The impetus for this blog (and soon to be Youtube channel/podcast) Pinkerite was when Steven Pinker declared among other things:
Those of us who were familiar with Steven Pinker's career knew he had been a long-time promoter of advocates of race science including Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, but a Twitter friend of Razib Khan, Jesse Singal wrote an apologia for Pinker in the NYTimes, which was full of bullshit - but then it is Jesse Singal, part-time Koch brothers hack.
Biologist PZ Myers, one of the people who had long since become fed up with Pinker, called Pinker a shitweasel and dissected Singal's apologia.
The ignorance of alleged journalists like Singal about Pinker's alt-right and racist-friendly career appalled me and I created a diagram: Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections especially for the reading-challenged like Singal.
Then in May 2018 Bari Weiss wrote an article about the "intellectual dark web" and included Steven Pinker as its most respectable member.
Pinker has covered himself with plenty of shame since then, as I have documented in this blog, while at the same time being presented as the world's favorite science celebrity, appearing with an actual intellectual of value like Paul Krugman and speaking at the United Nations.
And it turns out that the Spiked Magazine "Unsafe Space" tour in which Pinker blamed the media and academia for the alt-right was paid for by the Charles Koch Foundation.
Yesterday Pinker decided to double down, agreeing with right-wing Catholic op-ed NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat that "political correctness" is making smart young men become alt-right radicals.
There were some good responses to Pinker's tweet.
The most disgusting aspect of this is that, by using his science celebrity to promote evolutionary psychology and race science, it is Pinker himself who is radicalizing the alt-right.
Steven Pinker is shameless individual.
And he's also a lousy researcher. I talked to Brian Ferguson about that and I will be posting that conversation soon.
“The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be ... I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs... comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right. Internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way — who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix.
When they are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses, or in The New York Times, or in respectable media, they are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity. And they're immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions..."He said it in late 2017 and Learn Liberty - a Koch-funded project which supports Dave Rubin directly, posted it on Youtube in January 2018, which is when the controversy erupted.
Those of us who were familiar with Steven Pinker's career knew he had been a long-time promoter of advocates of race science including Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, but a Twitter friend of Razib Khan, Jesse Singal wrote an apologia for Pinker in the NYTimes, which was full of bullshit - but then it is Jesse Singal, part-time Koch brothers hack.
Biologist PZ Myers, one of the people who had long since become fed up with Pinker, called Pinker a shitweasel and dissected Singal's apologia.
The ignorance of alleged journalists like Singal about Pinker's alt-right and racist-friendly career appalled me and I created a diagram: Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections especially for the reading-challenged like Singal.
Then in May 2018 Bari Weiss wrote an article about the "intellectual dark web" and included Steven Pinker as its most respectable member.
Pinker has covered himself with plenty of shame since then, as I have documented in this blog, while at the same time being presented as the world's favorite science celebrity, appearing with an actual intellectual of value like Paul Krugman and speaking at the United Nations.
And it turns out that the Spiked Magazine "Unsafe Space" tour in which Pinker blamed the media and academia for the alt-right was paid for by the Charles Koch Foundation.
Yesterday Pinker decided to double down, agreeing with right-wing Catholic op-ed NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat that "political correctness" is making smart young men become alt-right radicals.
There were some good responses to Pinker's tweet.
The most disgusting aspect of this is that, by using his science celebrity to promote evolutionary psychology and race science, it is Pinker himself who is radicalizing the alt-right.
Steven Pinker is shameless individual.
And he's also a lousy researcher. I talked to Brian Ferguson about that and I will be posting that conversation soon.
