Friday, April 20, 2018

So what's new at Quilbert?

Somebody on Twitter referred to the alt-right rag Quillette as "Quilbert" recently - I'm not sure if it was deliberate or the result of a rogue spell-checker, but I thought it was funny.

The news at Quilbert is that there is little new at Quilbert. In spite of professional author Jonathan Kay having become the Canadian editor several weeks ago, nothing much seems to have changed. Which makes sense since Kay apparently thought Quilbert was just dandy as it was.

I was surprised to see criticism of Kevin Williamson, but that's probably more due to his position being so extreme (he wants abortion made a hanging offense) even the Quilbert crew has issues with him. Well, not everybody in the Quilbert crew

But for the most part it's still the same old alt-right/libertarian Quilbert:
  • there is still an extreme gender ratio favoring men. Of the 24 items currently listed under "recent" only two are written by women. 
  • All references to feminism are anti-feminism. 
  • Many of the authors are grad students or amateurs, as when admitted conservative Steven Messenger reviews "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. The review is a rambling tiresome slog. It's as though the review was written by someone with no expertise in psychology but rather might have spent his entire career as a mechanical engineer. Which is in fact what Steven Messenger has done.
Quillbert's James Damore and Jordan Peterson fevers seem to have broken, but don't worry, Quilbert still provides masculinity-panic content.

So much winning, Jonathan Kay.