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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
I have observed the pendulum swinging back the other way...the rise of what I have called normcore-right ,since 2021. These are people who are strongly anti-woke but at the same time hold mainstream (or normie) views, like about vaccines or even Ukraine. They sometimes take extreme views on otherwise mainstream positions, like Richard Hannia on the death penalty. Or supporting open borders in the case of Caplan. It's a subset of the un-woke who have carved out a niche of signaling high-status beliefs appealing to a well-educated, high-SES audience who are anti-woke but also strongly inclined to reject conspiracy theories , extremism, or tribalism. It's close to the IDW but more traditionalistic and less secular. NRO columnist Kevin Williamson started this in 2016 by opposing Trump and also strongly opposing economic populism, and in one of his more famous articles taking an especially incendiary or hard-core tone in which he said that downtrodden, white-working class towns “Deserve To Die”', which at the time generated some controversy.
Death penalty has majority support almost everywhere. Even in the US.
Maybe some places in western Europe oppose it, but by and large, death penalties were abolished in their respective countries in spite of popular opposition.
Death penalty is only an 'extreme view' if you have fully internalised the regime narrative or are otherwise too busy to read widely and have been convinced by all the op-eds and human rights activists that it's universally regarded as barbaric.
No, what I mean is his take on it, not that he supports it. Subtle difference. I think his take is somewhat extreme, at least in my opinion. It seems like he wants to expand the scope of the death penalty and does not seem perturbed by the possibility of wrongful executions. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/survey-results-ii-likes-and-dislikes I don't think he's wrong per say but it still seems extreme. I think he's right that mass incarceration and the death penalty are effective deterrents and crime mitigators, but the literature is at best mixed on the matter.
There are other reasons someone can oppose something that does not involve assimilating propaganda , like weighing the pros and cons of an issue
It's not that extreme a view even if it's outside the overton window. A fairly robust majority of Americans supports the death penalty while also believing innocent people are sometimes executed, and a large majority disapproved of the supreme court banning the death penalty for pedophilia. Heck you'd probably not get much below 50-50 on the Trump platform of executing drug dealers because they kill 500 people on average(or whatever statistic he made up).
Yeah you're right. His views on the death penalty would not be that extreme compared to Saudi Arabia. Extreme is a relative term.
Even compared to the average American his views on the death penalty don’t seem extreme, it’s only next to the elite consensus that it seems weird.
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