Hanania likes to position himself as “rationalist adjacent”, but one of the core principles of “rationalism” is steelmanning your opposition, something he never does. His content is an infuriating mixture of criticisms of Populism Inc. (which people within the online right have *already made* before him) and straw men. I have never read something by him and felt it actually challenged my own views directly. I’ve had to mute him because his feed consisted of cherry picking the dumbest opinions on RW twitter and then talking as if that proved anything, and as if you couldn’t do that for any other position.
My impression is that he is a personality and platform that has been cultivated and/or groomed for some narrow, particular purposes by his funders, and part of the deal is continue to troll in particular ways to obscure what exactly he's supposed to represent as much as possible.
Don't really see it. Think Hanania just genuinely hates us and gets off on showing it whenever he can. He's always been a uniquely gifted troll. Unless it's Caplan grooming him, I suppose.
Seems like a [somewhat autistic] misreading. Hanania was portraying the vacuousness of such people. He did not depict anyone genuinely claiming abortion to be based. The last sentence drives the whole point home: "based!" is a debased and thought-terminating expression, a reflection of those that constantly invoke it.
The narrator has stepped outside of the dialogue and is mockingly weighing in. The character reflexively weighs her actions in relation to an empty symbol. The incongruity of the term and what it is [potentially] being applied to emphasizes the term's abuse. You say, "oh, no one would ever do that, it doesn't make sense." The point, which is made clear by the rest of the sentence, the previous sentence, and the whole piece, is that making sense has ceased to be an objective for these people.
You can call this an unfair caricature or whatever, but this is not an example of Hanania lying.
So think of "based" like you might the word "Progressive". One might write a similar essay on the vacuousness of how people use it, for example during the student loan cancellation debate. Are mass government giveaways progressive? Sounds like it. But wait the students are wealthier than the average American. Is it progressive to subsidize the relatively wealthy? The word, can be nearly what you want it to be and both sides can accuse the other of hypocrisy. But were I to write... "That night JP Morgan asked Jenny for a bailout... Soon she'll have to decide whether foreclosing on George Floyd's house to come up with the money is fascist or progressive, and no one will care what she does as long as she continues to say the right things about disgusting creditors." - I would just be lying. The hypocrisy in question has it's limits. These are clear, and Hanania knows what they are. An outside observer, will come out of Hanania's essay... believing these don't exist. And while my own analogy is misleadingly exaggerated since obviously, race is far more salient than personal abortions... people absolutely will care what she does if they find out about it.
No, I don't think people are coming away from Hanania's piece with the notion that the types of people portrayed are or might be pro-abortion.
As for limits on hypocrisy, that's for what is said in public, not what a vapid tart thinks privately. Your example reads like mocking satire, not a lie. I would not read such a sentence by a critic of progressivism and accuse them of lying. And if it were preceded by five paragraphs criticizing and mocking progressives and demonstrating how stupid and shallow their use of the term is, that impression would be even stronger.
"Soon she’ll have to decide whether abortion is Based or part of the Longhouse, and no one will care what she does anyway as long as she continues to say the right words about disgusting Hondurans."
Read carefully, though.
His point is that nobody will care what she *does*--i.e., she'll get an abortion on the sly and nobody will bat an eye. It's not that anyone thinks abortion in that case is based--it's an accusation of hypocrisy.
Interesting take, thanks for this. I have some different thoughts. I believe Hanania makes a two-fold intellectual error at a meta level.
1. He wants to take a scholarly approach to these political and social subjects and a priori remove them from populist discourse, while sneering at populists. He clearly believes non-intellectuals have no seat at the table wrt to the great social and political issues of our day. He instead endlessly privileges what he refers to it as 'elite human capital', a term he uses endlessly. Put more simply? He tries way too hard to signal that he's elite. It's status seeking and it's kind of gross. He loves to bolster himself by sneering at the average MAGA guy.
2. He actually understands the natural impulse of native born, euro heritage American citizens, and their sense of being attacked and set aside, his previous stances make that clear. But note how nasty he got? I think he's trying to compensate for his own failings, which deep down he stil holds. The current position is the mistaken pose, not his previous views. Today's views are much more monetizable with the intellectual set.
He was a jerk then, and he's a jerk now. He's actually quite intelligent, there is no doubting that, which is kind of sad. If he could set aside the animus and explore this space with more compassion he might have something more interesting to say.
Two reasons why "Hoste" should never have been allowed to write for Counter-Currents (or anywhere else on the Far Right).
First, he was a HBDer. I have explained for years how that cult is incompatible with kinship based White nationalism. To summarize decades of writing in one sentence - HBD focuses on hierarchies of traits (that end up favoring Jews and Asians) rather than on the genetic and cultural ties between peoples; it's akin to rejecting your own child because someone else's child has a higher "IQ."
Second, as soon as he admitted his ancestry, he should have been shown the door. There is just a different set of interests. It is never a good idea to have someone else defend - or more accurately pretend to defend - your interests. You have to do it yourself.
It is simply inevitable that a non-European HBDer would turn against the (White) Far Right. Any sensible person could have predicted it. To have enabled such nonsense demonstrates piss-poor judgment.
I've ubsubscribed from Hanania a long time ago. He is very pro abortion which I don't like. I like that he is pro-immigration but he is still quite racist. He's one of those 13/50ers: someone who loves pointing out disproportionate bad traits amongst certain groups. Especially blacks. But ignores the fact that disproportionate doesn't mean most. It seems he came around on immigration cause in his eyes: “at least they're better than black people!”
He wrote a whole book about how we absolutely NEED to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws in order to get rid of “wokeness” but it seems like he just REALLY wants to be allowed to discriminate.
While I have you here - What percentage of blacks do you think would decide your case impartially as members of a jury in a case where a black person was on the opposing side?
Appreciate the response. I've only personally reviewed data on high profile cases -- OJ Black Not Guilty 69% and White Not Guilty 14%. Michael Brown case --no indictment --- Wrong Decision: Black 80% and White 23%. Zimmerman - case tried acquitted - 86% Black Dissatisfied and 30% WHITE Dissatisfied.
---
Quickly found a mock juror experiment showing a 30% black bias in guilty verdicts and an 8.7 month mean higher sentence - So not particularly huge. Whites mildly biased towards black defendant. https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9934.
---
Ideally you'd show footage of a shooting with the victim/shooter altered to be white or black and then compare responses.
---
Anyway, I will be looking into this more and seeing if I can get you some better data. Hope you'll stick around.
Banania is a goof-ball. Take away all the attention and he's no different than the average deranged street person howling gibberish into the concrete canyons of the urban world.
The smart move is to move to the other side of the street and pretend not to see him.
I get the point you are making, but it comes of as pedantic to zero in so much on one paragraph.
He can just be a bad-faith asshole. His record of being just that is fairly voluminous.
Frankly, I do take that particular criticism of a lot of online RW chatter being precisely that: people trying to pigeonhole their politics to what seems most aesthetic over principled. That said, he isn’t the person to genuinely talk to over that issue as he is a bad-faith asshole that holds very little principles himself.
He grabs the dumbest things eRight people say and blasts it as if it is the steel man of an argument. Honestly it is why I don’t care for a lot of RW people raging over what random online progressives say. Sure, you can point out that these dummies exist for people that deny it, but you are hardly giving biting thoughtful critique of politics to lampoon what some gender goblin says on a Bluesky account.
At worst it is the bad-faith asshole. But in the spirit of my point, let’s make a more good-faith criticism of Hanania and just admit he isn’t a serious thinker and move on. It isn’t like he honestly engages with anyone seriously criticizing anyways.
I came to the same conclusion with people like Deep Left Analysis. It broke my brain seeing every post that guy made was an assertion of the clumsiest framing of a RW claim that he dismantled with ease as if he was doing some sort of intellectual weightlifting.
How does someone publicly masturbate to their own mediocrity and hold a shred of honest self-awareness? I can only conclude it is either malice or their mediocrity is truly just that. Either way, I don’t expect to learn the real truth and found it best to block both him and Hanania.
I’m banning Physiognomy posts unless they are at least mildly interesting.
Hanania looks weird? Really? You are telling me for the first time… Shut up.
Hanania likes to position himself as “rationalist adjacent”, but one of the core principles of “rationalism” is steelmanning your opposition, something he never does. His content is an infuriating mixture of criticisms of Populism Inc. (which people within the online right have *already made* before him) and straw men. I have never read something by him and felt it actually challenged my own views directly. I’ve had to mute him because his feed consisted of cherry picking the dumbest opinions on RW twitter and then talking as if that proved anything, and as if you couldn’t do that for any other position.
My impression is that he is a personality and platform that has been cultivated and/or groomed for some narrow, particular purposes by his funders, and part of the deal is continue to troll in particular ways to obscure what exactly he's supposed to represent as much as possible.
Don't really see it. Think Hanania just genuinely hates us and gets off on showing it whenever he can. He's always been a uniquely gifted troll. Unless it's Caplan grooming him, I suppose.
>groom
Yup, I think you’re more right than you think.
His trolling makes it very obvious exactly who he's standing for
Seems like a [somewhat autistic] misreading. Hanania was portraying the vacuousness of such people. He did not depict anyone genuinely claiming abortion to be based. The last sentence drives the whole point home: "based!" is a debased and thought-terminating expression, a reflection of those that constantly invoke it.
The narrator has stepped outside of the dialogue and is mockingly weighing in. The character reflexively weighs her actions in relation to an empty symbol. The incongruity of the term and what it is [potentially] being applied to emphasizes the term's abuse. You say, "oh, no one would ever do that, it doesn't make sense." The point, which is made clear by the rest of the sentence, the previous sentence, and the whole piece, is that making sense has ceased to be an objective for these people.
You can call this an unfair caricature or whatever, but this is not an example of Hanania lying.
So think of "based" like you might the word "Progressive". One might write a similar essay on the vacuousness of how people use it, for example during the student loan cancellation debate. Are mass government giveaways progressive? Sounds like it. But wait the students are wealthier than the average American. Is it progressive to subsidize the relatively wealthy? The word, can be nearly what you want it to be and both sides can accuse the other of hypocrisy. But were I to write... "That night JP Morgan asked Jenny for a bailout... Soon she'll have to decide whether foreclosing on George Floyd's house to come up with the money is fascist or progressive, and no one will care what she does as long as she continues to say the right things about disgusting creditors." - I would just be lying. The hypocrisy in question has it's limits. These are clear, and Hanania knows what they are. An outside observer, will come out of Hanania's essay... believing these don't exist. And while my own analogy is misleadingly exaggerated since obviously, race is far more salient than personal abortions... people absolutely will care what she does if they find out about it.
No, I don't think people are coming away from Hanania's piece with the notion that the types of people portrayed are or might be pro-abortion.
As for limits on hypocrisy, that's for what is said in public, not what a vapid tart thinks privately. Your example reads like mocking satire, not a lie. I would not read such a sentence by a critic of progressivism and accuse them of lying. And if it were preceded by five paragraphs criticizing and mocking progressives and demonstrating how stupid and shallow their use of the term is, that impression would be even stronger.
It will only 1 minute to get the gazillion typos this post fixed by ChatGPT.
Touché, had some bad experiences early-on given the content of my writing.
Hanania is a pasty-looking little worm of a man. I wouldn't listen to him based on his pysiognomy alone.
Based and physiognomy pilled.
Hannania looks weird and therefore I do not listen to him.
"Soon she’ll have to decide whether abortion is Based or part of the Longhouse, and no one will care what she does anyway as long as she continues to say the right words about disgusting Hondurans."
Read carefully, though.
His point is that nobody will care what she *does*--i.e., she'll get an abortion on the sly and nobody will bat an eye. It's not that anyone thinks abortion in that case is based--it's an accusation of hypocrisy.
Which is also wrong.
Powerful
Interesting take, thanks for this. I have some different thoughts. I believe Hanania makes a two-fold intellectual error at a meta level.
1. He wants to take a scholarly approach to these political and social subjects and a priori remove them from populist discourse, while sneering at populists. He clearly believes non-intellectuals have no seat at the table wrt to the great social and political issues of our day. He instead endlessly privileges what he refers to it as 'elite human capital', a term he uses endlessly. Put more simply? He tries way too hard to signal that he's elite. It's status seeking and it's kind of gross. He loves to bolster himself by sneering at the average MAGA guy.
2. He actually understands the natural impulse of native born, euro heritage American citizens, and their sense of being attacked and set aside, his previous stances make that clear. But note how nasty he got? I think he's trying to compensate for his own failings, which deep down he stil holds. The current position is the mistaken pose, not his previous views. Today's views are much more monetizable with the intellectual set.
He was a jerk then, and he's a jerk now. He's actually quite intelligent, there is no doubting that, which is kind of sad. If he could set aside the animus and explore this space with more compassion he might have something more interesting to say.
Two reasons why "Hoste" should never have been allowed to write for Counter-Currents (or anywhere else on the Far Right).
First, he was a HBDer. I have explained for years how that cult is incompatible with kinship based White nationalism. To summarize decades of writing in one sentence - HBD focuses on hierarchies of traits (that end up favoring Jews and Asians) rather than on the genetic and cultural ties between peoples; it's akin to rejecting your own child because someone else's child has a higher "IQ."
Second, as soon as he admitted his ancestry, he should have been shown the door. There is just a different set of interests. It is never a good idea to have someone else defend - or more accurately pretend to defend - your interests. You have to do it yourself.
It is simply inevitable that a non-European HBDer would turn against the (White) Far Right. Any sensible person could have predicted it. To have enabled such nonsense demonstrates piss-poor judgment.
Grifters gotta grift.
This alleged “lie” is not exactly devastating to Hanania’s worldview.
I've ubsubscribed from Hanania a long time ago. He is very pro abortion which I don't like. I like that he is pro-immigration but he is still quite racist. He's one of those 13/50ers: someone who loves pointing out disproportionate bad traits amongst certain groups. Especially blacks. But ignores the fact that disproportionate doesn't mean most. It seems he came around on immigration cause in his eyes: “at least they're better than black people!”
He wrote a whole book about how we absolutely NEED to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws in order to get rid of “wokeness” but it seems like he just REALLY wants to be allowed to discriminate.
I would stay the heck away from him.
While I have you here - What percentage of blacks do you think would decide your case impartially as members of a jury in a case where a black person was on the opposing side?
Good question. I suspect you have stats about this. But I'll just hazard a guess and say a slim majority would be impartial?
Appreciate the response. I've only personally reviewed data on high profile cases -- OJ Black Not Guilty 69% and White Not Guilty 14%. Michael Brown case --no indictment --- Wrong Decision: Black 80% and White 23%. Zimmerman - case tried acquitted - 86% Black Dissatisfied and 30% WHITE Dissatisfied.
---
Quickly found a mock juror experiment showing a 30% black bias in guilty verdicts and an 8.7 month mean higher sentence - So not particularly huge. Whites mildly biased towards black defendant. https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9934.
---
Ideally you'd show footage of a shooting with the victim/shooter altered to be white or black and then compare responses.
---
Anyway, I will be looking into this more and seeing if I can get you some better data. Hope you'll stick around.
Banania is a goof-ball. Take away all the attention and he's no different than the average deranged street person howling gibberish into the concrete canyons of the urban world.
The smart move is to move to the other side of the street and pretend not to see him.
I get the point you are making, but it comes of as pedantic to zero in so much on one paragraph.
He can just be a bad-faith asshole. His record of being just that is fairly voluminous.
Frankly, I do take that particular criticism of a lot of online RW chatter being precisely that: people trying to pigeonhole their politics to what seems most aesthetic over principled. That said, he isn’t the person to genuinely talk to over that issue as he is a bad-faith asshole that holds very little principles himself.
He grabs the dumbest things eRight people say and blasts it as if it is the steel man of an argument. Honestly it is why I don’t care for a lot of RW people raging over what random online progressives say. Sure, you can point out that these dummies exist for people that deny it, but you are hardly giving biting thoughtful critique of politics to lampoon what some gender goblin says on a Bluesky account.
At worst it is the bad-faith asshole. But in the spirit of my point, let’s make a more good-faith criticism of Hanania and just admit he isn’t a serious thinker and move on. It isn’t like he honestly engages with anyone seriously criticizing anyways.
I came to the same conclusion with people like Deep Left Analysis. It broke my brain seeing every post that guy made was an assertion of the clumsiest framing of a RW claim that he dismantled with ease as if he was doing some sort of intellectual weightlifting.
How does someone publicly masturbate to their own mediocrity and hold a shred of honest self-awareness? I can only conclude it is either malice or their mediocrity is truly just that. Either way, I don’t expect to learn the real truth and found it best to block both him and Hanania.
I read this whole thing and now at least I know I don’t ever have to do that again. So dumb!