Talk:Quillette/Archive1

I don't like this article
Ha ha, when I read this I seriously thought I had accidentally loaded the Unencyclopedia page for Quillette - it's so over the top. I like rational wiki (usually) so can we have a sensible page for Quillette please, written by someone who isn't obviously a jilted former lover of Clare "uber-Nazi" Lehman...
 * It is sensible... feel free to read her crazy articles and videos for the alt-right The Rebel Media here:
 * https://www.therebel.media/claire_lehmann?page=1
 * https://www.therebel.media/claire_lehmann?page=2 Octo (talk) 19:10, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Laughable
This article is... really awful. I hadn't heard of RationalWiki until now, but it sounds like a misnomer. 98.111.246.76 (talk) 00:12, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
 * 00:37, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Holy Hell
This has got to be the worst think I've seen on rational wiki. Could we have some attention on this? (I'm, erm, too busy)
 * Eh, well the original author is gone, but if you have something specific you want to add then perhaps someone could do something. 22:36, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
 * "This is the worst" is not very actionable. At the very least you'll have to describe why it's "the worst". Martin (talk) 23:38, 10 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree with the anonymous commenter, in that this is the worst article I have seen on Rationalwiki. Too much ad hominem, too little actual engagement with the ideas Quillette publishes. Also, although the critique of the conservatives getting banned from Twitter article is good, listing all of the so-called "conservatives" is IMO over the top, and gives undue weight to just one Quillette article. I think that, like when the Guardian publishes controversial opinion pieces, we should not always take publication as endorsement. Like the Guardian, Quillette has been known to publish two opposing articles on the same subject - a publication that does that, obviously does not endorse both articles!--Greenrd (talk) 18:14, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
 * This is not the worst article I have seen, but it is due an honorable mention. Quillette has been called a "magazine obsessed with the evils of 'critical theory' and postmodernism"--two of my favorites.Ariel31459 (talk) 18:04, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * After some review, none of these complaints seem to bear any merit after comparing each one against the actual article text. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 18:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * "Quillette is a right-wing online magazine that tries to present itself as alt-center when in reality it serves to legitimise (sic) many views shared by the alt-right." True, true, but maybe correct the spelling, and use fewer vague terms.Ariel31459 (talk) 18:38, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Spelling is fine. Unless you hate the British. 19:05, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Nah, in this case, the British English uses z. That's a trivial correction.  But I do want to be cantankerous about the first sentence of the summary being too high level and lacking detail.  What the hell, Ariel.  ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 19:11, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * And isn't it taken out of context? Right after the sentence, examples are provided, presumably to define the terms. 19:13, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The terms are vague rhetorical terms of art. Quillette obviously publishes articles some find objectionable. That does not make it "right-wing." The link goes to "rightism" leaving us to ponder its usefulness. From our article on Alt-center ..."or alt-centre is a misleading term sometimes used by HBD/race realist individuals in the alt-right community who try to present themselves as political centrists and moderates because they realise if they openly admitted having a right-wing to far-right bias, this doesn't work too well with their bullshit claims of being "objective" scientists." I emphasize that it is a misleading term, that requires political antennae not accessible to the common reader. Ariel31459 (talk) 19:42, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * they call themselves alt center, that's among their own branding, their far right and alt-right bias are really fucking plain as day. Their latest half-dozen articles include complaining a radical TERF astroturf party has received widespread disdain from actual feminists, inventing a narrative far-right Muslim anti-gay protests are "colliding protected groups"(while massively overinflating the scale of the movement), raising a shitstorm about "thoughtcrime" for a racial pseudoscience peddler, who according to the people who fired with him collaborated with nazi propogandists in writing his work in order to actively promote bigotry.  That's literally from their goddamn front page.  Stop covering your eyes then saying that you don't see anything wrong.  There's nothing there that's not papering over alt-right bullshit.  If you don't know what the term "alt right" means, that's you being willfully ignorant, not the term being vague or unclear.   ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 20:19, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm just gonna leave a Revise template on main until we can get this sorted out 20:26, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

psst. We're not gonna get it sorted out because the complaints are all but baseless given a moment's thought. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 20:50, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Noted, I will revert the edit then 21:42, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The first article, about British politics, does a lot more explication than complaining: "This [party] failure might partly be down to mistakes made by the party’s leaders. Early on, they were criticised for failing to work effectively with other political parties and they have ruffled the feathers of longstanding feminist advocacy groups. The WEP has struggled to negotiate areas of controversy within feminism, particularly the trans issue, which has been a source of significant tension."
 * The second article talks about conflicts between British LGBT people and religious Muslims. Hard to tell if there is exaggeration or invention. I guess one just has to know.
 * Noah Carl is someone I don't know about, but I see what the problem is.
 * "Alt-right" is supposed to mean: a loosely connected far-right, white nationalist movement." The term would appear to be an extravagance in this context. Ariel31459 (talk) 22:14, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Loosely connected doesn't mean unconnected. The nature of their connections is exactly through publications like quillette covering them, and sharing links to each other, and stages with each other.  Not traditional explicit organizational structures(and backchannel direct communication with each other to coordinate).  It's asinine to claim it as a snarl word rather than a semi-coherent ideological movement, with notable members and ideas.  When it became publicly clear who and what the alt-right was, almost everyone who was a major self-identified member rebranded, but the movement didn't go away.  ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 22:45, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Loosely connected means incoherent when the connection is severed; that is, when one departs from white nationalist connections. So far, there are no such connections. Moral support of an academic who deviates from the safest path around demographic sociology can get one close to the precipice, but again, as I have said, the usage appears to be extravagant. Also, they are not so much snarl words as political buzz-words, as if this wiki were some kind of manual for right thinking. The main problem with using them is the reader is asked at the outset to accept derogatory conclusions on a subject they have yet to consider. The consequence is likely to be an annoyed reader. I think it is safe to say we disagree.Ariel31459 (talk) 23:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * The connection isn't severed at all, and you're sandbagging. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 03:25, 1 June 2019 (UTC)


 * I have a very different perspective on what happened with the term "alt-right". (An outsider perspective, I want to emphasise - I'm not on the right at all.) The alt-right subreddit, and their offshoot DebateTheAltRight, revealed themselves to be full-on neo-Nazis, complete with Holocaust denialism and all, and after that almost no-one wanted to be seen as alt-right. So, whereas originally it might have been used by some journalists and bloggers as a loose category for people like Trump who didn't subscribe to mainstream conservative lines on everything, by 2019, it had been "reclaimed" by the far right to just mean neo-Nazi or white nationalist, which to me seem almost identical. So that is why IMO it is inappropriate to use the label alt-right to describe Quillette, or for that matter, anyone to the left of the BNP.--Greenrd (talk) 13:08, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Quillette regularly publishes defences of racialism/hereditarianism, in fact most its editors are hereditarians. It's undoubtedly an alt-right publication because of its fixation with race. The Trump "MAGA" crowd are in a different category, i.e. alt-lite, although both alt-lite and alt-right share some similarities and the alt-lite is widely considered an entry point for radicalisation. Most alt-righters started out as alt-lite, but then were radicalised into "race realism".Footsteps (talk) 14:37, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Race-obsessed weirdos who have published in Quillette: Nathan Cofnas, Adam Perkins, Richard Haier, Toby Young (editor), Jonathan Anomaly. Young and Anomaly are also eugenicists. If these race-fixated loons aren't "alt-right" what are they? Just view Perkins, Cofnas' Twitter accounts to see their unhealthy obsession with only race and IQ, and/or "human biodiversity", its virtually all they talk about.Footsteps (talk) 14:45, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Please note just because someone is banned doesn't mean they are wrong. 15:14, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

This entire debate is absurd. The article is correctly sourced and correctly worded in line with our normal style using terms consistent with how we use them throughout this site. Stop trying to redefine the term "alt-right" based on your enlightened centrist viewpoint. I agree with everything ikanreed wrote. 15:14, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I also agree with Dysk and Ikanreed. Quillette promotes "race realism", and that is a central characteristic of the alt right. The alt right isn't just overt neo-Nazis; some of them are more subtle with their racism. 16:16, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

If you guys still doubt that Quillette is a bunch of sciencey racists
Quillette resurrects 19th century racist pseudoscience skull measurements.

20:05, 20 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Phrenology is the pseudoscientific idea that we can determine personality traits by measuring certain regions of the skull. That quote from Quillete does not reference phrenology. Rather, it presents the much more modest idea that the bone structure of the face and skull is one of the main physical features that varies among humans (in addition to variation in soft tissues, like skin pigmentation and hair texture), that this formed part of the basis of historical racial typologies (whether or not those racial typologies are actually legitimate), and that the socially assigned "race" of an individual can be determined with a high degree of accuracy based only on craniometric information alone.... all of which is actually true, and pretty uncontroversial. I'm reminded of Creationists who try to conflate abiogenesis with the historical pseudoscience of spontaneous generation.


 * --104.218.24.25 (talk) 13:08, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, all that "legitimate craniometry" in deciding the ubermensch by forehead shape. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 14:12, 30 July 2019 (UTC)


 * And now I'm reminded of the Creationists who try to conflate the theory of evolution with Social Darwinism. It does not follow that if a particular set of facts were once abused for racist ends, then to acknowledge the truth of those facts is necessarily an endorsement of racism (or at least "whiffs" of such an endorsement). The idea that physical features other than soft tissues vary between geographically distant populations really shouldn't be controversial, or treated as a dogwhistle for "race realism". When looking at an albino from Central Africa, you can tell at a glance that they're African and not European. If skin tone were the only visible trait upon which the socially constructed categories of "race" were premised, then your ability to do this would be a great mystery. Clearly there's a handful of physical traits that vary geographically which collectively inform our perceptions of "race", and certain craniofacial dimensions are among these. I just think we're really stretching on this phrenology/ubermensch claim.
 * 104.218.24.26 (talk) 12:15, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Now we're just waiting for the experimentally controlled double blind paper bag test. ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 15:44, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
 * I mean, craniometry or whatever, Quillette is wrong in that people are organized "predictably" and you can assess human variation just by looking at skull measurements. Craniometry can be abused for racialism and has been used to justify segregation. Why give Quillette the benefit of the doubt when it's started by an alt-righter, they defended literal white supremacists, they quoted literal historical phrenologists to support their arguments, they have eugenics supporters on board, and they publish crap on hereditarianism? I did have to adjust for some technicalities involving how phrenology was defined, but the "sciencey racists" part still seems accurate to me? 19:45, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
 * The problem with "who cares" is that BoN cares. There's a certain degree to which obviously racist people taking obviously racist conclusions, and working backwards to build a psuedoscientific framework to make it all sound legitimate is a problem, that can't just be answered by pointing at the first two things.  We do have an obligation to discuss what the psuedoscience they use is, and how long-debunked it is, and identify the ways they re-frame it to hide that.
 * BoN brought up creationism, and Quillette is to "scientific racism" as intelligent design is to creationism. It's a "let's cut off the parts that are dead giveaways to our endgame, use some modern scientific language, publish some legitimateish papers, and then complain that we're cut out of the mainstream by politics".   Really the phrenology stuff is just "cdesign proponentists" where they slip up and include the old insane bullshit, instead of the new subtle bullshit.
 * It helps their case that the biological components of human behavior aren't something we have a good universal framework for understanding yet, so "genesdidit" is harder to debunk ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 20:03, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Also, on Quillette and harassment
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/alt-right-antifa-death-threats-doxxing-quillette-a8966176.html

Quillette author Eoin Lenihan "Progdad" tries to link journalists to antifa based on accounts journalists follow on Twitter. Link also has a link to a New Republic article on the subject. Quillette articles identifying journalists as "antifa" was also shared on Stormfront. 20:25, 20 June 2019 (UTC)
 * It appears that some journalists ended up in the Atomwaffen kill list. Also documented months ago back in May 2019. Claire Lehman has denied the claims just a few days ago, looks like gaslighting. 02:55, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Can we give this drive-by vandal BoN a round of applause
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Quillette&diff=2089820&oldid=2089328

173.244.44.44:

Media Bias Fact Check, a site BoN called a "real website", now says Quillette is a questionable source, went even further than "mixed". I kinda feel it has to do in part with me updating the page at the time because I noticed that drive-by edit to disagree with Media Bias Fact Check.

This is just too delicious to not share. I'm smug as hell. 22:48, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Team smug! ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 16:54, 1 August 2019 (UTC)