From Steve Sailer

• Because most of them are unteachable. He tells a truth everybody else’s too nice to say. It’s not racist if you don’t politicise it. That is, don’t waste tax money on a shiny new school most of them won’t appreciate (except to tag it creatively soon after it’s built) but don’t block individual liberty either with apartheid (Bantu education, not giving the talented exceptions a shot at higher education because of race). So who ought to give the talented few a shot? Hard, largely thankless apostolate, trad religious orders? I’m nasty enough to want to see a white kid, expected to polish his transcript or résumé with such ‘social action’ (Teach for America! ... just what they want, some white kid coming in and telling them what to do... it’s a bad school but it’s their school), tell his teachers Sailer’s answer just to watch them react. (Of course somebody that vulnerable probably isn’t in a position to be kicked out of polite society so kids just play along; it’s the system.)
• The up side of WASP competitiveness including SWPLs.
• Leeches? Unlike him (he skates into determinism... eugenics?) I’m an open-borders libertarian: work hard and play by our rules (easy really: don’t harm others; beyond that, knock yourselves out) and all are welcome (I don’t care what race you are, what religion you practise or if Sailer hates your wedding customs). But he has a point here. A country lets in somebody super-talented, rightly asking ‘What can you do for us?’ then out of charity invites his whole immediate extended family, including people who never contributed to the system to live out their day off it, who in turn invite their untalented cousins who likewise are a burden not a help to their hosts.
• The well-meaning government forcing banks to give mortgages to people who can’t afford them was stupid and helped cause this depression.
• The news as self-parody: Surprisingly, though, the focus of modern fact checks is rarely what we 20th-century fact-checkers would have underlined as checkable facts. Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking.

Labels: libertarianism, politics