Normally when I post Youtube videos here, most are from excellent but fairly obscure content creators.
To be sure, I have posted content from "Last Week Tonight" before, but there has never been an episode so perfectly aligned with the Pinkerite mission than this week's report on Bari Weiss taking over CBS news.
What an absolute thing of beauty, especially the frequency with which Oliver mocks Weiss's egomania, starting with her self-aggrandizing characterization of quitting the NYTimes as her "Jerry Maguire moment."
And this Last Week Tonight episode may have finally made Bari Weiss notorious enough that even those to whom I have mentioned the name "Bari Weiss" in the past will no longer immediately respond "Barry White started a right-wing publication? Wait, isn't he dead?"
Right out of the gate, Oliver points out that Weiss was given control over a news organization when she herself has no experience in news - she's always been op-ed. Her rightwing garbage heap "The Free Press" is opinion-heavy - and often from right-wing extremists and racists as I discussed a year and a half ago.
Oliver mentions Weiss's idiotic retweet of the parody Twitter account @OfficialAntifa and her mischaracterization of (aka "lies about") NYTimes staff meetings.
He mentions the rightwing plutocrats who bankrolled her including techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.
I have been discussing the awfulness of Bari Weiss since I began this website so there was little new I learned from the report, although I did learn that the Free Press has been publishing shitty editorial cartoons by right-wing playwright David Mamet - who I knew was a right-wing hysteric 18 years ago.
Oliver fact-checks The Free Press.
Its article about trans-care that turned out to be utter bullshit.
Lies told by the Free Press about crime in Austin, Texas.
Claims that reports of malnutrition in Gaza were fake.
Then Oliver gets into Bari Weiss's clown college for racists, known as the University of Austin, which I have discussed so many times here.
The result of this magnificent report will be that the circle of people who consider Bari Weiss a far-right sleaze-merchant and laughingstock will grow considerably.
Of course there are some who will celebrate Weiss's career as the world's most successful courtier, raking in that right-wing money by bending the knee and kissing the ass. On Bluesky, Jamelle Bouie questions the awful Sally Jenkins about her promotion of a celebration of the Weiss victory by the awful Caitlin Flanagan.
John Oliver makes an excellent case for the fecklessness of Elon Musk, but he also mentions Harmeet Dhillon a lawyer who loves Trump and his fascist administration and was once (or still is?) the lawyer of far-right looney-toon grifter Andy Ngo.
Because we are living in Bizarro World, thanks to morons voting for a felon/rapist/traitor/psychopath, Dhillon is now "assistant attorney general for civil rights."
But the most important aspect of Oliver's piece is how utterly poisonous Twitter is - a force for pure evil.
Oliver discusses the way that Twitter is apparently fiddling with its algorithm to push right-wing content. I hope those still on Substack - looking at you, Paul Krugman - are aware that Marc Andreessen is just as right-wing extremist and just as capable of tweaking the Substack algorithm.
Excellent episode of John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" in which he discusses the end-goal of the CRT panic, created out of thin air by Koch employee and Trump supporter Christopher Rufo.
Rufo is a former member of the Koch-connected and race pseudoscience-friendly FAIR board of advisors.
I think the presence of so many Quillette authors (and Quillette editor Jon Kay) and race pseudoscience promoters Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer is a signal that the purpose of FAIR and its CRT panic is not only the standard right-wing scheme to force the US government to fund religious schools via "school choice."
Race pseudoscience, which claims Black Americans are innately, genetically inferior - and therefore as stated in a Quillette review by Razib Khan - an existential threat to America - cannot survive if Black American history is well-known. The reason Black Americans have not thrived is due to the legacy of slavery itself, plus Jim Crow, plus redlining, plus terrorism like the Tulsa massacre, etc etc. The attempt to erase Black history is the attempt to declare that Black American failure to thrive is the result of bad genes.
And that's why FAIR is not only against CRT, it is against teaching Black history, period, especially the 1619 project.
Mary Grabar, a fellow at the right-wing Alexander Hamilton Institute, has written an essay praising Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) for introducing the Saving American History Act of 2020, “a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts.” This is the right-wing version of “cancel culture,” except it adds government repression to the mix, making it far worse.
Grabar endorses censorship because she dismisses the idea that teachers are competent professionals who can be trusted to analyze complex concepts: “few teachers have the ability or the time to teach beyond the materials given to them.”
Grabar compares the 1619 Project to Howard Zinn, about whom she wrote a book called Debunking Howard Zinn because “Howard Zinn was bad–a communist, a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”
Like the 1619 Project, legislators have tried to ban Zinn from schools. Grabar complains that “When in 2017 Arkansas State representative Kim Hendren, introduced a bill to prohibit the use of Zinn’s book in state-funded classrooms,” the Zinn Education Project “framed the attempt as censorship.” Yes, how shocking, to describe legislation literally banning a book from public school as censorship.
Funny how often "free speech" advocates on the right end up supporting censorship.
And this company now Herasight and (Kirkegaard's) not listed there, neither is his friend Nima. But all of these other people, Jonathan Anomaly, Jeremy Li, Tobias Wolfram are listed even on the websites home page on the day that I record this, so they try to keep Emil in the background. That I know, and I can also prove this, that all of this, this whole research network there was kind of cultivated, for example, in this Vienna conference. Then later in 2023, I attended another retreat with Emil and a group of his associates. Jeremy Li was there in Italy and Como...
I've mentioned Ahrens on this blog before. The "Vienna conference" he refers to is the alleged private conference that Emil Kirkegaard hosted in a hotel in Vienna around the same time that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) held its annual meeting in Vienna in 2022.
Ahrens, who says he was at that 2022 meeting, shares details about the conference in this latest video and claims the following people, among others, attended Kirkegaard's side-conference:
Unfortunately Ahrens does not provide solid documentation for a connection between Kirkegaard and Herasight, but the fact that Ahrens was a close associate of Kirkegaard adds credence to the claim, on top of the already very strange fact that so many of the listed Herasight team members have connections to the far-right and race pseudoscience and even, like Jonathan Anomaly, to Kirkegaard himself.
On top of all that, Ahrens says that Kirkegaard talked about putting a hit out on his legal adversary Oliver Smith:
I know that Emil reached a settlement with this English Oliver (Smith) person who he had lost the lawsuit against and they reached an out of court agreement. No, I must say Emil told me in the past when he was drunk, this must have been in 2023. And he said this multiple times that he was going to get someone to or thinking about getting someone to kill this person. So he said that he might set up a crypto bounty on this guy's head and for 50,000 that someone would likely just get rid of him. And um. He, he told me this personally, I know that ultimately he reached an out of court agreement with him, so he didn't enact his threat. Just this is what these people talk about, right? So now that I make this video and I make all of this public, of course, there might also be talk in these circles about basically setting a bounty on my head.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Kirkegaard said that. People who have devoted their lives to racism and far-right politics are horrible people by definition. I put nothing past them.
Instead of paying to have him killed, Kirkegaard was likely behind the smear campaign against Oliver Smith that included an article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal attacking Smith as a former neo-Nazi (ironic isn't it?)
I would love to have more information about any connections between Kirkegaard and Herasight or Bari Weiss and some of the people associated with Herasight.
I had to laugh though when Ahrens tried to defend Kirkegaard against a charge of antisemitism at minute 25:24 in the video, by saying:
"(Kirkegaard) told me that he likes Jews because they are smart and he thinks they are good with money."
Hossenfelder is not nearly as impressive as she finds herself. _______________________________________________________
I recently became aware of German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder when I came across her videos on nuclear energy, in which she minimizes the dangers of nuclear energy and especially nuclear waste storage.
Also, I found her personality so irritating that even though I basically agree with her about the absence of free will, I found myself coming up with pro-free will arguments as I watched her video on the subject.
So, did she have an IDW connection? I Googled her and found her hobnobbing with race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer. Bingo. I have a practically infallible nose for the stench of the Intellectual Dark Web after doing this blog for four and a half years.
But worst of all, Hossenfelder thinks Steven Pinker's melange of sociobiology and reactionary politics, "The Blank Slate," is an important book.
But then (Hossenfelder) did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.
In his response, Stewart joked about the backlash he received from Democrats:
“I just think it’s better to deal head on with what’s an apparent issue to people. I mean, we’re just talking here.”
That’s when Stewart referred to my statement that “not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”
“It was one fucking show!” Stewart exclaimed. “It was 20 minutes. But I guess, as the famous saying goes, ‘democracy dies in discussion.’”
“But look,” Stewart added with a Southern accent, “I have sinned against you. I’m sorry,” before he insinuated the pushback was propaganda.
In other words, instead of engaging with my actual critique, he set up a straw man. He didn’t defend his false equivalency — he pretended my objection to his comment was that he had made a comment at all.
Besides, Jon Stewart is not just a comedian trying to nail his tight ten at the Comedy Cellar on open mic night. By his own design, he puts himself out to be a serious player and influencer in American politics.
“I very much wanted to have some kind of place to unload thoughts as we get into this election season, and I thought I was going to do it over at, they call it, Apple TV+,” he said. However, he added, “they felt that they didn’t want me to say things that might get me in trouble.”
But when he gets criticism for his thoughts, he falls back on (Southern accent) "who me? I'm jus' a lil' ole comedian."
I would subscribe to Mary Trump's work, but unfortunately she's still on Nazi-loving Substack.
Both Steven Colbert and John Oliver are consistently outshining Stewart.
Biden is old. But he is not corrupt, incompetent or criminal. He believes in democracy. For Stewart to compare the two men in this way distorts reality in the precise manner right-wing propagandists do. He should be ashamed of spouting this kind of claptrap.
And clearly, he is, because he devoted an entire segment in his second show to trying to laugh off the backlash to his first show. That’s how you know Stewart has messed up — he tries to gaslight his critics by accusing them of overreacting.
But here’s the thing Stewart knows, deep in his heart: The political fate of this country isn’t a joke — especially for our most vulnerable citizens. If you’re an immigrant fleeing violence in your homeland, if you’re a young woman impregnated by your rapist, if you’re a transgender child, if you’re a person of color living in a community with white supremacists, the difference between a Biden and Trump presidency is a direct threat to your life, not a punchline.
Great episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the idiot fascist Republican attempt to faschify a college, but ended up making it basically into a baseball scouting service.
Christopher Rufo recommends a newsletter to his readers that has published several supporters of discredited genetics theory
The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.
At the time of reporting, Aporia was one of 19 Substack newsletters Rufo links to in the “recommended” section on his own newsletter, which according to Substack has more than 50,000 subscribers. Rufo also appeared on Aporia’s podcast, which has published flattering interviews with proponents of scientific racism and eugenics.
Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called “wokeism”, has repeatedly described his goal as “colorblind equality”, but his links to Aporia raises questions about Rufo’s proximity to extremists.
Most recently Rufo has been credited in conservative media and beyond with playing a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who is Black.
The Guardian emailed Rufo with questions on his apparent endorsement of Aporia, and how he reconciled that with his professed “colorblindness”. He did not respond directly to any questions put to him but instead made a crude sexual insult to a Guardian reporter.
And there is still the problem of nuclear waste which Pinker and his co-authors dismiss, of course:
Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change, we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground. It’s a far easier environmental challenge than the world’s enormous coal waste, routinely dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last forever.
John Oliver addressed the issue a year and a half ago. Apparently it's not as easy as Pinker & friends would have you believe.
But even I was shocked by how completely bonkers Thiel sounded in his keynote speech.
Here's a small excerpt from the transcript I created, where Thiel compares environmentalism to Charles Manson:
...You know, already the two world wars, certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons. You know, on some level suggested that the sort of, I don't know the the the sort of rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit then by by by the 50s and 60s. And the the the kind of um the kind of history I would tell it's not perfect, but of of the last 70-75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways, you know um you know, you have a crazy person like Charles Manson, you know, what did he see when he was overdosing, you know, on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war, and then he decided to become some sort of, you know, anti-hero from Dostoyevski and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in, and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s. It's like we have to just slow this down. We have to put some brakes on. Uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this, have this dual use component...
It's hard to know when to begin and end the excerpt because it is not a collection of discrete, inter-related thoughts, but rather a stream-of-consciousness ramble.
And by the end of the speech he introduced the Antichrist:
...Start it seems, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that and uh that, you know, whatever the dangers are in the future, 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.
So three years ago, I found it disturbing that one of the richest and most politically powerful men in the world was ranting about the Antichrist and even more disturbing that nobody else seemed to care.
I mean, not even the militant atheists connected to the Intellectual Dark Web, who also gave speeches at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference, had much to say about Thiel's Christian apocalypse spiel. The worst Steven Pinker had to say was that Thiel's keynote speech was "data-light and impressionistic."
Jerry Coyne, another IDW militant atheist at the Conference, never said anything about Thiel at the time, although thanks to Bari Weiss' The Free Press touting religion recently he - three years later! - took note of Thiel's religiosity, but utterly ignores the Antichrist babble and makes Thiel sound almost mainstream in his critique.
Pod Save America posted an episode about the South Park episode "Twisted Christian," explaining the various cultural references like the 6-7 phenomenon and pointing out that Thiel really did hint that Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.
Kudos to the South Park team - it was absolutely inspired to give Peter Thiel a song and dance routine.
Between this and John Oliver's take-down of Bari Weiss, I feel like the mainstream is finally beginning to pay attention to issues I've been shouting about for the past seven years.
Although conditions were generally terrible for freed slaves, the US government did try to assist them in making the transition to freedom. In addition to abolitionists and Radical Republican members of Congress there was an attempt to get land to the slaves. This mostly ended in failure:
The Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which established the Freedmen's Bureau on March 3, 1865, was initiated by President Abraham Lincoln and was intended to last for one year after the end of the Civil War.[3] The Freedmen's Bureau was an important agency of early Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. The Bureau was made a part of the United States Department of War, as it was the only agency with an existing organization that could be assigned to the South. Headed by Union Army General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau started operations in 1865. Throughout the first year, its representatives learned that these tasks would be very difficult, as Southern legislatures passed laws for Black Codes that restricted movement, conditions of labor, and other civil rights of African Americans, nearly duplicating conditions of slavery. The Freedmen's Bureau controlled limited arable land.[4]
Black Codes were the first of many institutional roadblocks against black people in the South, the most notorious of which were the Jim Crow laws.
And then there were lynchings. The Smithsonian provides this interactive map of lynchings between 1835 and 1964. And please note that although the vast majority of the lynching were of blacks, other "races" are represented, including Italians.
As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, “Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”
But this moment was short-lived.
As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the “slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
History is made by human actors and the choices they make.
According to Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name,” the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the country’s accommodation, “explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.”
Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. “Redeemers” employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.
Juvenile convicts at work in the fields, 1903. Library of Congress/John L. Spivak By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.
The South’s new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the South’s agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy. How to build a new one?
Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” to continue as “a punishment for crime,” they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.
A new form of control
With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system.
Here’s how it worked. Black men – and sometimes women and children – were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners’ plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy – the “crime” of being unemployed – which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.
Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the region’s untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.
So a combination of violence and legislation were used throughout the 19th century against blacks and naturally contributed to black poverty.
I thought about the evo-psycho bros claims about blacks as I read about the Memphis riots of 1866. The "Memphis massacre"
...was a series of violent events that occurred from May 1 to 3, 1866 in Memphis, Tennessee. The racial violence was ignited by political, social and racial tensions following the American Civil War, in the early stages of Reconstruction.[2] After a shooting altercation between white policemen and black soldiers recently mustered out of the Union Army, mobs of white civilians and policemen rampaged through black neighborhoods and the houses of freedmen, attacking and killing black men, women and children.
The sight of black soldiers from the Union Army must have seemed terrifying yet ridiculous to whites in the South who were accustomed to treating people with any trace of West African ancestry like dirt.
John Paul Wright Professor of Criminology at the University of Cincinnati and one of the most blatantly racist of all the members of the Criminal Justice branch of the evolutionary psychology brotherhood said:
John Paul Wright from "Biosocial Criminology: New Directions" edited by Kevin Beaver and Anthony Walsh
The fact that there were not more incidents of former black Union soldiers clashing with the people who almost all supported their recent torment belies Wright's claim that black people, by nature, have "low self-control."
A tweet from Michael Shermer in supporter of racist extremist J. Philippe Rushton - I think Shermer is a fair representative of the reactionaries and race pseudoscience promoters who signed this Westminster Declaration But racist Toby Young would also be a good choice. ===========================
Hot on the heels of the most recent right-wing declaration of their right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics without pushback (a "scholarly" paper,) comes a DECLARATION for the right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics - including anti-trans hatred, climate change denial and Covid conspiracies - without pushback.
Apparently this has been out for like a month but I'm only finding out about it now.
Anyway, let's review this INTERNATIONAL list of utterly shameless race pseudoscience ghouls, evolutionary psychology goons and rightwing grifters. Some of the same people who published the paper also signed this declaration.
This list includes former far-leftists who are now stooges of the right.
Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK - far-right ghoul
Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK - far-right ghoul
Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK - rightwing ghoul
Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/USA - one of the creepiest of the rightwing grifters - likes to display herself for Peter Boghossian- speaking of whom...
Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany - conspiracy promoter
Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK - far-right ghoul, ally of Shellenberger and Taibbi
Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany - "The Journalist Sebastian Leber referred to Pohlmann in the Tagesspiegel in April 2022 as a "conspiracy ideologue" who had conspired jointly in the secret action "Leberschaden" (liver damage) with the "who's who of the German "swashbuckler scene" (German: Schwurblerszene)," especially blogger Robert Cibis."
Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK - rightwing ghoul
Alan Miller, Together Association, UK - anti-vax kook
Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA - "leftist" idiot
Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland - everything about him I could find is written in German. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA - PragerU freak
David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA - rightwing idiot
Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain - everything about him I could find is written in Spanish. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - evolutionary psychologist, anti-trans fanatic, ally of far-right freak Christopher Rufo, disgraced researcher
Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada - evolutionary psychologist, rightwing oaf, attendee of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists
Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA - anti-vax kook (see link for Robert W. Malone)
Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain - appears to be a Covid hysteric
Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia - rightwing anti-trans idiot, contributor to racist Quillette
Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV Host, Presenter, Italy - stooge of the Right
Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK - stooge of the Right
Francis Foster, Comedian, UK - rightwing "comedian" and ally of Putinbot Konstantin Kisin - Kisin sure has a lot of friends on this list
Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA - rightwing grifter, Quillette author
Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy - almost everything about her I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that she's a right-winger
Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy - no surprise here: "Marcello Foa, a Eurosceptic journalist who has often shared stories proved to be fake..."
Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy - too much Italian
Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy - anti-vax kook
Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy - libertarian idiot
Alessandro Di Battista, Political Activist, Writer, Italy - Putinbot: "Di Battista declared that "for the world peace, thankfully we have Putin". On 22 February 2022, Di Battista declared "Russia is not invading Ukraine" and "that Putin wants everything but a war"."
Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy - appears to be a Putinbot
Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel - anti-vax kook
Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil - right-winger, idiot
Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada - there are too many Stephen Moores in the world. I'm going to guess that the one listed is this right-wing Trudeau-hating idiot.
At minute 26, Molyneux says that successful Blacks are successful by countering "the narrative of insurmountable white racism" to which Taylor replies:
Taylor Well two points there. First of all, even when you do control for IQ, there are residual differences (between Blacks and whites). These can perhaps be attributed to differences in the willingness to forgo present satisfaction for future gain. There seems to be an independent variable along those lines as well. Blacks, have, I never can remember if there's a greater or lesser ti-... how that works out according to the lingo -
Molyneux Less capacity to defer gratification I think would probably be the easiest way to put it. I have that problem too.
Taylor They are less able to sacrifice now for future benefit. And this is found from childhood on. Even when you control for IQ. But I agree with you, IQ is really the fundamental differential...
Molyneux smiles and nods vigorously. I haven't watched the whole thing because it is revolting to have to look at Taylor's smiling smug face while he peddles, with total self-confidence, mind-boggling bullshit.
Now Taylor and Molyneux are infamous racists and not considered part of the mainstream. But what's important to realize is that Taylor is saying the exact same things as "biosocial criminologists" who hold positions in several American colleges.
...Lynn (2002), in a comprehensive investigation of psychopathology, presents evidence that Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics score higher on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventorys (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate scale compared to Whites, while East Asians score lower. Furthermore, Lynn argues that this racial trend extends to a host of related social outcomes measures including childhood conduct disorder, ADHD, recklessness, aggression, criminality, the ability to delay gratification, marriage rates, and even moral understanding. Across the multitude of studies analyzed, a clear pattern emerges where Blacks score the worst on these measures, Whites intermediate, and Asians the best even when controlling for the effects of age and IQ.
Although a major point of the essay is that "race" is a biological phenomenon and therefore test scores are genetics-based "racial" traits, the Lynn citation in fact demonstrates that race science and biosocial criminology claims are based on cultural race categories.
"Latinos across the Americas have differing proportions of Native American, African, and European genetic ancestry, shaped by local historical interactions with migrants brought by the slave trade, European settlement, and indigenous Native American populations."
So in effect the alleged biological race classifications per Lynn, Wright and Morgan are Black, White, East Asian, Native American, and (Black/White/Native American in unspecified combination who speak Spanish.)
The scientists also have been developing software that learns to recognize the origins of the short segments of DNA that make up our genomes. Recently they used their program to calculate what percentage of each subject’s genomes was inherited from European, African or Native American forebears.
“This year we saw that we were in a great position to do the analysis,” said Joanna L. Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe.
On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.
So genetically, in Lynn's study, "black" does not mean 100% Sub-Saharan African it means a combination of African, European and Native American that varies from one person to another culturally identified as "black."
Although the Zimmer article references information from 23andMe, it doesn't mention what I think is the worst blow of all to race science claims of test scores and biological race: East Asians and Native Americans are close enough genetically that 23andMe groups them together as a single "global population" which is as close as 23andMe gets to race categorization.
The 45 Ancestry Composition regional populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, British & Irish is a part of Northwestern European, which is part of European. In April 2018, we added over 115 new recent ancestor locations which reflect specific countries where your ancestors likely lived during the last 200 years. These recent ancestor locations are noted in each of the regional populations below. You can learn more about Recent Ancestor Locations here. Currently, there are over 150+ recent ancestor locations in the Ancestry Composition Report. The global populations available in Ancestry Composition are:
What this means is that genetically, East Asians and Native Americans are as close to each other as Europeans are to other Europeans.
So the biological racial classifications according to Richard Lynn are, in terms of 23andMe's global populations:
White (European)
Black (Sub-Saharan African, European and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual)
East Asian (East Asian & Native American)
Native American (East Asian and Native American)
Hispanic (European, Sub-Saharan African and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual.)
Demonstrating that race "science" is a pseudo-scientific mess. It is an ideology pretending to be science, using science-sounding language promoted by biosocial criminology college professors.
...We focus on the way biosocial criminologists operationalize race to outline the sociological consequences of what we see as a renewed commitment to the bio-criminalization of race. Biosocial criminologists do not reject that race is socially constructed, but in practice they disregard the main consequences and raison d’être of this postulate. Though biosocial criminologists praise the incorporation of cutting-edge science into criminology, the research programme’s actual findings concerning race do not necessarily align with views from genetic and neuroscientific research. Instead, we argue that biosocial criminology solicits social constructionism as a shield to re-insert antiquated biologic notions of race through a guise of bio-sociality.
Richard Lynn in 2002 did not have access to genetic findings via 23andMe, but John Paul Wright and Mark Alden Morgan, in their 2015 article in an allegedly scholarly publication, certainly did - the Carl Zimmer article I cited is from 2014.
Now if Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor were hired by American colleges, there would be a controversy. So why is there not a peep about the fact there are colleges employing people who are teaching criminology theories based on the same unscientific race theories that are peddled by people like Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux?
Biosocial criminologists who have endorsed the racist ideology also promoted by Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux includes:
I can't help but laugh at the bitter irony of Brian Boutwell, a fervent believer in race science and a practiced denialist of environment in general and the impact systemic racism has had on Black Americans in particular, being associate dean of a "college for public health and social justice."
There are more race science-swilling biosocial criminologists which I will add as I confirm them. It is unknown whether these colleges endorse the race beliefs of their teachers, whether they don't think it's a big deal that their students are being taught by peddlers of pseudo-scientific garbage, or if they are completely ignorant of the situation.
