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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I find it amazing that on this day 1 year ago it would have been the true blue left who would have called for Hanania link disclaimers while now it's the right wingers doing the same, even though his views haven't really changed much in that time.

Particularly given that many of those same people have likely ridiculed the purity spirals on the left.

By mid-2022 I could tell Hanania had exhausted his couple of interesting ideas, and it had become clear he wasn't at that 99.9th percentile of internal coherency that makes for an insightful commentator. I almost wrote a response to a comment here, saying that people were obviously overestimating Hanania's ability to invest into his own ideas. He was an r-strategist poster. And he was going to have to start wasting everybody's time to keep up with the meatgrinder of being a professional twitter wonk.

Never really liked him as a populist since he's basically open borders. He seems to lack a basic understanding of humans. It's become especially grating now though since he's basically this term's Romney/McCain/Cheney. Being held up by all the left wing posters as a conservative with morals and principals, aka beliefs that align more with their own.

I have been calling out Hanania's stupidity since at least 2023, and I'm no true blue aussieleftist. But he's definitely flattering different biases these days.

Well yes, the strategy of farming hateclicks with deliberate offense is not especially dependent on actual opinions.

There are still a few Hanania fans here, at least. He is a contrarian drifting towards the Yglesias level of annoying, but he still makes some good points.

I suppose I count as defending Hanania - I don't particularly like him, but I think hate for him here is absurdly overblown.

I will just straight-up defend Yglesias, though. I don't find him particularly annoying and he strikes me as effectively advocating for his preferred positions in a way that admits of rational argument and counter-argument. Well done him.

He can write reasonably when he wants to, but when he just wants to Boo Outgroup Yglesias gets really bad.

I suppose I count as defending Hanania - I don't particularly like him, but I think hate for him here is absurdly overblown.

The hate he gets is just a result of people putting him on a pedestal. If it wasn't for that, he'd be indistinguishable from the blur of faceless Substackers that no one cares about. I wouldn't even care that he's calling himself "elite human capital", it's the fact that others agree with his self-image that is absurd, and warrants the reaction to him.

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