<p>Every thread with Bel in it comes back to what’s wrong, in his opinion, of our society. He clearly thinks we need to go back to the portrayed 50s (“good” girls, only straight people are allowed to be seen, etc) and that only the “right” type of people should ever be in charge of anything (everything relates back to HIS idea of intelligence). Anything else that is not specifically in his perceived perfect world is wrong. </p>
<p>Oh, and if you disagree with him, he’ll link you to one of thousands of articles he apparently has at his disposal… and ignore any line of questions that challenge the article. </p>
<p><em>steps off soapbox and leaves thread</em></p>
<p>Lol. If we’re talking intelligent on a societal level we know we’re smarter but at the school level we’re behind in math and our very own English. China is doing nearly the same we did decades ago, smart kids go to school, poor kids have to work. Yet they’re about to run us while our students spend 20 minutes on 1 simple problem.
Oh and what just happen here… We wasted a good page about homosexual and intelligence. People in the 50s… They have their own little world, their bubble. Ever since colored asked for equality they can’t accept that. The same is happening here with gays.
We are indeed getting not only more intelligent, we are becoming more tolerance of people, more sensitive to changes. 1912? Might as well go back to the dawn of human civilization more than 10000 years ago. I trust that the result of that would be most enlightening indeed.</p>
<p>Sorry, I was including China in my analysis. >_></p>
<p>China’s definitely more intelligent than it was 100 years ago.</p>
<p>But it’s difficult to compare between nations with the definition I gave, given the fluidity of information between nations and the fundamental role this information plays in defining our society’s cognitive capacity.</p>
<p>Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that depending on what period we’re talking about.</p>
<p>Nowadays, I’m reading that they’re rapidly trying to open up a lot of universities to meet demand…but most of the new ones are private colleges and with few exceptions…private colleges and their graduates over there are given the same/worse regard we have for our for-profit colleges and their graduates here. Also, unlike here in the US, the most prestigious colleges tend to be public ones as they are popularly perceived as being run much more for the sake of providing a better quality education/prestige with high academic standards whereas the privates are perceived as being run mainly to get tuition money from students who didn’t meet the grade for the lower-priced and more prestigious publics*. </p>
<p>As for 14+ years ago, one didn’t necessarily have to be rich to get a topflight university education as tuition was completely free for all students who passed the exceedingly cutthroat competitive national college entrance exam. However, you did have to be exceedingly smart enough and have the endurance to pass that 3-day exam. </p>
<p>Free tuition for admitted students was still in effect when I did my summer study abroad in China during the late '90s. However, the Mainland Chinese government did away with the free tuition policy sometime not too long after I left. </p>
<ul>
<li>Similar perceptions regarding public and private colleges are also present in other East Asian societies like Japan, the ROC(Taiwan) and South Korea. With a few exceptions, all the top universities tend to be public colleges.</li>
</ul>
<p>There are efforts to identify the genetic markers for intelligence. As described in the article below, many Westerners are squeamish about acknowledging the importance of IQ and its heritability, but the Chinese are less so.</p>
Beliavsky,
The schools are providing resources for their GBLT students. They aren’t “promoting” anything. They are welcoming and acknowledging and providing resources for their existing students, just as they might have resources and programs for , say, International students on their campus. Your commentary about GBLT is quite disturbing.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, the article you linked to also suggests a genetic component in sexual orientation. </p>
<p>I thought it was just a “choice” that rebels make just to appear cool - you know, why it’s so important to avoid “promoting” it?</p>
<p>It also says - let’s say your son brought home the perfect girl, and she passed all your IQ tests and so forth. But she had a gay sibling. Would you then discourage such a marriage, as her family’s “gay gene” might then be present in your grandchildren?</p>
<p>Zhao Bowen (pictured in the article) doesn’t seem too smart about his own safety. In the picture, he is not using the seat belt in the car, and the article mentions him bumming a cigarette from someone.</p>
<p>I notice that sometime people don’t wear seat belt in cab, especially in New York so that’s nothing.
Smoking-“He makes small talk with a girl, bums a cigarette off her.” LOLLL.</p>
<p>Some of us like men and some of us like women and some of us could go either way. If it is okay to be gay, then it seems to me it is absolutely okay to choose to be gay for those for whom it is a choice. If it is okay to be gay, then we no longer have to justify it. I don’t see how it hurts society if some choose to be gay. I have no problem with the idea of gay “recruitment” although I agree that isn’t happening at the present time. What does happen is that gay/straight alliances in high schools and colleges provide a safe place for gay students, with parents like Beliasvsky, to decide how to handle their coming-out.</p>
<p>I am sad Beliavsky feels as he does but soon, in this country, his opinion will be pretty much irrelevant. I wonder how much increased societal support will encourage those who might earlier have felt the need to stay closeted to just go ahead and break with their disapproving families? I feel sorry for those parents. They don’t get a do-over with this issue.</p>
<p>Gosh, what if we could find some study that showed that the smarter/ higher IQ / more educated a person, the more the likelihood - er, probability - that they didn’t think that being gay was wrong or immoral. It wouldn’t be like Beliavsky to go against what the smartest people say.</p>
<p>It’s NOT a choice (there is a difference between choosing to engage in sexual acts with someone of a certain sex vs being heterosexual/homosexual/somewhere in between). Did you choose to be straight? No. No one chooses to be discriminated against. LGBT “recruitment” is not happening. In fact, it’s quite the opposite (but LGBT aren’t being recruited to be straight–more like beaten, raped, and shamed). </p>
<p>This thread was interesting when posters stuck to the original topic. Please do not make assertions about something you don’t know about/don’t experience (and if you did “know” or “experience” you wouldn’t be making claims that it’s a choice). Beliavsky has successfully derailed the thread. Congrats.</p>
<p>How do we know that amount of Americans can understand common sense. I bought it for free on my kindle and it isn’t difficult to understand, just a long non-stop read.</p>
<p>There’s also the fact that Americans today just aren’t concerned with reading things like Common Sense (or reading, period. Since it’s much less taxing on the brain to just watch TV or read celebrity gossip). But I do not doubt that relatively less Americans today can understand Common Sense, since I do not think Thomas Paine used particularly contemporary language. Just like I don’t think people of the 18th century would be able to understand Harry Potter or Hunger Games, which are considered great works of literature today…</p>