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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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I meant Unz the outlet, not the person.

You say there's a stronger taboo against anti-black racism now than there was a few years ago, but if that's true, then that's all the more reason why Kirk interviewing Sailer makes no sense.

The problem wasn't ever what views an individual had, it was what clique they're associated with. It's why Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes for excommunicated. Sailer is definitely associated with the dissident right, and he writes all about HBD and crime. That's his beat. But now Kirk is associating with him.

I get the feeling you don't remember the Con Inc. climate in 2018, have a refresher.

HBD is finally gaining mainstream attraction and even approval among well-connected people. Sailer is no longer as fringe. Musk is aware of all the big figures now; he even follows @cremieuxrecueil. it took a while but it's finally happening to some extent at least. E-acc is a bridge between HBD and mainstream, too. Elon buying twitter was the biggest gift to the right in generations.

Yes, I also get the feeling that HBD is starting to go mainstream. For example, Bryan Caplan's "Let's Ban Discrimination: A Socratic Dialogue" includes this gem:

Leonidas: [frustrated] I’m not even going to engage that, Socrates. You’re ignoring my central point.

Socrates: Namely?

Leonidas: That the average Egyptian worker endures horrible discrimination at Greek hands.

Socrates: How do you know that?

Leonidas: Open your eyes! [He waves in the direction of the street-sweepers.] Egyptians are much more likely to do hard, low-paid jobs than Greeks.

Socrates: Agreed. How, though, does that show “discrimination”?

Leonidas: [stunned] Isn’t it obvious?

Socrates: Hardly. Suppose the two of us were standing at the finish line of a marathon, keeping time.

Leonidas: Very well.

Socrates: Suppose further than out of the first hundred runners in the race, only two are Egyptian. One possible explanation for their poor performance, granted, is “discrimination.” For example, the judges could give Egyptian competitors unfavorable starting positions. But there are plainly other ways to account for their subpar performance.

Leonidas: Such as…?

Socrates: You tell me.

Leonidas: Perhaps… Greeks practice running more. We “try harder.”

Socrates: We did invent the marathon, after all. Can you think of any other explanations?

Leonidas: Well, uh…

Socrates: I promise I won’t repeat a word you say.

Leonidas: [grumpily] I guess you could say that Greeks just have more running ability.

Socrates: A distinct possibility.

Leonidas: So you’re justifying the mistreatment of Egyptian workers?

Socrates: Not at all. I’m trying to discover the extent to which Egyptian workers are mistreated.

Looks like the whisper network paid off.

Bryan Caplan has always been shouting this stuff from the rooftops. He hasn't been whispering anything. He's usually subtle just saying stuff like if we control for IQ and criminality there is little evidence for discrimination instead of making a point of saying blacks are low IQ or criminal, but it's always been there in his writings.

he even follows @cremieuxrecueil

Who the hell is this and why is he significant?

If someone like myself — by all accounts an “extremely online” person compared to your typical man in the street — does not know a thing much less heard of this person/thing then it’s pretty much a given that any scandalous association you seem to think this implies won’t amount to anything with your typical reality TV addicted swing voter (i.e., the ones who ultimately swing elections one way or the other).

my point is that he is aware of HBD , as @cremieuxrecueil is a major hbd figure.

I’d say Kirk himself moved to the right. And I’m not sure if you’ve watched the interview with Sailer, but from a skim watch it seems that he tempered or qualified some of his views, a lot was generic conservative policy. Sailer was always much less openly racist than Derbyshire, he considers himself essentially in the Cochran school, and his policy preference is basically colorblindness. I’d say today Sailer spends almost as much time criticizing dissident rightists as he does the left, I really think he considers himself almost a quasi-Buckley type figure, more mature and polite than vulgar and base DR types.

And again, The Bell Curve made the cover of The New Republic in the Late 90s, Sailer isn’t even much to the right of Andrew Sullivan.

Gavin was excommunicated because his multiracial boys’ group got involved in a bunch of federal cases that nobody wanted to get caught up in, and he was never much of a genuine conservative anyway. Yiannopoulos was excommunicated because he was perceived as having defended gay sex between 13 year old boys and adult men. In neither case was it because their (conservative) politics were too far right.

I see your point, but man, rightists sure loved getting involved with the less defensible J6ers.

Sailer was never really far-right, more like a liaison between the neoliberal-left and the non-mainstream right. He pushed for the vaccine, sends so much traffic to the NYTs that they probably give him a Christmas card and free lifetime subscription .

I coulda sworn a big thing with the bell curve was that it was basically respectable when it came out, and it took a few years before the 'pointing out statistics is racist' idea fully took hold on the left. I remember some big name black journalist who, in a retrospective, talked about how he found it personally disgusting that other people at the Atlantic(maybe?) wanted to have dispassionate scientific discussion about those ideas, and he had to nod and smile along, etc. I would model the change as, in the 90's, racism is bad, but statistics are not racist, into, those types of statistics are actually racist, into, maybe but those statistics seem correct and frankly I don't care anymore if you call me racist.