I'm not sure what it says about me, a Democrat, that I actually enjoy your insightful but cruel commentaries, but keep it up. My main criticism would be that your writing is a little too in-crowd for my taste... kind of a substack version of inside the beltway.
I'm a leftist (a communist, even), but I like your matter-of-fact style. I enjoy disagreeing with you most of the time about many things (but not all). I don't hate you, because I think hate is bad both from a purely moral (thus relatively uninteresting) standpoint, but also hate is completely inefficient. If we can agree to build something together, we don't need to agree on anything but what's needed to actually complete the project. THAT'S democracy : we discuss about what we need or want to achieve, find a form on consensus, discuss on how to achieve it, then work at it. We don't need to agree on anything else to reach success.
I can play music with right-wingers. I can develop software with libertarians. We certainly don't need to agree on trans rights to fight efficiently climate change, and the reverse is true, too. It's actually pretty surprising how many people believe that you must agree on a whole bunch of unrelated things to simply work on THAT ONE thing, and that hinders almost every collective endeavour.
You're my favorite type of leftist! Letting broad ideological purity subvert effective political action and coordination is a constant pathology of, well, politically impotent movements (libertarians and radical leftists being the canonical examples.) Here's to getting things done, like saving the planet, for example.
I want to discuss one of the groups Richard mentions: "low trust individuals who always think they need to be on guard so you don’t fool them." I find this group extremely frustrating because it seems like they are extremely bad at being low trust and on guard. They don't trust the government, the media, scientists, the public health establishment and many other groups. However, there are certain groups of people that "low trust individuals" seem to believe that they can trust with their lives and their fortunes. These include:
1. Anyone who tells them there is a way for them to get rich quick.
2. People who say that all your health problems, up to and including cancer, can be cured by eating weird foods, taking "natural" supplements, and doing weird forms of exercise.
3. People who tell them that outgroups have formed an organized crime ring dedicated to kidnapping and molesting their kids, even though there are many other kids who would be much easier targets for such a ring.
4. Pastors who tell them that Jesus wants them to give the pastor all their money, and also that Jesus wants them to hate the outgroup really hard even though that is the literal opposite of what Jesus said to do.
Why on Earth are low trust individuals constantly on guard against being tricked by everyone except the people who are blatantly, obviously trying to trick them?
Low trust individuals see scumbags as their ingroup, and therefore trust them. It's obvious to them that they aren't part of the group of accomplished people. They think of themselves as master con artists, superior to all the other sheep. True con artists know this intuitively and exploit them as marks. It's funny because on some level, they are choosing to be part of a group that exploits them, but they'd rather feel kinship with a group that exploits them but tells them they are special than feel kinship with a group that does not exploit them but does nothing for their ego. When the choice is money or an ego trip, there's no contest.
"To not be understood is much worse than being hated." Hatred can imply some kind of respect, an admission that you are powerful and that you matter. In hatred there can be obsession, and hatred is often a sort of "spurned love." For example, when you hate an enemy, you might hate them because you recognize that they *should* use their powers for good, but instead use them for evil. Misunderstanding, on the other hand, requires no intimacy. It is ignorance, neglect, and dismissal. Hatred has within it a feeling of power and attraction, whereas misunderstanding is pure entropy and laziness.
When someone says, "I hate you," I feel that, at the very least, they have taken the time to consider me important enough to hate. But when someone totally misrepresents my views, and assumes I believe in something else, it feels like the worst form of disrespect -- worse than hatred. This is even true if the person misunderstanding me claims to actually be a fan or like my work.
That last part irks me especially because it brings out this question within myself of whether or not I have bluntly, confidently, and clearly communicated my own ideas and values. Have I been misunderstood because I am too obscure, or too sarcastic, or hiding behind too many layers of irony? Do I write in a way that is too hyperbolic, exaggerative, or self-referential? And if this is the case, is this misunderstanding a product of my own weakness -- my inability to stare myself in the face and express myself genuinely and authentically? Those questions never appear to someone who is superficial or tribalistic, but they still obsess me.
Kudos for multiple reasons, but certainly for including that Sam Kriss quote. This is magic:
"He has rearranged his Hitler particles into an almost perfect facsimile of liberalism, with just one piece missing, which is the assumption of a universal human dignity."
Very simple to address for me as someone else who has something like fascist shaped priors that have been arranged into a liberal shape by learning enough.
There is no such thing as universal human dignity. There are (fragile) human derived systems that can bestow certain rights upon people who fall within the orbit of that system (provided that system is robust enough to maintain and defend itself). That is all.
Human rights are just renamed natural rights which are made up. Civil rights can be created by people *if* we build a coherent, self-sustaining enough system. And, of course, what specific civil rights should be enshrined in such a system are up for debate.
Put another way: the Enlightenment accidentally invented a social technology that works but it doesn't work for the reasons the Enlightenment people thought it would work or for the reason most "nice" liberals think it works. Human nature is not nice. It's also not cruel. It's both and neither. We are evolutionarily derived organisms who happen to be capable of an above average amount of cultural plasticity. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Or put yet another way: Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman. God is Dead. Even most atheists have not actually internalized what that means.
You think liberalism is contingent on a metaphysical belief in human dignity? Shouldn't liberalism seek to expel anyone who doesn't believe in metaphysical morality then?
You keep suggesting that right wingers simply don't understand you, but I'm not sure you understand the best restrictionist arguments either. From my perspective, the best reason to be skeptical of Indian immigration, translated into left-wing speak, is that it undermines multiculturalism. Indians appear to be the most racist people on Earth according to poll data:
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of brilliant and congenial Indian-Americans. And I agree with you that assimilation is very much a real thing, if you create the right conditions for it, which historically we have done well. But I hate to say that, when I look at the Partition of India, diversity does not seem like a strength to me in that part of the world. And it seems very possible to me that H1B fraud is a real problem. See Mahvash Siddiqui's article here for instance: https://cis.org/Siddiqui/H1B-Tsunami-Why-US-Must-Act-Protect-American-Jobs-Security-and-Prosperity
You can talk all you want about individual geniuses, but those geniuses will thrive best in a particular legal and cultural environment. One which values relatively objective measures of employee merit, honesty, fair dealing, etc. Obviously these virtues aren't exactly in abundant supply in modern Silicon Valley. And multiculturalism is also, obviously, under serious threat in the United States. So we can't take these virtues for granted. We can't assume that these virtues will persist, especially if we're actively selecting for ethnic nepotists or fraudsters in our immigration policy, which seems likely to be the case currently.
If you want to select for kids like Jensen who were able to skip two grades, that's much better. That sort of talent should be detectable via a proctored aptitude test which is hard to game. If you truly wish to liberalize immigration, you should push to do it right, and address legitimate voter concerns around this, in order to create a broad base of voter support.
BTW, we already have a lot of brilliant people in the US. This study found that the average CS undergrad in the US is at a similar skill level to a CS undergrad from an elite institution in China/Russia/India: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1814646116 Maybe we could stop obsessing over immigration and think a little more about how to multiply the benefits of our existing talent base (for example, by making sure they don't create AI which kills everyone, that sort of thing). It's not clear to me that expansion of immigration is even the correct focus on the margin. If NVidia hadn't come about there would probably be some other big GPU company which quite likely would also get started in the US.
“And multiculturalism is also, obviously, under serious threat in the United States. So we can't take these virtues for granted. We can't assume that these virtues will persist,”
Oh I agree we can’t take our values for granted. But you’re wrong that the threat comes from multiculturalism. The threats are homegrown. That’s why it was so important to defeat the wokes a few years ago, and today it is so important to defeat nativists like Stephen Miller and JD Vance.
Take a look at the Economist Democracy Index by region, you can see there are very strong patterns by region. A single data point (Trump) is not enough to disrupt the overall pattern. Heck, he hasn’t even managed to push the US out of the “Flawed Democracy” bracket into the “Hybrid Regime” zone.
I also don’t think Trump is exactly “the white person’s candidate” when he actually got less of the white vote than Mitt Romney did, if I am reading the numbers correctly. Furthermore: Arguably Trumpism is, in many ways, mirrored wokeness -- I might defect on you after you defect on me, even if I'm not a defection-prone person in general. Wokeness is itself rather 3rd world in its intellectual roots: https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-age-of-moral-sadism
In my case at least, I disagree with what I perceive to be your libertarianism on the subjects of trade and immigration, just as I do with anyone else who holds similar opinions. To me that is a selfish, irresponsible philosophy that is quite un-American.
Closely related, I am also put off by what I perceive to be your prejudice against, not blacks anymore, but against all people with low IQ's, as though, in matters of public policy, their happiness and well-being is not just as important as the happiness of those with above average IQ's. See my substack and book for the kinds of policies I favor in this respect.
Finally, I don't think that you're quite as smart and talented as you think you are. Your once saying that you could write as well as Shakespeare if you put your mind to it or something to that effect, to take an extreme example. I also thought your book discussing the problems of affirmative action was not nearly as well put as the woman you cite as your source.
> I’m impressed by their dedication. They can’t let the smallest interaction with Yglesias go! We’re not talking about him ever agreeing with me that racism is good or something, it’s just normal nerd stuff. The instinct to set the bounds of acceptable discourse is a fundamental drive for many of these people, and it seems that deciding who matters is key to their sense of self-worth.
It's shunning. If you've been shunned, it's not just that I personally won't interact with you - that's just called "stopping being your friend/acquaintance." I also must punish those who DO interact with you, otherwise the cost of being shunned rapidly approaches zero. It's a pretty standard mechanism used to force internal cohesion and group solidarity by non-state groups such as the Roma, non-integrated Muslims, the Amish, etc, to enforce internal norms, it just becomes weird when you realize it's being applied by online-only types.
No, people on the left aren't even sorta acting strategically. It's as simple as the fact they tend to be intellectuals (or want to be) and naturally credit ideas and ideologies with power -- good and bad. And they naturally tacitly assume you defeat bad views by showing them to be wrong.
Thus, if you suggest that women and men might differ in statistical averages on certain mental affinities/interests you are standing up for the dicks who tell women they are inferior by making it harder to argue against them.
It's a misplaced attitude that treats arguments as soldiers -- though you have to take the arguments and ideas seriously first -- but it also misses the fact that often people are bad just because they are dicks not for any deep ideological or theoretical reason.
Richard, I really enjoy your writing and views even when I disagree with them. I share your disdain for the anti-intellectual right (as well as the faux-intellectual right) as my origins are right-wing as well. I began to reject right-ism back in the 2010's and even briefly embraced wokeness, before realizing its own moral bankruptcy. So I certainly appreciate your journey, and share your loathing for both ends of the horseshoe.
Where I relate to you most is in the realization you seem to have that the right is not evil - it is just stupid. I see this stupidity as a willful stupidity more than an intellectual limitation. The right does not read, not because it can't read, but because right-wingers are too lazy to read. They don't engage with ideas not because they are incapable of doing so, but because the certainty of stupid beliefs flatters their egos more than the ambiguity of reality.
The thing that ultimately turned me on the frog Nazis is how mindlessly repetitive they are. Even before woke began to die out, I was already getting sick of the daily litany of outrage bait paraded around by people like Libs of TikTok because of how stale and boring it had become. I *want* to learn new things and experience new things and expand my mind. Even highly intelligent rightoids who did read engaged in this repetition. They would just do this while making comparisons to Orthodoxy or the Roman Empire or something. It was a kind of mental masturbation and as they kept doing it over and over and over showing no interest in anything else or even the slightest interest in "yes, but what will you actually do about it tactically/strategically" I increasingly realized that this was never about truth or intellectual curiosity or improving the world or anything like that, no matter how smart they were. It was stupid lizard brain stuff all the way down. At the point you allow yourself to be enslaved by your own lizard brain and never examine it, who cares what your IQ is? I'll take a politically checked out dumbass over these people any day. There's at least some chance I can convince that guy that his populist instincts are stupid.
There's of course dynamics like this on the left as well. I have no interest in the interiority of a mind that can genuinely spend months to years seemingly doing nothing but mentally masturbating over anti-Israel content or big corpo hate or whatever. This is cockroach/microbe like behavior - mindlessly moving towards the same stimuli over and over and over with no reflection at all.
I have basically lost whatever sympathetic theory of mind I ever had for these people. They legitimately seem more like some kind of animal than humans to me now - utterly at the mercy of their meat and exercising no meaningful meta level agency to speak of. It's the mental equivalent of doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and screwing.
I think that there are a decent amount of Bluesky types that hate you because they actually think you are a Nazi. They read your opposition to mass genocide as more practical than ideological: in theory, if a high IQ and conscientious American elite could be convinced to support mass genociding mentally disabled people, criminals, and low IQ people, they think you and your 'Elite Human Capital' framework would support this. They would say your dislike of actual Nazi mass genocide programs stems from feeling like the Nazis targeted the wrong groups (high-IQ Jews) more than any principled moral criticism. They view you as a far-right-wing operative trying to build the inter-elite solidarity that would be needed (through cultural concessions) for elites to implement widespread 'Nazi policies' against people who are 'low on the natural hierarchy' and 'genetically inferior'.
I ran in a lot of left-wing spaces when younger. It is important to remember that left-wing spaces naturally select for people in the extreme right-tail of neuroticism. Of course if people on the left think you are an actual Nazi they are going to have issues with center-liberals like Yglesias and Thompson being friendly to you. It would be like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh suddenly becoming close friends with Ta-Nehisi Coates. They don't read your rebrand as a rebrand: they read it as a consistent application of your 'Nazi ideology'.
I read your sub stack because a lot of your positions make sense and at least you have the humility to admit when you were wrong - and not really in an opportunistic way. I think your tendency to be flippant/condescending about certain subjects devalues the rest of your work at times. But if readers are patient - they'll likely see through it
I'm not sure what it says about me, a Democrat, that I actually enjoy your insightful but cruel commentaries, but keep it up. My main criticism would be that your writing is a little too in-crowd for my taste... kind of a substack version of inside the beltway.
I'm a leftist (a communist, even), but I like your matter-of-fact style. I enjoy disagreeing with you most of the time about many things (but not all). I don't hate you, because I think hate is bad both from a purely moral (thus relatively uninteresting) standpoint, but also hate is completely inefficient. If we can agree to build something together, we don't need to agree on anything but what's needed to actually complete the project. THAT'S democracy : we discuss about what we need or want to achieve, find a form on consensus, discuss on how to achieve it, then work at it. We don't need to agree on anything else to reach success.
I can play music with right-wingers. I can develop software with libertarians. We certainly don't need to agree on trans rights to fight efficiently climate change, and the reverse is true, too. It's actually pretty surprising how many people believe that you must agree on a whole bunch of unrelated things to simply work on THAT ONE thing, and that hinders almost every collective endeavour.
You're my favorite type of leftist! Letting broad ideological purity subvert effective political action and coordination is a constant pathology of, well, politically impotent movements (libertarians and radical leftists being the canonical examples.) Here's to getting things done, like saving the planet, for example.
I want to discuss one of the groups Richard mentions: "low trust individuals who always think they need to be on guard so you don’t fool them." I find this group extremely frustrating because it seems like they are extremely bad at being low trust and on guard. They don't trust the government, the media, scientists, the public health establishment and many other groups. However, there are certain groups of people that "low trust individuals" seem to believe that they can trust with their lives and their fortunes. These include:
1. Anyone who tells them there is a way for them to get rich quick.
2. People who say that all your health problems, up to and including cancer, can be cured by eating weird foods, taking "natural" supplements, and doing weird forms of exercise.
3. People who tell them that outgroups have formed an organized crime ring dedicated to kidnapping and molesting their kids, even though there are many other kids who would be much easier targets for such a ring.
4. Pastors who tell them that Jesus wants them to give the pastor all their money, and also that Jesus wants them to hate the outgroup really hard even though that is the literal opposite of what Jesus said to do.
Why on Earth are low trust individuals constantly on guard against being tricked by everyone except the people who are blatantly, obviously trying to trick them?
Low trust individuals see scumbags as their ingroup, and therefore trust them. It's obvious to them that they aren't part of the group of accomplished people. They think of themselves as master con artists, superior to all the other sheep. True con artists know this intuitively and exploit them as marks. It's funny because on some level, they are choosing to be part of a group that exploits them, but they'd rather feel kinship with a group that exploits them but tells them they are special than feel kinship with a group that does not exploit them but does nothing for their ego. When the choice is money or an ego trip, there's no contest.
Richard's explanation of the reasons why some people hate his writing helps to explain why I like his writing.
"To not be understood is much worse than being hated." Hatred can imply some kind of respect, an admission that you are powerful and that you matter. In hatred there can be obsession, and hatred is often a sort of "spurned love." For example, when you hate an enemy, you might hate them because you recognize that they *should* use their powers for good, but instead use them for evil. Misunderstanding, on the other hand, requires no intimacy. It is ignorance, neglect, and dismissal. Hatred has within it a feeling of power and attraction, whereas misunderstanding is pure entropy and laziness.
When someone says, "I hate you," I feel that, at the very least, they have taken the time to consider me important enough to hate. But when someone totally misrepresents my views, and assumes I believe in something else, it feels like the worst form of disrespect -- worse than hatred. This is even true if the person misunderstanding me claims to actually be a fan or like my work.
That last part irks me especially because it brings out this question within myself of whether or not I have bluntly, confidently, and clearly communicated my own ideas and values. Have I been misunderstood because I am too obscure, or too sarcastic, or hiding behind too many layers of irony? Do I write in a way that is too hyperbolic, exaggerative, or self-referential? And if this is the case, is this misunderstanding a product of my own weakness -- my inability to stare myself in the face and express myself genuinely and authentically? Those questions never appear to someone who is superficial or tribalistic, but they still obsess me.
Kudos for multiple reasons, but certainly for including that Sam Kriss quote. This is magic:
"He has rearranged his Hitler particles into an almost perfect facsimile of liberalism, with just one piece missing, which is the assumption of a universal human dignity."
Have you ever addressed that?
Very simple to address for me as someone else who has something like fascist shaped priors that have been arranged into a liberal shape by learning enough.
There is no such thing as universal human dignity. There are (fragile) human derived systems that can bestow certain rights upon people who fall within the orbit of that system (provided that system is robust enough to maintain and defend itself). That is all.
Human rights are just renamed natural rights which are made up. Civil rights can be created by people *if* we build a coherent, self-sustaining enough system. And, of course, what specific civil rights should be enshrined in such a system are up for debate.
Put another way: the Enlightenment accidentally invented a social technology that works but it doesn't work for the reasons the Enlightenment people thought it would work or for the reason most "nice" liberals think it works. Human nature is not nice. It's also not cruel. It's both and neither. We are evolutionarily derived organisms who happen to be capable of an above average amount of cultural plasticity. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Or put yet another way: Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman. God is Dead. Even most atheists have not actually internalized what that means.
https://creation.com/en/articles/nietzsche-madman
So, your Hitler particles remain entirely in place. Good to know. I'll make sure to vote against anyone like you, in any context.
You think liberalism is contingent on a metaphysical belief in human dignity? Shouldn't liberalism seek to expel anyone who doesn't believe in metaphysical morality then?
No one asked you. You opinion doesn't interest me. I was addressing Richard.
Have no rejoinder but ad hominems and shunning. Duly noted.
This piece does a nice job explicating various political factions. It also does a good job as making someone like Andrew Sullivan appear humble.
But RH acknowledged that, in his last paragraph. Jeepers, don't tell me you *didn't read the whole essay*!
Humility is a virtue, but "Private Joker has guts, and guts is enough."
You keep suggesting that right wingers simply don't understand you, but I'm not sure you understand the best restrictionist arguments either. From my perspective, the best reason to be skeptical of Indian immigration, translated into left-wing speak, is that it undermines multiculturalism. Indians appear to be the most racist people on Earth according to poll data:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2013/05/racial-tolerance-map-hk-fix.jpg
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of brilliant and congenial Indian-Americans. And I agree with you that assimilation is very much a real thing, if you create the right conditions for it, which historically we have done well. But I hate to say that, when I look at the Partition of India, diversity does not seem like a strength to me in that part of the world. And it seems very possible to me that H1B fraud is a real problem. See Mahvash Siddiqui's article here for instance: https://cis.org/Siddiqui/H1B-Tsunami-Why-US-Must-Act-Protect-American-Jobs-Security-and-Prosperity
You can talk all you want about individual geniuses, but those geniuses will thrive best in a particular legal and cultural environment. One which values relatively objective measures of employee merit, honesty, fair dealing, etc. Obviously these virtues aren't exactly in abundant supply in modern Silicon Valley. And multiculturalism is also, obviously, under serious threat in the United States. So we can't take these virtues for granted. We can't assume that these virtues will persist, especially if we're actively selecting for ethnic nepotists or fraudsters in our immigration policy, which seems likely to be the case currently.
If you want to select for kids like Jensen who were able to skip two grades, that's much better. That sort of talent should be detectable via a proctored aptitude test which is hard to game. If you truly wish to liberalize immigration, you should push to do it right, and address legitimate voter concerns around this, in order to create a broad base of voter support.
BTW, we already have a lot of brilliant people in the US. This study found that the average CS undergrad in the US is at a similar skill level to a CS undergrad from an elite institution in China/Russia/India: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1814646116 Maybe we could stop obsessing over immigration and think a little more about how to multiply the benefits of our existing talent base (for example, by making sure they don't create AI which kills everyone, that sort of thing). It's not clear to me that expansion of immigration is even the correct focus on the margin. If NVidia hadn't come about there would probably be some other big GPU company which quite likely would also get started in the US.
“And multiculturalism is also, obviously, under serious threat in the United States. So we can't take these virtues for granted. We can't assume that these virtues will persist,”
Oh I agree we can’t take our values for granted. But you’re wrong that the threat comes from multiculturalism. The threats are homegrown. That’s why it was so important to defeat the wokes a few years ago, and today it is so important to defeat nativists like Stephen Miller and JD Vance.
As for the rest,
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-trump-discredited-higher-order
Take a look at the Economist Democracy Index by region, you can see there are very strong patterns by region. A single data point (Trump) is not enough to disrupt the overall pattern. Heck, he hasn’t even managed to push the US out of the “Flawed Democracy” bracket into the “Hybrid Regime” zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#List_by_region
I also don’t think Trump is exactly “the white person’s candidate” when he actually got less of the white vote than Mitt Romney did, if I am reading the numbers correctly. Furthermore: Arguably Trumpism is, in many ways, mirrored wokeness -- I might defect on you after you defect on me, even if I'm not a defection-prone person in general. Wokeness is itself rather 3rd world in its intellectual roots: https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/the-age-of-moral-sadism
Longer reply to your points here: https://substack.com/@ebenezer1/note/c-248309091
In my case at least, I disagree with what I perceive to be your libertarianism on the subjects of trade and immigration, just as I do with anyone else who holds similar opinions. To me that is a selfish, irresponsible philosophy that is quite un-American.
Closely related, I am also put off by what I perceive to be your prejudice against, not blacks anymore, but against all people with low IQ's, as though, in matters of public policy, their happiness and well-being is not just as important as the happiness of those with above average IQ's. See my substack and book for the kinds of policies I favor in this respect.
Finally, I don't think that you're quite as smart and talented as you think you are. Your once saying that you could write as well as Shakespeare if you put your mind to it or something to that effect, to take an extreme example. I also thought your book discussing the problems of affirmative action was not nearly as well put as the woman you cite as your source.
How do people keep citing the obviously true Shakespeare thing as something revelatory? Writing improves.
> I’m impressed by their dedication. They can’t let the smallest interaction with Yglesias go! We’re not talking about him ever agreeing with me that racism is good or something, it’s just normal nerd stuff. The instinct to set the bounds of acceptable discourse is a fundamental drive for many of these people, and it seems that deciding who matters is key to their sense of self-worth.
It's shunning. If you've been shunned, it's not just that I personally won't interact with you - that's just called "stopping being your friend/acquaintance." I also must punish those who DO interact with you, otherwise the cost of being shunned rapidly approaches zero. It's a pretty standard mechanism used to force internal cohesion and group solidarity by non-state groups such as the Roma, non-integrated Muslims, the Amish, etc, to enforce internal norms, it just becomes weird when you realize it's being applied by online-only types.
Non state groups like the Roma, Muslims, Amish... and the progressive left?
No, people on the left aren't even sorta acting strategically. It's as simple as the fact they tend to be intellectuals (or want to be) and naturally credit ideas and ideologies with power -- good and bad. And they naturally tacitly assume you defeat bad views by showing them to be wrong.
Thus, if you suggest that women and men might differ in statistical averages on certain mental affinities/interests you are standing up for the dicks who tell women they are inferior by making it harder to argue against them.
It's a misplaced attitude that treats arguments as soldiers -- though you have to take the arguments and ideas seriously first -- but it also misses the fact that often people are bad just because they are dicks not for any deep ideological or theoretical reason.
Richard, I really enjoy your writing and views even when I disagree with them. I share your disdain for the anti-intellectual right (as well as the faux-intellectual right) as my origins are right-wing as well. I began to reject right-ism back in the 2010's and even briefly embraced wokeness, before realizing its own moral bankruptcy. So I certainly appreciate your journey, and share your loathing for both ends of the horseshoe.
Where I relate to you most is in the realization you seem to have that the right is not evil - it is just stupid. I see this stupidity as a willful stupidity more than an intellectual limitation. The right does not read, not because it can't read, but because right-wingers are too lazy to read. They don't engage with ideas not because they are incapable of doing so, but because the certainty of stupid beliefs flatters their egos more than the ambiguity of reality.
The thing that ultimately turned me on the frog Nazis is how mindlessly repetitive they are. Even before woke began to die out, I was already getting sick of the daily litany of outrage bait paraded around by people like Libs of TikTok because of how stale and boring it had become. I *want* to learn new things and experience new things and expand my mind. Even highly intelligent rightoids who did read engaged in this repetition. They would just do this while making comparisons to Orthodoxy or the Roman Empire or something. It was a kind of mental masturbation and as they kept doing it over and over and over showing no interest in anything else or even the slightest interest in "yes, but what will you actually do about it tactically/strategically" I increasingly realized that this was never about truth or intellectual curiosity or improving the world or anything like that, no matter how smart they were. It was stupid lizard brain stuff all the way down. At the point you allow yourself to be enslaved by your own lizard brain and never examine it, who cares what your IQ is? I'll take a politically checked out dumbass over these people any day. There's at least some chance I can convince that guy that his populist instincts are stupid.
There's of course dynamics like this on the left as well. I have no interest in the interiority of a mind that can genuinely spend months to years seemingly doing nothing but mentally masturbating over anti-Israel content or big corpo hate or whatever. This is cockroach/microbe like behavior - mindlessly moving towards the same stimuli over and over and over with no reflection at all.
I have basically lost whatever sympathetic theory of mind I ever had for these people. They legitimately seem more like some kind of animal than humans to me now - utterly at the mercy of their meat and exercising no meaningful meta level agency to speak of. It's the mental equivalent of doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and screwing.
I'm a big fan of footnote #2.
I think that there are a decent amount of Bluesky types that hate you because they actually think you are a Nazi. They read your opposition to mass genocide as more practical than ideological: in theory, if a high IQ and conscientious American elite could be convinced to support mass genociding mentally disabled people, criminals, and low IQ people, they think you and your 'Elite Human Capital' framework would support this. They would say your dislike of actual Nazi mass genocide programs stems from feeling like the Nazis targeted the wrong groups (high-IQ Jews) more than any principled moral criticism. They view you as a far-right-wing operative trying to build the inter-elite solidarity that would be needed (through cultural concessions) for elites to implement widespread 'Nazi policies' against people who are 'low on the natural hierarchy' and 'genetically inferior'.
I ran in a lot of left-wing spaces when younger. It is important to remember that left-wing spaces naturally select for people in the extreme right-tail of neuroticism. Of course if people on the left think you are an actual Nazi they are going to have issues with center-liberals like Yglesias and Thompson being friendly to you. It would be like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh suddenly becoming close friends with Ta-Nehisi Coates. They don't read your rebrand as a rebrand: they read it as a consistent application of your 'Nazi ideology'.
I read your sub stack because a lot of your positions make sense and at least you have the humility to admit when you were wrong - and not really in an opportunistic way. I think your tendency to be flippant/condescending about certain subjects devalues the rest of your work at times. But if readers are patient - they'll likely see through it