Pleasantly surprised to see you agreeing with me on animal suffering being bad, eating insects depending on animal suffering. Nice that other conservative/libertarian people agree with this. I guess since you are autistic and rationalist-adjacent it shouldn't be *too* surprising.
Actually, I was surprised Richard cares about insects (potentially) suffering, given his aesthetic preferences and how much they mean to him. Insects?! Really? Taking seriously the question of the moral value of bugs is a symptom of the larger moral collapse in society.
Lol, imagine being convinced there is no God but also worried about the morality of eating insects. This is why "rationalists" are so frustrating. If you're so convinced of materialism why waste so many keystrokes on an pointless, invented morality? Like, you're going to die. The universe will die. Even if the hardcore transhumanists get their wish and "upload their consciousness to machines" (ironically, implying mind-body dualism) they'll still cease to function one day. Doesn't really matter if it's tomorrow or 22 billion years really. Dead is dead, a chasing after the wind.
But thank you for your contribution to fighting wokeness, our common enemy.
Well, according to my understanding of the theory of relativity, which admittedly is very limited, there is no absolute difference between the past and the future and every moment exists forever.
"It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. And yet the philosophers construct their ethics independently of this; they talk to pass an hour."
- Blaise Pascal
I generally agree. If you're going to agonize over arcane moral questions, then accept Christ and at least agonize over doing the Lord's will. If you're going to reject the free offer of the gospel, then do the honest thing and recognize that all of atheistic moral philosophy is really just psychological self-management, and if you're still agonizing over the feelings of insects, you're self-managing incorrectly.
The question wasn't "Are you worried about the morality of eating insects?" It was a question of whether the morality of insects depends on the suffering they could experience, which is obvious. You shouldn't torture things for your personal pleasure. I take that as obvious as a vegan Christian. I see nothing in the Bible that allows eating things if that means you have to torture them (as you do when you buy meat and dairy of which the overwhelming majority is from factory farms).
I don't know why you think morality is pointless and invented given "materialism." Most sophisticated moral realists, materialist or not, think torturing innocent children is wrong regardless of how you think or feel (or how God thinks or feels), so they are doing nothing inconsistent. It's also unclear how children dying or me dying one day gives you the right to torture them.
Transhumanism no more implies mind-body dualism than the fact that I can transfer software from one computer to another implies that there is 'mind-body dualism' between software and hardware. And why would the existence of God imply morality? Even most theists accept that God has no morals for any other species but our own. I see no reason to believe an omniscient and omnipotent God would care any more about our sex lives than he would about those of chimpanzees or squirrels.
It's circular. If you're just data then you aren't "you" but just data. And sure the data can be copied and deleted from here to there. But tranhumanists posit they exist and can be moved from body to machine. Like the old teleportation anecdote where an earlier prototype "teleports" a guy across the room but instead of disappearing the original copy is still standing there confused. The technician goes "oops" and shoots him. Sorry, you're dead and a copy of your data is stored somewhere else unless you are real and can be "moved". Either way all the bodies will die and the machines will stop working at some point according to most of cosmology.
If all 'you' are is an electrochemical state located in your brain, then the desire to continue living (for that electrochemical state to exist in the future) is as irrational as wanting to copy it. The copy of you will have the experience of being you every bit as much as the you that will exist in a year will, and the you that exists now will be as dead as the 'original' in the copying example. The reality of continuous personal identity itself is debatable at best under materialist worldview. I assume a rationalist would say the desire to perpetuate this state that is 'you' whether by not dying or by copying it is as valid as any, if 'you' likes existing.
Fun stuff. My position is that people will always want government to do stuff, addicted to it like drugs. A party that promises stuff will always win. So libertarianism will never happen. Sorry. Your choice is between the party of no abortion or the party of chop your kid's dick off. Pretty easy choice for me.
Sad to see Abraham Lincoln so high. This man started a war that murderer hundreds of thousands of people. And he was very clear about the fact that he was not doing it to end slavery.
He's no Hitler, but I would have expected Hanania to have a large enough libertarian following to bring Lincoln's ratings down a bit.
Even granting that all you say is true, the simple fact of the matter is that no man did more to break the back of the Confederacy, and those guys had to go.
Joe is majorly underselling Lincoln. Even with the South unable to vote in his re-election campaign, Lincoln very easily could have lost by prolonging the war and was arguably spared defeat by a timely major victory that spelled the wars end. It’s true that Lincoln’s priority was preserving the Union, but he kept the war going longer than he needed to for that purpose— had he been willing to give up on freeing the slaves, he could have brokered peace sooner.
>Your fourth favorite thing in the universe is apparently Thomas Sowell. I like him too, but does he really deserve to be that high, right before Adam Smith, who said many of the same things but 200 years earlier? Are you sure that you’re not practicing affirmative action in your hearts and souls, despite how supposedly anti-woke you are? If I were black, would you not rank me higher? Look into the mirror and ask yourselves the tough questions.
I love you, Richard, but you're underselling Sowell. He's the most relevant intellectual on that list today and probably the most ahead of his time. Maybe that's because he's allowed to write on topics because he's black.
I'm pretty tepid on him. Anyone who supports open borders is sus, and I'm even saltier about him in particular because he got me to agree with the position when I first encountered his arguments defending it when I was a teenager. Liking Ayn Rand is also a major negative.
On the other hand, I really like his work on education and appreciate his willingness to say unpopular things, even when I happen to disagree with them. iirc I gave him a 3.
Edit: Introducing me to pro-natalism was pretty based, even if I needed other sources to convince me of it. He at the very least planted a seed that ended with me having five kids (so far). Maybe he should've been a 4.
I first heard of Caplan on a Coleman Hughes podcast a long while back on an episode about his case for open borders. I had a knee-jerk reaction to the title and refused to even listen to the episode.
But I eventually came across his work on education and pro-natalism which I found to be interesting and helpful in forming some of my views on both subjects. And he didn't seem insane in a few podcast episodes I decided to check out, including one with Hanania, so I revisited his immigration stuff. I now begrudgingly accept some of his arguments about the economic benefits and whatnot, though I'm still very much at odds with him on much about the issue.
I'm 36. Kids are 6, 5, 3, 1, and -6 months. Can still remember encountering Caplan on immigration in EconLog while he was blogging in advance of publishing Myth of the Rational Voter. Found the argument persuasive then and can still see the appeal for people with an economic/autistic mindset.
Anti-immigration people, mostly. I can see the argument for more or less but *open borders*...get out of here. Him and Yglesias. I don't want one billion Americans. Even if we could handle that level of crowding (and I like New York, but I know most of the country doesn't want to live there) you don't triple a nation's population without causing major problems.
The population tripled in the past 100 years. And if it triples again, the US population density will be around that of present-day Ohio.
Anyways I get your point. But I thought Hanania's readers would appreciate Caplan airing controversial opinions, given that we just saw Hanania defend Harvey Weinstein and Robert E Lee!
I was about to say something about his speaking voice being annoying but then I went and listened to him in a video again and realized it's just his regional accent and I shouldn't have ranked him lower for that.
> I’m an absolutist on this question. The right response to an employer mistreating you should be the same as the response to a friend or lover mistreating you: find someone else.
If someone is sexually harassing you, they should be fired. I agree with "innocent until proven guilty," even in private, non-court based affairs. But that obviously doesn't mean everyone is eternally innocent. When I think of sexual harassment, I include everything from groping someone's breasts without their consent - which should obviously mean legal punishments - and catcalling.
You could make the case that catcalling shouldn't be legally punishable even if it's a jerk thing to do and should get you fired (like cussing someone out). Fine. But there should obviously be laws against involuntary groping from bosses - or anyone for that matter. Being anti-sexual assault is being pro-freedom of association. Maybe you meant things like catcalling and people were thinking in broader terms like sexual assault and that's what skewed the data.
> Most of you believe that someone who rapes and murders a child should be treated humanely at taxpayer expense until natural death
The death penalty is more expensive as far as I am aware.
> When I’ve debated others on the death penalty, the first thing people bring up is usually the possibility of wrongful convictions. I always point out that’s a problem with life in prison too
Yes, but one is different than the other. Imagine you have two buttons and 100 convicted criminals in front of you where the court has decided that the death penalty would be sufficient punishment for them. They've been convicted of terrible crimes.
For some reason, you are given the choice of what to do with them. Of the two buttons in front of you, one button kills them all and the other puts them in jail for life. However, it is known that a few of them have been falsely convicted. No one knows who exactly, but it's probably somewhere from 2 to 5 of them.
Should you slaughter them all or send them to jail? It's fairly clear to me that they should be sent to jail. The innocent people probably want to live, and you should respect their wishes. You may argue that jail is worse; but regardless, you should respect the wishes of the innocent even if you would prefer to be killed yourself. Also, you have to suffer for ages on death row anyway awaiting your death. Further, you claim to be tough on crime, so if life in prison is worse, you should prefer that.
> Yes, you can go back and undo the damage of a life sentence in theory, but you might not! If the only thing you care about is reducing false positives and not punishing innocent people, you can’t have a criminal justice system at all.
The first sentence is a non-response. They might not be found innocent later, yes. That's why your opponents say "might." It's better that they have a chance.
Who said it's the only think we care about? It's a major thing we should care about, obviously. That's why we have an innocent until proven guilty system. It's worse to put an innocent person behind bars than to fail to convict a guilty person. That's how rights work. If someone is 51% likely to be guilty, you shouldn't imprison them.
> I’m also more anti-crime than my readers, favoring the death penalty, shooting fleeing felons
Shooting fleeing felons is absurd. Are they murderers who will likely murder if they "flee?" Then yeah, you could shoot them. Maybe you meant this, but that's hard to believe as I would expect you to know the difference. Any other person? That's obviously wrong. They should be given due process of law. It's called proportionate, retributive justice where innocence is presumed until guilt is established. I have no idea why aside from emotional reactions you would want this. You say you like it for aesthetic reasons, so I guess I can't expect you to think rationally about this.
Edit: there may be more to respond to here, but that's all I will do for now.
In your first point, I believe he's talking about harassment, not assault, which is already illegal everywhere, not just in the workplace. The point is whether your employer should fire you is up to your employer, not the government. It's a voluntary relationship. If a woman's boyfriend says something sexist, the government doesn't make her break up with him; nor should it make an employer fire someone for saying something sexist or whatever. If it's not criminal, then it's between consenting adults; if you don't like the way your boss is treating you, quit. If it's worth the salary to put up with, don't. It's your cost benefit analysis to make, just like deciding whether to stop seeing a significant other or friend over something they say.
"You could make the case that catcalling shouldn't be legally punishable..."
Making catcalling legally punishable is a ridiculous idea, appropriately unconstitutional in the US.
I’m surprised Bryan Caplan is so low on your reader rankings. I guess the normie objection to Caplan is his open borders policy but it’s really for me to find anything that I actually disagree with him on. Maybe too soft on criminals and drug users?
Surprised that Zionism and “my country should support Israel over the Palestinians” scored the same. I expected Zionism to score much higher. I thought the median Hanania reader would say that Israel is clearly better and contributes more to civilization, but that the US should go isolationist.
I put 5 on both, but I'd pull out our bases and troops and phase out all military aid (we can have exceptions, like our few people running a radar station in the Negev), I'd still work with them on hacking Iran's nuclear program, missile defense, cyber, space colonization, and so on, and would continue to sell them weapons. I'm generally non-interventionist, but I'm not a full-blown isolationist. I'd close a lot of US bases and withdraw a lot of US troops (from Europe, ME, Asia), and wouldn't start any wars, but I wouldn't end our alliances.
I would guess that Zionism is weighed down by a low response rate, a fair number of frogs and Unz types just giving it a 1, and a bunch of regular based people not giving a response or giving it a 4, being like "yeah, Israel is better, it has high IQ, high TFR, high sector, but can the Republicans just shut up about it already and focus on civil rights?" I'm curious if the high standard deviation mostly comes form lots of 1's and lots of 4's, that would be my guess.
Curious what the rating for Zionism is when you restrict to everyone who gave Hitler a 1.
I mean, it's the Richard Hanania newsletter. I'm sure he attracts far more than his fair share of "I disagree with you but I like to read smart people with different views" liberals (the Scott Alexander/Steven Pinker crowd), but basically it's a newsletter for his fans, so of course he is going to rank highly.
For sure, and he deserves it. My point was just that Hanania might be a five relative to other bloggers and a 4 once you throw Washington and Lincoln into the mix. No shame in ranking 11 against that competition.
Given that you are a self-professed pro-natalist guy who thinks employers should be able to sleep with their secretaries, I am amazed your survey does nothing to address family law, divorce, child support, or alimony. Perhaps in 20 years.?
Turchin lost me when he invented a composite measure of social disorder adding together three or four things and put equations with second derivatives of it in his book. I'm all for trying to quantify stuff but there's stuff that you really can't treat like a physics equation, and when you do you wind up getting nonsense.
Pleasantly surprised to see you agreeing with me on animal suffering being bad, eating insects depending on animal suffering. Nice that other conservative/libertarian people agree with this. I guess since you are autistic and rationalist-adjacent it shouldn't be *too* surprising.
Actually, I was surprised Richard cares about insects (potentially) suffering, given his aesthetic preferences and how much they mean to him. Insects?! Really? Taking seriously the question of the moral value of bugs is a symptom of the larger moral collapse in society.
I object to suffering as a metric of morality. That is just hedonism.
I know pigs feel pain and I have no moral objection to eating them.
Lol, imagine being convinced there is no God but also worried about the morality of eating insects. This is why "rationalists" are so frustrating. If you're so convinced of materialism why waste so many keystrokes on an pointless, invented morality? Like, you're going to die. The universe will die. Even if the hardcore transhumanists get their wish and "upload their consciousness to machines" (ironically, implying mind-body dualism) they'll still cease to function one day. Doesn't really matter if it's tomorrow or 22 billion years really. Dead is dead, a chasing after the wind.
But thank you for your contribution to fighting wokeness, our common enemy.
Well, according to my understanding of the theory of relativity, which admittedly is very limited, there is no absolute difference between the past and the future and every moment exists forever.
That would be some humanities major getting it wrong, and you trusting them too much.
Time definitely goes "forward" in relativity. (Ph.D. in Engineering from Stanford.)
"It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. And yet the philosophers construct their ethics independently of this; they talk to pass an hour."
- Blaise Pascal
I generally agree. If you're going to agonize over arcane moral questions, then accept Christ and at least agonize over doing the Lord's will. If you're going to reject the free offer of the gospel, then do the honest thing and recognize that all of atheistic moral philosophy is really just psychological self-management, and if you're still agonizing over the feelings of insects, you're self-managing incorrectly.
The question wasn't "Are you worried about the morality of eating insects?" It was a question of whether the morality of insects depends on the suffering they could experience, which is obvious. You shouldn't torture things for your personal pleasure. I take that as obvious as a vegan Christian. I see nothing in the Bible that allows eating things if that means you have to torture them (as you do when you buy meat and dairy of which the overwhelming majority is from factory farms).
I don't know why you think morality is pointless and invented given "materialism." Most sophisticated moral realists, materialist or not, think torturing innocent children is wrong regardless of how you think or feel (or how God thinks or feels), so they are doing nothing inconsistent. It's also unclear how children dying or me dying one day gives you the right to torture them.
Transhumanism no more implies mind-body dualism than the fact that I can transfer software from one computer to another implies that there is 'mind-body dualism' between software and hardware. And why would the existence of God imply morality? Even most theists accept that God has no morals for any other species but our own. I see no reason to believe an omniscient and omnipotent God would care any more about our sex lives than he would about those of chimpanzees or squirrels.
It's circular. If you're just data then you aren't "you" but just data. And sure the data can be copied and deleted from here to there. But tranhumanists posit they exist and can be moved from body to machine. Like the old teleportation anecdote where an earlier prototype "teleports" a guy across the room but instead of disappearing the original copy is still standing there confused. The technician goes "oops" and shoots him. Sorry, you're dead and a copy of your data is stored somewhere else unless you are real and can be "moved". Either way all the bodies will die and the machines will stop working at some point according to most of cosmology.
If all 'you' are is an electrochemical state located in your brain, then the desire to continue living (for that electrochemical state to exist in the future) is as irrational as wanting to copy it. The copy of you will have the experience of being you every bit as much as the you that will exist in a year will, and the you that exists now will be as dead as the 'original' in the copying example. The reality of continuous personal identity itself is debatable at best under materialist worldview. I assume a rationalist would say the desire to perpetuate this state that is 'you' whether by not dying or by copying it is as valid as any, if 'you' likes existing.
Fun stuff. My position is that people will always want government to do stuff, addicted to it like drugs. A party that promises stuff will always win. So libertarianism will never happen. Sorry. Your choice is between the party of no abortion or the party of chop your kid's dick off. Pretty easy choice for me.
Sad to see Abraham Lincoln so high. This man started a war that murderer hundreds of thousands of people. And he was very clear about the fact that he was not doing it to end slavery.
He's no Hitler, but I would have expected Hanania to have a large enough libertarian following to bring Lincoln's ratings down a bit.
Even granting that all you say is true, the simple fact of the matter is that no man did more to break the back of the Confederacy, and those guys had to go.
Joe is majorly underselling Lincoln. Even with the South unable to vote in his re-election campaign, Lincoln very easily could have lost by prolonging the war and was arguably spared defeat by a timely major victory that spelled the wars end. It’s true that Lincoln’s priority was preserving the Union, but he kept the war going longer than he needed to for that purpose— had he been willing to give up on freeing the slaves, he could have brokered peace sooner.
Why do you like Omar?
>Your fourth favorite thing in the universe is apparently Thomas Sowell. I like him too, but does he really deserve to be that high, right before Adam Smith, who said many of the same things but 200 years earlier? Are you sure that you’re not practicing affirmative action in your hearts and souls, despite how supposedly anti-woke you are? If I were black, would you not rank me higher? Look into the mirror and ask yourselves the tough questions.
I love you, Richard, but you're underselling Sowell. He's the most relevant intellectual on that list today and probably the most ahead of his time. Maybe that's because he's allowed to write on topics because he's black.
Biggest surprise is Bryan Caplan all the way down at #25. Who doesn't like Bryan Caplan?
I'm pretty tepid on him. Anyone who supports open borders is sus, and I'm even saltier about him in particular because he got me to agree with the position when I first encountered his arguments defending it when I was a teenager. Liking Ayn Rand is also a major negative.
On the other hand, I really like his work on education and appreciate his willingness to say unpopular things, even when I happen to disagree with them. iirc I gave him a 3.
Edit: Introducing me to pro-natalism was pretty based, even if I needed other sources to convince me of it. He at the very least planted a seed that ended with me having five kids (so far). Maybe he should've been a 4.
I first heard of Caplan on a Coleman Hughes podcast a long while back on an episode about his case for open borders. I had a knee-jerk reaction to the title and refused to even listen to the episode.
But I eventually came across his work on education and pro-natalism which I found to be interesting and helpful in forming some of my views on both subjects. And he didn't seem insane in a few podcast episodes I decided to check out, including one with Hanania, so I revisited his immigration stuff. I now begrudgingly accept some of his arguments about the economic benefits and whatnot, though I'm still very much at odds with him on much about the issue.
You have five kids but are young enough to have read Caplan on immigration as a teenager. Sorry to ask, but how old are you?
I'm 36. Kids are 6, 5, 3, 1, and -6 months. Can still remember encountering Caplan on immigration in EconLog while he was blogging in advance of publishing Myth of the Rational Voter. Found the argument persuasive then and can still see the appeal for people with an economic/autistic mindset.
Caplan's a more prolific poaster of cawntent. Less of LKY's stuff is easily accessible.
Anti-immigration people, mostly. I can see the argument for more or less but *open borders*...get out of here. Him and Yglesias. I don't want one billion Americans. Even if we could handle that level of crowding (and I like New York, but I know most of the country doesn't want to live there) you don't triple a nation's population without causing major problems.
The population tripled in the past 100 years. And if it triples again, the US population density will be around that of present-day Ohio.
Anyways I get your point. But I thought Hanania's readers would appreciate Caplan airing controversial opinions, given that we just saw Hanania defend Harvey Weinstein and Robert E Lee!
I was about to say something about his speaking voice being annoying but then I went and listened to him in a video again and realized it's just his regional accent and I shouldn't have ranked him lower for that.
tbh sounds pretty based
human cloning is good, people should be more autistic
Cloning von Neuamnn would be great
That's kinda weird but what's actually wrong with it?
If you don't like controversial statements, why are you reading Hanania? In this column he defends Robert E Lee and Harvey Weinstein...
> I’m an absolutist on this question. The right response to an employer mistreating you should be the same as the response to a friend or lover mistreating you: find someone else.
If someone is sexually harassing you, they should be fired. I agree with "innocent until proven guilty," even in private, non-court based affairs. But that obviously doesn't mean everyone is eternally innocent. When I think of sexual harassment, I include everything from groping someone's breasts without their consent - which should obviously mean legal punishments - and catcalling.
You could make the case that catcalling shouldn't be legally punishable even if it's a jerk thing to do and should get you fired (like cussing someone out). Fine. But there should obviously be laws against involuntary groping from bosses - or anyone for that matter. Being anti-sexual assault is being pro-freedom of association. Maybe you meant things like catcalling and people were thinking in broader terms like sexual assault and that's what skewed the data.
> Most of you believe that someone who rapes and murders a child should be treated humanely at taxpayer expense until natural death
The death penalty is more expensive as far as I am aware.
> When I’ve debated others on the death penalty, the first thing people bring up is usually the possibility of wrongful convictions. I always point out that’s a problem with life in prison too
Yes, but one is different than the other. Imagine you have two buttons and 100 convicted criminals in front of you where the court has decided that the death penalty would be sufficient punishment for them. They've been convicted of terrible crimes.
For some reason, you are given the choice of what to do with them. Of the two buttons in front of you, one button kills them all and the other puts them in jail for life. However, it is known that a few of them have been falsely convicted. No one knows who exactly, but it's probably somewhere from 2 to 5 of them.
Should you slaughter them all or send them to jail? It's fairly clear to me that they should be sent to jail. The innocent people probably want to live, and you should respect their wishes. You may argue that jail is worse; but regardless, you should respect the wishes of the innocent even if you would prefer to be killed yourself. Also, you have to suffer for ages on death row anyway awaiting your death. Further, you claim to be tough on crime, so if life in prison is worse, you should prefer that.
> Yes, you can go back and undo the damage of a life sentence in theory, but you might not! If the only thing you care about is reducing false positives and not punishing innocent people, you can’t have a criminal justice system at all.
The first sentence is a non-response. They might not be found innocent later, yes. That's why your opponents say "might." It's better that they have a chance.
Who said it's the only think we care about? It's a major thing we should care about, obviously. That's why we have an innocent until proven guilty system. It's worse to put an innocent person behind bars than to fail to convict a guilty person. That's how rights work. If someone is 51% likely to be guilty, you shouldn't imprison them.
> I’m also more anti-crime than my readers, favoring the death penalty, shooting fleeing felons
Shooting fleeing felons is absurd. Are they murderers who will likely murder if they "flee?" Then yeah, you could shoot them. Maybe you meant this, but that's hard to believe as I would expect you to know the difference. Any other person? That's obviously wrong. They should be given due process of law. It's called proportionate, retributive justice where innocence is presumed until guilt is established. I have no idea why aside from emotional reactions you would want this. You say you like it for aesthetic reasons, so I guess I can't expect you to think rationally about this.
Edit: there may be more to respond to here, but that's all I will do for now.
In your first point, I believe he's talking about harassment, not assault, which is already illegal everywhere, not just in the workplace. The point is whether your employer should fire you is up to your employer, not the government. It's a voluntary relationship. If a woman's boyfriend says something sexist, the government doesn't make her break up with him; nor should it make an employer fire someone for saying something sexist or whatever. If it's not criminal, then it's between consenting adults; if you don't like the way your boss is treating you, quit. If it's worth the salary to put up with, don't. It's your cost benefit analysis to make, just like deciding whether to stop seeing a significant other or friend over something they say.
"You could make the case that catcalling shouldn't be legally punishable..."
Making catcalling legally punishable is a ridiculous idea, appropriately unconstitutional in the US.
I’m surprised Bryan Caplan is so low on your reader rankings. I guess the normie objection to Caplan is his open borders policy but it’s really for me to find anything that I actually disagree with him on. Maybe too soft on criminals and drug users?
Advocating for the destruction of civilization, even if unintentionally, is a pretty big black mark.
Liking Adam Smith a lot is something of a blue-pilled libertarian thing. Once you read the Austrians his output on economics becomes less impressive.
Surprised that Zionism and “my country should support Israel over the Palestinians” scored the same. I expected Zionism to score much higher. I thought the median Hanania reader would say that Israel is clearly better and contributes more to civilization, but that the US should go isolationist.
I put 5 on both, but I'd pull out our bases and troops and phase out all military aid (we can have exceptions, like our few people running a radar station in the Negev), I'd still work with them on hacking Iran's nuclear program, missile defense, cyber, space colonization, and so on, and would continue to sell them weapons. I'm generally non-interventionist, but I'm not a full-blown isolationist. I'd close a lot of US bases and withdraw a lot of US troops (from Europe, ME, Asia), and wouldn't start any wars, but I wouldn't end our alliances.
I would guess that Zionism is weighed down by a low response rate, a fair number of frogs and Unz types just giving it a 1, and a bunch of regular based people not giving a response or giving it a 4, being like "yeah, Israel is better, it has high IQ, high TFR, high sector, but can the Republicans just shut up about it already and focus on civil rights?" I'm curious if the high standard deviation mostly comes form lots of 1's and lots of 4's, that would be my guess.
Curious what the rating for Zionism is when you restrict to everyone who gave Hitler a 1.
Frankly I was a little surprised you ranked so highly. There’s a lot of freaking people on that list and many of them founded our country.
I mean, it's the Richard Hanania newsletter. I'm sure he attracts far more than his fair share of "I disagree with you but I like to read smart people with different views" liberals (the Scott Alexander/Steven Pinker crowd), but basically it's a newsletter for his fans, so of course he is going to rank highly.
For sure, and he deserves it. My point was just that Hanania might be a five relative to other bloggers and a 4 once you throw Washington and Lincoln into the mix. No shame in ranking 11 against that competition.
Richard, do you believe in god?
Quit grunching, he answers this question in the post you're replying to.
(No, he doesn't.)
Glenn Gaywald over Shinzo Abe... What a shame.
Hanania readers soyjaking over a black man in a bow tie making basic Libertarian points and giving a mild critique of black culture.
Given that you are a self-professed pro-natalist guy who thinks employers should be able to sleep with their secretaries, I am amazed your survey does nothing to address family law, divorce, child support, or alimony. Perhaps in 20 years.?
Turchin lost me when he invented a composite measure of social disorder adding together three or four things and put equations with second derivatives of it in his book. I'm all for trying to quantify stuff but there's stuff that you really can't treat like a physics equation, and when you do you wind up getting nonsense.