Dude, who even knows.
Post with 5 notes
Paywalled but still, first serious profile I’ve seen sign of of a guy who I first came across two decades ago and have basically assumed everyone moderately clued in to contemporary conservatism to have read ever since
Post reblogged from Marta Monica Jaramillo Restrepo AKA La Tuti with 201 notes
That last exchange being in Steve Sailer’s notes is just ::chef kiss::
Post with 7 notes
Is Steve Sailer even officially bipolar?
I’ve just been assuming he was since – God, literally decades ago at this point – I saw his theory that a lot more of history than you’d think turned on who happened to be manic at the critical time and I was like “hmm, that’s not really something I can see someone pondering about from outside”, and then realized there were a lot of stretches where he seemed to be posting links or blockquotes with maybe one original sentence to keep his blog warm, and then times I’d check it at like 2AM and he’d just written three dense multi-paragraph posts each referencing four posts from months ago and in 15 minutes when my internet content ran out and I started instinctively pulling up every site I could think of again he’d written two more
Post with 17 notes
I actually first encountered Sailer in the comments of Yglesias’ ThinkProgress blog in the early 2000s
Question with 6 notes
Anonymous asked:
What pivot to White racial identity? Academia and plenty of journalists have talked about it but the Republican Party just .... didn’t do anything. Even Trump was pretty much entirely reactive. Ban CRT sure, but it’s not like any actual affirmation or pride in White identity is within the Pale. The Sailer Strategy was never enacted.
It’s not showing up in federal elected yet (well, Paul Gosar maybe, he doesn’t seem any hesitant after Steve King) but the cadre for the next generation is marinated in it. Institutional conservatism had a stronger establishment arm already in 1980 but that’s really what Reagan did, by 1994 the Contract With America was taking Congress
Also in a world where Hillary won she might well have ramped back up ‘70s style DOJ trawling for civil rights cases to file in their own name, there was rumbling about that at the end of Obama, instead now Biden’s letting that sleeping dog lie. Adjusting the political balance of power constrains the possibility space.
Anyway this reminds me in the mid-2000s, once when I was trying to be a screenwriter in LA I went down to Orange County for a seminar at Chapman on culture work run by the IHS (Big Libertarian development arm)
And I ended up writing this story, How Yusuf and Hassan Saved 9/11, which I’m still quite proud of, for the capstone project, and I appreciated that Big Libertarian shows nice hospitality, having rooftop lounge cases-of-beer kickbacks every night. And I noticed, lingering one night, that at one point everyone at the tables of movement professionals and would-bes was doing “top this!” banter and interesting follow-up points we had all clearly picked up from Steve Sailer at some point and not mentioning it
Post with 22 notes
So, everyone else made the connection between how Steve Sailer had a theory that more of history than we know was based on which major figures were bipolar and hypomanic at any given critical point, and the way sometimes he would make one placeholder post every four days and sometimes he would post five major essays in a row at 2am and edit them live, right?
Post with 23 notes
me, scoffing at vulgar twitter racists: kid, I’ve been reading Steve Sailer before you were born
me, startled aware: that might be true
Question with 19 notes
Anonymous asked: do Steve Sailer!
The quick version is pointing out his graceful slides into and out of movements and moments, the way he poses humility while he actively tries to become a kingmaker - in everyone currently important’s comments all the time making intelligent points, making posts whose real point I can tell is to link to some upstart and baptize them as within the “/ourguy/ but acceptable” circle
The way he namedrops more and more as the years go on, the time I was at a libertarian establishment event in the 2000s and at the afterparty we related these sophisticated insights and outrages to each other and I wondered who was going to first mention we OBVIOUSLY all got this from him but no one
The way the skeleton key to him is his sports posts, about golf course design and high school football and about his postwar utopia San Fernando Valley childhood where all the Protestant and Catholic and Jewish kids were casually American together and that’s what made everyone think the blacks would work too
And that didn’t work so that’s the fall of man and so much of his stuff, from the genetics/haplotypes stuff he used to push harder to the culture war he genteelly draws from now is aimed at building a justification to cut off the blacks as ballast so it can be his postwar utopia childhood again
Post with 12 notes
Spinning the Cylinder with Michael Anton
So two recent things on Michael “Decius” Anton, Machiavellian “Flight 93 Election” author turned White House pet intellectual.
First, the man’s own foreign policy manifesto and then this beat-sweetener from Vanity Fair.
Let’s start with his “America and the Liberal International Order”. Basically it’s his introductory remarks to the “foreign policy community”, arguing that the course he’s charting is well within their norms, practices, and ideals. As for what that course is, it’s down in the “Reforming the Liberal International Order” section. I read that once and got the sense it was a real monumental shift, but when I went to write it down I couldn’t really put my finger on what it consisted of and honestly I still can’t, which is about what you’d expect from a diplomatic theorist with a Straussian background, I suppose.
Basically giving up on democracy promotion as a goal in itself, reserving it for when democratization furthers other goals, “in a place where and at a time when we have the capacity to water it, and it is in our interest to do so”?
Orienting around controlling a (possibly illiberal) periphery for the sake of a core “liberal international order”, identified with old NATO, “The ‘liberal international order’ is thus better termed the ‘liberal rich-country order’ or—if you prefer foreign policy jargon—the ‘liberal functioning-core order.’”?
I mean I get that, but it’s really hard to picture what it means in practice. South Korea was an authoritarian periphery for most of the Cold War, now it’s a reasonably liberal international core, Turkey was a kind of authoritarian periphery even when it was in old NATO, now it’s becoming less Western liberal core because it’s becoming more democratic. What would this doctrine do, or have done with that? If Wahhabists AND Communists both rise in Indonesia or Malaysia, what does that mean to the US and how does it react under this operating philosophy?
But I guess a lot of diplomacy is about strategic vagueness to be filled in later. In pettier notes:
- His line that “Since [Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid], we have suffered two mass casualty attacks on American territory.” I assume that’s Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And like, fair, the Philippines had upgraded from “territory” to “commonwealth” in the decade before the capture of Manila and the Bataan Death March, but they weren’t independent yet.
- Read the “Prestige” section, about prestige/contempt and how they’re generated, and how they affect negotiating success, and alliance-building, and influence on vital regions, and try to tell me that’s not a design doc for a Paradox grand strategy game.
- In that same section, he invokes the wisdom of Osama bin Laden, Thucydides, and Steve “one observer” Sailer, in that order.
Now the beat-sweetener. Tells what his job is (N.S.C. senior communications director), what that involves (distilling Trump’s foreign policy “message” and figuring out how various state ideological apparatuses can promote it), who had an equivalent role before him (Ben Rhodes, apparently). Gives some color: guy likes Machiavelli, guy likes suits. One colleague says “huh, really?”, a mentor says “I could see it”. Is he alt-right? Nah but there’s overlap. One guy says the themes carry over and the difference is sophistication.
The one really interesting thing here is the recurring theme of California. The mentor talks about Anton’s elegaic take on the lost Republican middle class California. Anton gives quote to confirm it. An essay is linked for more support. And remember quoting Sailer. Remember what I said about Sailer the other day, how the California transformation explains him.
So, that’s Trumpian intellectualism: not Breitbart, but Sailer.
Link with 2 notes
Steve Sailer: iSteve: "What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden" →
I guess conspiracy theories are Sailer’s new hobbyhorse. Fair enough. People like the 9/11 truthers are kind of ridiculous, but after all, the official story of 9/11 was “this was a grand conspiracy organized by a reclusive mastermind hidden out in a secret mountain lair in the middle of nowhere”.
Anyway, my personal conspiracy theory (geopolitical headcanon, if you will) is that Osama bin Laden was never killed; he was instead captured and taken to his own Saint Helena on one of the more obscure American Pacific islands, where every morning (Islamic holy days excepted) a kindly interrogator comes in with mint tea and almonds, plays chess with him, and gently prods the former CIA asset to tell his story.
I have no evidence for this whatsoever; I believe it for the same reason anyone believes in conspiracy theories - the secret hope the world is actually being run by someone halfway competent.