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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Emil Kirkegaard, welcomed back to the International Society for Intelligence Research - after only two years

It seems that Emil Kirkegaard is not only visiting the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) conference in Zurich this year, he gave a presentation, "Imputing intelligence data into existing datasets using the MMPI." He claimed to be representing the "Arthur Jensen Institute."

The evidence of Kirkegaard's participation was originally posted by RiotIQ in a tweet.

But then the tweet was deleted. Fortunately the evidence remains. 

Here is the archived tweet, and here is the photo from the original tweet, below.


Two weeks before the ISIR conference, the preliminary speaker program was shared with the speakers. I noticed that one of the scheduled speakers was a notorious (Abdellaoui provides a link to the Rational Wiki article about Kirkegaard) individual, known for an unhealthy obsession for trying to prove that race differences in IQ and other social traits were due to inborn and immutable genetic differences. Besides a reputation for sloppy scientific work in dubious journals, he was also well known for an obnoxious social media presence, regularly posting messages and memes denigrating a wide range of marginalized groups. This behavior has garnered him a large following of, largely anonymous, online fans. He is a leading figure and major contributor to the bad reputation of intelligence and genetics research. On top of this reputation, this individual has never been part of any credible research program, PhD program, or university, which made it all the more surprising to me that he was invited to speak at the same academic conference as me. I decided to publicly cancel my talk, as I did not want to be associated with this individual.

My theory is that Kirkegaard got an assist from Emily Willoughby a member of the ISIR board

Last year Willoughby, along with another ISIR affiliate James Lee received a half-million dollars from the "Institute of Mental Chronometry." The institute, closely aligned with the ISIR, was founded by Arthur Jensen and the ISIR itself is basically a continuation of Jensenism. The Institute of Mental Chronometry could be called the "Arthur Jensen Institute" since that's essentially what it is.

As recently as May of this year, Willoughby was listed as affiliated with the University of Minnesota, but her page is empty now. But who needs a real job when the ISIR is your sugar daddy?

Willoughby has been quite chummy with Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter over the years.








But what about this mysterious "Arthur Jensen Institute" that Kirkegaard claims affiliation with? 

He doesn't mention the name on any of his online media. Not on Substack, nor his Twitter profile, nor his personal domain site, nor his Google scholar page, nor on Research Gate, nor on Scopus nor on the ISIR's journal "Intelligence" where Kirkegaard has published several times. And it's not mentioned on Kirkegaard's Arthur Robert Jensen memorial site.

It is mentioned in his Open Psych website profile page. But the link doesn't go to a website for the Arthur Jensen Foundation, it just goes to another list of papers.



Kirkegaard was also in the news recently for his business affairs: White Supremacist Who Wants Legal Child Porn Doing Business Through Wyoming LLC.

In short, Emil Kirkegaard is a perfect match for the racist ghoul organization International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Monday, July 29, 2024

The Racist Rodeo 2024 begins ~ where is Cory Clark?

Well it's funny how the ISIR page for the 2024 Racist Rodeo (the annual convention of the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research) doesn't mention Cory Clark. 

Back in January Thomas Coyle - a fan of hardcore racist Russell T. Warne - shared a poster that lists Clark. Apparently she's receiving a "most racist" award and no, that's not hyperbole. Other recipients of the "Constance Holden Award" include Toby Young, Alice Dreger, and Susan Pinker (Steven's sister.)

I didn't see Coyle's post until today though. In my defense, this and most of the info about the League of Professional Racists can be found on Twitter and I hate to go on Twitter, since techno-fascist Trump-boy Elon Musk has made it an absolute dump and it's painful to spend any time there - even besides the tweets from the race pseudoscience gang.

Cory Clark teamed up with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard to write the usual right-wing garbage for racist Quillette.

Clark also co-authored a paper which seems to be the race pseudoscience gang's attempt to revive the use of the term "equalitarian" a favorite of 20th century segregationists.

So of course Steven Pinker is a fan. I don't think Steven Pinker has ever met a racist he doesn't like.

Speaking of hardcore racists, I'm told by my informant that a post by RiotIQ, an account owned by Warne, shows both Anatoly Karlin and Emil Kirkegaard at an ISIR event this year.


The ISIR conference truly is where the hardest of the hard-core racists meet.



Sunday, July 28, 2024

The incredible cynicism of techno-fascist Peter Thiel and the Republican Party

There's an OK article in the Washington Post about all the techno-fascists who hope to control Trump via Thiel's protege, J. D. Vance.

What's disturbing is that it doesn't mention that although Vance is opposed to same-sex marriage, Thiel himself is same-sex married.

The cynicism of the techno-fascist brigade is so obvious - why doesn't the Washington Post article mention it? 

Clearly the hostility towards LGBTQ is nothing but a tactic to get Christian Nationalist votes. 

Meanwhile laws against gay marriage won't hurt a billionaire like Thiel - he has a whole other country, New Zealand, where he can flee to after he trashes the lives of LGBTQ people in the United States of America.

The article mentions Musk and Andreessen of course, and helpfully gives the names of other techno-fascists, some of whom I hadn't heard of before:

  • David Sacks 
  • Jacob Helberg
  • Delian Asparouhov
  • Joe Lonsdale
  • Doug Leone
  • Blake Masters
  • Colin Greenspan
  • Katherine Boyle
  • Evan Swarztrauber
  • Palmer Lucky

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

America's techno-fascist problem

All the disgusting fascists who have been cozy with the IDW and race pseudoscience are supporting Trump:

Anybody still on Twitter (Musk) or Substack (Andreessen) is supporting Trump's efforts to destroy American democracy.

Period.

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

The racist rodeo - European-style - the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) typically alternates between holding its annual conferences in North America and Europe. This is a European year and so the conference is in Zürich.

The line-up appears to have fewer obvious racists this year, although it does have Richard Haier, who is a devotee of 20th century racist Arthur Jensen - ISIR is founded on Jensenism

Haier has been spending his time lately hobnobbing with blatant racists like Charles Murray, Bo Winegard (and the gang at Aporia) and Stefan Molyneux, while promoting the idea that Black Americans can have their innate mental genetic defects cured through genetic manipulation.

One half of the respectability power couple of ISIR, Camille Benbow is also listed as a conference participant. To get an idea of the racist world that Benbow and her husband David Lubinski inhabit, consider Charles Murray's introduction for one of his more recently-published race-screeds, Human Diversity (my emphases):
Jensen made this pronouncement in his magnum opus, The g Factor, published in 1998. The list of eminent scholars who have shared that view began with Cyril Burt and Lewis Terman in the early part of the twentieth century and continued through the rest of the century and into the twenty-first century with figures such as Raymond Cattell, Nathan Brody, Hans Eysenck, John Loehlin, David Geary, Diane Halpern, Thomas Bouchard, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow. I should add that Richard Herrnstein and I took the same position in The Bell Curve.
Murray dedicates the book to Supreme Court corrupter, and Bari Weiss's "sugar daddy" Harlan Crow. I'm guessing Crow is one of the monstrously evil plutocrats funding Murray's racist screeds now.

Murray has, you guessed it, also appeared at ISIR conferences. But he isn't listed (so far) for this year's conference. But let's see who is:

Elsbeth Stern is the host and she seems at first glance far more reasonable than the typical ISIR conference attendee, actually admitting to the missing heritability problem in a paper published by Nature :
The search for the genes responsible for the expression of cognitive capabilities has not yet had much success, despite the money and effort invested in human genome projects.
However, the paper shows she's a big believer in the Pioneer Fund-underwritten twins studies and her second citation is of scientifically worthless evolutionary psychology. So she is fundamentally a proponent of sociobiology - which makes her a perfect fit for the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Brook Macnamara is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Case Western Reserve, and is interested in "individual differences" a term that usually means "group differences" which is a sneaky way of referring to race pseudoscience. Or as Emil Kirkegaard says: "group differences are just individual differences, really." Kirkegaard has also presented at ISIR meetings, until he embarrassed them

Matt McGue has a "collegiate affiliation" in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, and says he is a behavioral geneticist - which is the latest term for proponents of sociobiology.

Wendy Johnson is part of the twin studies sociobiology gang, publishing with Bouchard, McGue and Ian Deary, past president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Sophie von Strum is cited several times in "Human Diversity," by Charles Murray. She is Professor of Psychology in Education and Director of the Hungry Mind Lab at the Department of Education at the University of York and she says she wants to discuss Genomic prediction of educational outcomes - one of the favorite topics of the dread Kathryn Paige Harden, who has also appeared at ISIR conferences.


Wendy M. Williams is another member of the League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters as well as a professor of psychology at Cornell.

Franzis Preckel, and Klaus Oberauer seem to be garden-variety researchers, notable (so far as I can tell, yet) by their comfort with associating their names with an organization full of racists.

Once again, the Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry is paying some bills:

All graduate students and postdocs with an accepted oral or poster presentation for ISIR automatically qualify for $1,500 in travel support (for traveling from outside of Europe) or $1,000 of travel support (for those traveling from within Europe) from the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

That organization is rolling in the dough-re-mi, last year it gave half a million to two race-pseudoscience promoters Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee.

Monday, July 1, 2024

SCOTUS helps Trump take one more step towards dictatorship

Our disgusting, right-wing plutocrat-corrupted Supreme Court has aided and abetted Trump in getting one step closer to a dictatorship.

So how does that connect to this blog, other than it's run by an American? Because Harlan Crow, one of the corrupters of the Supreme Court is also the sugar daddy of Bari Weiss, the queen of the Intellectual Dark Web.

As dissenting Justice Sotomayor wrote:

"Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency," Sotomayor wrote. "It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for 'bold and unhesitating action' by the President, ante, at 3, 13, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more."

"Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent," Sotomayor added.

She added in her opinion, “The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power.”

But let's not give ALL the credit to Harlan Crow - there's also Leonard Leo, ANOTHER friend of Bari Weiss:

Long averse to media attention, Leo recently taped a podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss. The discussion was first highlighted by the watchdog group Accountable.US.

Calling it now: worst decision since Dred Scott. 

Historian David Blight appears to agree.



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