Posted on 07/03/2014 5:09:24 AM PDT by blam
Christina Sterbenz
July 3, 2014
Cultures are complicated, and anyone attempting to explain or group them will struggle to avoid giving offense.
Political scientists Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Christian Welzel of Luephana University in Germany put forth their best effort by analyzing data and plotting countries on a "culture map." Their system stems from the World Values Survey (WVS), the largest"non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed," which dates back to 1981 and includes nearly 400,000 respondents from 100 countries.
The latest chart, published several years ago, includes data from surveys conducted from 1995 to 1999, 2000 to 2004, and 2005 to 2009.
Check it out:
Inglehart World Values Map Wikimedia Commons
So what's going on in this chart?
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Maybe, subject to one’s interpretations of the meanings.
Yet Sweden is the capitol of the world for Muslim rape against Westerners.
“Cultural differences” is a term used by liberals to describe their differences with traditionalists. When they speak of problems with traditionalists, they actually mean race-haters, bigots and those opposed to horribly deformed liberaldom.
Sociology is not a science. It is interpretation and conjecture of supposed empirical data that is not tainted. Formulas, algorithms, tenets and beliefs derived therefrom are nothing more than one would find on Facebook or Twitter. Just because some to the tenets are widely expressed there does not make it ‘science’, and trying to put it in a graph that represents actual untainted data is crap.
b) Ethiopia is not Islamic c) It's interesting to me that the US, Poland and Ireland are on similar points of the "Secular Rational" scale.
d) It's also interesting that all the Anglophone countries rate lower on the "Secular-Rational" scale but highest on freedom of expression. Perhaps it should be re-named the "Pseudo-Secular Rational" scale, because the Nordic countries enforce PC bull--- with a religious fervor.
In my days of college engineering, a graph/envelope that looks like some of the constituent groups contained in this graph would be most closely described as “discontinuous”, “doubly discontinuous” and “triply discontinuous. In an engineering science based vein, this smacks of manipulation and interpretation of data that do no follow normal rules of physics.
To most liberal academics Israel doesn’t exist. Of course to most liberal academics God doesn’t exist.
CC
Probably reflects the depths of faith among Poles.
I noted that, too.
It may not be an exact science like math where there is a definitive unchanging answer because people's beliefs and behavior are not definitive and unchanging. It may not be a science that you find useful but it can certainly be a "science" nonetheless. (studying and categorizing societies or cultures in this case). Granted, you can't say that everyone who lives in the countries listed holds the views described by the axes. However, if you go to Ghana and ask a random person questions about their "traditional/secular" beliefs mentioned in the article, how likely do you think they will give an answer that falls in line with the graph?
TAHDAAAAHH...SCIENCE
As our country is inundated with people from other nations and cultures and people from different cultures are migrating into new geographical areas (Europe), I think it is important to understand some of the differences between the cultures. Not so that we can accommodate them but so that we know what we are in for.
It seems that you are either denying that different groups of people have these differences or you are being obtuse as to the impact that these differences have. It sounds like you are saying, "We will never have an exact knowledge of the differences in societies and cultures so there is no point in even trying to understand them at all."
I may believe that different axes might be more useful (views on civic involvement, views on class mobility, views on liberty and property rights, views on the legitimate use of force against others) but I also acknowledge that views on God, family, security and self expression are important too. Liberals use the term "rights" and have contorted it's meaning. Does this mean that conservatives shouldn't care about rights?
Conjecture about actions of ‘proof’ that have not occurred.
All a sane person need do is to look at Poland’s inclusion in a blob subset like a Gerrymandered political district and realize something isn’t right here.
They always say, "If Texas was a country it would have a higher GDP than...." I would like to see a study that said, If Philadelphia was a country it would have a culture similar to....." or "If southern (Appalachian) Ohio was a country it would have a culture similar to....."
That’s the vertical axis component, them being further down than many cultural & geographic neighbors. The horizontal axis component, being further to the survival side of the chart, would be driven more by what I identified.
The researchers were pointing out the interesting fact that the Protestant European countries seemed to all answer the questions in the same way and the Catholic European countries were a little bit different and so on. I don't think they even gave a name to the green group in the middle because there was no interesting characteristic that they all shared. They included Poland in the Catholic European blob because it is a Catholic European country and according to the data their cultural views were relatively close to the other Catholic European countries. It would be an interesting follow up study to see if they can find out why this one Catholic European country is "Gerrymandered" so far out from the others. I can't find Portugal on the graph but because I know they are a Catholic European country I can predict what general area of the graph their answers would fall into. That is a hypothesis not conjecture.
So to sum up, I would say that the location of the countries on the graph is scientific. The boundaries of the colored area is a less scientific, general interpretation of the data.
I don’t care what you say and explain, there is nothing scientific or explainable about how Poland fits in that group to which it is assigned. The ONLY similar condition I’ve seen in graphs are those that indicate Gerrymandered Political districts.
This whole thing is just not worth discussing anymore. I don’t have anything vested in it other than a willing suspension of disbelief.
Per Wikipedia...
"Poland is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south...
....in 2007, 88.4% of the population belonged to the Catholic Church"
Seems like a scientific, explainable reason for including them in the same colored blob as the other Catholic European nations.
Bfl
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