Featured Post

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! (If you get that annoying...

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, December 18, 2020

Gretchen Mullen, Colin Wright and Vladimir Putin

The IDW branch of race pseudo-science is so frequently triggered by information presented in graphic format that I have an ongoing series about it here at Pinkerite.

First it was The graphophobia present in Steven Pinker's fan base

Next, Pinkerite graphophobia: meet Colin Wright and Lee Jussim

Then More weirdness from Pinkerites

Next The IDW v Big Data

Then Bret Weinstein targets Rebecca Lewis

A few months ago Steven Pinker and his fan boys.

Steven Pinker's supporters on Twitter, who in my experience are mostly right-wingers, hate my infographic (and accompanying text) entitled Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections with an atavistic hysteria.

And now this latest incident. 

Recently I happened to stumble on a Twitter account called Skeptic Review, who, about a week earlier, expressed derision for my Pinker infographic, seconded by Quillette's managing editor Colin Wright - the second time he's been noted here as a graph-o-phobe. 

You can see Wright's Linked-In profile here. His boss, Quillette founding editor Claire Lehmann also has a Linked-In profile and I was fascinated to see that while she's been founding and running Quillette she's simultaneously been a public relations consultant for Vendorable.

But back to the graph-o-phobia. No matter how many times I've asked Pinker defenders to tell me which part of my diagram is inaccurate, the only thing I can get out of them is insults. 

Colin Wright's comment about my work was predictably stupid and in bad faith. He complains that I didn't explicitly make a line between twin brothers of race science, Quillette's own staff member and blatant racist Bo Winegard, and his brother Ben. 

Besides the fact that they are obviously related - Winegard is not a very common name - and they are right on top of each other and there's not really any room to put a line without it looking weird, I explained at the bottom of the diagram: 

Please note: in an effort to keep the diagram readable I sacrificed completeness. For example: Richard Lynn has also appeared in a Stefan Molyneux video.

I didn't know much about Skeptic Review (the account sometimes goes by the name of Gretchen Mullen) so I checked out its web site and there I found something even weirder than Gretchen Mullen's and Colin Wright's phobia about infographics: Skeptic Review has on several occasions posted North Korean and Russian propaganda, sans comment. 

There doesn't seem to be any connection to skepticism in these posts. Gretchen Mullen, or whoever, apparently just decided to randomly share the propaganda of dictatorships. 

The best one is probably this glorification of Putin as a manly and deeply religious man




Apparently "skeptic" means something different in Gretchen Mullen's world.

Predictably, when I asked Mullen and Wright to explain why a self-proclaimed "all things skeptic" site would publish such things, they hurled insults.


Once again the issue wasn't that I had said something inaccurate - I shared links to the Skeptic Review, which was irrefutable evidence. It seems that Wright is appalled and outraged that someone would point out inconvenient facts.

I've made a big deal about what an absolutely shameless hypocrite James Lindsay is, piously mooing about civility and difficult conversations while being a gigantic asshole on Twitter.



It's not a coincidence: lecturing others about civility and reason while demonstrating the exact opposite, without any apparent awareness or shame, is absolutely on-brand for the IDW/Quillette gang.

Or as IDW stooge Ayaan Hirsi Ali proclaimed of the recently-published Quillette self-congratulation fest:
These authors are living, breathing examples of how to fight for Enlightenment values and how to do it with dignity and civility. --Ayaan Hirsi Ali

And before I forget to mention it - although Colin Wright claims to be a liberal and others claim he's a Trump critic, when it comes to race, Wright and Trump are on the exact same page.

 


Blog Archive

~