I’m beyond the “keto flu.” That was tough.
A few months ago I asked a Hindu nationalist friend of mine the best persons who promote the “Out of India Theory.” One name he forwarded to me was Koenraad Elst. Though Elst and I disagree on facts in relation to the issue at hand, a reader has pointed out that he’s taken a very strident and clear stand against the ad hominem attacks against me from those who would consider him a fellow traveler. This honorable stance frankly has shocked me to my core, as I’m just not used to it after engaging with SJWs and various ideologues for so long. The ad hominem is so easy that it takes some fiber and integrity to resist it.
One consequence of Elst’s clear stand is that I think I do need to revisit some of his work.
Read some of The Enigma of Reason yesterday. I would recommend it. I’ve read some of Dan Sperber’s previous stuff, like Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, and it’s familiar. Also, Sperber was a major influence on Scott Atran, so even though this book is new many of its ideas and orientation are prefigured in In Gods We Trust.
SMBE 2017 in about a week at the JW Marriott in Austin. I’m not going to be there the whole time, but when I’m there I’ll be tweeting.
Waking Up With Sam Harris #83 – The Politics of Emergency (with Fareed Zakaria). I agree with Fareed Zakaria more on Islam.
A left-wing journalist is attacking Richard Dawkins on the basis of his family having had African servants when they lived in Kenya. This person is some sort of Max Blumenthal clone from what I can see. A fringe element of far Left basically has a modus operandi: pick someone to destroy, and extract elements of their life to flog them as evil (call them racist, sexist, something -ist).
This is great on Twitter, but not optimal for movement building. I understand that there is a reasonable, moderate, liberal, Left. But this radical Left wants many of us out there on the street, our families dispossessed. When the lines are drawn, this is why some of us will keep voting Republican despite all our issues with the party: we don’t want to be personally destroyed.
Related to the chilling impact of this behavior, Liberals and Immigration, Kevin Drum says:
I have no idea what, if anything, we can do about this. But I will say this. I lurk on a number of message boards populated by liberals, and what they say privately is very often more nuanced than what they say publicly.¹ On immigration, there are probably lots of liberals willing to concede that there needs to be a limit to the flow of undocumented workers. There are cultural, economic, and nationalistic reasons for this. But there’s little benefit to saying so in public. It just invites massive, social media swarms insisting that you’re a closet racist.
This is in response to Peter Beinart’s piece How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration. I think Michael Brendan Dougherty has a pretty good response to this in National Review. Before he wrote this piece he observed on Twitter that Beinart wasn’t confronting something that had changed on the Left. I responded: “white supremacy.”
White supremacy has gone from being the KKK or Neo-Nazis, to basically all of American society. The term is used liberally and without much care. Just like the term racist or sexist. It’s both a cudgel in tactical debates, and, for many it’s a sincere belief. A Sister Souljah moment could never happen today for a white male Democratic politician because he would be accused of being a white supremacist for attacking a black woman (Obama himself was attacked for pandering to ‘respectability politics’).
On immigration, note that in the mid-2000s Republicans could have probably been able to muster the courage to ignore the base if the Democrats had agreed to a bill to flood this country with high skilled immigration (a proposal by some Republicans). But for political and policy reasons the Democrats wanted something comprehensive, which includes lower skilled workers who are both the Democrats’ future vote bank, and people who are important (often relatives) to Democratic voters.
Above Drum asks about conservatives and which views they keep quiet about in relation to policy. I think there is more variation on responses to climate change, foreign policy, and tax policy than you might think. The fear comes not from the social media mobs, but from the wealth people and interest groups funding fellowships.
About ten years ago Reiham Salam and Ross Douthat wrote Grand New Party in part to stake out a fiscally more moderate and socially conservat(ish) framework. There are obviously a lot of voters in that position, but the donor class was never a big fan. Trump seems to have taken that plank in a more populist direction and run with it, but there doesn’t seem to be the policy and personnel infrastructure to execute on this, so you see a more donor class friendly presidency (at least so far).
The Evolution meeting is happening right now in Portland. Check out the hashtag, #evol2017.
California just added four more ‘discriminatory’ states to its travel ban. This is going to impact academics in the UC system who may want to visit UT or UNC or Duke. As a friend pointed out the state of California is really punishing the blue areas of red states, since these are the places which interact the most with California. I think this is just BDS thinking spreading. It may trigger counter proposals, but as I said the people most impacted in red states are Democrats. Perhaps there won’t be any reaction? Like economic sanctions on authoritarian states this is going to hurt people you don’t want to hurt, without impacting the people you are targeting. But it makes you feel good.
Happy Eid.
In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been posting on Brown Pundits a fair amount.
Awesome new method by @gbradburd for simultaneously modeling continuous and discrete population structure #evol2017
— Nancy Chen (@popgenchen) June 25, 2017
The assumption of pulse admixtures is easy, but it’s often wrong. I really hope this gets more wide circulation because it might be leading us astray in many ways. Though this varies by taxa. Plants probably have less pulse admixture going on that social organisms.
In Turkey, No Teaching Of Evolution, But Banning Gays Is Fine. It’s hard to gauge Erdogan sometimes, because he made some liberal(ish) noises as late as the Arab Spring in 2011. No longer.
Translating Genesis. Alter’s translation and commentary is my favorite so far, but it’s been many years since I read Genesis. Any good recommendations? (please don’t say NIV)
Draft genome of the Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). Huge on Sami Twitter.
Savarkar’s book Hindutva needs a new cover.
A former executive is accusing Infosys of racism that favours Indians #whiteSupremacy.
Genetic loci associated with coronary artery disease harbor evidence of selection and antagonistic pleiotropy. Not a huge surprise.
Did I mention SciReader is back?
Estimates of Introgression as a Function of Pairwise Distances.
Leaderless Uber Scrambles to Prevent Employee Exodus. I think if Netflix ever stumbles they’ll have enormous issues immediately, since their hiring and firing policy puts zero emphasis on loyalty.
US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub. If you don’t know about Sci-Hub, read the article.
Robots That Make 400 Burgers an Hour May Soon Take over Fast Food Restaurants. Burger meat is usually the low quality stuff. I suspect a combination of lab grown meat and/or vegan meat-substitute is going to come to dominate the market in a generation. Combined with automated burger making a whole sector will be transformed (in contrast, steaks require a lot more work to imitate, so people will probably eat real meat steaks for a while).
35 years of the world economy, visualized as a living organism https://t.co/bA2wSf7Syg pic.twitter.com/oZis6sbnrY
— Max Galka (@galka_max) June 24, 2017
Natural selection shaped the rise and fall of passenger pigeon genomic diversity.