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Notes -
David Cole has quit Takimag:
He's enjoying his freedom from The Crowd:
This follows the end, earlier this year, of the Unz Review. Of course the website still exists, though I have no reason to go there after Steve Sailer, the last interesting writer, left. If you believe Unz, he quiet quit:
This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.
I still remember fondly how I would read UR and Takimag in the 2010s. Too bad they succumbed to brainrot and audience capture.
Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).
Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.
Antisemites will say "If you were kicked out of 100 different bars, maybe you're the problem." Maybe the reason so many writers, Richard Spencer, Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.
It's hard to take the criticism seriously, when you propose any of these people are supposed to be barometers warning against aggregate stupidity.
Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.
Why, because he looks weird?
I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.
What are the public intellectuals you guys approve of, anyway?
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.
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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