw in assuming present-day cuckoldry rates align with historical cuckoldry rates is the fairly recent widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion. How many women who sleep with interloper males are using birth control? Probably most, and more so if those women are higher SES.

Mentioned in the comments of the post he linked to is research from geneticist Bryan Sykes showing an estimated non-paternity rate of 1.3% per generation in England extending all the way back to 1300 AD, and one of our national treasures, Gregory Cochran, mentions that similar historical results have been found in the Irish and among the Boers. While Roissy reasonably presumes that women of higher socio-economic status do a better job of keeping extramarital dalliances from producing living evidence of their cheating than prole women do, Steve Sailer asserts that it's likely those with surnames that survived over several generations (including Sykes, the surname the eponymous Bryan Sykes used on the way to concluding an estimated 1.3% cuckoldry rate) were more put together and orderly--that is, of higher SES--than those that did not survive the test of time.

So if today's upper class women are better at avoiding procreation from affairs than lower class women are when, prior to modern contraception, non-paternity occurred in fewer than 1-in-50 births, well, it has been--for at least a millenia, anyway--a marginal phenomenon, and it continues to be so today, perhaps even more fringe now than it was in the past.

Another prospective reason PUAs overestimate cuckolding rates may be due to selection bias, with susceptibility to Game tactics and class being inversely correlated to some extent. That old bugaboo the GSS shows that among married or formerly married women, those on the lower half of the class structure are more likely to cheat on their husbands than those on the upper half are (14.7% of those in the lower/working classes to 11.1% of those in the middle/upper classes, n = 10,778). And of course marriage rates are lower in the lower/working classes than they are in the middle/upper classes. Infidelity rates are presumably higher among those in unmarried relationships than they are among those in married relationships, so the overall class gap in cheating rates is likely wider still.

GSS variables used: EVSTRAY, CLASS(1-2)(3-4), SEX(2)

Feelings towards Jews by region

After ruminating on Dinah Shore (yeah, I read everything Steve Sailer writes because Steve Sailer wrote it, not because it necessarily piques my interest), Steve concludes:

One might think, from things like Philip Roth's alternative history The Plot Against America, that the South is teeming with anti-Semites, but that seems to be more the cherished belief of Northern Jews than the bitter experience of Southern Jews.

The GSS has queried respondents on their feelings towards four times in its history, most recently in 2004. It asked them to use a "feeling thermometer", for which ratings between 0-49 indicate unfavorable feelings towards Jews and ratings from 51-100 indicating favorable feelings towards them, the higher the score, the more favorable the perception. The following table ranks the nine geographic divisions (as identified by the US census) by their average feelings towards Jews:

Region	Jews
New England	68.21
South Atlantic	62.38
West North Central	62.08
Mountain	61.54
East North Central	61.25
Middle Atlantic	61.22
Pacific	60.30
West South Central	58.69
East South Central	57.50

New England is especially positively predisposed towards Jews, which might make the rest of the country look like fertile ground for the fourth reich to an identity-obsessed Jew like Philip Roth, but warm feelings are the norm across the country, with little difference between the mid-Atlantic states such as Roth's own New Jersey and, say, the southern seaboard which is comprised of states including South Carolina and Georgia.

To the extent that there is any relative hostility towards Jews detectable here (and it's stretching prodigiously to even speculate as much--one SD is 20 points on the scale), it shows up in heavily NAM regions of the South and West. Foreign-born Hispanics' opinions on Jews are notoriously 'embarrassing', and there has historically been a lot of tension between blacks and Jews over who is America's most victimized group. Indeed, whites express warmer feelings towards Jews than blacks, Hispanics, or Asians do.

GSS variables used: REGION, JEWTEMP

All the freaks are on parade

Black and African-American are in, Negro and Colored are out. Hispanic is still acceptable, but Latino is where the zeitgeist is headed (no matter if actual Latinos prefer the term "Hispanic" over the term "Latino"--they're just pawns in the game of white moral posturing, after all). Oriental has been tasteless for generations now, we describe them as Asian.

What about gays? That's the default identifier I employ. Do I need a few good lashings from the PC o' nine tails to straighten (heh) me out? From Google's Ngram viewer, the percentages of books published in the US containing each of six nouns recognizably identifying those who are into others of the same sex, in their plural forms to avoid sweeping up confounding adjectives:

Good thing I'm not always as clinical in my thinking as I should be--homosexual is on the way out and gay is about to take the top spot. Apparently it's what the buggers prefer, so far be it from me to protest.

Sapphic and sodomist, barely identifiable on the graph, have become even less apropos over time. Prior to the second half of the 20th century, not much was written about gays at all. Society said if you're going to do whatever you want to do, fine, but do it behind closed closet doors. We now recognize that for being the hidebound, retrograde stuff that it was, though, as we celebrate alternative lifestyles, striving relentessly to bring them out in plain view!

Shocker--married mothers smarter than single moms

Spurred by Parapundit's Randall Parker and the sight of low-hanging stereotype-validation fruit, the estimated IQ scores (converted from GSS wordsum results with the simplifying assumptions of a mean population IQ of 100 and that one standard deviation in wordsum results is the equivalent of 15 IQ points) of men and women who have procreated at least once, by marital status, follows. For utility, all data are from 2000 onward and the foreign-born and those aged 46 and older are excluded.

Reproductive men

Married -- 101.0
Divorced/separated -- 97.8
Unmarried -- 93.6

Reproductive women

Married -- 101.3
Divorced/separated -- 98.7
Unmarried women -- 93.6

Parenthetically, the mean IQ for those of the same age and time cohort who haven't had any kids is 101.2. To see dysgenic forces in action, look no further than single mothers and their unfortunate spawn, who have both the nature and nurture decks stacked against them.

GSS variables used: CHILDS(0)(1-8), BORN(1), WORDSUM, YEAR(2000-2012), SEX, MARITAL(1)(3-4)(5), AGE(18-45)