It was never exactly a secret that "clander," the main writer of Stuff White People Like, is Christian Lander, but a nice interview of him by Gregory Rodriguez in the L.A. Times makes it public.
Yes, he's a white person, not an Asian as various commenters theorized at length.
The comments on his site tend to be pretty funny in their cluelessness about his motivations. The most obvious analog to Christian, who describes himself as "a general snob," is Tom Wolfe, but without all the exclamation points: a political and cultural conservative with a contrary streak who is an acute observer of status symbols not because he disdains material possessions but because he has strong aesthetic opinions about, well, stuff.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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I have seen the blog as making fun of events, locations, or activities that in diverse large urban areas that will basically be all white. If you go to the indi music concert you are probably going to be in an all white crowd. If you study abroad for a semester, you are probably safe in assuming virtually everyone else will be white. The same goes for art film houses, prius repair waiting rooms, farmers markets, new age religious gatherings, or the ultimate Frisbee league.
People do not understand the difference between all white people do something versus the group that does this activity is comprised of only white people.
There are middle class activities that fit into the same category. Visit a craft show held in suburbs and it will be as white as tne Indi music concert.
Going to high school in Toronto, City of the Good and Diverse, turned me into a conservative too. Toronto will do that to you.
Steve, Lander reveals that he got the idea for the blog after talking about The Wire with a friend. How come you've never reviewed this series? One would think you would've jumped at it given the subject matter.
Rodriguez's column is very insightful. Basically, Lander's blog is similar in the contextual subject matter (how whites feel living in a world and even country with non-whites) but with a different focus (on the self rather than the other).
Sometimes readers here give in to irrational fear and paranoia about this reality. The whole "Camp of the Saints" mentality. But, really, that which does not destroy white culture gives it a stronger sense of itself. As the blog points out, white people do not get any edge from breeding like bunnies. They get their edge from raising children with a strongly developed rational facility, who have a lot to offer the world.
This stuffwhitepeoplelike site has really struck a chord hasn't it?
To me, most of the observations are old hat, but its created such a buzz.
Steve may have liked it first but I could have written it first!! I used to blog on a site that was predominantly Asian-American in audience, and here's one of my entries from about 2 years ago:
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Saturday, I took a rare trip to 9:30 Club in DC to see Robert Pollard in Concert. I know you don't know who Robert Pollard is, and if I told you he was the mastermind behind Guided By Voices that still would not ring a bell. Robert Pollard's music plumbs terrifying, obscure depths of the White Male experience that you would just NOT want to know about. You would become ill and experience existential nausea. It was like a Klan rally, it was so caucasoid. I was getting in touch with my inner Whiteness in there. Audience demographics: 2 black males, 1 indian dude, 1 asian female, 4 asian males , and about 500 (mostly sausage) whities. His new band RAWKED hard, and I found out he talks in that same fake British accent he sings in, even though he's from Dayton, Ohio. He's also like 50 years old with a mane of white hair and drinks Jose Cuervo striaght from the bottle on stage. And he twirls the mike alot.
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But life goes to the do-ers, not the dabblers, doesn't it?
I checked out the "stuff" link...
Christian Lander thinks "Pootie Tang" is "as funny a movie as you'll ever see"?!
This man clearly has issues. I'm not sure I understand what they are, but then, I don't think he does either.
People who get offended at the blog don't realize that "white people" does not equal people who are white. For his purposes, for example, rednecks aren't white people. Neither are Amish. Neither are many conservative Republicans.
^ But Lander says that he got the idea for the blog when he wondered why more "white people" didn't watch HBO's "The Wire." Last time I checked, rednecks and conservatives are not the white people who watch "The Wire." If anything, the white viewers of that show are, generally, the type that Lander lampoons.
Another interesting thing about clander is that he is showing that white folks have a culture. They do not just melt into the background created by ethnics.
Of course as anonymous above pointed out, clander's whites are one among many white cultures which are distinct from any other ethnicity's culture.
Almost all of modern science, math, and technology is one of those cultures.
Lander, who arrived in L.A. from Toronto 2 1/2 years ago, came up with the idea for the blog after talking to a Filipino friend
White people like to point out that they have friends of color.
Some of "Stuff White People Like" reads a lot like Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks. Which fits your observation that Clander is talking about whiter people and not white people. How else can one take #74 "One of the best places to gain a white person’s trust is at an Oscar party."?
Who the hell is he talking about?
And David Brooks did expensive kitchen gadgets much, much funnier (#54).
"As the blog points out, white people do not get any edge from breeding like bunnies. They get their edge from raising children with a strongly developed rational facility, who have a lot to offer the world."
We can only have rational children who have much to offer if we only barely reproduce? NONE of our problems with third world migration and the diminished stature of the West have nothing to do with barely reproducing? Whether by causation or correlation, I believe our problems and dislike of children are related.
There's another post for "Stuff White People Like": Childlessness.
Slowing down the babymaking is a far cry from going extinct. And non-whiter white do benefit from the economic networking that the whiter set is so good at.
Unless lesswhite people are prepared to stop eating fruits and veggies picked by Mexican migrant workers, Japanese cars and electronics, Chinese manufactured goods... and consume only Green Euro-approved organic all natural produce and really drive Prius cars.
If there really were some kind of crisis, a smaller population base might even be an advantage for an elite ethnos. It has worked fine for the Jews for a good long time, and they are still going strong. Sometimes quality matters more than quantity. Like the 300 Spartans.
Quote from the comments section of the lastest post:
As an Asian American who lived in Berkeley for the past 7 years, I can safely say that this website accurately represents most of my white friends. Also, I think this blog could have an alternate title: Stuff Asian People Do to Curry Favor with White People
When you compare him to the lower-middle-class equivilent (you know, Jeff Foxworthy), you realize it isn't especially funny.
Stuff White People Like makes this weeks New York Magazine's The Approval Matrix
Part of the guy's schtick is that the 'white' people that he lampoons are the one subset of white people that, at least outwardly' wish 'whiteness' would disappear, or that 'whiteness' is the source of all evil. Susan 'white people are the cancer of the human race' Sontag is perfectly 'white' per the site. Rednecks don't mind being white. That's part of the joke, that these people are the 'whitest' of all.
"When you compare him to the lower-middle-class equivilent (you know, Jeff Foxworthy), you realize it isn't especially funny."
Neither is Jeff Foxworthy, truth be told. This isn't "ha ha" funny so much as "that's so true" funny. I had a good laugh this morning when my whiterpeople friend invited me to breakfast mere minutes after I had finished reading the entry on the blog talking about how much white people like breakfast places.
gregory rodriguez seems particularly pleased with the emergence of clander.
"Anonymous said...
Sometimes readers here give in to irrational fear and paranoia about this reality. The whole "Camp of the Saints" mentality. But, really, that which does not destroy white culture gives it a stronger sense of itself. As the blog points out, white people do not get any edge from breeding like bunnies. They get their edge from raising children with a strongly developed rational facility, who have a lot to offer the world."
"It has worked fine for the Jews for a good long time, and they are still going strong. Sometimes quality matters more than quantity. Like the 300 Spartans."
Ask a Briton how strong the Angles and Saxons made british culture. There are now virtually no british (celtic) place names in all of England. The native Britons toiled, while the Anglo-Saxons ruled.
Ask an Anglo-Saxon how strong the Normans made thier culture. The Normans imposed a rigid manorial system on the anglo-saxon free-holders. The (now) native Anglo-Saxons toiled, while the Normans ruled.
And what of the strongly developed rational facility of the Romans? It meant nothing to the Vandals and Goths who plundered and conquered them. What of the rational facility of the Greeks? It meant nothing to the Turks who ruled them for nearly four hundred years.
History is the history of real-estate and who owns it. Which people occupy which land. Who gives orders, and who takes them. Who wins, and who loses.
A people that will not continue itself......will not continue as a people. That ought to be obvious.
And are you seriously holding up the jews as a model of how whites as a whole should want to organize our societies? Is that what whites want to be? - a small persecuted minority, suffered to exist by jealous neighbors, and subject to pogroms and genocide? Not a winning strategy, if you ask me.
Oh, and by the way, the 300 Spartans all died.
Martin,
Ok, touche. But I don't see any signs of white Americans being pressed into bondage by illiterate Mexican orange pickers. If anything, I see quite the opposite. I also realize this closely resembles the old Spanish hacienda system, which in terms of the players looked quite similar on both ends. European owners and managers and Indian workers.
I also know that those vegetable and fruit pickers are from the same stock of people who invented and cultivated the foodstuffs that now feed the world: manioc, maize (corn), beans, potato, tomato, and so on. They even have religions about these foodstuffs to this day.
I do know that Americans have pressed themselves into bondage via a bloated welfare state to the descendants of African slaves who refuse to work or participate in a modern economy. Americans are so filled with unjustified guilt for being from the only stock of people in the world who ended the ancient African institution of slavery. I know that the Mexican fruit pickers, road repairers, landscapers, home and office constructors, and cleaners have no such twisted feelings of guilt. They believe what they know: that to survive is to work.
White people have no shortage of land. What is a danger, particularly at this economic juncture in American history, is the racial spoils system created in the 1960's. White people are ready to expand it, and give more money to women who reproduce without regard to their children or society, and give more offices to those unable or unwilling to show they deserve to hold them.
I know that the immigrants are already voting against these collective spasm of neurotic guilt and protecting their neighborhoods from the street people that have long ago scared white people out of the cities.
NPR: 'Stuff White People Like' Blog Hits a Nerve.
- Rain And
Clander's blog fodder is trendies, liberals, and Jews of the more Episcopal type, all of them well-off and (loosely) under 40, inhabiting metropolises, college-educated (not infrequently, graduated relatively recently), and apparently bent on emulating the indefeasible Yuppie unawares.
As others here have indicated, there are many whites who would find Mr. Lander's doleful countdown of snobbish enthusiasms (enthusiastic snobberies?) incomprehensible. They do smack of the boho and the thirtysomething.
But I admit and boast that I saw myself (and my more intelligent friends) in about half the items on the list so far.
Is it white to brag about how white one is? Well, not openly.
Sure, that blog isn't really about all "white" people. What makes it so funny, though, is that it's lampooning the set of liberal white people who love, love, love to pat themselves on the back for being enlightened about race, etc., but -- in fact -- most of what they do involves an exclusively upper-class white crowd.
And are you seriously holding up the jews as a model of how whites as a whole should want to organize our societies? Is that what whites want to be? - a small persecuted minority, suffered to exist by jealous neighbors, and subject to pogroms and genocide? Not a winning strategy, if you ask me.
The strategy is as successful as any in history.
Btw, there are two sides to every story and it gets old hearing the Jewish side as if it's the only one; Jews have given better than they've gotten - the times that were bad for Jews were the exceptions. That the Jewish side of the story is the only side in most empty heads is a testament to just how well they've succeeded (remember who writes history?).
If you really want to critique the Jewish evolutionary strategy, you should probably start with the whole "a people who jettisoned their own lower and middle classes centuries ago and consequently cannot live on their own anymore" thing.
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