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Thursday, June 1, 2023

Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks

I reported on Sabine Hossenfelder's connection to the Intellectual Dark Web several weeks ago.

I thought she was bad news then - I had no idea how bad.

She can be found on Twitter in 2021 promoting racist garbage rag Quillette, while defending infamous transphobe and disgraced journalist Jesse Singal

I had a feeling her bad take on trans youth was not a one-time incident.


In the screenshot above, I included her response to a comment, because it demonstrates her personality alignment with the Intellectual Dark Web - that smug certainty that they are perfectly rational and objective and untouched by politics, and only those they disagree with have political or ideological commitments.

More recently Hossenfelder can be seen promoting Quillette's sexual harasser's pity party article, written by known harasser Laurence Krauss. I wrote about that recently.



And weeks before she retweeted another article by Laurence Krauss in Quillette. 

PZ Myers has another post about "Krauss, the right-wing cartoon."




Ezra Klein breaks the issue down:

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after publishing an article by the paper’s architecture critic titled “Buildings Matter, Too.” David Boardman, the chair of the board that owns the Inquirer, said Wischnowski had done “remarkable” work but “leaves behind some decades-old, deep-seated and vitally important issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that were not of his creation but that will likely benefit from a fresh approach.”

One interpretation of these events, favored by frustrated conservatives, is that a generation of young, woke journalists want to see the media remade along activist lines, while an older generation believes it must cover the news without fear and favor, and reflect, at the very least, the full range of views held by those in power.

“The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’” wrote the Times’s Bari Weiss. “One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.’”

Another interpretation is that the range of acceptable views isn’t narrowing so much as it’s shifting. Two decades ago, an article like (Tom) Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and a slogan like “Black Lives Matter” would be controversial. Today, Black Lives Matter is in the sphere of consensus, abolishing prisons is in legitimate controversy, and there’s a fight to move Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens into deviance. The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux, and the fight to define its boundaries is more visible.

I have no doubt at this point that Sabine Hossenfelder is one of those "frustrated conservatives" who does not get the problem with comparing Black lives to buildings. The comparison is exactly the point the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is making. 

And there is the effort by conservatives to portray all Black Lives protests as violent. That was not the case. But Black protests have been portrayed that way since the Civil Rights era, a point made by this just-released video from "Some More News."

Hossenfelder is a real dummy, to insert herself into American racial politics like that. 

But maybe not - now that Hossenfelder is being promoted by Big Think, she's no doubt getting her Thielbucks. 

So she won't have to worry about what non-conservatives think. Like the other members of the IDW gang she will be safe inside the right-wing bubble.

Can a Hossenfelder byline in Quillette be far behind?

We know Quillette promotes race pseudoscience. An important reason we know this is because founder Claire Lehmann admitted it.

So this is not Hossenfelder innocently promoting Quillette, unaware of its racism.

Hossenfelder is promoting Quillette because she finds racism perfectly acceptable.

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