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.

I continue to believe that an honest discussion about human variation, full of vigorous but respectful debate, is better than the alternative of uncomfortable silence and moral bullying. Better to face reality with humility and candor than turn from it.

aporiamagazine.com/p/human-biodiv… Will we discover that populations differ not only in physical traits but also in psychological traits on average? Almost certainly. The skull is not an impenetrable wall to selective forces. Will this present real challenges to our moral views? It would be naive to deny this.

Sadly, many prominent centrists and rationalists who vilipend religion and other "superstitions" remain silent while an ideology that contends that men can become women and women can become men through the magical power of "identification" conquers the mainstream. It is not anti-trans to assert what everybody knows: Identifying as something does not make you that thing. Every intellectual who thinks of him or herself as a dedicated rationalist and descendant of the Enlightenment should declare this without qualification.

Some personal/professional news. I am working for Ideas Sleep Furiously (@Ideas_Sleep), trying to produce the best, most interesting content about all kinds of topics from a decidedly non-woke but charitable and debate-oriented perspective. Check us out. For a long time, @Quillette was kind enough to employ me. And I love the time I spent with them and all the articles I published with them. I have nothing but admiration for them. And I wish them continuing success. And they gracefully wished me such success as well.