HEAVENS TO MERGATROYD! This blog is twenty years old!

Yes the name of this blog was inspired by
one of Snagglepuss's favorite exclamations.

My first blog post was not very inspiring: 

I'm still working out the kinks, come back later, it will be better. Thanks.

Back in those days we thought that George W. Bush was, and ever would be, the worst president of the United States. 

All these years I've been hogging the domain name mcclernan.com for myself, in spite of having many relatives, close and distant, who share the name. But so far nobody has complained.

I recapped the first ten years, back in 2015. Obama was president then, so things were looking up from the Bush years. 

So what's happened since November 2015?

I was blogging pretty heavily from 2015 through 2018, averaging about 300 blog posts per year, more or less. But blogging fell way off in 2019, when I only managed 59 posts and after that only managed 42, 28, 23, 29 and 34 posts each year after that. This year I have 43 posts, counting this one, so far. 

The reason blogging dropped off so much on Heavens to Mergatroyd is at least partly because I started my blog Pinkerite and instead of writing about politics and especially race pseudoscience on this blog, I started writing about those things over on Pinkerite instead.

I see that in 2015 I expressed my admiration for the feminist writer Sady Doyle who since then became Jude Doyle. I mentioned him in January of this year in a blog post on Pinkerite. 

2016 started out on a high note when I moved from Astoria back to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side in a quaint hundred-year-old walkup. Then I moved out thanks to unpleasant neighbors in 2021. 

Trump was elected. I immediately became interested in Canada and in the French language. I had been in Canada once, in 2005, before I started this blog. Since Trump was elected I visited Canada in 2017, 2018,  twice, then not again until January of this year. 

Part of the reason for the gap, I think, was because Biden defeated Trump in 2020, and I didn't feel as much of an urge to get out of the United States during that time. But when Trump was elected again in 2024, I went to Montreal during the inauguration, just to be out of a country full of morons who voted for a rapist fascist disgusting felon psychopath, clearly in the early-mid stages of dementia. 

And of course there was Covid.

In the past ten years I traveled to France and Slovenia.

I've written about learning French quite a few times. Thanks to my French studies I ended up learning more about Peppa Pig and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic than someone my age would ever expect to know. Dear god I know so much about My Little Pony now.

I  also created my own animations in French, but they are pig and pony-free.

I discovered Murderbot, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. I knew J. D. Vance was a creep in 2016.

I've continued to express my appreciation for the Beatles and in particular for Paul McCartney in the past ten years. 

I've memorialized Earl Rich, a friend of mine who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1997, several times on this blog.

Quite a few people I have known have died in the past ten years. My childhood arch-enemy John Sayers, my young adulthood arch-enemy Laura Garth, my actor friend Tony White, another actor friend Doug Rossi, my college friend Geri Tuckett. And of course my cats, poor Miss Willow and poor Mr. Fuzz. But at least my cats lived about as long as cats normally live, the other people I mentioned here died before their time. Since my cats died, I've switched to caring for plants instead.

Theater-wise, things have been slow. I only managed to eke out one production, Norma Jeanne at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic about Marilyn Monroe in the past ten years, but I've written three solid full-length plays since 2020 and am working on a fourth.

Pete Duel, Judy Carne, Ben Murphy
-----------------------------------------

Here's a funny coincidence - I've written about Pete Duel on this blog - first in 2005, then again in 2015.

And the Pete Duel Memorial Site is still going strong in 2025. The entire series "Alias Smith and Jones" is now available on the Internet Archive.

One of my favorite episodes, "The Root of it All," was quite feminist for 1971. In the episode, Smith and Jones meet a feisty woman played by Judy Carne and another woman played by Victoria Thompson. 

Well Thompson showed up in a playwrights group I was part of for a couple of years in 2022-23. I knew I had seen her name before and after Googling around I discovered she had been in AS&J - but I never got a chance to ask her about the experience. But still, it was a funny coincidence.

In addition to this blog, I've had my blog NYCPlaywrights going since 2010, and Pinkerite since 2018.

TOP TEN POSTS IN THE PAST 10 YEARS

1. Did Brigitte Macron and her first husband appear in an episode of "French in Action" - mystere et boule de gomme! - over 16,000 visits.

2. Move over Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp! - 15.6K visits.

3. Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite and also updated the diagram.) - 4.2K visits.

4. No, Erik Satie did not only eat white foods(!!!) - 2.98K visits.

5. What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is? (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite). - 2.74K visits.

6. Qui était Jeanne de Bret? - 2.68K visits.

7. #Free Melania - yes I know Melania has only herself to blame for marrying Trump, but my god, you can see what a grotesque psychopath he is in this video. No wonder, according to Trump's biographer Michael Wolff, she hates him. -  2. 22K. visits.

8. RIP MTM - I discussed the death of Mary Tyler Moore. 2.15K visits.

9. Watching Justin Trudeau talk about feminism is the most erotic experience of my life - still undefeated - 1.94 K visits.

10. Manhattan statuary - surprisingly popular at 1.94K visits.

Will I manage to blog for another ten years? Time will tell.

You can read about the history of blogging here.

The sorry state of rail travel in the United States

To get an idea of how much worse rail travel is between the United States and Europe, consider this: 

There are 334 miles between Montreal and New York City, going almost directly south.

There are 331 miles between Edinburgh and London, going almost directly south.

A mere three miles difference.

But it takes 12 hours to get from Montreal to New York. Amtrak claims 10 hours, but in my experience it takes 12.

It takes 3 and a quarter hours to get from Edinburgh to London.

Even considering that passports must be inspected when crossing the international border between Canada and the United States, that's a ridiculous difference in the amount of time it takes to travel virtually the exact same distance.

It takes over 24 hours to travel from New York to Miami, a distance of 1100 miles. 

It takes 16 hours to travel the same approximately distance between Paris France and Maribor Slovenia, which includes four countries - France, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

Something needs to be done about train travel in the US.

Fascism comes to America

I knew the United States was in bad shape when it elected Donald Trump in 2016. 

I began learning French in earnest not long after that election. And now I speak French OK after eight years.

It turns out it's very difficult to emigrate to Canada, even if you're pretty good at French. But I am looking at all possible options for getting out of the United States for the duration of the hideous evil Trump dictatorship.

Mes animations françaises

Well the quest to learn French continues - I've been at it seriously since Trump became president, since I rightly guessed he would be a disaster for the United States and there would come a time when I would have to escape to Canada, which is officially bi-lingual.

I still am only about level B2, just maybe on the edge of C1, which is "expert" level. I'm pretty confident in my ability to read and even to write in French. My French speaking ability is OK except when confronted with an actual francophone, and then I become embarrassed about speaking it. 

And as far as understanding when French people talk - I can understand French politicians and other professional speakers pretty well, but regular street French still sounds like a big mush.

But the quest continues and I've taken to creating silly videos as a learning aid.

The first one I created "Les Perroquets" was because I kept mixing up the word "perroquet" - parrot - and "perruque" - wig. And then the goofy story about wig-wearing animals came to me. Voilà.

This next one, "La Pecheuse" I made because I find it funny that "pêche" means to go fishing, as in "J'aime aller à la pêche" - "I like to go fishing," but the word pêche also means "peach." Yes I realize English has weird homonyms too, like "bat" the mammal and "bat" as in baseball bat, but I'm used to those. The French ones still seem funny to me.

Then I switched to writing "comptines" which are French nursery rhymes. The first one, "Pain Perdu" was written in a Covid haze - yes Covid finally got me at last, this past July. So I was thinking about the French term for French Toast, which is not, as some have guessed "le toast francais." 

The French call it "pain perdu" which is pain = bread and perdu = lost. Lost bread. So I came up with three verses on the subject of "pain perdu." 

It's trickier to rhyme in French than you might think, because although a LOT of French words rhyme with each other - in practice, French almost always throws out the last consonant of any given word, which means most of the words end with a vowel sound. 

 On the other hand, the word you want to use may change depending on whether the subject is male or female, for example. 

The main character in these three Pain Perdu verses is a French woman, but in the second verse I wrote "Une jour il va me rendre fou." which means "one day it's going to drive me crazy" (literally "one day he is going to me render crazy.") 

Not only did I get the gender of the word "jour" - day - wrong - it should be UN jour (but the similar word "journee" IS feminine - don't get me started) but since the person speaking is female, it should be "il va me rendre folle" A crazy man is fou. A crazy woman is folle.  But "folle" rhymes with "goal," which does not rhyme with perdu. Oy.

Since my voice was a croaking mess at the time I was making the animation (I was referred to as "sir" by the receptionist when I called to cancel my dentist appointment) I decided to use AI for the voice. And since I hate my voice even when it is not impacted by Covid, I like the results much better. 

Pain Perdue is the first to not feature le chat qui porte une perruque, but the second one to feature outer space. 

The cat in the wig is back in the most recent video, "Les Nouvelles Comptines Pour Les Nuls" (New Nursery Rhymes for Dummies.) The first rhyme is about a tea kettle, only because the word for tea kettle, "bouilloire" is hard for me to say. Like many French words it has too many vowels in a row. Although at least it has consonants. There are two French words I can think of off the top of my head - oie (goose) pronounced "wa" and eau (water) pronounced "oh" that have NO CONSONANTS. 

 And I also confuse bouilloire with two other words -  "brouillard" - fog and "brouiller" - blur.

The second rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for kite is "flying deer" - cerf volant.

The third rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for "bat" in the mammal sense is "chauve-souris" which literally means "bald mouse." I mean, really? You see a flying mammal and the thing you notice is the condition of its head hair? And I don't think non-flying mice exactly have long flowing locks either.

Also the word for "to smile" in French is "sourir" - which, when you conjugate it for first or second person singular (well present tense, they have a dozen other tenses, don't get me started), is spelt "souris" exactly like the word for mouse. "Une souris qui sourit" means "A mouse who smiles" but even though the word "sourit" in this case is conjugated for third person singular, it sounds the same - so it sounds like "Oon sue-ree key sue-ree." And yes, I spelled it wrong (souri) in my animation. And yes that is a stylized representation of the Moulin Rouge.

Don't even get me started about the confusion between voler meaning to steal and voler meaning to fly. I'm thinking of making another animation about that.

La souris qui sourit et la vache qui rit - ca va me rendre folle.

I created all the music using Garage Band, and hand drew the illustrations in the first two videos, mostly, but used canned images for the second two. And the AI voices were created in murf.ai. I put it altogether in Adobe Premiere Pro, which I am finally getting the hang of - I was pretty happy with the bat. 

Blogger slacker

Oof I've really slacked off on this blog. Mostly because in addition to a job I have other blogs I regularly update.

Meanwhile the Republican Party wants Donald Trump to be dictator. They are unspeakably evil.

This is exactly what I had in mind when Trump was elected and I immediately signed up for French classes with the idea of moving to Canada.

Hurray for Justin Trudeau!

Justin Trudeau's post-election speech: Full transcript - Macleans

Glad for Canada they still have a good, liberal leader. And it's mon premier ministre d'amour!

Will this Canadian lawlessness never end?

Canada is a country so lacking in real scandals that their news media has to get its scandals anywhere it can. It's especially a problem since Canadian media looks south and sees that Donald Trump probably breaks the law more in a typical week than Justin Trudeau has done in his lifetime.

I really think that the press holds good people who are politicians - like Trudeau and Hillary Clinton and Obama and Macron - to a much higher standard than assholes like Trump. 

Anyway, so the Canadian media takes any little thing they can and blows it up into a scandal.

The latest is that Trudeau ate a chocolate bar during a Conservative filibuster.

Just stop, Canada. Count your blessings and stop.

O Canada! The third episode of the NYCPlaywrights Podcast

I have finally completed the third episode of the NYCPlaywrights Podcast. It took forever because I interviewed six people and all those interviews had to be edited and engineered. It's actually a miracle I got it out before October. The next podcast is going to be easier, I need a break.

You can find the podcast on the web site. Soon it will be on iTunes and other podcast distributors.

Back from Canada

The name of the company means
"late night" in French, although
literally it is "bed late."

I had a nice weekend in Canada in Montreal and Quebec City, although I did too much driving again.

The logo here is for a Canadian convenience store chain, "Couche-Tard" which I was happy to see on Sunday night when we didn't get a chance to get dinner before seeing a theater production in Quebec.

Claude Montminy, one
of my interviewees.

Also because I love that logo. It means "Canada" to me as much as maple syrup or Justin Trudeau.

I've interviewed several Canadians for the upcoming podcast and it should be a pretty good episode. 

I was excited to get a chance to speak French too, and I even asked Claude Montminy, a native francophone, one of my interview questions in French, namely: "Pourquoi tu-es devenu dramaturge?" ("Why did you become a playwright?")

Although most people, even in Quebec City, speak English as well as French and will switch to English in a heartbeat if you sound at all anglophone.

The latest NYCPlaywrights Podcast is online

A little better technical quality for this second podcast. Also a special easter egg, a clip of John Lennon talking about KING LEAR and I am the Walrus.

Listen here.

I'm really looking forward to the next podcast on the theme of "O Canada!" - can't wait for my trip to Canada in a few weeks to do some research. 

An acoustic version of "Oh Canada" 

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."

Justin Trudeau plays rope-a-dope and Trump is the dope

The Canadian Kid

It was so obvious Trump was going to come out of the G7 looking like a fool.

Like so many others, Trump completely underestimated Justin Trudeau - who long ago assembled a team to prepare for Trump to throw the inevitable trade tantrum. As the NYTimes said:

The Canadians could see the trouble looming in the summer of 2016. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister at the time, found herself, along with millions of Canadians, fixated on the unfolding United States presidential election, and it was becoming impossible to overlook the gathering clouds of protectionism. 

Trudeau and team studied and learned well that you can't get down into the mud with Trump - he is a creature of mud and he has the home advantage. They are remaining calm and polite which is driving Trump crazy - he doesn't understand calm and polite.

And Trudeau set the stage long ago by being so cordial to Trump and the feckless Ivanka - Trump assumed Trudeau was another toady like the Republicans he so routinely rolls over. He thought he was going to roll over Trudeau.

If you watch the documentary "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau doing the same with the conservatives in his own country in 2012 who thought Patrick Brazeau was going to crush him in the boxing ring. They just couldn't imagine this polite friendly guy could be strong.

As this Guardian review of "God Save Justin Trudeau" notes: 

Film-makers Eric Ruel and Guylaine Maroist depict Trudeau’s spectacular victory in October as a fight, showing it was exquisitely planned from the start.

Trump of course doesn't understand planning & preparation as he famously kept saying he was going to go into talks with Kim Jong Un and just wing it.

It turns out Trump still doesn't get what happened with Trudeau, and still can't understand how Trudeau, whom Trump thought was a little wimp, just like the right-wing Canadians did before Trudeau crushed Patrick Brazeau in the boxing ring, could stand up to him. According to this piece in Vanity Fair, TRUMP SPENDS NORTH KOREA DEBRIEF OBSESSING OVER JUSTIN TRUDEAU: 

Yes, speaking to reporters in Singapore following his summit with gulag enthusiast Kim, Trump continued to lash out at our mild-mannered neighbor to the north and promised to mete out more financial punishments for allies that dare match his provocations. 

“When I got out to the plane,” Trump said. “I think that Justin probably didn’t know that Air Force One has about 20 televisions. And I see the television and he’s giving a news conference about how he will not be pushed around by the United States and I say push him around? We just shook hands. It was very friendly . . . No, I have a good relationship with Justin Trudeau. I really did, other than he had a news conference, that he had because he assumed I was in an airplane and I wasn’t watching. He learned. That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada. He learned. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. We have a big trade deficit with Canada . . . It’s either $17 [billion] but could actually be $100 billion. You know they put out a document, I don’t know if you saw it. They didn’t want me to see it, but we found it. Perhaps they were trying to show the power they have. It’s close to [a] $100 billion-a-year loss with Canada. They don’t take our farm products—many of them.”

In the movie "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau talking about how he is often underestimated. And nobody underestimated him more than narcissist ignoramus bully Donald J. Trump, the perfect target for Trudeau and his exquisite planning.

Mes deux bon profs de français

Logo of the official
French presidential web site

J'ai deux bon profs de français dans ma vie a ce moment: le Premier Ministre du Canada (le premier ministre d'amour) lequel j'ai deja mentionne souvent, et aussi le President de la France. 

Les deux m'aider apprendre la belle langue a cause du manier qu'ils parlent: lentement, clairement et tellment longtemps.

Si je socialize exclusivement avec les politiciens eloquent, quand je vais au Montreal ou Paris, tout ira bien.

Voila, alors un discours du President de la France pour 35 minuits.

The Better Angels and the War on Drugs

In The Better Angels book, Steve Pinker discards racism and poverty as explanations for black violence.

...the sheer depravity of inner-city violence—toddlers struck by bullets in drive-by shootings, church funerals of teenagers invaded by knife-wielding gangs—could no longer be explained away as an understandable response to racism or poverty.

Marvin Harris made the case that unemployment lead to black poverty. And the data back him up.

Here is the Pew Research Center's statistics on black and white unemployment.

And here is a chart from the US Department of Justice Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980 - 2008. I couldn't find a chart for all violent crime by race, just homicide

The two charts have very different ranges, so I adjusted them to line up according to year, removed the data about whites and added y-axis lines for greater clarity.

The top line is the unemployment rate for blacks. The bottom line is the homicide rate for blacks. It looks like there is some correspondence there especially post-1990: as unemployment dropped, homicide dropped.

Pinker mentions the War on Drugs:

The American imprisonment binge was set off in the 1980s by several developments. Among them were mandatory sentencing laws (such as California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out”), a prison-building boom (in which rural communities that had formerly shouted “Not in my backyard!” now welcomed the economic stimulus), and the War on Drugs (which criminalized possession of small amounts of cocaine and other controlled substances).

As I mentioned earlier in this series, the War on Drugs deliberately targeted blacks and hippies:

One of Richard Nixon's top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper's Magazine.  

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday."You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

According to this Vox article as of 2013 half of all offenders were in for drug-related offenses.

Most of the drug-related prisoners were black. And as Vox points out: "Black people are much more likely to be arrested for drugs, even though they're not more likely to use or sell them."

Looks like Nixon won his war against the blacks and the hippies in the end.

Pinker has his doubts about the crime decline and incarceration.

But the case that the incarceration boom led to the crime decline is far from watertight. 161 For one thing, the prison bulge began in the 1980s, but violence did not decline until a decade later. For another, Canada did not go on an imprisonment binge, but its violence rate went down too. These facts don’t disprove the theory that imprisonment mattered, but they force it to make additional assumptions, such as that the effect of imprisonment builds up over time, reaches a critical mass, and spills over national borders.

And he admits:

The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. 

There is an excellent movie, 13th which considers the War on Drugs part of an ongoing program of criminalizing black people. As its Wiki says:

(Ava) DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated in practices since the end of the American Civil War through such actions as criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weigh more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, demonstrating how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

So what is Pinker's answer to the decline in crime? People just started thinking differently:

The Great Crime Decline of the 1990s was part of a change in sensibilities that can fairly be called a recivilizing process. To start with, some of the goofier ideas of the 1960s had lost their appeal. The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun. A greater awareness of rape and sexual abuse made the ethos “If it feels good, do it” seem repugnant rather than liberating. 

In her New Yorker review, Elizabeth Kolbert also pointed out that:

...Pinker names thinking itself as the ultimate pacifier. “One would expect that as collective rationality is honed over the ages, it will progressively whittle away at the shortsighted and hot-blooded impulses toward violence, and force us to treat a greater number of rational agents as we would have them treat us,” 

I've already quoted Marvin Harris on the problem with this approach but it bears repeating:

To insist on the priority of mind in culture is to align one's understanding of socio-cultural phenomena with the anthropological equivalent of pre-Darwinian biology or pre-Newtonian physics. It is to believe in what Freud called "the omnipotence of thought." Such a belief is a form of intellectual infantilism that dishonors our species-given powers of thought. (Cultural Materialism, pp. 59 - 60) 

As I've observed years ago, when devotees of evolutionary psychology (AKA sociobiology) try to explain changes to human culture, which happen in a less-than-evolutionary time span, they get lost.

It appears to me that what happened was, between The Blank Slate, published in 2002 and when The Better Angels of Our Nature was published in 2011, even Pinker had realized how silly it is to try to use evolutionary psychology theories to explain art trends and so had to cast about for something else. He couldn't switch outright to another complete, coherent research strategy because that would negate much of what he had already said in The Blank Slate.

So he used an eclectic hodgepodge of theories that, while they may (but often do not!) explain a single aspect of a cultural phenomenon, don't work to explain an entire system.

The Blank Slate is by far Pinker's most influential book, the New Testament of evolutionary psychology to The Bell Curve's Old Testament. And when Pinker is oppressed by negative reviews, he calls on the evolutionary psychology brotherhood for support. We'll talk about that next.

By the late 1970s the hippies & the blacks were working together, singing about Latinas.

The Better Angels and the three research strategies

Thanks for adding to my argument about your
connections to the alt-right Steven Pinker.

I spoke too soon when I mentioned Steven Pinker hasn't tweeted a recommendation for anything in Quillette since January 31 - he just recommended the article I discussed in my previous Pinker post.

You can't tell Pinker and his fanboys that evolutionary psychology is not the same as evidence because they are True Believers and it bothers them not at all that their theories based on strict adaptationist speculations are untestable. They just explain their theories about lady brains, declare victory and then try to make social policy based on this assumed victory.

Speaking of which back to "Better Angels."

I have limited myself to just a few sections of Better Angels, starting with the preface in which Pinker explains the evolutionary psychology connection to his book:

...I first learned of the decline of violence from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s classic book in evolutionary psychology, Homicide , in which they examined the high rates of violent death in nonstate societies and the decline in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present.

In his superb paper, Materialist, cultural and biological theories for why the Yanomami make war by R. Brian Ferguson, which is like a Rosetta Stone of three "research strategies" Ferguson critiques the work of Daly and Wilson:

Besides Chagnon’s own theory, many other evolutionary biology explanations of war are falsified by Yanomami material. Consider first the pre-eminent evolutionary psychology theorists on homicide, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, who refer to Chagnon’s work frequently. They argue (Wilson and Daly, 1985; Daly and Wilson, 1988: 168–71) that competition for reproductive success is greatest among young males, and that this has led to an evolved predisposition to use violence. Their primary data set is homicide rates in Detroit and Canada, where the peak of homicide offenders is between the ages of 20 and 29. Of course, they do not claim that homicide confers reproductive success
today, but rather that this is an expression of a ‘young male syndrome’ that exists because that was the case in the evolutionary history of human violence, a point echoed by Wright (1994: 262). Maschner and Maschner (1998: 22–3) follow Daly and Wilson, and repeatedly cite Chagnon (1988), to claim that all war is driven by reproductively-oriented status striving by ‘males between the ages of approximately 15 and 25–30’.  

Chagnon’s statistics contradict this idea. A maximum of 6 per cent, and as noted earlier possibly none, of the men in his sample of between 20 and 24 years old had participated in a homicide, and only 12 per cent of the combined categories for 20–30 years old had done so, whereas 62 per cent of the men over 40 were unokai. Chagnon also tells us (1968a: 115, 129–30) that young men are likely to avoid physical confrontations, desert raiding parties, and be reluctant to attack at the last minute. On a raid, young men are kept from the most danger by older men, and are allowed to retreat first. Among the Yanomami, the chosen exemplar of our evolutionary past, killers are (by local standards) middle-aged married men.

You can read the whole thing for yourself here. It's 17 pages and well worth it.

I have discovered since my last post that Pinker doesn't only use "idealist" (called "cultural" in the Ferguson paper) and sociobiological ("biological" per Ferguson) research strategies but he also uses cultural materialist ones.

Pinker adopts "infrastructural determinism" straight out of cultural materialism in order to explain something he calls "the Civilizing Process" except he uses the term "exogenous triggers."

In the case of lessening European violence he identifies the triggers as "Leviathan" and commerce.

The Leviathan , a state and judiciary with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, can defuse the temptation of exploitative attack, inhibit the impulse for revenge, and circumvent the self-serving biases that make all parties believe they are on the side of the angels. 

Commerce is a positive-sum game in which everybody can win; as technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead, and they are less likely to become targets of demonization and dehumanization.

Or as Marvin Harris said in Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture:

In Europe, the caste system was swamped by the development of entrepreneurial contracts, the bourgeoisie's challenge to hereditary privileges, and the breakthrough to capitalism.

Harris then goes on to contrast European feudalism with Indian socioeconomics, which increases the clarity of Harris's explanations of infrastructural determinism.

But then Harris is a serious scholar.

The New Yorker review noted Pinker's limitation:

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. 

Before I get into Pinker's difficulties with the United States I want to share Marvin Harris's thoughts on research strategies.

First he defines the term:

By a scientific research strategy I mean an explicit set of guidelines pertaining to the epistemological status of the variables to be studied, the kinds of lawful relationships or principles that such variables probably exhibit, and the growing corpus of interrelated theories to which the strategy has thus far given rise. The aim of scientific research strategies in general is to account for observable entities and events and their relationships by means of powerful, interrelated parsimonious theories subject to correction and improvement through empirical testing…

The he explains what is wrong with eclecticism:

Science does not set out from a concern with what sometimes happens; science sets out from a concern with what generally happens. Cultural materialism asserts that infrastructure generally determines structure and superstructure. Eclecticism consists of the refusal to state what generally determines what. Therefore it cannot organize the collection of data around the task of testing what can generally be expected to account for sociocultural difference and similarities…. 

Then, as if he had Pinker in mind, Harris gives an example of someone who starts out with infrastructural determinism and then switches out.

From the cultural materialist viewpoint, the chief vice of eclecticism is that it discourages researchers who encounter the least bit of difficulty from persisting in the attempt to identify plausible infrastructural determinants. The most irritating examples of eclectic retreats from materialism are those which follow hard on the heels of partial success with an infrastructural theory. “Yes, this devilish infrastructural theory is a success,” the researcher says. “But fear not, I am no devil worshiper. The fact that an infrastructural component was dominant here, does not mean that infrastructure is dominant everywhere.”

Which is what Pinker does and we will look at that next.

I made a podcast

I discuss increasing Canada-America friendships in this podcast.

Not talking about evo-psychos though, talking about playwriting & other theater topics including my forbidden love for Justin Trudeau.

It's part of Ken Wolf's Playwriting Podcast series.

The podcast I made can be heard here. 

Another Canadian Kerfuffle

I follow Gerald Butts on Twitter but I guess I was too absorbed in fighting with Quillette to notice the controversy with Quillette's spiritual father alt-right Ezra Levant.

This must have made Ezra Levant's day since being noticed by Justin Trudeau is, I am convinced, what he lives for. He tweeted back:

First if you read the tweet you can see Butts' says "alt-right nazi friends of the Rebel" and doesn't call Levant a Nazi.

Secondly it's absolutely true that Levant has alt-right nazi friends. I guess Levant is counting on nobody remembering Gavin McInnes' infamous rant while he was working for Rebel Media. As CanadaLand helpfully offered: We Watched Gavin McInnes’s Full Anti-Semitic Rant So You Don’t Have To.

But oh dear god Levant must have felt so conflicted by what happened next. Of course the Conservative Party in Canada supported alt-right Rebel Media by mentioning the exchange. In the video below (I could only find a copy of the video by Trudeau-haters, don't click through)...

...first we see the Canadian minister whom Trudeau once yelled at "Oh you piece of shit!" much to Levant's poorly disguised semi-orgasmic delight - then at the end some Conservative woman mentions the Nazi quote and Trudeau's response is:

 "...when it comes to civil discourse, when it comes to the back and forth that happens in this house, it's a real shame to see the conservatives using lines straight out of Rebel magazine, and Rebel web cast. The Rebel should not be writing commentary and questions for the members opposite. They should know to disassociate themselves from that kind of politics and those kind of personal attacks."

Ouch! That's gotta hurt "Rebel magazine, Rebel web cast" he doesn't even call it by its actual name.

Sorry Ezra Levant, he's just not that into you.

Although all of Canada must be aware at this point of the cavalcade of racists and nazis and alt-right feminist-haters like Claire Lehmann who like to hang out at Rebel Media.

I discover more about Canada: meet Tabatha Southey & Jonathan Kay's mom

I didn't even know who Justin Trudeau was until he came to the United States in early 2016 and such a big deal was made about his bromance with Obama. But even that barely registered. It was sort of like, oh, I guess they have a new Prime Minister in Canada now and he's young and handsome and gets along well with the President.

It took the election of Donald Trump to really make me appreciate Canada and Justin Trudeau.

There were so many things I didn't know about Canada until the past year. For instance, the capital is Ottawa, not Toronto. Did you know that? If you're like most Americans, you didn't. Here are Americans being asked who Justin Trudeau is right after he was elected.

So of course I had no idea who Tabatha Southey was.

While researching Steve Pinker's connections to the alt-right I came to realize that Quillette, which he frequently linked to from Twitter (although at this point not since January 31), was not only frequently running pro-evolutionary psychology articles but was running evo-psycho articles by people who not only believe in the innate intellectual inferiority of blacks, but in some cases believe that black people are also more innately criminal than other "races." Those people happen to be American college professors specializing in Criminal Justice. Some of them had also appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel. A couple of their articles for Quillette have been reposted at white supremacist American Renaissance.

So my antennae have been out for Quillette content on Twitter, and when I came across Tabatha Southey's comment,  festooned with a Great Auk, I naturally Liked and Retweeted it. And naturally got into arguments with people who attacked her on the thread. But for all I knew she was just some random person with good taste.

And even when Jonathan Kay (who I knew of only because he ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's "Common Ground") and his fellow Quillette author Debrah Soh, (whom I had also never heard of prior to this string of events) were freaking out about Southey's remark about Quillette, days later, I still wasn't clued in.

Then I Googled her. Turns out she's a big fucking deal in the Canadian literary scene. And has been for at least over a decade. So big that according to Kay, Ezra Levant even attacked her on Sun News (the video is unfortunately no longer available.) And she in turn has written about Levant. I'm surprised I didn't read that piece, because I was Googling for stories about Levant at that time in connection with the awful events of Charlottesville.

And now I realize I have already linked to an article by Southey on this blog on January 28, a piece in Maclean's which asks the immortal question: Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person?

Which Hackette's hacks are still mad about.

Jonathan Kay sniffed that the Effin Birds project isn't funny but actually it is. I don't think Kay has much of a sense of humor though. Southey made good use of his Tweet.

In turns out that Kay is pretty vicious: he told people to block me on Twitter saying I was "Not right above the shoulders" in response to my pointing out that Quillette provides wingnut welfare to hacks. Although since he is a three-time (so far) author at Quillette, I don't suppose his response was exactly a calm and disinterested assessment of my rightness above the shoulders.

I posted that on my Twitter and asked if he's always been that vicious. I was told he was like his mother, a Canadian right-winger, except she is "even worse." 

This is Kay's mother. No surprise she's a fan of Christina "Koch hack" Sommers and Jordan "lobster man" Peterson.

I sure have learned a lot about Canadians in the past year.

Anyway, back to Southey - in spite of Kay's comment she is still quite funny. The funniest I've found so far is from a couple of years ago. I LOL'd.

For a while when I was a little girl, my older brother and I made a lot of underwear jokes. We were like the George Burns and Gracie Allen of undergarments, only loud, and our routines were mostly just one of us saying the word "underwear," and the other one laughing; anyone else saying the word "underwear" could easily set us off as well.
Getting us dressed in the morning took forever. Trips to the laundromat were so gleeful, it was like the dryers emitted laughing gas. Finally, my poor mother reached the end of her knicker-quip tether, and this is what she did: One Saturday morning she took all the underwear in the house: mine, my brother's, hers and my dad's Y-fronts – a cotton comedy cornerstone right there – and she put them all on my parents' bed and basically said, "You have until sundown, go nuts." And that's what we did, and then, almost miraculously, we were done with underwear. 

And so I'm going to offer the world a chance to do much the same now. World, you have one week to make Hot Justin Trudeau jokes, and enjoy sexy-world-leader innuendo with impunity. Please make the most of this week and then, come Nov. 1, let's be done with this. 

You want to say, "Whoa, I'd respect his arctic sovereignty," this is your moment.
Dying to shout, "Man, I'd enter that into my Hansard," when images of Justin Trudeau come on the TV screen at your local bar, you go right ahead. 

Any journalists thinking of asking, "Hey, soon-to-be-prime mister, did it hurt when you fell from heaven, and do you feel that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affected your rate of descent?" at Mr. Trudeau's next press conference, this is your time. 

Want to comment, "I know he's prime minister but he's welcome to be chief of my staff" on the next news article you see speculating about the Trudeau cabinet picks, by all means, do so now. 

Ditto "I'd like to be first past his post," and "I'll bet that's a right honourable member."

Although perhaps my laugh was partly out of guilt since I have been known to say that Justin Trudeau can eat my poutine any time.

And this piece about Damore is brilliant.

While he’s hardly alone, Damore’s laborious effort provides indisputable evidence of the attitudes that many women in STEM face. When a woman submits her resume, she knows it may be read by a Damore. When she negotiates a raise—an arena in which she’s damned if she does and, as the Google memo explains, too innately high in “agreeableness” if she doesn’t—she weighs the possibility that she’s negotiating with a Damore. When a woman takes maternity leave, she wonders how many of her colleagues are Damores, dismissing her as someone innately lacking the “drive for status.” 

Damores are everywhere. Great flocks of Damores perch in their offices—or worse, on the corner of your desk when you’re up to your neck in stack traces—depositing their opinions on IQ differences on passersby and filling the air with their cry of “Women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.”

Am I a centrist?

At a movie theater on the UWS
of Manhattan to see "The Post"
which I guess makes me a liberal.
In the US.

I always thought of myself as a left-liberal, but now that I'm paying more attention to international politics by way of my admiration for Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, I wonder.

Canadian writer Jonathan Kay found it highly offensive that I pointed out that Quillette - for whom he has written three articles, two in 2018 - is not actually centrist but rather alt-right and that it publishes the work of many people - people I like to call evo-psycho bros who believe that black people are innately less intelligent and even, more criminal, than other "races" justified by their transparently bad science.

At least two Quillette articles have been reprinted on the white supremacist web site American Renaissance:
On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell; and
How Criminologists Who Study Biology Are Shunned by Their Field by Brian Boutwell.

Quillette's founder, alt-right Claire Lehmann threw a fit on Twitter when I suggested that one of her favorite authors, Bo Winegard, is a hack who is riding the wingnut welfare gravy train with his laughably bad "scientific" claims about race and gender essentialism. 

Anyway, because of my unpleasant interactions with Lehmann and Jonathan Kay and other Quillette supporters I find I am accused of being on the far Left. 

They don't care, I suppose, that I've also criticized people they consider "Social Justice Warriors" also known (by me at least) as  "identitarians." I even did a series on Social Justice Warriors vs. New Atheists, on this blog. I also dislike the "Dirtbag Left" or sometimes the "Radical Chic." I argued with Rebecca Traister about Al Franken and #MeToo. I have criticized Robin "white fragility" DiAngelo and Razib "too racist for the NYTimes" Khan equally for their racial essentialism. 

In fact, there seems to be no large group of people with an online presence I can be part of because I invariably will disagree with them about one thing or another and that will end in being blocked or banned or insulted.

As far as being Far Left, I voted for Hillary Clinton which makes me left-liberal in the US. 

In Canada I would be Liberal since I would have voted for Justin Trudeau. As I mentioned the other day, in Canada they have two major parties vying for who is the most firmly pro-choice. And even the Conservative party in Canada is firmly pro-socialized medicine. So actually I might be centrist in Canada.

In France I would be a complete Centrist because I would have voted for Macron. In France they have viable Socialist and Communist parties. And while I certainly agree with many aspects of socialism, I don't think it's the complete answer.

Not helping to clarify the issue are people like Steven Pinker, who claim to be liberal, but who constantly bashes the Left.  Pinker even suggests there is an effort on the part of the media and academia to withhold "the truth" - a position in complete accordance with the alt-right.

I think this is all part of the reason why Emmanuel Macron felt he had to create a new political party, En Marche, to reflect the problem of people like me - agreeing with some aspects of several parties, and not finding a place for ourselves with our refusal to accept everything from any one group of people.

I still adore Canada though...

Sure the Canadians have their alt-right freaks just like the US, but jesus, in Canada the Liberal party and the NDP were apparently in competition to see which is the most relentlessly pro-choice!

I am really looking hard at this whole dual-citizenship thing.

Oh and mon premier ministre d'amour had long hair back then - I love that look.