Category: Culture
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The great Han Empire in Africa
Howard French’s China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is a bit cliche. Rather than a scholarly book it’s more an observational travelogue, and it suffers somewhat from the fact that it is focused on Chinese who live in Africa, but are never of it. Chinese are Chinese,…
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Millennials with college degrees don’t favor censorship
There’s a specter haunting the academy. The specter of “red guards” destroying lives and tearing down Western civilization and all its accomplishments in the interests of antinomian leveling impulses through denunciations and purges. (here is the latest instance; the whole thing leaves me yawning, because too few people have the courage or gall to stand up…
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How Barbecue Should Be Done
Hold the sauce! Also check out Texas Monthly‘s The 50 Best BBQ Joints . . . in the World!. And Daniel Vaughn’s work is a must read. He’s the “Barbecue Editor” of Texas Monthly, and author of The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue (check out this radio interview on the topic).
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On understanding the algebra of history
Over the years I’ve convinced many people to read Scott Atran’s In God’s We Trust. Why? Because it gives you a basic framework for understanding and interpreting religious phenomena. The cognitive anthropological toolkit does not give you the total resources of decomposing religious phenomena. But, it is probably a necessary toolkit to begin at the…
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Samurai Jack is back!
After all these years, Samurai Jack is back. You can find the first three episodes at the Adult Swim website. A little Googling will get you the rest of them. There are three episodes left to finish out the series. It’s pretty incredible that this short, which I watched in the first half of the…
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Female Genital Mutilation IS a Muslim Issue. And, it’s a Medical Issue. And, it’s an African Issue. And, it’s a Human Rights Issue.
k Slate has put up an extremely misleading article up, Female Genital Mutilation Isn’t a Muslim Issue. It’s a Medical Issue. Articles such as the one above are why people end up eventually not believing the media at all. First, a few minutes of Googling will show that female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision…
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Less intelligent people want to exclude racists from the public square
Logit Coefficients B SE(B) Probability SEX 0.739 0.217 0.001 DEGREE -0.302 0.092 0.001 WORDSUM -0.338 0.068 0 POLVIEWS -0.078 0.078 0.317 INCOME -0.026 0.06 0.671 AGE 0.007 0.007 0.283 ATTEND 0.09 0.046 0.05 GOD -0.018 0.077 0.819 Constant 3.341 0.937 0 It’s been a while since I’ve done much GSS blogging. Part of…
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The anti-“End of History and the Last Man”
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man has often been misconstrued. But, it did argue for the long term trend of the ascendancy of democracy and market values. Though Fukuyama did not necessarily predict the universal dominance of Western liberalism, that is one of the corollaries many associate with The End of…
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Austin vs. Portland
The above video is from a Portlander who is quite anti-Austin, though in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. The issue of cross-city comparisons was on my mind for two reasons. First, Joel Kotkin wrote an article last fall in Forbes, America’s Next Great Metropolis Is Taking Shape In Texas, that friends are sharing on Facebook. Second, I’m…
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Treasure your exceptions, progress is real but not universal
The beginning of How the Scots Invented the Modern World describes the execution of a man for the crime of atheism around 1700 in Scotland. More precisely, this individual was rather loud about their heresy, and that is always the problem. Silent dissent is usually tolerated. This is the last time someone was executed for…
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Modernity is not magic with Muslims
There are many reasons I have become very skeptical of the media over the years. Though I do not subscribe to the conspiracy theory paradigms, it is obvious that the mainstream media often combines fidelity to precise narratives with a lack of detailed knowledge about the topics they are covering. In other words, they’re stenographers…
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$150,000 only gets you so far….
The above salary range seems accurate. I know newly minted PhDs in computer science may “only” get in the low $100,000 range at Google. So a salary in the mid six-figure range is totally reasonable with a few years of experience. Recently a friend who is an engineer at Google in Mountain View got a…
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Coffee is not measured by its price
An interesting piece on a $1 coffee joint, Has Coffee Gotten Too Fancy?: Mr. Konecny’s ambitions for Yes Plz go beyond selling a high-quality cup of coffee at that magic price point, though he knows that it sends a powerful message. What he wants to do is shift the very nature of coffee culture. He…
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Living as Loki, friendship before Ragnarok
In Norse mythology Loki is a trickster frost giant who also plays a god. His relationship to the Aesir is complicated, but at the end of days when the world is nearing its final hours he is fated to stand against his erstwhile companions. I do not know much about the Marvel comics adaptation of…
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Just because it’s not hereditary does not mean you can affect it
A comment below from John: Love to see a post about which human traits worth caring about are notable for having little or no hereditary component. It is all good and well to know what we cannot change, but it makes more sense to focus personally and as a parent on those things that aren’t…
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“Rationalists” are the worst, except for all the alternatives
A slight controversy about the “rationalist” community has surfaced on the internet recently. Scott Alexander can point you to the appropriate places to bone up on what’s going down, as well as a relatively short apologia for his community. First, the self-description of the community as “rationalists” is in my opinion a big problem. It’s…
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Why only one migrant per generation keeps divergence at bay
The best thing about population genetics is that because it’s a way of thinking and modeling the world it can be quite versatile. If Thinking Like An Economist is a way to analyze the world rationally, thinking like a population geneticist allows you to have the big picture on the past, present, and future, of…
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Why are so many of us “star-men”
Seven years ago I wrote 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan. It’s the most popular post I’ve ever written. As of now there have been 630,000 “sesssions” (basically visits) on that page alone. I suspect that many more have read my summary of The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols, the original paper…
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The vast majority of Muslims believe that being gay is not morally acceptable
“Do you personally believe that Homosexuality is….” Morally acceptable Morally unacceptable Not a moral issue United States 23 37 35 Britain 30 15 50 Russia 9 72 9 Turkey 4 78 12 Egypt 1 95 1 Jordan 2 95 3 Lebanon 7 80 11 Palestinian Territories 1 94 4 Tunisia 0 92 4 Israel 27…
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10 Things About Roman History You Should Know
Since Since the earlier “10 Things” was quite popular, I thought I’d try my hand at another one on a topic I know rather well. This involves Roman history. Unfortunately, history is a less clear and distinct topic than evolutionary biology, so there may be some disagreement with the assertions below. But here we go….…