Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Dennett and Steve Pinker were in a āhuman biodiversity discussion groupā with Steve Sailer and Ron Unz in 1999, because of course they were
I look forward to the ābut we often disagreedā non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.
Pinker: looking through my photo album where Iām with people like Krauss and Epstein, shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with them
Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard
Mr AGP? Wow.
Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???
Surely āscientificā is giving them far too much credit? I recall previously sneering at some quotes about skull sizes, including something like women keep bonking their heads?
I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)
Oh, definitely. For clarity my intention was to riff off them and increase levels of disrespect towards racists. In hindsight, the question format doesnāt quite convey that.
Iām mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. Heās been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think heās even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, Iām curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But Iāve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since Iām pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I havenāt seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonaldās another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evanās account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesnāt emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I havenāt pored over everything heās blogged and microblogged, he hasnāt sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
And in 2014:
I suppose itās possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
I thought that Sailer had coined the term in the early 2000s, but evidently thatās not correct
The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marksā book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if thereās a detailed timeline.