Jerry Coyne defends Steven Pinker again

Jerry Coyne generates another aggrieved whine-fest on behalf of Steven Pinker.

Coyne writes:

I’ve never seen Steve commit a shoddy act nor engage in ad hominem arguments.

But I documented Pinker doing just that in January of this year.

Coyne also writes:

This is puzzling to me as he’s a nice guy and can’t be accused of Misogyny and Nazism Through Tweeting. 

Later Coyne says:

He’s also been accused of being an alt-righter, and that’s the most mendacious accusation of all. Pinker is on the Left, though more toward the center than are, say, the Justice Democrats. He donated a sizable sum to the Democratic Party during the last election cycle, and I know from conversations with him that he’s not the neo-Nazi you’d guess from reading, say, Ph*ryng*l*.

The word Ph*ryng*l* refers to PZ Myers blog Pharyngula.

If you do a search on Pinker in Myers' blog, what you will discover is that Myers was once just as much a fan of Pinker as Coyne. But unlike Coyne, learning about Pinker's race science connections and his defense of the alt-right - which, as Myers rightly observers was really an excuse to attack the left - Myers has changed his view of Pinker. (Just as I had once been a fan of Coyne but by 2011 began to reconsider.)

Now it isn't that Coyne is simply loyal to Pinker - if you read Coyne's blog you will find that he basically agrees with Pinker - and Quillette - about everything, but especially the misogyny and Islamaphobia.

Naturally Coyne doesn't mention Pinker's connections to race science promoters Razib Khan and Steve Sailer. Pinker has promoted both their careers. And then there is Pinker's support for Quillette, a magazine that publishes so much that is agreeable to white supremacists that American Renaissance has reprinted many Quillette articles.

Quillette's founder Claire Lehmann, whom Pinker has never criticized to my knowledge, but rather only the opposite, is clearly a right-winger, not only because of her work for far-right Rebel Media but because of her classic right-wing positions on issues like, most recently, the poor.

Pinker himself pushed the "marriage is the answer to violence" trope of the right in "Better Angels" and I explain here how the data demonstrate that marriage rates and violence rates decreased together beginning around 1990.

Lehmann is a big fan of professional misogynist Camille Paglia. Pinker described Paglia as a "feminist" in "The Blank Slate." This is what Paglia thinks of women.

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."

But in the mind of Steven Pinker, a person can have absolute contempt for women and yet at the same time be a feminist.

As I have demonstrated, Pinker claimed to be appalled by the beliefs of the alt-right but at the same time recommends the work of the very people who claim black people are innately more violent and stupid than other races.

So how can Steven Pinker claim he isn't a right-winger and a racist and a misogynist while supporting and promoting right-wingers and racists and misogynists?

In his New Yorker review of "The Blank Slate" Louis Menand noted:

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."

Pinker's "having it both ways" tendency is so bad I caught him doing it in the same sentence:

And there he is doing it in "Better Angels." You can't say we don't know if marriage is the cause or effect and then in the very same sentence say it seems to be the cause. If you have decided that something is the cause, you argue for it. What kind of rhetorical bullshit is that, to say "we don't know" and then declare we do know in the same sentence?

Pinker seems to exist in a "having it both ways" reality. 

• He can claim we don't know the causes of youth violence and then admit environment matters. 
• He can claim that marriage prevents violence while ignoring evidence that refutes this.
• He can claim he's not a right-winger or racist or misogynist while promoting and working for right-wingers and racists and misogynists
• And Steven Pinker can quote people to support his points even if doing so misrepresents the people he quoted. And when criticized for this ethical failure, simply dismisses the criticism by saying "so what?"

I've called Pinker a weasel and PZ Myers called him a lying shit-weasel, but let us consider the possibility that Steven Pinker, rather than deliberately arguing out of both sides of his face as some kind of obnoxious strategy, simply does not understand that you cannot logically claim two incompatible positions are both true at the same time.

It's possible that Pinker has succeeded thanks to money and connections and his success has convinced others that he is bright. And there are enough people in this world - people like Jerry Coyne - who are themselves so deficient in logical and coherent thought that Pinker's deficiencies don't register with them.

And since the deficiencies don't register, they can't fathom why people like Myers find them so irritating. And so they explain it to themselves like this:

As best I can understand, people don’t like him because he’s famous and they’re not...

Of course Pinker turns on Justin Trudeau when Quillette tells him to

I knew it was a mistake for Justin Trudeau to pal around with Steven Pinker.

Pinker is a contributor to Quillette, and constantly sings the praises of that right-wing, race science-promoting rag.


Quillette was founded by Claire Lehmann, who, while she was running Quillette was also working for unhinged Trudeau-hater Ezra Levant at Rebel Media.

Of course Jon Kay at Quillette would claim that the real problem with Justin Trudeau's government is hiring too many women and non-white people.

And of course Steven Pinker would go along with that.

I certainly hope Justin Trudeau has learned what a lying right-wing shitweasel Steven Pinker is.

Once again, the press whitewashes Pinker

This time it's Tom Bartlett at the Chronicle Review: Why Do People Love to Hate Steven Pinker?

This piece doesn't quite match the low point of Andrew Anthony in the Guardian, but it does align with the press's usual indulgent, ill-informed and gullible takes on Steven Pinker:

Last year Pinker briefly found himself on the defensive after saying that the alt-right is made up of "often highly literate, highly intelligent people." On its face, it seemed from that quote that Pinker was throwing his lot in with incels, white nationalists, and assorted bigots. Pinker, however, went on to say that those drawn to the alt-right, intelligent though they may be, are then led to embrace "repellent conclusions," in part because they’re encountering politically incorrect ideas for the first time and those ideas are like "a bacillus to which they have no immunity." Pinker thinks more robust and honest discussion can help inoculate students against being drawn into that radical fringe.

No. Wrong. Just as bad as Jesse Singal.

As I demonstrated in great detail culminating in this post, what Pinker is doing is promoting the claims of race scientists - especially "biosocial criminologists" who argue for the very things that Pinker claims to consider repellent.

But right in the middle of the article, the author contrasted my description of Quillette with Pinker's:

Quillette is either "unique and indispensable," as Pinker puts it, or a "center for white male grievance," as one critic described it.

How do I know I'm the "one critic"? Because if you Google "Quillette" and "center for white male grievance" these are the two hits.

Heavens to Mergatroyd is my personal blog. Since then I have posted most of my Pinker/Race Science/IDW content to this site. Naturally I never heard from Bartlett for this article.

This isn't the first time I've been quoted on Quillette without being named. The same thing happened when Politico linked to me calling Quillette a bunch of clowns on Twitter. I didn't hear from Politico either.

What's especially odd is that there are prominent people who have criticized Quillette. Daniel Engber may not be a household name, but just this past January he was published in Slate calling Quillette "a soap-box for self-pity."

It's quite a strange dynamic set up by the article: Steven Pinker, famous, wealthy, frequently lionized in the press, constantly asked for his opinion including by CNN vs anonymous "one critic."

Catty Persons

Claire Lehmann, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young are all members of what I think of as the IDW Misogynist Ladies Club - all three of them have careers built on hating women on behalf of right-wing men like the Koch brothers.

And I do mean misogynist, not just anti-feminist. I've noted Lehmann's misogyny especially, although Sommers and Young have had even longer careers championing the cause of those poor downtrodden men. And Cathy Young still has some serious apologizing to do, in my opinion, for the way she celebrated the Gamergate mob's campaign against women.

But nothing is more illustrative of the deep internalized misogyny of the alt-right Weird Sisters than their attitude towards fiction author Kristen Roupenian.

Roupenian's short story "Cat Person" was published in the New Yorker in December 2017 and "went viral" - clearly it struck a nerve with many people.

It's well-written - but the New Yorker is not known for publishing bad work as even Philistines like Lehmann, Sommers and Young must be aware.

"Cat Person" is about (spoiler alert) a college student who gets involved with an older man, she discovers he lied about being a "cat person" on his online dating profile, she has disappointing sex with him and she breaks up with him.

Now remember, this is a work of fiction. I can't find anything online by any of the three women that explains why they dislike her work so much as fiction.

And there is nothing overtly feminist about the piece - but just writing about a fictional woman's disappointment with a fictional man seems to be enough to enrage them. How dare she.

Lehmann, Sommers and Young have a very personal contempt for Roupenian, whom they never refer to by name. As you can see here, Cathy Young jumped right on the hate train, making a truly bizarre comment about Roupenian's success, and even one of her Twitter followers doesn't seem to understand her response.

Sommers conflates Roupenian with her story of a bad relationship to gloat about a work of non-fiction written by Roupenian recounting a man breaking up with her.

Claire Lehmann uses another work of fiction by Roupenian to tell us it's wrong and she, Claire Lehmann, knows what men really want.

Although Lehmann elsewhere ho-hums that she only got half-way through the piece.

But then Lehmann is rapidly getting a reputation as an ignoramus who doesn't read much at all.

Cathy Young, whose political views I criticized  (and this was even before I realized how invested she was in Gamergate) attacked me in a viciously personal way while discussing me with Steven Pinker's buddy Razib Khan over my criticisms of Khan's race science.

It should be obvious that an incredibly expensive lawsuit in federal court is how nobody wants to "get in the spotlight somehow." The belief that I would do anything to be famous, no matter how harmful to myself, says more about Young than about me.

I said in the previous post that Lehmann, Sommers and Young would not spend so much of their waking lives hating women if they weren't getting paid to do it.

On the other hand, I don't think the Koch brothers or the other right-wing men who support their careers really care about a young short story author.

So although I think the Catty Persons' motivation is primarily financial I also think there is something about the characters of all three women - something twisted and damaged - that makes them so well-suited to their professional careers of incessantly attacking women and women's aspirations.

Claire Lehmann's Quillette aligning yet again with the Koch brothers

You can hear the tone in the videos she's made for Canada's far-right Rebel Media. I can't listen to Lehmann speak for more than a few seconds before my teeth start grinding.

I don't have the definitive evidence that Lehmann is paid by the Koch brothers that I do for Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young, who both have Reason magazine bylines, but I think it's inevitable that they would pay her to do what she does.

I don't think Lehmann, Sommers and Young would spend so much of their waking lives hating feminists - or even just any woman who writes popular fiction that presents a man in an unflattering light - if it wasn't a lucrative and easy gig.

Although Cathy Young especially seems to
really enjoy her job of hating other women
out of a misguided belief that this
is supporting men somehow - you can
read Cat Person here
and decide for yourself if the prose
is as bad as all that.

Here's Lehmann's participation in a Mercatus Center project, another Koch brothers-funded enterprise. The term "political correctness" is used twenty-nine times in the interview. Follow the link and use the handy search box to see for yourself.

It was recently brought to my attention that Lehmann is publishing Michael Shellenberger, whose speciality is anti-renewable energy. Here he defends the Koch brothers

Shellenberger runs a pro-nuclear power organization "Environmental Progress" - what a perfect Koch brothers-esque astroturf name - and one of his Science and Economy Advisors is... Steven Pinker.

And here's Shellenberger's paen to Marie Curie who according to this NYTimes piece from twenty years ago:

...tended to deny the perils of radiation, despite being deeply troubled by the deaths in the 1920's of colleagues and radiation workers from leukemia.

Sounds like the perfect mascot for Shellenberger.

Now I haven't found evidence that Shellenberger is being funded by the Koch brothers, but his projects certainly align perfectly with the Koch brothers hostility toward renewable energy. And "Environmental Progress" defends the Koch brothers here:

Policymakers and journalists have made much of corporate funding for efforts to kill clean energy. Mostly those efforts have focused on the Koch brothers and Exxon. Fair treatment would require more focus on groups like ELPC and Sierra Club, which have taken money from natural gas companies while fighting nuclear energy, America’s largest source of clean, low carbon power.

Rolling Stone fights the Koch brothers over their anti-environment policies.

So how are things at Chernobyl?

...For almost three decades the forests around the shuttered nuclear power plant have been absorbing contamination left from the 1986 reactor explosion. Now climate change and lack of management present a troubling predicament: If these forests burn, strontium 90, cesium 137, plutonium 238 and other radioactive elements would be released, according to an analysis of the human health impacts of wildfire in Chernobyl's exclusion zone conducted by scientists in Germany, Scotland, Ukraine and the United States.

Amy Harmon on race & science

Per her NYTimes bio:

Amy Harmon is a national correspondent for The New York Times, covering the intersection of science and society. 

She has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for her series The DNA Age, and as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived in America.”

With this background, Harmon is an excellent counter to the beliefs of "race science" proponents. She reached out to me on Twitter about my commentary on the subject, and she is at the top of my list of people to interview for the podcast, once I get that together.

Two of her most recent NYTimes pieces:

• For a Black Mathematician, What It’s Like to Be the ‘Only One’
• What I Learned While Reporting on the Dearth of Black Mathematicians

In the latter she writes:

Some people claim that there are not many black research mathematicians because African-Americans are not as intelligent as other races. These people, whom I have reported on for other stories in recent months, almost invariably use mathematical accomplishment as their yardstick for intelligence. They note that no individuals of African descent have won the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They lack any genetic evidence to explain the gap in average I.Q. scores between white and black Americans that they cite as the basis of their belief, or reason to think that a genetic trait would be impervious to social or educational intervention, or that high I.Q. is key to math ability, which Timothy Gowers, a 1998 Fields medalist, has attributed largely to “the capacity to become obsessed with a math problem.”

And of course "some people" are the proponents of race science. And using the Fields Medal as a signifier of racial intelligence is a problem for race science proponents since they generally tend to believe - as Linda Gottfredson a leading proponent of racial intelligence does - that East Asians are genetically more intelligent than whites (not counting Ashzkenazi Jews.) Here is Gottfredson teaming up with Canadian white supremacist Stefan Molyneux to rank "races" by intelligence.

Steven Pinker is a supporter of Linda Gottfredson.

But the Fields Medal in its history only has six recipients of East Asian ethnicities, based on names, but many more of European ancestry, even by only counting names that are unlikely to indicate Ashkenazi ancestry.

So if the Fields Medal awardees are an indicator of ethnic intelligence and East Asians are more intelligent than those of European ancestry, why wouldn't the East Asians be better represented?

But there's no real science in "race science" so it shouldn't be surprising when their specious claims turn out to be very poorly supported.

Intellectual Dark Web sites & the second string

Bari Weiss mentioned twenty-five people in her Intellectual Dark Web column, but there are plenty more, as even whoever is running this "inofficial" Intellectual Dark Web archive agrees. Although this extended circle lists people mentioned in the Weiss article. I will just include those who are not in the Weiss article, whom I like to call the second-stringers. Several of these names are new to me.

The archive includes Ezra Klein as a member which is absurd so I left him out.

• John Anderson
• Bishop Robert Barron 
• Peter Boghossian 
• Yaron Brook 
• Steven Crowder 
• James Damore
• Richard Dawkins 
• Larry Elder 
• David Fuller 
• Jonathan Haidt 
• Lewis Howes 
• Coleman Hughes 
• Gregg Hurwitz 
• Lawrence Lessig 
• James Lindsay 
• Bjorn Lomborg
• Glenn Loury 
• Greg Lukianoff 
• Helen Pluckrose 
• Gad Saad 
• Sir Roger Scruton 
• John Stossel 
• Skyler Turden 
• Jocko Willinck 
• Akira the Don 

I would add to the list:

• Jerry Coyne
• David Duke
• Niall Ferguson
• Linda Gottfredson
• Iona Italia
• Jonathan Kay
• Razib Khan
• Ezra Levant
• Richard Lynn
• Gavin McInnes
• John McWorther
• Daphne Merkin
• Andy Ngo
• Steve Sailer
• Jesse Singal
• Richard Spencer
• Jared Taylor
• Bo Winegard
• Cathy Young
• Toby Young

Really you could add anybody who writes for Quillette to the list.

Here is another Intellectual Dark Web site with a logo and all. It lists the leaders of the IDW which includes mostly those mentioned in the Weiss article but also some of the second stringers and one mentioned nowhere else - John McWhorter - so I added him to my list.

And I found another IDW site.

Standard IDW Hypocrisy

Bo Winegard blocked me on Twitter for criticizing his support for "human biodiversity."

Bo Winegard's HBD bona fides.

Human Biological and Psychological Diversity - co-written with Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell

On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism (in Quillette) - co-written with Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell

The soul of the Intellectual Dark Web

In March 2018 the magazine GQ published an article on one of the activities of the "intellectual dark web": free speech grifting.

The article doesn't use the term "Intellectual Dark Web" but then it was published two months before the Bari Weiss piece popularized the term. But it is full of those "renegades" mentioned in the Weiss article: Milo Yiannapoulos, David Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and especially Christina Hoff Sommers.

The article points out that these self-styled free speech defender are strangely silent about free speech threats from the right:

Serwer theorizes that fixation on liberal college students persists because it involves the environs of scholarly elites, gives elders the opportunity to "sneer at a younger generation," and is politically expedient for conservatives. According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization with ties to the Koch brothers, from 2000 to 2017, there were anywhere from six to 35 self-reported disinvitation attempts annually and 40 percent of them came from the right, while Heterodox Academy, an organization devoted to increasing viewpoint diversity, finds that the majority of successful disinvites came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as "the psychology of progressive hostility." Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization.

The most chilling part of the article is this snapshot of the compromised & corrupt soul of Christina Hoff Sommers:

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her "a fascist," among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black "Stay Woke" jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read "No Platform for Fascists." It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, "Black lives matter," Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.

Claire Lehmann: the poor only have themselves to blame

Unfortunately its members are not as well-educated as you would expect from an "intellectual" dark web.

The controversy makes the leap outside of Twitter:
Professional media person: Poor people have money but they just waste it on ‘benders’

Quillette - Molyneux connections

Southern Poverty Law Center:

A glance at Stefan Molyneux’s subscriber count (650,000+) on YouTube suggests that he is a charismatic, persuasive and influential individual. A skilled propagandist and an effective communicator within the racist “alt-right” and pro-Trump ranks, his promotion of scientific racism and eugenics to a large and growing audience is a serious concern. Molyneux has been delivering “race realist” propaganda, based on pseudo-scientific sources, to his audience on an ongoing basis for over two years, and thus has encouraged thousands of people to adopt his belief in biological determinism, social Darwinism and non-white racial inferiority. Molyneux puts considerable effort into cloaking the practical implications of these beliefs across his media platforms.

Quillette authors who have appeared on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel

1. Kevin M. Beaver - May 2015 & May 2016
2. Peter Boghossian - July 2012 #1, July 2012 #2, October 2013,  December 2013,
3. Brian Boutwell
4. Richard Haier
5. David M. Haskell
6. Adam Perkins 
7. Michael Shermer
8. John Paul Wright

Guests on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel defended and/or promoted by Quillette

1. James Damore
2. Linda Gottfredson
3. Richard Lynn
4. Charles Murray
5. Jordan Peterson - February 2017,  July 2017, August 2017, December 2017
6. Lauren Southern - 10 videos

This list will be updated as more information is available.

Jerry Coyne is not really the best judge of who is a misogynist

I'm unsure of whether or not to classify Jerry Coyne as a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" - he's not mentioned in the Bari Weiss article and he tends to avoid writing for right-wing media like Quillette, although he is a fan, but if he's not actually a member of the IDW he is certainly its biggest cheerleader.

He also appears to be Steven Pinker's publicist. Last week Coyne was sharing with the world Pinker's views on an article critical of the work of Steven Pinker (spoiler alert - Pinker & Coyne agree the criticism was bad and wrong and driven by nefarious motives) and this week he's pondering whether "New Atheism" is dead. Of course Coyne shares Pinker's thoughts with his blog audience.

Coyne shares his own thoughts:

Three articles bashing New Atheism have recently been published (here, here, and here). I already criticized the Guardian piece, and am not going to waste my time on the others. After all, we know the tropes, which have been repeated ad infinitum: New Atheism used to be a lively and going concern, then four old white men (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris [who’s not old]) arrogantly proclaimed themselves leaders of the movement, with at least three of those men being bigoted and/or misogynistic, as well as adherents to the alt-right (Dennett manages to escape those labels). That, goes the narrative, drove people away from New Atheism, an egress that could have been avoided if New Atheism had properly aligned itself with social justice. Now, because of the fault of its leaders and its rejection of wokeness, New Atheism is dead. 

I don’t agree with this narrative on several grounds. Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris never proclaimed themselves “leaders of New Atheism”. They became spokespeople for atheism because they all had bestselling books and were also eloquent speakers.  They are not bigots or misogynists, though I admit that Dawkins was sometimes hamhanded in his use of Twitter.

It seems to never occur to Coyne that there's a good reason why Daniel Dennett has escaped being called bigoted and/or misogynistic - because he isn't on the record making bigoted and/or misogynistic statements.

It doesn't occur to Coyne because he doesn't know what bigoted and misogynistic statements are.

Hitchens is most famous outside of New Atheist circles as the guy who said women aren't funny. His long-time colleague at The Nation, Katha Pollitt made clear how much contempt Hitchens had for women - and he was anti-abortion too.

Dawkins is infamous as an Islamaphobe, going so far as to suggest that Christianity is superior to Islam, in spite of Christianity being, you know, a religion that also glorifies crimes against humanity in its sacred texts.

“There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”

Richard Dawkins is old enough to remember the IRA blowing up buildings for the sake of Catholic Ireland against Protestant England.

The Christians predictably loved Dawkins comments about Christianity. Dawkins doesn't mind giving aid and comfort to Christians in exchange for bashing Islam.

It's very likely Dawkins will be remembered as much for his part in Elevatorgate as anything else. The vicious threats against Rebecca Watson from Dawkins' fanboys gives plenty of evidence of the fundamental misogyny at the heart of the "New Atheist" movement.

And then there's Sam Harris, named as a member of the IDW, along with Pinker, in the Weiss article. I have blogged about his Islamaphobia, his misogyny and his support for Charles Murray and race science. 

But Coyne himself is a supporter of race science and manages to perfectly synthesize his Islamaphobia and his misogyny as I discussed on my personal blog last year.

Coyne gives the whole misogynist game away when he doubts that Muslim women are able to make their own choices:

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip is a good one, particularly timely, and speaks directly to the notion of the degree to which Muslim women “choose” to be covered. When a Western Muslimah (not one in Iran or Saudi) declares that she wears the hijab “by choice,” I never accept that claim at face value. Was she brought up wearing one? Did she go to school where other girls wore them? Are her friends mostly hijabis? This whole notion of “choice” in Islamic dress needs to be examined, yet I haven’t seen a single article on it. It’s the rhino in the room.

I was brought up Catholic and sent to Catholic school and told not to use birth control. I was able to decide to quit the Catholic church and use birth control. So yeah,  if I can make decisions in spite of my upbringing, then I guess I can accept that Muslim women can make their own choices. Even if I don't agree with their choices.

If women are forced to wear something then yeah, we need to fight for their right to make their own decisions. Otherwise it's not our business.

Coyne is unable to understand why feminists in a pluralist society support Muslim women's rights to wear something that signifies their religion - even if the feminists in question don't agree with some of the things the religion says. In a free society we must accept some people will make personal choices we don't like. Coyne is not comfortable in such a society. Because he believes women who make choices he doesn't like are incapable of making their own choices.

Because Jerry Coyne is a bigot. And a misogynist.

So no, I don't think Coyne is a reliable source of who is and is not a bigot and misogynist. 

Support the Southern Poverty Law Center

You can tell how effective the Southern Poverty Law Center is at opposing "race science" by how hostile members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are towards it.

Here is Claire Lehmann urging Sam Harris to sue the SPLC for a straight-up piece of factual reportage.

The IDW is a collection of the most fragile snowflakes - as the SPLC observed Christina Hoff Sommers can't take a single line of criticism

Sommers, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar, took to Twitter and claimed that the SPLC “denounced” her as an “enabler of male supremacy.” She told the Weekly Standard that the SPLC was “blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.” An email to Sommers’ assistant asking for clarification went unanswered.

And if Christina Hoff Sommers believes a thing you know her Reason Magazine and Gamergate comrade, the toxic Cathy Young, won't be far behind.

Michael Shermer, recently seen celebrating the crushing by Steven Pinker of the "cockroach" Phil Torres is naturally in with the Quillette gang in opposition to SPLC.

Steven Pinker, of course, is also on the record in opposition to the SLPC.  It should be noted that not only is Ayaan Hirsi Ali (named as a member of the IDW in the Bari Weiss article) famously hostile to Islam, she's married to Niall Ferguson who in 2018 created a controversy pulling a fairly typical IDW "free speech grifter" stunt:

In Spring of 2018, Professor Ferguson was involved with College Republican leaders at Stanford to oppose a Left-leaning student take over of the Cardinal Conversations initiative. In leaked emails, he was quoted as asking for opposition research on the student involved. He later apologized and resigned from the said initiative when emails were leaked revealing his involvement in the events. "I very much regret the publication of these emails. I also regret having written them," Ferguson wrote in a statement to The Daily.[118]

Maajid Nawaz managed to get a few million dollars out of the SPLC for expressing an opinion that Nawaz didn't agree with. Opinions are of course protected under the First Amendment, but Nawaz isn't American and the SPLC no doubt settled because no matter the ruling, had it gone to trial, it would have been more expensive than settling. 

I expect that this encouraged Gavin McInnes to try his luck suing SPLC.

McInnes’s complaint against the SPLC – posted online by his lawyer G Baron Coleman – says that that McInnes was “successfully targeted for personal and professional destruction by a self-appointed enforcer of [political] orthodoxy”.
Later, the complaint alleges that the SPLC is responsible for “the termination of Mr. McInnes’s employment, an almost complete deplatforming and defunding and subjecting him to employment discrimination based on his lawful non-employment recreational activities”. 

In a statement Monday, the SPLC president, Richard Cohen, said: “To paraphrase FDR, judge us by the enemies we’ve made”, continuing: “The fact that he’s upset with SPLC tells us that we’re doing our job exposing hate and extremism. His case is meritless.”
It’s not the first time McInnes has criticized the SPLC. Last June, he told the Guardian at a New York City rally supporting Tommy Robinson, the far-right founder of the English Defence League, that the SPLC was a “pernicious group that preys on old Jewish people … (with) cultural PTSD because of what happened in world war II”.

The FBI has characterized McInnes "Proud Boys" as an extremist group:

The FBI now classifies the far-right Proud Boys as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism”, according to a document produced by Washington state law enforcement.
The FBI’s 2018 designation of the self-confessed “western chauvinist group” as extremist has not been previously made public.
The Proud Boys was founded by the Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes. McInnes has insisted that his group is not white nationalist or “alt-right” but the Proud Boys have a history of misogyny and glorifying violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists them as a hate group.

Does McInnes plan to sue the FBI too? 

McInnes was predictably welcomed back in to the far-right Canadian fold - rejoining Rebel Media, founded by scary Trudeau obsessive Ezra Levant.

And so as first reported by Mediaite, McInnes is now back at The Rebel, where he is presumably free to resume sharing his wide-ranging theories about Jews, this time as his “SJW” alter-ego “Miles.” 

I wonder if Claire Lehmann will be reuniting with Rebel Media. Here she is doing an episode with McInnes back when she was a Rebel Media regular. The Intellectual Dark Web is nothing if not extremely tight-knit. And I've no doubt other members of their little group will be tangling with SPLC in the future.

And that's why it's so important to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center. I send them money every month.

The undeniable conservative slant of Quillette - race and gender

Misogyny and racism often go hand-in-hand so it's no surprise that the people in Quillette who support "race science" are having a meltdown over the concept of "toxic masculinity."

I haven't investigated the issue much myself - it's clear that men are overall more violent than women, but there are enough exceptional men - like Fred Rogers for instance - that it appears there is nothing inevitable about individual men being violent.

In any case people like Christina Hoff Sommers are paid by the Koch brothers (who fund Reason magazine among other right-wing media) to defend male cultural/economic hegemony and so of course they're going to jump on this issue.

But what this article makes clear is that Quillette has by no means dropped its devotion to race science, in spite of its increasing notoriety. The introduction to the masculinity melt-down is written by John Paul Wright the most blatantly racist "biosocial criminologist."


Just as many conservatives believe the real problem in our society is anti-white bigotry, Wright believes our society is in the grip of anti-male bigotry.

It's clear that in spite of Wright's academic credentials his real passion is conservative politics, made crystal clear by his book and associated web site Conservative Criminology.

John Paul Wright is the perfect exemplar of Quillette "scholarship."

He's also possibly, if my web analytics are correct, the most devoted reader of Pinkerite so far. 

IDW vs Loving vs Virginia

To demonstrate how lazy - or mendacious - the IDW is, one need only read Razib Khan's Areo article in which he alleges that:

In the United States one hundred years ago, segregation was a fact of law, and there were black Americans and white Americans. Today, it is not a fact of law—and there are black Americans and white Americans. There was no scientific difference between then and now. There has been a historical and moral process of change and development.

 and then consider all he had to do was read Wikipedia's article on Loving v Virginia.

Khan compares the segregation system of a hundred years ago to now, which is odd considering that:

In 1967, 16 states, mainly Southern, still had anti-miscegenation laws.[6]

So fifty-two years ago sixteen states were so opposed to black and white people having children together they had laws against it, and as the Loving case demonstrated were fully prepared to enforce the law.

And you have to wonder what exactly Khan is trying to say with the statement that "there was no scientific difference between then and now" when, as Wikipedia reports:

After Loving v. Virginia, the number of interracial marriages continued to increase across the United States[39] and in the South. In Georgia, for instance, the number of interracial marriages increased from 21 in 1967 to 115 in 1970.[40] At the national level, 0.4% of marriages were interracial in 1960, 2.0% in 1980,[41] 12% in 2013,[42] and 16% in 2015, almost 50 years after Loving.[43]

So in other words, contrary to Khan's suggesting that the issue is "historical and moral process" in contrast to the persistence of racial categories, in fact the historical and moral process does lead to more sexual interactions - and presumably children - between people designated as "black" and those designated as "white."

And the fluidity of "race" identification is demonstrated by Mildred Loving herself:

During the trial, it seemed clear that she identified herself as black, especially as far as her own lawyer was concerned. However, upon her arrest, the police report identifies her as "Indian". She said in a 2004 interview, "I have no black ancestry. I am Indian-Rappahannock." A possible contributing factor is that it was seen at the time of her arrest as advantageous to be "anything but black". There was an ingrained history in the state of the denial of African ancestry.[8] 

How easy to counter Khan's implication that segregation was only an issue one hundred years ago.

Could Razib Khan really be that careless? Or is the article part of the IDW project to erase African American history?

More carelessness from Razib Khan

Razib Khan, writing for Areo, the only slightly less right-extremist race science twin of Quillette says:

Our intuitions about race are in many ways imperfectly related to the genetic realities from which they emerge. And those intuitions are embedded in the social histories of our cultures. In the United States one hundred years ago, segregation was a fact of law, and there were black Americans and white Americans. Today, it is not a fact of law—and there are black Americans and white Americans. There was no scientific difference between then and now. There has been a historical and moral process of change and development. 

The dream of the beige future obviates the need to emphasize the moral and ethical aspect of the way we organize societies—in both its urgency and its difficulty. The dream is that science and the march of history will magically make the problems of racism disappear because racial distinction will disappear.

In the first paragraph quoted above he claims there is no "scientific difference" between 1918 and 2018. Since science has so manifestly changed in a hundred years, we can probably safely throw out a perfectly legitimate reading of the sentence "There was no scientific difference between then and now."

But what can that sentence really mean? There's no genetic difference between the population who was "black" a hundred years ago, compared to now? Or that "black" and "white" as classifications haven't disappeared and therefore there is no "scientific difference"?

But before talking about that, there's the issues of Khan's claim that "one hundred years ago, segregation was a fact of law."

As Ezra Klein had to clarify to the equally careless Sam Harris:

Segregation, my mom was alive in segregation. Charles Murray was alive during segregation. We’re talking, I think, it’s within the week of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. This is not ancient history, it is recent history.

So actually the time-span of post-segregation is HALF of Khan's example. I would believe cynically that Khan deliberately said a hundred years instead of fifty years in order to bolster his claim about the rock-solid boundaries of race, but knowing Khan's work as I do, it could be simply that Khan is a bad writer and a lazy thinker. But being a recipient of wing nut welfare will do that to you.

This isn't the first time Khan has reassured his readers that racial boundaries are distinct. And we do know that Khan feels that history tells us much less than genetics when it comes to human culture.

And then there's the issue of the tenuous connection between "black" and "white" and science, never mind "scientific differences." I'll talk about that next.

The gob-smacking brazenness of Steven Pinker

Pinker's response to being caught
misrepresenting others' views

To witness the shamelessness and intellectual laziness of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette gang, you only need to review Jerry Coyne's publication of Steven Pinker's response to Phil Torres' Salon article.

IDW people are never the subject of critiques but rather, always, the poor beleaguered victims of "hit pieces" from those with illegitimate motivations.

Coyne writes:

Torres’s piece, I conclude, is not an act of judicious and scholarly criticism, but an anti-Pinker hit job motivated by things other than a concern for factual accuracy.

Both Coyne and Pinker demonstrate what I have begun to think of as the rhetorical trademark of the Intellectual Dark Web: when you are confronted with an argument you can't refute: ignore it or dismiss it.


They went with dismissal in this case.

First Coyne shows how it is done:

When I read Torres’s piece, I wasn’t impressed, as Pinker’s “errors and false assertions” seemed to consist mainly of quotations used in EN that, claimed Torres, don’t accurately represent the actual views of the quoters (Torres contacted some of them). 

Coyne prefaces an admission that Torres caught Pinker misrepresenting others' views ("Torres contacted some of them") by saying "I wasn't impressed."

And then Pinker:

The rest of Torres’s complaint consists of showing that some of the quotations I weave into the text come from people who don’t agree with me. OK, but so what? 

Even though I've recognized for many years that Steven Pinker is a weasel, I was astounded. "so what?" I was going to write my own response but found this piece by Olle Häggström via Phil Torres' Twitter feed. I admit I was relieved to find it. Pinker's dismissal of Torres' valid point was so shameless I wondered if I misunderstood somehow.

But no, Pinker really is that brazen.

...Pinker has now written a response to Phil's essay, and had it published on Jerry Coyne's blog Why Evolution is True. The response is feeble. Let me expand a little bit on that. 

After a highly undignified opening paragraph with an uncharitable and unfounded speculation about Phil's motives for writing the essay, 1 Pinker goes on throughout most of his response to explain, regarding all of the quotes that he exhibits in his book Enlightenment Now and that Phil points out are taken out of context and misrepresent the various authors' intentions, that... well, that it doesn't matter that they are misrepresentations, because what he (Pinker) needed was words to illustrate his ideas, and for that it doesn't matter what the original authors meant. He suggests that "Torres misunderstands the nature of quotation". So why, then, doesn't Pinker use his own words (he is, after all, one of the most eloquent science writers of our time)? Why does he take this cumbersome detour via other authors? If he doesn't actually care what these authors mean, then the only reason I can see for including all these quotes and citations is that Pinker wants to convey to his readers the misleading impression that he is familiar with the existential risk literature and that this literature gives support to his views.

It seems that although the IDW likes to promote the idea that its critics are all "postmodernists" Steven Pinker is the biggest postmodernist of all - words can mean whatever he says they mean.

IDW regular Michael Shermer celebrates Pinker squashing the cockroach Torres. Which of course didn't happen unless you live on Bizarro World with the rest of the IDW gang, where words mean whatever Steven Pinker says they mean and misrepresentation is quickly dismissed with a brazen "so what?"

Critique of "Enlightenment Now"

This article in Salon about Steven Pinker's most recent publication "Enlightenment Now" mentions so many things about Steven Pinker's work that I have noticed too - his shallowness and carelessness, embedded in excess text.

The article begins with a bang:

In a recent article for Quillette, the “Intellectual Dark Web’s” online safe space, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker offers some reflections on his most recent book, "Enlightenment Now," one year after it was published. Pinker notes that EN (as I will abbreviate it), a pollyannaish paean to Enlightenment "progressionism," has been the target of “irate attacks from critics on both the right and the left.”

The author, Phil Torres, used an approach to critiquing Enlightenment Now that I had to adopt for "Better Angels"

The problems were so pervasive that I ended up writing an extended critique of just a few pages of the chapter. (Examining the entire book would have been simply overwhelming.)

After detailing Pinker's carelessness and misrepresentation Torres writes:

...Pinker borrowed a quote from Bailey, who didn’t cite the original source and who lifted the quote from its original context to mean the opposite of what Zencey had intended. This led Zencey to confess to me, “how this guy [i.e., Pinker] managed to become a public intellectual in fields so far removed from his expertise is something to wonder at.”

The article concludes:

Let me end with a call for action: Don’t assume that Pinker’s scholarship is reliable. Comb through particular sentences and citations for other hidden — or perhaps intentionally concealed — errors in "Enlightenment Now." Doing so could be, well, enlightening.

Here is what I concluded about Pinker's work:

 Pinker fails to have any kind of intelligible organizing principle - he just bops around talking about whatever he feels like talking about, so if he finds vegetarianism in Great Britain more interesting than how the Spanish treated indigenous Americans, well that's what he's going to talk about, regardless of the relative significance of each phenomenon to the history of violence. 

The result is that for all his words, Pinker provides no useful explanation for anything.

The reliance of biosocial criminology race science on the Pioneer Fund

Just discovered that SAGE makes virtually an entire book of biosocial criminology race science available for free online: The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality from 2014.

As always, John Paul Wright is the most blatant about his belief that not only is race a biological and not just sociological phenomenon, but "black" people are the worst race. And anybody who doesn't agree with John Paul Wright is a filthy leftist. From his chapter co-written with Mark Alden Morgan entitled Human Biodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction:

 Lynn (2002), in a comprehensive investigation of psychopathy, presents evidence that Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics score higher on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory's (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate scale compared to Whites, while East Asians score lower. Furthermore, Lynn argues that this racial trend extends to a host of related social outcome measures including childhood conduct disorder, ADHD, recklessness, aggression, criminality, the ability to delay gratification, marriage rates, and even moral understanding. Across the multitude of studies analyzed, a clear pattern emerges where Blacks score the worst on these measures, Whites intermediate, and Asians the best even when controlling for the effects of age and IQ.

Lynn is Richard Lynn, the godfather of race science. According to his Southern Poverty Law Center profile:

Lynn is the current president of the notoriously racist Pioneer Fund. Prior to becoming president in 2012, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer Fund grants, both directly, and through the Ulster Institute for Social Research. Lynn is the founder and president of the Ulster Institute, “a think tank for the support of research on social issues and the publication of works by selected authors in this field.” According to its website, “The Ulster Institute for Social Research specialises in the application of psychology to the analysis of social problems,” which translates to promoting racist research by Lynn and several of his colleagues and collaborators.

Lynn isn't the only Pioneer Fund associate cited by Wright and Morgan - they also cite J.P. Rushton. From SPLC:

Since 2002, Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund (Rushton died in 2012), which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the “science” of creating “better” humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to “improve the character of the American people” through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to “prove” inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.

Linda Gottfredson is also cited. From SPLC:

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole.

And of course, inevitably, Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve":

Many criticisms of The Bell Curve, most notably Charles Lane’s thorough takedown in The New York Review of Books, have pointed out that Murray’s attempts to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist scientists. In an afterward to the book, Murray rejects criticisms that rest on the fact that “we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run ([Lane] alleged) by men who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority.” Murray contends that the racist pseudo-scientists he cites “are some of the most respected psychologists of our time” and that “the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation.” 

In fact, the Pioneer Fund’s ties to eugenics and white supremacy are not nearly as historically remote as Murray would have his readers believe. The president of the Pioneer Fund at the time The Bell Curve was written was Harry Weyher, who was a personal friend of the Fund’s founder, Wickliffe Draper, and shared his supposedly archaic views on race; just two months after the initial publication of The Bell Curve, Weyher gave an interview in which he argued, among other things, that desegregation had “wreck[ed] the school system.” Another of the Pioneer Fund’s board members at the time Murray was writing, John Trevor Jr., was also an officer of Coalition of Patriotic Societies, which, during his membership, was indicted for sedition over “pro-Nazi activities” and called for the release of all Nazi war criminals. Despite Murray’s claims, the Pioneer Fund continues to support “research” into race differences conducted by outright white supremacists. 

In a similar vein, Murray whitewashes the individual people who provided the intellectual foundation for The Bell Curve. To take only one example, Murray and Herrnstein described Richard Lynn, whose work they relied on more than any other individual, as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.” In his many subsequent defenses of Lynn, Murray neglected to mention the many serious methodological criticisms of Lynn’s work, or his contributions to white supremacist publications including VDARE.com, American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly, the last of which Lynn also serves on the editorial staff of.

John Paul Wright constantly whines about the Left, but where would biosocial criminology be without racists and Nazi sympathizers?

Steven Pinker goes full alt-right, publishes in Quillette

Quillette and Steven Pinker have long had a mutual admiration society, but this is the first time I am aware that Pinker has a byline in Quillette.

The text in the Pinker diagram will be updated to reflect his intensified connection to "race realism."

Infamous promoter of eugenics, Toby Young, celebrates Pinker going the full Quillette.