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
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Who else is promoting racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard? Carole Hooven of the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology

Steven Pinker, one of the biggest promoters of race pseudoscience is at Harvard. So it shouldn't be a surprise that there are other promoters of such garbage at Harvard.

Yesterday I noted former Harvard president Lawrence Summers promoting professional racist Bo Winegard. But although Summers has had quite a career, constantly falling upwards (what were you thinking Obama?) he's long been known as a bigot who justifies his bigotry through laughably weak evolutionary psychology

And although this is beside the point, I was reading not long ago what an enormous slob Summers is. It's only interesting because I seriously doubt a woman could be such a slob as that and have the professional career Summers has had. Am I right Janet Yellen?

But now I find Carole Hooven, of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, also promoting racist Bo Winegard, and she thanks him for his work - his work for Quillette, the Peter Thiel funded right-wing racist online magazine, so racist that American Renaissance likes to excerpt its articles on race.



Racists like Razib Khan and Andrew Sullivan claim there is no longer systemic racism, but that is easily disproved when you consider the network of right-wing racist plutocrats who provide funding for racists, from Ron Unz granting hundreds of thousands to Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and Gregory Cochran, to Thiel funding Quillette to the Koch and Mercer funding vehicle DonorsTrust which gives millions to white supremacist organizations VDARE and American Renaissance



But of course it's not enough to have extremist media pushing anti-Black racism, you need people like former Harvard president Lawrence Summers and current Harvard employees Steven Pinker and Carole Hooven to help mainstream absurd racist pseudoscience beliefs.

Although Pinker is no longer seen promoting Bo Winegard - probably because, like Steve Sailer, Winegard's racism became too blatant even for Pinker, he certainly has in the past. 

Because of course he has.




Monday, August 29, 2022

Lawrence Summers retweeting racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard

It's been known for a long time that the Peter Thiel-funded Quillette is a right-wing racist garbage rag

So of course we see former secretary of the treasury Lawrence H. Summers retweeting an article from Quillette.
 

But not just any article, it is an article written by one of the most blatant racists in the Quillette stable and that is saying a lot.

It's authored by Bo Winegard, who was seen not too long ago advocating for country-level racial quotas, a scheme the Nazis famously executed. 


I've mentioned Winegard's racism many many times on this blog.


So from what I can tell, racist Steve Sailer influenced Pinker and then Pinker influenced Summers.

But I wasn't aware until now that in addition to being comfortable with misogyny, Summers is also comfortable with racism. But there it is. This is the guy he retweets:





Sunday, August 21, 2022

Friday, August 12, 2022

The nonprofit racists club: the International Society for Intelligence Research

The full-time professional racist club is not 
a good club to be in - and notice that Khan
is feeling sorry for himself claiming people lie about him.
Without providing any evidence, of course.


I really should have been paying more attention to the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), seeing as how it is a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading race pseudoscience.

Much more solid than the relatively amorphous Intellectual Dark Web.

In my defense, tracking the Intellectual Dark Web has been taking up a lot of my time, on top of my day job.

But my neglect of ISIR was remedied today. I saw some tweets go by about someone I had never heard of before, Emily Willoughby, and I really didn't pay attention. Until I saw psychologist Erik Turkheimer defending her.

Not suspecting anything worse, silly trusting me, I began with the assumption that Willoughby was just a typical clueless dummy who incorrectly believes that "heritability" is a measure of genetic causation. Something that both Turkheimer and the paper The Heritability Fallacy have explicitly argued against.

But Willoughby, it turns out, is very much devoted to the cause of promoting race pseudoscience, as I eventually realized.


I am really starting to have doubts about Erik Turkheimer. He always seems to end up defending hereditarians.

And what is wrong with "behavioral genetics" that people like Turkheimer believe that heritability is not a measure of genetic causation, while so many others believe it is a measure of that very thing. As Jonathan Haidt demonstrates in this image.




Nobody in the field ever seems to address what should be a major issue: they can't agree on the meaning of one of their most important terms. One more reason to think that "behavioral genetics" is just another recurrence of socio-biology, with a thin veneer of gene statistics to make it look legitimate.

So Willoughby, it turns out, is not only a long-term enthusiastic admirer of some of the most racist ghouls in the race pseudoscience universe, like Gregory Cochran, HBD Chick, Charles Murray and Linda Gottfredson, but she is on the board of directors of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

The mainstream media, as usual, ignores this shockingly racist organization in spite of its annual conferences featuring hardcore racists. But fortunately The New Statesman did publish an article about them, in 2018:

After we exposed his involvement with eugenicists, Toby Young pointed out that the conference at which he actually spoke, that of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), was “super-respectable” and attended by “numerous world-renowned academics”.

He is entirely correct. The ISIR is home to many great scientists, and its journal Intelligence is one of the most respected in its field. Yet Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures”, serves on the editorial board of Intelligence, along with fellow director of the Pioneer Fund Gerhard Meisenberg, who edits Lynn’s journal Mankind Quarterly. Two other board members are Heiner Rindermann and Jan te Nijenhuis, frequent contributors to Mankind Quarterly and the London Conference on Intelligence. Rindermann, James Thompson, Michael Woodley of Menie and Aurelio Figueredo, all heavily implicated in the London Conference on Intelligence, helped to organise recent ISIR conferences. Linda Gottfredson, a Pioneer Fund grantee and former president of the ISIR, famously authored a letter in the Wall Street Journal defending Charles Murray’s assertion that black people are genetically disposed to an average IQ of “around 85”, compared to 100 for whites.

The tolerance afforded to eugenicists threatens the reputation of respectable scientists. Stephen Pinker, the world-renowned cognitive psychologist, spoke at last year’s ISIR conference. Another speaker at the conference, however, was the aforementioned Emil Kirkegaard, a “self-taught” eugenicist who has written a “thought experiment” which discusses whether raping a drugged child could be defended, and whose research into OKCupid made international headlines for its “grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible” use of personal data.
Ah yes, Steven Pinker. Of course. At the racist roundup. If there is a pack of racists, chances are very good that Steven Pinker will be somewhere nearby. And he still can't stop promoting the career of anti-Black racist Razib Khan.


OK these people are sickening and I have French homework. More soon.

Thursday, August 11, 2022

Trump must be beaten down

Dictator appeaser Damon Linker, who works for the libertarian (founded by Cato members!) think tank Niskanen center (racist Razib Khan's buddy Matthew Yglesias works for them) argues that we shouldn't hold Trump accountable because we'll make the filthy MAGA cult angry.

It's funny, isn't it, that you never see pundits warning MAGAs to tone it down.

You're never going to see an article in the NYTimes or the Washington Post or sponsored by any think tank that says something like: "hey guys, half the country thinks that you and Trump are an existential threat to American democracy - and by extension, the entire world, so maybe you should tone down the rhetoric a little or even maybe rethink your trajectory."

Of course not. 

Because while few mainstream media pundits will come right out and say so, they know that MAGAs can not be reasoned with. They are stupid and evil and resolutely stubborn in their insistence on remaining stupid and evil. Just like any German supporter of Adolf Hitler was.

Linker claims that "half" the country thinks Trump should not be subject to the rule of law, but doesn't back this claim with statistics. The only statistic his article provides is to demonstrate that Trump is more popular with hardcore Republicans ("...the results of the straw poll at last weekend’s CPAC conference, which the former president won with 69 percent") than before.

Since one of Linker's jobs is working at a think tank, he surely must be capable of performing basic research - or asking a Niskanen flunky to do it for him - his exaggeration about "half the country" must be deliberate. 


Half of Americans (50%) think former President Donald Trump should be charged with crimes based on the evidence presented at the House January 6th hearings,

Let alone not think Trump is above the law. And that's half of all Americans, not 69 percent of the hardest hard-core Democrats.

And because 50% of Americans don't think Trump should be charged doesn't mean they actively think he shouldn't be. Many people don't pay attention to anything outside their own tiny lives and so haven't given it much thought. Just like Nixon was popular well into Watergate because so many people - especially Republicans - are ignoramuses:

(Nixon's) support among his allies (who had included some conservative southern Democrats as well as Republicans) had already started to erode significantly, but it was the “smoking gun” tape that finally forced his resignation on August 8, before the House could vote on impeachment. At that point, the public was clearly behind impeachment, although a significant minority of Americans — including most Republicans — still didn’t think Nixon should be removed from office.


But back to our inability to reason with MAGAs. Since you can't get through to MAGAs with reason, what would get through to MAGAs?

The only thing they respect. Power.

Although we didn't have a straw poll to find out, it seems plausible that many Germans supported Hitler right up until the end. Right until he was beaten down. Where were all the Nazi-sympathizers after Hitler was done? Suddenly very scarce.

And that is why Trump must be beaten down. Using every legal means, he must be beaten down. Constantly. Without ceasing. UNTIL HE IS DONE.

Only then will we be free of both him and his filthy treasonous, dictator-loving cult.

UPDATE: Linker is now an author at far-right, racist, Peter Thiel-funded Quillette. More Thielbux for the conscience-free - wheeee!

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

James Lindsay, banned from Twitter for being a neo-Nazi


A tweet by James Lindsay,
darling of the Intellectual Dark Web
and a neo-Nazi


Anybody could see that James Lindsay was a right-wing extremist kook.

I first mentioned his extremism back in 2019. I mentioned him a few times since then, the most prominent was when he came for me, which gave a nice little boost to this blog, and a good chance to talk about his insane "your mom" hypocrisy.

(His partner in grift, Peter Boghossian, also came for me.)

So I'm not surprised Lindsay rode the right-wing extremist grifter gravy train to its logical conclusion: anti-Semitism, as reported in The Daily Beast


Finally, Twitter gave him the boot for hateful conduct.

But this blog could not call itself Pinkerite with any self-respect without spending a moment to mention how much Steven Pinker loved and supported James Lindsay. Along with Andrew Sullivan and Jerry Coyne.

Ending, one hopes, at least by the time Lindsay went full neo-Nazi.










Pinker praising Lindsay's book Cynical Theories.




Blog Archive

~