Monthly Archives: July 2009

The manner in which President Barack Obama handled the Henry Louis Gates affair is shameful and abominable.  Yesterday afternoon, I sent a letter to President Obama by way of FedEx.  The letter can be downloaded here (although the free Adobe … Continue reading →

Racism can be defined as a negative evaluation that privileges color or ethnicity in an inappropriate  way.  This definition tells us what is surely right, namely that not every negative evaluation of a person is thereby racist.  It is not … Continue reading →

Who cares if the surgeon general is about 40 pounds overweight, as is the case with Regina Benjamin—President Obama’s nominee for the position?  There is a perfectly good sense in which it should not matter, just so long as she … Continue reading →

Analogous to the white person who has devoted her or his life to helping under-privileged minority children, a wise Latina judge might have some important insight into how both justice and injustice manifest themselves in the lives of people of every ethnic group. Surely, this ought to be and must be the point that Judge Sotomayor was trying to make. Continue reading →

Since any experience can be a profound learning experience that gives one general insight, the interesting question has to be in what sense are the following remarks by Judge Sonia Sotomayor defensible: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman … Continue reading →

Now enormous powers of discernment require considerable intellectual ability. So we know that whatever else true, it follows from the very powers of discernment that evolution has accorded women that they must also have considerable intelligence. The very idea that women are somehow less intelligent than men has no basis in evolutionary theory; and, as I have just indicated, this can be seen from a rather unusual perspective, namely the powers of discernment that evolution accords women. Now, the asymmetry between women and men that has a deep biological basis points to why a man might be bothered by a so-called loose woman. It is not just that she is having lots of sex. It is also the case that she is not being as attentive as she should be to her own well-being; for in having lots of sex, the woman takes on a risk that no man does.
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Political correctness seeks to turn the history of a group’s having been victimized into a kind moral non-culpability zone for those who are a members of the group in question. This is to ignore the very poignant truth that being a victim of system wrongdoing has rarely if ever turned folks into model moral citizens. Victimization and evil motivation are not incompatible pairings either logically, conceptually, or practically. Neither blacks nor women nor any other group of people, however, defined have turned out to be the exception to this truth. Continue reading →

George Santayana observed that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. We now know beyond any shadow of doubt that from an evolutionary perspective ethnic differences are utterly inconsequential in terms of both talent and temperament. Thanks to the work in evolutionary biology in the 20th Century, we now know this truth in a way that not even Darwin could have known it. Yet, in the name of racial equality, we have made more of racial differences than a wicked man like Hitler, himself, could ever have imagined. Continue reading →