Here's a 13-minute interview of me shot by Craig Bodeker back in 2010 at the H.L. Mencken Club meeting. I was pretty rocky in the beginning, but it came out okay:
Good God Steve, you actually look respectable! Didn't you used to have a scruffy beard?
Seriously, you come across quite well. Your posts often display a goofy sense of humor, so I kind of expected you'd be a bit of a goofball, but you turn out to have a sober voice and a serious demeanor. (Actually, you look like an oil company spokesman or something. But in a good sort of way!)
Steve, you actually look a good bit like Mike Judge, which is interesting given this joke conspiracy theory I share with a friend about you having secretly been a writer on "King of the Hill." (That show being a veritable anthology of iSteveisms.)
Anyway, this video's been up on Youtube for a while now, just so you know.
I even see a bit of Liam Neeson in the cheekbones and eyes...
Anyway, interesting point about potentially segregating sports events by race. I'm pretty sure most Americans (myself included) find the idea ridiculous, but I remember that there was serious debate in China about the inclusion of white ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan in the Asian Games back in the late 90s.
Many Chinese didn't feel it was proper for European whites to be included in an Asian competition.
You have a nice, easy, affable manner Steve; you seem like a guy who'd be hard to rile in a debate or in a conflict. I'll bet the other guy would get upset at your evenness of temper.
Here we are all commenting on your looks (myself included) w/out touching on your explanation of what HBD means.
You explained it concisely and clearly, and I can't see that anyone listening to it would not say, "He's right: some things are so obvious we ought to trust our eyes more. We should learn to look more carefully at our policies to see if we are basing them on truths, not on nonsense."
I agree that it was a shaky start and that it turned out well in the end.
You make what I think is a mistake common to HBDers, which is to present your views timidly and apologetically, giving the presentation a you're-not-gonna-like-what-I-have-to-say-so-let-me-do-my-best-to-be-diplmatic vibe. It leaves the listener wondering just what outrageous new views he's going to hear about, putting him on the defensive from the get-go. It's an understandable and even quite comfortably passable mistake, but I don't believe it's effective as simply proceeding to confidently state your views in a manner that assumes you're going to get quick agreement with them. That doesn't being stone serious. That'd probably work against you. Go ahead and have fun with it and liven things up. Just don't be apologetic.
Awesome. You should do more videos.
Incredible. A Whiskey post I can unreservedly agree with. Definitely do more videos. (You do want to expand your reach don't you?) I'd be seeing Craig Bodeker about it. That dude has talent.
Well it's nice to see your face but don't be fooled by all the compliments. You are not a good media talking head.
Watch Fox news some night. Bill O'Reilly introduces Liz and Kimberly - and they both break into manic grins. You didn't smile once in thirteen minutes.
HBD scares the pants off the public. The face of HBD should be a happy face. You look furtive and guilty. Much of the public are like puppy dogs, they don't understand the words but react to tone and gestures. You need to more aggerssively sell the idea that HBD is wholesome, natural, and pleasant. Most of the public already believes that blacks are less intelligent but they are afraid to let that notion into consciousness lest they slide somehow into being a Nazi. They don't need arguments they need a role model.
You come across as sincere and knowledgeable - like someone explaining the benefits of a proctosygmoidoscopy. Study Mike Huckabee. He surrounds himself with an armor of niceness. No one would dare call such a sweet man a dirty racist.
Since I'm in the advice giving mode today - all your readers want you to write a book. Me too. But first you need to work on your TV persona. The most important part of the modern book of ideas is the book tour. If you can do a great two minutes on the morning shows you will have a best seller almost irrespective of what's on paper. Media promotion counts for a lot. Otherwise how can you explain O'Reilly's success as an author?
I liked political correctness as "status climbing by stupidity". No doubt that is how it plays out for the common-or-garden member of the chattering classes.
PC is not as dumb as it looks. It is vital for the global elites status system - but for material, rather than moral, reasons. Since WWII, PC has a hard-core basis in promoting the political power and economic privilege of the West's high-status globalising elites.
Obviously the example of the Nazis showed how far political incorrectness could go wrong, and showed the danger of populist nationalism. Also the destruction of the British Empire by the Japanese showed that the easy days of white supremacy over the colored man were gone. The defeat of the US in Vietnam only reinforced that point.
More importantly, PC evolved to help the West's political elites recruit support from the (non-aligned) Third World decolonising powers. Hence the CIA's liberalism on this score. And the GOP's early support for Civil Rights, to thwart communists scoring propaganda points over the "Negro Question".
And later, once the Cold War was won, PC came in handy to the West's economic elites for recruiting labour, opening markets, attracting capital and extracting energy from the Developing World.
So PC serves the interests of globalising elites, of whom the cultural elites (media/academia) serve mainly as errand boys, rather than shock troops. As such PC is not going away fast.
"Is the index finger longer than the ring finger? Just asking."
I looked at pics of the so-called gay male hand with its digit ratio and the so-called straight male hand with its digit ration, and the pics show that the forefinger is noticeably longer than all the fngers.
However, having seen the pictures, I took it upon myself last year or so to check out the hands of the five gay guys I know well. Simply said to them, "Let me see your hands." Two of them knew what I was checking, the others hadn't a clue.
Okay, so it wasn't a large sample, but not a one of them had a digit ration of the so-called "gay hand." We even used a ruler.
I just sent off an email of U of Minnesota Regents. I urge others to make the President of this school a guy w/out a job. From what I have read, the students are up in arms, but I only found out about this on the web, not on mainstream news.
Watch Fox news some night. Bill O'Reilly introduces Liz and Kimberly - and they both break into manic grins. You didn't smile once in thirteen minutes.
That's a very good point. I saw a seasoned TV head rattled in debate once and the camera caught her looking decidedly alarmed but right at that moment she obviously "remembered to smile" and she broke out in this totally incongruous grin (given what was occurring). (Guess her ethnicity.... Okay, okay, let's not go there.) I scoffed, but then I quickly thought to myself, you know, why the hell not? If the public are indeed by and large idiots, why not give them what they want? After all, the public vastly outnumbers cynical bastards who see through it all like me.
So my advice is console yourself with results, Mr. Sailer. I bet that's how the above mentioned lady sleeps easy at night.
Yes, pc is really about social climbing and I think that calling people out, even as one smiles, as "a climber," might be quite effective face-to-face.
I think Steve should write a book on sports (and sports only) as it relates to HBD. This is the 'wedge' to get the public to pay attention since it's the least controversial aspect of the issue. Start doing the book tour/cable news circuits. Get some mainstream publicity. Then, drop the hammer in the next book. Profit, etc.
What is the story about political correctness in ex communist countries ? Is it taking hold or has the experience of communism vaccinated the population against this ideology ?
Of course he looks "professional," didn't you pay attention to his adventures from Corporate Amerika + heavy golfing? If casting the black guy to play in Steve's movie we are down to Dennis Haysbert and Delroy Lindo basically; I could also see a heavily sedated Courtney B. Vance
I also second that request for more videos. Would be great to have you load them up on the blog every now and then. Would definately generate more readers.
Is anyone else having trouble viewing this video in Firefox browser? I have same problem with half of RamZPaul videos with Firefox suddenly. Other YT videos work OK with Firefox. And all these videos work fine with Chrome.
Just want to make sure Firefox isn't messing with HBD people.
Steve, I saw this video a year ago (along with John Derbyshire's) but it was a pleasure again the second time. I believe that most commenters haven't discussed "HBD" issues because you eloquently stated the HBD case in a nonconfrontational and sensible manner. And were talking to the choir. As far as smiling like a talking-head pundit on TV: You don't and Mit Romney shouldn't either. His incessant car-salesman grin is what makes him look so slick and untrustworthy.
"'Which cellist is playing the Bach in the intro? I've pretty much ruled out Rostropovich and Casals.'
Sounds like Mischa Maisky."
Not to me. I just compared the two Menuets (admittedly a very small sample) and his is more vigorous and impassioned. In the intro to Steve's clip, the playing is much smoother, maybe Yo-Yo Ma?
I was not familiar with his playing, though, and he had me at Hello, as they say. Thanks a million for your comment. Being a Fournier fan, I might not have bothered with Maisky otherwise.
You contrast Bio diversity with Cultural diversity. Great idea. All PC folks like Their Definition of diversity. You use Their diversity like a judo master uses momentum.
You use a universal activity, running, to explain HBD. Excellent choice professor.
I too like political correctness as "status climbing through stupidity".
Watching you reminds me of seeing Joseph Sobran the first time. Holy cow, the man can speak well! Suggestion - Make more videos, post on YouTube, collect ad revenue. Prepare for larger audiences.
Seeing and hearing you makes us feel like we know you. It also prepares us to buy your book, pay to see you speak, want to see you as a paid talker on TV, etc.
"You explained it concisely and clearly, and I can't see that anyone listening to it would not say, 'He's right: some things are so obvious we ought to trust our eyes more. We should learn to look more carefully at our policies to see if we are basing them on truths, not on nonsense.'"
"Anybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content."
Okay, since I pointed out that we were too focused on the delivery and not enough on your content, let me add more specifically what probably works with general audiences in outlining the meaning of HBD and why talking about it is important. (BTW, I thought your discussion was absolutely clear and effective so the following is offered not as criticism but as points to remember whenever speaking to a general audience. In fact, I don't even understand why you or anyone else thought you got off to a slow start.
1) You did the right thing in beginning with some kind of sports analogy. It works for many reasons--we can all see who dominates sports, and we are sports-crazy society. Keep doing that.
2) Move to others "obviouses": "What else do our eyes tell us?" Supply possibilities...about gender, ("Even in young toddlerhood, boys are rougher in play than girls.") Appeal to what every parent and every grandparent and every babysitter has ever observed in babies, toddlers, the point being there are huge gender differences long before "society has molded a child."
3.) As you know, it's imperative to always stress you are speaking not of individuals but of groups.
4) You do this all the time, but be sure to offer that prediction, accurate prediction is what science is all about--keep it up.
5.) Use parental experience over and over again to drive home the points of HBD, even within a family-- ask the parents in the audience if, by a certain age, they can predict which child will score better in math, which in languages, which will bring home good grades, which will not, which takes after mom, which after dad. Point out, discuss the personal in asking about mother's side of family versus father's side of family. (Of course, from here you can decide how far out to extend "family differences," all the way to race and racial differences and your Sailer, easy-to-grasp definition of race.
6.) Approach the importance of discussing HBD because it has policy implications by asking audience about their own experiences in school--were they tracked? Not tracked? Did it work for them? Fail? How was tracking decided? Fairly? Unfairly?
Even as students, did they notice programs or policies that were utter failures, yet still pushed year after year?
Because Americans are positively elephants when it comes to recalling what was wrong with their schools and with their education or with their teachers, and because they are highly emotional about those past experiences, use questions about their education to broach the notion of the institutionalizing of policies and programs that don't work yet are still sucking up billions decades later.
I don't know if this is what you wanted, but my point is that the more personal you make your discussion, the more you let people understand that acknowledging HBD is really about letting the very personal evidence one has gathered from a lifetime of observation reveal some truths, and that fostering discussion of these general truths can help us develop better policies, spend money more effectively, and make more informed choices for ourselves and our kids. The more personal the discussion is made, the more harmless the term becomes, and the more manipulative seem the people who wish to quash it.
"****They don't need arguments they need a role model. ****
Here is the pretty female face of HBD?
Hey Ruka. She has a number of interesting videos.
6/22/12 2:59 PM"
What a beautiful, eloquent, bright young woman. Few people can state a case about anything so well. One problem: her life is destroyed - she'll have to change her name or work for herself. A brief porn career would have been less damaging.
Be honest, how many readers here would advise their daughters to post such material. So brave!
As far as smiling like a talking-head pundit on TV: You don't and Mit Romney shouldn't either. His incessant car-salesman grin is what makes him look so slick and untrustworthy.
There is a crucial difference. Romney is telling people what they WANT to hear. Sailer is telling peope what they DON'T want to hear (for now).
Similar to the rule of thumb journalists supposedly follow of treating famous people as though they're not famous and treating people who aren't famous as though they are, uncontroversial political points are probably beast made with exaggerated seriousness while controversial points points probably benefit from exaggerated relaxedness.
Perhaps my point would be easier to grasp by considering an extreme: you don't really think interviewing through clenched teeth would help advance a HBDer's career do you?
Janissaries. Genetically the brightest young Christians, culturally the most dedicated Moslems - elite fighting troops.
"The Janissaries were chosen before they reached adulthood from among the Christian population living in Anatolia and the Balkan peninsula to become the elite fighting force of the Ottoman Empire. A portion of these selected children, as they were considered to be more talented, received a higher standard of education to become the ruling class of viziers as well as engineers, architects, physicians and scientists."
China. Chinese are genetically the same people who were the worlds richest civilisation for a large chunk of history, but who went into relative decline for around 400 years up to 1980, including a degree of Euro-colonisation, invasion by Japan, and loss of territory to Imperial Russia. What's changed between basket-case China 1912 and biggest Tiger 2012? Whatever it is, it ain't the people.
The thing that got me interested in HBD was when I was a low level adminstrator at a university and forced to attend diversity meetings and told that "all Whites and only Whites" were racist, because of "White privilege" and "institutional racism."
According to these PC diversity officers this explained the poor performance of NAMS.
Coming from a very tolerant and liberal White family I was very offended by these ideas and started to search for their origin.
That's how I stumbled upon HBD, cultural Marxism and other ideas.
We are experiencing a seemingly engineered decline in the White population in this country, and these ideas create hostility toward Whites which is not good.
I am not sure how these themes can be brought in but I am sure that a lot of other people besides myself were (and are) searching for answers to explain the pulpable hatred and hostility toward Whites by many Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics they all to often see in the media.
Sure, for poor NAM performance the media also blames the schools, the teachers, the parents, not enough money etc.. but somehow it always come back to slandering Whites as racists.
I guess it you could somehow suggest that poor NAM performance is not a reusult of White racism in a way that people could understand and not be offended by (for those new to HBD) it could help.
Anybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content.
Sorry, Steve you made your bed, you must now lie in it. The situation in HBD is that most of the compelling evidence for race differences was known half a century ago. The problem is not ignorance. It is resistance.
The public is like a reverse Fox Muldur - they don't want to believe. The public for whatever reason clings to the notion of racial equality. As you well know, there is an industry of academics devoted to disproving HBD. The late Steven Jay Gould toiled in that vineyard all his life.
So your task isn't to fashion rational arguments that will strike the scales from the eyes of the unknowing. Your task is to slowly grind down an entrenched enemy. That's needed but I'm not tough enough or patient enough to do it myself.
Around 1970 the Westinghouse study showed conclusively that Head Start didn't work. Naive young man that I was, I expected the program to be dissolved. Not so. Today Democrats warn that if elected Republicans would shut down Head Start. I wish.
The public wants Head Start to work. They want public schools to somehow make blacks employable. They wanted to make blacks good neighbors by giving them home ownership. Your job as you have defined it is not just to spread facts and theories. Your job is to tell the public that they can't have what they want so dearly. This is truly a thankless job.
"Sure, for poor NAM performance the media also blames the schools, the teachers, the parents, not enough money etc.. but somehow it always come back to slandering Whites as racists."
You have to look first at the kind of person who pursues a career in the media. They tend to be people who believe their words can "make things better." There is, after all, power in words, and they seek that if they've any success at all.
Also, they tend to be people who have no substantive education in the natural sciences. Sure, they've taken the requisite high school courses and the usual one "life science" course in college, but that's it.
They know nothing of evolution and natural selection. (I guess I shouldn't be too tough on them since even people schooled in science know of these). Yes, sure, they can define the terms but don't even think about applying Darwinian principles to what they see in life to help them understand what they see. In this way, they are as ignorant as the most religious fundamentalists they scorn.
Then, too, there are some, I believe, who DO understand why Africa is still primitive, why Hispanic and black children don't do as well in school as Asians and white kids, why crime is higher in black areas than in all others, but they figure, "I can't say that, and even if I could, it wouldn't solve anything." This, of course, is illustrative of their proclivity to be THE ONES who solve a problem.
They are short-sighted people, pretty funny really, since romantic liberals like to think of themselves as optimistic. While the young ones among them might remain optimistic for time, the older ones decide to hide the truth, hoping for...I don't know what.
There are a couple reality shows about survivalists. People dig underground compounds in the desert where they plan to sit out the: Yellowstone volcano explosion, meteor strikes, habitat catastrophy, or magnetic pole reversal.
If I were you I'd invest in a hidey-hole.
Barack Obama and Eric Holder are associated with the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and several other violent groups. If there is another race riot on the scale of the Rodney King riots if I were you, I would get out of LA.
Holder is believed to have an "enemies list". If that is so, your name is on that list and now your face can be seen on this video.
They know what you look like. They know where you live.
"The public wants Head Start to work. They want public schools to somehow make blacks employable. They wanted to make blacks good neighbors by giving them home ownership. Your job as you have defined it is not just to spread facts and theories. Your job is to tell the public that they can't have what they want so dearly. This is truly a thankless job."
You might be right, but if ever we have reached a time in the country's history that people are listening to mispent money, it's now.
Just this morning a cable network business anchor put up a point that I've heard spoken several times in the last month (the topic was student loans): "It's time we faced the idea that not all kids should go to college. Where'd we get that dumb idea?" This is something you'd not have heard a few years ago, even though many knew the truth of it.
I'd like to see Steve zero in more on policy and HBD. "Are certain groups of people for whom many government programs were designed to help really better off today or worse off?" The welfare state has killed the black family and healthy black culture. Take the Bay Area. Can anyone seriously suggest that blacks from Oakland, Richmond, just about all of Alameda and West Contra Costa counties are better off than pre-welfare bonanza days? I recall when they owned homes, when they had jobs, when they raised kids in two parent families, when parents saw to it their kids stayed out of trouble.
Steve might want to talk about WHY that has disappeared. While the white family structure of America has also disintegrated, the trend followed the disintegration of the black family structure, and is largely the product of government checks for pregancy and a lifetime of government support. Still, white dysfunction hasn't resulted in the violence in black dysfunction.
You can talk IQ all you want; you can talk innate propensity to aggression all you want, but the truth is that throughout the country at one time, there were black communities that were healthy from both a social and an economic standpoint, even if there weren't black doctors or lawyers or bankers.
4:30 "Like you can take information and turn it into a binary stream of ones and zeros, but you can't make it all ones"
(nerd warning) Bad analogy. The set of binary strings is countable, and hence isomorphic to unary strings, under e.g. prepending a 1 and interpreting as a base 2 integer; thus, 0110 => 10110 => 22 => 1111111111111111111111
Anyway, I disagree that being cute, nice or likeable will help change minds - not if you remain staidly logical. What you have to do is reframe. As Steve said, PC is about status, so you make your opponents' arguments sound low-status. Roissy's responses to feminists are instructive.
"As Steve said, PC is about status, so you make your opponents' arguments sound low-status."
Yes, but.... those who spout this pc nonsense and have influence with it aren't low status and they know that.
So, you have to look one of the markers of status other than money, and profession, and show that these people are lacking in those areas.
Education & intelligence.
The way to undercut their status is to politely reveal them as people with educations that are actually quite incomplete and unimpressive, people with bought degrees at fancy schools or people with nothing more than liberal arts educations. Portray them as NON-Renaissance men and women (they like to think they are) with no knowledge nor interest in science/math.
Or, perhaps they're not simply uneducated (ignorant) but just unintelligent since after all that education, they seem to know so little about subjects they spout off about.
In short, take the clothes off their pitiful educations, the thing they most pride themselves in and show them to be innumerate and incurious.
Not what I thought you looked like. But then the first time I saw a picture of James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, after several years of listening to him (waaaay before the internet) he wasn't either. Maybe no one ever is.
I also thiught the iterview was pretty nicely done.
The biggest thing I'd point out about your ideas is that PC is not a modern invention, it's an emergent property of groups of people. There are always enemies (real or imagined) and always ideas that may cast suspicion on you of being somehow allied to the enemies. There are always social classes of some kind, and ideas or beliefs or words that may mark you as being from one of the lower classes.
Not all tha long ago, it was communism rather than racism people used to tar their opponents with. Someone expressing too much skepticism about the wisdom of our cold-war foreign policies or MAD, or too critical of how we treated our poor, risked being shut up by being labeled a communist sympathizer. Hell, in the run up to the Iraq war, plenty of people were shut up by smearing them as terrorist sympathizers or traitors, despite the fact that the attackers we were theoretically supposed to hate had almost nothing to do with the people being smeared.
The underlying cause of this, I think, is that expressed ideas and beliefs are used by most people to indicate whose side they're on, what social class they belong to, etc.
Look at the numebr of people, right and left, who have firm opinions on AGW despite having not the background to even read any of the papers in climate modeling. Look at the number of people who are absolutely sure that IQ is meaningless and race is meaningless, without being able to describe anything about what an IQ trst actually is or measures, or knowing the first thing about genetics. Hell, remember how many utterly innumerate journalists, upn seeing that Lancet paper estimating the number of deaths in Iraq, suddenly expressed opinions on the validity of cluster sampling? (And by amazing coincidence, their opinions almost always lined up with their prior political beliefs.). Watch what happens now when someone starts talking about Obama's record in the war on terror among liberals who once called Bush every name in the book for the same policies.
Some people use ideas to talk about and think about reality. Most don't. In every society that has ever been, I suppose there have been topics that were hard to talk or think about because of the need to avoid some taboo association. And every now and then, this probably wipes your society out--it's just not permissible to talkor think honestly about whether dirty foreigners could defeat your local god-king, so you find yourself being slaughtered by those dirty foreigners.
The bright spot here is that the internet is making it extremely hard for the powerful people in control of responsible media organs to suppress whole lines of thought or pieces of evidence. Even if NBC news won't report the latest black on white hate crime, police beating caught on camera, or antiwar protest when the media are supporting the war, all those things will show up on the net, for those who care to see them.
You have a good voice. You should do some webcasting. Use appropriate backdrops. Go to a local track when speaking about sports or a nearby farm when addressing insufficient migrant labor. Be confident that you will only get better. I remember when Rush Limbaugh first started doing a TV show, he couldn't have been more awkward, fussing with his watch and with his clothes. His reaction to the criticism was very funny it went something like " folks, remember that I'm doing this for the first time and that you're not going to do the best you can do at something the first time - ask your wives."
Another content-related comment: One idea you did well with, and should continue hammering on, is the idea that HBD is a tool for understanding the world. Biologically and culturally, people are not all the same. Sometimes, both kinds of differences track nicely with easy to identify groups, and they help you understand your world a little better.
I also think there is a big benefit available to people who try to think deeply and coherently about stuff on the edge of their culture's taboos, as with HBD in US culture. Most everyone understands the obvious stuff (stay out of majority black neighborhoods at night unless you really know what you're doing, don't put heterosexual men in unsupervised charge of high school aged girls or gay men jn unsupervised charge of high school aged boys), but most people find it hard and disagreeable to think clearly about taboo subjects, and if they're unwilling to discuss or research those subjects, they will often walk off a cliff due to some error of logic or something.
The benefit isn't in winning arguments or elections or being a highly paid pundit, but rather in understanding and being able to make predictions about the world. As a strategy for making friends and rising in the social hierarchy, HBD is about as helpful to a modern American's prospects as skepticism about Communism was to a Russian intellectual in 1948. But if you want to make better decisions about whether to emigrate to the US or better predictioons about whether the USSR or US economies will grow faster, that skepticism was helpful for the Russian intellectual, and HBD is helpful now.
Just as an aside, have you noticed the way that prominent pundits and thinkers and politicians who were grossly wrong about Iraq all lost their jobs and influence? And then, how all the talking heads and apologists for big banks who were convinced the Fed and the banks and the markets knew what they were doing before the financial meltdown have lost all their influence and respect, and have been relegated to obscure academic posts?
Wait, you mean that didn't happen? You mean architects and boosters of our clusterfuck in Iraq and our disastrous financial meltdown are still in positions of power, making decisions and planing out future disasters? You mean people still take Tom Friedman seriously when he natters on about foreign policy? Tim Geithner has WHAT job now?
Say, it's almost as though being right or wrong is beside the point. As though those people are rewarded for something other than knowing what the world looks like and making good decisions based on that knowledge. Which suggests that showing the elites supporting elite opinion are wrong and grossly ignorant won't really have much effect. Remember how the masterminds of our War on Terror under the Bush administration kept publicly getting confused about whether Iraq was majority Sunni or Shia, which one was more common amng Kurds and in Iran, etc? Did you notice that this obvious ignorance of really basic facts did no more damage to their credibility than did the disastrous results of their poorly-informed decisions?
Who do you think would play you in a movie? For some reason I'm thinking Jeff Bridges...
ReplyDeleteI used to look like Judge Reinhold, but he recently got a lot of plastic surgery to fix that problem.
ReplyDeleteNo more beard?
ReplyDeleteWhen I doubt, Steve, always go with the black leather jacket. Whiskey would agree.
ReplyDeleteWhite women hate Hate HATE betas.
It could work with Liam Neeson, but dubbed over w/ Christian Bale's "American" voice
ReplyDeleteNice piece. My mental image of you is, or was, the bearded one. Beards are back in fashion, so I must compliment you on your contrarian sensibilities.
ReplyDeleteGilbert Pinfold.
I guy who thinks so much like me talks like that !!!!!!
ReplyDeleteWhen I read you, you have a Canadian accent in my head.
Is the index finger longer than the ring finger? Just asking.
ReplyDeleteNice of you to bring "Thing" along for the interview. He doesn't get much work anymore.
ReplyDeletepretty impressive interview, Steve
ReplyDeleteHey, you talk much slower than I thought you would. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteYou should do more interviews!
ReplyDelete-Hank the Plant
We seen this already.
ReplyDelete"Who do you think would play you in a movie?"
ReplyDeleteWasn't Epic Beard Man turned into a mestizo-mulatto?
So, how about a black guy play Sailer?
Good God Steve, you actually look respectable! Didn't you used to have a scruffy beard?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, you come across quite well. Your posts often display a goofy sense of humor, so I kind of expected you'd be a bit of a goofball, but you turn out to have a sober voice and a serious demeanor. (Actually, you look like an oil company spokesman or something. But in a good sort of way!)
Steve, you actually look a good bit like Mike Judge, which is interesting given this joke conspiracy theory I share with a friend about you having secretly been a writer on "King of the Hill." (That show being a veritable anthology of iSteveisms.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this video's been up on Youtube for a while now, just so you know.
Autism has spoken...
ReplyDeleteTo aid HBD in its struggle not to be crushed by political correctness, click here and give the top definition a "thumbs up" to ensure it stays on top!
ReplyDeleteYou look much different than I imagined.
ReplyDeleteI was expecting someone who talks the way Matt Taibbi writes. Good thing you are what you are though.
ReplyDeleteI even see a bit of Liam Neeson in the cheekbones and eyes...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, interesting point about potentially segregating sports events by race. I'm pretty sure most Americans (myself included) find the idea ridiculous, but I remember that there was serious debate in China about the inclusion of white ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan in the Asian Games back in the late 90s.
Many Chinese didn't feel it was proper for European whites to be included in an Asian competition.
the dad in RISKY BUSINESS
ReplyDeleteYou have a nice, easy, affable manner Steve; you seem like a guy who'd be hard to rile in a debate or in a conflict. I'll bet the other guy would get upset at your evenness of temper.
ReplyDeleteYou'd have made a good teacher.
You look very different from your iSteve.com photo.
ReplyDelete(You look nice of course. )
"For some reason I'm thinking Jeff Bridges"
ReplyDeleteIt would be cool to have Jeff Bridges play you in a movie.
It would be great to have Jeff Bridges play *one* in a movie i mean - one doesn't want to sound sucky uppy.
ReplyDelete"So, how about a black guy play Sailer?"
ReplyDeletelol, morgan freeman
Here we are all commenting on your looks (myself included) w/out touching on your explanation of what HBD means.
ReplyDeleteYou explained it concisely and clearly, and I can't see that anyone listening to it would not say, "He's right: some things are so obvious we ought to trust our eyes more. We should learn to look more carefully at our policies to see if we are basing them on truths, not on nonsense."
You are more handsome than before. Good job!
ReplyDeleteAwesome. You should do more videos.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it was a shaky start and that it turned out well in the end.
ReplyDeleteYou make what I think is a mistake common to HBDers, which is to present your views timidly and apologetically, giving the presentation a you're-not-gonna-like-what-I-have-to-say-so-let-me-do-my-best-to-be-diplmatic vibe. It leaves the listener wondering just what outrageous new views he's going to hear about, putting him on the defensive from the get-go. It's an understandable and even quite comfortably passable mistake, but I don't believe it's effective as simply proceeding to confidently state your views in a manner that assumes you're going to get quick agreement with them. That doesn't being stone serious. That'd probably work against you. Go ahead and have fun with it and liven things up. Just don't be apologetic.
Awesome. You should do more videos.
Incredible. A Whiskey post I can unreservedly agree with. Definitely do more videos. (You do want to expand your reach don't you?) I'd be seeing Craig Bodeker about it. That dude has talent.
Looks like you're on the set of "I Shouldn't Be Alive"
ReplyDelete"Horace said...
ReplyDeleteI guy who thinks so much like me talks like that !!!!!!
When I read you, you have a Canadian accent in my head."
The exact same thought popped into my head. In my head Mr. Sailer always sounded like Sideshow Bob with an Ottawa Valley Irish twist, just like me.
Well it's nice to see your face but don't be fooled by all the compliments. You are not a good media talking head.
ReplyDeleteWatch Fox news some night. Bill O'Reilly introduces Liz and Kimberly - and they both break into manic grins. You didn't smile once in thirteen minutes.
HBD scares the pants off the public. The face of HBD should be a happy face. You look furtive and guilty. Much of the public are like puppy dogs, they don't understand the words but react to tone and gestures. You need to more aggerssively sell the idea that HBD is wholesome, natural, and pleasant. Most of the public already believes that blacks are less intelligent but they are afraid to let that notion into consciousness lest they slide somehow into being a Nazi. They don't need arguments they need a role model.
You come across as sincere and knowledgeable - like someone explaining the benefits of a proctosygmoidoscopy. Study Mike Huckabee. He surrounds himself with an armor of niceness. No one would dare call such a sweet man a dirty racist.
Since I'm in the advice giving mode today - all your readers want you to write a book. Me too. But first you need to work on your TV persona. The most important part of the modern book of ideas is the book tour. If you can do a great two minutes on the morning shows you will have a best seller almost irrespective of what's on paper. Media promotion counts for a lot. Otherwise how can you explain O'Reilly's success as an author?
Albertosaurus
Steve
ReplyDeleteYou look very professorial for a guy who makes his living by panhandling off anonymous strangers on the internet.
Isn't it time you shook down your regulars for a few lousy bucks?
Jack
I liked political correctness as "status climbing by stupidity". No doubt that is how it plays out for the common-or-garden member of the chattering classes.
ReplyDeletePC is not as dumb as it looks. It is vital for the global elites status system - but for material, rather than moral, reasons. Since WWII, PC has a hard-core basis in promoting the political power and economic privilege of the West's high-status globalising elites.
Obviously the example of the Nazis showed how far political incorrectness could go wrong, and showed the danger of populist nationalism. Also the destruction of the British Empire by the Japanese showed that the easy days of white supremacy over the colored man were gone. The defeat of the US in Vietnam only reinforced that point.
More importantly, PC evolved to help the West's political elites recruit support from the (non-aligned) Third World decolonising powers. Hence the CIA's liberalism on this score. And the GOP's early support for Civil Rights, to thwart communists scoring propaganda points over the "Negro Question".
And later, once the Cold War was won, PC came in handy to the West's economic elites for recruiting labour, opening markets, attracting capital and extracting energy from the Developing World.
So PC serves the interests of globalising elites, of whom the cultural elites (media/academia) serve mainly as errand boys, rather than shock troops. As such PC is not going away fast.
"Anonymous FredR said...
ReplyDeleteWho do you think would play you in a movie? For some reason I'm thinking Jeff Bridges..."
Who would Hollywood get to play Steve in a movie? Obviously, it would be this guy:
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm501258752/tt0120586
"White women hate Hate HATE betas."
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't know about that, but in Steve's case it's a moot point, anyway, because there's nothing beta about him.
Tall, Smart and Handsome.
What's not to like?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-906137020156661587
ReplyDeletesarris, simon, insdorff
Maybe Luke Wilson. Anyhow, I couldn't resist, and put your video up at Ex-Army. But I vigorously plugged your blog, as usual.
ReplyDeletehttp://ex-army.blogspot.com/2012/06/steve-sailer-on-human-biodiversity.html
Talks like Jared Taylor.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do_w2V0-3D0&feature=player_embedded
ReplyDeleteUniversity of Minnesota condemns white people.
"Tall, Smart and Handsome.
ReplyDeleteWhat's not to like?"
Sheila, Babe, I think Steve would describe himself as a "beta."
So what happened to the Mencken Club annual meetings? Anti-faed?
ReplyDeleteto anon at 6:56 who said, jokingly, I'm sure,
ReplyDelete"Is the index finger longer than the ring finger? Just asking."
I looked at pics of the so-called gay male hand with its digit ratio and the so-called straight male hand with its digit ration, and the pics show that the forefinger is noticeably longer than all the fngers.
However, having seen the pictures, I took it upon myself last year or so to check out the hands of the five gay guys I know well. Simply said to them, "Let me see your hands." Two of them knew what I was checking, the others hadn't a clue.
Okay, so it wasn't a large sample, but not a one of them had a digit ration of the so-called "gay hand." We even used a ruler.
Yeah, Steve, please do a post on the University of Minnesota thing.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe the university president still has his job. He shouldn't. Where are the grads and donors?
you're a handsome guy
ReplyDeleteI just sent off an email of U of Minnesota Regents. I urge others to make the President of this school a guy w/out a job. From what I have read, the students are up in arms, but I only found out about this on the web, not on mainstream news.
ReplyDeleteWatch Fox news some night. Bill O'Reilly introduces Liz and Kimberly - and they both break into manic grins. You didn't smile once in thirteen minutes.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very good point. I saw a seasoned TV head rattled in debate once and the camera caught her looking decidedly alarmed but right at that moment she obviously "remembered to smile" and she broke out in this totally incongruous grin (given what was occurring). (Guess her ethnicity.... Okay, okay, let's not go there.) I scoffed, but then I quickly thought to myself, you know, why the hell not? If the public are indeed by and large idiots, why not give them what they want? After all, the public vastly outnumbers cynical bastards who see through it all like me.
So my advice is console yourself with results, Mr. Sailer. I bet that's how the above mentioned lady sleeps easy at night.
Which cellist is playing the Bach in the intro? I've pretty much ruled out Rostropovich and Casals.
ReplyDeleteYes, pc is really about social climbing and I think that calling people out, even as one smiles, as "a climber," might be quite effective face-to-face.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to try it.
I think Steve should write a book on sports (and sports only) as it relates to HBD. This is the 'wedge' to get the public to pay attention since it's the least controversial aspect of the issue. Start doing the book tour/cable news circuits. Get some mainstream publicity. Then, drop the hammer in the next book. Profit, etc.
ReplyDeleteI woould like to see more _new_ interviews with unsurpassable Mr. Sailer.
ReplyDeleteYour F.r.
What is the story about political correctness in ex communist countries ? Is it taking hold or has the experience of communism vaccinated the population against this ideology ?
ReplyDeleteOf course he looks "professional," didn't you pay attention to his adventures from Corporate Amerika + heavy golfing? If casting the black guy to play in Steve's movie we are down to Dennis Haysbert and Delroy Lindo basically; I could also see a heavily sedated Courtney B. Vance
ReplyDeleteWow! You're good looking.
ReplyDeleteI think you were very effective, when are going to be Rachel Maddow?
ReplyDeleteTodd Fletcher said...
ReplyDeleteI think you were very effective, when are going to be Rachel Maddow?
After the sex-change operation?
"Which cellist is playing the Bach in the intro? I've pretty much ruled out Rostropovich and Casals."
ReplyDeleteSounds like Mischa Maisky.
"Here we are all commenting on your looks (myself included) w/out touching on your explanation of what HBD means."
ReplyDeleteAnybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content.
You look better without a beard.
ReplyDeleteI also second that request for more videos. Would be great to have you load them up on the blog every now and then. Would definately generate more readers.
Is anyone else having trouble viewing this video in Firefox browser? I have same problem with half of RamZPaul videos with Firefox suddenly. Other YT videos work OK with Firefox. And all these videos work fine with Chrome.
ReplyDeleteJust want to make sure Firefox isn't messing with HBD people.
Steve, I saw this video a year ago (along with John Derbyshire's) but it was a pleasure again the second time. I believe that most commenters haven't discussed "HBD" issues because you eloquently stated the HBD case in a nonconfrontational and sensible manner. And were talking to the choir.
ReplyDeleteAs far as smiling like a talking-head pundit on TV: You don't and Mit Romney shouldn't either. His incessant car-salesman grin is what makes him look so slick and untrustworthy.
"'Which cellist is playing the Bach in the intro? I've pretty much ruled out Rostropovich and Casals.'
ReplyDeleteSounds like Mischa Maisky."
Not to me. I just compared the two Menuets (admittedly a very small sample) and his is more vigorous and impassioned. In the intro to Steve's clip, the playing is much smoother, maybe Yo-Yo Ma?
I was not familiar with his playing, though, and he had me at Hello, as they say. Thanks a million for your comment. Being a Fournier fan, I might not have bothered with Maisky otherwise.
"Anybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content."
ReplyDeleteWe comment on your content everyday.
You contrast Bio diversity with Cultural diversity. Great idea. All PC folks like Their Definition of diversity. You use Their diversity like a judo master uses momentum.
ReplyDeleteYou use a universal activity, running, to explain HBD. Excellent choice professor.
I too like political correctness as "status climbing through stupidity".
Watching you reminds me of seeing Joseph Sobran the first time. Holy cow, the man can speak well!
Suggestion - Make more videos, post on YouTube, collect ad revenue. Prepare for larger audiences.
Seeing and hearing you makes us feel like we know you. It also prepares us to buy your book, pay to see you speak, want to see you as a paid talker on TV, etc.
"You explained it concisely and clearly, and I can't see that anyone listening to it would not say, 'He's right: some things are so obvious we ought to trust our eyes more. We should learn to look more carefully at our policies to see if we are basing them on truths, not on nonsense.'"
ReplyDelete"Anybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content."
Okay, since I pointed out that we were too focused on the delivery and not enough on your content, let me add more specifically what probably works with general audiences in outlining the meaning of HBD and why talking about it is important. (BTW, I thought your discussion was absolutely clear and effective so the following is offered not as criticism but as points to remember whenever speaking to a general audience. In fact, I don't even understand why you or anyone else thought you got off to a slow start.
1) You did the right thing in beginning with some kind of sports analogy. It works for many reasons--we can all see who dominates sports, and we are sports-crazy society. Keep doing that.
2) Move to others "obviouses": "What else do our eyes tell us?" Supply possibilities...about gender, ("Even in young toddlerhood, boys are rougher in play than girls.") Appeal to what every parent and every grandparent and every babysitter has ever observed in babies, toddlers, the point being there are huge gender differences long before "society has molded a child."
3.) As you know, it's imperative to always stress you are speaking not of individuals but of groups.
4) You do this all the time, but be sure to offer that prediction, accurate prediction is what science is all about--keep it up.
5.) Use parental experience over and over again to drive home the points of HBD, even within a family-- ask the parents in the audience if, by a certain age, they can predict which child will score better in math, which in languages, which will bring home good grades, which will not, which takes after mom, which after dad. Point out, discuss the personal in asking about mother's side of family versus father's side of family. (Of course, from here you can decide how far out to extend "family differences," all the way to race and racial differences and your Sailer, easy-to-grasp definition of race.
6.) Approach the importance of discussing HBD because it has policy implications by asking audience about their own experiences in school--were they tracked? Not tracked? Did it work for them? Fail? How was tracking decided? Fairly? Unfairly?
Even as students, did they notice programs or policies that were utter failures, yet still pushed year after year?
Because Americans are positively elephants when it comes to recalling what was wrong with their schools and with their education or with their teachers, and because they are highly emotional about those past experiences, use questions about their education to broach the notion of the institutionalizing of policies and programs that don't work yet are still sucking up billions decades later.
I don't know if this is what you wanted, but my point is that the more personal you make your discussion, the more you let people understand that acknowledging HBD is really about letting the very personal evidence one has gathered from a lifetime of observation reveal some truths, and that fostering discussion of these general truths can help us develop better policies, spend money more effectively, and make more informed choices for ourselves and our kids. The more personal the discussion is made, the more harmless the term becomes, and the more manipulative seem the people who wish to quash it.
****They don't need arguments they need a role model. ****
ReplyDeleteHere is the pretty female face of HBD?
Hey Ruka. She has a number of interesting videos.
I saw Richard Thomas should play Steve in a movie.
ReplyDelete"****They don't need arguments they need a role model. ****
ReplyDeleteHere is the pretty female face of HBD?
Hey Ruka. She has a number of interesting videos.
6/22/12 2:59 PM"
What a beautiful, eloquent, bright young woman. Few people can state a case about anything so well. One problem: her life is destroyed - she'll have to change her name or work for herself. A brief porn career would have been less damaging.
Be honest, how many readers here would advise their daughters to post such material. So brave!
As far as smiling like a talking-head pundit on TV: You don't and Mit Romney shouldn't either. His incessant car-salesman grin is what makes him look so slick and untrustworthy.
ReplyDeleteThere is a crucial difference. Romney is telling people what they WANT to hear. Sailer is telling peope what they DON'T want to hear (for now).
Similar to the rule of thumb journalists supposedly follow of treating famous people as though they're not famous and treating people who aren't famous as though they are, uncontroversial political points are probably beast made with exaggerated seriousness while controversial points points probably benefit from exaggerated relaxedness.
Perhaps my point would be easier to grasp by considering an extreme: you don't really think interviewing through clenched teeth would help advance a HBDer's career do you?
Re "Bio diversity vs Cultural diversity"
ReplyDeleteJanissaries. Genetically the brightest young Christians, culturally the most dedicated Moslems - elite fighting troops.
"The Janissaries were chosen before they reached adulthood from among the Christian population living in Anatolia and the Balkan peninsula to become the elite fighting force of the Ottoman Empire. A portion of these selected children, as they were considered to be more talented, received a higher standard of education to become the ruling class of viziers as well as engineers, architects, physicians and scientists."
China. Chinese are genetically the same people who were the worlds richest civilisation for a large chunk of history, but who went into relative decline for around 400 years up to 1980, including a degree of Euro-colonisation, invasion by Japan, and loss of territory to Imperial Russia. What's changed between basket-case China 1912 and biggest Tiger 2012? Whatever it is, it ain't the people.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteNot sure what to add to what you said.
The thing that got me interested in HBD was when I was a low level adminstrator at a university and forced to attend diversity meetings and told that "all Whites and only Whites" were racist, because of "White privilege" and "institutional racism."
According to these PC diversity officers this explained the poor performance of NAMS.
Coming from a very tolerant and liberal White family I was very offended by these ideas and started to search
for their origin.
That's how I stumbled upon HBD, cultural Marxism and other ideas.
We are experiencing a seemingly engineered decline in the White population in this country, and these ideas create hostility toward Whites which is not good.
I am not sure how these themes can be brought in but I am sure that a lot of other people besides myself were (and are) searching for answers to explain the pulpable hatred and hostility toward Whites by many Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics they all to often see in the media.
Sure, for poor NAM performance the media also blames the schools, the teachers, the parents, not enough money etc.. but somehow it always come back to slandering Whites as racists.
I guess it you could somehow suggest that poor NAM performance is not a reusult of White racism in a way that people could understand and not be offended by (for those new to HBD) it could help.
Anybody else have any comments related to what I had to say? I don't mind comments on my looks, but would be interested in responses to my content.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Steve you made your bed, you must now lie in it. The situation in HBD is that most of the compelling evidence for race differences was known half a century ago. The problem is not ignorance. It is resistance.
The public is like a reverse Fox Muldur - they don't want to believe. The public for whatever reason clings to the notion of racial equality. As you well know, there is an industry of academics devoted to disproving HBD. The late Steven Jay Gould toiled in that vineyard all his life.
So your task isn't to fashion rational arguments that will strike the scales from the eyes of the unknowing. Your task is to slowly grind down an entrenched enemy. That's needed but I'm not tough enough or patient enough to do it myself.
Around 1970 the Westinghouse study showed conclusively that Head Start didn't work. Naive young man that I was, I expected the program to be dissolved. Not so. Today Democrats warn that if elected Republicans would shut down Head Start. I wish.
The public wants Head Start to work. They want public schools to somehow make blacks employable. They wanted to make blacks good neighbors by giving them home ownership. Your job as you have defined it is not just to spread facts and theories. Your job is to tell the public that they can't have what they want so dearly. This is truly a thankless job.
Albertosaurus
"Sure, for poor NAM performance the media also blames the schools, the teachers, the parents, not enough money etc.. but somehow it always come back to slandering Whites as racists."
ReplyDeleteYou have to look first at the kind of person who pursues a career in the media. They tend to be people who believe their words can "make things better." There is, after all, power in words, and they seek that if they've any success at all.
Also, they tend to be people who have no substantive education in the natural sciences. Sure, they've taken the requisite high school courses and the usual one "life science" course in college, but that's it.
They know nothing of evolution and natural selection. (I guess I shouldn't be too tough on them since even people schooled in science know of these). Yes, sure, they can define the terms but don't even think about applying Darwinian principles to what they see in life to help them understand what they see. In this way, they are as ignorant as the most religious fundamentalists they scorn.
Then, too, there are some, I believe, who DO understand why Africa is still primitive, why Hispanic and black children don't do as well in school as Asians and white kids, why crime is higher in black areas than in all others, but they figure, "I can't say that, and even if I could, it wouldn't solve anything." This, of course, is illustrative of their proclivity to be THE ONES who solve a problem.
They are short-sighted people, pretty funny really, since romantic liberals like to think of themselves as optimistic. While the young ones among them might remain optimistic for time, the older ones decide to hide the truth, hoping for...I don't know what.
There are a couple reality shows about survivalists. People dig underground compounds in the desert where they plan to sit out the: Yellowstone volcano explosion, meteor strikes, habitat catastrophy, or magnetic pole reversal.
ReplyDeleteIf I were you I'd invest in a hidey-hole.
Barack Obama and Eric Holder are associated with the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and several other violent groups. If there is another race riot on the scale of the Rodney King riots if I were you, I would get out of LA.
Holder is believed to have an "enemies list". If that is so, your name is on that list and now your face can be seen on this video.
They know what you look like. They know where you live.
Albertosaurus
"The public wants Head Start to work. They want public schools to somehow make blacks employable. They wanted to make blacks good neighbors by giving them home ownership. Your job as you have defined it is not just to spread facts and theories. Your job is to tell the public that they can't have what they want so dearly. This is truly a thankless job."
ReplyDeleteYou might be right, but if ever we have reached a time in the country's history that people are listening to mispent money, it's now.
Just this morning a cable network business anchor put up a point that I've heard spoken several times in the last month (the topic was student loans): "It's time we faced the idea that not all kids should go to college. Where'd we get that dumb idea?" This is something you'd not have heard a few years ago, even though many knew the truth of it.
I'd like to see Steve zero in more on policy and HBD. "Are certain groups of people for whom many government programs were designed to help really better off today or worse off?"
The welfare state has killed the black family and healthy black culture. Take the Bay Area. Can anyone seriously suggest that blacks from Oakland, Richmond, just about all of Alameda and West Contra Costa counties are better off than pre-welfare bonanza days? I recall when they owned homes, when they had jobs, when they raised kids in two parent families, when parents saw to it their kids stayed out of trouble.
Steve might want to talk about WHY that has disappeared. While the white family structure of America has also disintegrated, the trend followed the disintegration of the black family structure, and is largely the product of government checks for pregancy and a lifetime of government support. Still, white dysfunction hasn't resulted in the violence in black dysfunction.
You can talk IQ all you want; you can talk innate propensity to aggression all you want, but the truth is that throughout the country at one time, there were black communities that were healthy from both a social and an economic standpoint, even if there weren't black doctors or lawyers or bankers.
"The thing that got me interested in HBD was when I was a low level adminstrator at a university..."
ReplyDelete"You have to look first at the kind of person who pursues a career in the media"
And at the kind of person who peruses a career as a "low-level administrator" - POW!
4:30 "Like you can take information and turn it into a binary stream of ones and zeros, but you can't make it all ones"
ReplyDelete(nerd warning) Bad analogy. The set of binary strings is countable, and hence isomorphic to unary strings, under e.g. prepending a 1 and interpreting as a base 2 integer; thus, 0110 => 10110 => 22 => 1111111111111111111111
Anyway, I disagree that being cute, nice or likeable will help change minds - not if you remain staidly logical. What you have to do is reframe. As Steve said, PC is about status, so you make your opponents' arguments sound low-status. Roissy's responses to feminists are instructive.
"As Steve said, PC is about status, so you make your opponents' arguments sound low-status."
ReplyDeleteYes, but.... those who spout this pc nonsense and have influence with it aren't low status and they know that.
So, you have to look one of the markers of status other than money, and profession, and show that these people are lacking in those areas.
Education & intelligence.
The way to undercut their status is to politely reveal them as people with educations that are actually quite incomplete and unimpressive, people with bought degrees at fancy schools or people with nothing more than liberal arts educations. Portray them as NON-Renaissance men and women (they like to think they are) with no knowledge nor interest in science/math.
Or, perhaps they're not simply uneducated (ignorant) but just unintelligent since after all that education, they seem to know so little about subjects they spout off about.
In short, take the clothes off their pitiful educations, the thing they most pride themselves in and show them to be innumerate and incurious.
Not what I thought you looked like. But then the first time I saw a picture of James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, after several years of listening to him (waaaay before the internet) he wasn't either. Maybe no one ever is.
ReplyDeleteI also thiught the iterview was pretty nicely done.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest thing I'd point out about your ideas is that PC is not a modern invention, it's an emergent property of groups of people. There are always enemies (real or imagined) and always ideas that may cast suspicion on you of being somehow allied to the enemies. There are always social classes of some kind, and ideas or beliefs or words that may mark you as being from one of the lower classes.
Not all tha long ago, it was communism rather than racism people used to tar their opponents with. Someone expressing too much skepticism about the wisdom of our cold-war foreign policies or MAD, or too critical of how we treated our poor, risked being shut up by being labeled a communist sympathizer. Hell, in the run up to the Iraq war, plenty of people were shut up by smearing them as terrorist sympathizers or traitors, despite the fact that the attackers we were theoretically supposed to hate had almost nothing to do with the people being smeared.
The underlying cause of this, I think, is that expressed ideas and beliefs are used by most people to indicate whose side they're on, what social class they belong to, etc.
Look at the numebr of people, right and left, who have firm opinions on AGW despite having not the background to even read any of the papers in climate modeling. Look at the number of people who are absolutely sure that IQ is meaningless and race is meaningless, without being able to describe anything about what an IQ trst actually is or measures, or knowing the first thing about genetics. Hell, remember how many utterly innumerate journalists, upn seeing that Lancet paper estimating the number of deaths in Iraq, suddenly expressed opinions on the validity of cluster sampling? (And by amazing coincidence, their opinions almost always lined up with their prior political beliefs.). Watch what happens now when someone starts talking about Obama's record in the war on terror among liberals who once called Bush every name in the book for the same policies.
Some people use ideas to talk about and think about reality. Most don't. In every society that has ever been, I suppose there have been topics that were hard to talk or think about because of the need to avoid some taboo association. And every now and then, this probably wipes your society out--it's just not permissible to talkor think honestly about whether dirty foreigners could defeat your local god-king, so you find yourself being slaughtered by those dirty foreigners.
The bright spot here is that the internet is making it extremely hard for the powerful people in control of responsible media organs to suppress whole lines of thought or pieces of evidence. Even if NBC news won't report the latest black on white hate crime, police beating caught on camera, or antiwar protest when the media are supporting the war, all those things will show up on the net, for those who care to see them.
You have a good voice. You should do some webcasting. Use appropriate backdrops. Go to a local track when speaking about sports or a nearby farm when addressing insufficient migrant labor. Be confident that you will only get better. I remember when Rush Limbaugh first started doing a TV show, he couldn't have been more awkward, fussing with his watch and with his clothes. His reaction to the criticism was very funny it went something like " folks, remember that I'm doing this for the first time and that you're not going to do the best you can do at something the first time - ask your wives."
ReplyDeleteAnother content-related comment: One idea you did well with, and should continue hammering on, is the idea that HBD is a tool for understanding the world. Biologically and culturally, people are not all the same. Sometimes, both kinds of differences track nicely with easy to identify groups, and they help you understand your world a little better.
ReplyDeleteI also think there is a big benefit available to people who try to think deeply and coherently about stuff on the edge of their culture's taboos, as with HBD in US culture. Most everyone understands the obvious stuff (stay out of majority black neighborhoods at night unless you really know what you're doing, don't put heterosexual men in unsupervised charge of high school aged girls or gay men jn unsupervised charge of high school aged boys), but most people find it hard and disagreeable to think clearly about taboo subjects, and if they're unwilling to discuss or research those subjects, they will often walk off a cliff due to some error of logic or something.
The benefit isn't in winning arguments or elections or being a highly paid pundit, but rather in understanding and being able to make predictions about the world. As a strategy for making friends and rising in the social hierarchy, HBD is about as helpful to a modern American's prospects as skepticism about Communism was to a Russian intellectual in 1948. But if you want to make better decisions about whether to emigrate to the US or better predictioons about whether the USSR or US economies will grow faster, that skepticism was helpful for the Russian intellectual, and HBD is helpful now.
Anonymous 6/24:
ReplyDeleteJust as an aside, have you noticed the way that prominent pundits and thinkers and politicians who were grossly wrong about Iraq all lost their jobs and influence? And then, how all the talking heads and apologists for big banks who were convinced the Fed and the banks and the markets knew what they were doing before the financial meltdown have lost all their influence and respect, and have been relegated to obscure academic posts?
Wait, you mean that didn't happen? You mean architects and boosters of our clusterfuck in Iraq and our disastrous financial meltdown are still in positions of power, making decisions and planing out future disasters? You mean people still take Tom Friedman seriously when he natters on about foreign policy? Tim Geithner has WHAT job now?
Say, it's almost as though being right or wrong is beside the point. As though those people are rewarded for something other than knowing what the world looks like and making good decisions based on that knowledge. Which suggests that showing the elites supporting elite opinion are wrong and grossly ignorant won't really have much effect. Remember how the masterminds of our War on Terror under the Bush administration kept publicly getting confused about whether Iraq was majority Sunni or Shia, which one was more common amng Kurds and in Iran, etc? Did you notice that this obvious ignorance of really basic facts did no more damage to their credibility than did the disastrous results of their poorly-informed decisions?