I hadn't thought about it, but this guy's absolutely right. Forget Berkeley; Madison has been the pink navel of America all the way back to the days when UCB was a sleepy little cow college.
I don't know what it is about Scandihoovians, even of the transplanted Midwestern variety, that makes them so bipolar: Either they're sailing up your rivers to burn your monasteries, or they're pinkos paddling around Lake Wobegon, there's hardly any middle ground.
(Via Twitter.)
... eagerly awaiting a comment from Brigid. In the mean time, why stop at those two? Ann Arbor and Austin are two more and that's just the A's.
ReplyDeleteUncle Kenny,
ReplyDelete"... eagerly awaiting a comment from Brigid."
Look at my picture.
Don't make me come burn your monastery.
Might take the time to remind faithful VFTP readers that Madison is still very much considered "70 square miles surrounded by reality", not unlike how Austin is viewed by surrounding Texicans...
ReplyDeleteIOW, Madison and Milwaukee are but liberal enclaves in an otherwise conservative Wisconsin. Unfortunately, Madison being the state capitol and all...
Look at my picture.
ReplyDeleteI am, but it's only 17 pixels tall, so there's a limited amount of data I can derive from it. For instance, I can tell you've got a hat. And a gun. And I'm pretty sure you've got at least a right arm. ;)
perlhaqr,
ReplyDeleteI was referring to the fact that pasty-faced tall blonds with kinfolk in Norge and Sverige can poke fun at Scandihoovians if they want to. ;)
Never knew a scandiwegian that wasn't a bit off.
ReplyDeleteTurns out, apparently, that a good deal of my family- the german part, that is- emigrated from one of the scandiwegian countries in the 400's. Explains a few things.
Not too many of us had brown hair, either, most were blonde or white haired from birth (like Dad) or redheaded. Suppose as mine goes white, I could get a helmet with horns. Or possibly a bigass broadsword named Hrunting.
Never had any desire to burn a monastery, nor to run shivers up Chris mathew's legs, but I have- or used to have- a mean right hook and Never walked away from a fight.
Crawled from a few, and was carried from at least one...
Scandihoovian please.
ReplyDelete"Either they're sailing up your rivers to burn your monasteries, or they're pinkos paddling around Lake Wobegon, there's hardly any middle ground"
You mean there's a difference???
Shootin' Buddy
We have mostly scandiwegians here. The scandihoovians are those lake woebegone dorks.
ReplyDeleteThe monastery burners may not have been gay, but they certainly were homosexual, to the point of changing the genetics of the region dramatically, even up to today. Try to find an XYY north of central Germany or west of Byelorussia. For reference, Wiki up Jomsviking.
ReplyDeletePretty much nothing left except the steady, organized, productive types I grew up with and always rather liked. As a kid, I guess I thought the Irish were a tad too colorful and professionally violent, and hung with folks named Larsen, Mattson, and Fingelstadt.
The penchant for social conformity runs deep there though. I've been to Madison, where everybody seems very proud of the fact that the biggest Mexican restaurant in town is openly owned by illegals. A real giggle at the expense of the silly people who populate the rest of the country.
The Germans in Milwaukee (Little Chicago) are the same way as the Scandahoovians. Unassimilated Euros settling in a place that looks like home and making it just like home.
But I would also point out that the student population in Madison is drawn from pinkies all over the country, which must shift the demographic somewhat.
Gewehr98 might be spot on the marker. I think I'll check the county voting records from Wisky to see if the rest of the state is inhabited by Americans.
Good point Tam, there doesn't seem to be ANY middle ground anymore, anywhere. Glad I'm a Southern boy, and don't have to deal with y'all :-)
ReplyDeleteNope, I checked and Tam's right, they're all a bunch of pinkoes. Almost all the state voted for Obama. Sad.
ReplyDeleteEd,
ReplyDelete47,XYY is almost never inherited, but is caused by cell replication errors.
Pretty much everything I've read has relegated the old "supermale" XYY thing (along with the allegedly hyperfeminine XXX) to the pile of discarded theories.
I'm the proud product of a "Burn the village to the ground, doo dah, doo dah" bloodlines, thank you.
ReplyDeleteAs a 2nd-gen Severige and now that Mom's finished her ancestral book (only goes back to 1645, the handwritten names get illegible earlier), from what I've learned of my Swedish relatives half of them would sail up your river and build you a church whether you wanted one or not, attendance compulsory. Burn Madison please - just send a signal and we'll do Berkeley at this end.
ReplyDeleteUnlike the Germans, the Scandinavians WERE successfully Christianized. I always enjoyed visiting the Norway pavilion at Epcot, just for the experience of being surrounded by people were taller than me. That must be like what working with MattG is like.
ReplyDeleteDon't tease me. You already made it clear what you think. I want to hear from all the gun-toting Indiana Nordic blondes and redheads ... every one.
ReplyDeleteThe monastery burners may not have been gay, but they certainly were homosexual, to the point of changing the genetics of the region dramatically, even up to today. Try to find an XYY north of central Germany or west of Byelorussia. For reference, Wiki up Jomsviking.
ReplyDeleteI thought the theory was that they all got sent off to die as berserkergang warriors, and thus didn't get a chance to breed that way, not that they were homosexual. Though, I suppose that would explain this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=posAGaWVmvw
*dances with the technoviking*
------
I was referring to the fact that pasty-faced tall blonds with kinfolk in Norge and Sverige can poke fun at Scandihoovians if they want to. ;)
I know, I was just being silly. I do that sometimes. With as much stuff as I get worked up about in the world, if I took everything seriously I'd probably stroke out within a week.
Grew up in Wisconsin. First taste of the left was when I attended U of Colorado. Guess both Boulder and Madison deserve the title Peoples Republic of.
ReplyDeleteMost folk in WI tend towards conservative side except for the SE cities around Milwaukee and their demographics explain that.
Deer hunting season is still the highlight of the year. Well that and Football. Go PACK
Tam, the incidence of XYY in Sweden is 1 in 2,000. In Norway and Denmark, the heart of the Viking diaspora, it's 1 in 3,000.
ReplyDeleteCompare that to Scotland and Ireland, where the phenotype was bred for deliberately. roughly 1 in 100, or 3,000 percent higher. 20or 30% would be statistically significant.
Count Oxenstierna, in his History of the Vikings, goes into great length concerning the recruiting of six and a half to seven foot tall, often simple-witted and violent men, commonly hired in family units.
It has become PC to say XYY isn't inherited, and in some cases it isn't. But, an XYY person will produce the following gametes:
X
YY
XY
Y
This is the result of the extra Y chromosome that can migrate to any end of the centromere during the mitotic stage of meosis.
The female partner can only give an X chromosome, therefore the possibilities in the children are
XX - NORMAL FEMALE
XYY - XYY SYNDROME
XXY - XXY SYNDROME
XY - NORMAL MALE
this means that 50% of the children will be normal if the guy marries a normal female.
25% will have XYY syndrome while 25% will have XXY syndrome
therefore he has 1/4 chances of having a child with the same syndrome.
So, it is random for people who don't have XYY, but heritable for many of those who do, with the same incidence as ADHD if passed on by the father. Validating Oxenstierna's histories of it being found in families of berserkers.
Interestingly, the incidence of XYY is highest among the same groups that spike the curve on ADHD, to whit the R1b folks (Alpine/Celtic).
Here in Connecticut Irish kids are 15% of the school population, but a healthy majority of professionally diagnosed ADDers. Most of the rest are Scot, Welsh, southern German, or white southerner. The article was so amazingly un-PC I find it difficult to believe it made the Hartford Courant, much less the front page.
A very handy gene shift to have in a society constantly at war or expanding into a wild new frontier, but savagely disfunctional in a stable setting.
Extremely gregarious people, though annoyingly chatty, they bond quickly and are the great risk takers. Plus, no matter how badly you get your butt kicked, you've moved into another emotional bubble in 2 or 3 hours and are ready for another go.
So, the heritable variety at least seems to have been bred out of the Norse. It would also seem the high incidence among the round-faced pink people shows a strong selection for said heritable variety at some time in the past.
The downside is that if'n Madison gets nuked, my hometown is apparently the "back-up" state capital, so not a great improvement on the political front.
ReplyDeleteThis is NOT the blog I come to looking for genetics...
ReplyDeleteAnyhoo. Surprised no one has questioned or mentioned it, so maybe everyone is aware of the fact that Wisconsin is often considered the birthplace of American Progressivism, AKA Liberalism, the inspiration for Marx, Engels, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin...
Ed,
ReplyDelete"It has become PC to say XYY isn't inherited..."
It has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with a better understanding of what causes trisomy.
Simply put, the "supermale" and "hyperfeminine" theories of trisomy date from a time when dinosaurs dragged their tails and continental drift was still fringe science. There's a lot of water under the bridge since the mid-to-late '60s; a lot of what we thought was true then just isn't so.
"Through further research, it has been determined that men who carry the XYY chromosome lack the ability”... to metabolize several different chemicals that transmit nerve impulses to the brain.... This impairment is due to a direct result of an X-linked mutation that disables an enzyme called MAOA.”(Steen, p.234).
ReplyDelete"Because of the disabled enzyme, MAOA (Mononamine Oxidase type A) is unable to metabolize three neurotransmitters; norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine".
"Though the XYY male may have the same physical type as that of normal XY male, they still possess certain characteristics comparable to the one with MAOA deficiency (Kaplan,).
And so the pendulum swings back again, with a link between XYY and MAO-A, the so-called "Warrior Gene". With an extra foot or so of height and a couple of hundred pounds of muscle added.
Both references are peer reviewed and from the 2002-2008 time frame. One point not addressed to my satisfaction is the question of whether the two problems are inextricably linked or separate, parallel parts of the same selection profile.
Again, that 3,000% difference between Norway and Scotland, next door neighbors geographically but thousands of years apart genetically, does sort of point the finger at something.
I strongly suspect I would be a lot safer wandering around 15th century Norway than in Scotland at the same time.
Austin TX is a buy products of state to state immigration.
ReplyDeleteWe were just a small to middling sized College town which gave us a liberal bent. Then when the tech industry got big, the Sunny Vale/Silicon Valley crowed came in, they've been trying/succeeding turning us into little California. We also got influx of people from other bastions of failed liberalism.
Why is it, that when poeple move from a crap hole to somewhere they believe to be better, they try to turnit into the craphole they left?
Josh :-(
Austin / Travis County a little blue dot in a big red state.
If the state is so left how in hell did a Repub. get elected?
ReplyDeleteAhem. Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor and the Scadihoovians are in Minnesota. Not that we're proud of this fact, but we accept it.
ReplyDeleteWisconsin, by some margin, leans German in origin, though there are a fair number of folks there with Nordic blood, too.
wv: slysine - a periodic wave that sneaks up on you.
Howdy from the arm pit of the midwest, the sanfransisco of the midwest and other appropriate epitaths
ReplyDeleteCan anybody explain to me how we could get from the original idea of the "Wisconsin Progressive Ideal" to what we have now....or was it a natural progression?
I was always taught the Wis. Prog Ideal was that the working man wouldn't have to work in dangerous situations, kids could get early education via Kindergarten (started in Milwaukee, I think) and the working man would get a fair wage for his service.
Seems simple to me...so how did it get basterdized to what we have now?
Steve
Steve -
ReplyDeleteOnce you start dictating to people what they can and can not do it gets out of hand. the power to tell some one else how to live there life is adictive.
progresives all ways start out small; as, a way to get there foot in the door, and move on to bigger/more control.
Look up 'Overton Window.'
Josh
There's always been a strand of the Progressive philosophy (Dewy, LaFollett, G. Pinchot et al) that leaned towards some of the Marxist ideas and trends - centralization, the most efficient anything no matter the cost, more regulation. Add in the Italian Fascist techniques of propaganda and social control, plus a dose of Gramsci to explain why the workers of the world have not united yet, and out of that comes a lot of the Madison/Austin/Boulder/Berkeley nuttiness. If your general population has a tendency towards social cohesion to begin with, it probably helps the ideas and tendencies to spread faster.
ReplyDeleteJust my $.02.
LittleRed1
As a guy with a polish last name, who transferred into high school in the German center of Scandahoovian Minnesota, I think I'm credentialed to comment on the current topic.
ReplyDeleteWhich sucks.
If you're looking for bipolar, look no further than Minnesnowta, the state that sent both Rod Grams and Paul Wellstone to the US Senate.
ReplyDeleteWe got lots o' dem Scandewegians, Scandahoovians, and Finlanders. As Aczarnowski notes, we've even got dem Germans and Poles here, adding to the mix up.
Gay Vikings? That explains why they liked to go south and vacation in Constantinople. It was the Baths.
ReplyDeleteSkip - my guess is the state is structurally Left, like California - so there's probably a Democrat gerrymander in there.
Note that they hotbed of liberalism and progressivism in predominately conservative states are always the large metropolitan areas. You know, the same kind of places that the scandiwegians used to sail up to and burn.
ReplyDeleteMy scandiwegians heritage has always been focused around "shut up, leave me alone, and let me try to scratch out a living in this rocky soil."
But if you get in our face and start bossing us around then we will put down our plows, pick up our swords, sail up your river, burn your monistary, loot your cities, stampede your women and rape your cattle. or something like that. Things get a little confusing in the heat of battle...
I had a nice long weekend in Madison doing research for a failed start-up a decade ago.
ReplyDeleteCollege towns have good bars, good music (The Kissers in this case) and pretty (and credulous) young girls.
I would hate to see it razed.
Nothing better than cold stone soup, from a frozen hole in the fjord-side rocks, accompanied by morose dirges in praise of misery and dark thoughts. It's a good prelude to a nice vacation in Beserkdom, where problems are resolvable in a most satisfactory warm way.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, we are nice peace loving peoples, who love long wordy novels, fish & likker, and an emotional landscape that makes for good art cinema.
And I really love the "Barbarian' commercials on Da Toob; strictly documentary. BTW, I'm a mere six-foot,180 lb'r. My big, blonde female cousins usta kick our butts worser than their college-team brothers at family reunion football games. Brunhilde was a wimp, compared to them. Three generations removed from the immigrant ships, and via 1910's hell's Kitchen, from Ekilstuna. Sveden.
We like good sharp steel, too.
It's really not that hard to understand the relation between the two ends of the spectrum, One group wants to take your stuff with the power of their sword, and the other with the power of the law.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but the group with the swords understands and respects you if you stand up to them and say no. And if you successfully stop them from taking your stuff they will probably leave you alone.
ReplyDeleteThe other group just doesn't seem to get it.
Oh, they get it. They know that they don't need to worry about impaled on the pointy end of a law. So they can just keep coming.
ReplyDeleteI don't know...were I one o' them "take your shit with laws" types, I'd actually be pretty worried about being impaled with pointy things right about now.
ReplyDeleteAT
wv: pantha...we've got panthas here in Fla; they're cool, but I personally prefer cougas...'specially scandahoovian cougas ;)
"that sent both Rod Grams and Paul Wellstone to the US Senate."
ReplyDeleteNot to mention Jesse Ventura as Governator and Al Franken as a Senator.
Scandanavian music is similarly bipolar. You've got ABBA on one hand and Gaahl on the other.
ReplyDelete"Nuke the nest"? Just a moment, some of us live there! Can I finish packing my BOB? It's sitting on the bed as I type this. BTW, I've never burned a monastery, but I've paddled past the one on the Red River; got all four tires slashed for daring to spend my recreational dollars there. I swear I didn't talk to anyone. Honest.
ReplyDeleteWith one exception, a maternal Great-Grandmother who came over from England in a steamship (spit!), I am entirely descended from British folks who were here before the Revolution.
ReplyDeleteI am quite proudly Anglo-Saxon, and think that we are provably the best of the Northern Europeans.
P.s. My people are called Scotch-Irish, but are really just troublemakers from the border between England and Scotland.
Yep, this country was founded by British Protestants, and all of you other people are here only by our sufferance.
(I wrote that last bit to inspire people to comment further, though I do believe it's true.)