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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29147 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.

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.

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.

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