PS

There is no going back to the way America used to be.

And the political left is not motivated by stupidity, but by evil.

The political right is motivated by stupidity - stupidly believing that they can just play by the rules that their enemies use as weapons against them.

Both political parties are, essentially, vehicles of influence and power for the wealthy. It is they - the international clique of the super rich and other monied interests (large corporations, banks, etc.) who really call the shots.

PS: J1234, that was a good example of a distractive technique, the way the ctlr-left of Martha's Vineyard deflected people from seeing their own hypocrisy.

Academia and journalism still guided by principle and evidence? Yes, that's what I mean, to be elaborated on in the next post. Mr. Sailer very much wants to believe that everyone is GOOD, but just often ignorant or stupid. The universities and media have been infiltrated by the ctrl-left over half a century - I'd say it was completed at least a decade ago. They are simply not on our side.

That attitude of wokeness you well describe has been pushed upon the lower level useful idiots, so that we are in no position to possibly convince them of anything that is in Steve Sailer's well-selling book.* Yes, "futile" is the right word.


* I got my 3 copies - one is with a friend who may or may not really like it. I want to find out soon.

PS: I see that your links to the posts about most research being wrong are both in the health/medical fields. That's to be expected. There's just not enough theory to base stuff on. Studies and attempted assignment of causation say one thing this year and another 30 years later.

Here I am, still worried about eating eggs. Ya' see?

Regarding your other topic, I'd like to see the article and yours and his comments if you can find it. The solutions are not always easy. Mr. Sailer hopes they will be, but hope is not a strategy. Without hard decisions being made, our descendants will have nothing good to say about these generations...

PS: Thank you, M. I'm sure the Sokal troll job is one I have read about, surely under iSteve also.

Yes, I can see it being embarrassing and angering for the folks in these fields to get trolled like that. Nobody wants to wade through his colleagues' BS papers, and maybe not even his own, once that [Submit] button has been pressed. How did you pick out one piece of BS from a whole steaming pile of BS? It's naughty indeed to assign the that task to these people going forward, to prevent another such happening.

PS

As I recall, Lindsay and others in his group were canceled academically under the pretext that they were submitting false and invented information for publication. In a literal sense that accusation was true, but it was obviously just retribution for heresy. The far left establishment was trying to create an "outrage" over something that was very peripheral to the point the offending group's actions, a common diversionary tactic of theirs. (Like Martha Vineyard's "outrage" over Florida's treatment of illegal immigrants so that the world hopefully wouldn't notice that leftist Martha's Vineyard kicked said illegals out of their community.)


Our moderator said:
"What Steve Sailer just won't ever get is that THEY DON'T CARE. They don't care that your arguments are quite civil and reasonable, and that it won't do people any harm to listen, agree, and follow the advice. Thing is, THEY! WANT! HARM! GET IT? They want the destruction of our society."

I think this is a valid critique of Mr. Sailer, to one degree or another. To what degree, I can't say. He seems to assume that academia and journalism are still guided by principle and evidence, that it's possible for them to be shamed into reexamining their inconsistent world views and policies. I mean, the political/world perspective that shouted "SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!" when Trump got elected is certainly capable of experiencing shame itself, right? Well, with some notable exceptions, I'd say "wrong".

To me, the wokeness found in these places is less of an ideology than a politicized psychology. It's appeal to the morally non-grounded is that it makes them feel utterly incorruptible and completely redeemable, regardless of their transgressions. You're an unwed and absent father? A career woman who is sleeping her way to the top? An addict? No problem...the magic social justice words you utter make all of that go away. All you have to do is be 100% faithful to the narrative (and in word only.)

With wokeness, shame doesn't apply to you. You can do whatever you want to society. You can't publicly denigrate and be contemptuous of black culture or the third world anymore, but you CAN hate Western Civilization, so the impulse lives on! Trying to persuade such a mindset is kind of futile.

Steve is a brilliant guy, though. He follows the path he thinks he needs to follow. I feel blessed by his writing, though I rarely go to Unz as of late. I always smile and chuckle when I see the "More Late Breaking Emmitt Till News!" headline. (I think there's one up right now.)

PS: Good afternoon, frens!

http://norskk.is/bytta/menn/dog_park.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/file?type=printable&id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00192-017-3389-1.pdf

Sailer is a good guy. And (like Mike Pence,) I imagine he is a good neighbor.
And he is not wrong, per se. But he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
(Well, maybe he is, but it does not often come across in his writing.)

I did read something he wrote, a short while ago, (perhaps on substack?) about some modest solutions to the World's Most Important Graph...

It was something along the lines of...

Either we need some sort of serious eugenics program (eeeek!)(Dysgenic Fertility has Always Been Our Greatest Strength!), or we need to genocide most of the 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬!, you know, if anyone would like a world worth living in 100 years from now.

Of course, he dismissed this idea as evil...

But... ☮️

PS
Hail:

It sounds like Lindsay was following in the footsteps of Alan Sokal.

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Published in 1996 in Social Text, a leading journal of "cultural studies".

Obviously fake (It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct), but the editors liked the paper's conclusion. So it was published.

Big controversy over it when Sokal revealed it to be a hoax. Much of the academic opinion was how naughty he was to have fooled them that way.

PS: I think Mr. Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" fits in with the goings on of today, and this post, well, too, Alarmist. Only, your one has a better tune for sure.

PS: Mr. Hail, I do remember at least in the iSteve comments, discussion of this guy that was trolling the woke journals with this stuff. I can't remember a specific Steve Sailer post about it, but a quick search on TUR for James Lindsay or any Lindsay didn't get me anything. (You may do better.)

I never really expected detailed solutions out of the Steve Sailer. I don't think that's part of the work he does. His job has been to illuminate the problems, getting everyone (those who read, though, ONLY) to understand how the current mess came about, and to teach those stupid people who don't get it, very nicely (95% of the time) how things could be different, more sane, if most people would just agree.

Like him, I think that if a large majority of all the "fringe" groups I mentioned (and there are more I missed) in this post were really to agree and not have any other motive other than ignorance in not agreeing with the reasoning of Steve Sailer till now, sure, we'd be good. It'd be no 1955 Los Angeles or even a 1970s Anytown, USA in the Heartland, but with the stipulation that people understand (meaning no more Coalition of the Fringes, just a unified multi-cultural... wait, whaaat?) then it might just work, like a better-working, safer version of Brazil(?).

Well, first, you're not gonna turn it around like that. Think of only the 1 group, the now-worshipped Black! crowd. Would they go back to the 1970s in attitude where they are not worshipped and most (there was AA even then, but it was smaller) better pull their weight?

More importantly, what I wrote in this post is that there are forces that want things to go the way they are going. Steve Sailer does not get this or does not WANT to get this. The solutions to THAT must come from a different sort of person - that's the next post on this.

PS

America ... the Western World is being steered into a black hole. There’s no way back; only through.

Cue Billy Joel

🎶
You may be right.
I may be crazy.
But it might just be a
Lunatic you’re looking for.
🎶

🤡🌎 Honks

🕉

PS

-- James Lindsay and Steve Sailer --

I don't know if you have much followed the work of James Lindsay, since he first came to attention with the three "extremely-Woke fake academic papers" stunt. (see note)

But people eventually turned against James Lindsay when they realized his anti-Wokeness position was hollow. James Lindsay was a 1980s-style liberal. He argued against Wokeness but had nothing to offer in its stead.

At some point in the early 2020s, James Lindsay crossed a Rubicon and began attacking White-ethnonationalism hard, arguing that such people are an ultimate evil and Wokeness MUST be defeated in order to prevent the rise of a White-ethnonationalist backlash. After this turn, it was clear to me why James Lindsay became so relatively well promoted for a few years there.

In an uncharitable mood I would call James Lindsay a "false opposition." The strongest Sailer critics say the same of him. What is his solution? He never offers solutions, seldom even something we could call "policy proposals."

If you tease them out (as you've done here), and put them into a narrative imitating Sailer's writing voice (as you have here), they don't look like anything much more than "put the clock back to when I was a younger man."

A critic who says, "Weren't there problems in the society that led to Wokeness and the radical anti-white, anti-male, anti-"family formation" etc. regime in that time, x years ago, that you tacitly want to turn the clock back to? That kind of criticism has popped up in the Sailer commentariat for YEARS, but he never really addresses it.

Those who pop up making arguments against some of those "Wokeness sacred-cows" which extend back beyond some past threshold-point (certainly some the "founding myths" of the 1940s, for example; the Good War mythology, and other things), in those cases Sailer gets angry and pushes back.

It's probably true that Sailer grew more conservative (in a general-psychological sense) in the 2010s. He turned sixty in December 2018, and was none too happy about it. He is not a principled political radical who envisions a new system. I don't think he's ever been that, at any stage of his life. Certainly he is not one now.

__________

(NOTE --- The James Lindsay "fake academic papers" scandal were a series of 2017-18 cases of he and a confederate, both with PhDs, conspired to submit nonsensical but militantly pro-Wokeness material to academic journals, submitted, "peer reviewed," accepted, and published--despite it being gobbeldygook strung together with Woke language. I am sure Sailer wrote about this at the time, because to a degree the fake papers were even surreal-comical. From memory, one was "The racialized-gender dynamics behind the emergence and systematization of dog-on-dog rape culture at U.S. dog parks in the Trump era". The contents were even stupider that the headlines, with implausible data (actually made up). And some of these fake papers got published. When they announced the papers were fake, it created a lot of "gotcha" headlines in Fox News and the like. James Lindsay soon emerged into a career as an anti-Woke dissident and independent academic who went on long diatribes about the supposed intellectual origins of Wokeness. But his act wore thin, for many of us, after a while.)