Makgoba as you rightly points out is a mixture of managerialism and fake “Africanism” who found himself both as enemy of Mbeki (on AIDS) and as ally (odd Africanism).

Great blog.

Your choice.

Aren’t those “public-service” websites wonderful? Who do you think takes the time to come up with all that stuff, anyway? I mean, wow.

Before you crawl too far out on that particular limb, you might want to watch or read the transcript of the recent interview between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and James Watson. You’ll find both at “The Root,” that notorious nest of Snapple-quaffing Klansmen.

As for the science: the spam filter only allows one link, so I’ll go with Risch et al. 2004. These results are not even remotely controversial, nor can they be misinterpreted. As Steve Sailer put it, “it’s as if you gave Strom Thurmond a map of the world and a box of crayons.”

On the big question, Professor Watson’s “we don’t know” remains the official answer – for now. As Watson says, however, it is unlikely that we will continue not knowing for much longer. Moreover, Occam’s razor is now in the room.

Would divestment have succeeded in the absence of drama queens? As in all counterfactuals, history is silent. I was recently encouraged by HBO’s treatment of Samuel Adams, which managed to portray him as exactly the drama queen he must have been – and a truly foul character, to boot. But without Samuel, would we ever have heard of his cousin?

It is the permanent misfortune of the Girondin to get it from both sides. The very sincerity of his error makes him everyone’s perfect target. The right trolls him because he is not beyond redemption; the left purges him for just the same reason. At least the former address their complaints to his ears, whereas the latter go straight for his neck.

You have asked nicely, though, so I promise to stop power-trolling your blog.

There’s nothing crypto going on here. Moldbug came out in an earlier comment thread as a sincere racist with appeal/allegiance to some sort of secret organization of contemporary scientific racists who, he felt certain, would one day soon be vindicated. Obviously the current scientific consensus is just a misguided radical orthodoxy which be dethroned and dumbass nineteenth/early twentieth century thinking restored to its rightful place of intellectual dominance.

Moldbug, to paraphrase that supremely uneven film True Romance, we’re not afraid of you, we just don’t like you or find your ideas worth engaging with. Even without the trollish bobbing and weaving, your ideas aren’t any more worth engaging with than those of flat earthers. Add the vitriol and rhetorical games on top of that and it’s not even worth telling you that you’re wrong.

This is a marvellous image.

“What do we want?”

“A detailed and complex policy approach that is informed by a nuanced, thoughtful, thorough understanding of the relevant concerns (taking, of course, a broad view of what we mean by “relevant”), and the background to those concerns, of the various parties affected in each of the possible outcomes that we might cautiously envisage would emerge from the course of action under discussion – allowing, one must keep in mind, for the fact that there are many variables of which we can only have a very insecure knowledge.”

“When do we want it?”

“It is, of its nature (if I may be allowed to use the expression despite the danger of essentializing that it entails), an ongoing and provisional process for which no precise schedule can be established.”

Surely, Professor Burke, there was a time in your life when you had strong opinions toward what you perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a power structure that had no answer to your questions but to stonewall. How did you express those opinions? How easily were you dissuaded?

Do I need to remind anyone of the tactics that progressives used, 40 years ago, to seize control of America’s universities? (My wife has an MFA, for example, from the alma mater of the “Third World Strike.”)

Then once ensconced, suddenly you’re Lady Catherine de Burgh, and to ask you a question you don’t want to answer is the pinnacle of barbarism.

What if Americans knew? That the great intellectual battlements that tower gloomily above them, whose cardinals are of course the only men and women who can really be trusted to formulate the “public policy” of their purportedly democratic government, and whose fees are one of the main costs of their lives, would tremble at such feathers? That their R1 professors were so sensitive?

Especially since so many of same, albeit in earlier life, were so elated by any petty breach of the peace that might advance the causes of their creed. I remember the shantytowns on the quad. Were their occupants defeated?

It’s enough to make any young man want to read R.J. Dabney, Ernst von Salomon, Albert Jay Nock, Albert Beveridge, George Schuyler, Ernst Juenger, John S. Wise, John Burgess, Stuart Cloete, Henry Maine, Nirad Chaudhuri, W.E.H. Lecky, Kelly Miller, George W. Steevens, or Thomas Nelson Page.