Wednesday, May 02, 2018

Right-winger doesn't like what I have to say about Steven Pinker & friends

My blog post Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections seems to have really gotten right-winger Kaiter Enless's knickers in a twist: Heavens to Mergatroyd’s “Hereditarian” Chart of Doom.

Kaiser Enless,  "a graduate from the Art Insitute of Pittsburgh with an Associate degree in Graphic Design" is writing for a right-wing/libertarian blog called New Media Central which appears to get just as much Internet traffic as this, my personal blog.

There is some hard-core right wing-nuttery at New Media Central based on the About page:

  • Ian Erickson "...has contributed to The John Birch Society and various other websites. He had a book of poetry titled Broken published while majoring in Biblical Studies at Pillar College in NJ."
  • Jack Smith "...is a supporter of the UK Independence Party and campaigned for ‘Brexit’, his particular interests being British politics and political campaign analysis. A keen poet, Jack has performed frequently in his home town in-front of small audiences of left-wing creative writers, who he is disappointed not to have offended yet."
  • Orwell & Goode (a pun for “all well and good”) is a Youtuber, blogger, and an economics masters degree student. He personally identifies as a paleolibertarian, but extends his support to nationalist movements throughout the Western world.
  • R.C. Maxwell is the American Voice Political Action Committee’s National Coordinator. He is a Republican strategist known for using new media, online solutions, and grassroots organizing as tactics to turn districts red.
  • Isaiah Minter "...is an outspoken critic of Egalitarianism, Feminism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Black Lives Matter, and Democracy."
  • Christopher Logan is hard-hitting street reporter and the founder of Logan’s Warning. Also the president of North American Infidels – an anti-Islam political activism organization.
No surprise that Steven Pinker has fans among right-wing extremists. After all, Pinker cultivates right-wing extremists as allies, as my chart illustrates.

What's most amusing about Enless is that even though he claims I'm a paranoid crazy, he still thought it worthwhile to write about my chart.
In the television series, Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the character Charlie discovers a disturbing conspiracy at his office revolving around a mysterious man named Pepe Silvia, the only problem is that there is no Pepe Silvia; the secondary problem is that there actually is a Pepe Silvia and Charlie had simply lost his mind. 
Roll the two aforementioned fictional scenarios (with something from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button') together and you’d end up with something akin to the absurd and paranoia-riddled article by the self-avowed “anti-racist” blog, Heavens to Mergatroyd (henceforth HTM) entitled, Steven Pinker’s rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections.
It stands to reason that people who admire Steven Pinker aren't the brightest bunch and many of them seem to have reading comprehension problems. Enless writes:
 The basic premise is that Charles Murray is a bad person and that he has essentially transmitted his badness to Pinker via Sam Harris and somehow this leads people to… David Duke, or something. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense so let us read from the text.
Enless then argues with the text from the New Yorker review I quoted as if I wrote it. It seems as though he can't tell the difference between what I wrote and what I quoted - although it could be that he's such a bad writer he lacks the skill to convey what he really thinks. 

This made me laugh though:
The article then goes on to list and smear a whole number of disparate people including political comedian Gavin McInnes (best known for his stint on The Rebel), science writer Claire Lehmann (best known for Quillette), evolutionary biologist and writer, Richard Dawkins (who has praised Quillette), IQ researcher Richard Lynn (best known for his seminal work, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, written with Tatu Vanhannen), white-activist Richard Spencer (best known for coining the term alt-right), American Renaissance founder, statistician, writer and activist for ethnic determination, Jared Taylor, as well as that ever-present boogeyman of the Democratic party, Dr. David Duke.
If you actually read the article you will see that for all the people he claims I "smeared" I simply quoted from either their personal web sites or from legitimate sources which describe facts about them. Apparently to quote facts about them is to "smear" them.

You get a sense of where Enless's sympathies lie by his descriptions of Jared Taylor and David Duke.

He calls Duke "that ever-present boogeyman of the Democratic party, Dr. David Duke."

Duke's Wikipedia page:
an American white supremacist and white nationalist politician, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, convicted felon, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Enless describes Jared Taylor as "a mild-manner statistician and dedicated proponent of freedom of association."

According to Taylor's wiki:
Samuel Jared Taylor (born September 15, 1951) is an American white supremacist.[2] He is the founder and editor of American Renaissance, a white supremacist online magazine. Taylor is also an author and the president of American Renaissance's parent organization, New Century Foundation, through which many of his books have been published. He is a former member of the advisory board of The Occidental Quarterly and a former director of the National Policy Institute, a Virginia-based white nationalist think tank.[3] He is also a board member and spokesperson of the Council of Conservative Citizens.[4][5]
Taylor, like many of the organizations he is associated with, is often described as promoting racist ideologies by, among others, civil rights groups, news media, and academics studying racism in the U.S.[6][7][8][9]

It's odd that Enless accuses me of smearing Pinker through guilt-by-association since Enless himself seems to believe that either people like Duke and Taylor aren't actual racists, in spite of all the evidence, or that it's perfectly fine that they are racists.

At least we agree on one thing: Steven Pinker is most likely lying about his opinion about The Bell Curve and black intelligence:
I would posit that the reason Steven Pinker has not explained why he disagrees with claims made concerning black intelligence being hereditary is that it is politically and socially disadvantageous to do so; he is both intelligent enough and well-read on the literature enough, to know that the claims made are not fanciful and are well backed by evidence. 
So based on Enless's own views I have not unfairly tainted Pinker through guilt-by-association: Enless thinks the racists in my chart are fine people and he believes Steven Pinker is a racist too, but just too chickenshit politically saavy to admit it.

This is a fan of Steven Pinker and even he thinks Pinker is a liar. And Enless isn't the only Pinker fan who thinks so.

If anybody is tainting Steven Pinker it's Kaiser Enless.