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Steven Pinker praising "bad boy" Alan Dershowitz
in the October 2013 Harvard Law School video on
Youtube titled: "Celebrating Alan Dershowitz: teacher"
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If you do a search in the Justice Department's Epstein files on the name "Pinker" you will see the name is mentioned 416 times. In a few cases the name is not connected to Steven Pinker - his sister Susan appears a few times and at least one other person named Pinker is mentioned, but the vast majority of mentions are Steven Pinker.
The most important information about Pinker's connection to Epstein has long been known: Pinker helped Epstein's lawyer Alan Dershowitz defend Epstein in 2007.
The phrase "had sex with Dershowitz" appears 53 times in the Epstein files, as in:
A lot of the documents in the Epstein files are duplicates or at least the information is duplicated across many documents. And to be fair, I only did a half-assed job of searching every file in which Pinker's name appears. So I could have missed something. But still, I did find some items of interest:
On March 28, 2012 Pinker received an email from Epstein's assistant:
Hello Steven. Jeffrey Epstein will be making a trip up to Harvard on Sunday April 15th. He is wondering if you might be around and available to meet with him?
To which Pinker responded:
Unfortunately I'm out of town that day, but if Jeffrey is around on Monday the 16th, I'll be back and would be delighted to meet with him.
Thanks. I don't normally give out email addresses, even to friends... but I guess since Jeffrey flew stephen on a plane it is ok.
In 2018, Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Krauss a list of attendees for the Women in the World Summit, a convention of female leaders and activists. Mr. Krauss responded, “Let’s do a men of the world conference,” and listed men accused of misconduct: Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Woody Allen.
The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.
Strangely, the usual billionaire crowd is not showing up for this one, so I am running hard to revision it as a serious science event, inviting more third culture intellectuals and also the global press (NYTimes, WSJ, NYorker, Economist, etc.) Ultlimately it will be a much stronger and more important event, but it's not the one advertised to you. The list status is below. (Btw, I hope you will come (Martin and Pinker would be very happy if your showed up) but will understand if you want out.
I saw your boys, the Dersh, and Larry Summers, at a dinner Pinker had for Rebecca's birthday. Poor guy, he's going out for his wife, and then, the day before the event, Ilarry, his father dies. And while his whole family was in Montreal and in mourning, he persevered with smile on his face and only his close friends knew.
I talked to the Dersh - what a story! David Boies!! What's going on? Didn't talk to Summers.
On February 8, 2012, Epstein wrote to Brian Boyd:
i look forward to sponsoring your dream work . 75k. we will work out the details.. Steve Pinker is also a friend. ( since you seemed to hold him in high regard )
Boyd is a University of Auckland professor who "met disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for breakfast, and later discussed the fee that Epstein offered to pay him to write about Nabokov’s novel Lolita."
1. I remembered I did speak to your cfo in the past , but I believe he thought at that time that my colorful past could become an issue . the time is now ripe. 2. the event in April 4-6 0 will be with Pinker, venter . sr martin rees frank wilcek, . 6 or 7 nobel prize winners. lawrence krauss. richard dawkins...
Thank you very much for your note, which means a lot to me. You are probably not aware of this, but I consider you one of my only real friends -- you don't want anything from me, don't try to push any agendas on me, and you care about me. The feeling is mutual.
Imagine having a rapist psychopath as one of your only real friends.
Of course you knew there would be a connection between Kosslyn and Pinker, evident in an article that is included in the Epstein files:
...Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker credits Kosslyn, his former graduate adviser, with breathing new life into another venerable institution. "The Harvard University psychology department had been a backwater, coasting on its reputation, before Steve reinvigorated it in the 1990s with an aggressive program of hiring young mid-career scientists, which vaulted the department into the front ranks," says Pinker, who joined the department in 2003. Pinker also cites Kosslyn's leadership through the financial crisis as evidence that he's the right peron to turn around the Stanford center: "I'd be surprised if Steve didn't make the center financially viable and intellectually vibrant within a few years:'
What damn fools these self-impressed academics are.
I have not spent much time on this Pinkerite blog discussing Pinker's connection to Epstein, although most people are far more interested in that than in Pinker's 25 years - at least - of promoting hereditarianism and professional racists like Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, and writing for the racist publication Quillette and appearing on the Neo-Nazi podcast Aporia (owned by Emil Kirkegaard, a pedophilia apologist.)
But it's clear that Epstein pleading guilty to raping kids did not bother him at all. I noted in the last post that Pinker's racist ally Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring about pedophilia and is a huge fan of Camille "North American Man/Boy Love Association" Paglia.
Pinker is a fan of Paglia too, mentioning her in his Blank Slate as one of the good (i. e. misogynist) "feminists."
I think that Pinker, like many in his wealthy "celebrity intellectual" cohort, believes that moral and ethical concerns don't apply to him. That's why he screams "guilt by association" whenever anybody mentions the awful people he allies with.
So why wouldn't he be delighted to meet with Epstein in 2012?
Why wouldn't Jeffrey Epstein consider him a friend?
UPDATE: Great article in The Verge by Elizabeth Lopatto that mentions the connection between Epstein and his friends and the Intellectual Dark Web:
Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved.
Recall the great many pronouncements about the limits and dangers of #MeToo — hilariously, Bari Weiss wrote an entire article in The New York Times about “iconoclastic” members of the “intellectual dark web” who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Included in this group was a correspondent of Epstein’s: Sam Harris, to whom Epstein suggested he use “more charm and less argument” in debates. Several of the names mentioned in the article would later join Weiss’ abortive attempt at an “independent” school, the non-accredited University of Austin. Much like the group Weiss profiles itself, the University of Austin would become a tool of the far right.
