Culture Wars – Razib Khan

November 8, 2021 by Razib Khan 0

Confusing human universals for the inventions of white people

About three weeks ago Michael Powell of The New York Times wrote a piece about the Dorian Abbot situation, M.I.T.’s Choice of Lecturer Ignited Criticism. So Did Its Decision to […]

July 28, 2021 by Razib Khan 0

crime, criminology, Culture Wars, Identity, Social Policy, Top Stories

Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021)

I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the

July 28, 2021 by Razib Khan 0

crime, criminology, Culture Wars, Diversity, Identity, Politics, Review, Social Policy, Top Stories

Charles Murray’s ‘Facing Reality’—A Review

A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas hewed more or less to the dismissive conventional wisdom. It wasn’t until I read a 1998 essay in Commentary magazine by Christopher Chabris that I began to reconsider. Chabris argued that the media furor around The Bell Curve obscured more than it illuminated, and that the consensus among psychologists on the importance of intelligence to life outcomes was indeed close to what Murray and Herrnstein had asserted. To my surprise, in the 21st century, my relationship …

November 21, 2017 by Razib Khan 0

Culture, Culture Wars, Semiotics

Against the rectification of names of the enemy

Since the beginning of this weblog, a particular tick that is common to humans emerges over and over. A tick that is seductive, inevitable, and which I periodically react negatively to (and surely do engage in). That tick is the one where peculiar or exotic terms, or common terms in specific senses, are deployed to […]

December 21, 2011 by Razib Khan 0

Culture Wars, Politics

Have the “culture wars” gotten worse?

The assertion in the title seems almost trivial in an impressionistic sense. There really wasn’t a strong distinction on cultural issues between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. By the 1980s there definitely was a gap between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. And that chasm got wider as the years went on. […]