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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!

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The media finally discovers that Christopher Rufo is part of the race pseudoscience gang - Rufo defends himself using members of the race pseudoscience gang

Christopher Rufo: racist ghoul
and enormous asshole.

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

I mean, Rufo is part of the Republican-Trump establishment which automatically means racism.

I've been tracking Rufo since at least 2020 because of his association with the race pseudoscience network.

But good work finally catching up, The Guardian.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.

Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism”, has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality”, but his links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.

I'm unfortunately not surprised that the article failed to mention that Richard Haier, "mainstream" scientist is also a member of the Aporia gang.

UPDATE - you just cannot parody these right-wing racist ghouls. Rufo defends himself against charges of being too cozy with race pseudoscience by getting his dear friends, two prominent members of the race pseudoscience network, Claire Lehmann and Peter Boghossian (also Harlan Crow's sugar baby) to speak up for him. 

What a pack of assholes.


UPDATE UPDATE - Jonathan Katz weighs in on this latest example of right-wing racist extremism at Substack.

Sunday, January 28, 2024

A reminder of the scientific consensus: race is biologically meaningless

Contrary to what hereditarians like psychologist and libertarian political operative Steve Pinker and libertarian and political operative Charles Murray believe.

Great lecture by Gresham professor of physic Robin May who has a PhD in mammalian cell biology.


Saturday, January 27, 2024

A third citation for Pinkerite

Still a nobody, but I guess it's something.
----------------------------------------------------------

A few years ago right-wing ghoul Peter Boghossian, one of Harlan Crow's sugar babies, complained that I, a nobody with only two citations, had the audacity to write blog posts criticizing celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.

I just discovered my article Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections has been cited by a paper called Intellectual dark web, alt-lite and alt-right: Are they really that different? a multi-perspective analysis of the textual content produced by contrarians - just published this month.

I'm sure it's not enough for Boghossian, but then again Peter Boghossian is a right-wing political operative funded by one of the men who corrupted Clarence Thomas, so does anybody care what he thinks?

I really have to update that Steven Pinker paper though. I've found out so much more about Pinker and the race pseudoscience network in the almost five years since I published in 2019, plus there are a few typos, including worst of all, in J. Philippe Rushton's name. 

Rushton is one of the founding fathers, along with E. O. Wilson, of contemporary race pseudoscience.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Subscribe to Jonathan Katz and The Racket

 Good for Jonathan Katz - he got off Substack.

Anybody who follows this blog should subscribe to Katz's "The Racket", now at Beehiv - Katz writes about the racist right too and unlike Pinkerite, he's a professional journalist.

As soon as I realized he was off Substack I became a premium subscriber. 




Monday, January 22, 2024

Richard Haier, the ISIR and the 2022 Buffalo mass murder

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This screen cap from the shooter's manifesto
displays not only the  work of Michael Woodley
(upper-right corner section)
but features citations with links to work by other
prominent hereditarians and ISIR regulars:  
Thomas Bouchard, Jr, Robert Plomin and Ian Deary,
The third citation is for an NYTimes article by Nicholas Wade

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



I completed the Rational Wiki article on Richard Haier.

One of the things I discovered while researching Haier is how much he loves Arthur Jensen.

Another thing I discovered is that several participants of International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) conferences - Haier was president of the ISIR in 2016 - were cited in the manifesto of Payton Gendron, the mass-murderer who killed ten Black people in a store in Buffalo New York in 2022. It wasn't only Michael A. Woodley.

You can find the manifesto online if you spend ten minutes looking. Gendron's citations were in the anti-Black section of his manifesto, but he hates Jews too, and has a whole section in the 180 page manifesto ranting against them. But most of the manifesto is devoted to Gendron's loving descriptions of weapons.

Michael Woodley has often been a participant in conferences for the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and achieved fame when it was noticed that his work was cited in the manifesto. You can see it clearly here.

First there was a petition against him. 

Then the New York Times picked up on that and published an article entitled: A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

Richard Haier loves Charles Murray
---------------------------------------------------------------

The subtitle says: "The work of Michael Woodley, a Briton who was cited by the teenager who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, included pseudoscientific theories that have been used to justify racism."

The article does not mention Woodley's connection to the ISIR, but I knew about it because I became aware of Woodley and his connection to the race pseudoscience network back in November.

The failure of the New York Times to make the connection is, I assume, why the ISIR let Woodley participate in this year's conference. The ISIR banished Emil Kirkegaard in 2022, after Abdel Abdellaoui embarrassed the ISIR, but it's doubtful that Woodley (or Abdellaoui) are any less devoted to hereditarianism than Kirkegaard is, so the only reason the ISIR would have had to banish Woodley would be for public embarrassment. 

And why would the ISIR ban Woodley for inspiring a mass murderer? After all, several people who are much more prominent in the world of race pseudoscience, with much longer associations with the ISIR were also cited in the manifesto: Thomas Bouchard, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary and the late J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Donald Temple, and Tatu Vanhanen. Also the shooter used a diagram that appeared in The Bell Curve. Charles Murray has also participated in ISIR conferences. And Richard Haier loves Charles Murray.

I also discovered, while researching Haier, that Kathryn Paige Harden had appeared at two ISIR conferences. The glowing article about her in the New Yorker a couple of years ago neglected to mention that.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

The far right hates Peter Thiel for being gay

I knew this would come out sooner or later. The NYTimes profiled the ghouls who are scheming against diversity, equity and inclusion - and not just DEI statements, but the concepts themselves.

And big surprise - they are racist, misogynist and homophobic.

Last spring, (Heather) Mac Donald emailed some of the same people about news reports that a boyfriend of Mr. Thiel — nominally their ally in the rising “national conservatism” movement — had committed suicide after a confrontation with Mr. Thiel’s husband at a party. Calling the episode “a scandal,” she opined that gay men “are much more prone” to extramarital affairs “on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.” She added mockingly that a friend had once tried to convince her “how wonderful Thiel’s ‘husband’ was.”  
Neither Ms. Mac Donald nor a Manhattan Institute spokeswoman replied to emails seeking comment.

Heather MacDonald is also a huge racist who hates feminists.

In another email to Dr. Yenor, Ms. Mac Donald reflected on a further “curse of feminism”: the proliferation of “nannies of color” in her Manhattan neighborhood and the “bizarreness” of women entrusting their children to caregivers from “the low IQ 3rd world” while devoting themselves to making partner at a law firm.
...
Ms. Mac Donald replied, “We are all just SO grateful if there is a black who does not overtly hate us.” She went on to rail against a libertarian podcast that praised former President George W. Bush for selecting Black people for his cabinet, “as if there is any talent required to make quota appointments.”

In case anybody was wondering exactly how evil Heather MacDonald and the Manhattan Institute are.

Too funny the same people Thiel has likely funded hate him for being gay.

I was glad to see Dorian Abbot got a shout-out in the article, I was talking about him not too long ago.

But where is a mention of "liberal" Steven Pinker? He's part of the gang of ghouls targeting American colleges and diversity, equity and inclusion. 

And he thinks Heather MacDonald is brilliant.



Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Kathryn Paige Harden at International Society for Intelligence Research conferences

I've found that Kathryn Paige Harden has participated in at least two ISIR conferences.

At the 2009 conference she delivered a paper "Why Don’t Smart Kids Have Sex? A Twin-Control Study." Also at that year's conference were Michael Woodley and Charles Murray. Harden claims she's not an hereditarian but by any standard, she absolutely is.

2009 was the year that Woodley published "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications" which was included in the manifesto of the monster who committed mass murder in Buffalo in 2022. 

The mass-murdering freak found other people inspiring, several of whom, like Woodley, have appeared at ISIR conferences. More about that soon.


This image, including part of a Michael Woodley paper (on the left)
 appeared in the manifesto of the 2022 Buffalo mass-murderer


In 2018 Harden delivered the keynote “The Genetic Lottery: Genes, Education, and Egalitarianism." Also at that conference were Woodley, again, and Emil Kirkegaard and Emily Willoughby and the usual mob of race pseudoscience true believers.

Harden can be heard promoting Emily Willoughby in this podcast in 2021:

Paige: It obviously doesn't stop at the neck and most people already know that. I talk about this study in the book where Emily Willoughby, who is a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, She and her colleagues asked a sample of lay Americans, not academics, to estimate the genetic influence on diseases like diabetes or breast cancer, mental illnesses like schizophrenia, but also psychological traits like intelligence or personality.

Richard Haier can be seen using a Harden article to defend Charles Murray and Sam Harris against Ezra Klein. More about Richard Haier soon. Talk about true believers in pure race science. Haier literally believes that the cause of poverty is bad genes, a position I like to call the "hereditarian equation."



Monday, January 15, 2024

The 2023 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research: Steven Pinker, Richard Haier and Michael "mass-murder inspiration" Woodley

Richard Haier having a good time 
with racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

Can there be any doubt that Haier is
rightwing racist ghoul?



Well it took a long time but the race pseudoscience gang at the International Society for Intelligence Research has finally published its program.

Although we've already seen how racist its 2023 meeting attendees are because the racist Aporia on Nazi Substack published this video.

I do appreciate the gang providing a table of participants. But where is Emil O. W. Kirkegaard?

Apparently it doesn't bother Richard Haier to
pal around with professional racists and neo-Nazis like Bo Winegard


Well, as unsavory as these ghouls are - your libertarians, your Quillette authors, your fans of J. P. Rushton, your pals of neo-Nazis, the most appalling participant of the ISIR 2023 conference has got to be Michael Woodley of Menie, "Independent."

The bigwigs at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research must have read this article in the New York Times in 2022 and then all agreed - this is the kind of guy we want to participate in our 2023 conference!

(Woodley) was also cited, among other academic references, in a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo last month.

Despite his own extreme views, the researcher, Michael Woodley — a 38-year-old British man — has been affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, one of Belgium’s leading universities, and his controversial work was originally undertaken as he studied at some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions.

The discovery that the gunman had cited Mr. Woodley’s work shocked many academics, who said they hoped it might now force institutions to confront questions about their responsibility toward society, academic rigor and the space they give to extremist ideas.



I wouldn't hold your breath, shocked academics - as long as there is money to be handed out by racists to people who promote race pseudoscience, they will never question their responsibility!

Sunday, January 14, 2024

David French in the NYTimes claims Steve Pinker is a "liberal"

 Because of course he does. The lazy, stupid media prefers to accept what Steven Pinker says instead of looking at what he does:

French:

For instance, when a Harvard scholar such as Steven Pinker speaks of “disempowering D.E.I.” as a necessary reform in American higher education, he’s not opposing diversity itself. Pinker is liberal, donates substantially to the Democratic Party and “loathes” Donald Trump. The objections he raises are shared by a substantial number of Americans across the political spectrum.

As usual the mainstream media white-washes Pinker's alliances which include:

 And many more. 

But right-wing pundits claiming to be "liberal" is standard now and an old Koch trick

And of course David French is a right-winger who has written for National Review.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Good for you Mr. Beat ~ race is a social construct and systemic racism exists

I've watched the videos of "Mr. Beat" for awhile and although he often talks about American politics, usually he isn't this political. I'm glad he decided to make this video. 


 

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Newsflash: Trump is an idiot

From the Washington Post:

“The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”

Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”

In interviews, historians described Trump’s statements as inaccurate and disputed the notion that a negotiation or compromise could have been reached to halt the war over slavery, which led to the deaths of an estimated 620,000 people between 1861 and 1865, with some historians suggesting the toll was much higher.

Idiot.

Friday, January 5, 2024

Man-baby Musk can't take criticism

I had almost forgotten about this episode of Last Week Tonight from a few weeks ago, but people have been sharing Bankruptcy Elmo's response.



As many have pointed out, this "woke" John Oliver is exactly the same John Oliver of the past ten-plus years.

We have a serious techno-fascist stochastic terrorist man-baby billionaire problem.
 

Thursday, January 4, 2024

Jordan Peterson and Steve Sailer and Some More News - and Steven Pinker and the right-wing Harvard coup



I've provided a link to this excellent Some More News video about crackpot Jordan Peterson previously, but I hadn't watched it all the way through until yesterday. In my defense it is a really long video, which Cody lampshades several times throughout.

So I hadn't realized that racist filth Steve Sailer got a shout-out in the video. Jordan Peterson tweeted an article by Sailer that distorted the findings of a study about diversity. Some More News points out, accurately, that Sailer is a white supremacist.

The video also mentions Stefan Molyneux, Bari Weiss, Linda Gottfredson and Andy Ngo. 

Remember, billionaire techno-fascist Marc Andreessen admires Peterson.

Now Steven Pinker's alliance with Steve Sailer - from using him as his data guy to including a piece of crap that Sailer wrote in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" - is a prime reason for the existence of this blog. I am motivated to point out that while Pinker was playing a mild-mannered liberal college professor, an image aided and abetted by a compliant, lazy, stupid media, he has a history of over twenty years of promoting white supremacists and racists.

And Pinker has not only never denounced Steve Sailer and has never expressed regret for promoting his career, Steven Pinker is now chummy with Richard Hanania, yet another white supremacist.

Here is Steven Pinker's only subscription on Twitter - to Richard Hanania.

And now Pinker has teamed up with Christopher Rufo, Bari Weiss and all the IDW/Quillette/right-wing, plutocrat-funded ghouls and the GOP in the GOP war on colleges, starting with destroying Harvard's first Black woman president, Claudine Gay.

In the New York Times, Gay rightly notes this is not only about her, it's a campaign to "unravel public faith in pillars of American society."

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Pinker & friends claim to be so concerned about anti-Semitism, yet I haven't heard a peep out of them about the fact that Substack promotes Nazis. Maybe because some of those Nazis are their friends.

UPDATE: Pinker makes it clear he and his rightwing ghoul mob are gunning for all American education institutions:

Pinker has proposed adopting a clear policy on academic freedom, promoting a wide range of viewpoints and embracing institutional neutrality by avoiding pronouncements on events of the day.

"It’s not just about Harvard, but about higher education and institutions in general,” Pinker said.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Peter Thiel is not only a crackpot but a great big honking racist

 I've long noted that Peter Thiel is a crackpot.

A recent Atlantic profile about Thiel confirms he - along with the New Criterion crowd - is a huge racist. (My bold emphasis.)

In the last thursday in April, Thiel stood in a ballroom at the Metropolitan Club, one of New York’s finest Gilded Age buildings. Decorative marble fireplaces accented the intricate panel work in burgundy and gold, all beneath Renaissance-style ceiling murals. Thiel had come to receive an award from The New Criterion, a conservative magazine of literature and politics, and to bask in the attention of nearly 300 fans.

These were Thiel’s people, and he spoke at the closed-press event with a lot less nuance than he had in our interviews. His after-dinner remarks were full of easy applause lines and in-jokes mocking the left. Universities had become intellectual wastelands, obsessed with a meaningless quest for diversity, he told the crowd. The humanities writ large are “transparently ridiculous,” said the onetime philosophy major, and “there’s no real science going on” in the sciences, which have devolved into “the enforcement of very curious dogmas.”

Thiel reprised his longtime critique of “the diversity myth.” He made a plausible point about the ideological monoculture of the DEI industry: “You don’t have real diversity,” he said, with “people who look different but talk and think alike.” Then he made a crack that seemed more revealing.

“Diversity—it’s not enough to just hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars,” he said, prompting laughter.

I was sorry the piece did not talk about Thiel's crackpot, Bible-quoting keynote speech for another gang of Thiel's people, the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference. 

Someone at Rational Wiki recently questioned the claim that Thiel "secretly supported Quillette" made by right-winger Charles C. Johnson and quoted in Max Chafkin's book on Thiel, "The Contrarian" on the grounds that Johnson is untrustworthy.

I don't know what Johnson could have gotten out of falsely claiming Thiel supported Quillette, since very few people have even heard of Quillette. And Johnson's claim that Thiel was working for the FBI appears to be confirmed in this Atlantic article:

Thiel received an invitation that day, and then again in January 2022, to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. No agenda was specified. Thiel had been fascinated by Putin’s czarlike presence in a room in Davos years before, all “champagne and caviar, and you had sort of this gaggle of, I don’t know, Mafia-like-looking oligarchs standing around him,” he recalled, but he did not make the trip.

Instead, he reported the contact to the FBI, for which Thiel had become a confidential human source code-named “Philosopher.” Thiel’s role as an FBI informant, first reported by Insider, dated back to May 2021. Charles Johnson, a tech investor, right-wing attention troll, and longtime associate of Thiel’s, told me he himself had become an FBI informant some time ago. Johnson introduced Thiel to FBI Special Agent Johnathan Buma.

A source with close knowledge of the relationship said Buma told Thiel that he did not want to know about Thiel’s contacts with U.S. elected officials or political figures, which were beyond the FBI’s investigative interests. Buma saw his interactions with Thiel, this source said, as strictly “a counterintelligence, anti-influence operation” directed at foreign governments.

Thiel responded to my questions about his FBI relationship with a terse “no comment.” A close associate, speaking with Thiel’s permission, said “it would be strange if Peter had never met with people from the deep state,” including “three-letter agencies, especially given the fact that he founded Palantir 20 years ago.”

Johnson told me he knows he has a reputation as a right-wing agitator, but said that he had fostered that image in order to gather information for the FBI and other government agencies. (He said he is now a supporter of President Joe Biden.) “I recognize that I’m an imperfect messenger,” he said. He told me a great many things about Thiel and others that I could not verify, but knowledgeable sources confirmed his role in recruiting Thiel for Buma. He and Thiel have since fallen out. “We are taking a permanent break from one another,” Thiel texted Johnson about a year ago. “Starting now.”

I think it's very plausible that Thiel has funded - and still is funding Quillette, since Thiel's New Criterion speech sounds exactly like something written by a Quillette stooge. 

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

What's that anti-woke fanatic Anna Krylov up to now?

"Western civilization" propaganda from Dorian Abbot and
the rightwing-funded "Minding the Campus"
which, of course, hates the 1619 Project
------------------------------------------------------------------
I've written a few times about Anna Krylov and her boyfriend Jay Tanzman (Jerry Coyne referred to
them as partners and Tanzman as a "freelance statistician"
) especially Krylov who wrote a screed against renaming science terms, hyperbolically comparing that to being burnt at the stake. Krylov and Tanzman have also written for racist Quillette - of course.

Recently they were seen publicly aligning with a whole bunch of racists like neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, co-authoring a paper which is yet another attempt by the racist right to "move the Overton window" and make race pseudoscience mainstream. I wrote about that here.

I guess that's why they put me on their mailing list. I recently found something in my inbox with the headline "A New Online Collection Documents Censorship in Science."

It says:

Following up on their perspective on scientific censorship published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, co-author Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman have published an online collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds documenting the modern rise of censorship in science. The collection, titled Spotlight on Scientific Censorship, can be viewed here.

They mean following up on the aforementioned paper they produced with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard and the other race pseudoscience ghouls.

The collection is the usual right-wing garbage written by the usual racists and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web and its very own Austin University. 

This latest effort by the racist right to move the Overton window in favor of racism is being promoted on the Substack (of course) of Dorian Abbot, associated with Austin University.

Abbot was recently mentioned here on Pinkerite as part of the gang giving evolutionary psychologist Carole Hoover (fan of the hateful, Kiwi Farms-praising Gender Wars playing cards) an award for her support of hereditarianism.

A glance at Abbot's Twitter timeline shows that although he is a professor of geophysical sciences, he is far more interested in promoting right-wing political schemes. I suspect it's because being a right-wing political operative pays better than a geophysical sciences professorship. 

Abbot's Substack, "Heterodox STEM" also publishes... 

And on and on, the usual collection of right-wing ghouls, goons and grifters.

And of course this latest Krylov/Tanzman effort is being promoted by a fellow participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (Dorian Abbot was there tootheir travel buddy Jerry Coyne.

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