An excellent tutorial from a lawyer with a Youtube channel on how the effects of legal (de jure) segregation created de facto segregation.
People like Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss, who deny the continued existence of systemic racism, need to watch this. Not that this will change their minds - I suspect they get paid too much to continue to promote the views of right-wing racist plutocrats to ever change their minds.
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| Wheee it's the Racist Rodeo! |
We are delighted to announce the 23rd annual ISIR conference in Berkeley, California, USA! The conference will be held from Thursday, July 27 until Saturday, July 29 at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, located at 2086 Allston Way, Berkeley, California. We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell!
But this isn't Pinker's first racist rodeo, he was there in 2015, complaining about bad writing.
I find it odd that Pinker is touted as some kind of language expert when he chose a truly rancid piece of dreck - poorly argued, poorly researched - written by professional racist Steve Sailer for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." I think we should all have doubts about Steven Pinker's opinion on the subject of good writing.
But I don't think the primary reason for the speech is a concern for style so much as a chance to retaliate against Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, or as Pinker describes them in the most weaselly way possible: "critics of the value of intelligence research." Oddly he includes idiot David Brooks with them - Pinker and Brooks are now allies.
Pinker will never get over the fact that Gould humiliated him in the New York Review of Books. And he was mad at Malcolm Gladwell for daring to point out Pinker's cozy relationship with racist Steve Sailer, but Pinker - and Geoffry Miller - seemed to feel better about Gladwell after he signed the Harper's Letter. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist who gained notoriety through fat-shaming.
The audience chuckles when Pinker shows the slide of Gould, Gladwell and Brooks. Pinker says:
...three prominent critics of the value of intelligence research and of the major findings that I think are accepted by most people in this group...
This tells us two important things - "intelligence research" means race pseudoscience - and that Pinker is in agreement with alleged "major findings" that the pack of racists in the room believe in. Pinker continues:
What the three of them have in common is that they are all excellent writers. And what a lot of people who do research in intelligence have in common is, like most academics, they're not. And so in the battle for hearts and minds, I think many of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight. Namely, the people who are most vociferous in proposing the idea that intelligence doesn't matter, it can't be measured, it's all an artifact of socio-economic status, it doesn't matter above a certain low threshold and so on, they present their case very clearly and articulately. And so I think it behooves intelligence researchers to get their side of the story out in an effective matter...
What Pinker is proposing is nothing less than a coordinated political campaign by partisans of race pseudoscience.
But certainly Pinker's buddy Razib Khan demonstrates how badly race pseudoscience proponents write, so bad that even his fellow racists recognize it. Pinker tries to excuse the bad writing of his racist pals due to their being academics, but Khan is not an academic, he's a rightwing political operative posing as a scientist, so what's his excuse?
Pinker was also at the racist rodeo in 2017. He participated in the Distinguished Contributor Interview, available on YouTube. The audio is terrible. The interviewer, David Lubinski is:
...one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence",[8] an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.
I haven't had a chance to review the whole interview but this part is pretty fascinating at minute 3.40:
Lubinski
...How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate"
Pinker
It's true that at the end of "The Language Instinct" my first popular book, I commented on how one topic I did not cover in that book, that I never studied myself up to that point was just because the individual differences in the normal range just seemed a little ripple of noise on top of something interesting that we all have in common. Compared to the question of what makes the brain smart, how do we solve problems, how do we invent things, how do we discover things. What makes some of us a little better than others on a quantitative scale, struck me as less interesting. But then - as you pointed out I was not right back today(?) - individual differences are interesting in a number of ways. One of them is, if you're interested in human nature, what is innate, across the human species, what makes a human human, one of the ways to study it is to look at how something varies. Since you need some kind of independent variable in science to study anything. If you're interested in what do the (?) human nature. You can compare humans to chimpanzees, there are a number of ways of getting at it. But one of them has to be well, let's look at the differences in the genes and see how they correlate with differences in psychological abilities. Another was the fact that - I didn't appreciate until reading an article by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues in the late 80s in Science, that pointed out a problem that I had a deepening appreciation of, that behavioral genetics isn't just the study of the genetic influences but it leads to surprising discoveries about environmental influences, mainly the small contribution of the so-called shared environment, which I think came as a surprise to everyone, pointed out by Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, David Rowe and later Judith Harris. One of the profound discoveries of behavioral genetics is not so much that genes matter, though that still comes as a shock to many people, but that the part that isn't genetic isn't necessarily familial, isn't necessarily parental. That there's some profound source of variation in what makes us what we are that is neither genes nor families. That's a discovery that I find, even - almost 15 years after publishing The Blank Slate - it's very hard to get people to even understand it, let alone try to explain it. But that is a profound intellectual puzzle about what makes us what we are. I have my own favorite hypothesis about it, my own interpretation of the evidence. A lot of it seems developmental noise, and so non-shared environment as the name of the variable that counts for that chunk of variance may be somewhat dissuading. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression but in answer to your question, it is a highly interesting question what is it other than our genes that make us what we are and that's something that can only come to light through the study of intelligence and personality...
First, the notable use of the term "human psychological diversity" which I have no doubt is another way of saying "human biodiversity" a favorite euphemism for race pseudoscience promoters, as is, almost always, "individual differences."
I think the subtext for Lubinski putting Pinker on the spot here is "you used to be opposed to race pseudoscience, what made you decide to join our club?"
Second, Pinker is alluding to the theories of his protegée Judith Rich Harris when he talks about "non-shared environment." Basically what Judith Rich Harris meant was society:
What children learn in the context of their home may not, in fact, work in the world outside the home. Western societies demand very different behaviors in the home and outside the home; for example, displays of emotion that are acceptable in the home are unacceptable outside of it ( Dencik, 1989 ; Fine, 1981 ). A central assumption of GS theory is that socialization is a highly context-dependent form of learning. Children learn separately how to behave at home (or in the presence of their parents) and how to behave when they are not at home. The manner of learning, the reinforcement contingencies, may also be quite different: In the home they may be reprimanded for mistakes and praised when they behave appropriately; out of the home they may be ridiculed for mistakes and ignored when they behave appropriately.
What is so incredibly irritating about Pinker's amazement about this "discovery" allegedly made via behavioral genetics is that anthropologist Marvin Harris's entire career, since at least the mid-1960s, has been pointing out the non-family influences on human behavior, via his research strategy "cultural materialism." Specifically infrastructural determinism.
For a comparison of the research strategies of cultural materialism, sociobiology (which Pinker most often agrees with) and the "ideas control behavior" position, see R. Brian Ferguson's "Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why the Yanomami make war."
And Pinker is certainly aware of Marvin Harris, enough to dismiss him with this absurdly simplistic assessment: "But his view of human nature is too narrow — everything boils down to calories."Apparently Pinker just can't or won't make the connection between Judith Rich Harris' shallow analysis of this "variable" and the decades-long body of work of Marvin Harris.
More about this interview later when I write about Pinker's progress in the exciting field of "human psychological diversity."
Now back to Racist Rodeo 2023.
Frank C. Worrell is Black, but also takes money from Koch and other right-wing plutocrats, so can be relied on not to make a fuss about the core racist beliefs of many of those associated with ISIR.
As Pascal Robert said (via F. D. Signifier) :
...the whole purpose of (Black) conservatives is to disabuse the notion that Black people are deserving of any policy that would transform their economic condition, because they are so culturally defective that capitalism can't save them. And they do this because their paymasters, like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and other think tanks pay them to say this crap...
Black people willing to sign onto a race pseudoscience club are extremely valuable to organizations like ISIR, so they can say: "see, even Black intellectuals agree with us about Black people."
For another example see JayMan - if they aren't actually a white nationalist man-baby.
So how racist is the ISIR? Glad you asked.
The current president, Rosalind Arden is a Quillette author who has also co-authored with hardcore race-ranking racist Linda Gottfredson, which is why I recognized her name on sight. Gottfredson was president of ISIR in 2012.
Board member Emily Willoughby is a big fan of race pseudoscience.
Earl Hunt, president in 2011, now deceased, liked to talk about "racial differences."
2016 president Richard Haier is a Quillette author and a defender of hard-core racist/neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. He's co-authored with ISIR's 2020/2021 president and current secretary/treasurer, Rex E. Jung.
Board member John Protzko wrote a paper on intelligence that cites Linda Gottfredson.
Board member Guy Madison is a sociobiologist who defends all the other promoters of race pseudoscience and has co-authored with white supremacist Edward Croft Dutton.
Board member Andreas Demetriou co-authored a paper that references Pinker, Gottfredson, Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen.
Board member Robert Colom is a big fan of the crackpot theories of Richard Lynn.
Board member Timothy Bates is a race pseudoscience ghoul who likes to retweet other race pseudoscience ghouls like long-time Bo Winegard associate and co-author Cory Clark. Bates was also ISIR president in 2017 & 2018. Co-authored a paper with right-wing racist kook Hans J. Eysenck.
The 2020 conference was a bumper crop of the hardest of hard-core racists featuring Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Greg "600K from Ron Unz" Cochran, Johnny Anomaly, Razib Khan, Stephen Hsu AND Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was finally banned last year because Abdel Abdellaoui complained about him.
It has been criticized for having included on its editorial board biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg and psychologist Richard Lynn, both of whom are promoters of eugenics and scientific racism.[1][3][4][5] The editor-in-chief of the journal defended their involvement on the basis of academic freedom.[1] Lynn and Meisenberg no longer serve in the editorial board as of 2018.[2][6]
Currently Haier is the editor, associate editors are Thomas Coyle, right-wing fan of racists like Bo Winegard, and Sophie Von Strumm a proponent of behavioral genetics via her Hungry Mind lab, and a frequent co-author with Plomin.
The editorial board includes Bates, Demetriou, Colom, Hilger, Jung, Neubauer, Pietschnig, Plomin, Schubert plus two names I recognized on sight, David C. Geary, an author at Quillette who co-authored a paper with the "human biodiversity" Winegard twins, and Heiner Rinderman, identified as a "human biodiversity pseudoscientist" in Rational Wiki. And there's Russell T. Warne, another Quillette author.
Probably not everybody associated with ISIR and "Intelligence" is a racist, but even if not, they are comfortable working with lots of racists.
Ooh - more YouTube videos from ISIR conferences:
Linda Gottfredson in 2016 for the "Distinguished Contributor Interview" - I haven't had a chance to watch it yet - I dipped in every now and then and there appears to be plenty of whining about how she's been treated with less than the adulation she expects, because she's a huge honking racist. I don't know if she repeats the performance she gave when she was invited onto racist Stefan Molyneux's show and together they ranked races by intelligence.
Brian Boutwell in 2018 - "biosocial criminologist" and some time co-author with neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard. Boutwell also appeared on Molyneux's show.
Gregory Clark in 2018 - hardcore hereditarian economist. White supremacist Douglas Murray was devastated when Clark was deplatformed.
Toby Young in 2017 - Young was a Quillette editor and comedian Stewart Lee had some amusing things to say about him and Emil Kirkegaard.
I will be reviewing more Racist Rodeo videos ASAP.
I reported on Sabine Hossenfelder's connection to the Intellectual Dark Web several weeks ago.
I thought she was bad news then - I had no idea how bad.
She can be found on Twitter in 2021 promoting racist garbage rag Quillette, while defending infamous transphobe and disgraced journalist Jesse Singal.
I had a feeling her bad take on trans youth was not a one-time incident.
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In the screenshot above, I included her response to a comment, because it demonstrates her personality alignment with the Intellectual Dark Web - that smug certainty that they are perfectly rational and objective and untouched by politics, and only those they disagree with have political or ideological commitments.
More recently Hossenfelder can be seen promoting Quillette's sexual harasser's pity party article, written by known harasser Laurence Krauss. I wrote about that recently.
And weeks before she retweeted another article by Laurence Krauss in Quillette.
PZ Myers has another post about "Krauss, the right-wing cartoon."
Ezra Klein breaks the issue down:
Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after publishing an article by the paper’s architecture critic titled “Buildings Matter, Too.” David Boardman, the chair of the board that owns the Inquirer, said Wischnowski had done “remarkable” work but “leaves behind some decades-old, deep-seated and vitally important issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that were not of his creation but that will likely benefit from a fresh approach.”
One interpretation of these events, favored by frustrated conservatives, is that a generation of young, woke journalists want to see the media remade along activist lines, while an older generation believes it must cover the news without fear and favor, and reflect, at the very least, the full range of views held by those in power.
“The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’” wrote the Times’s Bari Weiss. “One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.’”
Another interpretation is that the range of acceptable views isn’t narrowing so much as it’s shifting. Two decades ago, an article like (Tom) Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and a slogan like “Black Lives Matter” would be controversial. Today, Black Lives Matter is in the sphere of consensus, abolishing prisons is in legitimate controversy, and there’s a fight to move Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens into deviance. The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux, and the fight to define its boundaries is more visible.
I have no doubt at this point that Sabine Hossenfelder is one of those "frustrated conservatives" who does not get the problem with comparing Black lives to buildings. The comparison is exactly the point the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is making.
And there is the effort by conservatives to portray all Black Lives protests as violent. That was not the case. But Black protests have been portrayed that way since the Civil Rights era, a point made by this just-released video from "Some More News."
Hossenfelder is a real dummy, to insert herself into American racial politics like that.
But maybe not - now that Hossenfelder is being promoted by Big Think, she's no doubt getting her Thielbucks.
So she won't have to worry about what non-conservatives think. Like the other members of the IDW gang she will be safe inside the right-wing bubble.
Can a Hossenfelder byline in Quillette be far behind?
We know Quillette promotes race pseudoscience. An important reason we know this is because founder Claire Lehmann admitted it.
So this is not Hossenfelder innocently promoting Quillette, unaware of its racism.
Hossenfelder is promoting Quillette because she finds racism perfectly acceptable.
Google, which owns the Blogger platform, recently notified me it put my post "Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel" behind a warning because it "violated community standards."
The notification provided a link to its community standards and I see nothing that violates them. So you have to GUESS what Google doesn't like.
It may be political censorship, but it could also be because Google has stupidly decided to let AI moderate Blogger content.
On my personal website, a post about Watergate was flagged. Again, Google does not tell you what exactly is the problem, but my guess is that because Woodward and Bernstein relied on W. Mark Felt to be their deep background source, and because they gave Felt the alias "Deep Throat," Google's AI moderator decided that was porn. But again, just a guess.
I will be migrating Pinkerite from the Blogger platform as soon as possible. It's better to go the independent web route anyway.
You can now read the original article here: Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel.
Cochran:
Rushton thought that the explanation of geographical variation in IQ was adaptation to a world with winters. I didn’t think that was crazy, but I was pretty sure I could come up with ten other comparably plausible explanations. In some, the key events might have happened tens of thousands of years ago, while others might have been recent enough to be documented in the historical record.
Increasingly, I suspect that there is no single explanation. Maybe several of my notions are partly true. The Ashkenazi Jews look like a case of recent selection for white-collarism in a reproductively closed merchant caste – and maybe there are similar explanations for the Parsees and some of the high Indian castes. Cousin marriage explains some of what we see in places like Iraq or Uttar Pradesh.
More racist brainfarting here.
Basically, you just imagine what you consider plausible scenarios about race and intelligence.
Write it down.
Boom, you did a race pseudoscience.
But I doubt Cochran, who I think is likely every bit as racist as his late partner in pseudoscience, Henry Harpending, thinks he needs to prove anything. I expect he believes that he knows better than anthropologists like R. Brian Ferguson (who Cochran has insulted) and geneticists like Adam Rutherford (who Cochran also insulted), even though Cochran's training is in physics.
What was biologist PZ Myers saying again about physicists?
Rushton was the racist who got lots of support from E. O. Wilson.
Crackpot Ron Unz was so impressed by Cochran's "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" brainfart he gave him more than half a million dollars. Racism is very lucrative if you have the right racist kook as your sugar daddy.
Cousin marriage was the explanation that Steve Sailer dreamed up, and Steven Pinker was so impressed he put the theory into The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004.
Speaking of Sailer - like Cochran, professional racist Steve Sailer has a profile on Linked In.
And so does professional racist Jared Taylor. Although, like Sailer, he doesn't list his racist "accomplishments" but instead lists himself as "Translation Consultant and Professional." Not a word about Taylor's actual job as an infamous white supremacist creep.
And professional racist Richard Spencer is also on Linked In. He does mention his racist history, kind of, but no doubt few know how hardcore racist Taki's Mag is.
I didn't go looking for these profiles by the way. When I looked at Cochran's profile, all these other professional racists popped up in the right-hand sidebar under the heading "People Also Viewed."
Professional racists funded by right-wing racist plutocrats - this is why we can't have nice things.
Oh look David Duke has a Linked In profile which lists under Experience "Grand Wizard of the KKK" and he uses a photo of George Floyd as his avatar. I reported that account. If you have a Linked In account, you should too. Just click the More button under the profile name, and then select "Report" from the drop-down.
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| Apparently Linked In has no moderators - or just doesn't care |
Egged on by public embarrassments Anna Krylov and Jerry "get offa my lawn" Coyne, Pamela Paul made absurd claims based on the phony panic trumped up by Krylov and friends.
The NYTimes published some excellent responses included from two of my favorite social media champions against race pseudoscience, professor of biology Carl T. Bergstrom and science historian David Sepkoski.
Bergstrom:
Public understanding of science is essential for democracy. Misleading readers to score political points with an argument that scientists have exchanged merit and objectivity for progressive ideology is a disservice to science and the public alike.
Sepkoski:
Scientific racism, for example, is sadly not a historical relic. The field of human behavioral genetics thrives on publishing papers clinging to the notion that group differences (read: racial differences) exist in intelligence and other measures of ability, despite countless studies undermining such conclusions. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of the researchers who conduct these studies are white (and predominantly male), and their work has attracted great enthusiasm in the white nationalist community.
Payton Gendron, the perpetrator of the 2022 Buffalo massacre, cited the work of leading scientific proponents of innate racial differences. There is a direct connection between this discredited science and violent extremism.
Thanks for your good work gentlemen.
But then Quillette loves harassers like Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer.
And Quillette founder Claire Lehmann hates women.
Also noteworthy - senescent Richard Dawkins promoting shitty racist rag Quillette and defending harassers.
Normally my various interests are well-compartmentalized, so it's fun when two or more come together like they do today. I've recently been posting lots of videos from the Majority Report and I was very pleased to see that the MR had had an interview with one of my favorite historians, David Blight.
Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Frederick Douglass, and was featured prominently in the documentary "Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches" (highly recommended) which is how I came to learn about Blight - I am currently doing research for a play I am writing about the relationship between Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who met three times while Lincoln was president.
She's done it twice before - the first was her incredibly bad argument for why we should panic about renaming science terms - she equated renaming terms with being burnt at the stake.
Then she published in racist garbage rag Quillette.
And now her transparent grift, with Jerry Coyne, to create another stupid false panic about science, aided and abetted by Intellectual Dark Web friendly Pamela Paul in the New York Times. I've already written about it, but the American Prospect has more to say (my highlights):
The authors’ claim that their article was rejected by many scientific journals based on political criteria is false. In an interview, Anna Krylov, a professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Southern California who was one of the scientists who initiated the article, admitted to me that they had formally submitted their article to only one established journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which rejected it.
What she and other co-authors had actually done was, in Krylov’s words, make “informal inquiries” to journal editors, about whether they might consider the article. This practice violates scientific norms of submitting articles to journals anonymously to avoid potential bias. Despite her efforts to use her and her colleagues’ networks to feel out journal editors, Krylov claimed that all of them discouraged her from submitting the article because of its viewpoint, but she offered no evidence from those conversations or emails.
These authors know very well that the overwhelming majority of research articles submitted to serious scientific journals are rejected. The eminent journal Science accepts only 6.1 percent of submitted papers. Other prestigious journals have similarly low acceptance rates, including Nature (7.6 percent), the British Medical Journal (4 percent), The New England Journal of Medicine(5 percent), The Journal of the American Medical Association (4 percent), and The Lancet (5 percent).
The one journal to which they formally submitted their paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), accepts only 15 percent of all submissions, according to Prashant Nair, a spokesperson for the journal. PNAS’s rejection is hardly evidence of the editors’ leftist bias. Krylov refused to provide copies of the evaluations of their article by the three reviewers solicited by the journal, but she did provide a copy of an email exchange between her and one of the editors, Zan Dodson, who asked the authors to clarify the differences between “merit” in scientific research and in other arenas, such as college admissions. According to PNAS’s Nair, the article “was sent for review, and the Editorial Board found that a number of claims made in the manuscript were unsupported by citations or additional argument. The Board concluded that it cannot recommend any particular protocol for improving the cogency of the arguments. As such, the manuscript was rejected.”
Well I decided to take a break from posting videos from The Majority Report and instead post another video from Some More News. I love these guys and you should too and you should give them money every month like I do. YouTube shows like this are like the Daily Show in the early 2000s.
Topics for this episode include The Twitter Files; Elon Musk; Repealing Roe V. Wade; the Metaverse failure; the Fake Shoplifting Crisis - Candace Owen gets a shout-out for her Nazi shit; Havana Syndrome is not a thing; Grifters - includes Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin; and Tucker Carlson.
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JayMan and Jerry agree on so much - like, apparently, that Italy has four distinct races ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
(Anna) Krylov and her IDW pals are not even pretending anymore - they are just blatant about being far-right and racist ghouls.
I was certainly thinking of Jerry Coyne as one of Krylov's pals, since he teamed up with her to produce another right-wing sob story, but even so, I was still astounded that Jerry Coyne has sunk so low, he is using anonymous "human biodiversity" loser "JayMan" on his blog now.
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And then... crickets |
The important thing to keep in mind is that inherited traits are directly passed down from parents to children, whereas heritable traits are not necessarily genetic.
Oh fun fact - JayMan confesses that Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate set them on the road to race pseudoscience!
Steven Pinker, a great academic, and whose 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature introduced me to hereditarian explanations for human behavior (and which is required reading for anyone with no familiarity with the role that genes play in human behavior) has recently sent a note to Ron Unz attacking his mischaracterization of Richard Lynn’s position in Lynn’s response to Unz.
Even better, on the same page, JayMan offers an explanation for why Pinker is such a gigantic weasel about race pseudoscience:
Pinker has been one of the great voices speaking for the importance of heredity when explaining individual and gender differences, but he skirts around the truth when it comes to differences between groups. I think that Pinker’s response to Unz and Pinker’s discussion of Ashkenazi intelligence shows that Pinker knows full well about genetic contributions to group differences. But, he doesn’t endorse any of these. Why? Why be obtuse about facts? I think that this is because he fears Watsoning. He is the “Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,” after all. One would imagine that this title at least provides him with an office with one of the really nice views. He doesn’t want to give that up, as his former university president Larry Summers was forced to do. Pinker’s own words about Richard Lynn to Unz tells us why:
You write as if Lynn were a well-respected psychologist whose findings have been widely accepted. This is very far from the case. Outside the circle of a handful of bloggers and behavioral geneticists he is somewhere between obscure and radioactive. (I believe several of his books are either self-published or put out by fringe publishers.)
Pinker doesn’t want this to happen to him.
This is a sad statement on the current state of intellectual discourse, and a great waste for a brilliant man like Steven Pinker.
Heritability statistics do remain useful in some limited circumstances, including selective breeding programs in which developmental environments can be strictly controlled. But in environments that are not controlled, these statistics do not tell us much. In light of this, numerous theorists have concluded that ‘the term “heritability,” which carries a strong conviction or connotation of something “[in]heritable” in the everyday sense, is no longer suitable for use in human genetics, and its use should be discontinued.’ Reviewing the evidence, we come to the same conclusion. Continued use of the term with respect to human traits spreads the demonstrably false notion that genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits. Instead, scientists need to help the public understand that all complex traits are a consequence of developmental processes. Without such an understanding, we are at risk of underestimating the extent to which environmental manipulations can have profoundly positive effects on development. Thus, the way ‘heritability’ is used in most discussions of human phenotypes not only perpetuates false ideas; it also blinds us to steps we might otherwise take to improve the human condition.
ParaPundit Randall Parker’s blog making social commentary and discussing some of the implications of HBD
Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog The man who (largely) started it all
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| Peter Boghossian, philosopher of white grievance -------------------------------------------------------------- |
...let’s take a look at their page on the school’s website. Oh look, there is one of those former professors who huffily quit writing forbidden professorial things on a whiteboard:
What’s he writing? What questions of the mind is he leading his students on a deep intellectual exploration of? What are they doing with their unfettered freedom of inquiry and civil discourse?
Let us just zoom in here:
“Non-black people cannot use the n-word.”
Oh. Okay. The forbidden word so forbidden even the people complaining that it’s forbidden won’t even write it out when in a room full of people who also don’t understand why they can’t say the forbidden word.
Does Peter thiel financially support the University of Austin?
Peter Thiel, a billionaire entrepreneur and investor, has been reported to be a financial supporter of the University of Austin, a new university that is being established in Austin, Texas. However, the extent and nature of his support are not entirely clear, and Thiel himself has not confirmed or denied his involvement.
In December 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that Thiel had donated $10 million to the University of Austin, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The report also stated that Thiel was one of the university's initial backers and had been involved in its planning stages.However, Thiel has not made any public statements regarding his involvement with the University of Austin or his alleged donation. It's worth noting that Thiel has been known to support controversial causes and has faced criticism for his views on various issues, including higher education. Therefore, his reported support for the University of Austin has generated some debate and scrutiny.Overall, the exact nature of Thiel's involvement with the University of Austin remains unclear, and there is no official confirmation from either Thiel or the university about his alleged donation.
We already know University of Austin has a Koch connection.
And the Majority Report has plenty to say!
This blog is turning into a publicity site for The Majority Report, lately, I'm reposting their videos so often, but I can't help myself. I had to share this video, an epic take-down of the sociopathic stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok's Chaya Raichik, and best of all they mention that the Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon is supporting this evil freak.
PLUS - unexpected bonus - criticism of Koch man Conor Friedersdorf.
Since ChatGPT told me that Bari Weiss received a quarter of a million dollars from Peter Thiel in 2017, it occurred to me that perhaps her 2018 article for the New York Times about the splendors of her fellow travellers, Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, was a public announcement of who had agreed to be on the Peter Thiel payroll. In addition to all those associated with Quillette.
In the article there were twenty-five individuals named by Weiss as connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, including Steven Pinker, Kanye West, Milo Yiannapoulos, Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones.
But the most significant of the IDW bunch are those who were photographed for the article, standing in the dark in the bushes.
I guess the photographer wanted to make a point by posing these Intellectuals in the Dark, but drew the line at literally portraying them in a Web and so had to stick them in some bushes instead.
The eight bush skulkers include Joe Rogan, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Dave Rubin and Eric and Bret Weinstein.
So what does ChatGPT have to say about them?
Yes, Peter Thiel has provided funding to Sam Harris in the past. In fact, Thiel was one of the early supporters of Harris' podcast and helped fund the creation of the Waking Up app, which was later renamed to the Sam Harris app. Thiel and Harris have also engaged in public conversations and have expressed mutual respect for each other's work in various fields.
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Supposedly Harris says he's done with the Intellectual Dark Web.
I came up empty on a Thiel funding source for Michael Shermer, but ChatGPT did have this info, which is not even available at SourceWatch.
Has the Skeptic magazine received funding from Donors Trust?
Yes, according to public records, Skeptic magazine has received funding from Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that provides support to a variety of conservative and libertarian organizations. Specifically, tax filings from Donors Trust show that they provided funding to the Skeptics Society, the organization that publishes Skeptic magazine, in both 2014 and 2015. It's worth noting that Donors Trust supports a wide range of organizations across the political spectrum, and the fact that an organization receives funding from Donors Trust does not necessarily imply any particular political alignment or agenda.
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Donor's Trust is the infamous right-wing funding vehicle that also gives millions to racist monsters VDARE.
ChatGPT had nothing about Thiel or Donors Trust funding for Christina Hoff Sommers, but it's not a secret that she's taken money from Koch-funded organizations for decades. ChatGPT agreed:
Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative writer and critic of contemporary feminism, has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on policy, education, and advocacy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Sommers include:
Here's what ChatGPT had to say about Heather Heying:
Heather Heying has received funding from a number of conservative and libertarian organizations over the years, particularly those focused on science, education, and policy. Some of the organizations that have provided support to Heying include:
I'm curious what The Discovery Institute hopes to get from Heying for its money, since it promotes intelligent design and critiques of evolutionary biology.
We do know that Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein have promoted junk science during the Covid pandemic. But that's Game Theory.
When I asked ChatGPT about Dave Rubin it said:
- Peter Thiel: As mentioned earlier, Thiel has expressed support for Rubin and his work, but there is no clear evidence that he has provided direct financial support to Rubin.
- PragerU: Rubin has collaborated with PragerU, a conservative educational organization that produces videos promoting conservative and libertarian ideas.
- Turning Point USA: Rubin has also worked with Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization that promotes conservative and libertarian ideas on college campuses.
- The Federalist Society: Rubin has expressed support for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that promotes originalist interpretations of the US Constitution.
- Republican politicians: Rubin has expressed support for several Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul.
Eric Weinstein of course works for Thiel Capital, but I did not know he and Bret had been Thiel Fellows:
Curiously ChatGPT wouldn't say that Bret Weinstein was funded by the same organizations who fund his wife, Heather Heying, which makes no sense. It did say about Weinstein:Bret and Eric Weinstein were both fellows at the Thiel Foundation, which provides funding to young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. The Weinsteins have also been associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, a loose network of public intellectuals who are known for challenging mainstream narratives on a range of topics. While the IDW is not a formal organization and does not receive direct funding, many of its members are supported by conservative and libertarian donors who share their views.
- Jordan Peterson: Canadian psychologist and author (IDW member per Weiss article)
- Claire Lehmann: Australian psychologist and founder of Quillette (Quillette is the primary publication of the IDW per the Weiss article)
- Sam Harris: American philosopher and author (see above)
- Christina Hoff Sommers: American philosopher and cultural critic (see above)
- Jonathan Haidt: American social psychologist and author
- Heather Mac Donald: American political commentator and author
- Gad Saad: Canadian evolutionary psychologist and author
- Bret Weinstein: American biologist and evolutionary theorist (see above)
- Douglas Murray: British author and political commentator (named member of IDW)
- Andrew Doyle: British comedian and writer (or "comedian")
- Cathy Young: Russian-American journalist and author
- Debra Soh: Canadian sex researcher and science writer (named member of IDW)
- Conor Friedersdorf: American journalist and writer
- Peter Boghossian: American philosopher and professor
- Toby Young: British journalist and author (also was Quillette associate editor)
- Maajid Nawaz: British activist and writer
- Meghan Daum: American author and columnist
- Yascha Mounk: German-American political scientist and writer
- Helen Pluckrose: English author and editor of Areo Magazine
- James Lindsay: American author and mathematician
- Bruce Gilley: American political scientist and professor
- Claire Fox: British author and commentator
- Jamie Palmer: British writer and commentator (Quillette editor)
- Heather Heying: American evolutionary biologist and writer (see above)
- Ed Husain: British writer and commentator
- Coleman Hughes: American writer and podcaster
- Frances Widdowson: Canadian academic and writer
This is not an exhaustive list, as many other individuals have also written articles for Quillette.
