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Notes -
Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:
That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
This is the last straw, Alex.
Barely a day ago, @Amadan gave you some rather clear operational advice, with his mod hat on:
He said it well, I can't say it any better. Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.
Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice.
If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.That's a minor quibble at the end of the day. You have been repeatedly warned to behave yourself, and you've clearly annoyed both the commentariat and us mods well past the point of being justifiable on merit. You are being egregiously obnoxious, and show no signs of stopping. We tolerate more from those who give the forum more. You're not there, quite the opposite.
Banned for a month. Consider this provisional, since the other mods are asleep and I've asked them for their opinions regarding a duration. Me? I'm open to the idea of a permaban.
Edit: I've elected to cut down the ban to 2 weeks since two respected commenters are willing to speak up on Turok's behalf. Hopefully he gets the message.
To be clear Turok is not a left winger. Hes a hananianite libertarian who is butthurt that they couldn’t co-opt the right from the conservatives.
And rightfully so. Back then the left were acting crazy so it looked like the right were the only place for sensible, moderate and logical discussion. Turns out the inmates are running that particular madhouse too...
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right... here I am, stuck in the middle with you...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8StG4fFWHqg
Ah, I was going more Lord Tennyson but your link works as well to describe the current situation...
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Twas ever thus.
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I don't have a Twitter account, and I don't go out of my way to follow twitter e-celbrities.
Maybe you can help me out here. What's this "Hanania" guy's deal?
Everything I see about him here on the motte seems to suggest that his entire schtick can be reduced to "poor people are gross moral failures and I'm clearly not poor. Are you poor? Are you a gross moral failure?"
Am I missing something here?
Imagine someone who not only unironically uses the term human capital, and unambiguously considers themselves as higher human capital, but who also conspicuously talks about how the Republican Party has really gone downhill since it started catering to the tastes of those lower human capital against the advice of better human capital.
iprayiam3's characterization of Turok can apply to Hanania in general- someone who is generally upset that their intelligence and self-evident superiority aren't met with the deference and leadership they feel is their due. You can talk about Hanania, the social critic, but what that misses is Hanania, the would-be luminary / public intellectual / movement leader. Critics are common, but it takes a special sort of Influencer who is Intelligent enough to deserve to be listened to.
In mechanical terms, Hanania is/was a journalist who gained noticed in the 2000s by writing for far-right publications (that he has since disavowed). But from those publications he made connections with the sort of people who read them and more mainstream right-leaning media to sometimes write for those, and in turn use those as a further spring board. Hanania is a sharp enough wit that he can stand out by poking midwits, and enjoys it for both its own sake and the adulation it brings from those happy to see the victims pricked.
IIRC, part of what made Hanania stand out / get excommunicated from the respectable media (besides his not-quite-secret further right entry point) was that his schitk of being an angry libertarian also made him one of the earlier public critics/opponents to what we now call DEI. Hanania was always something of a shock-jock writer, picking arguments to provoke, and mocking woke / social justice / DEI efforts was something where he was ahead of the crowd. That boosted his credentials in some circles, especially those more interested in racial-IQ science, in the 'only Diogenes is wise enough to tell it like it is' sense. However, intellectual humility is not exactly something Hanania gets accused of having too much of, and he (or at least his support group) would probably tend to fixate more on Diogenes' acerbic wit and less on the joke.
This comes to the political pretensions... not really ever, but the closest in the the early-mid-2010s, pre-Trump. Trump rose because there was a power vacuum of voter base trust in the Republican establishment. That vacuume was because the Republican base disagreed with the Democrats on a lot and wanted someone who would fight. Hanania was also someone who disagreed with the Democrats on the lot and wanted to fight. This is a now decade-old vibe, but there was a vibe that Republicans were looking for something different than the stale old Bush-era republicans. (Memorably, the Republican Party elite had been taking the lesson via post-Romney autopsy that the change they needed was to become more like the Democrats. This, uh, didn't work out for that wing of the party.)
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
I don't know / recall if Hanania ever made an overt play for Republican Party influence, but he's been bitter about it in ways that are more akin to a spurned would-be-lover than an outsider. Hananaia has written about how conservative republicans are worse (in some ways) than democrats, about how Trump has a stranglehold on the party, about how the party has become the low human capital party (since Trump), etc. etc. The sort of thing that gives the impression that Hanania sure would think it was a good thing if the Republican party was replaced with people who met Hanania's standards, which of course includes agreeing with Hanania, and would naturally elevating Hanania-like people like Hanania into policy power. (But, of course, he'd never be so low-brow as to directly appeal to his own greatness.)
Despite that, Hananaians occasionally make scratches, or at least associations, with political relevance. Hanania was allegedly / accused of contributing to the Project 2025 republican wishlist / template that the Trump administration cribbed from for early policy priorities. At the same time (loosely / more recently), Hanania did a media tour publicly professing regret for ever voting for Trump (which, of course, was due to Hanania being insufficiently Hanania and taking his reasoning further). Hanania thus tries to shape Trumpian politics, while also keeping as far distance as he can. If Trump zigs, he will zag, and comment at length at how bad zigging is.
Hananaia acts, in other words, loosely like a would-be government-in-exile hoping that, should the hated regime fall, people will naturally look to them for guidance. However, this is undercut a bit by how the would-be government is led by a hated aristocrat who openly loathes the peasants, and hardly loved in return. Still, he's useful enough to enough people that he continues to exist.
The way you write Hanania reminds me of Sailer’s law of female journalists (https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailers-law-of-female-journalism/) - very low value human capital of him to succumb to the same pressures.
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I'm a big fan of noticing that he's against most books. The man's a distillation of every criticism of 'elite human capital' that isn't.
On one hand, thank you for further validating my already poor opinion of him. On the other hand... I'm sorry you have felt it useful to have that link on hand.
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So, he wants to run a hanania republic.
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Hanania-chan is tsundere?!
Oh God, I can’t unsee it.
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He has written some genuinely good stuff. His best article is probably Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas, although I have a soft spot for Why Asia Stopped Having Kids.
All in the eye of the beholder. I could never understand why the Dissident Right people ever thought he said anything interesting, and the ones that did took a pretty heave credibility hit.
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He's a sneering anti-Trump libertarian who has a history of some politically incorrect racial views but now claims to oppose political correctness on the basis of colorblindness. That's not a totally inaccurate representation of his schtick but he also has unkind things to say about rural people, women, etc. He's very very pro-abortion and thinks the winning formula is 'aesthetics and rhetoric of Bush era democrats, but without the concern about race, hyper-neoliberal economics'. As a political formula this is, regardless of how well it would work as a governing formula, almost actively delusional; he combines most of the least popular positions in the modern US. He's also aggressively anti-Trump.
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Broadly, the Hanania perspective is:
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I'll take your word for it. My eyes glaze over when I read this posts. Now that you mention it, he certainly does strike me as a Hananianite or a Hanania-lite. As someone with libertarian sympathies, I wish I had better representation.
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I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.
I like Amadan's comment a lot, I think it's one of the best mod comments I've ever read on any forum and is very fair, but I think that "Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy." is not really a good reason to mod people, since people really shouldn't be blamed for writing things that are "so against the grain here that it drives people crazy", which can apply to all sorts of good comments. You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.
Won't lie, this ban feels like the noose tightening around my neck too. Especially with people repeatedly bringing up how "abrasive" I am in totally unrelated threads and context.
I've been temporarily banned here before for going on rants against my political opponents and so on. When I chilled out and let the matter settle, I always realized that the mods had been right to ban me. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" is a key rule that helps to prevent this place from turning into a largely useless cesspit of outrage bait and insanity, like Reddit or X. AlexanderTurok certainly broke that rule many times, but he is not the only one. I've broken it before. I think you've broken it before. It happens. We're emotional beings, after all. I'm about as pro free speech as it gets, but of course in order to keep this forum from turning into chimpanzee shit-flinging, some rules have to be enforced. I think that the ideal of "try to bring light instead of heat" is a good one. No matter what the content of your opinion is, there are more and less inflammatory ways to state it. And again, I say this as someone who is very pro free speech. But the pragmatic reality is that this forum would go down the tubes very quickly if the rule against being inflammatory was not enforced.
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Unlike back on reddit where being abrasive was explicitly allowed.
(The moderators had said that you can't be antagonistic, but darwin admitted to being abrasive. So they had to warp the rules to say "being abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things, so see, darwin didn't admit to anything banworthy".)
Can you point to the post where we said "being abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things, so see, darwin didn't admit to anything banworthy"?
Unfortunately that is past the point where Reddit lets you search. (You may see posts suggesting that Reddit only returns 1000 posts but narrowing it down will work. Narrowing it down will not work.) But I can come up with some related posts:
Moderator tells me that I can be abrasive but not antagonistic
Moderator says he did a survey and the majority thinks that abrasive and antagonistic are totally different things
I mention that moderator admits that Darwin is abrasive, and moderator doesn't claim I misrepresented him, and says that Darwin isn't antagonizing people to any degree.
Where's the part where we "warped the rules" for Darwin's benefit?
I don't entirely agree with Zorba's (6-year-old!) distinction between "abrasive" and "antagonistic" (they are two different things, but they are closely associated and someone being consistently abrasive is probably being consistently antagonistic) but I see what he was getting at. You have never been able to accept that you can't rules-lawyer your way into demanding we ban all and only the people you don't like.
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I have no particularly strong opinion on the ideal ban duration here. I'd be open to anything from a week to a perma ban. I did say it was provisional, and I'm happy to change it to a different value once the other mods chime in. If the others think a week is more appropriate, I can change the duration retroactively to make it so.
What concerns me, quite immensely, is that Turok has shown no particular signs of being corrigible. Even after multiple warnings from other mods, I can't make out any difference in behavior. Other people who have been banned usually learn to knock it off. If they don't, they earn a PB. For such people, gradual escalation from warnings to short bans to longer bans usually works! For people who don't seem to give a damn? I'm inclined to reach for the gun.
WC was just modded by Nara for his comment calling black orphans a "virulent invasive species". He wasn't banned, and did manage to come up with a semi-reasonable explanation for that choice of phrasing. You can review the mod log for details.
We didn't ban him for it, but that was absolutely a formal warning, and will be taken into account should he do so again. I'm not going to go into detail about our internal mod discussions, which happen to include concerns about our neutrality in enforcing moderation decisions as well as community sentiment, but rest assured that bans are very much on the table. Just not today.
I would like to chime in in Turok's defense- as someone who does not agree with him very much- that he has slightly improved. I agree with goodguy- he is obnoxious but a month is too long.
Very well, since the two of you did speak up for him, I'm going to knock it down to 2 weeks. It'll only get worse if he doesn't get better.
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I might be missing something, but I thought the point of the "bare links" rule is to provide commentary (which he did in spades), and not just leave people with... bare links. So I'm not sure what rule posting, or not posting a link would supposed to be circumventing.
At the same time, "someone on Twitter said" doesn't tell us much. What 'someone'? Right wing someone, left wing someone, progressive Marxist someone, Aryan supremacy someone? There's a lot of ground that "someone" covers and we don't know if the tweet, taken out of context, is supportive (I'm a liberal, told ya that reality has a liberal bias), is grudgingly supportive (I'm a tankie, liberals get the bullet too, but this once they were right), is supportive from the other side (I'm conservative, this is where we can agree with liberals), is condemnatory (I believe in the superiority of the white race as proven by HBD and the stupid liberals are trying to tar us as spreading misinformation, this is what we have to fight against) or what.
Not saying the post was good. The "someone on Twitter" bit is annoying, because you can't even check if they actually said that, if his interpretation matches that of other people, etc. I'm just saying it doesn't break the bare links rule, or wouldn't even if there was a link.
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The only thing worse than a bare-link is no link at all. Which is uh.. Now that I think about it, an empty comment. You're right, I'll retract that claim, in my defense I wrote it at 5 am.
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Wait Alex, are you even reading what you are writing here? It's right wing 101 that "yeah disinformation is bad, but acktually the media and journalists are spreading it, not witches on twitter ad 4chan." People all the way from boomercons to hardcore white supremacists and neo nazis would agree with that statement.
So obviously (well you didn't link the tweet because of course not) the author of the tweet meant that, not meant any actual agreement with the libs. I can't see any other way to interpret this statement at all.
One of those irregular verbs from Yes, Minister; 'I'm questioning received dogma, you're spreading misinformation, he's lying.'.
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Or it could be both? It could be that the media, journalists and a large swath of the rest of society torched the integrity and trust in reliable institutions and now in their absence cranks have taken over.
Those two kind of are complementary theories.
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
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Sure that is a valid interpretation as well. But if you heard that some right wing influencer posted it then it's more likely the former.
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Your interpretation is not correct.
Yet you still won't provide a link to the tweet or even make the slightest attempt to justify your interpretation.
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Who is that? Do you have a link to the Tweet?
Why does it matter that he's "right" about something? You know the saying about a broken clock?
So you think the libs are right about this. Maybe you should explain your reasoning instead of seething that right-adjacent tech bros don't agree with banning all the conspiracy theorists off the internet.
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The things he agrees with them on don't even need to be stated. It's so baked in we take it for granted now, e.g. moving away from fossil fuels and making electric vehicles in the first place
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Well part of the problem is that all social media tech is that a small group of people deciding everything based on how much they can trap you in their algorithms to shove advertisement in front of your face. I would not characterize that as decentralized! It is the very nature of the companies gives the two-digit IQ megaphones on social media, it is encoded in the incentive structure of the business models. Someone stupid getting their voices heard get the slightly smarter people spending energy on feeling good about how they are smarter than the idiot got boosted.
Misinformation and disinformation is not an internet problem it is a (social) media problem and the quote just conflated that.
It's a weird new problem for those who thought the primary issue with media companies was fealty to big corporate advertising dollars. But that's so twenty years ago. The left's priorities advanced significantly throughout the culture since then. We're in a situation now where the left is far less critical of Big Advertising and its employees because their concerns mirror their own.
Comprehensive, ground-up free speech IS right-wing in that sense. People Power wasn't mean to go that way, though.
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Come on. That is a cheap rhetoric trick and you know it. Anyone can read Mein Kampf, find an unobjectionable quotation which which their current political opponent would disagree and thus prove that their opponent is literally less reasonable than Hitler.
I think English has the idiom that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am sure that if I were to dig through all the stuff Trump had said this year, I would be able to find plenty of sentences which sound reasonable, even insightful in isolation.
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I mean so was the printing press. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as eventually we will learn to deal with it. And I find that in almost all cases, the dangers of censorship and centralized clearing houses of information is that not only does it make organized lying possible— in fact easy — but it makes countering the official lies nearly impossible.
The danger of too much contrarianism is being exposed to crazy ideas that fail on critical examination. This is at least possible because the truth is also available.
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I regret to inform you that you share a planet with people who believe in penis-stealing witches, and many of them don't even have Internet access.
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The original default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time. Recently, in large part thanks to the Internet, some people are occasionally less than 100% wrong. You might even say that the Internet made people less wrong (bah-dum tiss).
People being wrong is not a new problem and the Internet didn't make it worse.
During the life of Marie Antoinette, there was a scandal involving a diamond necklace that severely damaged her reputation. Except she had literally nothing to do with it, and she could prove that she had nothing to do with it. The French press vilified her anyway.
And who could forget about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans? You know, the guy who was proven innocent and then dragged through the mud by the French press because the army was too embarrassed to admit they made it all up? The guy who was vilified because of a bunch of lying journalists and government officials? That guy?
/images/17528682967017636.webp
Hey, I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph. Maybe instead of giving journalists and government officials unlimited power to censor anyone who disagrees with them, we should consider that maybe the call is coming from inside the house.
Journalists have been spreading disinformation since the invention of writing.
Hey now, writing predates journals.
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This is a common misconception. For most things of life-or-death importance, people were usually at least vaguely right. The Middle Ages might have had a cosmology which was laughably wrong, but their farmers certainly knew what was the optimal time to plant grain, because no society which is wrong about these things can survive.
Would medieval Europe have benefited greatly from a time traveler infodumping all the actionable knowledge of our age, e.g. how the plague works, and how to bootstrap an industrial civilization a la planecrash? Sure.
But there is a difference between being wrong because you lack the tech to find evidence either way (e.g. microscopes and sterilization for germ theory) or because your epistemics suck (which to be fair they often did).
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C'mon Turok, I
liketolerate you, but you gotta stop making yourself such an easy target. It's a bad look to start your post with "some rando on Twitter said something", you could have easily made the point yourself.Anyways, I'm pretty sure that people believing and spreading factually false things is an unsolvable problem, certainly with the existence of the internet. While I am regularly dismayed by the selective gullibility/incredulousness of the twitterati, it probably can't be helped at any sort of scale, and the sort of public concessions that you seem to seek would probably backfire and result in further ideological entrenchment. You can call out that attitude where it happens here, but don't just complain to us about wrong and stupid everyone else is.
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He would not say it because of all the things libs are definitely wrong about, this is the one that they are the most wrong about.
There is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation, and of modern lysenkoism, in enshrining the opinions of any class of people, even your beloved Elite Human Capital's. Letting ideas compete is the long term solution, not the problem, even if it can be sometimes subobtimal in the short term.
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