Thursday, February 08, 2018

A reminder: it's all about Steven Pinker

Pinker being oppressed yet again by the elites.

Although Claire Lehmann (watch her videos on the Youtube channel for alt-right Rebel Media here) and Bo Winegard have been making my ongoing series about the evo-psycho bros all about them, it's important to remember that what this is really about is exploring the connections between Steven Pinker and the alt-right.


I've been doing it for just about a month now and although I already had some idea of the connections, I learned a lot more.
Although it's actually the hypocrisy of Pinker's statements about race and criminality on the PC video that I find most interesting and I haven't gotten to that just yet.

Perhaps Pinker's books will provide more insight.

From the New Yorker review of The Blank Slate:
Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."

From the New Yorker review of Better Angels:
The scope of Pinker’s attentions is almost entirely confined to Western Europe. There is little discussion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” about trends in violence in Asia or Africa or South America. Indeed, even the United States poses difficulties for him. Murder rates in the U.S. are, over all, significantly higher than those in Europe, and in some parts of this country they’re so high as to be positively medieval. The homicide rate in New Orleans last year was forty-nine per hundred thousand, roughly what Amsterdam’s was six hundred years ago. St. Louis’s and Detroit’s murder rates in 2010 were about forty per hundred thousand, around the rate of London in the fourteenth century. (Detroit’s 2010 murder rate, it should be noted, actually represents a big improvement; in the late nineteen-eighties, it was more than sixty per hundred thousand.) 
Do these cities lag behind in “the civilizing process” because they’re poor or educationally disadvantaged? No, Pinker argues; the key factor is that they have large African-American populations. Low-income blacks in the U.S. are “effectively stateless,” living in a sort of Hobbesian dystopia beyond the reach of law enforcement. It doesn’t help that cities like New Orleans and St. Louis are in the South; according to Pinker, the entire region is several steps behind, as “the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe.”

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The alt-right evo-psycho empire strikes back

Claire Lehmann and Bo Winegard both blocked me from their Twitter accounts for criticizing them, because they are such champions of free speech, but that's easy enough to get around.

And as usual, accuracy is not a primary concern for Lehmann - it was actually Jamelle Bouie who got Khan fired I merely contributed by documenting his racism for years. Bouie provided a link to my work.

Also the idea that I'm "bullying and smearing" Bo Winegard is absurd. He's publishing his work in alt-right Quillette, he's an adult, Lehmann. If he's going around claiming that black people are less intelligent by nature than white people which he most certainly did as I have been documenting for a month, well he can't expect people to not talk about it.

Everything I've said about Winegard can be found on my blog here.

Probably the best place to start is here where I begin to discuss the article on the Bell Curve that he and his brother published in, where else, Quillette.

There will be more to come as I continue to discuss words that he has decided as a grown-ass man to publish online.

If there is any evidence that I've smeared anybody by all means please email me exactly how I've done so. My email address is posted on the right.

Also: thanks for all the extra traffic to this site.

Evo-psychos seem to believe that whenever they inspire controversy it proves how true their statements are. I'm very tempted to follow in that tradition.



This woman --> who has previously boasted about getting fired from the NYTimes is now going after for his writing on Quillette. I don't normally get angry over trolls, but bullying & smearing a grad student is simply despicable.

Read more »
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Evo-psycho bros and wingnut welfare

Not the logo for the racist Pioneer Fund -
this is an expired trademark from a mutual fund
but I thought the evocation of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade made it appropriate. As far as
I can tell the Pioneer Fund responsible
for supporting so much of the racist science that
ended up in The Bell Curve doesn't have a logo
 
The evo-psycho bros are seemingly baffled by the fact that their ill-supported claims and their professional connections to white supremacists could lead anybody to accuse them of racism.


 In A social science without sacred values the Winegard brothers write:
(Charles) Murray is still hounded by accusations that he is a racist and an anti-poor elitist. In fact, Murray’s reputation was so thoroughly besmirched by the “bell curve wars” that those who cite his works today are also vulnerable to accusations of racism. 
In 2014, Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, was blasted simply for quoting a Charles Murray book (in this case, Losing Ground, not The Bell Curve). For example, Josh Marshall (2014) wrote that, “When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start.” 
Marshall then lists a few reasons one loses credibly for quoting Charles Murray, including that Murray “is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people.”
As I have shown over the past month in this evo-psycho bros series: "black people are not as smart as white people" is exactly what Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, J. Phillipe Rushton, John Paul Wright, Richard Lynn, Steve Sailer, Razib Khan, Kevin M. Beaver, Stefan Molyneux and Bo and Ben Winegard believe.

Murray got much of his information from studies made by people supported directly by the Pioneer Fund, including Gottfredson, Lynn, Rushton and Jensen.

For the record Murray seems to be making a very nice living as an author. In spite of the evo-psycho bros constant whining about their opponents' machinations against them, their leading lights, including Steven Pinker have all gone onto pretty sweet careers, by most people's standards. The Winegards also whine about poor Larry Summers in this paper. A few years after the NBER controversy Summers went to work in the Obama administration.

Phillipe Rushton did just fine too. According to Barry Mehler in 1997:
Despite Rushton's controversial race theories, he has been embraced by the scientific mainstream, having been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He has published six books and nearly 150 articles, one of which appeared in the October 1986 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, under the sponsorship of Academy member E. O. Wilson.
And then Rushton went on to become the president of the Pioneer Fund, which also funded the organization responsible for American Renaissance.

Thanks to publications like American Renaissance, those pushing scientific racism, but without science credentials like Steve Sailer can make a living writing racist bullshit. And of course Steven Pinker gave Sailer scientific legitimacy by including a piece of barely scientific writing by Sailer in a collection of the "best" science writing.

And if nothing else evo-psycho bros can fall back on the Right's sugar daddies like the Koch brothers. The Kochs have deep pockets to hire lots of hacks, just ask Christina Hoff Sommers.

Economist Paul Krugman has a term for it - wingnut welfare:
Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available. 
Obviously this reality has important incentive effects. It encourages conservatives to espouse ever-cruder positions, because they don’t need to be taken seriously outside their closed universe. But it also, I’ve been noticing, makes them remarkably lazy.
We can see wingnut welfare happening in real time.

Claire Lehmann's Quillette is a place for racialist science and all other alt-right predilections to find a home, as I have discussed in this evo-psycho bros series. Lehmann's priorities are clear when she bashes Justin Trudeau, a good man, politican and leader, while promoting a laughable whack-job like Jordan Peterson. As always the right-wing mind confuses shit for Shinola and vice-versa.

So of course Lehmann publishes a hack like Bo Winegard. It's clear he took the main idea from his paper A social science without sacred values and repurposed it for Quillette while making sure to promote his other work with links in his Equalitarianism” and Progressive Bias. And that's how wingnut welfare works.

One of the Winegards shared this evolutionary psychology "study"with a sample size of 20 on Twitter. One commenter speaks for many others, I suspect.




Although really the sample size hardly matters. They could do it with a sample size of two or twenty or twenty thousand and the result would be exactly the same because it's a foregone conclusion. The behaviors in question were determined in advance to be indicative of evolutionary adaptation. So whenever evo-psychos write one of these papers, all they are doing is cataloging their victories.

And while the world is full of the gullible and the ignorant and therefore people who are impressed by their work, including people in the press, the evo-psycho bros are nevertheless beleaguered by meanies who won't just STFU and accept that whites are smarter than blacks genetically, and that blacks are more criminal than whites genetically.

So how will the evo-psycho bros neutralize these charges of racism?

The Winegards have a plan. I will talk about that next.
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Voilà un Aubergine

Here I am getting away from my computer for a change. I'm at Albertine, right across Central Park from my apartment. Albertine has an amazing book store with literature in French and English. Here is the ceiling on the second floor.

Ceiling of the bookstore























Translation: "Those with whom he will govern."


Of course I like to get the magazines there with Macron on the cover - one of my 21st Century men!

Here I am, soaking up the Frenchy-French vibes. You can see below to the first floor behind me.




Unfortunately for some reason I keep forgetting the name of this place and end up calling it Aubergine. My last French teacher was not amused.

Voilà un aubergine.








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So what would a bio-criminology justice system look like?

People associated with American Renaissance
Richard Spencer is in the front row wearing a tan suit.
They pay Steve Sailer to write racist bullshit.
In 1997 John Paul Wright co-authored a paper, along with his doctoral advisor Francis T. Cullen, Crime and the Bell Curve: Lessons from Intelligent Criminology which states:
(Charles) Murray repeatedly informs interviewers that he simply is being a good social scientist who is conveying unpleasant truths that can be ignored only at the nation's long-term peril (see also DeParl 1994; Murray and Herrnstein 1994). 
At least with regard to crime, we claim otherwise; Murray's social science is misleading, and his message is erroneous. He needs a boost in his criminological intelligence. The apparent persuasiveness of The Bell Curve, which Murray coauthored with the late Richard Herrnstein, is that it purports to show that IC has powerful and largely immutable effects across a range of behaviors. If "cognitively disadvantaged," a person is going to commit crimes, fail at school, be unemployed, end up on welfare, produce illegitamet kids, and be a lousy citizen. But if these effects do not in fact exist, or if these effects are in fact amenable to reversal, then the foundation on which Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) thesis is built crumbles. 
In 2012 Wright co-authored a paper along with Beaver, Boutwell, Barnes, DeLisi, and Vaughan called Exploring the association between the 2-repeat allele of the MAOA gene promoter polymorphism and psychopathic personality traits, arrests, incarceration, and lifetime antisocial behavior which associates African-American criminality with a higher instance of the 2-repeat allele among blacks.
Analyses revealed that African-American males who carried the 2-repeat allele were, in comparison with other African-American male genotypes, significantly more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. Additional analyses revealed that African-American male carriers of the 2-repeat allele scored significantly higher on an antisocial phenotype index and on measures assessing involvement in violent behaviorsover the life course. 
They admit that their subjects self-reported their "race" but say:
Since prior research has revealed that the distribution of the 2-repeat allele varies by race (e.g., Reti et al., 2011; Widom & Brzustowicz, 2006), the analysis begins by examining the allelic distributions by race. As Table 1 shows, the 2-repeat allele was carried by 0.1% of Caucasian males and by 5.2% of African-American males. To check the consistency of these estimates, all of the analyses were recalculated using self-reported race instead of interviewer-rated race. Importantly, research has revealed that self-reported race correlates almost perfectly with race identified via genetic markers (Tang et al., 2005). 
The Tang et al. they are pointing to is the 2005 study concerning micro satellite markers Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies. Its abstract says this:
We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity--as opposed to current residence--is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S.
Once again we have the problem with genetics and race. Co-author Neil Risch says they used US Census categories for race, which is an obvious social construction. They identify four races in this case, white, black, Hispanic and East Asian.

We've already discussed the issue  in this evo-psycho bros series with self-identified whites being as much as 1/8 black and the average African American being almost a quarter white. And so clearly a lot of genetic information is missed by the study by forcing people to be one "race" when they are usually not.

There is also the issue of Hispanic being identified as a race, as Razib Khan can tell you:


So there's no clear establishment of genetic ethnicity in the 2005 microsatellite markers study. Everybody was shoved into one of four buckets regardless of what the 326 microsatellites indicated.

Therefore, what "black" means in all these studies is:
  • descendants of primarily West African ethnicity;
  • who were enslaved by whites and who have on average almost one-quarter white ancestry due to slave-rape; 
  • who are identified as "black" even when they have obvious European ancestry, thanks to social custom (one-drop rule);
  • And subsequent to slavery have suffered mistreatment as "blacks" by the white majority from lynching to segregation.
That's a very specific group of people and calling them "African" American tells almost nothing about this group of people. And this group of people tells you almost nothing about the genetics of an entire continent.

Thanks to 23andme we know approximately how much European ancestry turns a "black" into a "white" - 87.5%. What was once considered completely black thanks to the one-drop rule and identified as "octoroon."

But in addition to the problems of genetic/race uncertainty, there is also room for doubt about the 2-repeat allele of the MAOA gene issue.

The evo-psycho bros don't have much motivation to explain themselves clearly, especially since obfuscation is mostly their friend. It not only hides - usually - their contempt for African Americans but it covers the weaknesses in their methodologies.

Locating weaknesses in methodologies hidden by poor writing is a big part of what technical writers in IT do. Which may be why I'm going through this exercise instead of journalists, who have mostly avoided it, in spite of the controversial nature of the topic.

Luckily there are some scientists who do write clearly. Dr. Aaron Gardner with a BSc (Honours) in Genetics published on his blog: The Warrior Gene: 5 common myths debunked.


EXCERPT

The Genetics of MAOA

MAOA is interesting as changes in its activity don’t relate to individual SNPs, rather they are driven by changes in its promoter region. All genes have a promoter region, which sit upstream of the gene in the DNA sequence and this is the location where polymerase proteins bind and begin to read through the gene.
Within the promoter of MAOA is a region of DNA known as a variable number tandem repeat or VNTR. VNTRs are small sequences of DNA which can be repeated a variety of times, which gives rise to the 2R or 3R terminology you may have seen around MAOA. 2R means that there are two repeat sequences in the VNTR, 3R three repeat sequences and so on. This is important as the number of repeats has a big impact on how well MAOA is “read” by the polymerase protein. When the gene is not read as efficiently not as much MAO-A is produced meaning the breakdown of neurotransmitters is also reduced [R]. It is this lack of MAO-A enzyme activity which is thought to lead to increased aggressive behaviour [R].
Myth 3: The aggressiveness associated with the “warrior gene” is caused by SNPs.
Fact: Changes in MAOA function are actually linked to alterations in the VNTR located in the promoter region.
I’ve summarised the common repeats below and how they impact on the efficiency of MAOA reading and thus MAO-A activity. 3.5R and 4R variants are thought of as normal, with 2R variants having the most reduced function and 3R and 5R variants sitting between. As such the 2R, 3R and 5R types are sometimes referred to as MAOA-L meaning low activity [R, R].
The number of repeats within the MAOA VNTR has a big impact on transcription efficiency and subsequently MAO-A activity [R, R].

What effect do changes in MAOA VNTR have on aggressiveness?

Low activity of MAO-A is thought to drive increased aggressiveness. But if you look at the table above you can see the 3R  form of MAOA is actually very common. I don’t know about you but upwards of 30% of the population being overly aggressive sounds very high.
So lets look at the data; the 2R, 3R and 5R variants which show reduced MAO-A enzyme activity have been linked with increased aggressiveness in a variety of studies [R, R]. So far the hypothesis seems to be holding together.
But! all these reports come with a very large caveat. Whilst they do show that the MAOA-L forms are associated with increased aggression, having an MAOA-L form does not mean that someone will be aggressive, there are numerous other factors associated, with the most important thought to be early life abuse [R]. 
Simply put, whilst some people with the 2R, 3R and 5R variants were more aggressive, there were lots of people who also had these variants who weren’t more aggressive. The associations only appeared when a large enough population was studied, and this suggests that there are lots of other factors which are also influencing how aggressive we are, not just MAOA. Some studies have failed to find a link between MAOA and aggression [R].
END OF EXCERPT


I'm sure "lots of other factors" influencing aggression is not what the bio-criminology bros want to hear since it's so much easier to just assume there's a genetic marker for aggression related to African ethnicity.

Now with all this uncertainty about racial identification and the uncertainty surrounding a "warrior gene" you might expect the evo-psycho bros to be less assertive in their claims of what it all means for society at large. But if you expected that you don't know the evo-psycho bros.

Much like its sister web site, the book Conservative Criminology: A Call to Restore Balance to the Social Sciences by John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi contains much ranting about liberals. They are angry because liberals won't let them make racist claims without criticism.
We have also published papers that have clearly violated the liberal ethos of academia. Our work, along with the work of our friend and colleagues, has examined the rather important role of genetic influences on human behavior, including criminal behavior (Beaver et. al, 2013b; DeLisi et al, 2014), and various traits such as impulsivity and low self-control (DeLisi et al., 2010; Wright et al, 2012). 
Indeed, we and our colleagues have been instrumental in creating an arm of criminological study called “biosocial criminology.” 
So what would a "biosocial criminology" justice system look like? Maybe something like this...
(The DEFENSE attorney addresses Kevin WRIGHT, the prosecution's expert witness.)
DEFENSE
Mr. Wright, as an expert in racial criminology -  
WRIGHT
That's biosocial criminology.
DEFENSE 
Right. Mr. Wright, you say black people are more likely to commit crime because of their genetic background.
WRIGHT
That is what the science says. It's all in The Bell Curve.  
DEFENSE 
And what makes you so sure my client is a member of the black "race"?

WRIGHT 
As Steven Pinker told us, race is real. There is a black race and a white race. And other races.
DEFENSE
How many races are there? 
PROSECUTOR 
Objection. Irrelevant. 
JUDGE
Sustained.
DEFENSE
Would it interest you to know that my client has a mixed ethnicity of 40% White, 10% Pacific Islander, 15% Native American and only 35% African? And so he is not even half African.
WRIGHT 
As we learn in Bio-criminology 101: If it looks African, it is African.

I've mentioned the paper A social science without sacred values written by Bo and Ben Winegard earlier in this series, but only in reference to how they misrepresented what Larry Summers said at the NBER conference on diversity in STEM careers.

The Summers reference is part of the main argument of the paper, the problem of liberal mental bias.

Although they are not at all worried about conservative mental bias they admit, perhaps inadvertently, that it exists:
One, researchers have consistently complained that stereotypes are inaccurate, unjust, and maladaptive products of a biased social brain (see Jussim, 2012). However, it turns out that many stereotypes are actually remarkably accurate. Because many stereotypes are about talent, skill, and personality inequalities among social groups, this line of research, according to Duarte et al., was not surprisingly initiated by a conservative social scientist, Clark McCauley (McCauley & Stitt, 1978). That is, liberal researchers were not interested in discovering that stereotypes were accurate because that would violate a sacred liberal narrative about equality. 
They believe that while liberals avoid exploring stereotypes because of their "sacred liberal narrative about equality" on the other hand conservatives actively seek to research stereotypes in order to confirm they are correct - stereotypes are "remarkably accurate."

Presumably to honor the sacred conservative value of inequality.

Which gives us some insight into why, in spite of the flimsiness of the evo-psycho bros methodology designed to demonstrate the innate criminality and lower intelligence of blacks, they rush to tell the world about their weak findings. Without shame.

The Winegard brothers have so little concern for the possibility that conservatives are influenced by their political positions that although they discuss the persecution Charles Murray has endured, they don't mention the connection between The Bell Curve and the white supremacist organization the Pioneer Fund.

More about that next.
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Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Newsflash: the alt-right hates Justin Trudeau

I would say Justin Trudeau is worth a million Jordan Petersons or Stefan Molyneux, but actually there's really no comparison between a man like Justin Trudeau and the likes of a Peterson or a Molyneux.

It would be like comparing the invention of the wheel to smallpox and syphilis.

Of course alt-right assholes were all over Trudeau saying personkind like anybody but the alt-right gives a shit.





Several evo-psycho bros have given interviews to living coprolite Molyneux, who is also pushing the Trump/Republican/Russian line about the Steele dossier. Like you do. When you're an enormous alt-right asshole.

And of course if you're talking alt-right you have to include worthless racist & misogynist shithead Claire Lehmann, who used to work for Rebel Media, owned by Ezra Levant who is absolutely obsessed with Trudeau and was long before Trudeau became PM.

'



Naturally evo-psycho king Steven Pinker is hyping Peterson.



Meanwhile here is self-righteous atheist Jerry Coyne whining about Trudeau's visit to a mosque and yet, even though he claims to not have a well-formed opinion of Peterson, likes to promote him anyway. Not long ago I pointed out that although Coyne expects women to stop "coddling" all religions, Coyne is willing to cut the religious slack whenever it suits him. And here's an example - it doesn't seem to bother Coyne that Peterson says things like this:

Peterson said religion in general and Catholicism in particular stand as a perpetual bulwark against ideologies of the political left or right, which is why the Catholic Church is under now attack by those ideologies — along with Dr. Peterson himself.
And this:
“The Catholic Church warns us against the danger posed by the un-moored rational mind,” said Peterson, who would not reveal his own religious beliefs. He added that religions in general provide a “balanced” and complete understanding of reality, while ideologies such as Fascism or Marxism (which he says lies at the root of gender theory) present a very narrow understanding.
If you swapped out "Catholic Church" for "Islam" Coyne and Pinker and all the rest of the New Atheist bigot hypocrites would be shitting themselves with outrage.

The support of Peterson by New Atheists tells you everything you need to know about the utter lack of ethics and coherency of the New Atheists.

Meanwhile today my glorious Prime Minister of Love is speaking in the US. 

Worms like Peterson and Molyneux are so jealous of this man.



This is live on Facebook. People can make comments. Some of them are, uh, interesting...






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More inane anti-feminism from Quillette

Oh brother. A college student author at Quillette has this to say about the movie The Apartment.
It is in this context that we are treated to the famous Christmas party scene, which resonates rather differently in 2018 than it must have done in 1960 (or in 1980, or even in 2010, for that matter). The workaday hum of Consolidated Life yields to the tune of “Jingle Bells” and a hedonistic spirit of dancing, kissing, gaiety. Alcohol is everywhere. A progressive institution like Vox would never allow such a scene in their offices today. And perhaps they are right to be wary; it’s possible to see the joy of the Christmas Party at Consolidated Life as a meager veneer on a culture of exploitation and the damage wrought by the arrogant chauvinism of men like Sheldrake. In the bitterness of his ex-lover, Miss Olsen, and in Fran’s emotional devastation, are we offered a glimpse of a place and time in which it might have really sucked to be a woman? Or should the scene be understood as a depiction of authentic joy, adopting an attitude towards sexual liberation favored by Laura Kipnis or Cristina Nehring, in which heartache at the hands of bad actors is something to be overcome privately (within certain well-defined limits, of course) rather than treated as evidence of the need for structural reform? On a certain reading, attempts to fully eradicate moments like these in the workplace are suggestive of a dreadful grimness; a cure that may be worse than the disease it is designed to treat.
What MRA rock does Claire Lehmann find these people under? Of course someone published by Lehmann is going to think that the "cure" of men forced to back off is worse than the disease of men entitled to do whatever the fuck they want to women and get away with it.

...I followed a link that Slate counts as "viral" - something called "My Father Died Suddenly. He Was Just Starting a New Life" by Cristina Nehring. The article is basically what it says, but I found it difficult to focus on the rest of piece after I got to the fifth paragraph:
"Wolfgang Nehring was a scholar and a gentleman, a stoic and a romantic, a handsome devil who kidnapped the woman he loved out of the home of her boyfriend in 1964 and married her immediately thereafter."
I tried to continue but so many questions popped up. Is the kidnapped woman the author's mother? I didn't see anything to confirm this in the article. Does she literally  mean "kidnapped" as in Wolfgang Nehring forcibly removed the woman from her boyfriend's home? Did they know each other before this, and if so, how well? Did they have a relationship prior to the one with the boyfriend? What did the woman think of this situation? Was she being abused by the boyfriend and Cristina Nehring's father was a rescuer? Where were the woman's parents?
But if the author didn't mean "kidnapped" why didn't she just say "eloped"? If you're going to accuse your father of something that is at the present time known as "bride kidnapping" and considered a sex crime, shouldn't you at least try to explain, to make your father seem like less of a rapist? 
I was ready to write this off as the author being excessively dramatic or careless about wording, until I discovered something in the author by-line - a link to Nehring's book on Amazon entitled "A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century" which is described thusly:
"In the twenty-first century, political correctness, cynicism, prag-matism, and the commodification of sex have reduced romantic love to a discredited myth or a recreational sport—"a cause for embarrassment," says Cristina Nehring. In A Vindication of Love, Nehring wrests romantic love from the clutches of retrograde feminists and cutting-edge capitalists, thrill-seeking convenience shoppers and safe-sex moralists. With help from lovers ranging from Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Nehring celebrates the wild, irreverent, and uncompromising models of love we have inherited—as she rediscovers romantic love's fearless and heroic provenance, and challenges readers to demand partnerships that fully engage body, heart, and mind."
In a review of the book The New Republic says:
"Nehring addresses her book to women. She thinks that it is women in particular who need to hear her message, because she has an unusual diagnosis of the reasons for today’s risk-averse living. Bypassing such plausible causes as pervasive human anxiety, the desire to control the uncontrollable, the felt need to surmount mortality and the limits of the body, she pins the whole thing on--fanfare of operatic trumpets!--feminism. Feminism is to blame for women’s rejection of romantic love because, says Nehring, feminism asks women to be always rational and always in control, rejecting the romantic emotions as sources of low status or even of servitude. Moreover, feminism urges us to see love in contractual terms, and that sort of calculation is incompatible with real passion."
Nehring was against #MeToo long before #MeToo was born.
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Fun video

I feel it's important to continue to connect the dots between Pinker and the evo-psycho bros, but the racism and misogyny is so disgusting. Time for some fun.


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Cloward to Cullen to Wright to Beaver to Gottfredson to Molyneux

So apparently Richard Cloward is the founder of the biosocial criminology dynasty.

According to Francis T. Cullen's Wikipedia page page Cloward was Cullen's doctoral advisor.

I was very surprised to read this about Cloward:
In 1966, Cloward co-founded the National Welfare Rights Organization, which advocated federalizing Aid to Families with Dependent Children by building local welfare rolls. In 1982, he and his wife Frances Fox Piven founded "Human SERVE" (Service Employees Registration and Voter Education), which established motor-voter programs in selected states as precedents for the Motor Voter Act enacted in 1993. 
Also in 1966, he and Piven published a paper in the May issue of The Nation magazine — "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty",[4] which advocated wiping out poverty by increasing demands on the federal government, leading to implementation of a guaranteed minimum income. His detractors have called this the "Cloward-Piven Strategy"
Also according to Cullen's page, one of his notable students is John Paul Wright. And according to Wikipedia for Wright, his doctoral student is Kevin Beaver. According to Beaver's page his notable students are J. C. Barnes and Brian Boutwell.
And we've already seen that Barnes and Boutwell give credit to Beaver for "converting" them to biosocial criminology.

I looked up some of Cullen's work and was quite surprised that Cullen was a co-author of Race, Racism, and Support for Capital Punishment. Unlike the evo-psycho bros, Cullen seems to believe that racism actually exists, as the abstract says:
There is a clear racial divide in support for the death penalty, with whites favoring and blacks opposing this sanction. This divide has persisted for decades and remains statistically and substantively significant even when controls are introduced for the known correlates of death penalty attitudes. A meaningful portion of this chasm is explained, however, by racism, with whites who manifest animus to blacks being more likely to embrace the lethal punishment of offenders...
Conservative Criminology: A Call to Restore Balance to the Social Sciences by John Paul Wright and Matt DeLisi has a list of recommendations the authors feel will improve the criminal justice system by making it less liberal. On page 129:
Sentences of death should be swiftly and righteously imposed, without fear of this important sanction.
So what happened with Wright? Well we know that Wright credits Steven Pinker with work that has informed his thinking.
I, John Paul Wright, would like to thank Francis T. Cullen for all his years of academic and personal mentorship. I would also like to acknowledge Kevin Beaver, Matt Delisi, and Michael Vaughn for their encouragement and dedication to this field of study. I also want to recognize the pioneers in the field, whose work has informed much of my thinking: E. O. Wilson, David Rowe, Steven Pinker, Avshalom Caspi, Terri Moffatt, and Judith Rich Harris. Finally I would like to salute Anthony Walsh and Lee Ellis, whose careers exemplify the scholarly pursuit of truth.
I would have guessed there was Steve Sailer connection too, since Wright and Sailer sound very similar when talking about blacks. But in this post from his Unz Review column, Wright is quoted from 2008 complaining about the plight of biosocial criminology and Sailer says:
Is criminology a social science? I hadn’t realized that. I thought criminology was just what people who wanted to be prison guards majored in at junior college. 
Linda Gottfredson however seems to be a big influence on Wright's thinking. In the chapter he co-authored with Mark Alden Morgan entitled Humanbiodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction in The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality edited by Kevin M. Beaver, J. C. Barnes and Brian Boutwell it says:
...There is, unfortunately, good reason to question the objectivity of scientists, especially social scientists, as it relates to discussions of race. 
A hallmark belief, or sacred value, of contemporary progressive ideology is that minority groups do not differ in their talents or abilities and thus that disparities found in the workplace, in the educational arena, or even the criminal justice system, reflect bias and discrimination against these groups. Speaking specifically of intelligence differences between groups, Gottfredson (1994) refers to this sacred value as the "egalitarian fiction." More broadly, the egalitarian fiction provides liberal academics a script, or a narrative, from which they draw to interpret almost every racial disparity as the product of some form of racism. Differences between "races" in crime, for example, cannot occur because groups differ in their levels of conformity to the law, this narrative states, but because racism creates strain that results in crime (Jang & Johnson, 2003), or because laws are racially biased (Alexander, 2012), or because police racially profile (Rojek, Rosenfeld, & Decker, 2012).

Gottfredson, like Wright and Beaver, appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube video channel. 

Linda Gottfredson joined Stefan Molyneux for the December 29th broadcast of Freedomain Radio, entitled “Race, Evolution and Intelligence.” Using recycled claims from The Bell Curve — a notorious book by Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) and Charles Murray — Molyneux asserted that there is a racial hierarchy as far as IQ distribution is concerned. 
“You could roughly equate a sort of five part split or divergence among IQs for particular groups with — I think as Charles Murray pointed out — Ashkenazi Jews sort of at the top, 110, 115, and if you just focused on verbal, 120 plus,” Molyneux said, before listing Asians, Caucasians and, lastly, Hispanics and African-Americans — the latter of whom he claimed have an average IQ of 85. 
Gottfredson, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware, agreed, noting that Molyneux neglected to mention one final racial category. “I would just add one more group and that’s African blacks. The IQs of different groups of African blacks, you know, range more around 70.” Gottfredson, of course, has accepted $267,000 in research grants by the racist Pioneer Fund since 1988, and was a staunch opponent of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.

Later in the video Gottfredson defends the late eugenicist Jean-Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). Prior to his death Rushton headed the Pioneer Fund, and made outrageous pseudoscientific claims about black men and women having larger secondary sex characteristics — which he said were inversely proportional to brain size. 
Molyneux's racial hierarchy in 2015 is somewhat different from his hierarchy in 2017.

2015
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. Asians
  3. Caucasians
  4. Hispanic
  5. African-Americans
  6. Africans (Gottfredson's addition)
2017
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. East Asian (it's unclear if he's including South Asian in with this or not)
  3. Caucasian
  4. Mestizo/Hispanic
  5. African Americans
  6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
  7. Pygmies
  8. Indigenous Australians
As we have seen, evo-psycho bros, human biodiversitarians, and all the rest of the socio-biologists believe fervently in race but they never know at any given time how many races there are. This is why evolutionary psychology is perfect for people who don't like to work very hard - it's so flexible and mood-dependent.

So what might a biosocial criminal justice system look like? I'll discuss that next.
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