There is nothing I hate more than “centrist” intellectuals who think they are the only one with the guts to speak truth to our neo-Marxist, post-modern overlords. What I most about these fuckers is that they play themselves up as cool, bad-boy outsiders — Steven Pinker with his hair, Jordan Peterson with his cowboy boots, etc. If you’ve never heard of any of these people, count yourself lucky. If you have, just read this. I’ve picked a long excerpt but read the whole goddamn thing.
Radical centrists believe everyone else is politically motivated, while they occupy a space of inhuman, cyborg neutrality. Everyone else has impaired abilities to use reason and judge evidence because of their emotional attachments to certain values, while radical centrists are scientific beings of pure logic. If any of this were remotely true I might have some respect for radical centrists, but in reality they are people who are moderately informed about politics, don’t have any personal reasons to dislike the status quo, and are blinded by the Dunning-Kruger effect from seeing their own motives. For example, they like to believe that they know anecdotes are not evidence, but they will share literally every anecdotal story from WSJ-NR-Q about a campus SJW controversy. They switch between the systemic/statistical and personal/anecdotal as it fits their purposes, just like everyone else. They cherry-pick. They conflate sex and gender because they personally happen to like the traditional gender roles in their society, while simultaneously acknowledging social construction as it applies to other things. They believe economics is a sound science (it’s not) that forms the basis of their policy preferences (it doesn’t), but all other social sciences are hopelessly biased by the devoted Marxism of their practitioners (there’s no reason to believe they are any more biased than economics). Evolutionary psychology, perhaps the least scientific, least experimental branch of psychology, is given credence above all other types of psychology, simply because it can help them justify their own preference for traditional gender roles. Humanities are worse than worthless, unless we’re talking about the histories of certain communist countries, then they can suddenly take on a mythological level of importance (in the sense that nobody has actually read them but they still believe they know the moral of the story). I could go on, but this is getting boring even for me.
Radical centrists also tend to be naive about the nature of anyone’s actual political motives. They think everyone else is conspiratorial, but the truth is they just really can’t put two and two together or follow the money, ever. For example, even though Charles Murray’s ideas are absolute junk science on par with phrenology, radical centrists still think it’s irrelevant that he’s funded by a literal eugenics think tank that was started by a nazi sympathizer. They still think he should be invited to campus to share his garbage ideas so students can critically evaluate those ideas- meaning they should also ignore who funded Murray and focus only on his words. Similarly, when the same Koch-funded astroturf student groups keep inviting controversial speakers to campuses, and the Murdoch-owned WSJ keeps reporting every resulting controversy, radical centrists respond every time with the same disappointment, condescension toward students, and alarm over the death of free speech and inquiry, never recognizing any pattern about how the story was generated or ended up on their screens.
I think I need a cigarette.
Mary G
Wow, new speed record for eyes glazing over and finger hitting the scroll wheel. You forgot the “I read these assholes so you don’t have to” tag.
Doug!
@Mary G:
It’s a great piece but if you haven’t been subjected to radical centrism, skip it.
Villago Delenda Est
Reminds me of economists who can’t possibly be swayed by grants from say the Koch Brothers or Goldman Sachs, but everyone ELSE is persuaded by monetary incentives.
father pusbucket
Link?
Mary G
@Doug!: I guess so, because I never heard of the people you mention. Thank dog.
Villago Delenda Est
@father pusbucket: The word “this” in Doug’s introduction, near the end.
Lyrebird
Oh, this is awesome!
I don’t have time to read the whole thing, but just the excerpt is very refreshing.
Even way back when he wrote The Language Instinct, Pinker showed such wild swings between empirically very solid claims, cherry picking, and just slamming others without due diligence, it was hard for me to know how to respond.
For any other folks out there in the middle of this (and @Mary G: if you’re not surrounded by this, I can totally get not finding much of interest in the article), I recommend inter-library loaning yourself or even buying a copy of The Trouble With Nature by Roger Lancaster.
I’m not a radical centrist, I’m a young curmudgeon who usually studiously avoids books tagged “Queer Theory” because the words they use are too long, but Lancaster’s writing is actually much clearer than the article Doug! linked, and it has beautiful take-downs of some of the BS about gender that Pinker and others spread around using evolution and ancient art as justification.
Doug!
i made the link more prominent.
Mary G
Doug, this is a great thread by a Democratic candidate in Indiana highlighting his $25 a month donor from California:
Doug!
@Mary G:
Thanks. I’ve got more fundraising on tap tomorrow.
Corner Stone
When I think of the radical centrists I think of the Obama Bros and their bullshit. I guess there is a reason to be teaming up with Bill Frist on healthcare…
Jewish Steel
“ If someone frequently talks at length about how much they despise rap and hip-hop, and all the reasons they believe these to be inferior forms of music, that person might have some issues.”
God, does that bring back bad teaching memories. If that’s the first thing you think I need to know in our first guitar lesson, it is likely to also be your last guitar lesson.
Corner Stone
“Bad Boy of Curling”
.
.
.
That has to be some kind of fucking joke, right?
burnspbesq
Remind me again why I should care?
Mary G
@Doug!,Good. This Politico story about Republicans showing up in Vegas to kiss up to an absent Sheldon Adelson because they are getting outraised so badly is encouraging.:
Jeffro
Couldn’t the author have just said “both-sides-erism sux” and been done with it??
Nice version: “people, you’re smarter and better than this!”
Mean version: “both-sides assholes, you’re just like everyone else and you’re too dumb to admit it”
danielx
Speak truth to, indeed. Fuck them – they may not have noticed, but people have figured out that Marxism as an economic philosophy and basis for governance does indeed suck. Marxism as an analytical tool, on the other hand, is very useful and has a great deal to be said for it.
WaterGirl
Doug, did you see Raven’s suggestion this week of a really good candidate that he would to see featured in one of your fundraising threads?
Matt McIrvin
@Doug!: Been subjected to too much of it, still want to skip it.
FlipYrWhig
@burnspbesq: “Someone is wrong on the Internet.”
DougJ
@WaterGirl:
Yeah. Thinking about it!
psycholinguist
the part about evolutionary psychology is so spot on, although I would add that for the evolutionary psychologists themselves, it is more than simply about their preference for traditional gender roles – it is about their preference for acting like complete assholes, e.g. trying to screw everyone they come in contact with in one form or another. Man, I hate those guys, and they’re probably about 90% guys.
Doug!
@Jeffro:
These guys aren’t necessarily full on both siders. It’s more complicated than that.
FlipYrWhig
@Jeffro: “As a highly-educated leftist, you know who I hate? Highly-educated centrists. They look stupid and stay stupid things, unlike us, who never look stupid or stay stupid things. This is a very important political argument.”
Doug!
@psycholinguist:
That’s my impression as well.
dww44
@WaterGirl: Who was the candidate? For what office from what state? Am curious.
Lyrebird
@dww44: Chalis someone from Georgia… I liked her bio, fwiw.
jl
I tried to read it. Is joftius an academic philosopher? In some sections he writes like many of them do, and it is just too painful to try to follow. And does the debunking need that many words.
If these three items are quotes from Pinker, why bother? Is there a substantial number of people left of center politically who view those three statements as sacred cows that cannot be disputed without risking being exiled from society? Really? I may botch this up since my academic philosopher logic is rusty, but who chop through the validity of an argument if the premises are untrue? Pinker’s argument is unsound. We know that right away. Doesn’t need several hundred words. Unless Pinker thinks, say, Sweden, or the Netherlands are communist, but in that case he is not really a centrist, just pretending to be one.
” …capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests
different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. “
Aleta
I bet their parties are the worst.
Mike J
@dww44: I want to pitch Lisa Brown, the candidate running against Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Cook downgraded the seat away from “safe Republican” to likely, and Paul Ryan’s superpac opened an office in Spokane to defend it. This is the Alabama of Washington, and if nothing else we can make Republicans spend money in places they should be able to ignore.
jl
@psycholinguist: It’s easy for anyone, or any group, to tell all sorts of just-so stories to please their preconceptions and prejudices. Much harder to do a good faith empirical test of the just-so stories, if they threaten your world view, or the integrity of one’s manly balls.
I think a number of patriarchal evolutionary psychology just-so tales have bit the dust over a last few years, a lot from studies of female sexual behavior in mammals and birds that did not fit the appropriate mold.
Economists are guilty of it too. They love to tell their favorite causal story about a dynamic process from cross-sectional correlations. A lot of fun to tell those things, and you can get famous off it. So, maybe becomes dangerous to go look to see if the stories are really true.
Matt McIrvin
@jl: I’ve seen a lot of well-meaning people passing around, not Pinker’s article, but some meta-meta-complaint about how “social media makes you stupid” because some liberal or other accused Pinker of being an alt-rightist on the basis of Pinker’s article. Therefore knee-jerk Tumblr SJW blah blah. Just trying to tease apart all the bad assumptions makes my head ache.
psycholinguist
@jl: Wasn’t talking so much about the actual academic enterprise of evolutionary psychology – some of it isn’t bad, most of it is pretty awful mainly for the reasons you’ve outlined. I was referring more to the type that the field tends to draw. I’ve had a few colleagues and students who moved from my field of cognitive psychology into evolutionary psych and none of them surprised me with their choice. They tend to be selfish, amoral pricks, and evolutionary psych gives them a nice excuse for their shitty behavior.
Yutsano
@Mike J: This district has three colleges in it plus I could see Brown throwing around her Coug connections to get some traction. The real problem is Spokane is Republican as all get out. But in this environment who knows?
I just want to see Newhouse go down and down hard.
Major Major Major Major
I think this article is bad and I don’t even like these people.
@jl: Agree.
Mike J
@Matt McIrvin: Speaking of stupid, I read some rando on twitter the other day complaining that the DOJ was full of SJWs. Whcih I thought was sort of the point.
jl
@psycholinguist: Economics isn’t as friendly to that type as it was ten or twenty years ago. They need someplace to go.
Major Major Major Major
I also don’t see what the big deal is with Pinker’s hair, or how somebody might wear boots they like or a leather jacket. You wouldn’t hate them less if they didn’t.
tobie
The name Pinker rings a bell but I couldn’t tell you exactly where I’ve come across him. Could it be in The Guardian?
Anyhoo…this sentence made me feel old because I couldn’t decipher the acronyms:
Mike J
@tobie: Wall Street Journal-National Review-Quillette about Social Justice Warrior controversy.
Ten Bears
“Radical centrist” is an oxymoron. Republicans smoking pot.
tobie
@Mike J: Wow! Thanks for the cheat sheet.
Mike J
@tobie: k.np.
Dmbeaster
What do these people actually believe in, or what are their values? Being centrist is not a value, its meta. It may also just be where you happen to end up if you have values and compare them with others, and happen to find that you share positions with the both sides of two heated antagonists. But seeking to find that middle position first so that you can espouse an alleged centrist position is not based on values. Its just a snotty unwillingness to actually believe in something which might, horrors!, result in finding yourself fully in one camp or the other.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ten Bears: Sort of like libertarians. Selfish assholes who like to get high.
Achrachno
@jl: I think the article Doug quotes seems like a hatchet job on Pinker and is probably quite unfair. I’m not an expert on Pinker’s views, though I’ve heard him speak a couple of times and have read a few pieces by him, but I’m smelling unfair characterization. From what I’ve seen he’s quite reasonable and more progressive than centrist politically. He does oppose the “all nurture” approach to psychology and thinks genes play a significant role in making us who we are. That might irritate some of us on the left.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dmbeaster: They really want to jump in bed with the “conservatives”, but the “conservatives” are so crude and anti-intellectual. As joftius (the author) points out, they’re all about maintaining the status quo, which they benefit from. It allows their mediocrity to thrive, without fear of being pushed out by some bitch or blah on actual merit.
Villago Delenda Est
@Achrachno: We’ve got brains. We can tell our genes to fuck off.
Matt McIrvin
@Achrachno: Right now Pinker seems to be really insistent on how the academic left establishment shuns anyone who espouses his views, and it’s playing right into the hands of the “anti-bigots are the real bigots” people. I don’t think Pinker is necessarily doing that on purpose but it’s how it’s being cited.
Achrachno
@Villago Delenda Est: Your brain was built by your genes, so not an option. No matter how hard we try, we can’t think like a squid, or even a chimp.
Villago Delenda Est
@Achrachno: But we can think. And overcome the programming.
Major Major Major Major
@Achrachno: I think it’s more a piece attacking people who aren’t Pinker, as inspired by something Pinker did, which nevertheless is framed as a piece attacking Pinker for some reason.
jl
@Achrachno: I don’t have a particular opinion about Pinker one way or another. I haven’t followed enough of the debates he’s been in to have a firm opinion. I do think that Pinker’s book Blank Slate was attacking a straw man, at least by the early 2000s. So, I just said if those were quotes that began Pinker’s argument, I think they are just wrong, and no need to waste a lot of time on the truth or falsity of arguments that rest on false premises.
I think, from times I remember him popping up in public kerfluffles, that Pinker sometimes issued what amount to an apologetic for somebody’s boorish bigoted BS. Pinker is smart and knowledgeable enough to present a reasonable case that there might be something true within shouting distance of what was said.. But, it wasn’t what was said.
Achrachno
@Matt McIrvin: Pinker may think that, and he may be right or wrong — I don’t know. Too many 2nd hand sources in this discussion. Who’s doing the citing and how correctly are they presenting his views? The original linked article didn’t seem to actually quote Pinker, but just the opinions of his critics. Pinker seemed to be present only as paraphrases, perhaps inaccurate or out of context. But I admit I got fed up with the thing and didn’t read it all. Maybe if I knew Pinker’s views better I’d see the critics are right. But, the tone of the article did not make me think the author was likely to be right. Seemed like there was a very large ax being ground.
Achrachno
@Villago Delenda Est: The thinking could be a product of the programming, even 100%. This is a hard problem.
jl
@Achrachno: I have the same frustration with the article.I took at face value that the lines that were claimed to be quotes were in fact quotes that started Pinker’s argument. If not backed up in the links or references, that is a big problem with the article.
Achrachno
@jl: “if those were quotes that began Pinker’s argument, I think they are just wrong”
I’m not sure they’re quotes. Where’d they come from? What was the context, if they are quotes? I’m just really uneasy with the article — it seems a bit over the top.
polyorchnid octopunch
I dunno about the rest of it but Jordan Peterson is a bigoted shitbag. He’s in the process of being completely delegitimized here in Canada; he decided he needed to defend Western Civilization! from FN reconciliation and transfolk and some folks have been combing through his backscroll and reposting his more bigoted statements about those groups of people.
Achrachno
@Achrachno: @Achrachno: OK, I went back and forced myself to read more. They are quotes, but you have to follow a link to a partial transcript. However, they’re pretty close to being out of context as presented in the article. Even from the partial transcript one can see that Pinker’s position is within the liberal spectrum.
Eljai
There’s a link to the transcript of Pinker’s remarks at the end of the first paragraph of the article. If I follow, Pinker is saying that certain “true statements” such as “different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates” are not allowed to be discussed by the politically correct left. So when people with alt-right tendencies come upon these so-called “facts”, they can’t put them into context and, thus, interpret these statements in the most racist way possible. Since the left hasn’t allowed us to discuss these ideas before, well, we are defenseless against the racists’ arguments. I dunno, Pinker’s assertions strike me as bullshit on a number of levels.
PIGL
@polyorchnid octopunch: im not sure how well the discrediting is working … check out a recent article in The Tyee.
Documentary evidence that he’s a racist reactionary prickears will not hurt him with his fans because that’s why they like him … somehow or other they sensed The subtext that is so very impolite to notice.
Chip Daniels
I did read the whole piece, and its worth the time.
What makes these centrists essentially conservative in their outlook is their notion that there was a Golden Age, when things were terrific, from which we have fallen.
Like how they imagine an age when colleges were robust centers of free speech without any sort of boundaries, even though speech has always been circumscribed by morality and law.
Or that they love the humanities, but only those that are rendered in pen and ink illustrations of Great Men in powdered wigs and knee breeches.
Mostly they recoil from actual politics. They love to imagine politics as educated men like themselves exchanging stinging barbs, sharp insights, and zesty bon mots, then breaking for tea.
The actual ugliness of the American Revolution, and the Civil War, the brawling political battles and factions and partisans that preceded these, are invisible to them.
The labor union struggles, civil rights struggles, Vietnam protests, gay rights protests…these things are all outside their boundary of “legitimate” political struggle.
Doug!
@Dmbeaster:
You’ve summed up my belief about centrism quite well.
Shinobi
Can I bum one? wow.
cokane
@Chip Daniels: this is a completely false characterization of Pinker, who actually argues against there being any Golden Age that was better than today. He argues that we’re in the real golden age and probably will be in an even better one in the future. The fact that people regularly trot out these characterizations just shows they haven’t actually read the man.
Also, too, for Doug, conflating with Pinker with Peterson is just fatuous nonsense.
JDM
It is nice to see the rest of the world catching on to Steven Pinker’s bullshit.
cokane
@Achrachno: it’s a deeply unfair example of quote mining and taking a writer out of context, the whole point about ethnic groups and crimes completely excises what Pinker would later go on to say about the history of Irish-Americans and crimes and how that proves (to Pinker) that there’s no causality due to ethnicity. But if you read the medium piece, it leaves you with the impression that Pinker is at least racism-curious. It’s straight up Fox News style lying to your own readers.
Jess
@cokane: Thank you! I was just gearing up to make the same point. I have read several of Pinker’s books–with the same baseline of skepticism that I brought to Marxist PoMo theory and Ayn Rand when I first encountered them–and I have to say that Pinker makes far more logical and evidence-based arguments than most of the less “centric” authors I’ve read. Even when I don’t agree with him, I’m impressed with his chops. If his critics want to show that he’s wrong, they better rise above sneering about his hair style come up with stronger arguments about how his arguments are flawed.
Jess
And, by the way, having endured too many years of grad school in the 90s, I’ve found that the radical left PoMo theory folks are some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever encountered.
Starfish
@Jess: Pinker is someone who is very smart but also very wrong when he steps off his own mat. Neil de Grasse Tyson does this too. They are both very smart people in their area of expertise, but when they start riffing on other topics, they go wrong with a quickness. It’s like all the computer science people who think that they would run the government better or that their kids don’t need vaccination because they know better than medical doctors. It is arrogance.
What Doug posted here was very timely for me because there is someone that I know who is a jerk to people, and he is tweeting condescendingly right now about people not being openminded about him inviting trolls to his conferences. He likes the drama, and he needs to admit that he likes the drama instead of condescending to others.
DougJ
@Jess:
His books are one thing, his stupid comments on Spike TV etc. are another.
Noam Chomsky was a pioneering genius in linguistics (1000x greater than Pinker) but I’ll still give him shit for saying Bush and Gore were the same, even if he didn’t do it in a book.
cokane
@Starfish: to compare Pinker and de Grasse Tyson to anti vaxers is just a level of disingenuousness that’s hard for me to fathom. I mean, sure they are public intellectuals and have held the stages for decades now, so of course not everything they’ve said is 100% the best take. Is that a sin? The idea that our public intellectuals need to never err is exactly the kind of silencing bullshit Pinker is rightfully critical of.
I don’t think everything Pinker has said is true, but goddamn, he’s at least earnestly trying to get there.
cokane
@DougJ: do you not see the narcissism at play here? Chomsky too hot. Pinker is too cold. DougJ needs his public intellectuals to be juuuuust right — at all times.
DougJ
@cokane:
I think they are both wrong.
cokane
@DougJ: Putting Chomsky aside for a sec, nothing in your post contains an actual pushback on the content of what Pinker has said. The only text in your post is a fashion criticism and a false comparison to Peterson.
The medium piece, which ostensibly does that, merely quote-mines the man to create an egregiously false characterization of things he has said. This is Jesse Watters level bullshit. Even Pinker himself has said in public forums that while he agrees with criticisms of the far left he also thinks many people exaggerate its importance.