This little meme was posted by Will Stancil. I’m wondering if I’m just too online, because I got the joke immediately.
In case you haven’t heard of him (you live a blessed life), Steve Sailer is a notorious and ubiquitous racist and far right pundit who haunts many comment sections. Well, he would be ubiquitous, if reasonable people didn’t insta-block him as soon as he tries to intrude on a conversation. All you really need to know about him is this bit from his wikipedia page.
Sailer, along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis, was described as an “evolutionary conservative” in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O’Sullivan. Sailer’s work has frequently appeared at Taki’s Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review. He used the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.
Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker.
He’s not an “evolutionary conservative”: although he likes to claim the authority of biology and evolution in his pronouncements about race, he’s really just a guy with an MBA in marketing. He knows nothing about science.
Anyway, what made me laugh about the little cartoon is that I’ve been using the fact of finding Sailer babbling in a thread as analogous to the site flying the black death quarantine flag — back away quickly and never return. There’s something wrong with a site that tolerates his disease. It’s why I shun Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen and Razib Khan, and that Steven Pinker would actually publish his poison is another nail in his coffin.
Had no idea that Sailer wasn’t a real scientist. Now everything makes sense about his drivel. It’s scary how the right lies about credentials.
I hate it when a klinker gets taken up in an otherwise good anthology. I have a copy of The Best American Science Writing 2005, ed. Alan Lightman. And inexplicably, there is an article by David Berlinski.
I wrote in detail about Sailer’s crap consanguinity article a few years ago.
https://www.pinkerite.com/2021/11/steven-pinker-steve-sailer-and-cousin.html
I have no clue who Steve Sailer is, and even with the explanation and clicking through some of the links I still don’t get it.
I’d say that’s the definition of an inside joke…
“evolutionary conservative” Opposable thumbs, nah you don’t need that you’ve got a tail. If it was good enough for great^ googol grandfather,it’s good enough for you.
I gather “evolutionary conservative” is short for “supports bigotry by misrepresenting evolutionary theory, a scientific field they make no effort to study or understand despite being crucial to their personal philosophy.”
It always feels to me that its important to appear in those conversations calmly refuting the bigots. Not talking to them but to the audience, so it is clear to those in the audience less aware that what they are seeing is horribly wrong.
What does “heterodox” mean WRT economics? In religion it means “not orthodox”*, as in adopting one or more versions of the doctrine that differ from the “official”/”orthodox” version. So what “orthodox” economic theory/doctrine/idea does a “heterodox economics blogger” differ from?
No, it doesn’t mean “not homodox.”
Damn auto-formatting borked my punchline — the last sentence was supposed to be the footnote.
I think it means “economic blogger who blogs about different economic subjects and doesn’t stick to one orthodox theory for explanations”. Non-dogmatic for the purpose of their non-economist audience.
So no-homo economicus indeed.
No. It’s a term of the art.
cf.
https://www.academia.edu/33025407/Heterodox_economics_history_and_prospects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_economics
Why does this Nobody have a Wikipedia page?
And of course guys on Wikipedia are offended by Sailer being called a white supremecist.
O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the meek and the home of the craven
… that Steven Pinker would actually publish his poison is another nail in his coffin.
A train of thought which led inexorably to a web search.
Yes, you can find comments by/about Steve Sailer at whyevolutionistrue.com…