Smarter Than Thou

I knew it! I’m smarter than you! Well, not you, necessarily, but lots of people. And most of my neighbors. You see, I’m a liberal, and liberals are smarter than conservatives. I knew it.

I used to know this because I watch Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and they are smarter than Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and all the friends at Fox News combined. But now I know it because science has proven it.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary biologist from the London School of Economics, has found that young adults who identify themselves as “very liberal” score 11 points higher than their “very conservative” counterparts on standard IQ tests. I knew it! Not only are these smarter liberals liberal, but they also tend to be atheists. So take that Zeus!

Now I’m no longer an young adult, but I am very liberal, and my theology is atheistic if the theist’s god is an invisible white man who lives in the sky and constantly spies on people and who may or may not have a son, so I must be smarter than my very conservative and very religious neighbors.

Of course “very liberal” and “very conservative” are highly imprecise terms (though the fact that I can use a word like “imprecise” shows how smart I am, and the fact that I can challenge my own superiority shows how very liberal I must be). I may be very liberal when compared to those in my town who still harbor fond memories of the good ol’ days of slavery when black folk and women folk knew their place and there was no gay folk, at least not if they knew what was good for them. But I may be less than liberal when compared to those in my town who long for a total nanny state.

I’m neither a fascist nor a nannytarian. I’m just very liberal. Or at least I used to be. I don’t like income taxes much, and I think the government is too big, and big business is too big, and there is nothing too big to fail (remember the dinosaurs?), and I don’t like forcing people to buy health insurance from private insurers, and I don’t like cap and trade, and I don’t like fear mongering by climatologists any more than I like fear mongering by politicians, and I think we a live in a plutocracy (which is a state of the rich, for the rich, by the rich), and I think government is just a shill for corporate interests, and having discovered that the CIA allows agents to moonlight for private corporations doing global corporate espionage I have taken to wearing a tinfoil yarmulkah to protect myself from the mind probes of the corporate fascist overlords who are invisible white men with eyes in the sky that are constantly spying on me, and having watched what was supposed to be a very frightening CNN expose on air toxicity in airplanes, and having been captivated by the production values of the piece which was designed to frighten me despite the fact that the conclusion was that the amount of toxic poisons in the air of jet airplanes is so low as to be irrelevant, I now wear a hazmat suits whenever I travel by plane, and while I want to be environmentally wise and drive a Prius I won’t buy one until Toyota equips each car with an anchor that I can manually throw out the window to stop the car in the case of a computer malfunction that makes the car accelerate almost to the speed I normally drive at.

I had better stop thinking like this; I can feel myself IQ score dipping. How about you?