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Pinker being oppressed yet again by the elites. |
I've been doing it for just about a month now and although I already had some idea of the connections, I learned a lot more.
- Steven Pinker published alt-right racist Steve Sailer in a collection of "the best" of science writing in 2004. Granted "alt-right" wasn't a term in 2004, so technically Sailer was a far-right racist then but he's alt-right now. I spent a couple of bucks to get a second-hand copy of the book and actually read "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" and it is terrible as I explain here. If that was considered the best of science and nature writing that year then 2004 was really bad.
- When a New Yorker review harshly criticized (read it here) Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature because Pinker is an incoherent thinker (yeah I know all you Quillette readers think he's a genius) Pinker immediately went to Razib "fired from the NYT for being racist" Khan for support.
- In addition to Pinker's direct connection to the alt-right via Sailer, Pinker also frequently praises the work of people who appear with alt-right Stefan Molyneux to whine about how they're being oppressed by people who call them racists, like Brian Boutwell.
- And Pinker praises the work of proponents of "human biodiversity" like Boutwell and the Winegard brothers.
Although it's actually the hypocrisy of Pinker's statements about race and criminality on the PC video that I find most interesting and I haven't gotten to that just yet.
Perhaps Pinker's books will provide more insight.
From the New Yorker review of The Blank Slate:
From the New Yorker review of Better Angels:
Perhaps Pinker's books will provide more insight.
From the New Yorker review of The Blank Slate:
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. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."
From the New Yorker review of Better Angels:
The scope of Pinker’s attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe. There is little discussion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” about trends in violence in Asia or Africa or South America. Indeed, even the United States poses difficulties for him. Murder rates in the U.S. are, over all, significantly higher than those in Europe, and in some parts of this country they’re so high as to be positively medieval. The homicide rate in New Orleans last year was forty-nine per hundred thousand, roughly what Amsterdam’s was six hundred years ago. St. Louis’s and Detroit’s murder rates in 2010 were about forty per hundred thousand, around the rate of London in the fourteenth century. (Detroit’s 2010 murder rate, it should be noted, actually represents a big improvement; in the late nineteen-eighties, it was more than sixty per hundred thousand.)
Do these cities lag behind in “the civilizing process” because they’re poor or educationally disadvantaged? No, Pinker argues; the key factor is that they have large African-American populations. Low-income blacks in the U.S. are “effectively stateless,” living in a sort of Hobbesian dystopia beyond the reach of law enforcement. It doesn’t help that cities like New Orleans and St. Louis are in the South; according to Pinker, the entire region is several steps behind, as “the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe.”