Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Steven Pinker has gone full right-wing paranoid conspiracy old man

For more of my ongoing series on the interconnections between Pinker, proponents of evolutionary psychology and the alt-right see evo-psycho bros.

Everything I've had to say about Pinker in the last 12 years.

Well it's like I've been saying for years, Steven Pinker is a right-winger. And you'll never guess what he blames for the alt-right - the mainstream media and "fake news."

Although he doesn't use those terms. The beginning of the video below begins like this:
...I wouldn’t want to say persuadable but certainly um, whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly-literate, highly-intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who um often are uh radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill as the saying goes, the allusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media, ah that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity and they are immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable uh and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions. Let me give you some examples. So here is a fact that is going to sound ragingly controversial but is not and that is that “Capitalist societies are better than Communist ones.” OK? So if you doubt it, then just uh ask yourself the question: “would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea.” Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany, or in the 1960s...
Pinker believes that the New York Times and "respectable media" are also suppressing the truth about gender and racial essentialism.

Now the thing is that Pinker is clearly either lying or insane. It's easy to prove that the New York Times et. al have plenty of voices speaking up for "the truth" according to Pinker. In fact it wasn't too long ago when there were no voices speaking out against evolutionary psychology as I complained about here.

Clearly another New Atheist, like Dawkins and Hitchens going the route of delusional paranoid old coot.