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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29148 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’m not convinced by this. They never actually connect Hoste to Hanania. The best they have is anecdotal connections (both drop out of HS, get a GED, then go on into academia) none of which are unique enough to really be a smoking gun. I would bet there are at least 10,000 students who did the same thing. Second, the connection between the two online is the (supposed) sock puppets, except that they never bother to establish they are sock puppets, rather than one person follow the account of someone else. I follow accounts on multiple platforms, I’m not the person I’m replying to and even being a consistent reply to posts by Hoste doesn’t make it clear that Hanania is Hoste.

There are 320 million Americans, which means it takes just 28 bits of information to uniquely identify someone. That's not a lot. I've found Reddit accounts of someone I know just because he expressed an opinion that sounded familiar, and I was able to quickly confirm it by looking at the post history and find posts on all the interests I knew this person had, posts to his city's subreddit, and details about his personal life. He thinks the account is anonymous.

There's even someone here who I won't name (I'm not sure if he's actually trying to be completely anonymous) who I found the real name of because he told one fact about himself that was way too specific to be more than one person.

Each of those matching stories is several bits of information. The overlap in interests and political opinions alone is also a huge amount of information. So is the mere fact that they're both writers. Then there's the matching first name. Each one of these things is probably seven or eight bits of information. That all is probably enough to identify him, but what seems like proof is the accounts made with his email addresses and website registered to his hometown. That should be enough on its own.

The only way it isn't him is if this is the result of a fifteen year long attempt to frame him. Even that would be very difficult to pull off.

See Gwern on Death Note and Anonymity. https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

Maybe you need to read Richard Hanania on why the media is honest and good.

Nothing Hanania argues is wrong, though, the average NYT new story about an uncontroversial issue is substantially or entirely factual, and this was his entire point.

Which is a dumb point. If I have info on a River that tells me with great accuracy the average depth is 3 feet that is shitty if I’m trying to ford the River and the largest depth is ten feet.

It’s relevant because on 90% of issues the mainstream press is more accurate than the reactionary press simply because the latter has poor funding, poor staff, poor writing, fewer people on the ground and rejects even the pretension of accuracy.

Honestly don’t know if that is true. Can you think of a major story from the last day five years the MSM press was right on?

  1. Russia — they were wrong.

  2. Ukraine and Hunter / Joe — they were wrong.

  3. Hunter laptop — they were wrong.

  4. Covid origins — they were wrong.

  5. Covid masking — they were wrong.

  6. Covid lockdowns — they were wrong.

  7. Ivermectin — they were at best overly critical.

  8. Twitter files — they ignored.

  9. Joe Biden corruption — they ignored.

Can you give some specific pieces of coverage from MSM that you think were simply wrong in these instances? Otherwise this is rather vague - I mean you can't just say something so vague as 'Russia - they were wrong' without substantiation.

Really? They spent years pushing Russiagate (including the server lie and the Steele dossier). We all lived it…

Perhaps the minor stories are the good ones?

/10. BLM / structural racism

In 2012, Disqus suffered a data breach, with hackers stealing the details of more than 17.5 million users. Hoste was one of those users. HuffPost has reviewed data showing that Hoste’s account used a unique password on Disqus that was also used to log into other Disqus accounts that commented on AlternativeRight.com. This indicates Hoste was using so-called “sock puppet” accounts — hiding behind yet more fake names — to comment on the site. The comments from these accounts are written in a style similar to Hoste’s, and they are linked to email addresses belonging to Richard Hanania. The account @RA74 was set up using Hanania’s Gmail address, which Hanania has shared publicly before. The account @RAH2, which uses Hanania’s initials, was set up with Hanania’s email address at the University of Colorado, where he was a linguistics student. And the account @CJusD was attached to Hanania’s email address at the University of Chicago, where he studied law.

It looks like they're claiming RA74 and RAH2 shared a password with Richard Hoste, and also shared email accounts with Richard Hanania? That's pretty compelling imo.

(note that I wouldn't endorse doing this kind of dox analysis ever, doxxing isnt nice, but this story is big enough that it doesn't matter if we discuss it)

It looks like they're claiming RA74 and RAH2 shared a password with Richard Hoste, and also shared email accounts with Richard Hanania? That's pretty compelling imo.

Depends greatly on the password I should think -- the top twenty passwords account for something like 10% of users IIRC?

It's going to turn out to have been 'guest' or 'password' isn't it.

'Unique' clearly suggests it's not one of them.

unique

Huh, I missed that -- if it's unique among the Disqus users dataset that is pretty strong statistical evidence, yeah.

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