The Skeptical Inquirer joins forces with rightwing political operative Jerry Coyne

Well you would expect something like this from The Skeptic, which is owned by extreme race pseudoscience supporter Michael Shermer.

But I didn't expect The Skeptical Inquirer would join forces with reactionary race pseudoscience ghoul Jerry Coyne and some creep I assume he met at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, Luana S. Maroja, who apparently takes money from rightwing crackpot Peter Thiel's leading courtier Bari Weiss.

This is your brain on race pseudoscience
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It should be clear to everybody by now that Jerry Coyne is not a scientist - he is a right-wing political operative, probably taking money from Thiel or Koch or some other racist plutocrat. 

Coyne went after P. Z. Myers, who is a scientist. 

Coyne's utter lack of professional and personal ethics was on full display when he made a presentation at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (featuring racist troll Amy Wax) and mentioned Myers and described him as a "blogger" rather than a biologist. I'm amazed he didn't repeat that in the article:

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions. The biologist P.Z. Myers joined several other critics of this field (once called sociobiology) when he asserted that: “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false.” Even social psychologists, who almost universally accept evolution itself, are far less enthusiastic about the idea that evolution explains important aspects of human psychology, social attitudes, and preferences.

But Myers’s widely accepted view is misguided, for the fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is simply this: our brains and how they work—which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts—sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors. Nobody denies this for our bodies—palimpsests of once-adaptive traits that are no longer useful (wisdom teeth, tailbones, and transitory coats of hair in embryos)—but opponents of evolutionary psychology deny it for our behaviors. But there is no scientific reason for such duality. Why on earth should our bodies reflect millions of years of evolution while our behaviors, thoughts, and psychology, molded by the very same forces, are somehow immune to our past? The only way this could be true is if human behaviors lacked genetic variation, a sine qua non for evolution. Yet research has shown that our behaviors are among the most genetically variable human traits!

And so the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies, launched by E.O. Wilson’s eponymous book, continue under a new name, but the subject remains human exceptionalism—the view that we’re somehow nearly free of the evolutionary forces that molded behavior in other species. It’s true that the early days of evolutionary psychology included some “soft” research that proposed dubious and untestable adaptive hypotheses for our behavior, but now the field has reached an explanatory maturity that has to be taken seriously.

Coyne links on "misguided" to an article in - what, an important magazine on biology? Or a general magazine like Scientific American? No, he links to garbage Areo, which is basically Quillette light. 

This is a good opportunity to post again Myers' evisceration of evolutionary psychology, in a superb video.

Coyne mentions E. O. Wilson, who as we know, irrefutably, was a racist.

Now once Areo and Wilson are cited, you know that jaw-dropping racist bullshit will not be far behind. 

All the blather about GWAS and "individual differences" and how race is really really real is worth skipping because all you have to know about Coyne and Maroja is the way they describe career racist Bo Winegard:

But the central question about genetics in the culture wars involves behavioral characteristics of different populations and ethnic groups, with differences in intelligence being the subject deemed most taboo. In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry. Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

I really hope Coyne's problem is early-stage dementia because otherwise he has no excuse for being such a sleaze. 

First, Marietta College did not release a public statement about Winegard's employment status, giving Winegard and a network of right-wing racist allies a chance to spin the issue as Winegard, Champion of Free Speech. 

Second, Winegard doesn't "merely suggest the possibility" - he is a hard-core true believer in race pseudoscience and agrees 100% with the hereditarian beliefs of The Bell Curve, which is why he is employed by Quillette.

Third, Winegard isn't only a race pseudoscience ghoul, he is a neo-Nazi with dreams of national racial quotas.

This is Jerry Coyne's example of a poor abused martyr for science. 

What a horrible reactionary ghoul Coyne has become. 

And the Skeptical Inquirer is a disgrace.

UPDATE: apparently Skeptical Inquirer has been on a downhill slide for years now, I just haven't been paying attention:

On Facebook:

Kavin Senapathy is with Martina Fern and
92 others.

March 18, 2020 ·

I have an update about how the Center for Inquiry and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have reacted to my recent Undark essay (https://undark.org/.../center-for-inquiry-race.../) in which I criticize their indifference to matters of race, racist pseudoscience, and the white supremacy among their ranks.
Wait for it …
Within days, they removed all of my Skeptical Inquirer articles and my Point of Inquiry episodes from their website...

----------------------------------------------

From the Undark article:

Meanwhile, scientific racism — the idea that there are biological differences between so-called races, often paired with a notion that the white race possesses superior intellect — has made a disturbing comeback, in tandem with the resurgence of white nationalist groups. This revival of racist pseudoscience has prompted widespread alarm in the scientific community, including a 2018 statement from the American Society of Human Genetics that denounced attempts to use genetics to “bolster bogus claims of white supremacy.”

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

Elon Musk: STILL a stochastic terrorist

This isn't the first time Musk has lied his way to putting another person's life in danger.

Elon Musk is a menace to the United States and should be sent back to South Africa.

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan should be sued into bankruptcy. They too are stochastic terrorists, using their platforms and their mobs of idiot fanboys to threaten the lives of scientists.

MONSTERS!

From The Washington Post:

A vaccine scientist says anti-vaccine activists “stalked” him at his home Sunday after Joe Rogan and others, including Twitter owner Elon Musk, challenged the scientist to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine proponent and Democratic presidential candidate, over vaccine misinformation.

Peter Hotez, a Houston-based scientist and pediatrician in global health, vaccinology and neglected tropical disease control, spent much of the pandemic debunking misinformation spread online about covid-19 and the vaccines targeting the coronavirus. He was also part of a Nobel Prize-nominated team of scientists who created an affordable, easy-to-make coronavirus vaccine.

Hotez criticized Rogan over the weekend as “awful” for hosting Kennedy, one of the country’s leading anti-vaccine advocates who has peddled false claims linking vaccines to autism, on Rogan’s wildly popular podcast last week. In response, Rogan publicly challenged the vaccine scientist to debate Kennedy, in a tweet Saturday that’s now been viewed more than 50 million times. Rogan said he’d give $100,000 to the charity of Hotez’s choice “if you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.” Then, billionaires claimed they’d give more money and vaccine skeptics piled on. Among them was Musk, who tweeted that Hotez was “afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong.”

If you are still on Twitter you are enabling that asshole Elon Musk - GET OFF TWITTER NOW!

Rebecca Watson has an excellent response to those monsters.

I learned from Watson that idiot Michael Shermer was part of the idiot mob.

Happy Juneteenth!

Fellow Americans visiting Abe Lincoln on
June 19, 2023 at 8:19 AM
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Today I went on a pilgrimage to the Lincoln memorial as a Juneteenth observance. Yes I know Lincoln had issues and faults in his opinions of Black people, but even Frederick Douglass, a sometimes fierce critic of Lincoln, appreciated Lincoln - and Lincoln appreciated Douglass - as recounted in Douglass' recollection of the reception at the White House after the second inaugural:

I said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?’ I replied, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’

When they get around to making a Juneteenth monument, I will visit that instead.

The second inaugural is carved into the north wall of the Monument. I got a photo of that too.

I think this may be the first time I've visited Washington DC without being part of a protest.

I'm currently reading a book that analyzes the second inaugural called 

Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural by Ronald C. White that I am enjoying very much.

My Juneteenth celebration this year was more mellow than last year's, when I observed Juneteenth by offering a plan to charge patriots a fee to blast Stone Mountain with Civil War era cannons.

Posthumous justice for the Philadelphia 15

From the NYTimes:

When they enlisted, the Navy had promised training and assignments that would lead to advancement, but the Black sailors soon found that those opportunities did not exist for them. They were forced to be servants for the ship’s officers, “limited to waiting on tables and making beds” as so-called mess attendants, they wrote.

For daring to speak out, a few of the men were jailed and all of them were kicked out of the Navy with discharges that forever labeled them as unfit to serve.

The plight of the group, which became known as “the Philadelphia 15,” faded from public attention as World War II erupted. But the injustice they faced, and the stigma their discharge papers carried, lived on for more than 80 years.

On Friday, in a ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, four surviving family members of two of those men, brothers John and James Ponder, accepted a formal apology from the Navy for the racist treatment their loved ones had endured as sailors aboard their ship.

Finally justice is done.

Conor Friedersdorf ~ Koch man AND Thiel man 💲💲💲💲💲

I've noted before that Conor Friedersdorf is a wingnut welfare recipient, spouting right-wing talking points while funded by Charles Koch.

But there's no law against taking money from more than one right-wing plutocrat at a time, and it looks like Friedersdorf has decided to throw himself in with the blatantly racist Quillette. It was credibly claimed that Quillette has taken money from Peter Thiel.

💲KA-CHING!!!💲

And speaking of double-dipping - from the beginning I suspected that Koch was in the financial mix for Quillette - and not just because so many Quillette authors were also taking money from Koch organizations.

And now the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute is reprinting Quillette articles. 

So it's not just the Donors Trust-funded white supremacist American Renaissance reprinting Quillette articles.

Fun fact: Peter Thiel also contributes to Donors Trust.

UPDATE:

I wrote to Friedersdorf about this, not expecting a reply, but I got one:

Nancy,

Are you under the impression that you get paid to go on the Quilette podcast? You do not. Nor do I make any money from the Koch brothers, one of whom is dead. 

I am paid by The Atlantic and by the Best of Journalism newsletter that I started. 

Thanks for writing, I'm glad to be able to correct your inaccurate impression.

Best,

Conor

------------------------

So here I thought Conor Friedersdorf was offered too much money to refuse, but it turns out he's so unconcerned about Quillette's promotion of race pseudoscience that he's willing to do a Quillette podcast for free. I guess my suspicion that he agreed with Pinker was correct.

And I assume what he meant to say was that he was not taking money from Charles Koch anymore, since according to the American Prospect:

It's not just the IDW itself: Some of its key popularizers also get Koch funding. Bari Weiss and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf—who has been one of the most visible defenders of Peterson in the mainstream media—have both received cash prizes from the Koch-funded Reason Foundation, where David Koch himself sits on the board of trustees. And remember “The Coddling of the American Mind”? Well, one of its co-authors, Greg Lukianoff, is the head of that campus free-speech watchdog, FIRE. That organization is funded, of course, by the Koch brothers (for good measure, the Charles Koch Institute also did a laudatory write-up of the piece).

The Atlantic is perhaps the worst offender. Last year it launched “The Speech Wars,” a reporting project that seeks “to understand where free speech is in danger and where it has been abused.” Even though the magazine had just been bought by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and was seeing all-time high circulation and web traffic, The Atlantic solicited funding for the project from none other than the Charles Koch Foundation (the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Fetzer Institute are also underwriters).

I never used the term "Koch brothers" in my email to Friedersdorf. I wrote about David Koch's death back in 2019.

And as far as Friedersdorf's "Best of Journalism" newsletter - it's on Substack and I have my suspicions about that platform.

But I guess Friedersdorf is right, my impression was inaccurate - I had thought he was a financial opportunist, but now my impression is that he is a true believer in race pseudoscience.

And looky here - Trump's would-be enabler Damon Linker, "senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center," is working for Quillette. I assume Quillette pays for articles, if not for podcasts.

Quillette was once considered an IDW publication, but it appears to be rapidly becoming the  publication of the American right. 

Another indication - besides the Donors Trust thing - how comfortable the American right and faux centrists are with race pseudoscience. 

Biologist vs. Steven Pinker

Biologist Keira Havens has written a superb piece on the appalling race pseudoscience career of Steven Pinker. Well-written, well researched and even funny:

Gould wasn’t wrong when he said that the field of evolutionary psychology had some work to do in developing falsifiable hypotheses and considering causal factors other than biology (an issue it continues to struggle with today). But hit dogs will holler. Pinker rushed to the head of the pack to defend his friends, the concept of biological determinism, and the narrow, barren conclusion such dogmatic thinking generates. Enthusiasm doesn’t translate to expertise though, and Pinker reveals an inability to distinguish between origins and outcomes and a weakness for flawed studies, citing phrenology-adjacent work to support his arguments.

Gould responded:

If we define poetic justice as defeat by one’s own favored devices — Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation — then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words”.

Even though Gould passed away in 2003, Pinker still fights his ghost on the regular, probably because burns like that leave you scarred for life.

But my favorite part of her post is her timeline of Pinker's career. Of special interest to me is this bit, because I've been planning to write about this little incident for a long time and will, soon:

2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).

And here's a fun coincidence - in the next bullet point Havens mentions a conflict between John Horgan and Pinker and his gang:

2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”

Horgan's article is damning:

I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer.

I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm--that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.

Demonstrating how accurate it is to refer to the race pseudoscience gang as a gang.

BTW - Edward Wilson is E. O. Wilson the indisputable racist and Marc Hauser was accused by Harvard of research misconduct. So he's a natural for the race pseudoscience gang.

It so happens that just the other day I discovered a video of a discussion on war for the now-defunct Philoctetes Society. It features historian David Blight, whom I recently mentioned for the first time on Pinkerite; anthropologist R Brian Ferguson whom I've mentioned many times; the psychiatrist, the late Dori Laub; and moderated by John Horgan. But I hadn't realized Horgan is a hero.

Thanks for your excellent work, Keira Havens.

E. O. Wilson misrepresents his critics' objections to sociobiology

He does it for the Peter Thiel-funded Big Think.  A really annoying thing about Big Think content is that it often does not provide dates for videos.

While Wilson was misrepresenting his critics' objection to sociobiology, he was encouraging and agreeing with racist charlatan J. P. Rushton:

As an author of the r/K model, one would have expected Wilson to have been outraged at Rushton’s proposal, which implied, as many nineteenth-century scientists did, that human “races” constituted different species—a view no reputable biologist, including Wilson, would have publicly defended. But Wilson immediately dashed off a letter to Rushton applauding his application of the r/K model as “one of the most original and interesting [ideas] I’ve ever encountered in psychology,” adding that the work was “courageous.” “In this country the whole issue would be clouded by personal charges of racism to the point that rational discussion would be almost impossible,” he wrote, urging Rushton to “press ahead!"

This is the essence of sociobiology - claim the current social hierarchy is the result of nature, and claim human races are different species.

Randroids promoting Charles Murray and race pseudoscience

I recently mentioned two Black intellectuals of the Left discussing the motivations of the Black people who work for the Right. Right-wing plutocrats are happy to shovel tons of money at anybody willing to promote their views.

Here's an example: Aaron Briley, agreeing with Charles Murray that Black brains are innately inferior to brains of other "races." 

The YouTube channel that posted this is The Objective Standard Institute, a bunch of Ayn Rand cultists - and I knew immediately that is what they are, because if you have even a passing familiarity with the "philosophy" of Ayn Rand, the term "objective" is a red flag. Ayn Rand called her collection of pet peeves and predilections "Objectivism."

I wrote a lot about Ayn Rand, her beliefs and her wretchedly bad novel "Atlas Shrugged" eight to ten years ago on my personal blog.

The OSI doesn't put Rand on the homepage, but it was quick work to search their site and find Rand all over it.

And here is Executive Director Craig Biddle giving a talk on the wonders of Ayn Rand.

And here he is having a chat with idiot Dennis Prager. 

Charles Murray is not a biologist, he's a political scientist whose entire career has been propped up by right-wing racist plutocrats. His goal is to justify racist practices as "science." As we see Murray doing a couple of years ago.

If Charles Murray had his way, it would be legal to discriminate against any Black job applicant on the basis of pseudoscientific, racist beliefs.

The Peter Thiel-funded Big Think can also be seen promoting Charles Murray here.

NOTE: Aaron Briley appears to be no longer associated with The Objective Standard Institute. I tracked down his Linked In profile, which mentions nothing about the OSI - perhaps he suddenly acquired a conscience? And although his resume lists him as Adjunct Faculty with Central Texas College, I can't find anything else online that connects him to the college.

Happy Loving Day

From the website:

Loving Day is the anniversary of a historic court decision for interracial marriage.

Every year on June 12th, it’s a global day of visibility, education, and community.

It's important to realize that WITHIN LIVING MEMORY it took a court case to allow two people of different ethnicities to marry in a state in the United States. 

Imagine believing that systemic racism, and the impact of a centuries-long race system, no longer exist.

Mildred Loving's arrest warrant is available on the New York Historical Society website.

The charge reads: 

...Mildred Jeter, a negro in the said County did on the 2nd day of June, 1958, unlawfully and feloniously did go out of this State for the purpose of being married to Richard Loving, a white person, and with the intention of returning, and was married to the said Richard Loving out of State, and afterwards returned to and resided in it, cohabitating as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The case was not finally decided until June 12, 1967. Only 56 years ago. Well within living memory. 

Thank you, Mildred and Richard Loving for fighting against the insanity.

"An antiwoke organization implodes" - buh-bye FAIR!

“You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

I was going to write about Jerry Coyne whining about the criticism of his little IDW grift perpetrated in cahoots with Quillette author and crackpot Anna Krylov. Best part, Coyne uses the phrase "Lee Jussim is an antiwoke social psychologist at Rutgers." Pinkerite has often noted the right-wing reactionary, vicious, race pseudoscience-loving loserosity of Lee Jussim. 

The second best part was when Coyne unironically describes race pseudoscience-promoting reactionaries Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt and Koch employee and reactionary Quillette author John McWhorter as "of the left."

Jerry Coyne and his right-wing allies live in a hermetically-sealed bubble.

Coyne was especially mad at P. Z. Myers, because Myers had this excellent response to the Krylov/Coyne grift. One of the best parts: "screw you McWhorter."

UPDATE: Myers responds to Coyne's complaints. Will Coyne ever stop embarrassing himself with his pathetic right-wing stoogery?

But there is much MUCH bigger news, which I found by looking at Coyne's website - the far-right reactionary FAIR grift "implodes!"

I had already noted how many members of the FAIR board of advisors were right-wingers, Trump supporters and Republicans.

The news comes from the New Yorker:

Professionally, Bartning had never worked on issues related to race or civil rights; he was an entrepreneur and investor who had helped American Express launch its online travel business and later helped lead the personal-care company E.O.S. One of his most recent ventures was a failed startup that sought to connect local farms with chefs. But he resolved to do something about what he was seeing at Riverdale—maybe even start an organization to counter it. He read an article in the Jewish magazine Tablet, about the rise of a new ideology on the left—a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality”—and another parent offered to connect him with Tablet’s editor and with the author of the article, Bari Weiss.

I had always assumed that Christopher Rufo was the real founder of FAIR, although Bartning had been given the credit, as I noted in September 2021. 

But as with so many horrible right-wing reactionary projects, this one is the work of Peter Thiel's leading courtier, Bari Weiss.

The New Yorker article demonstrates what professional journalists should be doing: getting past the lies. Although the article's description of right-wing extremist Peter Boghossian was unfortunately extremely flattering.

The article, written by Emma Green, mentions so many people I've discussed on this site for their connection to race pseudoscience and/or the Intellectual Dark Web: creepy Melissa Chen; Substack's Lulu Cheng Meservey, the awful former Quillette editor Colin Wright; Hoover ghoul Niall Ferguson; Angel Eduardo; Quillette author Glenn Loury; Koch employee/Randroid Kmele Foster.

The article is long but the gist is that Bion Bartning, who is basically a normie, although "independently wealthy," decided to wade into a culture war campaign dear to the American Right and the Republican Party - preventing discussions of systemic racism. 

Bartning:

“I’d say that, in the first few months of starting FAIR, I didn’t realize the degree to which this was being politicized,” he told me. “Getting this issue tied up in a culture war between two political parties is dangerous and could end up pushing things toward a more dehumanizing approach, because people get locked into their position.” 

Bartning's tragedy was that someone connected him to Bari Weiss - Madam Culture War herself.

Eventually Bartning achieves this insight:

“There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation,” he said. “That’s part of what’s happening in our culture. You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

Probably the biggest get of the article is the revelation of Weiss' coziness with Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow:

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bari Weiss is, through and through, a right-wing political operative taking money from some of the most evil and crackpot plutocrats in the world to help the anti-democracy Republican Party make the United States a worse place, through the promotion of culture wars.

For me one of the best aspects of the article is that it provides a window into the Intellectual Dark Web Culture War issues factory:

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

Bari Weiss is truly a conscience-deficient individual. 

UPDATE: P. Z. Myers comments:

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies.

UPDATE: Charles Murray is such a good buddy of Harlan Crow, he dedicated one of his more recent sociobiology books to him.

Gavin Wax & Amy Wax & far-right extremism

So it seems that Gavin Wax is a cousin of infamous racist troll Amy Wax, a speaker at Peter Theil's CPAC for racists.

Who is Gavin Wax? 

Well according to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Less than three weeks after the Mar-A-Lago meeting, a collection of radical right figures gathered at an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) in Manhattan. Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Greene hobnobbed with #Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, prominent white nationalist activists Peter and Lydia Brimelow, and an array of ultranationalist European leaders.

The NYYRC gala captured the dark mood that has overtaken a growing faction of the American right: one fixated on dominating enemies, ruminating on their own perceived victimhood, and weaving a reality in which dramatic action – including violence – is justified.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax told attendees.

Peter and Lydia Brimelow are the racists who live in White Supremacist Castle.

One more connection between Republicans and hard-core racists.

Wax was in the news more recently for being fired by the Babylon Bee:

The Babylon Bee – the satirical news site under fire for its unceremonious, public firing of New York Young Republican President Gavin Wax – has finally actually sent Wax his termination papers, The National Pulse understands.

Almost a week after Bee founder Seth Dillon took to Twitter to sack Wax over what appears to be his support for Donald Trump (Dillon and the Bee are DeSantis supporters and have done business with the Florida Governor), the site notified Wax...

Seth Dillon is a financial backer of stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, creator of Libs of TikTok.

Imagine being so extreme that even Seth Dillon thinks you're too much.

LOCK HIM UP!!!

Reuters: 

"Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here?" Trump said to one of his attorneys, according to the 49-page indictment.

"Trump mishandled classified documents that included information about the secretive U.S. nuclear program and potential domestic vulnerabilities in the event of an attack, the federal indictment said."

Any American who continues to support this rancid POS is an accessory to treason.

Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?

I recently recommended R. Brian Ferguson's under-recognized Rosetta Stone of anthropology approaches, Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. Per page it is one of the most valuable explanations of the three main camps of human behavior theorizing, in my opinion. You should read it - it's short, clearly written and free.

And today I have finally gotten around to recommending Ferguson's latest book "Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?" Thanks for the heads-up, Sam.

Ferguson, along with Maxine Margolis and a few others, is one of the most important students of cultural materialism-pioneering anthropologist Marvin Harris.

I haven't read the book yet, but I can share an interview with Ferguson on a YouTube channel called The Dissenter. Enjoy.

The enduring effects of de jure segregation on de facto segregation

An excellent tutorial from a lawyer with a Youtube channel on how the effects of legal (de jure) segregation created de facto segregation.

People like Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss, who deny the continued existence of systemic racism, need to watch this. Not that this will change their minds - I suspect they get paid too much to continue to promote the views of right-wing racist plutocrats to ever change their minds.

Steven Pinker at the 2023 Racist Rodeo (the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research)

Wheee it's the
Racist Rodeo!

The International Society for Intelligence Research is having its annual conference  and guess who's going to be there? 

We are delighted to announce the 23rd annual ISIR conference in Berkeley, California, USA! The conference will be held from Thursday, July 27 until Saturday, July 29 at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, located at 2086 Allston Way, Berkeley, California. We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell! 

But this isn't Pinker's first racist rodeo, he was there in 2015, complaining about bad writing. 

I find it odd that Pinker is touted as some kind of language expert when he chose a truly rancid piece of dreck - poorly argued, poorly researched - written by professional racist Steve Sailer for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." I think we should all have doubts about Steven Pinker's opinion on the subject of good writing.

But I don't think the primary reason for the speech is a concern for style so much as a chance to retaliate against Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, or as Pinker describes them in the most weaselly way possible: "critics of the value of intelligence research." Oddly he includes idiot David Brooks with them - Pinker and Brooks are now allies.

Pinker will never get over the fact that Gould humiliated him in the New York Review of Books. And he was mad at Malcolm Gladwell for daring to point out Pinker's cozy relationship with racist Steve Sailer, but Pinker - and Geoffry Miller - seemed to feel better about Gladwell after he signed the Harper's Letter. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist who gained notoriety through fat-shaming.

The audience chuckles when Pinker shows the slide of Gould, Gladwell and Brooks. Pinker says:

...three prominent critics of the value of intelligence research and of the major findings that I think are accepted by most people in this group...

This tells us two important things - "intelligence research" means race pseudoscience - and that Pinker is in agreement with alleged "major findings" that the pack of racists in the room believe in. Pinker continues:

What the three of them have in common is that they are all excellent writers. And what a lot of people who do research in intelligence have in common is, like most academics, they're not. And so in the battle for hearts and minds, I think many of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight. Namely, the people who are most vociferous in proposing the idea that intelligence doesn't matter, it can't be measured, it's all an artifact of socio-economic status, it doesn't matter above a certain low threshold and so on, they present their case very clearly and articulately. And so I think it behooves intelligence researchers to get their side of the story out in an effective matter...

What Pinker is proposing is nothing less than a coordinated political campaign by partisans of race pseudoscience.

But certainly Pinker's buddy Razib Khan demonstrates how badly race pseudoscience proponents write, so bad that even his fellow racists recognize it. Pinker tries to excuse the bad writing of his racist pals due to their being academics, but Khan is not an academic, he's a rightwing political operative posing as a scientist, so what's his excuse?

Pinker was also at the racist rodeo in 2017. He participated in the Distinguished Contributor Interview, available on YouTube. The audio is terrible. The interviewer, David Lubinski is:

...one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence",[8] an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.

I haven't had a chance to review the whole interview but this part is pretty fascinating at minute 3.40:

                        Lubinski

...How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate"

                         Pinker

It's true that at the end of "The Language Instinct" my first popular book, I commented on how one topic I did not cover in that book, that I never studied myself up to that point was just because the individual differences in the normal range just seemed a little ripple of noise on top of something interesting that we all have in common. Compared to the question of what makes the brain smart, how do we solve problems, how do we invent things, how do we discover things. What makes some of us a little better than others on a quantitative scale, struck me as less interesting. But then - as you pointed out I was not right back today(?) - individual differences are interesting in a number of ways. One of them is, if you're interested in human nature, what is innate, across the human species, what makes a human human, one of the ways to study it is to look at how something varies. Since you need some kind of independent variable in science to study anything. If you're interested in what do the (?) human nature. You can compare humans to chimpanzees, there are a number of ways of getting at it. But one of them has to be well, let's look at the differences in the genes and see how they correlate with differences in psychological abilities. Another was the fact that - I didn't appreciate until reading an article by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues in the late 80s in Science, that pointed out a problem that I had a deepening appreciation of, that behavioral genetics isn't just the study of the genetic influences but it leads to surprising discoveries about environmental influences, mainly the small contribution of the so-called shared environment, which I think came as a surprise to everyone, pointed out by Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, David Rowe and later Judith Harris. One of the profound discoveries of behavioral genetics is not so much that genes matter, though that still comes as a shock to many people, but that the part that isn't genetic isn't necessarily familial, isn't necessarily parental. That there's some profound source of variation in what makes us what we are that is neither genes nor families. That's a discovery that I find, even - almost 15 years after publishing The Blank Slate - it's very hard to get people to even understand it, let alone try to explain it. But that is a profound intellectual puzzle about what makes us what we are. I have my own favorite hypothesis about it, my own interpretation of the evidence. A lot of it seems developmental noise, and so non-shared environment as the name of the variable that counts for that chunk of variance may be somewhat dissuading. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression but in answer to your question, it is a highly interesting question what is it other than our genes that make us what we are and that's something that can only come to light through the study of intelligence and personality...

First, the notable use of the term "human psychological diversity" which I have no doubt is another way of saying "human biodiversity" a favorite euphemism for race pseudoscience promoters, as is, almost always, "individual differences."

I think the subtext for Lubinski putting Pinker on the spot here is "you used to be opposed to race pseudoscience, what made you decide to join our club?"

Second, Pinker is alluding to the theories of his protegée Judith Rich Harris when he talks about "non-shared environment." Basically what Judith Rich Harris meant was society:

What children learn in the context of their home may not, in fact, work in the world outside the home. Western societies demand very different behaviors in the home and outside the home; for example, displays of emotion that are acceptable in the home are unacceptable outside of it ( Dencik, 1989 ; Fine, 1981 ). A central assumption of GS theory is that socialization is a highly context-dependent form of learning. Children learn separately how to behave at home (or in the presence of their parents) and how to behave when they are not at home. The manner of learning, the reinforcement contingencies, may also be quite different: In the home they may be reprimanded for mistakes and praised when they behave appropriately; out of the home they may be ridiculed for mistakes and ignored when they behave appropriately.

What is so incredibly irritating about Pinker's amazement about this "discovery" allegedly made via behavioral genetics is that anthropologist Marvin Harris's entire career, since at least the mid-1960s, has been pointing out the non-family influences on human behavior, via his research strategy "cultural materialism." Specifically infrastructural determinism.

For a comparison of the research strategies of cultural materialism, sociobiology (which Pinker most often agrees with) and the "ideas control behavior" position, see R. Brian Ferguson's "Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why the Yanomami make war."

And Pinker is certainly aware of Marvin Harris, enough to dismiss him with this absurdly simplistic assessment: "But his view of human nature is too narrow — everything boils down to calories."

Apparently Pinker just can't or won't make the connection between Judith Rich Harris' shallow analysis of this "variable" and the decades-long body of work of Marvin Harris.

More about this interview later when I write about Pinker's progress in the exciting field of "human psychological diversity." 

Now back to Racist Rodeo 2023.

Frank C. Worrell is Black, but also takes money from Koch and other right-wing plutocrats, so can be relied on not to make a fuss about the core racist beliefs of many of those associated with ISIR. 

As Pascal Robert said (via F. D. Signifier) :

...the whole purpose of (Black) conservatives is to disabuse the notion that Black people are deserving of any policy that would transform their economic condition, because they are so culturally defective that capitalism can't save them. And they do this because their paymasters, like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and other think tanks pay them to say this crap...

Black people willing to sign onto a race pseudoscience club are extremely valuable to organizations  like ISIR, so they can say: "see, even Black intellectuals agree with us about Black people."

For another example see JayMan - if they aren't actually a white nationalist man-baby.

So how racist is the ISIR? Glad you asked.

The current president, Rosalind Arden is a Quillette author who has also co-authored with hardcore race-ranking racist Linda Gottfredson, which is why I recognized her name on sight. Gottfredson was president of ISIR in 2012. 

Board member Emily Willoughby is a big fan of race pseudoscience. 

Earl Hunt, president in 2011, now deceased, liked to talk about "racial differences."

2016 president Richard Haier is a Quillette author and a defender of hard-core racist/neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. He's co-authored with  ISIR's 2020/2021 president and current secretary/treasurer, Rex E. Jung. 

Board member John Protzko wrote a paper on intelligence that cites Linda Gottfredson.

Board member Guy Madison is a sociobiologist who defends all the other promoters of race pseudoscience and has co-authored with white supremacist Edward Croft Dutton.

Board member Andreas Demetriou co-authored a paper that references Pinker, Gottfredson, Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen.

Board member Robert Colom is a big fan of the crackpot theories of Richard Lynn.

Board member Timothy Bates is a race pseudoscience ghoul who likes to retweet other race pseudoscience ghouls like long-time Bo Winegard associate and co-author Cory Clark. Bates was also ISIR president in 2017 & 2018. Co-authored a paper with right-wing racist kook Hans J. Eysenck.

The 2019 conference was a bumper crop of the hardest of hard-core racists featuring Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Greg "600K from Ron Unz" Cochran, Johnny Anomaly, Razib Khan, Stephen Hsu AND Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was finally banned last year because Abdel Abdellaoui complained about him.

Other racists were not happy that Kirkegaard was banned. 

The conference flyer for 2022 lists Abdellaoui, and also Emily Willoughby's advisor Matt McGue, a proponent of behavioral genetics (sociobiology); Jochen Paulus, a German journalist; Aljoscha Neubauer an Austrian psychologist; and Anna-Lena Schubert a psychologist with distinct sociobiology leanings, who co-authored a paper with Kirsten Hilger, an ISIR board member who won the Richard Haier prize. The local host was Jakob Pietschnig, who cited, as credible sources, in a paper on IQ: Edward Dutton, Herrnstein/Murray, three citations from J. P. Rushton and seven from Richard Lynn. That guy loves his race pseudoscience. Which is why he is part of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

I finally found the 2022 program online and it turns out that Steven Pinker was at this conference too, giving an invited speech called "Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters" which is part of Pinker's campaign to associate race pseudoscience with rationality.

Also featured - racists! Including Tobias Wolfram who likes to retweet Cory Clark; Heiner Rindeman, who co-authored with racist Noah Carl; and Damien Morris, author at Quillette. And the usual ISIR gang already mentioned.

Of course Richard Lynn and JP Rushton both participated in ISIR conferences. The 2012 conference program notes the passing of two leading promoters of race pseudoscience, Arthur Jensen and Rushton. Rest in hell, racists.

So many extreme racists have been associated with this organization I wouldn't be surprised if they made Steve Sailer their next president.

The ISIR has a Facebook page and they are NOT ashamed of all the racists associated with their organization. Their page banner is full of racists. This demonstrates how obsessed ISIR - and behavioral genetics, sociobiology and "human psychological diversity" is with race.

Top row, left to right: 

• Ronald Aylmer Fischer - huge racist
• Charles Spearman - inspiration for racists
• Cyril Burt - racist fraud
• Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr - behavioral geneticist racist twin studies guy
• Alfred Binet
• Arthur Jensen - huge racist - major thought leader of ISIR, along with Rushton
• Robert Plomin - promoter of race pseudoscience

Bottom row, left to right:

• Francis Galton - huge racist, founder of behavioral genetics and eugenics
• Illustration by Henry Thomas Aiken - I'm not sure its relevance to ISIR, when I asked Google to find the image source, the first hit was for some kind of presentation, no longer available except for the front page, called British History and the Census from the University of Glasgow
• Stephen J. Ceci - apparently not an hereditarian but took money from Cato (Koch) to defend them
• Charles Murray - huuuuge racist
• Charles Darwin as a young man
• Sandra Wood Scarr - Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, of great interest to racists like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard - writing in "Intelligence" the publication of the ISIR

So apparently "Intelligence" will publish anything as long as the author is devoted to race pseudoscience. According to its Wiki:

It has been criticized for having included on its editorial board biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg and psychologist Richard Lynn, both of whom are promoters of eugenics and scientific racism.[1][3][4][5] The editor-in-chief of the journal defended their involvement on the basis of academic freedom.[1] Lynn and Meisenberg no longer serve in the editorial board as of 2018.[2][6]

Currently Haier is the editor, associate editors are Thomas Coyle, right-wing fan of racists like Bo Winegard, and Sophie Von Strumm a proponent of behavioral genetics via her Hungry Mind lab, and a frequent co-author with Plomin. 

The editorial board includes Bates, Demetriou, Colom, Hilger, Jung, Neubauer, Pietschnig, Plomin, Schubert plus two names I recognized on sight, David C. Geary, an author at Quillette who co-authored a paper with the "human biodiversity" Winegard twins, and Heiner Rinderman, identified as a "human biodiversity pseudoscientist" in Rational Wiki. And there's Russell T. Warne, another Quillette author.

Probably not everybody associated with ISIR and "Intelligence" is a racist, but even if not, they are comfortable working with lots of racists.

Ooh - more YouTube videos from ISIR conferences:

Linda Gottfredson in 2016 for the "Distinguished Contributor Interview" - I haven't had a chance to watch it yet - I dipped in every now and then and there appears to be plenty of whining about how she's been treated with less than the adulation she expects, because she's a huge honking racist. I don't know if she repeats the performance she gave when she was invited onto racist Stefan Molyneux's show and together they ranked races by intelligence. 

Brian Boutwell in 2018 - "biosocial criminologist" and some time co-author with neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard. Boutwell also appeared on Molyneux's show.

Gregory Clark in 2018 - hardcore hereditarian economist. White supremacist Douglas Murray was devastated when Clark was deplatformed.

Toby Young in 2017 - Young was a Quillette editor and comedian Stewart Lee had some amusing things to say about him and Emil Kirkegaard.

I will be reviewing more Racist Rodeo videos ASAP.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Quillette, racism and Thielbucks

I reported on Sabine Hossenfelder's connection to the Intellectual Dark Web several weeks ago.

I thought she was bad news then - I had no idea how bad.

She can be found on Twitter in 2021 promoting racist garbage rag Quillette, while defending infamous transphobe and disgraced journalist Jesse Singal. 

I had a feeling her bad take on trans youth was not a one-time incident.

In the screenshot above, I included her response to a comment, because it demonstrates her personality alignment with the Intellectual Dark Web - that smug certainty that they are perfectly rational and objective and untouched by politics, and only those they disagree with have political or ideological commitments.

More recently Hossenfelder can be seen promoting Quillette's sexual harasser's pity party article, written by known harasser Laurence Krauss. I wrote about that recently.

And weeks before she retweeted another article by Laurence Krauss in Quillette. 

PZ Myers has another post about "Krauss, the right-wing cartoon."

Oh look, Hossenfelder was called out for retweeting Quillette in 2020 and claims she doesn't see anything racist in Quillette.

Ezra Klein breaks the issue down:

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned after publishing an article by the paper’s architecture critic titled “Buildings Matter, Too.” David Boardman, the chair of the board that owns the Inquirer, said Wischnowski had done “remarkable” work but “leaves behind some decades-old, deep-seated and vitally important issues around diversity, equity and inclusion, issues that were not of his creation but that will likely benefit from a fresh approach.”

One interpretation of these events, favored by frustrated conservatives, is that a generation of young, woke journalists want to see the media remade along activist lines, while an older generation believes it must cover the news without fear and favor, and reflect, at the very least, the full range of views held by those in power.

“The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’” wrote the Times’s Bari Weiss. “One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other, the word ‘fit.’”

Another interpretation is that the range of acceptable views isn’t narrowing so much as it’s shifting. Two decades ago, an article like (Tom) Cotton’s could easily be published, an essay arguing for abolishing prisons or police would languish in the submissions pile, and a slogan like “Black Lives Matter” would be controversial. Today, Black Lives Matter is in the sphere of consensus, abolishing prisons is in legitimate controversy, and there’s a fight to move Cotton’s proposal to deploy troops against US citizens into deviance. The idea space is just as large as it’s been in the past — perhaps larger — but it is in flux, and the fight to define its boundaries is more visible.

I have no doubt at this point that Sabine Hossenfelder is one of those "frustrated conservatives" who does not get the problem with comparing Black lives to buildings. The comparison is exactly the point the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is making. 

And there is the effort by conservatives to portray all Black Lives protests as violent. That was not the case. But Black protests have been portrayed that way since the Civil Rights era, a point made by this just-released video from "Some More News."

Hossenfelder is a real dummy, to insert herself into American racial politics like that. 

But maybe not - now that Hossenfelder is being promoted by Big Think, she's no doubt getting her Thielbucks. 

So she won't have to worry about what non-conservatives think. Like the other members of the IDW gang she will be safe inside the right-wing bubble.

Can a Hossenfelder byline in Quillette be far behind?

We know Quillette promotes race pseudoscience. An important reason we know this is because founder Claire Lehmann admitted it.

So this is not Hossenfelder innocently promoting Quillette, unaware of its racism.

Hossenfelder is promoting Quillette because she finds racism perfectly acceptable.