What’s so bad about critical race theory? Critical race theory is a fairly small body of texts produced by a splinter faction from a minor intellectual movement within American law schools during the 1980s.
The best way to understand critical race theory is to read these texts. Some of these approaches are interesting or persuasive; others are not. But there are two things to keep in mind when approaching them. The first is that these texts were put together by lawyers – who are, as a group, not to be trusted. The second forms the subject of this essay. The movement that critical race theory broke from is critical legal studies, or CLS. Critical race theory has its own intellectual roots (more on that shortly), but its history as a movement is usually traced back to the CLS conferences of the mid to late 1980s. The basic axiom of critical race theory is that racism is not an irrational deviation from the norm of liberal neutrality – instead, it’s a system of exclusion that operates through those norms. Like this: Like Loading... Steven Pinker's delusions of peace - ABC Religion & Ethics. "Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries," Steven Pinker writes in his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes .
The celebrated Harvard professor of psychology is discussing what he calls "the Long Peace": the period since the end of the second world war in which "the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another. " As a result of "this blessed state of affairs," he notes, "two entire categories of war - the imperial war to acquire colonies, and the colonial war to keep them - no longer exist.
" Now and then there have been minor conflicts. "To be sure, [the super-powers] occasionally fought each other's smaller allies and stoked proxy wars among their client states. " But these episodes do not diminish Pinker's enthusiasm about the Long Peace. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. The persistence of unreason.
Marshall McLuhan. Noam Chomsky. Zizek. RSA Animate - 21st Century Enlightenment. Web Sound - Terence McKenna. Terence McKenna on Marshall McLuhan Terence McKenna: The Last Interview (1999) The following are excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November of 1999, in preparation for a profile that appeared in the May 2000 issue of Wired.
These interviews have also been edited and released on a CD, Terence McKenna: The Last Interview. Given McKenna's subsequent demise, I chose selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in Hawaii. The comments have been edited and are not chronological; I have included my questions only when necessary. UbuWeb Sound | UbuWeb PennSound | CENTRO | EPC | WFMU. Why Are Things Cute?