As Sahar’s Blog has been evolving, I have been talking to more and more people around about the various subjects it covers. After all, the whole point is to create a forum where various points of views are represented, not just mine! And it always surprises me how people want one thing, say another thing and do something totally different.
Take the example of the elimination of poverty. Everyone wants poverty to be eliminated. Everyone says they will help by donating money to various causes. But many of those who dared answer the last question didn’t put their money where their mouth was.
The conversation became even more interesting when I pointed out that poverty wouldn’t be eliminated by donating money, but rather when the way we do things changes and, more fundamentally, when the reasons behind our actions change. It was amusing and, at the same time, a little sad to see how some would fidget uncomfortably when I would ask them what they would be willing to sacrifice of their cushy north american lives to help the lives of millions of others.
Which is why I found the article below, by MacLean’s very own Mark Steyn, so interesting – even if I don’t agree with all of it.
What Bono says and what he does
There’s a well-documented reason the do-gooder can’t put his money where his mouth is
After playing the Obama inauguration a couple of months back, the pop star Bono flew back home to a rare barrage of hostile headlines. As you know, the global do-gooder wants us to send more of our money to Africa. So why is he sending his money to the Netherlands? From the Irish Times:
“Bono ‘Hurt’ By Criticism Of U2 Move To Netherlands To Cut Tax.”
U2 hasn’t, in fact, moved to the Netherlands. You won’t find them busking outside downtown Rotterdam mosques of a Friday night. But they did move some of their business interests from the Emerald Isle to the Low Countries. From the Times of London: “Bono Hits Back Over Tax Dodging Claims.”
Actually, he didn’t really “hit back” except in the mildest way, protesting that there was nothing “hypocritical” about being an “activist” and taking advantage of favourable “financial services” arrangements in the Netherlands, and that in any case U2 “pay millions and millions of dollars in tax.” Hey, so what? Any old Halliburton robber-baron pal of Dick Cheney can make the same claim: paying “millions and millions” counts for nothing when you’re supposed to be paying millions and millions and millions and millions. From the Belfast Telegraph:
“U2 Frontman Bono’s Tax Avoidance ‘Depriving Poor.’ ”
According to Nessa Ni Chasaide of the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, U2 has consciously deprived the Irish exchequer of revenue needed for overseas aid. “While Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world,” said Miss Ni Chasaide, “the fact is that his band has moved parts of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands. Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least 160 million U.S. dollars every year.”
Oh, come on. It doesn’t cost “the impoverished world” anything. It’s Bono’s money, not theirs. And who’s to say, even if he did give it to the government, that they’d stick it in the mail to some Afro-Marxist kleptocrat as opposed to squandering it closer to home? I’m with the U2 lads on this: I think the caterwauling rockers know better how to spend their dough than the state does. I’m entirely sympathetic to the wish of Timothy Geithner and the other A-list tax delinquents of President Obama’s administration not to toss one more penny than the absolute minimum into the great sucking maw of the government treasury.
Unfortunately, that’s not an argument a celebrity “activist” like Bono can easily make. So his “hitting back” consisted mostly of sitting back while the Bono impersonator Paul O’Toole stood outside the Department of Finance in Dublin singing his own version of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For—i.e., a jurisdiction with zero per cent tax rates for billionaire rock stars. U2 Ltd. actually moved to the Netherlands a couple of years back, about 17 nanoseconds after the Irish finance minister removed the tax exemption on “artistic” income above 250,000 euros. This was round about the time of Bono’s Live 8 all-star African-awareness-raising rock gala, but the world was too busy Rocking Against Bush to pay any attention. It’s only in the last few weeks that charities and NGOs and “justice groups” have decided to make an example of the unfortunate warbler.
But here’s my question: instead of arguing whether U2 Ltd. should be based in Dublin or Amsterdam, why not move it to Africa? After all, it’s essentially a licensing operation, so it doesn’t have any physical product to warehouse or ship other than the occasional PDF or MP3. All you need’s a phone line and a computer. Or, at the very least, why doesn’t Bono outsource U2 Ltd.’s tax preparation to Africa? With the invention of the Internet, India’s accountants started mugging up on 1099s and Schedule C and the other salient features of the U.S. tax code and have managed to snaffle a percentage of the American tax-filing bonanza away from H&R Block. Why couldn’t Bono open up a small accountancy firm in Bangui or Bujumbura? If he’s so eager to help Africa, wouldn’t that be a great vote of confidence?
Read the rest of this thought-provoking article here.
From Maclean’s: Warren Buffett and the power of optimism
March 19, 2009
I haven’t found the link to this particular article, but read it in the paper copy of Maclean’s I picked up today. You can find the Maclean’s website here.
When Warren Buffett speaks, people are wise to listen carefully. The legendary investor became the world’s richest man by keeping his eye firmly trained on the long term, ignoring fads and manias, and sticking to the timeless fundamentals of sound business. So this week, when Buffett gave CNBC a three-hour interview, millions were hoping for some guidance. Those who listened carefully were not disappointed.
(…)
But Buffett said one thing that was particularly resonant for those of us wading daily through a deluge of troubling economic data. “People are scared, and fear is very contagious. They’re also confused,” he said. “And if you’re fearful and confused, you don’t start to get over being fearful until you aren’t confused.”
The most important role we in the media can play in this environment is to dispel some of the confusion that fuels fear and paralyzes consumers.
Which brings me to the following question: what of the role of the public to inform itself? Have we been doing a good job with that? We were all (myself included) quick to point the finger at Jim Cramer, but we might as well have turned it on ourselves for not investigating the truth more.
Perhaps now is the time to start that off.
Kate Fillion talks with psychologist and teen expert Michael Bradley
Q: What’s going on with teens that makes them act, as you put it in your new book, “crazy”?
A: Neurologically, their brains are going through an explosion of growth, getting ready for the great leap into adulthood. But there’s neurologic fallout from the renovation process: emotional processing speed gets slowed down, they’re less able to read adult emotional cues. Second, the world is telling them to be crazy, do things that are self-destructive. Cultural prompts, in the form of song lyrics or scenes in movies or video clips, are telling them drugs, sex and certain forms of violence are cool, adult and harmless. Thanks to the efficiency of electronics, we pound them with these suggestions to a degree we’ve never pounded on another generation of teens. A third issue is that, as parents, we don’t really respond very well. Responding to these contemporary problems with rules from past generations just doesn’t work.
Q: What kinds of parental responses are disastrous?
A: The biggie is to use fear. A lot of us were raised by parents who’d hit, yell, threaten and punish. That’s a lot of our training, but it doesn’t work today. We also can’t police a kid’s world the way our parents could. The mission statement used to be, “How do you control the kid?” We can’t afford that anymore, because of the changes in the culture. Now it’s, “How do I teach my kid to control herself?” It means talking to your kid with respect, asking good questions, helping her form a set of values, because you’re not going to be there when she needs those values to negotiate her culture.
Q: Large-scale U.S. studies show that teen pregnancy and drug use are both down by about 25 per cent over the past 10 years. Smoking and drinking have also declined. Isn’t that evidence that kids are actually less crazy?
A: In that same 10-year period, hospital records show adolescent fatalities by overdose have increased two- to threefold in America. Birthrates are down, we do know that, but levels of sexual activity are higher than they’ve ever been, as are levels of sexually transmitted diseases. So we’re highly suspicious of some of the numbers, most of which come from self-report inventories, where you give kids a form asking if they’re having sex and doing drugs. We have some research that suggests contemporary teens underestimate those behaviours by 30 to 40 per cent. The reason is that a lot of kids today understand that we live in an information age where very little, if anything, is really private. Another stunning example of under-reporting was that instead of asking kids if they had a sexually transmitted disease, researchers recently drew blood in a well-controlled sample of American female adolescents: one in four had an active STD. That study did not include testing for syphilis or gonorrhea, so the true numbers are even higher.
Q: You’ve said that parenting is most important during the teen years. Why?
A: I get a lot of angry mail from shrinks on this, because we’re all taught that the first five years of life are the most critical. I argue that the last five, from 13 to 18, are at least as critical and perhaps more so. The kid is developing an adult brain, thinking critically, making decisions, and the world is throwing a lot of challenges at them. Many parents respond by trying to be a friend to their child. But when we overindulge our kids, we make them weak. Kids are able, often, to do very well at school and at a sport, but at very little else in life. They can’t do life, because they haven’t become resilient through denial, or earning their way, or living with frustrations and being able to overcome them. A lot of parents refuse to let their kids be frustrated, we jump in and solve all their problems. In so doing, we can cripple them.
Q: How important are chores and responsibilities for teenagers?
A: Really important. People say teens should contribute, but I think it’s the flip side of that, really: teens are so important that we need them. Teens need to feel a sense of responsibility, not based on being yelled at or told they’re lazy, but hearing, “We really need you to help, we’re counting on you.” When you create that feeling in a teen, they’re much less apt to act crazy.
Read the rest of the interview here.
It’s always interesting to read something that expands your horizons. I love seeing other points of views, even if they end up giving me a bit of a headache. What can I say – brain expansion can be painful business.
On December 6th 1989, a young man entered Montreal’s Polytechnique School and shot 14 women dead. The shooter, Marc Lépine, was looking to kill women. He separated the men from the women in the first class he entered, asked the men to leave the room and shot at the women.
This is often where narratives go on to talk about their outrage at violence against women, and rightfully so. Violence, in any shape or form, against any group of people, is an unacceptable way to express feelings of anger and resentement.
However, as Mark Steyn explains in his article, we often forget about one very significant aspect of the story, and excuse the men who ran away. While it might be argued that these were all young students, probably between the ages of 20 and 23, who were frightened and in shock, it can also be argued, as Mark Steyn does, that this is a reflection of the passivity typical to Canada and Canadians.
I think this argument is both harsh and soft; harsh in that there are many Canadians who are anything by passive, and soft in that there are many people around the world who are passive. It just so happens that in Canada, the institutions representing us have been permeated by passivity, which makes it easy to generalise the syndrome as inherent to all Canadians.
But passivity seems to have become somewhat of a norm; however, the reasons behind it vary from country to country. While someone from a middle to upper class background might be passive because they are stifled by their own comfort, others in absolute poverty are so intent on survival that they don’t wish to antagonize any form of help they might get.
This goes back to arguments I have been putting forth in previous articles about how most people on this planet are good people, but that they just haven’t been acting. For various reasons, they are in situations that don’t permit them to act. Even the middle to upper class, which I am often a little too eager to critisize, is probably scared of falling into the same poverty that numbs so many millions into passiveness.
Why don’t you read Mark Steyn’s article for yourself and let me know what you think?
The new film ‘Polytechnique’ sidesteps the old norm of ‘women and children first’
By Mark Steyn
On the annual commemoration of the “Montreal Massacre,” the Quebec broadcaster Marie-France Bazzo remarked how strange it was that, after all these years, nobody had made a work of art about what happened that day at the École Polytechnique.
I wonder, in the two decades since Dec. 6, 1989, how many novelists, playwrights, film directors have tried, and found themselves stumped at the first question: what is this story about?
To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.
For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater. And, as I always say, no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all, his pure laine moniker notwithstanding, what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. As I wrote in this space three years ago:
“The defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The ‘men’ stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.”
(…)When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In reality, First Officer William Murdoch threw deck chairs down to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the first officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered 5,000 pounds toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Pace Cameron, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.
At the École Polytechnique, there was no social norm. And in practical terms it’s easier for a Hollywood opportunist like Cameron to trash the memory of William Murdoch than for a Quebec filmmaker to impose redeeming qualities on a plot where none exist. In Polytechnique, all but one of the “men” walk out of that classroom and out of the story. Only Jean-François acts, after a fashion. He hears the shots . . . and rushes back to save the girl he’s sweet on? No, he does the responsible Canadian thing: he runs down nine miles of windowless corridor to the security man on duty and tells him all hell’s broken loose. So the security guard rushes back to tackle the nut? No, he too does the responsible Canadian thing: he calls the police. More passivity. Polytechnique’s aesthetic is strangely oppressive—not just the “male lead” who can’t lead, but a short film with huge amounts of gunfire yet no adrenalin.
(…)I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive, enervating passivity. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it. M Villeneuve dedicates his film not just to the 14 women who died that day but also to Sarto Blais, a young man at the Polytechnique who hanged himself eight months later. Consciously or not, the director understands what the heart of this story is: not the choice of one man, deformed and freakish, but the choice of all the others, the nice and normal ones. He shows us the men walking out twice—first, in real time, as it were; later, Rashômon-style, from the point of view of the women, in the final moments of their lives.
Read the full article here. And take out that Tylenol, while you’re at it. You might come to need it sooner that you’d expect.
From MacLean’s: Why it’s time to set Conrad Black free
February 27, 2009
It’s funny how some of us tend to limit the concept of justice to black & white. I brought up the article below during a recent conversation with friends and they were appalled by Steve Maich’s point of view that perhaps the just thing to do would be to let Black go free, even if he is guilty. While it was amusing to watch the steam pour out of their ears in an Looney Tunes worthy moment, it was also quite enlightening to see just how difficult it is for some to separate the concept of justice with that of the classic reward and punishment system.
I have to formulate my own opinion about this particular subject, but this article has helped me open my mind more than I would have thought it possible for Conrad Black to do so. So… Thank you, Mr. Black.
Why it’s time to set Conrad Black free
By Steve Maich
Conrad Black just spent his first Christmas in a U.S. federal prison, and if the thought of that gives you pleasure, then you’re not going to have much use for the next 900 words. This is an argument in favour of Black, but not exactly in his defence. This is an appeal to pragmatism, and perhaps to mercy, because sometimes pragmatism and mercy are essential elements of justice. This is an argument for why Conrad Black should be released from prison, if not now, then soon. Not because he’s innocent, but because there is nothing more to be achieved from his incarceration. It is a waste—of money, of potential—and it’s time to wrap it up.
The U.S. president is entitled to pardon or commute the sentence of any federal prisoner. The last days of any administration often see a bonanza of executive leniency, and Black has applied to have his penalty reduced. Most Canadians are hostile to the idea—a recent poll showed more than 70 per cent are glad to see Black languish in the joint for the full term of his sentence—and it’s easy to understand why. Black is not a terribly sympathetic figure and presidential pardons seem arbitrary and undemocratic. But P.S. Ruckman, an associate professor at Rock Valley College in Illinois, is a leading expert on the pardon power, and he believes it is “an essential part of the U.S. justice system.” First, because it provides a check on the power of the judiciary, but also because it allows justice to be more “precise.” In a system dominated by procedure, strict rules of evidence and rigid sentencing grids, justice is often a blunt force. The pardon system allows for a more subjective test of fairness.
Legal experts generally cite two key objectives in the punishment of white-collar crime: deterrence and retribution. Rehabilitation is mostly irrelevant because once you’ve been busted for corporate fraud, people generally won’t let you hold their wallet, much less run a public company. As for deterrence, there is little evidence to suggest that such a thing exists in cases of high-stakes fraud. It’s been almost 20 years since Ivan Boesky and his pals went away for their massive insider trading scheme, and it still happens brazenly every single day. Enron collapsed seven years ago, and still there is enough shady book work going on to keep forensic accountants and short sellers in brisk business. Next week will mark the 60th anniversary of the death of Charles Ponzi, the godfather of the pyramid scheme, and only last month did money manager Bernard Madoff unveil his masterpiece of the genre. When there are millions to be made, and countless ways to cover your tracks, and the perpetrators think they’re smarter than the cops, the risk of being caught is an afterthought.
But even if deterrence were possible, what more could you really want? Black lost control of the company he built over three decades, then watched from the sidelines as it was torn apart and sold in pieces. Much of his personal fortune has been decimated by his long and ongoing legal struggle. He has been forced to quietly accept the gleeful scorn and ridicule of the world press, including prurient and highly suspect examinations of his personal life. And then, of course, there’s the indignity of the time he has already served in prison. The life Black built has been shattered. Now the only thing to argue over is how finely to grind up the shards.
Read the rest of this article here.
Scott Feschuk’s suggestions for 2008 dictionnary updates
February 27, 2009
Words that ought to be in the dictionary, ’08 edition
aniston verb the inability to just let it go already: Twelve years after the championship game, Roger still anistoned that untimely fumble.
blagojevich noun 1. one who commits a crime with comic ineptness: That blagojevich robbed a bank without a mask—or a gun! 2. a grown man who wears a marmot upon his head.
bush verb to long achingly for someone’s departure: After finding half a pizza in the crack of our sofa, my wife began bushing about my couch-crashing best friend.
cheney noun 1. a creature, rarely seen in public, possibly mythical, believed to feed exclusively upon kitty-cats and the souls of orphans. 2. one who successfully hunts the most dangerous game of all—man!
dow verb to decline so rapidly as to force the monocles of heretofore wealthy tycoons to pop from their eye sockets.
jackman noun a genre of screenwriting wherein the plot is meticulously constructed to maximize shirt removal. syn. mcconaughey.
Check out the rest of this article here.
A look back at Christmas 2008
February 27, 2009
Amidst the dire forecasts of a global economy headed for the toilet, contrasting against the heart-warming election of an African-American to the United States presidency, Christmas 2008 was a particularly hard one for some of the earliest victims of the current economic turmoil.
But there is always a way to turn anything into something positive, and so was Christmas 2008 for some of these people. MacLean’s reported on this in a very interesting article:
The recession that saved Christmas, by Ken MacQueen and Cathy Gulli
Lean times, some find, are connecting them to the real meaning of the holidays
You’d have to go back in Audrey and Owen Freeman’s lives to the Christmas of 1964 to find a time such as this—when bleak circumstances should doom the spirit of the season to wander lost in a fog of loneliness, dislocation and worry. It was their second Christmas together. They lived with their infant daughter in a bare apartment in Toronto—a city so foreign to Audrey that when she moved there from the outport of Carmanville, Nfld., she says: “If I had been going to the moon at the time, I wouldn’t have been more scared.” Owen was laid off just before Christmas. There wasn’t a spare cent once the rent was paid. They were too proud to tell their parents so they resigned themselves to a Christmas without presents, turkey or tree. “We were young and in love, I suppose,” says Audrey, “so we were willing to put up with most anything.”
Two days before Christmas, a trunk was delivered to their apartment, unannounced. Audrey’s parents had stuffed it with decorations and gifts; with candy, fruitcake and nuts; with a tiny red velvet dress and a stocking full of the things little girls love. There was a letter inside, too, and a cheque for $100, because there was no room in the trunk for a tree and dinner with all the trimmings. And so a Christmas that seemed destined to be marked with tears was instead celebrated with weepiness of the happy sort. Tears became a Freeman holiday tradition as three more children, then spouses, and then eight grandchildren joined the fold, all settling into communities near the Freeman’s home in Ajax, Ont. “If anybody walked into our place Christmas morning,” says Audrey, “they’d think we were all very sad.”
Sad? Not at all. But the biggest test of that comes this Christmas. Owen lost his job last winter after 37 years with a drugstore chain, forced into early retirement in part by illness. In all, he spent three months this year in hospital. With finances tight, the Freemans reluctantly sold their home in Ajax, and moved back to Carmanville this October. “I guess you could say we’ve come full circle,” says Audrey. “The economic downturn has affected us in that we had no choice but to move halfway across the country in order to survive on our small pension and limited savings.”
They aren’t alone in planning this year for a lean holiday season. World markets are in turmoil, retirement savings are gutted. The economy of Canada, like most of its global trading partners, is in decline. Consumer confidence, the Conference Board of Canada reported in November, fell to its lowest point since the brutal recession of 1982. And no wonder: some 71,000 Canadian jobs were lost last month, the largest drop in 25 years.
(…)
Obviously for many this will seem a diminished holiday born of fear and debt. And yet, with tough times comes an opportunity to reimagine the holiday. There are many who see this as the recession that saved Christmas, a chance to scale back the spending and search out the optimism of our inner Tiny Tims. What is Christmas, after all, but the willing suspension of disbelief? There is much that can’t be measured by leading economic indicators, or by money in the bank or the lack of it. For the Freemans, the standard for all the Christmases to come was set in the hardship of 44 years ago. “We are fortunate in that we started to cut back on spending and realize the true meaning of Christmas long before we were forced to,” says Audrey as she readies their home for the holidays.
This year, they face the prospect of a first Christmas far from their children, like many families this recessionary season who will be unable to spend as they are accustomed to on presents and travel. The Freemans are determined to make the best of it, saying it gives the children, now in their 30s and 40s, a chance to start their own traditions. Their gift-giving has never been extravagant. (…) The family will watch each other open their presents Christmas morn via a Skype computer video link; (…). The Freemans will then dine with Audrey’s cousins in Carmanville, where they will toast their good fortune and Owen’s improving health. “He’s doing really well,” Audrey says. “We’re very thankful just to have each other, and to be able to celebrate Christmas at all.”
Read the rest of the article here.
From MacLean’s: Why smart people do stupid things
February 13, 2009
Why smart people do stupid things
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
If you’re like most people, like four out of five of us in fact, you won’t answer the following question correctly. Jack is looking at Annie, Annie is looking at George. Jack is married, George is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Possible answers: yes, no, can’t be determined. Unless you were alerted by the way the question was prefaced here, and spent a little time seeking a not immediately apparent response, you’ll likely give the obvious—and wrong—answer: can’t be determined because Annie’s marital status is unknown. In fact, that’s immaterial: either Annie is married and gazing at single George, or she is unwed and looked upon by married Jack. No matter which, the answer is yes: a married person is looking at an unmarried person.
Yet 80 per cent of us opt for the facile answer, and not just in logic puzzles, says University of Toronto psychologist Keith Stanovich. That’s because we’re natural-born “cognitive misers,” creatures of an evolution that has shaped us to seek rapid, instinctive “ballpark answers” rather than expend the mental energy required for exact solutions. (In other words, think.) What fascinates Stanovich, and makes his book, What Intelligence Tests Miss (Yale UP), both entertaining and scientifically significant, is that cognitive parsimony—and a host of other barriers to rational thought—are no respecters of IQ. The highly intelligent are as prone to irrationality as anyone else, and there is no reason to be surprised when smart people do dumb things.
IQ tests and their proxies, like the SAT test for university admission, are the most important determinant in the academic and professional careers of millions. They’re virtually “deified” in the U.S., according to Stanovich, who says their critics only bemoan the tests’ neglect of other valued human capacities—so-called emotional or social intelligence. Admirers and detractors, in other words, both assume IQ tests are the last word in thinking ability. That’s nonsense, says Stanovich: while an IQ test is good at assessing ability to focus on an immediate goal, it cannot assess whether the person tested “has a tendency to develop goals that are rational in the first place.”
In that regard, as in so many others, George W. Bush functions as symbol-in-chief. For many of his critics, the former president—as witnessed by his mangled syntax and serene indifference to the intersection of reality and bedrock belief—was not so much a mistaken politician as an actual idiot. But his IQ, as calculated from his college admission tests, can reliably be set at an above-average 120, about the same as his 2004 opponent, John Kerry, widely regarded as a pointy-headed intellectual. Bush is not a stupid man.
But he is, Stanovich believes, “a very irrational” one. Had his IQ tests been accompanied by RQ tests—means of measuring a subject’s rationality quotient—Stanovich has no doubt Bush would have failed them all. They would have revealed his overconfidence, low intellectual engagement, lack of openness to experience, high faith in intuition and other barriers to clear thought. And although Bush may be an extreme case of what Stanovich calls dysrationalia, he is far from alone. Eons of evolution have selected, as scientists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd put it, for all animals, including humans, “to be as stupid as they can get away with.” Thinking is costly—in concentration, energy, time and risk—compared with instinctive reaction. The Taung child, the three-year-old hominid killed by an eagle 2.5 million years ago, is a graphic explanation of why we duck first, and think later, when a shadow passes low over us.
Read the rest of the article here.
