The Chinese are on their way (back) up to the top after the century of humiliation, and get to watch the West imploding with self-destructive Wokeness.

Yet, rather than a smug aloofness about their 5000 years of civilization, the Chinese often seem very touchy about being disrespected by the West. I guess resentment is very easy to come by, and/ or the West really is that impressive, even in its present pitiable state.

But northern Europe, beyond the borders of the Carolingian empire, was still in a dark age. The last Lithuanians weren’t Christianized until the 14th century.

Tyler Cowen interviewed the author of this book. Worlds colliding!

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ashley-mears/

COWEN: If someone called me “bridge and tunnel,” what would that be referring to?

MEARS: Okay, ouch. Manhattan being an island, it’s the term that denotes somebody who’s seen as not having enough money or cultural competency to make it to live in Manhattan, so they have to travel by bridge or tunnel from Brooklyn or from Staten Island to come in. And they try to get into the door, and the door person quickly recognizes that this is an outsider, and they don’t belong.

COWEN: I am, in fact, from New Jersey. What is it about me that they would see as the giveaway?

MEARS: About you in particular? I demur on that question

The website “Tag the Sponsor” attempts to prove that many so-called “Instagram models” with no visible means of support (i.e. no actual modeling contract) and a highly expensive lifestyle are merely selling themselves to perverted Gulf Arabs.

Candace Bushnell, the original “Sex & the City” columnist, dubbed these men ‘modelizers.’

https://observer.com/2007/06/meet-the-guys-who-bed-models/

But not all modelizers are so high-profile. In Manhattan, just being rich can be enough. Take George and his partner, Charlie. On any given night of the week, George and Charlie are taking a group of models, sometimes up to 12, out to dinner. George and Charlie could be Middle European or even Middle Eastern, but in truth they’re from New Jersey. They’re in the import-export business, and though neither is 30 yet, they’re each worth a few million.

The Texas Hill Country is home to the first Union monument on Confederate soil, erected in 1866 in honor of German Texans killed for refusing to sign a Confederate loyalty oath.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treue_der_Union_Monument

Interesting. Pretty sure that ‘first dibs’ was common in 1980s-era Bay Area California, which had a lot of Upper Midwesterners among its early settlers (themselves descended from earlier New Englanders), including my people. Not sure where they picked it up though.

Not sure if this was already posted, but New York State is literally following the Sailer Strategy of giving convicted drug dealers first dibs at legal cannabis licenses. The entire article is pure Sailer gold:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/nyregion/marijuana-sellers-licenses-hochul.html

New Yorkers With Marijuana Convictions Will Get First Retail Licenses

Officials intend to reserve the first 100 or more retail licenses to sell marijuana in New York for people who have been convicted of related offenses, or their relatives.

When Aeroflot loses your suitcase…

https://granta.com/who-killed-tolstoy/

On the day of my flight to Moscow, I was late to the airport. Check-in was already closed. Although I was eventually let onto the plane, my suitcase was not, and it subsequently vanished altogether from the Aeroflot informational system. Air travel is like death: everything is taken from you….

Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ sighed the clerk. ‘Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?’

I tried out for a different, extremely minor quiz show once. They filtered the throng with a first-pass exam that was extremely easy – almost everyone here would have aced it. Still, that eliminated about half the crowd.

Then, when I made it to the actual show, the actual questions were extremely easy – I aced them, as would have almost all the iSteve commenters. But the other contestants didn’t. Now, looking back, I have a much greater appreciation for the difference between internet nerds, and the average American who can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme court when approached in the street by Jay Leno.

Classic comment from “Theodora” at Heartiste:

https://heartiste.org/2017/06/16/the-difference-between-fat-men-and-fat-chicks/

I think that one big difference between female obesity and male obesity is this: while the health and aesthetics problems are common to both sexes, female obesity is totalitarian. Fat men don’t demand to be called Big Beautiful Boys. They don’t lie themselves that they are voluptuous, gorgeous and curvy. They don’t want to change the standards of beauty existing since the beginning of humanity. They don’t shame and bully thin people (“eat a sandwich!:), they don’t ask to vanity change the sizes of clothes, they don’t ask to erase the word “fat” from public conversations. Fat men usually deal with their problems individually and in silence, while fat women want to change society, dictionaries, standards, reality and human nature to ease the burden of their fatness, acting as true Stalinists in the process.

That’s why the female obesity epidemic is more dangerous than a matter of health and aesthetics, and an affront not only to Beauty, but also to Truth, and well-deserving of the Shiv.

Handel did this in 24 days. I wonder what any of these people could accomplish in 24 days. Wiki:

“The music for Messiah was completed in 24 days of swift composition. Having received Jennens’s text some time after 10 July 1741, Handel began work on it on 22 August. His records show that he had completed Part I in outline by 28 August, Part II by 6 September and Part III by 12 September, followed by two days of “filling up” to produce the finished work on 14 September.”

Ethiopia is really part of the Greater Mediterranean, and its art history in the early medieval years is not that different from parts of Europe that were somewhat in the boonies compared to Greece and Rome (say, Saxony or Visigothic Spain).

Medieval Ethiopian Christian Art is recognizably related to Byzantine art etc. There is a lot of good information on it at the Met. Museum.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acet/hd_acet.htm
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ethi/hd_ethi.htm

On the other hand, Greg Cochran posted this when Tyler Cowen asked if Ethiopia will be the next China:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41965919?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

‘I’m ambivalent — snobbery is unappealing, but Didion’s California is a lot better than what succeeded it. I also think her observational skills and prose style were more impressive than her analytical mind…’

I don’t see her as a snob. She was from about one social tier above mine — but that’s just the way it was. She neither hid it nor saw in it some form of superiority. I have no problem with someone who honestly tells us what they see. She did that.

Didion had a lot of female haters, from Pauline Kael and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison on down. They largely find her to be a snob:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

https://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-cordial-enmity-of-joan-didion-and-pauline-kael/

https://popula.com/2018/10/15/the-center-held-just-fine/

I’m ambivalent — snobbery is unappealing, but Didion’s California is a lot better than what succeeded it. I also think her observational skills and prose style were more impressive than her analytical mind.

It’s also funny that the haters insist that Didion was “Upper Upper class,” despite not being all that wealthy and working for a living. Perhaps Old Palo Altan can enlighten us as to where the Didions stand in the California class hierarchy.

All the most-liked comments on the NYT obituary insist that all her haters are male chauvinist pigs who don’t want to see a woman get her due credit.

The current version of sexual liberation sounds a lot worse:

https://delicioustacos.com/2013/12/10/these-kids-today/

I often think about how to cope in these situations. I wonder how it would go over to put out books that are fairly highbrow, and also quite reactionary, e.g. Brideshead Revisited; Family and Civilization; Chesterton; De Maistre; Joseph Burnham; Christopher Lasch; Philip Rieff.

Are the progs literate enough to realize that these books threaten them?

In the 1950s, Turf wars in rapidly Diversifying upper upper Manhattan (i.e. Washington Heights) resulted in a Puerto Rican gang murdering an Irish teenager, that made big news:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0096144209351107

The New Deal liberals were very incentivized to suppress any race-war aspects of this, and so they did.

Semi-tangent: a truly astonishing merger of “”data science”” with relativist postmodernism:

https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-new-data-shows-it-perpetuates-them

Some woke “quant” types did a massive amount of work to prove that predictive AI …. predicts more crimes in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods — and that this IN ITSELF counts as “bias.”

They used to try to hand-wave away higher black crime rates as white people’s fault – no more. The entire piece studiously avoids even mentioning any actual crime rates.

We used to think “woke postmodernism can’t ruin the quantitative fields” — no more. This is what it looks like.

The whole piece is like a clown world version of Run Unz’s article on race and crime — triumphantly pointing to higher crime rates in black neighborhoods as… proof of racist AI!!

At least in Texas, the top schools appear to be not only exurban, but very affluent. Westlake and Southlake are among the very wealthiest communities in their respective metro areas.

Southlake is probably the second-wealthiest town in the DFW metro area, and the wealthiest (Highland Park) isn’t on that list but has produced plenty of NFL stars.

Since every town in Texas is football-crazy, presumably having affluent parents provides all sorts of advantages to the teams (beyond just football-craziness).

A lot of public high schools in Texas have very large enrollments (4000+ or even 5000+) which should help field a strong football team, and yet, there appears to only be a limited correlation between school size and football ranking, probably for the usual unspeakable HBD reasons.

https://www.maxpreps.com/rankings/football/1/state/texas.htm

In the DFW area, Duncanville, Lewisville, Skyline, Allen and Prosper are all over 4000 enrollment (Allen is over 5000) and yet, only two of those five make it into the Maxpreps TX top 25 list.

There also appears to be some correlation, but only a limited correlation, between football ranking and football budget. A good number of Texas towns spend \$50million plus on huge high-school football stadia (probably a good proxy for overall football budget), and yet, only a few of those show up on the top-25 list.

This Twitter thread earnestly argues that it is wrong for lesbians to turn down ex-men because that is “discrimination.”

Of course, by the exact same logic, it is wrong for lesbians to turn down actual men. That, too, is “discrimination.”

The entire courtship process would fall apart if no one could exercise their powers of discrimination.

"Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women?"

Yes.

Let me explain why.

I just learned this myself a few months ago. I went to a trusted friend who helped me work out why this is problematic when I couldn't see it for myself.#CisWithTheT https://t.co/sMqNF2HROG

— Christine Cavalier (@PurpleCar) October 27, 2021

The feminization of discourse is a huge deal. I think it is a big part of why so many men are so turned off of so many institutions — they can sense the feminization and say: no thanks.

Even without a byline, you can tell within a few sentences whether an author is masculine or feminine.

It’s a big part of why so much official discourse feels so fake: all about feelings and niceties and euphemisms. Men say: no thanks, we need the blunt truth. Hence the appeal of truth tellers. I wonder what the M/F breakdown of readers here is? 95/5?

I noticed that too; thanks for pointing that out.

Washington Watcher’s recent column also notes that EU leaders have mostly come to their senses on the ‘refugee’ issue as well — especially France, where the top four presidential candidates are all running on varying degrees of immigration restriction.

Perhaps many US/EU voters have common-sense views on the issue but don’t want to vote for a Trump / Le Pen figure because of the “ick factor.”

Is the tide turning??

pic.twitter.com/RzwLlo7ftd

— Dr. Benjamin Braddock (@GraduatedBen) August 31, 2021

Just for the record — I always check on this out of curiosity — this is one of those stories where the NYT reader-commenters, to judge by the “most-liked” comments, are definitely not buying The Narrative.

Entertaining / horrifying thread of unverifiable Afghan refugee stories:

Afghan refugees will at least be interesting in colleges. I only ever had one student from Afghanistan but I had to stop him from very passionately arguing that women like being raped and beaten

— Evil (Political) Scientist (@knrd_z) August 15, 2021

‘Yes, like the beleaguered pop star, who shaved her head in 2007, I took clippers to my own head. Too many headaches, too little sleep — I had to flee myself, my relationships, my hair.

There it is again…

Interestingly, Whitlock uses exactly the same metaphor (car accident and rehab) as Amy Wax, to describe black responsibility.

Whitlock:

Let’s say white people pitted us against each other. Let’s say it started in slavery. No problem. I agree it happened. I also think it’s insanely foolish to expect white people to fix it. It’s not going to happen. It’s no different from a man breaking your leg in a fight and expecting him to do the rehabilitation. Only you can do the rehab.

Wax, reviewed by John McWhorter:
https://newrepublic.com/article/76403/what-hope

Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”

Semi-off-topic: Some prime Narrative Management going on in the NYT here, catnip for the Sailersphere. Emphasis added?

Why India Struggles to Win Olympic Gold

By Hannah Beech and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat
Published Aug. 4, 2021
Updated Aug. 5, 2021, 12:02 a.m. ET

….In recent years, the country’s most powerful crop of Olympians has come from a narrow neck of land in northeastern India, where ethnic minorities live in the shadow of the Himalayas…. Because of their ethnicity, people there often face discrimination….Mary Kom, a light-flyweight boxer from Manipur who captured bronze at the 2012 Games in London, said she has long faced prejudice from Hindu nationalists who say that as a Christian, she is somehow not truly Indian. There are also racist whispers, some not so quiet, that people from the Himalayan foothills are more martial than others in India and that’s why they make good boxers….“Manipuri people, we have a fighting spirit, especially women,” said Kom, who grew up rationing meals to save money for a pair of sneakers

This came up when commenters discussed Steve’s review of Colin Quinn’s book:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailer-in-takis-magazine-colin-quinns-the-coloring-book-a-comedian-solves-race-relations-in-america/#comment-1042941

Go to a cultural center anywhere in the country, no matter where, and even if there are no Jews it’s the Maurice and Florence Rosenthal Center for Art of Wyoming, the Herman and Lillian Tannenbaum Historical Museum of NASCAR of Rural Arkansas.

Actual example:

The Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center is located in Dayton, Ohio and was built in 2003 to serve as Dayton’s key performance arts center. Architect Cesar Pelli created a world-class 2,300-seat theatre that has fiber optic lights in the dome ceiling that depict the Dayton sky as it appeared on the eve before the Wright brothers’ first flight, December 16, 1903. The Winter Garden houses exotic palm trees and a cafe with a large glass-enclosed wall that overlooks downtown Dayton.

Since its opening, the Schuster Center has hosted a number of top plays, including Wicked, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Beauty and the Beast.

http://www.schustercenter.org/

As soon as I looked up “Dotbusters” on Wikipedia, I knew it would provide more ammunition for the fight against malevolent WASP American settler colonialism:

“Later that month, a group of youths attacked Navroze Mody, an Indian man of Parsi (Zoroastrian) origin, into a coma, after he had left the Gold Coast Café with his friend. Mody died four days later. The four convicted of the attack were Luis Acevedo, Ralph Gonzalez and Luis Padilla, who were convicted of aggravated assault; and William Acevedo, who was convicted of simple assault.”

That excellent ACLU article is — unsurprisingly — by Michael Powell, who has fearlessly made a specialty of gently questioning the Woke Narrative from within the walls of the NYT.

He has to be extremely subtle to avoid cancellation, but I fear that they will catch up with him and defenestrate him sooner or later.

Steve posted about his Smith College article here

https://www.unz.com/isteve/open-season-on-townies/

And I have to repost this quotation — from my comment on Steve’s post on Powell’s article on Racist Musicology — about how Powell’s temerity has earned him a special editing process, in an effort to preemptively avoid Woke blow-ups:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-it-racist-to-say-that-beethoven-was-greater-than-esperanz/#comment-4473348

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has an interesting article on the New Yorker on the subject:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously/amp

That sounds a bit like the view of notorious evil genius Scott Rudin, as expressed in 1993:

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/26/magazine/hollywood-at-a-fever-pitch.html

Good books make bad movies. Good books operate according to literary, not cinematic, principles. But a good movie idea often comes out of a bad book. I hear Rudin tell a writer that a book is precious, but the script is great. “The script made me cry,” he says. “The book made me want an insulin injection.” Movies are simply montage, pieces of kinetic trickery that create the illusion of action. “They’re all about cuts.” They are dead things, especially compared to theater, which is alive. A play can’t leave the room it’s in. It must recreate the world every night in a black box with living people. “It’s conjuring as much as anything. A movie to me is like watching a rerun of a ball game.”

Highly relevant and worth reading:

Angela Nagle, “How the Libs Owned Us All”

https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/how-the-libs-owned-us-all

The Establishment is really good at coopting the appealing ideas of its challengers, thus it is able to remain the Establishment.

Bingo. If art is just social convention all the way down, then why not go with the Trend Du Jour?

If there are any art collectors who want to support black artists while simultaneously upholding traditional values, they could look into Henry Ossawa Tanner:

It would be easy to think this is all posturing. But another NYT story, by the same extremely Woke lady reporter, gives one pause.

Apparently, rich art collectors are at the moment more eager to spend millions of dollars on Artists of Color than those of pallor. That suggests they really believe in what they’re doing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/arts/design/auction-sothebys-basquiat-christies.html

The only clues that the world had changed over the past year was that the focus seemed to have shifted from the usual blue-chip art market darlings to artists of color, several of whom — Jordan Casteel, Mickalene Thomas and Rashid Johnson — set high prices for their works at auction…… By contrast, the energy seemed to drain from the rooms when it came to the more conventional contemporary market stars. At Christie’s, for example, paintings by Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince sold to their backers without any competition…..Still unclear is whether the current interest in artists of color will last. But for two nights this week, it felt as if a new world was in the offing, one in which work by a Ghanaian painter like Amoako Boafo could sell for twice the high estimate — and a longtime auctioneer would have to beg the crowd to “keep those eyes awake” as they bid on Marc Chagall.

Patricia Lockwood’s LRB attack on Updike is a good specimen of the feminist zeitgeist. She gives him his due, but ultimately it comes down to who-whom.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n19/patricia-lockwood/malfunctioning-sex-robot

More basic question is: could a heterosexual male author even get published today without bending the knee? Interesting thoughts by Alex Perez, a based male author:

https://im1776.com/2021/04/27/the-new-literary-bad-boys/

For WASP culture before the fall, John P. Marquand is a good prequel to Updike:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/-martini-age-victorian/302954/

I’m sure that slumberj and Old Palo Altan have some thoughts there.

Maybe so…. There are plenty of progs who absolutely loathe Rod, but still.

My main point is that Steve could do both — blog and Substack — if he wanted to, not just either-or.

Rod Dreher has both a (free) blog at TAC, and a (paid) Substack.

The blog is for culture-warring, and the Substack is for more inspirational arts & culture stuff.

Steve, like Rod, is prolific enough to maintain both at once, if he wants to give it a try.

For example, Steve could move the (less political & less cancellable?) movie reviews, music commentary & golf criticism to Substack and see how much that brings in, while maintaining the political commentary on Unz.

This is a good piece that puts the 2005 Larry Summers brouhaha as a key turning point in moving toward Female Discourse and away from facts and logic.

https://thoughtsofstone.com/the-day-the-logic-died/

What are the chances, indeed?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Trang_Phuong_Ho

Note that this NYT article is actually fairly objective and tries to present both sides. That’s because it is written by Michael Powell, one of the vanishingly few NYT writers who is quietly not completely on board with the Revolution.

If you follow Powell on Twitter, you’ll see that he is a quiet skeptic of The Narrative. I hope this comment doesn’t get him cancelled.

Another NYT dissident, Nellie Bowles, just announced that she is going on leave from the paper to convert to Judaism out of love for her partner, fellow badthinker Bari Weiss.

Here’s how the NYT is trying to handle its internal dissidents (emphasis added):

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html

The NYT has some scruples about trying to appear in some way to be “””fair”””.

But the lower-brow Woke lumpenintelligentsia just go full-on Hate Whitey

https://www.mic.com/p/i-want-justice-for-anti-asian-violence-but-not-at-the-expense-of-black-people-61719028

Darwin’s interest in beetles as recorded in his diary — including an account of tasting one and being squirted with acrid beetle juice — has been incorporated into an oratorio by Richard Einhorn:

“A taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life.”

https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/sites/orchester/Images/Programmhefte/Programmheft_WS_2011-12_Richard_Einhorn_The_Origin.pdf

Trump appointed Vermeule to the Administrative Conference of the United States, so it could be…

https://www.acus.gov/newsroom/news/president-trump-appoints-three-new-members-council-administrative-conference-united

Vermeule’s take is interesting: The Deep State is good, as long as it’s right-wing, and also there should be unlimited immigration of Catholics.

It could also be James Hankins.

Harvey Mansfield has a non-zero chance of being NeverTrump. On the other hand, he could be radicalized by now, now that he’s experienced Cancellation.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/30/editorial-mansfield-politics-disinvitation/

But, the best bet is David Kane, the Government instructor who’s been defenstrated for inviting Charles Murray to speak on campus, and for “””””racist””””” blog posts:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/1/editorial-fire-david-kane/

Hey, Colin Jost has a new book out. Let’s see how his new book is covered in the NYT… Oh wow, guess what, it looks like drawing invidious inferences based on someone’s racial identity and facial physiognomy is OK now. Who knew?

But Jost knows many viewers believe he has coasted on his annoyingly clean-cut looks that, despite his underlying earnestness, can give him an air of insincerity….

As he writes in his memoir, “Some of you think you know me, but you’re actually just thinking of the villain from an ’80s movie who tries to steal the hero’s girlfriend by challenging him to a ski race.” (In acknowledgment of this, he titled the book “A Very Punchable Face.”)..

What has succeeded for them, Che said, are recurring bits like the one where they read jokes sight-unseen that they have written for each other (and which Che often writes to make Jost sound racist).

“I guess if you look at Colin and you don’t know him, if someone told you that he was a racist, you’d be like, yeah, maybe,” Che said. “He couldn’t be further from it, which is why it’s so funny.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/books/colin-jost-a-very-punchable-face-snl-weekend-update.html

https://books.google.com/books?id=OPCTHC5AAbwC&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false

Wikipedia links to this book’s discussion of the vogue for multiethnic songs in that era, including “It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone” (1910), “My Yiddisha Colleen” (1911), “Yidisha Luck and Irisha Love” (1911), “Moysha Machree” (1916), “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohen” (1916) and “Kosher Kitty Kelly” (1926).

The footnote there is to William H. A. Williams, Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800-1920.

Let’s check in and see what the Respectable Paper of Record has to say about this production….

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/movies/hamilton-review-disney-plus.amp.html

“Jonathan Groff channels the essential, irreducible whiteness of King George III.”

Yep, sounds about right.

Raymond Wolters, in his books about desegregation of schools, has some Real Talk.

I remember reading the “lauded” book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by “eminent” historian Thomas Sugrue, and being stunned that he never actually discussed crime, only the (presumably irrational) fears of crime. That was a big turning point in my realization that the Respectable People are very willing to straight-up lie on behalf of their cause.

VDare, discussing Paul Kersey’s book on Detroit, describes the transition between 1943 (last white-on-black riot in Detroit) and 1967 (white flight after black-on-white riot).

https://vdare.com/posts/we-almost-saved-detroit-the-crime-crackdown-of-1961
https://vdare.com/articles/learn-whitey-learn-paul-kersey-s-escape-from-detroit

I remember when the Wimpy Liberal Christians got upset at some of Trump’s “dehumanizing language,” and some wags pointed out that Jesus called people dogs, swine and vipers.

Good times…

Yup, that was my experience

Growing up in nice suburban SuperZIP = nice, pleasant, socially approved opinions on race

Couple of years in the not-completely-gentrified big city = race realist

Who but Steve Sailer ever heard of, much less remembers in a timely fashion, the anti-Chinese riots on Guadalcanal in 2006? Steve, do you have a photographic memory? This blog is a national treasure.

It’s not just antifa — there’s a whole class of youth celebrities who seem to look aggressively and intentionally ugly: hideous ‘grilles’ on their teeth, awful facial tattoos, horrible complexions from never going outside — just an overall look of ill health.

I’m thinking of Tekashi Six Nine, Billie Eilish and Post Malone, but I’m sure there are better examples.

The whole look just screams: poor nutrition and poor exercise habits.

How does this make sense in an Evo psych way?

That sounds somewhat like the image of the Manson Family as portrayed in Helter Skelter and in Tarantino’s movie. Perhaps more downscale.

I punched the average figures in the column into a BMI calculator for a handy method of comparison:

Asian women: 24.5
white women: 28.9
white men: 29.1
black men: 29.2
Hspanic women: 32.0
black women: 32.5

Looks about right. I wouldn’t be surprised if class makes an even bigger difference than race, on average. Coastal elites are well-known for making cruel remarks about the horrific levels of obesity then encounter, on the rare occasions when they have to deplane in flyover country.

It’s quite sad. I’d like for my fellow Americans to be less obese, and thus healthier and more attractive to the opposite sex–for their own good. Unfortunately, it’s hard to express that sentiment without coming across as a Bloombergian soda-ban snob.

Steve, if you haven’t already, you should post about Carle Zimmerman’s *Family and Civilization.* These problems go way way back in history (I.e. the decline of Rome & replacement by pholoprogenitive Celts and Germans).

The Baby Boom was a false dawn for familism. U.S. coastal elites were already atomistic individualists by 1800. Ben Franklin noticed this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Speech_of_Polly_Baker
It was the Catholics and Lutherans who really filled up the country.

The difference between Israel & the U.S. is more than just good policy vs. bad policy. It is about a deep existential-metaphysical belief in being part of something larger than oneself. More:

https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/how-families-contribute-to-the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/evolution-individualism-and-the-end-of-the-family/

Off-topic:

Based on his complete ripoff of Steve’s Takimag column, we can add Gerard Baker of the WSJ to the ever-lengthening list of MSM figures who read, but do not cite, Steve Sailer:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-often-distorted-reality-of-hate-crime-in-america-11589562033

Of course, the Usual Suspects on Twitter are not happy about this at all.

UCSB students are able to enjoy the fruits of Professor Bhavnani’s deep wisdom at the bargain cost to California taxpayers of \$290,000 per year.

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=university-of-california&q=bhavnani&y=

https://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/kum-kum-bhavnani

Kum-Kum Bhavnani is Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Her research interest lie within development, feminist and cultural studies. She has published a number of books and articles including Talking Politics (1991, Cambridge University Press), Shifting Identities Shifting Racisms (Sage 1994: co-edited with An Phoenix), Feminism and ‘Race’ (2001, Oxford University Press) and Feminist Futures (Zed 2003: co-edited with Johan Foran and Priya Kurian). In 2006 she completed a feature documentary film, The Shape of Water (narrated by Susan Sarandon (http://www.theshapeofwatermovie.com) which spans three continents and was filmed over four years. Her next research documentary, also narrated by Susan Sarandon, premiered in 2012. Nothing Like Chocolate(http://nothinglikechocolate.com) narrates the story of an anarchist chocolate maker living in the rainforests of Grenada who creates world-renowned chocolate sustainably and ethically. Her 2014 documentary, Lutah (https://vimeo.com/87403939), focuses on an independent Santa Barbara-based architect, Lutah Maria Riggs, who, among other spaces, designed the Lobero Theater and the Vedanta Temple. In 2018, she premiered We Are Galapagos, a research documentary focused on the people in the Galapagos who work on innovative ways to save their islands, the wildlife and the planet. You Think you Can’t Dance? premiered in February 2019. This short research documentary examined how and why ballroom dancing has become a significant pastime in the 21st century. She is presently working on her next documentary, Science for Nuns/Monks, (working title: funded by the John Templeton Foundation) which examines how and why Tibetan Buddhist monastics are learning astrophysics and neuro psychology alongside their study of Buddhist sutras.

Leonardo Da Vinci had a terrible time finishing things, or getting things done. He left many notebooks, in proportion to products.

On the other hand, Bernini and Rubens were both highly effective managers of large studios, with many assistance, multiplying the effect of their own hard work many times over.

It’s true that there’s a lot of indefensible BS in the humanities. And it’s true that grade inflation makes it possible for dummies to skate by in verbal fields, more so than in quantitative fields.

But there is such a thing as rigor in the humanities, and to the extent that it exists, the Ivy League is not the worst place to find it. Ivy League undergrad history majors, like John G. Roberts, Jr., Harvard ’76, will do a lot of reading primary sources, learn languages, and write papers like “The Utopian Conservative: A study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster” (60pp.) and “Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party’s Approach to the Social Problem, 1906-1914” (166pp.)

http://hnn.us/articles/13328.html
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/13401

By contrast, at many lesser universities (outside the Honors Colleges and suchlike), it’s possible to get through the undergraduate curriculum by reading mostly textbooks (vs. primary sources), without doing work in other languages, and without writing original theses of any length.

Source: personal observations at a variety of universities

That’s just the “E” in STEM. Depending on the science, Harvard is right up there with MIT, or close behind.

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/mathematics-rankings
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/physics-rankings
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/chemistry-rankings
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/biological-sciences-rankings

And if you look at the level of undergrad achievement, e.g. how the top of the class performs in the Putnam Mathematics Competition, Harvard is right up there.

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

There are a lot of blog posts on the boundary between Red Sox fans and Yankee fans (the latter, basically wherever Metro North goes).

https://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/finding-the-true-border-between-yankee-and-red-sox-nation-using-facebook-data/

Connecticut is split between the two, but New Haven is definitely Yankee country.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/24/upshot/facebook-baseball-map.html#9,43.912,-73.978

On the other hand, the eastern edge of upstate New York, along Lake Champlain opposite Vermont, is still Red Sox country.

Harvard also had a ‘separate but unequal’ scientific school, like Yale’s Sheff: the Lawrence Scientific School, which eventually, like the Sheffield, was more closely integrated with the ‘real’ undergraduate college. Harvard tried to acquire MIT five or six times, I believe.

I wonder if being so closely linked to Wall Street — literally at the other end of the commuter rail — meant that Yale could be complacent and happy with more verbal-literary education, and never felt the need to build up STEM.

I think a lot of the black folks in New Haven came to work in industry e.g. the Winchester rifle factory. I believe the few other industrialized towns in Connecticut, e.g. Bridgeport, also have black populations.

Now the cooking, cleaning, maintenance, etc. staff of Yale is mostly black.

Heather Mac Donald is virtually the only “mainstream” type writer who goes and talks to people like those housing project managers. They’re quite frank about what really ails the downtrodden communities.

Schooldigger.com lists 151 public high schools in the city of Los Angeles, of which:

8 are majority-black
100+ are majority-Hispanic
1 (one) is majority white (New West Charter in West L.A.)
0 are majority-Asian (the highest being Rise Kohyang High in Koreatown at 38% Asian)

Congratulations, Mr. Unz.

Regarding the list of comparable websites, you might want to add The American Mind, created by the Claremont Institute.

https://americanmind.org/

It appears to be walking a delicate line: published by a recognized, “established” nonprofit foundation, it nevertheless also publishes pseudonymous Tweeters such as “Zero HP Lovecraft,” “Peachy Keenan,” “Elijah Del Medigo,” “Second City Bureaucrat,” “Spotted Toad,” and “L0m3z.”

Like your website, TAM appears to recognize that the old distinctions between “mainstream” and “fringe” are no longer operative.

Meanwhile, Quillettte, also a fairly non-establishment webzine created with zero institutional support, is publishing the likes of James Hankins and Christopher Caldwell. The old establishment is absolutely continuing to lose its monopoly.

Never fear, West Virginia is still home to Chinese-born virtue-signallers in positions of power:

This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the “Kung-Flu” to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.

— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) March 17, 2020

Speaking of flats/apartments in London — Bertrand Russell gave the newly married and “desperately poor” T. S. Eliot a spare room in his (two-bedroom) flat in 1915.
https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljournal/article/download/1552/1578
Hard to imagine in 2020: 1. The intellectual heirs of Russell and Eliot getting along well enough to be friends. 2. Elite ruling-class intellectuals living in a mere two-bedrooms — one of which is shared with a married couple!

Basil Stag Hare is a memorable character in Brian Jacques’s Redwall series of boys’ books. I assume that this Basil represents an English ‘type,’ but don’t know enough to be sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall

I’m hoping that Steve will write something about the impressive displays of Crimestop and Herculean efforts of mental jiu-jitsu that are currently being deployed by the Woke in order to fulfill the Prime Directive, which is:

Thou Shalt Not Criticize Persons of Colour.

e.g.

It’s clear that Bernie’s vote base is among Hispanics. His Redistributive Socialism is a winner in CA and TX among Hispanics, as Steve has pointed out. But all the establishment Dems in a panic about socialism are not allowed to point out that lots of Hispanic immigration means lots of votes for socialism. They have to square the circle that Immigration is Good, and Socialism is Bad, without acknowledging that with enough Immigration, you get Socialism.

It’s also clear that the Woke Elite would have loved anybody but “shirtless Trans-Am driver” Biden. They would have much preferred Warren (woke White College Women), Buttigieg/Bloomberg (woke elite technocrats), Kamala Harris/Cory Booker/Julian Castro (woke ID-politics POC), or Bernie (woke activists). Unfortunately, the dreams of the Woke have been dashed by black voters in South Carolina, and then more generally. But you absolutely cannot criticize or blame black people for their voting choices, or any of their choices, so the woke have to point the finger of blame anywhere but at the black electorate for the failure of the Wokest candidates.

Off-topic:

Another NYT article — this one about Preferred Pronoun Placards at Harvard — in which the most-upvoted comments have a distinctly “When the Saxon Began to Hate” flavor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/us/gender-pronouns-college.html

“I’m sorry, I’m a liberal and I hate Trump, but this is ridiculous and this is why Trump wins” Etc.

I haven’t seen either of these two movies (only the associated meme *), but I bet “American Factory” would make an interesting comparison with “Empire of Dust,” in which the Chinese businessman goes to Congo:

https://filmmakermagazine.com/35197-empire-of-dust-an-interview-with-bram-van-paesschen/

Filmmaker: Your film depicts many racist exchanges between the Chinese and the Congolese. It makes you wonder how they’re able to co-exist and, to some extent, get work done.

Van Paesschen: I must say that there are other countries investing in the country—Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa are some of the main players. They are quite crude and racist too, but they hide it. They make these partnerships with NGOs and pretend they care about human rights, but they really don’t like it. The Chinese are honest. So in a way, what should one appreciate more? The honesty or the hypocritical stance of the Western companies? [The Chinese] don’t care about human rights and they’re honest about it. “We don’t care. We’re here to do our job. And we’re here to invest in the country.”

* the meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-all-so-tiresome

The Chinese workers are dissatisfied with the lack of communication among the native workers, which they see as essential for productivity. At one point in the documentary, the workers miscount when loading a truck and are missing materials upon arrival. Lao Yang is told by a worker that he cannot contact the “gravel guy” because the guy rarely answers his phone in the morning. Lao Yang replies that it’s already past 12:00 PM. The phrase “It’s all so tiresome” is spoken by a frustrated Lao Yang in reaction to his experience working with the Africans.

Dallas sells itself as having willed its way into existence through sheer chutzpah, despite having no inherent geographical reason for existence. The Trinity was never a navigable river (the chutzpah couldn’t quite make that happen). Dallas:
* convinced the railroads to come through town
* convinced the State Fair to settle in town
* convinced the Federal Reserve to locate in town

Thus it’s the Business Center of the Southwest which couldn’t have been predicted in 1900.

But most importantly (they say), Dallas and Fort Worth put aside their long-standing rivalry long enough to build D-FW Airport, which is the main reason for its success in the last decades with corporate relocations.

Corporations who are looking for:
* lower cost of living thus lower payroll costs (e.g. South/ Sunbelt / Sand States)
* no state income tax for the executives (Texas & Florida)
* several flights a day to the branch offices anywhere in the U.S. in under four hours (Dallas or Chicago)?

Find Dallas to be of the few places that satisfies all of those criteria.

Neither Austin nor Oklahoma City was in the running to build another DFW airport decades ago, and even less so now.

On top of being beautiful, Austin is also of course a College / Government town, thus Very Progressive and thus very attractive to tech companies who need someplace to put their SJW employees (who are better paid and not as concerned about Austin’s higher housing costs, as compared to the cubicle drones in Dallas-Fort Worth).

Oklahoma is more firmly Red than the Texas metros, thus more attractive to Middle American Radicals, but less dominated by the Elite / Minority coalition than, say, Dallas.

Dallas doesn’t have the humidity & hurricanes of Houston, though of course the summers are bad, along with hail, tornadoes, etc., and of course lacks natural beauty. But for the corporations and white collar workers who want Cheap Land, Low Taxes, Good Schools, etc. it ticks all the boxes.

Frisco, Tex., as Steve has pointed out, is the high point of all this (at the moment), as the Republican Base settles there to raise kids.

However, as Steve has also pointed out, the Vibrant Diversity which has already taken over the inner-ring suburbs e.g. Grand Prairie, Irving, Garland, Mesquite, Cedar Hill, etc., will eventually come for Frisco etc. too. It’s just a matter of time. But all that churn is good for the real estate business.

Just Google “Inclusive Communities Project” for the Soros-type, Fed-supported NGO whose lawsuits ensure that every single suburban Whitopia in Texas is going to get the Diversity that it has coming… good and hard.

When are they going to Cancel the Textbooks?

https://quillette.com/2019/06/05/superior-the-return-of-race-science-a-review/

Psychometricians do not dispute the existence of a 10-15 point IQ gap between black and white Americans; they only debate its causes. Consider what some experts have written in mainstream textbooks:

Nicholas Mackintosh: “It should be acknowledged, then, without further ado that there is a difference in average IQ between blacks and whites in the USA and Britain.”
Nathan Brody: “There is a 1-standard deviation difference in IQ between the black and white population of the U.S. The black population of the U.S. scores 1 standard deviation lower than the white population on various tests of intelligence.”
Earl Hunt: “There is some variation in the results, but not a great deal. The African American means [on intelligence tests] are about 1 standard deviation unit […] below the White means.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/puritans-as-a-city-on-a-hill-daniel-rodgers/

For more than 200 years the work lay in manuscript, until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1838, in a collection of documents in which it was preceded by a few poems just a cut above doggerel and followed by a short history of the US Postal Service.

This Twitter thread makes a visual case for Modernism e.g. Mies Van Der Rohe

https://twitter.com/logosnaut/status/1225926455718182913

However, the core problem is that ‘beautiful photograph’ does not equal ‘good building.’

A photograph can’t really tell you:

* is the building compatible with the physical scale of human beings?
* what about light, shade, temperature, climate?
* what happens when it gets old, or needs cleaning, or breaks, or is less than 100% pristine?
* can you actually use it for the intended purpose?

@wrathofgnon on Twitter is great at exploring the actual realities of what makes a good building, as opposed to the zoomy fantasies in architects’ heads.

By contrast, here in the NYT is an enthusiastic piece on architecture strictly as a matter of “lusty fantasies”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/arts/design/Lequeu-Morgan-Library.html

Great piece but I’m not sure Matt Y coined the term “awokening.”

It’s here in the headline tag of this John McWhorter piece from a year before Matt’s piece (i.e. 2018)

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/05/24/atonement-as-activism/

Stripped Classicism is underrated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_Classicism

A modern style that still bears some relationship to humanism and history.

Is there something weird about the first three hyperlinks in the article? (“Dark days on Wall Street”…”turned down a chance to work on Wall Street”…)

Geogeghan has a good article in the New Republic about how 2020 Dems are totally disconnected from the working class in e.g. Chicago

https://newrepublic.com/article/156000/educated-fools-democrats-misunderstand-politics-social-class

Interview with John Miller of National Review:

https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-bookmonger/episode-282-the-age-of-entitlement-by-christopher-caldwell/

I knew a family that did this. The WASP / Ashkenazi parents were 100 % pure uncut Blue State Ivy League progressives.

They had one biological child, and one child adopted from a “developing” country. Both kids had the most exquisite, elaborate nurture you could wish for.

The biological kid went right to Harvard-Yale-Princeton and a “prestige” career and the adopted kid is a dropout who consorts with lowlifes.

Really makes you a believer in heredity.

In my humble opinion, the value of the iSteve comments lies less in specific threads, than in the presence of a certain few commenters whose perspectives could hardly be found anywhere else.

I gratefully take advantage of the “Commenters to Follow” feature to keep abreast of their latest musings, without having to follow any particular thread:

Alfa158
AnotherGuessModel
arclight
Auntie Analogue
candid_observer
Crawfurdmuir
dearieme
Hunsdon
Jack D
Jenner Ickham Errican
Old Palo Altan
PV van der Byl
SimplePseudonymicHandle
slumber_j
vinteuil
whorefinder

Ohio State, eh?

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

By 1979, Athletics Department officials knew that Strauss conducted unusually prolonged genital examinations on male athletes, and that athletics staff were not permitted to be present during these examinations. In addition, Strauss was known to shower alongside male students at Larkins Hall, a behavior which was unique among team physicians to Strauss.[1]:2 Between 1979 and 1996, multiple students complained about Strauss’s excessive and unnecessary genital examinations, but no action was taken by OSU until January 1996, when he was placed on administrative leave in response to patient complaints.[1]:2–3

Larkins Hall, which served OSU as its Physical Education facility and Natatorium, was perceived as a sexualized environment, and multiple witnesses reported that voyeurism and public sex acts occurred there from the early 1980s to the late 1990s.[1]:163[6] 30 wrestlers and gymnasts reported voyeurs were routinely present at Larkins Hall in the locker room, shower, and sauna areas, ranging from college age to approximately 60 years old; the “leering” voyeurs would ogle student-athletes that were using the facilities and some would masturbate.[1]:166–167 Strauss was counted among the voyeurs; former OSU students stated that Strauss would shower among athletes multiple times per day or stare into the shower while seated on a stool.[7] In addition, peepholes were found in bathroom stalls and shower walls.[1]:166–167 The building was completed in 1932, named for retired OSU Athletic Director Dick Larkins in 1976, expanded in 1977, and demolished in 2005.[1]:165–166[8][9][10]

I’ve noticed definite regional differences between Ivy Leaguer-type upper middle class whites on the West Coast and the East Coast.

Neither group has the “prole” regional accent, and yet, regional differences remain.

As an American visiting parts of Germany and Italy, it certainly seemed to me that the working class people there seemed to have more pronounced regional accents, whereas the educated class spoke a more “standardized” national tongue.

(Just the same as in the various regions of the U.S.A., of course)

Semi-Off-Topic:

The Mexican baseball league is pursuing a kind of reverse ‘Birth Tourism’ by flooding the league with foreign yanqui ringers who may happen to have a drop or two of Mexican ancestry (James Russell, Logan Watkins, Chris Carter, Beau Amaral)

https://gen.medium.com/home-and-away-american-ballplayers-are-flooding-the-mexican-league-923130436df6

I’m sure it’s no big deal…

https://twitter.com/ClaireBearLovez/status/1174784811308703744

Off-topic: A couple of moderately skeptical takes on the recent National Conservatism conference in DC

https://jacobitemag.com/2019/07/09/nationalism-qua-nationalism/
https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/22/not-national-conservatism-weve-looking/

Off-topic: “Magic Dirt” spotted in New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/trump-nationalism-tucker-carlson.html

She defended President Trump’s vulgar comment last year disparaging immigration from certain countries, to laughter and applause. And she dismissed the idea that immigrants somehow became American simply by living here, which Ms. Wax (borrowing a term used by white nationalists and self-described “race realists”) mocked as the “magic dirt” argument.

There’s no reason that “people who come here will quickly come to think, live and act just like us.” she said. Immigration policy, she said, should take into account “cultural compatibility.”

“In effect,” she said, this “means taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”

A new history of the 1969 Cornell student takeover

https://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/