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| One of the "Boot Boys" displays his value as an alpha male. ---------------------------------------- |
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: "Whatever 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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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Pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?
