Thursday, January 11, 2018

Pinker explains the Alt Right

Some leftists are upset by this:
Steven Pinker 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". ...

And what are some of these true statements he’s referring to? Handily, he provides examples in the very same speech:

“Capitalist societies are better than communist ones.”
“Men and women are not identical in their priorities, in their sexuality, and in their tastes and interests.”
“Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.”
“Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of suicide-terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.”
Here is an example of leftist denial of reality:
Susan Wojcicki is said to have been the loudest voice in Google’s executive ranks demanding the firing of heretic James Damore to encourage the others. The funny thing about it is that Wojcicki consistently explains that Damore had to be fired for the most maternal reasons imaginable: she felt that his memo affected her emotional relationship with her five children.
In her words:
Wojcicki, who was part of the team at Google that decided to fire Damore, recalled talking about it over dinner with her children, to whom she had always tried to promote diversity and equality.

“The first question they had about it [was], ‘Is that true?’” Wojcicki said on the latest Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “That really, really surprised me, because here I am — I’ve spent so much time, so much of my career, to try to overcome stereotypes, and then here was this letter that was somehow convincing my kids and many other women in the industry, and men in the industry, convincing them that they were less capable. That really upset me.”
So instead of answering whether the claims were true, she fired the guy.

As long as the Left is in the business of suppressing the truth, the Alt-Right will be primarily about exposing the truth. The truth will set you free.

Jerry Coyne says "Pinker smeared again by those who distort his words". I am not sure he has been smeared. This is a battle between the Alt-Right and the Ctrl-Left. Recognizing objective truths about groups puts Pinker on the side of the Alt-Right, even if he is a leftist Jewish atheist childless Canadian Harvard professor Trump-hater. If he went full Alt-Right, he would probably get kicked out of Harvard and ostracized from his intellectual circles. We can only expect him to go so far.

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