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Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.
Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.
"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."
And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.
Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.
It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.
Okay, I'll give you that one, that was probably the best reply you could have written.
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What?
His take on Putin's interview with Tucker is a classic:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1755750991964913902
I still go back to it from time to time.
Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.
How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.
But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.
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Having never seen a photo of Richard Hanania, I just now googled him. I guess he looks kind of smarmy. But not even 10% as bad as you make him out.
I mean "Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt." Come on man. No he doesn't.
I used to like him before I knew what he looked and sounded like, back when all I knew about him was his pretty good breakdown of the Afghanistan debacle, where he did a fair amount of work and before most of his now infamous antics.
His book on US foreign policy also seems remarkably interesting., partly because he is now covering for the same people he was criticizing back then.
He is smart and hard working, yes, however, there are mysteries. Consider this video interview of him.
Give him a listen. Do you find him sympathetic or trustworthy etc?
He made my skin crawl lightly before his implausible turn to 'enlightened centrist'.
I watched the video. His tight lipped grin is not a good look. Smarmy.
I thought he wears makeup, but google won't confirm. A guy born with natural eyeliner? Maybe? Some of the Indians I know have really dark regions around their eyes. That's just their DNA and not relevant to their trustworthiness. This guy is ethnically middle eastern and looks that way.
He is not worse than people of Walmart or the devil from Constantine. Not a great look, but not terrible. If his resting look was anything other than that tight grin he'd be fine.
Perhaps. His brother also appears to be like that.
It might just as well be your intuition, that is, subconscious evaluation of other people's appearance and mannerisms isn't very good. When I first saw him on video I was very surprised in an unpleasant way. His later behavior confirmed my initial intuition that he is bad news.
His father looks far more normal.. There is, however, almost certainly something wrong in the family - Hanania's brother Edward was notoriously arrested for throwing dogs off a parking garage, supposedly due to schizophrenia and later died of a heroin overdose. Hanania himself was sent to a residential program for 'troubled youth' which, he says, 'changed his life for the better'. Well..
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He has a weird face but I suppose in way it’s kind of an ancient face. Some (a minority of) Palestinian Christians are the last pure Levantines, you are witnessing a phenotype from deep in civilization’s past.
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I see, you make fun of his appearance because he made fun of your friends‘ appearance. His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.
What else? „lolcow“… if you could look into his brain argument… wrong vibes… „total bitch“ . You‘ve convinced me he‘s actually more correct than I originally thought.
The discourse I'm familiar with is pretty high caliber, while Hanania is there throwing schoolyard insults, and crying when anyone returns fire. He is wrong, and a hypocrite.
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