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| What's it going to take for journalists (except the Guardian), to ask Pinker about his warm relations with neo-Nazis? --------------------------------------------------- |
Pinker's predilections for having-it-both-ways and weasellitude were both on display in this interview with staff writer Finn McRedmond:
Though, for all the talk of counter-Enlightenment trends, Pinker is at pains to stress that the world isn’t backsliding into the dark ages; there has just been a light, directionally concerning, shift. “Despite the setbacks of the last 15 years, I don’t think the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Liberalism is on a back heel, but there are still liberals.” Who are the liberals that might be able to wrest the West back from the iconoclastic populists Pinker holds in such deep contempt? “It’s probably not Gavin Newsom, it’s probably not Pete Buttigieg,” he says matter-of-factly. And then, as I have
come to expect of him at this point, neglects to provide a positive answer.
When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Stephen Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, filmed themselves dancing in their home. But, the respite from this man – one who represents the inverse of everything Pinker believes in – was brief. The second election of Trump in 2024 “flabbergasted” Pinker. He cites Trump’s first election, in 2016, as the moment that events seemed to spin out of coherence. Not even Pinker’s voluminous talent and erudition – nor that of his fellow liberal peers – could reckon with these cosmic forces. I found Pinker someone reluctant to give a straight answer on small questions; no matter all that data, fame and institutional support. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he doesn’t have any answer to the big ones.
That's Pinker, tout craché. Dismissive commentary but no straight answers. But of course he outsources answers to his race pseudoscience friends and has done so for the past quarter-century.
And since this is not the Guardian, Pinker is not asked about his connection to those friends even as he becomes more obvious about his alliances, even with actual neo-Nazis.
What is wrong with journalism? Just in terms of interest, it would have jazzed up the article considerably to ask about Pinker's long-time support for racists.
Instead the interview seesaws back and forth between passive-aggressive complimentary and then snippy observations about Pinker. His blue eyes don't get a mention this time, but his hair does.
Pinker is described as a liberal, but the interviewer doesn't mention that in spite of Pinker's dislike of Trump, in many ways the second Trump presidency is a dream come true for Pinker and his allies - from anti-trans hostility to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion.
But posing as a liberal while promoting hideous right-wing goals is what makes Pinker so valuable to the Intellectual Dark Web project of "moving the Overton window."
I did laugh aloud at this part:
...A cynic would call him pious. Instead, what I found in the man – as we spoke in a windowless room in Fitzrovia – was someone driven to distraction by the liquid rationality coursing through his veins; trading a faith in the divine for the higher, matter-of-fact power of data; permanently agog at the sea of unreasonable maniacs around him. If you were to burst him with a pin, I suspect he might explode into a shower of Excel spreadsheets.
Meanwhile it seems that Pinker has been a big influence over Anna Krylov. She used to promote women in STEM, a position I found puzzling considering her alliance with the IDW gang from Bari Weiss to Quillette to Pinker.
It looks like they've gotten her to come around to their way of thinking. P Z. Myers has a great response:
Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.
Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.
In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.
Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint.
And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!
Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.
Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished.
Unless…
Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.
Sure, Krylov is a crank - and probably a grifter taking money from some organization controlled by Peter "and I know about the antichrist" Thiel - but at least she is no longer in conflict with herself: I assume she's given up on her previous women in STEM efforts now that she's joined the far-right push to force women out of public life so they'll stay home and have lots of White babies.
The reactionary ghouls at X have recently been all a-twitter over a stupid women-are-losers piece by Helen Andrews that even annoyed some conservatives.
But I don't know what the problem is. All these right-wing women with professional careers who think women are polluting institutions with their feminizing girl germs, like Steven Pinker's buddy Cory Clark - why don't they all go ahead and quit already and become tradwives? Who is preventing them?
How about some quiet quitting?
