“Is Science Racist?” Book Review.
It may seem to be a rather silly question, but you might be able to find a reasonable argument for the premise. Maybe scientists are racist, and we need to…
We Need Stoicism More Than Ever: A Response to the New APA Guidelines
Recently, the American Psychological Association took aim at “traditional masculinity,” when they released their “first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.” They summarize these as follows: Once psychologists began…
The Many Faces of Social Justice
Social Justice today has a seriously bad rap. Almost every morning, a new essay decrying the pernicious effects and general incoherence of “Social Justice ideology,” “Social Justice activism” or the…
A Racist Exam Question—or Was It?
“It was an oddball question for a Health Science class, eh?” writes my colleague, when I text her the article about the controversy surrounding Cal State University, Long Beach lecturer Matthew…
The Progressive Case Against White Privilege
The arguments against the existence of white privilege are stereotypically represented as originating primarily from right-wingers and grounded in conservative notions about American meritocracy. But there is a stronger argument…
What Thomas Sowell Taught Me about Being a Dissident Feminist
Thomas Sowell is a legendary economist and social scientist, and that most disconcertingly contrarian of public intellectuals: the black conservative. Aged eighty-eight, he was born in the South and raised…
Academic Freedom or Social Justice: What Kind of University is Portland State?
On October 2, 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke a story that detailed an unprecedented audit of certain sectors of academic research, specifically those we—its authors—called “grievance studies.” In that…
Replacing Religion: How Secularism Has Failed and How It Can Succeed
Imagine a world in which individuals based their opinions on reason. Now, it is all but a certainty that human beings will at times fail to use logic in their…
The Epistemological Problem of White Fragility Theory
One flaw in the theory of white fragility is that it relies crucially on the paradigm of implicit bias. Papers like this one, which provides a reanalysis of an influential study…
The Jesuits: For God and Globalization
On 16th November 2018, a twenty-six-year-old American missionary called John Allen Chau was killed by an isolated tribe on the island of North Sentinel, part of the Indian island territories of Andaman…
Servile Oblivion and the End of Education
Liberal education is the individual assimilation of cultural memory: we recover the historical and metaphysical ground of our being by studying the accumulated riches of the past. This humanly essential…
The Creative Practitioner and Cultural Appropriation
There is, perhaps, no more important topic in the social sciences than the study of intercultural communication. Understanding between members of different cultures was always important, but it has never…
How Did Free Speech Get Here?
It was a good day for our public discourse when, on the popular public talk show Firing Line, conservative intellectual William F. Buckley had a conversation with avant-guard Beat poet…
A Screenshot, a Meme and a “Transphobic” Tweet: How Game Journalists Hounded One Man Out of Work
Sean Halliday, a community manager for Good Old Games, was fired after he accidentally tweeted under a hashtag with sociopolitical connotations. Now he’s been hounded out of a second job…
Charity in the Marketplace of Ideas
Public discourse nowadays lacks civility. It is downright vitriolic at times. One need only glance at the news to observe how much heated rhetoric abounds in public discourse in places…
Appealing to Hearts and Minds on the Subject of Global Warming
The facts are not enough. We are never going to be able to address global warming effectively if we don’t win the hearts of people, as well as their minds.
Talking Politics at the Family Dinner Table
Every four seconds, an idealistic adolescent in North America screams at their parents for not being woke. Although this statistic is entirely made up, I’ve heard enough personal anecdotes to…
The Politics of Natural Ability
There has recently been a considerable amount of attention and controversy surrounding proposed differences in the natural talents of social groups. Most, though not all, of these claims tend to…
