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

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

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

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

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

Quillette defends racist crank Linda Gottfredson

No surprise that Quillette, which promotes "race science" proponents and evo-psycho bros has published an article defending Linda Gottfredson. It seems Gottfredson was disinvited from being a keynote speech at the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance meeting in Sweden.
My guess is that the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance people finally realized that Linda Gottfredson is a racist crank.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole. 

In Her Own Words: 

“The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks. The evidence is less definitive for exactly where above IQ 100 the bell curves for Jews and Asians are centered.“
—“Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” The Wall Street Journal, 1994
“The IQs of different groups of African blacks range more around 70.” 

—Interview with Stefan Molyneux, 2015

Here is the section of the interview with Molyneux in which they rank "groups."

The wonderful Bruce Schneier on digital security

I've mentioned Bruce Schneier on several occasions on this blog before, but always in reference to how he kicked Dunning-Kruger poster boy Sam Harris's ass on the issue of profiling and airport security.

Now Schneier has a new book out about security focused on "the internet of things" - aka IoT - called Click Here to Kill Everybody.

I'm glad somebody is paying attention because it was clear to me from the outset of IoT that it was incredibly dangerous to leave computerized objects operating in physical space vulnerable to hackers. Scheier talks about it in the video above.

So whatever happened to Neil LaBute?

I was surprised to see that the LaBute festival is still happening this year. I just posted their call for submissions at NYCPlaywrights.

Neil LaBute's relationship with MCC Theater was suddenly cut, back in February of this year: 

Neil LaBute, a prominent American playwright and screenwriter known for his portraits of misanthropic and misogynistic men, has been abruptly cut off by one of New York’s leading nonprofit theaters. 

MCC Theater, a prestigious Off Broadway company, announced Thursday that it was canceling an upcoming production of Mr. LaBute’s latest play and terminating his tenure as its playwright-in-residence, effective immediately. 

The theater’s leadership repeatedly declined to explain the reason for its action, but on Friday, Blake West, its executive director, said, “We’re committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and professional work environment for everyone we work with.” 

Mr. LaBute did not respond to a request for comment. 

The action is a startling development in the 15-year relationship between the nonprofit theater and the polarizing playwright: MCC has been a longtime champion of Mr. LaBute’s work, which often raises uncomfortable questions about sex and power and leaves viewers debating whether Mr. LaBute was critiquing or reveling in the bad behavior of some of his protagonists.

Geffin Playhouse also dropped him:

No reason was given by MCC for its split with LaBute, nor did Geffen offer an explanation for its own move in replacing “Fat Pig” with a play by another writer. Sources with knowledge of the Geffen production said that Chrissy Metz, the “This Is Us” star who was announced as the star of “Fat Pig,” had dropped out of the project last month; however, the Geffen, when asked for comment, did not elaborate on its initial announcement.

As this author on Twitter noted:

On the other hand you could argue that if it was for sexual harassment then it was smart of LaBute to cut a non-disclosure deal with MCC, because if nobody is sure he was fired for harassment  there will likely not be outrage when he makes a come-back. 

And less than a year after whatever it is caused such an abrupt break, LaBute is having no trouble at all getting hired or having theater festivals with his name on them.

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. 

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?

Speaking of right-wing Helen Pluckrose

I find it funny that Helen Pluckrose and other right-wing Quillette clowns believe they've proven something by getting a reworded Mein Kampf into some lame po-mo publication.

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Quillette has published John Paul Wright twice. John Paul Wright is on record as believing that black people are intellectually and morally inferior to other "races."

So what do Helen Pluckrose et. al. believe? That it's better to deliberately publish a racist than to inadvertently publish one? Or do they believe it's just worse to be racist against Jews than racist against blacks?

John Paul Wright, published in "Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research"

And here's another one of John Paul Wright's greatest hits.

And of course Quillette doesn't only publish people who push racism elsewhere - it publishes articles that say exactly the same thing that John Paul Wright says, except less blatantly.

Here is John Paul Wright pushing his extremist race theories on far-right racist Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel.

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.

I love these 21st century men

Ils me donnent de l'espoir pour l'avenir!

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.

When evil worlds collide: Daphne Merkin & Quillette

I've been criticizing Daphne Merkin for her awfulness for thirteen years on this blog. 

Separately I've been criticizing the right-wing disguised as centrist rag Quillette for almost a year.

And now they've found each other. Quillette has an interview with the dread Daphne Merkin.

Although to be honest even I didn't think Daphne Merkin would sink so low as to team up with Quillette.

Daphne Merkin's awfulness still has the power to surprise. 

Dar Williams is having none of Brett Kavanaugh's shit

Dar Williams the goddess posted this to her FB today:

In the early 80's, a pumped up group of athletes, in the middle of a winning season, stood before our packed high school gym. When the applause died down, the captain said, "We'd like to thank you all for your moral support and [full name of girl] for her oral support." Shocked double takes all around. Could we have heard incorrectly? No.
So. Now we hear of Brett Kavanaugh's "Renate Alumnius" reference, and supposedly there's a picture of nine football players stating to be "alumni" of a girl from another school. It's in writing. For that alone, no nomination. 

Those athletes at my high school, those vainglorious shits, took their shining moment to willfully degrade a fellow student, to lampoon her sexuality to the thousand plus students in attendance. I am so happy the girl didn't commit suicide (she has thrived despite them). What they did was not sexist. It was misogynist. 

Brett Kavanaugh, you are a misogynist. Hundreds of boys in my high school would NEVER have used a public moment to verbally assault a fellow student, or to have allowed it to happen. HUNDREDS. Boys knew the difference, even then, between their own insecure, unsure, fumbling steps to becoming men and MISOGYNY. 

Today was an important day. Tears, shock, and confusion on my part and many others'. I believe every accusation, because, Brett Kavanaugh, you called yourself an "alumnius". You are a misogynist, just like those misogynists from my high school. You took your moment of glory to humiliate a girl, as if that were the proof of your true power. That is a hatred of women. That is misogyny.

I can't believe this song is 22 years old now. It's still perfect.

O Canada! The third episode of the NYCPlaywrights Podcast

I have finally completed the third episode of the NYCPlaywrights Podcast. It took forever because I interviewed six people and all those interviews had to be edited and engineered. It's actually a miracle I got it out before October. The next podcast is going to be easier, I need a break.

You can find the podcast on the web site. Soon it will be on iTunes and other podcast distributors.

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.

Apple tree

I've lived in this apartment on the UWS for two and a half years now but did not realize there was an apple tree growing right next door until recently when I looked up and saw apples. 

Happy Autumn Equinox 2018

I'm so happy that another ghastly NYC summer has come to an end and the lovely, reasonable weather of autumn is here.

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.

Bad choice for a good cause: Robin DiAngelo's contempt for white progressives

The refusal of some in the US to acknowledge that the Confederacy stood for treason for the cause of slavery is a continuing disgrace to the US. 

But I'm afraid that Star Peterson chose the wrong text to make her point:

Star Peterson, a Charlottesville activist who suffered severe injuries in the car attack following the Aug. 12, 2017, Unite the Right rally, read aloud a portion of a book called “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism.” 

Written by sociologist Robin DiAngelo, the book examines why it can be difficult for white people to talk about race and steps they can take to acknowledge that. At a Charlottesville City Council meeting last month, copies of the book were given to the councilors. 

After reading the excerpt, Peterson said she hopes School Board members will seek out the book and learn from it.

What the School Board members will learn from Robin DiAngelo is that the very people who oppose Confederacy fetishism, like Peterson, are considered by Robin DiAngelo to be doing the most harm to black people.

DiAngelo:

"I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color." 

Maybe Star Peterson should actually read DiAngelo's book. She might learn that far from helping people of color, DiAngelo believes that Peterson is part of the group of people hurting black people the most.

"OTTAWA" by Adam Scotti

by Adam Scotti

I follow Adam Scotti on Twitter and so often see wonderful photos of Justin Trudeau. Scotti is the official photographer for Trudeau. It must be nice to be a photographer when your main subject is not only a world leader but an attractive man. 

I also follow Soazig de la Moissonnière on Twitter. She is Macron's official photographer.  She also provides wonderful photos.

De la Moissonnière and Scotti follow each other on Twitter and often retweet each others' work - they have professional mutual admiration society.

by Soazig de la Moissonnière

Robin DiAngelo making claims without evidence again

It is stunning how Robin DiAngelo is never questioned by the media when she makes claims about what white people allegedly believe. Here she is once again implying that white people living right now don't understand that Jackie Robinson and other black ballplayers were the victims of racist discrimination.

And of course Robin DiAngelo has every reason to avoid making the effort to support her claims about what white people believe:

• First because doing research would mean actually working, instead of just giving lectures and writing op-eds over and over again which say the same things. Lectures and op-eds she could probably deliver in her sleep by now.

• Second because the media never asks her where she gets her information. If the media doesn't care that Robin DiAngelo pulls her information about white people directly out of her ass, why should Robin DiAngelo make an effort?

• And third - even if she wasn't lazy and ethics-deficient, Robin DiAngelo probably realizes that if she did poll white people on their thoughts about Jackie Robinson's career, it would not support her project of presenting white people as monsters who, sixty years on and plenty of books and articles and movies about how Robinson & all black ballplayers suffered from a racist system, still don't get it.

Robin DiAngelo has based her career not on improving understanding across ethnic lines, not on reuniting people who have been torn apart thanks to the United States history of white supremacy, she has based her career on demonizing white people - all white people - as idiots and assholes. But especially liberals.

I blame Robin DiAngelo for encouraging extremist ethnic hate-mongers like Sonia Gupta and Ruby Hamad. And for normalizing racists like Donald Trump.

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.

Meet Sonia Gupta, bigot and misogynist

Greetings Twitterers 

Some other content for your consideration:

• My many-part series on the connections between evolutionary psychology and "race science" including harsh criticism of "The Bell Curve."
• My analysis of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and why it fails as both a political manifesto and as literature, as well as Rand's influence over Alan Greenspan and how that fed into the financial crisis of 2008
• If you're a playwright, check out opportunities at NYCPlaywrights.org

And FYI - I am anti-hereditarian - which means that I don't agree with those, like Sonia Gupta, who seem to believe that you can judge human beings by knowing nothing more about them than their gender and ethnicity. 

Thanks for visiting my site.

Wow thanks to my writing about toxic bigot Ruby Hamad, I also discovered toxic bigot Sonia Gupta, who agrees with Ruby Hamad that white women are the devil.

After some exchanges with her I was set upon by the misogynist crew who admire her. One of them wouldn't stop sending misogynist trope gifs to me until I blocked him, another one just sent me a string of pointless insults until I blocked him. Then there's this charmer, Andy DeBroux, telling me where I should and should not express my opinions. What is it about developing software that attracts so many misogynists?

Please note that Gupta approved of this comment because of course she would.

Of course DeBroux's tweet did inspire me to write this blog post, so I hope he's happy about that.

Gupta makes clear on her Twitter account that she's not a big supporter of feminism since her devotion is to hating white women. 

I hope to god no white women have to work with Gupta or DeBroux at their software companies, that won't end well.

Gupta describes herself as a lawyer turned software developer, so I've no doubt she has more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. And yet she seems to consider her struggles in life similar to the struggles of African Americans. She seems to believe that all forms of being non-white are equally oppressed.

Sonia Gupta really really hates white women though. I guess she figures if the computer programming career doesn't pan out, she can get a third career devoted to her resentment and hatred of white women - all the other privileged extremists can contribute to her career via Patreon.

I just hope that Gupta doesn't think she's going to parlay her hatred of white women into a lucrative career as a mainstream writer - Mikki Kendall already tried that but got stopped cold thanks to The Nation. On the other hand, it seems to be working out for Ruby Hamad. 

Fun fact - ole Sonia "I hate white women with the heat of a thousand sounds" Gupta and I have a mutual connection on Linked In - small world!

I really have a hard time believing that people like Gupta and Hamad are for real. They seem like caricatures invented by some Koch brothers-funded think tank to try to portray the social justice left as vicious and hateful and simple-minded bigots, who come from privilege but claim to be as oppressed as the decendents of 300-plus years of slavery and apartheid and abuse. 

But seriously, Gupta is obsessed with her hatred of white women.

The caricature image of "white women" as a snarling witch-type character with an exaggerated hook nose ratchets up the misogyny - and possibly anti-Semitism   an extra notch.

Must attack feminists of course.

This tweet probably explains why misogynists flock to her.

And of course can't forget to attack liberals. It's absolutely stunning how much more often these alleged social justice people attack feminists and liberals than they do conservatives.

Gupta hasn't only gotten pushback from white women though - apparently she has or at least had, at one time, white friends.

Apparently those wacky white people don't enjoy being friends with someone who constantly makes extremist, essentialist declarations about them based on their ethnicity. How does Sonia Gupta withstand such unbearable oppression?

Ruby Hamad, extremist & bully

I find it hard to believe that Ruby Hamad is apparently a legitimate journalist, given that she's a bigot and an hereditarian extremist.

Her absurd, race-obsessive screed against "white women" and her suggestion that all white women are scheming assholes who use a trick of melting into tears to avoid discussing race was published by The Guardian:

As I look back over my adult life a pattern emerges. Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she has said or done that has impacted me adversely, I am met with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I am hurting her. My confidence diminished and second-guessing myself, I either flare up in frustration at not being heard (which only seems to prove her point) or I back down immediately, apologising and consoling the very person causing me harm.

In other words, when Ruby Hamad has bullied a white woman (and of course there is no way to verify any of Hamad's claims) to the point of tears, the problem is not that Ruby Hamad is a nasty person, the problem is that "white women" are evil monsters who "weaponize" their emotions in a cold and calculated manner:

It is what that writers’ festival audience member was demonstrating, and what blogger and author Luvvie Ajayi called the “weary weaponising of white women’s tears”.

Ruby Hamad is a bigot. It's hard to believe that someone this ridiculous can have a legitimate literary career. Like Robin DiAngelo, Hamad is such an extremist, and so intent on attacking women and liberals, that if she is not secretly taking money from some right-wing organization to say toxic extremist things in order to make the social justice left look like idiots and assholes, she may as well do so, since the results are the same.

And unlike in the Guardian, attacks on people based on skin color are (with the exception of Sarah Jeong) generally found unacceptable:

Kansas City journalist Lisa Benson Cooper was recently fired from KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri after sharing, on her personal Facebook page, a think piece from The Guardian, by Ruby Hamad, titled “How White Women Use Strategic Tears to Silence Women of Colour.” Benson Cooper, a black woman, shared a link to the article on her private Facebook page. Two white female coworkers saw the post and complained about it to HR, which resulted in Benson Cooper’s firing.

The article I linked to at The Mary Sue is pro-Hamad and full of comments claiming that it was unfair to fire Cooper over pasting a link to Hamad's article on her Facebook page.

My assumption is that many of the social justice left have never had jobs in corporate America, because in corporate America there are rules against discrimination based on race, as required by the US government. Anti-discrimination applies to all ethnicities, unlike in the world of the social justice left where they actively promote the idea of treating people differently depending on "race."

It's part of the unspoken belief of many in the social justice left that the best way to fight racism against non-white people is to commit micro-revenges against white people. The social justice left won't admit that this is what they believe, but their actions speak louder than words.

But when people like Lisa Benson Cooper get involved in social justice social media they start to think that the rules of that little world, which includes micro-revenge against white people, is now the way things work. And then they get a rude awakening when they behave according to the rules of the social justice left, rather than the rules of the rest of society.

Ruby Hamad is an extremist and a toxic, bigoted individual and the Guardian should be ashamed for promoting her unhinged hatred.

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.

The crazy-generous people working in Central Park

I did my scheduled volunteer shift in the Central Park kiosk today, handing out free maps and telling people where to find the Alice in Wonderland statue and Strawberry Fields. Even though it was drizzly the whole shift there were still people out and about, needing maps and directions.

I'm a volunteer but there are lots of people in the Park working hard, trying to make a buck and they are so generous to me - too generous in my opinion. Last time I did a shift there, the guy with the ice cream cart parked nearby gave me a free ice cream.

But this week was something else - the pedicab guy looked like he wasn't getting any customers - I guess the kind of hardy souls willing to explore Central Park in the rain are not the kind who want to ride in pedicabs. So while I was in the kiosk he asked me if I was cold. When I allowed I was a little cold he bought me a coffee and wouldn't take my money. And I mean, I crumpled up a five-dollar bill and threw it out of the kiosk at him and he still wouldn't take it.

So then I got the clever idea to repay him by asking him to drive me from the east side of the park over to Central Park West, figuring he would have to take my money then, and I would give him extra in the tip to cover the coffee. Well he even tried to get out of taking payment for that - hauling my lazy ass across the park in the rain, for free.

Well I was prepared for him this time - as soon as he stopped, I hopped out of the cab and ran for it, after leaving $25 in his cab. He had to take it then. 

I say the same thing to these guys, every time they try to give me something free: "you're in New York City, dude, you need to keep every dollar you can get!"

And the worst thing is that I don't have anything to give back to them. Sure I can give them a free map but everybody who asks gets a free map. And they don't need a map of Central Park anyway, they practically live there. But I just can't believe how generous they are, especially when they are working long hours in sometimes very unpleasant conditions. You gotta love them. While coming up with tricks to pay them back.

In this photo you can see the cart across the street from the kiosk, where the pedicab guy bought me coffee. I should have gotten a picture of the pedicab guy.

Back from Canada

The name of the company means
"late night" in French, although
literally it is "bed late."

I had a nice weekend in Canada in Montreal and Quebec City, although I did too much driving again.

The logo here is for a Canadian convenience store chain, "Couche-Tard" which I was happy to see on Sunday night when we didn't get a chance to get dinner before seeing a theater production in Quebec.

Claude Montminy, one
of my interviewees.

Also because I love that logo. It means "Canada" to me as much as maple syrup or Justin Trudeau.

I've interviewed several Canadians for the upcoming podcast and it should be a pretty good episode. 

I was excited to get a chance to speak French too, and I even asked Claude Montminy, a native francophone, one of my interview questions in French, namely: "Pourquoi tu-es devenu dramaturge?" ("Why did you become a playwright?")

Although most people, even in Quebec City, speak English as well as French and will switch to English in a heartbeat if you sound at all anglophone.