That’s a good question. Prob the New Orleans Katrina line about blacks having poor native judgment. My guess. I think that Podhoretz called him reprllent (that’s how he spelled it). To think lardass Jpod would try and call anyone repellent.
Steve has broached the JQ occasionally but not too much. Maybe something about how WASPS had noblesse oblige but our current elites (cough, cough) not so much.
I think the best thing that Steve ever wrote was on immigration and how Professor George borjas of Harvard published studies showing that there is very little if any economic benefit from immigration and what benefit there is is almost always captured by those who hire immigrants and the immigrants themselves. More importantly Steve is the only person I have ever read that talked about another sociologist professor who rebutted professor borjas immigration work by claiming immigration to Miami during the 1980s showed that Miami gained a lot of economic benefit. Even though I am a Miami native I had forgotten the waterfall of cocaine in the billions of dollars that flooded into the Miami economy during the 1980s until Steve mentioned it. Immigration is about three things profit power and Punishment people refuse to talk about power and Punishment but can be persuaded when they realize there's no economic benefit from it at all to the rest of us the only stronger argument for Less immigration is how our grandchildren will become a hated minority in a land of our fathers I think Steve has done more to sway the immigration argument than anyone I know of.
You should do greatest hits by decade or maybe greatest hits in five year increments. Or you could conclude that's a wasteful exercise since humans just make the same mistakes, at least twice a generation, and everyone's still proving you right. That's why I got bored with long-form blogging. Congratulations on still bringing a fresh perspective and clever turn of phrase!
For a few seconds, I thought I was reading Jimmy Carter, then I remembered he didn't wish Israel well. Why haven't they given the West Bank back to Jordan? King doesn't want it?
ha- I don't think anyone loses a war on purpose. I did recently learn something--the six day war was triggered in part, by France cutting off Israel's weapon supply (even refusing to deliver some planes they had already paid for--didn'rt return the money either).
Since I often quote Big Steve in my Ricochet posts, I thought I might be able to give objective data: what have I implicitly asserted to be the man’s greatest hits? I had thought I’d cited several times his January 1, 2014 article titled The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos, but no, I only did that once. At whatever frequency, though, it’s still a great one.
Though not broached in the OP, I’d like to mention some non-Taki’s content that I have admiringly recycled. Again, to judge from my personal archive, I never hammered with any single iSteve blog post. The man stays fresh and so do I! Indeed, I seek freshness so diligently, I even reach for comments within a blog post. The one I remember best – although I can’t find it now – was from someone who apparently was a civil engineer, ferociously deriding all the other commenters who weren’t as they vainly chipped in on why that pedestrian bridge in Florida collapsed a few years ago. “You all sound like liberals talking about guns,” he said, and I believe he was right.
Though probably not a field of inquiry that Steve has sought to make a name in, I see I have fairly often reached for his stuff on subjects southeast-European. There was a post about Operation Storm, and one about the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and also at least one about the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. Probably no one’s idea of greatest hits, but they did help me make this or that point on another website.
A book of all your Taki articles would be a fantastic read. Of course one could just click on them but it would be nice to have a physical copy.
Perhaps an article combining the themes of "The Rise and Fall of Statistics" with "The Self-Righteous Hive Mind" would provide some insights into the explosion of useless sports "metrics". Could also also insert something about gambling.
Thanks. My first couple of years weren't that good. Then I hit my stride around 2011 or 2012 and then the Great Awokening got going to provide a huge amount of material.
Your Israel Palestine column actually aged poorly. I too used to think along those lines--give em a state and then when you get attacked by that state the world will understand if you have to kick its ass.
WRT your dictator preserving his shiny toys hypothesis--that works with sane dictators. In Gaza they actually elected the terrorists dictator (they didn't necessarily think that it would be the final election but whatayagonnado?) And did the Hamas government like their shiny toys enough to stop pestering the local super power? No. They attacked and when Israel kicked their ass, they refused to surrender, preferring the public relations coup of having their beautiful "open air prison cum refugee camp" flattened.
Turns out "palestinians" are a special kind of crazy.
Reading about Shakespeare and royal breeding makes me wonder why royal families didn't fear that marrying the child of a madman or idiot might be problematic.
My vague impression is that the English in Shakespeare's time wanted to do scientific breeding for horses and to a lesser extent for cows and pigs and wheat, but not quite enough to do the hard work of thorough record keeping and statistical analysis of what worked and what didn't work. So they relied on rules of thumb and general impressions of tricks of the trade, which kind of sort of worked. Finally, around 1760 a handful of farmers got down to work and started making steady progress.
But statistical reasoning lagged ridiculously far behind: Galton unveiled the correlation coefficient in 1888, two centuries after Newton had invented calculus to figure out his law of gravity.
Galton's work is a formalisation of basic coherent thinking. Newton's is a work of alien imagination. I find it inexplicable that the two would be that way around.
Now I know why I don’t like soccer and European soccer leagues never appealed to me. I guess I never felt the need to one-up the chuds on how sophisticated I am. It also explains why I’m a big Cal football fan despite Berkeley being a kinda ugly and gritty town filled with homeless, and extreme liberal freaks. From a concentric POV that makes sense, my family has been going to games for generations and it’s the closest team to me.
Rotherham is lynching, only on a larger scale of victims and still viewed as prejudice towards the offenders.
We will likely never know if Leo Frank orJohn Connely, a black janitor, or both, participated in the rape and murder of Mary Phagan. But it's repulsive how many Jewish autbors have blamed the rape-murder on her since the Sixties, and not one Jewish intellectual has challenged them. She was a dead factory girl, half-starved by her wages, tortured and violated and murdered, and now she is a symbol of anti-Semitism just for trying to pick up her paltry check. The state of Georgia dramatically re-opened Frank's case but refused to re-open her's. Repulsive. Disgusting.
Sure. The incredibly stupid Broadway Play, Parade, by Alfred Uhry, made dead Mary Phagan into a vengeful wraith urging the lynching of Frank. The even more stupid, if that can be believed considering other output, David Mamet book, The Old Religion, makes dead Phagan into a "gynecological odor" tormenting Frank to his death. Mamet may have known more of the facts of the case but fudged them, as Frank's own wife refused to visit him and cut off communication, and several Jewish jurors voted him guilty. Southern Jewish jurors! Yes. Before that, there were a good half-dozen books and B-movies from the 30's to the Sixties, of the Goodbye Columbus theme, depicting Phagan as both an adult and a seductress driving him mad with lust which led to murder. There have been more since. Look, I wrote this 30 years ago. It was a bloody industry defaming a dead, raped child laborer whose last meal was watery cabbage soup. If you want the other names and books, go to the "About" page of my eponyous blog and read the first two chapters of my unpublished, but unusually widely purchased dissertation. I get a penny for each sale.
A few more things. She never accused him, being raped and dead, but has been demonized since the day she died. Her organs were cut from her body and shown in the courtroom, with no dignity. Frank's lawyers resorted to defaming her ethnicity's innate sexual slatterness. Her grave has been desecrated, along with her reputation, a poor, 14-year-old pencil factory laborer he financially exploited. My strong opinion is that we will never know if his janitor or Frank or both participated in the crime, so I can't say he's guilty. But films and novels and then an academic industry grew up around lurid depictions of one stripe or another, always essentially blaming her "sexuality" as much as the actual lynchers.
I read widely. Crazy Left, Crazy Right. Everything in-between. I abhor the Nation of Islam and have been roughed up by them at a Hillary, Al, Tipper rally, and at Atlanta's Five Points Station after commuter hours. Take that as you will. But I still ordered their book on the Frank case. I also made personal visits to white supremacist sites in Acworth, GA, always trying to get the broadest picture of the crime. Because she was 14. Because that's when the ADL began accusing America of anti-semitism internationally, in 1915, which led directly to hate crime laws and destroyed our system of equal justice.
I've studied as an Emory gad student two dozen books and dissertations about how Jews in Atlanta were destroyed by the Frank case. It's nonsense. Mostly written from the 30's to the Sixties by B-Move Grindhouses disinterested in the politics, then academicians and public television activists from the Sixties onward. All untrue. We have a thriving Jewish community; early Jewish mayor, and more. Every single academician I've read has been very selective in his footnotes, leaving out the New York Times articles and editorials cited but of course not generated by the NOI writer, awful as that organization is. Do your own damn research. Blame the so-called "credible" academicians who entirely left these citations out. No analysis of anything contradictory by jurors, the wife's response, and other things. I still lean that he's a less likely offender than Connoly, the janitor. But I checked every single NYT footnote: they were real, and I came away disturbed. Obviously, all the "legitimate" academicians and novelists and playrights making Frank a symbol of oppression concealed all of this historical context, at the very least.
And then the State of Georgia did it. They symbolically vacated Frank's guilty verdict, apologized, etc. I wrote to Governor Roy Barnes asking him to simultaneously, symbolically re-open the Phagan rape/torture/murder case as a gesture of equality and goodwill.
The next day, the ADL came after me. And the next time you want to, use your own damn real name.
Trump's made some good progress on the illegal half of the immivasion. But here we are off slapping around drug-running dictators and threatening liberation of ice covered "Greenland", while the 2nd pillar of the destruction of the West--the fertility collapse--gets nary a word.
The pre-coup old Waspy American elite of a century back was clearly on the right track with their eugenic concerns. The civilized races are now in outright demographic collapse while the most useless races continue to breed like rabbits.
"Israel, the regional military superpower, can intimidate these into suppressing their native terrorists."
What native terrorists are these. Look at Syria where not a single of the many named terrorist groups have ever threatened israel*. Are any of them natives? of course not. Some 10,000 of them are Ujghurs, not just not native to Syria, not native to ME, but long the tools of MI6 and CIA to create rebellion in China. 25 years or rapid growth and good times for the Ujghurs has meant they job is pointless over there so they were miraculously passed through to Turkey where the families lived while the terrorists killed Syrians in the expecation they would gain land and homes in Syria. Turned out right for them in the end.
* well no terrorist leader has bad mouthed Israel to date. I gather the crowds of modern Joolani thugs now often shout threats of what they will do to
"Admittedly, though, I’m bored with Israel vs. Palestine."
But why on earth doesn't the Blindness of so much of US to a blatant genocide interest you.
Surely it is the biggest mass delusion around - far more than BLM, defund the Police or the denial of IQ and race.
You are ducking out on the biggest story around. Why?
I just reread it and I think it holds up. I think at the time I was struck by the point that Prohibition made it so nobody wanted to listen to women for a few decades.
To those who have vaguely heard of him, Steve Sailer is that MAGA blogger who writes about race, yet only one of the selected columns is about race in America, and many recurring themes were omitted. Golf courses, modern architecture and generous pieces about people (the Baltimore bridge, Trump's ear) who did their jobs well.
I mean it as a compliment to them both when I say that for range, originality and output he is, in his very different way, the equal of Martin Gardner and should have had the same renown.
The Righteous Mind is one of my favourite books so thankyou for the great insight about the essential difference between conservatives and liberals. It's a lot simpler than Haidt's analysis and it works.
Steve, I’d like to know which of your many writings got you in the most trouble.
Do you have an equivalent of John Derbyshire’s “Talk”?
That’s a good question. Prob the New Orleans Katrina line about blacks having poor native judgment. My guess. I think that Podhoretz called him reprllent (that’s how he spelled it). To think lardass Jpod would try and call anyone repellent.
Steve has broached the JQ occasionally but not too much. Maybe something about how WASPS had noblesse oblige but our current elites (cough, cough) not so much.
Your review of the Neil Young bio 'Shakey'!
Probably the least attention anything I wrote ever got was my review of a Kurt Cobain biography, which I filed at about 3am on September 11, 2001.
I knew there was a reason I always liked UPI more than AP:
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2001/10/16/Book-Review-Cobain-The-Last-Rock-Legend/82891003255268/
Please consider publishing a volume of your book reviews (and of course a volume of your movie reviews too)!
I think the best thing that Steve ever wrote was on immigration and how Professor George borjas of Harvard published studies showing that there is very little if any economic benefit from immigration and what benefit there is is almost always captured by those who hire immigrants and the immigrants themselves. More importantly Steve is the only person I have ever read that talked about another sociologist professor who rebutted professor borjas immigration work by claiming immigration to Miami during the 1980s showed that Miami gained a lot of economic benefit. Even though I am a Miami native I had forgotten the waterfall of cocaine in the billions of dollars that flooded into the Miami economy during the 1980s until Steve mentioned it. Immigration is about three things profit power and Punishment people refuse to talk about power and Punishment but can be persuaded when they realize there's no economic benefit from it at all to the rest of us the only stronger argument for Less immigration is how our grandchildren will become a hated minority in a land of our fathers I think Steve has done more to sway the immigration argument than anyone I know of.
David Card won the Nobel in part for his Miami Mariel study.
You should do greatest hits by decade or maybe greatest hits in five year increments. Or you could conclude that's a wasteful exercise since humans just make the same mistakes, at least twice a generation, and everyone's still proving you right. That's why I got bored with long-form blogging. Congratulations on still bringing a fresh perspective and clever turn of phrase!
For a few seconds, I thought I was reading Jimmy Carter, then I remembered he didn't wish Israel well. Why haven't they given the West Bank back to Jordan? King doesn't want it?
Jordan had a bad time the last time they let in a bunch of "palestinians"
Makes you wonder if they lost the Six Day War on purpose.
ha- I don't think anyone loses a war on purpose. I did recently learn something--the six day war was triggered in part, by France cutting off Israel's weapon supply (even refusing to deliver some planes they had already paid for--didn'rt return the money either).
Since I often quote Big Steve in my Ricochet posts, I thought I might be able to give objective data: what have I implicitly asserted to be the man’s greatest hits? I had thought I’d cited several times his January 1, 2014 article titled The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos, but no, I only did that once. At whatever frequency, though, it’s still a great one.
Though not broached in the OP, I’d like to mention some non-Taki’s content that I have admiringly recycled. Again, to judge from my personal archive, I never hammered with any single iSteve blog post. The man stays fresh and so do I! Indeed, I seek freshness so diligently, I even reach for comments within a blog post. The one I remember best – although I can’t find it now – was from someone who apparently was a civil engineer, ferociously deriding all the other commenters who weren’t as they vainly chipped in on why that pedestrian bridge in Florida collapsed a few years ago. “You all sound like liberals talking about guns,” he said, and I believe he was right.
Though probably not a field of inquiry that Steve has sought to make a name in, I see I have fairly often reached for his stuff on subjects southeast-European. There was a post about Operation Storm, and one about the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and also at least one about the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. Probably no one’s idea of greatest hits, but they did help me make this or that point on another website.
A book of all your Taki articles would be a fantastic read. Of course one could just click on them but it would be nice to have a physical copy.
Perhaps an article combining the themes of "The Rise and Fall of Statistics" with "The Self-Righteous Hive Mind" would provide some insights into the explosion of useless sports "metrics". Could also also insert something about gambling.
Thanks. My first couple of years weren't that good. Then I hit my stride around 2011 or 2012 and then the Great Awokening got going to provide a huge amount of material.
Your Israel Palestine column actually aged poorly. I too used to think along those lines--give em a state and then when you get attacked by that state the world will understand if you have to kick its ass.
WRT your dictator preserving his shiny toys hypothesis--that works with sane dictators. In Gaza they actually elected the terrorists dictator (they didn't necessarily think that it would be the final election but whatayagonnado?) And did the Hamas government like their shiny toys enough to stop pestering the local super power? No. They attacked and when Israel kicked their ass, they refused to surrender, preferring the public relations coup of having their beautiful "open air prison cum refugee camp" flattened.
Turns out "palestinians" are a special kind of crazy.
Yeah, I had a hot streak on foreign policy for awhile, but I've been colder lately, so I write even less about it.
As Yogi Bear once said, it's difficult to make predictions, especially about foreign affairs, especially while Trump is president.
Reading about Shakespeare and royal breeding makes me wonder why royal families didn't fear that marrying the child of a madman or idiot might be problematic.
My vague impression is that the English in Shakespeare's time wanted to do scientific breeding for horses and to a lesser extent for cows and pigs and wheat, but not quite enough to do the hard work of thorough record keeping and statistical analysis of what worked and what didn't work. So they relied on rules of thumb and general impressions of tricks of the trade, which kind of sort of worked. Finally, around 1760 a handful of farmers got down to work and started making steady progress.
But statistical reasoning lagged ridiculously far behind: Galton unveiled the correlation coefficient in 1888, two centuries after Newton had invented calculus to figure out his law of gravity.
Galton's work is a formalisation of basic coherent thinking. Newton's is a work of alien imagination. I find it inexplicable that the two would be that way around.
Now I know why I don’t like soccer and European soccer leagues never appealed to me. I guess I never felt the need to one-up the chuds on how sophisticated I am. It also explains why I’m a big Cal football fan despite Berkeley being a kinda ugly and gritty town filled with homeless, and extreme liberal freaks. From a concentric POV that makes sense, my family has been going to games for generations and it’s the closest team to me.
Rotherham is lynching, only on a larger scale of victims and still viewed as prejudice towards the offenders.
We will likely never know if Leo Frank orJohn Connely, a black janitor, or both, participated in the rape and murder of Mary Phagan. But it's repulsive how many Jewish autbors have blamed the rape-murder on her since the Sixties, and not one Jewish intellectual has challenged them. She was a dead factory girl, half-starved by her wages, tortured and violated and murdered, and now she is a symbol of anti-Semitism just for trying to pick up her paltry check. The state of Georgia dramatically re-opened Frank's case but refused to re-open her's. Repulsive. Disgusting.
I've never seen anyone blame Mary for her own death. Have I missed something? Can you let me know who?
Sure. The incredibly stupid Broadway Play, Parade, by Alfred Uhry, made dead Mary Phagan into a vengeful wraith urging the lynching of Frank. The even more stupid, if that can be believed considering other output, David Mamet book, The Old Religion, makes dead Phagan into a "gynecological odor" tormenting Frank to his death. Mamet may have known more of the facts of the case but fudged them, as Frank's own wife refused to visit him and cut off communication, and several Jewish jurors voted him guilty. Southern Jewish jurors! Yes. Before that, there were a good half-dozen books and B-movies from the 30's to the Sixties, of the Goodbye Columbus theme, depicting Phagan as both an adult and a seductress driving him mad with lust which led to murder. There have been more since. Look, I wrote this 30 years ago. It was a bloody industry defaming a dead, raped child laborer whose last meal was watery cabbage soup. If you want the other names and books, go to the "About" page of my eponyous blog and read the first two chapters of my unpublished, but unusually widely purchased dissertation. I get a penny for each sale.
A few more things. She never accused him, being raped and dead, but has been demonized since the day she died. Her organs were cut from her body and shown in the courtroom, with no dignity. Frank's lawyers resorted to defaming her ethnicity's innate sexual slatterness. Her grave has been desecrated, along with her reputation, a poor, 14-year-old pencil factory laborer he financially exploited. My strong opinion is that we will never know if his janitor or Frank or both participated in the crime, so I can't say he's guilty. But films and novels and then an academic industry grew up around lurid depictions of one stripe or another, always essentially blaming her "sexuality" as much as the actual lynchers.
I read widely. Crazy Left, Crazy Right. Everything in-between. I abhor the Nation of Islam and have been roughed up by them at a Hillary, Al, Tipper rally, and at Atlanta's Five Points Station after commuter hours. Take that as you will. But I still ordered their book on the Frank case. I also made personal visits to white supremacist sites in Acworth, GA, always trying to get the broadest picture of the crime. Because she was 14. Because that's when the ADL began accusing America of anti-semitism internationally, in 1915, which led directly to hate crime laws and destroyed our system of equal justice.
I've studied as an Emory gad student two dozen books and dissertations about how Jews in Atlanta were destroyed by the Frank case. It's nonsense. Mostly written from the 30's to the Sixties by B-Move Grindhouses disinterested in the politics, then academicians and public television activists from the Sixties onward. All untrue. We have a thriving Jewish community; early Jewish mayor, and more. Every single academician I've read has been very selective in his footnotes, leaving out the New York Times articles and editorials cited but of course not generated by the NOI writer, awful as that organization is. Do your own damn research. Blame the so-called "credible" academicians who entirely left these citations out. No analysis of anything contradictory by jurors, the wife's response, and other things. I still lean that he's a less likely offender than Connoly, the janitor. But I checked every single NYT footnote: they were real, and I came away disturbed. Obviously, all the "legitimate" academicians and novelists and playrights making Frank a symbol of oppression concealed all of this historical context, at the very least.
And then the State of Georgia did it. They symbolically vacated Frank's guilty verdict, apologized, etc. I wrote to Governor Roy Barnes asking him to simultaneously, symbolically re-open the Phagan rape/torture/murder case as a gesture of equality and goodwill.
The next day, the ADL came after me. And the next time you want to, use your own damn real name.
Something on "Affordable Family Formation".
Trump's made some good progress on the illegal half of the immivasion. But here we are off slapping around drug-running dictators and threatening liberation of ice covered "Greenland", while the 2nd pillar of the destruction of the West--the fertility collapse--gets nary a word.
The pre-coup old Waspy American elite of a century back was clearly on the right track with their eugenic concerns. The civilized races are now in outright demographic collapse while the most useless races continue to breed like rabbits.
"Israel, the regional military superpower, can intimidate these into suppressing their native terrorists."
What native terrorists are these. Look at Syria where not a single of the many named terrorist groups have ever threatened israel*. Are any of them natives? of course not. Some 10,000 of them are Ujghurs, not just not native to Syria, not native to ME, but long the tools of MI6 and CIA to create rebellion in China. 25 years or rapid growth and good times for the Ujghurs has meant they job is pointless over there so they were miraculously passed through to Turkey where the families lived while the terrorists killed Syrians in the expecation they would gain land and homes in Syria. Turned out right for them in the end.
* well no terrorist leader has bad mouthed Israel to date. I gather the crowds of modern Joolani thugs now often shout threats of what they will do to
"Admittedly, though, I’m bored with Israel vs. Palestine."
But why on earth doesn't the Blindness of so much of US to a blatant genocide interest you.
Surely it is the biggest mass delusion around - far more than BLM, defund the Police or the denial of IQ and race.
You are ducking out on the biggest story around. Why?
Lmao
I decided to see if I’d bookmarked any of your Taki columns; oddly, there’s only one. It’s this 2021 piece on “Distaff Writers”.
https://www.takimag.com/article/distaff-writers/
I just reread it and I think it holds up. I think at the time I was struck by the point that Prohibition made it so nobody wanted to listen to women for a few decades.
To those who have vaguely heard of him, Steve Sailer is that MAGA blogger who writes about race, yet only one of the selected columns is about race in America, and many recurring themes were omitted. Golf courses, modern architecture and generous pieces about people (the Baltimore bridge, Trump's ear) who did their jobs well.
I mean it as a compliment to them both when I say that for range, originality and output he is, in his very different way, the equal of Martin Gardner and should have had the same renown.
The Righteous Mind is one of my favourite books so thankyou for the great insight about the essential difference between conservatives and liberals. It's a lot simpler than Haidt's analysis and it works.