I just mentioned yesterday that I learned of the Ron Unz-Gregory Cochran feud via racemonger Emil Kirkegaard, who writes for the white supremacist Mankind Quarterly.
Charles Murray is a fan of his work, of course.
And apparently Andrew Sullivan is also a fan of Kirkegaard.
Is this why the Orwellian-named "Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism" asked Sullivan to be a member of its board of advisors?
Today we'll talk about Kirkegaard v Smith and what a legal loser Kirkegaard is.
Kirkegaard sued Oliver Smith for defamation for posting comments Kirkegaard didn't like:
Kirkegaard is suing me for four comments I wrote in January and February 2018 (one on my Twitter, three on The Unz Review) and he also wants an injunction so I don’t repeat them.
That was in December 2018.
A year later Smith reported on the preliminary judgement in his favor:
To summarise the outcome – the judge has ruled in my favour the comments I wrote are expressions of opinion and agreed with me their real meanings are not what the Claimant erroneously pleaded. I’m happy with the judge’s ruling; the same cannot be said for the Claimant, who despite antagonising me online up to the date of the judgment – is suddenly silent, having to come to terms with not only losing, but humiliatingly paying a substantial amount of my costs.
Kirkegaard is now in contempt of court, and Smith tweeted about it the other day:
Some fun facts about Kirkegaard via Rational Wiki:
Kirkegaard identifies as a proponent of HBD,[211] i.e. racialism and has described himself as a "race realist",[212] a term coined by J. Philippe Rushton
that is adopted by white nationalists like David Duke. His website contains posts on race and eugenics.[213][214][215] Against the scientific consensus that race is not an accurate way to describe or analyse human biological variation, Kirkegaard erroneously argues human races are valid biological constructs (as "genetic clusters") and makes PRATTs such as quoting Lewontin's Fallacy:
I think one can just read the various existing defenses of race realism if one is curious. The page you link to is well-sourced but an exercise in semantics and irrelevance. E.g. section Genetic evidence: Race does not predict human variation well presents results irrelevant to the title, it is well accepted that most variation is within the major racial groups. It does not follow from this that the between group variation is unimportant. Indeed, even very small differences can make a large difference, as people with mutations in e.g. SRY can report. It does not matter so much to me whether these groups are called races, genetic clusters, biogeographical ancestry or whatever (the most common euphemism in medical genetics).[216]
Kirkegaard doesn't just argue for human races, but maintains there is a racial hierarchy with different "tiers" of races based on average intelligence, for example he considers Indians to be a "lower tier".[217] He argues mean group differences in intelligence is mostly the result of genetic factors, for example writing "The hereditarian hypothesis is almost certainly true.[218] In fact, he has gone as far as arguing "100% genetic for the USA black white gap".[219] Nonsurprisingly, no peer-reviewed science journals would publish this pseudoscience and so Kirkegaard was left submitting a paper to the Mankind Quarterly.[220] On his website, Kirkegaard recommends outdated racialist literature such as John Baker's Race (1974) and in 2015 positively reviewed the far-right Metapedia article on race and intelligence.[221][222] He alleges a left-wing bias in academia that downplays heritability of race and IQ.[223]
Kirkegaard is permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia,[224] having misused the wiki to spread his racist nonsense. He has since whined about Wikipedia deleting his pseudoscientific writings on race.[225]
