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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs! (If you get that annoying...

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Thursday, February 6, 2025

This attempted fascist takeover must end with Elon Musk going to jail

 The fascist take-over is blatant and in the United States, unprecedented. Elon Musk is breaking the law and must go to jail for it along with his barely-legal helpers.

 

Krugman:

Imagine that you’re a federal contractor who has made campaign donations to Democrats; suddenly the government stops paying what it owes you and brushes off inquiries by saying that they’re working on the problem. Or you’re a federal employee who, according to somebody in your office who has a personal grievance, has expressed sympathy for DEI; somehow your regularly scheduled salary payments stop being deposited into your bank account. Or even imagine that you’re a retiree who canvassed for Kamala Harris, and for some reason your checks from Social Security stop coming. 
 
Don’t say they wouldn’t do such things. We’ve seen these people in action, and of course they would if they could. 
 
For the moment they probably can’t. The federal payments system is immensely complex, and like most government infrastructure has been financially squeezed for decades. So it’s cobbled together, much of it running on old hardware and even older software, kept functioning thanks to old hands and institutional memory. The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away. 
 
As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,

I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL. 
 
For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)
But this observation raises another concern. What if the Musk people — Muskovites? — try to muck with systems they don’t understand, believing that they’re super smart and can master everything with the help of a little AI? It’s not hard to imagine the whole federal payments system — including, by the way, servicing of federal debt — crashing.
So much damage — to U.S. credibility, to the Constitution and the rule of law, and possibly even to the very functioning of the government. And Trump only took power 2 weeks ago.

This is what happens when you allow a stochastic terrorist to run your government.

Friday, January 31, 2025

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan express their deep concerns about human rights and dignity for trans people

Left side, top to bottom: Matt Walsh, Pamela Paul, Jesse Singal
-------------------------------------------

Some More News has an excellent installment about all the anti-trans ghouls and grifters out there. Musk, Rowling, Shrier, Pamela Paul, Matt Walsh, Harmeet K. Dhillon and Andy Ngo are mentioned by name. 

Jesse Singal is not mentioned by name, but his face is displayed a couple of times.

The episode points out that a constant theme of anti-trans grifter ghouls is that trans people were talked into becoming trans thanks to some pro-trans conspiracy, and the ghouls love to promote stories of the tiny minority of gender transitioners who detransitioned. The ghouls are very concerned about the possibility of regret by transitioners.

Minute 28:27: 

According to a 2021 meta analysis, less than one percent of participants in gender-affirming surgery regretted it. For context, the regret-rate for successful knee surgery is 2.9% Which you may recognize as more than 1%. Gender-affirming surgery has a lower regret-rate than almost any other elective surgery. 

Now Jesse Singal is best-known for his crusade against trans rights, while his long-time pal Razib Khan is better known for his promotion of race pseudoscience

And as of yesterday, his hatred of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

But don't worry, Khan also hates trans people, probably as much as Jesse Singal does. Khan was recently seen on Twitter, mocking the idea that trans rights are human rights


Khan likes to frame his contempt for Amnesty International as a concern about their form of advocacy - they don't make an argument in a tweet for why trans rights are human rights, you see, merely an assertion

I have not yet found Khan himself making an argument that trans rights are not human rights. Maybe because, if he laid out his hatred and bigotry explicitly, it would make him look even more like a gigantic asshole.

Not to be outdone, Jesse Singal, Khan's long-time pal tweeted:


Singal writes about Trump's anti-trans executive order, while citing fan of "Gender Wars" cards and Pinker protege Carol Hooven, and spewing bullshit about "left-of-center thinkers."

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

It's so funny that Singal pretends to care about treating trans people with dignity while being on very friendly terms with the psychopathic ghouls of Kiwi Farms and while attacking individual trans people from behind his paywall-blocked podcast like the disgusting political operative grifter/faux journalist he is.

Who the fuck does he think he's fooling, exactly?

Singal has justifiably become known for being a useful tool of the far-right and Republicans in their project to win votes by demonizing trans people, but he gets mad when people mention that




Meanwhile the Jesse Singal follower labeler on Bluesky is chugging along, receiving many positive reviews.







But back to Razib Khan, for he was recently seen promoting the complete Trump ratfucker tool Andy Ngo. I assume that Trump will partner with Ngo and Ngo's former (or current) lawyer, the ultra-evil Harmeet K. Dhillon to do more ratfucking, using antifa as an excuse to crack down on all dissidents, much like the Nazis used Marxists. These Republicans are absolute fascist filth.



Dhillon is discussed in the Some More News video at minute 39:32 with the point made that she's the Swiss Army tool for right-wing extremist causes.

But Khan does not neglect to stop for a minute to lick the boot - this time Marc Andreessen's buddy, Joe "natural aristocracy" Lonsdale. Khan knows that the only reason a mediocrity like him has any notoriety at all is because he's been a right-wing plutocratic bootlicker since at least kooky Holocaust denier Ron Unz.



Thursday, January 30, 2025

The triumph of race pseudoscience in the Trump administration

Well the Intellectual Dark Web gang of race pseudoscience promoters must be thrilled with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He can be seen during his hearing promoting race pseudoscience.



TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited):

                SENATOR ANGELA ALSOBROOKS  
 
…you said the following and I quote: “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.”

Can you please explain what you meant? 

                        KENNEDY 

There are areas of studies, I think, most of them, by uh Poland um that show that the particular antigens that Blacks have a much stronger reaction… there’s differences in reactions to different products by different races…  

                SENATOR ANGELA ALSOBROOKS 

So I have 17 seconds left. Let me just ask you then. What different vaccine schedule should I have received?

                        KENNEDY  

I mean uh the Poland article suggests that that Blacks need fewer antigens than -

                SENATOR ANGELA ALSOBROOKS  

Mr. Kennedy with all due respect that is dangerous.

                           KENNEDY   

...this is science, this is published peer-reviewed science.”


The reference to Poland is Dr. Gregory Poland, and Kennedy completely misrepresented the finding in a 2014 film, discussed here by NPR in An Anti-Vaccine Film Targeted To Black Americans Spreads False Information (my highlight):

The film also brings up a 2014 study from the Mayo Clinic that showed Somali Americans and African Americans have a more robust immune response to the rubella vaccine than Caucasians and Hispanic Americans. One of those interviewed in Kennedy's film then asks, "So if you have that process that could be caused by vaccines, why wouldn't there be a link between vaccines and developmental delays?" 
 
But the study's own author and leading vaccine researcher, Dr. Gregory Poland, says this conjecture is not accurate. 
 
According to a statement provided to NPR by the Mayo Clinic, the study demonstrated "higher protective immune responses in African-American subjects with no evidence of increased vaccine side effects" and that any claim of " 'increased vulnerability' among African-Americans who receive the rubella vaccine is simply not supported by either this study or the science."

Now Steven Pinker doesn't like Kennedy, but other IDWers like crackpot Bret "Game Theory" Weinstein LOVES KENNEDY and so does IDW-namer crackpot Eric Weinstein, Peter Thiel's personal bootlicker.

But don't worry about Pinker, he still loves racists. Here he can be seen promoting, yet again, the career of racist ghoul Razib Khan.


And Pinker is not at all embarrassed to tell the world he has a connection to the racist/neo-Nazi Aporia Magazine. He can be seen on Twitter using his "celebrity intellectual" status to help legitimize the Emil Kirkegaard-controlled organization, just as he does with racist garbage rag Quillette.


Providing yet more evidence that I was absolutely right to include Pinker in my EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK diagram.

Oh and Razib Khan hates New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. I notice he didn't post this on Bluesky. Only on Elmo's racist cesspit.



Now Khan is infamous for his racist views but never forget that he also hates trans people. More about that in the next post.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Where is the ISIR 2024 conference program?

This is a poster, not the program
Every year, the International Society for Intelligence Research posts info about its latest conference along with a conference program so you can see exactly who participated.

This year they have not. Why? We already know that the odious racist Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard participated in 2024. And another member of the racist/ neo-Nazi Aporia gang, Cory Clark gave a presentation that ISIR liked enough to include on the conference page for 2024.

Clark has co-authored with neo-Nazi Aporia editor Bo Winegard, including in Quillette, and has appeared on the Aporia podcast. Her race pseudoscience credentials are rock solid.

Curiously, although Clark is not ashamed to admit, on her Twitter timeline to collaborating with the usual gang of evolutionary psychology dummies, race pseudoscience ghouls and political reactionary grifters including Jesse Singal, Lee Jussim, Jerry Coyne, Carol Hooven, Diana S. Fleischman and Greg Lukianoff, she doesn't mention the ISIR conference at all, in spite of ISIR apparently finding her important enough to highlight.

It doesn't seem possible ISIR could have included anybody more extreme than Clark and Kirkegaard. But the fact that ISIR has declined to publish its program makes me wonder.

To a certain extent, ISIR is finally getting the reputation for racist extremism it deserves. In a Bluesky skeet attacking this blog (before I had a Bluesky account) Eric Turkheimer wrote: "I have no sympathy with ISIR-- broke off all relations a few years ago."

(I got into it with Turkheimer, once I finally had an account and could defend myself and he quit the discussion quickly and without responding to my points in self-defense.)

Turkheimer's problem with me is mainly for pointing out how chummy his pal Kathryn Paige Harden is with Razib Khan. As always with those who seek to defend promoters of hereditarianism from little ole me, there is the charge of "guilt by association."

Sorry Turkheimer, the fact is that not only does Razib Khan consider Harden a friend, Harden has promoted his career (after any reasonably well-informed person knew Khan got the sack from the NYTimes for his racist career) offering, via tweet, to "get you on camera as our 'Expert in the Chair'."

And finally Harden acknowledged Khan in her much-promoted "Genetic Lottery" book, in fact in the same paragraph as Turkheimer.


Harden has also appeared at ISIR conferences, but not recently.

Speaking of behavioral genetics, I recently discovered the work of psychologist Jay Joseph and his paper, co-authored with Ken Richardson called The Bell Curve at 30: A Closer Look at the Within- and Between-Group IQ Genetic Evidence that absolutely trashes the "twins studies" that are the very foundation of all branches of modern sociobiology, including behavioral genetics. It is a joy to read. More in a future post. 

Meanwhile changes are afoot at the ISIR publication "Intelligence" - Richard Haier is out as editor-in-chief. But I don't know if Haier was found to be too racist, or not racist enough. Or something else.

It doesn't seem like ISIR has any motivation to change its racist ways, especially with Trump and race pseudoscience politically ascendant these days, and all that racist plutocrat money slopping around. And the ISIR was founded to promote the race pseudoscience of The Bell Curve and Arthur Jensen.

At least ISIR published a poster for the 2024 conference, so along with eyewitness reports from the conference we know the following participated:
  • Camilla Benbow
  • Stephen Ceci
  • Cory Clark
  • Richard Haier
  • Wendy Johnson
  • Emil Kirkegaard
  • Matt McGue
  • Brook Macnamara
  • Klaus Oberauer
  • Franzis Preckel
  • Elsbeth Stern
  • Sophie von Stumm
  • Wendy Williams

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Elon Musk is a huge, obvious Nazi

According to German-language SPIEGEL

(translated via Google Translate)
Four weeks before the federal election, tech billionaire Elon Musk once again got involved in the German election campaign on a big stage and campaigned for the AfD. At the party's official election campaign launch in Halle (Saale), the Trump advisor and Tesla boss was connected live from the USA at the beginning of party leader Alice Weidel's speech.

Musk reaffirmed his support for the AfD party with a video message. "It is very important that people in Germany are proud to be German," Musk said via livestream. "German culture" goes back "thousands of years." Even the Roman emperor Julius Caesar was "impressed" by the fighting spirit of the Germanic tribes, Musk continued.

This Nazi scumbag needs to be deported right back to South Africa.

Of course Musk is a fan of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and Kirkegaard is a fan of Musk. Because they are part of the same racist and neo-Nazi network.

And of course we all saw Musk give a Nazi salute twice.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Krugman nails it

I just wish Krugman would find a different platform besides Substack for his "Krugman Wonks Out" blog - he makes excellent observations about Marc Andreessen - but Andreessen funds Substack:

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.

To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.

The likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, however, surely have that kind of money, yet they’re prostrating themselves before Trump. They aren’t stupid; they have to know what kind of person Trump is and understand — whether or not they admit it to themselves — the humiliating nature of their behavior. So why do they do it?

The answer, I believe, is that many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

I had to laugh at this part of the interview:

Andreessen: Of course, that’s true. You could say over the last 200 years, the left, over time, has won most of the fights or even all the fights. 

It's thanks to the left winning that we no longer have slavery. Thanks to the left we don't have children  working in factories. Thanks to the left, Black people can vote, women can vote. Thanks to the left, you can't discriminate against Jews. Thanks to the left there's a separation between church and state.  Thanks to the left you can't arrest gay people for being gay. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I once argued with socialists about their belief that nobody should be allowed to be a billionaire, that there should be a government cap on personal wealth. But thanks to these fascists with souls made of black holes, I am all in favor of limiting the damage they can do to the rest of us by taxing billionaires into extinction.

No disrespect to Krugman, but the movie "Chinatown" (yes I know it was directed by a child rapist) asked and answered the question of what motivates the obscenely wealthy, over 50 years ago:

Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?

Noah Cross: (like Polanski, a child rapist): Oh my yes.

Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?

Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!


UPDATE: Wonkette had an equally critical, if more spicy response to Andreessen:

Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weissand Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his. 
 
To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Rachel Maddow: a public servant announcement



Rachel Maddow is doing excellent work in exploring the utter depths of corruption and incompetence already evident in the coming Trump dictatorship. Her latest "public servant announcement," as she calls them, is about the odious Pam Bondi, Trump's replacement pick for the only slightly more odious Matt Gaetz. 

Since the election, (Trump) has proposed so many advisers of low character and dubious qualification that he has overwhelmed the circuitry of the confirmation process and the public sphere. It’s almost as if the early proposition of Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department were a way to divert attention from the unalloyed awfulness of so many others: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Mehmet Oz, and Kristi Noem among them. The dessert for this feast of misbegotten nominations was served when Trump appointed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of his eldest son, Don, Jr., as the new Ambassador to Greece—a move that accommodates the son’s fresher affections for a Palm Beach socialite.

The next four years - or however long it takes - will be a shitshow of epic proportions and we can thank all the morons who voted for Trump.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK updated

 Also at Academia.edu


Some of the information in this document is from the Hope Not Hate report "Race Science, Inc."

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Jesse Singal: Kiwi Farms needs a more broad-based psychopathy

Jude Doyle is one of several trans people
Herzgal disparages in the podcast episode.

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Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, reactionary grifters to the core, snipe at their transgender enemies from behind their paywalled podcast "Blocked and Reported" - hosted on fascist Marc Andreessen-funded Substack - in an episode called Premium: Liz Fong-Jones And Kiwi Farms Keep Fighting (The Parable Of Mailfrawd)

If you think that episode title sounds like an effort at both-sidesing the vicious psychopathic website Kiwi Farms versus one of their targets, you would be right.

I couldn't access the podcast via the website Archive Today, but since I knew that Singal has a sizable fanbase at Kiwi Farms, I figured I could find access there and sure enough, one of the kiwi farmers even had a link to a transcript of the show, which I have now archived via Archive Today.

The transcript has not been corrected for auto-transcription errors. For instance the name Eliza Rae Shupe is consistently misspelled "Shoop." But I'm going to assume the transcript is roughly correct in content, if less so in spelling.

Fairly early on in the podcast Singal demonstrates the technique of both-sidesing Kiwi Farms vs. its critics. My highlight.

Jesse: Anyway, we've discussed before that we think in certain cases there's like a little bit of a moral panic about Kiwi Farms. On the other hand, they do dox people. They do like fixate on these targets and talk about them for sometimes thousands of pages. So it's a little bit disingenuous to host a messaging board – Where in the most extreme cases, everyone's like, this person should kill themselves. This person should kill themselves...

So Kiwi Farms does all these terrible psychopathic things, and yet Singal suggests that concerns about Kiwi Farms are nothing more "in certain cases" than a bullshit moral panic.

A really weird aspect of this podcast episode is the revelation that, in spite of being aware of Kiwi Farms for years, Singal and Herzog apparently only now realize that it has a far-right tilt. 

Jesse: So people sometimes say that Kiwi Farms only fixates on sort of left of center targets. And some other people say they like particularly fixate on trans targets. I think there's something to that. Now, there are some right wing people they get in beefs with. I will say, if you're going to fixate this much on Internet targets, there's definitely more worthy ones than the ones they pick. I think part of their ethos in some cases is like, oh, you want to be famous on the Internet? Here you go. And it can be very unpleasant. 

0:23:12 
 
Katie: Yeah. Okay, well, like, I just searched. I went to the site. I put it into my browser. I did all of the letters. 

Jesse: Katie Herzog, confirmed Kiwi Farms user. 

Katie: I searched for Chaya Rychik. She is the exact sort of person I would expect to have a thread on Kiwi Farms. Nothing. 

0:23:45 
 
Jesse: Well, I think Kiwi Farms probably agrees with her about, like, wokeness and blue-haired elementary school teachers. That doesn't surprise me. 

Katie: But that's my point. Like...
Katie: Can we not get a Kiwi Farms that is a little broader? Oh, wait, actually. Okay, so there's Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome.  
 
Jesse: That's the opposite. That's like a thread in favor of her.

(Pinkerite: yes there is a Libs of TikTok Derangement Syndrome thread at Kiwi Farms in which most of the commenters white-wash the actual harm that Libs of TikTok does. Singal was licking Elon Musk's boots not long ago. Musk is an enthusiastic supporter of Libs of TikTok.)

Katie: But that's what I want. I want a more egalitarian, a more democratic. 

Jesse: Why can't we get a liberal Joe Rogan? That's what you're saying. 

0:24:22 
 
Katie: Why can't we get... Trade it in a lab under DNC headquarters. I don't want to have to go to Rational Wiki to find out. 

Jesse: Oh, God. Rational Wiki makes Kiwi Farms look like... I don't know what. But they would never dock. 

Katie: Anyway, so I just wish they could be a little broader in scope. That's all I'm asking for, farmers. Come on. 

Jesse: Right. 

So Herzgal has no problem with the psychopathy of Kiwi Farms, they just wish the psychopathy was a little more broad-based. 

A Singal fan agrees

And somebody - subscribers or plutocratic funders or both - are paying for this podcast. What a fucking world. 

Later on in the transcript, Singal hah hah lampshades the fact that his life's work is pure shit:

0:42:31 

Katie: Okay, so what I'm curious about is, so Liz Fong Jones said that this person was making, that she's responding to a public accusation. So it just seems bizarre that Kiwi Farms, who are genuinely good detectives, they are very good at digging shit up, has never been able to find the accuser.

Jesse: So because I'm not looking...

Jesse: at all... I could devote the next three years of my life to looking at everything they've said about Liz Fong Jones on Kiwi Farms, which I am, thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

It is funny that Singal claimed I'm tenacious and his good buddy Razib Khan claimed I was obsessed with him, and meanwhile Singal spends his time digging up Kiwi Farms dirt on Liz Fong-Jones.

As with the equally repellent Nina Paley, Singal defends the real-world consequences of Kiwi Farms psychopathy on the grounds of "free speech." 

Jesse: I think you can understand from Liz Fong Jones' perspective why she'd want to pursue action against Kiwi Farms. And she's doing so totally within the laws of Australia. But you can also understand how chilling this is from a free speech and sort of basic internet discourse perspective.

Trans author Evan Urquhart had a good response to that argument:

Kiwi Farms’ whole reason for being has been to suppress the freedom of those they disagree with. Their users didn’t merely express themselves in hateful ways, but took action, often criminal action, to silence others. That’s why these online hooligans should never be allowed to wrap themselves in the free speech mantle. Free speech can thrive as long as Kiwi Farms can’t.

I think that Singal and Paley and other anti-trans grifters make money off of transphobia but want to maintain plausible deniability when the results of their grifting contributes to harm to actual human beings - for legal reasons if for no other.

To understand how insanely un-self-aware both Singal and Kiwi farmers are, Singal recounts, without comment, psychopathic Kiwi farmer ghouls unironically moaning about anybody stooping so low - and during Christmas. 

Katie: But there could also be, I mean, it's possible he got, he quit who fucking knows.
1:10:13
Jesse: Yeah. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is the guy, which I think he is, and that he was fired.

Jesse: News of this was posted to the front page of Kiwi Farms. A lot of Kiwi farmers were outraged that Liz Fong Jones would stoop this low, especially on Christmas and during Christmas.   

Someone on Bluesky created a custom feature that allows users to see if someone is a follower of Jesse Singal on Bluesky. 

All you have to do is go to this profile and subscribe. Then if someone is a follower of Singal a label will appear on their posts. You can also just subscribe to the Jesse Singal Followers block list. Probably a good idea since it's likely that a certain percentage of Singal's followers are Kiwi farmers.



Thursday, January 2, 2025

Garbage takes itself out ~ Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins resign

buh-bye
-----------------
Reactionaries Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

The Friendly Atheist, unfortunately on the fascism-loving Marc Andreesen-funded Substack writes:

...biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).

Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.

None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.

P. Z. Myers writes:

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Of course the rightwing media is playing their sad violins for these poor "censored" celebrity intellectuals.

Sarah Haider, a longtime ally of race pseudoscience-promoter Razib Khan basically admits on her Substack that she finds trans rights so horrifying, she's willing to reconsider religion as a bulwark against those rights:

It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.

But also, the ascent of Trump is the ascent of Christian nationalism and I believe Haider is an opportunistic grifter who knows which way the wind is blowing. She revealed her game plan in a series of predictions back in July:
  • Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.  
  • God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 


Coyne has his own blog and nobody who spends a half-second Googling his name is unaware of Coyne's opposition to trans rights. 

And Coyne's anti-trans op-ed is available for anybody to read. So what Turley means by "censorship" is actually that the FFRF changed its mind about endorsing Coyne's opinion.

I mean, Quillette, the racist ("hereditarian") publication beloved by Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins, never publishes my opinions. Am I being censored by Quillette?

Coyne's also part of the "free speech" gang of grifters and anti-vaxxers and racists who met for the Standford "Academic Freedom" Conference. The highlights of that conference were Amy Wax bemoaning the push-back she received from her blatantly racist public statements and Peter Thiel's babbling, Bible-quoting keynote speech

It's curious that Coyne, such a devoted atheist, had no public objections to Thiel's religion-based argument about armageddon vs. antichrist.

But Coyne isn't content to merely question the reality of trans-identity, as the Friendly Atheist noted. The actual agenda of Coyne's op-ed is revealed by the claims he found on a virulently anti-trans website:

Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Coyne's message was received loud and clear by trans people and allies. Coyne wasn't only suggesting that trans people are delusional, he portrayed them as sexual predators.

So naturally it's the job of the right-wing media network to pretend that all Coyne said was that sex is binary.

Monday, December 30, 2024

Historian David Blight responds to being attacked by Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald in Quillette

This is one of those instances when my interests collide. 

I have been enjoying historian David Blight's work while doing research for my almost-complete play GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

Primarily through Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, but also through his Yale lecture series about the Civil War and Reconstruction. And let's not forget his appearances on C-SPAN.

So although I've written about Blight on a few occasions on this blog, including Mac Donald's attack on Blight, I happened to be listening, yesterday, to one of Blight's more recent Yale Lecture series "Legacies of Reconstruction and the Origins of Jim Crow Society" for my play research rather than for content for Pinkerite. 

But lo and behold, right smack in the middle of the Class 24, Legacies of Reconstruction video -  available for free on YouTube, thank you Yale - Blight responds to the Mac Donald attack and it is a thing of beauty. 

Blight is in the middle of discussing Yale's Civil War Memorial (Blight wrote about it for The Atlantic in February 2024) which Blight calls "a Yankee apology for Reconstruction" when he mentions the Mac Donald attack. Transcript below.



It’s Russell’s and the War Memorial committee's and Yale's apology for Reconstruction. Yeah. You know, we over we took over the South. We colonized it. We imposed black suffrage on you. Oh my God. Yeah. You reacted violently here and there, but we understand. It's OK. Come back to Yale. 

 

It's a Yankee apology for Reconstruction. And the next time you walk through this, think of it that way if you can. And I apologize for getting animated about this. 

 

Not really. 

 

But I just got viciously attacked in an online essay about my New York Times essay. And I would otherwise not respond except the woman who wrote it for a very right-wing – I didn’t know about it until people started saying “have you read this have you read this?” I said no. It's a site called Quillette. OK, I'm sure some of these students must know it, it's its roots are in Australia, it turns out, very libertarian, very, very right wing stuff. But she wrote an essay far longer than my New York Times piece, attacking me and Yale. And all the elitism of our universities. And on and on and on and on she went. She especially went after how I treated this reconciliation story in the Yale and Slavery book. She said “these elite liberals have become so terrible they don't believe in reconciliation.” 

 

That is such a misreading of the book I wrote called - she mentioned my book Race and Reunion but clearly never read it. Or even if she did, it didn't impress her. 

 

The Jim Crow system in the South evolves in a culture forgetting what the Civil War was really about. A purposeful forgetting of the essential results and consequences of the liberation of four million people. The American reunion of North and South is built on a new edifice of the destruction of black rights. Political, civil and eventually of even black lives. 

 

Alright, that's enough of an editorial. Now you're all going to go try to - they have a paywall though for this Quillette thing, so… I got to read it initially. Now there’s a paywall. I was going to quote her today but it couldn't open - I was not gonna pay for it. I mean, come on. 

 

Uh. I don't know, sometimes it's good to get attacked viciously like that. It means somebody read it.


If Blight wants to read the Quillette article without the paywall, and I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to pay for Quillette, I have it archived for free right here.

Later in this lecture, Blight mentions race science (38:47) but doesn't make an explicit connection between that and Quillette.

I’m just sorry that Blight's days of being blissfully unaware of the existence of Quillette are over. 

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Elon Musk doubles-down on his neo-Nazi support

In case anybody had any doubts about how extremely racist and fascist the American shadow president is, Elon Musk's latest editorial in support of "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD)  should make it crystal clear.

As the excellent report from Hope not Hate noted, there is a connection between the extremely racist Emil Kirkegaard and the AfD. One of the "senior figures" of Kirkegaard's racism umbrella organization Human Diversity Foundation, Erik Ahrens (German original), is the social media advisor of the AfD.

So it's extremely bizarre that Musk claims to be opposed to racism.


But what's really happening here is that Musk has decided to redefine racism as prejudice only against those eligible for an H1-B visa, which is how technology corporations recruit non-Americans to work in American companies.

There is currently a growing rift in Trump-world between the hardcore MAGAs who oppose all immigration, and Musk, who only opposes immigration from those he figures he can't profit from

Surprise, surprise: Tesla Emerges Among Top Employers Of H-1B Visa Holders.

Trump agrees with Musk. Is this really what the dummies who voted for Trump wanted?

Racist ("hereditarian") and oligarch boot-licker Claire Lehmann is obviously team Musk (source.)







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