Christopher Donovan: An interesting article in the Boston Globe describes how the medieval practice of “trial by ordeal” might have actually worked pretty well. Basically, it came down to the social order created by widely-held beliefs — the logic or truth of those beliefs aside. If everyone uniformly believed that God would punish them for a crime, […]
I teach courses on child psychology, and every textbook has a chapter on IQ. It’s always a bit touchy talking about it — I’ve got to be on my best behavior. I discuss the data showing genetic influences and then I point out that most of the “environmental influences” on IQ could equally well be explained by […]
Kevin MacDonald: I was going to blog on the recent news reports of Latino-Jewish ties, but I really can’t improve on Patrick Cleburne’s blog over at Vdare.com. A must read. Cleburne agrees with the Kvetcher that the real motivation is “the mutual goal of making the majority population a minority population. We need to all be […]
In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a […]
I went through a Nietzsche phase as an undergrad philosophy major but never read The Anti-Christ, so Thomas Dalton’s current TOO article “Nietzsche and the Origins of Christianity” was a real eye-opener — the ultimate conspiracy theory: St. Paul as the center of a plan to counter Roman power by recruiting non-Jews to “to steal […]
Christopher Donovan: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Smith v. Berghuis, quite possibly the most absurd lawsuit of the year. Needless to say, the claim was racial discrimination. Equally needless to say, he’s got supporters in the media and among whites. Diapolis Smith, a Black man, shot and killed Christopher Rumbley during a bar […]
Kevin MacDonald: The story of Bob Kellar, a city councilman in Santa Clarita, has been getting a lot of attention in Southern California. The LA Times (“’Proud racist’comment roils Santa Clarita”) describes the context: The controversy stems from a Jan. 16 anti-immigration rally in Santa Clarita; Kellar spoke and referred to a statement by […]
