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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! (If you get that annoying...

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Monday, October 28, 2024

Adam Rutherford says no to racist $1K


Adam Rutherford, a long-time critic of race pseudoscience, is a big fan of the excellent HOPE Not Hate report Race Science Inc.

He wrote an article for the Guardian about it: Propelled by tech money, the menace of race science is back – and it’s just as nonsensical as ever.

So it was absolutely flabbergasting to read in the Race Science Inc. article that the racists asked Rutherford to write for them:

Frost added that he was using these high-profile guests as a “shield” to avoid scrutiny, giving the semblance of a respectable publication. In March 2023, he approached Adam Rutherford, the UCL geneticist, and offered him $1,000 for a regular column on Aporia. Rutherford, who has published extensively against scientific racism, criticising the likes of Kirkegaard and Dutton, rejected the offer.


Few Americans know who Adam Rutherford is, but he is huge in England

It's hysterical that Aporia thought they could get Rutherford to destroy his entire career for them, and to add insult, for a measly $1000.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Emil Kirkegaard's Race Pseudoscience and Nazi Network

The Guardian ran an article recently about people and organizations Pinkerite has blogged about. Thanks to Oliver for the heads-up. The article is Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss.

The tech boss is a guy I'd heard of but forgotten, Andrew Conru:

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.


The HDF is the Human Diversity Foundation  apparently now partially funded on the remains of the infamous Pioneer Fund. The name recalls Steve Sailer's old Human Biodiversity Institute.

HDF is owned by that international man of douchebaggery, Emil Kirkegaard.

HDF’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard, has made similar comments about “remigration”, saying of families settled for two or three generations: “I generally support policies that pay them to leave.”

Kirkegaard, who also appears to use the name William Engman, is an author of more than 40 papers published by Mankind Quarterly, a British race science journal established in the 1960s.

Emil Kirkegaard says HDF ‘is not involved in politics’. 
Originally from Denmark and now living in Germany, he heads what Frost described as an “underground research wing” for HDF consisting of about 10 hobby researchers and academics.

Ongoing HDF projects, discussed in a video call between the group last year that was led by Kirkegaard, included studies into “international dysgenics”, whether dating apps alter human breeding, whether people with progressive opinions are mentally ill or whether Wikipedia editors are too leftwing.

The Guardian article is based on an article by Hope Not Hate, Race Science Inc. published a few days ago. 

And it is a hum-dinger.


The article:

The Scandza Forum is one of the most important events in the far-right calendar. Hosted by Fróði Midjord, a Scandinavian neo-Nazi, it is a conference of extremist intellectuals who gather for lectures on white nationalism, race science, and World War II revisionism. In May 2023, the Scandza Forum was held for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic at the Von Stackelberg Hotel in Tallinn, Estonia, attracting more than 100 far-right activists from across the western world.

Among the guests was an undercover reporter for HOPE not hate.

At the conference, our infiltrator met a man who introduced himself as Matthew Archer, although we now know his real name is Matthew Frost.

Frost said he was the founder of Aporia, a website running stories on “HBD”, or human biodiversity. This is the belief that there are meaningful and measurable differences between different “races”, especially in terms of intelligence. It is, in essence, the misuse of science to promote racist ideology.

According to the article, Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team. 

Aporia is the racist Substack account. I'm waiting on Jonathan Katz to talk about Aporia one of these days since he wrote about other Nazis happily making bank at the racism-friendly Substack.

Aporia has a direct connection to German Nazis:

The third senior figure of HDF is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.


The Hope article includes images from the slide presentation given for the HDF's ghouls. You can see the org chart here. That's Kirkegaard in the bottom square to the right of the org chart.



Just to give the HDF some historical context, I created my own org chart, based on info from the Hope Not Hate article and elsewhere.


You can see the PDF version here.

It's funny, in the article Kirkegaard is shown as being so happy about meeting Peter Thiel. Kirkegaard is on the record as saying that homosexuality is a mental illness. He surely must know that Peter Thiel is proud to be gay.

I guess money changes everything.


And as usual it comes back to the Nazi Bar known as the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). Many of those connected to Aporia are associated with or attended meetings of ISIR including Kirkegaard, Charles Murray, Helmut Nyborg, Jonathan Anomaly, Curtis Dunkel, David Piffer, Bryan Pesta, James Thompson, Russell T. Warne, Razib Khan, Gregory Clark, Garette Jones, Jonatan Pallesen, Toby Young and of course ISIR bigwig Richard Haier.


Kirkegaard is an essential player in the right-wing billionaire-funded racist/neo-Nazi/fascist network.

Jerry Seinfeld changes his mind

 So a few months ago I wrote about Seinfeld hanging out with right-wing creep Bari Weiss, whining about the Left ruining comedy. 

Apparently Seinfeld has done a 180 on the issue. Which is a good thing - but like the hosts of The Majority Report I can't guess what happened. Maybe he finally realized what creeps Bari Weiss and her crew are?


Friday, October 11, 2024

Monday, October 7, 2024

The Trump campaign fully embraces race pseudoscience

Per the Washington Post:

In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, Trump’s suggestion that non-White immigrants are genetically inferior was made explicit.

The comment came as Trump was disparaging his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“How about allowing people to come through an open border,” he said, “13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person and they’re now happily living in the United States?”


This is a false claim — “outrageously false,” in the wording of The Washington Post Fact Checker — based on a misrepresentation of numbers released by the government. That data indicated that there were about 13,000 immigrants who had committed murder but were not in custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many, though, are in custody elsewhere, including at the state level. Nor were they all immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration; many were here under Trump, too.

Unchallenged by Hewitt, Trump continued on the subject.


“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he said. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Reinforcing that he was talking about the “bad genes” of immigrants, Trump offered up more false claims based on the ICE data.

Hewitt, rather than contesting Trump’s genetic argument, shifted the conversation with no apparent irony to the federal criminal charges Trump himself faces. These, of course, are not a function of criminal genes, in Trump’s estimation, but instead of the political whims of Biden. (In reality, they are a function of Trump’s actions.)

"Criminal genes" is a core belief of Biosocial Criminology, a loose collection of racist, hereditarian beliefs that relies heavily on the racist garbage of Jean-Phillipe Rushton. How did I miss this article in Undark on the subject of Biosocial Criminology?

Later that year, the lead author of the paper, Brian Boutwell, took to the right-wing magazine Quillette to complain that biosocial criminologists were being shunned by their colleagues. Around that time, Boutwell and one of his co-authors on the paper, Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver, appeared separately on the show of alt-right podcaster Stefan Molyneux to talk about the links between crime, biology, and race. (Wright, one of the Cincinnati professors, appeared on the show too.)

Shunned or not, the authors of the paper maintained active careers. Boutwell is now an associate professor at the University of Mississippi. One of his co-authors, J.C. Barnes, was until recently the chair of the Biopsychosocial Criminology division of the American Society of Criminology. Another co-author, Beaver, now directs the Biosocial Criminology Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University, and he maintains an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. (Beaver did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Steven Pinker is a booster of biosocial criminology, which the Undark article does not mention, but which I've been tracking.

It should come as no surprise that Trump embraces race pseudoscience, considering he is funded by racists like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen

In a surprise twist, Andreessen's partner Horowitz has switched to supporting Harris.

But any reporter doing the least amount of research on Thiel would understand exactly how racist he has always been. This is from "Contrarian" the book about Thiel by Max Chafkin:
Clarium employees read, played chess, and debated (sample topic: If you were going to design a country from scratch, what would it look like?) Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, though out was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to hear talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDARE, the far-right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. There were liberals at Clarium, but they understood that it was best to keep those views quiet. 
How ironic that Steven Pinker (born in Canada), who apparently despises Trump (see him doing his awkward dance when Trump lost in 2020) has contributed to Trump's dangerous racist beliefs, by promoting racists and race pseudoscience (albeit usually stealthily) for the past couple of decades.

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