The good guys: Fardels Bear on race science

"Fardels Bear" banner art

I found a great web site via Twitter: Fardels Bear - A History of the Alt-right.

The site has posted two great pieces on race science this week:

Undead Race Science which is about the Quillette pro-race science review of the Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. 

False premise 5: “When dealing with this topic, it’s useful to step back from any definitive assertion to contemplate a less divisive question: is it possible that human populations could differ in cognitive ability, at least in part, because of their different evolutionary histories?” 

See how reasonable they are being? Just asking the question: isn’t it possible black people are just stupider than white people because of how they are from Africa and all? What? I’m just asking!
Since Quillette goes to great lengths to deny there are any social or political reasons for asking this not-at-all provocative question we are free to ask why they are asking it. What scientific question is at stake? It is very difficult to posit an answer outside the context of a racist society where such “cogitive differences” have huge social consequences.
And, to be clear, the history of race science has shown that the question is not a new one and that it has been explored in a lot of depth for over a century. And the research program proposed by Quillette has failed to establish any reasonable conclusion at all. If there were evolutionary reasons for differences in “cognitive capacity” among “races” we would know by now. It is reasonable to conclude that the question is no longer a reasonable one to ask.  How long must we suffer people with very questionable motivations asking it?

And more recently Fardels Bear published Arthur Jensen and His Nazi Friends. The whole article is informative and excellent, and he discusses something discussed in Pinkerite - the incredibly slipperly way - seemingly by design - that race science proponents use race-related terminology.

Several times in this space I warned of equivocating between a “genetic population” and “race.” The trick of simply substituting “population” for “race” leads readers to think that our conventionally defined races are genetic populations which they definitely are not, but allows the writer to sound scientific and up-to-date.  Jensen gained enormous credibility by using the language of population genetics.   But all he did was steal that language without properly using the concepts. Jensen actually studied conventionally defined (and socially constructed) “races” unless his subjects actually took some kind of genetic test to make sure they were of the same breeding population with their fellow test-takers. Jensen claimed to study genetic populations because he wanted sound scientific. He simply claimed that we can tell just by looking at someone what “population group” they belonged to. Here’s the key passage:

This is practically axiomatic, according to the geneticists with whom I have spoken…. Races are more technically viewed by geneticists as populations having different distributions of gene frequencies. These genetic differences are manifested in virtually every anatomical, physiological, and biochemical comparison one can make between representative samples of identifiable racial groups (Kuttner, 1967). (p. 80)

Jensen simply moves from a socially defined “race” like “black” to the claim that they are the same as a genetic population. He knows this because of “geneticists with whom I have spoken.” Which geneticists? He provides us with a citation with to (Kuttner, 1967). Aha! Regular readers know Robert Kuttner!

Kuttner, as you probably guessed without even checking the link, is a hard-core racist.

Fardels Bear is a project of writer and history John Jackson.

Pinkerite will be making an effort to include more science-based opponents of race science in this blog going forward. Starting with an interview with anthropologist and Pinker critic R. Brian Ferguson.

Rebecca Watson v the IDW

Watson v Candace Owens

Watson criticizes Ben Shapiro

In her most recent video Watson talks about a sexual harassment and career study and reveals that eight years after the horrific, Richard Dawkins-created "Elevatorgate" she is still getting attacked by men.

Elevatorgate was a sort of precursor to Gamergate, another misogyny-fueled attack mob phenomenon, which was celebrated by Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Recently I mentioned that Bret Weinstein was telling his Twitter followers that Rebecca Lewis, author of Alternative Influence Broadcasting the Reactionary Right was just trying to get power by claiming that she was getting threats on Twitter.

Like it's so unbelievable that a woman would actually get threats on social media.

One of the problems with the response to Dawkins over his part in Elevatorgate, the reason he got so little pressure to take responsibility for what he had wrought, was that it took a long time for people to believe it was really Richard Dawkins who wrote the "Dear Muslima" letter.

It used to be so hard to believe that science celebrity men could be assholes, but now we know better - they can be and they often are.

Quillette doubles down on race science: Bo Winegard and Noah Carl

The Sami people ("Lapps") of northern Finland
were not considered  by Blumenbach to be
part of the "becoming" Caucasian sub-group.

Today we see a team-up of long-time Quillette-published proponent of race science and other forms of hereditarianism, Bo Winegard, and Noah Carl, who was in the news recently after he was dismissed from a Cambridge University college due to his "collaboration with far-right extremists."

Winegard and Carl teamed up to write a book review for Quillette of Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini.

I haven't read the book so I won't evaluate how accurately the review describes Saini's arguments. My impression of the book is that Saini made it as much about herself as about a critique of race science, with big glossy photos of herself with every article about the book, which dampened my enthusiasm for reading it. Plus I haven't had time.

The review itself is chock-full of the usual race science claims which I have been critiquing, but I want to focus on one section in particular:

The primary reason that natural philosophers began to classify humans into different races is that human populations look different from one another. Their skin colors, hair textures, facial structures, and stature all differ, often in predictable ways. Furthermore, these differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. 

The "philosophers" link is to work by Johann Frederich Blumenbach, whom I was just talking about recently in relation to carelessness in race science terminology and Blumenbach's invention of the term "Caucasian."

It's interesting to compare Blumenbach's description of "Caucasian" to Winegard's. In "The Anthropological Treatise of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach" he describes light skin as "most handsome and becoming" but he also includes "Eastern Asians" (which are now known as South Asians) and North Africans.

Caucasian variety Colour white cheeks rosy s 43 hair brown or chestnut coloured s 52 head subglobular s 62 face oval straight its parts moderately defined forehead smooth nose narrow slightly hooked mouth small s 56 The primary teeth placed perpendicularly to each jaw s 62 the lips especially The lower one moderately open the chin full and rounded s 56 In general that kind of appearance which according to our opinion of symmetry we consider most handsome and becoming To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns and those of Eastern Asia as far as the river Obi the Caspian Sea and the Ganges and lastly those of Northern Africa.

He says that Caucasians are all the way to the Ganges river, which is on the eastern border of India. As I mentioned in the other post, people of South Asian descent, considered Caucasian by Blumenbach, are sometimes called "black" in Great Britain.

Although Blumenbach loves those rosy cheeks, he also includes people with different skin colors and people outside of Europe as Caucasians, and excludes the entire eastern half of Russia.

Winegard uses the term Caucasian differently, in another article in Quillette, "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism":

If one knows that Thomas is a Caucasian, one can be reasonably sure that Thomas has relatively light skin, and that he has recent ancestry in Europe. 

We see Winegard's approach - you create a category, "Caucasian" and then you see if a person can be placed into the category by looking at his skin color and checking the geography of his ancestors.

Winegard, who clearly knows the provenance of the word "Caucasian," has redefined Blumenbach's term - no longer may North Africans or Asians be considered part of the group, now a Caucasian must have light skin and come from Europe.

Winegard's redefining "Caucasian" for his own artisanal classification system is not an error though, it's deliberate - for Winegard's article, co-written with his brother Ben and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell makes it clear that you can decide who counts as whichever race at your convenience:

But racial categories, like film categories, aren’t immutable essences that perfectly sort humans into distinct groups. There aren’t a fixed number of racial categories, and the number researchers use is partially a matter of convenience. One might start with five continentally based categories (i.e., Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines) and then add more categories as one’s analysis becomes more granular (e.g. Ashkenazi Jewish, Mizrahi Jewish, and so on). These categories aren’t real in some metaphysical sense, but they are useful, and they do have predictive value. 

He mentions Ashkenazi Jews as a "granular" category, but other race science proponents, including Linda Gottfredson, whom Winegard mentions with approval in his Quillette article in defense of "The Bell Curve" counts Ashkenazi Jews as a distinct race, more intelligent than Caucasians as we see her doing in this interview with Stephan Molyneux.

In other words, Bo Winegard's race classification system is "Caucasians, East Asians, Africans, Native Americans, and Australian Aborigines" with Ashkenazi being presumably a granular sub-category of Caucasian, while for Molyneux and Gottfredson, the race classification system is "Ashkenazi Jews, Asians, Caucasians, Hispanics, Blacks and African Blacks."

As we see, again and again, sloppy, incoherent and "useful" race classification is the very essence of race science. Race science proponents don't even agree with each other on which races exist.

Winegard claims these hazy random ad hoc classifications are useful.

How are they useful? Unless your goal is the Libertarian one - to declare that some poor people, easily identified by the color of their skin, are just too genetically stupid to help via tax-payer funded social programs, and so we should therefore stop funding them.

In other words the policy proposal at the heart of The Bell Curve.

I will be getting back to my Bell Curve series soon, but first I will talk about anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson's critique of the claims of Ashkenazi intelligence (claims that were endorsed & promoted by Steven Pinker) that Molyneux uses to place Ashkenazim at the top of the racial intelligence hierarchy as well as Ferguson's critique of another theory endorsed by Pinker - and a discussion of Pinker's shamefully sloppy work.

Quillette is awful again

In today's NYTimes: Canadian Inquiry Calls Killings of Indigenous Women Genocide

To nobody's surprise Quillette editor Jon Kay and grifter-for-hire Andy Ngo have horrible takes.

Good people on Twitter respond:

Meanwhile Claire Lehmann comes the closest I've seen to defending race science in public - besides of course publishing articles by people who support race science -  in an argument with Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  They are talking about Noah Carl.

I didn't find if Lehmann responded.

This must have been a shock for Lehmann to have Carl, defended by Quillette, attacked and called a charlatan by Taleb.

And then Taleb went after IQ which is the basis of most race science arguments.

I mean, Taleb was their guy. You can see how often Quillette has referred favorably to Taleb in this screen cap of search results. 

Taleb's resume, which includes making a bundle on the stock market and attacking Paul Krugman is Ayn Rand's wet dream.

What an unpleasant surprise for the gang at Quillette.

Sam Seder v Alex Jones

Sam Seder is convinced that Alex Jones gets Koch money.

If that could be proven it would mean six members of the IDW get Koch money.

The misogynist Christina Hoff Sommers

I've pointed out before that IDW women don't just hate feminists - they are full-on misogynists.

Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrated that again recently with this tweet telling women to STFU about menstruation because men never talk about bodily secretions.

Then she promoted a tweet where someone compared menstruation - a healthy normal process - to jock itch, a fungal infection.

There is nothing especially feminist about wanting to talk about menstruation. And nobody is making Christina Hoff Sommers listen to people talking about it. I think she just doesn't like the idea of women talking about their lives and their icky gross bodies.

To a certain extent this is probably an example of rightwing empathy deficiency. Sommers, at age 68, has probably not had to deal with menstruation for well over a decade. And if it's of no interest to her, Christina Hoff Sommers, why should anybody else be talking about it?

The best part of the responses to her tweet was all the people asking her if she's ever known any men.

For example:

Has Claire Lehmann finally dropped the centrist mask?

Looks like Claire Lehmann is going to be at the National Conservatism Conference with right-wingers like John Bolton, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel, of whom we were speaking just the other day, since he is Eric Weinstein's boss.

According to their about page:

The conference on “National Conservatism” will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing. 

We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Our aim is to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country. 

The Edmund Burke Foundation is a new public affairs institute dedicated to developing a revitalized conservatism for the age of nationalism already upon us.
The National Conservatism Conference will take place at the Ritz-Carlton Washington DC.

Lehmann might have trouble with the goal of opposing political theories grounded in race though.

Meanwhile, the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum has declared Quillette to be a conservative publication:

While Bartlett presents Quillette as a conservative niche publication (and quite rightly)

My guess is that Lehmann agreed to admit she and Quillette are rightwing after being prompted by the Kochs, whom I am convinced, more than ever, help fund Quillette. Because, per this IWF article, they think Quillette is hip - or rather "People Are Talking about Quillette, a High-Brow Publication for Academics. No, Really--It's Hot"

This is something the Right wants very much - a "high-brow publication for academics" that is conservative and "hot."

They really live inside their own bubble.

Eric Weinstein quoting Upton Sinclair

Eric Weinstein's salary depends on the Trump-supporting right-wing extremist Peter Thiel.

Steven Pinker: The World's Most Annoying Man

I generally like the work of Nathan J. Robinson, the author of the article in Current Affairs, The World's Most Annoying Man, although I was disappointed I didn't learn anything new about Pinker. I already knew he is full of himself, is fairly empathy-deficient, is a phony liberal and yes, supremely annoying.

The fact that I have devoted a blog to critiquing Pinker, albeit focusing on his support for race science, might account for my already knowing much of what Robinson reports.

However, Robinson does get credit for making me laugh out loud at the end of this passage:

Now, for me, it is trivializing, even downright insouciant, to talk about the depth of anguish and despair that millions of people endure daily in this country as a “modicum of anxiety.” And it is dismissing the urgency of the problem to say it might just be a price we have to pay. 40,000 people, measured in the official American mass death unit, is over 13 annual 9/11s. It does not matter if this was worse long ago. It doesn’t follow that it’s not a “crisis,” merely that the crisis is a recurring one and we have never done what we ought to do in order to try to fix it. It is trivially true that “not every problem” is a “crisis.” But surely, if you do not see 40,000 people taking their lives each year as urgent, you are the most insouciant of insouciant assholes.

Robinson wrote pieces about Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro too. I'd love it if Robinson wrote a piece about each member of the IDW.

Heather Heying: "we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom"

Michael Shermer demonstrating
IDW "civility" by calling a critic
of Steven Pinker a cockroach while
suggesting the critic's motive was
nothing but being desperate for attention

I recently discussed the mystery of why Bari Weiss decided for herself to group people like Stefan Molyneux in with Steven Pinker and other presumably more respectable individuals in her article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.

I did not solve the mystery.

But while reading the article more thoroughly than I ever have before, several things jumped out at me.

One is a Big Lie of the IDW, which Weiss promotes in her piece:

...they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness...

If Pinkerite has demonstrated anything, it's that nobody in the IDW is especially civil. And in fact Weiss demonstrated it herself when she wrote:

“I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors,” Mr. Peterson said in January on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On his Twitter feed, he called the writer Pankaj Mishra, who’d written an essay in The New York Review of Books attacking him, a “sanctimonious prick” and said he’d happily slap him.

So why does Weiss repeat the IDWs self-congratulatory marketing copy?

And who exactly is writing the copy?

My bet is on Eric Weinstein. He's often mentioned as merely the coiner of the term "Intellectual Dark Web" but Weiss's article makes it clear that it's about more than just the nomenclature:

...when Ms. Owens and Charlie Kirk, the executive director of Turning Point USA, met last week with Mr. West at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, just outside of the frame — in fact, avoiding the photographers — was Mr. Weinstein. He attended both that meeting and a one-on-one the next day for several hours at the mogul’s request. Mr. Weinstein, who can’t name two of Mr. West’s songs, said he found the Kardashian spouse “kind and surprisingly humble despite his unpredictable public provocations.” He has also tweeted that he’s interested to see what Ms. Owens says next.

And then there is this quote from Weinstein:

“I’m really only interested in building this intellectual movement,” Eric Weinstein said. “The I.D.W. has bigger goals than anyone’s buzz or celebrity.”

Weinstein has goals for the IDW.

And then there is Heather Heying, Eric's sister-in-law. I've argued several times with fans of the IDW on Twitter, pointing out that there is another side to the Evergreen story than the one promoted by the IDW and Fox News narrative. As Bari Weiss puts it:

A year ago, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were respected tenured professors at Evergreen State College, where their Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic politics were well in tune with the school’s progressive ethos. Today they have left their jobs, lost many of their friends and endangered their reputations.

But then Weiss includes Weinstein and Heying in her discussion of IDW profitability:

That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.

Bret Weinstein in particular seems to have parlayed his increased fame into a series of high profile public forums, including one for the Koch-sponsored Spiked Magazine/Learn Liberty.

As Weiss writes:

The exile of Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying from Evergreen State brought them to the attention of a national audience that might have come for the controversy but has stayed for their fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender.

Spoiler alert: their "fascinating insights" on gender are garden-variety evolutionary psychology and in Heying's case scolding young women to wear more clothes lest they be guilty of "toxic femininity."

All in all, it sounds like they've used the Evergreen controversy to level up. And Heying seems to agree. Weiss quotes her:

“Our friends still at Evergreen tell us that the protesters think they destroyed us,” Ms. Heying said. “But the truth is we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom.”

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report - UPDATE

UPDATE - adding Candace Owens - so that is now five IDWs getting direct Koch funding.


Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.

TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)

Candace Owens

Communications director for Turning Point USA (Source: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web)

Charles Murray - AEI scholar.

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. (Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty

Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees. 

Christina Hoff Sommers - AEI scholar

Meet the ‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Steven & Bari & Stefan & Eric

A little over a year ago Bari Weiss published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" subtitled "An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?"

Weiss wrote:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

Eric Weinstein, his brother Bret and his sister-in-law Heather Heying all appeared in the silly photoshoot for the article, and were interviewed by Weiss, so there was certainly a high level of cooperation on the article from them. But Eric, who has been given credit for the name "intellectual dark web" does not consider Molyneux to be a member of the gang, in spite of Weiss's including him in "the group". As we can see in this tweet exchange from September 2018.

Later the same day Weinstein claimed he never met Molyneux and that he barely knew his ideas.

In January of this year, Weinstein still says he does not know Molyneux.

It seems that Bari Weiss did not speak to Molyneux for the article. 

As we can see by his reaction.

Weiss has never been on Molyneux's show, although several other people she included in the IDW have, including Michael Shermer, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson and Candace Owens. Meanwhile Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan both had Molyneux on their shows. Weiss appeared on Rogan's show.

Weiss opened her Intellectual Dark Web article like this:

Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” 

I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.

Before I continue, there are skeptics who doubt Sam Harris is an actual neuroscientist and that Dave Rubin has ever been a comedian.

Also "fundamental biological differences between men and women" is not nearly the extent of what they believe, and the description doesn't mention race, which is at least as important to IDWers as gender.

This is Weiss's group definition in the article:

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

Then Weiss links to this web site as the "closest thing to a phone book for the I. D. W." which includes many people not mentioned explicitly by Weiss, including Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akaad, described in his Wiki:

British political commentator, politician, anti-feminist, polemicist and YouTuber with the online pseudonym Sargon of Akkad. He was a UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate for the European Parliament's South West England constituency in the 2019 election, although he failed to win his election. Benjamin grew to prominence through the Gamergate controversy. Since Gamergate, he has covered topics such as identity politics, the alt-right, Brexit and political correctness.

However, the site does not include Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones nor Stefan Molyneux. Weiss writes:

But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

By the end of the article, there is still no explanation for why Bari Weiss grouped Molyneux in with the IDW. She writes:

I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.

But I think that what Pinkerite has been demonstrating, blog post by blog post, is that in fact there really are few differences in point of view, especially about race and gender, between those Weiss considers respectable, like Steven Pinker, and "the cranks, grifters and bigots."

More obscure race riots: Tulsa

While researching the Bell Curve I coincidentally came upon a little-known example of a white majority attacking blacks, driving them out of the county, in this case Forsyth County Georgia.

Notably, as vicious as the attack was, it was apparently virtually unknown until a former county resident wrote a book about it.

I wondered about the possibility that there were many more of these kinds of attacks, where resentful whites decided to destroy the wealth, in addition to some of the lives of prosperous blacks, but had been ignored by the history books.

And sure enough... I had actually heard of the Tulsa riots enough to mention them on my personal blog. But what I didn't realize was how little-known they had been, for a long time.

According to the Wiki:

Many survivors left Tulsa. Black and white residents who stayed in the city were silent for decades about the terror, violence, and losses of this event. The riot was largely omitted from local, state, as well as national, histories: "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms or even in private. Blacks and whites alike grew into middle age unaware of what had taken place."[15]

I've mentioned before that one of the tactics of race science proponents, from Sam Harris to Razib Khan is to erase the history of African Americans since slavery. They've had plenty of help from white historians.

It appears to me that the race science proponents insist on remaining willfully ignorant of the systematic theft of black wealth by the white majority.

Ignoring this system is why a "biosocial criminologist" like John Paul Wright (Quillette author and Stefan Molyneux guest) can claim that "the differential abilities of races to organize socially" is the reason for African American failure to thrive in the 154 years since the first Juneteenth of 1865.

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

Willfully ignorant - or just plain old racist.

The Tulsa massacre happened in 1921. The fact that the immediate ancestors of emancipated people, emancipated but left with absolutely no property or money, were able to become prosperous in fifty years is miraculous. And the white mob destroyed it:

In 1921 Oklahoma had a racially, socially and politically tense atmosphere. The War had ended in 1918 with the return of many ex-servicemen. The Civil War was still in living memory, even though it had ended in 1865. Prohibition had come into force the previous year, 1920, ushering in a new era of lawlessness. Civil rights for disenfranchised peoples were poor and the Ku Klux Klan had seen a recent resurgence. Tulsa, as a booming oil city, supported a large number of affluent, educated and professional African Americans. This combination of factors each played a part in the rising tensions which was to culminate in the coming events.

In the interview of Wright by Molyneux, we hear Molyneux disparage "economic determinism." That's yet another attempt to erase, by the Intellectual Dark Web, the consequences of the very real system of economic injustice against African Americans.

One thing that has always struck me as odd. Why, exactly did Bari Weiss choose to group someone like Stefan Molyneux in with Steven Pinker in her Intellectual Dark Web article? I will be looking at that in the next post.

Follow the money: Charles Murray and the Manhattan Institute

Here is Charles Murray tweeting a response to an article about race science. He apparently has plans to
promote the same in his new book.

Wait - new book? But isn't Murray supposed to be retired? Does retirement mean anything when you're a plutocrat-funded public intellectual?

The answer is, apparently, not really. According to the January 2018 NPR piece by Michel Martin:

Mr. Murray recently announced that he'll be retiring as the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, moving into an emeritus role. He's giving a major address tomorrow to mark this transition, so we thought we'd take this moment to talk about his career. And I started by asking him about "The Bell Curve."

Is there any substantial difference in activities between being a W. H. Brady Scholar and an American Enterprise Institute emeritus? Considering Murray is still writing books, I don't see any difference. 

Murray has a career as a public intellectual thanks to the Manhattan Institute funding his book. According to the February 1994 article (so before The Bell Curve which was published in September 1994) in the New Yorker entitled Intellectual Stock Picking:

...(William H.) Hammett's special gift was his nose for the Zeitgeist. The institute's current chairman, Richard Gilder (no relation of George's), refers to Hammett as "the greatest intellectual stock picker of our time." And his first act of selection was his decision to fund the research of Charles Murray, a formerly liberal social scientist who had recently written a short study for the Heritage Foundation which attacked the welfare system. Murray argued that the principal cause of the preexistence of the black underclass was not racism or Republican policy or structural changes in the economy but welfare itself. Welfare was more appealing than work; and recipients, once on it, became dependent. At the time Hammett met Murray, in 1982, he was unemployed and virtually unknown. Hammett was so taken with Murray's frontal attack on sacred liberal principles that he immediately signed him up to write a book on the subject. The usual rightwing foundations declined to subsidize Murray's work, so Hammett agreed to victual the scholar for a year or so, even though the institute's treasury was almost empty.

When Murray's book on welfare, "Losing Ground," appeared, in 1984, Hammett secured a grant from the Liberty Fund to hold a two-day conference in New York on "the Murray thesis," and he invited not only fellow-travelers and academics but also liberal journalists and card-carrying members of the intelligentsia. He mailed out a thousand copies of the book, and sent early favorable reviews to other potential reviewers, counting on the herd instinct. And he spent every available penny in the institute's budget to send Murray barnstorming around the country...  

"...Losing Ground," which has sold an amazing eighty thousand copies so far, put both Charles Murray and the Manhattan Institute on the map. "Wealth and Poverty" had given conservatives a rallying cry: Murray's book was a conversion document, and it arrived, as Hammett intuitively understood, at a propitious moment. Many nonconservative were already becoming more sympathetic toward Daniel Patrick Moynihan's theory that family breakdown was largely responsible for the problems of the black underclass. But while Moynihan had stated that welfare contributed to these problems and that it needed to be reformed, Murray insisted that the War on Poverty was their chief cause and that welfare needed to be abolished altogether. His single-mindedness lost him any libera readers, and critics charged that the book contained significant fatal errors, but there's no question that "Losing Ground" achieved the Hayekian goal of shifting the debate from liberal to conservative terrain. Experiments in "workfare" and President Clinton's call for a "two years and out" welfare system at least indirectly reflect Murray's influence.

Steven Pinker promoted the Moynihan claim that the real problem with black families wasn't lack of money, it was "family breakdown." As if the first isn't causally related to the second. In case anybody still wants to argue that Steven Pinker is a liberal.

And Charles Murray has been the recipient of wingnut welfare ever since the Manhattan Institute staked him in 1984. As Krugman pointed out, wingnut welfare is an important disincentive to doing rigorous work - no matter whether it's good, bad or indifferent, as long as you say what the plutocrats want you to say, they'll keep cutting those checks.

Wingnut Welfare and the Intellectual Dark Web

One of the most important aspects of the Intellectual Dark Web is its reliance on wingnut welfare.

Paul Krugman wrote about "Wingnut Welfare and Work Incentives " on his NYTimes blog in 2015 and it's absolutely essential reading to understand the success of the careers of rightwing public intellectuals from Charles Murray to Quillette.

Krugman wrote:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

Several people associated with the Intellectual Dark Web have connections to rightwing plutocrats, but there are other funders that they refuse to name. James Lindsay, Major Grifter explains why in this tweet.

Of course it matters if you are being supported by the Koch foundation, and there is no "magic of moral pollution" - rather it's basic quotidian logic. It makes me wonder if James Lindsay has ever held a real job.

If you are being funded by the Koch Foundation you are not likely to criticize Koch. You are likely to publish what you think will increase the chances of future Koch funding.

But it seems like gas-lighting is how the IDW & friends decided to address the credibility-reducing fact of being on wingnut welfare, as we saw with Andrew Doyle of the Koch-funded Spiked Magazine. Spiked ran a piece claiming that George Monibot's piece about Spike's funding was "McCarthyism."

"Follow the money" as Mark Felt told Bob Woodward in "All the President's Men." It was a good policy then and it's a good policy now.

In the next post I will discuss how Charles Murray first got into wingnut welfare. Funnily enough, it was when he was funded to write a book about the work disincentives of welfare.

Barack Obama v Race Science

When Barak Obama was a civil rights lawyer and writer living in Chicago he did a piece on "All Things Considered" arguing against the biology of race and The Bell Curve.

I would love to have access to the audio of Obama saying these words. 

UPDATE: NPR now has all its Obama content online here. Includes the piece for which I have posted the transcript below.

I originally found the transcript on, of all places, Razib Khan's Gene Expression web site.

NPR
October 28, 1994
SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET) 

Charles Murray’s Political Expediency Denounced
BYLINE: BARACK OBAMA
SECTION: News; Domestic
LENGTH: 635 words 

HIGHLIGHT: Commentator Barack Obama finds that Charles Murray, author of the controversial “The Bell Curve,” demonstrates not scientific expertise but spurious political motivation in his conclusions about race and IQ. 

BARACK OBAMA, Commentator: Charles Murray is inviting American down a dangerous path. 

NOAH ADAMS, Host: Civil rights lawyer, Barack Obama. 

Mr. OBAMA: The idea that inferior genes account for the problems of the poor in general, and blacks in particular, isn’t new, of course. Racial supremacists have been using IQ tests to support their theories since the turn of the century. The arguments against such dubious science aren’t new either. Scientists have repeatedly told us that genes don’t vary much from one race to another, and psychologists have pointed out the role that language and other cultural barriers can play in depressing minority test scores, and no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they’re pregnant are going to have developmental problems. 

Now, it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented. But Mr. Murray isn’t interested in prevention. He’s interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it’s artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It’s easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray’s calculations. After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, realor perceived, that minorities may enjoy. 

I happen to think Mr. Murray’s wrong, not just in his estimation of black people, but in his estimation of the broader American public. But I do think Mr. Murray’s right about the growing distance between the races. The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So’s the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we’re going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray’s book. We’re going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing and that the values of hard work and discipline andself-respect are somehow outdated. 

That being said, it’s time for all of us, and now I’m talking about the larger American community, to acknowledge that we’ve never even come close to providing equal opportunity to the majority of black children. Real opportunity would mean quality prenatal care for all women and well-funded and innovative public schools for all children. Real opportunity would mean a job at a living wage for everyone who was willing to work, jobs that can return some structure and dignity to people’s lives and give inner-city children something more than a basketball rim to shoot for. In the short run, such ladders of opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or affirmative action. But, in the long run, our investment should payoff handsomely. That we fail to make this investment is just plain stupid. It’s not the result of an intellectual deficit. It’s theresult of a moral deficit. 

ADAMS: Barack Obama is a civil rights lawyer and writer. He lives in Chicago.

You have to wonder if Steven Pinker thinks that Obama is one of those contributing to making the public discussion about The Bell Curve "ignorant and dishonest."

Non-Platonic family trees

Recently I discussed Steve Sailer (formerly promoted by Steven Pinker) and his odd use of the term "Platonic" and specifically his application of the term to human descent. I wondered what the point was in applying the concept to the biological reality.

Thanks to 23 and Me, which added a new feature since I last checked, it's clear that the human family tree is even more tangled than I realized.

The new feature "DNA Relatives" displays everybody in the 23 & Me database with DNA in common. I have a total of 1151 DNA relatives.

The closest relatives are two first cousins, one "MR" on my father's side and Sean on my mother's side.

I share 12.4% DNA with Sean and 6.36% DNA with MR. Curiously, I share more DNA with one of Sean's daughters, 8.66% than I do with my own paternal first cousin.

But what's even odder is that my maternal and paternal cousins are related to each other. In the table below there is my paternal cousin's name, MR (name redacted) in the first column, then my connection and percentage shared DNA in the second column, then Sean's connection to MR, which, true, is only "Distant Cousin" at 0.07% but still that is weird.

And they aren't the only ones, although they are the closest of my relatives on 23 and Me.







Thanks to 23 and Me it is even clearer than before that there is no good reason to talk of Platonic family trees. It's not the nature of family trees to be "Platonic" in any usable sense of the term.

Speaking of 23 and Me, while arguing with Bret Weinstein on Twitter - indirectly, he won't talk to me - I saw a tweet apparently in agreement with Weinstein from 23 and Me founder Linda Avey. I asked her if she was a proponent of race science but she didn't answer.

Bret Weinstein: intellectual sloth or gigantic shitweasel?

I've mentioned in the past that race science proponents are extremely careless when they talk about race, often conflating ethnicity and "race" whenever they wish, and then claiming that their critics are anti-science for denying the existence of "race" when in fact their critics believe that ethnicity is real, but that "race" is something else.

In this case the author of the NYTimes article on "The Intersection of Race and Blood," Rose George, does all the work of being sloppy about terminology, and Bret Weinstein picks it up and runs with it.

The imprecision about race jumps right out of the gate in the first lines:

“We need black blood.” 

I didn’t know what to say to this, not least because it had been said by the head of donor services at England’s National Health Service Blood and Transplant. The interview was for a book I was writing on blood, a topic I knew a little about by then, but the baldness of his statement still shocked me. Surely we’re all the same under the skin?

Rose George is British. If you are an American and you think you know what a Brit means when they call someone black, you are probably wrong. In Britain "black" is much more expansive than in the US:

Historically, the term has most commonly been used to refer to Black people of New Commonwealth origin, of both West African and South Asian descent. For example, Southall Black Sisters was established in 1979 "to meet the needs of black (Asian and Afro-Caribbean) women".[7] Note that "Asian" in the British context usually refers to people of South Asian ancestry.[8][9] "Black" was used in this inclusive political sense to mean "non-white British".[10]

And it appears that in fact George really is talking about a "black" girl of Indian ethnicity:

Much of (blood) variance “has been driven by evolutionary selection by bacteria, malaria and parasites,” says Connie Westhoff, executive scientific director at the National Center for Blood Group Genomics at the New York Blood Center. If malaria finds its way into the bloodstream via a particular antigen, that antigen may change to defend itself, leading to different blood types. Cholera thrives better on intestinal cells derived from O-type stem cells, but O is also more protective against malaria. For many complicated reasons, only 27 percent of Asians have type A, but 40 percent of Caucasians do. Type B is found more commonly in Asia than Europe. 

This works not just with blood types. Sickle cell trait is now known to protect against malaria, which is why sickle cell, a painful and debilitating disease caused by malformed blood cells, is found frequently — but not only — in people with African heritage, because malaria thrives in Africa. 

This past winter, the case of a little girl named Zainab Mughal in South Florida illustrated all this complexity perfectly. Zainab, who is now 3, has neuroblastoma, an aggressive cancer, and her treatment — chemotherapy and stem cell transplants — means she will need blood.

Weinstein delivers a lecture on science |to the anti-race science heathen  

But she also has rare blood. She belongs to the fewer than 1 percent of the population missing an antigen that the other 99 percent have, making her blood some of the rarest in the world. In her case, she lacks both the antigens Indian B and Big E. Via appeals to the American Rare Donor Program, and then the International Rare Donor Panel in England, Zainab’s local blood banker, One Blood, found five donors with the same extremely rare type.

Ironically, in some historical classifications of "race," people from India were considered "Caucasians."

The term Caucasian originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.[14] In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasischen) race in its wider racial sense.[4][15][16]

Meiners acknowledged two races: the Caucasian or beautiful, and the Mongolian or ugly. His Caucasian race encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches.[17]

Which gives you a good idea of how random race classifications are. And George demonstrates the standard race/ethnicity conflation so common in the media:

...While no one is suggesting forced segregation of blood bags, it’s now scientifically established that blood can be racially or ethnically specific...

What does "racially or ethnically specific" mean in this context? George is not a very clear writer - in spite of the fact that she apparently makes a living as a freelance writer -  but I think what she's doing here is presenting race and ethnicity as literally interchangeable terms.

To immediately understand why they are not, note that "Italian" and "Irish" are ethnicities but Italians and Irish are considered the same race - white. At least they are both considered white now.

Bret Weinstein is a biologist and evolutionary theorist and there's no reason why he would have to just accept an article written by a freelance writer with no apparent science background at face value.

Weinstein attempting to justify himself

In this tweet he attempts to justify his failure to talk clearly about "biological terms of art." This is bullshit. All he has to do is point out that "ethnicity" and "race" and "population" etc. are not the same. He's a scientist, he was a teacher, if he can't offer insight into the issue, who can?

Instead what he did was weaponize an imprecisely written article against critics of race science, starting with condescendingly describing his opponents as a circle holding "fashionable" opinions as if it's just so much cocktail party chatter.

Now why did Bret Weinstein do this?

Is it because he's just so intellectually slothful that he can't be bothered to provide useful insight on a topic for which he was trained?

Or is Bret Weinstein a gigantic shitweasel (like Steven Pinker) whose real career is to play a scientist in order to best further the political agenda of the Intellectual Dark Web, which is significantly funded by right-wing plutocrats?

Pinker at the UN & forbidden questions about funding

Steven Pinker delivered a speech at the UN as part of its ECOSOC Inaugural Presidential Lecture Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress in Creating the Future We Want.

Thanks to my current technical writer job, I have access to the video of the lecture and the follow-up interview and questions.

It was not especially interesting. During the interview he used the line he likes to use to defend the biological reality of race (highlighted):

 I mentioned "The Mismeasure of Man" as the foremost example, to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups - there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever, that it is purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do  this Nazis. But on the other hand there is a quotation, I don't know who's responsible for it: "reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."

When asked about economic inequality he admitted that it has increased but we should not be concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor as long as the poor are becoming less poor.

Although he did allow that plutocracy was "a real problem" which is curious considering how much the Intellectual Dark Web, of which Pinker is considered the exemplar, is supported by plutocrats.

Pinker promoted nuclear energy - but he had to be prompted into it by the interviewer. It was my impression he tried to avoid mentioning it until pressed.

He mentioned the Flynn effect as a counter to "stupidification" which the interviewer said was a word Pinker used in his book "Enlightenment Now."

It was clear that the questioners weren't all that familiar with Pinker outside of the preceding half-hour lecture which focused on the discussions in "Enlightenment Now." One questioner, who wasn't introduced by name, started out with an interesting issue, saying "people do not earn as much as money, Money earns more than people do" which is of course an essential component in the continuing vast increase in economic inequality.  But the discussion didn't go anywhere interesting.

Pinker did mention "Call out culture" and "politically correct norms" of millenials, which he said were abetted by boomers.

The final question quoted David Brooks. Ugh. It's always baffled me that David Brooks has been able to make a living as a public intellectual. I think it's a legacy of the advantages that mediocre white males had in the twentieth-century. Until recently the NYTimes op-ed columnists were overwhelmingly older white men, including Brooks who has been there for decades.

Speaking of the affirmative action system for mediocre white males of the boomer generation, Steven Pinker and his IDW buddy Michael Shermer don't like the idea of distinguishing between "punching up" and "punching down" and appear to think that the reason that old white men such as themselves are "up" is due to meritocracy rather than affirmative action for people of a specific gender and ethnicity and class.

Meanwhile, Pinker's buddy Andrew Doyle who works for the Koch-supported Spiked magazine thinks it's some kind of bizarre left-wing insanity to ask where they get their funding. As we have seen, Claire Lehmann doesn't like to reveal all her funding sources for Quillette, just like James Lindsay, Major Grifter doesn't like to admit who funded his grift.

Just look at all those "Likes" for his tweet. 24K - all those fans of the IDW who prefer ignorance to Enlightenment.