South Korea is supposed to be one of the highest avg IQ countries. Actually it’s one of the things I really noticed when moving here, people just seem brighter, quicker to grasp basic stuff (or stuff I feel should be basic).
What I always wanted to do was design IQ tests that hit other areas. IQ is just problem solving and pattern recognition. Some of the upper level tests really get into pattern recognition which is cool, so a genius painter who understands visual relationships/patterns is recognized by the test. But there are patterns in sound too, I’d like to design a frequency/pitch/volume/stereo test, I’m sure there are audio-based people who would score off the charts in recognizing patterns here. It would be a super weird abstract test and people who flunked it wouldn’t even know what the hell it all meant.
As for EQ, I don’t know about the whole concept. Yes there are patterns in emotions and people like Bill Clinton are very good at reading these patterns. Probably it’s easier with people around mean IQ to identify with others, since most others are also around the mean. That doesn’t mean high IQ people can’t have high EQ, they just have to pretent to be retards. LOL
I was watching Pumping Iron (cause I’m getting buff) and realized he’s a smart dude. Arnold understood visualization/imagination, proportion, artistic anatomical relationships, sculpting…not the average gym rat.
Actually on the topic of gym guys, Vince Gironda must have been 160. Dood was like 100yrs ahead of his time.
Arnold succeeded in unrelated areas of life like no other person (off the top of my head).
He was the best bodybuilder, one of the most recognizable action movie stars and Governor of the most populated state of the most powerful empire history has ever seen. There’s no question in my mind he would have found a way to become President if he was allowed. Not to mention he accomplished most of this moving to a foreign country where he had virtually no network.
Had some good ideas, but his view on eliminating the squat (his gym had no squat racks, according to wiki) seems stupid to me. Then again, I’m not focused on bodybuilding.
If you are considering the raw balance of world power, i.e. unreasonable actions that you can get away with without the rest of the world throwing a fit, then you should take into account the British Empire in the 1800s. Those guys could sail into a new country, subjugate the population and strip mine the land for resources, and it was just part of business. They did this on a global scale. Sure, the only reason they could get away with was because most of the world was a bunch of banana republics, but power is relative, right?
Yes, today the US has nuclear aircraft carriers and stealth bombers. However, the rest of the world has become more sophisticated also. So, the US cannot dominate other civilizations to the degree that past empires like the British could. Although, I suppose you could argue that the US dominates other cultures today through more subtle means - having the entire world brainwashed by American Idol and Hannah Montana is not an insignificant achievement… The entire South Korean population is pretty much enslaved by StarCraft…
The Roman Empire with its Pax Romana. Lasted for a very long time.
Both spanned most of the Old World and dominated it much more than US “dominates” the world today.
China is as big as US, and for most of the last 5000 years except the last 200, has been pretty powerful, although not particularly expnasionist so I don’t know if that would qualify as an empire.
I was gonna say the Mongolian or Roman empires. I didn’t think about the British.
What about the French? The Maginot Line was the greatest military accomplishment of all time. It perfectly fulfilled its mission. The Germans were not able to penetrate it. In fact, I don’t even think they tried.
You ignored WWI (part of the back to back thing, ya know)
"“Without American production the United Nations could never have won the war” -Joseph Stalin, Tehran Conference
We stood back and manufactured while they did the fighting, then moved in at the end to secure victory. Sounds pretty empirish to me. Plus you’re ignoring that we crushed out the Empire of Japan alone. Where was Russia on that front?
It’s hard to award “Greatest Empire” without qualifying it. Romans’ definitely get a nod for longevity and the absolute nature of their rule. They also covered the “known world” so from a relative view, they had one of the most complete empires.
Mongolians I don’t think are in the running, they never got any solid grip on Western Europe and were pretty fleeting (less than 40 years at their peak).
French don’t really deserve it either, their grip was never really that strong, their tenure was brief and they were always in competition with the British (and largely losing).
The British would be another strong contender to the Romans for the reasons enumerated by Ohai. Their empire outlasted the French, was more complete, and they held a relatively strong grip on it, whereas the French tended to be more “laissez faire”.
I have to admit, the US “Empire” doesn’t really have a strong argument here. You’re talking about a period of like 50 years max right now, we don’t really have any clearly defined control over anybody beyond those discussed in political theories (I don’t see a clear profit stream from this “empire” either), and any theoretical control we do have is contested by world approval. In the “pro” column you could say that in absolute terms we may have the greatest intangible empire due to the size of the global population and wealth, etc, but I just don’t see us having a strong enough global control to really get that name.
I would however make the argument that in its current state, we have the greatest military the world has ever seen both in relative and absolute terms, hands down.
This quote is so out of context it’s ridiculous. As you’ll remember from Modern Euro AP, Stalin was flattering the US and Britain to encourage them to open a second front in Western Europe (as well as give him part of Poland, Finland and some other stuff after the war). He also had leverage following a victory at the Battle of Kursk and strategic positions on the eastern front. The quote was made in the context of a ceremonial dinner where Churchill presented Stalin with a sword from King George. The Stalin quote was a negotiation tactic, nothing more.
I do agree that the US production was instrumental in the victory over Germany, but Stalin’s quote should not be used as evidence of that.
Also, if I recall correctly Russia had moved against Japan and made the Japanese situation clearly hopeless, but Truman (whatever your opinion of him) nuked Japan instead. If the US didn’t use nukes then Russia would likely have been involved at the end, just like the US was in Europe.
When Russia moved on Japan, we were already preparing to strike the home island (having taken back most or all of the Pacific territory) when we hit Germany, they still occupied all of western Europe and Northern Africa.
You can argue the quote was somewhat out of context, but arguing that it’s not true is just silly. Russia would have quickly ran out of equipment and been back in it’s WWI rifle sharing / bullet rationing tactics had it not been for the US backing them with production.
Russia did most of the heavy lifting in WWII. US didn’t crush Japan alone, Russia was just about to sail into Japan when Truman realized he had to get Japan to surrender, and dropped the big 2 on them.
In terms of power, the US is probably most powerful ever, but with only half a century of supremacy so far.
