Category Archives: Culture

Over at his blog Rod Dreher has posted an email exchange we had with the title Razib Khan, Anti-Woke Mage Of Old Religion. Blog-on-blog interaction. Feeling a 2005 vibe! So […]

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Every few weeks or so I “get into it” with parts of Hindutva Twitter. Some parts of Hindutva Twitter I’m quite friendly with. Other parts, not so much. There is the weird incel-like “Trad Twitter” faction…that always ends up to be strange perverts. But I don’t want to focus on them. Rather, I want to …

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Democrats’ Georgia Hopes Rest on Jon Ossoff, 33. How Did He Get Here? He’s rich. That’s it. No need to read the piece, that’s all it is. Yes, he has […]

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The Atlantic has a piece up, The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism Many of us are unaware of the special circumstances that eased our entry into American life—and of the bonds, we share with other nonwhite groups. I’m really curious what The Atlantic paid for this piece because it’s a husk of prose that just …

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Woke brown girls with middle class/upper class dads who say they h8 white bois but only date white bois. pic.twitter.com/GelvYxbhcH
— BIMBO_UBERMENSCH (@bimboubermensch) December 3, 2020

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The Bell Beakers are an interesting “culture.” A Bronze Age European people defined by their beakers, their origins seem to be amongst non-Indo-Europeans in Southwest Europe. But, at some point, the motifs spread to Indo-Europeans in Central Europe, an offshoot of the Corded Ware people who had admixed further with Neolithic farmers. These Indo-Europeans are …

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Michael Lind has a piece in Tablet, The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice. As a trained American historian, Lind is always a good read and […]

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Totally Under Control—the new pandemic documentary written by Alex Gibney, and co-directed by Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger—covers the period between January and late spring of 2020. It traces the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and examines the dismal response of the American political elite. On January 21st, the headline in the New York Times read “China Confirms New Coronavirus Spreads From Humans to Humans.” The full horror of mass deaths and economic lockdown hadn’t yet dawned on the world, and even in Wuhan there wasn’t full comprehension of what was to come. The following day, President Donald Trump was asked if he was worried by the pandemic. “We have it totally under control,” he replied. This declaration has not aged well, and Totally Under Control details the bungling, the mismanagement, and the incoherence of the Trump administration’s response—a chronicle of a dance between COVID-19 and the White House that has claimed over 240,000 American lives as of this writing. As a point of contrast, the documentary also examines …

The post Totally Under Control—A Review appeared first on Quillette.

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Politico has a silly piece up, How Hindu Nationalism Could Shape the Election. The silliness is in the title: Hindu nationalism will not shape the election. No one in the USA knows what it is. No one in the USA cares. But headlines need to justify the “deep-dives.” The author clearly had a preconceived conclusion, …

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The death of Olivia de Havilland made me very sad. For many years I had tracked the passing of various “Golden Age” movie stars. I myself don’t remember this period, […]

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Bangladesh: Protests Erupt Over Rape Case: Protests in Bangladesh erupted this week after a video of a group of men attacking, stripping, and sexually assaulting a woman went viral, Human Rights Watch said today. Protesters called for the resignation of Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal over the government’s failure to address an alarming rise in …

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So what is this? What to make of this?
We’re in the 21st century, aren’t we.

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Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice […]

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Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice […]

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The argument put forward by Joe Henrich in his new book is audacious and surprising.

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At least the aim of Matt Yglesias in his new book is to revive and strengthen America.

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In the 2000s I would have arguments with some Indian American friends about the ethnic trajectory of Indian Americans in terms of their similarity American Jews, where I staked out the position that the analogy was superficial (e.g., on the Sepia Mutiny blog). To understand why the analogy doesn’t work, you need to know the …

Continue reading “Why Indian Americans are not the new Jews”

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The Guardian has a long piece about Parsis, The last of the Zoroastrians. The author is the child of a Parsi mother who married a white Briton. Though he brings his own perspective into the piece, I appreciated that he did not let it overwhelm the overall narrative. The star are the Parsis themselves, not …

Continue reading “Endogamy and assimilation: Parsis in India”

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Recently I read a piece on Indian cuisine from a “woke” perspective, Reclaiming Indian Food from the White Gaze: The same food I was teased for as a kid has become trendy and divorced from its cultural origins. Now, I’m using my cookbook to change the narrative. Obviously I disagree with the ideology interlaced throughout …

Continue reading “Food between cultures”

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In the spring of 1995 I was logging into Gopher, reading the CIA Area Handbook series archives, and using Usenet and Talk to communicate with people on the other side of the world. The period between 1995 and 2000 was a wide-open era when phrases like “information wants to be free” were asserted as mantras. […]

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