The most detailed review of the now famously reviled "War on Science" book, published by a company specializing in Christian nationalism, has just been posted on a YouTube channel called Shaun.
I've written about the book a couple of times since I saw that the author list includes the usual "Intellectual Dark Web" affiliated pack of right-wing grifters, sex pests and gutter racists.
I knew it was going to be a great video when Shaun mentions Angela Collier early on. Her video on harassment in academia is a classic.
Also early on, Shaun discusses Pinker:
Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard who, as I mentioned earlier, writes a chapter in "The War on Science." And as we've seen, he's got a few photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein floating around out there. But unlike Kraus, Pinker has since decided to distance himself from Epstein rather than defend him. "I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance," he says.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Steven Pinker helped Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense when he was indicted for sex crimes in 2006. To quote a BuzzFeed News article here, "an obscure document from Epstein's legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the Internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts."
Pinker has since claimed that he didn't know Dershowitz was going to use his opinion in defense of Jeffrey Epstein and claimed that he was not paid for the letter. Quote. "It's something that Alan and I do regularly as colleagues."
He also claimed he was not aware of the charges against Jeffrey Epstein, which I find a bit difficult to believe to be honest. It was big news at the time, and you regularly work with his lawyer apparently. Also, if a lawyer asked me to provide expert opinion for a criminal offence and it pertained to a law about enticing minors into prostitution, I would probably ask for the details on that one before my name ends up in a court document defending the head of a sex trafficking ring or something.
Anyway, even if we very generously take Steven Pinker at his word and assume he didn't mean to help defend Jeffrey Epstein at trial and that he never liked the guy and thought he was awful, we still have to ask what's he doing in this book with Lawrence Krauss? Because Lawrence Krauss doesn't think Epstein is awful, he thinks he's great, he loves the guy, he thinks he was absolutely brilliant. Now, maybe it's just me, but I would find it hard to maintain a positive working relationship with someone who likes and keeps defending Jeffrey Epstein. That would be a deal breaker for me in a friendship. So no, I don't believe Steven Pinker never liked Jeffrey Epstein because I think if that was the case he probably wouldn't now be working with Lawrence Krauss.
Excellent.
One of the revelations in the video for me was the recounting of the ways that Alan Sokal is a complete reactionary sleazoid, proclaiming his victory over a tiny postmodernist self-published journal, "Social Text" that actually rejected his phony paper at first and asked him to make changes.
But such things as behaving sleazily certainly won't bother the kind of people who think that the various authors included in "The War on Science" are martyrs of wokeness.
There's also a section on Elevatorgate, and later in the video in the Transphobia section, Shaun highlights Richard Dawkins being the usual shameless hypocrite and bigot that members of the Intellectual Dark Web and associates tend to be.
He quotes Dawkins first, then calls back to Elevatorgate.
"So since males are often larger and potentially violent. Or even sexually violent. Of course, it's logical for females to perhaps feel uncomfortable encountering a male they do not know in close proximity in an enclosed space."Unless of course that space is an elevator, in which case she's just being hysterical and she should zip it. Yes, that's right sound the contradiction alarm we got one. Richard Dawkins thinks that males, by which he means transwomen are sort of inherently threatening, and thus it makes sense for cis women to be afraid of them just minding their own business existing in a place. But Richard Dawkins also thinks that males, by which he means nice scientists like me, are harmless and they should get to actively proposition whichever woman they like, in whatever context they like, without complaint.
Perfect.
I didn't think it possible, but the sleaziest contributor to this book was not Krauss, Pinker, Dawkins, Sokal, Amy Wax or even Jerry Coyne. The sleaziest contributor was Sally Satel a shill for Purdue Pharma. The video cites the ProPublica article Inside Purdue Pharma’s Media Playbook: How It Planted the Opioid “Anti-Story”
The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.
Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000. The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”
On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”
“Great piece,” Rosen responded.
Of course Satel is a senior fellow for the American Enterprise Institute, the same right-wing libertarian organization of soulless ghouls who supported the career of gutter racist Charles Murray for decades.
Satel's contribution in this pathetic joke of a book is to whine that she was "cancelled" at Yale, while avoiding the mention of her conflict of interest with AEI and how she shilled for death merchants.
Lawrence Krauss shows himself to be utterly corrupt by presenting Satel as a victim of a war on science.
But then, as Shaun notes:
As for Lawrence Krauss, I would ask him what he thinks about financial bias as a potential threat to science. Among the various so-called threats to science laid out by him and his introduction, zero of them are corporations buying off scientists to act as spokespeople for their interests; using bribes to get around government regulations; or pushing unsafe drugs onto the market for profit.
Surely those things are more of a threat to science than a bunch of culture war nonsense. Well, I would ask Lawrence Krauss all that, but of course, he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, remember? So he's probably more willing than most to overlook this sort of thing.
And then the video gets to Aporia. Shaun points out that Bo Winegard is a big influence on the various goons who contributed to this book, and then discusses Emil Kirkegaard and Human Diversity Foundation (renamed Polygenic Scores LLC) and the connection to the Pioneer Fund.
All things that anybody who follows this blog already knows, but I'm happy when others discuss these issues, especially since Shaun has a much bigger following than Pinkerite.
The best part of the Aporia section is when Shaun plays a clip of Bo Winegard agreeing about race "realism" with Jared Taylor.
But then I've known Bo Winegard is a gutter racist for a long time. It was the least surprising news in the world when I learned he teamed up with neo-Nazi and pedophilia apologist Emil Kirkegaard - the video discusses Kirkegaard's idea about drugging children that never fails to horrify.
Yes, the video is four hours long, but worth every minute.
