anotherpanacea

There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.
One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather [...]

That’s right: the German government has declared that it will fund experts to ensure the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. This has been going on for some time: with funding, a position as a newsmaker, and specialized knowledge, an expert or partisan can create the primary resources wikipedia requires, and then alter the content to correspond [...]

There is a deeply interesting discussion of energy policy going on at ask.metafilter. It hits on some of the best thinking in environmentalism right now, and takes that long-range speculative view that may not satisfy the average policy wonk but gives me the philosophical shiver that lets me know that some deep thinking is occurring.
DarkForest [...]

Necessity is the mother of invention, but ingenuity is its own reward. This site gives me joy.

“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts.
Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here, where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people. In response, [...]