Jacobin is a bit late to the realization there… He’s pretty much always been full of shit with his “the world is in constant progress” argument. He’s one of those people who thinks his expertise in his field means he’s better at everyone else in other fields…
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I saw this most clearly when he wrote a preface to someone else’s book on a subject I have a great deal of knowledge about, and so I knew everything he was saying was basically wrong.
That made me question why I had blindly accepted his scholarship (with footnotes! and appendixes!) on subjects I didn’t know as well.
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Unfortunately, most people do blindly accept his knowledge, because he’s credentialed (even when he’s talking outside his area) and a man speaking confidently… that’s enough for them.
And of course, he’s saying things that make them feel good, so there’s that.
He’s helping to undermine the very institution that gave him his position, too.
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It’s the “great man” theory at work. It tends to penalize actual scholarship and reward academic inbreeding.
Academically, Pinker is a pug dog.
A pug dog who is knowingly and openly connected to a pedophile sex trafficking ring.
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The book on things improving are not even in his field of study. He’s asserting that the people doing the real work are wrong.
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Yeah sure, but given his continued prominence, he deserves regular calling out. As you also wrote, “Unfortunately, most people do blindly accept his knowledge, because he’s credentialed (even when he’s talking outside his area) and a man speaking confidently…”
Seems to me that not everything that’s worth publishing needs to present an idea no one has thought of before.
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“ The PPP is meant to prevent small businesses who employ less than 500 people from having to fire employees due to the economic pressures of the public health crisis. PPP loans range between $150,000 and $10 million per loan.
Philly’s police unions now receiving the PPP are made up of employees of the Philadelphia Police Department and the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office. Both of these employers reported to Reuters that they had not laid off or furloughed any workers due to the pandemic.”
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“ Joel Christensen, chair of classical studies at Brandeis University, said that “however forced, or tepid or merely transactive” Pinker’s interaction with Epstein was, it “confirms for many what has been clear for years.” Pinker, he said, “is a reactionary who is moving from the center to the right because he refuses to engage critically with new voices or to entertain honestly the criticisms his work has produced.”
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Sure! I’m glad that posted that.
No doubt. There should also be acknowledgement that people got there, first, though. Plenty of scholars were discussing the problematic nature of his work when it came out.
Right? His book “Better Angels of our Nature” basically asks a historical question, and he most certainly did not engage with any literature that clashed with his thesis, except to dismiss it. It’s the typical right-wing playbook, to assume the humanities are incapable of creating sound works of scholarship, because the answers aren’t reflecting the triumph of white men. He’s like others, just wanting to go back to a time when it was only white men shaping our understanding of the world. This was true when this book was published.
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Nonsense! He is the center. If there’s any movement, it must be everyone else! /s
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Someone needs to ask him how much better it got for those girls after he helped Epstein skate free.
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Pinker was also a signatory of the Harper’s letter. This is all connected. As I noted:
[to be clear, PInker is not one of the signatories I admire.]
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Probably a good thing for some he’s not an English pug dog.
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Now that it’s clear that the people I was friends were for decades are obviously authoritarian (despite all the fucking evidence at the time that they were authoritarian), I’m going to distance myself…
If people who hung out with members of the Reagan administration and Thatcher government couldn’t see their authoritarian proclivities AT THE TIME, then they were willfully blind.
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Requisite:
All that 800 dimensional chess must be exhausting.
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In signing a letter asking us to support the free speech rights of fascists and transphobes and give their ideas a serious hearing it’s clear that she’s learned nothing.
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Well, somethings go too far, like out and out demanding ethnic cleansing and second class citizenship for some “undesireables”, instead of just hinting at it and having policies that ensure it happens in the background… /s
Also…
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/12/politics/trump-president-rankings/index.html
While I have my problems with historical rankings of presidents as an exercise (e.g. the graders tend to be far more liberal than the population at large)
If this is true:
The presidents viewed at the top of the lists (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln historically) or near the top (Ronald Reagan) tend to be thought of fondly.
Then the graders are NOT more liberal than the population at large. Reagan was not a great president. He’s directly tied to this shit show we’re living through.
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Yet another group winds up on his list of frenemies, after doing his bidding:
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Wait, Trump will turn on you as soon as you are inconvenient, even when you have been blindly supporting him no matter what? Who would have thought!
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