Thursday, February 08, 2018

A reminder: it's all about Steven Pinker

Pinker being oppressed yet again by the elites.

Although Claire Lehmann (watch her videos on the Youtube channel for alt-right Rebel Media here) and Bo Winegard have been making my ongoing series about the evo-psycho bros all about them, it's important to remember that what this is really about is exploring the connections between Steven Pinker and the alt-right.


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.
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:
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.”