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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.

Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".

Some quotes:

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.

If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.

Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society [...] women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.

It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.

What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?

  1. Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.

  2. Deny deny deny?

  3. Ignore it?

I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.

I think the CW blowback will be in line with what you'd expect from decades ago: a career deranging storm lasting a year or so, echoing forever. He is a much less sympathetic case than Charles Murray, who can actually stand by what he wrote. According to Hannia, he wrote some vile and idiotic stuff up until his mid twenties because he was somewhat of a sexless, friendless, loser writing anonymously. He disavows what he wrote. His past motivations were to score political points - not to think things through - leading to a bunch of hairbrained "modest proposals". He explained all this, his journey to where he is today, and his motivations to prevent people from descending into the kind of unreason which captured his mind well into adulthood.

On the one hand, I can believe he is now writing honestly, and I see him as a valuable insider. On the other hand, I can see how people would be reasonably skeptical. I mean, he sincerely argued for the forced sterilization of ~80M Americans, an idea which doesn't portend a great thinker. To me, the sheer idiocy of his former ideas makes me believe him today.

I think his September book release will be heavily impacted and probably outright cancelled, although I don't know much about publishing. This would be a shame, although understandable from the POV of the principle actors. It's been blurbed by people with solid reputations who probably want nothing to do with the guy anymore. Its being published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, who are likewise going to want to distance themselves.

Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.

I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.

People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.

There are literal zero people autistic enough to cross that rubicon. Donald Trump wouldn’t. Some random blog posted here went with I’m not a scientists but what if it’s true on hbd. Hannania himself will posts IQ data by race but won’t come out and say it. And in his apology just said differences exists I don’t know why, but I have a degree of confidence he doesn’t believe in structural racisms.

I’m starting to think the rubicon needs crossed. Hannania apparently began to believe he could get policy in the right place without crossing. Something like 1 in a 150 African Americans were shot in Minneapolis last year so not crossing the Rubicon seems like it has real world negative effects for all.

Well I guess everyone is opaque about "crossing the Rubicon". Assuming Hanania is honest, we don't need to guess about what he thinks because he responded to the huffpo piece on his substack. He finds his old views repugnant; largely explained by immature, emotional reasoning. His solution was intellectual advancement, and personal development. After looking at the data he realized hbd is true, and small-l liberalism is the best path forward.

I think this sums of where he was when he was writing anonymously.

A young LARPer with a tendency to get carried away with certain arguments, enamored by the romantic idea of grappling with supposedly suppressed ancient truths, simply couldn’t handle that level of nuance.

An alternate explanation is that these kinds of extreme pro-ethnic-cleansing arguments are genuinely unpopular among large swaths of the center right.

There are left wing university professors who used to be actual, no-shit, terrorists. Does that mean terrorism is genuinely popular (or at least not genuinely unpopular) among the large swaths of the center left?

Also, if Bari Weiss is now "center-right", I swear to god...

It's not so much that terrorists are popular (though I'd bet that some among the left don't mind having "dial a riot" in their deck of cards), as the fact that the center-left feels vastly more secure in its control over the direction of leftist politics than the center-right does. Realistically, any far left policy that gets memetically popular will be sanewashed into something the center-left either already supports (e.g. they might not want single-payer healthcare, but they would like a universal system) or can accept (race and gender grievance stuff). Bernie got swatted like a fly by the DNC whereas the GOP is praying that Trump gets imprisoned or killed because their other standard-bearers can't beat him (assuming the polling is remotely accurate, a fact about which I am presently agnostic). All those boomer bombings are easily forgotten about because all put together pale in comparison to one Oklahoma City Bombing. Joe Biden's anachronistic affection toward organized labor is a bigger threat to neoliberal economics than every commie professor in the country combined.

I don't think that the center right really thinks that some sort of far right is a serious threat (though it's entirely possible that they've been repeating it long enough that they believe it themselves), but a populist right very much is, and they're more than willing to conflate the two to stay in power. This isn't anything new. Not so long ago, Trump himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.

Funny thing in American politics today is the right rallies around Trump because he’s going to win the primary but they probably have better and more electable candidates behinds him. The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.

The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.

They don't need it. By now a majority of the nation simply won't vote Republican because it isn't respectable to do so. The Democrats can run a yellow dog and still win.

No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.

Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.

No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.

That's not the question I asked though.

Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.

You can find them distasteful without wanting to disinvite a dude for pseudonymously advocating for them on obscure internet forums, 10 years ago.

I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago

What you call the anti-woke right is really the institutional anti-woke right — the version of the right that can get editorials in national newspapers, books with major publishers, and professors at good universities. It is beholden to liberal norms because of the utter collapse of the traditional right in major cultural institutions and its failure to build alternatives.

This is why right-wing anti-elitism (as exemplified by Trump) is a fairly anaemic long-term threat to the left: it doesn’t build anything to compete with their long-term bases of power.

Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…

Exactly. But that's not stuff he's believed in the past decade, and he's the only person arguing against them from a place of sympathy and understanding. To cancel him is to say that "fascists" can't change and/or that you don't want them to.

Agreed. Under his old alias he expressed explicit support for ideas that are so far outside the Overton Window that even Putin or Xi Jinping wouldn’t publicly endorse them (even if they carried them out in practice).

To be precise, all of those things would also be fine, if he just picked a different group as his target.

Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.

Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.

You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?

It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.

Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.

OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.”

Well, I call it nothing very shocking because I routinely see even more extreme right-wing content, not because I agree with it. I myself am not a white supremacist.

What exactly are you pushing me for, when it comes to using “whiteness” to describe the set of effects that being white in a racist society might have on people? I think it’s bad terminology and people should stop using it. Are you asking me to conclude that everyone who uses such terminology actually intends white people harm? Because, if so, I don’t think that’s true. Alternatively, you might be asking me to be outraged, in order to campaign more effectively for people to actually stop. I am not sure if my outrage would actually be helpful, though.

There are a lot of situations in which a more measured argument would be more persuasive. After all, most people who support such terminology believe that outraged people are mistaken about its meaning. By not being outraged and instead taking people at their word, I might well have a better chance of changing people’s minds. I’ve not tried to make this argument, but I am pondering whether I should engage more with people to my left, now that this place is becoming less interesting to me.

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I appreciate you as a dissenting voice, but I genuinely believe Hanania's upcoming book is the most important conservative book of the last 20 years and possibly the most important American book of the past decade. I can't afford for him to lose status because I can't afford for this book not to be a smashing success.

Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,”

You don't think a statement like "whiteness is a disease" has these sort of implications? Even after granting the point that forced sterilization is worse than non-metaphorical decolonization or treating someone's race as a disease, the difference between one being written pseudonomously, and the other publicly in academic journals completely overrides any conclusion that could be made from the comparison you wanted to make. Like I pointed out you can openly call for murdering people based on their race, and the "paper of record" will come to your defense. Hanania could have rewritten all his old posts verbatim, replaced other races with "white" and no one criticizing him, including you, would have cared.

Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status.

Hanania should have never had any trust or status, but he should not lose any over this.

With all due respect, you cannot “openly call for murder.” What you can do is sing a song that calls for murder and then pinky promise you don’t mean it literally, and then the NYT will make sure to mention all that stuff about not taking it literally.

It’s not good! In a country where white people are a racial minority, it’s reasonable to see a serious potential threat. I sincerely hope we do not see violence as a result.

To be clear, I don’t support the pejorative usage of “whiteness” to describe cultural or personal qualities. However, I am not the one making a comparison, here. I’m responding to a comparison that I was given. It is indeed tricky to compare “aimed at white people, no claims of inherent racial superiority, disturbing in potential unspoken implication but not necessarily meaning what a person’s worst fears might make of it, continues to be openly held, not given strong social sanction” with “aimed at a racial minority, claims of inherent racial superiority, explicitly terrible policy suggestions, very recently repudiated, given some social sanction and we may see more.” That’s a lot of variables!

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The NYT has just finished bending over backwards in order to whitewash a literal call for a genocide, do you want to make a bet about any negative consequences coming their way as a result?

This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.

To be fair, "the right" in question here is Bari Weis and her friends.

It doesn't matter what he does because he doesn't matter. I've personally heard of him before but I had no idea what he did nor what his political opinions were. The internet wasn't even much help because the guy isn't prominent enough to have a Wikipedia page, which is, I believe, the bare minimum to consider one relevant to the public discourse. Best I can tell he's a conservative writer with a Substack, who may be more popular than other conservative writers with a Substack but since it doesn't appear he ever wrote professionally he's nothing more than a blogger. The only mention of this incident I've seen in the media is from Huffpost, and they don't have comments so it's hard to even tell what kind of engagement the article got. Besides that no one cares, which leads me to believe that Hanania is the kind of guy who's a celebrity in the extremely-online world but virtually unknown in the real world. There will be no consequences because no one gives a shit.

I can see him having an impact—it's likely conservatives will go after the civil rights act or interpretations thereof due in large part to the influence of Hanania when they gain power next.

That's the hope.

Being influential with the right people can be more important than influential with the mass market. Name me one guy in the pro-life movement but they keep working and won. Other examples I’d give would be TC and George Mason. Which is well highly connected to Koch. The people the .1% read aren’t the people the selling lots of books.

Name me one guy in the pro-life movement but they keep working and won.

Mike Pence.

Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, George W Bush, Justices Alito ACB Thomas Gorsuch Roberts and Kavanaugh, essentially every Republican Senator from 2000 to 2020 contributed to this win.

Fruck studiously takes notes for the next time he wants to shit all over someone in a way that also belittles the community but doesn't break any rules.

He wrote about it.

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully

Unfortunate. It's not going to help him, probably will hurt him. He offered zero defense of anything he said, at best he comes out looking something like Freddie De Boer where he's straight up claiming he was nuts for a while. As my dad used to call it, the George W Bush defense: nothing that happened before I was 35 and found Jesus counts!

His reply struck as me as earnest, particularly because he at least offers a why for the what. That said, I'm still annoyed, but not at all because of the content of his past opinions but entirely because they were left unacknowledged and hidden until a HuffPo expose forced the question. I would have respected him a lot more if he was more upfront and honest about how his opinions have changed, even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

I would have respected him a lot more if he was more upfront and honest about how his opinions have changed, even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

Especially given how much his brand revolves around disagreeableness and bravery. Or rather: the denial that it's even brave to make certain noises online.

even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

That seems utterly banal? "I have held these exact opinions for as long as I've had conscious thought" is much more remarkable and would actually be deserving of a mention IMO.

It is banal with how I phrased it. I just want some sort of hint, because my current impression is that he pretended otherwise.

Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects. Naturally, this led me to look around, and come to the only logical conclusion, which was that I was naturally superior to everyone else and women in particular shouldn’t have any rights. Strangely enough, now that I have a fulfilling personal life and objective career success, such ideas don’t appeal to me anymore.

Hard to overstate how intellectually unappealing this is. I actually empathize with it on some level, but it's sure not an argument that LoserCuckHanania was wrong and WinnerCareerHanania is right. I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose. I surely won't be part of any cancellation project against him, but it probably does diminish my view of him as an honest actor.

Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views? I've never seen any evidence of this anywhere, and there are very obvious examples to the contrary.

Evidently they've never met any Chad types who (among men) hold their conquests in utter contempt.

I suppose one probable explanation is that such types don't bother to post their views on this on forums, so they aren't visible online that much.

Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views?

Because at least some scholars who study such men seem to think (e.g. William Costello) that they do tend to be more misogynistic (which, as pointed out, is different from them being the only misogynists)?

The linked study is based on scoring higher on scales for "Hostility Towards Women", "Rape Myth Acceptance", and "Sexual Objectification". Reading the appendix, these scales are sufficiently low-quality that it is difficult to conclude much from them, at least not without the data for how people responded to individual questions.

Some of the 10 items on the "hostility towards women" scale include "I feel that many times women flirt with men just to tease them or hurt them.", "I am sure I get a raw deal from the women in my life. ", and "I usually find myself agreeing with women. (Reverse coded)". It doesn't really provide novel information to learn that someone romantically unsuccessful has worse experiences with women and is less likely to have someone like a wife in his life that he is more likely to agree with than if the women he interacts with are strangers. (It's also a bit funny to imagine someone making a "hostility towards men" scale and making one of the items "I usually find myself agreeing with men. (Reverse coded).")

Meanwhile large sections of "Rape Myths" and "Sexual Objectification" are things the now-successful Hanania would presumably agree with. Questions like that are going to pick up on very broad demographic correlations with ideology. The ideological bias on display also makes me more skeptical about the people conducting these studies. Examples of the 11 "Rape Myths" include "To get custody for their children, women often falsely accuse their ex-husband of a tendency toward sexual violence.", "Many women tend to exaggerate the problem of male violence." and "It is a biological necessity for men to release sexual pressure from time to time.". (The last would naturally correlate with high sex drive and thus sexual dissatisfaction.) Examples of the 10 "Sex Objectification" items include "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige.", "Using her body and looks is the best way for a woman to attract a man.", and "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners.".

Also some of these seem sufficiently unarguable that it seems like it might be heavily influenced by the respondents' social desirability bias. For instance, if many of the men disagreeing that "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige." or "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners." believe otherwise but are the type to answer surveys with what they perceive as the most socially desirable answers, are they also more likely to misrepresent how sexually satisfied they are? And the second one would also measure sex drive.

It’s a feminist meme that the only reason a man could criticise feminism is sexual frustration or a sense of inferiority. Basically so that to criticise feminism is to declare yourself a loser. Same principle as “what, you can’t handle a strong woman?”.

The same trick was pulled with gay rights - the meme that homophobia is usually a sign of suppressed gay lust.

It's just that it's somewhat strange that even dissident rightists fall for this garbage.

It’s not implied, obviously there are whole regions of the world where every man holds misogynistic views. He’s saying that in cosmopolitan, white, blue tribe PMC circles, young male misogynists are probably highly disproportionately incels.

He never said that only romantically unsuccessful men hold misogynistic views, he just implied that men who are romantically unsuccessful are prone to hold misogynistic views.

In a column meant to give an acceptable explanation for his past (supposedly) abhorrent views on women, he claims that such views "naturally" originated from his unsatisfying romantic life i.e. obviously implying that they cannot possibly stem from anything else.

I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.

This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.

I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.

Why not just that each produces biases in its own way?

The opposite stance also seems to be true—those not entrenched in a system may be less likely to notice the value in it.

You're probably correct that each produces biases of their own - nobody is completely free from that. However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not. The skewing effect of social desirability, on the other hand, seems to be a pressure that just gets worse the more integrated you are in social life. The more you rely on other people, the more incentives there are to curry favour with them and adopt the beliefs of the group.

Personal experience probably isn't a great source for belief, but as I've grown my social circle over the years the more I have felt the pressures of social life encroaching. The tribalistic social pressures and incentive structures that drive people to adopt certain group beliefs for social signalling purposes are disturbingly strong, and it occurs even when no proper evidence has been provided to me that these beliefs are correct, and it's only by actively and consciously guarding against these instincts that I've managed to maintain my streak of heterodoxy. But doing that requires one to accept a level of discomfort they could otherwise shield themselves from.

Good comment. Sort of goes to disprove "Twitter isn't real life."

However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not.

See also here.

It's eerie seeing him be so humble and self-effacing. Typically he gives Moldbug a run for his money as far as smugness and dismissiveness go.

It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.

It's also funny that after years of him lambasting people for apologizing to the mob, he's now in full, grovelling apology mode, and more grovelling than any of the other cancellation victims he mocked.

I mean, did he not realize this stuff would come out one day?

Me: Have favored classical liberalism since I was a teenager, no matter what personal issues I was dealing with, because the soul-crushing authoritarianism, collectivist-driven unfairness, and relative economic ineffectiveness of alternatives to classical liberalism has always been apparent to me. My audience: a handful of people on various scattered political forums.

Hanania: Was too stupid to realize the superiority of classical liberalism until at some point in his 20s. Hanania's audience: Huge SubStack audience, book deal, mingles with influential political figures.

I mean none of this is surprising of course. Think about how some of today's famous and well-compensated neo-conservative writers, for example, were Marxists in their youth.

I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.

Overall, this all encourages me to maybe write more long-form and actually try to become a famous political writer.

To be fair, while my commitment to classical liberalism has never wavered much, in my more emotional moments I have often longed to, and still long to, purge the world with authoritarian murder. But these are heated moments. Like Hanania, I have written some things in the past that would certainly not make me look like a classical liberal were I to be judged only by them.

Indeed one of the things that surprised me about reading Hanania's article is that he did not say that he had written those previous things in the heat of emotion while actually being a classical liberal. He instead said that he actually was not a classical liberal back then. That makes it harder for him, which increases the degree to which I think it is likely to be true.

However, like @Quantumfreakonomics, I find it very hard to believe that he is honest when he writes this:

One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter.

However, relevant discussion thread where Hanania responds: https://twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1688214708094996485.

(Not sure why TheMotte auto-changes nitter to twitter)

Overall, I think that this article is a pretty good bit of writing, but I find it to be just a bit too polished, it has the feel of having been produced as much by tactics as by honesty. The careful reader will come away with a lack of faith in Hanania's willingness to ever write his true thoughts, but then the careful reader will not have had that faith about Hanania to begin with.

It is also possible that the whole essay is bullshit and that he actually is not and never has been a classical liberal. Which would actually maybe make me have more respect for him, since it would imply not only a truly fine commitment to and skill at the art of fakery, but also such a profound love of trolling that he willingly took on a greater burden of necessary fakery in order to be able to continue successfully annoying both sides.

One way or another, if Hanania's response helps him to sail through these stormy waters while keeping his book deal and his mainstream cachet, I will congratulate him and will look forward to hopefully seeing him tear the HuffPost a new one at some point in the future.

I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.

From a moral point of view? Of course. You have 20 more years on the side of the angels.

From a writer's point of view? I'm not so sure. For a local example, see Resident Contrarian's post on having a middle-class income:

You’d think that the ability to [write a post like this] would be universal among people who haven’t been poor at all since they have more time at decent pay-rates than anyone else, but you’d be at least partially wrong. They know what it’s like to have money, but it’s all very usual; the stuff about it that’s weird or different skids off of their awareness without biting like a dull file on hardened steel. It’s not their fault - it’s just normal.

Similarly, you know what it's like to be a classical liberal, but (presumably) it's just normal.

You make a good point about how one can sometimes better understand a view if one has not always held it. Point taken.

I’m not sure how an “intellectual” could be right from the beginning. It takes reading a lot and just because of timelines you work thru one piece of works before others.

I also don’t think classical liberalism works everywhere. It hasn’t worked in Africa or a lot of the ME. Probably wouldn’t have worked until fairly recent in Russia (too much war risks required authoritarian/military politics). Just because classical liberalism roughly works in America doesn’t mean it’s the correct government. But it was for this place and time.

That is fair, I should say that I favor classical liberalism if and when it is possible.

I don't think that one needs to be an intellectual or to read even one book to figure out that classical liberalism is the way to go. Actually I distrust political theories that require one to be grounded in some entire corpus of writing in order to understand them.

This is a pretty good response.

He makes it clear that he doesn't hold the same views, and finds them repugnant. At the same time, he doesn't back off from his current writings, and avoids grovelling.

It won't sate those who can't be sated, of course, but it will probably be sufficient for those who aren't put off by his current views, but who would be repulsed by his former ones, and aren't fans of cancelling when views have changed.

He certainly avoids many of the forced errors that commonly plague statements like this, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out the one clearly false statement that I don't think he ever would have made if his career and reputation weren't on the line

Ya and he basically says policing can reduce crime and implies lot of blacks in jail.

The left will hate him. Because he doesn’t believe in all these structural issues and it’s just genetics. But he works for the right who wants the policies they want without having to say the quiet part out loud.

I’ll downgrade him some as an intellectual because he really isn’t the hard truth teller he claims to be. He is trying to work in the system and get the things he believes are doable and most important. Which seems to be aimed at ending civil rights law and getting rid of a lot of pride. But it does seem like he’s down for saying what he needs to sit with the cool kids.

Moron.

He could have ignored it and increased his chances of surviving, or he could have owned it and gone down with dignity.

Instead, he will go down as a cuck.

I suspect there's some other balancing act going on here.

Hanania doesn't need liberal approval or sympathy, nor could he possibly get it before all this anyway.

He does need to stay relatively acceptable to rich and powerful old boomer conservatives who control the media megaphones and purse strings and set the tone for where things are headed going forward within the shifting conservative movement, especially regarding public political priorities about legal matters (both in the Federal government and concerning cases conservative activists drag in front of the Supreme Court).

And old boomer conservatives are, I think, the only people left who overwhelmingly still cling to the rotting corpse of the old Reagan public settlement about race (namely, we all agree that racism is a truly awful thing, we legitimately believe in a goal of milquetoast equal opportunity, but we will also define racism such that it only applies to truly egregious acts by individual extremists that have nothing to do with almost anybody normal, and we'll likewise view it through a colorblind lens that also holds black Americans to the same standard as everyone else).

Fundamentally, on the ground (at least online), this settlement is over. If you're a younger male or traditional Christian or are white, you have been steeped in progressive activists salting the earth on this and related identity topics since, like, 2013, and so you've already acclimatized to the new reality, or for you this might be the only reality you've ever even known. "Racism" now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you. And so it's no surprise to see conversation norms heavily shifting for younger conservatives, or the sorts of people who at the least are drawn to anti-woke discourse. Younger people who likely would've accepted the public moral legitimacy of the old Reagan settlement stop accepting the moral legitimacy of what has replaced it, and so all the guard rails come down.

I read an interview between Hanania and Chris Rufo the other day (IIRC), and Rufo was basically making something like this point - lots of old boomer conservatives are still very sensitive to how race is talked about, largely because they're insulated from all these changes out in the wild, and so he has to be quite delicate rhetorically about how he talks about race when trying to reach out to them. They can agree about policy goals, but the rhetorical frame that's required to convince them is quite different than what younger online anti-woke types would be receptive to.

This seems like I what I was getting at about a bit of a noble lie where we just ignore disparate outcomes.

One thing I’d add is a lot of the old agreements seem gone outside of race. Pride seems like the exact same thing where we had everyone can do what they want at home to now we teach pride in elementary school.

The right doesn’t want to come out and say they think homosexual lives are inferior. And that’s before we even get into the more extreme things being pushed.

Have you considered the possibility that this is sincere? That is, that he genuinely doesn't hold or like his past views?

Now every time someone attempts to discredit him by posting the huffpost article, someone else can post this in response, which'll take off some of the bite.

This seems like the right play to me.

Have you considered the possibility that this is sincere?

That would be the part that warrants the opening insult. "Oh no, I no longer hold hose views! If I apologize for the stuff I said pseudonymously, I'm sure that will clear things up" is extremely unwise.

Now every time someone attempts to discredit him by posting the huffpost article, someone else can post this in response, which'll take off some of the bite.

Or it won't. In fact there's no reason to believe that it will.

That would be the part that warrants the opening insult. "Oh no, I no longer hold hose views! If I apologize for the stuff I said pseudonymously, I'm sure that will clear things up" is extremely unwise.

That assumes he's looking to "clear things up" rather than to "tell the truth".

I always thought clearing things up involved telling the truth.

Your point is AFAICT that apologising is not incentivised by current cultural norms (or by the nature of his readership).

My point is that some people care more about honesty than incentives.

is extremely unwise.

Why? The way he put it doesn't really open him much to further attacks or attempts at pressuring further capitulation. The main negative to this, under my current model, is losing some people who'd prefer he was his former pseudonymous self, but I think these should generally have lower impact than the people that doing this could let him hold onto.

Or it won't.

It'll obviously vary by person?

Why? The way he put it doesn't really open him much to further attacks or attempts at pressuring further capitulation.

This is why. The way he put it is irrelevant, he will always be open to further attacks.

It'll obviously vary by person?

Yeah, but I don't think the kind of people who control access to mainstream gigs will be the kind of people who'll accept his apology and move on.

It legitimizes the concept that he is now tainted goods because he once held those views. The claim that X conservative (was) racist isn’t about racism, it’s about saying that he is tainted goods and thus no longer worth dealing with. He backs away and thus the attack was legitimate— he was (and for the left, the past isn’t over) racist therefore anyone who has anything to do with him catches racist cooties and nobody wants that. It’s like being asked if you have stopped beating your wife — all answers are wrong.

His target audience is not the left, and people'd believe the article written against him anyway if he tried radio silence.

The left side of the people he's losing by acknowledging weren't going to listen anyway—they'd believe the accusation, or they'd just not care for his political opinions. The main loss to his audience by doing this are people who a) couldn't read the huffpost well enough to be convinced it was Hanania or b) people who thought he was currently still basically Hoste, and are disappointed at the ways he is no longer.

He also doesn't concede anything in the present. He doesn't consider himself tainted goods. He's not going "yes, I'm secretly racist and bad, sorry about that." He's going "I used to be racist and bad, now I'm right and good," and doing it in a way that isn't subjecting himself to anyone's judgment but his own—it's not an entreaty but a declaration.

It matters for mainstream conservatives. They’re the ones most afraid of guilt by association, because most of them have professional careers to defend. And because he’s now tainted, he won’t get that audience, nor get invited to their platforms to speak or write.

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Once you say "Yes, I was racist and bad, but..." nothing said after the but matters.

Maybe he's being completely sincere. It makes no difference. He's shown his enemies they can extract confessions through pressure, and shown his allies that there's no point defending him since he won't defend himself.

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If notable respectable figures continue associating with Hanania, it might signify a shift in cancel culture. These figures might argue that Hanania's genuine apology should suffice. Currently, individuals who have made racist remarks are offered little redemption even compared to those convicted of multiple violent crimes. With ever-changing definitions of racism, many important people could benefit from a system that forgives sincere apologies, like Hanania's. Moreover, associating with someone like Hanania, who undeniably made racially charged comments, could shield those who've made milder missteps in the past.

Isn't the dox illegal? It was only put together with hacked information.

No. Once information obtained illegally is in the public space, it is perfectly respectable to analyze it or examine it. If the journalists solicited the hack it might matter.

Anyway in the USA public figures effectively have no privacy. Writing for money qualifies.

An example of how social media molds the public discussion. Of course, publishing information which you obtained by legal means about somebody is not illegal. Obtaining it may be illegal if done by means of breaking into somebody's property, for example. But it's not called "the dox" anymore then. But - since Twitter and Facebook told us "publishing hacked information is prohibited!" (which also was a lie in several ways) - now people go around telling each other "talking about hacked information is illegal!"

I don't think that because of Twitter or Facebook, so I don't know why you're accusing me of that and putting words in my mouth.

Of course, publishing information which you obtained by legal means about somebody is not illegal.

I am genuinely unsure whether there are legal issues with using e.g. the hacked Disqus database. When I googled it I got a few conflicting answers saying "it depends," so I hoped someone might answer. It seems to me that it might be similar in legality to using libgen.

libgen is very different, because each unauthorized copy of the copyrighted material is a separate violation (including, technically, each time it's loaded from a computer disk or network into memory - that's copying too). However, while copyright has been used sometimes to suppress discussion of things (e.g. by scientologists) I don't think that's the issue here.

I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just noticing how the actions of Big Social influence our thinking about what's allowed and not allowed.

No? It's not generally illegal to publish information that was hacked by someone else. Otherwise this post about Sony's Spiderman market research would be illegal.

Just a little update: the HuffPost article is, as I write, either the first or the second result if I search for the word "Hanania" on Google. I wonder whether this is just the algorithm favoring recency or whether there is a more political explanation for it. I tried it with incognito mode and got the same result. Google is capable of fingerprinting my browser even with incognito mode on though, so it is possible that this has more to do with me than with the HuffPost article.

It's the 17th result right now on DuckDuckGo. I doubt that Google did anything Hanania-specific here, they just like to signal boost "authoritative" outlets. Try finding primary sources for anything vaguely controversial with Google. It's impossible. Just page after page of NBC News, CNN, CBS News, NPR, NBC News Boston, Fox News Milwaukee, NYT Opinion, HuffPost, etc.

I was almost gaslit by this phenomena earlier today - I went back to read about the retraction of a spurious connection only to discover that the retraction was buried under copies and rereporting of the original flawed accusation.

Same with YouTube. I can't ever get the original video anymore; it's always some legacy media channel with talking heads in suits and ties giving me """context""" (i.e. the narrative) and playing censored, shortened clips full of jump cuts (I feel like I am watching an American documentary).

It’s a big part of why Google has become less interesting over the years. Used to be a solid way of finding interesting blogs and personal websites, whereas these days the first few pages for any given result are largely carbon-copy authoritative sources.

I pitched a “Google Discover” search tool to a Google CM friend a while back to solve this problem, basically a Google version of StumbleUpon that would help you find interesting new content, possibly with legal disclaimers. He loved the idea and said he’d run it past higher ups but he said I shouldn’t hold my breath b/c of general risk aversion in the company when it comes to search.

Denying I don’t believe will work. He either needs to say nothing and hope this doesn’t catch on or needs to say it was him. Denial just seems like too obvious of a lie. As a summary of the article it’s a lot of words that says two things

  1. Hannania believes in HBD.
  2. He was a fan of eugenics for low IQ people which is a more difficult position

This is becoming a bit of a problem for the intellectual right. The thing is racial differences are real. But admitting it and trying to form policy that opens you up to your a racist attacks. A lot of good policy like let the whites have most governing positions in S Africa and just ignore blacks being at the bottom rest on that. And everyone of all races benefits from that policy. But it looks bad when the 8% white population controls 95% of leadership positions.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

My guess is he just never responds to the HuffPost piece.

This issue shows up in a lot of culture war stuff. The right tries to talk about children etc when debate pride/gender ideology. But really we just don’t believe those are good things that should be promoted in society and people are better off if they are fringe ideologies.

There's a lot more stuff in there besides the two things you mention. For example:

Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”

“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he wrote.

Of course, many proponents of "HBD" do indeed consider racial antagonism to be part and parcel of that worldview. I'm not the first to note that "HBD" is a motte and bailey with dry statistics in the motte and outright racism in the bailey. But if you're going to fold remarks like this into "HBD" then you really are saying the quiet part out loud.

When normies hear "ethnic cleansing" they think of ovens and Auschwitz. Hanania's (psuedonym's) actual phrasing there is much less inflammatory ("get them to leave") and while I'm sure you can find any number of progressive sources, ideologically captured historians, etc, who will claim that these things are identical, I don't think most people are going to buy it.

Per the core definitions used, ethnic cleansing is explicitly "get them to leave" as distinct from "destroy them" entailed by genocide. This is common across most sources. See eg:

That's one of the major reasons to have separate terms for the two! They're often paired in history, but it's not weasel-wording to use the actual definition of the phrase as it's actually and deliberately used in practice.

If using a term as it is defined, but relying on the fact that everyone reading it will interpret it very differently isn't weasel wording, what is?

I'm going to disagree here, I think "ethnic cleansing" is commonly understood as forceful displacement rather than actual genocide. It's obviously not an entirely clean distinction - making an entire ethnic group leave an area is almost always going to require a lot of violence - but normies are not going to look at a Kosovo situation and say "that's not ethnic cleansing, there's no gas chambers".

I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.

I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.

Imagine my confusion when I saw this out of context in the comment feed, and assumed it was posted in this thread instead.

I appreciate strong definitions too (although it's a war we have thoroughly lost, because strong definitions mean accountability and the mainstream can't abide that) but ethnic cleansing isn't the term I am looking to define - weasel wording is. What is weasel wording if it isn't relying on fuzzy definitions to push an agenda while maintaining plausible deniability?

In that case I don't understand the objections when that word is used to describe what happened to white ethnics in urban cores in the sixties.

The people convincing whites to sell their homes were often not hostile blacks but instead scaremongering white real estate profiteers.

That's the very poorly documented pravda, anyway. Race riots, though, are very well documented.

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I'm going to echo @raggedy_anthem except I'll go further- plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere. Unless you're planning on offering a pension for life conditional on relocating to someplace conveniently far(and, ideally, cheap and safe), with no right of return, there will be no takers. Even then, you're not getting all of them, or even most, although sure you're disproportionately throwing out the laziest. The far right twitterati plan of "blacks get ~$100k to move to Liberia with no backsies, but we pinky promise there won't be any coercion" is inherently unworkable no matter what multiple of Liberia's annual average income the amount is. Americans know there isn't another country as nice as the one they live in, and they especially know the countries that even come close won't take people America is paying to leave, even if they have an 85(or 75 or whatever) IQ.

plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove. Thanks to both sides of government wanting these people to be a cheap labour source there wasn't actually any real enforcement of this, which meant that a lot of illegal immigrants became activists or otherwise engaged with the system. The pre-existing panopticon can just be turned on, you stick "is an illegal immigrant" into XKEYSCORE and have the results sent to the enforcement agency on a per-state basis - that's a huge swathe of them gone in one go. Beyond that you can have a bunch of people go and audit the actual citizens and determine if there was any grounds for an appeal or revocation. Finally, you can implement a bunch of procedures and rules which make life so much worse than their home country that they will actually self deport. Cutting down on immigrant welfare/subsidy abuse, harshly taxing remittances, language requirements, etc.

Being an actual citizen of the USA in good standing is definitely worth a lot (though I wouldn't take the deal - I'd rather live where I currently do than the USA ceteris paribus) but being a fugitive unable to access any and all banking/financial services, unable to get employed etc would absolutely incentivise a return to their nation of origin. And if you're a HBD believer, you don't even need to do anything more - just implement some eugenic policies and the migrants you don't want will be gone in a few generations anyway due to disparate impact alone.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove.

Who are "these people" exactly? Are you not including the 40 million African Americans, or...?

I was basing it off the original quote, so "these people" actually means "post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America".

I’m intrigued that you conflate “HBD believer” with “believer in coercive eugenics.” Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread defining that term in very telling ways.

Huh? Where did I say "coercive eugenics"? I didn't have any coercive eugenics in mind at all, unless you believe that failing to continually subsidise the reproduction of the intellectual underclass counts as "coercive". I even said "a few generations", implying that these efforts would take time. If I was suggesting coercive eugenics the underclass would not be sticking around for a few generations.

Also important to note that black people in practice are American As Fuck -- the idea that they are the true descendants of both the Borderers and Cavaliers has some merit.

And part of being American As Fuck (especially if you are a true descendant of the Borderers and Cavaliers) is "it's a free country, if you don't like me you are welcome to fuck off to Liberia".

So yeah, extremely unworkable -- even the National Divorce suffers from this issue, as many Red states do contain a lot of Black people.

I increasingly feel like the problem with Hanania is he's genuinely a callous, nasty person and that won't work in the longhouse culture.

I've had moments of extreme vitriolic exaggeration, so I cut him slack when he puffs his chest and talks of how masculine, disagreeable he is, how everyone's a pussy, how he's disgusted at men showing vulnerability, ungratefulness, incompetence etc. etc. I think of it as just playing to the audience of fellow tough guy meritocrats. But perhaps I'm too cynical, cynicism overflowing into naivete, and it's all genuine (like Tate is genuinely some kind of a pimp or whatever). So he'd prefer it if sterilization were sound policy, because he'd rather just genocide poor people and black Americans, basically out of spite; meritocratic equal-opportunity race-blindness may or may not be unworkable, but for him it might not even seem desirable.
It's an alien mindset for me, but not ineffable, and exactly what progressives seek to demonstrate in their enemies.

Regardless, I think if people are correct that Musk is beyond cancellation, Hanania can curry favor with him and remain somewhat relevant for this reason alone. Musk is positively seething about EFF's Malema and his "clever" borderline genocidal rhetoric; maybe he won't stop quoting a guy who used to have edgy takes about blacks.

I actually knew a guy who had Hanania as a TA back when he was at UCLA. My friend didn't think of him as a nasty guy. But perhaps the internet has warped his mind.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

I think ignorance is the opposite of bliss in this case. If you naively hold that all races are equal in terms of cognitive potential (as almost all "respectable" sources have stridently proclaimed since, idk, the 1960s), then you are absolutely setting yourself up to be furious about the glaring disparity in outcomes.

The end result is the carcinous growth of ideologies like CRT which are on the desperate hunt for racism-of-the-gaps (as I prefer to call systemic racism) in order to explain why despite the enormous effort put into mitigating said disparities, they still persist.

They're searching under the lamp post of their ideology, because it puts blinders on their ability to even conceive that group differences exist, and this lack of conception prevents them from even looking at the glaring evidence all around, and motivates them to attack those who'd shine a scientific torch on it.

The only actual answer to the question of why Whites typically do better than Blacks is the YesChad.jpg reply that it's because they're better in all the ways that matter outside of sports and entertainment. You can further assuage accusations of White Supremacy by pointing out that Asians beat them too.

Recognizing that HBD is even an option immediately dissolves the puzzle, even if it's outside the window of polite conversation. Unfortunately, that's not where society as a whole is at, outside primarily pseudonymous spaces or hushed conversations with people who think much the same but are unable to speak up.

For a long time though we just mostly ignored the differences in differences. The things you mentioned didn’t become a problem until the BLM and CRT people showed up. Things just functioned for a long time.

Look, you can argue that blacks are stupid, especially when compared to whites, but they aren't blind. They can look around and tell that they're worse off than whites and an explanation of "well, that's just how it is, umm, can we talk about something else" has very little appeal to them. Someone was going to fill the niche of blaming it all on racism and pretending there is no difference in outcomes is ignoring reality hard enough that you can't keep it up.

What I find hard about this is that there are lots of groups that aren't blind. There is something else, historical or visual or whatever, that causes the specific groupings and specific arguments that we see become prevalent.

But it doesn’t seem like blacks created this current environment. It seems like this was mostly white on white crime.

If that isn’t stable then what is stable - teach differences in elementary school, noble lie, whatever we got now, or complete separation seem to be the only options.

Well yes, everything about this current environment is white people’s fault, or at least the fault of some subset of whites, if you go far enough back. Importing hundreds of thousands of black slaves was a decision made by white people. Deciding that equality in outcomes for their descendants is a policy goal was a decision made by white people. Etc, etc. And yes, the current racial mania is mostly a white thing- have you heard the actually-originating-in-the-black community versions of these things? It’s 85 IQ conspiracist schizoposting. I don’t think there is an easy solution to black underperformance, but encouraging assimilation seems obvious and necessary. And we can expect that to be important for lots of reasons- to start with, while lower black IQ’s might be the main reason for their poor outcomes, it really, really doesn’t help that they have a ridiculously broken and dysfunctional ghetto culture. Making blacks less distinctive compared to whites also means you have less of a racial consciousness issue.

Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.

From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:

That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?

A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.

We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?

...

A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?

Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.

I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.

What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.

...

What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.

All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.

...

What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?

From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:

But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.

...

Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.

Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least worth trying – certainly nothing else that has been tried so far has proven to work very well.

In terms of criminal justice, too many blacks are imprisoned now. Certainly some – those who prey on the person or property of others – should be imprisoned, and few blacks would disagree. But many more are imprisoned for victimless drug offenses, and this should end. The War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, and should be discontinued, with drugs decriminalized. The problems associated with drug use among blacks should be handled by the black community itself.

...

These are my suggestions, and I believe them at least worth considering.

From "Radish defends slavery" by the Dreaded Jim:

You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?

Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.

And from "Economic efficiency of slavery" by the same:

For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that slavery does not work to get such tasks done – hence the failure of the Soviet Union.

However for many tasks, tasks suitable to stupid people, tasks for bad people, tasks where you want people to reliably do as they are told rather than make good decisions, the sort of tasks that most black people are suitable for, slavery was markedly more productive and efficient than free labor, with the slave producing more value for himself and his owner with less labor, than he did when freed.

When the slaves were freed, they became for the most part, considerably worse off economically, having to work harder and getting less to eat.

...

Economists find this outcome most strange, but there is no mystery to it. When stupid people, prone to short time horizons, get to make their own decisions for themselves, they are apt to make stupid decisions.

A slave maid could not steal the silverware, because she could not own anything. An employed maid could steal the silverware, and probably would, and would be the worse off for it. An employed maid might well beat the baby with stick as thick as her arm because her mistress spoke sharply to her. A slave maid would not, because her mistress could do worse.

If masters and slaves were better off than employers and employees, an economist would ask, why could they not just cut a deal to do what they previously did, only without chains and beatings, do the same tasks in the same way, only as employees?

The answer to that question is: that the former slaves, once freed, could not credibly commit to stick to such a deal, and generally did not stick to such a deal, thus economically worse off. Stupid people, prone to violence, with short time horizons, needed masters.

The enslaved Africans weren’t hanging around being stupid and problematic, getting underfoot, necessitating some productive use for them.

Presumably the African slavers who forced them into slavery and sold them felt otherwise.

In all seriousness, every pre-industrial civilisation relied on some system of forcing people to do back-breaking physical labour. Africa had slavery since Ancient Egypt invaded Nubia, in Europe we had peasants and serfs. Now we have robotics (lit. Workers in Czech) and machines. Soon we will have AI.

From where I’m standing, the devil’s bargain is importing an ethnically distinct forced labour class. Once you do, even post industrialisation it will be very clear who was on which side of the metaphorical or literal whip and those wounds aren’t going to heal with time. Especially when the forces that put A on top of B end up not changing.

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Well, if you think that slavery is "sane" and you are consistent, then if hyper-intelligent aliens ever came to Earth and tried to enslave humanity to work in the unobtanium mines in similar conditions as what blacks experienced in the American South, you would justify it and side with the aliens. And that would be your choice, but I would still shoot you the first chance I got.

I'm not fresh on the status of the value of propagating existence around here. I feel like there is a contingent of folks who would argue that it is the primary, if not only, value underlying nearly everything else. So, I'm left wondering about this scenario. If morality is purely relative/subjective, such that the aliens just have the morality they have and there is nothing objective separate from that, is it better to mine unobtanium in slavery (for a while, at least; not sure how to discount future probabilities) or to just be exterminated?

I’d just like to register my repugnance with your axioms and your conclusions. Statistics are not people, and people who believe in eugenics and dysgenics believe (in my experience) in genetic destiny far more than statistics does.

I think that eugenics should be practiced in order to eliminate as many genetic disorders and conditions as are reasonably possible. Cystic fibrosis is absolutely a genetic destiny with a sharp and severe impact on quality of life and I don't see why we should just accept that some people are going to be born with horrible conditions when it is within our power to fix it totally within one or two generations.

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I find it hard to believe that an employed maid could beat a baby because of low time preference but a slave maid wouldn't. Are you claiming that a slave maid would be punished as soon as her deed was discovered, but for an employed maid, the employer would wait a while before punishing the maid? That seems unlikely.

I think the point is that the employed maid could merely be fired while the slave maid would be beaten or killed herself. But as with most Dreaded Jim material I suspect it was written to optimize for provocativeness rather than sense.

There is no stability; we're in a death spiral, where those in charge will keep claiming group differences don't exist and keep increasing measures to eliminate or cover up differences in outcome, until something completely breaks.

It was a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground. Sooner or later some ambitious young activist was going to pick it up and ride to power on the back of racial grievances.

It took a while because all the people who originally enacted the noble lie in the 60s knew the truth. But they made it so that you could not speak the truth, and eventually a new crop of children grew up never learning the truth while hearing the lie repeated again and again in their televisions and classrooms. They did not get the joke.

Anything which is common knowledge but which cannot be said out loud becomes lost knowledge a generation later. Unprincipled exceptions always yield to superior holiness. Hence generational loss of hypocrisy.

From "The Goal Is Soft Genocide. Unless Stopped, the Outcome Will Be Hard Genocide." by The Dreaded Jim:

But in holiness competition, we get the phenomenon that neoreactionaries call “not getting the joke”. If you are going to be selected for loyalty to progressive memes, best take those memes absolutely literally and seriously, since only the truest believers get into the best universities and get the plum jobs. So the next generation of progressives takes the most ridiculous things as holy writ, the more ridiculous the better, since precisely the most stupid, ridiculous and outrageous things will differentiate you from the other applicant to Harvard.

And from the comments of "Putin Successfully Stabilizing Syria" by the same:

The Dark Enlightenment calls this “Not getting the joke”, and “ending the unprincipled exception”. The trouble with Jewish progressives is that they don’t get the joke, they drink the koolaide, they attack unprincipled exceptions.

Thus, for example, “equal but separate”. Suppose fifty percent of the city is black, and the government has separate black and white water fountains and public toilets. Suppose the government applies the same amount of money to installing and mantaining black and white water fountains and public toilets. That is equal but separate.

But, strangely, one hundred percent of the black water fountains will be out of order to due to casual vandalism, and one hundred percent of the black toilets have their floors covered three inches deep in human shit. The Converso denounces this as white racism and “separate and unequal”

In Australia, the Australian government has discovered it is just not practical to attempt to provided full blooded aboriginals with human type housing. Somehow Jews have failed to notice this, perhaps because all such housing is provided far away from regular humans, but when they do discover it, their reaction will be predictable.

See also "Reason as Memetic Immune Disorder" by Phil Goetz.

What is that website greaterwrong? I liked that post

It's a mirror of LessWrong for people who don't like the way LessWrong 2.0 looks and prefer something closer to the original.

If you don't know what LessWrong is and how it relates to The Motte, here's a quick rundown:

The Rationalist community was born during the 2 years in which Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, blogged daily, first on Robin Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, then later on his own blog called LessWrong. These blog posts are known as The Sequences, and form the foundation of modern rationality discourse. For more on Eliezer's backstory, please see my earlier comment on /r/CultureWarRoundup.

A few years after Eliezer stopped blogging, LessWrong declined to the point of irrelevance and the community moved on to various other websites, an event known as the Rationalist diaspora. Scott Alexander (author of Unsong), who had made a name for himself on LessWrong under the pseudonym Yvain, started a blog called Slate Star Codex, which became the major website of the diaspora. So popular was this website that it spawned it's own subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex.

Like in a lot of other forums, political discussion started taking over the sub; the solution was to corral all political talk to a single recurring thread called the Culture War Thread, which quickly became the single most popular thread on the subreddit, accruing thousands of comments each week. Eventually, under pressure from critics (most notably /r/SneerClub), Scott decided to evict the thread from the sub. Those who wanted to continue the thread created a new subreddit, /r/TheMotte, where the thread continues to this day. You can think of it as the rationalist politics subreddit, much like this is the rationalist fiction subreddit.

And you didn't ask about this one, but since it will probably come up, /r/CultureWarRoundup is a competing alternative to /r/TheMotte created by users who were dissatisfied with the latter's moderation policies.

I prefer using it to not feed cookie data to the Lesswrong cabal directly.

It's an alternative front-end for LessWrong.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder

The situation wasn't stable. Most people might have ignored the differences, but advocates didn't and black people didn't. And they kept pushing. They can't find a solution because

  1. The difference aren't due to anything that can be solved by social engineering.

  2. The US makes it really hard to get away with just plain rigging everything with explicit quotas. And it does have to be pretty much everything, or you just push the problem around.

Diana Moon Glampers hasn’t been tried yet.

I'm pretty sure that billions to a trillion dollars have been spent on the specific issue of black underperformance since the Civil Rights days. The reason that CRT took off is that it turns out that trying to stack hundred dollar bills beneath the underperformers didn't help them peer over the fence.

The root cause has always been willful ignorance of reality, and outcomes like CRT are almost guaranteed when activists notice that their efforts lead nowhere.

Unfortunately this could basically kill his influence. It won't completely obliterate him and he will likely still be able to make a solid living from writing things on Substack, but his days of being quoted by people like Musk and being a central player in the battle against wokeness are likely coming to an end. A tactic that woke defenders love to use is the quippy ad-hominem about how ideologically repugnant their opponent is. Hanania's book is coming out in September and I can already hear leftist retorts along the lines of "this is the guy who said Blacks should all be sterilized". Nuance doesn't really matter because trying to defend against the attack or adding context concedes the central point that this person uttered thought-criminal ideas in the past. Mainstream conservatives are still utterly terrified of being considered "racist", and linking to someone's book who said something like that could pose a risk to them that way. As such, these attacks can be pretty successful for at least trashing people's reputation in polite company, which is all the woke defenders really need to do to make someone mostly irrelevant.

He's legitimately the only person who understands how to defeat wokeness. His career being terminated would be sad for him, but not an absolute disaster for the movement, so long as someone with a cleaner history is able to pick up his talking points and run with them.

But I fear that that won't happen. We've gone decades without mass opposition to Griggs or the other excesses of the Civil Rights Act forming. It could take decades for another influential figure like Hanania to pick up the torch. (Yes, I know about Caldwell, but he never reached the popularity of Hanania.)

He believes wokeness is downstream from the civil rights act.

Seems plausible, though I haven't seen comparisons of legislation vs wokeness in other similar Anglo countries like Canada and Australia who have frequent first nations prayers before government meetings.

though I haven't seen comparisons of legislation vs wokeness in other similar Anglo countries like Canada and Australia who have frequent first nations prayers before government meetings.

Or better yet - other entirely different non-Anglo countries, where they had BLM protests with scarcely any black people living there, chant about punching TERFS, etc...

If only they were only before government meetings...

We also have e.g. a Racial Discrimination Act. I'm sceptical about the impact of legislation on culture, but the legislation exists.

He talks about how wokeness is in large part the result of government policy and Supreme Court decisions, and how we can fight to overturn these.

To my knowledge, Caldwell is the only other one, but he never got as popular.

And this is precisely why I'm at a loss as to why he ever got popular. The same people telling me that politics is downstream from culture, who go on at length how the Constitution can't protect your rights because it will just get reinterpreted to take them away from you, who go as far to say the rule of law is a sham, etc., fell in love with the guy who thinks wokeness is baked into the Civil Rights Act and a handful of SC decisions...

Because he's deradicalizing us and giving us hope for a way out.

I'm not familiar with this guy but I think the obvious solution is to never, under any circumstances, apologize for sins against the Left. I'm reminded of the scene from Darkest Hour where Churchill, referring to peace talks with Hitler, yells "you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is stuck in its mouth!" The Left -- that is, the mass of men and women who are in control of nearly every relevant channel of Western power and influence -- aren't interested in conversation. They're interested in grinding their enemies under heel. They are the tiger, and even the most well-meaning attempts of conservatives to roll over and play the deferential gentleman get them eaten. But oh, how very gracefully those posh conservatives bowed their heads and accepted martyrdom! It won't achieve anything. The Christians with whom I stand should model themselves after the crusaders. More Richard the Lionheart and less Thomas a Kempis.

Rightists do change their beliefs like any honest person. They should be candid about that. But these changes should be framed as intellectual corrections or, at worst, correcting youthful intemperance. Never, ever, should they use Leftist semiotics (saying, "I commit to doing better," or "I apologize for my past hurtful words" is self-immolation). In other words, if you're being accused of right-wing dogwhistling then you're doing it right. Either way the Left hates the Right. They should make themselves worth the hatred.

If all that seems too rigid, then know I think these rules necessary guardrails against the conservative inclination to seek compromise. That leads to the "speed-limit conservatism" of the National Review crowd. Those people exemplify the chief problem with conservatism. The problem isn't a lack of clear policy goals or manifestos or books about the glories of Western civilization. Books are dead when their words don't fill the chests of men. The problem is that conservatives are old and bloodless. Bronze Age Pervert's book isn't a sane or articulate political project. It voices a spirit which moves and animates everything else. The actual content of the book is all performative insanity -- nobody would seriously consider comparing Mitt Romney to Alcibiades unless they're joshing around. BAP is a full-on thought-criminal who attracts just the people he needs to attract: serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them. These men don't need another thought-piece about changing the Leftist orthodoxy from within. They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.

If it seems like I'm not addressing your main question, then know that's partly because I'm not familiar with Hanania (though it looks like I should be!). The best option you present appears to be #3: ignore what's going on. Not because he's ashamed or looking for approval, but because it isn't worth his time to explain himself. His silence is the answer. Eventually he might be forced to address the issue. Then he should just be honest about why he's changed his views, using parameters similar to what I outlined above. Avoiding an apologetic tone is crucial. The very young men the dissident right appeals to will sniff that stuff out as weakness, and deservedly so.

The Left -- that is, the mass of men and women who are in control of nearly every relevant channel of Western power and influence

To the extent that this is not just a tautological redefinition of "the left", this strikes me as factually inaccurate. The right of center has significant support among the the police, military, non traditional media, and a large minority of traditional media. Republicans routinely win ~50% of elections at all levels, a supreme court in their favor. A majority of high-wealth individuals are Republican.

The good advice in this post is for Hanania to be honest with himself and his beliefs. It is a virtue to courageously stand up and truthfully say "yes I believed this, but here is why I changed my mind" or "I used to believe this; I still do but I used to, too". It is obviously cowardly and expedient to apologize if he does actually hold those convictions.

On the other hand, large swaths of this post are deeply uncharitable and indistinguishable from a self-fulling siege-mentality worldview (which may or may not be in accordance with reality). Many leftists have an exactly symmetric but opposite narrative, just as passionately and deeply held. I suppose you can both be right, but you both can't have the moral high ground.

The right of center has significant support among the the police, military, non traditional media, and a large minority of traditional media. Republicans routinely win ~50% of elections at all levels, a supreme court in their favor. A majority of high-wealth individuals are Republican.

The police in cities and the military are both controlled by the left; only the lower ranks are otherwise.

So? The police in smaller municipalities aren't.

The military is controlled by the commander in chief, the sec-def and the combatant commanders which are political appointees.

The military is controlled by the commander in chief, the sec-def and the combatant commanders which are political appointees.

As was demonstrated in at least two incidents under Trump (Afghanistan and refusal to quell the DC BLM riots), the deep state has more control than this would imply.

Historically security apparati have sided with whoever the lower to mid ranking officers have supported in the event of civil strife, not with who the top brass threw in with. For a recent example, Niger’s new President is a captain, not a general. Police departments are constrained by the opinions of the sergeants and lieutenants at least as much as by the chiefs. And according to people that are in the military, the military is in practice a lot less woke than it tries to come off as because the captains and majors aren’t on board.

Historically security apparati have sided with whoever the lower to mid ranking officers have supported in the event of civil strife

This is just selection bias. When the military stayed loyal, there was no civil strife.

The actual content of the book is all performative insanity -- nobody would seriously consider comparing Mitt Romney to Alcibiades unless they're joshing around. BAP is a full-on thought-criminal who attracts just the people he needs to attract: serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them

I honestly think this is cope for the fact that BAP and people who like him genuinely believes a lot of straightforwardly false ideas. "The mean of the white IQ distribution is significantly higher than that of the black IQ distribution and that means more white people should have positions of influence than black people" - okay. "Race mixing pollutes the nobility of the Nordic Races and races have different spirits. white people are superior to asian bugmen" - not true at all. (ten more examples elided). And, yeah, it's pointless arguing whether or not BAP 'really believes this', maybe it's all a big joke. But a large portion of the internet far right he associates with, e.g. people he retweets on twitter, clearly do believe it - both from their public posts and (if you imagine they're joking too) private conversations. These are precisely the serious young men you mention. What prevents this resurgence of far-right ideas from descending into romantic fantasies and failing to accomplish anything? Those "serious young men with spines" satisfy their animals spirits translating old texts or dreaming of conquering a small african country, while ... lifting weights and posting on twitter, or plotting to reduce illegal immigration by 30% or introduce tariffs in the next Trump admin.

They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.

You can imagine your Based Marketing Firm or Based Dating App is a mannerbund all you want. It's still responding to the demands of the market, selling slop to consumers. The 'world' isn't going anywhere - technology's taking it over, the 'liberal' global economy is more capable than ever and 'satisfying consumers' as well as it ever has.

Seriously, it's worth meditating on the lack of practical meaning within this statement:

serious young men with spines who are looking to armor themselves for the eventual crackdown their overlords will visit upon them. These men don't need another thought-piece about changing the Leftist orthodoxy from within. They need to find communities of other, understanding men with whom to build themselves against the world.

How are they 'armoring themselves'? 'Communities of men building themselves against the world'? I keep hearing stuff like 'build brotherhoods of men / institutions that will survive the collapse, and pick up the pieces in the harsh world to come'. But ... that isn't happening. AGI catastrophe is more plausible than that. It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.

IQ

You surely know but BAP isn't too keen on HBD and IQ-focused discourse; or rather, his notion of evaluation methodology, «racial hierarchy», desirable qualities and perhaps even the mechanics involved are all entirely different from the Sailerite school of thought (which is why I'm pissed when everyone on the dissident right is rounded up to a Nazi; no you fools, at least appreciate the vibrant diversity of other doctrines which are every bit as irreconcilable with yours, it's an honor to be hated from so many different angles!). And it's not about Nordics as such, he preaches exactly what it says on the tin – Bronse Age mindset, bodybuilders on horseback.

It's hard to think of a material way that 2020 is worse off than 1980, and 1970-1980s america didn't collapse.

I dislike the phrase "techno-solutionism" but it ought to be recognized how much of our "not worse off" depends on outracing the decline. Opinions differ as to how sustainable that is. I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.

He's made many positive comments about IQ, HBD, and such, alongside negative ones. I'm arguing his other 'evaluation methodologies' are more literary hallucinations than they are real.

And it's not about Nordics as such, he preaches exactly what it says on the tin – Bronse Age mindset, bodybuilders on horseback.

In his twitter or podcasts, he makes many specific claims about races! I think these are almost always false.

depends on outracing the decline.

I specifically mentioned 1980 because of the crime wave - property crime rates are down significantly since then (both by statistics and by anecdote/vibe). I don't think there is an advancing decline along any material standpoints. Any such theft or damage is bad, and simple but somewhat harsh policy changes would easily deter those people and similar, but I don't think there's any active decline, just stasis or improvement atm.

I don't think there is an advancing decline along any material standpoints.

Rates of family formation, real purchasing power among people who earn a salary, energy consumption per capita (never recovered from the 1970s crisis!), fentanyl addiction rates, US homeless population, oil discoveries, increased rate of adverse weather events due to climate change, rise of a surveillance state, rise of a surveillance marketing system, US military corruption, US manufacturing capacity, US infrastructure maintenance...

I strongly appreciate engagement with my point!

Rates of family formation

It's reasonable to replace this with two factors: fertility rate, and % of children living with two parents. The current fertility rate is .001 off from the rate of 1980! I think a lot of that is immigrants having higher birth rates and arbitrary luck that 1980 happened to be the lowest fertility of that era. I agree that not having two parents isn't ideal, but it's plateaued since 1990, and doesn't represent a meaningful decline for the middle and upper-class americans who still have reasonable families. It's still unfortunate.

energy consumption per capita

This is misleading imo, like citing coal consumption per capita or 'pharmaceutical consumption per capita' as targets. The development of computers has allowed the same amount of useful work to be done with less energy. Is it bad that, instead of shipping physical books, we now transmit bits over cables? When we miniaturize a chip so that it does the same work with 2x less energy, something that happened many times in the 1960-2000s - energy consumption maybe 'declines', despite nothing bad happening.

real purchasing power among people who earn a salary

I'm not sure what statistic you're referring to - 'real' means inflation adjusted, generally, and googling I only found this, which seems to go up. And the percent of the population that earns a salary only decreases with time bc aging, so changes in composition can't be the reason.

fentanyl addiction rates, US homeless population

I agree these have risen and are bad! Homelessness has doubled since 1990. But they are sort of ... qualitative issues for the majority of people, not quantitative ones. Some people have it very bad, the majority of people still have it fine. What I'm discussing is more material / economic / functional declines for everyone.

oil discoveries

I don't think this is true, really. The shale oil boom in the 2010s helped make the US a net oil exporter.

increased rate of adverse weather events due to climate change

This doesn't really fit with the original topic of human-caused decline, and I'm pretty suspicious of its truth anyway. Maybe there are more of some events in some areas and less in others. However that actually means 'genuinely uncertain', not 'secretly believes it's totally false and is JAQing', it really could go either way.

rise of a surveillance state

The US government is incredibly respectful of privacy, tbh. There's no technical reason your computer doesn't send all your keystrokes to the Anti-Crime Division or whatever, but we don't! We have all sorts of anti-privacy laws that are mostly respected. Most of the threats to privacy are private actors who sell data to other actors. Getting cancelled from your job for a political heresy by entirely private actors isn't great, but that's not a 'surveillance state', it's basically the default during all of human history.

US military corruption

I am entirely unfamiliar with this topic, but find it plausible corruption isn't much worse than it was in the past. Especially the 'this is just the way we do business' kind of 'corruption'. Analogous to political machines. Again, entirely unfamiliar.

US manufacturing capacity

Manufacturing output has plateaued, not declined (note I'm not confident that graph means what I think it does). Manufacturing employment has declined, obviously - but this is just because our service jobs are more useful than manufacturing jobs. There's a reason manufacturing employees in Bangkok or Shanghai earn les than coders or financial analysts in America, and it's not because we're tricking them - the exchange rates between us and them are set by their demand for our products, compared to our demand for theirs. Foreign countries with a lot of manufacturing want to participate in & purchase our services enough that they're willing to price their labor at a lot lower than ours, per capita! We're just specializing in more complicated and capital and IQ intensive work. China wishes they had our service jobs and we had their manufacturing jobs! They'd swap in an instant. As would Thailand, Mexico, and Niger.

US infrastructure maintenance

Not informed. This might refer to two things: One, the 'our infrastructure is old and not being upgraded quickly enough' thing, which I think is arguably true but I'm not sure it's that important, or that it was that much better in the past.

The other is (probably not what you meant but) that building and bridge collapses are in the news every so often, and twitter RWers quote tweet these with 'AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS DESTROYING OUR SOCIETY'. I assume that isn't your argument, but 1970s and 1920s newspapers also had lurid details of infrastructure collapses at arguably higher rates.

So of your points, I agreed with partially 'rates of family formation' and entirely agree with 'homeless/fentanyl', and wasn't informed on a few more. If my understandings are correct, I think this supports my point, mostly - things aren't really getting worse on the whole. Like, nations are big, you'd expect a few things to get worse on the net no matter what, alongside many other improvements.

It's reasonable to replace this with two factors: fertility rate, and % of children living with two parents. The current fertility rate is .001 off from the rate of 1980! I think a lot of that is immigrants having higher birth rates and arbitrary luck that 1980 happened to be the lowest fertility of that era

If you're going to measure the fertility rate like that then you need to start looking at individual populations and demographics as well. The "immigrants having higher birth rates" part is the real killer - I think that is actually masking a drop in fertility and family formation among the original population, and the fecundity advantage of immigrants disappears within a generation or two. You've actually just pointed out that the problem is even worse than it appears, because the numbers are being artificially inflated by recent immigrants. Remove them from the equation and look at the original population and their descendants, and it becomes clear that something is wrong. Importing populations high in fertility but low in human capital and mean IQ (the kind of mean that matters for regression) and claiming that this fixes the problem is like saying that you don't have a debt problem because you can borrow more money to cover the existing debts.

Is it bad that, instead of shipping physical books, we now transmit bits over cables?

While some of these changes are due to increased efficiency I think that a lot of it represents a real decrease in productive work being done - outsourcing is something I view as largely bad for the nation engaging in it and that would also have shown up in these figures. Some of the factors driving these changes are absolutely good, but some of them are very much not.

I'm not sure what statistic you're referring to - 'real' means inflation adjusted, generally, and googling I only found this, which seems to go up

I actually made a mistake - I meant Americans who earn a wage rather than a salary, so my fault here. I also think that inflation statistics are massaged in order to mask this decline and make it less obvious when compared with the methods used in previous decades, and if you calculate inflation using historical metrics the decline becomes a lot starker.

Homelessness has doubled since 1990. But they are sort of ... qualitative issues for the majority of people, not quantitative ones. Some people have it very bad, the majority of people still have it fine. What I'm discussing is more material / economic / functional declines for everyone.

There are tent cities forming around multiple state capitals, and the homeless population is causing large problems in San Francisco and other cities. The amount of homeless people doubling in 30 years isn't a warning of decline or a signal - it IS decline. Those homeless people obviously have a lower QOL than they did before (and they are probably using less energy too), and they also decrease the QOL for the people near them. It doesn't technically hurt everyone (the people on Martha's Vineyard won't give a shit) but it very clearly represents material decline.

I don't think this is true, really. The shale oil boom in the 2010s helped make the US a net oil exporter.

It doesn't matter what you think here because you are wrong - oil discoveries are down and have been continuing to decline. The shale oil boom is in my view a temporary mirage, but that is immaterial here considering they don't represent new discoveries. Shale oil fields have been known about for some time, but were largely considered uneconomical to extract. As a source of oil, they have a much lower EROEI than conventional light sweet crude, and this creates an energy tax on the rest of society. Dipping into the crumbs at the bottom of the oil barrel is not a sign of a recovery!

This doesn't really fit with the original topic of human-caused decline, and I'm pretty suspicious of its truth anyway.

I think climate change is a real, serious issue and one that is directly caused by human activity - we are already starting to feel the effects of it, and those impacts will continue to get worse over time. But actually litigating this would be a massive undertaking beyond the scope of this comment.

The US government is incredibly respectful of privacy, tbh.

You should go back and read the Edward Snowden disclosures. The US government is absolutely not respectful of privacy and there are ultimately no protections against oversight-free surveillance. They were willing to violate the privacy of Donald Trump during crossfire hurricane despite having explicit knowledge that there was no real Russian collusion, and pass on private details to the political campaign of his opponent. People being cancelled for heresy is also bad and a sign of decline (failing power structure desperately tries to remove critics to strengthen popular perception) but that's a bit more vague and hypothetical than something like declining oil discovery rates.

I am entirely unfamiliar with this topic, but find it plausible corruption isn't much worse than it was in the past.

I don't find that plausible at all, but statistics on this are hard to come by. I have seen a lot of news stories about corruption in federal procurement contracts (million dollar bins etc) and there have been multiple expensive boondoggles which have not resulted in any actual military advantage - I think the F-35 has been an incredibly expensive loser, for instance, but I also admit that I can't really prove that objectively without throwing them into combat with equivalents from the Russian/Chinese military.

Manufacturing output has plateaued, not declined (note I'm not confident that graph means what I think it does).

I also have my doubts about that data but I cannot see exactly how it is generated and if there are any nasty tricks that obscure the kind of decline in capacity that I'm talking about here. More importantly, total output isn't what I was talking about - there are severe bottlenecks in multiple important manufacturing industries (defence, shipbuilding etc) and supply-chain requirements. A lot of chips and other vital components are manufactured in China, to the point that it is actually a serious military issue and there are frequent prosecutions of people who sell Chinese-manufactured gear to the military.

But more importantly, what I said there was capacity. I'll switch to a specific category now - shipbuilding. Right now the US shipbuilding industry has undergone a catastrophic decline, to the point that China has roughly 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the USA according to the navy. There's more to manufacturing than just GDP output - the knowledge-base, supporting industries, infrastructure etc all take time to build up (or mothball), and if there's any kind of crisis that impacts international trade then those differences will become extremely relevant.

Not informed. This might refer to two things: One, the 'our infrastructure is old and not being upgraded quickly enough' thing, which I think is arguably true but I'm not sure it's that important, or that it was that much better in the past.

Transportation, clean potable water supply, reliable electricity - and I'm talking largely about the flyover states. There are real, serious problems in the American heartlands that aren't just "black women made this bridge that then fell down". The statistics for rural life in America show clear and undeniable signs of decline in a huge variety of ways.

Like, nations are big, you'd expect a few things to get worse on the net no matter what, alongside many other improvements.

My position is that the US is declining on the whole, and this is obscured by financial chicanery and the uneven distribution of the decline. Some areas are prospering, and combined with massaged financial statistics the overall decline is obscured and hidden - but it shows up in a few places if you know where to look.

I do not foresee or dream of a collapse, but I'm also not looking forward to this kind of dysfunctional culture being empowered by technology indefinitely.

I've been reading which I think put this distinction we should be making between cultural and material progress quite well. From Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos:

We are much more willing to look at the progress of technology as the model that social progress "should" resemble, no matter how improbable the resemblance might be. The cycle of invention and obsolescence is more appealing than the tragic history of "the rise and fall" of Rome: technology promises us a rise without a fall, and a history without heroes or villains – only inventors. Unlike a struggle between factions, with each side pretending to be certain that they alone can lead the public to a better future but living forever with uncertainty and regret (as when the Tories slaughtered the Whigs, and vice versa, in the American Revolution) about all the good men who died on the other side, half wondering as to whether or not the unexpected outcomes of all the violence really were "the best of all possible worlds", as Candide would say, when we imagine social progress in technological terms we need not question the extent to which we will be heroes, villains, or simply passive cowards, in the next chapter of history to be written. Brutus must have wondered, before his death, if he had been more a villain than a hero, and must have questioned whether or not he would have been better off a coward and a conformist –whether or not all of Rome would have been better off, by the same token. Instead of all this endlessly ambivalent tragedy, we can all fix our eyes on a new cellular phone, laid bare upon the dining room table, and express our astonishment at how much "the state of the art" has improved in the last twenty years: now this is progress!

We ignore that the table the phone is sitting upon hasn't changed at all; nor has the concrete floor, nor the pipes that bring us water below the floorboards, and so on. It does not occur to us that the stasis of our senates, parliaments, prisons, police services and universities should be judged more harshly, relative to the rapid progress made in other fields (or at least in this one). Instead, we behave as if the innovations made in consumer electronics were infectious. Perhaps if you leave that cellphone sitting on the table long enough, the ingenuity embodied within it will seep through the polished surface, drip down the wooden legs, through the concrete floor, and then percolate into the pipes --revolutionizing the sewage system along with everything else it touches, without any of us having to be bothered about leading a revolution.

silly tangent

I googled No More Manifestos, and found my way to the author's youtube channel.

It looks like he was a vegan debater in the past. His most popular video is about a /r/drama tier internet dispute where someone sent him death threats (or something, I haven't watched it).

His popular videos are all 7ish years ago - he still posts, but gets many fewer views.

From a recent video - he wanted to move to the US, but was unable to, due to the intricacies of immigration law! He's also never driven a car.

Yeah his YouTube can be very off-putting. I first got interested in it as a curiousity and then he surprised me with how well read he seems to be in history and political philosophy. His other writings are mostly academic style articles where he claims that millions of Buddhists have been mislead by scholars on the embarrassing role of flatulence in breathing meditation present in the ancient Pali texts:

In plain English, what he calls “abdominal breath” is flatulence –and the mistranslation of the corresponding passages of the canon is very nearly the apotheosis of farting. So-called “breathing meditation” is not at all what millions of Buddhists have been lead to believe: many passages of the PTS translations (old and new) are grossly misleading, and, in one important aspect least, they are flatly wrong.

My pipes have changed, though? They're plastic now, instead of metal - cheaper and less likely to put metal ions in the water. And there's a water filter in my house between the pipe and my mouth. The city, itself, is using improved water treatment tech. And these changes have entirely been enabled by science, technology, and society.

My table also has changed. It's a bit cheaper, and the antifungals are less toxic now. I can have a new one delivered if I don't like it. Maybe I have a standing / treadmill desk. Maybe I don't have to use the table as much, as I go on a walk in nature while chatting with friends or listening to podcasts.

The concrete formula itself has improved quite a bit too, and is 10x cheaper. (edit: 1.1x cheaper, I rewrote this a bit and missed that)

"Technology isn't changing the social aspects of society", he says on the anonymous political internet forum.

I think he extended that table metaphor a bit too much, but the point is that technological progress can go hand in hand with stagnation in universities, police departments, parliaments etc, though it gives the illusion that these things must also be obviously better than they were in the past.

The idea of stagnation in universities is also subtle. Ethnic and gender studies are a festering wound. But ... if we're looking to the past, we have to compare them with psychoanalyis, theology, continental philosophy / idealism, marxism ... is it really obvious things are much worse? A lot of ruin in a nation etc.

And back to the original topic, I think the factual accuracy of (most of) the internet far-right including bap is now comparable to that of the ethnic studies people. The far-right carries forward a bunch of accurate claims, but is accreting an ever-growing ball of nonsense onto it. Part of hanania's popularity comes from not being like that!

is it really obvious things are much worse

Aside from the cost, things aren't obviously much worse than they were in the past 50 years but they're not very different either. Asking what subjects are taught is one way of evaluating a university, but I'll just throw some ideas out to illustrate that there are other avenues where innovation could have been made but wasn't.

How about asking if some of the subjects are being taught to an objective standard at all? There are language courses where you get your degree and can't speak the language, Buddhist studies taught by true believers who won't bring your attention to the ugly aspects of its history etc, and a lot of dishonesty about whether this degree will help you in life at all (employment being the obvious one). It's taken for granted in some industries that your degree has not prepared you for the job at hand and the necessity for further training is a given, but there doesn't seem to be any incentive for the university to care about this.

Then there's the format. Why is a lecture hall with hundreds of students the unquestioned standard? There is a surplus of PhDs in many fields, it wouldn't be that expensive to drastically increase the student to teacher ratio (or the professor to admin ratio to get more directly at the cause). As much one on one tutoring as possible seems to be the ideal but apart from PhD students no one is even aiming for that.

And lastly, how can you encourage critical thinking amongst students when, in the liberal arts especially, the person with the power to fail them is also the someone who they are supposed to be confidently and credibly accuse of bullshiting?

And back to the original topic, I think the factual accuracy of (most of) the internet far-right including bap is now comparable to that of the ethnic studies people. The far-right carries forward a bunch of accurate claims, but is accreting an ever-growing ball of nonsense onto it. Part of hanania's popularity comes from not being like that!

I don't disagree, though the guy I'm quoting from is definitely not of the far-right. The original topic is a few comments back so I'll have to reread and maybe edit lest I misunderstand you.

okay. "Race mixing pollutes the nobility of the Nordic Races and races have different spirits. white people are superior to asian bugmen" - not true at all. (ten more examples elided).

That’s a non-falsifiable belief that by definition can’t be proven wrong.

Eh while there are a bunch of non-falsifiable woo-spiritual idealist components to it, it is in large part falsifiable IMO. And it's not just, like, a single dumb belief that doesn't affect the behavior of the internet racists very much, it's something many of them are very deeply rhetorically and personally invested in.

Why it's falsifiable, in theory: The most obvious interpretations of it all make direct claims about what people do in hypothetical but theoretically realizable situations! Some anti-racemixing people just think other races are inferior, others think different races have different noble 'qualities' and mixing is degenerate relative to both races. Both are falsifiable - you (god-king or alien or whatever) could just take a bunch of 'pure' nordics and a bunch of mixed people and put them in various 'ancient bands of men swordfighting' situations, and see which group acts 'nobler' according to your criteria. You could, similarly, put white and asian people in situations that test whatever standard of strong independent man-ness you think asians lack, maybe they have to speak out against their boss or lead a revolt against a corrupt lib regime or whatever. And then see which race statistically does the thing more. This all sounds absurd, of course, but it's what a literal reading of the statements these people make would suggest.

I think that, though no perfect natural experiments like that exist, one can falsify the claim by just observing the behavior of half-white / half-indian/asian/arab people compared to pure white people & observing the behavior of whites/asians.

Both are falsifiable - you (god-king or alien or whatever) could just take a bunch of 'pure' nordics and a bunch of mixed people and put them in various 'ancient bands of men swordfighting' situations, and see which group acts 'nobler' according to your criteria.

We already had that experiment historically. The Aryans got bodied by the North-East Asians.

If you're referring to the mongol invasions, they never managed to conquer areas that are properly Aryan- just some eastern Euro slavic speaking lands.

The Turks and Mongols took over the entire Central Asian steppe that was previously dominated by Aryan tribes. They also conquered India and Iran. You know what Aryan actually means right? The Afanasievo were pasturing in Mongolia long before the Mongols ever took up the horse and bow.

And BAP’s followers do not use aryan to refer to Hindus.

More comments

Hanania is in the top five political commentators in the US today. Nobody else is more consistently willing to stand by obvious truths regardless of who they annoy and anger. He is one of very few people with whom I agree on almost everything. But as @Quantumfreakonomics says, all of us have been edgelords of various descriptions at one time or another. In my case it wasn't politics but I don't particularly want my 2007-era cyberbullying of random early youtube celebrities to be associated with my real identity either.

The proof seems pretty clear (if it really is a very unique password that's even more a smoking gun than a very unique username). Hanania should just say that his views have changed, and that he is no longer the kind of angry young man who wrote those comments. In any case, I have to say that I was expecting much, much worse when I saw the headline. The worst part is that he thought Sarah Palin was attractive, which really does suggest poor taste.

Hanania should just say that his views have changed, and that he is no longer the kind of angry young man who wrote those comments

Bullseye.

The proof seems pretty clear (if it really is a very unique password that's even more a smoking gun than a very unique username).

I don't think this matters. He should still just flatly deny it, and say "Ooo, what a coincidence that someone else has the same password :^)". The leftists hate him already, rightists don't care already, but they DO care (for some reason) about having at least paper-thin plausible deniability, which is what a pro-forma denial verging on non-engagement supplies.

Hanania is in the top five political commentators in the US today.

"Top five" by what metric? Because it certainly isn't reader/listenership.

I also question the "all of us have been edgelords" assertion.

I feel like I’ve lived a sufficiently goody two shoes life to be allowed to say that no, not everyone has been an edge lord.

That said, I don’t think people should be punished based on opinions they held years ago.

He still holds those opinions. And my guess is most Americans hold similar opinions. He’s just saying genetics are real.

He may have changed his views on sterilization but I guarantee he still holds HBD views.

Linking your real email adress to accounts commenting on outright white nationalist websites seems like an incredibly low IQ thing to do, and all the more weird for someone as obsessed with IQ as Hanania.

In recent years, he's been explicitly condemning the HBD right, even going on Emil Kirkegaard's blog to trash it to his face. I suspect Hanania probably understood that wignat politics was a dead end, but at the same time he couldn't pretend that HBD was false. So he tried to triangulate into a "moderate centrist" position, but apparently the ruling elite and its attack dogs are never far behind.

This will be an important test for the US right. The history of these doxxing events has shown that the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race. We'll see if this time is different.

It would be a fitting end for that line of thought to see Hanania completely ostracized. Left with nothing but a substack and a horde of disgruntled wignats in his comment section.

Wignat politics being a dead end always rings hollow when the ones who turn up their nose and sneer at it end up contorting themselves to speaking in riddles and code to not offend their overlords. Which is a complete conspiracy theory by the way. There are no overlords of course, Hanania just can't be allowed to speak his mind and has to hide his name or weave his truths with mainstream politics for the same reason the sun rises and sets every day. It's just the way of the world, right?

The zionist takeover of the conservative party happened decades ago. Men much better than Hanania were tossed out for saying much less than he did. He made his bed in the containment zone created for and by those men. His antics do nothing but rustle and agitate those already in that sphere. All this talk about him as if he matter at all is, from that standpoint, just inane. He would at best be the brightest snowflake in a dissident right snow globe, but he's not even that.

the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race

Have you considered that this is because the right also has certain sensibilities about race and gender?

Yes, but who is leading who is the question here. The oft-repeated remark that conservatives are just liberals of 20 years ago didn't spring up from nowhere.

I really don't think that mainstream conservatives have much continuity with the racial conservatives of old, although they have beliefs which are often politically incorrect(eg black culture is uniquely destructive) and a willingness to make alliances with closeted racists. It's probably partly true that conservative sentiments about gender are more influenced by where liberals were 20 years ago. But, conservatives do have their own principles on the matter which diverge from what liberals think.

This will be an important test for the US right. The history of these doxxing events has shown that the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race. We'll see if this time is different.

I don't think it should be. That dude that was working for Tucker as a writer might have been worth defending. Hanania? Not only do I not understand how he was ever taken seriously, dude's basically the personification of Hlynka's "alt-right progressive" meme. Also, he seems pretty happy throwing people under busses himself.

I don't know who Hlynka is, nor have I seen their meme. Care to link it?

@HlynkaCG is a long-time poster here, who has posited that what most people refer to as the "far right" or "alt-right" are better understood as offshoots of the left/progressive movement. For evidence, consider the history of the eugenics movement, the original party affiliation of the KKK, and progressive interest in Fascism and Communism prior to WWII, versus opposition to both from people like Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, etc.

people like Lewis, Chesterton, Tolkien, etc.

...Hobbes, Smith, Burke, Madison, Kipling...

Hobbes, Smith, Burke, Madison

Now this is downright anachronistic.

I don't think it is, there are distinct themes and lines of reasoning that can be followed from each to through to the next.

He is a regular poster here. He often makes these claims on these here pages.

Also, he seems pretty happy throwing people under busses himself.

This might be what does him in. He's been spending the better part of the recent past praising the liberal establishment and throwing people on the dissident right to the meatgrinder, even condemning them for racism.

In hindsight, it seems obvious he made a dash for respectability by opportunistically burning past bridges. Well, seen in that light, you could say this is karma in a sense. Who will now defend him after he did so much to alienate and even actively disparage those who used to read him?

throwing people on the dissident right to the meatgrinder, even condemning them for racism

I don’t think he did it as a ‘dash for respectability’, I think he did it because he has a genuine respect for power. And his views on racism are that a lot of it on the hard right isn’t motivated by measured consideration of the evidence but rather by pure tribal outgroup hatred for difference, by disgust in other words. This isn’t an original point - @DaseindustriesLtd made the same argument here very recently on a couple of occasions, for example when observing some German racism towards Turks. It certainly doesn’t make Hanania a ‘progressive’.

I don’t think he did it as a ‘dash for respectability’, I think he did it because he has a genuine respect for power.

They're the same picture.

It certainly doesn’t make Hanania a ‘progressive’.

Never claimed Hanania is a progressive. Surely you can do better than arguing against strawmen?

I don’t think he did it as a ‘dash for respectability’, I think he did it because he has a genuine respect for power

Same, same. Respectability is defined by those who have power and not by those who don't.

To be fair, those he threw to the wolves defending him would make him look worse to the people he wishes to be associated with. There is a reason why every election year both parties try to accuse the other of being supported by David Duke.

Maybe he lost the substack gig of having a loyal following of dissidents, but if he sacrificed perceived truth for wider reach, I doubt he cares about such a career path.

Hlynka’s meme is essentially that anyone on the right who doesn’t agree with the exact views of a gun-owning moral majority Reaganite hick in a flyover state circa 1987 is a secret “progressive”, so that isn’t a particularly useful distinction.

Or (mods), to put it more charitably, his is a very narrow, very particular, very recent definition that doesn’t encompass the vast majority of the rightist / conservative tradition in the West since the French Revolution.

Hlynka’s meme is essentially that anyone on the right who doesn’t agree with the exact views of a gun-owning moral majority Reaganite hick in a flyover state circa 1987 is a secret “progressive”

No, my claim is that there is a readily identifiable intellectual/philosophical tradition that starts with writers like Hobbes and Montaigne during the Protestant Reformation, progresses through thinkers like Smith, Madison, and Burke to become the "One Nation" (Tory), Abolitionist, and Republican movements of the 19th Century, which were then carried into the 20th by writers like Kipling, Lewis and Tolkien.

Furthermore, I maintain that this tradition exists distinctly from (and often in opposition to) the more progressive "Rousseauean" tradition from which the [current year] secular academic memeplex derives.

in other words the left-right spectrum is best understood as a religious schism within the European Enlightenment, and that left codes as intellectual not because they possess any great intellect, but because they were able to hollow out the institution of academia and wear it as a skinsuit.

If I were more like yourself and a few others on this forum I might have some comments why you in particular would want to misrepresent my views, but Im not, and I'm not going to make that comment because when you're born outside the Matrix you know in that the steak aint real.

Lewis and Tolkien (&Kipling?) certainly did not approve of any republican movements. And unless I misremember, Lewis is on record as saying he believed that socialism was the most Christian economic policy though he himself disliked it intensely. In general many of the English figures on that list were deeply dubious about American culture.

What everyone keeps trying to point out is that you have an incredibly specific interpretation of all those figures that is very distinctively postwar American.

There is indeed a vague tradition of pessimistic human-fallibility conservatism that is often opposed by a utopian human-perfectibility tradition. But they’re fuzzy, interbred and often linked with other elements. They are certainly not distinct enough for “only I / my tribe carry the true flame, and the rest of you are irredeemably corrupted by progressivism” style dismissals. They are also not quite the same as the progressive/conservative distinction.

left codes as intellectual not because they possess any great intellect, but because they were able to hollow out the institution of academia and wear it as a skinsuit.

Yes, I agree.

EDIT: plus the abolition movement was mostly Methodists and quakers (or utopian leftists) and Hobbes is best know as the great defender of absolute monarchy.

And unless I misremember, Lewis is on record as saying he believed that socialism was the most Christian economic policy though he himself disliked it intensely.

Unless I'm misremembering he talks about the political system Christianity aims for in Mere Christianity, and says that it would contain elements of conservatism, socialism, liberalism etc while resembling none of these as a whole.

No, you’re right. I apologise, it’s been a while. My only point is that these people do not fit into a nice beat tradition where they are build on each other.

Lewis and Tolkien (&Kipling?) certainly did not approve of any republican movements.

approving of a movement is not the same thing as being part of a movement or "a product" of it.

In fact, that's one of, if not the core, points of disagreement. Whether Stormfronters and SJWs like each other has zero bearing on whether or not they are they are drinking from the same well or using the same rhetoric. The old "Stormfront or SJW" question is a meme for a reason.

EDIT: plus the abolition movement was mostly Methodists and quakers (or utopian leftists) and Hobbes is best know as the great defender of absolute monarchy.

19th century Quakers were neither left-wing nor particularly utopian, likewise while Hobbes is memed as an absolute monarchist he was perhaps one of the most ardent individualists of his time precisely because his whole schtick is that 'agency ultimately resides with the individual.

That the mark of a true king is that men choose to follow him of their own volition

approving of a movement is not the same thing as being part of a movement or "a product" of it.

In fact, that's one of, if not the core, points of disagreement. Whether Stormfronters and SJWs like each other has zero bearing on whether or not they are they are drinking from the same well or using the same rhetoric. The old "Stormfront or SJW" question is a meme for a reason.

You’re clearly not wrong (horseshoe theory exists for a reason) but unless you can back up your intuitions about what movements people belong to then you’re left with either a very superficial analysis or visceral feelings of kinship/dislike. It seems rather similar to the way that the left decides certain figures or groups are progressive/fascist /colonial not because of anything they say or do but by squinting until they see a certain resemblance and ignoring whatever doesn’t fit. Because it’s in the eye of the beholder it’s hard to debate usefully.

More importantly to my mind, it ignores the role that circumstances play. As @FCfromSSC says, religious tolerance means a very different thing in a 99% Protestant country vs a 50/50 prot/catch country versus a 30% Christian, 30% atheist, 30% Muslim country, say. If you hold exactly the same political beliefs in these different places the results will be wildly divergent.

I feel like I've been pretty open about and consistant in my theory that there is a spectrum of philosophies between Rousseau on the left and Hobbes on the right.

I feel like you're trying to pull a "national socialism isn't actually socialism" or "real communism has never been tried" type card rather than acknowledge the argument being made.

More comments

It's quite curious how rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) figures will go through the trouble of creating a pseudonym, but then make basic mistakes in opsec that will link them back, thus rendering the whole effort pointless.

The article claims that he reused email addresses, which is a really serious basic mistake. Not only does doing this assume that every website the email address is used on will never suffer a data breach or some other exploit that leaks users' email addresses, it also risks "crossing the streams" where you absentmindedly start doing things meant for one pseudonym on another. And it's really easy to avoid this mistake, too. Just create a new email account.

There's a couple other rationalist figures I have in mind that have had poor opsec, but it's probably best to not name them or go into detail (unless people here are really curious about opsec and want to learn more). Although, all the information I would post is public anyway.

Their IQ is low, sorry

This is quite low-effort. Please put more work into your comments than just drive-by insults.

It's quite curious how rationalist (or rationalist-adjacent) figures will go through the trouble of creating a pseudonym, but then make basic mistakes in opsec that will link them back, thus rendering the whole effort pointless.

To be fair, you don't notice all the cases where people do it correctly.

And it's really easy to avoid this mistake, too. Just create a new email account.

The amount of security you get out of creating a new email address is phenomenal and it's one of the easiest things you can do. It's basically the only thing propping up this story and all it would have required was 5 minutes on gmail (two minutes to create an account, two minutes to create the second account that you are actually going to use setting the first address as its recovery option, a minute to shake your head in disappointment at Richard Hanania.)

The last time I tried this Google locked me out of my account, saying I had to sign in with the same browser I created my account with. I couldn't do this, because I had created the account using a temporary browser profile. It's there a better free provider that doesn't do this? I used to use sharklasers.com, but a lot of sites now block that domain.

Not that I'm aware of, but things like that are part of the reason I always make two accounts and create a recovery email chain. Also instead of using incognito, download Firefox or brave or some other browser you don't use. And basically use that browser only for things tied to your new identity, and if you decide to move on you can just scrub that browser off your system. Oh and if you are going to use edge and you already use chrome or vice versa, make sure you turn off all the syncing shit that copies cookies and other data between them.

Don't you need to provide a phone number to create a gmail account these days? And, if you want to use it to view 18+ youtube content or whatever, you also need to provide a credit card or ID?

view 18+ youtube content

https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restriction-Bypass

Ha, that's awesome!

Seems to work nicely. Thanks!

Nope! It had been two months since I last created an email account, so I was a bit worried when I read this, but I just made bugsinmyeyescharles@gmail.com and no phone number was necessary. They give you the option for recovery purposes, but you can skip it if you like. You can skip adding a recovery email too, which is a good idea if this is your first burner email actually, I didn't realise you could skip that too (and I always use the last burner I made up as the recovery so there is a link, but you would have to connect around 27 other accounts as well to see an email address with any ties to my physical identity.)

Edit: I wanted to bust this comment out quick to illustrate the ease of creating a new email address, and I forgot about the age thing - yeah, you would, but this is about pseudonymously expressing your heart's deepest and most racist thoughts, not watching strippercise videos. Like all security issues, you do have to give up some convenience - in this case engaging with the stupidest comment sections on the internet.

and no phone number was necessary

It demands one from me

O_o That's odd, it definitely worked for me (and I'm sad nobody has signed my new email address up to a bunch of bizarre newsletters.) Maybe it's a location thing - I always have my vpn set to somewhere on the pacific rim, maybe that will fix it? (also make sure you have all location tracking turned off if you are using Windows otherwise you may as well not use a vpn).

Well, I already created several accounts so maybe I am flagged as problematic. Or maybe it classifies people from my area as more suspect.

TBF Scott's "pseudonym" was originally only intended to block prospective bosses from finding his blog on cursory name search; it wasn't really intended to protect against cancellation. It achieved what it was supposed to i.e. getting him hired.

Also, a decent chunk of these people were literal teenagers at the time that they made those mistakes, and this is hardly limited to Rats.

It's preposterous, and a sign of the times, that one needs to be well-versed in opsec in order to freely speak their mind. The highest degree of opsec is to simply never share your thoughts, never post anything online, ever.

Alternatively you could don the mask and assume a digital alter ego, extraverting all the opinions of orthodoxy while suppressing your more controversial takes. Dissociative identity disorder for the digital era.

Both modes of living are fundamentally dishonest, misrepresentative, and, indeed, miserable.

Freedom of expression without fear of cancellation and censure is required for one to affirm their identity. Anything else is robbing one of their ability to authentically express their identity and who they are.

It's preposterous, and a sign of the times, that one needs to be well-versed in opsec in order to freely speak their mind.

Maybe it's a sign of the times, but this isn't anything unique to the internet. The Federalist Papers were published under pseudonyms.

Arguably, it's a sign of the times that a significant many on the internet aren't practicing opsec. When the internet first started, people were just screen names in ephemeral chat rooms. Now, they use their real names, with real photos of themselves, leaving behind permanent posts on social media sites describing everything in detail for the entire world to see.

The highest degree of opsec is to simply never share your thoughts, never post anything online, ever.

Technically true, but that's like saying the highest degree of transport safety is to never drive or get in a car, ever.

(And before the urbanists go "this but unironically", might I point out that bikes, trains, trams, and planes still have accidents too, so the technically-true highest degree would also avoid those.)

Both modes of living are fundamentally dishonest, misrepresentative, and, indeed, miserable.

I don't see how this follows. There's nothing fundamentally dishonest or misrepresentative about adopting a pseudonym. It also doesn't have to be miserable. 90% of opsec is shutting up, and that could get many people by for many years. You would only have to do the remaining 10% if you're really paranoid.

Freedom of expression without fear of cancellation and censure is required for one to affirm their identity. Anything else is robbing one of their ability to authentically express their identity and who they are.

I don't find much value in having my identity affirmed or expressed.

Arguably, it's a sign of the times that a significant many on the internet aren't practicing opsec. When the internet first started, people were just screen names in ephemeral chat rooms. Now, they use their real names, with real photos of themselves, leaving behind permanent posts on social media sites describing everything in detail for the entire world to see.

I know this. I grew up on IRC, where the first rule you learned was never to use your real name or give out any personally identifying information on the Internet.

This changed when Zuck came along, and normalized the exact opposite behaviour. Now, if you don't have any digital persona attached to your real name due to stringent practice of opsec, you are automatically regarded with suspicion.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you have no presence online, people assume the worst anyway. I'm tired of hiding behind a pseudonym, as I have done since I first logged onto the net in the mid 2000s.

90% of opsec is shutting up

Sure. Never express yourself, just keep everything held down.

I don't find much value in having my identity affirmed or expressed.

This seems to be one of the most pertinent problems of our time.

Sure. Never express yourself, just keep everything held down.

That is not what I meant. What I meant is that, for example, if you don't want to reveal to others where you live, you shouldn't mention the name of your city or town. Basic stuff like that. You can still express yourself.

This seems to be one of the most pertinent problems of our time.

How is it a problem? Arguably, it's the other way around, and wanting your identity affirmed or expressed is the problem. The entire trans movement and its externalities stem from a misguided goal to affirm and express their identities.

That is not what I meant. What I meant is that, for example, if you don't want to reveal to others where you live, you shouldn't mention the name of your city or town. Basic stuff like that. You can still express yourself.

Except, it's not your self being expressed under a pseudonym. It's your digital simulacrum.

I mean, yes. But arguably even if you do link your real-life identity, it's still a digital simulacrum, because typing text is different than saying words in real life. Is there a standard by which if you reveal enough details on a pseudonym, it's no longer considered a "digital simulacrum"?

More comments

Isn't much of this downstream of irl rewards accruing to people who post online?

On Facebook circa 2006, the reward was being cool and maybe getting a date. On Twitter and Instagram circa 2022 it became getting enough followers to monetize and move into the real media like a JomBoy or a Hanania.

It's preposterous, and a sign of the times, that one needs to be well-versed in opsec in order to freely speak their mind.

No it's not, the weird moment in the late 90s/early 00s where the rest of society hadn't quite caught on to the existince of the internet was just that. A weird momemnt. What we are seeing now is a return to the status quo.

The biggest example I have in mind is of someone who didn't make opsec mistakes as a teenager, only as an adult.

Fair enough.

Maybe I'm projecting but it's possible he halfway wanted to be found out. Like he wishes he could post his more risque views in public but is scared of the consequences. Being a public figure and having to hide some of your beliefs all the time would be stressful

I’m very curious about opsec and wish to know more.

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.

Hmm. Minus the shot on the "Jewish elite", this or something close to this might be right. It's not at all charitable, but it might be accurate.

this or something close to this might be right

Seriously? Sarah Palin was 49 years old 10 years ago so definitely not fertile. She was also not attractive in any conventional sense of the term.

She was 44 in 2008 when she burst onto the national scene, so still potentially fertile. I recall the phrase "VPILF" being tossed around quite a bit.

IIRC there was an actual porno called "Who's Nailin' Palin?" -- and a funny joke from the brief period of funny Stephen Colbert jokes about how Equal Time law required the development of one called "Who's Ridin' Biden?".

She has five kids. Accusing "barren" libs of seething at her fertile life is the point. Not that she is is fertile right this minute.

She was DC attractive

No, the Jewish part is accurate. See this.

Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. She covers politics and policy, foreign and domestic, and provides insight into the conservative movement, the Republican and Democratic parties, and threats to Western democracies. Rubin, who is also an MSNBC contributor, came to The Post after three years with Commentary magazine. Prior to her career in journalism, Rubin practiced labor law for two decades, an experience that informs and enriches her work. She is a mother of two sons and lives with her husband in D.C. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” and is host of the podcast Jen Rubin's "Green Room."

So a conservative Jewish political commentator wrote a punchy article dunking on self hating liberal whites and the Jewish elite. This guy references her statement about such people and Palin. And that's the "gotcha" being used to demonstrate his vile racism.

So it's the sort of gotcha that falls apart with a bit of digging. Not that would-be cancellers will care and not that it helps him any.

Rubin is now a full bore progressive. That’s why it’s funny.

Quite funny to go back fifteen years and find Jennifer Rubin defending Sarah Palin in Commentary. How times change.

Oh, he's literally just paraphrasing an article by a neoconservative Jew. That puts it in a much different perspective.

Let he who has never anonymously posted edgelord comments on the internet cast the first stone. I honestly can't imagine how dull and intellectually lazy one would have to be to never once let a single cancellation-worthy thought enter their mind. In the early 2010s there was even less of a barrier between thinking something and posting it anonymously on the internet. Not everyone was reading Moldbug back then. You didn't expect the thought police to be around every corner.

The idea of rationalism being an "off-ramp from extremism" has been around for some time. This article is not strong Bayesian evidence of anything, even assuming that it's true (It probably is. Hanania would have denied it immediately if it was false, and he's been radio silent on Twitter since the article dropped). Conservation of expected evidence; you should have assumed that anyone who says the things that Hanania says publicly under his real name also has stronger beliefs that he doesn't say. The quoted material sounds like exactly what you would get if you prompted a non-RLHFed LLM with the phrase "Richard Hanania under fire after the following controversial statements resurfaced:".

Ignoring it is the best option here. Anyone with a brain knew that there was a high probability that he believes (or believed) things like this. What the article does is make these things salient and give activists a pretext to attack Hanania and his associates. If he ignores it completely he can maintain plausible deniability.

What's especially interesting is that I have seen quite a few young progressive online thinkers, on breadtube for instance, turned out to have established their internet footprint far earlier than you'd expect, on places like Something Awful. Naturally, they don't extend the same courtesy to others they seem to be worthy of in regards to ignoring past "misdeeds."

I know an inordinate amount about this and you'd be surprised - Zoe Quinn also cut her teeth harassing and doxxing people on the Helldump forum on that site. I've often thought that you can trace the current social justice internet culture to what happened on the SA forums.

I assume you're referring to how SA, the notorious den of trolls that made the internet tremble in fear became a moralizing community dedicated to social justice?

Yes, actually. If you look at a lot of the people who started weird twitter you can see them dropping hard r n-bombs on the regular back in FYAD. At the same time, the kind of culture that developed around forums like Helldump is a direct precursor to social justice cancelling tactics, to the point that you can just draw a straight line between them.

Let he who has never anonymously posted edgelord comments on the internet cast the first stone. I honestly can't imagine how dull and intellectually lazy one would have to be to never once let a single cancellation-worthy thought enter their mind.

Maybe this is one of those generational differences. (IE those who grew up with the internet vs those who didn't) But to me there is a vast gulf between a thought entering your mind and committing that thought to the public record. As the old saw goes, don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't have read at your funeral.

If your funeral doesn’t include ceremonial recitations of the having-a-daughter-is-the-ultimate-and-final-cuck copypasta and the contents of the late FBI crime statistics bot, were you ever really alive in the first place?

What about memes? Can they project all the memes I've saved onto a screen next to a youthful happy picture me at my funeral?

As the old saw goes, don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't have read at your funeral.

At my funeral, I'm beyond (mortal) punishment. Which would make it one of the least constrained places to express my thoughts, if that were possible. You have to be a hell of a lot more careful than that to safely express right-of-center-views today. But of course you can always just-world it.

don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't have read at your funeral.

I've never heard this before, but it's really good advice.

don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't have read at your funeral.

I have a sudden urge to attend a 4channers funeral.

More seriously, yeah it's probably generational. If the internet took off during the dumbest part of your adolescence and young adulthood, it would probably be unfair to expect all that much restraint and wisdom from you.

The other issue is - do you seriously believe you wouldn't get cancelled for the stuff you post here, if you lived around or worked for the blue tribe?

The weird thing is, the kind of stuff that people typically get cancelled for is usually not that different from things I occasionally hear boomers and older people say in person, but which would get you banned from almost any online platform. The standards for what's acceptable in person seem to be much more relaxed than what is acceptable online, at least when it comes to certain topics. I suppose the opposite is true when it comes to swearing and talking about sex. But certain opinions which are actually quite common (especially those related to transgenderism) have been utterly tabooed by young people online.

This is why I find some of these cancellations so confusing. People aren't just getting cancelled for saying edgy stuff when they were anonymous teenagers. They're getting cancelled for stuff that is well within the Overton window if you step outside the terminally online bubble.

For example, try asking anyone over 40 whether transwomen are women. Few would say they are. But you say this on almost any social media, and they'll react as though you're some kind of extremist. Or ask someone over 60 what they think of gay marriage.

I think that the kind of people who hold to dogmatic political ideologies also tend to be the kind of people who don't do much mingling with strangers in real life, at least not anywhere that isn't pre-selected to be mostly filled by people who agree with them.

Also, in real life one can see the person one is arguing with and most of time time realize that they do not fit your worst stereotypes of what people "on the other side" are like, which naturally tends to de-escalate conflict.

Also, in real life being loudly dogmatic about politics can lead to unpleasant consequences ranging anywhere from being viewed as a buzzkill all the way up to possible violence, so most people probably have a natural tendency to avoid getting into dogmatic political debates with strangers in real life if possible.

The above has to do with talking to strangers. When it comes to talking with people one already knows, people have even more reason to not get into vicious political disagreements.

On the other hand, people who know each other well in person often have an emotional desire to change each others' minds about things they disagree deeply on, and generally also feel like they can trust the debate to not spill over into violence, so sometimes people who know each other in person are actually emotionally incentivized to get into vicious political disagreements more than they would with strangers.

The internet collapses space. When you go online anywhere in the world, you are effectively stepping into an American university campus and required on pain of cancellation to comport yourself accordingly.

deleted

The actual wisdom to Hlynka's advice is to have control over your funeral's invite list.

Touche'

I want him to acknowledge the article and say that his views changed, but not grovel.

"I want him to freely bleed in shark infested water, but not for sharks to feast on him."

Any sensible admission of past guilt is merely chuming the cancelation waters. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

But he doesn't have moral guilt. Like I said, he just has to flatly state that he once believed one thing and now believes another. Hell, didn't Obama flirt with Marxism in college?

The kinds of people running cancellation campaigns do not see "flirting with Marxism" as a demerit.

Those are not the people who need to forgive Hanania. The people we need to forgive him are the Republicans in Conservatism Inc. Typically, they go along with left-wing cancellation campaigns, then brag about how much better than the left they are for ousting the "bigots" from their ranks, while still engaging with the bigots on the left. The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro are acting in bad faith, but most Republicans are just too stupid to notice the contradiction on their own. If Hanania points it out, there's a chance some of them will get it. And we NEED conservatives to read his upcoming book. Mass awareness of Griggs v Duke is the key to getting it overturned, which is the key to defeating wokeness.

The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro

I have never seen or heard an intelligent comment come from Ben Shapiro. Why do you think he deserves to be listed as one of the "smart people"?

"He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004, at age 20, with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in political science and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Afterwards, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2007 with a J.D., cum laude."

The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro are acting in bad faith

Uh, Ben Shapiro has personal reasons for being very concerned about the right embracing old school racial doctrines.

Yeah, the reason is that the people paying him (the Kochs) tell him to care.

I know that you're implying it's because he's Jewish, but no smart person will believe that embodying all of the negative stereotypes about Jews is less likely to encourage anti-Semitism than allowing white people to have the same level of racial consciousness as Jews. I don't think most progressive Jews or cuckservative Jews no better, but Ben Shapiro and Jonathan Greenblatt do. That they behave in this manner anyway makes them a bigger threat to the Jewish people than to the white race, not that they're friendly to either. They care about their own career and nothing more.

The problem with Griggs is that disparate impact can be discrimination as not permitted. For example, assume UNC wanted to continue to practice AA. They could pick a random attribute (eg single parenthood) that correlates with being black and provide a bonus for that. The goal is to find a facially neutral category but one you know isn’t in fact evenly distributed.

The problem with Griggs v. Duke is that idea that any disparate outcome against minorities shifts the burden of proof to “there is discrimination.”

Under current law, the right question is “does this policy have a truly reasonable relation to the X it is measuring.” So an IQ test for an intellectually challenging job? It has a reasonable relation and therefore the disparate impact is irrelevant. If on the other hand some firm institutes some policy about giving preferences in difficult jobs to people whose parents received SNAP benefits then that would be discrimination.

This of course assumes the government should even give one iota about discrimination by non government companies. But my suggestion deals with the statute as-is.

The idea that disparate impact is something we need to look out for is what created wokeness.

just has to flatly state that he once believed one thing and now believes another

Bleeding in shark infested waters. I wish it wasn't so.

Why do you want him to say his views have changed? Do you believe this to be true, do you want it to be, or do you want him to grovel in a less pathetic manner? Nothing he has said back then is substantially different in anything sans tone from his current beliefs, far as I can tell. And saying something like "In the course of my career as an irreverent political pundit, rude troll and dunker-on-outgroup extraordinaire, I've learned to eloquently pontificate on women's tears winning the marketplace on ideas and right wingers being obscene barbarians, but avoid being clearly hostile or pointing out when the Outgroup's vanguard happens to be disproportionately Jewish" is, in my opinion, worse than nothing.

I mean, that exact statement would both be in character for him and also be the sort of non-apology that points to how ridiculous the controversy is.

I don't think his comment was even 'noticing', I think it was literally playing to his audience. If Hanania calls them the "white elite" in a wignat (or substantially wignat) comments section, all the usual respondants will "well akshually..." him, so he says "self-hating white and jewish" to pre-empt those responses. It's no different to here, the only place where I make sure to always mention I'm Jewish along with white when I discuss it because otherwise SS or someone else will "well akshually" me and derail/ignore the rest of my point.

"self-hating white and jewish"

Oxford commas save lives!

I think there's not much to notice here, everyone knows (oh no, consensus building!) that Democrats love to hate on Palin and that rather more of prominent Democratic elite [understood extensively, a la Karlin's Elite Human Capital meme, e.g. Colbert and Stewart and even their target audience] are Jewish. Indeed it is through their mean-spirited clowning1* 2** that I still have vaguely negative associations with her name despite paying roughly zero attention to US politics at that time.*** («Sarah Palin writing notes on her hand shows she's not like those elites and their memory» – the subtitle helpfully communicates the important dimension of the conflict; no better way to highlight your claim to status than in clever dispassionate hinting at anti-elitism as ressentiment driven by deficiency, or as some naive conspiracy theory).

It is also my gut feeling that back then they've been somewhat more shrill, catty and obnoxious with that elitist hate and affected condescending mockery of Palin than generic whites, as it tends to be. I allow that maybe that's just muh Verbal Intelligence and loud NY culture showing, and their hate was driven by the same forces as in regular «self-hating white elite» rather than some genuinely tribal sense of hostility for Palin as unashamed, fecund Christian; white liberals do despise right-wing Evangelicals. Those factors suffice to casually "notice" a disproportionate contribution.

But yes, I think you're correct that he has mostly preempting that sort of akshually from the audience. But so what? I imagine those two words – «and Jewish» – get pattern-matched to dog-whistling from a much more extremist cluster, are precisely what pushes this «revelation» over the limit of being dangerous for his career, and not-so-coincidentally are the clearest, most undeniable delta from his contemporary messaging; which in itself adds the power to the accusation of witchcraft – «he's learned to hide his power level». It's one thing to begin writing more obliquely about Ungrateful Le Blacks (his recent Killer King piece), it's another to drop a token altogether.

* Amusingly, the site showed me an insanely pronatalist ad for BreastmilkCounts.com before proceeding to Colbert, even bereft of heavy-handed race-coded messaging; I guess not all is lost with liberal culture if they allow this sort of placement.

** Stewart's criticism is oddly relevant to Hanania's case.

*** I am aware that Colbert is a Catholic Elite Human Capital akshually.

He no longer cares about white nationalism. On the contrary, he's opposed to it, in the way that one would typically be opposed to any policy prescription, and he has written about his opposition extensively. He doesn't reject it on moral grounds, nor does he thinks white nationalists are untouchable and must not be associated with in any capacity. Therefore, he should treat his radical past the same way that a typical Democratic party elite treats the communist phase that they had in college, and not the absurd way that society demands white nationalism or fascism or whatever the boogeyman is be treated.

I’ve never anonymously posted edgelord comments on the internet. It isn’t hard to avoid doing so.

Successfully pissing people off - left, right, up or down - is a strange thing to have become an accolade.

I’m not convinced by this. They never actually connect Hoste to Hanania. The best they have is anecdotal connections (both drop out of HS, get a GED, then go on into academia) none of which are unique enough to really be a smoking gun. I would bet there are at least 10,000 students who did the same thing. Second, the connection between the two online is the (supposed) sock puppets, except that they never bother to establish they are sock puppets, rather than one person follow the account of someone else. I follow accounts on multiple platforms, I’m not the person I’m replying to and even being a consistent reply to posts by Hoste doesn’t make it clear that Hanania is Hoste.

There are 320 million Americans, which means it takes just 28 bits of information to uniquely identify someone. That's not a lot. I've found Reddit accounts of someone I know just because he expressed an opinion that sounded familiar, and I was able to quickly confirm it by looking at the post history and find posts on all the interests I knew this person had, posts to his city's subreddit, and details about his personal life. He thinks the account is anonymous.

There's even someone here who I won't name (I'm not sure if he's actually trying to be completely anonymous) who I found the real name of because he told one fact about himself that was way too specific to be more than one person.

Each of those matching stories is several bits of information. The overlap in interests and political opinions alone is also a huge amount of information. So is the mere fact that they're both writers. Then there's the matching first name. Each one of these things is probably seven or eight bits of information. That all is probably enough to identify him, but what seems like proof is the accounts made with his email addresses and website registered to his hometown. That should be enough on its own.

The only way it isn't him is if this is the result of a fifteen year long attempt to frame him. Even that would be very difficult to pull off.

See Gwern on Death Note and Anonymity. https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

Maybe you need to read Richard Hanania on why the media is honest and good.

Nothing Hanania argues is wrong, though, the average NYT new story about an uncontroversial issue is substantially or entirely factual, and this was his entire point.

Which is a dumb point. If I have info on a River that tells me with great accuracy the average depth is 3 feet that is shitty if I’m trying to ford the River and the largest depth is ten feet.

It’s relevant because on 90% of issues the mainstream press is more accurate than the reactionary press simply because the latter has poor funding, poor staff, poor writing, fewer people on the ground and rejects even the pretension of accuracy.

Honestly don’t know if that is true. Can you think of a major story from the last day five years the MSM press was right on?

  1. Russia — they were wrong.

  2. Ukraine and Hunter / Joe — they were wrong.

  3. Hunter laptop — they were wrong.

  4. Covid origins — they were wrong.

  5. Covid masking — they were wrong.

  6. Covid lockdowns — they were wrong.

  7. Ivermectin — they were at best overly critical.

  8. Twitter files — they ignored.

  9. Joe Biden corruption — they ignored.

Can you give some specific pieces of coverage from MSM that you think were simply wrong in these instances? Otherwise this is rather vague - I mean you can't just say something so vague as 'Russia - they were wrong' without substantiation.

Really? They spent years pushing Russiagate (including the server lie and the Steele dossier). We all lived it…

Hence my point. When it is important, they suck. When it is non-important, then who cares?

The point is that, on non-controversial matters, journalists are actually decently trustworthy.

Are they? Or is it just fewer people notice when they get it wrong in non-controversial matters? This seems like a version of Gell-Mann amnesia.

More comments

Perhaps the minor stories are the good ones?

In 2012, Disqus suffered a data breach, with hackers stealing the details of more than 17.5 million users. Hoste was one of those users. HuffPost has reviewed data showing that Hoste’s account used a unique password on Disqus that was also used to log into other Disqus accounts that commented on AlternativeRight.com. This indicates Hoste was using so-called “sock puppet” accounts — hiding behind yet more fake names — to comment on the site. The comments from these accounts are written in a style similar to Hoste’s, and they are linked to email addresses belonging to Richard Hanania. The account @RA74 was set up using Hanania’s Gmail address, which Hanania has shared publicly before. The account @RAH2, which uses Hanania’s initials, was set up with Hanania’s email address at the University of Colorado, where he was a linguistics student. And the account @CJusD was attached to Hanania’s email address at the University of Chicago, where he studied law.

It looks like they're claiming RA74 and RAH2 shared a password with Richard Hoste, and also shared email accounts with Richard Hanania? That's pretty compelling imo.

(note that I wouldn't endorse doing this kind of dox analysis ever, doxxing isnt nice, but this story is big enough that it doesn't matter if we discuss it)

It looks like they're claiming RA74 and RAH2 shared a password with Richard Hoste, and also shared email accounts with Richard Hanania? That's pretty compelling imo.

Depends greatly on the password I should think -- the top twenty passwords account for something like 10% of users IIRC?

It's going to turn out to have been 'guest' or 'password' isn't it.

'Unique' clearly suggests it's not one of them.

unique

Huh, I missed that -- if it's unique among the Disqus users dataset that is pretty strong statistical evidence, yeah.

The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.

I dunno, I think he just likes angering people. A high-effort troll but a troll nonetheless. He ran out of alpha on angering left-wing people and has started angering right-wing people for new kinds of dopamine.

What other explanation is there for a post titled "Diversity Really is Our Strength. Immigration destroys social cohesion. Good." He makes a bunch of rather dubious arguments in favour of immigration and destroying social cohesion, ignoring the benefits of the single most important quality for a country. The post straightforwardly argues for what's in the title. But it is undeniably worded in a way to anger a good chunk of its audience.

One of his other tweets went something like 'trads BTFO, look at South Korea with its anti-porn legislation, anti-abortion... and the lowest birth rate in the world bar none'. Now anybody could see the obvious flaws with categorizing South Korea as a patriarchal 'trad' state. For one SK has an extremely large and powerful feminist movement that introduced said anti-porn legislation. It does not exactly belong in the Afghanistan-Saudi Arabia axis of genuinely trad, patriarchal states. South Korea even had a female head-of-state.

I dunno, I think he just likes angering people.

He's said publicly (though I can't dig up a source) that a certain amount of trollishness is a deliberate PR strategy. Clickbait article titles get clicks. Viral edgy-tweeting gets people to follow him on twitter, which he can then follow up with calmer tweets pointing people at articles on his substack. Some percentage of those people will subscribe. (A fairly large percentage of them will later unsubscribe or unfollow -- this strategy tends to attract non-thoughtful angry ideologues -- but enough people stick around.)

I'm not sure to what extent he's just going with this strategy because it works, but it does seem to work.

I don't think the fact that you think there are obvious counter-arguments means he's trolling. They seem like honestly held beliefs to me.

Yeah but he words them in such a way as to anger much of his prospective audience.

South Korea even had a female head-of-state.

So did Pakistan.

South Korea is on the conservative end for a wealthy democracy, but it has a large feminist movement that has been very active in their society. It’s definitely not Pakistan.

Indeed.

But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.

Hanania holding those beliefs seems pretty obvious based on the things he’s willing to say, but, uh, Richard Hoste? He seems like the sort to use a made up pseudonym instead of one with his real first name.

I haven't checked any of the claims HuffPo makes but I'd be surprised if they were false, based on what the article contains. Interestingly enough, the claim that Hanania was Hoste had appeared on random replies to his tweets for a long time. Searching on twitter, the claim, as far as this one search goes, appeared on November 2022 here, getting 3k likes.

Which way shall Hanania go?

I'm confident he won't disappear, pretty sure he won't deny. I lean a bit towards ignore over own, he seems to enjoy the retweets he gets from people like Steven Pinker, he co-hosts a podcast with Inez Stepman who's a more mainstream conservative, which I think makes ignoring feel like a better option. Although Hanania's bluntness and contrarianism could lean towards owning / mentioning it so idk. Maybe we'll get a Reflections On My Past As A White Supremacist or something.

His book, The Origins Of Woke, comes out in Sep 19, published by HarperCollins. Will they kill that deal? He can just publish the book elsewhere if they do, so it'd be more annoying than anything else.

If there is significant public backlash to this, e.g. the book cancellation, it'd be a fun demonstration of how random social media politics is. There's a lot of slack in who gets cancelled, it's not an "efficient market". Everyone involved is acting on narrow, local incentives - 'cancellers' are either actually Offended or just trying to write pieces that'll get attention, corporations or individuals who cut ties with 'cancelled' people are just trying to avoid shame, etc. This isn't what it would look like if there was some competent and efficient conspiracy trying to suppress right-wing views. (said suppression does happen and is still bad, but it's very distributed and unplanned and there are way more unnecessary self-owns than there would be if I ran it.)

Hanania is yet another example of how far-right ideas and individuals genuinely are mixing with the more mainstream GOP. Even if you dislike nazis, this isn't necessarily bad - maybe Hanania is the right-wing equivalent of the college socialist who tames his radicalism and becomes a neoliberal, keeping the good motivations and ideas of his youth and throwing out the bad. But that is happening, "trump staffers who read BAP", etc.

Hanania seems pretty uniquely vulnerable to cancel culture because he’s blue tribe, just with far right beliefs. On a deep and fundamental level the opinions of fellow blues matter to him in a way that red triber’s don’t. This isn’t about his actual business model, which isn’t very cancellation vulnerable, but this isn’t Matt Walsh or somebody who genuinely doesn’t care if the NYT blacklists him from writing op Ed’s.

if steve sailer can continue to chug along then hanania will be fine. he probably won't get invited to write any more NYT editorials, but why would, say, musk give a shit when he's already retweeting interracial crime statistics without a care

Steve Sailer is all-in on the dissident right, though, even if he's not as radical as a lot of others. No mainstream Republican is inviting him to an event, no mainstream publication is giving him a platform. Hanania is the kind of guy who might appear at the White House (not as staff, but as a visitor) under a DeSantis presidency.

There's interracial crime statistics and "just asking questions" and "chasing uncomfortable facts" and then there's...this.

You ironically seem to be buying into the Left's framing that anyone who actually dares to get into things like those stats is a hardcore, irredeemable extremist but a lot of people who flirt with data like that would be concerned (even just for tactical reasons) by some of the quotes above.

Even Musk probably doesn't want to sit in front of a BBC journalist explaining his 63 likes of Hanania's posts + some of those statements.

And he once said that if he owned Twitter — the platform that catapulted him to some celebrity — he wouldn’t let “feminists, trans activists or socialists” post there. “Why would I?” he asked. “They’re wrong about everything and bad for society.”

I remember this Substack post and find it remarkable how bad faith this take on it. Hanania's entire point here was that his political opponents are actually pretty charitable when it comes to free speech, that if he had any real power, he'd definitely silence them entirely, so the extent to which conservatives are censored is actually pretty tame. Here's the relevant bit:

The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends. Tyler’s attitude is much healthier on these things and maintains the proper perspective. I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.

He's saying that they're kind of right to regulate Twitter and he understands the situation!

I agree with most of what Hanania says. I'll be pretty interested in seeing where he goes from here.

But even that is stupid. If you ban conservatives in toto, you can’t influence them. Instead, you subtly ban conservative thought to make the on the edge conservative believe the vast majority are not conservative. Humans are social creatures. They are influenced by “everyone else seems to agree with X so I probably should too or at least keep quiet about it.”

I don’t think RH is that smart to be honest.

I have not been particularly impressed on the occasions that Hanania has been linked.

That said, trying to cancel a guy who already says the quiet part out loud is a bit silly. Is that really more extreme than what he normally says?

My (probably terrible) instinct is that he can ignore it, but I also don’t know how much of his money comes from non-substack sources. Publishing and speaking is a weird market.

Disagree with below - it's very different from what he usually says. Discussing your emotional distaste for LGBTs analytically or unemotionally discussing the lower mean IQ of blacks while still ultimately promoting democracy and race-blind meritocracy, arguing the MSM is still better than the right-wing media and talking about how jews are universally successful due to their genes, claiming that veganism is a strong moral position even if he still disagrees with it - is very far from denouncing the "ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite" and promoting the Turner Diaries. e.g. Doglatine wouldn't have claimed Hanania was a very interesting writer if he was still doing the second.

I also think Hanania is more correct now than he was ten years ago, and suspect he has, to a significant extent, actually changed his mind (compare to Karlin's more limited moves in that direction). Although obviously he's still going to strategically conceal some ideas that are too distasteful.

I have not been particularly impressed on the occasions that Hanania has been linked.

If you are very right-wing, he might be a breath of fresh air to see support for stronger right-wing ideas (IQ and merit and correlation with race, crime) coexist with lambasting of weaker right-wing ideas (universal anti-immigration, populism, ...).

I don’t think anti-immigration is a weak idea. I’m personally okay with a small level of immigration but I can understand why one doesn’t want the population to artificially change.

For the most part it's not that far from what he normally says. Some differences are that, for example, as far as I know he doesn't bring up the "Jewish elite" under his birth name. I might have missed him referring to it somewhere, though. Also, when he writes under his birth name he generally has a more equivocational tone than he does in these quotes. These quotes are more blunt.

Did he say anything about Jews other than the 'barren white and Jewish elite' thing when talking about Sarah Palin?

Because he is half Ashkenazi and has married a Jewish woman. They have only one child together, of course.

Hanania isn’t Jewish, he’s a Palestinian Christian.

I thought his mother was Jewish, but I must have imagined that as I can't find anything online about her.

He looks very Jewish, but that isn’t uncommon for Levantine Arabs, obviously.

Well yeah, antisemitism is something that the mainstream is absolutely unwilling to forgive even if they look the other way on disguised racism a lot. He’s not an idiot:


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