From Aporia:

Steve Sailer: Still noticing after all these years

Bo Winegard reflects on the immense influence of Steve Sailer and reviews ‘Noticing’, a newly published anthology of Sailer’s essays.

MAR 28, 2024
Written by Bo Winegard

When I was a young, closeted race realist in graduate school, I first began to read Steve Sailer’s essays—and I was impressed both by their honesty and by their elegant but unpretentious style. He wrote the things I wanted to say. And how I wanted to say them. But I was a social psychologist. And being a race realist in social psychology is like being a happy man at a funeral. You are certain that you are not alone but prudent enough to keep your views private. At least, until you really trust somebody.

Thus, I was a solitary Sailer reader. For a while. Eventually I tired of prudence. Race, IQ, immigration—these were topics too important to suppress. Therefore, I became more outspoken about my views—by which I mean that I broached the topic of race and IQ from time to time. What I discovered surprised me. I was far from the only Sailer fan around. This does not mean that psychology graduate programs are full of surreptitious race realists like resistance fighters in some occupied country. Far from it.

But I did find a loyal club of fellow dissidents.

We discussed race and IQ and immigration and crime. And of course Sailer. Each of his heretical sentences thrilled us. “Can you believe he wrote that?!” we’d exclaim before analyzing his latest essay. Reading and discussing Sailer felt rebellious. And rebellion is very attractive to young intellectuals. But Sailer was more than a provocateur; he was a serious thinker. Wrestling with his writings made us more knowledgeable and more aware of important subterranean ideas. (As Sailer has noted, many of these ideas are mainstream in academia if you translate the deceptive nomenclature of journal articles into ordinary language.)

Sailer’s influence on me was...

I have noticed a trend in urban architecture of large buildings that look like they should not be able to stand without violating several laws of physics. I understand it makes an impression but can we just not? Like what message are we trying to send with the ‘it’ll all come… pic.twitter.com/InDioq9dkM

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) March 27, 2024

I’m sure these new cantilever skyscrapers are designed by fine engineers who have checked everything over and over and over. But they make a lot of people antsy just looking at them. And they make you think about the distant future.

I f the 1250′ Empire State Building fell over sideways, it would wipe out a wide swath from, say, 34th St. to 39th St.

But nobody worries about that, in part because the Empire State Building looks like it was built to last. If, God forbid, it falls down, it will likely fall straight down like the World Trade Centers.

Nor does the Empire State Building make you ponder what troubles are we leaving to future generations. Whereas hanging cantilever skyscrapers get you worried about how big a fund the developers have set aside for maintenance and eventual deconstruction.

They have set aside a vast reserve, haven’t they?

It’s nice to hope that future generations will be richer than us so they will easily be able to afford to maintain our follies so that they don’t fall over sideways. But what if they aren’t? Is it wise to leave them cantilever time bomb skyscrapers for them to try to scrape up the money to deal with?

The late Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) was an IQ researcher for the Israeli military in an era when it did a world-historical good job at figuring out who its brightest guys were.

The problem with IQ science, however, is that it get pretty repetitious pretty quick. So with his IQ researcher pal Abram Tversky, Kahneman progressed into researching shortcomings in human cognition, for which he became extraordinarily famous among the nerdier sort of online thinker in the early 21st Century. I’m more of a glass-is-half-full guy, so I was less impressed than my peers with Kahneman’s glass-is-half-empty discoveries:

Michael Lewis’s Hot Hand
Steve Sailer
January 18, 2017

From his 1989 Wall Street memoir Liar’s Poker to his new book, The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis has succeeded his mentor Tom Wolfe as our top Southern center-right nonfiction author. …

Three of Lewis’s nonfiction works have been made into hit movies: The Blind Side, Moneyball, and The Big Short. Perhaps to challenge Hollywood screenwriters to extend their range even more, Lewis has written his least filmable book yet, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, about the Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their research into common cognitive mistakes.

In an age fascinated by artificial intelligence, Tversky (who died in 1996) and Kahneman (who is now 82) specialized in understanding “natural stupidity.” Their work won Kahneman the quasi-Nobel prize in economics in 2002.

After the 2008 financial crash, Kahneman became wildly fashionable as a corrective to the “rational man” assumption of economics. His 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, about how people make mistakes on the logic puzzles Kahneman contrived for them, was a huge best-seller (although I doubt too many people who bought it at airport bookstores ever finished it).

Now Lewis has written a biography of the two, claiming that Tversky and Kahneman had figured...

The late Richard Serra was perhaps the most intensely hated artist of the later 20th century by the public because wealthy institutions loved to ruin pretty downtown parks for officeworkers just wanting to eat their lunch amidst greenery by installing one of his giant rusting metal walls smack in the middle of it. As I blogged in 2002:

In Pasadena, Caltech foolishly hired Richard “Tilted Arc” Serra to create a “world class” sculpture on the grassy lawn where hard-working nerds like to relax by tossing the old Frisbee around. Not exactly surprisingly, Serra responded by designing one of his typical viewer-victimizing Berlin Walls to split the field in half, block the sightlines, and potentially break the necks of the Frisbee players. The students have been protesting and the college administration is trying to maintain a low profile. Go nerds!

But I’ve actually seen a Richard Serra sculpture that adds to rather than detracts from the landscape. Instead of ruining some public space, it was in the natural habitat of a Serra: on the manicured 3 acre front lawn of some Master of the Universe in the Hamptons (which is likely the most modern art-oriented suburb in the country). It’s this guy’s private lawn so you don’t have to waste part of your limited lunch hour navigating around it, it’s a rather pleasant shape for a Serra, and it’s off to the side of the lawn in front of trees rather than diagonal down the middle. So, it’s actually popular with passers-by. From the New York Times:

Home Is a Sculpture Garden, but the Art Doesn’t Stop at the Door

Monumental works by Serra, Noguchi and many others occupy the grounds, and the collection of Louise and Leonard Riggio continues inside their house.

By Hilarie M. Sheets
July 10, 2019

A 300-ton steel sculpture by Richard Serra snakes across the lawn of Leonard and Louise Riggio’s Tudor-style mansion in Bridgehampton, N.Y. “The Serra has become a landmark...

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Buy My Book

Steve Sailer March 27, 2024

My anthology Noticing is coming out in paperback this week from Passage Press for $29.95.

Please buy it.

Also, I’m continuing my book tour with a speaking event in Los Angeles this Friday evening, before stops in Austin, New College in Sarasota, Fla., the West Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Here are my public speaking engagements (usual ticket price $45):

Friday, March 29, 2024: Los Angeles
Friday, April 12, 2024: Austin
Tuesday, April 23, 2024: Sarasota, Fla.
Friday, May 3, 2024: New York City (may be sold out)

And here are Frequently Asked Questions about my book:

Please note the addition of the Sarasota, Florida event and the deletion of the Miami, Florida public event. Those who have purchased Miami tickets will have them refunded. (The smaller private dinner in Miami will go on as scheduled.)

Q. Where are you speaking in Los Angeles this Friday evening?

A. In central Los Angeles near multiple freeways, i.e., not in Santa Monica or Pasadena.

Q. Yes, but where?

A. When you buy a ticket and prove you aren’t some violent Antifa maniac who hates the First Amendment, you’ll be informed of the precise address by email.

Q. Wait a minute: Are you concerned about criminal violence and are taking precautions against it?

Please read the whole thing there.

Presidents of the United States tend to be jocks rather than artists. How many Presidents have had strong artistic orientations, outside of rhetoric? Not many.

Jefferson was a fine, if impractical, architect (Monticello was a money pit: its octagon dome constantly leaked, so he could never afford to follow the enterprising Washington’s example and free his slaves in his will). He more or less invented the campus quad, a great American innovation in landscape architecture. (Oxford and Cambridge had lawns enclosed within college buildings, but Jefferson’s U. of Virginia was the second campus with multiple buildings around a big lawn, and it set a huge example.)

But we have to go back 215 years to Jefferson.

Lincoln was, at times, a master prose stylist, but his genius was of a lawyerly rather than imaginative or particularly aesthetic tendency.

Ronald Reagan was an actor, but the Gipper’s trademark role was as a jock, Notre Dame football player George Gipp:

I suppose you could argue that Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump were artists of personality, but that’s extending the concept pretty far.

In contrast, many Presidents have had athletic interests, as exemplified by the huge fraction going back to William Howard Taft who have, at some point in their adult lives, been enthusiastic golfers. Even guys who were pretty much over golf by the time they finally made it to the White House, like Reagan and Nixon, played enough in their early middle ages to claim decent 12 handicaps.

The last President to not be a golfer was 99-year-old Jimmy Carter. Before him, Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover were the only Presidents in the last 115 years to not play golf. They each won only one Presidential election.

Golf represents this weird counter-counterculture of conservative artistry obsessed with beauty that is divorced from the mainstream counterculture of the art world. Over the years, I have looked in perhaps a dozen bookstores devoted to the arts, such...

Sadly, this is for real. It’s not made up with AI or anything. It’s just as bad as it looks.

At 1:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, a 1000 foot container freighter ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing a huge section of I-695 to collapse into the river.

I’m guessing deaths are most likely in the two digits. At rush hour, however, the toll might have been in the four digits.

pic.twitter.com/us0S0vc5AP

— Kyle Daly (@kyledalyfagan) March 26, 2024

Baltimore is about the 8th biggest port in the U.S. I’d imagine the port is now blocked off, but the Key bridge is so long (8000′) there might be a way around. The Port of Baltimore specialties include importing cars and exporting coal.

There was a similar disaster in St. Petersburg, FL in 1980 when a freighter hit the Sunshine truss bridge during a sudden intense squall that made the ship’s radar useless. 35 motorists were killed when 1200 feet of roadway fell into the water.

In the live cam footage, a couple of minutes or so before the ship hit the pillar, all its lights went off. After about a minute some emergency lights came back on, suggesting some sort of malfunction that perhaps disabled steering. A huge puff of black smoke can be seen, perhaps due to the pilot trying to reverse power. Or maybe an explosion.

Personally, I would at this point avoid jumping to conclusions about how this must be an example of whatever is your favorite complaint, such as the Crisis of Competence or DEI or Crumbling Infrastructure or whatever you learned about the Port of Baltimore from watching the second season of The Wire.

I also wouldn’t immediately rule out a 9-11-style hijacked kamikaze mission. If the harbor pilot were on the radio to the harbor master, we could know quickly whether that happened or not.

A remote control bomb might conceivably be timed so perfectly that it leads to the ship hitting the bridge’s tower squarely two or three minutes later, but...

An interesting question is how negative is the correlation between sports and music.

For example, on Twitter, Samuel Johnson tracked down a quote from Paul McCartney about how none of the Beatles were interested in playing or watching soccer, which must be pretty statistically unlikely for four straight Liverpudlian blokes born in the 1940s.

One of my favorite videos is Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days:”

I had a friend was a big baseball player
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool, boy

Of course, it’s a fastball, not a speedball, which is something else entirely. Roy Chapman was killed by a fastball (or a spitter, perhaps), while John Belushi was killed by a speedball. Springsteen is evidently not a rabid baseball fan.

If you watch the carefully edited video carefully, you’ll note a couple of brief shots that suggest Bruce throws like a girl:

My impression is that rock stars tend to be not terribly masculine (e.g., Springsteen says his stage character is modeled on his blue collar dad, but that in real life he takes more after his artistic mom), but straight. Long hair, high cheekbones, ectomorphic build, and a general air of delicacy all seem to correlate positively with musical performing stardom.

It’s a fairly unusual combination, but it’s evidently a good way to get girls.

How many rock stars died of AIDS in the 1980s-1990s? There was Freddie Mercury and then there was … uh … there was that guy in the B-52s. It’s an especially limited toll considering that more than a few rock stars were needle junkies, the other main way to die of AIDS.

You might think that being cheered on the stage and on the field would attract the same type of personality:

Marilyn Monroe [Just back from a USO tour of Korea]: “Oh, Joe, you can’t possibly guess how wonderful it is to be cheered by 10,000 people!”

Joe DiMaggio: “Yes, I can.”

Are there...

Basically if you don’t use the word “black” in a positive manner, you are a racist.[The term ‘blacklisted’ is racist, US warns its spies: Intelligence community newsletter offers advice on ‘linguistic diversity’ and advice from a crossdressing spook, Telegraph.com, March 24, 2024]:

US spies, including members of the CIA, have been told the term “blacklisted” is racist in an internal diversity newsletter which also offered advice from a crossdresser.

The guidance has been included in The Dive, a newsletter circulated by the intelligence community’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility office.

According to Fox News Digital, which has analysed the document, it is packed with diversity guidance aimed at improving the accuracy of language used by the intelligence community.

One of the articles, discussing linguistic diversity, has urged officials to refrain from using the term “blacklisted”.

This is because it implies “black is bad and white is good”. The term “sanity check” is discouraged because it is disparaging towards people with mental illness.

“Cakewalk” and “grandfathered” are also no longer regarded as acceptable because of their association with slavery.

In another article, an anonymous intelligence officer writes that his crossdressing habit has made him more effective in his role.

“I am an intelligence officer, and I am a man who likes to wear women’s clothes sometimes,” the author wrote. “I think my experiences as someone who crossdresses have sharpened the skills I use as an intelligence officer, particularly critical thinking and perspective-taking.

“It is challenging for some people to understand crossdressing, and non-binary or genderfluid people because gender is a part of overall identity,” he added. “Many of us think of our identities as fixed, and some find this approach to gender threatening to their own identity.”

Crossdressing also enabled him to better understand his...

Birmingham, Alabama is 69 percent black and 24 percent white. It’s one of America’s most violent cities. Somehow, the city has a white police chief, who just begged the black community to disengage from the ‘stop snitching’ mindset and help police solve murders. [Birmingham police chief: ‘Residents haven’t had enough yet,’ don’t cooperate in homicide investigations, WVTM13.com, March 20, 2024]:

“Some people would tell you I’m crazy. They would be wrong. It’s not crazy when the state of the world makes you want to kill everyone responsible. It’s crazy when it doesn’t.” — Frank Castle, The Punisher

I think about this quote a lot, especially after reading about the insanity of squatters having more rights than home owners all across America (home owners being arrested for trying to remove these parasites), and illegal aliens using their social media accounts to teach illegal aliens how to squat on homes in the USA and take possession of them.

Well, I think about this quote hypothetically, of course… but we do live in a crazy world run by people committed to staying in power. We can call them crazy, but remember the truth of what they’ve created: “t he purpose of a system is what it does.”

Her name is Nadia Vitels, a white woman whose body was found in a duffel bag. She was alleged murdered by two black squatters who were living in her recently deceased mother’s home in New York City. [2 suspected squatters in custody in Pennsylvania after woman found dead in duffel bag in Manhattan, ABC7NY.com, March 23, 2024]:

KIPS BAY, Manhattan (WABC) — Two suspected squatters wanted for questioning in the murder of a woman who walked in on them living inside her recently deceased mother’s Kips Bay apartment are now in custody.

The suspects were caught Friday in York, Pennsylvania, by members of the U.S. Marshals Regional Fugitive Task Force just before 11 a.m.

Halley Tejada, 19, and Kensly Alston, 18, were wanted in connection to the brutal death of Nadia Vitels.

Tejada is being held on a local charge of receiving stolen property, for possession of the victim’s stolen Lexus. Both are being held pending extradition for her murder.

Building superintendent Jean Pompee says a weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

“Knowing that there’s justice for her and her family? That’s a...

You won’t see this data breakdown in the New York Times or the New York Post.

It should be noted in 2023 New York City, blacks represent 24.3 percent of population, Hispanics 29.1 percent, and Asians 14.1 percent. Whites are 32.1 percent of the city’s population.

For those homicide suspects arrested, 96.5 percent were black, Hispanic, or Asian in New York City for 2023. These statistics come courtesy of the 2023 Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City :

Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter

Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims are most frequently Black (57.1%) or Hispanic (31.3%). White victims account for (6.9%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims while Asian/Pacific Islander (4.7%) victims account for the remaining portions of Murder and Non- Negligent Manslaughter victims.

The race/ethnicity of known Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects mirrors the victim population with Black (57.0%) and Hispanic (36.3%) suspects accounting for the majority of suspects. White suspects account for (3.5%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects while Asian/Pacific Islander account for (3.2%) Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects.

The Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrest population is similarly distributed. Black arrestees (61.2%) and Hispanic arrestees (29.5%) account for the majority of Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrestees while Asian/Pacific Islander arrestees (4.6%) and White (3.3%) arrestees account for the remaining portions of the Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrest population.

Note there were more white victims of homicide in 2023 New York City than suspects, meaning interracial murder were primarily non-white on white.

Also;

• 95.8 percent of robbery suspects arrested in 2022 New York City were non-white (62.5 percent black).
• 90.7 percent of rape suspects arrested in 2022 New York City were non-white (46.2 percent black).
• 97.8 percent of shooting suspects arrested...

We know who is committing gun violence across America at a rate almost comically disproportionate to their percentage of the overall population: black people.

Now in one town in Mississippi, the United States Navy has put up a wall of shipping containers to stop random gun fire from hitting service members inside the base.

No, this is not a joke: the boxes were put up because a nearly 100 percent black subsidized near the base is home to so much gun violence, ultimately requiring the extreme measure to maintain the safety of those living and working inside the Naval Construction Battalion Center.

This base is home to the Atlantic Fleet’s decorated Navy “Seabees”… [A Navy base put up a wall to ward off stray bullets. Locals say that’s not enough to solve gun violence.: Gulfport, Mississippi, has a far lower homicide rate than Jackson. But some neighborhoods have seen frequent gunfire, and residents say it takes a toll., June 18, 2023]:

More than 20 shipping containers line the south side of a Navy base in Gulfport, Mississippi. They’re not there to transport goods, but instead stand as a silent marker of the gun violence afflicting the state’s second-largest city.

The hulking boxes were put in place last fall, after gunfire at a subsidized apartment complex across the street damaged five homes inside the Naval Construction Battalion Center; no one was hurt. The base responded by increasing patrols around its perimeter and making one of the most fortified areas of Gulfport even more so.

“The optics of that are very bad,” said John Whitfield, a pastor and the CEO of Climb CDC, a nearby nonprofit focusing on workforce development. “The practicality of it, I understand.”

A spokesperson at the base said the barrier is meant to be a “temporary solution” and that the city had offered assurances that it was addressing the gun violence issue. Still, the Navy is considering building a permanent concrete wall.

“The force protection of...

Back before the United States of America entry into The Great War, the US Marines engaged in an occupation of Haiti. This started in 1915. By 1920, black leaders in America were particularly worried about what this occupation by an unapologetically white nation (recall, Birth of a Nation had been released in 1915 and was a monumental success) symbolically meant, since Haiti was birthed in the blood of the white French that black slaves had murdered as they created the first black republic.

Yes, the Constitution of 1805 explicitly made Haiti a black republic.

Thus, the collapse of Haiti and white people from America emerging as a force for order – whereas explicit black power had been the primary mover of the government since black slaves revolted and killed all the white people on the island – was of grave concern to the nascent NAACP. Enter a historic document forever demonstrating that blacks in America knew what the collapse of Haiti meant for black people worldwide (hint: the confirmation of every stereotype of the unfitness for blacks to govern independently of colonial masters). Yes, this is the conclusion of James Weldon Johnson, a black man who visited Haiti early on into the US Marine occupation of the island. [James Weldon Johnson, “The Truth about Haiti. An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation.” Crisis 5 (September 1920): 217–224.]:

U.S. marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. By 1919, Haitian Charlemagne Péralte had organized more than a thousand cacos , or armed guerrillas, to militarily oppose the marine occupation. The marines responded to the resistance with a counterinsurgency campaign that razed villages, killed thousands of Haitians, and destroyed the livelihoods of even more. American organizations such as the NAACP opposed the U.S. occupation of Haiti. They sent delegations that investigated conditions and protested the blatant racism and imperialism of U.S. policy in Haiti in the early 20th century. An article from 1920, by NAACP...

Where were you at the end of the American Dream? [Pittsburgh Police Are No Longer Responding To “Non-Emergency” Calls; Report, Zero Hedge, March 11, 2024]:

WPXI Channel 11 out of Pittsburgh reports that police will no longer be responding to calls that are not deemed to be “in-progress emergencies,” meaning theft, harassment, criminal mischief, and burglary alarms will essentially be ignored.

Such calls will Instead be redirected to an answer machine, according to the report which also notes that from 3 am to 7 am, the city’s six police stations will operate without desk officers present.

Only around 20 officers will be available for overnight shifts to cover the entire city, the report further notes, stating that the decision has been taken due to “understaffing.”

Responding to the development, Councilman Anthony Coghill told Channel 11 “When it comes to harassment and things of this nature, you better have a police officer there. That’s what the public expects. That’s what I expect out of our city.”

Police Chief Larry Scirotto has said that he wants to cut the call volume from approximately 200,000 calls per year down to about 50,000 and that the changes are neccessary.

Pittsburgh has essentially been a victim of a defund the police mentality, with the municipal city council having last year approved the a budget that called for a reduction in police staffing.

Police enforcement is at an all-time low, according to city reports, with arrests in the city having dropped from over 18,000 in 2013 to 6,710 in 2022. Traffic stops also dropped from close to 29,000 in 2013 to a record-low 6,883 in 2022. Meanwhile, violent crime has risen since 2019.

Pittsburgh City Councilman Ricky Burgess sponsored a bill that banned the city’s police officers from making “traffic stops for minor offenses.” According to reports “the controversial legislation was created to make traffic stops more ‘equitable and fair.’”

In 2020, the council also...

Ahmaud Arbery and Laken Riley died nearly four years apart (February 23, 2020 and February 22, 2024, respectively) in Georgia.

Arbery was a black career criminal, who was “jogging” from construction site to construction site ostensibly looking for things to steal. Riley was a white nursing student out for a jog when an illegal alien tried to sexually assault her; she fought back, and according to a retired Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) criminal investigator, this action is what led to the illegal alien to cave in her skull.

[Nursing student Laken Riley tried to call 911 before deadly encounter with migrant: cops, NY Post, February 28, 2024]: