1) Progressives have ruined the humans sciences. The latest example is Nature Reviews Psychology encouraging authors to include a "citation diversity statement." But the damage was already near total.

aporiamagazine.com/p/progressives… 2) What is a citation diversity statement? Well, it's essentially a letter confirming the authors' efforts to cite non-white, non-male, non-Western scholars. For progressives, diversity is a euphemism for "fewer white men."

1) Feminization may not spell the end of the West, but it is almost certain to erode the traditional values that have long sustained its key institutions. In this essay, I address several objections raised to Helen Andrews’ argument on the feminization of public life.

aporiamagazine.com/p/what-helen-a… 2) In the New York Times, David French attacked Andrews' piece for heroizing men and denigrating women. He contended that Andrews was ignoring "even a cursory analysis" of history, pointing out that men have often created brutal cancel cultures that suppressed dissent.

(1) On average, Black Americans score substantially lower than White Americans on standardized tests of cognitive ability. This finding is well-established and largely uncontested in the academic literature.

aporiamagazine.com/p/sasha-gusev-… (2) The only major question is about the cause (s) of these persistent disparities. Hereditarians argue that genetic factors play a significant role, while environment-only theorists contend that differences in physical, social, and cultural environments are the primary drivers.

1. Woke is about race. Without race differences, woke would not exist. Those who write about woke without writing about race differences are like scientists who write about chemical reactions without writing about atoms. Cofnas @nathancofnas is right.
aporiamagazine.com/p/woke-is-abou… 2. Michael Shermer recently wrote about the causes of woke, but did not mention race differences. His analysis is therefore misleading. Woke is not primarily a flawed understanding of human nature; it is a flawed understanding of *race*.

A major problem with the "It's unseemly to focus on the causes of racial disparities" argument is that the media WILL focus on racial disparities. Endlessly. And we know they have an answer. Racism. You can't have it both ways. If focusing on racial disparities is unseemly, then the proposed cause should be irrelevant.

And if it's reasonable to point to racism, then it's also reasonable to point to groups differences in relevant traits.

1. Matt Yglesias recently argued that we should preserve a taboo on investigating group differences in the United States. He's wrong.

aporiamagazine.com/p/a-troublesom… 2. He notes that blacks are massively disproportionately represented in the NBA, but so are men from the former Yugoslavia. However, he also notes he has not looked into the causes because it would be "unseemly" to be preoccupied with such a question.

1. Hughes should be praised for his consistency and thoughtfulness, but the color blindness that he advocates is impossible and should be rejected by any realist about human nature. It is no more plausible than communism. And perhaps more insidious.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1814587227038450001

2. I wrote a long review of it for @AporiaMagazine. Here I will only briefly summarize it.

The first issue is the nature of race. Is race a biological phenomenon or is it a social construction?

aporiamagazine.com/p/the-god-that…

1:) I wrote about the Founders' view of human nature, a constrained and pessimistic view.

aporiamagazine.com/p/conceived-in… 2:) Obviously, Thomas Jefferson had different views from James Madison who had different views from Alexander Hamilton. My analysis is based on The Federalist, a collection of essays written to defend the Constitution of 1787.

Perhaps the simplest question in politics is should white people care about remaining majorities in countries which their ancestors created. The rest, as they say, is details. Demographics are destiny. Of course, a kind of pluralism is perfectly consistent with this desire. It's not an easy or simplistic pluralism. And it's not something we've discussed candidly. But it's something which should merit more conversation moving forward. That's not easy or expedient. But necessary.

1. In 2013, John Horgan contemplated banning research on race and IQ, even though he was otherwise a "hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science" because it had no "redeeming value." 2. This is a common position from otherwise steadfast "champions" of free speech and inquiry. Many advocates of "heterodoxy" either ignore the topic or actively call for self-censorship (or worse).

In practice, colorblindness is used by progressives to belittle white identity while promoting black and Hispanic identity. Thus calling for colorblindness is like calling for cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma in which the opponent will definitely defect. It's a losing move. Worse, those who promote colorblindness are rarely (never?) honest about the mammoth disparities that would result. How would we explain those? Progressives would feel vindicated: "See...society really is racist. We told you. This is exactly why we need DEI."

1/ I wrote a long review of Coleman Hughes's book, "The End of Race Politics." Here, I will summarize it. My short response to colorblindness is that it is impossible and probably immoral because race is real and consequential.

aporiamagazine.com/p/the-god-that… 2/ Race politics are unavoidable because race is real and races are slightly different from each others in ways reliably related to social outcomes. We should face this honestly.

1. I wrote about free will and retributive punishment, defending both against increasingly popular attacks from philosophers and public intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky.

aporiamagazine.com/p/in-defense-o… 2. First, conceptual analysis, which can be boring and tedious, but is necessary in a debate as complicated and persistent as free will. There are four basic positions on free will: Libertarianism, hard determinism, hard incompatibilism, compatibilism.

1. Sapolsky's "Determined" is a baffling but entertaining book full of obvious errors and weak arguments. Furthermore, it hardly engages with any serious philosophical questions about free will and punishment. 2. The chief thesis of the book as the title suggests is that humans are determined, like all other aspects of the physical world; therefore, they do not have free will and, more important, they should relinquish antiquated superstitions about responsibility and blame.

1. One could make a great case that racism flourishes in the US...against whites. The data? First, how do workers perform by race? Obvious prediction of racism theory is that blacks who are hired are *more* talented than whites (since they overcame racist employers). 2. The best data we have, however, suggest that blacks are worse workers, on average, than whites. Importantly, the ratings were both subjective and objective, and those estimates were quite similar.



researchgate.net/publication/10…
psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-07…

1. Great conversation on Twitter about discussing race differences honestly. So I wrote about it, defending my position that candor about race differences is obligatory for intellectuals. Why? @bronzeagemantis @sebjenseb

aporiamagazine.com/p/yes-we-shoul… 2. The primary reason of course is that race is a conspicuous social reality and races are different from each other. This means people will always notice race disparities. One can't hide them, suppress them, censor them, or hope people ignore them.

The fundamental weakness of "anti-wokism" is simple: People refuse to grapple the reality of race differences. And so long as they attribute group differences to culture, the belief that people can be utterly transformed by the West (and Western Culture) remains. Once one accepts the reality of race differences, the world makes sense. Culture is not haphazard, random, or entirely contingent. It is, in a sense, an extended phenotype. Of course, culture can change, and culture affects human behavior--but it is constrained by genes.

(1) Race realism. What is it? Why is it so incendiary? And what does it mean for multiracial societies?

The most controversial topic in modern discourse is race--it's also one of the most important because dishonesty about it disfigures debate.

aporiamagazine.com/p/race-realism… (2) Modern elite discourse contends that race is illusory, a kind of reified figment of our social imagination. BUT, it also contends that we need to promote race-conscious policies to rectify past wrongs. Race is unreal. But some "races" deserve benefits.

(1) Mainstream conservatism is just as squishy about race as liberals and progressives. And because of this, they have no substantive answer to wokism. What is the cause of large and persistent racial disparities if not underlying race difference? (2) The mainstream conservative might contend that the causes are cultural. Maybe father absence. Or welfare dependence. But if race differences are not real, what caused the cultural differences? The mainstream conservative might say "history."

1) Elites effusively praise "diversity," but it's important to understand that in practice, diversity means "smaller proportion of white people." Thus celebrating diversity is not about celebrating differences; it is about celebrating the shrinking white population. 2) A great (and hilarious) example of this: The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports grades various sports for their diversity. It's sole criterion is percentage of non-white people. To get an A+, a the sport/institution must have 40% or more "people of color."

(1) Modern radical progressives are unified by a demonization of historically successful groups, of "whiteness," of "patriarchy," of "heteronormativity." In short, of everything that created Western civilization. Thus, inevitably, they disdain the West as it exists. (2) They want fundamentally to transform the West, to eliminate its historical characteristics, to turn it into a "diverse" civilization of variegated genders, sexes, races, et cetera, in which biology is overpowered by belief, by identity, by fiat as it were.