Re. the 2nd paragraph, I was responding to “There are lots of ways that the diet of pregnant women and young children will affect the average IQ of the population. I think it’s reasonable to look at the historical record and consider that the average height of a population will be correlated to average IQ – this is not to say that taller people are inherently more intelligent but that a population which has a poor enough diet overall that they don’t grow tall will also be intellectually stunted on average.”

You wrote that you see elements of “overbearing socialism”. I assumed you were referring to the increasing overprotective attitude of western governments, since there certainly was no observable increase in *social* security in western capitalist countries for the last several years. But while it is correct to associate “overprotective government” with “old eastern bloc”, it has, by design, little to do with socialist concepts. The fact that this behavior now occurs in highly capitalist societies is just further proof of that. This association is propaganda from cold war times that happens to be useful today to make capitalist societies even more extreme(look at health care discussion in US)

> By the way, apparently the trend is for human beings to be smaller and ‘wider’ in the future due to not so advantageous changes in nutrition.
> What does that say about the IQ?

Not much. Most advertisement is highly targeted manipulation of values, designed by highly paid psychologists or PR people. Most of the food you can buy is heavily processed, i.e. “easy to eat” with lots of hidden fat, sugar and salt. Basically, you have a billion dollar food indutry spending millions on consumer manipulation to sell even more food, preferably food that is cheap to produce. The general public is bound to lose against such a system. (However, if you live in, say, Norway, this industry and the resulting advertisement is not very strong yet)

Oh, oppressive societies of all kinds don’t like people like that.

You obviously did not get my exaggeration (often used in political satire) in relation to drinking to highlight an important point. It is just an example and is valid for many areas of life. To stay with this perhaps not so good example as you did not understand what I’m saying, of course people have always liked to drink, but if they woke up puking in the morning they accepted it’s their own fault and that’s just how it is when you drink too much. These days the government or ‘somebody’ should have warned them. If people are too much in debt on five credit cards they will never be able to pay back it’s not their fault for being stupid or greedy and borrowing too much, it’s the governments or the banks fault- partly true (aiding and abetting) but still, nobody forced them to take out that loan or mortgage they could never afford.

By the way, apparently the trend is for human beings to be smaller and ‘wider’ in the future due to not so advantageous changes in nutrition. What does that say about the IQ?

One would think the cold war is long since over, but even today people often associate socialism with dictatorship and capitalism with freedom.

When it comes down to the actual meaning, capitalism basically gives the additional freedom to die on the street due to hunger or cold, while socialism will restricts the extent to which you can exploit others. These aspects are exactly what distinguishes the “free market” in US (or China) from the “social market” in several European countries. And to me, this difference implicitly follows when you believe into such basic things as human rights.

That being said, there’s definitely something odd about those facebook folks. With that level of idiocy and ignorance, they’ll make great politicians one day.