Steven Pinker (@sapinker)

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Worth watching: "It is not a genocide; it is a counterattack in a war."

John Spencer Verified account @SpencerGuard Sep 12

This should be pushed far and wide. Watched in every college class in the U.S. Thank you @billmaher The moral confusion is gross. "It is not a genocide, it is a counterattack in a war...Gaza equals genocide is a lie, an easily provable lie (as I have argued from first hand observations in Gaza). The fact that so many democrats go along with it is to me the party's worse moment since they undid reconstruction after the civil war...words have meaning...genocide, kill or try to kill an entire people, you can't just change the definition of genocide to mean counterattack in a war where people including civilians die, that's every war..."

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Steven Pinker @sapinker 4h

In South Caroline to appear at the Charleston Literary Festival, where I'll chat on stage with Geoffrey Harpham about When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. charlestonliteraryfestival.com/2026-speakers

www.charlestonliteraryfestival.com 2026 Speakers — Charleston Literary Festival

Steven Pinker @sapinker 17h

Why Men Die Younger Than Women, and Women Suffer More Pain open.substack.com/pub/stevestewa…

www.stevestewartwilliams.com Why Men Die Younger Than Women, and Women Suffer More Pain The evolutionary origins of sex differences in health and illness

Steven Pinker @sapinker 2d

It's always The End of History. Brilliant essay by Harry Seavy: "Ours is the decisive moment, and it is we who are alive to see it, to shape it, to place history on the tracks of what we make out of it. In this decade, as the winds of crisis whip around us—democracy, liberalism, AI, climate change—as we stand uniquely at the precipice, the very point at which things will either tip over into the abyss or be miraculously rescued from it, we face a moment the world has never seen before. Just like everyone else before us." quillette.com/2026/11/06/aft…

quillette.com End-of-History Illusion and the Age of Crisis Nothing short of being at the precipice, on the sharp edge between the world as it was and the world as it will be, ever seems able to describe the present in terms that adequately capture it.

Steven Pinker @sapinker 2d

"Steven Pinker: Why we pretend everyone is equal | Rak höger"

Me:
I think there is hope, and I think we may have just, just passed peak woke, although there were rather extreme manifestations of that in 2020 and 2021 after the George Floyd killing. It’s still a serious problem, and it’s got to be, simply because professors in the United States have tenure, and so they’re in their positions until they die or retire.

Ivar Arpi (@Ivarpi):
Or capital punishment.

Me:
Or capital punishment, yes.

So it turns over very slowly, and I think that the problem is that, in most universities, especially in the social sciences and humanities, there is a political monoculture on the left and an absence of political diversity. This is not a problem just in being unrepresentative, because there’s nothing that says that a university has to match the demographics of the society. But the problem is that, when there are legitimate hypotheses within a field that tend to be correlated with political ideology—and there are plenty of them—certain hypotheses just don’t get voiced, don’t get thought, don’t get taught. Certain criticisms never get made simply because everyone thinks the same way.

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Steven Pinker

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