dola:

America's smartest cities - Aug. 31, 2006

Seems to be your list, and probably the accurate one.

edit: at first I assumed it was referring to this article: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/money.../educated.html

Yep, that's the one I was looking at, and the Census Bureau was looking at the cities themselves, not metropolitan areas.

As for whether it's false or not, I think you'd have a hard time convincing people that crime above the national average (in some cases, three TIMES the national average) is "low crime". The odd thing is, Egan could easily have left that out of his column without really changing his point.

There's a lot that I find odd with Egan's premise. I mean, after wondering why on earth conservatives would pick on big cities and find them "inauthentic", he describes Seattle as "Here in Seattle, it’s become a one-party city, with a congressman for life and nodding-head liberals who seldom challenge a tax-loving city government." Yet he doesn't really want conservatives to mount a succesful challenge to the domination of Democrats. He just thinks, "It would be nice, just to keep the philosophical debate sharp, if there were a few thoughtful Republicans around."

I thought liberals were normally opposed to tokenism. :)

And how many of these top ten cities are located in areas were CCW is allowed?

Thank You Cam. I was hoping someone would call him on this very thing.

I probably lean a bit further right than Troy described himself earlier, but I am very close to matching his self description in this thread. I probably should have given that post a +1. I find it concerning when people seriously start throwing stero types around. It reminds me of the rebuke by "intellectuals" that followed Kerry's defeat. Remember? "A vote for Bush is a vote for biggotry and unenlightenment" I'm not even sure that unenlightenment is a word, but I'm rambling now.

Is this topic seriously implying that being conservative is equivalent to a lacking of intelligence? It seems to me that a number of left leaning folks are piling onto this topic, and taking that away. It seems pretty short sighted to lay immediate claim to a notion that allows you to align yourself with the "educated", while simultaneously dismissing the opposition as a lot of fools.

Note: I get that the topic doesn't propose this, but it certainly seems to be the way that folks have taken it.

Rest assured, there are a lot of people more intelligent than you. Believe it or not some of them are conservative.

Well, both sides are a bit off on this. The Right definitely has its intellectuals in George Will, William Kristol, David Brooks, etc. However, there is definitely a sphere of the Republican Party who is distrustful of intellectuals. This is the part of the party that embraces George W. Bush's from the gut politics.

However, I think a line needs to be drawn between the Republican Party and the Conservative movement. It doesn't necessarily work to treat both the same, even though Bush and Palin call themselves true conservatives (I speculate plenty think they aren't).

There's more crime in cities???? You don't say...

I think the problem is that there isn't a well-known word that's the opposite of "plurality". In the future, whites will no longer be a majority, but will still have a plurality. Plurality is already not a universally-known word anyway, so just using majority/minority gets the point across.


Well, some challenge is better than no challenge at all. One-party systems, be they Democrat or Republican, can divorce themselves pretty well from the people they're supposed to represent. A case in point I know well is, of course, Chicago. I think we can all agree that echo chambers are a bad thing.

Heck, in the last Cook County Board election I voted for a Republican for Board President, just to try and help break up the stranglehold (didn't work).


I think this is the point 100%. There's more than one type of Conservative (obviously), but the "conservatives" who have gotten a hold of the GOP since, say, the late 1990s, are exactly the kind of conservatives who have driven away a) intellectuals and b) old-school fiscal conservatives.