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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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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.

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