radrss

Your Favorite Blogs In One Place

Viewing post at Grasping reality by brad delong

Jeet Heer: An Addendum to the Ezra Klein and Sam Harris Debate about Charles Murray: Weekend Reading

Weekend Reading: Can somebody please tell me why Sam Harris was supposed to be interesting and smart?" Jeet Heer: "An addendum to the Ezra Klein and Sam Harris debate about Charles Murray. Harris uses Glenn Loury as a human shield, which is ironic given Loury's history with Murray...

...In his defense, Harris mentions he had the "fantastic" Loury "who happens to be black" on his show. Some of his best podcast guests are black! As it happens, Glenn Loury and Charles Murray have an interesting and salient history.

They were colleagues together at American Enterprise Institute in the early 1990s. But after publication of Bell Curve and D'Souza's terrible End of Racism (also sponsored by AEI), Loury (and another black conservative, Robert Woodson) decided they could no longer work at AEI.

Here is Loury's account of Bell Curve and larger hostility of American right to blacks, even black conservatives:

So Loury, who Harris thinks is "fantastic" and (unlike Klein) a reasonable voice, thought that Murray's was so terrible that he couldn't in good conscience work with him.

As another addendum: Sam Harris thinks Ezra Klein is "far left"—which brought me a rare laugh in a doleful world:

#weekendreading