Charles Murray prophesies the triumph of race pseudoscience again - and fails again

In a recent post on his Substack (ugh Substack) blog, psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes:

The third leg of the missing heritability problem is the mechanism gap. This refers to the fact that no matter what our estimate of heritability is, for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences. We can analyze variance, in Lewontin’s famous phrase, but we can’t analyze causes. All of the interesting within and between family work that Sasha (Gusev) catalogs is a step in the right direction, but the truth is there isn’t much progress toward actual mechanistic understanding. I personally doubt there ever will be (for complex human behavior), but that is another topic. The mechanism gap is crucial to my bet with Charles Murray, for example. Murray bet that by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out, and that entails more than a reasonable estimate of a black-box heritability coefficient.

There are two especially interesting points, the first being Turkheimer's statement:

"...for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences." 

Based on what I have learned about the claims of hereditarians, especially through my series on Adam Rutherford, (now in a convenient single-page format) I agree with this, as I went to great lengths to explain in my Rutherford piece.

But I suspect Jerry Coyne respects Turkheimer, who refers to himself in the same post as an "anti-hereditarian," in a way he does not respect me. Coyne has mentioned Turkheimer a few times on his blog and always respectfully, in spite of admitting that Turkheimer is opposed to race pseudoscience. Although I think Coyne likes Turkheimer in part because of Turkheimer's support for the ghastly Emily Willoughby. Coyne is a big supporter of Willoughby, and I'm sure her being chummy with neo-Nazis bothers him no more than Steven Pinker's alliance with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia bothers him. In spite of Coyne's performative anxiety over antisemitism.

Hell, I bet that if Turkheimer bought a pair of cowboy boots, Coyne would let him join the Boot Boys.

The second interesting point in the paragraph is that Turkheimer had a bet with Charles Murray with Murray supporting the claim that:

"...by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out."

Charles Murray will never learn.

Back in the pre-Musk days of Twitter, Murray had been mocked for his frequent predictions (see image above), since the publication of the Bell Curve, that his race pseudoscience beliefs would be vindicated through science.

It's Murray's true belief in race pseudoscience that makes him such an important thought leader of hereditarianism, enough so that even Turkheimer takes him seriously enough to make bets with him, instead of endlessly mocking him for being a grotesque old delusional racist crank. 

Murray is a political scientist, not a life scientist, which is exactly why hereditarians have confidence in his views of genetics, along with professional racist Steve Sailer who holds a degree in marketing. 

Murray is as likely to stop believing in the eventual triumph of race pseudoscience as a devout Christian is likely to stop believing in the Second Coming. And these days, Murray is a devout believer of both sects.

Hereditarian Jonathan Haidt (a big fan of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence) could be seen making a similar prediction back in 2009. These
days Haidt is writing for Bari Weiss' The Free Press, because of course he would.

Meanwhile Murray can be seen on X/Twitter joining with far-right political operative (and apparent employee of Emil Kirkegaard) "Cremieux" being mad about the efforts to retract the garbage of white nationalist Richard Lynn, from whom neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard inherited the remaining Pioneer fund assets.

Murray thinks Lynn was right about everything. But data will never matter to a true prophet like Charles Murray.

Right-wing political operative "Cremieux" (Jordan Lasker) seen 
hypocritically whining about someone else having "political reasons."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the same Substack post, Turkheimer snipes at Jay Joseph:

And the truth is, there aren’t many people writing these days who are willing to adopt a strictly zero-genetic-influence position. Jay Joseph is pretty much the only one I can think of.

I doubt this is exactly Joseph's position, as indicated by his comment on a Steve Sailer tweet. As I said, Sailer, a guy with a degree in marketing, is an important figure in hereditarian science, no doubt why Steven Pinker promoted Sailer's career for a decade.

I assume Joseph will have a direct response to Turkheimer's claim eventually.

Although at least Turkheimer has gotten fed up with Sailer and his obsession with race.

Turkheimer discussed his bet with Murray in an article in the Atlantic called Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are, published in October:

Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox. I took the bet because I was confident I would win.

Turkheimer then describes Murray's beliefs evident in "The Bell Curve," which is essentially the  hereditarian Bible:

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein argue that intelligence, as measured by an IQ score, is a crucial determinant of success in modern society. They also argue that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics, leading to the establishment of “cognitive elites” as intelligent people select one another for reproduction. 

Based on Adam Rutherford's paper, and its accompanying cartoon, Rutherford appears to be in complete agreement with Murray.

On Bluesky, I asked Rutherford about Turkheimer's characterization of the Bell Curve and its apparent agreement with Rutherford's paper, but I don't expect a response, since he's never been anything but dismissive or insulting towards me, but if he does respond I will report it here.

The fact that there is "zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences" does not stop hereditarians from starting businesses based on this zero knowledge. Turkheimer mentions one of them, Herasight, run by several believers in race pseudoscience:

Phenotypic parental IQ accounts for something like half the variance in offspring IQ. A properly controlled PGS accounts for 5% on a good day. (The embryo testing company Herasight has recently made big claims that they can do better, but I will wait until I see a peer-reviewed paper.) 

But promoting hereditarian claims as settled science has been around since at least when Pinker, Haidt and friends were promoting the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

To be completely fair to Murray, there are still 31 days left for his prophesy to come true. But it's not looking good.

The Boot Boys versus Pinkerite ~ is Jerry Coyne deliberately obtuse? Is Steven Pinker really a racist?

One of the "Boot Boys" displays his 
value as an alpha male.
----------------------------------------

Almost a year ago I was called "tenacious" by infamous anti-trans grifter and Kiwi Farms apologist Jesse Singal, although I prefer the word "relentless."

But at the time I admitted that in fact I do a fairly half-assed job with this blog. Especially compared to people who make money from promoting the issues I write about - like race pseudoscience and transphobia. People like Singal and Razib Khan.

And here's another example: Jerry Coyne came after me back in June, and only now am I getting around to discovering it.

In my defense, I do have a Google alert set to "Pinkerite," but apparently Coyne's blog is not notable enough to get flagged.

The amazing part is that last month I even linked to the blog post where he mentions me, but I missed the mention. 

Here it is:

I haven’t heard the podcast, nor do I read Aporia, though I am a bit aware of Noah Carl. But what the Guardian is doing here is really smearing Pinker, trying to make him out to be a racist because of who he’s associated with. The relevant question is this, though: Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist. The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class.

Finally, I still fail to understand why so many people have it in for Pinker, and this was well before the Aporia magazine podcast.

First, Coyne has claimed to "understand why so many people have it in for Pinker." 

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" Nathan J. Robinson said:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne's deliberate obtuseness, if it is deliberate, is on display when he writes:

Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist.

So unless Pinker is explicit about it, it doesn't count. The entire past quarter-century of Pinker promoting racists and participating in racist organizations like the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and publications like Quillette and now Aporia - none of that counts.

For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press: 

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer;  

• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021; 

• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. 

I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard, who is a neo-Nazi and works for Aporia, owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

What's perhaps even more breathtaking than Coyne's obtuseness is his shameless hypocrisy. Coyne is obsessed with antisemitism, frequently writing about it and about Holocaust victims on his blog, and has a horror of pro-Palestinian protesters.

So how is Coyne able be so sanguine about Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his Aporia magazine, (see this post on how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) while being hyper-sensitive to anything that he believes has a hint of antisemitism?

But maybe worst of all, for someone who used to be a scientist, is Coyne's lack of intellectual curiosity. Coyne writes:

The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” 

Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class. 

But if Coyne wasn't so lazy himself he would realize that I have parsed the arguments, which he should know because he mentions Rutherford, so he is aware that I wrote a nine-part series: "What happened to Adam Rutherford" in which I discuss a paper Rutherford co-authored with nine other people and in which I critiqued behavioral genetics. I'm not a scientist, but I can certainly read what scientists and scholars have written about behavioral genetics and draw my own conclusions and then write about them.

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
------------------------------------

Although unsurprisingly, Coyne lies about what I said about Rutherford. I never called Rutherford a racist. I pointed out that he and most of the co-authors of a paper he wrote have racist connections. 

What is it about these hereditarians that makes them incapable of accurately reporting on articles about hereditarians?

I did call Shermer a racist because, among various reasons, one of Shermer's heroes is racist charlatan Jean-Philippe Rushton. E. O. Wilson's encouraging correspondence with Rushton even convinced Wilson's fan club that Wilson was a racist. Shermer and Pinker are best buddies.

I certainly wasn't happy to have to discuss Rutherford's hereditarianism, since it had been so great to have someone so charismatic and famous and explicitly anti-racist on the anti-hereditarian side. Or what I thought was the anti-hereditarian side.

It was so depressing to discover that Rutherford's paper makes its argument in part through the disgraced pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology. 

Biologist P. Z. Myers explains why it's so bad here.

I really just could have saved time and dismissed Rutherford's paper for its use of evolutionary psychology alone, but there were a lot of issues I wanted to talk about, so I spent hours and hours writing about those issues. 

But Coyne doesn't know any of this because he already made up his mind in advance that I hadn't done any work on the issues. 

I'm sure that part of Coyne's refusal to face unpleasant facts about Pinker is because Coyne has a personal relationship with Pinker. 

It's not my place to kink-shame Coyne, but I have the distinct impression that Coyne has Daddy issues with Pinker. I've noted Coyne's obsession with Pinker's cowboy boots before, but recently Coyne bought his own cowboy boots, in what looks to me like an attempt to impress Daddy. 

He likes to call himself and Pinker "the Boot Boys."

As I said, Coyne's blog is apparently not noteworthy enough for Google alerts to flag his mention of "Pinkerite." If you ask Google's AI about "Why evolution is true," it doesn't talk about Coyne's blog, only about Coyne's book by the same name.

HOWEVER, Pinkerite does get a mention by Google's AI.

Although I don't call Pinker a "public intellectual" I call him a "celebrity intellectual" because that's what the New York Times called him. But still, pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
-------------------------------------------------

Racist Roundup: Larry Summers, Bryan Pesta and White Supremacy Castle

Read this chef's kiss-perfect article by Nell Scovell at the Daily Beast: Harvard's Slutty Professor Has to Go for Emailing Epstein for Sex Tips. (Archive version.)

So good:

"Summers analyzes the situation in classic economic terms, comparing the marginal cost (i.e., spending money on gifts) with the marginal benefit (i.e., receiving sex) to maximize profit or utility. You don’t have to be a former Treasury Secretary to know that dating is all about the ROI.

Epstein’s response to Summers’s account of his “courtship” is to offer praise. “No whining showed strentgh (sic)” Epstein wrote. (Summers was totally whining.)"

Larry Summers is a misogynist, of course, but he's also a racist, gladly siding with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard (now one of Emil Kirkgaard's employees) when Winegard was whining in Quillette.

Meanwhile, Bryan Pesta has lost again. Like Bo Winegard, Pesta works for Emil Kirkgaard as discussed in the HOPE not Hate exposé:

A diagram shown to our undercover reporter shows that the (Human Diversity Foundation) research team has approximately 10 members. The meeting our infiltrator attended had 11 writers from the UK, the US, and Europe, including Kirkegaard. At least one contributor (Meng Hu at the University of Hong Kong) was not present. Several of the team are known in the world of scientific racism, and had contributed to Aporia or had in the past been funded by Pioneer. Chief among them is Bryan Pesta, who between 2019 and 2022 received Pioneer money and was dismissed from his academic position at Cleveland State University in February 2022 for misusing genetic data in his research.

Pesta contested his firing and last week: 

Cleveland State University did not violate the First Amendment rights of a professor who it fired after he published academic work exploring race and intelligence, a court ruled recently.

A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the 2022 firing of Professor Bryan Pesta in a decision issued on Nov. 4.

YAY!

And finally, although it was announced in September, I just found out that New York's Attorney General is suing white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow, the one-time owners of White supremacy Castle:

New York state’s Attorney General announced last Wednesday, September 3 that the  office of Letitia James has filed suit against VDARE Foundation, seeking to keep its founding members from collecting or controlling any more charitable funds from the foundation and redirecting any remaining funds to other entities.

VDARE Foundation, which operated a political blog that promoted anti-immigration viewpoints, was the purchaser of the Berkeley Castle in 2020. The group’s primary controlling members have been Peter and Lydia Brimelow, who live in Berkeley Springs with their family.

The Brimelows announced last year that they had shut down VDARE and its website in response to ongoing legal and financial troubles, including actions by the New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate the financial oversight of the group.

VDARE was originally incorporated in New York as VDARE Foundation, Inc., a New York charitable not-for-profit corporation by founder Peter Brimelow.

AG James has alleged that Peter and Lydia Brimelow have violated “the laws governing charitable not-for-profit corporations and their fiduciaries” by using VDARE Foundation funds for personal gain and have not complied with reporting and best practices for deciding the use of charitable funds under their control.

“At the time that VDARE ceased operations, it had conveyed over $1.7 million in cash and real estate assets to an out-of-state not-for-profit run by Lydia Brimelow,” the Attorney General alleged in her September 3 lawsuit filing.

The lawsuit can be read here.

In the court filing, the Attorney General asks that VDARE be dissolved as a charitable organization, that its assets be redirected to other charitable entities and that the Brimelows be barred from having any further role in deciding the use of charitable funds received by VDARE.

YES PLEASE!

Two pals of Steven Pinker, Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, have written for VDARE. In 2024, Charles Murray can be found promoting Sailer's career, including his VDARE connection, at the racism-loving American Enterprise Institute.

Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582

Whatever happened to Adam Rutherford?

I did a 9-part series here.

Now all in one place on Medium.

Larry Summers is a misogynist - PLEASE DO REPEAT THIS INSIGHT

Left to right - Alan Dershowitz, Jeffrey Epstein, Steven Pinker (hair only),
unknown and Larry Summers
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Anybody with any sense already knew that Larry Summers was a shameless misogynist since twenty years ago, when he was president of Harvard and rolled up to a conference dedicated to diversity in STEM careers to inform the audience that women were just not smart enough in STEM subjects to deserve good careers in STEM.

An idea that comes directly from the idiot pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology which Summers' buddy Steven Pinker has been hawking for a quarter century.

So it's no surprise that not only was Summers a chum of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a decade after Epstein was busted for "solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18," but he is a disgusting misogynist as shown in just-released Epstein emails. 

Summers and his defenders claimed that Summers was only saying women are innately bad at STEM but they were still smart enough in other areas - but clearly Summers believes that 

a. women are overall less intelligent than men and;

b. a woman who had an abortion is less worthy of Harvard than a man who abuses women, like Epstein. 

In case you have a hard time reading the image below, of a letter from Larry Summers to Jeffrey Epstein on October 27, 2017, the key lines from Summers are:

"I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."

and 

"I'm trying to figure why American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard, but hit on a few women 10 years ago and can't work at a network of think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT." 

I assume he's talking about abortion, since I don't believe that Summers actually believes that someone who murders an actual baby will get into Harvard with no questions asked - even in some kind of prison correspondence-course situation.

And it's pretty clear he is expressing his sympathy for Epstein since this "hitting on a few women" is said to be 10 years ago, approximately when Epstein was being investigated for what turned out to be child sex trafficking.

I mean, I already had a very low opinion of Larry Summers, given his friendly connection to neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, but I didn't anticipate exactly how rotten he really is.

The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?"

The liberal New Yorker's
byline ratio: 5 women to 24 men
way back in 2012

Pinkerite's beat is critiquing the Intellectual Dark Web, Steven Pinker and race pseudoscience, but every so often I go a bit outside those parameters.

Today I will focus on misogyny rather than race pseudoscience, although that certainly doesn't exclude the Intellectual Dark Web or Steven Pinker, both fans of misogyny. 

One of the people photographed skulking around in the dark for the Bari Weiss article about the IDW is Christina Hoff Sommers, whose entire right-wing think tank-funded career is based on being a woman who hates other women. 

Pinker, like all the reactionaries associated with the IDW, has dedicated his life to the belief that women are innately, genetically less capable in STEM pursuits than men. This is a pillar of the political movement - falsely labeled a science - known as evolutionary psychology.

The American right, having hurt trans rights thanks to the Trump administration, aided and abetted by grifting ghouls like Jesse Singal, has now set its sights on trying to force women out of jobs, the better to distribute women as rewards for good behavior to men, and so women will resume their godly roles as domestic servants and breeders of white babies.

The New York Times, of course, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

The New Yorker has responded to this latest backlash against women with a surprisingly good article. I am surprised because only 13 years ago I was tracking the liberal New Yorker's terrible male:female byline record, which always favored men and often by a lot.

But this recent article by Jessica Winter, "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" is great in spite of the title. Here is the archive if you don't have access to the article on the New Yorker site.

It's especially good because Winter goes after weaselly influencers like Scott Galloway:

The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.

What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.

And later...

Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our “obsolete model of the breadwinner father,” he warns, “we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life.” As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be “left out” of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit’s identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women’s attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be “stripped” of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent.

The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—is especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men’s disinclination toward housework and other “draggy business of family life” may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance.

And maybe the best slam-dunk on Galloway:

Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about seventy-five years ago. Much as the Trump Administration does when it vows to revive the coal industry, or when it shares fascist-lite iconography that would be at home in a Paul Verhoeven film, Galloway appeals to the reader’s nostalgia for mid-century “Peak Male.” It was young men, he reminds us, who stormed the beaches at Normandy and who won the Battle of the Bulge: “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach, big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory.” Of course, the German soldiers were young men, too. And it isn’t clear which border Galloway thinks the Russians were crossing, or if he realizes which side they were fighting for.

You'd think someone who claims to represent manly men would at least know which side the Russians were fighting on during the Battle of the Bulge.

And Winter does a great job of addressing the claim that women need men for protection, by pointing out that women need protecting from men. And although the Russians were on the side of the Allies during most of World War II - and so technically the good guys, they were "an army of rapists."

LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!

How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor

 

Just a reminder to ghouls like Claire Lehmann - you are cordially invited to stay TF out of New York City for the duration of his term.

And yes, I did think of Lehmann and all her ghoulish right-wing friends, while voting for Mamdani. 

But only for a second, I didn't want to completely spoil my day.

LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!!!

Watch Mamdani & supporters sing it here.

A religious schism in IDW land ~ is Charles Murray headed for hell?

Charles Murray fund-raising 
for neo-Nazis and racists
----------------------------------

Steven Pinker and Charles Murray are fighting over the existence of souls in the Wall Street Journal.

As we've seen, militant atheist Pinker is perfectly capable of ignoring the religiosity of his allies when it suits him, as when he gave a mild critique of Peter Thiel's antichrist-themed speech, without a single complaint about Thiel's religious extremism.

But I guess this is where Pinker draws the line: Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" apparently in support of a book he recently published. 

If I were to be cynical I'd say the difference between the way Pinker responds to Peter Thiel's religiosity versus Murray's is due to Thiel having far more money to donate to causes that Pinker cares about, like anti-trans and anti-DEI than Murray. 

Murray could be seen not long ago proudly fundraising for neo-Nazis Emil Kirkegaard and Bo Winegard, whom Pinker likes well enough to appear on their podcast and support their race pseudoscience cause.

I don't have a horse in this race. Both Murray and Pinker are gutter racists with a devotion to promoting race pseudoscience and both are anti-DEI and anti-trans. Pinker is a weasel and Murray is a ghoul who famously wanted to put the children of poor people into orphanages.

But it's always a good time watching associates of the Intellectual Dark Web fight each other.

On October 16 Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" 

Murray is supposedly retired but that doesn't stop him from continuing his career-long efforts to make the world a worse place.

Now I had assumed that like most libertarians, Murray was an atheist - their thought leader Ayn Rand was an atheist. And he was, but now he's having second thoughts, apparently through the feminizing influence of his wife and the supremacy of Western Civilization (aka White people):

Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. 

Murray's religious epiphany offers that old chestnut, the god of the gaps:

I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly. 

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

If we have not yet explained "anomalies" therefore it's a god.

Pinker responded on October 29 with Charles Murray’s Unscientific Case for the Soul, calling Murray's argument the soul of the gaps:

He admits that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet his “soul of the gaps” argument—there’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it—is extraordinarily weak.

Charles Murray responded the same day with Pinker Whiffs at My Case for the Human Soul. He takes several paragraphs to get there, but ultimately throws in the towel:

The empirical challenge to the materialist position from terminal lucidity implies that consciousness can exist independently of the brain but isn’t necessarily “evidence for the human soul.” That was a speculative leap on my part. I plead guilty.

But he got some attention for his book and that was likely the point of this exercise. In spite of Murray's spiritual concerns, the endless quest for material wealth, even after being retired for years, seems ultimately what matters most to Murray.

Meanwhile, Pinker's leading fan-boy Jerry Coyne, who finally took note of Peter Thiel's religiosity very recently is now mad at Arthur C. Brooks and others, including Murray, for their  religiosity:

"groups" meaning "race"
------------------------------------

This bio implies (Brook's) a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!

Because they are all grifters. 

Charles Murray's entire career of shitting on the poor has been funded by AEI and other right-wing plutocrats. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had a long association with AEI; the same with Brooks and Douthat. 

When their patrons decide it's a good political move right now to promote religion, they are going to promote religion.

Mystery solved.

And Charles Murray's Christianity, as is so often the case, has not stopped him from being a wicked man. Just recently he could be seen on X/Twitter promoting his 2021 book "Facing Reality" which argues that Black people are an existential threat to the United States because, per race pseudoscience, they are genetically inclined to criminality. Murray's atheist friend Razib Khan was in total agreement.

If there is a Jesus in heaven, the same Jesus who said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me," then Charles Murray is certainly bound for hell.