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    Posted by jobautomator

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    21 Comments

    12. No_Aesthetic on

      [Richard Hanania: Into the Headlights](https://londonstorm.substack.com/p/richard-hanania-into-the-headlights):

      >To witness Richard Hanania attempting thought is like watching a man trying to sprint through a revolving door. He wears the look of someone perpetually sideswiped by reality, forever blinking in the astonishment that the world exists at all, let alone that it might contain consequences. The banal hits him like prophecy and the obvious arrives as thunderclap. One has the sense that if he were informed of the sunrise, he would require smelling salts.

      >And yet, this figure of chronic bewilderment has somehow insinuated himself into the alleged citadels of reason: *The New York Times* and *The Economist*, those once-respectable journals that now apparently treat the ability to string sentences together as a qualification to speak about the world. That he ever occupied their pages is not a compliment to him but an indictment of them. It is proof that our institutions no longer vet for intellectual honesty and critical thinking, only for audacity delivered in a confident baritone. Their mistake might have been excusable as sloppiness had it not emerged that Hanania, while playing the urbane commentator by day, moonlighted as a vitriolic racist.

      >When exposed, he did not recoil from his beliefs; he merely adjusted his costume. Having once proclaimed the pseudoscience of “race realism” like a street-corner crank, he now affects the pose of the chastened apostate. His supposed epiphany arrived not after moral inquiry or empirical disconfirmation, but, by his own admission, two months after voting for Donald J. Trump. It turns out the truth that had blared at full volume for a decade could only penetrate his mental fortress by way of self-inflicted injury.

      >Now, in the role of freshly scrubbed oracle, he offers himself to the liberal intelligentsia as a decoder of the very right-wing derangements he spent years amplifying. This is the contemporary grift in miniature: emerge from the swamp, absolutely reeking of it, and then set up a toll booth for anyone who wants a guided tour of your former filth.

      >His old enthusiasms, of course, still simmer just beneath the surface. His former devotion to “race realism” now arrives coated in the sterile jargon of statistical anomalies, the last refuge of every crank convinced that arithmetic confers upon him the highest moral authority. The melody, however, remains the same: that Black people are a civilizational hazard, and that their alleged pathologies can be solved with the cold machinery of data-driven governance. Here Hanania reveals the perfect marriage of the bigot and the bureaucrat.

      >He is serenely untroubled by the question of what happens when this machinery crushes the innocent along with the guilty. To deprive a person of liberty by legalistic machinery is to him not tyranny but tidiness. That he himself might one day be swallowed by the same indifferent system does not so much as graze his imagination; though this, perhaps, is unsurprising. Those who dream of omnipotent systems never picture themselves under the heel.

      >We are instructed to admire this as intellectual evolution, as though it were a feat of bravery to emerge from a hole you spent years digging. Perhaps one could indulge the fantasy that his sudden centrism is a sincere attempt to reconcile Silicon Valley’s data cult with the liberal establishment. The odds are roughly those of being struck by lightning while holidaying on the Moon.

      >In this pivot we see something close to the worst of man: one who might have been almost anything, yet chose instead to drift through the corridors of the elite with the dazed astonishment of a man perpetually surprised to be indoors. But Hanania can at least claim the excuse of playing the fool. His devoted readers have only the ongoing indignity of believing him.

    13. jbouit494hg on

      Time for a real TRVTH NVKE:

      “Democrats needed to moderate and reject activist language on trans rights in 2024!”

      This statement is 100% true. It’s also something that they did do, so skillfully that nobody even noticed. Their message discipline was perfect.

      Kamala Harris was up on stage for the whole campaign hammering home that abortion is about women’s rights, and nobody ever stepped in to interject about birthing persons.

      (And I completely reject “moderating on trans rights” beyond that.)

    19. randommathaccount on

      Well I do think any discussion of separating from left-wing activists solely based on electability reasons is fundamentally misguided because other avenues for attaining electoral success are never considered acceptable. There is a strong populist sentiment running through the USA but I wouldn’t be very positive on any Dems trying to tap into it by stoking the flames of resentment against the rich or those groups in society perceived as being more successful on average (eg: Jews, Asians).

    21. hcregna on

      This is your daily reminder that at the cost of mildly less doomscrolling and shitposting, you could be making a difference politically.

      It takes like half an hour of planning to shift money away from Republican-leaning businesses, and it’s way more impactful that being on Reddit. Every dollar spent at a Republican company is another dollar that’ll get funneled into more of this. Don’t fund the Confederacy.

      If you have an account with Charles Schwab (whose founder was recently palling around with Trump), switch to Vanguard or Fidelity. If you like drinking booze from a Confederate state, be adventurous and try something else. Skip Goya at the grocery store. It’s not hard to quickly look up a company in something like [https://www.goodsuniteus.com](https://www.goodsuniteus.com/) or %5Bhttps://www.opensecrets.org%5D(https://www.opensecrets.org/).

      Dollars add up. Tesla sales in Europe dropped by half in Europe. Jack Daniel’s sales dropped by over half in Canada. Real, individual people made that happen

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