January 12, 2014

Upworthy: "What America Cares about Now"

From Upworthy
     
By Steve Sailer on 1/12/2014

41 comments:

Felix M said...

Perhaps unemployment comes under "poverty" but I wouldn't have thought so.

Sad to see that education, science, and techology don't get a look in. President Kennedy, please come back.

And surely cancer is only a concern with the over 40's?

1/12/14, 7:30 PM
Reg Cæsar said...

I'd never heard of this "Upyoursy". Is it important?

Insensitivity to the color-blind should get the biggest circle. Not for America, but for themselves.

1/12/14, 7:33 PM
Anonymous said...

Upworthy is a means that the morally pathetic have to jump on the latest bandwagon. Most of the people who post Upworthy articles would be burning witches and hanging gays if it were fashionable to do so.

One only has to look at what categories they've chosen to reflect the internet:

Environmental Challenges
Global Challenges
Health
Human Knowledge
LGBT
Other
Race and Bigotry
Social Policy and Economics
Women

1/12/14, 7:40 PM
2Degrees said...

I need advice from Steve and his readership.

Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?

1/12/14, 7:41 PM
Anonymous said...

Speaking of Steve's previous post, most of these are losers' concerns. I'm sure that most of the people who said that they're concerned about "standards of beauty" are women lacking in beauty, that most of the people who said they're concerned about "fat shaming" are fat women, that "bullying" mostly concerns wimpy and gay men, "bigotry" and "racial profiling" mostly concern members of unpopular ethnic groups, etc. Nietzsche decried ressentiment more than a hundred years ago, but there's about a thousand times more of it now than there was then.

1/12/14, 7:50 PM
Anthony said...

Upworthy: what liberals who prefer their information predigested into highly emotional videos, rather than reading, care about now.

1/12/14, 7:51 PM
countenance said...

"What America cares about now"

Translation:

The low information undertow parroting what they hear the media talking about. IOW, this isn't what America cares about, it's what the media care about.

1/12/14, 7:53 PM
Anonymous said...

Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?

It's true that rural/smaller tax base states receive more federal funding per capita, but it's not based on politics. Large metros higher salaries.

New England states and Hawaii receive more than they put in and they're usually blue, yet mostly rural.

http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2010/02/17/federal-taxes-paidreceived-for-each-state/

1/12/14, 7:54 PM
Reg Cæsar said...

I'm sure it wasn't their intention, but this site posted a wonderful graphic explanation of why Africans don't belong in Italy… or France, Germany, the UK or the US.

http://www.upworthy.com/we-have-been-mislead-by-an-erroneous-map-of-the-world-for-500-years

(NB: that link worked fine in three browsers, but not as HTML in Blogger's preview function. What the funct?)

I've always thought the Peters Projection worked better gor our side than for the other.

1/12/14, 7:56 PM
24AheadDotCom said...

2Degrees: in case your quest is valid, a very simple search should bring up charts showing that most red states (with the exception of TX) take more than they give and that the opposite is true of blue states (with the exception of WV, etc.) I've also discussed how, depending on how you define a blue state, blue states give more to charity than red states. Those are good arguments to use against red state mythologizers like HotAir, TP commenters on blogs, etc.

In case you're just playing a game, I suggest doing it at a much more appropriate site like HotAir/Townhall/RedState.

1/12/14, 7:58 PM
Anonymous said...

Steve, as you can clearly see from the evidence, you should confine your writing to "Standards of Beauty". I recommend lots of images of puppies and butterflies as well.

You could be big, man!

Puppies. The children. Because we care. (Don't forget lots of pics of beautiful women. Think of the clicks you will get!)

1/12/14, 8:12 PM
SFG said...

Uh...no. This is what the hipster-feminist-liberal editors of Upworthy care about.

The country's in bad shape, yes, but not that bad.

I *would* like to see the Dark Lord of the Chateau make his version. Roissy? You reading this?

1/12/14, 8:19 PM
Crawfurdmuir said...

2degrees, that contention does not take into account two things:

1: states that have income taxes benefit at the expense of the federal treasury by the deductibility of state tax payments from federally taxable income. This is a subsidy to those states - typically Democrat-leaning ones like New York and California. In states without income taxes (e.g., Florida), residents pay federal taxes on all of their income.

2. States that borrow money extensively enjoy a tax subsidy on the interest payable to bondholders by virtue of the exemption of municipal bond interest from federal taxation. They thus enjoy lower interest rates than those charged to borrowers whose interest payments are taxable income to the bondholders. In general, states that have high levels of government spending and indebtedness benefit at the expense of those that do not. Again, California is a textbook example.

If we total the value of these Federal tax expenditures to high-tax, high-spending, highly-indebted states, which tend to support Democrats, the supposed imbalance of Federal direct spending in low-tax, low-spending, low-debt Republican-leaning states is largely balanced out.

As for HBD explanations, we must remember that many Southern states with large black minorities are carried by Republicans because of their white majorities - though the vast majority of Federal expenditures in those states for AFDC, food stamps, Social Security Disability, etc., go to the black population who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

1/12/14, 8:41 PM
Anonymous said...

Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?

As an American let me point out something. This Republican (red) state versus Democrat (blue) state is not a good metric. In our electoral system, if a candidate wins a state by 1 measly vote, then that state goes for that candidate. So Missouri might be considered a republican state since it voted in 2008 for McCain over Obama by less than 4 thousand votes out of around 3 million cast.

But, Missouri has a democrat for governor and one of our two US Senators is a democrat, though the state legislature is majority republican. Is Missouri a republican state, or a democrat state?

Many states are like this where the difference between the republican or democrat candidate in a given year is just a few percentage points. So to make a better assessment, you need to look at the county level and even to the wards and precincts.

In Missouri we have pockets of democrat voters, namely the large black populations of Kansas City and St. Louis, who pay less taxes and utilize more federal assistance than the white, republican suburbanites. Should this assistance be attributed to republicans taking more than they pay, or to democrats?

Even in states like California which is solidly democrat, or Kansas which is solidly republican, you need to look at counties and demographic blocks to ascertain who take more in services than they pay in taxes. I am sure the Mexican population in California, who vote predominately democrat, take more government assistance than the whites.

Here is a map of the 2012 election, broken down by county. In many red states, those little blue counties contribute a heck of a lot to that state's welfare rolls.

1/12/14, 9:06 PM
countenance said...

Anonymous 1/12/14, 9:06 PM

First off, as a St. Louisan, welcome to the Sailer-o-Sphere.

That said, as the one and only author of all the posts on this medium has proven, there is one huge factor which delineates red states from blue states, and even more so red counties from blue counties, and probably even more so red precincts from blue precincts, in terms of Presidential politics.

It's the proportion of the jurisdiction's population that contains white non-Jewish adults involved in what are stereotypically called "nuclear families" (heterosexually married and children as a result of that union).

One thing you may or may not have noticed about our state in Presidential politics: Since 2000, Missouri has not only been redder than the national average (popular vote), it is getting more divergently red over time. Missouri was 2.5% redder than the country in 2000, about 5% redder in 2004, about 7% redder in 2008 and about 13% redder in 2012.

1/12/14, 9:27 PM
Geoff Matthews said...

Regarding red states and federal funding, many western states have significant amounts of land owned by the federal government. This is never taken into consideration. Neither are military installations.

1/12/14, 9:31 PM
Kaz said...

What a bunch of hot air bullshit.

How the hell is standards of beauty so high?

Be relatively thin and clean. It's that simple..

1/12/14, 9:42 PM
Anonymous said...

Nothing about Eskimos?

1/12/14, 9:49 PM
2Degrees said...

24AheadDotCom said...
2Degrees: in case your quest is valid, a very simple search should bring up charts showing that most red states (with the exception of TX) take more than they give and that the opposite is true of blue states (with the exception of WV, etc.)

Why would my request not be valid? I am an HBD sympathiser, but suffer periodic fits of self doubt. I live in NZ, which is a very small society and is far easier to understand than a vast country like America. Facts are facts even if they do not fit my world view, but I remember liberals announcing that red states were dumber than blue states. That turned out to be wishful thinking on their part. If peopel are feeding me a load of rubbish about New Zealand, I am no so easily fooled. That’s not the case with the US.

I am referring to the following article:

www.businessinsider.com.au/maps-that-explain-the-world-2013-2#tax-payback-red-indicates-states-that-get-more-than-a-dollar-back-for-every-dollar-of-taxes-paid-1
I really miss the Inductivist - moved by data not by ideology. In a perfect world, Steve Sailer would be Regis professor of sociology at Cambridge.

1/12/14, 10:03 PM
TGGP said...

Supposedly, the driving force behind sharing links that makes stuff go "viral" is moms on Facebook. Upworthy was founded by that Facebook/New Republic guy with a liberal mission, so it will have that skew on top.

1/12/14, 10:06 PM
Prof. Woland said...

I like the names MSNBC gives to their programs like Hard Ball, Disrupt, and my favorite Up Chris Hayes.

1/12/14, 10:23 PM
Anonymous said...

Upworthy headline generator:

http://www.upworthygenerator.com/

Generates upworthy article titles, complete with angsty photos of weepy designated victims.

"Watch A Transgender Eight Year-old Become An Inspiration With One Question."
--Starts around 1:54. Gets mindblowing around 2:15.

"Think You've Never Discriminated Against Someone? Maybe You Should Listen To This Former Drug Addict."

"Before You Say America Is The Best Country, Listen To The Second Half Of The Third Sentence From A Fashonista."

"What Happens When One Iconoclastic Tween Talks About The Elephant In The Room."

"What Happens When One Angry Holocaust Survivor Stands Up To The Critics."

1/12/14, 11:57 PM
Anonymous said...

countenance - The low information undertow parroting what they hear the media talking about. IOW, this isn't what America cares about, it's what the media care about.

Very good comment mate!

Big overlap with Twitter there I suspect. Disqus, not so much.

1/13/14, 2:29 AM
Anonymous said...

24AheadDotCom said - 2Degrees: in case your quest is valid, a very simple search should bring up charts showing that most red states (with the exception of TX) take more than they give and that the opposite is true of blue states

Then Democrat election policy is clear. Cut taxes everywhere to the point that all states become net beneficiaries!

(Yes, I know there is a problem with that from a mathematical standpoint but hey, it's a thought experiment)

1/13/14, 2:39 AM
sunbeam said...

I know for a fact that Upworthy doesn't know what it is talking about.

No idea how they got their "bubbles," but if it had anything to do with the internet, there are some glaring omissions.

1) No porn bubbles.

2) No one Piece.

3) No Naruto.

Come one, teen and pre-teen boys are hardcore internet users. I remember when I worked in the computer field seeing some estimate in the 1990's that 90% or something of all internet traffic was related to porn.

Then when it got widespread in the 90's, something changed. I used to use a lot of bittorrent sites. Most of them exclude porn, but usually the biggest torrents had something to do with anime, manga, or Firefly or something similar.

I am pulling numbers out of my butt, but I'm pretty sure Dragonball Z took over from Porn in the early 2000's.

So Upworthy doesn't pass my smell test. I've been wrong before though.

1/13/14, 3:48 AM
Anonymous said...

I would think after running years and years of almost trillion dollar deficits, that every state would be getting back more from the feds than it paid in taxes.

1/13/14, 4:40 AM
Anonymous said...

2Degrees,

Kia ora. Tell your acquaintances to cross reference those charts with demographics, and you quickly see that many of the red states also boast high numbers of minorities.

There's also no difference between what that "tax dollar" is going towards, such as maintenance of federal land, or paying for Ofelia's ninth child. Furthermore a number of veterans have settled in "red" America, so their disability & pensions are counted as 'tax dollars'. When you start breaking it down, you start seeing that its not so cut and dry.

If Vermont had the same black population as say, Mississippi, things would be a bit different up there.

Basically, this 'statistic' is touted by blue state liberals who live in states with miniscule black populations to feel good about themselves over the unenlightened or some nonsense.

1/13/14, 6:12 AM
Anonymous said...

2Degrees:

Others have attempted to address the red/blue spending disparity, but lets throw in a few more salient facts.

Military spending/manufacturing - this is tilted towards states with large military bases and large manufacturing capability. Military bases were located in mainly Southern states because (1) an out of balance contributor to the population of military recruits was from Greater Appalachia, (2) Southern Senators and Representatives up until the 1970's had little competition in elections and so generally had seniority and thus the ability to steer government spending to their districts - this included military bases. Manufacturing has trended in the US out of blue states and into red states since the big 1957-8 recession which inagurated, so to speak, the rust belt. When the Feds purchase goods and services under buy-America provisions, the tendency is to purchase in red states because of this..

Welfare - the red states have a very large welfare client population of minorities - part of what makes them red states, in comparison to say Minnesota or Vermont.

Retirement - people tend to leave high cost/cold weather blue states in retirement and move to places like Florida and South Carolina. This leads to more social security and federal pension payments going to red states.

Farm Policy - agricultural subsidies of course tend to go to red states, as places like Michigan, Maine and New Jersey have little in the way of agriculture compared to Kansas or Indiana.

Land Ownership - the Federl Goverment owns large amounts of the surface area of western states, mainly red, and so spends a lot of money administering land and activities in places like Utah, Montana, and Arizona.

Income - cost of living is generally much higher in blue states than red states, leading to out-of-line tax payments on a per capita basis due to use of an income tax and the higher incomes needed to make people willing to live in places like LA or NYC. Someone who might be very happy and living large earning $60,000 in Nebraska would be nearly starving in NYC. The blue states are the ones who continually vote to keep their own high tax payments, so they must feel they are getting something from this system, otherwise self-interest would suggest conversion of the primary tax system to something more equitable that would hit lower income people harder than the present system.

1/13/14, 6:46 AM
Mr. Anon said...

What women think now.

1/13/14, 7:11 AM
Anonymous said...

"What America cares about now"

What America is allowed and encouraged to care about.

So, if a community is ravaged by black crime but if powers-that-be deem discussion of such as 'racist, then the fearful PC whites in the community will rather bitch about 'gay marriage' and Muslim terrorists.

1/13/14, 7:31 AM
David said...

Upchuckworthy

>Insensitivity to the color-blind should get the biggest circle. Not for America, but for themselves.<

I sense a microaggression. Not sure if it's yours or theirs. I will have another latte before trying to unpack this.

1/13/14, 8:13 AM
Anony Mouse said...

You know, beauty standards are a lot less brutal if you marry relatively young (When you're at the most attractive point in your life) an aren't spending 10+ years in the sexual marketplace, trying to keep up. I'm less pretty at 19, but to my husband, I'm also the person who knows him best, cooks him dinner, and generally tends to him, and that makes up for the inevitable decline in beauty. And since I'm not trying to compete with the new crop of 19 year olds hitting the marketplace, I don't need to hate the fact that they're more beautiful than I am now.

Also, in a reality where beautiful women get snapped up, married, and taken permanently off the market, the other men are more open to date what's left, even if it's less stunning. Now the really hot girls keep floating around the dating marketplace for 10-15 years, which is particularly hard on their less pretty peers.]

Traditional cultures: They may have been on to something!

1/13/14, 8:34 AM
Anonymous said...

Eskimoes? Why not leprechauns?

1/13/14, 9:43 AM
Anonymous said...

2Degrees said...”Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states...Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?”

I don’t know that this is an HBD argument as much as an arithmetic one. Unless you want to get into just who it is in Mississippi and Alabama that is consuming the taxes.

The whole red state/blue state divide is pretty inexact. Somebody using “red state/blue state” as part of a serious argument has a lot of nerve calling themselves an academic. More like Facebook quality arguer/yeller. How do you classify a state if it voted for Bush, McCain, or Romney but now has a Democrat governor? Virginia voted for Obama but had a Republican governor until last week and still sees Republicans dominating their legislature.

I have a number of lefty friends that trot this silliness out every now and then. I respond that “so you keep electing the same redistributionist hacks every election cycle and then argue that conservatives are dumb?” You can alternately respond with “why does that bother you? Isn’t the whole point of redistributionist policies that somebody is going to get back more than they pay?” If this alleged red state/blue state tax-and-spend disparity really bothered them, they’d be in a hurry to shut off various spending programs.

Geoff Matthews said...”Regarding red states and federal funding, many western states have...land owned by the federal government. This is never taken into consideration. Neither are military installations.”
Neither are bailouts of auto companies and banks. Both of which overwhelmingly benefit so-called blue states.

2Degrees said...”…I am referring to the following article: www.businessinsider.com.au/maps-that-explain-the-world-2013-2#tax-payback-red-indicates-states-that-get-more-than-a-dollar-back-for-every-dollar-of-taxes-paid-1”

Every state gets back more than it pays in taxes. For the simple reason that about half of federal spending isn’t covered by taxes, rather is borrowed.

1/13/14, 12:44 PM
Steve Sailer said...

Red States have far more military bases because they are less crowded (the dirt gap). For example, crowded New Jersey has only a small Air National Guard unit but they still managed to drop a bomb on a school during a training mission around 2000. Fortunately it was in the middle of night and nobody was killed.

1/13/14, 1:16 PM
Anonymous said...

Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?

Red states also have a higher average murder rate than blue states, but this is explained by the fact that red states actually have more blacks and browns than blue states. The south is the blackest part of the country. This likely plays a huge role in the phenomenon you write of as well.

1/13/14, 1:19 PM
Anonymous said...

"Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?" - it is by and large correct, when looked at at a state level granularity. Mississippi for instance is the worst offender, and yet the democrat counties therein are the largest consumers of welfare.

On the other side of the spectrum you have Wyoming, which is too sparsely populated to afford all of the national infrastructure that other states need in Wyoming.

1/13/14, 3:03 PM
ben tillman said...

Various academics of my acquaintance keep posting articles saying that Republican states pay less in tax and take more from the Federal Government than Democratic states. I do not live in the US and do not know the country well. Could I have some HBD data to throw back at them, or is this simply a fact we have to accept and work with?

1. Prisons and police cost governments money. The central government must keep its less enthusiastic states in line. Your friends have no idea (nor do I) how much of the money that the red states "take" relates to this.

2. Red states have a lot of military bases. How are related expenditures treated? Are the expenditures divided up and attributed to the states from which the members of the armed services come?

3. Arizona and Florida (if it is a red state) have lots of retirees who paid taxes elsewhere and now receive Social Security and Medicare funds in their new homes.

4. What the hell is their point, anyway? If their factual assertion is correct, it proves that the red states are unselfish in their willingness to forego a system that benefits them.

1/13/14, 4:46 PM
Hold the potatoes said...

Is this what America cares about or what its elites care about? I seriously doubt the average American gives 2 farts and a damn about Empowerment and the like.

Just because we're told that transgenderism and other crazy sh*t are equally valuable and valid lifestyles as 'plain vanilla' straight marriage and we're to be ashamed of 'cis' privilege, it doesn't mean most people actually buy it.

1/13/14, 7:14 PM
Aspect said...

"2Degrees: in case your quest is valid, a very simple search should bring up charts showing that most red states (with the exception of TX) take more than they give and that the opposite is true of blue states (with the exception of WV, etc.) I've also discussed how, depending on how you define a blue state, blue states give more to charity than red states. Those are good arguments to use against red state mythologizers like HotAir, TP commenters on blogs, etc.

In case you're just playing a game, I suggest doing it at a much more appropriate site like HotAir/Townhall/RedState."


Be sure when you look it up you also look at the demographics, something that's usually ignored because it will show just how black many of those red former slave states are.

Comparing apples to oranges to drum up support for liberalism over conservativism is hardly a mark in favor of liberalism to a realist, but its increasingly what passes for logic these days.

1/13/14, 7:22 PM
Anonymous said...

"Why America Needs to be Destroyed: Upworthy"

1/14/14, 4:51 PM

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