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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.

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.

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.

There is no stability; we're in a death spiral, where those in charge will keep claiming group differences don't exist and keep increasing measures to eliminate or cover up differences in outcome, until something completely breaks.