I’m surprised by how quickly the traffic on this blog has grown in the short time doing it. I see a regular group of a few hundred popping in daily. A larger group of a few thousand drops in at least every few days. of course, an army of robots and penis pill salesmen swing by daily, but I filter those out of the list. It’s funny how it is easy to spot web traffic from robots, but a major pain in the neck to block them entirely. The penis pill salesmen and fake ugg boots people from Eastern Europe are persistent. I  assume it works for them otherwise they would stop, but you never know. It may be that the real scam is further down stream and has nothing to do with stealing credit cards and selling fake medicine.

What got me thinking about it is a couple of things I recently saw. When I was regular on NRO, I would torment liberal by comparing them to the Seekers, the cult written about in the great book When Prophesy Fails. I know exactly one person familiar with that book and that one person is me. I never see anyone reference it and certainly no one connect it with modern liberals. That’s why I used it. That was the gag. The best way to insult someone is by doing so subtlety. Calling someone, who fashions themselves your intellectual superior, a booger-head just reinforces their sense of superiority. Referencing something they have to look up because it is unknown to them makes them feel inadequate. Childish on my part, but every man has his vices.

The other day, I saw that former National Review contributor Robert Weisberg had picked up on the idea and used it in his latest column. I don’t want to claim he got the idea from me, but I’d say it is highly probable. He may not even recall where he heard it, but he looked it up and decided it was a good bit of gear to stash away for future use. That’s often how ideas get into circulation. Someone with a small audience gets read by someone with a big audience, who then popularizes the idea, often taking credit for it. Rush Limbaugh has become a very rich man popularizing the ideas of others. Ann Coulter is another example of someone from Conservative Inc who got rich repeating the ideas of others while flashing some skin on TV.

There’s nothing wrong with it, but it is a reminder that ideas have a habit of escaping the enclosure. Steve Sailer gets ripped off all the time. I see his stuff recycled by less agile minded people on a regular basis. That’s not a terrible thing as he has many good ideas. It is why HBD’ers should not worry so much about the assault coming from dead enders like Jamie Bartlett and Tim Stanley. These are people with no useful or interesting ideas of their own. Instead they make a living attacking others, but by doing so five those ideas a wider audience. The concern is that people like these two trolls are good at character assassination, while guys like JayMan are not. Reading his post on the subject, I can see how guys like this could be silenced by thugs like Bartlett and Stanley.

Still, I suspect the ideas peculating in the so-called Dark Enlightenment – what a great phrase – will be surfacing in the columns of mainstream chattering skulls soon enough. There may be no Alfred Wegener out there in the Dark Enlightenment, but you never know. Science is the history of error and the best ideas were often met with skepticism and scorn from the running dogs of the status quo.

This post has already been linked to 709 times!