Saturday, January 27, 2018

The evo-psycho bros & The Social Constructionist Heresy

Five races are identified here
It's a funny thing about the evo-psycho brotherhood. As I discussed before they are all certain that race is not a social construct.

And yet you can't get a straight answer out of them about race. Not only for an exact definition of race, but an accounting of all the races that are supposed to exist.

Although at any given time they can reel off a bunch of names of things they sometimes call "races" (which they also call ethnicity and ancestry whenever it suits them) as the Winegard bros and Boutwell did in their article on race and the abhorrence of racism:
  • Caucasians
  • Asians
  • East Asians 
  • Africans
  • African-American
  • Native Americans
  • Australian Aborigines
  • Ashkenazi Jewish 
  • Mizrahi Jewish
Meanwhile, alt-right extremist Stefan Molyneux -  evo-psycho bro Brian Boutwell chose to provide a scientific veneer to his racism has a race classification system showing a different combination (with intelligence rankings):
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. East Asian (it's unclear if he's including South Asian in with this or not)
  3. Caucasian
  4. Mestizo/Hispanic
  5. African Americans
  6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
  7. Pygmies
  8. Indigenous Australians.
In spite of their imprecision about the definition of race and the classification of races and the total number of races, they are at the same time certain that there is a discrete race of people called "blacks" and another called "whites" and that individuals can be accurately assigned to one or the other "race" through self-reporting and that the two groups can then be compared in terms of innate intelligence, and anybody who disagrees with any aspect of the black/white classification and rating process is a denier of reality and giving aid and comfort to demagogues.

Carleston Stevens Coon identifies six races

It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that they can't tell you what race is because they don't have a goddam clue and don't care to investigate further, and all this yammering about platonic concepts is pure obfuscation. 

It reminds me of growing up Catholic.

One of the first things that put me on the road to atheism was when, as a kid it struck me as weird that there was this God who was so important to the adults I knew (and for good reason: he apparently could send you to hell to be tormented forever if he didn't like you) and yet there was precious little known about him, and nobody seemed to want to talk about him and they didn't like it if you asked questions about him.

It seems that for the religious, God was "the truth" and that's all they needed to know and looking too closely at the truth was intolerable.

I asked my first grade teacher Sister Martin Joseph if God could do things that Samantha Stevens on "Bewitched" could do and she just about bit my head off.

That's what it's like to ask an evo-psycho bro for clarity on "race." Your skepticism will lead to your being accused of being anti-science and "promoting a false narrative" and radicalizing the alt-right and denying reality itself, with your damn crazy politically correct insistence on testability and controls and standardized terminology.

And in fact, it turns out that for all their talk about genetics and heredity, when it comes to race, the hereditarians don't actually think much about the genetic evidence of "race." I'll talk about that next.

And then I'll talk about the connection between the evo-psycho bros and the Canadian alt-right - I've blogged about the Canadian alt-right before but I only now just discovered that Stefan Molyneux interviewed Ezra Levant for his Youtube channel and it turns out that Quillette's Claire Lehmann was a contributor of Ezra Levant's "The Rebel."  And her videos about feminism are just as anti-feminist as the content at Quillette.

The evo-psycho/alt-right network is even more tangled than I realized.