In this second part of the infinite series on the endless hypocrisy of Steven Pinker, we look at Pinker and Koch-funded, Koch-defending, Federalist Society contributor Harvey Silverglate, singing the praises of Carl Sagan.
Where? Why of course in the right-wing, race pseudoscience-promoting, Peter Thiel-funded Quillette.
(I linked to the Wayback Machine version of the article to avoid giving Quillette the hits.)
Can there be any doubt that if Sagan was alive today, Pinker and all the rest of the plutocrat-funded Quillette gang would hate him for being too "woke"?
And if Sagan was alive today, I don't doubt he would despise racist Quillette and everybody associated with it.
In this paragraph in the article we see Steven Pinker reaching new heights of hypocrisy:
(Sagan) highlighted the virtues common to science and civil liberties that are needed to deal with these challenges: freedom of speech, skepticism, constraints on authority, openness to opposing arguments, and an acknowledgment of one’s own fallibility.
Wow. The shamelessness of the last two items took my breath away:
Openness to opposing arguments: Steven Pinker never ventures outside his cozy plutocrat-funded bubble to talk to anybody who might give him an opposing argument.
Probably because when he does venture outside his bubble, he is asked about his promotion of the career of hardcore racist Steve Sailer.
How unpleasant for Steven Pinker. He can be sure that Quillette has no problem with his promotion of Steve Sailer since Quillette is 100% in favor of Sailer's racist views, as displayed in its very positive review of Charles Murray's race pseudoscience screed against Black Americans, written by J. P Rushton's most devoted disciple, Razib Khan. Steven Pinker, naturally, has also been promoting the career of Razib Khan, since at least 2006.
Pinker is also infamous for blocking anybody on Twitter who has anything critical to say.
Acknowledgement of one's own fallibility: the only time Pinker has ever admitted to being wrong, to the best of my knowledge, is for helping Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense. He's never admitted it was a bad idea to promote the careers of Steve Sailer or Razib Khan, and he's resolutely ignored others pointing out that he miscalculated evidence in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" such as Brian Ferguson's paper Pinker's List.
And when Steven Pinker was caught misrepresenting the words of others, as if the others agreed with him, Pinker had his fanboys Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer attack Phil Torres for daring to point out the truth and for good measure, Shermer called Torres a "cockroach."
Pinker for his part, misrepresented the complaint against him and then said "so what?"
The rest of Torres’s complaint consists of showing that some of the quotations I weave into the text come from people who don’t agree with me. OK, but so what?
