Let the beating down begin

Months ago I said Trump must be beaten down and also "Using every legal means, he must be beaten down. Constantly. Without ceasing. UNTIL HE IS DONE."

Well the January 6 committee finally got into the serious legal beating-down as discussed by The New York Times:

Which brings us to the investigation into the Capitol riot and the Jan. 6 committee’s four referrals to the Department of Justice for obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement and for inciting or assisting an insurrection or offering aid and comfort to its participants. The last is the most important. Violating 18 U.S.C. 2383, which derives from a law dating to the Civil War, carries the penalty that, if convicted, Donald Trump “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

Here, at last, is an accountability that goes beyond what the impeachment managers, regardless of their brilliant arguments, were able to do in 2021. Here is the uncompromising statement that while an insurrection is an impeachable offense — Mr. Trump was after all impeached by the House of Representatives — it is also unequivocally and horribly a criminal act.

This specific referral then holds out the hope that Mr. Trump will not be permitted to hold elective or appointed political office ever again. That was arguably the point of the impeachment: to make sure that his political career had ended.

Now, whatever the Department of Justice decides to do and whatever the special counsel Jack Smith discovers or determines, the Jan. 6 committee has achieved what the impeachment of Mr. Trump could not: a series of referrals that caps an expansive and heart-rending investigation into the abuse of power, the obstruction of Congress and the aiding and abetting of a rebellion, condoned, if not designed, by an American president. That president will be remembered as lawless, indicted or not, and will be disgraced in perpetuity, as Andrew Johnson should have been.

Exactly.

There is an excellent YouTube channel called LegalEagle with 2.68 million subscribers, which is a combination of fluff, like reviewing lawyers on TV shows (even a video on Sponge Bob Square Pants ) and serious legal analysis.

I've enjoyed many LegalEagle videos, but recently came across several about Trump's attempts to destroy American democracy:

• LegalEagle reacts to American Carnage at Lafayette Square and he is clearly very upset. Probably the first big wakeup call that many people received about how fascist Trump is.

• In a shorter piece, there is a day-after discussion of American Insurrection at The Capitol.

• And just yesterday there is an analysis of Trump's Criminal Referral from the January 6 Committee. And like every other video produced by LegalEagle on the topic of American politics, well worth a look.

It's a reminder how awful and dramatic Trump's reign of terror was. I can't wait for the movies about this time period to come out. If they are half as good as Game Change, about the 2008 election with a focus on Sarah Palin's candidacy (whose ignorance rivals Trump's), I will be very happy.

Julianne Moore is amazing.

Undark's Race Pseudoscience Issue

The online magazine, Undark, best known in Pinkeriteland for publishing an article on the race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan, has published a collection of articles on The Persistence of Race Science.

I hope that fans of race pseudoscience like Colin Wright and Lee Jussim don't see Angela Saini's Draper’s Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science, because it includes a diagram, similar in format to my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, here. 

My diagram prompted Wright and Jussim  to claim it was evidence that I was insane. 

I assume they will react with the same extreme graphophobia to this item. 

Note: In the original diagram, the plus signs open up to show members of the race pseudoscience-funding network, but only in the Chrome browser. It doesn't work with Safari.

A few of the people/organizations mentioned in Saini's diagram are also mentioned in my diagram, including Linda Gottfredson, J. P. Rushton,  Richard Lynn and the Pioneer Fund.

Pinker was not mentioned in any of the articles on race science in spite of his many connections to race science promoters, including Gottfredson, mentioned in the Saini piece. But Undark appears to have been friendly with Pinker so maybe the editors are reluctant to make the connection.

I was disappointed at first that Pinker's pal Razib Khan was not mentioned, but in my favorite piece in the collection Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest which focuses on E.O. Wilson, Yale professor C. Brandon Ogbunu, does reference Khan, just not by name:

Wilson’s dive into the human realm was, in my view, an exercise in the worst kind of carpetbagging, in which an expert uses their large reputation in one arena to justify parachuting into another where they are ignorant or out of their depth. In doing so, Wilson followed, and maybe helped write, a blueprint that continues to influence generations of dumpster fire biological determinists. The controversy encircled Wilson for years, but his excellent reputation eventually transcended it.

‍

After his death was announced, however, the conflict swirled anew. An essay in Scientific American revisited the connections between “Sociobiology” and scientific racism and, much more damningly, scholars uncovered archival evidence that Wilson was an ardent defender of J. Philippe Rushton, a scientific racist who spent a career peddling pulp science fiction about the essential differences between races, draped in the lingo of evolutionary theory. In the archival materials, Wilson referred to anti-racists as “scoundrels.” But apparently, he thought the actual scientific racist that he had a cuddly relationship with was a fine person.

‍

Amid all of this, a circus began.

‍

A broad, mostly academic alliance formed to defend Wilson’s reputation. It included the typical cast of cancel culture vultures and race science grifters, along with a surprising number of enablers who should have known better. And most of it seemed to me to be driven by some bold hidden agenda: to portray critics of Wilson’s legacy as if they were some imaginary legion of scientific critical race theorists, destined to overtake your curricula, make you and your children sad, and cancel everyone you know and love...

Khan's attack on the Scientific American essay is linked on the word "defend" and, delightfully, Jerry Coyne's predictable defense of Wilson is linked on the words "cancel culture vultures."

Best part of all: 

...along with a surprising number of enablers who should have known better. And most of it seemed to me to be driven by some bold hidden agenda: to portray critics of Wilson’s legacy as if they were some imaginary legion of scientific critical race theorists, destined to overtake your curricula, make you and your children sad, and cancel everyone you know and love...

That may well be a reference to Pinker. The Undark review of his book Rationality notes that Pinker claimed a connection between Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory without bothering to present evidence.

The reason they portray critics of Wilson that way is because they are political operatives, who take money from right-wing racists like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel, and, in Khan's case, Holocaust-denier Ron Unz. None of those living plutocrats is mentioned in Saini's article. They should be.

Elon Musk Jet Tracker ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈ ✈

But we all knew that in addition to being a stochastic terrorist, Elon Musk is a lying hypocrite:

Twitter on Wednesday suspended more than 25 accounts that track the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals — including one that followed the movements of the social media company’s owner, Elon Musk, who has said he was committed to “free speech.”

 

Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast, said he woke up on Wednesday to find that his automated Twitter account, @ElonJet, had been suspended. In recent months, the account amassed more than 500,000 followers by using public flight information and data to post the whereabouts of Mr. Musk’s private plane. Twitter later reinstated the @ElonJet account before suspending it again. 

 

Mr. Musk had been aware of @ElonJet for months. After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, he said that he would allow the account to remain on the platform. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Mr. Musk tweeted last month. 

 

Mr. Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended on Wednesday, along with the other accounts that he runs that track the planes of tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Mr. Sweeney shared a message that he had received from Twitter, which said his account had been suspended for violating rules “against platform manipulations and spam.”

However, this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google, not Elon Musk. So enjoy

🛫 ELON MUSK'S JET TRACKER 🛬

UPDATE: 

ELON MUSK'S JET IS ON 

MASTODON NOW

Elon Musk is a stochastic terrorist

KRIS GOLDSMITH

Per CNN:

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.

While Musk had initially been publicly supportive of Roth, that soon changed after he left the company.

Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory. 

This is the second time Musk has falsely accused someone of pedophilia. It's insane he didn't lose the first case. Clearly he has no qualms about using false accusations to smear people. He needs to be sued into bankruptcy.

The American far-right loves stochastic terrorism. And by far-right I am very much including the Intellectual Dark Web. 

Elon Musk is clearly a member in good standing of that crowd of ghouls. 

It's curious, that the far-right and the Intellectual Dark Web pretend to hate pedophilia when, as I have documented, they love blatant pro-pedophilia Camille Paglia.

Although for the last four years, this blog has focused on criticizing the race pseudoscience promoted by the Intellectual Dark Web, which has been aided and abetted by mainstream "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker, I have also ended up writing about the various stochastic terrorism projects connected to members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

• Maybe one of the earliest examples of social media-delivered stochastic terrorism was Gamergate, in 2014, with its connection to three members of the Intellectual Dark Web: named members Christina Hoff Sommers and Milos Yiannopoulus, and Cathy Young. The guy who attacked Paul Pelosi was a fan of Gamergate.

• Pizzagate in 2016 promoted by Mike Cernovich, a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

• The entire career of former Quillette staff member Andy Ngo, who lent his free speech grift to the Trump campaign, which hoped to use ANTIFA-panic as an excuse to declare martial law.

Oh how the Intellectual Dark Web loved Andy Ngo. Sommers calls for backup from members and fans of the IDW in this tweet.

• The career of James Lindsay, a beloved "intellectual" of the Intellectual Dark Web and influencer of the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi. Bari Weiss was a big fan of "Conceptual James."

I recently wrote about Libs of TikTok, the account created by self-proclaimed stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik. LOTT is funded by Seth Dillon. LOTT is defended by Bari Weiss. 

Is there any stochastic terrorist who Bari Weiss DOES NOT LOVE?

Libs of TikTok goes far beyond expressing political opinions about transgender issues. That would certainly be allowed under Twitter’s policies, which exist to curb harassment, violence, and hate speech, not opinions. In fact, Libs of TikTok has repeatedly highlighted specific individuals, events, and institutions with inflammatory language, often falsely suggesting they are guilty of heinous acts against young children. The account’s spotlight has repeatedly resulted in harassment and violent threats toward the individuals involved, in a process typically referred to as stochastic terrorism. Those targeted include doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for youth, teachers and schools with inclusive policies, and all-ages or youth-focused drag events.

"The Twitter Files" is Musk selectively releasing email exchanges in the hopes it will make old Twitter look bad. Musk has asked right-wingers Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss to help him.

When her access was granted, Bari Weiss tried to show that Libs of TikTok was treated unfairly. As Kevin Drum writes:

...Bari Weiss, a writer whose primary motivation in life seems to be her deep resentment of liberals, is the author of Part 2, and she provides the names of three political actors who were de-amplified:¹ 

• Charlie Kirk
• Dan Bongino
• Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)

And that's it. Weiss doesn't explain why she picked these three to highlight. She doesn't say why these three were de-amplified. Nor does she say if she also knows of any liberals who were de-amplified. And even though Musk has given her access to anything she wants to see, she provides no statistics about how many people were de-amplified; the reasons they were de-amplified; how long they were de-amplified; or anything else. She just provides three hand-picked names and that's the end of it.

Charlie Kirk is another named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Apparently Weiss failed to show Libs of TikTok was discriminated against, and in fact revealed it was given special consideration. 

The American far-right tries to discredit the concept of "stochastic terrorism" - at least as applied to its members, as seen recently in a piece by Koch employee and all-around soulless political operative Christopher Rufo a friend of James Lindsay and member of the IDW-loaded FAIRforall board of advisers. Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger are, of course, also advisors of that organization.

But I'll end this post on a high note:

Elon Musk HUMILIATED When Crowd Turns On Him And Dave Chappelle

and:

Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, joined Chappelle onstage Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco, where Chris Rock was also headlining. 

“It was more boos than I’d ever heard,” an attendee, Jason, said in a direct message. “Sustained jeering.” 

Two audience members said they booed Musk because of the widespread firings and layoffs at Twitter. A third person said he booed Musk because of his political agenda — before the midterm elections, Musk urged followers to vote for Republicans. The three people shared screenshots of their tickets to the show with NBC News and spoke on the condition that only their first names be used to protect their privacy and to avoid backlash from Musk’s fans.

Both cheers and boos can be heard in videos of the event, which were viewed millions of times on social media Monday. Later on Twitter, Musk attributed the mixed reception to his recent embrace of conservative politics.

“Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” Musk tweeted. 

He added, “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

All three audience members said that Musk’s tweet was inaccurate and that the booing drowned out the cheering.

The incident and the audience members’ explanations represent a shifting tide for Musk, who has reached a new level of notoriety since he took over Twitter while vocally supporting conservative causes.

I ♥ Alex Winter

 His Mastodon account is great. @alexwinter@mastodon.social

Twitter is now part of the Intellectual Dark Web

Can there be any doubt that Musk has joined the network of right-wing plutocrats who support the Intellectual Dark Web?

On Friday, a more unexpected sighting came in the form of Weiss, the conservative newsletter writer who was previously a New York Times opinion columnist. Weiss was in the San Francisco office that evening, speaking and "laughing with" Musk, two employees said.

By Saturday, Musk said Weiss would take part in releasing what he's dubbed "the Twitter files," so far consisting mainly of correspondence between Twitter employees and executives discussing their decision in 2020 to block access to a New York Post article detailing material on Hunter Biden's stolen laptop. Now, Weiss has been given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.

The level of access to Twitter systems given to Weiss is typically given only to employees, one of the people familiar said, though it doesn't seem she is actually working at the company. Matt Taibbi, the other newsletter writer through whom Musk has released the Twitter files, didn't seem to receive this degree of access, the person added.

 

More disagreements in IDW land

The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), defined by, and introduced to the world by Bari Weiss, who is on the record as a fan of the stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik of "Libs of TikTok," is tied together mainly by a right-libertarian point of view and a predilection for race pseudoscience. 

But they do sometimes have their disagreements.

Two named members of the Intellectual Dark Web, Claire Lehmann and Sam Harris, left Twitter when Donald Trump returned. However, their businesses remain: Lehmann's Quillette, allegedly funded by babbling lunatic Peter Thiel among other plutocrats, and Harris' MakingSense. 

This fact was noted by ivermectin-promoting, game theory loving crackpot Bret Weinstein, also a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Meanwhile the Cato Institute's "Human Progress" has gotten around to critiquing Peter Thiel's crackpot, Bible-citing keynote speech for the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference (Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists) for not appreciating the last 50 years of Human Progress.

Steven Pinker, who Bari Weiss considers the exemplar of respectability on the IDW spectrum, linked to the "Human Progress" article from his Twitter account. 

It's a safe bet that Pinker will never leave Twitter based on a principled stand. 

"Impressionistic" is a very generous way to describe Thiel's babble, but considering  how Thiel funds organizations that Pinker counts on to support race pseudoscience and right-wing reaction, like Quillette, he can hardly be scathing and expect to remain a member in good standing of the plutocrat-supported IDW.

But some mild criticism is likely welcomed by Cato, since it is largely a Charles Koch vehicle. 

Although Koch and Thiel agree far more than they disagree, there must be a rivalry there, and Koch may not be displeased when Thiel gets some mild criticism. 

The article does not mention Thiel's bizarre Antichrist reference, complete with Bible citation, but then, one of the two authors of the piece is Gale L. Pooley, a senior fellow at the intelligent-design promoting Discovery Institute. Discovery used to employ far-right Trump flunky CRT/trans-panic mongering Christopher Rufo.

This section of the Human Progress piece caught my attention

Progress has been especially good for the poor – especially when considering time inequality. A person in China working eight hours a day to earn enough money to buy food in 1960, would only need to spend around 18 minutes to do the same in 2021. For the time it took to buy one meal in 1960, he or she would get 27 meals in 2021. The Chinese gained 7 hours and 42 minutes a day to do with as they please. Indians gained 6 hours and 30 minutes a day over the same period. Some 3 billion people now have much more time to learn and contribute to knowledge discovery and creation.

How absurd to include that, as if right-wing libertarian plutocrats cared about the poor.

Peter Thiel is infamous for his lack of human empathy, justifying apartheid as a good economic system. 

And Cato, well Cato's idea of "Human Progress" is to attempt to end taxation for the rich. A belief-system that now rules the Republican Party.

If the poor have benefitted from progress, it is not thanks to the plutocrat-forward policies of Cato and friends. Thanks to their policies, economic inequality has, after being relatively low since the end of WWII, skyrocketed starting with the Reagan administration.

Based on their policies, the endgame of Thiel, Koch, Musk and other right-wing plutocrats must be to create a world controlled by about one hundred obscenely wealthy men - a global feudalism.

Which is why they hate democracy so  much, as this video notes.

Another excellent YouTube video on the evil of a human society controlled by billionaires.

How is Libs of TikTok Chaya Raichik able to live her best life as a terrorist?

The rightwing in the United States is currently trying to achieve power through slandering and demonizing LGBTQ people.

One of the most prominent voices of hatred is an individual named Chaya Raichik, who runs a Twitter account called "Libs of TikTok." At one time Raichik referred to herself in her Twitter account as a "stochastic terrorist."

She may be evil, but at least Raichik is self-aware. 

For a deeper dive into stochastic terrorism, check out Scientific American's How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence.

The Anti-Defamation League describes Libs of TikTok:

Libs of TikTok is a popular anti-LGBTQ+ twitter account operated by former real estate agent Chaya Raichik. The account, which has over 1.3 million followers as of August 2022, attempts to generate outrage and stoke anti-LGBTQ+ hostility by reposting selected out-of-context social media content created by LGBTQ+ people and liberals. The individuals, events and organizations targeted by the account are frequent targets of harassment, threats and violence.

Today Slate writes:

Barely 24 hours after a gunman killed five people and injured 19 others at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Elon Musk's new Twitter responded to the massacre by reinstating the account of James Lindsay, the right-wing activist responsible for popularizing the anti-LGBTQ slur "OK groomer," which over the last 10 months has been used to imply that demands for LGBTQ rights or representation are tantamount to child molestation. In August, Lindsay was banned from Twitter for using a variation on the term, which under Twitter's old regime was prohibited as a form of hateful conduct. But by Monday night, not only was Lindsay back, but "OK groomer" was trending on the platform under its new ownership. 

This is "stochastic terrorism" in action. James Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi, and the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi was strongly influenced by Lindsay. Of course idiot Elon Musk would bring him back:

Elon Musk’s Anti-Trans Twitter Regime

Not content with reactivating accounts that spewed anti-trans content, Musk’s Twitter has now banned a group that organizes to protect people at LGBTQ events from far-right violence.

The Slate article continues:

Since last spring, the prominent right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok has been a major player in driving anti-LGBTQ animosity, with an ongoing series of posts highlighting LGBTQ events around the country, often including dates, locations and names and pictures of people involved. Last June, it became clear that such posts were being used as a roadmap for harassment or violent confrontations, including a particularly hateful protest outside a Dallas gay bar that was holding an all-ages drag brunch to celebrate Pride Month, which resulted in patrons and their children being chased back to their cars and far-right protesters calling for all attendees to be shot.

The LA Blade writes:

Libs of TikTok has been suspended several times on multiple platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Raichik had previously been suspended from Twitter for accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” children, which Twitter confirmed violates its policies against hateful conduct after facing pressure from Media Matters and others. Her Twitter account was also suspended after she targeted multiple hospitals for providing gender-affirming care, leading to violent threats against patients and providers and forcing at least one hospital to request support from law enforcement. (On September 5, Raichik baselessly claimed that a bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital “was probably a left-wing person trying to get me suspended.”)

Notably, Raichik previously pledged to redouble her attacks on hospitals providing trans people with health care after she was suspended from Twitter in August. 

So, what does the Intellectual Dark Web have to say about this raging right-wing homophobia? A few members of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex are LGBTQ.

• In July of this year, Bari Weiss's girlfriend Nellie Bowles was gleefully promoting Libs of TikTok on Bari Weiss's Substack:

Another week and another funny investigative report from Libs of TikTok, this time about a Portland lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, that closed a week after opening...

• Cathy Young tried a "both sides" claiming that reporting on Libs of TikTok was just as bad as Libs of TikTok. But then, I think Cathy Young was a pioneer in stochastic terrorism, thanks to her enthusiastic cheerleading for Gamergate.

• Enthusiastic transphobe and one-time Quillette editor Colin Wright recommends Libs of TikTok.

• Dave Rubin retweeted Seth Dillon in March.

• Michael Shermer is a big fan of Libs of TikTok

How is Chaya Raichik able to live her best life as a stochastic terrorist? 

She is funded by Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon.

Seth Michael Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee "satire" website, said he has a "deal" with Chaya Raichik, owner of a Twitter account who claims gay and transgender people “groom” children to accept sexual abuse from adults.

When Libs of TikTok was suspended from Twitter, Seth Dillon tweeted: 

“BREAKING: Twitter has once again hit Libs of TikTok with a 7-day suspension for ‘hateful conduct.’ No specific tweets were flagged. We’ve since fired off another letter to Twitter (attached). They’re on notice that we will sue them if they permanently suspend us,” Dillon tweeted.

That's ironic because I think that Seth Dillon will eventually be sued - for funding terrorism. 

Both Dillon and Libs of TikTok have Substacks, because of course they do. Substack has no standards and I suspect it is financially supported by right-wing plutocrats.

Meanwhile advertisers are leaving Twitter.

More from Media Matters.

There should be some legal and financial consequences for spreading stochastic terrorism. For Chaya Raichik, Seth Dillon and Elon Musk.

Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young and the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi

Cathy Young was such a big
booster of Gamergate, she
became a Gamergate meme

 I discussed the influence that James Lindsay had on the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi.

Well today the NYTimes reports that the would-be assassin was also influenced by Gamergate - and Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young were the two biggest cheerleaders of Gamergate:

According to his blog posts, the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, which began in 2014 as a backlash against female critics of the gaming industry and included misogynistic attacks and death threats, became a catalyst of his growing interest in right-wing conspiracy theories and the many rants against women that he posted on his blog.

“How did I get into all this,” he wrote in one passage. “Gamer Gate it was gamer gate.” He described Gamergate as a “consumer led revolt against communism,” and railed against “wokism” and feminism — complaints that appeared to be precursors to his later embrace of the most virulent and bigoted of online conspiracy theories. It all came in an era in which such theories have spread among wider groups of Americans and have been promoted by far-right leaders.

Sommers and Young are paid by right-wing plutocrats, especially Charles Koch, to promote misogyny and Gamergate was a misogyny goldmine:

Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic, has for months received death and rape threats from opponents of her recent work challenging the stereotypes of women in video games. Bomb threats for her public talks are now routine. One detractor created a game in which players can click their mouse to punch an image of her face.

Not until Tuesday, though, did Ms. Sarkeesian feel compelled to cancel a speech, planned at Utah State University. The day before, members of the university administration received an email warning that a shooting massacre would be carried out at the event. And under Utah law, she was told, the campus police could not prevent people with weapons from entering her talk.

Cathy Young had an obsessive hatred for Anita Sarkeesian, because Young did not agree with Sarkeesian's commentary shared online via the Youtube channel Feminist Frequency.

Not only did Young hate young feminists like Sarkeesian, she did her best to lionize stalker sociopath Eron Gjoni, celebrating the anniversary of his public letter attacking Zoe Quinn, which kicked off Gamergate.

Young was still attacking Quinn in 2019, in this case using the right-wing extremist garbage rag The Post Millennial (currently edited by Trump's ratfucker Andy Ngo) as her source.

Christina Hoff Sommers did her part in promoting the misogynist shitstorm that was Gamergate. Here she can be seen in 2016, via her employer, the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, defending Gamergate along with Camille Paglia, a defender of pedophilia.

Let me be clear - although I think Young and Sommers are prominent supporters of hate campaigns like Gamergate because they are paid by the likes of Koch to do so, I also think they enjoy their work because both of them - along with Paglia and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann are, by character, deeply misogynist.

These are horrible people. It should be no surprise that their hate campaign inspired nut jobs like the would-be assassin.

Bye bye Birdie

All my Twitter accounts are gone, now that Musk brought Trump back.

I am on Mastodon now at https://mastodon.lol/@Pinkerite

An ongoing web journal of the saga is here at Twitter is Going Great!

There should be no doubt about Musk's far-right politics since he is apparently a fan of the terrorist account LibsofTikTok, created by a monster who used the account to threaten hospitals, funded by feckless soulless troll Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee.

Elon Musk is on the side of the monsters.

Pinkerite's 4th Anniversary ~ Peter Thiel and the race pseudoscience network

Yesterday, November 17 was the fourth anniversary of this blog. I really can't believe I've kept it going this long, with my day job and my playwriting and French classes but the machinations of the race pseudoscience network keep annoying the hell out of me so I have to come here to write about it.

The big news in the past year in the world of Steven Pinker the Intellectual Dark Web and race pseudoscience was the revelation that Peter Thiel has funded - and likely still does, the leading mouthpiece of the Intellectual Dark web (according to Bari Weiss) - the far-right racist Quillette.

This was bookended by Peter Thiel's keynote speech a few weeks ago, for the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, AKA Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. Thanks to the appearance of Amy Wax at the conference, it was crystal clear that the Freedom the conference means is the freedom to be a public racist.

Meanwhile, Thiel's old business partner Elon Musk is on track to destroy Twitter, which, much like the twin towers of the World Trade Center, won't really be appreciated until it's gone.

More items of interest in the past year:

• Confirmation that E. O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, aided and abetted racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton in a way that very much reminds me of the way Steven Pinker has promoted the careers of racists Steve Sailer and Razib Khan.
• James Lindsay was kicked off Twitter for being a neo-Nazi. Then it turned out that the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi was a big fan of Lindsay.
• Two people associated with Harvard University, Larry Summers and Carole Hooven each expressed their support for neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard.
• I began posting some items from Pinkerite to Medium, including my proposal for taking out the trash on Stone Mountain
• Jon Stewart gave Andrew Sullivan an appropriately bad time about Sullivan's claims about "Black culture."
• I finally became aware of the racism-friendly International Society for Intelligence Research

The top most-visited posts this year:

• The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan  - 1.51K
• Perjurer & racist Emil O W Kirkegaard comes for me - 1.4K
• Timothy B. Lee of Full Stack Economics and the career of Razib Khan - 1.06K
• Is Peter Thiel a babbling lunatic? - 846
• Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum part 1 - 732
• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 544 (third year in a row in the top 10)
• Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel - 482
• Unz Foundation grants to Gregory Cochran, Steve Sailer and Razib Khan - 430
• Jerry Coyne learns who J. Phillippe Rushton was, Kathryn Paige Harden denies being an hereditarian, E. O. Wilson was a racist - 397
• Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - 396

Donald Trump ~ new adventures in ratfucking

This article in Gizmodo recently caught my eye:

Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump:

An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump’s false claims about “Antifa,” an “organization” that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed.

In the run-up to the 2020 election I tweeted several times about Trump's ratfucking, focusing on his connection to former Quillette editor Andy Ngo. 

So it seems that I actually underestimated how much Trump was ratfucking. 

He's a soulless monster who will try any dirty trick to get power and that is why Trump must be beaten down.

Jerry Coyne misrepresents evolutionary psychology and declares his support for race pseudoscience

At the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, Jerry Coyne referred to biologist PZ Myers as "a blogger" and misrepresented evolutionary psychology again. 

Myers has some thoughts about that on his blog, and on the Conference in general under the title Cranks congregate to demonstrate that they're cranks.

Here is the transcript of Coyne's remarks about Myers and evolutionary psychology from the audio recording I made.

 

(I want to) give you 4 examples of misstatements that are promulgated in biology by advocates of particular ideologies...

#3:  Evolutionary psychology is worthless as a discipline, and this is been made most vociferously by the blogger PZ Myers who made this statement: "The fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology are false." 

Well, the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology are simply that our brains, as well as our body show traces of our ancestry over the past 6 million years. And that's not false, that's true, and I could give you a lot of data to show that in terms of behavior, for example. Let's just say that the denigration of evolutionary psychology is widespread. 

Now, why is it widespread? It's again, comes out of the ideology that we're blank slates. I think that comes from Marxism, where people are seen as infinitely malleable by the social environment. Whereas evolutionary psychology tells us that we're not blank slates that we're born with a little bit of writing on those blank slates, that can be changed a bit, but can only be changed within certain limits. And evolutionary psychology, I should add, for those of you who practice this discipline, does have a somewhat spotted history, but in the long run it's produced many valuable insights, such as differences in sexual behavior between men and women, differential (couldn't understand him here) and so on.

His claim about the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology is pure bullshit, and P. Z. Myers already addressed that bullshit eight years ago and nine years ago:

There is also a tactic I really dislike; I call it the Dignified Retreat. When criticized, evolutionary psychologists love to run away from their discipline and hide in the safer confines of more solidly founded ideas. Here’s a perfect example [Myers then quotes Coyne saying essentially the same thing he said at the SAF Conference]

…the notion that “the fundamental premises of evo psych are false” seems deeply misguided. After all, those premises boil down to this statement: some behaviors of modern humans reflect their evolutionary history. That is palpably uncontroversial, since many of our behaviors are clearly a product of evolution, including eating, avoiding dangers, and the pursuit of sex. And since our bodies reflect their evolutionary history, often in nonadaptive ways (e.g., wisdom teeth, bad backs, the coat of hair we produce as a transitory feature in fetuses), why not our brains, which are, after all, just bits of morphology whose structure affects our behaviors?

You know what? I agree entirely with that. The brain is a material product of evolution, and behavior is a product of the brain. There are natural causes for everything all the way down. And further, I have great respect for psychology, evolutionary biology, ethology, physiology, anthropology, anatomy, comparative biology — and I consider all of those disciplines to have strong integrative ties to evolutionary biology. Does Coyne really believe that I am critiquing the evolved nature of the human brain? Because otherwise, this is a completely irrelevant statement.

Evolutionary psychology has its own special methodology and logic, and that’s what I criticize — not anthropology or evolutionary biology or whatever. Somehow these unique properties get conveniently jettisoned whenever a critic wanders by, only to be re-adopted without reservation within the exercise of the discipline. And that’s really annoying.

What I object to in evolutionary psychology is that their stock in trade is to make observations of behavior in a single species, often in a single population, and then to infer an evolutionary history from that data point. You don’t get to do that. It’s not that the observations are invalid (they’re often interesting in their own right), or that it’s not possible that human behaviors carry a strong genetic component — it’s that you simply can’t draw an evolutionary conclusion from the simple existence of a trait in a population. Yet evolutionary psychologists do, all the time.

Myers made a superb, accessible video about the problems of evolutionary psychology, which I posted.

So why does Jerry Coyne completely ignore what biologist P. Z. Myers has said? Is he motivated by particular ideologies?

In a later post on his blog, Coyne signaled his support for race pseudoscience:

The denial or rejection biological truth affects two areas of evolutionary biology most of all: the idea that there are differences between groups, and the fact that differences between individuals, and averages between groups, might have a genetic basis. Ideologues reject both because difference implies ranking, and this supposedly implies superiority/inferiority, which in turn implies bigotry. And the notion that individual or group differences might be partly based on genes somehow makes them easier to reject than if they were cultural.

Just as Coyne lied about evolutionary psychology, he lied about critics of "biological truth." The actual truth is that hereditarians like Coyne have yet to prove the "biological truth" they would like to believe about differences among "groups." 

But not having data doesn't stop this crowd. As the piece at Inside Higher Ed notes:

While many other speakers described higher education’s commitment to the pursuit of truth as fading, the conference was heavy on anecdotes and speculative diagnostics relative to clear data. 

Now Coyne seems like a bumbling cranky old man to me - but is he really so stupid as to believe that race has not been used to rank people as inferior/superior?

And does he really not understand that this ranking system - which race pseudoscience goons do all the time - is what motivates all race pseudoscience promoters? It's not an accident that a favorite paper of race pseudoscience promoters was written by two racists who were brought together by a third racist.

So far Coyne has completely avoided mentioning Amy Wax's sulphuric racist rant. No doubt because Coyne's racism is the same as Wax's and he approves of what she said.

Before the racist panel, the last one of the Conference, I was feeling some sympathy for the complaints of the victims of "cancellation" who trotted out their grievances one by one over the course of the two days. Certainly it is possible that some university administrators have done their jobs badly or have been unfair. And of course people can disagree on what is going too far to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

But when Amy Wax began to projectile vomit racist bullshit, I got my wakeup call: the underlying belief-system of this conference is indeed race pseudoscience. 

The fact that Coyne agrees with Wax, although he constantly declares himself to be a liberal, demonstrates that the issue that truly binds these people together is their anger that they get pushback when they promote racist pseudoscience in public.

Here is Coyne in the foreground, just below his racist ally Amy Wax.

It's curious that when Isaac Chotiner interviewed Amy Wax in 2019, she claimed she did not believe in race pseudoscience:

WAX

And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.

CHOTINER

People do get outraged about that. You are correct.

WAX

I have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer, because of course any answer has to be subject to the strictures of political correctness. I have had a couple of really smart people, people on the left, say, to me, Hey, you have a point: we don’t have an answer, and we are not allowed to think about it rigorously and realistically because there is a code of things you do say and things you don’t say.

CHOTINER

What is your answer?

WAX

I don’t have one. I mean, my answer is this term “culture,” which consists of so many different things, from top to bottom, so many different aspects of the society. It is this very complex amalgam that holds people back on all sorts of levels. And I am not an anthropologist, I am not a political scientist. I just think that is where the answer lies. And then the question is: Do the people make the culture? Is it something that drops from the sky, or is it something about how people think, what they do, the habits that they have, the values that they have, the practices that they engage in?

CHOTINER

When you are casting doubt on the idea that it “drops from the sky,” are you trying to say that it is something innate, or that it is the result of history and experience?

WAX

I think the word “innate” is terribly mischievous.

CHOTINER

Mischievous?

WAX 

I would not use the word “innate.” To me, “innate” is a term that looks to heritable, or genetic factors. Now you can broaden it and say innate to a culture, but I would probably not say that, because it is so misleading. So, I’m really not saying anything about biology. Nothing at all. I mean, this is not a race-realist question or point of view. It’s totally agnostic on that question. It pushes that question aside and says, What is it about cultures that hold people back?

She certainly has a "race-realist" point of view now. I wonder what changed? Was it all those invitations to dude ranches from her new racist friends?

The Inside Higher Ed article also mentions that the conference skewed older male and white. It sure did.

You can see Pinker on the left, next to Anna Krylov.

Here's Eric Kaufmann, the Koch man, questioning whether we should end taboos against racism.

During the Conference, Coyne posted another fetish-pic of Steven Pinker's boots. I have joked around, saying he's obsessed with Pinker's boots, but now I'm starting to wonder if this is a serious paraphilia for Coyne.