Quillette, home of right-wing kooks & grifters

I'm pleased to see that respectable journalists and not just scruffy bloggers like me are recognizing how right-wing and awful Quillette and its gang of sleazeballs are.

The Guardian:

In the lead-up to (James) Damore’s appearance, (Andy) Ngo penned an article for the Wall Street Journal alleging that the event had been threatened, writing that that “we expected controversy. But we also got danger.” The evidence of danger, as reported in Willamette Week, was “two violent threats on Facebook, three diversity events held on campus as counter-programming, and a scornful blog post”. 

This was more than enough for Fox News, who ran an item under the headline “Antifa targets ‘Google memo’ author James Damore’s talk at Portland State”.
Despite the headline, Portland’s Rose City Antifa told the Guardian ahead of time that no antifascist counterprotest was ever planned, and none materialized. There was only a small audience walkout. 

Nevertheless, along with spreading the video, Ngo wrung from the evening an article for Quillette, a website obsessed with the alleged war on free speech on campus. The event was also given lavish attention by the YouTube star Tim Pool, who insists that he is not “alt-right”, despite his apparent chumminess with the movement’s leading lights.

GQ:

 According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization, in 2017 there were just 29 attempts to disinvite speakers, out of 4,700 universities, and the majority of those that were successful came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as "the psychology of progressive hostility." Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization. 

Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor turned conservative provocateur, said he's figured out "how to monetize social justice warriors." Ben Shapiro, who rose to fame "owning" liberals on college campuses, sells "Leftist Tears" mugs and a book entitled How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. Andy Ngo, a conservative activist who followed Sommers around to her Portland engagements, asked for donations after he published a video of the Lewis & Clark episode, notably edited down to just the protesting rather than including Sommers's ideas. Sommers vouched for Ngo's plea for money, tweeting that "he works tirelessly promoting free expression in Portland area. Often for no compensation. Help him out if you can."

Speaking of Jordan Peterson, Quillette's favorite cult leader, the New York Review of Books has a nice piece about him: Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism:

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration. 

Nowhere in his published writings does Peterson reckon with the moral fiascos of his gurus and their political ramifications; he seems unbothered by the fact that thinking of human relations in such terms as dominance and hierarchy connects too easily with such nascent viciousness such as misogyny, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. He might argue that his maps of meaning aim at helping lost individuals rather than racists, ultra-nationalists, or imperialists. But he can’t plausibly claim, given his oft-expressed hostility to the “murderous equity doctrine” of feminists, and other progressive ideas, that he is above the fray of our ideological and culture wars.

Evo-psychos & SJWs & Brocialists oh my

Somebody named MEH 0910 is talking about me at UNZ.

He practically reposts my entire item Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer: remuneration not repudiation in the discussion under Sailer's post indicating he hasn't read Steven Pinker's latest book.

MEH 0910 follows up his own comment by writing:

Interestingly, she also has problems with Social Justice Warriors.

As I discussed in this post, I have problems with plenty of other groups besides evo-psychos/human biodiversity proponents.

Although brocialists and social justice warriors mostly hate each other, they all generally agree that the real problem in the world isn't the Right, it's liberals and feminists. 

In this, they agree with the evo-psycho/HBD gang. 

So, basically, if you routinely attack liberals and feminists I'm not going to like you.

But here's the thing - no matter how objectionable Robin DiAngelo (SJW) or Doug Henwood (brocialist) is, it still doesn't make human biodiversity or evolutionary psychology correct.

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the anti-art, anti-intellectual fundamentalism of Social Justice Warriors

Social Justice Warriors mean well. But their methods to achieve social justice are contrary to actual justice.

One of the methods used by Social Justice Warriors is to prevent others from speaking, and from producing art,  even if the speech and the art are only theoretical. 

Social Justice Warriors don't want to be accused of censorship no matter how censorious they are and so Coates has to jump through some hoops in order to try to defend against what he is attempting to do: shut down a TV show based on what Coates guesses it might be like, per his piece in The Atlantic. 

First Coates admits that it's a good idea to reserve judgment until you actually see a thing. 

But then he explains why this must be an exception:

But HBO does not actually want the public to reserve judgment so much as it wants the public to make a positive judgment.

But of course promoting its shows is what any production company does. So why should this be an exception?

Then Coates argues that because others have made pro-Confederate art (Birth of a Nation included) nobody can be trusted.

Then he pointlessly quibbles on terminology - the promotional text is "what if the South had won the Civil War"? Everybody knows this means the Confederate army. 

Then Coates says it's not the same as with The Man in the High Castle which is about what if the Nazis had won. Coates says it's a bad comparison because the Nazis are more thoroughly reviled than the Confederacy.

But this is a matter of degree. It's certainly true that the Confederacy has been given far too much respect for an organization that committed treason in defense of human bondage. But the Confederacy did lose. And furthermore, the reason that Nazi Germany committed atrocities was primarily due to anti-Semitism - and anti-Semitism still exists.

And Coates ignores "A Handmaid's Tale" which posits religious zealots controlling women's bodies. And we still have that going on today. Obviously not as much as the dystopia presented in Handmaid. But again this is a matter of degree - African Americans are still the victims of systemic racism but things have gotten better since they were slaves. 

But I don't remember anybody making a big stink about "A Handmaid's Tale" on the grounds that patriarchy has not been completely obliterated.

Then Coates goes on to say that even though the show is probably anti-racist, it's not good enough because, since there is still systemic racism there's no point in asking what would have happened if the Confederacy won.

He then admits the show has two black writers but suggests that black writers would not ever want to write a show with such a premise on their own.

As always, Social Justice Warriors presume to speak for all non-whites.

Coates then complains that the idea of the show is not original. Which begs the question, so why is he making such a big deal out of it?

I knew the idea is not original because I remember seeing the "mockumentary" CSA thirteen years ago. 

Although maybe it's just as well Social Justice Warriors don't know about CSA - since they are all utterly irony deficient they will probably think that CSA is pro-Confederacy.

More insanity from SJWs

Frank Bruni doesn't call the students at Evergreen State College "Social Justice Warriors" but that is what they are. And you can tell they are because the tactic used by the students is to:

1. Call all who disagree with them on an issue touching race "racist"
2. Shut down the discussion

The only thing that's lacking is the third step, which is claiming that anybody who complains the discussion was shut down is suffering from "white fragility."

Step 1. Call those who disagree racists:

Bruni:

I asked Bridges about the epithets hung on Weinstein. He said that such terms are being deployed too readily and casually.
“Using the word ‘racist’ halts the conversation,” he said. “It just ends it. It doesn’t explore the beliefs, the values, the behaviors that comprise individuals.”
Isn’t he, too, being characterized as racist?
“Of course,” he said. “It’s just the way discourse goes these days.”

Step 2. Shut down the discussion.

Bruni:

Confronted with a loud barrage of questions, he asks the students, “Would you like to hear the answer or not?”
“No!” several shout. And there you have it. They’re not conducting an interrogation. They’re staging an inquisition.

That is the very essence of Social Justice Warriors.

But what of Robin DiAngelo? Here she is being quoted in the Hamilton Spectator recently:

This is where I'd like to bring up white fragility. Dr. Robin DiAngelo, who created the phase, states "White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as white fragility. White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves."

As always, DiAngelo is lying about white people.

There are few whites (if you can identify exactly who counts as "white") who are unaware of racial injustices in the United States. Many white people, probably a majority, are aware that there are penalties involved with being non-white in the US.

But as always, Social Justice Warriors don't do nuance. They believe in simple explanations for simple minds.

True story: 

One summer when I was eight years old my two younger brothers and I were at a kind of day camp at the local public school. We attended the Catholic school during the school year, but the Catholic school didn't have a summer day camp. 

My brothers and I had no knowledge of the racial strife going on at that time in the world at large. My parents were not political people and so we certainly wouldn't have heard anything through them. We lived in an all-white suburb of Philadelphia. A choice of location which, I feel compelled to point out, neither my brothers nor I had any say in. 

One day me and my brothers were sitting in the grass outside the school. I don't remember there being any adults around, I'm not sure why. I assume there should have been some adult oversight of a bunch of little kids. In any case, in the distance was a crowd of black kids, around my age, maybe some a little older. My brothers and I had no feelings about the black kids, one way or another. And suddenly the black kids started chanting something like: "oh, ah, get off of our land." And began walking towards us. In my eight-year-old wisdom I said to my younger brothers: "we don't have to move - we aren't on their land. This is the school's land." So we remained seated, our own little sit-in you might say - although of course we had no knowledge of the sit-ins that happened during the struggle for civil rights in the South.

And so the black kids marched over us, kicking us as they went. We told our parents about it afterwards and we weren't sent back to the public school day camp after that. 

 I still feel guilty I let my younger brothers get kicked around because I was so naive. I had no idea at the time why those kids would decide to target us. It's clear to me now that they targeted us because we were white.

As an adult I understand that the black kids had a better idea of the ongoing civil rights struggle and that's why they targeted us for our ethnicity, while we didn't understand the background for why they targeted us. Because yes, black people have suffered horrifically in this country and were struggling to make the world more fair through the Civil Rights movement. And the black kids were clued into the struggle. But the victims of oppression are not necessarily saints. And the response to oppression often results in targeting innocents. My brothers and I, although white, were innocent of perpetrating wrongs against black people. But we were trampled on anyway. 

It's not the worst thing that could ever happen, obviously, but it's not nothing. 

The fundamentalism of Social Justice Warriors

I generally like Arthur Chu. I follow him on Twitter. I've quoted him with approval. I think his piece Your Princess is in Another Castle is great.

But unfortunately like so many other erstwhile smart and decent people, the subject of race completely short-circuits his rational thought processes.

Because when it comes to race, Social Justice Warriors are fundamentalists in comparison to other liberals. They are fanatical and constantly looking for chances to denounce others who are not as fanatical.

You can see the fundamentalism of Social Justice Warriors in action in this series of tweets Chu wrote in reference to Bill Maher using the term "house nigger" in a non-racist context.

But in the world of the SJWs, there is no context in which the word "nigger" may be used. The very sound of the word itself is a crime against humanity much like saying "Goddam" is always a sin to fundamentalist Christians. If you use the word "Goddam" you are a sinner. To a SJW, if you use the word "nigger" you are a racist. End of discussion. SJWs are not interested in context.

Others pointed out to Chu that Maher had no problem writing a check for a million dollars for Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. But to Chu, writing a check for a million dollars to a black candidate means nothing. The only thing that matters is that Maher used the taboo word.

And Chu used the word "indulgence" to describe Maher's donation. To Chu, to Social Justice Warriors, using the N-word, once, regardless of context more than balances out donating a million dollars to a black man's campaign. That is the religious intensity with which Social Justice Warriors view taboo words - they believe uttering a bad word is literally worth more than a million dollars of "indulgences."

One of the big differences between the Catholic Church and Protestantism is that Catholics believe that "good works" may ameliorate the wrath of God. So even if you have committed some (non-mortal) sins in your day and died before confessing them during the Sacrament of Confession, your kindliness and decency would weigh in your favor and you might go to Purgatory instead of Hell.

Like all human systems this one was abused - "good works" eventually became synonymous with "donating money to the Catholic Church" and so sinning was essentially monetized. The richer you were the more sins you could get away with as long as your forked over "indulgences." And so Protestants reacted by not only creating sects which refused indulgences but which also refused to count any good actions as beneficent.

Protestants came to believe that your actions as a moral human being mean nothing. In some sects they believe that only declaring that Jesus is your savior will save you from an eternity of hellfire. In other sects they are even more extreme - there is nothing you can do to save yourself from going to Hell, you are already predestined for Hell before you are born.

Much like Robin DiAngelo, the queen of the Social Justice Warriors, believes that all white people are racist simply by being born white, and neither their intentions nor their good works matter. You may have marched in Civil Rights rallies, married a non-white person, donated to the NAACP, campaigned for Obama, spoke out against a racist at work, or all of the above and you assume that a rational person would look at those actions and pause before declaring you a racist.

But Social Justice Warriors are not rational. And they are looking to point a finger at heretics. It's their greatest joy.

It would be interesting to do a study and see what percentage of Social Justice Warriors come from fundamentalist Protestant backgrounds. 

"Bitter Gertrude" demonstrates the authoritarianism of Social Justice Warriors

Bitter Gertrude, aka Melissa Hillman, who used to be artistic director for the now-defunct Impact Theatre and is currently teaching high school students, is left of center, and so we agree on much in the socio-political sphere, and I've occasionally commented here when I've agreed with her.

But Hillman, like so many others in American theater is a Social Justice Warrior and therefore an irrational extremist when it comes to race.

When I heard about the Albee casting kerfuffle I knew Hillman would be right there with the extremists and sure enough, she was. So much so that her commentary on the issue is a perfect illustration of the Social Justice Warrior strategy used against those who disagree with them.

Hillman writes:

Racism isn’t the argument here. The estate’s decision was absolutely racist, period, the end. That’s not up for debate. It’s the kind of racism that demeans the entire industry and requires resistance.

There it is, two of the three stages of the standard SJW strategy:

1. Accuse those who disagree with you about any issue touching on race of racism
2. Shut down the conversation.
3. When the target complains that the conversation has been shut down, accuse the target of "white fragility."

Robin DiAngelo, as I've written about many times before on this blog, is the leading purveyor of the "white fragility" stage of the strategy.

Michelle Johnson an African American playwright, (who also happens to be my Facebook friend although we've never met in person) does not agree that Edward Albee's estate is racist.

On the Albee controversy, I was in the minority. As a playwright, and in general, I’m just not a fan of the “colorblind” concept. As with one-size-fits-all leggings, I believe it’s a fiction designed to make some people feel better about uncomfortable realities. Also, I don’t believe the writer’s intent is a secondary issue.
“Virginia Woolf” was written in 1962 — two years before the end of legalized discrimination. Projecting modern-day sensibilities on that doesn’t change it. Talking about the large number of amazing black actors today and how many black “Nicks” should have and could have been in existence in 1962 is beside the point.
The point is, that’s not the play Albee wrote. And to accuse him or his estate of racism in wanting his play about the 1960s culture of white academia to remain as he wrote it seems as ridiculous to me as letting a white woman be cast as lead in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” a play about a black family discouraged from buying a house in a segregated neighborhood in 1959 Chicago.

So there you have it. An African American playwright doesn't think Albee's estate is racist, but Melissa Hillman is here to declare that the issue has already been decided, end of discussion, so STFU Michelle Johnson.

Social Justice Warriors like Hillman care much more about power and control than they do about actual social justice. Their idea of social "justice" is to willy-nilly accuse random white people of racism, based on faulty reasoning and even lies. I was a SJW target in 2011 and I've been watching them and their tactics in horror ever since. If SJWs ever get any serious political power they will use it to hunt witches and exact revenge on anybody who dares to disagree with them.

Bitter Gertrude on the Bechdel test and "white feminism"

And of course, like the brocialists, SJWs
lie about and smear white feminists like Gloria Steinem.

Steinem and Dorothy Pittman Hughes in 1971

Bitter Gertrude, AKA Melissa Hillman bashes the Bechdel test and pushes the bullshit racist notion of "white feminism."

Intersectionality means that every time there's talk about discrimination against women the SJWs start screaming - BUT ALL WHITE WOMEN ARE PRIVILEGED.

Which, while true in a general and relative sense compared to non-white women, does not negate the fact that all women are disadvantaged as compared to men. And it's constantly noted that the Bechdel test isn't everything - it's a low bar. But that doesn't make it NOTHING.


Social Justice Warriors are consistently willing to sacrifice feminism on the altar of "intersectionality" - and their tactic is exactly the same as that used by Berniebros and brocialists and Susan Sarandon: hold women, especially feminists, to a much higher standard of behavior than anybody else. Unlike every other advocacy group, women are supposed to bend over backwards to consider every issue before their own. That's what "intersectionality" is really all about - for the SJWs the intersection is gender and race, for socialists the issue is gender and class, but in every case feminists are attacked for being so selfish as to think of women's rights first. How dare those bourgeois bitches.

How stupid is Robin DiAngelo? How sleazy is her "white fragility" marketing campaign?

On the one hand you could argue that DiAngelo is smart - she's made a career for herself that is lucrative and not very hard - she travels around the country explaining to identitarian organizations that all white people are equally racist and the only way they can have some of their racism alleviated is to pay DiAngelo to lecture about "white fragility."

On the other hand some of the things she says are amazingly stupid. Her most recent free advertisement from the Good Men Project includes this statement:

But what if someone does literally point their finger and boldly state, “You are racist!” (a deep fear of progressive whites)? A white person who claims to be antiracist and who positions themselves as above or beyond other whites is being a self-righteous jerk, but that is on them. What is on me is to identify my racist patterns and work to change them. If the point being made is insightful to that goal, then regardless ofhow carefully or indirectly it is being made, that is what I need to focus on. The method of delivery cannot be used to delegitimize what is being illuminated or the excuse for not doing my work.

First off, this demonstrates a basic tenet of DiAngelo, that all white people are equally racist:

"A white person who claims to be antiracist and who positions themselves as above or beyond other whites is being a self-righteous jerk, but that is on them."

Apparently someone "claiming" to be anti-racist, and therefore claiming to be better than white people who are racist - is deemed to be a self-righteous jerk.

But also, and most stupidly, is her incomprehension as to why people don't like to be called racist if they believe they are not racist. White progressives do not wish to be called racist because they feel racism is a sign of stupidity or evil or usually both. And so if you declare them a racist, you have said they are stupid and/or evil.

And Robin DiAngelo finds this some kind of moral indictment, to object to someone attacking you as stupid and/or evil on the basis of your ethnicity.

Listen to DiAngelo describe people taking offense at being judged unfairly. It's at minute 5:18. Her words are bad enough, but it's the tone, especially, dripping with utter contempt, that tells you how she feels about anybody who questions her pernicious message.

"Because we hear a moral slight. We sincerely believe it wouldn't be possible for us to be racist because we're good people... and so we get very upset and defensive and we cry and we get our feelings hurt and we suggest that you don't know us and that you're generalizing."
"I actually think progressive white folks like me are the hardest."

She clearly thinks that those claiming she is generalizing are idiots, but in fact that's exactly what she is doing. Generalizing.

Meanwhile she aids those who are actual racists by giving them a legitimate reason to claim that anti-white racism exists in the United States. Robin DiAngelo is not helping the issue of race in America. Robin DiAngelo is making it worse by being the anti Martin Luther King Jr. She is promoting the idea that people should be judged on the color of their skin and not, as King dreamed, the content of their character.

The thing about DiAngelo's career is that she answers to nobody.

She is hired to promote her specious arguments about race and she will never have to face any critics. So she can keep turning her critics into defenseless straw men she can easily defeat with her contempt and her overweening smug self-satisfaction.

DiAngelo has completely accepted the mind-set of racism: that all humans are easily grouped into one of a few distinct "races" and should be judged accordingly. And she is attempting to spread that dehumanized view of individual human beings.

She makes a good living preaching the gospel of "race" and revenge and she will keep doing it as long as someone will pay for it.


More about Robin DiAngelo.


My Anti-Racist Bona Fides

Because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is my statement on racism:

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in Google search results on my name), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years.
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Swinging cats

Soon-Yi and Allen - I had to pass them because
they walk slow like a couple of tourists

You can't swing a cat without hitting a celebrity in this town. Today I went to a Meetup meeting for Philosophy over on the UES across the park from me and got to meet Massimo Pigliucci who was presenting a lecture with audience participation on the topic of morality vs. ethics. Of course he's not known outside of the world of philosophy, but he's a pretty big deal within it. I had heard the name before but I wasn't aware that Pigliucci was such a prominent critic of Sam Harris - I've been a non-prominent critic of Sam Harris for years on this blog.

After the meeting I found this excellent piece online, Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements in which Pigliucci says:

I have already mentioned Harris, who writes about ethics with little acknowledgment (or understanding, or both) of just how complex a topic it is, and how much literature there is out there to engage with. As he infamously wrote in the first footnote of chapter 1 of The Moral Landscape, “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” Why are we taking such a brazen display of anti-intellectualism as anything more than a clear mark of an overinflated ego? But far from that, Michael Shermer then builds on Harris’ point (or perhaps simply restates it, at much greater length), coming out with yet another “revolutionary” book about the science of ethics, predicated on an argument that had so many holes in it that I felt a bit embarrassed having to explain them in a public forum a couple of years ago [15].

Pigliucci goes after other New Atheists I've expressed dislike for, Dawkins and Hitchens, although he doesn't mention Steven Pinker in this piece (he does elsewhere though.) He also criticizes Neil deGrass Tyson, which surprised me, but then I wasn't aware that Tyson had dismissed philosophy. And he goes after P. Z. Myers, unfairly, I thought, although I will agree that his Pharyngula can get really nasty - but I found it much worse before everybody realized what an asshole Dawkins was. And of course Dawkins himself was a contributor to the nastiness of Myers' blog, as I found out directly through personal experience.

I also disagree with Myers on some issues, most especially his defense of identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) like Suey Park of #cancelcolbert infamy, and I tangled with him briefly over Hillary Clinton a couple of months ago on Twitter. But he's generally one of the good guys. And naturally he had plenty to say in response to Pigliucci.

I'm surprised it took me so long to really become acquainted with Pigliucci's critiques of the New Atheists, since he's especially well-qualified to defend philosophy from their attacks, being not only a long-time skeptic/atheist activist but also an evolutionary biologist as well as a philosopher. 

I came to know the New Atheist celebrities not through their various political controversies but through my disagreements with evolutionary psychology. Which I discovered via the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who criticized it back when it was known as sociobiology. 

And I came to philosophy also from Marvin Harris, through his criticism of Hegel (and the Hegelian dialectic) and his quoting Schopenhauer. In fact currently if you Google "Marvin Harris, Hegel, Schopenhauer" my blog post is the first hit.

So like so many New Atheist notions, the idea that philosophy is no longer of value, to be replaced by "real" science is overweening and absurd.

After the Philosophy-in-Manhattan Meetup, I walked home through Central Park when I was stuck on a path walking behind a slow couple in front of me. To my annoyance it was another one of these old man with a much younger woman couples, which I see so often on the Upper West Side due to old men using their wealth by buy women. But as I passed their slow asses I realized it was in fact Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. 

I once fantasized that if I ever ran into Woody Allen, whom I despise at least as much as New Atheists, I would kick him, but thanks to this natural experiment I have discovered I would not. But I still think he's a creep. And he walks like a freaking tourist.

No Jamelle Bouie, Robin DiAngelo is not helping

I was very disappointed to see that Jamelle Bouie cited Robin "intentions are irrelevant" DiAngelo in his latest piece about Donald Trump.

The first time I ever heard of Bouie was when he used my blog posts as a resource - because I had been documenting Razib Khan's racism for years -  to make a case against Khan when Khan was up for a steady writing gig with the NYTimes. I mention this fact in my anti-racist bona fides (bottom of this post and on the right-hand side of this blog.)

Thanks to social media, there are times when people are falsely smeared as racists - I have had that very thing happen to me. The thinking seems to be that because black people have been treated horribly on the basis of their ethnicity, it's now appropriate to turn the tables and treat white people badly on the basis of their ethnicity. You can casually smear a white person as racist, for any reason, if you feel like it because black people have suffered. And you will be considered a hero by many on the left, as Mikki Kendall was.

This is not justice. This is revenge.

It's one thing when social media zanies like Mikki Kendall promote revenge, but Robin DiAngelo has taken that revenge-based approach and codified it into a series of lectures and workshops given to established, respectable organizations. One of DiAngelo's techniques is to bow to the personal prejudices of some people in order to discriminate against others, on the basis of ethnicity. Now it certainly wasn't the intention of the woman who cried to distress a POC - she was expressing sadness for what happened to a POC - but since Robin DiAngelo's belief is that intentions are irrelevant that means that bigotry against a white person is perfectly acceptable, even if what they are doing is expressing sympathy for a POC.

This is why Robin DiAngelo is so incredibly pernicious, because she packages garden-variety bigotry as social justice.

I completely agree with Bouie's article about Donald Trump and racism. And Bouie does not lump all white people together. As he notes in his piece:

For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether “discrimination against whites is a significant problem.” In last year’s survey, 43 percent of Americans—including 60 percent of working-class whites—said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

But as far as an identitarian like DiAngelo is concerned, "43 percent of Americans" saying discrimination against whites had become a bigger problem is meaningless - because as far as DiAngelo is concerned, 100% of white Americans are racist. She says exactly that - that your beliefs and actions, as an individual, ethical-decision-making human being are irrelevant.

if we are well-intended and do not consciously dislike people of color, we cannot be racist. This is why it is so common for white people to cite their friends and family members as evidence of their lack of racism. However, when you understand racism as a system of structured relations into which we are all socialized, you understand that intentions are irrelevant.

So because we are all socialized in the system, we are all the same. DiAngelo does not allow for individual human beings becoming aware of, and consciously rejecting the existing race-based system of structured relations - at least without paying Robin DiAngelo to run a workshop.

All white people are equally racist to DiAngelo because all white people are equally white.

This absolutely does not help the race problem in the United States. I resent very much being lumped in with a member of the Ku Klux Klan because Robin DiAngelo has decreed that my individual beliefs and actions mean nothing - only my ethnicity matters.

Just like people of color, white people resent being lumped together with others in a negative way on the basis of some physical trait. So naturally Robin DiAngelo is only going to fuel white resentment in her wrong-headed approach to social justice.

Robin DiAnglo is not helping.

More of my thoughts on Robin DiAngelo.

My Anti-Racist Bona Fides
Because the reflex response of all Social Justice Warriors/Identitarians like Robin DiAngelo is to smear their critics as racist, here is my statement on racism:

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in Google search results on my name), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.

• I helped prevent racist Razib Khan from getting a gig writing for the NYTime - thanks to documenting his racism for 10 years. 
• I stood up to a woman at work who had a pattern of saying racist things.
• I'd like to see Juneteenth become a national holiday.
• I demonstrated that David Mamet's play RACE is most likely based on Mamet's racial hatred of Michelle Obama.
• I believe African Americans built the US.

Meet the Brocialists

Jacobin magazine is the Kremlin of the Brocialists.  In my new ongoing series, I will be looking at the people associated with Jacobin magazine.

So far it appears that the majority of Jacobin writers are private-college educated white men from privileged backgrounds.

Ironically, two years ago, before I knew what a Brocialist was, I was on Jacobin's side during a Twitter war dubbed #jacobinghazi. Turns out it was really the old "both sides are just as bad" scenario. I've discussed social justice warriors vs. new atheists on this blog as an example. Well this was social justice warriors versus brocialists.

I took Jacobin's side because I wasn't acquainted with brocialism and didn't realize that it was a continuation of the socialist tradition of dismissing women's complaints about sexism as "bourgeois." And then I met Doug Henwood on Facebook. And his wife Liza Featherstone. Both of them write for The Nation. And their pal Amber A'Lee Frost. All three of them write for Jacobin. All of them have the attitude that feminism should not be about women, it should be about socialism. And they routinely attack women who are actual feminists.

When Brocialists attack women, no matter how viciously, they will always blame the women for the attacks. This also true of Gamergaters and Bernie Sanders supporters - and I suspect there is quite a bit of overlap of all three of these groups.

To get a good sense of the Brocialist attitude towards women, observe this tweet by Liza Featherstone. Matt Bruenig had a history of being abusive towards women on Twitter, and when this was brought to the attention of one of Bruenig's employers, Demos, they asked him to tone it down and when he refused they fired him. And Brocialists like Featherstone decided that the real problem wasn't a man representing a social justice organization behaving like an ass. The real problem was women complaining about it. Women complaining about abusive men is "authoritarian" according to Featherstone.

I will be discussing more about Bruenighazi soon because Matt Bruenig will be the first individual Brocialist I write about. Not counting Henwood, Featherstone or Frost.

Honey Man vs. Occam's Razor

I've been criticizing identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) quite a bit lately, but what about their arch-nemeses the New Atheists? I've been documenting both sides of this public idiocy coin for a couple of years now, including their mutual contempt society.

So what have those New Atheists been up to?

Well it appears that Sam Harris is continuing to be a complete asshole but I will have to address that later because right now

Richard Dawkins is still obsessed with Mohammed Ahmed, the kid who was arrested when his Texas school teachers thought the clock he made for a class project was a bomb.


Now I'm sure Dawkins has heard of Occam's Razor, which is:

(a) principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

The simplest explanation of Mohammed Ahmed's arrest would be this:

• American schools have been the scene of weapons-based violence in recent years.
• Texas is a state notorious for its anti-Muslim sentiments as this Houston Press article demonstrates - written before the Mohammed Ahmed incident.
• These two facts contributed to a Texas school over-reacting when a kid named Mohammad Ahmed came into school with a rebuilt clock - they had him arrested for fear it was a bomb
• It was announced that Ahmed's family is suing the school district for 15 million and an apology. They say the kid's due process rights were violated.
• Lawsuits over handling of an arrest are not uncommon in the United States.

Conclusion: a Texas school's fearfulness over a teenager's science experiment led to an over-reaction and then an unsurprising lawsuit. 

Simple right? Or maybe just too simple for an Islamaphobe like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was known as an Islamaphobe long before he ever heard of Ahmed Mohammed.

Using nothing more than hunches and suspicions Dawkins, supported by his sycophants and cheered on by right-wingers, has attempted to turn it into something much more complex. 

Dawkins tweeted his evidence-free suspicion that Mohammed Ahmed is not the victim of misjudgment but the perpetrator of a deliberate media scam.

Then, because the clock was not proven to Dawkins' satisfaction to be sufficiently original, Dawkins accused the kid again without any evidence of being the perpetrator of a deliberate hoax. 

The Twitter-verse, rightly, mocked Dawkins for his absurdity in picking on a 14-year-old kid's failure to live up to adult standards of inventiveness.

But Dawkins remained convinced of the kid's nefariousness and so when Mohammed's parents sued the Texas school district, Dawkins was ready to pounce.

First he doubled-down on the conspiracy theory that the kid deliberately made the clock look like a bomb.

Now remember, Dawkins never presented any evidence that the kid was a deliberate perpetrator of a clock-hoax or a media scam. He simply proceeds as if it was a settled case.

The real lesson Dawkins appears to have taken away from the negative response to his September tweets was that people dislike him for suggesting that a kid could be criticized like an adult. 

And so in order to demonstrate the children are just as culpable as adults, he tweeted this immortal tweet:

Now there are several things to note about this.

First, Dawkins seems to think that a 14-year-old is the prime instigator of the lawsuit against Texas. And because he makes this bizarre assumption, he then suggests that Ahmed isn't really a minor - by putting "kid" into quotes.

Second, he suggests that the 10-year-old in the photo is also culpable for his actions, even though the caption for the photo itself  - which Dawkins provided - says "child executioner... being forced by Isis militants to decapitate his victim.

It's as if Richard Dawkins does not come from this planet, and doesn't realize that minors generally are expected to obey the adults on whom they are dependent. In Mohammed's case, his parents, in the ISIS child's case, murderous extremists. But Richard Dawkins apparently feels that for being in a situation where they obey the will of their elders, children are no longer "kids."

And somehow Richard Dawkins and his followers are so mind-bogglingly obtuse that they believe that it's just wacky that the famously Islamaphobic Dawkins could be criticized for comparing Ahmed to an ISIS forced-murderer kid. Dawkins keeps insisting that it has nothing to do with both being Muslim, just that they both happen to be minors.

"All" Dawkins did was say that Ahmed and the ISIS kid were equally culpable for their crimes. Except of course Ahmed was guiltless of a crime. Except that Richard Dawkins persists in believing he is guilty of a crime. 

Now in spite of Dawkin's dark insinuations about Ahmed, what he keeps harping on the most is that Ahmed did not employ sufficient creativity in building his clock and yet referred to it somewhere as his "invention."

What Dawkins and his followers appear to be unable to grasp is the absurdity that a celebrity scientist is spending his days criticizing a teenager for either bad word choice or boastfulness. A teenager who did nothing  legally wrong and would be unknown still except for his wrongful arrest.

However this isn't the first time that Richard Dawkins used his celebrity to criticize a nobody. People in the atheist community are well aware of Dawkins role in "elevatorgate."

In 2011, Rebecca Watson, known only in atheist circles, complained in a video - very briefly - about a guy hitting on her in an elevator and Watson said "guys don't do that." And this one tiny thing caused Richard Dawkins to have a hissyfit - the story is told here on Watson's blog The Privilege Delusion. As a result of going up against Dawkins, Watson was inundated with rape and death threats that went on for at least three years.

Richard Dawkins finally apologized in 2014 for his Dear Muslima letter, although vaguely - it was too little too late, Watson had already been terrorized by his slavish fan-boys.

So Dawkins has a history of using his celebrity to pick on nobodies for petty reasons. And Watson was attacked by fellow atheists who had formerly been part of her in-group. Ahmed Mohammed was already a member of a hated minority in Texas before Dawkins began to smear him as a criminal mastermind. And at the present time the leading Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has suggested that there be a special database to track Muslims. 

On ABC News’ This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, "You did stir up a controversy with those comments over the database. Let's try to clear that up. Are you unequivocally now ruling out a database on all Muslims?"
"No, not at all," Trump responded. "I want a database for the refugees that -- if they come into the country. We have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don't know if they're ISIS, we don't know if it's a Trojan horse. And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances. We want to go with watchlists. We want to go with databases. And we have no choice."
Trump’s exchange with Stephanopoulos seems to be the clearest explanation of his position. No, he would not rule out a database on all Muslims. But for now, he wants a database for refugees.

And in such an environment, with such slavish followers, Richard Dawkins is attacking this nobody Muslim kid, implying he's guilty of crimes and should be considered culpable for them as an adult. And he seems to be implying that the fact that the kid's parents are suing for due process violations indicates he is guilty of all Dawkins' insinuations.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dawkins got lots of well-deserved criticism for his insanity on Twitter and on web sites such as NYMagazine: Richard Dawkins Is Really Committed to Calling Muslim Clock-Making Kid a Liar.

Now in spite of the fact that Richard Dawkins has become batshit insane out of fear of Muslims, he's also been very irritated by airline security procedures - something that you would think he would appreciate. So when they took his honey, he became furious and began a series of tweets that came to be known  "honey gate." My favorite response to Dawkins' self-importance was this:

I should mention that I despised Richard Dawkins long before he ever got a Twitter account both because of his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and my personal run-in with him on the Pharyngula web site. That was back in 2009 when everybody still thought Dawkins was a cool guy. Now everybody except right-wing Islamaphobes and hardcore New Atheists know that Dawkins has lost it.

One more thing before I finish with Dawkins - I notice that critics for the New York Times revere New Atheists. A review of Dawkins recently publish memoir begins:

Some lumbering robot, this Richard Dawkins. “Lumbering robots” was one of the ways in which this scarily brilliant evolutionary biologist described human beings vis-à-vis their genes in “The Selfish Gene,” his first and probably still his most influential book — more than a million copies sold.

Yeah he's scarily something. I wouldn't say brilliant.

More of my thoughts on Richard Dawkins elsewhere on this blog.

Happy Blogger-versary!

Wow, here it is, 10 years since my first blog post on November 2, 2005. 

Since that date:

My former partner and I won against Edward Einhorn and his copyright scheme ~ I wrote an article for the Dramatists Guild here. I got to know playwright David Ives a little since he was editing the Guild magazine at time. And I got an anecdote about David Ives and the bullwhip out of that one.

I did lots of self-productions which can be seen at my Mergatroyd site. One of them, Jane Eyre, nearly drove me into bankruptcy. And I became an award-winning playwright.

I turned NYCPlaywrights into a money-making venture instead of a money-losing venture. Of course it is not a lot of money. But it's still better than losing money.

I wrote sonnets because I was in unrequited love with a complete mediocrity. You're never too old to be a fool for love. But I did enjoy writing the sonnets. And some of them are not bad.

I got my first booty call, and from the son of a movie star yet. I did not take him up on it.

Obama became president Oh, yeah, that. Kind of a big deal. I was very excited when it happened, although I had been rooting for Hillary during the primaries. But I liked Obama too, and I think he's proven to be an unusually effective president, in spite of the hideousness of the Republican party.

I often expressed my love for Jon Stewart. And Paul Krugman. And my contempt for Ayn Rand, New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors.

I lived through unemployment and cancer, as well as being personally lied about and smeared by identitarian bully Mikki Kendall and famously bad movie director/producer Andrew Bellware.

I have received responses to this blog from the dread Daphne Merkin and from the cool yet somewhat out-there Cindy Gallop, as well as Santa Claus.

My proudest moment for this blog was when I contributed to preventing the greater mainstreaming of professional bio-racist Razib Khan.


Some blog statistics from blogger - unfortunately they only go back to 2010 so they're not entirely accurate over the last 10 years.

My 10 most popular posts of all time. #4, about Schopenhauer, is pretty surprising.

Damn my accursed principles!!!! Jun 3, 2008	3395
Stupid shit that Social Justice Warriors say, Flav... Mar 4, 2014, 2 comments	2080
Intact Gallery Aug 28, 2010	1994
Six Questions for Arthur Schopenhauer Nov 13, 2011	1773
Razib Khan and his continuing successful quest for... Jan 9, 2013, 6 comments	1476
Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendz... Jun 12, 2014, 8 comments	1376
Don't Let Me Down Oct 18, 2011	1175
On being smeared by the Mad Gastronomer and Karny... Jun 30, 2012, 4 comments	957
miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for ... Nov 30, 2011, 15 comments	858
more confirmation that Richard Dawkins is a gigant... Jul 6, 2011, 2 comments	818

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