Take a browse through Nancy McClernan’s blog, especially for the past few weeks. She’s tying all the threads together: evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Phillipe Rushton, the Pioneer Fund, Arthur Jensen, The Bell Curve, all the usual suspects. It’s the ugliest bit of knitting I’ve ever seen.

One of the many interesting examples is this story about how racists tried to use sports statistics to prove the inferiority of black people — they just can’t handle the intellectual demands of playing quarterback, goes the claim. Who is the source for the statistics behind this argument? Steve Sailer.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

If you’re citing Steve Sailer, you’re really dredging the cesspool. Do go read the rest — scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a list of links to this month’s posts, and they’re all good.

Damon Young got hilariously irate with a Trump appointee. But he made a terrible mistake.

Anyway, during a hearing yesterday, Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security chief, claimed not to know that Norway, one of the world’s whitest countries, was in fact one of the world’s whitest countries. Let’s forget for a moment that, if you take Nielsen by her word, it means that the person in charge of keeping America safe from terrorist attacks lacks the general sense of geographic and demographic knowledge you’d find in a moderately intelligent hedgehog. I literally just Googled “children’s books about Norway” and all of them are either about snow or feature characters named “Snojakta.” She is, under oath, claiming to know less about Norwegians than a 3-year-old.

Instead, let’s focus on her name. Her name is Kirstjen Nielsen. This is, if it’s not the world’s whitest name, a name that didn’t win the world’s whitest name contest because it submitted its application too late and couldn’t enter. This name is so white that it just denied me a car loan. THIS IS THE NAME OF A GOTDAMN VIKING! THIS IS THE NAME OF SOMEONE WHOSE MIDDLE NAME IS PROBABLY BROOMHILDA!

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a Viking-ass, Norse-god-ass name. BUT THERE’S DEFINITELY SOMETHING WRONG WHEN YOUR NAME IS KIRSTJEN BROOMHILDA RAPUNZEL LANNISTER NIELSEN AND YOU CLAIM NOT TO KNOW WHAT COLOR YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ NEIGHBORS PROBABLY WERE.

I think he was too quick to hand out the prize for whiteness. I would like to point out that I am so white I recognize that that name is more Danish than Norwegian, that I live in Minnesota and did not grow up in Clearwater, Florida where good Vikings would melt, that I am married to a woman of Norwegian/Swedish ancestry with a silent “j” in her last name, that I literally named our daughter after a Norse goddess, that I’m of half-Scandinavian ancestry tainted with the blood of the English/Scots/Irish, who are almost as white, and that I should probably get that prize. And there is a shocking percentage of the Minnesota population who could reasonably contest me for it.

Unless the prize is also for being the dumbest white person on the planet, in which case I will gracefully concede to Ms Nielsen. She has earned it.

David Colquhoun opines on that disgraceful eugenics conference at UCL. It’s all good, but I just want to single out this part, with its useful links:

Recently some peope have demanded that the names of Galton and Pearson should be expunged from UCL.

There would be a case for that if their 19th century ideas were still celebrated, just as there is a case for removing statues that celebrate confederate generals in the southern USA.  Their ideas about measurement and statistics are justly celebrated. But their ideas about eugenics are not celebrated.

On the contrary, it is modern genetics, done in part by people in the Galton lab, that has shown the wrongness of 19th century views on race. If you want to know the current views of the Galtan lab, try these.  They could not be further from Thompson’s secretive pseudoscience.

Steve Jones’ 2015 lecture “Nature, nurture or neither: the view from the genes”,

or “A matter of life and death: To condemn the study of complex genetic issues as eugenics is to wriggle out of an essential debate".

Or check the writing of UCL alumnus, Adam Rutherford: “Why race is not a thing, according to genetics”,

or, from Rutherford’s 2017 article

“We’ve known for many years that genetics has profoundly undermined the concept of race”

“more and more these days, racists and neo-Nazis are turning to consumer genetics to attempt to prove their racial purity and superiority. They fail, and will always fail, because no one is pure anything.”

“the science that Galton founded in order to demonstrate racial hierarchies had done precisely the opposite”

Or read this terrific account of current views by Jacob A Tennessen “Consider the armadillos".

These are accounts of what geneticists now think. Science has shown that views expressed at the London Intelligence Conference are those of a very small lunatic fringe of pseudo-scientists. But they are already being exploited by far-right politicians.

It would not be safe to ignore them.

Exactly. Remember this when the people calling themselves “race realists” or “scientific racists” try to tell you that they’re arguing on the side of science. They’re not. The scientific consensus is clear, and if you talk to credible geneticists or anthropologists or social scientists, they’ll all tell you that the claims of consistent racial distinctions in behavior or psychology or physiology are pretty much a load of hooey contrived to justify bigotry.

I keep getting told by ignorant regressives that our universities exclude radical and conservative ideas — that somehow, these institutions that value the free exchange of ideas so much that they have this thing called “tenure” to protect people who say stuff offensive to conventionality are actually dedicated to concealing the True Facts, whatever they may be, that can only be seen by Classical Liberals and Libertarians who have the clear sight.

It’s all nonsense. I’ve been to creationist talks on college campuses — it’s fairly routine, and that bullshit is about as openly counterfactual as you can get. Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Minnesota last year, and that bozo is creepy and wrong, but he got to babble in a university facility. Heck, I’ve spoken on university campuses all around the country, and you all know what a wacko I am. It takes being truly violent or hateful to get yourself booted off of a campus.

So I am not surprised that University College London hosted a eugenics conference now. In the 21st century. In one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Even though they’re mainly reduced to preaching at churches nowadays, the Discovery Institute is still having an event at Seattle Pacific University in March. This shit is still dribbling out everywhere, and they love to borrow the respectability of a university building to dress up their turds.

But this UCL conference also exhibits another interesting phenomenon. It features a whole sewage pit full of well known racists.

A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.

Lynn’s UISR runs the journal Mankind Quarterly, whose founders include a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.

Six members of the current board, including editor-in-chief Gerhard Meisenberg, spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences, while a further 16 LCI speakers have written for the journal in recent years. In total, 82% of those who spoke at both 2015 and 2016 conferences are directly associated with either UISR or Mankind Quarterly.

The UISR is bankrolled by Lynn and Meisenberg’s Pioneer Fund, a Southern Poverty Law Centre-listed hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting “racial betterment”.

Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Helmuth Nyborg, a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council, gave a lecture at last year’s American Renaissance conference which argued that Denmark’s gene pool would suffer from immigration from the Middle East. Nyborg spoke at the LCI in both 2015 and 2016. He has written numerous articles for Mankind Quarterly as well as a book for the UISR memorializing the former head of the Pioneer Fund, white nationalist J. P. Rushton.

James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter account, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.

But that isn’t the interesting part. Those people are boringly familiar, the same mob of contemptible racist jerks who show up all the time and get far more attention than they deserve. What’s interesting is yet another example of kook magnetism. People who have vile views about the personhood of different racial groups also seem to attract people who have vile views about consent and sex. Why do these racist fronts always seem to have a few people with abominable ideas about pedophilia?

Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.

Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be “self-taught in various subjects”, Kirkegaard now runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, along with Davide Piffer of Mankind Quarterly. Piffer is a fellow LCI-speaker, and was praised by Richard Lynn as having done “brilliant work identifying the genes responsible for race differences in intelligence.”

Authors on OpenPsych include Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favourite academic”, who praised Anders Breivik as a “serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”

I know, any article about these kinds of conferences is just an unrelenting geyser of name dropping of awful people, and it’s hard to stop listing the appalling associations, but lets just take a look at Kirkegaard. He’s one of those anti-semitic ‘white genocide’ lunatics, but that’s not even the worst part of his character: he has a way to justify raping children. I’ll put it below the fold; you may not want to continue at this point.

[Read more…]

Just watch this clip.

He starts out by explaining that the alt-right are highly literate, highly intelligent people who have been radicalized by exposure to true statements that have never been voiced on college campuses. You see, once Leftist dogma has been exposed as a falsehood, these bright young people just take the red pill and veer way off in the opposite direction.

You might be wondering, as I was, what were these True Facts that have triggered the defection of these brilliant students from progressive causes? Give me specific examples! He obliges.

• Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man.

  How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

• Men & women are not identical in their life priorities or sexuality. Again, who is arguing that men and women are identical? He says there is someone on the Harvard campus who argues this, but doesn’t bother to name names. Generally what I’ve seen on the left is approval and encouragement of differences — that men and women are different, but that the bigger differences are between individuals, and that those differences should be respected. We do object to being compelled to fit into the straitjacket of just two stereotypical gender roles. We also don’t think you can go from a karyotype to a flawless description of life priorities or sexuality.

• Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. Oh, yeah, he went there. Look at crime statistics and all those violent black criminals! We’re done, that’s all the analysis you need to do (and, by the way, those leftist college professors do not deny the statistics at all). But why do black communities have higher crime rates? It wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty, or discriminatory policing, or the existence of laws that basically criminalize being poor, would it?

  And of course he brings up that always-useful distinction, that Islamic people are more likely to be suicide bombers, as if that were the sole kind of violence that one ethnic group can perpetrate on another. How many Muslims have been killed by Christians? This is not to excuse either kind of violence, but to point out that playing selective games with the statistics to ignore institutionalized violence is profoundly dishonest.

I’m just going to have to say it outright: Pinker is lying here. These are all ideas that are routinely discussed at universities. The leftist positions he is caricaturing are far less dogmatic than he is claiming, and the alt-right positions far more so. There is no censorship that prevents addressing them; there is an expectation of greater, more evidence-based rigor in any discussion of such complex social, economic, and historical issues, and trying to pull the kind of misrepresentations and naive assertion of stereotypes that Pinker is babbling about here will get your arguments slapped down hard. I am shocked that a Harvard professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods.

---

Here’s a longer clip in which Pinker goes on to say the same sort of things that are routinely said in classrooms, all while doubling down and saying the “politically-correct left” is not allowing them to be said. He is completely un-self-aware. I guess it only counts if a politically incorrect person like Pinker says them as if they were his own novel idea, rather than the mundane substance of typical classroom discussions.

One of your own, Representative Steve Alford, stood up to speechify against legalizing the marijuana. And this is what he literally and actually said:

What you really need to do is go back in the ’30s, when they outlawed all types of drugs in Kansas (and) across the United States, Alford said. What was the reason why they did that? One of the reasons why, I hate to say it, was that the African Americans, they were basically users and they basically responded the worst off to those drugs just because of their character makeup, their genetics and that.

Now I can understand why any Democrats in the audience would simply stand there gleefully, watching the ol’ bigot tie his tongue into a noose and hang himself from the rafters. It’s always good to see your opponent make an ass of himself.

What I don’t understand is why time didn’t slow down for shocked Republicans as they hurled themselves at the podium, shouting “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and taking Alford down at the knees? They’re just sitting there, blankly, like this is just standard ordinary run-of-the-mill routine.

The Democrats in Kansas, all 5 of them, are having a grand time tearing him up right now. What do you think the Republicans are doing? Sitting on their hands.

Alford could face discipline from House Republican leadership, but House Speaker Ron Ryckman said it was too early to tell what leaders would do. He said he and House Majority Leader Don Hineman would take the issue under review.

As always seems to be the case, Alford is shocked, shocked I tell you, at the rude people who have called him racist.

He come up and told me I’m a racist, Alford told The Topeka Capital-Journal. I’m about as far from being a racist as I could get.

He has sort of apologized, though.

Alford stood by his remarks without citing his source, but said he should not have singled out African-Americans.

There are certain groups of people, their genetics, the way their makeup is, the chemicals will affect them differently, Alford told the Telegram. That’s what I should have said was drugs affect people differently instead of being more specific.

You see, he should have just implied it — his mistake was actually specifying black people, when he should have just trusted that his audience of all-white Kansans would have known exactly what he was talking about, wink wink, nudge nudge.

But don’t you worry! The Kansas Republican party is “reviewing” the issue.

Our president, and Stephen Miller, are colossal fucking bigots.

Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They all have AIDS, he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never go back to their huts in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

If the impeachment doesn’t happen soon, when does the revolution begin? Because, you must remember,
a substantial part of the electorate, the part that voted for him, probably agrees with those statements.

This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.

On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics, he wrote.

If it helps, Altman himself is gay.

No, it doesn’t help.

Altman himself is an entrepreneur, which seems to mean he hustles and shuffles money around, but hasn’t actually accomplished anything himself. He certainly hasn’t said anything novel about physics — he’s a college dropout, and his physics knowledge is probably somewhat less than mine, which isn’t saying a lot. Go ahead, check out his Wikipedia page, and tell me what he has done.

And that’s my objection to his statement — he has zero evidence for the idea that tolerating homophobia benefits science, or that a culture that actively promotes tolerance by rejecting bigotry is somehow equivalent to an oppressive culture that punishes people for their sexual orientation. I’ll just point out that it was people saying disparaging things about gay people that led to the chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. Germany had many prominent scientists and engineers in the 1930s, and supported science well, but also had the idea that Jews were bad, and so America was gifted with Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. One of my graduate advisors, George Streisinger, was a Hungarian Jew whose family fled the Nazis.

These are all equivalently stupid.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about women if we want them to be able to say novel things about computer science.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about black Americans if we want them to be able to say novel things about refrigeration technology.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about Jews if we want them to be able to say novel things about biology.

When you string it together that way, one thing that you ought to notice is the word “people”. Who? What people? It is the assumption about the identity of people: they are non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jews. They are, of course, rich white men, like the ones who populate the Silicon Valley tech bubble. We have to allow rich white men to say whatever they want in order to allow them to reinvent bodegas, reinvent the bus, reinvent food, and do all those other irrelevant things that will make the privileged richer.

It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible. “It’s possible” is not an evidence-based statement in support of a policy. It is the kind of open-ended, vague weasely string of words disconnected from cause and effect that allows great evil to thrive in the crevices of its ambiguity.

It’s possible that if we cook and eat the flesh of Sam Altman, we’ll become immortal gods on Earth. Won’t know until we try.