Because I exposed Steven Pinker’s atrociously bad arguments, I have now been accused of “smearing” and “distorting” Pinker’s words, and gotten all kinds of fun hate mail. Alas, nobody has been able to show where my arguments actually distort Pinker’s claims; he really does argue that “political correctness” is driving people to the alt-right, and that there are all these “facts” that Leftist Academics refuse to discuss on campus, which drives students further right when they discover that they’ve been lied to. It is a bullshit contrafactual, wrong and dishonest in every way, and the best people can do is say, “well, there’s some parts afterwards that are more nuanced, and you ignored those”. Nope, that’s irrelevant. When someone states outright lies, it doesn’t matter if later they say something else.

But that’s the fallback everyone is resorting to: it’s the logical equivalent of someone pointing out that Trump said something that was outright racist, while others refuse to acknowledge it and instead like to mention how he had a taco salad, so he’s not that bad. It’s not relevant. Quit dancing around the facts. I addressed Pinker’s lies, specifically. No one has refuted the fact that he did speak dishonestly.

If you want a perspective that’s less pissed-off than mine, I recommend Thomas Smith’s latest podcast. He thinks maybe I was a leetle too aggressively in-Pinker’s-face, to put it mildly, but then I think he’s a leetle too charitable, but then I also think maybe he’s new to Pinker’s history of making shitty arguments. Pinker is an advocate for evolutionary psychology, he criticized the March for Science as anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric (gosh, how many dog-whistles can you pack in a phrase?), he invoked the second law of thermodynamics to explain poverty, he endorsed the absurdities of Gamergate and Christina Hoff Sommers, and wrote the most arrogant piece on scientism ever. I say this not as a rabid anti-Pinker zealot — you can also find articles praising bits and pieces of Pinker’s work in my archives — but as someone who doesn’t just assume that Harvard confers infallibility with tenure, and who actually suspects that many aspects of Harvard reinforce an ugly sense of entitlement. He’s just really bad at thinking about way too many things.

Smith does point out something I could have been clearer about. If you look at the kinds of arguments Pinker often makes, they reduce to blaming the Left/Progressives/Liberals for things that the Right/Republicans/racists do. Somehow it’s always possible to make the worst things the alt-right does entirely the fault of those who oppose them, and also, he never bothers to say what we’re supposed to do instead. Encourage racists? Say kind things about them? Compromise on fundamental issues: suggest that maybe black people are only a little bit inferior rather than a lot inferior?

Even when they vaguely puzzle out this point, Pinker supporters don’t understand it. What does Jesse Singal say in the New York Times?

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

No. He clearly says that the alt-right’s beliefs are the fault of the “PC” Left, which says nothing about making better arguments to oppose them, and is a falsehood. His talk was about doling out the blame to the Left, not about fighting the alt-right. If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on,
which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do.

But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

Our president is a racist and a shameful laughingstock, part MCXVIX.

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.

Meanwhile, the more polite and diplomatic members of the rest of the world are all thinking about what a shithole the United States is becoming.

I’ve been reading Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House off and on. It’s tough. It’s terribly written, this kind of gossipy gibbering, and the only thing keeping me going at all is the occasional deliciously vicious insider story that pops up at you. I think, though, that Jeff Sharlet has the right perspective on it.

A number of my fellow journalists are saying privately and publicly that Michael Wolff’s book is no big deal — “nothing we didn’t know already.” This makes me think of people who see some piece of modern art, a Jackson Pollack or an Ellsworth Kelly, and say, “I could do that.” Yeah, but did you?

Exactly. I know it’s a bad book, but why didn’t any of the excellent journalists who are sneering at it now write a better book first? Wolff is a hack and a bit sleazy, but if he’s saying what everyone already knew, at least he had the guts to actually go against the cozy insider culture that infects government and the media right now.

Which would you prefer: An asshole who relishes his access to power as an ornament with which to improve his status with other elites, or an asshole who betrays it? Wolff, who by many accounts will betray just about anybody, was the writer for the job of bringing us inside the administration that wants to screw everybody.

When you put it that way…I want the asshole that’s willing to write about the bad crap going down at the cost of getting kicked out of the White House press room. I want a newspaper publisher who is willing to go to press with the story that will cost them easy access to the spin the administration wants to give to everyone, and instead has to work to get the story.

There is a Robert E. Lee Elementary School in East Wenatchee, Washington, and some community members are irate because the school board has proposed changing the name to just Lee Elementary. Some because it doesn’t go far enough.

“Lee needs to be gone, period,” JJ Jackson told the board before the vote. “My kids attend schools in this district and they come home daily complaining about racism, about teachers,
about clothing that a white kid can wear, but they can’t,” said Jackson, who is black. “Please
explain how the world’s biggest gang, the KKK and neo-Nazis, why it’s OK to support them.
Going forward, Lee is a no. It needs to be gone.”

I’m with him. Others, it’s because, well, change is bad, I guess.

“You should reject this group’s agenda because it will not stop with this name. This is but a microcosm of what is happening in our country. There are more important issues like assuring
our kids are getting a quality education,” he said. “Leave it the way it is. Set the standard right
here and now and stand up to this.”

I would like to know what “quality education” this fellow wants to see in his schools that’s more important than the complaints that Mr Jackson brought up. I rather suspect that they’re more of the conservative agenda than anything to do with actually improving and funding public education.

Maybe somebody should point out to them that, while Washington was not a state at the time of the Civil War, the territory did side with the North and actually recruited the Washington Territory Volunteer Infantry to support the defense of the region during that war.

Bonus amusement: there is a Ulysses S. Grant Elementary in Wenatchee.

Eggers also suggested addressing Grant Elementary at the same time, though that suggestion did not move forward.

As long as someone is explaining what side Washington was on in the Civil War, they might also mention that Grant was a Northern general and American president, and was not a slave-holding traitor to the country.

The money is always supposed to move upwards, and it’s a crime to question it. Take, for example, this Louisiana teacher who dared to ask why administrators were getting raises when teacher salaries had been frozen for years:

Local news station KATC reports that Deyshia Hargrave, a teacher at Rene Rost Middle Schools in Kaplan, Louisiana, attended a Vermilion Parish School Board meeting on Monday to ask questions about how the board could vote to increase the superintendent’s pay despite the fact that many school employees have worked for years without a pay increase.

Hargrave was informed that she was not supposed to ask questions at the meeting, as this was only intended to be a forum for public feedback. Nonetheless, board members tried to answer her questions.

It seems to me that asking a question is a perfectly reasonable form of feedback, especially since asking administrators why they have given themselves a raise is much more polite than simply stating that you protest the inequities constructed by the ratfuckers in charge, which would not be a “question”, and therefore would be allowed.

Unfortunately, in America in 2018 there can only be one response to questioning authority.

Now they’re saying she wasn’t arrested, she was just thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Just.

At the Golden Globes award last night, she gave a wonderfully passionate speech and said a lot of the things we need to hear right now.

That was excellent and beautifully presented — she is a professional actor, and a good one, but I am confident that this was more than a well-polished oration, and that she really feels what she said from the heart.

That said, though, I was dismayed to see the tag #Oprah2020 pop up everywhere, and people talking about having her run for president. Are we so shallow that we now see a TV personality — a rich, eminently successful TV and movie star — as sufficient qualification for the job of president? Have we learned nothing from Trump? Oprah has an inspiring message and can actually speak in complete sentences, which puts her light years ahead of our current senile clown, but it is a job that really does require experience and skills and knowledge that Oprah does not have.

If she wants to serve in government, let her run for a state office, and then as a national representative, and then I’ll perk up when she announces a run for the head of the executive branch. No shortcuts. Bring back the cursus honorum!

Andrew Therrien was getting dunned for payment on a loan he never took out, so he went on a one-man vendetta against loan sharks. He had special skills: not guns, but persistence and persuasion, and he eventually tracked down the company and the man who had made millions by inventing fake debt and selling it to collection agencies.

Therrien soon obtained two crucial sets of documents to that end. In March 2016 he flew to California to meet a debt broker, who handed over some contracts Tucker had signed. Separately, Therrien received an email from the manager of a collection agency, to whose conscience he’d spent weeks appealing. The email, whose subject line read “Have faith in the good in heart,” included actual phantom-debt files, with names and Social Security numbers. The metadata yielded a new name: Rob Harsh, Tucker’s IT guy. (The author of the email died of a drug overdose a few months later.)

In May 2016, Therrien emailed his discoveries to the FTC. A lawyer replied right away: “Andrew, we need to talk about this.” Therrien also gave his intel to some private lawyers who were going after Tucker in Texas. They contacted Harsh, and in August 2016 he submitted an affidavit to the court. Harsh, who declined to comment for this story, testified that Tucker had asked him to manipulate a database of almost 8 million payday-loan applications, writing in a made-up lender and adding an amount owed of $300 for each person.

Therrien had been right all along.

What’s discouraging, though, is that there were all these cracks in government regulation in the first place, and that the agencies that should have been hunting down and crushing these cockroaches weren’t getting anywhere.

Fresh this morning.

He seems a little worked up. Somebody take him out to do something relaxing.

Like fishing.