You just illustrated my earlier point.
I doubt it.
That there are hundreds of millions of people on the Right in America? That’s trivial to show.
That’s not the same as the alt-right, though. BPC’s post remains un-paradoxical.
No, different point.
Your brain is lost in a maze of mirrors.
Perhaps you could explain what point, then. With quotes, for preference.
It was the one about the vast majority of the electorate looking “right wing” to those on the far left.
That’s a pretty trivial point. And, again, doesn’t make BPC’s point any less true.
It’s because most Americans *are *more Right than Left.
Even your “moderate left wing” looks ridiculously right wing to leftists outside America. Only the American “far left” even *approaches *what I consider Left Wing.
Virtue-signalling, holier-than-thou claptrap.
Well, telling us that you are constantly blindsided by your ignorance does not help.
Not reluctant, only that he seems to also fall for the issue of pondering about things where he is not an expert. Many deniers of the dark web are now in the stage of “yes humans are responsible” on the global warming issue but they go for lukewarm solutions like Lomborg or positions that in reality end up telling Republicans specially to not bother.
Hence the problem I noticed coming from Pinker here:
Well, it is destructive alright, because people like Pinker, like the ones from the Dark Web are trying to become the new pundits for the right when the right eventually will finally stop carrying the idiot ball, but while pretending to look more at data, at best it looks more to me that they do it in an incomplete manner. IMHO Nuclear can be an effective compliment to solar and wind, but Pinker clearly ignores new developments in solar and batteries to ignore data that he does not like.
Source:
(Annoyingly, I noticed that Pinker does not provide in the article you quoted and in another more recent one, support for declaring Nuclear as the best solution and to allow him to dismiss Solar almost completely)
Who exactly am I signalling virtue to, pray tell? The other 3 hard leftists on this board?
And of course I’m holier than you, I’m not an admitted racist so that’s ridiculously easy.
Go back to taking the weekends off, your responses are (marginally) better when you do.
Again, terms like “virtue signaling” were invented by the right to go after the left*. It is merely a rhetorical attempt to change arguing about or advocating for doing the right thing into some sort of vice.
It’s ridiculous to try and use it against the left, with whom you share common values, or you wouldn’t identify as a Democratic centrist.
*It was coined in the US, so I mean what counts as left in the US. I’m sure that arguing about the right thing to do is the centrist position in many countries.
I started a post on this. It has some interesting graphics, but I gave it up as a lost cause. I applaud your energy.
Oh, GIGO.
No, actually this time you made some good points. I’m impressed!
BigT, I don’t agree that a useful term is out of bounds just because loathsome people use it.
Bumping due to this scathing takedown of Pinker’s latest book:
Some prime Pinker stupidity:
“Are mortgage lenders who turn down minority applicants really being racist, he muses, or are those lenders simply calculating default rates “from different neighborhoods that just happen to correlate with race?” (A long history of racist redlining may “happen” to have something to do with this too, but Pinker doesn’t get into it.)”
Gee, Steven, I wonder if maybe all that racist redlining and stuff may actually be related to racism?
A post of mine from 12 years ago:
Steven Pinker is well known for advocating teaching “race science” (19th century racialism with vague 21st century genetic possibilities and implications) as a real, and imperative, on-going scientific debate.
There are clear ethical concerns of propagating age-old harmful racism by rehashing popular racialist (and genetically essentialist) assertions as an never ending de jour debate. It becomes even more insidious when those advocating these racialist ideas reject the requirement of establishing causal links, or genetic correlates to behaviour, or any objective racial framework (the idea of essential racial categories are always explicitly advocated while no rigorous attempt is made to delimit these categories).
It still amazes me how much people will cloak themselves as lone, besieged bastions of rationality and scientific freedom, all in the hopes of completely avoiding addressing the real world issues of racism and the ethical concerns that flow from their fixations and advocacy.
Either way Pinker sometimes acknowledges a lack of evidence with the racialists that he gives his favour to (check out his supportive tweet of Nicholas Wade’s horrible race book) but he also says very dumb things in support of indefensible racist, wack-jobs like his decades long relations with OG internet Alt-Righter Steve Sailer (as I mentioned in my above 12 year old post and from yesterday’s article below in the Guardian ).
Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels , among many others, on his website.
Thank you. I didn’t know he lent credibility to supremacists like Sailer.
And thank you for bumping an old thread. I love rereading such things to see how my opinion has or has not changed with time. I don’t think I’ll ever not love this post though.
Aah, I’d forgotten this thread existed. I can think of a new-ish poster who could do with reading it in full.
Paging @DemonTree…