It's thanks to race pseudoscience ghoul Jerry Coyne that I found out about this New York Magazine review of the obvious right-wing reactionary tract "War on Science" which brings together the most contemptible race pseudoscience ghouls and Peter Thiel stooges and sexual harassers of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
Coyne's position is the same as that American Enterprise Institute stoogeThomas Chatterton Williams: the left and right are equally to blame for everything but the left is doing the real damage, no matter that the entire American government is now controlled by extreme fascism out to completely destroy the American education system.
That's what happens when you ally with freaks like Peter Thiel - and probably, in all these cases, take his money.
As always the question is: are Jerry Coyne and his network stupid, evil or some combination of the two?
From the New York Magazine review by Sarah Jones:
In 1994, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education coined the phrase Gish gallop to describe a debate tactic common among creationists. Practitioners would “spew out a ton of information, accurate or not,” that opponents had “no possibility of refuting in the time available,” Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It’s not hard to see why: An opponent has to decide, quickly, which bullshit to respond to and which she must table for another time. She usually cannot rebut each lie point by point, as Mehdi Hasan pointed out in his recent book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. I thought about the Gish gallop probably a dozen times while I read The War on Science. Though I cannot refute each lie or sloppy argument in a single essay, in the tradition of skeptics I will highlight a few additional howlers that compose the book’s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of “desexed language” in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations “avoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,” like when the Canadian Cancer Society “simply said” that “if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you’re 21.”
As proof, Gribble cites a page on the society’s website that does not use sex-specific language to explain who might need a Pap test, and who might not. The webpage is real, but Gribble excludes context that substantially weakens her broader point. The same boilerplate text appears in a 2014 Facebook post by the society, where it’s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to “women.” Some social-media manager probably assumed that the average reader would see the graphic, read it, and understand that women get Pap tests, and that appears to be consistent with the society’s language overall. The society’s website often mentions “woman” or “women” in its communications. A different page on cervical cancer and the importance of Pap tests addresses “lesbian, bisexual and queer women.” Pages on breast, uterine, and fallopian tube cancers mention women, too.
In another chapter, Christian Ott, a former Caltech professor, writes about his 2017 “cancellation.” After an investigation characterized by “postmodernist intersectional social theory,” Caltech found that he had violated Title IX and university policies by harassing grad students. Then BuzzFeed News came calling, as it would later do for Krauss. The site’s reporting “was sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,” Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report? Ott never fully explains, but Google still exists. Ott, it turns out, had fallen in love with one of his grad students, and then fired her, and he complained obsessively about the woman to a different female student. Caltech knew this because it had Ott’s messages along with his Tumblr account, where he had published 86 poems about the student he loved. Ott does not mention his poetry, but at the end of his chapter, he does thank his wife for her support.
The bullshit doesn’t end here. Boudry, the philosopher, begins a chapter on the illiberalism of pro-Palestine activists by quoting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” Gay said that “it can,” before adding, “it depends on the context.” It’s Gay’s use of context that enrages Boudry, who desires the unequivocal condemnation of something that did not actually happen at Harvard. He does not include a single example of students calling for the extermination of Jews there or anywhere else, nor does he prove one of his central claims, which is that there is a systematic pattern of antisemitism on campus after campus. Israel is the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard — sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene.
So much for New Atheism, sic transit gloria mundi. Though New Atheism as a brand had mostly devoured itself by 2016, the ideas it professed, and conflicts it waged, have become more relevant than its individual celebrities. The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.
Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore “real” in this world; that’s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. “would be better off with fewer Asians” while calling herself a “race realist.” The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, “disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.”
Perfect. Although the best line is this:
Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance.
You will never find a more self-impressed group than race pseudoscience promoters. This is the source of their endless bitterness - they are so impressed with themselves, and yet very few others, outside of crackpot racist billionaires are as impressed by them.
The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms. The War on Science is not remarkable for what it gets wrong, then, but for the work it is trying to do. In Krauss’s more recent writings, he does not accept Trump’s war on research wholesale, but he can’t escape himself, either. As he notes in his introduction, he once complained in The Wall Street Journal that “the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health spent hundreds of millions of dollars on social justice initiatives instead of fulfilling their mandates of supporting scientific research.” He got what he wanted. So did his friends. Now what?
Coyne illustrates Jones' point "they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right" by responding:
No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.
Neither Jones nor Coyne mention that Boudry is an enthusiastic contributor to race pseudoscience rag Quillette and was recently seen at a gathering of gutter racists, including neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, at the "Heterodox" conference. I'd bet good money that Kirkegaard helped fund the conference.
Coyne does mention that the contemptible Boudry is a friend of his. Because those racist ghouls like to stick together.
UPDATE: I went to the Defector link that Jones provided in her article and I was glad I did because the 2024 article by Erik Baker, The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us, contains an excellent thumbnail description of the role that New Atheism has played in the development of 21st century race pseudoscience:
The important thing to understand about New Atheism is that it was never primarily a theological position. Plain old-fashioned atheism is hard to innovate on in that respect. If one does not believe in God, there is not really much more that needs to be said about one’s religious beliefs. In fact, New Atheism was, at its root, not about religion at all. It was about science, and its original enemies were not fundamentalists of any faith but a group of atheist Marxist biologists. Before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—the oldest of the group—were best known as professional atheists, they came to fame as defenders of the idea now known as evolutionary psychology, which began its life in the 1970s as “sociobiology.” Dawkins and Dennett championed the perspective of the biologist E.O. Wilson, which held that Darwinian evolution by natural selection was able to explain the reasons for a wide range of human behaviors, social patterns, and habits of thought, which were in turn thought to be significantly determined by a person’s genetic makeup. Their opponents, including most famously the leftist Harvard scientists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, maintained that sociobiology was built on shoddy scientific foundations and downplayed the importance of history, not just biology, in explaining why our societies are the way they are. To them, sociobiology was the rebirth of eugenics and social Darwinism in a kinder, gentler disguise.
Around the turn of the millennium, Dawkins, Dennett, and allies like Steven Pinker came to a very clever realization. Fundamentalist Christians also disagreed with them about evolutionary science—because they denied human evolution outright. As a result of the political power the religious right had accumulated since the 1970s, evolution had become a hot-button culture war issue. The sociobiologists (now rebranded, savvily, as evolutionary psychologists) had an opportunity to cast themselves as staunch defenders of science and rationality in debates about high school science education, stem cell research, and the like. Gould and Lewontin, despite their materialist commitments, refused to embrace this framing: Gould, for instance, argued that science and religion were “non-overlapping magisteria” that, properly understood, provided answers to fundamentally different questions and therefore couldn’t be said to be in “conflict.” The evolutionary psychologists exploited their enemies’ weakness for nuance. Any refusal to join Team Science in the fight against Team Religion, they charged, revealed that the supposedly scientific criticisms of sociobiology were really symptoms of an ideologically driven disloyalty to Darwin and the evolutionary paradigm. To “believe in evolution” meant to agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Pinker—which meant to disagree not only with Jerry Falwell, but also with Lewontin and Gould.
New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead they could, against all odds, depict Bush as an almost unwitting agent of a great campaign to defend the Western Liberal Enlightenment Tradition (which reached its height in the great discoveries of modern science) against the cave-dwelling barbarians who wanted to reinstate the Dark Ages. The New Atheists of the aughts constructed an insidious conceptual conveyor belt: rejecting creationism meant believing in capital-S Science, which meant believing in Western Civilization, which in turn meant supporting or at least tolerating imperialist American wars in west Asia. Conversely, disagreeing with the New Atheists—opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior—meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.
I think of Jordan Peterson as somewhat less harmful, even though he is a regressive scam-meister.
But it's always a good time to dunk on Peterson, from the PZ Myers video about the lobster from back in 2019, right up to today's video from Some More News. Enjoy.
Great Youtube video The “Skeptics” Are Crashing Out HARD from Genetically Modified Skeptic, which talks about the Laurence Krauss grifterpalooza book The War on Science and many of the people I've talked about on this blog, including Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Sabine Hossenfelder, Laurence Krauss, Carole Hooven, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Human Diversity Foundation and OF COURSE Pinker.
Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year:
"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?” I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful. “You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”
Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.
"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student."
Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.
Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.
And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:
BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.
Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.
I've provided a link to this excellent Some More News video about crackpot Jordan Peterson previously, but I hadn't watched it all the way through until yesterday. In my defense it is a really long video, which Cody lampshades several times throughout.
So I hadn't realized that racist filth Steve Sailer got a shout-out in the video. Jordan Peterson tweeted an article by Sailer that distorted the findings of a study about diversity. Some More News points out, accurately, that Sailer is a white supremacist.
The video also mentions Stefan Molyneux, Bari Weiss, Linda Gottfredson and Andy Ngo.
Now Steven Pinker's alliance with Steve Sailer - from using him as his data guy to including a piece of crap that Sailer wrote in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" - is a prime reason for the existence of this blog. I am motivated to point out that while Pinker was playing a mild-mannered liberal college professor, an image aided and abetted by a compliant, lazy, stupid media, he has a history of over twenty years of promoting white supremacists and racists.
And Pinker has not only never denounced Steve Sailer and has never expressed regret for promoting his career, Steven Pinker is now chummy withRichard Hanania, yet anotherwhite supremacist.
On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.
My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.
As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.
Pinker & friends claim to be so concerned about anti-Semitism, yet I haven't heard a peep out of them about the fact that Substack promotes Nazis. Maybe because some of those Nazis are their friends.
Pinker has proposed adopting a clear policy on academic freedom, promoting a wide range of viewpoints and embracing institutional neutrality by avoiding pronouncements on events of the day.
"It’s not just about Harvard, but about higher education and institutions in general,” Pinker said.
I was struck by how much techno-fascist Marc Andreessen's manifesto sounds like it was taken from a speech from one of Ayn Rand's characters. Or, as Vice said: "like the ramblings of a college student who just finished his first reading of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. "
For example, from the "Enemies" section of Andreessen's rant:
Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Curiously, Andreessen never uses "human" or "people," he always uses "man" to indicate human beings. For someone who is so devoted to the future, that is an odd choice - an antiquated usage, a preference from before the last quarter of the 20th century. But maybe that tells you something about Andreessen's plans for women in his techno-fascist utopia.
Like so many "futurists," who are almost all white men, Andreessen ignores the impact that technological innovation - reliable birth control, jobs that don't depend on muscular strength - has had on women's lives, especially choices concerning child-bearing.
I think the reason for that is because these men carry an unexamined belief that childbearing decisions are a "woman's issue" and therefore not interesting and certainly not worth the consideration of the Important Thinkers they believe themselves to be. Women and their lives are the painted, dimly-lit background flats before which these Important Thinkers strut about in the spotlight, expounding their Deep Thoughts.
It's obvious in this passage from the Andreessen manifesto:
We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods.
We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.
But once Andreessen does notice it, what will be his response?
It seems likely to be enforced child-bearing. Crackpot Jordan Peterson advocated "enforced monogamy." Enforced child-bearing would seem to be the next step in putting women back into their pre-last quarter of the twentieth century place.
Marc Andreessen is apparently impressed by Jordan Peterson.
But I shouldn't deny Andreessen credit for his own crackpottery - he believes that women having fewer children is caused by TikTok.
Women being steered wrong by technology is a problem for techno-fascists - unless you exclude women from the "progress of man."
It should be noted that Mr. and Mrs. Andreessen only have one offspring. His wife, in her early 50s, is unlikely to have more without a surrogate
Peter Thiel, another libertarian, said that giving women the vote was a problem for libertarianism, and as a recent Atlantic article noted, "He elaborated, after some backlash, that he did not literally oppose women’s suffrage, but neither did he affirm his support for it."
And speaking of crackpots, back to Ayn Rand. In Andreessen's infamous list of techno-fascist saints he includes the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but doesn't mention Ayn Rand.
Rand would not have had a problem with misogyny being the solution to the techno-fascist ideologues' woman problem - Rand was a misogynist herself.
And her creation, John Galt, was a terrorist - as Rational Wiki notes in its entry on "Going Galt" -
...the "hero" John Galt of Ayn Rand's Objectivist doorstopper, Atlas Shrugged, who destroys civilization to avoid paying taxes.[3] (Going Galters) apparently think this is a good idea, and hope to follow in his footsteps.
In the novel, John Galt declared his opposition to collectivism by starting a community called Galt's Gulch.[note 1][note 2] He expressed his opposition to organized labor by organizing (what else?) a strike; the original working title of the book, incredibly enough, was The Strike.
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
John Galt's origin story is absurd - after Galt invents a magical perpetual motion machine, he becomes a terrorist when his bosses at the Twentieth Century Motor Company collectivize their own business.
You know, because that's such a plausible scenario in the real world.
One of the self-collectivizing owners, Ivy Starns is a psycho-sadist, a typical two-dimensional Rand villain. Rand uses Starns to explain the motivation of Communism:
...if you ever want to see pure evil you should see the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once... And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
This is what passes for political insight among libertarians: Communism is caused by sadism.
More importantly, Andresseen likely believes that such a goofy cartoon villain is real:
Although it's an odd thing for Andreessen to quote with approval, that Rand's heroes are fake, since Rand's heroes are real enough to Andreessen for him to include one of them - and not its actual human (albeit woman) creator - as one of his "saints" of techno-fascism.
Here's how Ayn Rand treated her preposterous villains: she blows them up, along with their wives and children.
Trains were more than just a magnificent obsession for Rand. They also served as a sort of avenging angel. By Atlas Shrugged’s seventh chapter, “The Moratorium on Brains” (no stickler for subtlety, was our Ms. Rand), so many of the great men have opted out of society that a working diesel engine cannot be found to run a revolutionary express train, the Comet, through an eight-mile tunnel in the Rockies. Nevertheless, one of the “looter” politicians ruining the world insists that the Comet — clearly modeled on the 20th Century, and probably one of the gorgeous new Zephyr trains of the time — make the trip anyway, so that he can make a campaign appearance in California. The spineless, government-appointed bureaucrats now running the railroad attach a coal-burning engine instead, even though they know it might asphyxiate everyone on board.
“It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them,” writes Rand, who then begs to differ, spending the next two pages ranting about sixteen unnamed individuals who will die aboard the Comet — and a good thing, too, as they embody all the sorts she most despises.
The doomed include everyone from a lawyer who feels he can “get along under any political system,” to “an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards” because they believed in the will of the majority; to “a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays” that insulted businessmen, and finally a doting mother of two who would not denounce her husband because of his weaselly government job.
“These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas,” she concludes with relish, presumably including in her condemnation the young tots the doting mother had just tucked into their bunks with visions of collectivism inculcated deep in their heads. To them, Rand adds a group of soldiers aboard a munitions train that runs into the Comet after it stalls in the tunnel, killing everyone in a spectacular explosion.
Rand later writes a scene in which, as the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling during what she terms a “strike” by the prime movers, a rail bridge falls apart and a Taggart Transcontinental train tumbles into the Mississippi River — one more vehicle crowded with thinkers of philosophically impure thoughts. And in yet another scene, Eddie Willers, the loyal aide to the book’s heroine, is aboard a train when it breaks down out in the Arizona desert. The other passengers and crew manage to be rescued by a passing wagon train(!), but Eddie refuses and pleads, “Don’t let it go!” while looking up helplessly at the locomotive. The others abandon the train and Eddie, almost certainly to his death.
It was such passages that led Whittaker Chambers, in his 1957 National Review takedown of Rand and her just-released book, to famously write, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To the gas chambers — go!’ ” By then Rand had lingered so long on her screed that trains, the cutting edge of American technology and design when she began, were about to be all but eliminated by the prime movers.
But reading of her love for trains’ capacity to kill at least allows one to understand her appeal to the modern Republican right. Her extended descriptions of those who will die and why they deserve to die resemble nothing so much as the climactic passages of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, in which, after another set of righteous people have been raptured out of harm’s way, the authors dwell in loving detail on the torments to be inflicted by the returning deity of the Apocalypse — in this case, not Jesus Christ, but John Galt. Different god, same gas chamber.
Marc Andreessen making saints of a Fascist Manifesto co-author and one of Ayn Rand's characters tells you everything you need to know about Marc Andreessen.
But I discovered Byrne has a very interesting collaborator: Nina Paley who did illustrations for Byrne's forthcoming book which is apparently loved by Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers.
Paley has created a "Gender Wars" deck of cards. The red cards are the "gender-critical" good guys and the black cards are people she lumps together as "transactivists," including a mass murderer.
Now I don't have a high opinion of culture war grifters to begin with, but even I was stunned to see that Paley included Kiwi Farms as one of the good guys in her deck of cards.
Founded by Joshua Moon, a former 8chan administrator, Kiwi Farms evolved into a popular platform for creating harassment campaigns. Its users often fixated on transgender people, relentlessly stalking and doxing them. At least three of its victims died by suicide.
In the image Paley created, the cow represents "lolcows" - the people selected by Kiwi Farms for torture. Paley apparently thinks this is cute and funny.
Paley did a podcast with Joshua Moon. She and her podcast co-host Corinna Cohn provide a dishonest description of Kiwi Farms:
In 1993 John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To learn why that’s no longer true, listen to Josh Moon enumerate “the amount of things that have broken that people in the industry assumed could never break,” as activists with personal vendettas and political agendas relentlessly employ every possible strategy to silence his small but notorious gossip site Kiwi Farms. From Cloudflare to Hurricane Electric, ISPs, data centers, and payment processors, literally anything up and down the Border Gateway Protocol has been targeted to shut down the ‘Farms. With ISIS, the KKK, Stormfront, neo-nazis, and child porn all continuing to enjoy online services, who expected “the gossip site that makes fun of troons” to be the straw to break the Internet’s backbone? And why have the individuals and organizations who once stood against censorship lost their own?
Here's what is actually meant by "makes fun of the troons":
Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized—people who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially struggling—with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims “lolcows” because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: “Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.”
Kiwi Farms users deploy slightly different tactics for various victims, but the rough beats are the same. First, the group assembles extensive dossiers. Then they use the information (some true, some contorted, some fabricated) to torment their targets.
When Sagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent private messages urging her to kill herself, a friend said. When posters learned that Terryberry, an 18-year-old with learning disabilities, used the internet to make friends, they worked to get her social media accounts shut down while mocking her mental health struggles. They relentlessly tormented Ginder for being nonbinary. One thread went on for more than a dozen pages.
Also a fan, another Koch employee (besides Hooven) Pamela Paresky. Hooven cited her when she promoted the crackpot sociobiologists' social affinity theory. Apparently Paresky thinks these cards are hysterical! I knew Paresky was a wingnut ass, but I didn't guess what a hate-filled ghoul she is.
Paresky wants to "protect kids" - but presumably NOT the ones selected to be lolcows by Kiwi Farms.
Oh, and in case you're a wingnut and you think I'm a hypocrite because I detest Kiwi Farms attempting to destroy the lives of nobodies, while condoning a mocking impression of celebrity grifter Jordan Peterson, consider this an illustration of the difference between rightwing humor and leftwing humor.
Rightwing humor punches down - at misfit nobodies and sexual minorities.
Leftwing humor punches up - at wealthy public grifters.
But it was still good to see "Some More News" provide the video evidence of Ngo's friendly relationship with fascists and hear him do his fake British accent. Superb.
But wait, there's more!
Andy Ngo: The Next Generation of News Grifter | BEHIND THE BASTARDS.
The "Behind the Bastards" guy knows Cody Johnston from "Some More News" - they did a podcast together about Jordan Peterson.
This is great and mentions Ngo's pioneering of stochastic terrorism (after Gamergate which was promoted by Ngo's pal Christina Hoff Sommers.)
Well I decided to take a break from posting videos from The Majority Report and instead post another video from Some More News. I love these guys and you should too and you should give them money every month like I do. YouTube shows like this are like the Daily Show in the early 2000s.
Topics for this episode include The Twitter Files; Elon Musk; Repealing Roe V. Wade; the Metaverse failure; the Fake Shoplifting Crisis - Candace Owen gets a shout-out for her Nazi shit; Havana Syndrome is not a thing; Grifters - includes Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin; and Tucker Carlson.
I've mentioned "Some More News" recently, but I want to praise this almost-perfect video from them, explaining the Intellectual Dark Web's attempts to deny the importance of history and the existence of systemic racism.
Unfortunately the video doesn't mention Pinker - it would be full-on perfect if it did - which is a reason why Pinker is so much more insidious than the rest.
Nobody else associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, as far as I am aware, was invited to the United Nations to express opinions. Steven Pinker was.
And yet he holds the same beliefs as Sam Harris and others associated with the IDW and race pseudoscience. He's careful not to directly state those beliefs, especially since the brouhaha in 2018, but it's easy enough to infer his beliefs by who he supports and his statement that:
The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism...
I really wish I had been aware of Some More News long ago, I would have loved to post this video when it was first released two years ago. When the argument against the race beliefs of the IDW is stated so clearly you really have to wonder - is the IDW simply evil - or are they basically too stupid to grasp the complexity of socio-cultural-historical interactions, but have been socially promoted waaaay above their intellectual abilities.
The best part of this video might be the analogy at minute 56:25, showing a Mario Cart race with Mario representing white people and Luigi representing Black people. It's so good but basic, even a sociobiologist might be able to understand it.
I recently discovered Some More News, hosted by Cody Johnston and it's taken me too long to do it - these guys have discussed many of the members of the Intellectual Dark Web and its most powerful funders and supporters:
Geneticist Adam Rutherford recently had some distressingly true things to say about the ability of scammers and grifters to promote themselves, and how hard it is for debunkers to keep up with fervid imaginations and shamelessness.
He name-checks Jordan Peterson. Today we'll look at the influence of Peterson on the thought-processes of racist Bo Winegard and his Neville Chamberlain, Patrick Lockwood.
But first, just so you know what a martyr I am, although the following text is based on the transcript provided with the video, the transcript frequently screws up so I had to listen to this with my own ears all the way through to ensure that the transcript is faithful to what is actually said, and make sure the punctuation is added and accurate. Yes, it was torture. Thanks for asking.
One more thing before we get into it: recall that earlier in the video, Lockwood described people who react negatively to race pseudoscience claims as "los(ing) their minds."
So we are at minute 45:32 in the video. My highlights:
LOCKWOOD
What I would propose is that, you know, if the person is extremely closed-minded then there's probably not much of a conversation you can have. If you've got someone that is probably in, you know the top two-thirds of open-mindedness, then what I would recommend probably is something like finding the pain.
Because if we go to first principles, the first principles of this radical social justice ideology is that life as Peterson, says quite ah presciently, that life is best viewed as a series of, like, victim-driven you know, narratives etc.
WINEGARD
Yes.
LOCKWOOD
And that's a highly problematic way of looking at the world. Because yes, life is overall a struggle and overall problematic, that's a fair statement. The problem is that despite the fact that we are base creatures crawling across the earth, we also have the capacity to aspire to something better than that and we can lift each other up and we can heal etc such etc.
So if in this argument with someone who has a more radicalized mindset, what can you do to get to the person's pain? Because that would be, as a clinical psychologist that's the first place my mind goes. If someone sees the world through the victim narrative, how can I get in touch with the part of them that feels like a victim and allow that to breathe and have space because I think if you don't uncork that bottle, then it's just going to shake up and become fizzy all over you, when you start debating.
WINEGARD
I wonder though, with, I mean, how many of the people, I think that's the appropriate to put it - the narrative, right? Seeing the world through an oppressor-victim basically that that is the world view right, now a lot of the people who have that world view are incredibly affluent privileged people and it's not clear to me that they actually think they're the victim, they just think the what, they, that's the lens those are the spectacles they look to for example it is see the world as like everything is victim-oppressor.
LOCKWOOD
Right but I mean for me this goes back to you know Paul Bloom's book you know, "Against Empathy the Case for Rational Compassion" because we can highly highly empathize with people even though we are not part of that group. You can be a white kid at you know Harvard and you can hear about all these news articles and these racist incidents and shootings "oh boy that's terrible. I don't want to be part of terrible. I have to identify with this group of people and make sure I'm not on the side of terrible."
WINEGARD
Mm hmm.
LOCKWOOD
Being able to get them to articulate "I'm desperately afraid of being identified with being a terrible person, this hateful group of people" I think that's a great place to start with a lot of these social justice warriors, because there's literally nothing wrong with one to be anti-terrible, if you know?
WINEGARD
(Chuckles)
LOCKWOOD
Like I don't find that any bit morally problematic
WINEGARD
(Chuckles)
I don't either.
LOCKWOOD
You know? I think it's just the way that that fear-driven instinct is managed is problematic. It's managed through this hyper rationalization and this hyper-focus on things that don't need to be focused on.
So what we see, again and again is Lockwood denying the possibility that the views of his political opponents, the "social justice warriors," could be based on rational analysis. Even when he admits that there are real-world instances of social injustice, he invents internal narratives for SJWs to portray them as pitiful squirrely creatures whose only response is emotional: "I'm desperately afraid of being identified with being a terrible person."
And Lockwood's straw-manning is so extreme that he even denies that SJWs have a hope of a better world. He contrasts his straw-manned portrayal of their "problematic" view of the world to "we also have the capacity to aspire to something better than that."
As if no social justice advocate has ever attempted anything constructive to build a better world and instead they all spend all their time peeing their diapers.
Now conveniently for Bo Winegard, Lockwood's attitude about "social justice warriors" perfectly matches Winegard's attitude towards people who criticize race pseudoscience.
This part was especially revealing about Lockwood's interactions with his political opponents:
if you don't uncork that bottle, then it's just going to shake up and become fizzy all over you, when you start debating.
I think that if someone becomes "fizzy" with Lockwood when debating him it is because of Lockwood's blatant assumption that the person he is debating is an emotion-driven hysteric. People will tend to find this annoying. But apparently Lockwood assumes they are expressing irritation not because of what he is doing but because of their internal, inexplicable "pain."
I know first-hand about this tactic because Lockwood pulled it on me. I wanted to discuss his support for race pseudoscience promoters - and this was before I found out about his friendly interview with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard. His response was to insist I was upset, and offer a one-on-one session with him. And he persisted in spite of my continuing rejection of his unwanted offer.
Now if Lockwood was just some Twitter rando it would be unremarkable. But he is a clinical psychologist, as he keeps saying, so what he is doing here is politicizing psychiatry - or I guess in his case psychology.
Wouldn't this be considered a breach of professional ethics?
Lockwood looks to Jordan Peterson for how best to address the concerns of one's political opponents - by dismissing their concerns as "victim-driven narratives":
...the first principles of this radical social justice ideology is that life as Peterson, says quite ah presciently, that life is best viewed as a series of, like, victim-driven you know, narratives etc.
Jumping ahead in the video to minute 50:49
WINEGARD
... so there's actually an empirical dispute there about what is our society like, that's really important to have. And I would wager for example that if we talk to Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson would say it's not as bad as these people make it seem. And that's one reason he thinks that this narrative is something of the problem is because it's actually not matching reality.
So both Lockwood and Winegard mention Peterson as an authority in their attitudes towards their political opponents. Peterson claims that their opponents' "narrative" should be dismissed because it does not match reality.
But Jordan Peterson is a charlatan.
And he was known as a charlatan well before this video was published.
In January 2018, a year and a half before the Lockwood/Winegard Munich Agreement was published, biologist P. Z. Myers made a video explaining why Peterson's claim about lobsters and humans was absurd.
As Myers states early on: "he walked right into my wheelhouse and made some specific claims about evolution and nervous systems that were straight-up idiotic and ignorant."
