Right-wing racists flipping out again because I created infographics

Obviously I'm never going to understand the thought processes of the racists who gather round Steve Sailer at Unz ~ so I despair of ever understanding why they have such a phobia about information in graphic format.

My graphics about Steven Pinker are the subject of controversy over at Unz. But the information I presented is virtually the same as the information that Bari Weiss presented in her Intellectual Dark Web article, connecting Steven Pinker to extremists:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

And yet they don't seem to think the Weiss article is crazy.

One of my Unz reader critics took exception to my criticizing the art of Sophie Blackall - but presumably doesn't mind that Steven Pinker devoted an entire chapter in "The Blank Slate" to ranting about modern art. 

You can't expect consistency from those wacky "race realists."

As anyone could have predicted Steven Pinker and Pinkerite Jesse Singal go the full Quillette

Look it's the gang from Unz.

Given Singal's well-known transphobia, and given that bashing trans people is one of Quillette's favorite activities - it was not only inevitable but I wonder what took him so long to start working with Quillette.

Quillette and Steven Pinker have long had a mutual admiration society, but this is the first time I am aware that Pinker has a byline in Quillette.

The text in the Pinker diagram will be updated to reflect his intensified connection to "race realism."

Infamous eugenics proponent Toby Young lists members of the race realism gang.

Young celebrates Pinker going the full Quillette.

The Tulsa massacre and the "race science" project of erasing American history

The "biosocial criminologists" I have written about on this blog believe that "black" people are innately more criminal than other "races." The most outspoken of the biosocial criminologists, John Paul Wright, explains the belief system in a book called  Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Kevin M. Beaver and Anthony Walsh:

It is clear that the main driver of "biosocial criminology" is to argue that the economic underachievement and related crime of blacks in the US is due to their inferior genetics. John Paul Wright again:

It's no surprise then that the hereditarian approach to American history is to try to erase it. Because if you erase it, you wipe out the evidence of what happened when blacks managed to prosper: the Tulsa massacre. It's clear that whites in Tulsa targeted blacks not because they were criminals but because they were uppity - they were too successful. And the white majority had the numbers to destroy them.

The predominantly black district of Greenwood in Tulsa had a commercial district so prosperous that it was known as "the Negro Wall Street" (now commonly referred to as "the Black Wall Street").[21] Blacks had created their own businesses and services in this enclave, including several grocers, two newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and numerous churches. Black professionals, including doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy, served their peers. Because of residential segregation in the city, most classes of blacks lived together in Greenwood. They selected their own leaders and raised capital there to support economic growth. In the surrounding areas of northeastern Oklahoma, blacks also enjoyed relative prosperity and participated in the oil boom.

Razib Khan and the race science project to deny history

Although Razib Khan posted this article on Medium on July 4 of this year, I didn't see it until today. It confirms exactly what I have been noticing about proponents of race science - they think that genetics tells us more about human culture than the historical record:

And yet genetics can shed light on historical patterns. Unlike written text genetics is neutral. It does not present a particular narrative or agenda. 

That's his bold emphasis in the original. This is the underlying justification for the erasure of history that allows Khan and Sam Harris and Charles Murray to assume that failure of blacks to thrive in the US has nothing to do with 300 years of slavery, a hundred years of apartheid and fifty years of discrimination but rather their own genetic inferiority.

As usual with Khan his essay is a combination of no-duh ("Much of the wealth of the kingdom which the planters were building unfortunately consisted of slaves") and ideas he either is unwilling to express clearly, or lacks the literary ability to express clearly:

While Indiana was settled mostly from the South, there were far more Yankees who founded towns in Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Ohio and Illinois were both divided between a northern portion settled from New England, and a southern expanse dominated by Scots-Irish “Butternuts.” 

All this seems clear in the genetic results. Now we can quantify the differences. Illinois is tilted a bit to the northern migrants. Ohio somewhat to the southern ones. Historical debates can be resolved through genetic analyses!

Nowhere does he say what "historical debates" he thinks are resolved through genetic analyses. Is that oversight a deliberate dog whistle for other race science proponents? Or is it just the output of a lousy writer who lacked a professional editor?

At the end of the essay, Khan is all enthusiasm for the Triumph of the DNA Test:

Over the next few years tens of millions of more Americans will obtain direct to consumer genetic tests. The database will grow larger and larger. Many demographic questions related to the history of this country will not need to be explored through reconstruction of texts and laborious perusal of letters and court documents. Rather, scientists will simply scan through the pedigrees they construct from human genomes, and synthesize their results with the rich assortment of resources already available from the fields of genealogy and history.

This time the bolded emphasis is mine. To realize the silliness - or the hidden agenda - of that bolded sentence one needs only reflect for a moment: genomes don't tell us that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 or how many lynchings were perpetrated. Does it really matter if the lynching party was composed primarily of individuals with a genetic heritage of Scots-Irish with a small expression of German-French?

In spite of Razib Khan's literary inadequacy we can see clearly the tactic favored by proponents of race science: deny the importance of history because only science is pure enough to tell us anything about the world.

Now the nonsense that Khan is spewing is no more incoherent or useless than anything written by Steven Pinker on the topic of history and culture and race - it must really piss Khan off the way Pinker is well-respected and highly-remunerated and beloved by the mainstream media - here they are fawning over Pinker again in this interview at the NYTimes - while saying much of what Khan says and just as badly.

Speaking of right-wing Helen Pluckrose

I find it funny that Helen Pluckrose and other right-wing Quillette clowns believe they've proven something by getting a reworded Mein Kampf into some lame po-mo publication.

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Quillette has published John Paul Wright twice. John Paul Wright is on record as believing that black people are intellectually and morally inferior to other "races."

So what do Helen Pluckrose et. al. believe? That it's better to deliberately publish a racist than to inadvertently publish one? Or do they believe it's just worse to be racist against Jews than racist against blacks?

John Paul Wright, published in "Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research"

And here's another one of John Paul Wright's greatest hits.

And of course Quillette doesn't only publish people who push racism elsewhere - it publishes articles that say exactly the same thing that John Paul Wright says, except less blatantly.

Here is John Paul Wright pushing his extremist race theories on far-right racist Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel.

One reason I have never called Steven Pinker a white supremacist

The kind of people who support and in some cases write for alt-right garbage pretending to be centrist like Quillette like to claim I have said Steven Pinker is a white supremacist, as we see Cathy Young doing in this tweet.

I've never said Steven Pinker was a white supremacist. I have pointed out that Steven Pinker has promoted hereditarians like Razib Khan and Steve Sailer who write for white supremacist publications like American Renaissance and Taki's Magazine.

I presented this information in the form of a diagram, which the right/alt-right seems to have a phobia about. The concept of presenting information in the form of an image as opposed to expressing the concept in words seems to strike them as not something sane people would do.

But it's not certain whether some of Pinker's colleagues or Pinker himself consider Pinker, as an Ashkenazi Jew, "white."

Some of the hereditarians ("race realists", biosociologists, evolutionary psychologists, "human biodiversity" proponents, "biosocial criminologists" etc) appear to have decided that the category "Ashkenazi Jew" is a separate category from "white."

Razib Khan comes down on the side of Jews being white, but hedges a little in Discover.

...I think the different statistics are not showing us whether Jews are white or not, because that’s not fundamentally a question which relies purely on genetics. Being white is not totally uncoupled from genetics. Someone of Chinese of African appearance could never be white. Genetics is a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition of whiteness. So, for example, Middle Eastern non-Muslim populations regularly assimilate to whiteness, while Muslims do not. To my knowledge no one thought of Jacques Derrida as a non-white intellectual, despite his Algerian Sephardic Jewish background. But if Jacques Derrida had converted to Islam, and passed himself off as an Algerian Arab or Berber, he would have become non-white. 

By this criterion it is obvious to me that Ashkenazi Jews are white. They have been part of the culture of the West since the late 19th century. But note my qualification. Jews as Jews were not part of Western culture between the years 500 and 1850. Those Jews who impacted Western culture left their Jewishness behind, whether as converts to Christianity (e.g., Karl Marx was a Jew who was raised as a Christian), or as cosmopolitan individualists (e.g., Spinoza). 

** Arguably the Jewish Enlightenment, and the rise of Reform Judaism, were both necessary preconditions for the inclusion of self-conscious Jews as Westerners, and racially as white Westerners.*** 

I find it strange the Khan admits that race is a cultural category, since in the past he's described human descendants of parents of different ethnic groups as "hybrids" as in this article Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern & European hybrids.

Elsewhere he has no problem using the term "hybrid" to mean interbreeding between separate species.

Here we see Steve Sailer in a tweet from April of this year, making a distinction between Jews and whites. Sailer conflates "white" with "gentile" here. 

However, in an article published by white supremacist site VDare Sailer writes:

So that implies one-fourth of white Americans with IQs above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews. 

As for Steven Pinker, he is so certain that race is a biological reality that he said on video that to deny race reality is to deny "reality itself." But what about Ashkenazis as a separate "race"?

As anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson noted in his debunking of the 2005 paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence:"

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done much to legitimize and publicize NHAI, while remaining carefully agnostic on its truth value. In the Times:"'It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard... Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well argued-paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright" (Wade 2005). His article about NHAI in The New Republic concluded that it "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken" (pinker2006:27).   

A blogger (Your Lying Eyes 2006) reported a public talk by Pinker on NHAI ("Jews, Genes, and Intelligence"). "Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the author's hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge."   

Pinker is credited with formulating Edge's Annual Question for 2006: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea... dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?" His own answer is "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." Of his four illustrations, one is Cochran and Harpending's argument on Ashkenazi intelligence.

I think that this shows the standard Pinker approach: make an argument in favor of something but then refuse to express a conclusion, which I believe he does to give himself plausible deniability. 

But it's still unclear from Pinker's perspective if Ashkenazi Jews are a separate race from whites, or a form of hyper-intelligent whites.

Well never fear, Stefan Molyneux (linked to Steven Pinker not only by me, but by Bari Weiss in her "Intellectual Dark Web" article) is happy to declare Ashkenazi Jews a separate race from whites.

Molyneux, for his part, was very happy to be mentioned in Weiss's article.

It must be noted that Steven Pinker didn't have any complaints about being grouped in with Stefan Molyneux.

Pinker appeared on Dave Rubin's show here. Stefan Molyneux appeared here, and explains his ranking of "races" by intelligence:

1. Ashkenazi Jews
2. East Asian 
3. Caucasian
4. Mestizo/Hispanic
5. African Americans
6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
7. Pygmies
8. Indigenous Australians

It's unclear if Molyneux is including South Asians in with East Asians or not. 

It's odd that Pinker, who has no problem attacking Stephen Jay Gould in front of an audience, presenting Gould as a laughable moron as in the video I linked to above, has never gone on record, to my knowledge, to dispute the claims of Stefan Molyneux.

So that's one reason I haven't called Pinker a white supremacist - I don't know if he even considers himself "white. "

Charles Lane, Richard Lynn and the tainted sources of The Bell Curve

Earlier in this evo-psycho bros series I quoted Charles Lane's 1994 review of "The Bell Curve" but I failed to discuss before now the interesting exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books where Lane's review appeared.

The first letter is from Richard Lynn, who I've mentioned a few times in this series and who is still alive:

Lane’s second criticism of my work is that some of it has been published in the journal Mankind Quarterly, which he alleges has a “white chauvinist agenda.” If this were true, the journal would surely have refused to publish my work showing that Orientals have higher IQs than whites. The fact that the journal did publish this work shows the absurdity of Lane’s charge. 

Furthermore, of my 25 papers cited in The Bell Curve, only 3 have been published in Mankind Quarterly. To reject the whole corpus of my work on these trivial grounds reveals Lane as a bigoted ideologue rather than a serious scholar.

To which Lane replies:

As for Professor Lynn’s description of the Mankind Quarterly, of which he has been a contributor and editor for over two decades—including the period when the journal was directly controlled by the outspoken Scottish white supremacist Robert Gayre—it is laughable. I didn’t try to discredit his “whole corpus” of work based on this association. Rather, I made a critique of specific points based on my reading of the evidence. In this connection, it is noteworthy that Professor Lynn does not attempt to defend his spurious claim that the average IQ of black Africans is only 70—a refutation of which occupied a considerable part of my article.

The other letter is from then president of the Pioneer Fund itself, Harry F. Weyher which concludes:

I will not comment on the balance of the review except to note that it seems about the same quality as the foregoing. Charles Murray has appropriately called this book review “McCarthyism” (Wall Street Journal, December 2, 1994). 

Harry F. Weyher
President
The Pioneer Fund
New York City

Weyher died in 2002, but Murray is still alive, as I illustrated yesterday.

Lane's response was in part:

Still, if Mr. Weyher is suggesting the Pioneer Fund has never opposed racial integration he is being disingenuous. He was personally recruited by Wickliffe Draper to help the Pioneer Fund at a time when Mr. Draper was preparing to wage scientific battle against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Later in that same decade, the Fund financed spurious research into chemical means of separating white donors’ blood from that of blacks’ in blood banks. This year, Mr. Weyher, who now operates the Fund more or less single-handedly, said in an interview with GQ: “That decision [Brown] was supposed to integrate the schools and everybody said we’d mix ’em up and the blacks’ scores would come up. But of course they never did. All Brown did was wreck the school system.”6 

The same article’s author wrote that “the fund’s hereditarianism forms a kind of dogma that leads it to venture well away from strictly scientific topics to shape the larger debate over policy implications. Weyher freely admits that he would like to eliminate what he calls “Head Start-type” programs. But, to judge by the grants that it has made, the fund’s administrators are also interested in limiting immigration, stopping busing, reversing integration, and ending affirmative action.”7

The hostility towards helping poor children is a common theme of the hereditarians, and in an interesting piece in April of this year in Vox, Matt Yglesias writes:

The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.

Murray’s critics are frequently accused of mischaracterizing him, so I want to quote, at length, what he says the upshot of this is (emphasis in the original):

We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. 

The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe. 

The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will — again, on the average — have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.

These claims about the baleful impact of social assistance spending are not uncontroversial claims about science. Indeed, they are not claims about science at all. And since they constitute what Murray himself views as the upshot of his book, and because Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist, it is correct and proper for fair-minded people to read the book for what it actually is: a tract proposing the comprehensive revision of the American welfare state along eugenicist lines.

Steven Pinker has steadfastly refused to admit to agreement with the Bell Curve's assessment of African Americans, while at the same time suggesting that Bell Curve's critics are unfair. We see him doing the same thing with Richard Lynn, which I will get to next.

Steven Pinker, defending "The Bell Curve" by linking to an article in Quillette, written by
admitted proponents of "human biodiversity" which defends statements about race and intelligence in "The Bell Curve" by stating: Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations." One of the authors thanks Pinker for his support.

Charles Murray - another member of the "intellectual dark web"

Like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, Charles Murray is also a fan of alt-right Quillette, home of some of the world's most prominent hereditarians, "race realists" and "biosocial criminologists."

Murray is of course most famous for The Bell Curve from twenty years ago, written with lots of studies funded by white supremacist organization The Pioneer Fund.

I knew many articles first published in Quillette found a second home at the white supremacist publication American Renaissance - what I didn't realize was the very high number of Quillette articles are republished there.

My continuing studies of the shameful career of Steven Pinker

Yes I was very disappointed that Justin Trudeau, mon
premier ministre d'amour, would say nice things about
a racist, misogynist & lazy thinker like Steven Pinker

I've had this blog for twelve years now - it will be thirteen as of November 2.

So what was I blogging about this time twelve years ago?

Surprise surprise - I was blogging about Steven Pinker and his connection to the racist right!

I have consistently discussed the career of Steven Pinker in the last 12 years on this blog, although some years I have not mentioned Pinker as much as others: in 2012 I only mentioned him twice and in 2008 I did not mention him even once. 

2018 has been a banner year focusing on Pinker's career, because he started out 2018 being more blatant about his defense of the right than ever before.

I hope to do even more going forward, justified by Bari Weiss citing Pinker as some kind of respectability high-point for the racist, misogynist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-trans "Intellectual Dark Web."

More about Steves Pinker & Sailer

Steven Pinker included Steve Sailer's piece on why Iraqis are too in-bred to have a democracy, in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" in 2004 because of course he agreed with it. 

Contrary to Pinker's reputation as a serious intellectual, what I have found time and again on reading his work is that it is often based on unsupported and untestable assumptions, and a complete disinterest in data.

The latter is demonstrated by Pinker's claim - in the right-wing tradition - that marriage prevents violence in men, a claim completely contradicted by data, as I discuss here.

Here we see Pinker discussing in 2007 in an article in the New Republic, Sailer's piece "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" and of course he does not mention Sailer's inclination to white supremacy.

In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis' strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever." Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building.

The idea that there is a reverse correlation between cousin marriage and democracy is easy enough to debunk, as I did when writing about "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" - by looking at the existing data on cousin marriage.

But as we have seen in the case of the magic of marriage, Pinker isn't interested in data if it's going to contradict his favorite sociobiological theories. 

It's true that it's easier to get data now on such things as consanguinity by country than it was in 2003 when Sailer published the piece, but that shouldn't matter - if Sailer and Pinker expect to be taken seriously on their claims about important issues, they should be expected to put a little work into backing their claims. 

And Sailer's "prescience" doesn't explain why, although Nigeria has a cousin-marriage rate of 51.2 - the highest in the world except for Kuwait and Burkina Faso, compared to Iraq's rate of 34.3, Nigeria is a democracy.

Pinker doesn't come up with arguments for why data doesn't tell the true story and thus why he and his friend Steve Sailer are correct in spite of data. Rather he completely ignores the existence of data.  It seems as though it has never even occurred to him that there might be data out there. His lack of intellectual curiosity is astounding.

And Pinker is the shining exemplar of scholarly respectability in the "Intellectual Dark Web" per Bari Weiss. This gives you some sense of what a joke the "Intellectual Dark Web" is.

Is it fair of me to link Steven Pinker to David Duke?

In her infamous article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, New York Times right-wing op-ed columnist Bari Weiss identified Steven Pinker as a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web," presenting him as its most respectable member:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

As I demonstrated in my diagram Steven Pinker's Rightwing, Alt-Right and Hereditarian Connections - a sort of Pinker-centric illustration of the Intellectual Dark Web published a month before Weiss's article - Pinker has connections to Molyneux and Alex Jones (Infowars), thanks primarily to his promotion of and admiration for Quillette, a web site founded by Claire Lehmann, contributor (along with Mike Cernovich who does not appear in my diagram) to Canada's far-right Rebel Media.

Bari Weiss also admires Quillette.

Weiss thanked by frequent Quillette contributor Andy Ngo
identified as a "free speech grifter" in this excellent GQ article.

I have been accused by Pinker fans of smearing Pinker in my diagram through guilt-by-association.

My diagram is a quick and handy guide, a picture being worth a thousand words and all, but it isn't the whole story. I included a text-based explanation with the diagram, justifying the Pinker connections, but Pinker's fans are inclined to be intellectually slothful and shallow - much like Pinker himself - and they just can't be bothered to read what I have written, much less come up with actual arguments.

In my original Pinker diagram there are four degrees of separation in the shortest route between Pinker and white supremacist David Duke, currently being portrayed by Topher Grace in Spike Lee's new movie BlackKKlansman, as in: Pinker to Quillette to (three Quillette authors) to Stefan Molyneux to David Duke.

But I explained in the footnote of my diagram, I don't include all the inter-connections for the sake of clarity. But this time, I am presenting the most direct connection between Pinker and Duke. And this time I included the text explanations so that even the laziest Pinker fan cannot miss them. You can click the image to see the PDF version.

I think it's likely that Steven Pinker is, on a personal level, even more right-leaning than his public persona would indicate. I think he reigns in his more extreme opinions (and so do some of his fans) because, I believe, Pinker is foremost a careerist. Which is why we see, for example, Pinker bragging about his meeting Justin Trudeau even though many members of the Intellectual Dark Web hate Trudeau, especially Pinker's good buddy Claire Lehmann.

Their hatred of Trudeau, a proud feminist, is what you would expect from people who have a seething, bitter hatred towards feminists. Lehmann herself not only hates feminists but is a straight up misogynist. So is her fellow Rebel Media contributor Gavin McInnes.

Apparently the Quillette gang has begun podcasting. All the more reason I need to start a podcast examining the "Intellectual Dark Web."

Steven Pinker, still shilling for trashy alt-right Quillette

Pinker is such a contemptible alt-right friendly creep. And please note that professional racist Steve Sailer, whose career Pinker has promoted over the years, likes this tweet.

Shameless alt-right Claire Lehmann's shameless Quillette censors me again

Once again those snowflakes at Quillette have shown that they lie about their devotion to free speech and they can't tolerate criticism.

I blogged a few months ago how they censored my comments on an article by Koch brothers hack Johnny Anomaly. Well they did it again. Luckily there is the Wayback Machine to help dig up old censored comments.

This was an article entitled "Why Women Don't Code" because Quillette supports Steven Pinker's claims that women are inferior to men at STEM thanks to evolution.

I had forgotten I had posted the comment, but apparently WordPress, which is still new to me, has a messaging channel that shares your comments from other WordPress sites, so  when I was tinkering around on a WordPress site I saw the responses to my comment there. 

But when I went to the original article I found my comment had been removed - and all the Quillette misogynist dude-bros' comments in response to mine were removed too. 

The only evidence in the original article's comment thread that I had ever written anything was some jerk mentioning me by my display name, presumably because his comment was posted separately from the thread under my original comment.

Some of the creeps claimed PHP isn't actual coding. Of course it is coding as the Wiki says:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (or simply PHP) is a server-side scripting language designed for Web development, but also used as a general-purpose programming language. 

And the Wiki entry for "coding" classifies script languages as programming languages. By any standard PHP - and PHP in tandem with a MySQL backend is coding.

But one of the main goals of Quillette, in keeping with Claire Lehmann's toxic misogyny, is to constantly attack and deride women as losers and morons. This attitude of Quillette & Claire Lehmann comes through in its editorial decisions and so Quillette attracts hard-core misogynists who are happy to participate in Claire Lehmann's campaign of contempt for women.

I don't claim to be a professional compiled languages programmer - I am a technical writer, new media producer and playwright who happens to do some coding on the side for my various projects. So even women who aren't professional coders can do it, when they need to do it.

I feel sorry for any women who have such low self-esteem that they read or contribute to Quillette. They must really hate themselves. And have a high tolerance for bullshit and hypocrisy.

Blocked by Steven Pinker

I don't know what I posted to Pinker's Twitter that made him block me - I had been posting critical things for years, and it had been days since I had checked Pinker's Twitter when I found I was blocked.

Pinker is a big booster of the alt-right Quillette which likes to pretend it favors vigorous debate about all kinds of ideas but what Quillette and Pinker really want is a safe space, a space safer than anything dreamed up by the most fragile social justice warrior snowflake, a space where the claims about race and gender promoted by Pinker and Quillette are never, ever critically examined.

Bootless

Here is MLK saying exactly what I said throughout my evo-psycho bros series. Of course he said it long before I did, but I hadn't heard of him saying these things. Not that my observations about the state of African Americans being the descendants of people who had nothing and were given nothing were especially hard to come by, anybody looking at the historical record could see what I saw. King adds the point that many white immigrants were given land out West, while the recent descendants of the enslaved were not.

When the evolutionary psychologists and human biodiversity proponents and socio-biologists and biosocial criminologists claim that black people are innately inferior they often use African Americans' crime rates to make their case. But the only way they can maintain their belief that the AA crime rate is a genetic inheritance is DELIBERATE IGNORANCE. 

And those are the people whom Steven Pinker has supported for well over ten years now.

Steven Pinker, Quillette, and the Trump supporter dark triad

Some of Steven Pinker's fanboys took offense over my connecting Pinker to various alt-right types.

But if anything Pinker continues to confirm his connection to the alt-right, such as his most-recent promotion of alt-right Quillette. But then, Quillette, fellow promoters of "race realism" are big fans of Pinker too.

Less than a year ago, Quillette's founder Claire Lehmann appeared in a video together with alt-right extremist Gavin McInnes in support of the alt-right's favorite victim James Damore. 

Of course Steven Pinker is also a defender of Damore, but he'd have to be since Damore's memo is simply a regurgitation of Pinker's own evolutionary psychology theories, much like Larry Summers' speech informing women of their STEM inferiority - at a conference on women in STEM careers - was.

What Pinker and his crowd represent is the resentment of white men, most clearly demonstrated by Trump voters, whom, a study in the news today indicates, are not worried about money but instead are worried about status:

Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women...

Although Quillette doesn't conspicuously support Trump, Ezra Levant, former employer of Claire Lehmann and Gavin McInnes, does. And McInnes can be seen claiming that Trump's election signaled a return to "masculinity."

The Toronto van massacre was perpetrated by a member of the mens' rights movement, apparently an "incel" who admired that other male supremacy champion, mass-murderer Elliot Rodger.

But meanwhile Claire Lehmann's buddy Gavin McInnes is trying to push the idea that the real enemy is Islam.

So Pinker & Lehmann promote the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men, Lehmann's Quillette, enthusiastically supported by Pinker, promotes the idea that blacks are intellectually inferior to everybody else, and McInnes (with help from "new atheists" like Sam Harris) promote the idea that Islam is worse than other religions. 

The Trump-supporter dark triad in a nutshell.

More on SPLC's article about the Right

In my excitement over the Southern Poverty Law Center's mention of Sam Harris I neglected to mention the Steven Pinker connection.

The article that mentions Harris is focused on pathways into the alt-right, based on evidence provided in an alt-right discussion group:

The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin (McInnes),” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglin at them.” 

The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”

...

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

Here is the chart provided by SPLC below. It doesn't surprise me at all that many of the names who influenced those joining the alt-right also appear in my diagram Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections: Jared Taylor, Stefan Molyneux, Gavin McInnes, VDARE, Taki's Magazine, Richard Spencer, Steve Sailer and with my updated chart, Sam Harris. I find it especially interesting that Harris and Sailer have the same number of citations.

The SPLC is only reporting the data collected at this right-wing group, but Sam Harris considers reporting the data a sign of the "stupidity" of SPLC.

And of course science racism promoting ninnies like alt-right Claire Lehmann (also on my Pinker chart) are going to support Harris.

Harris's tweet refers to Maajid Nawaz who sued the SPLC for calling him an anti-Muslim extremist, but I doubt he believed he could win - the SPLC calling Nawaz an anti-Muslim extremist was an opinion. And they have plenty of reporting about Nawaz to back them up. But even if they didn't, the fact remains that opinion is protected by the First Amendment in the United States. 

I think Nawaz's real goal was to hurt SPLC financially. Certainly his fans at InfoWars would love that. Back in 2015 Nawaz had no problem with InfoWars as Glenn Greenwald discovered.

Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, version 2

I have added Sam Harris to the chart in honor of his shout-out at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The PDF version is available here.

Click the image to see a larger version.

The series on "evo-psycho bros."
https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

1. https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros
   
   

   What are hereditarians?

   Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.
   
   
   "Hereditarian" - an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics.
   
   
   https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian
   
   
   Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:
   Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin...
   
   
   https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf
   
   
   Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."
   
   

   Steven Pinker

   Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
   
   
   https://stevenpinker.com/biocv
   
   

   The Blank Slate

   Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians.
   Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that.
   
   
   ...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this...
   
   
   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2
   
   

Even newer at Quilbert - alt-right Claire "free speech" Lehmann wants SPLC sued

Alt-right Claire Lehmann likes to shamelessly proclaim that Quilbert is a beacon of free speech in the world.

But the minute the Southern Poverty Law Center reports the truth about hereditarian racialist Sam Harris she wants to sue the organization. 

In other alt-right Claire Lehmann news, Lehmann thinks that women are too stupid to handle engineering.

Here is what the Southern Poverty Law Center said about Harris:

The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence. 

Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.” 

For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’”

Presumably Claire Lehmann is just too ignorant to know how libel laws work in the United States, and too lazy to make an effort to find out. But in fact the United States actually does stand for free speech, and so there's no way the SPLC could be sued for any of this. Any more than I can be sued for documenting Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections.

Speaking of which, now that Sam Harris has gotten a shout-out from the SPLC I am now duty-bound to update my Pinker chart and add Sam Harris. Pinker is a firm supporter of Harris, which makes sense since they are at about the same intellectual level and support scientific racists.

Stefan Molyneux, gigantic misogynist

Image from We Hunted the Mammoth

Dave Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth reminds us of what a horrible misogynist Stefan Molyneux is. So of course evo-psycho bros have appeared on his video channel - John Paul Wright, Brian Boutwell and Kevin Beaver and Richard Lynn, as well as Jordan Peterson and Michael Shermer and Ezra Levant. 

The only bigger Canadian misogynist than Molyneux is Gavin McInnes.