Methinks it is like a weasel ~ Steven Pinker equivocates again

Yesterday Steven Pinker tweeted a link to another unctuous blog post from Jerry Coyne groveling before the Master.

It was no surprise to read Coyne suggesting that anybody who criticizes the work of Pinker is a "Pecksniff."

So you can look forward to that (as usual, the Pecksniffs will come out in force to criticize it, no matter what he says). Steve said he’ll start writing it in about a year, and I suspect it won’t be long after that until it’s finished (he wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature in only a year and a half).

The term "Pecksniff" indicates that Coyne believes Pinker's critics are guilty of hypocritically and unctuously affecting benevolence or high moral principles.

Pecksniff is a Dickens character. If I had to choose a Dickens character to compare to Coyne, I'd have to say Uriah Heep: his name has become synonymous with sycophancy.

Pinker on the other hand reminds me of a Shakespeare character, Polonius.

But I was surprised by Coyne when he wrote this:

 We talked about determinism, free will, the evolution of music (Steve thinks that there is not an adaptive evolutionary basis for music and musicality, even though music is universal in all cultures),

This struck me as odd because in his immortal review of The Blank Slate, Louis Menand wrote:

...To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates - which is one of the things Pinker believes..."

But when I reviewed the chapter on art in The Blank Slate to find the source, I found Pinker saying the opposite:

"...The psychological roots of (artistic) activities have become a topic of recent research and debate. Some researchers, such as the scholar Ellen Dissanayake, believe that art is an evolutionary adaptation like the emotion of fear or the ability to see in depth. Others, such as myself, believe that art (other than narrative) is a by-product of three other adaptations: the hunger for status, the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends...

However Menand can be forgiven for missing that since later in the chapter dedicated to his anti-20th century art jeremiad, Pinker seems to forget he just said art is a by-product of a "hunger for status" providing yet another example of Pinker's signature trait, equivocation.

A trait Menand himself noted:

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. 

Pinker's entire point about 20th century modernism and post-modernism is that they deny human nature - which means evolutionary adaptation, which is the basis of hereditarian beliefs.

Pages after he says he does not believe art appreciation is an evolutionary adaptation, Pinker writes:

Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability - stripping away pretense - to themselves... 

...Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones...

I assume that is what prompted Menand to write the funniest line in his review:

To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal."

So Pinker wants to have it both ways - claim art is not an evolutionary adaptation itself but rather a by-product of something that truly is - hunger for status - while at the same time claim that modern art is unpopular because it denies evolutionary adaptation.

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

But modern art does not deny what Pinker clearly states is actually an evolutionary adaptation trait, hunger for status. If you are truly elite, a high-status individual, by definition you don't care what the droves want. The French even have an expression for it: epater les bourgeoisie, used to describe the attitude of artists from Pinker's beloved pre-20th century:

...a French phrase that became a rallying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late 19th century including Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.[1] It means "to shock the bourgeoisie".[2]

The continuing popularity of Baudelaire and Rimbaud demonstrates that what was once considered ugly, baffling and insulting may one day be enjoyed, even by the bourgeoisie.

And I don't know if only elites are buying the work of Cindy Sherman, one of the human-nature denying scoundrels mentioned in The Blank Slate, but her work is now often sold for millions of dollars.

Phil Torres, attacked by Pinker and Coyne for daring to make a valid critique of Pinker's work - which I assume makes him a Pecksniff to Coyne - wrote:

...they refuse — they will always refuse, it’s what overconfident white men do — to admit making mistakes when they’re obviously wrong.

But thanks to Pinker's predilection for taking both sides of an issue (AKA weak and strong pinkerism), it's hard to tell exactly when he's making a mistake. He seems to constantly hedge his bets. And when he wants to say something nasty about his critics, people like Coyne and Michael Shermer are apparently happy to do it for him.

As a result, the intellectual failures (and the petty and vindictive nature) of Steven Pinker go unrecognized by many.

But every now and then a member of the elite will point it out.

Enter POLONIUS 

   HAMLET 

God bless you, sir! 

   LORD POLONIUS 

My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. 

   HAMLET 

Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? 

   LORD POLONIUS 

By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. 

   HAMLET 

Methinks it is like a weasel. 

   LORD POLONIUS 

It is backed like a weasel. 

   HAMLET 

Or like a whale? 

   LORD POLONIUS 

Very like a whale. 

   HAMLET 

Then I will come to my mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent. I will come by and by.  

   LORD POLONIUS 

I will say so. 

   HAMLET 

By and by is easily said. 

Exit POLONIUS

Pinker vs. Krugman Part 2

Brown University made their recorded debate between Steven Pinker and Paul Krugman available (I only just now discovered it) and so as promised, this is part 2.

I have included the transcript here. Both the audio and the transcript end 3 minutes before the video.

I will be responding to this soon on Pinkerite.

In the meantime, can't resist responding to Pinker's latest weasel words. He wrote a letter to the Guardian complaining about how they portrayed his views of women, the last part of which he says:

I do disagree with the 1970s-era assumption that women’s equality depends on their being biologically indistinguishable from men: fairness does not require sameness. Vince’s observations that the distribution of women’s traits overlaps with those of men’s, and that individuals should be treated according to their talents and choices rather than their gender, far from contrasting with my views, could have been taken from the pages of my 2002 book The Blank Slate.

But what he means by women and men "not being biologically indistinguishable" which, in general principle, few people would disagree with in the first place, is that women have evolved to be inferior to men at STEM subjects.

Pinker also apparently believes that women evolved to be more interested in housekeeping than men.

In The Blank Slate Pinker characterizes Camille Paglia, a vicious professional misogynist  (and fan of NAMBLA) who believes women are hapless, helpless losers as a "feminist."

Knowing this should give you a good idea of exactly where Steven Pinker stands on women's issues  as on virtually any other - he is an absolute two-faced WEASEL.

The best review of The Blank Slate ever was in the New Yorker: What Comes Naturally by Louis Menand. Menand was the first reviewer, as far as I am aware, who noted a pronounced Pinker tendency of "having it both ways."

One of Steven Pinker's favorite "feminist" thinkers.

Pinker promotes race pseudoscience via Youtube podcast - uses the term "heritable" incorrectly

While I was focused on Bari Weiss for the past couple of months, Steven Pinker was busy launching his own YouTube podcast.

I discovered this when I was monitoring the Twitter/X feed of professional racist Steve Sailer and Sailer reposted a link to Pinker's YouTube channel.

Although Pinker refuses to acknowledge the existence of Sailer, even when asked about him directly by the media (an extremely rare occurrence but it did happen three years ago) Sailer has long maintained he is an important source of Pinker's sociobiology beliefs.

Unlike Pinker's Twitter/X account, which prevents most people from commenting, Pinker's YouTube channel does, so far, allow comments. And so I took the opportunity, at least until I'm censored, to point out that Pinker uses the term "heritability" incorrectly in his emission entitled Nature vs. Nature: What's More Impactful. Pinker says, flat-out:

The first law is that all behavioral traits are partly heritable. What does that mean? It means that some of the variation within a culture between one person and another what makes Jason different from Sam what makes Emily different from Jessica comes from differences in their genes.

Per the indispensable paper "The heritability fallacy" by David S. Moore and David Shenk, published in 2016: 

The term ‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.

Pinker should know better than to use the term heritability that way, but I think he doesn't care, because, I am convinced, Pinker lacks all sense of shame. One of the reasons why Steven Pinker is the world's most annoying man.

In addition to misusing the term "heritability," notice how Pinker slips in "within a culture" right before "one person and another." I don't think this is a slip of the tongue. I think Pinker uses it deliberately here, because Pinker is a weasel.

That word "culture" is very important because of the claim - first widely disseminated by Patrick Moynihan, promoted by Pinker in his book "Better Angels..." and more recently promoted by Andrew Sullivan in conversation with Jon Stewart - that Black people in the United States have not thrived since the days of slavery due to their own faulty "culture."

And here Pinker explicitly connects "culture" to genetics. 

Pinker is primarily a libertarian political operative, most recently aligning with the far right to attack Harvard. And his "scientific" claims are in service to his politics. Pinker has long pushed the idea, albeit subtly, that the only explanation for Black American failure to thrive is genetics. 

Because, like Steve Sailer, Pinker believes in race pseudoscience.

Terry Newman - lousy journalist for right-wing rag The Post Millennial and the IDW mob

The web site Media Bias/Fact Check gives a right-wing rating to the Canadian online magazine The Post Millennial, but I didn't have to check that site to know it - the fact that The Post Millennial decided to praise the Quillette/IDW/Rebel Media gang for mobbing a Canadian academic for an innocuous tweet immediately told me where they stood.

And as I mentioned a few days ago, Barbara Kay, the mother of Quillette editor Jonathan Kay, has written for it.

As I have discovered by taking note of all the Trump supporters who defend Quillette on Twitter, the right loves Quillette, which shouldn't be a surprise since Quillette's founder Claire Lehmann was a contributor to extreme right-wing Rebel Media. And based on Ezra Levant's joining in with her mob to go after the Canadian academic, I think they still keep in touch.

As if joining the Q/I/R mob wasn't bad enough, Terry Newman went after me too.

In case you can't read the text below Newman's tweet in this screen cap, it says:

"There were no responses to these questions. This refusal to provide evidence for accusations is striking considering the number of likes and retweets these dehumanizing statements get on Twitter. So what’s happening here? Let’s explore."

If you're reading this blog you know I have plenty of responses to those questions. There is also my extensive series on evo-psycho bros on my personal blog.

But like the incompetent journalist that she is, Terry Newman never contacted me for the answers.

There are a couple of reasons why I did not contribute more to that tweet thread:

First because I don't remember to follow up on every thread I comment on. And in this case I had no idea others had responded to my comment.

Second because I had said what I wanted to say: that many Quillette articles are so congenial to white supremacists they are reprinted in American Renaissance. Now for some reason Twitter won't let me paste a link that demonstrates all the Quillette articles reprinted in American Renaissance which is why I didn't include it in my tweet. But it is 100% factually correct as you can see via this link.

And how, exactly, is my empirically verifiable statement that Quillette supports race science and many of its articles are re-printed in American Renaissance an example of "dehumanization?"

Once I found out I was being smeared by Terry Newman in the Post Millennial I went to the site and sent a protest via message form - to which I never received an answer.

Then I tracked Newman down on Twitter and informed her that had she bothered to ask, I would indeed have responses to those questions. So when she demanded I provide them I did, immediately.

Rather than reading them she responded that she wasn't going to read them and did I think she was my fan. And when I pointed out what a hypocritical weasel she was, she blocked me. Standard Quillette/IDW/Rebel Media response.

So to recap: Terry Newman wrote an article quoting my tweet, misrepresenting me as not having any responses without reaching out to ask me, and then when I tracked her down and gave her my responses she refused to read them.

And in case you are wondering - yes of course, of course this ethics-deficient hack has written for Quillette.

Barack Obama: race denier & Bell Curve critic

Before I get back to reviewing the incredibly bad scholarship of the Winegard bros on The Bell Curve, I want to take a side trip to discuss the political angle.

The defenders of Steven Pinker keep proclaiming that he can't possibly have any views in common with the alt-right because he's such a big liberal, as evo-psycho bro Jesse Singal said in his white-washing op-ed for the NYTimes:

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.

Evo-psycho bro Jerry Coyne would like you to know what a big Democrat Pinker is:

Just a short note re yesterday’s post about accusations that Steve Pinker is a member of the alt-right simply because he called some alt-righters literate and intelligent in a discussion of how to keep people from becoming right-wing. I found on the Internet a list and discussion about Harvard donors to the Democratic Party, which apparently comes from “public filings” accessed by the Harvard Crimson. Among members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Pinker was the third largest donor to the Democratic Party...

But clearly Democrats don't all agree about race being something besides a social construct as Barack Obama makes crystal clear in his recent interview with David Letterman.

OBAMA 

"The long view on human history... uh... it turns out that we come up with all kinds of reasons to try to put ourselves over other people. Racism is a profound example of that but obviously, biologically there's no actual reality to it other than we made this thing up. We made it up, over time what happens is, because it manifests itself in very concrete ways: slavery, Jim Crow, subjugation, it becomes a social reality and it ends up having very real impacts. It is true that African Americans on average are poorer than other Americans. Well it's not because of their race it's because of the social constructs over the course of three, four hundred years that made them poor."

Now it's still unclear if Steven Pinker agrees with the premise in the Bell Curve that African Americans are genetically intellectually inferior to everybody else, but he has no qualms about promoting the work and/or careers of those who do, including J. Phillippe Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Steve Sailer,  Razib Khan, Ben Winegard and Bo Winegard as I have demonstrated in this evo-psycho bros series.

And we certainly do know that Pinker thinks that anybody who refutes the notion that all humanity is divisible into discrete biological races denies reality as he clearly states in this video.

I've written a book on the concept, The Blank Slate the Modern Denial of Human Nature, about the idea that any aspect of human talent or temperament has any biological basis has often been seen as political and morally and emotionally incendiary in most of the 20th century. And in the book I try to analyze how one can sensitively deal with discoveries of a biological basis of human personality and intelligence including possible discoveries about genetics of group differences. I think it's safe to say that the current approach, or at least in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence, 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." In a way it does matter what our emotional reaction is to various findings, they are what they are..."

So Steven Pinker believes so strongly in the concept of biological race that he thinks anybody who disagrees with him denies reality itself.

So Steven Pinker thinks that Barack Obama is a a reality-denier. 

In spite of Pinker being a Democrat.

Ironically I came to find Obama's criticism of The Bell Curve via Razib Khan's old web site. He reposted it at Unz here. He got it from the NPR web site. This is 1994, when Obama was a civil rights lawyer and writer living in Chicago. I assume this is a transcript from an actual audio recording. How I would love to have access to the audio of Obama saying these words.

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

Obama says: "...it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented..."

And yet Arthur Jensen did deny early intervention was effective:

 In administering I.Q. tests to diverse groups of students, Professor Jensen found Level I ability to be fairly consistent across races. When he examined Level II ability, by contrast, he found it more prevalent among whites than blacks, and still more prevalent among Asians than whites. 

Drawing on these findings, Professor Jensen argued that general intelligence is largely genetically determined, with cultural forces shaping it only to a small extent. For this reason, he wrote in 1969, compensatory education programs like Head Start are doomed to fail.

Again, as I have demonstrated, Steven Pinker supports the work of Arthur Jensen, both directly as we see in this Boing Boing interview, and indirectly when he recommends the work of the Winegard bros, who constantly refer to Jensen in their work.

Pinker likes to pretend there are no political repercussions for racist swill disguised as science like The Bell Curve. But not for lack of "racial realists" trying as when Jensen proclaims Head Start was doomed to fail. The data show that Head Start did not fail.

Research has demonstrated strong long-term impacts of random assignment to high-quality preschool programs from the 1960s and 1970s, including Perry Preschool and the Abecedarian program. Head Start, the large-scale federal preschool program, has also been shown to improve post-preschool outcomes, including high school completion and health outcomes.

But if Jensen had his way, all those kids who did benefit from Head Start would not have, due to the assumption of their innate, racial, intellectual inferiority.

That is why people who really understand what Steven Pinker is all about, as PZ Myers does, express such disgust with Pinker and call him a lying right-wing shitweasel.

I want to add my support especially to the weasel epithet. I picked up on that aspect of Pinker long ago and said this in 2011:

Pinker is constantly inventing straw-man liberals and academics he can accuse of all kinds of awfulness, so it's always satisfying when the actual liberals at The New Yorker get a hold of his books and tell you how poorly-reasoned and all-around weaselly they are.

I really recommend the Letterman interview with Obama. Not only for Obama, who is wonderful of course, but because Letterman expresses regret that he wasn't more involved in the Civil Rights movement in his youth. Letterman in my experience has always been kind of a glib wise-ass, but he's incredibly sincere in this interview and tells Obama he's the only president he's ever really respected on a personal level. I was really surprised and impressed by Letterman.

And it's likely that David Letterman does NOT think that Barack Obama is a reality denier, unlike Steven Pinker. 

Chotiner strikes again - Chotiner vs. AEI's Danielle Pletka

CHOTINER FOR 
THE WIN

When we last saw the New Yorker's Ian Chotiner, he was embarrassing free speech grifting stooge Thomas Chatterton Williams (to think I once admired Williams.)

Now Williams is, as far as I have been able to discern, only loosely connected to the wingnut welfare system funded foremost by Koch.

(UPDATE: Williams became an official member of the plutocrat funded wingnut welfare system by accepting a post at the AEI in December 2020.)

But in Chotiner's interview, published today, with Danielle Pletka, he strikes at the heart of the Koch plutocracy since Pletka is an American Enterprise Institute bigwig (like IDWs Charles Murray and Christina Hoff Sommers). 

Chotiner asked Pletka about her time working for infamously racist Jesse Helms.

You know things that were wrong. This isn’t a “may.”

But I worked for him on the Middle East and South Asia, and I was very proud of what we accomplished.

You know his record on South Africa, though, correct? [Helms opposed any sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol in 1994, soon after he was elected South Africa’s first post-apartheid President, Helms turned his back on him.]

I didn’t work on South Africa. I worked on the Middle East and South Asia.

I understand that. But I’m saying you must know about the guy’s career? I mean, the Civil Rights Act, the Martin Luther King holiday, his interactions with Carol Moseley Braun, his ads, his comments about South Africa and African National Congress. This stuff isn’t completely unknown to you.

I’m not quite sure what this has to do with my article.

What a weasel. And then this part:

Most significant to me is that Pletka was a "never Trumper" who claims to have changed her mind about Trump. I think what likely happened was that the plutocrats yanked her chain and she fell in line.

...and I really am crushed by this cancel culture, by the bullying, and by the transformation of American political discourse. And, by the way, I have really been happy, actually, to in some ways blame Donald Trump for that. It started with him. What did Michelle Obama say? “When they go low, we go high.” That has not been the guiding principle here.

Trump is probably making cancel culture, however much significance you attribute to it, significantly worse. That’s why I was surprised a little bit by the op-ed, because it seems like his defeat would be good for some of the things you’re worried about.

Yes, except for the fact that I think the ship has already sailed.

The obsession with "cancel culture" is telling. I think it's probable the AEI is the original instigator of the Harper's letter. Certainly many of the Harper's letter signers have Koch connections.

The Koch-dominated branch of the Right promotes the Trump antifa smear campaign against Biden, a campaign possibly inspired by and coordinated with the IDW's favorite shameless grifter Andy Ngo. 

Who was nominated is irrelevant, you mean?

Yes. I think that that choice was irrelevant, because I don’t think that those voters are the people who are steering the direction of the Party.

You write, “Are there problems on the right—horrible nasties on a par with the violent protesters who have lately inflicted untold damage on many U.S. cities, businesses and lives? You bet. These execrable gun-toting racists have received too much tacit encouragement from Trump.” Would you say it’s tacit? Isn’t it more direct than tacit?

I have to think about my answer. I think Donald Trump has played an opposite and equal role in encouraging bad people in the destruction that we’ve seen this year.

I’m asking because he talked about liberating Michigan. And then what he said about Kyle Rittenhouse.

Well, again, Donald Trump’s reaction, for example, in the wake of Charlottesville was abhorrent. I find an unwillingness on the part of many to condemn the destruction that takes place. The shootings, the violence, the threatening that’s been taking place—I find that also extraordinarily troubling. Now, is it incumbent upon the President to behave better? Damn, yes. That is why, for the last three and a half years, I’ve done very little but condemn Donald Trump on these matters. I try to be fair in calling balls and strikes, as I tried to be fair with Obama. I’m a conservative, so my view of what a ball and a strike is is different from yours. Nonetheless, those things are abhorrent. The problem that I see and the problem that brought me to write this is that there is an almost equal and opposite reaction on the other side.

You follow up that last quote by writing, “But they do not represent the mainstream of the Republican Party or guide the choices of the vast mass of Republican members of Congress.” Can you explain this a little bit more? I was slightly confused, because Trump is actually the President. And so it feels like maybe that does represent the mainstream of the Party, since he is the nominee and extremely popular and the most powerful and important Republican.

So Pletka's argument is that while violent extremists do represent the Democratic Party in spite of its nominee's moderate positions, on the other hand violent Trump supporters don't represent the Republican Party even though its leader, Trump, openly defended their violence.

The mind-fuckery and SHAMELESSNESS is absolutely appalling.

And to demonstrate once again the wretched character of the people aligned with Koch and the IDW, like Pinker and his defenders and the IDW/GamerGate creeps, Pletka takes a stupid cheap shot at Chotiner.

I’m thirty-seven—no, no, I’m thirty-eight.

You can’t even add.

Pletka hates Chotiner for allowing her to reveal herself as the soulless toady and defender of racists that she always has been and likely always will be.

Is Steven Pinker rational? Part 2

In part 1 of "Is Steven Pinker rational?" I noted that Pinker presented a false dichotomy of rational San vs. irrational Americans, which he was only able to accomplish by omitting the fact that like every human culture, the San have their share of irrational beliefs.

An even more significant omission is in this paragraph:

Yet for all the deadly effectiveness of the San’s technology, they have survived in an unforgiving desert for more than a hundred thousand years without exterminating the animals they depend on. During a drought, they think ahead to what would happen if they killed the last plant or animal of its kind, and they spare members of the threatened species. They tailor conservation plans to the vulnerabilities of plants, which cannot migrate but recover quickly when the rains return, and animals, which can survive a drought but build back numbers slowly.

Pinker neglected to mention that an important part of San "conservation plans" is to kill their own babies.

As Marvin Harris explained in his book Cannibals and Kings (1977):

Hunter-collectors under stress are much more likely to turn to infanticide and geronticide (the killing of old people)... Infanticide runs a complex gamut from outright murder to mere neglect. Infants may be strangled, drowned, bashed against a rock, or exposed to the elements.

More commonly, an infant is “killed” by neglect: the mother gives less care than is needed when it gets sick, nurses it less often, refrains from trying to find supplementary foods, or “accidentally” lets it fall from her arms. Hunter-collector women are strongly motivated to space out the age difference between their children since they must expend a considerable amount of effort merely lugging them about during the day. 

Richard Lee has calculated that over a four-year period of dependency a Bushman mother will carry her child a total of 4,900 miles on collecting expeditions and campsite moves. No Bushman woman wants to be burdened with two or three infants at a time as she travels that distance...

...Our stone age ancestors were thus perfectly capable of maintaining a stationary population, but there was a cost associated with it—the waste of infant lives. This cost lurks in the background of prehistory as an ugly blight in what might otherwise be mistaken for a Garden of Eden.

Now Steven Pinker must be aware of this and he must be aware that evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, consider infanticide, literally "a desperate decision of a rational strategist allocating scare resources."

In an interview, Pinker names Daly and Wilson as important influences:

Starting in the 1990s I broadened my research interests to the rest of human nature after reading about the replicator-centered revolution in evolutionary biology launched by George Williams, John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and Richard Dawkins, and applied to human psychology by Donald Symons, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. Judith Rich Harris, the independent scholar who wrote the brilliant book The Nurture Assumption, kindled an interest in behavioral genetics and the development of personality. 

But how would that look, if Steven Pinker said: "the San Bushman control their population through rational infanticide"? It would be the truth, but it would hardly lend itself to book sales and the interviews might suddenly become less worshipful and less useful for Pinker's career advancement than usual.

And so Pinker presents the San Bushman as though they have solved the material problems of earthly existence through the sheer force of their rational minds, with no muss or fuss. It's not true, but it suits Steven Pinker's purposes, much like quoting people who disagreed with him, to give the impression they agreed with him, suited his purposes in writing his previous book "Enlightenment Now."

But you could say Pinker is behaving rationally. He knows from experience he won't be held accountable for his misrepresentations by the media gatekeepers, but only by working scientists like PZ Myers or R. Brian Ferguson or philosophers like Phil Torres, who have much smaller audiences and will have a negligible impact on his book sales. 

Certainly rationality is important. But equally important is ethics. Steven Pinker behaves rationally - like a rational weasel.

Sometimes doing this Pinkerite blog feels like this.

Pingback for Jerry Coyne ~ I wonder why right-wingers love me so much

I'm sure Jerry Coyne has heard of Occam's Razor.

So let's consider the issue of Jerry Coyne claiming to be on the left:

Each time I see a pingback from one of these conservative sites, then, I am ambivalent. Am I helping or hurting my own cause? Like all people who take my point of view, I have of course been called “alt-right,” “racist”, and even a white supremacist. I brush off those names because they’re just slurs that progressives who lack arguments use to tar their opponents.

It's always fun when Coyne or Pinker claim their critics "lack arguments," when both Coyne and Pinker live in air-tight echo chambers and refuse to talk to their critics. Pinker infamously went on a blocking tear on Twitter (he blocked me long before that) and Coyne will not post or respond to any critics on his blog.

What disgusting lying self-congratulatory weasels they are.

So let's look at the facts.

Jerry Coyne constantly promotes and supports right-wingers and racists. 

He apparently thinks that those who believe Amy Wax or Steve Bannon engage in hate speech are ridiculous:

What is accomplished by convicting this guy and sending him to jail? Will it deter others from making ‘hate videos’? Perhaps, but the concept of “hate speech” is so slippery that such deterrence is unwise. Meechan, after all, was not calling for the Jews to be gassed, expecting to incite Jewish deaths. Remember that many saw, and still see, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad as “hate speech”, as they see the views of Steve Bannon, Christina Hoff Sommers, or Amy Wax as “hate speech”.

Like all the other ghouls he constantly aligns with, he hates the 1619 project. Probably because it teaches actual Black history, which he and the other race pseudoscience ghouls would like to erase so they can claim that Black failure to thrive in the US is due to inferior Black genes.

Jerry Coyne participated in racist anti-democratic Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists, where he demonstrated his alignment with notorious racist Amy Wax. While deliberately misrepresenting left-leaning biologist PZ Myers as just a blogger.

Jerry Coyne believes in racist race pseudoscience. But like his hero Steven Pinker, he's enough of a weasel that he won't come right out and admit it, or explain exactly what he believes about things like race and intelligence, but you'd have to be a moron to miss his sympathy with Noah Carl, one of the most far-right racists in the race pseudoscience business:

In the article above on his website, Noah Carl found one item I missed in the ASHG report. (Yes, I know of Carl’s infamy: he was fired from a position at Cambridge University for working on the connection between human race and intelligence: an ideologically taboo topic that was, in his case, also characterized as “poor scholarship”)

He grumbles about the kids these days and their newfangled words. 

But I think Coyne's position on the political spectrum can best be illustrated by the fact that he attacks critics of Amy Wax and Noah Carl, but he has nothing negative to say about famously racist and famously anti-democratic and famously pro-Trump Peter Thiel. Although he will go so far as to quote his fave right-wing bloggers' commentary about Thiel's support for Trump.

Now from this should we conclude that:

Jerry Coyne is a leftist who just happens to love racists and right-wingers and race pseudoscience and hates other leftists and has nothing bad to say about a lunatic right-wing anti-democratic Trump supporter?

OR

Jerry Coyne is a cranky old right-wing racist who is so delusional that he thinks he's still on the left?

Straight talk from a Pinker fan

Steven Pinker, it has been well established, is a fan of race pseudo-science, but is a weasel about it.

But Pinker's fans, many of whom are Trump supporters, know exactly what Pinker and his gang like Quillette, the IDW and many of the signers of the Harper's Letter really stand for. And it isn't a pure, disinterested love of open and honest discourse.

The honesty expressed in the tweet from Left Abandoned was as refreshing as the bigotry was extreme.

Number one on the list is of course race science.

This is who Pinker's fans are - because that is who Pinker is.

The goal of Pinker and his friends is to establish race science, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-trans bigotry and misogyny as "moderate" ideas.

Jonathan Katz on J. D. Vance and the Weinstein brothers

Jonathan Katz took a deep dive into the infamous Eric Weinstein-hosted interview of J. D. Vance and came up with some good, if predictably nauseating stuff.

He refers to Bret Weinstein as "disgraced evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein." I certainly have long thought Bret was a disgrace, since the Evergreen incident, which I am convinced was at the very least partly a deliberate scam on the part of Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. My opinion was then bolstered by Bret and Heather shilling ivermectin as a treatment for Covid. 

And then there's that obsession with Game Theory.

But I didn't know about this latest Bret Weinstein disgrace:

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biology professor turned podcaster and ivermectin guy, repeated a series of discredited pseudo-theories about AIDS in a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Weinstein, a frequent guest, told Rogan that he found the theory that party drugs like poppers cause AIDS to be “surprisingly compelling.” (It is not.) Weinstein also told Rogan he came to these ideas by reading a recent book by anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, creating a sort of unholy turducken of misinformation passed onto an audience of millions. 

Wow, what a garbage person.

Katz goes on to give a full accounting of the Intellectual Dark Web's racist, misogynist pseudoscience context that inform's Eric Weinstein's views, and demonstrates how much Vance agrees with them.

The problem is that race-baiting, misogyny, and a general obsession with supposedly in-born hierarchies aren’t distractions from the Trump team’s message. They are the campaign’s message. Even when confronted with an issue that genuinely concerns the electorate — such as the still-high cost of living, especially for those of us raising children — they can’t resist offering rhetoric and solutions that sound like they come from the minutes of a 1920s meeting of the American Eugenics Society, if not the pronatalist movement in Fascist Italy itself. The reason is simple: They really believe this stuff.

***

The vice-presidential candidate concludes:

VANCE: Just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to. I think it's, yeah — it’s the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market.

Yes, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and great influencer of medieval Christian doctrine, who taught, among other things that: “the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying”; and “for the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority,” and who summarized “the female is a misbegotten male.” Those virtue politics.

In spite of Steven Pinker's public distaste for Trump, the Republican ticket is the Intellectual Dark Web ticket, holding the same pseudoscience beliefs that Pinker has been promoting via evolutionary psychology first, then by a cleaned-up version of Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." Or as David Lubinski, bigwig at the International Society for Intelligence Research calls it "human psychological diversity."

Which is why the Republican ticket, funded by anti-democracy Peter Thiel and lead by a pussy-grabbing rapist and a misogynist creep, is the most evil in American history. 

And Pinker likes to attack Trump but he has no qualms about allying himself with Republican operative Bari Weiss and her garbage rag. But that's who Pinker is, a complete and utter weasel.

The Swoletariat: Steven Pinker is a Stupid Idiot

Pinkerite's beat is Steven Pinker's decades-long practice of promoting sociobiology/race pseudoscience, especially because he is the most respectable, mainstream, Justin Trudeau hobnobbing, UN presenting "celebrity intellectual" member of the race pseudoscience network.

Most critics of Pinker, however, seem to focus on his "optimism" and claims the world is getting better all the time.

And sometimes I have to share those criticisms. This video from a YouTube channel called The Swoletariat, jumps right into Pinker's fast and loose approach to data he claims support his position. It is, dare I say it, a weasely approach.

And the title makes me laugh.

The wonderful Michael Brooks can be seen making some of the same points two years earlier in this much briefer video.

I should say that keeping tabs on Steven Pinker's advocacy of race pseudoscience takes up all my available time. Here he is promoting right-wing racist idiot Richard Hanania.

Journalist Jonathan M. Katz has a great series on the awfulness of Hanania. 

Steven Pinker and Amy Wax and Persuasion

So Pinker hasn't been promoting Razib Khan, directly, that I could find, since 2021. So what has Pinker been up to?

Publishing his usual bullshit, specifically in the "Persuasion" Substack.

Persuasion, which was founded in June 2020, a few weeks before the Harper's Letter was published, appears to be part of the Harper's Letter scheme, associated with the Intellectual Dark Web and the Quillette gang.

Thirteen signers of the Harper's Letter are associated with Persuasion, including founder and editor in chief Yascha Mounk. The named instigator of the letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, currently taking money from the Koch-funded AEI, is on the Board of Advisors.

Persuasion also has an About page which lists "People," which includes Mounk and some members of the Board of Advisors, like Pinker, Haidt, Yoffe, McWhorter; various others (including "David"); plus two more Harper's Letter-signers, → Jonathan Rauch and → Ian Buruma.

You can see how much Persuasion is aligned politically with the Intellectual Dark Web and Quillette by a glance at the "Most popular" articles on its home page:

• The Neoracists - by Quillette author and Koch employee John McWhorter. The article is about  how bad it is to be anti-racist.

• Keira Bell: My Story - about regretting being transgender - anti-trans is a pillar of the Intellectual Dark Web/Quillette, and, because those are funded by the same people who fund conservative politicians, a new pillar of the Republican Party. Quillette talks about Bell a lot. Of course.

• Why I'm Losing Trust in the Institutions - Mounk's attack on the CDC for being excessively woke. You can see Mounk whining about people calling him on his bullshit while he pretends to be "of the left." Classic Koch phony bipartisanship. I found an excellent critique of Persuasion here. 

• A Taxonomy of Fear - Emily Yoffe's "cancel culture" screed. She makes sure to namecheck her favorite reactionaries of the IDW/Quillette industrial complex including race pseudoscience promoter Jonathan Haidt, Koch employee (via FIRE) Greg Lukianoff, contemptible anti-feminist Quillette author Meghan Daum, and of course Thomas Chatterton Williams. They live in an inbred world, these IDW/Quillette people. Which makes it especially fun when Yoffe writes:

Many people ask why any of this should matter in the age of Donald Trump—a president who attacks free speech, stokes bigotry and division, and believes he is above the law. It matters because we have seen what happened when his enablers on the right failed to stand up to the worst impulses of their leader. These enablers are now morally responsible for the tragic consequences of their inaction.

But if Peter Thiel has funded Quillette - and I think the claim is true - then the very people Yoffe admires take money from the same guy who funds Trump. It makes the "left is just as bad" defense incredibly hollow.

• The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" by Trump-loving right-wing extremist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who, like Pinker, Haidt, McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams is on the Board of Advisors of the (I believe) Christopher Rufo-founded, right-wing anti-CRT-scam FAIR for all. Ungar-Sargon's is the second "anti-racism is bad" piece in Persuasion's "Most Popular" list which should tell you exactly who is reading Persuasion. Her article spews the usual bullshit about the 1619 Project ("it's postmodern!") you can expect from the Quillette/IDW gang of goons and ghouls. Even if she takes money from Newsweek instead of Quillette.

• The Rittenhouse Verdict Shouldn't Have Been a Surprise - by contemptible infamous transphobe Jesse Singal, also on the Koch payroll.

Pinker has published two articles in Persuasion. The most recent is from this month and continues his current project of presenting himself as the arbiter of Rationality while promoting race pseudoscience as calm, cool reason.

I've long noted that Pinker is a weasel, so it is no surprise that he compares those who disagree with race pseudoscience to members of QAnon:

QAnon might be likened to a live action role-playing game, with fans avidly trading clues and following leads. Its progenitor, Pizzagate (according to which Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizzeria), also had a make-believe quality...

...Many of us are nonplussed by this way of thinking. It’s one thing to believe that Hillary Clinton is a morally compromised person—everyone is entitled to an opinion—but it’s quite another thing, and completely unacceptable, to express that opinion as a fabricated factual assertion.

But it’s our mindset that is exotic and unnatural. For many of us, it’s the dividend of a higher education which has imparted the sense that there is a fact of the matter about states of the world; that even if we don’t know it, there are ways of finding out; and that, as Bertrand Russell put it, “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Indeed, one could argue that this mindset is the most important dividend of higher education.

Or at least, it used to be. Here's another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites. These include the belief that we are born blank slates, that sex is a social construction, that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism, that the source of all problems in the developing world is European and American imperialism, and that repressed abuse and trauma are ubiquitous.

In spite of my best efforts, Pinker is not known primarily as a promoter of race pseudoscience, but his belief about race and racism is the same as that of Amy Wax, who is well-known as a racist.

Let's review:

Steve Pinker: 

...another candidate for a mythology zone: the sacred creeds of academic and intellectual elites... that every difference in the social statistics of ethnic groups is caused by racism...

Amy Wax:

The centerpiece of wokeness is that all disparities, all group disparities, are due to racism, racism, racism, racism.

How is what Pinker said any different from what Wax said? I see no difference in content, only a difference in style.

Although Pinker gives an extra little weasel twist by portraying his racism as pure rationality, opposed to those crazy myth-loving "elites."

And note that Pinker's term "sacred creed" is very close to the term "sacred values" used by  Quillette Associate Editor Bo Winegard, a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience and even an advocate of national ethnicity quotas (you know, like the Nazis were.) Pinker is on the record as admiring Bo Winegard and his twin brother Ben.

Steven Pinker is the genteel mask of the hardcore racism that Amy Wax shouts from the rooftops.

And that's why Steven Pinker is more pernicious than Amy Wax and that's why this blog focuses on media-darling/sacred cow celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker and not on the more obviously racist Amy Wax.