Steven Pinker defends pseudoscience: what have we learned?

Another testimony about Pinker from
his (former?) buddy Steve Sailer
------------------------------------------------------

John Tooby died recently. Tooby was one half of the evo-psycho wonder twins, along with Leda Cosmides. And the occasion of his death gave charlatan Steven Pinker the opportunity to defend the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology in Nautilus:

Belying the canard that evolutionary psychology is a bunch of post hoc just-so stories, John, together with Leda and their students, published many experimental findings that confirmed nonobvious predictions about a wide range of psychological phenomena. These included statistical thinking, the perception of race, the development of sibling feelings, and the emotion of anger.

It should be noted that none of their findings have proven that the specific phenomena they report on is evolved, other than the usual anodyne observation that humans are the result of evolution.

Tooby, Cosmides and Pinker were/are all psychologists, so of course they want to proclaim the Triumph of Psychology:

But John’s greatest accomplishment was bringing to fruition Darwin’s prediction that “psychology will be placed on a new foundation.” That foundation is natural selection, since it alone can carve nooks of beneficial organization out of a universe that relentlessly slides into disorder. As he and Leda put it in a paper title, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology.” 

Such self-importance for so little actual science! But Steven Pinker is nothing if not self-important. He's trained his stooges, like Jerry Coyne, to repeat that anybody who disagrees with Pinker is jealous of his fame. 

But this gives me a chance to promote the work of a biologist - not a psychologist - who has something to say about evolutionary psychology - PZ Myer's immortal YouTube video "The Problems with Evolutionary Psychology."

In other Pinker news, Pinker has a Substack, and considering the kind of people who created and are promoted by Substack (like Pinker's pal, the racist extremist Richard Hanania) I am absolutely not surprised. He's apparently had it since 2021, but I only became aware of it today because he promoted it on his Twitter/X.

And when I saw the post he was promoting, I had a hearty laugh: Linger over good writing.

Lest you are tempted to believe that famous (ooh they're so jealous!) celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker knows from good writing, be aware that Pinker, when he was tasked with editing "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" chose to include an absolute piece of garbage by infamous racist Steve Sailer called "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum." 

Now I'm not saying it's garbage just because it was written by an infamous racist - although the fact that he is a long-time infamous racist didn't bother Pinker at the time. 

No, it is a rank piece of garbage for many reasons as I explain in detail in my five-part series Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum. 

In a speech that Pinker gave at an ISIR conference, he seemed to think that the reason the hereditarian racialism of the ISIR gang wasn't as popular as he wished was because it didn't have writers as good as Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladewell, opponents of hereditarianism.

Also both Gould and Gladwell had embarrassed Pinker - Gould in the letters section of the New York Review of Books and Gladwell by being the only person with a prominent media platform to point out that Pinker promoted the career of Steve Sailer.

But even garbage-people like Steve Sailer can have their uses (besides provide dreck for the undiscerning like Pinker) and Sailer is important for his testimony that belies Pinker's claim about Tooby. In the Nautilus article I linked to at the top of this post, Pinker claims:

(Tooby's) influence on me is retroviral, chimeric: so thoroughly embedded in my brain that I can barely distinguish his ways of thinking from my own. 

But as Sailer wrote 21 years ago in racist VDARE - so two years before Pinker included his dreck in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing":

...it's important to realize how far Pinker has come over the years. He started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

In the same year in his Unz blog Sailer wrote:

....two friends of mine, Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah, who is a rare combination of mathematical geneticist and field anthropologist (inventor of the important Dad vs. Cad distinction), and by Greg Cochran, the brilliant rocket scientist turned evolutionary theorist. The title is a pointed rejoinder to Not in our Genes, the famous anti-sociobiological tract by the neo-Lysenkoist scientists Richard Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, although it’s also an attack on the evolutionary psychology party line handed down by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, which Steve Pinker enthusiastically summed up as "differences between individuals are so boring!" (I’ve since managed to persuade Steve that differences between individuals are a tiny bit interesting.)

"Individual differences" is a standard hereditarian euphemism that always boils down to an intelligence hierarchy by race.  For more about Harpending and Cochran's big, yet still untested hypothesis, check out my article in Rational Wiki for Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

In spite of the source of these claims about Pinker, I think they are credible - I think Pinker did reject the "there is no such thing as race" belief of early evolutionary psychology for the E. O. Wilson and Harpending/Cochran school of hereditarian racism.

Considering how many hereditarians and just plain-old racists Steven Pinker has defended, praised and promoted for over twenty years now, it's hard to reach any other conclusion. 

And it isn't just infamous racist Steve Sailer who noted Pinker's changing views. David Lubinski, less infamous but, I suspect, just as racist as Steve Sailer given his long-time association with the International Society of Intelligence Research, interviewed Pinker at one of the ISIR conferences and said (my highlight):

...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"

And then there is Pinker's own direct refutation of evolutionary psychology's "there is no such thing as race" in 2013: "Every geneticist knows that the "Race doesn't exist" dogma is a convenient PC 1/4-truth."

This is standard Pinker bullshit - geneticist Adam Rutherford directly contradicts Pinker. Not that Pinker will ever acknowledge that. And he doesn't need to. He's cozy in his right-wing bubble and has no reason to ever leave it.

Is anybody surprised that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Christian now?

I haven't written much about Ayaan Hirsi Ali on this blog, although she is a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, but I have to say something about her converting to Christianity and it's this: I'm not surprised.

I think Ali has always been a right-wing opportunist - she's had a gig with the Koch-funded AEI -  and there are more opportunities in right-wing funding circles for Christian nationalists than for atheists. 

Jerry Coyne notes the change:

I always thought that Ayaan Hirsi Ali belonged as the “fifth horseperson” alongside Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. After all, her arguments against religion were as strong and well expressed as those of the “four horsemen”. Perhaps it was because she concentrated most of her attacks on Islam instead of religion in general, but she was still an atheist, and had no faith.

Like the "four horsemen" Ali used atheism as a cover for anti-Muslim hatred - just like Jerry Coyne has done.

I have to take a moment to note Coyne's usual hypocrisy - Peter Thiel spewed insanity as the keynote speaker at a conference full of right-wingers - Coyne was an invited speaker - that ended with Thiel quoting the Bible. 

This is the end of his speech, from my transcript:

...we need to never underestimate the danger of, you know, one world, totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard hard to see what it ends. But, you know, there's always. You know, I there's always sort of the, the frame where. First Thessalonians five, chapter 3. The the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. And and I think you know what I what I want to suggest is that and and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state and and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon, thank you very much.

And from a New Yorker article:

Thiel’s faith, which is under-examined in “The Contrarian,” also seems central to his world view and appeal. In 2015, at a talk hosted by the Newbigin House of Studies, Thiel told the audience that Christianity was “the prism with which I look at the whole world.”

Coyne has never said word one against Thiel.

And why not? My guess is because Coyne is getting money, directly or indirectly, from Thiel. We know his travel and Thiel conference buddy Anna Krylov gets money from Thiel - at the very least because she's published in Quillette.

UPDATE: P. Z. Myers was also not surprised, writing "...(Ali's) been working at the Hoover Institute with a lot of wealthy conservative Republicans, it was just going to take time to realize who was buttering her bread."

Erasing Black history part one million: THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

I saw THE LEHMAN TRILOGY when it was on Broadway but left during the second intermission, disgusted that slavery was almost completely ignored as a factor in the creation of the Lehman brothers' wealth. 

The New York Review of Books published a piece on that topic, by Sarah Churchwell, which I found recently. The article points out that not only were the Lehmans slave-owners, they were staunch Confederates:

Henry Lehman died in 1855, but when the Civil War came, the two surviving brothers were staunchly on the side of the Confederacy. Mayer Lehman was a committed Southern Democrat, friendly with the governor of Alabama, and knew Jefferson Davis socially. In October 1861, Lehman Brothers, “Merchants of Montgomery,” advertised in local papers that they had stockpiled “almost every article of necessity” during the war. Promising to “be reasonable as to prices,” they added that “owing to the hardness of the times, they are compelled to demand the cash.” Cash, appropriately, was italicized. During the war, the firm successfully ran blockades while issuing the Confederacy with free credit; the Governor of Mississippi sent a public note of thanks in 1864 to “Messrs. Lehman & Brothers,” for accepting “Confederate Treasury notes,” while “charging nothing for their trouble,” to supply the army with cotton and wool for uniforms—despite the blockade that “prevented a larger supply.” In October 1865, “Lehman & Brothers, rich Jews, and merchants,” were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson for doing so, one of the raft of pardons Johnson issued to white Southerners after the war in the name of restoring the Union, but in fact easing the cost of defeat for the embittered white South (and contributing to his eventual impeachment).

I would say it's amazing that a play that deliberately omits the importance of the protagonists' slave-trading was produced on Broadway, but as the article points out, HAMILTON...

...does the same thing in its ambivalent dynamic of denouncing slavery’s iniquities while suggesting that its own protagonists were exempt from them. Anyone who didn’t know better would finish Hamilton innocent of the fact that George Washington owned slaves, much less that Alexander Hamilton himself bought and sold them on behalf of his wife’s family. Such stories try to have it both ways: for their heroes to be representative Americans, while erasing the vicious ways in which they truly were representative. The fact that everyone was doing it is not a defense, it merely measures the scale of the crime.

HAMILTON makes a point of noting that Hamilton was an immigrant. White immigrants gaining financially from the immiseration of Black people continues into the twenty-first century, although thankfully at a lesser scale than slavery. I wrote about that in my piece on Razib Khan's career a couple of years ago:

Only in America - someone born in Bangladesh moves to this country and makes himself a lucrative career dehumanizing a group of Americans whose roots in North America and the United States go back centuries. That's nothing against Bangladesh: European immigrants have been rising in the social pecking order on the backs of Black Americans for a long time, although admittedly, not all Europeans all at once. The Irish have about the palest skin around but it took them awhile, as most of them were impoverished and fleeing famine, to become respectable enough to be truly white. As this caricature from 1876 makes clear.

Razib Khan is a pioneer in that respect, pushing the boundaries so that all you have to do to get a leg up in the American nativist hierarchy these days is to portray Black Americans as subhuman and deny the existence of systemic racism. You don't even have to have European ethnicity anymore.

Khan's family must be so proud of him.

We can see this new system in action from the very beginning of Razib Khan's appalling career. The anti-immigration, white supremacist hate organization VDARE gave immigrant, non-white Razib Khan his start on the road to race pseudoscience fame and fortune.

Razib Khan may not have made a huge fortune like the Lehman brothers, but he has made good money for very little actual work, from wealthy racists like Ron Unz, due to his willingness to portray Black Americans as genetically inferior. Like Khan, thanks to anti-Black racism the Lehman Brothers achieved "white" status, noted by Churchwell:

...the stark racial hierarchy of the South, divided into its ruthless binary of “black” and “white,” made it easier for Jewish immigrants to assimilate as “white.”

And the belief that Black people are separate from humanity, a belief which started in the days of American slavery, continues as a "scientific" claim past the age of Jim Crow and, thanks to E. O. Wilson, J. P. Rushton, Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and Steven Pinker, and many others, right into the present day.

And an important tactic in the quest to prove Black Americans are separate is to erase Black American history.

Historian David Blight vs. the GOP

I didn't see this back in January when it was new, but better late than never:

Rep. Scott Perry references Frederick Douglass from the House floor. Historian David Blight is having none of it.

Original tweets on Twitter/X

Oh no the wokes got muh BIRDS!

Visit the home of Effin' Birds here

 So I'm reading this article in the New York Times about no longer naming bird species after slavers and other monsters of history...

That means the Audubon’s shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the southeastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition. The Scott’s oriole, a black-and-yellow bird inhabiting the Southwest and Mexico, will also receive a new moniker, which will sever ties to the U.S. Civil War general Winfield Scott, who oversaw the forced relocation of Indigenous peoples in 1838 that eventually became the Trail of Tears.

And of course I'm thinking "I bet those culture war hereditarians of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are going to start whining about this. "

So I scroll down the article. And sure enough, there's Jerry Coyne:

But to Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who is an avid birder, the need for more descriptive names did not seem pressing. Performative acts like this “are really deeply injurious to science,” he said. “We cannot go back through the history of science and wipe out everybody who was not a perfect human being.” Dr. Coyne added that the effort to update so many names would be better invested in something more impactful to society, such as teaching underprivileged children about birds.

Does Jerry Coyne EVER get tired of being a right-wing reactionary?

Of course you know Coyne is whining on his blog too - the best part is his right-wing amen corner, sharing the outrage in the comments section.

Quick! Call his travel buddy Anna Krylov! A few years ago she wrote a panicked article about the horrors of changing science terms, making her argument by comparing name-changes to burning people at the stake. 

Read all about it in Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit. I'm sure she'll reach new heights of right-wing panic over this bird situation - maybe this time she'll compare renaming to the Holocaust.

Krylov writes for Thiel-funded right-wing racist garbage rag Quillette because of course she does.

Steven Pinker promoting racist goon Gregory Clark

The Economist was too polite to call Gregory Clark a racist. 

I'm not so polite.

The Economist:

One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

This is who Pinker is promoting. Via Razib "you're a subhuman retard" Khan.

James Lee is a member of the racist gang, which is why he is funded by the white nationalist Arthur Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry.

Pinker, Clark, Khan and Lee attended the most recent racist roundup - that is the annual meeting of the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Fun fact: Clark was inspirational to racist goons Cochran and Harpending.

Can there be any doubt, with all the racists Steven Pinker has promoted and befriended in at least the last twenty years, that Pinker himself is a racist?

Rightwingers handing out awards to their wingnut welfare pals

 Oh look an organization funded by rightwing ghouls is giving Carole Hooven, wingnut welfare recipient, and proud fan of the ghoulish "Gender Wars" playing cards, an award:

Carole Hooven, associate in the lab of Steven Pinker and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been recognized as a Hero of Intellectual Freedom by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). ACTA’s Hero of Intellectual Freedom award honors individuals who have bravely defended viewpoint diversity and free expression in higher education.

I had never heard of American Council of Trustees and Alumni but since they were honoring Steven Pinker's protegee, I suspected it was a pack of wing nuts. And sure enough:

ACTA is a non-profit organization and is funded by grants from foundations and gifts from individuals. Foundations that have donated to ACTA include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[8] the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education.[9]

According to the ACTA website, they apparently only give awards to rightwingers:

She joins a distinguished group of Heroes of Intellectual Freedom from previous years, including Professor Erec Smith of York College of Pennsylvania (2022), Professor Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago (2021), and Joshua Katz, formerly of Princeton University (2020).

Erec Smith - Koch employee

Dorian Abbot - University of Austin goon

Joshua Katz - serial student harasser and participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

You will never go broke if you're willing to be a mouthpiece for rightwing racist plutocrats.

Natural History of Hereditarian Idiocy

I've completed my entry for Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence at Rational Wiki. 

I've criticized the hypothesis for years, but it was good to put everything in one place. Plus I included an automatic counter to track how many years it's been since NHAI was released, without ever being tested or proven.

NHAI is genetics as hereditarians wished it would be, and so they believe in it, and promote it, regardless of the lack of testing or proof. 

And as always, there was Steven Pinker, promoting the bullshit.

And what an arrogant goon that Gregory Cochran is. He compared his work to work by Einstein, and insults people with actual expertise in genetics, like when he called Adam Rutherford "dumb." Rutherford was not overly concerned about it.

Cochran has an unattractive appearance, voice, personality and system of beliefs - he's pretty much the opposite of Adam Rutherford in every way. 

Rutherford is a "celebrity intellectual" in the UK - in the US we get Steven Pinker. Ugh.

Steven Pinker - court thinker of the plutocracy

 This is so great.

Legitimate business - or another grift?

So Razib Khan apparently is part of a startup business now, GenRait Inc and he's tweeting about it on Twitter/X. According to the GenRait LinkedIn:

The company "allows genomics to achieve its full potential by empowering researchers to be creative and productive in a governed environment where they retain autonomy and flexibility over their data and have the tools at their fingertips to take action."

According to Khan's LinkedIn profile, he's been with the organization since December 2021 and he is both the Chief Strategy Officer and the Chief Experience Officer.

But he is not behaving like someone who wants to participate in a legitimate business. And knowing as I do about Khan's history of taking money from racist plutocrats, I have my suspicions about who is funding GenRait, Inc. 

Think about it - if you wanted to work for a typical legitimate business, would you continue to call people you disagree with "retarded" on social media? 

Here is Khan a couple of months ago, in the comments of a Substack post by his good buddy, racist Richard Hanania, calling another commenter a "subhuman retard."

I've mentioned previously Khan's hypocrisy and incivility, but now he's enlisted the aid of two right-wingers to justify the use of the term "retard," in a kind of right-wing incivility turducken. 

Reilly is a rightwinger and Stepman is probably even further right, a senior policy analyst for the ghastly, Koch-funded "Independent Women's Forum."

Now I assume that slurs of all kinds are considered acceptable or even good form in the far-right circles that these political operatives travel in, but does Khan expect this kind of public behavior to fly for a typical legitimate business?

Unless it's not a typical legitimate business, and the organization is being funded by the usual right-wing ghouls, who absolutely do not care that the CSO/CXO of GenRait  acts like an obnoxious ass in public.

Considering that, plus Khan's twenty plus years working as a rightwing political operative with blatant racialist views, I would be very wary of any genomic claims made by GenRait. 

And somehow, I don't think this organization has a strong HR department.

Elon Musk's roadmap to Twitter ruin

Rachel Maddow reports on Elon Musk:

What was Elon Musk's strategy for Twitter

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination. 

The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”

Recently Musk was seen promoting Libs of TikTok's attacks on the ADL. Because both Musk and LOTT are stochastic terrorists.

Another horrific mass murder committed by a white mob revealed - Atlanta 1906

In The New York Times:

On Sept. 22, 1906, hordes numbering in the thousands converged in downtown Atlanta, according to accounts compiled by historians and researchers, including from the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. The violence started with an attack on a Black bicycle messenger, and the mobs then went after anyone with dark skin, pulling people off streetcars and stabbing them and dragging them out of businesses and into the street.

The rampage continued for four days. Then, on the final night, a group of armed white men charged into Brownsville.

In the aftermath, homes and businesses had been gutted. Many residents fled. Atlanta was rattled and shrouded in shame as word of the massacre spread.

But soon, discussions of the violence were avoided and suppressed. For decades, there was no mention of it in the Atlanta public schools curriculum. There was limited scholarship surrounding what had been labeled until recently as a race riot.

The result was a void in a city that is typically anything but ignorant of its history, wrapping itself in pride as the home base for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Yet the massacre still silently had a role in shaping Atlanta’s evolution.

The highlighted paragraph is important because so often information about race riots - unhinged white mob mass murder - has been suppressed like that.

That is one reason why people like Charles Murray and E. O. Wilson believe or have believed in the American hereditarian assumption, which is: 

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,^[148]segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,^[149] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

They don't know, or they don't want to know the many many ways the white majority has tormented and thwarted Black people. And so in their view, all Black people problems are the result of Black people having bad genes. It's such transparent bullshit.

Charles Murray is done

Just a wretched excuse for a 
human being - which is why
the American Right loves him
------------------------------------------------------

I completed the Rational Wiki article on Charles Murray. He is just an absolute stinker of a human being. 

Probably my favorite parts of the piece are:

• Casting doubt on Murray's claim that as a "bright" high school senior, planning to attend college, he had no idea that burning a cross would be racially charged.

• Pointing out that Murray was motivated to trash "Hidden Figures" because Twitter critics did not like his tweet that cast doubt on the mathematical accomplishment of two Black teenage girls. Murray got his revenge!

• Digging up astronaut Michael Collins' criticisms of Murray's no-longer-in-print book "Apollo: The Race to the Moon"

And having another excuse to share Al Franken's rip on The Bell Curve.

More Hossenfelderbashing and capitalism

Sabine Hossenfelder is a fool, in my opinion, to make videos outside of her supposed area of expertise, physics. But considering that her non-physics opinions on issues like race and trans are invariably conservative and reactionary, I can't help wondering if she's getting funding from the usual plutocratic creeps.

Hossenfelder's claim that capitalism is a driver of scientific discovery is absurd and simplistic. 

Unfortunately I don't agree with Rebecca Watson either, that capitalism is responsible for "most if not all of society's greatest ills, including but not limited to income inequality and runaway climate change."

It's been my observation that on the Left, even more than before, capitalism is now considered the root of all evil. I doubt that. 

Capitalism was not created by a bunch of heartless monsters out to destroy the world. It evolved in response to the problems of daily human existence. 

I looked around the Internet to see what the consensus was on the origins of Capitalism, and Teen Vogue sums up what I found, pretty well:

The origins of capitalism are complicated, and stretch back to the 16th century, when the British systems of power largely collapsed after the Black Death, a deadly plague that killed off up to 60% of Europe’s entire population. A newly formed class of merchants began to trade with foreign countries, and this newfound demand for exports hurt local economies and began to dictate overall production and pricing of goods. It also led to the spread of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism.

The death of feudalism — a hierarchical system often seen as oppressive that kept poor people bonded to their masters’ land, which they farmed in exchange for a place to live and military protection — also left rural British peasants with no homes and no work, which eventually funneled them away from the countryside and into urban centers. These former farm workers then had to sell their labor in a newly competitive work environment in order to survive, while the state worked in concert with the new capitalists to establish a maximum wage and “clamp down on beggars.”

I doubt many would argue that feudalism is better than capitalism. And the claim that capitalism led to "the spread of slavery" is easily disputed by the many and varied forms of slavery that have existed outside of the age of capitalism. 

As for Watson's claim that capitalism is responsible for "runaway climate change" I think that's a case of "correlation is not causation." While climate change may have happened during the age of capitalism, humans destroying their environment and the phenomenon of unintended consequences also exist outside of capitalism.

And since I assume Watson doesn't want to trade capitalism for feudalism, what is her alternative? Socialism? Does she seriously think that humans couldn't make decisions with unintended consequences in a socialist system?

Humans fuck up - they trust people who should not be their leaders - see the Roman emperors, the European monarchies, the Catholic Church, Hitler, Stalin, Trump etc. etc. etc.; they don't think through all the possible consequences of decisions; they can be greedy and cruel and careless - and all without capitalism. 

Capitalism is just a collection of human-value exchange mechanisms, basically an accounting system, which is being mistaken for the actual root causes of human error and weaknesses and bad judgment - in Watson's case - and is being mistaken for the root cause of scientific discovery - as in Hossenfelder's case.

Just as nobody plotted to replace feudalism with capitalism, if capitalism dies out, it won't be the result of a plot, it will be because a new system of human-value exchange mechanisms evolved to better meet the needs of the people living in that society. 

In other words, human behavior is much more complicated than either Hossenfelder or Watson seem to understand. 

I don't claim to have a grasp on the whole thing myself - just enough to know that both Hossenfelder and Watson are being simplistic.

But at least Watson is not impressed by Pinker's idiotic "The Blank Slate" as Hossenfelder is. 

Razib Khan still promoting racist neo-Nazi ghoul Richard Hanania

Because of course he is. 

If Khan's biggest booster, Steven Pinker, isn't ashamed to be associated with the neo-Nazi racist ghoul; and Khan's buddy Matthew Yglesias isn't bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism; you know Razib Khan's not bothered by Hanania's racism and extremism and neo-Nazism.

I think what all this means is that right-wing racist billionaires have increased their funding of ghouls like Hanania so much that courtiers like Pinker, Yglesias and Khan no longer worry about being "cancelled" because not only do they have the option of wingnut welfare - see Carole Hooven and Thomas Chatterton Williams - but their plutocrat patrons have decided to go full steam ahead in the project of mainstreaming race pseudoscience and racism.

And to nobody's surprise, Charles Murray is also promoting the neo-Nazi racist ghoul - but Murray has been promoting exactly that kind of ghoul - Steve Sailer, Emil Kirkegaard, etc. for years. 

Murray doesn't just promote Hanania, he grovels before him. Holy crap is that revolting.

Jerry Coyne was lately seen promoting Hanania too. Of course.

Meet Nina Paley, culture wars grifter and Kiwi Farms fan

I assumed Alex Byrne was a garden-variety culture wars grifter, writing for racist rag Quillette. I figured he was hoping to advance his career by maybe scoring some wingnut welfare, like Carole Hooven, or maybe getting a Fox News interview, also like Carole Hooven.

But I discovered Byrne has a very interesting collaborator: Nina Paley who did illustrations for Byrne's forthcoming book which is apparently loved by Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers.

Paley is notable enough to have her own Wikipedia page, although I never heard of her until today.

Paley has created a "Gender Wars" deck of cards. The red cards are the "gender-critical" good guys and the black cards are people she lumps together as "transactivists," including a mass murderer. 

Now I don't have a high opinion of culture war grifters to begin with, but even I was stunned to see that Paley included Kiwi Farms as one of the good guys in her deck of cards.

Kiwi Farms is evil to the point of being psychopathic:

Founded by Joshua Moon, a former 8chan administrator, Kiwi Farms evolved into a popular platform for creating harassment campaigns. Its users often fixated on transgender people, relentlessly stalking and doxing them. At least three of its victims died by suicide.

In the image Paley created, the cow represents "lolcows" - the people selected by Kiwi Farms for torture. Paley apparently thinks this is cute and funny.

Paley did a podcast with Joshua Moon. She and her podcast co-host Corinna Cohn provide a dishonest description of Kiwi Farms:

In 1993 John Gilmore famously said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” To learn why that’s no longer true, listen to Josh Moon enumerate “the amount of things that have broken that people in the industry assumed could never break,” as activists with personal vendettas and political agendas relentlessly employ every possible strategy to silence his small but notorious gossip site Kiwi Farms. From Cloudflare to Hurricane Electric, ISPs, data centers, and payment processors, literally anything up and down the Border Gateway Protocol has been targeted to shut down the ‘Farms. With ISIS, the KKK, Stormfront, neo-nazis, and child porn all continuing to enjoy online services, who expected “the gossip site that makes fun of troons” to be the straw to break the Internet’s backbone? And why have the individuals and organizations who once stood against censorship lost their own?

Here's what is actually meant by "makes fun of the troons":

Mother Jones:

Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized—people who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially struggling—with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims “lolcows” because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: “Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.” 

 

Kiwi Farms users deploy slightly different tactics for various victims, but the rough beats are the same. First, the group assembles extensive dossiers. Then they use the information (some true, some contorted, some fabricated) to torment their targets. 

 

When Sagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent private messages urging her to kill herself, a friend said. When posters learned that Terryberry, an 18-year-old with learning disabilities, used the internet to make friends, they worked to get her social media accounts shut down while mocking her mental health struggles. They relentlessly tormented Ginder for being nonbinary. One thread went on for more than a dozen pages. 

Lacking a sense of empathy is said to be an indicator of psychopathy. 

I'm wondering if Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven like Kiwi Farms as much as Nina Paley apparently does. (YES - see below)

And you'll never guess - Paley is also an author at Quillette. Also interviewed by Paley: Razib Khan, Alice Dreger, Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven.

And as you've probably guessed, Joshua Moon is also a huge racist.

UPDATE: Paley conveniently posted fans of her cards on Twitter, and it turns out Carole Hooven is a big fan, promoting them on Twitter.

Stay classy, you poor cancelled martyr!

Also a fan, another Koch employee (besides Hooven) Pamela Paresky. Hooven cited her when she promoted the crackpot sociobiologists' social affinity theory. Apparently Paresky thinks these cards are hysterical! I knew Paresky was a wingnut ass, but I didn't guess what a hate-filled ghoul she is.

Paresky wants to "protect kids" - but presumably NOT the ones selected to be lolcows by Kiwi Farms.

And crackpot Jordan "enforced monogamy" Peterson is a fan.

Imagine hating trans people so much that you condone the glorification of psychopathically evil Kiwi Farms.

It's hard not to laugh at a right-wing wacko like Peterson: This Jordan Peterson Impression Will Absolutely Make Your Day

Oh, and in case you're a wingnut and you think I'm a hypocrite because I detest Kiwi Farms attempting to destroy the lives of nobodies, while condoning a mocking impression of celebrity grifter Jordan Peterson, consider this an illustration of the difference between rightwing humor and leftwing humor.

Rightwing humor punches down - at misfit nobodies and sexual minorities.

Leftwing humor punches up -  at wealthy public grifters.

Carole Hooven accepts that sweet sweet wingnut welfare

Back in March, I predicted that Carole Hooven would get her very own Quillette byline, thanks to her willingness to promote neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, plus her connection to Steven Pinker.

But I should have aimed a little higher. 

Charles Murray, advocate of ethnicity-based job discrimination, reports that Hooven is now, like him, on the easiest of all possible career trajectories: wingnut welfare via the American Enterprise Institute.

Adam H. Johnson tweeted about the ease and profitability of a wingnut welfare career at AEI in 2020, using Murray's career as an example. 

And you know Hooven is presenting herself - the way all hereditarian stooges do when they get pushback - as a martyr.

Of course Jerry Coyne, when he isn't posting pictures of victims of the Holocaust,  portrays Carole Hooven as a victim - the real question is who does Coyne think had it worse, Hooven or Anne Frank.

UPDATE: turns out Hooven is a fan of a pack of playing cards that includes a card that glorifies the psychopathically evil Kiwi Farms. 

The terrible decline of Morrissey

I'm the right age that I should have been a huge Smiths fan in their heyday, but somehow I missed out on the humor and left-leaning (and anti-monarchist) political commentary and ineffable beauty of their greatest songs until well into my 40s and by then the Smiths were broken up and the magical synthesis that was Morrissey and Johnny Marr was no more.

But Morrissey had given signs of what was to come long before then, per The Guardian:

Yet other aspects of his character were on display even in his heyday. In 1986, Morrissey gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he claimed that a “black pop conspiracy” was keeping his band down, describing reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and declaring that he “detests … black modern music”.

You can get a pretty good idea of how low he has sunk by who his fans are now - the some-time employer of Steve Sailer, the viciously anti-immigration, white supremacist castle-owning VDARE is raffling tickets to see Morrissey. 

Morrissey claims he is not on the far right - but come on, the VDARE freaks would not love him this much except that he is.

Woki Wiki

Edward Dutton, a bigot who covers just about all the bigotry bases, thinks Rational Wiki is too woke - but then you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who is not to the left of that extremist. 

He even thinks Wikipedia is too woke:

Unfortunately, some people, who are otherwise highly intelligent and discerning, don’t seem to realise its true nature, possibly because it involves the word ‘Wiki,’ which should be a red-flag anyway, considering the Woke biases of Wikipedia. It is written in a deliberately mocking-style, which should, surely, sound alarm bells.

 I assume he doesn't like Wikipedia in part because editors there gave Emily Willoughby, a bigwig at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research a bad time when she tried to post racist garbage there.

Dutton is disappointed that the stooges at City Journal took down the libelous hit piece they published by some pseudonymous rando (the smart money is on Emil Kirkegaard.) 

I guess Dutton wants to see City Journal - and its Manhattan Institute Death Star - sued.

Dutton links to an article by Steve Sailer, who is such a chickenshit coward that any time I get anywhere near his Twitter/X account with a new burner Twitter/X account, he blocks me - I don't even tweet at him - just tweeting at anybody on a thread near him makes him block me. 

I mean, why is he so afraid? What could I possibly do except tweet at him? And Twitter/X is an absolute rightwing racist cesspit now, he'd have an absolute home field advantage, with his loser racist goons there all around him, to cheer him on.

Is he still sore because I got him to embarrass Steven Pinker on Twitter, years ago?

Oh and who does Dutton go running to for comfort in the case of the libelous City Journal article? 

Why every racist hereditarian ghoul's hero - Steven Pinker. 

Dutton shared this Pinker tweet:

And speaking of the wingnut welfare Manhattan Institute, I'm working on a draft for a Rational Wiki article about the Institute’s most famous funding recipient - Charles Murray - and as I research him I find he's an even bigger asshole, personally and professionally than I ever dreamed. 

Just the part where he wants to deny welfare to single mothers to punish them for their immorality, combined with bragging about how he used Thai prostitutes while working for the Peace Corps - qualifies him as one of the world's most repulsive hypocrites. 

Although maybe this isn't about sex - maybe Murray thinks that single mothers on welfare are immoral because they are using tax-payer funded programs, and Murray would find it more moral if they escaped starvation instead through the free enterprise of prostitution.

Either way, it explains why Murray is the perfect thought leader for the grotesquely evil Manhattan Institute.

I gave up on Dutton responding to me via the academic email address he provides online, so I tried another email address someone gave to me. We'll see if Dutton responds this time - I will make a full report if he does.

Steven Pinker 🖤 Michael Shermer

Two pals who love race pseudoscience

I recently discovered Steven Pinker has an Instagram account. He's had it for years, I just didn't bother to look for it.

He doesn't post the usual reactionary offensiveness there, like he does on Elon Musk's shitshow "X," but he did reveal there that he has a warm personal relationship with Michael Shermer. 

The caption is: "MAMILs (middle-aged men in Lycra) - me and Michael Shermer in Santa Barbara"

First, since when is late 60s "middle-aged"? The image was taken in October 2021 when both were 67. 

But also never forget that Michael Shermer is a blatant racist, much more so than Pinker.  I'm not saying Pinker is not a racist, I'm saying he's much less blatant about it.

Certainly Pinker is not so disturbed by racism that it prevents him from being good buddies with Shermer, who is so racist he agrees with extreme racist and thankfully dead J Philippe Rushton and his bogus claims about Black people.

When E. O. Wilson's promotion of Rushton's career was in the news, not long after Wilson died, Shermer tweeted: "I thought (Rushton) was (a racist) too until I looked at the evidence. You should try that some day instead of motivated reasoning"

Rushton is well-known for the very poor quality of his work in addition to his racism. So it's Michael Shermer who is guilty of "motivated reasoning" and he's projecting here: Michael Shermer wants to believe that Rushton was correct that Black people are virtually a different species from white people, and intellectually inferior and genetically inclined to crime.

And E. O. Wilson encouraged Rushton and helped him with his career.