Category: Culture
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The poverty of multiculturalist discourse
As I’ve noted in this space before many of my “web friends” and readers are confused why I call myself “conservative.” This is actually an issue in “real life” as well, though I’m not going to get into that because I’m a believer in semi-separation of the worlds. I’ll be giving a full account of…
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The reasons for the seasons
John Farrell points me to this interesting post, Whose Christmas Is It Anyway?, which reports on revisionist scholarship which expresses skepticism that the Roman Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th is a co-option of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the birth of Sol. The context is that in the 3rd century various…
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The seasons
Over at Less Wrong there is a discussion on the Winter Solstice celebration. It being Less Wrong there’s a great deal of introspective analysis. That’s fine. When I was younger I did the “Solstice” celebration thing, though today at this age I think that if you live in the United States you should just own…
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Dalit capitalism
When it comes to caste and capitalism in India, The New York Times reads rather like Reason or a house publication of the Cato Institute. Last fall there was Business Class Rises in Ashes of Caste System. Now, Scaling Caste Walls With Capitalism’s Ladders in India: As the founder of a successful offshore oil-rig engineering…
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The Hobbit (2012 film)
My working assumption is that this will be a regression back to the mean in relation to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I notice is that the projected budget for the two films is already more than a time and a half greater than all three of those earlier releases. Even accounting…
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Turkey vs. Rumelia
The New York Times has a long piece, For Turkey, Lure of Tie to Europe Is Fading, which outlines the falling out of love of Turkey with the idea of joining the E.U. I believe this is a good thing. Right now the E.U. is being riven by the fact that northern Europeans, in particular…
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An illiberal people
Over the past few days the American media has reacted with some consternation at the fact that it seems likely that Islamist political forces will probably control around two-thirds of the Egyptian legislature. This bloc is divided between a broad moderate element which emerges out of the Muslim Brotherhood, at around ~40 percent, and a…
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Why some like it hot: awesomeness
Mr. Jason Goldman has a post up, On Capsaicin: Why Do We Love to Eat Hot Peppers?. We don’t need no stinkin’ science for this. Do some ethnography with an N = 1: me. Those of us who love spicy food are just awesome! Recently I went to a Thai restaurant for the first time…
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What anime tells us about Japan and America
A Slate piece on the coming Voltron Renaissance sent me to this interesting juxtaposition of the American cartoon and the Japanese original from which it was culled:
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History obviates surprises
There’s a piece in The New Republic, Mormonism’s Surprisingly Deep Affinity For Progressive Politics. It’s interesting, but I think that the niche for these sorts of pieces relies on the reality that there’s a deep lack of interest in American history on the part of the moderately educated public. Many of the “trends” or “surprises”…
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The end of Arab Christianity
Anthony Shadid has a poignant piece up, … But There’s a Slim Hope in History, on the specter of extinction facing Arab Christianity in the wake of the Arab Spring. This is an issue which I think most of my Left-liberal friends simply seem unable to confront forthrightly: ethnic and religious cleansing are often the…
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When genetics comes in handy in politics
In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were…
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When genetics comes in handy in politics
In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were…
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Is publishing your genome unethical?
Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won’t offer my own response in any detail. They’re handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn’t…
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Is publishing your genotype unethical?
Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won’t offer my own response in any detail. They’re handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn’t…
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Political correctness in 1900 and 2000
In my post yesterday I made the comment that it seems that British media in particular seems to have a fascination with “different race twins.” The generalization derives from the fact that people who email me these stories tend to point to British sources, but I decided to Google it. I think I’ll stick by…
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The educated want more children than they have
The post below is probably going to elicit a lot of comments. Some of it will repeat chestnuts of historical wisdom which illustrate the ignorance of the typical modern. For example, it is false that the lower classes always have more children than the upper classes. In general it is the reverse, because the…
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A college degree as contraceptive
Update: The Slate piece is not accurately representing the original research: Lerner’s article is spreading misinformation. What the Guttmacher Institute study shows is not that the educated are having fewer children vis a vis the uneducated, but that there is a growing gap in family planning: the children of the uneducated are increasingly unplanned. Knocked…
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40 hits in 40 years
I’m not very interested in music compared to the average person. But I’m curious about changing tastes in music over time, because it’s part of our cultural fabric. Since I lack real “thick” knowledge in this domain, I started to think of crutches to allow me to get a slice of perception as a function…