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
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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 World 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.