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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28795 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Richard Hanania is a man whom I do not always agree with but do appreciate for successfully pissing off people both on the left and the right. The ability to piss off people from both of those groups is, in my opinion, generally correlated with being right about things.

Well, Hanania has allegedly been linked to a pseudonym. The allegation is that about 10 years ago, he was routinely saying taboo things about race and gender issues under the name "Richard Hoste".

Some quotes:

It has been suggested that Sarah Palin is a sort of Rorschach test for Americans [...] The attractive, religious and fertile White woman drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad well before there were any questions about her qualifications.

If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.

Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society [...] women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.

It's nothing very shocking for those of us who read dissident right stuff, and it's not even really that far away from Hanania's typical under-his-birth-name writing. But it may be a bridge too far for much of the more mainstream audience.

What I wonder is, which way shall Hanania go?

  1. Own it, say "yes I am Richard Hoste and I did write those things"? He would gain praise from some people for honesty, but he would also stand probably a pretty good chance of losing book deals, interviews with some mainstream figures, and so on.

  2. Deny deny deny?

  3. Ignore it?

I think that it is an interesting case study, the attempted take down of one of the more famous examples of what is now a pretty common sort of political writer: the Substacker whose views are just controversial and taboo enough to have a lot of appeal for non-mainstream audiences but are not so far into tabooness, in content and/or tone, to get the author branded a full-on thought-criminal.

I think the CW blowback will be in line with what you'd expect from decades ago: a career deranging storm lasting a year or so, echoing forever. He is a much less sympathetic case than Charles Murray, who can actually stand by what he wrote. According to Hannia, he wrote some vile and idiotic stuff up until his mid twenties because he was somewhat of a sexless, friendless, loser writing anonymously. He disavows what he wrote. His past motivations were to score political points - not to think things through - leading to a bunch of hairbrained "modest proposals". He explained all this, his journey to where he is today, and his motivations to prevent people from descending into the kind of unreason which captured his mind well into adulthood.

On the one hand, I can believe he is now writing honestly, and I see him as a valuable insider. On the other hand, I can see how people would be reasonably skeptical. I mean, he sincerely argued for the forced sterilization of ~80M Americans, an idea which doesn't portend a great thinker. To me, the sheer idiocy of his former ideas makes me believe him today.

I think his September book release will be heavily impacted and probably outright cancelled, although I don't know much about publishing. This would be a shame, although understandable from the POV of the principle actors. It's been blurbed by people with solid reputations who probably want nothing to do with the guy anymore. Its being published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, who are likewise going to want to distance themselves.

Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.

I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.

People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.

There are literal zero people autistic enough to cross that rubicon. Donald Trump wouldn’t. Some random blog posted here went with I’m not a scientists but what if it’s true on hbd. Hannania himself will posts IQ data by race but won’t come out and say it. And in his apology just said differences exists I don’t know why, but I have a degree of confidence he doesn’t believe in structural racisms.

I’m starting to think the rubicon needs crossed. Hannania apparently began to believe he could get policy in the right place without crossing. Something like 1 in a 150 African Americans were shot in Minneapolis last year so not crossing the Rubicon seems like it has real world negative effects for all.

Well I guess everyone is opaque about "crossing the Rubicon". Assuming Hanania is honest, we don't need to guess about what he thinks because he responded to the huffpo piece on his substack. He finds his old views repugnant; largely explained by immature, emotional reasoning. His solution was intellectual advancement, and personal development. After looking at the data he realized hbd is true, and small-l liberalism is the best path forward.

I think this sums of where he was when he was writing anonymously.

A young LARPer with a tendency to get carried away with certain arguments, enamored by the romantic idea of grappling with supposedly suppressed ancient truths, simply couldn’t handle that level of nuance.

An alternate explanation is that these kinds of extreme pro-ethnic-cleansing arguments are genuinely unpopular among large swaths of the center right.

There are left wing university professors who used to be actual, no-shit, terrorists. Does that mean terrorism is genuinely popular (or at least not genuinely unpopular) among the large swaths of the center left?

Also, if Bari Weiss is now "center-right", I swear to god...

It's not so much that terrorists are popular (though I'd bet that some among the left don't mind having "dial a riot" in their deck of cards), as the fact that the center-left feels vastly more secure in its control over the direction of leftist politics than the center-right does. Realistically, any far left policy that gets memetically popular will be sanewashed into something the center-left either already supports (e.g. they might not want single-payer healthcare, but they would like a universal system) or can accept (race and gender grievance stuff). Bernie got swatted like a fly by the DNC whereas the GOP is praying that Trump gets imprisoned or killed because their other standard-bearers can't beat him (assuming the polling is remotely accurate, a fact about which I am presently agnostic). All those boomer bombings are easily forgotten about because all put together pale in comparison to one Oklahoma City Bombing. Joe Biden's anachronistic affection toward organized labor is a bigger threat to neoliberal economics than every commie professor in the country combined.

I don't think that the center right really thinks that some sort of far right is a serious threat (though it's entirely possible that they've been repeating it long enough that they believe it themselves), but a populist right very much is, and they're more than willing to conflate the two to stay in power. This isn't anything new. Not so long ago, Trump himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.

Funny thing in American politics today is the right rallies around Trump because he’s going to win the primary but they probably have better and more electable candidates behinds him. The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.

The left seems to rally around Biden despite no huge fan base because there is nothing behind him.

They don't need it. By now a majority of the nation simply won't vote Republican because it isn't respectable to do so. The Democrats can run a yellow dog and still win.

No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.

Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.

No. The left could be filled with 100% terrorists. That doesn't affect whether extreme HBD policies are or are not popular on the center right.

That's not the question I asked though.

Bari Weiss is running a university to attract customers. those customers may include the center right, woke-skeptic, and also find extreme HBD policies distasteful.

You can find them distasteful without wanting to disinvite a dude for pseudonymously advocating for them on obscure internet forums, 10 years ago.

I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago

What you call the anti-woke right is really the institutional anti-woke right — the version of the right that can get editorials in national newspapers, books with major publishers, and professors at good universities. It is beholden to liberal norms because of the utter collapse of the traditional right in major cultural institutions and its failure to build alternatives.

This is why right-wing anti-elitism (as exemplified by Trump) is a fairly anaemic long-term threat to the left: it doesn’t build anything to compete with their long-term bases of power.

Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…

Exactly. But that's not stuff he's believed in the past decade, and he's the only person arguing against them from a place of sympathy and understanding. To cancel him is to say that "fascists" can't change and/or that you don't want them to.

Agreed. Under his old alias he expressed explicit support for ideas that are so far outside the Overton Window that even Putin or Xi Jinping wouldn’t publicly endorse them (even if they carried them out in practice).

To be precise, all of those things would also be fine, if he just picked a different group as his target.

Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.

Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.

You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?

It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.

Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.

OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.”

Well, I call it nothing very shocking because I routinely see even more extreme right-wing content, not because I agree with it. I myself am not a white supremacist.

What exactly are you pushing me for, when it comes to using “whiteness” to describe the set of effects that being white in a racist society might have on people? I think it’s bad terminology and people should stop using it. Are you asking me to conclude that everyone who uses such terminology actually intends white people harm? Because, if so, I don’t think that’s true. Alternatively, you might be asking me to be outraged, in order to campaign more effectively for people to actually stop. I am not sure if my outrage would actually be helpful, though.

There are a lot of situations in which a more measured argument would be more persuasive. After all, most people who support such terminology believe that outraged people are mistaken about its meaning. By not being outraged and instead taking people at their word, I might well have a better chance of changing people’s minds. I’ve not tried to make this argument, but I am pondering whether I should engage more with people to my left, now that this place is becoming less interesting to me.

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I appreciate you as a dissenting voice, but I genuinely believe Hanania's upcoming book is the most important conservative book of the last 20 years and possibly the most important American book of the past decade. I can't afford for him to lose status because I can't afford for this book not to be a smashing success.

Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,”

You don't think a statement like "whiteness is a disease" has these sort of implications? Even after granting the point that forced sterilization is worse than non-metaphorical decolonization or treating someone's race as a disease, the difference between one being written pseudonomously, and the other publicly in academic journals completely overrides any conclusion that could be made from the comparison you wanted to make. Like I pointed out you can openly call for murdering people based on their race, and the "paper of record" will come to your defense. Hanania could have rewritten all his old posts verbatim, replaced other races with "white" and no one criticizing him, including you, would have cared.

Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status.

Hanania should have never had any trust or status, but he should not lose any over this.

With all due respect, you cannot “openly call for murder.” What you can do is sing a song that calls for murder and then pinky promise you don’t mean it literally, and then the NYT will make sure to mention all that stuff about not taking it literally.

It’s not good! In a country where white people are a racial minority, it’s reasonable to see a serious potential threat. I sincerely hope we do not see violence as a result.

To be clear, I don’t support the pejorative usage of “whiteness” to describe cultural or personal qualities. However, I am not the one making a comparison, here. I’m responding to a comparison that I was given. It is indeed tricky to compare “aimed at white people, no claims of inherent racial superiority, disturbing in potential unspoken implication but not necessarily meaning what a person’s worst fears might make of it, continues to be openly held, not given strong social sanction” with “aimed at a racial minority, claims of inherent racial superiority, explicitly terrible policy suggestions, very recently repudiated, given some social sanction and we may see more.” That’s a lot of variables!

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The NYT has just finished bending over backwards in order to whitewash a literal call for a genocide, do you want to make a bet about any negative consequences coming their way as a result?

This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.

To be fair, "the right" in question here is Bari Weis and her friends.

It doesn't matter what he does because he doesn't matter. I've personally heard of him before but I had no idea what he did nor what his political opinions were. The internet wasn't even much help because the guy isn't prominent enough to have a Wikipedia page, which is, I believe, the bare minimum to consider one relevant to the public discourse. Best I can tell he's a conservative writer with a Substack, who may be more popular than other conservative writers with a Substack but since it doesn't appear he ever wrote professionally he's nothing more than a blogger. The only mention of this incident I've seen in the media is from Huffpost, and they don't have comments so it's hard to even tell what kind of engagement the article got. Besides that no one cares, which leads me to believe that Hanania is the kind of guy who's a celebrity in the extremely-online world but virtually unknown in the real world. There will be no consequences because no one gives a shit.

I can see him having an impact—it's likely conservatives will go after the civil rights act or interpretations thereof due in large part to the influence of Hanania when they gain power next.

That's the hope.

Being influential with the right people can be more important than influential with the mass market. Name me one guy in the pro-life movement but they keep working and won. Other examples I’d give would be TC and George Mason. Which is well highly connected to Koch. The people the .1% read aren’t the people the selling lots of books.

Name me one guy in the pro-life movement but they keep working and won.

Mike Pence.

Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, George W Bush, Justices Alito ACB Thomas Gorsuch Roberts and Kavanaugh, essentially every Republican Senator from 2000 to 2020 contributed to this win.

Fruck studiously takes notes for the next time he wants to shit all over someone in a way that also belittles the community but doesn't break any rules.

He wrote about it.

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully

Unfortunate. It's not going to help him, probably will hurt him. He offered zero defense of anything he said, at best he comes out looking something like Freddie De Boer where he's straight up claiming he was nuts for a while. As my dad used to call it, the George W Bush defense: nothing that happened before I was 35 and found Jesus counts!

His reply struck as me as earnest, particularly because he at least offers a why for the what. That said, I'm still annoyed, but not at all because of the content of his past opinions but entirely because they were left unacknowledged and hidden until a HuffPo expose forced the question. I would have respected him a lot more if he was more upfront and honest about how his opinions have changed, even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

I would have respected him a lot more if he was more upfront and honest about how his opinions have changed, even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

Especially given how much his brand revolves around disagreeableness and bravery. Or rather: the denial that it's even brave to make certain noises online.

even with a perfunctory "I used to believe other stuff" passing reference.

That seems utterly banal? "I have held these exact opinions for as long as I've had conscious thought" is much more remarkable and would actually be deserving of a mention IMO.

It is banal with how I phrased it. I just want some sort of hint, because my current impression is that he pretended otherwise.

Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects. Naturally, this led me to look around, and come to the only logical conclusion, which was that I was naturally superior to everyone else and women in particular shouldn’t have any rights. Strangely enough, now that I have a fulfilling personal life and objective career success, such ideas don’t appeal to me anymore.

Hard to overstate how intellectually unappealing this is. I actually empathize with it on some level, but it's sure not an argument that LoserCuckHanania was wrong and WinnerCareerHanania is right. I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose. I surely won't be part of any cancellation project against him, but it probably does diminish my view of him as an honest actor.

Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views? I've never seen any evidence of this anywhere, and there are very obvious examples to the contrary.

Evidently they've never met any Chad types who (among men) hold their conquests in utter contempt.

I suppose one probable explanation is that such types don't bother to post their views on this on forums, so they aren't visible online that much.

Why is it stated as self-evident even by supposed ideological dissidents like Hanania that romantically unsuccessful men are the only men holding so-called misogynistic views?

Because at least some scholars who study such men seem to think (e.g. William Costello) that they do tend to be more misogynistic (which, as pointed out, is different from them being the only misogynists)?

The linked study is based on scoring higher on scales for "Hostility Towards Women", "Rape Myth Acceptance", and "Sexual Objectification". Reading the appendix, these scales are sufficiently low-quality that it is difficult to conclude much from them, at least not without the data for how people responded to individual questions.

Some of the 10 items on the "hostility towards women" scale include "I feel that many times women flirt with men just to tease them or hurt them.", "I am sure I get a raw deal from the women in my life. ", and "I usually find myself agreeing with women. (Reverse coded)". It doesn't really provide novel information to learn that someone romantically unsuccessful has worse experiences with women and is less likely to have someone like a wife in his life that he is more likely to agree with than if the women he interacts with are strangers. (It's also a bit funny to imagine someone making a "hostility towards men" scale and making one of the items "I usually find myself agreeing with men. (Reverse coded).")

Meanwhile large sections of "Rape Myths" and "Sexual Objectification" are things the now-successful Hanania would presumably agree with. Questions like that are going to pick up on very broad demographic correlations with ideology. The ideological bias on display also makes me more skeptical about the people conducting these studies. Examples of the 11 "Rape Myths" include "To get custody for their children, women often falsely accuse their ex-husband of a tendency toward sexual violence.", "Many women tend to exaggerate the problem of male violence." and "It is a biological necessity for men to release sexual pressure from time to time.". (The last would naturally correlate with high sex drive and thus sexual dissatisfaction.) Examples of the 10 "Sex Objectification" items include "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige.", "Using her body and looks is the best way for a woman to attract a man.", and "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners.".

Also some of these seem sufficiently unarguable that it seems like it might be heavily influenced by the respondents' social desirability bias. For instance, if many of the men disagreeing that "Being with an attractive woman gives a man prestige." or "Sexually active girls are more attractive partners." believe otherwise but are the type to answer surveys with what they perceive as the most socially desirable answers, are they also more likely to misrepresent how sexually satisfied they are? And the second one would also measure sex drive.

It’s a feminist meme that the only reason a man could criticise feminism is sexual frustration or a sense of inferiority. Basically so that to criticise feminism is to declare yourself a loser. Same principle as “what, you can’t handle a strong woman?”.

The same trick was pulled with gay rights - the meme that homophobia is usually a sign of suppressed gay lust.

It's just that it's somewhat strange that even dissident rightists fall for this garbage.

It’s not implied, obviously there are whole regions of the world where every man holds misogynistic views. He’s saying that in cosmopolitan, white, blue tribe PMC circles, young male misogynists are probably highly disproportionately incels.

He never said that only romantically unsuccessful men hold misogynistic views, he just implied that men who are romantically unsuccessful are prone to hold misogynistic views.

In a column meant to give an acceptable explanation for his past (supposedly) abhorrent views on women, he claims that such views "naturally" originated from his unsatisfying romantic life i.e. obviously implying that they cannot possibly stem from anything else.

I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.

This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.

I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.

Why not just that each produces biases in its own way?

The opposite stance also seems to be true—those not entrenched in a system may be less likely to notice the value in it.

You're probably correct that each produces biases of their own - nobody is completely free from that. However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not. The skewing effect of social desirability, on the other hand, seems to be a pressure that just gets worse the more integrated you are in social life. The more you rely on other people, the more incentives there are to curry favour with them and adopt the beliefs of the group.

Personal experience probably isn't a great source for belief, but as I've grown my social circle over the years the more I have felt the pressures of social life encroaching. The tribalistic social pressures and incentive structures that drive people to adopt certain group beliefs for social signalling purposes are disturbingly strong, and it occurs even when no proper evidence has been provided to me that these beliefs are correct, and it's only by actively and consciously guarding against these instincts that I've managed to maintain my streak of heterodoxy. But doing that requires one to accept a level of discomfort they could otherwise shield themselves from.

Good comment. Sort of goes to disprove "Twitter isn't real life."

However, that specific bias you're mentioning cuts both ways - those who are doing well in a system are also more likely to view it positively, warranted or not.

See also here.

It's eerie seeing him be so humble and self-effacing. Typically he gives Moldbug a run for his money as far as smugness and dismissiveness go.

It is eerie, and jarring. Like seeing Norm MacDonald be obsequious to The View.

It's also funny that after years of him lambasting people for apologizing to the mob, he's now in full, grovelling apology mode, and more grovelling than any of the other cancellation victims he mocked.

I mean, did he not realize this stuff would come out one day?

Me: Have favored classical liberalism since I was a teenager, no matter what personal issues I was dealing with, because the soul-crushing authoritarianism, collectivist-driven unfairness, and relative economic ineffectiveness of alternatives to classical liberalism has always been apparent to me. My audience: a handful of people on various scattered political forums.

Hanania: Was too stupid to realize the superiority of classical liberalism until at some point in his 20s. Hanania's audience: Huge SubStack audience, book deal, mingles with influential political figures.

I mean none of this is surprising of course. Think about how some of today's famous and well-compensated neo-conservative writers, for example, were Marxists in their youth.

I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.

Overall, this all encourages me to maybe write more long-form and actually try to become a famous political writer.

To be fair, while my commitment to classical liberalism has never wavered much, in my more emotional moments I have often longed to, and still long to, purge the world with authoritarian murder. But these are heated moments. Like Hanania, I have written some things in the past that would certainly not make me look like a classical liberal were I to be judged only by them.

Indeed one of the things that surprised me about reading Hanania's article is that he did not say that he had written those previous things in the heat of emotion while actually being a classical liberal. He instead said that he actually was not a classical liberal back then. That makes it harder for him, which increases the degree to which I think it is likely to be true.

However, like @Quantumfreakonomics, I find it very hard to believe that he is honest when he writes this:

One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter.

However, relevant discussion thread where Hanania responds: https://twitter.com/NoahCarl90/status/1688214708094996485.

(Not sure why TheMotte auto-changes nitter to twitter)

Overall, I think that this article is a pretty good bit of writing, but I find it to be just a bit too polished, it has the feel of having been produced as much by tactics as by honesty. The careful reader will come away with a lack of faith in Hanania's willingness to ever write his true thoughts, but then the careful reader will not have had that faith about Hanania to begin with.

It is also possible that the whole essay is bullshit and that he actually is not and never has been a classical liberal. Which would actually maybe make me have more respect for him, since it would imply not only a truly fine commitment to and skill at the art of fakery, but also such a profound love of trolling that he willingly took on a greater burden of necessary fakery in order to be able to continue successfully annoying both sides.

One way or another, if Hanania's response helps him to sail through these stormy waters while keeping his book deal and his mainstream cachet, I will congratulate him and will look forward to hopefully seeing him tear the HuffPost a new one at some point in the future.

I do of course think that being intelligent enough to change your mind is a good thing, but I think that it is an even better thing to have been right from the beginning.

From a moral point of view? Of course. You have 20 more years on the side of the angels.

From a writer's point of view? I'm not so sure. For a local example, see Resident Contrarian's post on having a middle-class income:

You’d think that the ability to [write a post like this] would be universal among people who haven’t been poor at all since they have more time at decent pay-rates than anyone else, but you’d be at least partially wrong. They know what it’s like to have money, but it’s all very usual; the stuff about it that’s weird or different skids off of their awareness without biting like a dull file on hardened steel. It’s not their fault - it’s just normal.

Similarly, you know what it's like to be a classical liberal, but (presumably) it's just normal.

You make a good point about how one can sometimes better understand a view if one has not always held it. Point taken.

I’m not sure how an “intellectual” could be right from the beginning. It takes reading a lot and just because of timelines you work thru one piece of works before others.

I also don’t think classical liberalism works everywhere. It hasn’t worked in Africa or a lot of the ME. Probably wouldn’t have worked until fairly recent in Russia (too much war risks required authoritarian/military politics). Just because classical liberalism roughly works in America doesn’t mean it’s the correct government. But it was for this place and time.

That is fair, I should say that I favor classical liberalism if and when it is possible.

I don't think that one needs to be an intellectual or to read even one book to figure out that classical liberalism is the way to go. Actually I distrust political theories that require one to be grounded in some entire corpus of writing in order to understand them.

This is a pretty good response.

He makes it clear that he doesn't hold the same views, and finds them repugnant. At the same time, he doesn't back off from his current writings, and avoids grovelling.

It won't sate those who can't be sated, of course, but it will probably be sufficient for those who aren't put off by his current views, but who would be repulsed by his former ones, and aren't fans of cancelling when views have changed.

He certainly avoids many of the forced errors that commonly plague statements like this, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out the one clearly false statement that I don't think he ever would have made if his career and reputation weren't on the line

Ya and he basically says policing can reduce crime and implies lot of blacks in jail.

The left will hate him. Because he doesn’t believe in all these structural issues and it’s just genetics. But he works for the right who wants the policies they want without having to say the quiet part out loud.

I’ll downgrade him some as an intellectual because he really isn’t the hard truth teller he claims to be. He is trying to work in the system and get the things he believes are doable and most important. Which seems to be aimed at ending civil rights law and getting rid of a lot of pride. But it does seem like he’s down for saying what he needs to sit with the cool kids.

Moron.

He could have ignored it and increased his chances of surviving, or he could have owned it and gone down with dignity.

Instead, he will go down as a cuck.

I suspect there's some other balancing act going on here.

Hanania doesn't need liberal approval or sympathy, nor could he possibly get it before all this anyway.

He does need to stay relatively acceptable to rich and powerful old boomer conservatives who control the media megaphones and purse strings and set the tone for where things are headed going forward within the shifting conservative movement, especially regarding public political priorities about legal matters (both in the Federal government and concerning cases conservative activists drag in front of the Supreme Court).

And old boomer conservatives are, I think, the only people left who overwhelmingly still cling to the rotting corpse of the old Reagan public settlement about race (namely, we all agree that racism is a truly awful thing, we legitimately believe in a goal of milquetoast equal opportunity, but we will also define racism such that it only applies to truly egregious acts by individual extremists that have nothing to do with almost anybody normal, and we'll likewise view it through a colorblind lens that also holds black Americans to the same standard as everyone else).

Fundamentally, on the ground (at least online), this settlement is over. If you're a younger male or traditional Christian or are white, you have been steeped in progressive activists salting the earth on this and related identity topics since, like, 2013, and so you've already acclimatized to the new reality, or for you this might be the only reality you've ever even known. "Racism" now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you. And so it's no surprise to see conversation norms heavily shifting for younger conservatives, or the sorts of people who at the least are drawn to anti-woke discourse. Younger people who likely would've accepted the public moral legitimacy of the old Reagan settlement stop accepting the moral legitimacy of what has replaced it, and so all the guard rails come down.

I read an interview between Hanania and Chris Rufo the other day (IIRC), and Rufo was basically making something like this point - lots of old boomer conservatives are still very sensitive to how race is talked about, largely because they're insulated from all these changes out in the wild, and so he has to be quite delicate rhetorically about how he talks about race when trying to reach out to them. They can agree about policy goals, but the rhetorical frame that's required to convince them is quite different than what younger online anti-woke types would be receptive to.

This seems like I what I was getting at about a bit of a noble lie where we just ignore disparate outcomes.

One thing I’d add is a lot of the old agreements seem gone outside of race. Pride seems like the exact same thing where we had everyone can do what they want at home to now we teach pride in elementary school.

The right doesn’t want to come out and say they think homosexual lives are inferior. And that’s before we even get into the more extreme things being pushed.

Have you considered the possibility that this is sincere? That is, that he genuinely doesn't hold or like his past views?

Now every time someone attempts to discredit him by posting the huffpost article, someone else can post this in response, which'll take off some of the bite.

This seems like the right play to me.

Have you considered the possibility that this is sincere?

That would be the part that warrants the opening insult. "Oh no, I no longer hold hose views! If I apologize for the stuff I said pseudonymously, I'm sure that will clear things up" is extremely unwise.

Now every time someone attempts to discredit him by posting the huffpost article, someone else can post this in response, which'll take off some of the bite.

Or it won't. In fact there's no reason to believe that it will.

That would be the part that warrants the opening insult. "Oh no, I no longer hold hose views! If I apologize for the stuff I said pseudonymously, I'm sure that will clear things up" is extremely unwise.

That assumes he's looking to "clear things up" rather than to "tell the truth".

I always thought clearing things up involved telling the truth.

Your point is AFAICT that apologising is not incentivised by current cultural norms (or by the nature of his readership).

My point is that some people care more about honesty than incentives.

is extremely unwise.

Why? The way he put it doesn't really open him much to further attacks or attempts at pressuring further capitulation. The main negative to this, under my current model, is losing some people who'd prefer he was his former pseudonymous self, but I think these should generally have lower impact than the people that doing this could let him hold onto.

Or it won't.

It'll obviously vary by person?

Why? The way he put it doesn't really open him much to further attacks or attempts at pressuring further capitulation.

This is why. The way he put it is irrelevant, he will always be open to further attacks.

It'll obviously vary by person?

Yeah, but I don't think the kind of people who control access to mainstream gigs will be the kind of people who'll accept his apology and move on.

It legitimizes the concept that he is now tainted goods because he once held those views. The claim that X conservative (was) racist isn’t about racism, it’s about saying that he is tainted goods and thus no longer worth dealing with. He backs away and thus the attack was legitimate— he was (and for the left, the past isn’t over) racist therefore anyone who has anything to do with him catches racist cooties and nobody wants that. It’s like being asked if you have stopped beating your wife — all answers are wrong.

His target audience is not the left, and people'd believe the article written against him anyway if he tried radio silence.

The left side of the people he's losing by acknowledging weren't going to listen anyway—they'd believe the accusation, or they'd just not care for his political opinions. The main loss to his audience by doing this are people who a) couldn't read the huffpost well enough to be convinced it was Hanania or b) people who thought he was currently still basically Hoste, and are disappointed at the ways he is no longer.

He also doesn't concede anything in the present. He doesn't consider himself tainted goods. He's not going "yes, I'm secretly racist and bad, sorry about that." He's going "I used to be racist and bad, now I'm right and good," and doing it in a way that isn't subjecting himself to anyone's judgment but his own—it's not an entreaty but a declaration.

It matters for mainstream conservatives. They’re the ones most afraid of guilt by association, because most of them have professional careers to defend. And because he’s now tainted, he won’t get that audience, nor get invited to their platforms to speak or write.

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Once you say "Yes, I was racist and bad, but..." nothing said after the but matters.

Maybe he's being completely sincere. It makes no difference. He's shown his enemies they can extract confessions through pressure, and shown his allies that there's no point defending him since he won't defend himself.

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If notable respectable figures continue associating with Hanania, it might signify a shift in cancel culture. These figures might argue that Hanania's genuine apology should suffice. Currently, individuals who have made racist remarks are offered little redemption even compared to those convicted of multiple violent crimes. With ever-changing definitions of racism, many important people could benefit from a system that forgives sincere apologies, like Hanania's. Moreover, associating with someone like Hanania, who undeniably made racially charged comments, could shield those who've made milder missteps in the past.

Isn't the dox illegal? It was only put together with hacked information.

No. Once information obtained illegally is in the public space, it is perfectly respectable to analyze it or examine it. If the journalists solicited the hack it might matter.

Anyway in the USA public figures effectively have no privacy. Writing for money qualifies.

An example of how social media molds the public discussion. Of course, publishing information which you obtained by legal means about somebody is not illegal. Obtaining it may be illegal if done by means of breaking into somebody's property, for example. But it's not called "the dox" anymore then. But - since Twitter and Facebook told us "publishing hacked information is prohibited!" (which also was a lie in several ways) - now people go around telling each other "talking about hacked information is illegal!"

I don't think that because of Twitter or Facebook, so I don't know why you're accusing me of that and putting words in my mouth.

Of course, publishing information which you obtained by legal means about somebody is not illegal.

I am genuinely unsure whether there are legal issues with using e.g. the hacked Disqus database. When I googled it I got a few conflicting answers saying "it depends," so I hoped someone might answer. It seems to me that it might be similar in legality to using libgen.

libgen is very different, because each unauthorized copy of the copyrighted material is a separate violation (including, technically, each time it's loaded from a computer disk or network into memory - that's copying too). However, while copyright has been used sometimes to suppress discussion of things (e.g. by scientologists) I don't think that's the issue here.

I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm just noticing how the actions of Big Social influence our thinking about what's allowed and not allowed.

No? It's not generally illegal to publish information that was hacked by someone else. Otherwise this post about Sony's Spiderman market research would be illegal.

Just a little update: the HuffPost article is, as I write, either the first or the second result if I search for the word "Hanania" on Google. I wonder whether this is just the algorithm favoring recency or whether there is a more political explanation for it. I tried it with incognito mode and got the same result. Google is capable of fingerprinting my browser even with incognito mode on though, so it is possible that this has more to do with me than with the HuffPost article.

It's the 17th result right now on DuckDuckGo. I doubt that Google did anything Hanania-specific here, they just like to signal boost "authoritative" outlets. Try finding primary sources for anything vaguely controversial with Google. It's impossible. Just page after page of NBC News, CNN, CBS News, NPR, NBC News Boston, Fox News Milwaukee, NYT Opinion, HuffPost, etc.

I was almost gaslit by this phenomena earlier today - I went back to read about the retraction of a spurious connection only to discover that the retraction was buried under copies and rereporting of the original flawed accusation.

Same with YouTube. I can't ever get the original video anymore; it's always some legacy media channel with talking heads in suits and ties giving me """context""" (i.e. the narrative) and playing censored, shortened clips full of jump cuts (I feel like I am watching an American documentary).

It’s a big part of why Google has become less interesting over the years. Used to be a solid way of finding interesting blogs and personal websites, whereas these days the first few pages for any given result are largely carbon-copy authoritative sources.

I pitched a “Google Discover” search tool to a Google CM friend a while back to solve this problem, basically a Google version of StumbleUpon that would help you find interesting new content, possibly with legal disclaimers. He loved the idea and said he’d run it past higher ups but he said I shouldn’t hold my breath b/c of general risk aversion in the company when it comes to search.

Denying I don’t believe will work. He either needs to say nothing and hope this doesn’t catch on or needs to say it was him. Denial just seems like too obvious of a lie. As a summary of the article it’s a lot of words that says two things

  1. Hannania believes in HBD.
  2. He was a fan of eugenics for low IQ people which is a more difficult position

This is becoming a bit of a problem for the intellectual right. The thing is racial differences are real. But admitting it and trying to form policy that opens you up to your a racist attacks. A lot of good policy like let the whites have most governing positions in S Africa and just ignore blacks being at the bottom rest on that. And everyone of all races benefits from that policy. But it looks bad when the 8% white population controls 95% of leadership positions.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

My guess is he just never responds to the HuffPost piece.

This issue shows up in a lot of culture war stuff. The right tries to talk about children etc when debate pride/gender ideology. But really we just don’t believe those are good things that should be promoted in society and people are better off if they are fringe ideologies.

There's a lot more stuff in there besides the two things you mention. For example:

Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”

“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he wrote.

Of course, many proponents of "HBD" do indeed consider racial antagonism to be part and parcel of that worldview. I'm not the first to note that "HBD" is a motte and bailey with dry statistics in the motte and outright racism in the bailey. But if you're going to fold remarks like this into "HBD" then you really are saying the quiet part out loud.

When normies hear "ethnic cleansing" they think of ovens and Auschwitz. Hanania's (psuedonym's) actual phrasing there is much less inflammatory ("get them to leave") and while I'm sure you can find any number of progressive sources, ideologically captured historians, etc, who will claim that these things are identical, I don't think most people are going to buy it.

Per the core definitions used, ethnic cleansing is explicitly "get them to leave" as distinct from "destroy them" entailed by genocide. This is common across most sources. See eg:

That's one of the major reasons to have separate terms for the two! They're often paired in history, but it's not weasel-wording to use the actual definition of the phrase as it's actually and deliberately used in practice.

If using a term as it is defined, but relying on the fact that everyone reading it will interpret it very differently isn't weasel wording, what is?

I'm going to disagree here, I think "ethnic cleansing" is commonly understood as forceful displacement rather than actual genocide. It's obviously not an entirely clean distinction - making an entire ethnic group leave an area is almost always going to require a lot of violence - but normies are not going to look at a Kosovo situation and say "that's not ethnic cleansing, there's no gas chambers".

I'm prepared to bite whatever bullet is here and say "those who read it and interpret it differently are wrong." It's a useful phrase with a clearly defined meaning. I use it as appropriate and if someone overinterprets it I'll correct them. I'm looking to describe a set of events that happen sometimes, not encourage overreaction.

I would say "You're welcome to suggest another phrase for the process of deliberate removal of a group of people from an area by any means necessary," but that feels silly. We have a phrase for that. It's ethnic cleansing. We don't need another. If people are overstating it or overinterpreting it, they should knock it off, since the word "genocide" already exists for that purpose.

Imagine my confusion when I saw this out of context in the comment feed, and assumed it was posted in this thread instead.

I appreciate strong definitions too (although it's a war we have thoroughly lost, because strong definitions mean accountability and the mainstream can't abide that) but ethnic cleansing isn't the term I am looking to define - weasel wording is. What is weasel wording if it isn't relying on fuzzy definitions to push an agenda while maintaining plausible deniability?

In that case I don't understand the objections when that word is used to describe what happened to white ethnics in urban cores in the sixties.

The people who suffered violence and died in the urban cores in the sixties were disproportionately black. The people convincing whites to sell their homes were often not hostile blacks but instead scaremongering white real estate profiteers.

There are ways in which white suburbanization doesn’t fit with people’s classic conception of ethnic cleansing.

The people convincing whites to sell their homes were often not hostile blacks but instead scaremongering white real estate profiteers.

That's the very poorly documented pravda, anyway. Race riots, though, are very well documented.

If you say "ethnic cleansing," most people's minds will conjure images like this or this. They will not picture people moving to a ranch-style a half hour away. Generally speaking, the white people who fled the cities in the sixties both began and ended up materially better off than the black people who stayed. Even if the role of nefarious white businessmen has been vastly overstated - and evidence could convince me it has been - this is still not what you'd call a central example of ethnic cleansing.

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I'm going to echo @raggedy_anthem except I'll go further- plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere. Unless you're planning on offering a pension for life conditional on relocating to someplace conveniently far(and, ideally, cheap and safe), with no right of return, there will be no takers. Even then, you're not getting all of them, or even most, although sure you're disproportionately throwing out the laziest. The far right twitterati plan of "blacks get ~$100k to move to Liberia with no backsies, but we pinky promise there won't be any coercion" is inherently unworkable no matter what multiple of Liberia's annual average income the amount is. Americans know there isn't another country as nice as the one they live in, and they especially know the countries that even come close won't take people America is paying to leave, even if they have an 85(or 75 or whatever) IQ.

plan A of "get them to leave" is inherently bloody minded and unworkable in the USA because a given value of nobody wants to live elsewhere.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove. Thanks to both sides of government wanting these people to be a cheap labour source there wasn't actually any real enforcement of this, which meant that a lot of illegal immigrants became activists or otherwise engaged with the system. The pre-existing panopticon can just be turned on, you stick "is an illegal immigrant" into XKEYSCORE and have the results sent to the enforcement agency on a per-state basis - that's a huge swathe of them gone in one go. Beyond that you can have a bunch of people go and audit the actual citizens and determine if there was any grounds for an appeal or revocation. Finally, you can implement a bunch of procedures and rules which make life so much worse than their home country that they will actually self deport. Cutting down on immigrant welfare/subsidy abuse, harshly taxing remittances, language requirements, etc.

Being an actual citizen of the USA in good standing is definitely worth a lot (though I wouldn't take the deal - I'd rather live where I currently do than the USA ceteris paribus) but being a fugitive unable to access any and all banking/financial services, unable to get employed etc would absolutely incentivise a return to their nation of origin. And if you're a HBD believer, you don't even need to do anything more - just implement some eugenic policies and the migrants you don't want will be gone in a few generations anyway due to disparate impact alone.

This isn't actually true. A vast number of these people are illegal immigrants who don't require anything more than enforcement of existing law to remove.

Who are "these people" exactly? Are you not including the 40 million African Americans, or...?

I was basing it off the original quote, so "these people" actually means "post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America".

I’m intrigued that you conflate “HBD believer” with “believer in coercive eugenics.” Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread defining that term in very telling ways.

Huh? Where did I say "coercive eugenics"? I didn't have any coercive eugenics in mind at all, unless you believe that failing to continually subsidise the reproduction of the intellectual underclass counts as "coercive". I even said "a few generations", implying that these efforts would take time. If I was suggesting coercive eugenics the underclass would not be sticking around for a few generations.

Also important to note that black people in practice are American As Fuck -- the idea that they are the true descendants of both the Borderers and Cavaliers has some merit.

And part of being American As Fuck (especially if you are a true descendant of the Borderers and Cavaliers) is "it's a free country, if you don't like me you are welcome to fuck off to Liberia".

So yeah, extremely unworkable -- even the National Divorce suffers from this issue, as many Red states do contain a lot of Black people.

Those ideas may not be identical, but it’s dishonest to pretend the conflation is totally unfounded. For history’s most famous genocidaire, “get them to leave” was Plan A. I believe there was even an offer to pay their passage.

When, inevitably, not all of them leave, Plans B - Z begin to suggest themselves.

I increasingly feel like the problem with Hanania is he's genuinely a callous, nasty person and that won't work in the longhouse culture.

I've had moments of extreme vitriolic exaggeration, so I cut him slack when he puffs his chest and talks of how masculine, disagreeable he is, how everyone's a pussy, how he's disgusted at men showing vulnerability, ungratefulness, incompetence etc. etc. I think of it as just playing to the audience of fellow tough guy meritocrats. But perhaps I'm too cynical, cynicism overflowing into naivete, and it's all genuine (like Tate is genuinely some kind of a pimp or whatever). So he'd prefer it if sterilization were sound policy, because he'd rather just genocide poor people and black Americans, basically out of spite; meritocratic equal-opportunity race-blindness may or may not be unworkable, but for him it might not even seem desirable.
It's an alien mindset for me, but not ineffable, and exactly what progressives seek to demonstrate in their enemies.

Regardless, I think if people are correct that Musk is beyond cancellation, Hanania can curry favor with him and remain somewhat relevant for this reason alone. Musk is positively seething about EFF's Malema and his "clever" borderline genocidal rhetoric; maybe he won't stop quoting a guy who used to have edgy takes about blacks.

I actually knew a guy who had Hanania as a TA back when he was at UCLA. My friend didn't think of him as a nasty guy. But perhaps the internet has warped his mind.

I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.

I think ignorance is the opposite of bliss in this case. If you naively hold that all races are equal in terms of cognitive potential (as almost all "respectable" sources have stridently proclaimed since, idk, the 1960s), then you are absolutely setting yourself up to be furious about the glaring disparity in outcomes.

The end result is the carcinous growth of ideologies like CRT which are on the desperate hunt for racism-of-the-gaps (as I prefer to call systemic racism) in order to explain why despite the enormous effort put into mitigating said disparities, they still persist.

They're searching under the lamp post of their ideology, because it puts blinders on their ability to even conceive that group differences exist, and this lack of conception prevents them from even looking at the glaring evidence all around, and motivates them to attack those who'd shine a scientific torch on it.

The only actual answer to the question of why Whites typically do better than Blacks is the YesChad.jpg reply that it's because they're better in all the ways that matter outside of sports and entertainment. You can further assuage accusations of White Supremacy by pointing out that Asians beat them too.

Recognizing that HBD is even an option immediately dissolves the puzzle, even if it's outside the window of polite conversation. Unfortunately, that's not where society as a whole is at, outside primarily pseudonymous spaces or hushed conversations with people who think much the same but are unable to speak up.

For a long time though we just mostly ignored the differences in differences. The things you mentioned didn’t become a problem until the BLM and CRT people showed up. Things just functioned for a long time.

Look, you can argue that blacks are stupid, especially when compared to whites, but they aren't blind. They can look around and tell that they're worse off than whites and an explanation of "well, that's just how it is, umm, can we talk about something else" has very little appeal to them. Someone was going to fill the niche of blaming it all on racism and pretending there is no difference in outcomes is ignoring reality hard enough that you can't keep it up.

What I find hard about this is that there are lots of groups that aren't blind. There is something else, historical or visual or whatever, that causes the specific groupings and specific arguments that we see become prevalent.

But it doesn’t seem like blacks created this current environment. It seems like this was mostly white on white crime.

If that isn’t stable then what is stable - teach differences in elementary school, noble lie, whatever we got now, or complete separation seem to be the only options.

Well yes, everything about this current environment is white people’s fault, or at least the fault of some subset of whites, if you go far enough back. Importing hundreds of thousands of black slaves was a decision made by white people. Deciding that equality in outcomes for their descendants is a policy goal was a decision made by white people. Etc, etc. And yes, the current racial mania is mostly a white thing- have you heard the actually-originating-in-the-black community versions of these things? It’s 85 IQ conspiracist schizoposting. I don’t think there is an easy solution to black underperformance, but encouraging assimilation seems obvious and necessary. And we can expect that to be important for lots of reasons- to start with, while lower black IQ’s might be the main reason for their poor outcomes, it really, really doesn’t help that they have a ridiculously broken and dysfunctional ghetto culture. Making blacks less distinctive compared to whites also means you have less of a racial consciousness issue.

Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.

From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:

That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?

A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.

We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?

...

A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?

Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.

I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.

What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.

...

What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.

All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.

...

What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?

From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:

But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.

...

Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.

Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least