Friday, August 31, 2018

The Quillette-Koch brothers circle is complete

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

The project to brand Quillette as centrist never ends.



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

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

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

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Cathy Young, Jesse Singal & Gamergate

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

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

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

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

I blogged about the May 2015 article in Boston Magazine which gives detailed information about the horrific evil of Eron Gjoni, the man who started Gamergate by harassing and doxxing his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn. An excerpt:
He chooses his words deliberately, spending much of our time together describing the month after his breakup with Quinn: how he extracted details from her Facebook, text, and email accounts; how he tracked her movements and shadowed her conversations. The process he described to me sounded as if he were gathering the pieces of a horrible machine, with each component designed to be as damaging to Quinn as possible. Eventually, the machine would have a name: “The Zoe Post,” a 9,425-word screed he published in August.
Then later:
From the start, it seems, Gjoni wanted to make certain that his blog about Quinn would connect with a large base of people in the gaming community, some of whom he already knew were passionately predisposed to attacking women in the industry. 
As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.” 
One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent. 
As he wrote, Gjoni kept pressing Quinn for information. About a week after their final breakup in San Francisco, Quinn finally stopped responding to Gjoni’s barrage of texts, Facebook messages, emails, and calls. He interpreted this not as a surrender or a retreat from his unwanted advances but instead, paradoxically, as a kind of attack. As he wrote at the time and later posted online, “GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. SHE’S AVOIDED ME EVER SINCE THIS CONVERSATION BECAUSE SHE IS PARANOID I MIGHT GO PUBLIC.” From this circular reasoning emerged a twisted justification: By withholding information, Quinn was somehow forcing Gjoni to “go public.” Eventually, Gjoni would come to see himself as the victim. “I was panicking at the thought of not publishing [‘The Zoe Post’],” he told me. “I didn’t care what the outcome was for Zoe.” 
After crafting the post for weeks, Gjoni shared his polished draft with about a dozen friends—mostly female game developers—as well as his mother, and asked them to weigh in on whether he should unleash it. He says about 10 of them gave him the green light. His mother, he claims, reluctantly approved, but was “very worried that I was going into it overly emotional.” One Gjoni friend I spoke with, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, said, “I felt it was healthy to get it out there…. What harm would it do to get his feelings out?” 
Others who later read the post saw something much more deliberate and malicious. Jesse Singal, an editor at NYMag.com, said it clearly “followed a script” of “these sad, specific ideas that a segment of the gaming community has about women being duplicitous and breaking men’s hearts.” Slate’s Arthur Chu told me, “He’s an articulate, well-spoken guy who knows how to put together something on the Internet. That’s the kind of weapon guys like that have…the ‘crazy bitch’ story. It’s a very potent trope to use…. It’s a very nasty, very calculating train of thought, and it worked.”
The "Zoe post" was not only incredibly vicious it was well thought-out and vetted -  Gjoni even got his mom and female friends to review it. This wasn't a moment's act of passion, this was a crowd-sourced project. It's astounding how so many people knew Gjoni was stalking his ex-girlfriend and planning on a massive invasion of her privacy and didn't talk him out of it.

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

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


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

It's clear that Cathy Young thinks Eron Gjoni is just swell:
The man who started it all has kept a relatively low profile. Gjoni, who was born in Albania and came to the United States with his family at the age of six, still lives in Boston where he and Quinn met. He is working on creating an artificially intelligent animation program that he hopes will be eventually be used by people who don’t have access to a major studio. He is on Twitter, where his posts often show a wry, quirky humor. (His profile quote is, “A good pun is its own reword.”)
This was published after the Boston Magazine article which Young mentions in an attempt to suggest it was unfair to Gjoni:
CY: Speaking of which, are there journalists who have given you a fair shake? 
EG: I think the closest was that journalist from Vice [Mike Pearl], and it was the closest because he ignored what I said completely and just talked about my views on [GamerGate mascot] Vivian James. 
CY: Zachary Jason’s piece for Boston Magazine insinuated that you’re still obsessed with Zoe Quinn because you suggested meeting at the place where you and she had first hung out. And the real reason was… 
EG: It’s because I’m vegan. He suggested lunch, and I said, “Cool, let’s go to a vegan place.” There are no vegan places [in Boston] where I have not been with her.
She also gets Gjoni to admit that if he could do it over again, he would stalk and endanger and invade the privacy of Zoe Quinn all over again:
Cathy Young: Let’s say that tomorrow someone comes to you with a time machine and you can go back to August 2014 and decide whether or not to do it all over again. Would you do it, and would you do anything differently? 
Eron Gjoni: It would be harder to do it. I would still do it, but it’s like—oh, this is going to suck. (Laughs) I suppose I’d take out the “burgers and fries” joke. I wasn’t sure about it, but people who were looking it over at the time said it was too funny to take out [and] like, “All right, I’ll trust you on it.”
Cathy Young doesn't only think Eron Gjoni is swell, she was pals, like Christina Hoff Sommers, with Milo Yiannopoulos  bonding over GamerGate. All three can be seen together in this Youtube video on Yiannopoulos's channel under the title Milo, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young explain journalism to the SPJ.
Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos in particular seemed such a desperate opportunist that we never predicted his rise to prominence, having explicitly stereotyped gamers in the past as “overweight” and “embarrassing”. A disgraced journalist and entrepreneur who had to close his tech site The Kernel due to unpaid debts, leaving staff uncertain if they would ever be paid, he’d then spent the next few years spouting insincere hateful ideas to a burgeoning Twitter audience who responded to his anti-feminist, anti-establishment invectives. He was eventually banned from the platform after finally abusing a woman who was apparently just famous enough for Twitter to respond.
It was apparent to me that there was something off about Yiannopoulos the first time I heard him, but Young and Sommers were either too dull or just didn't want to understand what a psychopath he truly is.

Young has defended Gamergate many times.


Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - Reason Magazine again

Cathy Young defends Gamergate - RealClearPolitics


This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)
Young might have been on the opposite side of GamerGate from Jesse Singal, but a year before the second anniversary of the Zoe Post, Young was able to use Singal's complaints about the UN report on cyberharassment as an excuse to attack Anita Sarkeesian as a "professional victim."



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

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

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

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


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

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




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

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


BOTH


One reason I have never called Steven Pinker a white supremacist


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


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

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

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

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

...I think the different statistics are not showing us whether Jews are white or not, because that’s not fundamentally a question which relies purely on genetics. Being white is not totally uncoupled from genetics. Someone of Chinese of African appearance could never be white. Genetics is a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition of whiteness. So, for example, Middle Eastern non-Muslim populations regularly assimilate to whiteness, while Muslims do not. To my knowledge no one thought of Jacques Derrida as a non-white intellectual, despite his Algerian Sephardic Jewish background. But if Jacques Derrida had converted to Islam, and passed himself off as an Algerian Arab or Berber, he would have become non-white. 
By this criterion it is obvious to me that Ashkenazi Jews are white. They have been part of the culture of the West since the late 19th century. But note my qualification. Jews as Jews were not part of Western culture between the years 500 and 1850. Those Jews who impacted Western culture left their Jewishness behind, whether as converts to Christianity (e.g., Karl Marx was a Jew who was raised as a Christian), or as cosmopolitan individualists (e.g., Spinoza). 
** Arguably the Jewish Enlightenment, and the rise of Reform Judaism, were both necessary preconditions for the inclusion of self-conscious Jews as Westerners, and racially as white Westerners.*** 
I find it strange the Khan admits that race is a cultural category, since in the past he's described human descendants of parents of different ethnic groups as "hybrids" as in this article Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern & European hybrids.

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

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


However, in an article published by white supremacist site VDare Sailer writes:
So that implies one-fourth of white Americans with IQs above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews. 
As for Steven Pinker, he is so certain that race is a biological reality that he said on video that to deny race reality is to deny "reality itself." But what about Ashkenazis as a separate "race"?

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

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done much to legitimize and publicize NHAI, while remaining carefully agnostic on its truth value. In the Times:"'It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard... Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well argued-paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright" (Wade 2005). His article about NHAI in The New Republic concluded that it "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken" (pinker2006:27).   
A blogger (Your Lying Eyes 2006) reported a public talk by Pinker on NHAI ("Jews, Genes, and Intelligence"). "Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the author's hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge."   
Pinker is credited with formulating Edge's Annual Question for 2006: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea... dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?" His own answer is "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." Of his four illustrations, one is Cochran and Harpending's argument on Ashkenazi intelligence.

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

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

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





Pinker appeared on Dave Rubin's show hereStefan Molyneux appeared here, and explains his ranking of "races" by intelligence:
  1. Ashkenazi Jews
  2. East Asian 
  3. Caucasian
  4. Mestizo/Hispanic
  5. African Americans
  6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
  7. Pygmies
  8. Indigenous Australians

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

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

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

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

The important career of Cathy Young

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

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

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






The problem with Rose Twitter

I've been a life-long liberal and often criticize the Right and Far Right and Alt-Right - and their enablers like Steven Pinker - on this blog.

But I also have a problem with the Far Left.

As much as I would like to believe that only the Right has a problem with living in their own Bizarro World, it's undeniable that the Far Left is almost as bad.

This was underlined for me when I encountered so many supporters of Bernie Sanders who were completely unconcerned about the practical, real-world conditions that might prevent Sanders from achieving all their socialist dreams, should he be elected. They seemed to assume Sanders would simply wave a magic wand and all Republican opposition, to things like single-payer healthcare, would disappear, unlike that loser Obama, who was not sufficiently able to magically alter time and space enough to please Berniebros and their handmaidens.

And they often became enraged with anyone who had the bad form to point out the practical real world problems.

But long before Berniebros it was clear to me that the Far Left would never find acceptable any person capable of winning enough votes to become president of the United States. 

And here is a member of Rose Twitter (socialists on Twitter who indicate their position with a red rose icon) to illustrate my point exactly.






UPDATE: except, apparently, John Quincy Adams. But I am sure that had Elizabeth and the other  Berniebros & handmaidens been around during the JQ Adams presidency they would not be content that he simply "opposed" slavery, they would be asking why he didn't immediately, successfully abolish slavery upon becoming president. 





Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Cathy Young and the sample size of one

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


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



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

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

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

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

Monday, August 27, 2018

Cathy Young, Koch brothers handmaiden, on the attack

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

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

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

What's really interesting is how the Quillette gang has a meltdown because I simply put facts into a graphic with my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections chart. Apparently they have a weird phobia about graphics, since it doesn't bother them that Bari Weiss grouped Steven Pinker in with members of the "intellectual dark web" like Alex Jones:
Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).
So I guess when I finish my project of turning the Bari Weiss article about a "web" into a web-like graphic, their heads will explode.


Sunday, August 26, 2018

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.



Saturday, August 25, 2018

How Robin DiAngelo normalizes Donald Trump's racism

If Robin DiAngelo is not working for the Republican party, she might as well be.

In DiAngelo's worldview, progressives are the worst people in the world. She says in her latest book "White Fragility"

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

If you follow DiAngelo's beliefs to their logical conclusion, no white person can accuse Donald Trump of racism because all white people are just as racist as Donald Trump. As she says in her Slate interview:

You asked me, “What would you call the difference perhaps between Trump and me?” But I actually think, yeah, we both are racists."

This is why Robin DiAngelo is hurting the cause of anti-racism, and not helping it. By normalizing racism and by attacking the people who are trying to be anti-racist and by helping those who favor racism - Trump and Trump voters.

But what does it matter, as long as Robin DiAngelo can make a living with her pernicious crackpot extremist claims about progressives? 

This is why Robin DiAngelo is an evil woman.

Friday, August 24, 2018

How Robin DiAngelo avoids the wrath of conservatives ~ she focuses her attack on progressives and women

The same conservatives who complained about Sarah Jeong's anti-white tweets don't seem to have much to say about Robin DiAngelo, even though her entire career is based on the hereditarian notion that being "white" is an essential identity that tells you everything you need to know about an individual and their moral inclinations.

But I think this episode of a podcast called "With Friends Like These" an interview with DiAngelo, demonstrates exactly why - because Robin DiAngelo consistently focuses her attacks on progressives and white women. Conservatives correctly understand that DiAngelo is working for them more than for anybody else.
On this week’s pod, Ana (@anamariecox) sat down with Robin DiAngelo, author of the book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. To kick things off, Robin explained what white fragility is, and the impact that it has not just on white people, but white progressives in particular. Ana and Robin then talked about the need for people who recognize racism’s ills not to get complacent or arrogant, but rather be actively anti-racist, and continue educating themselves. They then switched gears, and explored why white women often fail to be allies for people of color before probing the ways de facto segregation and tokenizing minorities are so deeply problematic.
It's apparent that with Ana Marie Cox, once again DiAngelo gets a free pass - her crackpot idea of "white fragility" is itself never questioned. The interviewer simply assumes it's valid and unquestionable and continues on from there. In 2015 another sympathetic (of course) interview with DiAngelo lays out exactly what "white fragility" means: Why all white people are racist, but can't handle being called racist: the theory of white fragility

In the interview DiAngelo says: "Racism comes out of our pores as white people. It's the way that we are."

DiAngelo truly believes that the color of your skin is all that matters. She does not allow for a variety of character contents of people she has designated as "white" - we are all born evil, so evil that racism comes out of our pores.

There will always be crackpots. What is so disturbing is that way that people like Ana Marie Cox promotes DiAngelo's crackpot theories and race essentialism absolutely without question. 

Monday, August 20, 2018

The latest NYCPlaywrights Podcast is online



A little better technical quality for this second podcast. Also a special easter egg, a clip of John Lennon talking about KING LEAR and I am the Walrus.


I'm really looking forward to the next podcast on the theme of "O Canada!" - can't wait for my trip to Canada in a few weeks to do some research. 

An acoustic version of "Oh Canada" 

Friday, August 17, 2018

My favorite Jamelle Bouie tweet so far


When I mentioned on Twitter that my blog posts about Khan had been used by Bouie in his Khan takedown, Claire Lehmann freaked out.

I've been hoping that Bouie would focus more attention on Quillette and the "Intellectual Dark Web" and it looks like he's doing it.



Thursday, August 16, 2018

Charles Lane, Richard Lynn and the tainted sources of The Bell Curve

Earlier in this evo-psycho bros series I quoted Charles Lane's 1994 review of "The Bell Curve" but I failed to discuss before now the interesting exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books where Lane's review appeared.

The first letter is from Richard Lynn, who I've mentioned a few times in this series and who is still alive:
Lane’s second criticism of my work is that some of it has been published in the journal Mankind Quarterly, which he alleges has a “white chauvinist agenda.” If this were true, the journal would surely have refused to publish my work showing that Orientals have higher IQs than whites. The fact that the journal did publish this work shows the absurdity of Lane’s charge. 
Furthermore, of my 25 papers cited in The Bell Curve, only 3 have been published in Mankind Quarterly. To reject the whole corpus of my work on these trivial grounds reveals Lane as a bigoted ideologue rather than a serious scholar.
To which Lane replies:
As for Professor Lynn’s description of the Mankind Quarterly, of which he has been a contributor and editor for over two decades—including the period when the journal was directly controlled by the outspoken Scottish white supremacist Robert Gayre—it is laughable. I didn’t try to discredit his “whole corpus” of work based on this association. Rather, I made a critique of specific points based on my reading of the evidence. In this connection, it is noteworthy that Professor Lynn does not attempt to defend his spurious claim that the average IQ of black Africans is only 70—a refutation of which occupied a considerable part of my article.

I will not comment on the balance of the review except to note that it seems about the same quality as the foregoing. Charles Murray has appropriately called this book review “McCarthyism” (Wall Street Journal, December 2, 1994). 
Harry F. Weyher
President
The Pioneer Fund
New York City

Lane's response was in part:
Still, if Mr. Weyher is suggesting the Pioneer Fund has never opposed racial integration he is being disingenuous. He was personally recruited by Wickliffe Draper to help the Pioneer Fund at a time when Mr. Draper was preparing to wage scientific battle against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Later in that same decade, the Fund financed spurious research into chemical means of separating white donors’ blood from that of blacks’ in blood banks. This year, Mr. Weyher, who now operates the Fund more or less single-handedly, said in an interview with GQ: “That decision [Brown] was supposed to integrate the schools and everybody said we’d mix ’em up and the blacks’ scores would come up. But of course they never did. All Brown did was wreck the school system.”6 
The same article’s author wrote that “the fund’s hereditarianism forms a kind of dogma that leads it to venture well away from strictly scientific topics to shape the larger debate over policy implications. Weyher freely admits that he would like to eliminate what he calls “Head Start-type” programs. But, to judge by the grants that it has made, the fund’s administrators are also interested in limiting immigration, stopping busing, reversing integration, and ending affirmative action.”7
The hostility towards helping poor children is a common theme of the hereditarians, and in an interesting piece in April of this year in Vox, Matt Yglesias writes:
The actual conclusion of The Bell Curve is that America should stop trying to improve poor kids’ material living standards because doing so encourages poor, low-IQ women to have more children — you read that correctly. It also concludes that the United States should substantially curtail immigration from Latin America and Africa. These are controversial policy recommendations, not banal observations about psychometrics.
Murray’s critics are frequently accused of mischaracterizing him, so I want to quote, at length, what he says the upshot of this is (emphasis in the original):
We are silent partly because we are as apprehensive as most other people about what might happen when a government decides to social-engineer who has babies and who doesn’t. We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended. 
The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor. The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe. 
The other demographic factor we discussed in Chapter 15 was immigration and the evidence that recent waves of immigrants are, on the average, less successful and probably less able, than earlier waves. There is no reason to assume that the hazards associated with low cognitive ability in America are somehow circumvented by having been born abroad or having parents or grandparents who were. An immigrant population with low cognitive ability will — again, on the average — have trouble not only in finding good work but have trouble in school, at home, and with the law.
These claims about the baleful impact of social assistance spending are not uncontroversial claims about science. Indeed, they are not claims about science at all. And since they constitute what Murray himself views as the upshot of his book, and because Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist, it is correct and proper for fair-minded people to read the book for what it actually is: a tract proposing the comprehensive revision of the American welfare state along eugenicist lines.
Steven Pinker has steadfastly refused to admit to agreement with the Bell Curve's assessment of African Americans, while at the same time suggesting that Bell Curve's critics are unfair. We see him doing the same thing with Richard Lynn, which I will get to next.

Steven Pinker, defending "The Bell Curve" by linking to an article in Quillette, written by
admitted proponents of "human biodiversity" which defends statements about race and intelligence in "The Bell Curve" by stating: 
Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations." One of the authors thanks Pinker for his support.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Charles Murray - another member of the "intellectual dark web"



Like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris, Charles Murray is also a fan of alt-right Quillette, home of some of the world's most prominent hereditarians, "race realists" and "biosocial criminologists."

Murray is of course most famous for The Bell Curve from twenty years ago, written with lots of studies funded by white supremacist organization The Pioneer Fund.

I knew many articles first published in Quillette found a second home at the white supremacist publication American Renaissance - what I didn't realize was the very high number of Quillette articles are republished there.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

My continuing studies of the shameful career of Steven Pinker


Yes I was very disappointed that Justin Trudeau, mon
premier ministre d'amour, would say nice things about
a racist, misogynist & lazy thinker like Steven Pinker
I've had this blog for twelve years now - it will be thirteen as of November 2.

So what was I blogging about this time twelve years ago?


I have consistently discussed the career of Steven Pinker in the last 12 years on this blog, although some years I have not mentioned Pinker as much as others: in 2012 I only mentioned him twice and in 2008 I did not mention him even once. 

2018 has been a banner year focusing on Pinker's career, because he started out 2018 being more blatant about his defense of the right than ever before.

I hope to do even more going forward, justified by Bari Weiss citing Pinker as some kind of respectability high-point for the racist, misogynist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-trans "Intellectual Dark Web."

Monday, August 13, 2018

Woman explaining geometry to monks (14th century manuscript)

What it must look like when a female mathematician 
has to deal with proponents of evolutionary psychology. 






Sunday, August 12, 2018

More about Steves Pinker & Sailer

Steven Pinker included Steve Sailer's piece on why Iraqis are too in-bred to have a democracy, in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" in 2004 because of course he agreed with it. 

Contrary to Pinker's reputation as a serious intellectual, what I have found time and again on reading his work is that it is often based on unsupported and untestable assumptions, and a complete disinterest in data.

The latter is demonstrated by Pinker's claim - in the right-wing tradition - that marriage prevents violence in men, a claim completely contradicted by data, as I discuss here.

Here we see Pinker discussing in 2007 in an article in the New Republic, Sailer's piece "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" and of course he does not mention Sailer's inclination to white supremacy.
In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis' strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever." Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building.
The idea that there is a reverse correlation between cousin marriage and democracy is easy enough to debunk, as I did when writing about "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" - by looking at the existing data on cousin marriage.

But as we have seen in the case of the magic of marriage, Pinker isn't interested in data if it's going to contradict his favorite sociobiological theories. 

It's true that it's easier to get data now on such things as consanguinity by country than it was in 2003 when Sailer published the piece, but that shouldn't matter - if Sailer and Pinker expect to be taken seriously on their claims about important issues, they should be expected to put a little work into backing their claims. 

And Sailer's "prescience" doesn't explain why, although Nigeria has a cousin-marriage rate of 51.2 - the highest in the world except for Kuwait and Burkina Faso, compared to Iraq's rate of 34.3, Nigeria is a democracy.

Pinker doesn't come up with arguments for why data doesn't tell the true story and thus why he and his friend Steve Sailer are correct in spite of data. Rather he completely ignores the existence of data.  It seems as though it has never even occurred to him that there might be data out there. His lack of intellectual curiosity is astounding.

And Pinker is the shining exemplar of scholarly respectability in the "Intellectual Dark Web" per Bari Weiss. This gives you some sense of what a joke the "Intellectual Dark Web" is.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Is it fair of me to link Steven Pinker to David Duke?

In her infamous article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, New York Times right-wing op-ed columnist Bari Weiss identified Steven Pinker as a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web," presenting him as its most respectable member:
Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).
As I demonstrated in my diagram Steven Pinker's Rightwing, Alt-Right and Hereditarian Connections - a sort of Pinker-centric illustration of the Intellectual Dark Web published a month before Weiss's article - Pinker has connections to Molyneux and Alex Jones (Infowars), thanks primarily to his promotion of and admiration for Quillette, a web site founded by Claire Lehmann, contributor (along with Mike Cernovich who does not appear in my diagram) to Canada's far-right Rebel Media.

Bari Weiss also admires Quillette.

Weiss thanked by frequent Quillette contributor Andy Ngo
identified as a "free speech grifter" in this excellent GQ article.
I have been accused by Pinker fans of smearing Pinker in my diagram through guilt-by-association.

My diagram is a quick and handy guide, a picture being worth a thousand words and all, but it isn't the whole story. I included a text-based explanation with the diagram, justifying the Pinker connections, but Pinker's fans are inclined to be intellectually slothful and shallow - much like Pinker himself - and they just can't be bothered to read what I have written, much less come up with actual arguments.

In my original Pinker diagram there are four degrees of separation in the shortest route between Pinker and white supremacist David Duke, currently being portrayed by Topher Grace in Spike Lee's new movie BlackKKlansman, as in: Pinker to Quillette to (three Quillette authors) to Stefan Molyneux to David Duke.

But I explained in the footnote of my diagram, I don't include all the inter-connections for the sake of clarity. But this time, I am presenting the most direct connection between Pinker and Duke. And this time I included the text explanations so that even the laziest Pinker fan cannot miss them. You can click the image to see the PDF version.



I think it's likely that Steven Pinker is, on a personal level, even more right-leaning than his public persona would indicate. I think he reigns in his more extreme opinions (and so do some of his fans) because, I believe, Pinker is foremost a careerist. Which is why we see, for example, Pinker bragging about his meeting Justin Trudeau even though many members of the Intellectual Dark Web hate Trudeau, especially Pinker's good buddy Claire Lehmann.

Their hatred of Trudeau, a proud feminist, is what you would expect from people who have a seething, bitter hatred towards feminists. Lehmann herself not only hates feminists but is a straight up misogynist. So is her fellow Rebel Media contributor Gavin McInnes.

Apparently the Quillette gang has begun podcasting. All the more reason I need to start a podcast examining the "Intellectual Dark Web."

The painfully slow but inevitable reckoning of TALLEY'S FOLLY

TALLEY'S FOLLY won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980. TALLEY'S FOLLY is "romantic." TALLEY'S FOLLY only requires two actors and one set.

Few younger people seem interested in TALLEY'S FOLLY with its cis-heterosexual white couple, but young people are not the ones programming community theater, or off-Broadway bread-and-butter crowd-pleasers.

And so TALLEY'S FOLLY is still being produced in spite of the fact that it is a play about a stalker bullying a woman into marriage.

I have been blogging about my distaste for TALLEY'S FOLLY over the years. But I missed this excellent blog post from a blog called Ramblings of a Theatre Nerd, critical of TF, posted five years ago. Up until today I thought I was the only non-critic to mention TF and its disturbing stalker/bully aspects.

One aspect of the play that Theatre Nerd mentioned, which I didn't, is the audience's clueless response to the play:
But I think what bothered me the most was the audiences reactions. As Matt was saying all the ways he’s been stalking her (pursuing her) for the passed year, people would aww. As he’d control her, the audience would aww. 
And this is why abuse goes unnoticed. This is why society doesn’t get it. This is the problem. The abuser is charming at first. He disguises his nasty mask as this amazing guy – until it’s too late. And it can be so subtle that unhealthy behaviors can be perceived as ‘wow, this guy must really love me (her).’   
So, that’s why I didn’t like Talley’s Folly, and that’s why I’m not happy that this is considered a love story. We have some work to do, society! 
Exactly.

Five years ago I blogged that reviewers were finally begin to notice the truly awful subtext of the play.  Curiously, since then, there have been fewer mentions of Matt being a stalker in theater reviews of TALLEY'S FOLLY. However, I don't think that necessarily means critics are less likely to pick up on it. I think it's possible that since the #metoo movement, many theatre companies are passing on TF because either they recognize the problem at the heart of the play, or theatre companies are being run by new blood who aren't interested in TF.

So now, only the more backwards theater companies in more conservative communities are producing it, and they aren't likely to have a feminist perspective on the play. A search on "Talley's Folly" and "review" for the period of 2017-2018 demonstrates there are virtually no in-depth reviews of the small-potatoes productions of TF that happened during that time period.

I consider that a good sign. 

Wednesday, August 08, 2018

BlacKKKlansman B-Roll

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Fun fact

Emmanuel Macron is two and a half years older than Macaulay Culkin.


Culkin and Donald Trump in "Home Alone 2"

Monday, August 06, 2018

Happy birthday Mr. President

The last real president of the US.


Sunday, August 05, 2018

What hath Robin DiAngelo wrought?

And she went after the Mighty Krug-Man too.
This can not stand.
It probably isn't Robin DiAngelo's fault, alone, or even primarily, that anti-white racism has become chic, but she certainly has been banging that drum for a long time, and a recent defense of Sarah Jeong mentions "white fragility" Robin DiAngelo's catch phrase which must surely be trademarked by now.

However, it's clear that it is chic and another article, by Zach Beauchamp, written in defense of Jeong argues that it's not so bad, all the nasty things Jeong said about whites, because all the other kids are doing it:
The problem here, though, is assuming that Jeong’s words were meant literally: that when Jeong wrote “#cancelwhitepeople,” for example, she was literally calling for white genocide. Or when she said “white men are bullshit,” she meant each and every white man is the human equivalent of bull feces. This is expressly Sullivan’s position: He calls her language “eliminationist,” a term most commonly used to describe Nazi rhetoric referring to Jews during the Holocaust. 
To anyone who’s even passingly familiar with the way the social justice left talks, this is just clearly untrue. “White people” is a shorthand in these communities, one that’s used to capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and/or racist ways. It’s typically used satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color, or to point out the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist. 
I get that white people who aren’t familiar might find this discomforting. 
But of course as we learn from Robin DiAngelo, finding this "discomforting" should not make one feel sorry for the white people, but rather contempt for their "white fragility."

It is certainly true that "the social justice left" says hateful things about "white people" - as I have noted several times on this blog, especially white women - especially white feminists.

It's interesting how often the social justice left attacks others on the left more than they attack the right. 

I always wondered if some of the more ambitious on the social justice left would ever pay for their flagrant ethnicity-based attacks - I've speculated about a lawsuit against Robin DiAngelo, which has still apparently not happened yet, but I still haven't counted it out. I was glad that Mikki Kendall seemed to have finally paid a price for her relentless race and gender based attacks when Michelle Goldberg wrote about her in The Nation. But now the NYTimes has demonstrated that ethnicity-based attacks are no barrier to career advancement.

In addition to the "all the kids are doing it" arguments in defense of Jeong are:
  1. She's just parodying racists (like Andrew Sullivan)
  2. It's OK to say racist things against whites because whites are all-powerful and all-privileged
  3. It's impossible for a non-white person to be racist because they are all oppressed by whites
  4. Jeong was attacked by racist trolls so that excuses her racism. This seems to be the one adopted by Jeong herself.
The worst thing about this defense of anti-white racism is that it gives the Right the opportunity to take the high road, as demonstrated by Jeong's attack on some right-winger and his response.




All these excuses given for why it's OK to attack people based on their ethnicity, if that ethnicity is white, makes the left look like a bunch of shameless hypocrites. And racists. And I hate shameless hypocrites and racists. And I hate it when idiots on the Left like Sarah Jeong make the Right look good.