This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As some are already aware, Huff Po is attempting to cancel the controversial writer/pundit Richard Hanania over some far-right posts he wrote a decade ago under an alias, which has been tied to his real identity. This coincides with his release of his book by Harper Collins, with the intent to have the publisher cancel it. v
The Huffington Post article: https://archive.is/YbIpz
(it would have been a 'boss move' had Elon suspended Huff Po account over this, declaring 'cancel culture is over'. )
There is already a prediction market about it, with 80 percent 'yes' it will be published
https://manifold.markets/AnonPlz/will-harper-collins-publish-richard
I agree overall though that nothing bad will happen to him, as I discuss here on my own blog post. First, cancellation does not work that well on academics/pundits as it does on other professions/careers (such as tenure). Even top CEOs are easier to cancel than pundits. Second, the left's credibility has been eroded in recent years due to hoxes , fake news, and 'mission creep' (when everyone is a racist or other bad person, the term loses its meaning/potency).
I think the fine folks over at the Huffington Post had a pretty clear goal in mind. Fortify the media landscape and the Overton Window. Make noise about Hanania and then attempt to squeeze him out behind the scenes through people like Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro before he is given any traction by them.
As far as I can remember there was a similar gambit against Stephan Molyneux after Dave Rubin decided on having a conversation with him. To that end I'd put my tinfoil hat on and say that the mainstream elements had already decided that this was something that needed to be done prior to the 'dox' thing of Hanania being published.
I think the idea of a 'cancellation' is kind of retarded without properly addressing who is functionally doing the cancelling. Yes, lib/left/progressives hate guys like Hanania. They have already 'cancelled him' by never associating with him and doing everything they can to make him fail. Like, this was always the case. So who is actually cancelling Hanania now and from what? If it's not Musk banning him off twitter, what is actually going on?
Well, it seems simple, now Hanania will never ever be on Joe Rogan or any show that exists in a mainstream sphere of center/right discourse. I.e. the Daily Wire and any affiliates. If you want in with the mainstream right wing grift you can't freely associate with Hanania anymore.
Or maybe that was always the case and now it's just official.
I thought Huffington Post and Gawker and other "new Media" folk of the early 2010s were no longer relevant. But they can still wipe the floor with upstarts like Substack it seems.
I think you are misunderstanding the dynamics at play. The Huffington Post is not cancelling Hanania, mainstream right wingers are. Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss have certain things they care about a lot more than the inane shibboleths of 'left vs right'. In fact these kinds of gatekeepers for mainstream right politics make no effort to hide their distaste for any outsider who potentially recognizes and therefor threatens their perceived ingroup.
And who can blame them?
I blame them, because their short-sightedness will come back to bite them just as much as it will everyone else.
I fail to see how. These same tactics won them their spot as the mainstream to begin with when they ousted everyone not sufficiently zionist out of mainstream publications like the National Review.
"Zionist" isn't the word you're looking for. Zionism is complementary to nationalism, especially ethnonationalism.
Anyway, giving white people no options other than self-loathing and extremism is going to lead to extremists.
Zionist is exactly the word I was looking. How else would you describe people so desperately in favor of Israel?
People have always been given the option of believing and doing exactly what they are told. And they wont do shit no matter how bad things get. Because they are told this is normal and they believe it, just like their idiot parents did back when a new normal was being established for their generation.
To that end the pool of 'extremists' has stayed the same.
That they're in favor of Israel isn't the problem.
Also, I don't agree with the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable, and the desire to stand up for oneself against a constant torrent of hatred is a part of human nature. But the people in China have yet to overthrow their totalitarian government, so maybe I'm wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A mainstream right winger wrote the huffpo piece?
No. You are still misunderstanding what's going on.
Like I stated in my first post, The Huffington Post and the like had already functionally 'cancelled' Hanania before they ever published anything about him. They did not publish anything from him, they did not report anything positive about him, they would not associate with him or his associates. At best they would slander him. So who can still effectively cancel Hanania after this 'dox' thing drops?
If he is not getting banned from twitter then Elon is not cancelling him. He was already considered a hostile element by the likes of The Huffington Post. So they can't cancel him more than what they had already done. So who can cancel Hanania? People who would or could potentially have worked with him!
Bari Weiss is tagged in the twitter thread because she can effectively gatekeep Hanania from the only gate he could potentially walk through to get more mainstream. That gate being the likes of The Daily Wire, Joe Rogan and any other smaller connected mainstream center/right wing media. If that gate is locked, Hanania can go nowhere and can't easily grow beyond the dissident right containment zone. That's the point of this 'dox' thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Definitely not. Hanania's podcast has been host to accepted figures like Bryan Caplan, Marc Andreesen, Richard Posner, and Steven Pinker. Sure, hardcore lefties might have really disliked him, but from the center to the right, he was accepted enough for these kinds of people to chat for an hour on a podcast.
More options
Context Copy link
those who are doing the cancelling want to turn him into a fringe figure like David Duke, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, or David Ike, who have little or no academic or intellectual credibility or even much credibility in the mainstream, even if they have large audiences, and also to persuade his wealthy and influential backers and friends, such as Marc Andreessen, disavow him. They, the left, see Hanania as being more than just a dissident or a heretic, but more transgressive. It's not so much as cancelling Hanania, although that is part of it, as it's trying to get the rest of the establishment to know where the boundaries are, and that Hanania is outside of them.
This did not work for Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, it only sort of worked for Jones, and it wasn’t even attempted with David Icke. The only truly canceled figure on that list is David duke, and that appears to have been a bottom up cancelation that spread to institutions after he didn’t have any support yet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Which seems to have worked no?
Molyneux still has his podcast. But I haven't seen anyone mention him for years. He used to be quite viral back in the day
More options
Context Copy link
It sure did?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The other possibility is that Hanania is used as a sort of sanctioned dissident to divert the libertarian to dissident right pipeline back to "individualist libertarianism" but with more racism.
HBD denial among libertarians is probably the leading cause for that pipeline, Hanania could be useful for the establishment by integrating it with libertarianism. I think it's his Occidental Observer associations that are a bridge too far, though.
Pipeline from libertarianism to fascism?
I can understand it.
I can understand someone who wants to be radical and "edgy", and the edgiest thing possible (and still respectable among his peers) was putting up poster of Ayn Rand. Times move, Overton windows moves too, and othere, edgier things become salonfahig. Portrait of Ayn Rand goes down, portrait of Adolf Hitler comes up.
I can understand someone who hates, really hates leftists and communists (for whatever definiton of "left" and "communism" he holds), and becomes a libertarian because it was the most anti-communist movement around. Then, when harder things come up, he joins too.
I can understand someone totally cynical and disilusioned, someone who freed himself from any delusions about "morals" "human rights" or "value of human life" and grokked that only might is right and only law is law of tooth and claw, but is highly optimistic about himself, someone who is certain that in fascist regime he will not end as ordinary disposable piece of goosestepping meat, but join the movement early, support the right side, play the right cards and rise high in the party hierarchy.
I cannot understand someone who ever sincerely held freedom as value, whether idealistically as freedom for all mankind or pragmatically as freedom for himself, who decided that the best life is total subjection to some self proclaimed "great leader".
Classical liberals had no problems integrating beliefs in race and HBD (far harder than even the most edgy 4channer today) with dedication to liberty. No reason why modern people can not manage it too.
"Total" is the key word that makes this impossible, but an appreciation for violence and the strong man that does what is necessary to maintain natural rights? Lots of lefties tend to round that up to "fascism".
Consider Hoppe or Tolkien. Neither could be accused of not loving freedom on a deep level. But I summise they're both perfectly okay with throwing Sauron off the helicopter.
In my experience this is the real source for this "pipeline" meme: the same confusion that makes people delude themselves into thinking Starship Troopers has anything to do with fascism. When you're far away from something politically, even large distances appear small, and so just as Bakunin and Stalin may appear identical to the libertarian, so do Pinochet and Hitler to the communist.
More options
Context Copy link
Right off the bat, this is just extremely wrong. The contradiction of liberalism and HBD led to a Civil War, segregation, integration, and racial conflict that has never actually stopped, it's just changed form. Liberalism completely lost the plot on HBD, to the extent that HBD itself is radical and edgy, though true, and it is not accepted within our scientific or social institutions. Liberalism has led to a demographic replacement in the United States and Europe that is unprecedented in human history except in military conquests or war crimes. Classical liberalism in fact cannot integrate HBD, this has been proven by the fact that HBD denial became entrenched under its hegemony.
There is a niche that Hanania could have tried to fill by saying "HBD is true and it matters for policy, but classical liberalism provides the best policy taking into consideration the importance of HBD." But even he couldn't bring himself to say that, he just joined every other classical liberal in denying the importance of HBD to policy. So Hanania himself seems to think branding himself as a classical liberal means denying the importance of HBD to policy.
In my experience, the libertarian to dissident right pipeline is not motivated by people dropping concern for morals or rights, it's motivated by them realizing they have been completely duped into a sucker's game by embracing an individualist ethos while the rest of the world organizes collectively and along tribal lines, and in doing so crushes them politically and culturally. They then accept HBD and notice that all the libertarians they have known tend to be white or Jewish men, and reciting some Milton Friedman lectures is going to be unlikely to convert the masses to drop their own tribal identities. Their ideological commitment to Freedom and Liberalism in the English Tradition is just a figment of their own whiteness. They then notice that they are stopped from having any similar identity by forces which themselves heavily organize on tribal lines.
In Rationalist parlance you could say they go from mistake theorists to conflict theorists, which is not the same thing as dropping concern for morals or rights. It's when libertarians realize the claim that it's a "self-evident truth" that our rights come from God and our government is merely formed to protect them with minimal force is an outright Noble Lie. Our rights come from our government, our morals are framed by our culture.
"Caring about rights or morals", then, doesn't mean watching Milton Friedman lectures or trying to convince everyone to stop being collectivists while being crushed by the organizing power of those collectivists, it means competing for the reins of political power and cultural influence. This is understood by those who organize and identify on tribal lines, and who use that same collective group-behavior to deny white classical liberals the ability to do the same.
Your post touches on a lot of thoughts I’ve had lately. I no longer consider myself as having a political ideology anymore. Political systems to me seem to rely on time and place far more than 2005 me would have believed in let’s Democratize the Middle East and make them good people. The US of course doesn’t believe in any concept of Democracy on the world stage. It’s basically a dictatorship. We don’t let Indians and Chinese dominate decisions because there are more of them and they would. And I believe that would be a bad thing.
Running on time/place I don’t believe Russia should or could have been a Democracy for most of its history. The military threat was too great that a centralized autocracy diverting large amount of resources to military was likely their necessary form of government. Though under the American umbrella now and with nukes seems obsolete.
Democracy worked in America because we had a continent of people sharing the basically the same big cultural things. If we were say 51% Muslim and 49% Christian with the Muslims basically getting what they wanted on everything it wouldn’t work. Democracy requires that you are basically one tribe moving in one direction. And I think a certain average IQ is necessary.
The whole Democracy thing seems to break when those factors aren’t in place. It hasn’t worked in places like Syria and it seems to be failing in S. Africa.
Which perhaps the one thing I believe in is a form of true Christian Nationalism. With Christian Nationalism being the foundation of America. By this I mean a belief in human rights and values of humans that comes with being a Christian where those in power have a limiting force on oppressing the weak. A belief in a common good.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because this is where libertarianism inevitably ends up anyway. There is a reason that every attempt to imagine a libertarian utopia ends up adding in an all-powerful world council guaranteeing exit rights, education rights and so on. For example, see Scott’s Archipelago. If you value freedom for the sake of building a stable culture that you admire, that’s not good! If you want the freedom to live in a community that’s not full of opioid addicts, that’s not good either. Freedom is not a values-neutral proposition, it smuggles in a lot of other stuff.
And of course in practice a sufficiently powerful world policeman (cough, America) ends up doing all sorts of selfish/ideological things too, because that’s what happens when you give lots of power to actual human beings.
It’s wholly possible to be someone who cares about freedom, consider the likelihood that you will be left alone by any given Guarantor of World Rights, and instead sign up with a Great Leader who is badly inclined towards freedom in general but whose practical preferences are vaguely matched with yours.
Of course, you can bite the bullet and go with full anarchy instead, then get ruled by whichever gang lord rises to the top. Not a popular choice, but it’s there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Or, maybe people have genuine beliefs and aren't just coordinating to keep people from the truth of your ideology.
I can't help but laugh at far right people accusing anyone not as red pilled as them as being a 'sactioned dissident' or whatever the new term is. Can you not believe that people actually believe something different than you for a real reason?
I don't think you really need to claim that his ideology is true in order for a pipeline of the kind being described to exist. While I'm sure SS does believe in his own ideology, the idea that there's a funnel where people who get into libertarian politics get sucked into the extreme right doesn't require lots of epicycles. It is an observed phenomenon that even people on the other side of politics have spoken about, and governments across the world are spending money to disrupt it. Some people do really have genuine beliefs, but that doesn't have anything to do with the people who are openly coordinating how to prevent people from believing what SS here does.
More options
Context Copy link
Nothing about what I said in this comment here is speaking to the sincerity of Hanania's beliefs, my comment is talking about Hanania being potentially useful to establishment thinking by providing an outlet for HBD acceptance within a classical liberal subculture.
I take Hanania at his word, I don't question his sincerity. Just because he's sincere doesn't mean he's not running from one bad idea to another on a poor intellectual foundation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link