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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

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

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Sunday, May 31, 2020

Trump's campaign strategy: Reichstag fires

Trump tweet from today

I am certainly not the first person to make a connection between Trump and the Reichstag fire strategy. As Timothy Snyder wrote in Reichstag Warning in the New York Review of Books on February 26, 2017, a month after Trump was sworn in. (my highlights):
In February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.” 
The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.... 
...The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror—real or fake, provoked or accidental—can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy. 
The most consequential example is Russia, so admired by Donald Trump. When Vlaimir V. Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, the former KGB officer had an approval rating of 2 percent. Then, a month later, the bombs began to explode in apartment buildings in Moscow and several other Russian cities, killing hundreds of citizens and causing widespread fear. There were numerous indications that this was a campaign organized by the KGB’s heir, now known as the FSB. Some of its officers were caught red-handed (and then released) by their peers. A Russian parliamentarian announced one of the “terror” attacks several days before the bomb actually exploded.
Putin blamed Muslim terrorists and began the war in Chechnya that made him popular. He thereafter exploited more terrorist attacks to consolidate his rule
: three years later, Russian security forces ended up gassing to death Russian civilians in a botched response to an attack at a Moscow theater. Putin used the negative press coverage as a justification for seizing control of television. In 2004, after the Beslan massacre, in which terrorists occupied a school and killed a large number of parents and children during a violent confrontation with Russian forces, Putin abolished the position of elected regional governors. And so the current Russian regime was built...
...It is alarming that in a series of catastrophic executive policy decisions—the president’s Muslim travel ban, his selection of Steve Bannon as his main political adviser, his short-lived appointment of Michael Flynn as national security adviser, his proposal to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—there seems to be a single common element: the stigmatization and provocation of Muslims. In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized “radical Islamic terror” thus making what Madison called a “favorable emergency” more likely.
It appears that Synder thought Trump would use Muslims to execute his Reichstag fire strategy, but now it appears - or rather it has appeared since last August - that Trump intends to use ANTIFA as the great bogeyman.

And ANTIFA is the perfect vehicle. ANTIFA - for anti-fascist - like to protest wearing masks and refuse to reveal their identities. This is custom-made for use by the Right to infiltrate, commit mayhem and blame it on leftists and the "terrorist organization" ANTIFA.

The connection between Trump's Reichstag fire strategy and the IDW is through Andy Ngo.  Ngo is a right-wing sympathizer who disgraced himself so badly that he's no longer with Quillette but rather has descended even further into the pits by joining the right-wing garbage publication Post-Millennial.
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. 

After the Ngo-ANTIFA brouhaha last July/August, it turned out that Ngo's lawyer is Republican committee woman Harmeet K. Dhillon.

The Proud Boys are apparently at it again.

This tweet is also from today

The Proud Boys is a right-wing organization founded by Gavin McInnes, who has his own IDW connection - he worked for the right-wing extremist Canadian Rebel Media along with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.


Meanwhile another organization of anonymous individuals called Anonymous has apparently published information about Trump's connection to Epstein although the story is not new. And of course the IDW has another connection to Trump - Steven Pinker was also a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein.

Although it was new to me that Trump had been accused of child molestation - of both boys and girls - by a web site called the Wayne Madsen Report:
In addition to Stephanie Clifford, aka porn actress "Stormy Daniels," and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, Cohen reportedly helped settle a number of rape cases involving Trump. WMR received a list from a reputable Republican source of these settlement claims, all of which involve male and female minors: 
  1. Michael Parker, 10-years old, oral rape, Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, FL, 1992. Trump paid his parents a $3 million settlement.
  2. Kelly Feuer, 12-years old, $1 million settlement paid in 1989, allegations of forced intercourse, Trump Tower, NY, NY.
  3. Charles Bacon, 11-years old, $3 million, allegations of oral and anal intercourse, 1994, Trump Tower, NY, NY.
  4. Rebecca Conway, 13-years old, intercourse and oral sex. Trump Vineyard Estates, Charlottesville, VA, 2012, $5 million settlement.
  5. Maria Olivera, 12-years old. Her family was paid $16 million to settle allegations of forcible intercourse occurring in Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, FL, 1993.
  6. Kevin Noll, 11-years old, anal rape, Trump Tower, NY, NY. 1998. Settlement details unknown.
Five of the six alleged incidents took place at two of Trump's best-known properties -- Trump Tower in New York City and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, FL. The exception is incident No. 4, which is the most recent (2012) and took place at Albemarle Estate at Trump Winery. Donald and Eric Trump opened the facility as a bed-and-breakfast in May 2015.

Trump started negotiating to acquire the property after it went into foreclosure in 2011. Trump formally purchased the entire estate in October 2012.
 
The child-sex settlements might explain Trump's reluctance to disclose his tax returns, WMR reports, and documents indicate our "president" is a deeply disturbed individual:
WMR's GOP source indicated that Trump has refused to release his tax returns because they will reveal the many out-of-court settlements he has paid to silence his assault victims and their families. The list of Trump's child victims came with an interesting reference point that was apparently part of the documentation in the settlement cases. Trump was designated with a psychiatric disorder referenced in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5). The referenced disorder is "Pedophilic Disorder (F65.4)."

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Trump is back to ratfucking

TRUMP THIS WEEK
Last summer I noted the connections between the IDW, Andy Ngo, his lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillon a Republican Committeewoman and Trump and Trump's plans to ratfuck the election campaign.

Trump stopped doing his ANTIFA ratfucking scheme for many months, first because his attempt to ratfuck Joe Biden through Ukraine led to a scandal, trial and impeachment (but not removal, tragically for the USA) and then not long after that, the coronavirus pandemic locked everything down.

But black people coming out to protest the killing of a black man gave Trump a good excuse to start the ratfucking scheme back up again. Which he promptly did.

TRUMP LAST AUGUST
A MONTH BEFORE THE UKRAINE
SCANDAL HIT
The next step, which Trump attempted already last summer, is to try to connect Antifa violence to the Democrats.



Thursday, May 28, 2020

There are no heroes anymore: Charles Blow is a bigot

Pinkerite normally fights those who say that non-white people, especially African Americans are innately evil. 

But sometimes Pinkerite must fight against those who say that white people are innately evil. I wrote a series about what a creep Robin DiAngelo is.

I had a feeling that the Central Park incident of a white woman calling the police on a black man would incite the bigotry of people who hate white women.

I did expect it would be someone who has long been a bigot who hates white women like Ruby Hamad.

I didn't expect it would also be Charles Blow.

It's bizarre that the NYTimes ran two op-eds expressing bigotry against white women on the same day.

The Central Park woman represents "white women" as much as Bill Cosby represents "black men."

I've been a long-time admirer of Charles Blow as can be seen on my personal blog.

And now Charles Blow is revealed as a blatant, shameless bigot.

There are no heroes anymore.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Bari Weiss promotes the IDW ~ 2020 edition

Contempt for women
This is where the Dirtbag Left, the IDW and Trump supporters find common ground: contempt for women


New York Times columnist Bari Weiss famously promoted her friends, mostly right-wingers as the "Intellectual Dark Web" two years ago.

Since then, the Intellectual Dark Web has had its ups and downs. Ben Sexmith of the right-wing, Trump-loving Spectator USA was ready to perform an autopsy on it just this month:
The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ has fractured now. Sam Harris is still droning on his podcast with more soporific power than a packet of Restoril. Rubin has become an overblown Fox News personality. God bless Jordan Peterson, wherever he is. The phenomenon left lots of people with a lot of questions. If we want them to have answers, well — now is our chance.
And Quillette certainly isn't what it was in 2018. Sure, it's still a sausagefest - I counted two bylines from women among twenty-four on its homepage today, but lately the coronavirus pandemic has shifted its focus from Quillette's usual enemies list: liberals, socialists, feminists, Muslims, and opponents of race science. Although reliably there is an article attacking transgender activism as a mob by bigot and hypocrite Jon Kay.

According to Graphetron, Quillette has fewer patrons now than when Bari Weiss promoted it in 2018 as "...the publication most associated with (the IDW) movement."



But Quillette is not dependent on individuals, it has an admitted funder, right-wing plutocrat Mark Carnegie, and other unnamed funders. My bet is one of them is Koch.

And speaking of sausagefests - Joe Rogan is the most successful of Bari's IDW friends. Bari wrote an article for the NYTimes today celebrating Rogan's Spotify deal:
When I saw the news that the king of all podcasting, Joe Rogan, had inked a deal with Spotify for his widely popular show I texted to congratulate him on getting crazy rich. How rich? 
“Weirdly richer,” he replied. “Like it doesn’t register. Seems fake.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal could amount to more than $100 million, a number that Rogan doesn’t want to discuss. “It feels gross,” he told me Thursday night. “Especially right now, when people can’t work.”

News of Tuesday’s deal, which gave Spotify exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” sent the company’s stock soaring: It added $1.7 billion to its market cap in 23 minutes. The musician and critic Ted Gioia pointed out on Twitter that “a musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights.”

OK, so it’s a lot of money. But Spotify reportedly paid almost double for Bill Simmons’s podcasting company, the Ringer, earlier this year. Money is not the only reason this deal matters.
 
Rogan is a friend of mine, and I’ve been on his show. But I still find the extent of his popularity mind-boggling. Imagine if I had told you, a dozen years ago, that the former host of “The Fear Factor,” an MMA color commentator who loves cool cars and shooting guns and working out, a guy with a raw interview show featuring comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was more influential than the entire slate of hosts on CNN.
You’d think I was nuts. But it’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and wearing loafers at hedge funds.
With "His fans are everywhere" Weiss links to an article in The Atlantic about Rogan. But Weiss never mentions a major point in The Atlantic piece: Rogan's fans are overwhelmingly male.
Most of Rogan’s critics don’t really grasp the breadth and depth of the community he has built, and they act as though trying is pointless. If they decide they want to write off his podcast as a parade of alt-right idiots and incels (as opposed to a handful of cretins out of about 1,400 guests) they will turn up sufficient evidence. And his podcast is a parade of men. So many men. Talking so (so, so, so) much about the things men talk about in 2019 when they think no one’s listening.
 It's curious that Weiss omits this - possibly because she's trying to help out her self-declared friend Joe Rogan achieve a bigger audience.

Although the article is about Rogan, Weiss can't help mention other members of the IDW:
But there is also a very practical reason Rogan can say whatever he thinks: He is an individual and not an organization. Eric Weinstein, another podcaster and a friend of Rogan, told me, “It’s the same reason that a contractor can wear a MAGA hat on a job and an employee inside Facebook headquarters cannot: There is no HR department at ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’.” 
Eric Weinstein is not only a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, he's its founder. If Bari Weiss is getting paid as the IDWs press agent, Weinstein would be the one cutting the checks.

And Joe Rogan has done exactly as the IDW would want. Before it was clear that Biden was the front-runner, Rogan supported Sanders. After Biden was the presumed nominee, he supported Trump and he said it while he was talking to Eric Weinstein who works for Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

In standard IDW fashion, Weiss claims several times in the article that Trump-supporting IDW Joe Rogan is not political. But he is absolutely political and he clearly is right-wing and has a special antagonism towards women. This is again from the Atlantic article Weiss linked to:


Rogan’s most recent Netflix special is often funny because Joe Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these? “I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he says during the special, which is something all comedians say, and is sort of true but also sort of not. People reveal their deepest selves in the subjects they keep revisiting, and the hills they choose to die on. With Rogan, you can often see and hear the tension between what he knows he’s supposed to believe and what he really thinks. Joe Rogan may be all about love, but beneath the surface he’s seething.
The members of the dirtbag left
 that Bari Weiss likes
In the article, Weiss mentions podcasts she likes to listen to, including one by Sam Harris. She also mentions a podcast called Red Scare, which is part of the Dirtbag Left. One of the hosts of Red Scare is Anna Khachiyan known for trashing feminists with Chapo Trap House's Amber A'Lee Frost in Spiked, a media outlet funded by Koch to run its free speech grift called the "Unsafe Space Tour", the one in which Steven Pinker made his pro alt-right remarks.

Red Scare demonstrates exactly where the Dirtbag Left and the IDW meet, in their admiration for Camille Paglia, stating at one point in their podcast which promotes an article by her: "(Paglia's) right about everything."

Camille Paglia is the ideal feminist for the IDW and the Dirtbag Left because she has utter contempt for women, proclaiming:

"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts."

Quillette founder Claire Lehmann referenced this remark by Paglia with approval.

Many members of the IDW admire Camille Paglia: Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Claire Lehmann (of course), Charles Murray, Eric Weinstein, (Anna Khachiyan and Eric Weinstein admire Paglia together on Weinstein's podcast)

This is where the Dirtbag Left, the IDW and Trump supporters find common ground: contempt for women. As the Atlantic article says:
In 2019, men feeling thwarted and besieged is a bipartisan experience. This is the era of the Angry White Man, and it’s not just the MAGA army. It’s a description that also matches your garden-variety “Bernie bro,” the Biden guy who just wants to change the subject, and that walking man bun who charged the stage at a Kamala Harris campaign event and showed his “profound respect” for all the women present—for a conversation about equal pay—by grabbing the microphone to lecture her about animal rights. All kinds of men out there are pissed off and looking for someone to blame.
They are looking to blame women. Especially women who don't know their place in what the Dirtbag-IDW-Trump coalition consider the natural male-dominated order of things.

This is especially well-illustrated by a recent NYTimes article about Chapo Trap House, the leading Dirtbag media outlet:
They dove into a discussion of the caucuses, and polling, and whether the media is fair to Mr. Sanders (they think not). 
“Should everything go according to plan on Monday, you will have the opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of every single one of the most insufferable cowards in the world,” Mr. Menaker said. 
“I’ve been keeping a list,” Ms. A’Lee Frost said. “Have you been keeping a list?”

There was a case of White Claw, an alcoholic seltzer water, onstage.
 
When Hillary Clinton’s name came up, the reaction was nearly indistinguishable from a Trump rally.

“Lock her up,” the co-host Matt Christman said to the crowd.

The crowd began to chant: Lock her up. Lock her up.
 
“She never really cracked the glass ceiling,” Mr. Biederman said. “She more like fell down the glass staircase.”
This photo from the NYT article demonstrates the male:female ratio for the 
Chapo Trap House audience is about the same as Quillette's bylines
Speaking of misogynist media that is doing very well financially, Chapo Trap House rakes in millions of dollars. Someone on Twitter posted a listing of how much money leftist podcasts make and it's a lot, especially because for some of the podcasters, like Jacobin and the Bruenigs, the podcast is a side hustle.

Ken Klippenstein, an author at The Nation magazine, found it offensive that someone pointed this out.


The top four earners in this list are part of the Dirtbag Left, and #5 on the list, The Dig, which is Jacobin, is very friendly with the Dirtbag Left and has the same hostility to feminism as the Dirtbags.

Jacobin recently published an article in which it was asserted that feminism isn't about women, it's about every gender. Although this being Jacobin the actual point is that women should stop focusing on their own rights like selfish capitalist bitches and learn where they rank in the socialist hierarchy (not very high.)

 I'm still waiting for Jacobin to publish an article about Black Lives Matter declaring it's not about black lives.




Weiss' article tells us that Joe Rogan is the new mainstream, but ends like this:
The real question for Rogan Nation is whether their man will be changed by a Spotify contract. “Why would I sell out now? You sell out to get what you want.”
And he’s got it.
Now that Rogan is taking Spotify's money, its guidelines may well change Rogan's show. According to Spotify's web site:
Hate content is content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability. We do not permit hate content on Spotify. When we are alerted to content that violates this standard, we will remove it from the platform. If you believe a piece of content violates our hate content policy, complete the form here and we will carefully review it against our policy. We are also continuing to develop and implement content monitoring technology which identifies content on our service that has been flagged as hate content on specific international registers.
Repeated violations of our prohibited content policies can result in losing access to the Spotify platform

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Blocked by Jerry Coyne - because he loves free speech so much

Steven Pinker's most groveling fan boy Jerry Coyne blocked Pinkerite on Twitter.

Because I posted a link on one of his Twitter threads to my blog post criticizing Pinker and other Koch toadies for their charade, pretending to care about free speech in a long-cold controversy when their real interest lies in promoting race science, and possibly just as important, attacking the press as Orwellian on behalf of Koch.

What race science promoters mean by free speech is the ability to promote their crackpot 18th-century based race theories as science, free of criticism.

It's important to note, however, that Coyne isn't only Uriah Heep, the toadies' toady, he is also a hypocritical, misogynist, Islamaphobic, cranky old man, supporter of race "science."

White supremacist American Renaissance likes Coyne enough to reprint him.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Four Koch toadies defend race science

Steven Pinker has been quiet lately about race science, but never fear, he still firmly supports it.

Politico recently published an article The New York Times Surrendered to an Outrage Mob. Journalism Will Suffer For It  by Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Pamela Paresky and Nadine Strossen defending Bret Stephens' citation of a wildly speculative paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), in an op-ed in the NYTimes.


Jerry Coyne, Pinker's ever-loyal toady, promoted the Politico article on his blog, in a post entitled Four heavy hitters criticize the New York Times for “Orwellian” retroactive censorship

Pinkerite discussed the article in question by Stephens, The Secrets of Jewish Genius, at the time it was published. I quoted Stephens from the article: 
The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper.
The 2005 paper quoted by Stephens is Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, which Stephens linked to in his op-ed.

Now if it's "common" to believe that Jews tend to be smart, couldn't Stephens have found another source to back up his claim? And in fact, Stephens supporters, while trying to defend Stephens, were able to do just that (my highlights.)
Stephens took up the question of why Ashkenazi Jews are statistically overrepresented in intellectual and creative fields. This disparity has been documented for many years, such as in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene by the eminent sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. In his Times column, Stephens cited statistics from a more recent peer-reviewed academic paper, coauthored by an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the authors of that paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the overrepresentation, arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group because of inherited traits, Stephens did not take up that argument. In fact, his essay quickly set it aside and argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.
So if the four defenders of Stephens could find a source of statistics other than NHAI, why couldn't Stephens? I think it's likely because Stephens agrees with NHAI and wants to promote it but also wanted to maintain plausible deniability. For in spite of the claim by his four defenders that Stephen's essay "argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind" what Stephens actually does is throw out a bunch of possible explanations without committing to any one of them. Then Stephens leaves it as an open question:
These explanations for Jewish brilliance aren’t necessarily definitive. 
Stephens is practiced at this method, as in his piece on climate change, in which he says:
None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.
He's not saying severe anthropogenic climate change is impossible, he's just implying ordinary citizens should be skeptical of environmentalists.

I imagine this trick, of casting doubt on settled science while maintaining a pose of neutrality, or contrariwise promoting an unfounded speculation while maintaining a pose of neutrality makes him a desirable ally of the Kochtopus.

And of course faux neutrality is a favorite tactic of the IDW - associates of Quillette have long tried to claim the rag is centrist while it has relentlessly promoted right-wing views and its founder  Claire Lehmann hobnobs with conservatives and takes their money.

Steven Pinker is a practiced hand at plausible deniability.

The Stephens defenders attempt to downplay the connection between Henry Harpending's racism and his co-authoring a paper that supports race science:
Second, the Times redacted a published essay based on concerns about retroactive moral pollution, not about accuracy. While it is true that an author of the paper Stephens mentioned, the late anthropologist Henry Harpending, made some deplorable racist remarks, that does not mean that every point in every paper he ever coauthored must be deemed radioactive. Facts and arguments must be evaluated on their content. Will the Times and other newspapers now monitor the speech of scientists and scholars and censor articles that cite any of them who, years later, say something offensive? Will it crowdsource that job to Twitter and then redact its online editions whenever anyone quoted in the Times is later “canceled”?
The four Stephens defenders imply that the problem critics have with citing NHAI is not because of its lack of "accuracy" (the real issue is NHAI is unsupported speculation) but because it's "immoral" which is always race science promoters response to criticism of their poorly-supported, speculative claims about race.

Steven Pinker, as the Politico article fails to mention, is in the public record as a supporter of the NHAI paper. Some years ago he gave a speech, still available on Youtube, called "Jews, Genes and Intelligence." Although he never bluntly states that the NHAI hypothesis is correct, he begins the lecture by strongly defending a pillar of race science belief - that "race" is biological:
I think it's safe to say that the current approach at least the approach for in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence I. mentioned the miss measure of man as the foremost example to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups. there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever that there are that it's purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do this Nazis but on the other hand there is a quotation I don't know who's responsible for it reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
Pinker then spends the rest of the lecture coming up with support for the NHAI hypothesis.

So contrary to his misleading self-presentation in the Politico piece, Pinker is not a neutral observer of a controversy about NYTimes "censorship" or simply a believer in free speech - he is a devoted partisan of the cause of race science. As is another co-author of the piece, Jonathan Haidt.

You can see Haidt here speculating, much as Charles Murray has done, that any day now we will have evidence for innate ethnic inferiority:
The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 
I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.
What I find most interesting in this passage is Haidt's emphasis on "ethnic differences in moralized traits" which is a favorite topic of biosocial criminologists

 The Politico article provides bios of all four authors, but none of them mentions the authors' connections to Koch.

I have mentioned frequently on this blog Pinker's connection to Koch.

I have also mentioned the fact that Pamela Paresky works for FIRE, which is funded by Koch.

Haidt co-wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" with Greg Lukianoff, who is president of FIRE. And I suspect if I dig I could find other connections between Koch-funded organizations and Haidt. Once I get around to that I will report what I find.

Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU is now tight with the Koch network through her connections to the Cato Institute, founded by Charles Koch:
Cato has also worked on occasion with the American Civil Liberties Union. For example, Nadine Strossen, the president of its board, contributed a chapter to a 2000 book on President Clinton's civil liberties record, and she delivered the B. Kenneth Simon Lecture at Cato's 2005 Constitution Day event, a speech that was subsequently published in Cato's Supreme Court Review.
...the Federalist Society, a lavishly funded conservative legal group that currently serves as a pipeline to the Trump administration. (Many of Trump’s judicial nominees are members of the Federalist Society, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whom Leo reportedly selected for the seat himself.) Leo is friends with David and Charles Koch, who have both donated generously to his organization.
So I think it's fair to say all four of the co-authors defending Bret Stephens are Koch toadies.

And in typical right-wing hypocrisy, it seems to bother the four toadies not at all that Bret Stephens himself is no friend of free speech. He infamously tried to get professor David Karpf fired because Karpf made a joking reference to Bret Stephens and bedbugs in a tweet.

Race science promoters and Koch toadies are nothing if not massive, shameless hypocrites.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Nikole Hannah-Jones wins Pulitzer for 1619 Project

Nikole Hannah-Jones
One of the reasons why idiots like Sam Harris, Charles Murray, Steven Pinker and others associated with the IDW can get away with their claims about the innate inferiority of African Americans is because so much African American history has been ignored and professional racists like Steve Sailer earn a living lying about Africa Americans.


So Pinkerite was very pleased when the 1619 project came along to help remedy the situation, something that Sailer in particular was very displeased about.

And now that Jones has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, Sailer and his racist scum followers at Unz are having a meltdown. I won't link to it though, I've given Sailer enough links.

No surprise, James Lindsay, crackpot and another friend of the IDW and sugar baby of right-wing religious fanatic Michael O'Fallon is also triggered by it.


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