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.

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.

All aboard the wingnut welfare gravy train with alt-right Claire Lehmann & white supremacist Jared Taylor

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is really proud of her boy Bo Winegard, so she keeps promoting his left-bashing work in Quillette.

Lehmann is especially solicitous of Winegard's career as we can see when she felt it was her duty to attack me as a " troll" for daring to point out that Bo Winegard is a hack taking wingnut welfare from alt-right promoters of racism like Claire Lehmann. With lots of dittos from her bot-like ditto-heads.

But then Lehmann as a member of the alt-right, seems to prefer men who promote "scientific" justifications for racism.

And it's mostly men, the ratio of men to women writing for Quillette is at best 10:1. This is no doubt partly due to Claire Lehmann's raging, obsessive, unhinged hatred of feminism.

But then Christiana Hoff Sommers has been riding the Koch brothers gravy train for decades in exchange for constantly attacking feminism, and no doubt Lehmann would like an easy wingnut welfare-style gig like that for herself. If in fact Quillette isn't already a direct vehicle for right-wing institutional funding, which would not surprise me a bit.

Quillette appears to be a way of rebranding the alt-right in order to make it appeal to centrists, and thanks to the assistance of New Atheists like Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer she's been making decent progress. It doesn't hurt that she is an advocate for the religion of New Atheists, evolutionary psychology, making a big to-do over James Damore, who was merely repeating everything that evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity and other hereditarians have been promoting for decades, ever since the Pioneer Fund paid people to come up with data proving the inferiority of blacks.

It cannot be pointed out often enough how right-wingers who typically side with corporations against workers suddenly find they no longer approve of "at will" laws like the one Google operates under in California. Funny how that works.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann often publishes the work of people who believe in the genetic inferiority of blacks. In addition to Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard, she's published the work of Brian Boutwell, Kevin Beaver, Razib Khan, Richard Haier, Jonathan Anomaly, Jordan Peterson, JC Barnes and probably many others.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is undeniably part of the alt-right: she was a regular on alt-right Rebel Media while running Quillette, which was founded in 2015. Lehmann has appeared on Rebel Media as recently as 6 months ago. Rebel Media has featured the work of, in addition to Ezra Levant its founder, a creepy man with a bizarre love/hate obsession with Justin Trudeau, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Michael "pizzagate" Cernovich, Faith Goldy, Pamela Geller, Jack Posobiec and others. And of course Rebel Media adores Trump.

Quillette seems to be the perfect alt-right/evo-psycho pipeline to legitimacy thanks to the New Atheists and their fanboys. Here's another example: a piece by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell titled On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism, first published in Quillette, is here republished in American Renaissance - presumably by permission.

So Bo Winegard (and his brother and Boutwell) aren't just hacks taking money from Quillette, they are hacks taking money from the unashamedly white supremacist Jared Taylor at American Renaissance.

Anybody who denies the connections between Quillette, often endorsed by Steven Pinker, and the alt-right is a liar.

My critique of Quillete and the theories of the evo-psycho bros have been perfectly rational - but because it's something that alt-right Claire Lehmann doesn't want to hear, she called me a troll, blocked me and accused me of bullying and smearing Bo Winegard. And Bo Winegard "just feels sorry for" me.

These people have no idea how laughably hypocritical they are.

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.

Do evo-psycho bros have any self-awareness at all?

Here's a tweet from evo-psycho bro John Paul Wright, who literally has a book and a web site called "Conservative Criminology."

For some reason it's only people he hates who mix politics and science. He's pure and empirical and untouched by earthly concerns when he claims that black people are by nature more criminal than other "races." 

This is from John P. Wright's chapter "Inconvenient Truths: Science, Race, and Crime in Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Kevin M. Beaver and Anthony Walsh:

This deficit, Wright believes, has nothing to do with the treatment of blacks during and post slavery and in fact claims that all blacks throughout the entire world are this way, thanks to their genetics.

As I pointed out, although Wright shares stories of black depravity on his Conservative Criminology web site he seems to ignore horrific stories about other "races" as with Mafia criminal activities in 21st century Italy reported in The New Yorker.

In a blog post about that issue, I compared Wright's stories of black "thugs" with the Mafia and suggested, in jest, that Wright ask his Conservative Criminology co-author Matt DeLisi if he thought Italians were white.

It turns out not everybody thinks so. I saw this comment thread on Facebook the other day.

By the way, Bo Winegard thinks that Vox should publish the further racist ramblings of Wright and others who believe that blacks are innately inferior to whites. However, you are not allowed to call him or Charles Murray or Brian Boutwell a racist. Because the evo-psycho bros and other hereditarians really think they can control the message and get further legitimacy for their project of "biologizing inequality" as anthropologist Marvin Harris used to call sociobiology.

As far as Heather MacDonald or Steven Pinker - where AREN'T they published? The Steve Pinker PR machine is constantly cranking away.

I'd be all in favor of getting the word out about what Charles Murray, John Paul Wright, Brian Boutwell and the Winegard brothers really think about black people. Far from helping to spread racism which it appears is what Winegard hopes for, I am convinced that once their shitty science is throughly analyzed only hard-core racists and those riding the wingnut welfare gravy train could fail to recognize how bad it actually is.

I'm pretty much done with Winegard and Wright unless they say something even more insane than usual. But I feel I've achieved my goal, demonstrating how dedicated to the alt-right they are and how much Steven Pinker nevertheless supports their work. I have maybe one or two more things to say about the criminal justice/biodiversity evo-psycho bros before focusing directly on Pinker.

Am I a centrist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More reasons why The Bell Curve is crap

By way of PZ Myers is this blog post by Mano Singham about the problems with The Bell Curve. Singham mostly quotes himself from his response to The Bell Curve in 1995.

This part reminded me of what I recently blogged about, Jordan Peterson and Conor Friedersdorf and Dunning Kruger - getting the dummies to believe how smart they are in spite of those damn intellectuals and liberals:

For the reader who does not share the ideology propounded in the book, another curious (and highly irritating) feature is the authors’ ingratiating efforts to co-opt readers into believing their thesis. They appeal to the reader’s vanity with statements asserting that the fact that the reader has waded so far through the book is a sign that the reader has a superior I.Q. Like many of the assertions in the book, one could quite convincingly argue the opposite.

Because hereditarians are mostly members of the "group" they, just coincidentally of course, consider the most intelligent, white men, they are therefore sanguine about the potential problems of branding various "groups" as less intelligent as we see wingnut welfare recipient Bo Winegard do on Twitter.

As Singham observed

'When all the dust settles, the authors of The Bell Curve are merely saying that the people and groups who dominate our society do so because of their intrinsic ability and merit, that this is the way things were meant to be, and that they and those like them should be benefited even more. When has it ever been an act of courage to assert that those in power have a natural right to that power? True, the authors were subjected to some scorn in the scientific community because of the flaws in their work. But facing those attacks does not imply courage. It takes courage to defend the powerless against the powerful; it merely takes gall to claim courage for defending the privileges of the powerful.

But as Winegard learned from leading evo-psycho bro Steven Pinker, the best way to defend hereditarianism is to blame the Left for the downside:

We Leftists don't disdain people who aren't intelligent, we disdain people like Bo Winegard who  presume to defend evolutionary psychology in right-wing rags by proclaiming the many scientists who criticize evo-psycho as "just-so stories"(including Stephen Jay Gould and PZ Myers) simply have "a faulty understanding of science" unlike him, Bo Winegard, "Professor at Marietta." 

I couldn't find anything via Google that connected him to "Marietta" which I must assume is Marietta College in George but really WTF knows? Winegard is off the Dunning Kruger effect chart.

Nobody is denying genetically caused IQ differences. This is the standard strawman of the hereditarians, conflating evolutionary psychology with evolutionary biology. 

Singham presents an analogy that maybe even a Winegard could grasp:

Simply stated, [Murray and Herrnstein’s argument] goes like this: If the variation in a particular individual trait is caused by genes, then the difference in average values of the trait in populations must also be caused by the genes. In the I.Q. debate, this argument takes the following form: variation in I.Q. among individuals in a population is caused (to a large extent, at least) by each individual’s genes. For group A, the average I.Q. score is higher than for group B. Hence members of group A must, on average, have higher I.Q. genes than members of group B. 

However plausible this sounds initially, the fallacy of this logic becomes immediately obvious with a little thought and the use of a popular analogy. If we randomly take some corn seed and plant it in uniform, rich, well-tended soil, we will get a distribution of plant heights whose variation is caused by their genes. If we take a sample of seed from the same source and plant in poor soil, we will again get a variation of heights that is caused by the genes. But the second group will have a lower average height than the first, even though the plants come from the same gene pool. This difference in average values is caused by the environment and not the genes, a fact known to every farmer. 

So it is possible to have a variation that is purely genetic in some trait within a single group, while the difference in average values of the same trait between different groups is caused purely by environment. For example, the variation in individual heights has a substantial genetic component. But in Japan, which has been a relatively isolated country, average heights have risen considerably since World War II, a fact easily explainable by better nutrition.

Bingham points out how poorly defined both race and intelligence are.

It is safe to say that, despite decades of effort by very determined people, we are not much closer to a definitive answer to the question of the roles of race and intelligence in the processes of social and economic stratification of society. All kinds of hypotheses can be invoked to explain the data. And this shouldn’t be too surprising. As I emphasized above, both race and intelligence are poorly defined and operationally ambiguous. When you have two variables that are ill-defined, it is asking too much to expect a simple relationship between them to emerge.

But of course if you are motivated by right-wing beliefs, like Bo Winegard and the people who publish his crap, you won't care about the inconvenience of ill-defined variables, you will simply hand-wave the problem away.

An then you will: declare the matter settled in favor of the superiority of white men; point out that just because your neighbor might be a member of the stupid group doesn't mean you'll hate him (unlike those Leftists) and; anybody including actual scientists who suggest that evolutionary psychology is full of "just-so" stories has a faulty understanding of science.

Unlike Bo Winegard "Professor at Marietta."

In case you forgot how much alt-right Claire Lehmann hates feminists...

I assume somebody is paying alt-right Claire Lehmann of alt-right Quillette to be such a hateful misogynist, the way the Koch brothers pay Christina Hoff Sommers. I actually hope so, otherwise there is something horribly wrong with Claire Lehmann that she is so obsessed with hating feminism and spewing bile on a daily basis.

Did a feminist kill alt-right Claire Lehmann's father?

And here's Justin Trudeau's ghostwriter Jonathan Kay re-tweeting an attack on Trudeau. Wow Jonathan Kay is an asshole.

And speaking of Christina Hoff Sommers, she's having a meltdown because - I am not kidding - the Southern Poverty Law Center mentioned her once in passing.  Of course an evo-psycho bro, Ben Winegard, likes it.

This is what they said:

 Prominent MRAs also include anti-feminist female voices, such as popular Canadian YouTube personality Karen Straughan, American psychologist Helen Smith, and the former head of a domestic-violence shelter for women, the British Erin Pizzey. Men’s rights issues also overlap with the rhetoric of equity feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers, who give a mainstream and respectable face to some MRA concerns.

But you know how Koch brothers hacks like to be drama queens.

Apparently it surprises Sommers that in spite of her spending her entire career on wingnut welfare spewing bile against women, she has somehow not become a beloved and respected public intellectual. Poor Christina Hoff Sommers! I'm sure she's crying all the way to the bank.

Spreading hate can be profitable, at least for a while

Pamela Geller is a right-winger and vicious anti-Muslim bigot. The New Yorker has  story about her and other free-speech grifters (as GQ dubbed them) whose project is apparently to cost liberal colleges lots of money by causing ruckuses, disguised as concern for free speech - they then ride the controversy to money and notoriety and in the case of people like Christina Hoff Sommers, approval by her bosses, the Koch brothers.

Geller is quoted:

Geller and Cernovich changed the subject to Internet censorship. “They kicked me off Google AdSense,” Geller said. “I was making six figures a year from that. You can’t even share my links on Pinterest now! I’m ‘inappropriate content.’ ”

Wow six figures from a blog. That's pretty amazing. I'm surprised she was kicked off Google AdSense long before making that much money, I have found GoogleAdSense to be extremely touchy about content, even just reporting the news, if it's violent, can make them freak out. Which is why I don't have Google ads on this, my personal blog.

In case you're not familiar with Geller, she's about as far right as you can get, and the thought of poor people getting healthcare drives her into paroxysms of lies as Media Matters documented (along with so many other of her frothing, often exaggerated or false claims) back in 2010:

Geller: Senate Democrats supporting health care reform voted "to rape the American people." In a December 21, 2009, blog post, Geller wrote of the cloture vote for health care reform: "The moochers and the looters, the crooks and degenerates voted at 1 am this morning to rip the constitution to shreds, to rape the American people and to nationalize medicine." She added that passing the bill on Christmas Eve would be "an act of treason and blasphemy."

I'm sure even without Google Ads though Geller is doing fine - between all the right-wing freaks in the US and the generous wingnut welfare from plutocrats she'll never go broke selling hatred.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Hackette's hacks are still mad about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this piece about Damore is brilliant.

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

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

The Quillette sausage party

I was reviewing my blog post All aboard the wingnut welfare gravy train with alt-right Claire Lehmann & white supremacist Jared Taylor because a pseudonymous person online referenced it by my name over a month ago.

"slphil"  starts by quibbling about whether or not Claire Lehmann is alt-right, as if there are official rules for who qualifies as alt-right. I don't see much difference between the alt-right and the far-right so it's not worth the effort to get into the issue.

I stand by what I said on the post except for one thing:

And it's mostly men, the ratio of men to women writing for Quillette is at best 10:1. This is no doubt partly due to Claire Lehmann's raging, obsessive, unhinged hatred of feminism.

The average ratio for the past month is 7:1.

However, this week's ratio is an astounding 22:1.

The fundamental stupidity of Sam Harris

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

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

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

Because Sam Harris is not very bright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Ezra Klein 

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

     Sam Harris 

But even Murray wouldn’t say that. 

     Ezra Klein 

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

     Sam Harris 

Again, there is confusion creeping in here. 

     Ezra Klein 

There is not confusion. 

Sam Harris 

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

     Ezra Klein 

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

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

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

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

     Sam Harris 

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

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

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

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

    Sam Harris 

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

    Ezra Klein 

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

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

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

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