Getting Right with Lincoln

Initially I called my play about the friendship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass THE LINCOLN-DOUGLASS DEBATES but decided to change it to GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

The first title was a response to the Republican party's shameful abuse of the memory of Douglass, specifically when a Republican state senator of Virginia, in the early days of the ongoing campaign by the Republican Party to erase Black history, introduced a bill to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts."

He was open, however to the discussion of "history" for example "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass."

The senator had confused abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass with white senator Stephen Douglas, who famously had a series of debates, primarily about slavery, with Lincoln in 1858. This was after Donald Trump had said “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Which made it sound like Trump believed Douglass was currently alive.

But in the end I decided that too many people might not get the difference between Douglas with one S and Douglass with two Ss and so might assume the play was about the actual Lincoln - Douglas debates. 

The phrase "getting right with Lincoln" is used often by historians, as I came to learn in the year and a half of researching Lincoln and Frederick Douglass before writing the play. The phrase comes from an essay by historian David Donald published in The Atlantic in 1956, although apparently Donald originally got it from a congressman:

 as Congressman Everett Dirksen solemnly assured his Republican colleagues, that these days the first task of a politician is "to get right with...Lincoln."

I decided to use the phrase as a way to describe Frederick Douglass' gradual appreciation of Lincoln and their friendship, which was cut horribly short by Lincoln's assassination.

Also it sounds cooler than my first title, although the phrase has been used by some of the least cool people imaginable, starting with Donald himself. Although he does not explain why he finds it so objectionable that all points on the American political spectrum want to claim Lincoln as an ally - does he not understand how politics works? - he does not hide his contempt for politicians as a whole. And then of course there's the very fashionable misogyny of the time:

the seventeenth annual Lincoln Day dinner of the New York Republican Club, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1903. Some five hundred men attended--their wives were segregated in those happy, bygone days-

Even less cool is Charles R. Kesler, who wrote Getting Right with Lincoln: Why Lincoln's Conservative Critics Are Wrong. The article is valuable in that it demonstrates a right-winger admitting the right's hostility towards Lincoln, but a quick Google of his name demonstrates that Kesler is awful. He was a member of the Trump-led Republican Party's scheme to erase Black American history, the "1776 Commission." 

As if that isn't bad enough, Kelser wrote an apologia for Trump after January 6, in which he cites third-rate thinker and professional racist Steve Sailer. 

Nobody except other racists take Sailer seriously, and so I have no doubt Kesler is a racist. Abraham Lincoln does not need an extremist ghoul like that defending his honor.

More recently the phrase was seen as the title of the 2021 book Getting Right with Lincoln: Correcting Misconceptions about Our Greatest President by Edward Steers. It's an exhaustive and exhausting book examining claims about Lincoln's relationships and beliefs. Steers finds no nit too small to pick. It's not a fun read, although I do appreciate its emphasis on the fact that historians, while usually starting out from the same primary sources, often do not agree among themselves.

In a lecture about Frederick Douglass in 2018, historian David Blight used the phrase too:

...there's this old saying about Abraham Lincoln that I think David Donald coined in a 1955 essay, 50-something. And the line is simply "getting right with Lincoln." You know, choosing your Lincoln and getting - using Lincoln for your cause, getting on the side of Lincoln. What would Lincoln think? What would Lincoln have done? We kind of do that with Douglass now to some degree...

Pinkerite continues

I juggle so many projects at any given time, I'm always looking for an excuse to drop one. I think most often of dropping my blog Pinkerite.

It's monotonous sometimes to keep writing about the same old race science promoting creeps and to have to occasionally look at the toxic sludge of professional racists like Steve Sailer. Monotonous and depressing to contemplate the stupidity and sheer evil in the world.

And during the coronovirus pandemic Steven Pinker has been quiet about race science. I was beginning to think maybe he was going to drop his support for it - or at least stop talking about it. I thought I might have to drop Pinkerite or at the very least change the name.

Then Pinker joined with other Koch-supported toadies to charge the New York Times with Orwellian free-speech suppression on behalf of a controversy from way back last December.

So I spent the afternoon writing a response, Four Koch toadies defend race science on Pinkerite instead of going to the park with the other mask-wearing social distancers.

Sigh.

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."

No surprise at all, Steven Pinker defends racist crank Linda Gottfredson

Steven Pinker blocked me months ago on Twitter because, like all members of the "Intellectual Dark Web," he cannot tolerate criticism of any kind. 

But I have another Twitter account for NYCPlaywrights so while logged in there I took a peek today at Pinker's Twitter time line and OF COURSE he is defending racist crank Linda Gottfredson, while supporting Quillette, the Kremlin of race science promoters and attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center a venerable anti-bigotry bulwark.

Pinker is bitter because the Southern Poverty Law Center criticizes supporters of race science - evolutionary psychology, "human biodiversity," "biosocial criminology" which includes his friends like Sam Harris, Claire Lehmann and many other members of the "Intellectual Dark Web."

Steven Pinker is a disgusting, racist-supporting individual. But that's been obvious since he started promoting the careers of race science cranks Steve Sailer and Razib Khan.

The fundamental stupidity of Sam Harris

I was reviewing this exchange between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein recently.

 I have long had a very low opinion of Sam Harris's intelligence and so I shouldn't have been, but I really was amazed at how sharply and clearly Sam Harris's stupidity jumped right off the page (highlighted.)

How is it possible that when Ezra Klein makes a very succinct and clear argument for why Jefferson's generalization of the innate intellectual abilities of blacks as a group was obviously disproved by individuals like James Baldwin and so using the "Jeffersonian politics of difference" that Charles Murray promotes is absurd, Harris completely misses the point and instead leaps to "do you doubt people are different"?

Because Sam Harris is not very bright.

Sam Harris is the recipient of wealth and connections that has allowed him to get to the point where he can play a smart person to gullible groups of young white men. Harris rode to fame on the anti-Islamic bigotry caused by the 9-11 attacks. 

But when people who actually know what the hell they are talking about talk to Harris, Harris comes out looking like an especially arrogant poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect as when an actual security expert, Bruce Schneier, ripped Harris's idiotic ethnic-profiling scheme apart.

And so since Harris isn't actually very bright, he's going to generally come out the worst for it whenever he gets out of the safe spaces of Quillette and "Intellectual Dark Web" echo chambers. And so in order to maintain his own belief in his superior intellect he will have to keep going back to people who believe he's really smart, the people who made him in the first place - the pants-pissing bigots.

And I think that's why he has such a whiny demeanor when communicating with people like Ezra Klein - I think Harris perceives he is being bested, but doesn't want to - or is so blinkered he can't believe it's due to his intellectual failings and so Harris suspects that there's unfair machinations being used against him.

Another thing that really struck me in the Harris-Klein exchange is that Harris, just like the Steven Pinker-promoted duo of alt-right racist Steve Sailer and right-wing operative and too-racist-for-the-NYTimes Razib Khan, wants to discard what we know about the African American experience in the US when discussing blackness and race and nature v nurture. As Khan said:

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 

The statement is so absurd it took me a while to realize that in this passage Khan means we should disregard history because then we will better understand the purity of the genetic information. It's such a bizarre way to understand humans - unless of course you've already completely bought into the assumption that nature is everything and nurture is nothing.

And Harris is in agreement with this. I suspect the hereditarians think this way in part because history isn't science but genetics is. Here's Harris in the discussion with Klein:

     Ezra Klein 

I doubt that we have, given the experiment we have run in this country, given the centuries of slavery and segregation and oppression, given locking people out of jobs, out of good schools, out of building wealth, out of going into top professions, out of being part of the social networks that help you advance; the amount of violence and terror and trauma that we have inflicted on African Americans in this country, I absolutely doubt — I truly, to the core of my being, doubt — that we are at a place where any of us should have confidence saying that the differences we see in individuals now reflect intrinsic group capacity. I think that at every other point in America history where we have said that — 

     Sam Harris 

But even Murray wouldn’t say that. 

     Ezra Klein 

That is exactly what Murray says. That at every other point in American history. 

     Sam Harris 

Again, there is confusion creeping in here. 

     Ezra Klein 

There is not confusion. 

Sam Harris 

Okay, I’ll try to sort it out in my next volley. 

     Ezra Klein 

You’ll sort it out. Of course. At every point in American history where we have made that argument, we now look back — and, I mean, this is not going way back. Segregation, my mom was alive in segregation. Charles Murray was alive during segregation. We’re talking, I think, it’s within the week of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. This is not ancient history, it is recent history. 

I think we look back and say, “Man, they really had it wrong.” You quoted back at me something that I think either I say it, or the Vox authors say it, now I don’t remember, but that, yeah, if you’re having a version of this conversation again, then it is incumbent on you to say why you’re so sure it will be different this time. 

Murray does say he thinks that some combination of genetic and basically immutably environmental characteristics make it so we can’t do much about this and there just are big differences between the groups, and it’s just going to remain that way, and American politics need to rearrange itself around that reality. 

Yeah, I strongly disagree, and I disagree because of American history. That is why my fundamental criticism of that conversation was that you needed to deal more with the history of this conversation and the history of this country. 

     Sam Harris 

Okay, but even in this conversation you are unwilling to differentiate scientific fact and scientific data and reasonable extrapolations based on data, from past injustices in American history, these are totally separate things — 

     Ezra Klein
No, we disagree on what a reasonable extrapolation from the data is.

Harris then goes onto whine about how the Southern Poverty Law Center was a big meanie to him - they were not.

Towards the end the exchange demonstrates Harris's Dunning-Kruger blind spot:

    Sam Harris 

I get that, but not in precisely the ways you think you do. I’m in the, once again, having the bewildering experience of agreeing with virtually everything you said there, and yet it has basically no relevance to what I view as our underlying disagreement. 

    Ezra Klein 

You have that bewildering experience because you don’t realize when you keep saying that everybody else is thinking tribally, but you’re not, that that is our disagreement.

Harris is bewildered because he can't keep up with the intellectual complexity that Klein has been throwing at him, but can't admit - can't understand - that the problem is his own deficiency and so he has a suspicion that something tricksy is going on.

But Harris will continue to be successful because he's telling all those white supremacists and misogynists what they want to hear and telling them that they are the true smart ones, the pure intellects, unlike those identity politics people.

And of course there's always the wingnut welfare from the Kochs or other right-wingers, glad to prop up mediocrities who say what they want them to say. 

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. "

Cathy Young and the sample size of one

Right-wingers like Cathy Young like to claim I am crazy for pointing out that Steven Pinker has promoted the careers of Razib Khan and Steve Sailer who have written for white supremacist media. My providing indisputable evidence for all of it doesn't seem to matter - just mentioning the facts in a public forum makes me a "psycho" to Cathy Young.

Yet it doesn't seem to bother Cathy Young so much when Bari Weiss groups Steven Pinker in with Alex Jones.

We know Cathy Young doesn't like Alex Jones because she compared his views to those of a transgender person:

Young doesn't come right out and say that Zinnia Jones represents the views of all trans people, but what else could she mean? Even Young must have been aware that Zinnia Jones was unknown to most progressives, let alone "the average person." But Young goes right ahead, anyway, and portrays Zinnia Jones' statement as something that progressives need to understand concerning the average person, and compares that to Alex Jones, who was already world famous by the time Young tweeted the comparison in July 2017.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when Young smeared me although she proclaimed me a loser nobody. To Cathy Young it seems it's important to smear a nobody because the nobody disagreed with Cathy Young's views and "sniped at" her - ignoring the fact that 80% of Twitter is somebody sniping at someone else. 

Jesse Singal wrote that conservatives aren't really as sensitive to threats as has been claimed. But Cathy Young certainly seems to find threats everywhere, even among those of us who are obscure. A tweet by a nobody is just as significant to Cathy Young as the well-publicized ravings of a world-famous demagogue who promoted dangerous and consequential conspiracy theories.

And if Zinnia Jones is good enough to be a sample size of one to represent the views of trans people, why can't Cathy Young alone serve to represent the workings of the conservative mind?

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.

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.

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
   
   

Let's explore biosocial criminology

I feel that I've done all that I can with investigating Steven Pinker's alt-right connections, without becoming a professional journalist myself.

My evo-psycho bros series now has 86 entries beginning in mid-January up until early March. A high-level view of Pinker's connections can be seen in this chart I created at the end of the series, Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections.

I had already been well aware of some of Pinker's alt-right connections, in particular his connection to Razib Khan whose career I've been following on this blog for over 10 years. I was also aware of his Steve Sailer connection although if I was aware he had included Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" in 2004 I had forgotten.

What really surprised me though was his connection to "biosocial criminology" - I'm not surprised that Pinker is promoting the careers of biosocial criminologists via Quillette, and is in agreement with their research strategy, I'm surprised there is a network of biosocial criminologists in American colleges who, as far as I have so far been able to determine, are in complete agreement with John Paul Wright when he said:

From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality.  

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

In fact, based on what I have seen of the alt-right connections of several of these biosocial criminologists, as demonstrated in my Pinker alt-right connections diagram, promoting the idea that "black" people are genetically more criminal than other "races" is the entire reason for the existence of "biosocial criminology."

Both John Paul Wright and J. C. Barnes, frequent co-authors together and with other leading promoters of biosocial criminology Kevin M. Beaver and Brian Boutwell work at the University of Cincinnati. The university's web site includes an essay How Biosocial Criminology Can Help Solve Crimes which does not provide a byline but I assume it was written by Wright, Barnes or both, especially since it references the work of both Wright and Beaver. 

Although Wright is the most frank about the race obsession that underlies biosocial criminology (as well as how much he bitterly hates liberals), he managed to tone it down for the school's web site. The closest the essay comes to admitting the racist heart of biosocial criminology is:

The study found impulsivity, which is one of the most important traits in the development of criminality, is not associated with just one factor, but is characterized by complex biosocial makeup. This and other studies have illustrated that impulse control, much like any human phenotype, is influenced by both social and biological factors.  Therefore, biosocial criminologists keep in account both biological and sociological factors to identify behavior that may lead to criminal behavior.

Phenotype is hereditarian/human biodiversity code-word for race.

The New York Times didn't care that I had been tracking Razib Khan's career for years, it wasn't until Jamelle Bouie, a prominent black writer took notice of Khan that his beliefs became known well enough to prevent him from getting a gig at the NYTimes.

I imagine something similar will happen with biosocial criminology. Some day a journalist or maybe someone associated with the University of Cincinnati, Florida State University or any of the other colleges that teach biosocial criminology will wake up to the fact that they are harboring scientific racists whose beliefs are based on the crackpot Northern Superiority Hypothesis theory of Richard Lynn and the Pioneer Fund-supported studies that were used in The Bell Curve. 

Unless Donald Trump can succeed in his dreams of a dictatorship, in which case all those racists are golden.

So what's Steven Pinker's alt-right gang up to now?

I've pointed out on this blog that the apparent aim of alt-right Claire Lehmann's Quillette is to rebrand Ezra Levant's alt-right views: anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Left as "centrist."

Here we see Razib Khan promoting the idea that Christina Hoff Sommers and Steven Pinker are "centrists."

To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

In Sommer's case very right-leaning since her primary employer appears to be the Koch brothers via her perch at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Or as this Twitterer observed a couple of years ago:

And Steven Pinker constantly attacks the left, as when he claimed that academia and the media are "radicalizing" the alt-right when it's actually he who is doing just that. Not to mention his good buddies, professional racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, who are also pals together as seen recently on Twitter.

I predict that Pinker will continue to lean ever further right, his hereditarian views are much too popular with the right and alt-right to avoid such a fate. 

And Pinker loves anybody who proclaims him brilliant and who promotes his bullshit Blank Slate theories.

Pinker doesn't do a very good job hiding where his real sympathies lie.

As a recent review of Pinker's most recent, "Enlightenment Now" by David A. Bell in The Nation noted:

But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart.

No big surprise there. Both of Pinker's good buddies Khan and Sailer were identified as leaders of the alt-right in Breitbart by none of than Milo Yiannopoulos.

And they have allies at the New York Times. In addition to Jesse Singal, Pinker fanboy and Razib Khan's buddy, there's Bari Weiss, who wrote a column decrying rude college students as the work of the Left and "Official Antifa" which turned out to be a hoax site. As reported in Mediaite:

New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss — a self-described Iraq War-supporting “outspoken Zionist” — took a narrative from the alt-right in her newest column, and used Tweets from a phony account in order to do it. 

The op-ed, which suggests the political left is intolerant and does not believe in free speech on campus “at all,” used two tweets from a fake “Antifa” account run by online trolls to prove that young leftists were attacking new-right personality Dave Rubin for being anti-LGBTQ, despite the fact that he is gay. 

Weiss wrote the following regarding Rubin’s experience with college activists:

“[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” 

Upon clicking on the links attached to the terms “Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist” and “fascist lieutenant,” readers will find the parody account @OfficialAntifa is behind the claims — not an actual youth leftist organization.

I think it's pretty obvious that the right-wing and alt-right media have decided a good strategy is to promote right-wingers like James Damore and Christian Hoff Sommers at colleges, and when some of the more obnoxious students - or in Damore's case, not even students, just rando outsiders - make a fuss, use this to claim "the left" is intolerant and anti-free speech. My guess is that Weiss didn't realize "OfficialAntifa" was fake because not only is she a lazy, awful journalist, just like Jesse Singal, but in the alt-right online circles she travels in, there's little concern over whether "Official Antifa" is real or not - if they can get away with using fake news to smear their enemies, they'll do it. 

Naturally Weiss identifies Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers' entire career has been devoted to attacking feminists. 

And Steven Pinker makes common cause with these freaks. Anybody who knew anything about Sommers' career could have predicted she would be leading the backlash to #metoo. That's what the fucking Koch brothers pay her for.

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections

UPDATE 4/20/2018:

This chart & associated discussion has been updated with the addition of Sam Harris. You can see the revised version of the chart here:

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinkers-rightwing-alt-right-and.html 

Click the picture to enlarge.

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

Quillette

http://quillette.com

Quillette is an online magazine founded by Australian writer and former psychology graduate student Claire Lehmann. The publication has a primary focus on science, news, culture, and politics......The magazine has been praised by the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, who described it as a "superb online magazine", and has garnered support by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette

Steven Pinker has recommended Quillette articles on Twitter and said about Quillette:

...one of the most stimulating & original new web magazines. 

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/909489258918027264?lang=en

Quillette has published many hereditarians, some of whom have been interviewed by Stefan Molyneux and republished articles in the white supremacist American Renaissance including Kevin M. Beaver, Brian Boutwell, Ben and Bo Winegard and John P. Wright. 

Steven Pinker is radicalizing the alt-right

Pinker recommended to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers this article in alt-right Quillette entitled Heritability and why Parents (but not Parenting Matter) written by his old buddy Razib Khan and a criminologist, Brian Boutwell.

Brian Boutwell, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Research and Corporate Partnerships, College for Public Health and Social Justice and Associate Professor Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University, College for Public Health and Social Justice.

The article says in part:

...Criminologists (and psychologists) have been aware for some time that criminal involvement runs in families* and is also heritable (a good portion of that heritability seems to be narrow-sense, though not all; see quillette.com/#comments). The psychologist Robert Krueger and colleagues some years back, provided evidence that humans mate assortatively for antisocial and criminogenic behaviors (put differently, highly antisocial individuals tend to pair off with each other in a non-random fashion).

Does this completely explain the concentration of crime in certain families? No. Can it be safely ignored and assumed to be irrelevant? No. Just as narrow-sense heritability is a puzzle piece that can tell you something about where the distribution of a trait could be headed in a population, it also helps inform the question of why certain traits cluster in families.

Boutwell has authored or co-authored, if my count is correct 24 articles for alt-right Quillette.

Now Pinker declared the Boutwell/Khan piece in Quillette "witty and smart" but he doesn't explain how the "criminal involvement runs in families" theory aligns with why the Irish had high rates of violent crime a hundred years ago, as he discussed in his PC video:

In the case of, say, rates of violent crime, it used to be — go back 100 years, the rate of violent crime among Irish Americans was far higher than among other ethnic groups. That obviously changed. There's no reason that that can't change in the case of current racial differences

Surely if criminality ran in families the Irish would still have high rates of violent crime.

And then there is Australia:

New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788. Over the next 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in lieu of being given the death penalty. 

Today, about 20% of Australians are descendants of convicts, including plenty of prominent citizens. 

Wow, Australia must be a hellhole of criminality based on the family crime trait theory. Oops, nope, Australia has lower murder rates than most countries, including England.

So does Pinker agree with the hereditarian explanation about crime or the environmental one? He can't have it both ways, the two are mutually exclusive.

In the PC video Pinker said:

Now, if you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them, or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions. Such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent.

It turns out that Brian Boutwell has come to the "extreme conclusion" that African Americans are naturally less intelligent than whites.

Boutwell is a bit less direct when discussing African American violence but in his interview with alt-right Stefan Molyneux he references a theory by former head of the Pioneer Fund  J. Philippe Ruston's called "Life History" and associates it with "an evolutionary theory of criminal behavior" beginning around 56:30 on the video. Rushton says things like:

The reason why Whites and East Asians have wider hips than Blacks, and so make poorer runners is because they give birth to larger brained babies. During evolution, increasing cranial size meant women had to have a wider pelvis. Further, the hormones that give Blacks an edge at sports makes them restless in school and prone to crime.

Boutwell tries to distance himself from bigots, as he writes in Quillette:

It is true that bigoted people might use data about race and IQ to support nefarious political agendas, buttressing their own prejudices with scientific sounding arguments. However, the way to address this danger is not by distorting previous research or publicly attacking scholars who investigate this issue. Rather, it is by promoting the vision of society that Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated decades ago, one in which people are judged by their actions and the content of their characters and not by the average traits of a group (ethnic, political, religious, or otherwise).

The reality of racial variation cannot be hidden behind a veil of pleasant myths in perpetuity. And if researchers and moralists insist upon a noble lie about human genetic sameness, then they will not be prepared to grapple with the difficult ethical challenges that human variation in a cosmopolitan society presents.

Boutwell refers above to the off-quoted section of King's "I Have A Dream" speech in which he says:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

It's breath-taking the way Boutwell jumps from "not be judged by the color of their skin" to "the reality of racial variation" which means, in practice, claiming black people are genetically less intelligent and more criminal than white people.

So what actually distinguishes Boutwell from a bigot with nefarious political agendas, buttressing his own prejudice with scientific-sounding arguments?

Boutwell's "science" is bad. First because although race means everything to Boutwell and the hereditarians, they have no clear definition of race, and so there is no objective way to determine the "race" of any individual. Although they've learned from alt-right racist Steve Sailer to claim that this is all perfectly fine because we can't expect to have "platonic essences."

They admit to not testing subjects for genetic ancestry.

They don't admit they got lots of their data from racists. Although they did.

And then there's the Northern Superiority Hypothesis that Richard Lynn appears to have dreamed up. I've mentioned Lynn, making claims about Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish intelligence although they are genetically indistinguishable from each other.

And what about nefarious political agendas? Boutwell has no qualms about promoting his theories both via alt-right racist Stefan Molyneux, and by allowing the white supremacist media outlet American Renaissance to republish his work from Quillette.

Apparently there is nothing that a scientific racialist like Brian Boutwell can do that is racist, in his mind, not even making common cause with white supremacists.

So while Steven Pinker is pointing at the media and colleges, claiming they are inadvertently radicalizing the alt-right by denying "the truth" which leads to them over-reacting and believing that blacks are naturally violent, Pinker is sending his Twitter followers directly to people who say the very thing he considers an "extreme conclusion."

It's not the media and the colleges who are radicalizing people, it's Steven Pinker himself. Both by connecting to the work of racialists but also by lending racialists like Boutwell and Khan and Steve Sailer respectability thanks to his own science celebrity.