Steve Sailer is putting together a book of his best essays.
* Include exchange with [John] Podhoretz.
* All the needling and making fun of David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell.
Those were funny as hell.
* Your posts referencing Tom Wolfe’s Hunt for The Great White Defendant and police shootings.
* Things that stand out in my memory:
Love is not colorblind
Jorge G. Castañeda’s “Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans”
Affordable Family Formation
Fun stories about Jerry Pournelle and Greg Cochran
* Plaques for Blacks is a classic.
“In contrast, white Americans used to take the complaints of American Indians more seriously. And indeed, Indians have much to legitimately gripe about regarding life on reservations such as Pine Ridge. But in recent years, as whites have become ever more amused by blacks, white concern for Indians has diminished. Native Americans, with their plodding dance rhythms, athletic stiffness, and lack of a gift of gab, have increasingly vanished from American consciousness. They now appear to strike whites less as noble and tragic than as depressing and tedious compared with those always entertaining blacks.”
* Men With Gold Chains is a cool shorthand for the concentric circles/leapfrogging loyalties dynamic- that motif that ties together a lot of stuff from parochial allegiances/affordable family formation/chain migration/dying alone/etc that needs to be in there somehow as a kind of conceptual glue.
* Revealed preferences in racial dating
Marriage gap > gender gap
Rolling Stone hoax exposure
Sailer Strategy
Commenter’s Trump Marches on D.C.
Discussions of Bonfire and Back to Blood
Discussion of L’Affaire Watson
Most Important Graph in the World
Gaddafi’s death
The Deep State/Turkey compared to U.S.
* First rule of female journalism needs to be included. It underlines many of your thoughts.
* How do you plan on organizing the book? Is it going to be just an assortment of your best pieces, or is it going to be broken up by topic area? Do you want the selections, taken together, to make an argument for a broader worldview? Do you plan to revise any of the pieces for publication?
Regardless, here are some of my favorite things you wrote:
1) The Cousin-Marriage Conundrum
2) The piece on the differences between gays and lesbians
3) The post (I think it was titled “Tendencies”) about Jews
4) As an F-you to JPod, the “Let the Good Times Roll” article
* Your “Darwin’s Enemies” (left and right) is a favorite of mine. It displays, as you once said, writing about high brow material in a low brow style.
* I think the Jarod Taylor debate is pretty foundational, if you can stick him in there with ya. That would probably be a good thing to open with. All your book reviews of the big books you’ve reviewed. Fukuyama and Pinker and such. Pops to mind your review of Paul Johnson’s book on Darwin. And you’ve reviewed other Johnson books . I always find your movie reviews fun and informing but maybe those are two ephemeral. When you used to write your VDare essays when you linked to them from your blog, at some point VDare stopped getting original stuff right? Anyways those were good and good length for an anthology entry. You gotta get the stuff on the big ones you called like the housing bubble, UVA obviously, I’m forgetting a big one, dude you gotta get your Donald Sterling stuff in there. Affordable Family Formation. The speech you gave on your epistemology at the Mencken Conference years ago. Your golf course architecture is coextensive evolutionary theory was that it was or something. Obviously you’ve written plenty on Testosterone, the man molecule. Olympics stuff. Ben Franklin stuff. Sailers First Laws of Female Journalism.
* Steve, you could publish several books: a collection of your movie reviews, a collection of your book reviews, a collection of your writings on politics, a book of good posts that don’t fall into any of the above categories.
Why do it? Blogs won’t last, but books have a 4,000 year history. There’s already so much stuff in books, that some form of access to them will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. If you want the future to read you, publish more books.
* Can’t remember specific article names, but these are the themes you’ve written about that I’ve found most enlightening:
– Sailer strategy
– Marriage gap
– The ethnic biases that are held by many non whites and Jews, and how our current ideas that only whiteness has such negative agency allows them to obscure these biases, even from themselves
– The left forgetting how long they’ve been in charge of things and always seeing ‘the man’ elsewhere
– ‘The ideal world of many female political activists is one in which they themselves will be seen as more attractive’
– Obama’s racial obsessions as seen in his autobiography
– The flight from white
– The megaphone
– The alteration of American identity to the ‘nation of immigrants’ conception from the ‘settlers’ conception in the last century, and how it’s pretended its always been like this (eg your ‘posterity’ example, emma lazarus)
– War on noticing
I guess I’d say the general theme of the above is peering through our current conceits about liberal egalitarian individualism to uncover the ways the world really works.
* Ben Franklin Principle and inverse (Get someone to do you a favor to like you and People hate it when you do favors for them all the time – it shows you are more powerful than them.)
How Females (Female Journalists) Always Want To Redefine Objective Standards of Beauty Such That It Equals Them
Why Protesters Never Actually Attack an Oppressor That Could Actually Hurt Them
How Males Imprint On Their Environment as Young and Seek to Re-create It When Older
How Gays Run Fashion Mags and Choose Androgynous Females to Represent Ideal Beauty (ie 16 year old boys)
etc etc
Why Football Players Are Neither Too Smart nor Too Independent Thinkers
Why Football Defense is Improvised Seek-and-Destroy-Offence
* Structure-wise you’ve got a huge advantage over most (or every) mainstream pundits – you’ve been consistently right about lots of different things over a very long period of time.
This is lots of work but I think this works very well for your strength as a structure –
Setup [new writing] giving an idea of the intellectual climate around the issue
Older Essay / Column
Newer Essay / Column
Capper [new writing] with lessons learned
One example that’s quite current – the Rolling Stone / Haven Monahan rape hoax. Your setup is coalition of the fringes / Jewish anti-whiteism / search for the great white defendant. Older column – an early mention of that with an earlier example. Newer column – a vindication / victory lap column that’s more recent. Capper – why you were able to see it when the mainstream wasn’t and what it says about the future.
Don’t neglect sports when picking column pairs as there is an immense untapped market for realistic, intelligent sports commentary.
* – Race FAQ
– IQ FAQ
– HBD 101
-Citizenism
– Affordable family formation/the marriage gap and all its political implications re: concentric vs. leapfrogging loyalties, the Coalition of the Fringes, etc.
– The high/low team-up against the middle. Why is mass migration even a rancorous political issue obfuscated by being discussed only in moralizing terms if it’s so transparently bad for America? BECAUSE OF ALL THE MONEY THEY STAND TO MAKE.
– The Narrative. MSM incestuousness and collusion.
– Obama stuff that came after “America’s Half-Blood Prince”
– Along the lines of the last three points, the Triumph of Marketing in general.
– Invade the world/invite the world. Neocon foreign policy & compassionate imperialism
– Arguments for immigration restrictionism. The stuff about how the US is different from Latin America re: racial color castes was particularly interesting to me, as were histories of Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
– Also the history of American immigration in general. Ben Franklin’s ideas, Emma Lazarus’s hokum, etc.
– The concept of diminishing marginal returns in politics & adaptability, again going back to Ben Franklin.
– Something about eugenics and the Age of Galton like in your speech to Margaret Thatcher
* Steve Sailer: I’m not sure if I’ve ever written up the story of how I came not to write anymore for National Review, but it’s not at all scandalous. Rich Lowry behaved quite honorably, as (I hope) I did as well.
* 1. One volume on sports might be very popular. It’s not my thing but obviously sports occupy a huge chunk of the American male mind. And the beauty of sports statistics is that you can use obvious undeniable facts (100% black cornerbacks, 100% black 100m finalists) — granted that sports statistics are already an acceptable topic of discussion — to force people to ask the questions that need to be asked.
2. I would love a collection of movie reviews — maybe re-edited or re-organized to give one or more thematic ‘hooks’ to readers who aren’t immediately drawn in by the movie titles. For example, the idea that behind the scenes, a lot of the creative geniuses are actually not on board with The Narrative.
2b. I don’t think this comes up quite as much on the blog, but in terms of new content — personally, I’m very interested in Steve’s thoughts on literature. Waugh, Gibbon, Macaulay, to Updike and Tom Wolfe. http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-coup-by-john-updike/#comment-415650
3. Not unrelated, a California-themed collection would be great. I remember the story of serving on jury duty for the Iranian car scammer; the piece of fiction about the Minority Mortgage Meltdown; various San Fernando Valley anecdotes; Bay Area vs. Southern California (a lot of great commenters there too).
4. Going right for the jugular, a Handbook to Ethnic Studies in America would be pretty great. Steve is so careful with his assertions, all of the outrage would basically be “point ‘n’ sputter.”
5. I’ve been especially interested in Steve’s reviews of other intellectual interlocutors, and his evaluations of their big theories, in book reviews and otherwise. Jared Taylor and Jorge Castaneda have been mentioned, but there are so many more. Yuri Slezkine, David Coleman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Krugman, Charles Murray. Raj Chetty. Elizabeth Warren. Robert Putnam. Francis Fukuyama. Samuel Huntington. Wasn’t there a big dialogue with Ron Unz early on? In each case, I find that Steve’s approach of taking a basic reality check is priceless. Raj Chetty may be an otherworldly genius in terms of theory. But how much does he know about reality?
Michael Barone: http://www.vdare.com/articles/barone-backsliding-into-bankruptcy
5b. Also — more broadly than intellectuals — profiles of individuals whose current significance is useful in understanding the world. Obviously Obama and Gulen. Coates. Bill Richardson. Joaquin and Julian Castro. Ellen Pao. Claire Cain Miller. Theranos girl. Tony Rezko. Jeremiah Wright. George P. Bush.
For me, Steve’s greatest contribution is in Noticing Patterns and Remembering Facts. We can quibble about the interpretations and the details but once presented with a significant fact, you can’t just ignore it. Thus, when Steve Notices a Pattern and then gives it a catchy name, it’s impossible forever afterwards not to notice further instances of that pattern.
Thus — I’m no good with titles but I would suggest that the theme of one volume could be for example: Noticing Patterns: 25 Concepts That Make Sense of the Current Year. And each chapter could collect Steve’s developed thoughts on that particular pattern. Maybe it’s the marketing background but I think Steve has a genius for tagging a Pattern with an instantly memorable catchphrase. Then forever afterward, you can’t avoid Noticing them.
There’s too many to count and readers will know exactly what I mean but, off the top of my head, in addition to those already mentioned. Obviously there is some overlap:
Who? Whom? (this one above all)
Noticing Patterns (itself)
Political Correctness Makes You Stupid
Vibrant Diversity
Human Biodiversity
Disparate Impact
Concentric Loyalties vs. Leapfrogging Loyalties
World War T
Adventuresses
Sapir-Whorf
Anti-Gentilism
All We Have To Do is Fix the Schools
“Good Schools”
Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World
50% Nature, 50% Nurture
Men With Gold Chains
Partially Inbred Extended Family
Beverly Hills Chihuahua / Extreme Texans / Mexican Mediocrity
Mulatto Elite / Paper-Bag Test / Certain People
California, the future of America
Marketing Major Postmodernism
Chechens
Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism
* Elections have consequences. Tide has turned. All the protest stuff this week is rearguard action. Maybe Hillary has some rumored last shot, but it will fail, ultimately, if it exists.
Look, we won, remember? All these people having vapors now because they’ve lost power over their former opponents. Just be nice to them and extend a hand no matter how many times they slap it away, be a good example of we are all Americans. Let them lose the pr war by themselves now. World is sick/ashamed of SJW type monkeyshines.
SJW-ism, setting internet mobs on people, is going to start having serious legal consequences. IRL, it is illegal to incite a riot or lynch mob. It is soon going to be the case online.
And why shouldn’t it be? It is domestic terrorism, again, one of those things that were projected upon us by SJW types. Demand it be stopped by authorities, it is a barbaric practice, like human sacrifice in a primitive society.
Which the internet is at the moment.
We have a bunch of people who have been feralized by nonstop propaganda for years. We should empathize with them, like the captives of communism after the end of it. So be patient with them, it will be worth it.
I mean, if presidency and both houses don’t make you feel like we won, I’m not sure what will.
* Sailer’s biggest mistake.
He should have kept mum about Steve Job’s bio that was slated to be called iSteve.
He would have gotten more traffic.
* The Sailer Strategy and your work on civic nationalism should be central. Trump already ripped off your election strategy, and his instincts are going to lead him in the direction of your civic nationalism work. From that core, expand out into themes that would be related to the emerging Trumpian nationalism. One black a block, Affordable family formation, natalism, diversity management, etc.
One additional suggestion: seek out Vox Day for advice, and potentially as a publishing platform. He would be a good judge of content, and has a good instinct for salability.
Castalia House is the publisher you want to contact.
http://www.castaliahouse.com/
They have been at the top of the Amazon sales lists in the politics and philosophy areas for the last year.
They started as a sci-fi publisher and have expanded their reach. William Lind, Martin van Creveld Mike Cernovich and a host of others are published by them. They do hard cover, paperback, e-book of all varieties and audio books.
Nothing against Regnery except that they are last years news.
I know I have mentioned them in the past when the first musings about your book appeared.
I like their books, their authors and their editor.
Face it that you are and your book will be controversial. Might as well go whole hog and become a best seller while you are at it.
* In no particular order:
• Citizenism vs white nationalism (probably a good time to give this idea more exposure)
• Invade the World/Invite the World
• G.W. Bush, Redlining, minority homeownership, and the GFC
• KKKrazy Glue / Coalition of the Fringes
• Concentric vs leapfrogging loyalties
• War on Noticing / Protective stupidity
• Anti-gentilism
• Overton shift re immigration, NYT, and Carlos Slim
-Phalangist ties are fascinating but if you’re trying to keep the book close to your core themes maybe not worth mentioning. BTW that’s yet another interesting topic that brings you up at the top of a Google search)
• Occam’s Razor/Butterknife
• Megaphone/Narrative/Eye of Soros – esp. Black Body Theory and Haven Monahan
• Magic Dirt Theory as well as Section 8 as a tool for real estate developers
• Set of useful statistics to calibrate your BS detector: demographics – esp. “latino tidal wave” and Slippery 6 type numbers that showed faultiness of conventional “pander to hispanics” wisdom – crime stats, etc.
• The World’s Most Important Graph – good chance for you to repeat your Sailer Doctrine success
• Some stuff on Coming Apart, The Bell Curve, and Ghettoside
• Merkel’s Boner
• Rotherham
• The Tsarnaevs, Omar Mateen, and the CIA
• William Shockley, test scores, Test Score Tong Wars
• Feminism, Elizabeth Holmes, Ellen Pao and her gay husband, stupid investors (or smart enough to know they can use the Narrative to pump, and dump after IPO – I honestly don’t know) – Theranos board of directors is interesting. I’ve been fascinated by the whole Theranos saga but idk if others have same interest
• It would be pretty funny if you devoted some space to some of the more determinedly stupid journalists and bloggers – Matt Yglesias comes to mind, as well as Genius T. Coates and maybe Josh Marshall. Might be risking looking petty here but would be entertaining reading.
* It depends what the purpose of the book is. Perhaps the most ambitious goal would be crossover to the mainstream.
Someone mentioned Freakonomics – which is subtitled “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”.
Perhaps the book could be along the lines “a rogue statistician notices the stubborn endurance of phenomena that Americans thought had gone away.”
The ideal articles are ones:
(a) that are backed by data
(b) where the essential point can be put across with a graphic and a brief explanation; which can then be followed by a longer exploration of whatever causes, consequences, and conventional wisdom is appropriate
(c) that will change the way that readers think; perhaps help them to see things that are in plain sight but that they have been trained not to notice.
* In no particular order:
• Citizenism vs white nationalism (probably a good time to give this idea more exposure)
• Invade the World/Invite the World
• G.W. Bush, Redlining, minority homeownership, and the GFC
• KKKrazy Glue / Coalition of the Fringes
• Concentric vs leapfrogging loyalties
• War on Noticing / Protective stupidity
• Anti-gentilism
• Overton shift re immigration, NYT, and Carlos Slim
-Phalangist ties are fascinating but if you’re trying to keep the book close to your core themes maybe not worth mentioning. BTW that’s yet another interesting topic that brings you up at the top of a Google search)
• Occam’s Razor/Butterknife
• Megaphone/Narrative/Eye of Soros – esp. Black Body Theory and Haven Monahan
• Magic Dirt Theory as well as Section 8 as a tool for real estate developers
• Set of useful statistics to calibrate your BS detector: demographics – esp. “latino tidal wave” and Slippery 6 type numbers that showed faultiness of conventional “pander to hispanics” wisdom – crime stats, etc.
• The World’s Most Important Graph – good chance for you to repeat your Sailer Doctrine success
• Some stuff on Coming Apart, The Bell Curve, and Ghettoside
• Merkel’s Boner
• Rotherham
• The Tsarnaevs, Omar Mateen, and the CIA
• William Shockley, test scores, Test Score Tong Wars
• Feminism, Elizabeth Holmes, Ellen Pao and her gay husband, stupid investors (or smart enough to know they can use the Narrative to pump, and dump after IPO – I honestly don’t know) – Theranos board of directors is interesting. I’ve been fascinated by the whole Theranos saga but idk if others have same interest
• It would be pretty funny if you devoted some space to some of the more determinedly stupid journalists and bloggers – Matt Yglesias comes to mind, as well as Genius T. Coates and maybe Josh Marshall. Might be risking looking petty here but would be entertaining reading.
I enjoy your movie and book reviews, as well as the stuff on Tom Wolfe and Heinlein. I like reading about Sabermetrics, although that’s more out of an interest in predictive statistics than baseball. Similarly, I find the golf stuff interesting more because of changing cultural tides and real estate issues rather than any great love for the sport.
A structure similar to Mark Steyn’s The Undocumented Mark Steyn would allow for the full range of iSteve topics to be touched on, including reviews etc. and could probably be done without too much rewriting. Something akin to a Citizenist Manifesto would be great to read but probably a lot more time, research, and rewriting. I’d buy either or both.
Incidentally, I bought America’s Half-Blood Prince recently and intend to read it before Obama leaves office. I didn’t know about iSteve in ’08 but I think it will be an interesting read with the benefit of hindsight.
* I agree with Canadian Observer: you have material for a whole series of books.
You have already published America’s Half-Blood Prince.
Next up:
America’s Philosopher’s Stone: how Benjamin Franklin published the recipe that made America great, and how we can still profit by his insight.
America’s Chambers of Secrets: the many true things that cannot be said in the press or the classroom or the workplace.
America’s Prisoners of Yes I Can: how the refusal to acknowledge diversity of aptitude misdirects our educational efforts.
America’s Goblet of Fire: how misunderstandings concerning crime and punishment will cause our cities to burn.
America’s Order for Phoenix: How George Bush’s plan to promote Latino homeownership led to boom and bust in the Southwest.
America’s Deathly Hallows: the cost in treasure and in lives of misguided reverence for sacred slogans.
* Steve, you had a very funny and perceptive post while back, proposing that instead of capturing more black votes, Republicans should try to brand the Democratic Party as the “black party” by constantly but indirectly referencing that as something that “everybody knows”. That and any other suggestions you have made to the GOP over the years would fit nicely with the Sailer Strategy theme.
I agree with earlier posters that the two biggest selling points (other than the Strategy of course) are prophetic predictions, and recurring memes and concepts innovated in the blog. Additional examples besides the ones from earlier comments:
-Lack of media coverage/analysis of Mexico, despite the obvious importance
-Lack of attention to averages or modal characteristics
-Need for more accurate stereotypes, not fewer stereotypes
-”extended family” metaphor for race
-(the war on) Pattern Recognition
-Israel as a model for the USA on border wall, and having a conscious demographic policy
-Zeroth Amendment
I would de-emphasize the snarky attacks on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ over-rated abilities, and the sometimes obsessive focus on Jews. The TNC stuff comes across as resentment that he is treated as smart, when he obviously is smart, or is undeservedly successful (which he also is). Your analysis of all things Jewish is often interesting, but the blog (more so than the essays) often focuses on it to a degree that is not always warranted by the material. This pattern was stronger in older posts, with a tendency to over-Judaize things that have simpler explanations, and I got the sense that it reflected your temporary intellectual interests for a few years, similar to the earlier focus on Obama, and that afterwards you use the synthesis of that research, but are no longer occupied with it.
