Why is Cathy Young still obsessed with Zoe Quinn & Anita Sarkeesian?

When Cathy Young blocked me on Twitter she complained that "She's obsessed w/critics of progressive ideology & follows them around, smears them as "alt-right" 

Now given how much Cathy Young is obsessed with smearing women via Gamergate it's odd that she would point at others who are "obsessed" but really it's not so odd when you consider that Young, who makes a living as a public intellectual, is a thin-skinned hypocrite. 

And of course by "follows them around" she means I occasionally look at their Twitter feeds and make critical comments. This kind of activity is probably 30% of all Twitter activity and engaged in, of course, shamelessly & hypocritically by Young herself.

Young clashes with left-wing Noah Berlatsky frequently. Their recent exchange demonstrates I'm not the only one who thinks Cathy Young is alt-right as well as demonstrating Young's ongoing dislike of Anita Sarkeesian.

The Wikipedia page on the alt-right notes:

The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loosely-connected and somewhat ill-defined[1] grouping of white supremacists/white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, neo-Confederates, Holocaust deniers, and other far-right[2][3][4] fringe hate groups.[5][6]
Alt-right beliefs have been described as isolationist, protectionist, antisemitic and white supremacist,[7][8][9] frequently overlapping with neo-Nazism,[10][11][12][13] identitarianism,[14] nativism and Islamophobia,[15][16][17][18][19] antifeminism, misogyny and homophobia,[10][20][21][22][13] right-wing populism[23][24] and the neoreactionary movement.[7][25]

So opinions vary on what exactly counts as the alt-right. Apparently Cathy Young is of the opinion that she is the final arbiter of who is and isn't alt-right.

In an interesting twist, Cathy Young herself is cited in the same Wiki article on the alt-right:

The alt-right has been said to include elements of white nationalism,[10][11][23] white supremacism,[8][9][66] antisemitism,[10][11][12] right-wing populism,[23] nativism[15] and the neoreactionary movement.[25] Andrew Marantz includes "neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists".[28] Newsday columnist Cathy Young noted the alt-right's strong opposition to both legal and illegal immigration and its hard-line stance on the European migrant crisis.[67] 

Now I haven't looked into Cathy Young's position on immigration, but it's absolutely clear that she is a masculinist, anti-feminist and misogynist. The Wikipedia entry on her notes:

Young has defended the social media campaign Women Against Feminism.[6]

and

frequently agreeing with men's rights activists

The entry doesn't discuss her personal involvement in Gamergate but rather quotes her opinion of it.

Describing the Gamergate controversy in relation to feminism, Young has stated that she believes that Gamergate is a backlash against feminism, but "it's a backlash against a particular kind of feminism, one that has a tendency to look obsessively for offences, read ideology into everything, and demonize male sexuality under the pretext of stamping out 'the objectification of women'."[7]

It isn't clear how many of the beliefs ascribed to the alt-right one must have in order to be alt-right - nobody knows. But given how ferociously Cathy Young hates feminism, I'd say that qualifies her.

It isn't clear who Young means when she claims I smear "them" - I've previously discussed how Young falsely claimed I've called Steven Pinker a white supremacist. It's possible that yet again she is claiming something false about me, perhaps suggesting I've called Steven Pinker a member of the alt-right. I haven't done any such thing, although I have pointed out that he has connections that would fairly, by most definitions, be called alt-right. And of course there was Pinker's infamous remarks about the alt-right, defended by Cathy Young's buddy Jesse Singal. The remarks were given as part of a Spiked Magazine Unsafe Space series - Spiked Magazine is, like Cathy Young and Steven Pinker, relentlessly anti-feminist. Although Pinker and Young like to try to brand Young's anti-feminism as "equity feminism" - a favorite term of Koch brothers hacks.

Now whether I'm right or not about Cathy Young being alt-right or Steven Pinker having alt-right connections, the fact remains that Cathy Young supported a mob-rule phenomenon, Gamergate, which put women's lives in danger and she still attacks the very same women who were the targets.

The worst that Cathy Young has to endure from me is the possibility of being mislabeled alt-right when she's simply a far-right Koch brothers hack libertarian.

Neither Zoe Quinn nor Anita Sarkeesian have done anything to justify Cathy Young's bitter hatred and obsession with them - Quinn was the target of an unhinged ex-boyfriend, and Sarkeesian has made videos criticizing the sexist attitudes in video games.

 But far from admitting she was wrong about her support of Gamergate in which women's lives were threatened Young is doubling down on her support right up to the present time.

Here's Cathy Young, just a few days ago, once again defending Eron Gjoni and smearing Zoe Quinn.

Why does Cathy Young hate these women so much? Why can't Cathy Young admit that Eron Gjoni is a horrible person who committed a calculated violation of another person's privacy for the purpose of throwing her to a misogynist mob?

Why can't Cathy Young let Gamergate go, even though her support of Gamergate reflects so badly on her?

Shameless, thin-skinned hypocrite Cathy Young attacking Zoe Quinn yet again.

Cathy Young, Jesse Singal & Gamergate

Cathy Young wearing a pro-Gamergate
T-shirt from Know Your Memes

I am actually pretty glad I'm not better-known, contrary to Cathy Young's claim last week that I'm trying to "get in the spotlight somehow." If I was better known I might become the target of a vicious misogynist mob, and if I was, Cathy Young would no doubt cheer them on.

I admit before she and Jesse Singal teamed up to personally attack me last week, I hadn't really paid much attention to what Young was up to, especially since she wasn't included in the Intellectual Dark Web article written by Bari Weiss. A fact for which Young expressed what sounds like sour grapes to me, here.

I was more aware of Cathy Young's ideological twin and fellow Reason Magazine contributor, Christina Hoff Sommers, who was mentioned in the Weiss article and who was also a friend of Milo Yiannopoulos and a booster of the men's rights movement.

Up until this week I had only mentioned Cathy Young, in passing, four times in the entire almost 12-year history of this blog.

I blogged about the May 2015 article in Boston Magazine which gives detailed information about the horrific evil of Eron Gjoni, the man who started Gamergate by harassing and doxxing his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn. An excerpt:

He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.

Then later:

From the start, it seems, Gjoni wanted to make certain that his blog about Quinn would connect with a large base of people in the gaming community, some of whom he already knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry. 

As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.” 

One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent. 

As he wrote, Gjoni kept pressing Quinn for information. About a week after their final breakup in San Francisco, Quinn finally stopped responding to Gjoni’s barrage of texts, Facebook messages, emails, and calls. He interpreted this not as a surrender or a retreat from his unwanted advances but instead, paradoxically, as a kind of attack. As he wrote at the time and later posted online, “GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. SHE’S AVOIDED ME EVER SINCE THIS CONVERSATION BECAUSE SHE IS PARANOID I MIGHT GO PUBLIC.” From this circular reasoning emerged a twisted justification: By withholding information, Quinn was somehow forcing Gjoni to “go public.” Eventually, Gjoni would come to see himself as the victim. “I was panicking at the thought of not publishing [‘The Zoe Post’],” he told me. “I didn’t care what the outcome was for Zoe.” 

After crafting the post for weeks, Gjoni shared his polished draft with about a dozen friends—mostly female game developers—as well as his mother, and asked them to weigh in on whether he should unleash it. He says about 10 of them gave him the green light. His mother, he claims, reluctantly approved, but was “very worried that I was going into it overly emotional.” One Gjoni friend I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, said, “I felt it was healthy to get it out there…. What harm would it do to get his feelings out?” 

Others who later read the post saw something much more deliberate and malicious. Jesse Singal, an editor at NYMag.com, said it clearly “followed a script” of “these sad, specific ideas that a segment of the gaming community has about women being duplicitous and breaking men’s hearts.” Slate’s Arthur Chu told me, “He’s an articulate, well-spoken guy who knows how to put together something on the Internet. That’s the kind of weapon guys like that have…the ‘crazy bitch’ story. It’s a very potent trope to use…. It’s a very nasty, very calculating train of thought, and it worked.”

The "Zoe post" was not only incredibly vicious it was well thought-out and vetted -  Gjoni even got his mom and female friends to review it. This wasn't a moment's act of passion, this was a crowd-sourced project. It's astounding how so many people knew Gjoni was stalking his ex-girlfriend and planning on a massive invasion of her privacy and didn't talk him out of it.

And Gjoni knew exactly what the effect would be of his vicious attack, because Zoe Quinn had already been harassed online, as documented by an article in the New Yorker, simply for publishing a video game the harassers didn't like.

I was very interested to see that Young and Singal were on opposite sides of Gamergate, as I highlighted in the passage above. Cathy Young was such an enthusiastic supporter of Gamergate that she celebrated the second anniversary of the "Zoe Post" with this tweet, alerting her followers to the interview she had done with Gjoni.

She published it in something called Heat St. which appears to be no more, but I found it on the Wayback Machine, and reposted the interview here for ease of access.

It's clear that Cathy Young thinks Eron Gjoni is just swell:

The man who started it all has kept a relatively low profile. Gjoni, who was born in Albania and came to the United States with his family at the age of six, still lives in Boston where he and Quinn met. He is working on creating an artificially intelligent animation program that he hopes will be eventually be used by people who don’t have access to a major studio. He is on Twitter, where his posts often show a wry, quirky humor. (His profile quote is, “A good pun is its own reword.”)

This was published after the Boston Magazine article which Young mentions in an attempt to suggest it was unfair to Gjoni:

CY: Speaking of which, are there journalists who have given you a fair shake? 

EG: I think the closest was that journalist from Vice [Mike Pearl], and it was the closest because he ignored what I said completely and just talked about my views on [GamerGate mascot] Vivian James. 

CY: Zachary Jason’s piece for Boston Magazine insinuated that you’re still obsessed with Zoe Quinn because you suggested meeting at the place where you and she had first hung out. And the real reason was… 

EG: It’s because I’m vegan. He suggested lunch, and I said, “Cool, let’s go to a vegan place.” There are no vegan places [in Boston] where I have not been with her.

She also gets Gjoni to admit that if he could do it over again, he would stalk and endanger and invade the privacy of Zoe Quinn all over again:

Cathy Young: Let’s say that tomorrow someone comes to you with a time machine and you can go back to August 2014 and decide whether or not to do it all over again. Would you do it, and would you do anything differently? 

Eron Gjoni: It would be harder to do it. I would still do it, but it’s like—oh, this is going to suck. (Laughs) I suppose I’d take out the “burgers and fries” joke. I wasn’t sure about it, but people who were looking it over at the time said it was too funny to take out [and] like, “All right, I’ll trust you on it.”

Cathy Young doesn't only think Eron Gjoni is swell, she was pals, like Christina Hoff Sommers, with Milo Yiannopoulos  bonding over GamerGate. All three can be seen together in this Youtube video on Yiannopoulos's channel under the title Milo, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young explain journalism to the SPJ.

The Guardian wrote of Yiannopoulos' connection to GamerGate:

Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos in particular seemed such a desperate opportunist that we never predicted his rise to prominence, having explicitly stereotyped gamers in the past as “overweight” and “embarrassing”. A disgraced journalist and entrepreneur who had to close his tech site The Kernel due to unpaid debts, leaving staff uncertain if they would ever be paid, he’d then spent the next few years spouting insincere hateful ideas to a burgeoning Twitter audience who responded to his anti-feminist, anti-establishment invectives. He was eventually banned from the platform after finally abusing a woman who was apparently just famous enough for Twitter to respond.

It was apparent to me that there was something off about Yiannopoulos the first time I heard him, but Young and Sommers were either too dull or just didn't want to understand what a psychopath he truly is.

Young has defended Gamergate many times.

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - The Observer

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine again

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - RealClearPolitics

By 2017 Cathy Young was still pro-GamerGate, even if she criticized Yiannopoulos.

This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)

Young might have been on the opposite side of GamerGate from Jesse Singal, but a year before the second anniversary of the Zoe Post, Young was able to use Singal's complaints about the UN report on cyberharassment as an excuse to attack Anita Sarkeesian as a "professional victim."

Sarkeesian was another target of the GamerGate mob who had to cancel a talk at Utah State after receiving threats.

Since GamerGate, Young and Singal seem to have bonded over their antagonism towards transgenderism. In February 2016, months before she celebrated the second anniversary of GamerGate Young defended Singal against "political correctness" over an article of his which had antagonized the transgender community.

Singal has been criticized often for his articles on transgenderism and I do find it odd how often he writes on that topic. I will be exploring Singal and Young's apparent obsession over transgenderism at some point in the future. We already know that another of Young's right-wing employers, Quillette has a hostile editorial line towards transgenderism.

Singal left Twitter for a very short time. When he came back he and Young had become a kind of team, something noticed in December 2017 by another Twitterer.

Anita Sarkeesian was driven from her home because of GamerGate. So was Brianna Wu. So was Zoe Quinn.

Meanwhile, Cathy Young expresses far more concern for Jesse Singal's very brief Twitter hiatus than she ever did for any of the women driven from their homes by the misogynist mob that Cathy Young celebrated, supported, encouraged and defended. And Jesse Singal seems to have no problem with Cathy Young's viciousness.

And talk they did. I think Young helped get Singal a gig at the Koch brothers' Reason Magazine. He's published two articles there so far, one suggests the #MeToo movement has gone too far, and the other is the absolute non-issue "Is it Racist to Refer to Space Colonization." I'm sure sooner or later he will publish something about transgenderism.

Cathy Young really should seek counseling for her internalized misogyny, although if she did get help, it could threaten her career of siding with monstrous men against women. And after all, constant attacks against other women is what the Koch brothers pay her for.

BOTH

Cathy Young and the sample size of one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who said it - Cathy Young or Mark Judge?

Gamergater #1

Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women videos, which feature prominently in the debate about videogames, feminism and sexism, are full of selective and skewed analysis—one that neglects positive female images, ignores examples of male characters getting the same treatment she considers sexist for women, and attacks games for encouraging deadly violence toward female characters when killing those characters is actually the "bad" option that causes player to lose points. (A fairly detailed three-part discussion of the flaws in Sarkeesian’s critique was posted a few weeks ago on Gamesided.com; for upfront disclosure, the first part quotes from an old column of mine criticizing radical anti-sex feminist Andrea Dworkin, on whose theories Sarkeesian sometimes relies.) It should go without saying that the biased shoddiness of Sarkeesian’s arguments does not in any way excuse the online harassment toward her, let alone violent threats.  But the harassment should not preclude a critical examination of her critique—instead of the largely unquestioning adulation it has received from the elite gaming media.

Gamergater #2

Yes, some games are violent. Some are misogynistic. And responsible people can have discussions about the effect that too much gaming has on the human soul and psyche—as well as what good games do. Yet Sarkeesian’s arguments are overly broad, deceptive, and full of specific errors. Gamers have pointed this out in great detail, and are still caricatured in the media as unintelligent, pajama-wearing mouth breathers.
One of the sharpest gamers to respond to Sarkeesian is a kid who calls himself Mr. Repzion. Mr. Repzion in a lifelong gamer, and on his YouTube channel he has posted several responses to Sarkeesian that are detailed and well researched. (They also contain occasional bad language.) Repzion was particularly exasperated at the errors Sarkeesian made when she recently attended E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The first is by Cathy Young. The second is by Brett Kavanaugh's black-out drinking buddy and probable rape-train rapist Mark Judge.

As much as I have been reading Cathy Young's commentary on, and support for the monsters of Gamergate during the past month, I would not have been able to tell the difference between Young's and Judge's words. Mark Judge is Cathy Young's soul mate when it comes to hatred of women who complain about sexism.

Young mentions Judge online but hasn't said that she knew him. They are just two awful human beings, I guess, being independently awful.

• Cathy Young mentions Mark Judge in Newsday
• Cathy Young mentions Mark Judge in Arc Digital Media
• Cathy Young says on Twitter Mark Judge should testify
• Cathy Young mentions Mark Judge in New York Daily News

Now that Young has found out (probably by now) that Mark Judge was a fellow Gamergater will she decide to admire and defend him as she did Milo Yiannopolous and Eron Gjoni?

Cathy Young and the he-man woman-haters club

Cathy Young is apparently followed almost exclusively by men on Twitter. No surprise there.

Cathy Young blocked me on Twitter today because I pointed out what an awful, misogynist human being she is. But of course she couldn't block me without making a big announcement on her Twitter feed so that the mob of misogynists who follow her would get a chance to offer Young their support by making nasty, idiotic and false statements about me.

I suspect this is the kind of thing Cathy Young lives for.

My guess is that Young is hoping they'll go after me much like the mob who went after women like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn during GamerGate. Cathy Young supported and encouraged the vicious misogynist mob during GamerGate.

Sorry Cathy, so far the only thing your mob has done is hide behind your blocked thread, in Twitter's safest space for misogynists this side of Quillette.

Reading the comments from Cathy Young's followers gives you a good sense of the idiotic level of discourse you get from misogynist cowards. 

And it's no surprise at all that Young supports the contemptible plutocrat mediocrity Daphne Merkin.

You can enjoy Cathy Young and her mob & their misogynist awfulness after the cut.

Cathy Young has Jesse Singal's back

Oh the endless hypocrisy of Cathy Young, and her concern for unfair attacks via social media.

In June, The Atlantic published a cover story by science journalist Jesse Singal on children and adolescents who identify as transgender but then return to the gender identity consistent with their birth sex — sometimes after undergoing appearance-changing and potentially health-damaging treatments. The backlash on social media and in left-of-center publications was fierce; the author and the magazine alike were vilified and accused of promoting bigotry.

Cathy Young is always so concerned about poor Jesse Singal and his relation to social media, yet she publicly celebrated the moment when a campaign of vicious, misogynist harassment began, with the extreme invasion of one woman's privacy by her obsessive ex-boyfriend when he posted her private information and correspondence online with the explicit goal of provoking social media harassment.

Naturally Young and Singal had no problem attacking me on social media in a vicious way.

The people who are part of the Reason Magazine-Quillette axis are absolutely shameless in their hypocrisy.

Jesse Singal is still a lazy half-wit "journalist"

No surprise to see that one of the fans of lazy half-wit "journalist" Jesse Singal is right-wing Koch brothers hack Cathy Young.

I was amused to read the comments in this thread, although not because the commenters were deliberately funny. Much like Singal himself, his Twitter followers are, try as they might, wit-less.

Almost none of them seems capable of actually reading what I've written about Pinker and his evo-psycho bro followers, or understanding it. But then, you really can't expect intellectual rigor from people who are impressed by Steven Pinker.

It actually has been a super year for Jesse Singal - he's under-qualified to be a journalist and yet he gets paid to write. He should count his blessings. 

But maybe that's why he cultivates hacks like Cathy Young - maybe someday Singal will give up journalism, which he really isn't suited for, and get Cathy Young to help him get a career that does suit him - wingnut welfare. 

Because it's possible that one of these days his editors will get tired of his habit of turning himself into the story:

• Jesse Singal, please leave me alone
• Journalist Jesse Singal says he ‘goofed’ on interpreting trans study
• New York Magazine's Jesse Singal commits fraud
• My Jesse Singal story

With any luck Singal will screen cap this too and post it on Twitter and we can keep it going - I'm happy to keep adding to the "stories about Jesse Singal" collection.

Jesse Singal gets on board the wingnut welfare gravy train

More of my thoughts on Jesse Singal


When I last mentioned Jesse Singal, the transphobic, Steven Pinker fan-boy on this blog, it was about his passive-aggressive tweets against me. Since then he's covered himself in more shame with his transphobic articles.

Being anti-trans is of course a hallmark of the alt-right-pretending-to-be-centrist flagship of the "intellectual dark web", Quillette. Being pro-Pinker - and that means pro-hereditarian, pro-evolutionary psychology, is also a hallmark of Quillette. And then too, Singal is a buddy of Pinker's favorite out proponent of race science, Razib Khan, also an author at Quillette.

So it wasn't especially prophetic of me, when back in April I said:

But maybe that's why he cultivates hacks like Cathy Young - maybe someday Singal will give up journalism, which he really isn't suited for, and get Cathy Young to help him get a career that does suit him - wingnut welfare. 

My mistake was thinking that "someday" Singal would get on board the wingnut welfare gravy train, instead of "very soon" - as of July 9, Jesse Singal is a contributor to Reason Magazine.

You can't go broke supporting a position that the Koch brothers also support.

Apparently Cathy Young (also an author at Quillette) is not afraid of being sued for defamation.

The important career of Cathy Young

Although Cathy Young felt she could cast aspersions on my career as a playwright, she isn't doing as well as one would expect from someone on the Koch brothers dole. She started a Patreon account in November 2015 and contrary to what her self-importance might lead you to believe, she only has 53 patrons to date.

Even from this partial image of her Patreon page it's clear that her focus is on hating feminism: "from feminism to a gender equality movement." The implication there is that feminism isn't really about gender equality.

What must it be like to be so focused on hating a group of people promoting the idea that women are human beings? Young called me a psycho in a tweet, but I submit that being focused on attacking women's aspirations is a far more certain indicator of psychopathy than any signs I have displayed.

Cathy Young, Koch brothers handmaiden, on the attack

It looks like I've hit a nerve of the B-list of the "Intellectual Dark Web." 

Cathy Young's snobbish attack on my career as a playwright demonstrates how astoundingly un-self-aware she is. She appears to actually believe that she's made a professional career as a writer, focused mainly on her own bitter anti-feminism, due to her superior literary skills rather than the fact that she - like so many other rightwing pundits including, now, Jesse Singal - has had a career underwritten by the Koch brothers.

Khan references the Undark magazine article for which I was interviewed (because I've been following the racist career of Khan since I started this blog) and it's a good article - I highly recommend it: Race, Science and Razib Khan.

What's really interesting is how the Quillette gang has a meltdown because I simply put facts into a graphic with my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections chart. Apparently they have a weird phobia about graphics, since it doesn't bother them that Bari Weiss grouped Steven Pinker in with members of the "intellectual dark web" like Alex Jones:

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

So I guess when I finish my project of turning the Bari Weiss article about a "web" into a web-like graphic, their heads will explode.

Monetizing misogyny

Speaking of misogyny, by way of Pharyngula is this article in Boing Boing about misogynists who make money by firing up mobs of fellow misogynists.

One of the things that completely convinced me that Will Shetterly was no longer one of the good guys was his siding with the misogynist assholes of #gamergate against Anita Sarkeesian and  Zoe Quinn. This is how deranged Shetterly became - in addition to siding with Koch brothers employee (by way of the AEI) Christina Hoff Sommers he also approvingly quoted another professional feminist-hater, Cathy Young, yet another Koch brothers employee (by way of Reason magazine) who said this:

When GamerGate members claimed to have found the man who had sent threats to Sarkeesian, anti-GamerGate blogger David Futrelle responded by accusing them of harboring some of Sarkeesian’s harassers in their midst—citing as his example a netizen known as “thunderf00t,” who has done little more than to engage in sharp criticism of Sarkeesian’s work.

That's the kind of right-wing Bizarro World (or just Shameless Lie-ville) that anti-feminists live in.

As Jay Allen in Boing Boing noted:

Many of these professional victimizers are anti-feminist video bloggers, who combine the income from YouTube video ads with funding through Patreon, a service which allows people who create content to charge subscribers per-release or per-month. One of the highest-profile examples is atheist and anti-feminist video blogger Phil “thunderf00t” Mason, formerly of Freethought Blogs. In addition to his promotion of atheism and debunking of pseudoscience, he focuses on attacking feminism and particular feminist personalities. In particular, he’s focused on video game cultural critic and video blogger Anita Sarkeesian, making multiple videos with names like “‘Feminism’ Vs FACTS (Anita Sarkeesian DESTROYED!)” and “Anita Sarkeesian- BUSTED!” 

Most of these videos rely heavily on editing short segments out of context and belaboring them, but that’s typical for the level of discourse in YouTube video blogs. What makes Mason different is that he actively exhorts his viewers to express their disagreement with personal abuse. In a video titled “Anita Sarkeesian and the BITCHY tweets”, he tells his viewers, “People call [Sarkeesian] a bitch because they think [she] acted like a bitch. That’s really not sexism, but a conclusion.” He describes this abuse as “part of the public marketplace of ideas”. And his viewers take that message to heart, often even citing thunderf00t by name while heaping personal abuse on Sarkeesian. For these videos, which often have hundreds of thousands of views, he gets approximately $1.50 USD per thousand views (recent estimates of YouTube income ranges from $0.60 to $5 per thousand), plus more than $2500 per video through Patreon. 

Mason—and others, like Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini, planning a feature-length documentary titled The Sarkeesian Effect—have targeted Sarkeesian for more than a year; they only joined up with GamerGate to promote their already-existing anti-feminist agenda.

You can understand why  professional feminist-haters like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Summers support thunderf00t and the rest of the mobbing evil misogynist freaks - that's exactly what the Koch brothers pay them for. What is Will Shetterly's excuse? He started out by justifiably attacking real Social Justice Warriors, like the conscience-deficient Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford, but he seems to have concluded that since they claim to be feminists (while spending their time attacking "white feminists" whom they hate more than any member of the Ku Klux Klan who ever lived) the real problem must be feminists and so we must attack feminists, including Sarkeesian who was never a Social Justice Warrior.

My guess is that Shetterly was never a true feminist and the existence of Social Justice Warriors has allowed him to fly his right-wing misogyny freak flag. Fortunately I never included Shetterly's SJW web site in my blogroll, so I don't have to take it down - but I am adding David Futrelle's "We Hunted the Mammoth" partly as a response to Shetterly's going over to the right-wing Koch brothers-supported misogynist side. As much as I hate the hardcore SJWs I will always side with feminists against misogynist-sympathizers like Will Shetterly.

Jesse Singal's continuing journey to the right

Anti- "identity politics" and yet considers it
necessary to declare her ethnic identity
on her Twitter profile.

I have documented Quillette's opposition to feminism and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann's misogyny on this blog often.

Quillette is a scheme to rebrand right-wing views like those of Lehmann's former (or maybe continuing) employer Rebel Media as "centrist" and so it aligns itself with fake liberals like Helen Pluckrose and Iona Italia.

Italia likes to denounce identity politics, although she proudly proclaims her religio-ethnic identity on her Twitter profile. 

Helen Pluckrose publicly proclaimed she isn't a feminist. And she's part of the Quillette-supported free speech grifter gang.

And it was Italia retweeting my tweet to her behind the safety of a block (because like all those who gather round right-wing safe space Quillette, she is a snowflake who cannot tolerate criticism) which got Jesse Singal and Cathy Young to team up to attack me, although I hadn't had anything to do with either of them for months leading up to the attack.

It's no surprise to find Pluckrose and Italia promoting Jesse Singal in their podcast. Singal is rapidly becoming a second-string member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" along with Cathy Young. 

One of the editorial positions of Quillette, in addition to anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-socialist and pro "race science" (which claims to have proven scientifically that black people are intellectually and morally inferior to other races) and a constant trumped-up panic over free speech in American colleges is a hostility to transgenderism. 

I found someone I knew from the NY theater scene, Libby Emmons, pushing hateful anti-trans rhetoric in Quillette with a typical reactionary screed:

It is no anomaly that the movement is hitting its cultural stride in the debate over pronouns. The first step in changing how we think about our bodies and what it means to be human is to change how we speak about these things. Transgender speech codes demand that we renounce our bodies’ basis in biology, and instead consider them constructs of arbitrary (and somehow unjust) societal expectations. We are not to think about ‘mother’ and ‘father’ as reproductive terms, but as culturally specified relationships. This aggressive effort to change and police the use of language, and to redefine terms like ‘male’ and ‘female’ to deny the sexual difference characteristic of all mammals, is designed to uncouple mind from body and humans from evolutionary and reproductive logic. Instead, an ideology of emotion is to be given dominion over biological reality.

Ah yes, the all-important pronoun issue. The thing that brought crackpot Jordan Peterson to everyone's attention. Quillette adores Peterson, of course.

Quillette appears to publish virtually any reactionary screed that matches its editorial positions, even an anti-trans rant by Emmons who has zero expertise, per her Quillette bio: a writer and theatre maker in New York. She is co-founder of the Sticky series & newly formed Puss Collective, & blogs at li88yinc.com. 

Jesse Singal is now infamous for his hostility to transgenderism, making him a perfect match for Quillette. It's surprising he hasn't published in Quillette yet, especially since he's started publishing in the Koch brothers-supported Reason.

Iona Italia and Helen Pluckrose are either complete idiotic dupes or are fully aware they are playing roles in the belief that pretending to be liberals makes them more effective at attacking feminists and liberals. Either way they are contemptible individuals.

The Quillette-Koch brothers circle is complete

Just when I thought my opinion of Cathy Young could go no lower, here she tries to argue, with the  inane laughing emoticon she favors so much, that Claire Lehmann isn't really far-right.

The project to brand Quillette as centrist never ends.

The Mercatus Center, which sponsors "Conversations with Tyler (Cowen)" is notorious for its Koch brothers connection as the New York Times discussed last May.

As early as 1990, entities controlled by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch were given a seat on a committee to pick candidates for a professorship that they funded, the records show. Similar arrangements that continued through 2009 gave donors decision-making roles in selecting candidates for key economics appointments at the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded think tank on campus that studies markets and regulation. The appointments, which also created faculty lines at George Mason, were steered to professors who, like the Kochs, embraced unconstrained free markets.

This tweet isn't only significant for its demonstration of Cathy Young's inanity, it is the first proof I've seen of a direct connection between Quillette and the Koch brothers. I knew Quillette had published articles by Reason contributors of course, but I hadn't seen any direct connection between Lehmann and any Koch organization.

I had thought before it's very likely there was a funding arrangement between the Koch brothers and Quillette - now I'm sure of it.

One reason I have never called Steven Pinker a white supremacist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reason loves religious zealots

Reason is a libertarian publication. Modern libertarianism was basically invented by Ayn Rand, the worst famous novelist ever. Her importance to libertarianism and Reason is underscored by her inclusion on their topics list along with the likes of Drew Carey and Ron Paul.

Initially I thought that libertarianism was a left/right hybrid - left on personal issues like abortion and religion, but right on economic issues.

So they are pro-choice, pro-rationalism, pro-free speech, right? At one time I thought so. But Reason and its fans are completely in the tank for McPain - they especially love Sarah Palin, the fundamentalist book-banning anti-choice ignoramus. They even had one of their tame pseudo-"feminists" Cathy Young, write an article about how great Palin's candidacy is for women.

More proof that I was right to draw the conclusion in the past few years that "libertarian" is just a fancy name for conservatives who don't hate sex.

The abysmal Quillette author gender ratio

Claire Lehmann agrees with Camille Paglia that
women are pathetic stupid losers.

It's absolutely no surprise to me that Quillette has an abysmal author gender ratio in favor of men.

Quillette never mentions feminism unless to criticize it; likes to publish the work of anti-feminists like Cathy Young; publishes crackpots like Jordan "enforced monogamy" Peterson; and likes to praise professional misogynists like Camille Paglia.

And then there's the fact that publisher Claire Lehmann is an anti-feminist and a misogynist. Female misogynists are the most pathetic misogynists.

But even publications that don't take an anti-feminist, anti-woman position, like the New Yorker, have had histories of publishing far more work by men than by women, right up into the 2010s, as I documented for several months in 2011-2012 on this blog.

The VIDA list has been tracking the lop-sided gender ratios of the big literary publications for years.

When I was tracking the New Yorker it had a female authorship rate average of 24% - or almost 4 male writers for every female one.

Since I started tracking Quillette's author gender ratio a month ago (and posting the results to Twitter) its female authorship rate has averaged 14% or about 7 male authors for every female author.

Now it's possible that my publicizing Quillette's low female authorship will make Quillette publish more women authors and thus improve Quillette's standing as a serious publication. But given the alt-right leaning of Quillette I don't think it's ever going to be taken seriously, no matter how much Steven Pinker praises it. But no matter what, if I have to make Claire Lehmann work a little harder (or work at all since there doesn't seem to be much actual editing that goes on in Quillette) then it's worth it.

Claire Lehmann & Jordan Peterson & other Quilletters

Dummies understand each other. That's why we see alt-right Claire Lehmann supporting wacko alt-right Jordan Peterson, on the "Conservatism" Youtube channel.

I have developed a strong aversion to the Australian dialect and it must be due to Lehmann. I used to think the dialect was charming when I heard Steve Irwin speak.

Here is Jordan Peterson in Time Magazine explaining his genius theory on why "Frozen" is propaganda:

INTERVIEWER

In your new book 12 Rules For Life, you’re very critical of Frozen. Why do you call it “deeply propagandistic”? 

PETERSON

It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics. You could say that Sleeping Beauty was raised out of her unconsciousness via a delivering male. Another way of reading the story is that unconsciousness requires active consciousness as an antidote. And the unconsciousness is symbolized in that particular story by femininity and active consciousness by masculinity. I could hardly sit through Frozen. There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Oh my god. The Mary Sue has a good response:

 Peterson tips his hand and reveals that he seems to be angry because Frozen has a plot twist.

Isn’t the darkness and the light in Elsa, who has the power to freeze things, for good or ill? 

The most propagandistic element of Frozen was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending. 

He was a villain the whole time! He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing! 

That’s how it turned out in the end, but there was no indication of that at the beginning. 

That’s good story craft — not tipping your hand. Like The Crying Game. 

It’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about Frozen, although I don’t think so. 

I’m sorry. This is just the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. First off, he totally dodged Luscombe’s question about Elsa, because she is rather obviously correct that Frozen looks at both the light and darkness of having power—especially female power in a world that is afraid of it. 

But then we get this gem about Prince Hans: “There was no indication of that in the beginning.” First of all, did we watch the same movie? Sure, the hints were subtle—but like, by children’s movie standards. Did Jordan Peterson really watch the “We finish each other’s … sandwiches!” sequence and interpret it as an earnest, deadly serious indication of true love? 

By this logic, all murder mysteries ever written are vile propaganda. The Sixth Sense is a PSA. Macbeth is a Maoist poster. M. Night Shymalan is the one true propagandist of our age. 

Now, all that said, I would certainly agree that Frozen, like pretty much all works of art, does have an artistic and a moral point of view. (As George Orwell famously said, all art is in some sense propaganda.) But I will never stop giggling at the idea that it is uniquely propagandistic among all of Disney’s animated films, just because Prince Hans turns out to be evil and the story wasn’t around when the last woolly mammoth died. Come on, now.

It's already clear that Claire Lehmann is not an especially bright individual and, perhaps as a result, she's placing her bets on patriarchy reasserting itself over feminism, possibly led by Jordan Peterson. Anybody who hasn't already concluded that Peterson is a clown is just... slow. There's no way around it.

The only possible way Quillette can survive is if Lehmann is the recipient of wingnut welfare because it's not only transparently an alt-right publication, just one step up from Lehmann's former employer Rebel Media, it has a ridiculously amateurish and right-wing line-up of writers.

Currently on Quillette's front page:

• Saloni Dattani - MSc student in behaviour genetics at the University of London

• Jack Staples-Butler - recent History graduate, unemployed receptionist

• Matthew Blackwell - currently completing a BA in Economics and Anthropology at The University of Queensland.

• William C. Vaillancourt - a recent graduate, majored in Poli-sci and history. Prior to Quillette on his resume he lists Independent Journalism Review, which was founded by a Republican operative and peddled a conspiracy theory about Obama.

• Nick Ottens - one of the very few legit, informed & not obviously right-wing authors

• Genevieve Weynerowski - a copywriter - fan of Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Kay

• Brad Cran - poet - based on his Twitter feed loves women who hate feminists: Lehmann, Sommers, Cathy Young, Bari Weiss

• Lisa Marchiano - "Jungian analyst" who likes to retweet Jordan Peterson and Quillette articles

• Brandon J. Weichert - right-wing MAGAt.

• Kirio Birks - a postgraduate student with B.A. in Philosophy 

• S. A. Dance - teaches high school, also writes for right-wing The Federalist

• Michael Shermer - hereditarian, New Atheist creep

• Nicola Wright - writes and edits content for LibertyWorks a right-wing Australian rag

• David Johnson is an independent writer from the UK with a degree in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in IT.  Writes a blog under the name of David Hansard...  Right-winger

• Elio Martino - a provisional psychologist, whose only writing credits appear to be hereditarian twaddle for Quillette

• Stuart Reges - Principal Lecturer at the University of Washington where he manages the introductory computer science classes

Basically anybody who works cheap and supports the hereditarian or alt-right view of the world (and those are in agreement more often than not) will be published by Quillette, which presumably pays very little.

Also of the sixteen writers above, only four are women, and that's a huge improvement over its gender ratio from a month ago. Of those, one, Nicola Wright is a hard-core right-winger, one is Pinker's #1 fan-girl (Saloni Dattani) and the other two were probably just thrilled to be published anywhere.

When Lehmann was still working for Rebel Media she wrote a piece in Quillette defending Trump voters:

Depending on how you spin it, however, low information people might also be less prone to rationalization and high information people might be more vulnerable to ad hoc hypothesizing. Being high in intelligence or a need for cognition does not automatically indicate that one is high in rationality. Nor does it tell us much about a person’s practical wisdom.

I think Claire Lehmann has lots of empathy for low-information people. She just better hope she gets a plutocratic sugar daddy to support her amateur alt-right apologetics.

And now a message for Jordan Peterson: