The Jonathan Anomaly and his SLAPP lawsuit saga continues - did Anomaly lie in his lawsuit?

 In his lawsuit against Rational Wiki, Anomaly states: (my highlight)

50. The article (about Anomaly in Rational Wiki) states that Dr. Anomaly “has published articles for... the antisemitic [web]site The Unz Review.”

51. This statement falsely suggests that Dr. Anomaly is an antisemite. No citation or evidence is provided in the RationalWiki article to show that Dr. Anomaly may be an antisemite.

52. The statement is also false because Dr. Anomaly has never published in The Unz Review. Rather, in 2018, Dr. Anomaly co-authored an article in the online magazine Quillette, defending Jews against antisemitism, called “What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong about Jews.” The Unz Review (which is indeed an antisemitic publication) later re-published the original article from Quillette, without permission, so that its readers would attack Dr. Anomaly and his co-author. Dr. Anomaly subsequently contacted The Unz Review to demand removal of his article.

-----------------------------

That's not what Jonathan Anomaly told me in the comments under his Quillette article What the Alt-Right and Regressive Left Have in Common. 

In fact when I linked to Anomaly's article What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong about the Jews and accused him of being an expert on the alt-right, his response was:

"I gave permission to Ron Unz to reprint my Quillette article which "challenges" the alt-right."

Voila, the screen cap.

The article itself seems to be Anomaly and racist Nathan Cofnas being mad at anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald for claiming Jews have a tendency to be left-wing.

Which is interesting because as we saw in the last installment of this series of the Jonathan Anomaly SLAPP lawsuit, Anomaly is a big fan of the 20-year-old and untested Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis invented by two racists and claimed by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be greatly influenced by... Kevin MacDonald!

Cofnas and Anomaly like to promote each other on Twitter.

And racist ghoul Emil Kirkegaard can be seen promoting Anomaly and Cofnas on Twitter in 2023 as "the younger generation of scholars."

Razib Khan can also be seen discussing Jewishness related to Nathan Cofnas, seen here with ultra racists Richard Hanania and "pro-slavery" Curtis Yarvin.  

Anomaly was promoted on Razib Khan's podcast in 2023.

It's like they're all in one big racist club. A big racist club that is obsessed with "Jewishness."

OK, I almost never comment on appearances because I'm hardly about to win a beauty contest, and appearance is not relevant to how racist someone is... but is Nathan Cofnas made out of wax?

Jonathan Anomaly files a SLAPP lawsuit against Rational Wiki

A photo of Jonathan Anomaly is featured 
next to the title of the HOPE not HATE 
investigation "The Superbaby Factory."
---------------------------------------------------------------------

I am not a lawyer, but it sure looks to me like the lawsuit that Jonathan Anomaly has filed against Rational Wiki can fairly be classified as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) as defined by Wikipedia (itself the target of SLAPP lawsuits over the years) :

In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism... SLAPPs bring about freedom of speech concerns due to their chilling effect and are often difficult to filter out and penalize because the plaintiffs attempt to obfuscate their intent to censor, intimidate, or silence their critics.

And a little bit later...

A common feature of SLAPPs is forum shopping, wherein plaintiffs find courts that are more favourable towards the claims to be brought than the court in which the defendant (or sometimes plaintiffs) live.[9]

That last point is especially important because I don't think it is a coincidence that Jonathan Anomaly filed the suit just as Rational Wiki was in the process of fundraising to defray the costs of moving from a more-pro-SLAPP state, New Mexico, to a less-favorable SLAPP state, Oregon. 

The lawsuit lists various of Anomaly's gripes against RationalWiki which includes:

> Rational Wiki has a point of view:

31. A very particular, highly ideologized, and readily identifiable left-liberal view of what is rational, what constitutes legitimate science, and what constitutes scientific consensus, pervades all of RationalWiki’s articles, with virtually no variation.

> Anybody can edit Rational Wiki:

40. No particular background, knowledge, training, or credential—academic, scientific, or otherwise—is required to be an editor, tech, moderator, or sysop of RationalWiki. The only requirements are to adhere to RationalWiki’s Mission and uphold its point of view, and submit to oversight, by the specialized editors, of the user’s content and “edits.”

> Then Anomaly - original name  Jonathan S Beres - claims he was defamed even though he's respectable, accomplished and important:

 45. Plaintiff Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher and economist who earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, a M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Tulane University.

46. Dr. Anomaly has served as a visiting professor at Oxford University, and has taught in PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) programs at Duke University, U.N.C. Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anomaly has authored dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers and is the co-author of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology, a widely used college textbook, published by Oxford University press.

> But not a public figure.

47. Plaintiff is not a public figure.

I don't know what the legal definition of "public figure" is these days, but Anomaly is certainly public enough that he was mentioned in a Guardian article this month, US natalist conference to host race-science promoters and eugenicists which says:

Broadly, eugenics is a group of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population. It became the basis of a popular movement from the late 19th century, and led to governments around the world adopting policies such as forced sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people. The field was discredited due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience. 

One scheduled speaker, Jonathan Anomaly is a former academic and an advocate of what he has called “liberal eugenics”. 

The Guardian reported in October that he was a senior staff member at Heliospect, a startup offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ even though screening embryos for these traits would be illegal in the UK. 

On the podcast of “new right” figure Alex Kaschuta, in an episode published on Tuesday, Anomaly said of his company’s services: “What can you do? Well, through embryo selection, you’re going to be able to calculate polygenic scores that reduce disease, boost IQ at least a bit, and maybe more in the future.”

And Hope not Hate discussed Anomaly's activities back in October in The Superbaby Factory - my highlights:

Former philosophy professor, early PolygenX employee (born Beres) is our undercover reporter’s first point of contact with PolygenX. He is an early employee of the company. He regularly appears on podcasts and blogs associated with scientific racism and the wider far right. Anomaly spoke in a panel alongside Simone and Malcolm Collins at the Natalism conference in Austin in 2023. The panel was moderated by Kevin Dolan, an activist in the DezNat far-right Mormon movement, which uses the Fasces as part of its symbol.

Anomaly has co-hosted live events for Aporia, the scientific racism website, and his writings have appeared on The Unz Review, a website run by the Holocaust denier Ron Unz. In 2018, Anomaly published an article titled “Defending eugenics” in the peer-reviewed Monash Bioethics Review. In an October 2023 video call with our undercover reporter, he described himself as a “race realist”, referring to the belief that scientific evidence proves racial differences. Although he is American, he spends time in the UK and has appeared on Lotus Eaters, a British far-right media outlet.

When we reached Anomaly for comment, his representative responded that he neither not held nor promoted far-right ideologies. We were told his appearance on Lotus Eaters was for “the furtherance of debate with those who he knew held different views to him”. Anomaly’s representative claimed that he asked Matthew Frost, Aporia’s founder, to remove any material featuring him from the website, as over the course of 2023, he began to disagree with its editorial stance. Anomaly nevertheless hosted a live event for Aporia in New York in February 2024 and many of his podcast appearances remain live on the website. He furthermore reposted four articles from Aporia on his Substack page this year, the most recent being July 22nd 2024. On December 26th 2023, Anomaly reposted an article titled: “The case for race realism.”

"Race realism" is race pseudoscience-speak for "some races are superior to others."

Anomaly claims his Rational Wiki article is defamatory. Although I have contributed to several articles on Rational Wiki,  I have never contributed to the Anomaly article, and hadn't read it until now. 

The lawsuit says:

48. RationalWiki contains an article titled “Jonathan Anomaly.” The article is dedicated to portraying Dr. Anomaly as a fascist and his work as pseudoscience. The article was published on RationalWiki in 2019 and has remained published and viewable on the website since that time. The article has been edited within the last three years Defendants by Will, Hughes, and Doe 1. 

The word "fascist" appears nowhere in the article, so it is unclear exactly why Anomaly makes this claim.

The article does classify Anomaly under the category "The colorful pseudoscience Race & Racialism and the article includes a section entitled "Pseudoscience and controversial writings" - but it appears perfectly justified. The article says:

Anomaly published a provocative article "Defending eugenics" in a peer-reviewed bioethics journal.[35] It has been harshly criticised,[36][37] with nearly 200 academics signing a letter of complaint to Monash Bioethics Review for publishing the article.[38]

The lawsuit continues:

49. The article is false because Dr. Anomaly is not a pseudoscientist or a fascist, but is a libertarian (or classical liberal), and has authored dozens of papers and articles where he identifies as such and propounds libertarian ideas.

I was just talking about how the term "classical liberal" usually means a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. It's nice that Anomaly confirmed this for me.

So there's no evidence that Anomaly was described as a fascist, and if 200 academics objected to Anomaly's "Defending eugenics" that certainly might suggest that Anomaly was dabbling in pseudoscience.

And then there's the fact that in his article Defending Eugenics: From cryptic choice to conscious selection, Anomaly includes a footnote which states:

6 Informal evidence for this claim comes from the success of Jews around the world even in the presence of social and legal discrimination, and from the percentage of Nobel prizes and other scientific accolades Jews were awarded in the twentieth century. More rigorous evidence comes from the heritability of IQ scores (Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the world, nearly two standard deviations above the global average). For more on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence, See Cochran et al. (2006), Cochran and Harpending (2009, ch. 7), and Wade (2014, ch. 8).

There is nothing "rigorous" about "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (NHAI) which is what Anomaly is talking about. I was the main contributor to the Rational Wiki article about NHAI, and I know how NHAI is nothing but a hypothesis based on speculation by two racists, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

This hypothesis, almost twenty years old now, has never been tested and some of its premises were debunked by anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

If Anomaly claims that the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence speculation is "rigorous" then you would be a damn fool to trust his judgement on what is and what is not pseudoscience.

And Anomaly's use of the term "heritability" appears to be the standard race pseudoscience effort to conflate the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "inheritance." For more about the frequent misuse of the term heritability see The Heritability Fallacy.

I will continue to write about Anomaly and this lawsuit in future blog posts.

The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss

It looks like the usual reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes have been collected under one cover,  in a book called The War On Science ~ Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech and Open Inquiry and the Scientific Process.

Just in time to help celebrate the Trump administration's war on trans people, women and non-white people. 

People on Bluesky have published the table of contents and most of the contributors have been discussed on this blog. 

This gang of goons is not at all embarrassed to be grouped with ultra-racist crank Amy Wax.

And of course Steve Pinker is in there.

Let's review who's who in the world of politically-motivated pseudoscience wankery:

Dorian Abbot is advisor at the Bari Weiss grift known as the University of Austin (UATX); author at the far-right City Journal; participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

John Armstrong is a right-wing reactionary who likes to retweet racist Toby Young.

Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year: 

"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”
I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”

Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.

Maarten Boudry - Quillette author in league with Jerry Coyne

Alex Byrne is an anti-trans activist and married to Carole Hooven.

Nicholas Christakis supported racist Razib Khan's attack on a Scientific American author who dared to discuss - justifiably - E. O. Wilson's racism. 

Roger Cohen from what I can tell is known for being married to Amy Wax.

Jerry Coyne is best known for once being a respected scientist then turning into a right-wing political operative, appearing at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and defending white nationalist Bo Winegard. That defense is probably the piece included in this book, since Coyne co-authored it with Luana Maroja and they are listed together in the table of contents. Coyne is most recently known for writing an op-ed claiming trans women are delusional and inclined to sexual assault.

Richard Dawkins is another once-respected scientist who descended into evolutionary psychology crankery and reactionary politics, causing people to ask "what happened to Richard Dawkins?" Well known for promoting a bonkers conspiracy theory that a child was a fiendish bomb maker, in the embarrassing "Clock Boy" incident. 

Janice Fiamengo was a member of the far-right misogynist "men's rights" organization the Honey Badgers

Niall Ferguson is a right-wing reactionary political operative think tank creature, who tried to pull a political op on a college student and got caught - which did not hurt his reputation on the far-right. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Karleen Gribble is an anti-trans activist and ally of Carole Hooven

Solveig Lucia Gold appears to be notable only for being married to Joshua T. Katz

Moti Gorin is an anti-trans activist

Carole Hooven is a fan of the viciously anti-transgender "Gender War Cards" and a promoter of garbage evolutionary psychology theories and bullshit explanations for the reactions against Lawrence Summers' "women are losers" speech given by Summers when he was president of Harvard.

Geoff Horsman considers ultra-racist Amy Wax to be a "brave truth-seeker."

Joshua T. Katz is known for student-diddling. Self-declared friend of racist ghoul Amy Wax. On the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute.  Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Sergiu Klainerman is a right-wing reactionary and Trump supporter.

Anna Krylov is a reactionary crackpot who couldn't reason her way out of a paper bag. I wrote of her logical incoherence in depth a few years ago. An organizer of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Luana Maroja appears to be an undistiguished academic who expressed her support for white nationalist Bo Winegard along with Jerry Coyne. Participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Christian D. Ott - according to Buzzfeed, 

"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student." 

Ott unsuccessfully sued for defamation two scientists who protested his hiring.

Bruce Pardy is a rightwing reactionary who claims  '“Socialized healthcare” is medical communism."'

Jordan Peterson - what hasn't been said about rightwing crank Jordan Peterson?

Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.

Richard Redding is a right-winger associated with the Federalist Society

Arthur Rousseau appears to be related to Lauren Schwartz.

Gad Saad is a rightwing evolutionary psychology clown, Trump apologist and climate change denier. Appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.
 

Sally Satel is on the payroll of the far-right American Enterprise Institute. Ally of Pinker, Hooven and Lee Jussim.

Lauren H. Schwartz is this anti-trans activist, who is apparently related to Arthur W. Rousseau, since she has also gone by the name Lauren Rousseau.

Alan Sokal became famous for going after the low-hanging fruit of postmodernism, then he allied with the far-right.

Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.

Judith Suissa is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Alice Sullivan

Alice Sullivan is an anti-trans activist, co-author with Judith Suissa

Jay Tanzman is a "freelance statistician" whose claim to fame seems to be that he's the boyfriend of Anna Krylov

Abigail Thompson  - this is the first time I'm hearing about Abigail Thompson, but it looks like she's in deep with Peter Thiel's Stanford-based gang of racists and right-wing political operatives. Thompson gave a talk for the Stanford Business School "Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar." The term "classical liberal" which Thompson used in her protest against DEI statements almost always indicates a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. The right-wing racist rag Quillette (alleged to have been funded by Peter Thiel) is a big booster of "classical liberalism." The Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar is directly connected to Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (aka "Academic Freedom conference") and the Seminar hosts run the political gamut from libertarian to right-wing racist extremist. 

Speakers for the Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar include racist Cory Clark, racist Nathan Cofnas, racist Victor Hansen, "Catholic epidemiologist" Tyler VanderWeele, James Orr, another hard-core religionist, Quillette contributor Glenn Loury, Bruce Pardy, rightwing reactionary, Mia Hughes an anti-trans activist who works for University of Austin grifter and pro-nuke politician Michael Shellenberger's Environmental Progress, David Neumark a fellow at the conservative Stanford unit the Hoover Institution, Cato racist Ilya Shapiro, Charles Calomaris, a right-winger and at one time a University of Austin grifter, Jordan Lasker a eugenicist and racist (aka "hereditarian"), Roger Pielke, climate change denier, and Justin Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University who believes that "Trump has a public mandate to dramatically reshape the federal government."

At one Stanford Classical Liberalism Seminar, run by Daniel Diermeier, you can see Amy Wax is one of the attendees. 

Amy Wax is notorious for her racist statements. She gave a full-throated endorsement of race pseudoscience at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Elizabeth Weiss was the third wife of the race pseudoscience gang's favorite "scientist" whose career was aided and abetted by E. O. Wilson, Jean-Philippe Rushton. Weiss appeared at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

Frances Widdowson is an author at racist Quillette, who hates Black Lives Matter. She participated in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists.

And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.

Bari Weiss promotes white supremacy at The Free Press

I have already noted that the garbage rag led by Bari Weiss, the Free Press, employs white supremacists like Douglas Murray - who is one of those named, by Weiss herself as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

And the racist right - very much including Bari Weiss and Steven Pinker - has been attempting to rehabilitate Richard Hanania's reputation since it came out he had spent years spewing incredibly racist garbage under the name "Richard Hoste."

No doubt because Hanania has access to so much fascist plutocrat money.

So I was not surprised to see Weiss publish an article in the Free Press by Richard Hanania.

You'll never guess Hanania's explanation for the obvious fascism of Steve Bannon and Elon Musk - they aren't REALLY fascists, they are just "trolling."

Say what you will about these men: None of them proclaims a Hitlerian worldview. Not too long ago, Steve Bannon was taking a page out of Al Sharpton’s book and denouncing Silicon Valley bosses for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics, which would make his brand of Nazism quite peculiar. Elon Musk has time and again pledged support for the Jewish people. He visited Israel in late 2023 and wore dog tags given to him by the father of an Israeli hostage in Gaza. Later, he went to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.

Except Elon Musk supports the German Neo-Nazi party AfD.

And Bannon has long been comfortable with Neo-Nazis - per the Guardian:

As the presidential election approaches, a recently designated neo-Nazi terrorist group is covertly seeding violent propaganda on to mainstream social media channels – exposing tens of thousands of unknowing followers to radicalizing messages – according to background research and a report provided to the Guardian by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

One of those channels on Telegram purports to be associated with Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, with an administrator claiming in group chats discovered by ISD to have had direct contact with the longtime Trump ally who is well-known for playing footsie with extremists and admitting to fomenting revolution.

But then this is Richard Hanania talking - not only did he have a long career as Hoste, promoting insane evil, these days he likes to hang out with his buddies, racists Razib Khan and Rob Henderson - here they are at a Free Press event. 

Both Henderson and Hanania have now written for The Free Press - I cannot believe Khan has not yet been employed there. 

Especially since Nellie Bowles, wife of Bari Weiss, loves loves Razib Khan. I assume exactly because of the race pseudoscience he loves to swill - especially when he can get it piping hot from non-scientist (well "political scientist") and career-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray, whom Khan recently had on his podcast. They...

...discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to face the reality of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.

The link goes to one of Murray's more recent racist tracts.

But I do have to defend Bari Weiss a little - Jamelle Bouie can be seen on a Bluesky skeet above saying that Weiss believes in absolutely nothing - but to be fair, she does believe in something - she believes in GRIFTING.

Dear Donald Trump Voters: His Actions Are Going To Hurt You Too - SOME MORE NEWS

 Another great one from SOME MORE NEWS

Rapist helping rapist - Accused Sex Trafficker and Rapist Andrew Tate Finds Ally in Trump

From the Financial Times:

The Trump administration has pressured Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the self-described misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, a champion of the US president who is facing criminal charges in Bucharest.

Andrew and his brother Tristan Tate, who are dual US and UK nationals, have become a cause célèbre in rightwing social media after having been arrested in Romania in 2022 and charged with human trafficking, sexual misconduct and money laundering, as well as starting an organised crime group. They have denied wrongdoing.

The Tates’ case was first brought up by US officials in a phone call with the Romanian government last week and then followed up by Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell when he met the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Trump 2.0: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

 

Welcome to Black History Month - before the Musk/Trump presidency ends it

I happened on this excellent video by Forbes Magazine, of all places, from 2022 about the history of the systemic theft of Black wealth, one of those essential pieces of historical knowledge that hereditarians like Razib Khan wish to erase.

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.

• Elon Musk has your Social Security number. It’s as scary as it sounds. 

• Elon Musk will decide the fate of Social Security and Medicare. Time to panic 

• Retirees sue to block Musk, DOGE access to personal information of millions of Americans 

• The Treasury's payment system is one of Elon Musk's targets. Here's what it does, from Social Security to tax refunds 

• The US Treasury Claimed DOGE Technologist Didn’t Have ‘Write Access’ When He Actually Did

 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.