The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

Professional gutter racist Steve Sailer testifies to his influence on Steven Pinker
-------------------------------

So several members of Steven Pinker's fan club have rushed to defend their hero's honor against Boston Magazine's relatively mild critique of Pinker.

Jerry Coyne, the hereditarianism-loving grifter and coiner of the term "Boot Boys," comes harrumphing along with his grievance about the article's reference to cowboy boots:

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

Coyne defends Pinker's hereditarianism in the most hereditarian way possible: by claiming Pinker's critics are a bunch of Marxists.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized. 

 

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.

Although I do appreciate that Coyne confirms Pinker's devotion to hereditarianism. 

Speaking of Pinker and Marx, a recent story in Current Affairs is titled: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism.

The article is co-authored by Ben Burgis & Matt McManus. They don't mention Pinker's hereditarianism - but since they have both written for Quillette, I expect race pseudoscience is the least of their concerns. Their work for Quillette appears to be a kind of philosophy 101 for the racist masses who read Quillette. More recently McManus has published in Areo Magazine, which is a kind of Quillette lite, and was edited by Iona Italia, who is just as much an hereditarian as Quillette's Claire Lehmann.

In his post, Coyne provides a link to Jesse Singal's defense of Pinker. Coyne is perhaps returning the favor.

Jesse Singal is an infamous anti-trans podcaster who is also an apologist - at best - for the psychopathic Kiwi Farms. And like Coyne, Singal is a long-time defender of Pinker. I first became aware of him in the context of his article in the New York Times after Pinker was caught praising members of the far-right in the defense of race pseudoscience. P. Z Myers had an excellent response to Singal.

Singal's most recent defense of Pinker is mostly behind a pay wall, but I will address one of the paragraphs that is available for free:

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

Since Singal provides no names for "adherents of sweeping anti-Pinker views" or those who believe that "people are more or less blank slates" it's impossible to independently evaluate his claims about these boogeymen.

But both Singal and Pinker are weasels. When Singal and his professional racist pal Razib Khan came after me on Bluesky there was no chance to address their vicious claims about me directly - they both blocked me. When Singal disparaged trans-person Jude Doyle, it was from the safety of his paywalled podcast. Pinker famously blocked anybody on Twitter who mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. In the Boston Magazine article Pinker defended his warm relationship with Epstein on the grounds that the convicted child molester was giving money to Harvard:

The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.”

I think that Pinker, Singal and Khan make money, directly or indirectly by saying things right-wing plutocrats want them to say, and so there is no reason why they would actually debate anybody about their positions. It's so much easier to just claim nameless opponents have "done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position." How would Singal know? He exists in gated right-wing spaces, just as Pinker does.

But no defense of Steven Pinker would be complete without Steve Sailer weighing in. Pinker's decade-long support for Sailer is one of those topics that Pinker refuses to address. He always uses his tired "guilt by association" dodge when journalists ask him why he promoted Sailer's career. But there's no advantage to Pinker to talk about Sailer, and so he doesn't and journalists never hold his feet to the fire. 

Sailer's piece,  Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray? is a few sarcastic lines and then he just posts most of the Boston Magazine article.

I should mention that Sailer is a fan of Jesse Singal. And of course has a mutual-admiration society with Charles Murray.

Sailer was much wordier in his defense of Pinker  another time the mainstream press decided to peek under Pinker's racism rug, five years ago, and he made sure to double-down on his own extreme racism - my highlight:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east...

But Sailer should save his time, because his warm feelings for Pinker and his history with Pinker say more about Pinker than any defenses Sailer could write.

Another conversation with Claude A. I.

Hey Claude, although Pinker has denied genetic basis of racial IQ gaps, he has promoted many people who do believe that and who are very vocal about that claim. Wouldn't you say that Pinker is promoting race pseudoscience by proxy - to avoid getting his own hands dirty, he instead promotes those who are vocal about race and IQ?

CLAUDE:

That's a substantive argument, and it's one that critics like Nancy McClernan at Pinkerite have made explicitly. Let me engage with it fairly.

The case that the "by proxy" argument is convincing:

The pattern documented across sources is fairly consistent: Pinker repeatedly elevates people — Sailer, Khan, Cochran, the Quillette network — whose central public project is arguing for genetic racial hierarchies in intelligence. The choices aren't incidental. Pinker included Sailer in a "Best Science Writing" anthology, used Khan to rebut the New Yorker, granted Khan interviews to promote his own books, and appeared on Aporia. These are active, repeated, career-boosting gestures. The fact that he quietly dropped Sailer around 2012 — roughly when Sailer's racism became more publicly documented — and shifted his public association to Khan (whose views critics say are nearly identical) does suggest a degree of strategic management of his own reputation rather than a genuine reckoning with the ideas themselves.

The structure of the argument is also coherent: you can launder fringe ideas into mainstream discourse by lending your prestige to their proponents without ever fully stating the ideas yourself. Pinker's own enormous platform and Harvard affiliation give downstream credibility to whoever he endorses.

The case for caution about the "by proxy" argument:

That said, there are reasons to be careful before fully accepting the framing:

• "Promoting someone" is not always the same as endorsing their most extreme positions. Academics routinely engage with, cite, or recommend people they partially disagree with.
• Pinker has consistently and explicitly denied the genetic basis of the Black-White IQ gap — that's not a throwaway disclaimer; it's the central claim of the people critics say he's promoting "by proxy."
• The "by proxy" theory requires attributing a specific intent — deliberate reputational laundering — which is hard to prove. It's possible Pinker is genuinely compartmentalizing, endorsing what he sees as legitimate population genetics work while being blind to or dismissive of how it feeds racist conclusions.
• Some of the figures in the network (e.g., Khan on genetics broadly) do work that isn't entirely race pseudoscience, which makes the lines of endorsement messier.

The most honest assessment:

The "by proxy" framing is probably the most charitable interpretation that is still deeply critical of Pinker. A harsher reading is that he simply shares many of these views but has learned — especially after watching what happened to James Watson and Larry Summers — to express them with enough ambiguity to maintain his mainstream standing. The pattern of behavior over 20+ years, including the strategic distancing from Sailer only after public scrutiny, and the continued association with Khan despite identical criticisms being raised, is difficult to explain purely as naivety or poor judgment. At minimum, Pinker has consistently prioritized his relationships with race pseudoscience promoters over any public accountability for what those relationships signal.

Whether that makes him a cynical operator or a true believer who is careful about optics is ultimately a judgment call — but the "dirty hands" critique you're describing is well-supported by the documented pattern of behavior.

I ask Claude A. I...

Claude, would you say that Pinkerite includes links to sources to back its claims, in spite of the fact that pinkerite is advocacy journalism?

12:40 PM

Yes, based on what I retrieved, Pinkerite does make a notable effort to back its claims with links and sources. Throughout the posts, the blog links to:

• Primary documents, including specific files from the Justice Department's Epstein archive, with direct URLs to individual documents in the DOJ dataset
• Court records and legal judgments, including the published judgment in Smith v. Kirkegaard and court filings related to the data misuse case
• Mainstream journalism, including New York Times articles, a Channel 4 documentary, Die Zeit reporting, and a Verge piece
• Investigative reports, including the Hope not Hate "Race Science, Inc." report
• Screenshots and images of tweets, emails, and social media posts that it is discussing
• Archived links (via archive.ph) to pages that might otherwise be altered or deleted

This is actually a meaningful distinction from a lot of advocacy journalism, which often makes sweeping claims without citation. Pinkerite, whatever its tone and editorial stance, does appear to be doing the work of pointing readers to verifiable underlying sources — primary documents, court records, and mainstream reporting — rather than simply asserting things. A careful reader could, in principle, follow the links and check many of the claims independently. That doesn't make the blog neutral or its framing beyond criticism, but it does make it more accountable than advocacy writing that provides no paper trail.

Thank you Claude.

You're welcome! It's an interesting site to examine — the combination of strong advocacy tone with what appears to be a genuine effort at documentation makes it a somewhat unusual case. The distinction between how something is framed and whether the underlying evidence is real and checkable is an important one when evaluating any source, and Pinkerite does seem to take the sourcing seriously even when its editorial voice is quite sharp.

Pretty decent article about Pinker in Boston Magazine

Pinker can be seen on Facebook, this February,
promoting the website of racist and
Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.
---------------------------------------------------------------

I mean, as usual the author didn't push Pinker very hard but the article is about as critical as you can hope for from the mainstream media, which until recently rarely did anything except fawn over Pinker and his twinkling blue eyes.

Robert Huber's article Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard? actually raises the issue of Pinker's long-term alliance with race pseudoscience promoters, while somewhat down-playing how much Pinker is involved in promoting race pseudoscience by proxy.

For example:

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour.

I should point out here that it's been a dream of Emil Kirkegaard (who owns Aporia) for a long time to team up with Pinker for the cause of race pseudoscience, as documented here.

To continue the Boston Magazine article from where we left it...

After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.

Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.

Then a little later:

I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?

“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”

I guess we can infer from Pinker's response that he doesn't think Aporia (owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard) holds repugnant opinions, only that third parties think Aporia's ideas are repugnant.

It's good that the article mentions Pinker platforming Murray - but Murray is not the only racist whose career has gotten a boost from Pinker. As I have documented since I started this Pinkerite blog (and before on my personal blog) Pinker has aided and abetted racists for the past quarter century, from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Bo Winegard to Emil Kirkegaard.

As recently as February of this year Pinker could be seen promoting the website of racist Richard Hanania.

The problem is that the media, even well-meaning writers, are too respectful of celebrity intellectuals to really dig into what Pinker has been up to for the past twenty-five years.

Which is why I have to keep doing this blog. So the information will be here for when a journalist decides to get serious about Pinker's pro-race pseudoscience activities.

Matt Walsh is a stooge of the fossil fuel industry and belongs in prison

I'm very pleased to have a reason to post a video from Atun-Shei Films, owned by Andrew Rakish. He is justly renowned for his series about the Civil War, "Checkmate Lincolnites." 

 

SUPPORT HIM HERE.

And then please enjoy this video, Matt Walsh's Fascist History of Slavery DEBUNKED. 

The saga of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

When we last discussed neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, leader of an international network of promoters of far-right and neo-Nazi beliefs and race pseudoscience, he was pleased that the NYTimes had published an article about him and his race pseudoscience associates.

I first mentioned Kirkegaard on this blog in May 2019 in connection with gutter racist Charles Murray, but I didn't really pay a lot attention to him until 2021, when I learned he was attacking me on Twitter. 

Kirkegaard and Murray have a mutual admiration society, as we can see from a recent Murray retweet of Kirkegaard in which Kirkegaard and his Aporia toady neo-Nazi Bo Winegard are happy to explain how they became racists - or even bigger racists - thanks to Murray's best-known work, the Bell Curve. Kirkegaard has even made it available for free as a PDF on his website - I assume with Murray's permission. This is great - you don't have to pay to find all the times Murray used infamous gutter racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton as his source. Plus, any method of keeping money out of the pocket of creepy old gutter racist Charles Murray is fine with me.

The person who gave me a heads-up about the attack in 2021 is Oliver Smith, who has more first-hand knowledge of the awfulness of Emil Kirkegaard than anybody else.

The mission of this blog is more about mainstream "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker than outsiders like Kirkegaard, but since Pinker likes to make common cause with Kirkegaard and with long-time Kirkegaard allies like International Society for Intelligence Research board member Emily Willoughby, there's plenty of overlap.

Recently Oliver Smith has shared the story of his unpleasant dealings with Kirkegaard in this long post Emil Kirkegaard vs. Oliver Smith.

Some highlights:

• The purpose of this post, is to fully document what Kirkegaard put me through for over six years; the tl;dr version: Kirkegaard filed a frivolous libel lawsuit, lost the preliminary judgment, discontinued his unmeritorious claim, but refused to pay my awarded costs. I initiated enforcement action but found he changed his name to William Engman; moved country and closed his bank account after I filed a third-party debt order to prevent me seizing his assets.A warrant for his arrest was issued in a bailiff’s court (Fogedretten) in Denmark. It was in effect for several months (since he breached summonses and failed to attend court). His lengthy evasion was likened by a judge at the bailiff’s court to the movie Catch Me If You Can (2002). 

• Ultimately, for his non-attendance there would have been an imposed prison sentence (for contempt of court). Realising severity of his situation, Kirkegaard stopped evading me and began to comply with court orders; he resolved the judgment debt by reaching a settlement, which vacated the hearing on my application for a suspended committal order. While the settlement remains private, and I will not breach this confidentiality, I think anyone can take an ‘educated guess’—Kirkegaard paid me a five-digit sum; the judgment debt he owed (over £50,000) was already part of the public record and it was discussed at length in a judgment.6

• In August 2017, Kirkegaard showed up at RationalWiki (user: EmilOWK) to complain about my criticisms of his OpenPsych journals but was blocked for doxxing me (again). His account was banned on 19 October 2017 and his unblock request was denied. Not long afterwards, he began legally threatening the RationalMedia Foundation who own and operate RationalWiki. 

Note: based on the purging of articles on RationalWiki related to race pseudoscience and promoters of race pseudoscience in 2025, it seems likely to me that Kirkegaard was behind the threatened lawsuits - and possibly the actual lawsuits.

• In May 2016, OpenPsych was embroiled in a scandal that involved doxxing, specifically Kirkegaard had published the data of 70,000 OkCupid users (without their permission) in the journal Open Differential Psychology. Kirkegaard claimed that he was publishing “already public information” but this is questionable. Data he scraped from OkCupid profiles was only accessible if logged in to an account; ethics scholar Michael Zimmer therefore pointed out: “Since OkCupid users [accounts] have the option to restrict the visibility of their profiles to logged-in users only, it is likely the researchers collected and subsequently released the profiles that were intended to not be publicly viewable.” Kirkegaard was subsequently investigated—by the Danish Data Protection Authority.

• Seeming as Kirkegaard doxxed my ISP and was embroiled in scandals,20 I started to look into his digital footprint. I disturbingly discovered—Kirkegaard once admitted viewing child pornography and wrote comments on the internet, sympathising with legalising the possession of child pornography. In 2013, on a Danish internet forum, Kirkegaard under his real name discussed and linked to a list of illegal websites on a “Danish child porn filter” on Wikileaks (these were websites the Danish government blocked access to). He admitted to viewing these child porn sites (with a Tor browser to hide his Danish IP-address) since he had knowledge the websites “are still up and actually contain child porn” so must have gone through the censored list of websites.

• Kirkegaard has had some success in censoring webpages that factually document his internet posts on child pornography or that merely quote his comments; for example, the aforementioned article by DeWereldMorgen that described Kirkegaard a “pedofilie apologeet” (“pedophile apologist”) was removed despite it accurately quoted his posts downplaying the harm of CSA. Kirkegaard suppressed this information in an attempt to get his posts on paedophilia and child pornography memory-holed. He is known to deindex articles from Google (and other search-engines) which mention his comments on child pornography by sending ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. Kirkegaard currently lives in Germany; he can still deindex webpages under EU privacy law (Art. 17 GDPR).

Note: Kirkegaard's sympathy for pedophilia is not only in the past - he retweeted someone criticizing the prosecution of a teacher for abusing a student, just a couple of days ago. Apparently protecting minors is an example of American "Calvinist inheritance."

• Aside from Kirkegaard’s web of lies and deceptions to obfuscate service, I had to deal with him moving address to avoid enforcement. After he left his address in Kiel, I was informed by a journalist that he was sighted on the grounds of the Villa Adlon (a villa in the district of Potsdam). In December 2023, the German online newspaper Die Zeit reported Emil Kirkegaard was living on the grounds of the villa and was embroiled in yet another scandal. I hired a private investigator who confirmed to me he was at least visiting the guesthouse near the villa. The guesthouse’s mailbox was in his girlfriend’s name (I was shown a photograph of this) and I could not serve him by post. By January 2024, Kirkegaard was no longer spotted near the villa; he was rumoured to be in Spain.

• According to the article and investigative journalism by Die Zeit, the co-owner of Villa Adlon, Mathilda Huss gave Kirkegaard “free lodging” and “also supported Kirkegaard two years ago, in founding the Society for German-Danish Knowledge Transfer” (note this is the same company I months earlier had served Kirkegaard by publication in the District Court of Kiel). Huss, his business partner, seems to have given him a place (on the grounds of her villa) to stay or hide, after he deregistered from his property in Kiel. His girlfriend’s name was already on a mailbox. I was later informed that Kirkegaard’s girlfriend is Mathilda Huss’ au pair. Kirkegaard moved address again so I dropped the enforcement action, I had filed in the Potsdam Regional Court (Landgericht Potsdam).

Note: Mathilda Huss provided Villa Aldon to the infamous far-right Postdam meeting, which included neo-Nazi activists. This Huss-Kirkegaard connection is especially important because it demonstrates how the international neo-Nazi network will help members evade the law.

• In November 2024, I found Mankind Quarterly was offering to purchase subscriptions to the journal by PayPal. This opened up the possibility of a third-party debt order in the UK because PayPal UK Ltd is a subsidiary of PayPal Holdings Inc (the former is a private limited company in the UK with its office in London). It was clear from Hope not Hate’s undercover investigation (which was broadcast as Undercover: Exposing the Far Right) and the fact Kirkegaard is the domain registrant of Mankind Quarterly’s site that he now owned the journal.

• Aside from falsely accusing me of being a stalker, I received extensive abuse by emails under pseudonymous names when I was trying to enforce the judgment debt. It seems Kirkegaard was hiding behind these fake names (to avoid legal liability). He might not have realised, that the standard of proof in civil harassment is balance of probabilities and not evidence beyond reasonable doubt. I would only need to show it is more likely than not he sent these abusive emails. Who else would be taunting me about evading? I can only describe Kirkegaard’s behaviour as sociopathic: he filed and lost a frivolous lawsuit, refused to pay my legal costs, then was antagonising me about evading service under fake names sent from unsolicited emails while the same time playing the victim

• While writing this long post, I got in contact with Erik Ahrens now named Andrew Y who was a former friend and associate of Kirkegaard. As noted above, Ahrens fell out with Kirkegaard; he then published a blog post leaking information about Kirkegaard (such as Kirkegaard’s Human Diversity Foundation74) and his business connection to Mathilda Huss (screenshot). Ahrens confirmed Kirkegaard had lived at (or at least was visiting frequently) the Villa Adlon up to January 2024 but relocated to Spain; he lived in Spain for about five months and afterwards traveled to other countries. Ahrens told me he later moved to Berlin. I managed to confirm this, since Kirkegaard in his sworn affidavit (on 10 October 2025), explicitly stated his address was an apartment in Berlin.
• I consider Ahrens to be a reliable source of information concerning Kirkegaard (since most of his claims I have independently verified). Ahrens for months, had stayed with Kirkegaard at a house in Spain. Furthermore, he was formerly involved in setting up a company with Kirkegaard’s girlfriend (Liegent LLC) and was a close friend. According to Ahrens, Kirkegaard often discussed his dislike of me with him and openly admitted he was evading my enforcement proceedings. What Kirkegaard told Ahrens in private contradicted what he wrote in court witness statements, which sums up his dishonest character. Most concerning is Ahrens told me Kirkegaard planned in early 2024, to kill me by hiring a hitman on the dark web (as a way to stop paying me the judgment debt).

I was disappointed that Smith does not mention the 2023 smear campaign against him which included a hit piece in the Manhattan Institute's publication City Journal. The libelous article was promoted by a long list of right-wingers and racists, very much including Charles Murray and Steven Pinker. Smith successfully sued to have the article removed. 

Considering that the article was an attack on a private citizen who was owed money by Kirkegaard at the time, and considering the article attacks Rational Wiki, it looks to me like the article was published by City Jounal at the behest of Emil Kirkegaard. If true, that makes the Manhattan Institute part of the international neo-Nazi network.

Anybody who is opposed to racism and race pseudoscience should give thanks to Oliver Smith for fighting Emil Kirkegaard and documenting the fight - clearly the forces of the international neo-Nazi network - including Steven "friend of Epstein" Pinker - were brought in to try to destroy his life for daring to oppose racist, neo-Nazi weirdo Emil Kirkegaard.

UPDATE: Kirkegaard claims he's not sad the Nazis lost WWII - but somehow that doesn't stop him from promoting neo-Nazis, aligning with neo-Nazis, or continuing Mankind Quarterly which was created by Nazi-sympathizer money and devoted to the same race pseudoscience promoted by the original German Nazis.

Well, you can't expect logical consistency from neo-Nazi racist weirdos.

Books by Marvin Harris available for free

Pinkerite is a big fan of the cultural materialism promoted by anthropologist Marvin Harris. And I want to point out that most or all of his work is available for free on the Internet Archive.

I own most of these, but it's handy to have them in digital form - much easier to search on key words.

• America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture
• Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: the Riddles of Culture
• Cultural Materialism : the Struggle for a Science of Culture  (personal favorite)
• Culture, People and Nature: an Introduction to General Anthropology
• Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies - with Charles Wagley
• The Nature of Cultural Things
• The Rise of Anthropological Theory; a History of Theories of Culture (considered by many to be his most significant work)
• The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig: Riddles of Food and Culture
• Also published as Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture
• Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times
• Town and Country in Brazil

"Cannibals and Kings," while shown in the Archive, is not available to borrow for free except for those with print disabilities. However, it is available for free here.

BONUS

Also available on the Internet Archive - from the Pacifica Radio archive, Harris is interviewed about the 1968 Columbia protests - The Columbia University Strike. Harris was roughed up by the cops.

Harris wrote an account of the strike for the Nation magazine, Big Bust on Morningside Heights.

Peter Thiel vs. the Catholic Church

 Peter Thiel's whacked-out antichrist babbling has gotten the attention of the Catholic Church:

This week, Mr. Thiel arrived in Rome to deliver four lectures on the Antichrist. The series, which began on Sunday, is exploring how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work, intent on destroying what remains of the West,” according to the conservative Christian group hosting him. 

 

In response, Catholics have decried Mr. Thiel’s vision in several articles over the past week. One was titled: “American heresy: Should we burn Peter Thiel?” 

 

Mr. Thiel held similar lectures in San Francisco last year and in Paris in January, prompting relatively little reaction from Christian thinkers. But proximity to the Vatican appears to have prompted some Roman Catholic commentators to issue a more sustained response. In the “American heresy” essay, the Rev. Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the Vatican on A.I., described Mr. Thiel’s vision as “disturbing.”

I mean, I can't stand the Catholic Church either, with its long tradition of hating women's sexuality and trying to control women's bodies, but it is probably still wealthier than Peter Thiel and so one of the few forces capable of shutting down his nutty antichrist babblings.

I wonder if Thiel still funds Quillette.

Is Nellie Bowles the worst writer in America?

The answer will not surprise you.

More at Defector:

It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read ⁦Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know. "

A couple of years ago her book was being trashed by enjoyers of good literature.

I will add that Bowles is also a terrible person, cheering on the stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok versus a lesbian bar. It's what you expect for someone who is a courtier of wealthy fascists. And because she and her regime censor wife control so much media, there will always be toadies lower on the food chain to praise Bowles.