I really can’t remember ever looking around at any gathering and counting numbers of this or that color or anything. Except at a supposed mixed gender gathering in Galveston. 40,000 drunk college guys with maybe 100 girls was not a pleasing ratio.
Viewing many photos of Italian family gatherings, the people are, strangely, Italian. The yellow labs do tend to enjoy being with other dogs.
Zuck and Trump best buds; Sailer-mania hits publishing world; Golden Retriever ownership becomes acceptable again (vs. rescuing a pit bull and having it bite your neighbor); what’s the world coming to?
The strong anti pitbull sentiment among Sailer commenters has long perplexed me. In recent years the left has concentrated the fearful and anxious, while the right has been more pandemic-schmandemic. The only things I see the right expressing fear/anxiety about are crime and pitbulls. I get the crime thing, but why fall for the anti-pitbull propaganda?
After the second occurrence of having a pit bull bite my golden retriever while passing on the street I felt my anxiety was well-earned. (Different locales/different dogs, same result)
pitbulls were bred to fight dogs. For most of their existence they were much less likely to bite people than most breeds. I understand this is not intuitive to people but always used to be true. I think the breed attracted a lot of irresponsible urban people starting in the 1990s, so I can't say with authority that's true anymore.
Still, it remains true that a propensity to bite other dogs doesn't imply it will bite humans.
Dog breeds can change propensities over one's lifetimes. E.g., Doberman owners decided to make them nicer after WWII, so Rottweiler owners decided to make them meaner.
Tough guy dog breeds (or protection breeds) come in then go out of style. I don't know when Dobermans were first imported to the US, but they were the top tough dog of the 1970s. There was even a movie in which a guy trained them to rob a bank. People would commonly say of dobermans "those dogs will turn on ya!". The one I knew were nervous biter types. The ones I've met recently are very nice.
In the 1950s boxers were briefly a craze, overbred and a bit ruined until people moved on. Before that I think it was German Shepards (rebranded 'Alsatians' during WWII) which were so popular they soon came with a guarantee of hip dysplasia.
In the early 1980s no one in America had ever heard of Rottweilers. By the end they were the macho dog of choice and, as Americans do, we bred them to be larger and trained them to attack more, and soon they were the bogeyman breed of the 1990s.
As each tough guy breed goes out of style, the wrong kind of people (you know who you are) lose interest, the population goes down, and their average temperament becomes more amenable to house pet status.
Back in the 1970s, the authoritative tome on the American pit bull terrier informed reader that it was a myth that pit bulls were too people friendly to serve as protection dogs. By the 1990s, they were popular protection dogs in cities because they could be trained to protect, but were smaller than other protection breeds and so better for apartment living. It wasn't long before urban breeders changed them from dogfighting dogs (which have to be bred not to bite people) to drug guardian large dick representing dogs.
Steve notices things then applies stats. Running one's life based on a sampling of sensational news stories is no more sensible than believe the other lies of the press.
I had two pit bulls rip my dog to death at a kennel thirty-two years ago. I blame the kennel most of all and the kennel owner has long been out of business. Not all pit bulls are violent but a large percentage of them are.
pitbulls were bred to fight other dogs and a pair of dogs can quickly take on a pack mentality. But pitbulls always used to be extremely people friendly and much less likely to bite a person than most breeds. So this story tracks
The numbers are what they are. Pit bulls attack more, and they rip and tear. If you know any surgeons who do pediatric trauma, talk to them, and your insurance actuary friends.
They attack and kill young children in their own households, which is astounding for canis domesticus.
We don't buy houses in majority-black school districts either.
A pitbull attack is bound to be more injury producing than e.g. a golden retriever attack. That's why trauma surgeons would be more familiar with them. Pit bulls have always been cheap compared to other powerful breeds and so have always been much more commonly owned by irresponsible people.
Checking chatGPT I get this:
Pit bulls are indeed responsible for the highest number of fatal attacks on humans in the U.S., far surpassing other breeds. Here are some key statistics for dog breeds involved in fatal attacks:
1. **Pit Bulls**: Responsible for 380 fatalities from 2005 to 2020, accounting for the majority of fatal dog attacks. This breed's bite force, size, and frequent involvement in attacks contribute to this statistic.
2. **Rottweilers**: Ranked second with 51 fatalities during the same period. Their strength and protective instincts can pose risks when improperly trained or handled.
3. **German Shepherds**: Another breed linked to fatal attacks, though significantly fewer than pit bulls and Rottweilers.
4. **Mixed Breeds and Huskies**: These groups also appear in fatal attack statistics but in much smaller numbers compared to the top two breeds.
So that looks pretty open and shut on the stats- except there are about 18 million pitbulls in the US and 1 million Rottweilers.
Those are what you need to take account of from a Bayesian point of view to calculate the risk you experience by adopting a pitbull.
That said, my dog is not a pitbull and when I adopted him I did so based on his very people friendly temperament. I don't need a problem dog, but was happy to take one from a shelter.
Inexperienced people shouldn't adopt certain breeds, but the idea that adopting a pitbull means your neighbor is getting bit is silly.
I remember in 1994 being asked to attend a wedding reception in Anacostia, Washington DC. I was one of six whites to attend with about 150 black attendees. The whites all stayed together. To be blunt, I didn't understand much of the black lingo. There was a lot of shouting as well. When a black man had what appeared to be a heart attack, I waited street-front for the ambulance. It probably shocked the crew that a white man was flagging them down.
Ken H. was an independent delivery/messenger man who I believe served some time in prison. As my business was very busy, Ken was a valued deliveryman from about 1991-1999. The word friend is sometimes thrown around too easily but I considered Ken a friend over the years. He very much wanted me to come to his wedding reception- his wedding itself was the night before- so I went.
"I’m up to 150,000 followers on Twitter/X at Steve_Sailer. // I was around 40,000 followers in April 2022, after 11.5 years on the platform, when Elon Musk announced his bid."
It was only sometime in winter 2016-17 that you started posting (or "tweeting" as they said in olden times) much at all on the platform currently known as "X". Almost all the activity from the @Steve_Sailer account before some point in early 2017 (when a slow ramp-up in activity begins) was of the auto-repost sort: links to blog-posts or columns.
Twitter/X highly rewards on-platform engagement. It has always punished (by lower visibility) those who seek to use it for posting external links. This has become much more true than ever. Posting a link to X triggers a mechanism to slash your view-counts by a large degree.
It isn't until around summer 2017 that on-platform interaction for the @Steve_Sailer account becomes truly regular in the way the Twitter-algorithm god demands. Starting around that time (definitely by mid-2017 in a full-on way), as later revealed in The Twitter Files and similar exposes of what Google and others were up to, these "platforms" had, along with the FBI and ADL and SPLC, created extensive domestic-enemies lists of problem-thinkers, dissidents, and racists, and archetype-profiles for others who the system detected interacting with major problem-people.
They ran black-lists and brown-lists, the latter for use the occasional waves of bans. The bans were sometimes random, without explanation. They wanted dissidents to soak in time that would all be lost (permanently deleted) when the random ban eventually came. The post-mid-2017 ramped-up system -- of always-on systematized reach-reduction for people on the lists -- was in place until the Elon Musk purchase. A successor version remains in place, except that @Steve_Sailer is obviously no longer on the most-restrictive lists.
Really the Twitter suppression of @Steve_Sailer is primarily a story of something like mid-2017 to mid-2022.
Total number of @Steve_Sailer Twitter/X followers, by selected date:
- Oct 2010: 0 (account created)
- Jan 2014: 1,885
- Aug 2014: 2,558
- June 2016: 7,020
- Nov 2016: 10,200
---> NOTE, ca. winter 2016-17, the start of the @Steve_Sailer account's regular "on-platform" tweeting and interaction. Steady gains in followers month after month for a while, until a drop-off becomes evident by mid- or late 2017.
- Nov 2017: 16,800
---> NOTE, In (or by) mid- or late-2017, @Steve_Sailer is put on one of the muscled-up deboosting 'black' or 'brown' lists; subject to adjustments in following years. Growth is slow, through coming several years despite regular tweeting and substantial attention, and the emergence of a "pro-Sailer meme culture" on the platform (the Sailer bat-signal, and others).
- Jan 2019: 21,500
- Nov 2020: 36,100
- Sept 2021: 38,600
- Jan 2022: 39,200
---> NOTE the anemic net growth up thru early 2022, despite heavy tweeting during this period.
---> mid-April 2022: Elon Musk begins bid to gain legal control of Twitter. Full legal control gained in Oct 2022. Exposés on the extent of pre-Musk Twitter's censorship apparatus emerge in the following weeks.
- July 2022: 47,300
- Nov 2024: 150,000
The @Steve_Sailer account pre-2017 had a trajectory similar to John Derbyshire's (@DissidentRight): impressive gains, but only gaining followers when a person specifically seeks it out. The Derbyshire account still to this day never tweets, except with occasional automated-repost-like links to outside material. @DissidentRight today has 13,800 followers.
The @Steve_Sailer account gained net 26,000 followers in four years between Trump's first election (2016) and his second (2020), a disproportionate amount of that in early-mid 2017 and relatively less between late 2017 and late 2020.
Between Trump's second (2020) and third election (2024), @Steve_Sailer gained 114,000 followers, essentially all of that gain after spring 2022. The various inflexion-points are no cosmic mystery here, and are aligned with known crackdowns and censorship initiatives.
The mid-2022 to late-2024 net gain exceeds the late-2017 to early-2022 gain-rate by well over 10x, giving an idea of the magnitude of the power of Big Tech deboosting in this case.
"a whole bunch of other good-looking Gen Z people who look vaguely famous and who seem more ecstatic to be at a party with Rachel and Monica than Rachel and Monica are to be at a party with them."
But at one point, when you decide to quit, you will leave all your followers behind. Twitter owns your contacts, not you. This is an important difference: in Bluesky and Substack instead, you own your audience. I wrote a short piece to explain this: https://open.substack.com/pub/4two/p/how-to-own-your-audience
I really can’t remember ever looking around at any gathering and counting numbers of this or that color or anything. Except at a supposed mixed gender gathering in Galveston. 40,000 drunk college guys with maybe 100 girls was not a pleasing ratio.
Viewing many photos of Italian family gatherings, the people are, strangely, Italian. The yellow labs do tend to enjoy being with other dogs.
Excuse me, Steve. They are not Yellow Labs. They are Golden Retrievers.
I think I spotted a Yellow Lab party crasher in the back right hiding behind a large Golden. The ears are a dead giveaway...
I knew I had it wrong. My mixed Border Collie and Great Pyrenees told me that.
Which makes my point, the dogs don’t care. They mix and match freely.
Zuck and Trump best buds; Sailer-mania hits publishing world; Golden Retriever ownership becomes acceptable again (vs. rescuing a pit bull and having it bite your neighbor); what’s the world coming to?
The strong anti pitbull sentiment among Sailer commenters has long perplexed me. In recent years the left has concentrated the fearful and anxious, while the right has been more pandemic-schmandemic. The only things I see the right expressing fear/anxiety about are crime and pitbulls. I get the crime thing, but why fall for the anti-pitbull propaganda?
After the second occurrence of having a pit bull bite my golden retriever while passing on the street I felt my anxiety was well-earned. (Different locales/different dogs, same result)
pitbulls were bred to fight dogs. For most of their existence they were much less likely to bite people than most breeds. I understand this is not intuitive to people but always used to be true. I think the breed attracted a lot of irresponsible urban people starting in the 1990s, so I can't say with authority that's true anymore.
Still, it remains true that a propensity to bite other dogs doesn't imply it will bite humans.
Dog breeds can change propensities over one's lifetimes. E.g., Doberman owners decided to make them nicer after WWII, so Rottweiler owners decided to make them meaner.
Tough guy dog breeds (or protection breeds) come in then go out of style. I don't know when Dobermans were first imported to the US, but they were the top tough dog of the 1970s. There was even a movie in which a guy trained them to rob a bank. People would commonly say of dobermans "those dogs will turn on ya!". The one I knew were nervous biter types. The ones I've met recently are very nice.
In the 1950s boxers were briefly a craze, overbred and a bit ruined until people moved on. Before that I think it was German Shepards (rebranded 'Alsatians' during WWII) which were so popular they soon came with a guarantee of hip dysplasia.
In the early 1980s no one in America had ever heard of Rottweilers. By the end they were the macho dog of choice and, as Americans do, we bred them to be larger and trained them to attack more, and soon they were the bogeyman breed of the 1990s.
As each tough guy breed goes out of style, the wrong kind of people (you know who you are) lose interest, the population goes down, and their average temperament becomes more amenable to house pet status.
Back in the 1970s, the authoritative tome on the American pit bull terrier informed reader that it was a myth that pit bulls were too people friendly to serve as protection dogs. By the 1990s, they were popular protection dogs in cities because they could be trained to protect, but were smaller than other protection breeds and so better for apartment living. It wasn't long before urban breeders changed them from dogfighting dogs (which have to be bred not to bite people) to drug guardian large dick representing dogs.
Because we notice things.
Steve notices things then applies stats. Running one's life based on a sampling of sensational news stories is no more sensible than believe the other lies of the press.
Pit bulls are ugly.
Maybe but I doubt that is the source of the antipathy. Nobody here ever tees off on pugs
I had two pit bulls rip my dog to death at a kennel thirty-two years ago. I blame the kennel most of all and the kennel owner has long been out of business. Not all pit bulls are violent but a large percentage of them are.
pitbulls were bred to fight other dogs and a pair of dogs can quickly take on a pack mentality. But pitbulls always used to be extremely people friendly and much less likely to bite a person than most breeds. So this story tracks
The numbers are what they are. Pit bulls attack more, and they rip and tear. If you know any surgeons who do pediatric trauma, talk to them, and your insurance actuary friends.
They attack and kill young children in their own households, which is astounding for canis domesticus.
We don't buy houses in majority-black school districts either.
A pitbull attack is bound to be more injury producing than e.g. a golden retriever attack. That's why trauma surgeons would be more familiar with them. Pit bulls have always been cheap compared to other powerful breeds and so have always been much more commonly owned by irresponsible people.
Checking chatGPT I get this:
Pit bulls are indeed responsible for the highest number of fatal attacks on humans in the U.S., far surpassing other breeds. Here are some key statistics for dog breeds involved in fatal attacks:
1. **Pit Bulls**: Responsible for 380 fatalities from 2005 to 2020, accounting for the majority of fatal dog attacks. This breed's bite force, size, and frequent involvement in attacks contribute to this statistic.
2. **Rottweilers**: Ranked second with 51 fatalities during the same period. Their strength and protective instincts can pose risks when improperly trained or handled.
3. **German Shepherds**: Another breed linked to fatal attacks, though significantly fewer than pit bulls and Rottweilers.
4. **Mixed Breeds and Huskies**: These groups also appear in fatal attack statistics but in much smaller numbers compared to the top two breeds.
So that looks pretty open and shut on the stats- except there are about 18 million pitbulls in the US and 1 million Rottweilers.
Those are what you need to take account of from a Bayesian point of view to calculate the risk you experience by adopting a pitbull.
That said, my dog is not a pitbull and when I adopted him I did so based on his very people friendly temperament. I don't need a problem dog, but was happy to take one from a shelter.
Inexperienced people shouldn't adopt certain breeds, but the idea that adopting a pitbull means your neighbor is getting bit is silly.
Pitbulls are responsible for 60-70% of fatal attacks on humans and dogs over the last 30 years.
How much do you make for being a Blue Check on Twitter?
A few cents per follower per year. It's better than nothing like I used to make, but it's not much.
I remember in 1994 being asked to attend a wedding reception in Anacostia, Washington DC. I was one of six whites to attend with about 150 black attendees. The whites all stayed together. To be blunt, I didn't understand much of the black lingo. There was a lot of shouting as well. When a black man had what appeared to be a heart attack, I waited street-front for the ambulance. It probably shocked the crew that a white man was flagging them down.
How did you come to get a wedding invitation to an (almost) all-Black wedding?
Ken H. was an independent delivery/messenger man who I believe served some time in prison. As my business was very busy, Ken was a valued deliveryman from about 1991-1999. The word friend is sometimes thrown around too easily but I considered Ken a friend over the years. He very much wanted me to come to his wedding reception- his wedding itself was the night before- so I went.
I went to a couple of black weddings in the 1990s.
Have you ever written on differences between Black weddings and White weddings?
I hate eating outside when it’s cold.
Watch who you say, “He’s a good boy,” to…
It's ok. You ask "who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?" and the trans male dogs are free to wag their butts too.
Oh man, I just thought of a new smart-ass answer when people ask me if my dog is a girl.
A rescue pit?
Great video of the dogs. Hilarious. As is your tweet about it.
"I’m up to 150,000 followers on Twitter/X at Steve_Sailer. // I was around 40,000 followers in April 2022, after 11.5 years on the platform, when Elon Musk announced his bid."
It was only sometime in winter 2016-17 that you started posting (or "tweeting" as they said in olden times) much at all on the platform currently known as "X". Almost all the activity from the @Steve_Sailer account before some point in early 2017 (when a slow ramp-up in activity begins) was of the auto-repost sort: links to blog-posts or columns.
Twitter/X highly rewards on-platform engagement. It has always punished (by lower visibility) those who seek to use it for posting external links. This has become much more true than ever. Posting a link to X triggers a mechanism to slash your view-counts by a large degree.
It isn't until around summer 2017 that on-platform interaction for the @Steve_Sailer account becomes truly regular in the way the Twitter-algorithm god demands. Starting around that time (definitely by mid-2017 in a full-on way), as later revealed in The Twitter Files and similar exposes of what Google and others were up to, these "platforms" had, along with the FBI and ADL and SPLC, created extensive domestic-enemies lists of problem-thinkers, dissidents, and racists, and archetype-profiles for others who the system detected interacting with major problem-people.
They ran black-lists and brown-lists, the latter for use the occasional waves of bans. The bans were sometimes random, without explanation. They wanted dissidents to soak in time that would all be lost (permanently deleted) when the random ban eventually came. The post-mid-2017 ramped-up system -- of always-on systematized reach-reduction for people on the lists -- was in place until the Elon Musk purchase. A successor version remains in place, except that @Steve_Sailer is obviously no longer on the most-restrictive lists.
Really the Twitter suppression of @Steve_Sailer is primarily a story of something like mid-2017 to mid-2022.
Thanks.
Total number of @Steve_Sailer Twitter/X followers, by selected date:
- Oct 2010: 0 (account created)
- Jan 2014: 1,885
- Aug 2014: 2,558
- June 2016: 7,020
- Nov 2016: 10,200
---> NOTE, ca. winter 2016-17, the start of the @Steve_Sailer account's regular "on-platform" tweeting and interaction. Steady gains in followers month after month for a while, until a drop-off becomes evident by mid- or late 2017.
- Nov 2017: 16,800
---> NOTE, In (or by) mid- or late-2017, @Steve_Sailer is put on one of the muscled-up deboosting 'black' or 'brown' lists; subject to adjustments in following years. Growth is slow, through coming several years despite regular tweeting and substantial attention, and the emergence of a "pro-Sailer meme culture" on the platform (the Sailer bat-signal, and others).
- Jan 2019: 21,500
- Nov 2020: 36,100
- Sept 2021: 38,600
- Jan 2022: 39,200
---> NOTE the anemic net growth up thru early 2022, despite heavy tweeting during this period.
---> mid-April 2022: Elon Musk begins bid to gain legal control of Twitter. Full legal control gained in Oct 2022. Exposés on the extent of pre-Musk Twitter's censorship apparatus emerge in the following weeks.
- July 2022: 47,300
- Nov 2024: 150,000
The @Steve_Sailer account pre-2017 had a trajectory similar to John Derbyshire's (@DissidentRight): impressive gains, but only gaining followers when a person specifically seeks it out. The Derbyshire account still to this day never tweets, except with occasional automated-repost-like links to outside material. @DissidentRight today has 13,800 followers.
The @Steve_Sailer account gained net 26,000 followers in four years between Trump's first election (2016) and his second (2020), a disproportionate amount of that in early-mid 2017 and relatively less between late 2017 and late 2020.
Between Trump's second (2020) and third election (2024), @Steve_Sailer gained 114,000 followers, essentially all of that gain after spring 2022. The various inflexion-points are no cosmic mystery here, and are aligned with known crackdowns and censorship initiatives.
The mid-2022 to late-2024 net gain exceeds the late-2017 to early-2022 gain-rate by well over 10x, giving an idea of the magnitude of the power of Big Tech deboosting in this case.
--------
https://web.archive.org/web/20140114142910/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20140828220842/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20161109055234/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160615053753/https://twitter.com/steve_sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20171110215625/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/
https://web.archive.org/web/20190102030111/https://twitter.com/steve_sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040548/HTTP://twitter.com/steve_sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20201116230017/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20210928065829/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20220105204321/https://twitter.com/steve_sailer
https://web.archive.org/web/20220724005739/https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/
Thanks.
I've been following you on X--glad to see you're more active on there now!
"488"
I see what you did there, lol.
"a whole bunch of other good-looking Gen Z people who look vaguely famous and who seem more ecstatic to be at a party with Rachel and Monica than Rachel and Monica are to be at a party with them."
Nice callback to the isteve.blogspot days!
I finally signed onto X this evening, so now you've got 150,001.
But at one point, when you decide to quit, you will leave all your followers behind. Twitter owns your contacts, not you. This is an important difference: in Bluesky and Substack instead, you own your audience. I wrote a short piece to explain this: https://open.substack.com/pub/4two/p/how-to-own-your-audience