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I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs!

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Saturday, August 31, 2019

Alt-right Quillette, equalitarianism & the White Citizens' Councils

(Excerpt reprinted from my personal blog from March 25, 2018)

Winegard doesn't use the term "egalitarianism" he uses the term "equalitarianism" with a QU in the article, entitled "Equalitarianism and Progressive Bias." Winegard writes:
Ben Winegard, David Geary, and I wrote a comment on a Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ article about political bias in 2015, in which we forwarded what we termed the “paranoid egalitarian meliorist” (PEM) model of progressive bias. I’ve come to believe that the name is inevitably and uncharitably pejorative (“paranoid” sounds bad even though it is descriptively neutral), so my colleagues and I have renamed it equalitarianism; however, I still think the basic model is accurate.
But Bo Winegard didn't invent the term equalitarianism. The term was used, with just as much contempt, by the mid-20th century segregationists of the southern United States. Carlton Putnam used it, cited in the book The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction by Neil R. McMillen
Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Pris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”
The term "equalitarian" pops up quite frequently in this book, which is a history of The Citizens' Councils:
The Citizens' Councils (also referred to as White Citizens' Councils) were an associated network of white supremacist, extreme right,[1] organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954.[2] After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States,[3] mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also opposed voter registration efforts and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used severe intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and violence against citizens and civil-rights activists.  
By the 1970s, following passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s and enforcement of constitutional rights by the federal government, the influence of the Councils had waned considerably yet remained an institutional basis for the majority of white residents in Mississippi. The successor organization to the White Citizens' Councils is the St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens, founded in 1985[3] to continue collaborations between Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist political agendas in the United States. Republican politician and past Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was a member[4] while North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Georgia Congressman Bob Barr were both strong supporters of the Council of Conservative Citizens; David Duke also spoke at a fund raising event, while Patrick Buchanan's campaign manager was linked to both Duke and the Council.[5]  
In 1996, a Charleston, SC, drive-by shooting by Klan members of three African American males occurred after a Council rally; Dylann Roof, the perpetrator responsible for the murder of nine Emanuel AME church members in Charleston in 2015, espoused Council of Conservative Citizens rhetoric in a manifesto.[6]
Many of the modern proponents of hereditarianism and opponents of "equalitarianism" come from Southern states and work for colleges in the South. Bo Winegard seems to be practicing a slightly updated form of old-time Southern white racism.

Carlton Putnam wasn't considered a crazy racist radical, by the way, he was extremely respectable:
Carleton Putnam (December 19, 1901 – March 5, 1998) was an American businessman, biographer, writer, and segregationist. He graduated from Princeton University in 1924 and received a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from Columbia Law School in 1932. He founded Chicago & Southern Airlines in 1933, which in 1953 was merged with Delta Air Lines. He would later serve as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines and hold a seat on its board of directors until his death.[1][2]
Here we see that Henry E. Garrett published "The Equalitarian Dogma" in the pages of Mankind Quarterly, the ultra-racist publication supported by The Pioneer Fund, which also financially supported many of the scientific racialists whose work was used in creating The Bell Curve. I've written about Mankind Quarterly before.

The article points to IQ testing as the justification of innate black inferiority and rages against communism - just as the hereditarians at Quillette do.

The Mankind Quarterly archives are provided via The Unz Review - not for some historical edification but because Unz Review is a racist web site and seeks to preserve the views of Mankind Quarterly, which also published work by Richard Lynn, an important source for The Bell Curve.

The White Citizens' Councils and the editors of Mankind Quarterly would be very proud indeed of people who fight against "equalitarianism" - people like Bo Winegard and Claire Lehmann.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

The Andy Ngo saga continues

Slate has a perfect summary of the past couple of months of Andy Ngo's career:

Andy Ngo, the right-wing journalist and provocateur who was embraced by mainstream Republicans and covered favorably in mainstream media after he was attacked by antifa activists during a street fight in Portland, Oregon, may suddenly be persona non grata among conservatives. Nearly all mentions of Ngo were scrubbed from the upscale right-wing publication Quillette after a newly-released video showed him acting friendly with members of Patriot Prayer, a far-right hate group that has repeatedly sought out fights with leftists. 
Ngo, who has used selectively edited videos to paint antifa as a violent, criminal group was hit with punches and milkshakes during a clash between antifa activists and members of the Proud Boys, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many on the right rallied around Ngo after that altercation, and spread false rumors that the milkshakes thrown at him and others had contained quick-dry cement.  
Ngo used his newfound fame to boost his profile, appearing on Fox News and other cable news outlets and embracing his victimhood. 
Just weeks later, however, a video surfaced on Twitter showing Ngo pal around with the Proud Boys-adjacent group Patriot Prayer. 
The video shows Ngo laughing as the group plans a violent attack on antifa members at a Portland bar in May. The video surfaced as part of a lawsuit brought by the bar, accusing Patriot Prayer members of causing a riot.
Many Quillette critics on Twitter suggested that Quillette had fired Ngo because of the video but Lehmann denied it...
Quillette, where Ngo worked as a photo editor until Monday, announced after the video surfaced that Ngo was leaving his job at the site. Ngo’s name was scrubbed from the site, The Daily Beast reported.
Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann told The Daily Beast that Ngo left the site weeks earlier but the move was not publicized until Monday.

“Andy actually moved on from Quillette a few weeks ago because he is undertaking bigger & better projects, we just hadn't updated the website and he hadn't updated his Twitter bio until today,” she told the Daily Beast. “I haven’t seen the video,” she added.
Lehmann also said that Ngo had been on a “break” from a “brain injury” he suffered at the Portland rally. 
 
Ngo, however, did not remove Quillette from his Twitter bio until Monday, noted National Observer reporter Caroline Orr, the same day that the Patriot Prayer video was released.
Columnist Tabatha Southey had a great response.



The question is, will Andy Ngo devote himself to ratfucking for Trump, or will this hurt his ratfucking career?

Monday, August 26, 2019

The IDW and 1619

The IDW has been surprisingly quiet about the 1619 project - surprising  because one of the most important issues that brings together the somewhat diverse members of the Intellectual Dark Web is a belief in the accuracy of race science and its claim that "black" people are genetically less intelligent than other "races."

In order to support this belief, it is essential for members of the IDW and friends to deny the importance of the history of African Americans, and the 1619 project is all about the history of African Americans, focusing most importantly on issues that have been under-discussed such as the looting of African American wealth through terrorism and fraud and semi-legal means.

Writing in Quillette, in an article that Steven Pinker recommended to his Twitter followers, Bo and Ben Winegard argued that the history of African Americans does not explain African American failure to thrive:
Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.
They toss off "a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others" and then dismiss it.

We see Sam Harris also seeking to deny African American history:
...you are unwilling to differentiate scientific fact and scientific data and reasonable extrapolations based on data, from past injustices in American history, these are totally separate things —
Razib Khan, whose career has been supported by Steven Pinker, was displeased by an article in the NYTimes by Carl Zimmer called Black? White? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier and Khan's response included this odd paragraph:
So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 
He actually uses the phrase "If we removed all the history" and suggests without a knowledge of history we would get at the truth of race in America.

You don't have to be an historian (I am not) to be completely dumbfounded by the suggestion that it would be useful to ignore the actual reasons why '"larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general "white" population."'

And professional racist Steve Sailer, whose career has also been supported by Pinker had the same take on the Zimmer article:
Actually, as the genome data has gotten more precise in the 21st Century, the big surprise has been how white are American whites. 
Slavery. Anti-misegenation laws. The one-drop rule. It's so obvious these are the reasons that the "white" population is so white. And Sailer and Khan are perfectly aware of those things.

But Khan and Sailer's responses show how incredibly blinded is the race science project to reality, so certain they are that DNA testing is the real story of "race."

So I knew eventually I would find a member of the IDW criticizing the 1619 project and turns out it's Charles Murray shown in the tweet at the top of this post. Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve, the book most beloved by race science promoters, which claims that black people have failed to thrive in part due to genetic inferiority, and which was written using research paid for by the white supremacist Pioneer Fund, scoffs at the idea racism has been a defining issue since the founding of the USA.

Murray's career is dependent on the claim of black genetic inferiority ~ and the related libertarian-friendly claim that therefore we shouldn't have a social safety net because the poor are just too stupid to help. So the 1619 project is highly offensive to him and right-wing racists, since it is full of evidence of systemic racism from before the founding of the United States.

But it's OK if Murray and his race science friends suffer from obtuseness, deliberate or otherwise. Rigor is not expected of right-wing intellectuals. Murray's career has been supported by the American Enterprise Institute which has long had Koch support. A phenomenon known as wingnut welfare.

The American Enterprise Institute loves The Bell Curve so much that in 2014 they celebrated the 20th anniversary of its publication by interviewing Charles Murray. In the interview Murray reveals that not only does he believe that some of the reason for black underachievement is genetic, he believes that science will prove him right very soon:
On this score, the roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning.
The best summary of the evidence is found in the early chapters of Nicholas Wade’s recent book, “A Troublesome Inheritance.” We’re not talking about another 20 years before the purely environmental position is discredited, but probably less than a decade. What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable? It should be interesting to watch. I confess to a problem with schadenfreude.
But the Zimmer article, which so annoyed Khan and Sailer, was published two months after Murray made that statement, and demonstrated that genetic testing has made it clearer than ever that race is a social construct. Confirmed by the fact that race science proponents in Quillette can't or won't define which races exist, biologically.

And I think that birth order studies demonstrate that the environmental position is absolutely confirmed - but proponents of race science live inside a right-wing funded bubble and don't have to address evidence that is contrary to what they believe.

You can thank the largess of the Kochs and other plutocrats for that.

And of course many members of the IDW have benefitted from plutocrat support and will no doubt continue to do so.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Charles Koch is still alive



I first got the news that David Koch died via the Twitter account of Jane Mayer, author of many New Yorker articles about the Kochs.

But as the NYTimes obituary makes clear, the most pernicious of the Koch brothers is Charles.

And of course the Kochs have heirs.
“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”
So the various members of the IDW who have taken Koch money including Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro and Steven Pinker don't have to worry.

Mayer recently reviewed a book which makes it clear that should humanity survive the effects of climate change, the Kochs, and especially Charles, will be known as people who did the most harm, personally, to the planet Earth.

From Mayer's review:
Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President Mike Pence, “the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.” Whether announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered for the Kochs. “Kochland” quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political donors, in 2018, “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous fifty.”


Monday, August 19, 2019

Steven Pinker: "Jews, Genes and Intelligence"

I will be posting my interview with anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson very soon (finally) but while researching I found a recording, posted seven years ago on Youtube, of a talk Pinker gave to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the paper Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), a paper which Ferguson debunked in his paper How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence".

Pinker's talk, entitled "Jews, Genes and Intelligence" reveals, not surprisingly that Pinker on the whole thinks it is likely that Ashkenazi Jews are intellectually superior, genetically, per the NHAI theory.

At the top of the lecture Noah Feldman explicitly warns the audience not to record the talk, and obviously somebody did anyway, but I expect the recordings - posted by at least two separate Youtube accounts by apparent fans of Pinker - to be removed from Youtube any day.

So I have the transcript here.

The video of the talk was posted in four parts because, I assume, when it was posted Youtube had a ten-minute maximum length on uploaded videos.

Ferguson discusses the NHAI theory and Pinker's boosting of the untested theory in the interview which I will post. Very soon.

And to nobody's surprise, Richard Lynn also jumped on the NHAI speculation to bolster his claims about race and IQ, in a talk posted on Youtube.

The transcript is after the cut.


Sunday, August 18, 2019

The NYTimes 1619 Project and its critics

The New York Times is running a much-needed series on the history of African Americans since the introduction of slavery to North America in 1619. It begins:
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

One of the most important issues, and one that this blog has addressed a few times is the underreported and historically ignored theft of the wealth accumulated, often through heroic effort, by the formerly enslaved people. 

That issue is addressed in the 1619 series in the article  A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America. The opening paragraphs of the article add more to my understanding of how much African American economic failure to thrive is due to terrorism:

Elmore Bolling, whose brothers called him Buddy, was a kind of one-man economy in Lowndesboro, Ala. He leased a plantation, where he had a general store with a gas station out front and a catering business; he grew cotton, corn and sugar cane. He also owned a small fleet of trucks that ran livestock and made deliveries between Lowndesboro and Montgomery. At his peak, Bolling employed as many as 40 people, all of them black like him. 
One December day in 1947, a group of white men showed up along a stretch of Highway 80 just yards from Bolling’s home and store, where he lived with his wife, Bertha Mae, and their seven young children. The men confronted him on a section of road he had helped lay and shot him seven times — six times with a pistol and once with a shotgun blast to the back. His family rushed from the store to find him lying dead in a ditch. 
The shooters didn’t even cover their faces; they didn’t need to. Everyone knew who had done it and why. “He was too successful to be a Negro,” someone who knew Bolling told a newspaper at the time. When Bolling was killed, his family estimates he had as much as $40,000 in the bank and more than $5,000 in assets, about $500,000 in today’s dollars. But within months of his murder nearly all of it would be gone. White creditors and people posing as creditors took the money the family got from the sale of their trucks and cattle. They even staked claims on what was left of the family’s savings. The jobs that he provided were gone, too. Almost overnight the Bollings went from prosperity to poverty. Bertha Mae found work at a dry cleaner. The older children dropped out of school to help support the family. Within two years, the Bollings fled Lowndes County, fearing for their lives.

THIS is the history of African Americans that people like Charles Murray, Razib Khan, Sam Harris, Bo Winegard and the rest of the race science gang seek to ignore or deny in order to keep the race science project going - the project most explicitly designed to claim that African Americans are often poor or in jail because of innate evolutionarily endowed traits of lesser intelligence and greater criminality explained most bluntly by "conservative criminology" professor of the University of Cincinnati, John Paul Wright.

Quillette hasn't yet complained about the 1619 project, nor have any of the IDWs that I have seen, but others certainly have, like the once relevant Newt Gingrich. Molly Jong-Fast (daughter of author Erica Jong) had a good response.



Christian extremist and Trump-loving Erick Erickson had a predictably stupid tweet. NYTimes columnist Jamelle Bouie who wrote an excellent piece for the project, What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to Slavery had a good response.





Bouie also had a good response to Benjamin Weingarten, senior editor of The Federalist (where do they get their money from?) and Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer (author of one of the most important pieces of the Trump era, "The Cruelty is the Point") has a good response to the Koch-funded and founded Cato Institute employee Ilya Shapiro.



If anybody from Quillette or the IDW complains about the 1619 project, I will post it, of course.

The creator of the project is Nicole Hannah-Jones, and I'm proud to say I've been following her on Twitter via @Pinkerite1 since starting the account.






Saturday, August 17, 2019

Quillette and the sleazy career of Andy Ngo

I'm not a fan of Jacobin, with its tendency to bash feminism and its support for the career of feminist-hating Doug Henwood.

But this Jacobin article has a good summation of the sleazy career of Andy Ngo, including his promotion by Quillette:
For his next act, Ngo joined Quillette where he is a “sub-editor.” Described as the voice of the intellectual dark web, Quillette published a report on May 29 claiming fifteen reporters who cover the far right were really “Antifa journalists.” According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the article by “estabished right-wing troll,” Eoin Lenihan, was picked up by the neo-Nazi Stormfront website within a day, and a day after that a video was uploaded to YouTube containing “imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the [Antifa] reporters.” The names of the journalists were put on a list called “Sunset the Media,” while the video ends with a notorious neo-Nazi saying he won’t “disown” anyone who kills the reporters. 
Two journalists, including Shane Burley, wrote of the unnerving effect of being put on a Neo-Nazi death list. Another targeted journalist wrote that Quillette had crossed the line from being merely reactionary to “reckless endangerment” and bluntly stated that its list “could’ve gotten me killed.”

It's likely that Andy Ngo and Trump's reelection campaign will engage in some ratfucking in Portland today.




Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Intellectual Dark Web and Gamergate

Several members of the Intellectual Dark Web are mentioned in two of the four articles published today in the New York Times on the fifth anniversary of Gamergate. I highlighted the IDW members.

Charlie Warzel writes:
...Gamergate attracted the attention of then-men’s rights bloggers like Mike Cernovich and Roosh V, right-wing political correctness monitors like Christina Hoff Sommers and middling journalists like Milo Yiannopoulos, then a writer for Breitbart.
And a little later...
Today, five years later, the elements of Gamergate are frighteningly familiar: hundreds of thousands of hashtag-swarming tweets; armies of fake Twitter accounts; hoaxes and disinformation percolating in murky chat rooms and message boards before spreading to a confused mainstream media; advertiser boycotts; crowdfunding campaigns; racist, sexist and misogynist memes; YouTube shock jocks; D-list celebrities hand-wringing about political correctness on Twitter; Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Breitbart; Candace Owens.
Later...
Far-right personalities swarmed Mr. (James) Damore — his first “exclusive” interview was with Stefan Molyneux, a far-right Canadian YouTuber who calls himself a philosopher and lectures about race and I.Q. and men's rights issues. 
Sarah Jeong's Gamergate piece mentions Charles Murray:
This August is an anniversary for me as well. Last year, I landed in hot water for a number of tweets I’d posted years before about white people, especially white men. They were irreverent jokes — some responses to people harassing me, others outright snark. Some were parodies of race science like Charles Murrays “The Bell Curve.” 
And like Warzel's piece, she mentions Cernovich:
There were posts with details about her former neighborhood. Texts with pictures of where she lived alongside pictures of guns. A tweet from the yet-relatively-unknown Mike Cernovich — now a figurehead of the alt-right — about how he had hired a private investigator to look into her.
None of the articles mention that Sommers and Yiannopoulos worked together to promote Gamergate, along with another recipient of Koch money (like Sommers) Cathy Young who has written pieces for Quillette.

I tend to think of Young and Sommers as part of a female misogynist triad along with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.

Sommers, Young and Yiannopoulos appeared together in a panel on Gamergate.



Cathy Young was so enthusiastic about Gamergate that she celebrated the two year anniversary of the "Zoe Post" which Eron Gjoni used to attack his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn by doing an interview with Gjoni for the now defunct Heat Street but which I found via the Wayback Machine and have posted here.



 This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)

She called Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and an actual victim of the Gamergate mob a "professional victim" to her pal, the Pinkerite Jesse Singal.




Less than a year ago she was still siding with Eron Gjoni and accusing Zoe Quinn of unethical behavior.


To date I haven't found evidence that either Young or Sommers have any regrets about their role as Gamergate cheerleaders. Although Sommers had a predictable response to Warzel's piece:



Monday, August 12, 2019

Theft and the African American failure to thrive

Pinkerite has pointed out that there have been many incidents of "race rioting" that resulted in the loss of wealth of African Americans, from outright murder to driving blacks out of towns and stealing their property.

But there's even more to the story as The Atlantic explains.
Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.
This is exactly the kind of history that race science promoters like Sam Harris want to ignore - if not erase completely - in order to claim that the African American failure to thrive is due to genetics. As Harris said in his debate with Ezra Klein:

          Klein 
...Yeah, I strongly disagree, and I disagree because of American history. That is why my fundamental criticism of that conversation was that you needed to deal more with the history of this conversation and the history of this country. 
          Harris 
Okay, but even in this conversation you are unwilling to differentiate scientific fact and scientific data and reasonable extrapolations based on data, from past injustices in American history, these are totally separate things —

Friday, August 9, 2019

Quillette is hoaxed

Last year Quillette promoted a project in which three individuals of dubious intellectual worth, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay hoaxed some low-subscription academic publications and declared it a victory against the academic left.

What goes around comes around, as they say.

Construction worker and avowed Leninist Archie Carter has plenty of gripes with the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that’s enjoyed a new wave of popularity during the Trump era. 
In an essay published Thursday on the conservative op-ed website Quillette, Carter declared that DSA had been overrun with overeducated, oversensitive college graduates, blinding itself to the true needs of the working class. 
“DSA is doomed,” Carter wrote. 
Carter’s piece seemed like exactly the kind of argument that’s turned Quillette, a self-described “platform for free thought,” into a hotbed for the right-wing online “Intellectual Dark Web” movement. Carter had impeccable blue-collar bona fides, with his Quillette bio describing him as a committed union member who’s always “watching the Mets blow a lead.” 
But there’s one problem with Carter’s story: He doesn’t exist. 
Pinkerite was skeptical of "Archie Carter" from the jump.


The Beast later on...
The hoaxer said he was inspired to trick Quillette by 2018’s “Sokal Squared” hoax, in which academics placed fake, obviously ridiculous research papers in journals in an attempt to prove that the humanities had been overrun by identity politics. The hoax had been well-received at Quillette, with Lehmann declaring that the Sokal Squared hoax was proof that the fooled academic disciplines aren’t legitimate fields.

There was of course great rejoicing in the world of Quillette critics after retraction.



Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Trump is the ratfucker

I've been talking about the connection between Trump and Quillette's favorite grifter, Andy Ngo via Ngo's lawyer, Republican committeewoman Harmeet K. Dhillon for the past month.

It was my hunch that Trump would try to use Ngo's fear-mongering over Antifa as a deflection tactic.

A week later, my hunch was further confirmed when Dhillon showed up at Trump's rightwing social media summit.

Just a few days after that, I saw that Andy Ngo was proceeding with the obvious next step - try to connect Antifa to the Democratic party.

A week ago, on what I think is the obvious co-ordination between Ngo, his lawyer and the Trump campaign I wrote:
There is a slight problem with the Antifa tactic - Antifa, being a bunch of anarchists and random zanies likely hate the Democratic Party as much as the Republican Party. 
But I am confident that Trump's ratfuckers will come up with a scheme to try to link Antifa and the Democrats. And Andy Ngo has already made an attempt to do just that.
The movie "All the President's Men" discussed the dirty tricks committed by the Nixon campaign, called "ratfucking."

But as we can see in the image at the top of this post, Trump does his own ratfucking, personally.

And this will not be the end of it. According to the NYTimes yesterday:
The Trump campaign was unapologetic on Tuesday about a New York Times report on its Facebook advertisements that use the word “invasion,” which featured prominently in the El Paso suspect’s manifesto. A senior Trump political adviser had a single-word answer — “no” — when asked if the campaign would change the tenor of its ads.
Trump's tweet about Antifa from today makes it obvious - any time Trump is accused of causing harm to the country because of his unrestrained racism and fear-mongering, he is going to try to do a both-sides. With plenty of help from grifter Andy Ngo. Expect Trump to mention Antifa a lot more, and to try to smear Democrats with that conveniently anonymous collection of masked individuals.

Legitimate journalists would do well to keep track of Andy Ngo if they want to scoop the next big story of the campaign. It's sure to be an utterly shameless example of ratfucking.

This video clip is the ratfucker scene from "All the Presidents Men" with Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Robert Walden as Donald Segrettti.


Monday, August 5, 2019

Taleb v Quillette/IDW

I've mentioned the antagonism between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the Quillette/IDW gang before, but it's gotten so bad recently someone besides Pinkerite is talking about it (outside the world of Twitter.)

First Things' Joshua P. Hochschild writes:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Claire Lehmann seemed like natural allies: Both are contrarian, entrepreneurial free thinkers. But recently, Taleb started calling Lehmann names on Twitter. 
Lehmann had defended behavioral genetics, especially claims about “intelligence”: that it is measured by IQ testing, is genetically based, and correlates with success in life. Taleb has extensively criticized all three claims—they exhibit some of his core themes: misuse of statistics and the difficulty of prediction in complex systems—and now he warned Lehmann to distance herself from the fraudulent field. 
In addition to empirical and mathematical problems, behavioral genetics has a moral problem. Claims about IQ and genetics are historically associated with eugenics. In a culture where social science has outsize influence on public policy—another core Talebian theme—attempts to treat as empirical fact a “racial IQ gap” explainable by genetics seem to imply a ranking of races, a harmful rift in the human family.
Taleb isn't only going after Lehmann, although she richly deserves criticism for her support of race science. He's also insulted Pinker and Sam Harris. I'm really enjoying it.

Meanwhile this Twitterer thinks the conflict has lost Quillette Patreon patrons. But I have no fear that right-wing plutocrats and organizations will step in to take up the slack.

But perhaps this tweet, published on August 3, is the reason that Pinker was recruited to shill for Quillette on August 4.




Sunday, August 4, 2019

Steven Pinker, Quillette, Linda Gottfredson and Stefan Molyneux


Well Steven Pinker was on my good side last week when he actually managed to condemn Trump's racism.

That didn't last long. I suspected it wouldn't.

Here is Pinker today promoting the center for race science and modern phrenology, Quillette.

To fully understand the race science beliefs of Steven Pinker and Quillette it is necessary to observe their support for hardcore racists over the years.

What they do is outsource the hardcore race beliefs to the less-respectable, being careful not to publicly agree with them too bluntly but still managing to support them, one way or the other.

Pinker will not admit straight-out that he supports the conclusions of race in publications like The Bell Curve, going so far as to claim he didn't agree with that book on race.

But in the very same tweet in which Pinker said he didn't agree with the conclusions about race in The Bell Curve he provided his many Twitter followers with a link to an article which defends the Bell Curve's conclusions about black people.

Leading many people who pay attention to the career of Steven Pinker to conclude he is a weasel.

In that two-faced tweet Pinker displayed a standard strategy in his approach to race science: focus all attacks on the critics of race science. The same technique Pinker used in defense of Linda Gottfredson, seen in this tweet. 

In autumn 2018 Gottfredson's invitation to be a keynote speaker at the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance meeting in Sweden was rescinded, no doubt when they got around to looking at her Wiki.

Quillette published an article complaining about the disinvitation, but failed to mention anything about Gottfredson's race science career, let alone The Pioneer Fund. 

Steven Pinker defended Gottfredson without mentioning her race science career while at the same time attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center because they do mention her race science career.

As far as I am aware, Pinker has never criticized the outrageous race science statements of Linda Gottfredson, like the time she sat down with Stefan Molyneux to rank "races" by intelligence.

This is how it works for the "respectable" proponents of race science. They outsource the most blatant promotion of race and intelligence claims to the likes of Molyneux and Gottfredson, while finding ways to attack critics of race science, focusing on fairness or free speech or politeness, to give themselves distance and plausible deniability.

Steven Pinker, supporter of people like Sailer and Gottfredson does not get his invitations to speak (at places like the United Nations) rescinded because people are not aware of his connections to race science.

That is one of the things this blog hopes to change.

Molyneux's YouTube channel was taken down but you can hear him and Linda Gottfredson ranking "races" by intelligence on this person's YouTube channel.


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