Steven Pinker’s Selective Outrage: A "Communal" Blind Spot for the Right

...and more. Brief thoughts on this week's news before it gets old.

Thoughts of the week and some predictions. Let’s keep tabs!

Steven Pinker, a once reliable intellectual, decided to write about “the Kirk case” The Right’s Post-Kirk Crackdown Has a Familiar Mob Logic by drawing on game theory, positing Charlie Kirk’s assassination as a “communal outrage”: a viral incident that can escalate into disproportionate retaliation. The essay revealed an inexorable decline in moral character, the reasons for which I cannot philosophise over but have witnessed since 2016. In the essay’s theoretical overreach and a narrative arc that prioritised diagnosis over humanity, it was notable for its conspicuous lack of condemnation for the gleeful bloodlust expressed by the left on BlueSky and its near-total absence of sympathy for Kirk, his family or the genuinely grieving MAGA community.

The “communal outrage” model, plucked out of the ether from Thomas Schelling and John Tooby, was, I suppose, a ‘clever’ heuristic for explaining viral escalations, but it was applied with a sharp pencil point to the right and completely rubbed out on the left.

Pinker’s historical analogies—the USS Maine igniting war, the Reichstag fire birthing fascism, George Floyd’s death fuelling “violent” protests—were invoked to underscore the dangers of disproportionate response, yet they served primarily as foils for the post-Kirk “crackdown.” Why not dissect how the Floyd incident, which Pinker nodded to as leading to “a wave of firings, de-platformings and cancellations,” mirrored the very mob justice he was now fantasising about from MAGA? In 2020 over 2000 businesses were looted, dozens of people were murdered, 17,000 arrests made, a $2 billion insurance hit that disproportionately ravaged minority-owned businesses. New York Times editor James Bennet was forced to resign after defending a Conservative op ed in the very outlet that published Pinker’s intellectually flashy but analytically shallow puff piece. His warning, “we should be wary of throwing around scare words like ‘fascism’ and ‘civil war’,” rang hollow after 1,500 words of escalating alarmism.

Pinker was one of the first to lose his mind to TDS, (which I do not find genuine but wholly cynical and strategic) and the usual hysterical rhetoric of Trump and MAGA being supposed existential threats to American democracy were repeated here. He mocked the canonisation of Kirk but spared his readers any reference to the sanctification of Floyd. If the essay’s condemnation was partial, its sympathy was practically absent. Pinker opened the essay with Kirk not as a flesh-and-blood father, husband, and conservative activist gunned down mid-sentence at 31, but as a “pugnacious and divisive” caricature whose death unleashed “a furious assault.” Genuine grief was reframed as a reason for Conservatives to unleash a furious assault. Where was it? Where was the acknowledgment of the raw horror for Kirk’s family, who buried him amid threats of their own? Or for the MAGA rank-and-file, many of whom saw in Kirk a scrappy everyman battling elite condescension; the kind Pinker served up here in barely disguised contempt.

The essay’s shallow psychologising treated the assassination as an abstract hypothesis on outrage dynamics, with Kirk reduced to a “pre-eminent symbol” in a dominance contest. Sympathy, that essential bridge to understanding, absent.

Dr. Pinker, heal thyself.

• 

In other news:

• Matthew McConaughey has a new book out & is doing the podcast carousel. He’s an idiot! I challenge anyone to put his words into Kamala Harris’ mouth & be able to tell the difference. Alright, Alright, Alright!

• Palestine is the loss leader for the Islam brand. Those losses are felt by the non-radicalised people of Palestine and Western civilisation.

  But it gets the fascist-istas through the door.

The Industrial Gaslighting Complex

• The UK Labour Party can only be currently understood via the lens of Conquest’s 3rd law:

“The behaviour of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Reform are far from being the best option for British conservatives but the catastrophe of Starmer’s leadership & party means they will likely be the next government. Farage needs to ally with Tommy Robinson. He will not last long if he doesn’t.

• Finally, just watched the pro-Antifa movie One Battle After Another directed by the once great Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s just officially become the Leni Riefenstahl of his age. And this was not even a documentary. It’s a fascist wet dream. What a way to go!