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What your take on Richard Hanania I can't tell if he's useful signal or bloated hot air. Mostly I'm not a fan, I find him pompous, aggressive and mostly without anything interesting to say....but maybe I'm missing something? Smart people seem to respect him. EDIT: I ask because I think he might be in that intolerable pundit's and influencers class but don't want to miss signal if it's there.
Hmmm...
I think that there's a group of 'public intellectuals' that includes Hanania, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Jesse Singal, and a few others, who have crammed themselves into a microniche of the influencer ecosystem where they play the same ragebait game as everyone else, but have the wherewithal to couch it in enough rhetorical flourish and data that they can maintain reputation as 'serious' intellectuals who are worth listening to even among the more respectable circles of discourse. They're basically squeezed in right beneath The Atlantic but above, say, Vice covering angles that are a bit too speculative for real news but never so lowbrow that they can't be discussed in polite company.
Their persona is basically "haha I agree with 95% of what [ideology] says, but on these specific issues I vehemently disagree and will vigorously bang the drum of dissent, bet you never expected that!" (Being FAIR, Ben Shapiro was also like this, but he's made the big time so he doesn't have to rely on this any more)
Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.
I also think he doesn't have much interesting to say. His shtick seems to be "here's some piece of data or a study result that seems to contradict a particular right wing narrative, I hereby declare that narrative debunked!" Here's an example. "Haha, I found some data that vaguely disagrees with your point! How's it feel to be WRONG?" Then he gets dunked on but he achieved his goal of gaining attention.
And he isolates that data from almost any and all surrounding context so that the interlocutor is forced to introduce the necessary informational context which he can either ignore, or attack narrowly "that doesn't refute MY data!" even though the whole issue is HIS data, in context, doesn't really refute anything. Or, if he wishes, put on a layer of irony and claim he wasn't making his claim seriously anyway, you rube.
In short, they all like to pull 'micro' motte-baileys where they never make any serious claim that can be pinned down and destroyed, they stick their toe in the Bailey enough to garner some outrage but no so far that they can't defend the claim with some artful rhetoric.
I think their grift mode is to state some superficially fallacious contrarian argument, then claim that they'll address all critiques and counterarguments in their longer substack essay, which once you pay to access it and read it, you realize it is just a wordier version of the same arguments but then they have your money.
So they're just selling newsletters via particularly skilled trolling, if you will.
Side note, just to add to my earlier gripes about Noah Smith, here's him botching another prediction/analysis about topics he really doesn't grasp.
Interesting...I agree with your assessment of all the people you mention with the possible exception of Jesse Singal, who seems like he may actually have some journalist chops. Just today Yglesias was had a post "something something media loves Trump" and I knew exactly what it was going to say before I read it. I read a third of it and shrugged. At least he's not offensive and rude? Hannananinana seems to delight in being a scoundrel to some extent and that turns me off. I watched some live video with him and Michael Tracy and jsut got too bored to keep watching. (I think Tracy is interesting FWIW).
Anyway, it's nice to test my perceptions against others, so thanks!
Jesse Singal is a little more... earnest than the others but you begin to notice that he critiques the left but never actually takes the obvious implications of all those critiques.
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