Entries for December 13, 2005

The amazingly prolific John McWhorter has written another book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. This is a follow-up to his 2001 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. I haven't had a chance to read the whole book but am eager to do so. Let me share with you some passages from the introduction.

McWhorter identifies as a major problem of black Americans "therapeutic alienation: alienation unconnected to, or vastly disproportionate to, real-life stimulus, but maintained because it reinforces one's sense of psychological legitimacy, via [defining oneself] against an oppressor characterized as eternally depraved."

Clive Crook's account in the National Journal of the Montreal conference on the Kyoto Protocol. Crook believes that global warming is real and requires reductions in carbon emissions. But he recognizes that Kyoto is a failure:

Many are now being forced to admit that the policy is failing–so embarrassingly that nothing similar is likely to take its place. As usual on such occasions, some face-saving scapegoating formula (you can guess which country is going be blamed) may emerge before the meeting wraps up. But the truth is that unless a new scheme is designed, there simply won't be an ongoing, effective, internationally coordinated effort to curb emissions of carbon to replace the failed Kyoto plan. . . . The Kyoto model was a dead end, to be sure: It has made getting to the right place far more difficult, and it has wasted more than 10 years.