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That goofy picture you chose of the Roman soldier 100% encapsulates why I stopped engaging with the "dissident" right people I knew even though I'd been talking with them online for like 15 years. They will have read like 50 fat monographs about the Roman Empire or Orthodox theology and then combine that with a bunch of alternative modern press and construct all that into some master narrative about the way the world works. They are often actually smart and good at pattern recognition but they intentionally narrow their vision so they only see minutia they approve of. Another species will read like the Selfish Gene and 500,000 blog posts about evo-psych and absolutely nothing else.

The straw that broke the camels back for me was I arguing with this dude I know who knows more about the Roman Empire than anybody who isn't a professional classicist. And he's making all these grand arguments about how empires fall and how elites get corrupted and decadence blah blah blah. And somewhere in this conversation he said something to the effect of how stupid obsession with economic growth is. (Line go up, hurr durr!) We started arguing about that and it became apparent that this dude did not understand that one of the main reasons "line go up" is productivity growth and that productivity is growth largely a product of technological innovation! This is utterly basic knowledge for anybody who wants to be a non-stupid person and especially anybody who has the gall to make long term predictions based on extrapolated macrohistorical trends.

This is 100% the same thing being done by smart leftist people who read 3000 books written by Derrick Bell, James Baldwin, Judith Butler and stuff like "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India" and absolutely nothing else. They know about every lynching that ever happened or about obscure black separatists from the 1920s but, again, don't understand basic stuff about what productivity means or how evolution works.

That combined with the fact these guys are almost always *confident* in their wrongness and yet still managed to be petulant and bitter made me realize what a waste of my time it was. I have better things to do with my time than argue with vaguely Nazi Strong Sad.

I don't trust anybody who thinks deep knowledge in one hyper specific domain translates into knowing how the whole universe works.

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It would be already something if they had the guts to be "Nazi Strong" in real life, but you eventually see them larping as SA supersoldiers just posting stupid memes about big nose bad. The same with leftoids larping as "elections are useless, let's burn Wall Mart" Guevarists and then they don't burn any Wall Mart....

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The dissident right is far more in touch with reality than any other mass political movement. It is the only mass political movement where hereditarianism, one of the central facts of human existence, is widely recognized.

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May 29
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I never said neoliberalism was the answer to all our problems. I'm actually pro industrial policy when it comes to industries important to defense, and I think it's dumb to ignore the consistent role massive government subsidies, grants, and general favors have had in key industries. Like, we have satellites in orbit today largely because the government dumped a bunch of money into getting men to the moon. All kinds of important stuff has been invented literally on the government payroll. Turing's project as another example was to crack Nazi codes in WWII. Government isn't necessarily "better" and it often sucks, but it's indisputably had a major hand in technological innovation.

I think it's unlikely that if AI, gene editing, and robotics truly takes off, "the coming wave" as it were, that vanilla neoliberalism or political liberalism will be able to handle it. Just like how feudalism and absolute monarchy makes no sense in an industrialized, secularized society. I don't think we even understand what sorts of things we might need to do yet.

But pretending we have in fact not discovered basic laws about how markets work is stupid. It's ignoring gravity stuff. The basic rules about supply and demand are just true. The basic rules about productivity and growth are just true. I'm making 0 moral statements here. I'm merely talking about the mechanisms behind why these work.

I'm not a genetic determinist just because I understand the basic principles of evolution either.

The point is that if you want to be non-stupid, you must take the world as it is and not how you wish it was. Even wanting to change it into something else still has to begin by admitting how it works *now.*

*Edit* I realized something may be a point of confusion with the issue I had with the guy I was arguing with so I'm adding this late edit. He did not understand that the line going up *incorporates* productivity growth. I had made some statement about technology often improving productivity in history and he responded with something like "but the line isn't a measure of technological innovation" and I was just bamboozled. Like, you may think that line going up is setting us up for an inevitable collapse (and even be right), but if you don't even understand that like farm mechanization improved agricultural productivity and that's one of the things that line is measuring, you don't know what you are talking about. In this case, the guy with the "End is Nigh" cardboard sign is also accidentally right and he also has no idea what he's talking about.

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May 30
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Even assuming an objective moral law (what C. S. Lewis calls the Tao) exists, it doesn't do a thing to change the fact that the Earth orbits the sun, evolution by natural selection is a thing, and technology improves productivity across time which makes line go up. These things will stay true until mass extinction, we get sucked into a black hole, Christ comes back, singularity, etc.

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Jun 1
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Okay, cool. As I already said:

"Like, you may think that line going up is setting us up for an inevitable collapse (and even be right), but if you don't even understand that like farm mechanization improved agricultural productivity and that's one of the things that line is measuring, you don't know what you are talking about."

It may be the case that gravity is drawing us into a black hole. Doesn't change one single thing about the nature of gravity.

And that will be the last response I make here.

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“I think holding to a traditional religious faith is cowardly, but I’ll admit that I usually don’t say that because I don’t want to needlessly alienate people who might agree with me on other things.”

You should go ahead and do a whole post on this. As someone who practices and believes in a traditional religion, it would be interesting to hear why I’m a coward. You could show you are not a coward by writing it.

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Secular people worldwide are on average bigger cowards than Religious people of any sect.

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May 29
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Surely that is Richard hiding his beliefs for his own advancement, as Dave Greene said..?

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I’d like to hear him explain why some of the finest people I know, some courageous people, are cowards. It’s a strong word. Religious people are used to being attacked from the left. It looks increasingly likely that in the future we’re going to be attacked from both the right and the left. I’d like to get an idea how that is going to play out, and hearing Richard speak clearly and openly on why he believes people who believe in traditional religions are cowards will help clarify that.

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May 29
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He said: “I usually don’t say that.”

So, say it in detail.

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May 29
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So much of the dissident right is just people who can’t succeed in a market economy seeking validation. It’s the same as the socialist left.

Socialist left: “in true socialism my talents will be appreciated! I won’t be in a dead end academic position for $30k per year!”

Dissident right: “Once society rewards TRUE virtue (ie the virtue that I have) I will no longer be a midlevel manager at an Orchard Supply Hardware! Girls who wear prairie dresses will talk to me!”

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It's also an elite overproduction thing and weird inflated expectations. Like 30K is terrible wages, but there's people who interpret anything below like 125K or tenure or similar as failure. This is a really weird attitude for most people to have. Normies may have stupid preferences in many respects but being satisfied with 60K and being able to pay all your bills and save for retirement and have a dog and a used Honda isn't one of them.

More wannabe elite people need to accept this. You live in the USA. You have basically infinite cheap entertainment options. It's not particularly hard to raise 2ish kids and live in some place that doesn't suck with meh level effort in material conditions that most people on Earth and most humans in history would have killed for. So you probably won't get tenure at Harvard or become a millionaire writing novels or found a successful tech startup. So fucking what? There are infinite other things you can do that don't suck and the choice is up to you.

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The dissident right complaint is that merely getting the wife and 2 kids is hard in some significant way, as is clearly visible in sun replacement fertility rates.

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A lot of that is people choosing to have less kids because with affluence comes the reality that kids represent ever higher opportunity costs. Now inasmuch as fewer people wanting kids translates into it being harder to find partners who want kids, fair enough.

I will give one anecdote that I do think illustrates an issue with a huge subset of this class though. There's this guy I used to talk to online who got very into Orthodoxy. He is quite smart, can code, and is doing some kind of dead end construction job, and is approaching 40 with no wife and family though he wants both. He lives in his grandma's basement. My advice to this dude was "Hey, guy, start going to church and participate in small groups. You will meet people, build a network, and there's definitely a larger chance you will meet single chicks who want kids there than sitting around in your basement." Nope, no dice. He just keeps sitting in the basement.

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The higher opportunity cost of children owes much to physical labor being outsourced or undersold to immigrants. That left white collar work and make-work requiring increasingly elaborate credentials to find reliable income streams, and now even that well has dried up. People are interested in seeing potential solutions to this problem that do not involve continuing to pour gasoline on the fire (immigration).

Individuals leaving their basements is a good idea. Here, both the mainstream and dissident right are guilty of elevating tech billionaires who sell the intellectual equivalent of heroin that makes it very easy to stay in basements.

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That techno heroin is most of the real opportunity cost. The reality is that having kids means I can watch fewer Netflix videos and play fewer games. This is the main reason why fertility starts falling off a cliff in any society once it starts getting rich be it communist surveillance state, Western democracy, Islamist, or whatever. Nobody likes saying it because it's so vapid. Instead they talk about cost of housing or climate doom or terrible dating apps or sexism/feminism or whatever. Those all matter to some degree. But most of it is kids = less leisure.

But we aren't going to *intentionally* decel because 98% of people don't want to be poorer. And you can't undo technological advancement. You can sort of regulate it into senility but given China that seems to do 0 to increase fertility.

Immigration is only a temporary stopgap. All the places that immigrants come from have collapsing fertility as well.

I have no simple answer to this problem. It probably involves making it as trivially easy to have kids as possible and convincing people that having kids is *fun.* They don't care about it being noble, patriotic, good for the species, or economically sensible to have someone take care of you when you are old.

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Shared community, nationalism / patriotism seem stronger salves than cost reduction. America saw fertility decline faster with the loss of these - it is a wealthier country than many rivals with worse fertility. These less tangible values are the ones that Dave Greenes article points out that Hannia either scoffs at or rejects.

The future may belong to whichever country outright bans the internet and smartphones rather than mere regulation.

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I am afraid that is largely true.

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May 29
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Curtis Yarvin and Lomez don't act like the people RH is criticizing. David Greene didn't used to either. The worst thing about the Dissident Right isn't just that they are messed up freaks, it's that they devote all their attention to trying to bring everyone they interact with down to their level, and usually they succeed.

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Yes, every movement with any sort of momentum or decent following at all has successful, smart people at the top. That's how hierarchy works. And randos aren't worth doxxing.

Also, it's kind of weird that you are taunting me with the success of the top people in the dissident right when I just said envy was a problem people who find themselves in the upper center of the status/income bell curve need to get over.

The envy issue isn't even specifically a dissident right problem. Look at the explosion with that angry antiracist white guy on Twitter recently who couldn't get a tenured faculty job. A bunch of people are competing for a bunch of scarce resources - venture capital money for their startups, tenured faculty positions, publication deals for their book, good jobs at FAANG or hot new AI companies, houses in highly desirably neighborhoods, and on and on. I'm saying people should chill if they don't make this cut. *Most* smart people don't make this cut. And if all these upset smart people are half so smart as they think they are, it should be (and is) trivially easy for them to attain middle to upper middle class success and there are a million fulfilling things they can still do with their lives. Some amount of striving is always good, but at the moment you start letting it turn you into a nasty, bitter, little twat you need to learn to let it go.

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May 30
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I'll second this. I'm not quite sure if I qualify as "dissident right" either, but I will say that I have very few complaints about where I personally have ended up in life. I like to tell myself my political beliefs are a result of reasoning from carefully chosen first principles, but to the extent that they're emotionally driven (and surely there is some degree of that), the driving emotion is disgust. Disgust at what I see as the purposeful undoing and reversal of human flourishing. My ability to evade these forces personally does not alleviate my hatred for them. Part of that is because every now and then I've had brush ins with one of them trying to grasp at me, albeit unsuccessfully as of yet, thank goodness.

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This is obviously not the main point of your article, but your statement that “I think holding to a traditional religious faith is cowardly” is silly, at least without further exposition.

The majority of people who are traditionally religious are religious out of habit and/or because of the social or psychological benefits that it provides. It’d be fair to describe that as shallow, unexamined, or perhaps even stupid if one doesn’t believe in God or religion. However I don’t know what it is that someone who is habitually religious is afraid of that would make them a coward.

I suppose you may be saying that they’re afraid of death or defining some subjective meaning to life for themselves, but having known many religious people I don’t think that’s a motivating factor for even most people who are religious.

Taking history as an example, I don’t think one could plausibly describe the Christian martyrs as being “cowardly”. To take more modern examples Muslim jihadists and Jewish settlers may be many bad things but I wouldn’t describe them as being cowards. Even the missionaries recently murdered in Haiti are at least brave for traveling to a dangerous country in their hope of saving souls. In all of these cases people face hardship and death because of their religious faith. I don’t think many secular people would ever be brave enough to face death absent some pseudo religious ideology like nationalism or communism. It’s not difficult to see how traditional religion has led many people to overcome their fears and accomplish more than they otherwise would.

These accomplishments aren’t limited to martyrdom and missionaries either. America was founded in large part on the religious faith of its original settlers. If one reads any of the writings of the puritans who settled New England one immediately appreciates that the pacification of the American wilderness was viewed as an act of faith, and the settlers themselves credit their success and courage to their belief in God’s providence.

This is only tangentially related to the above comments, but if you are right about God there is no point to any of your projects. Humanity will eventually perish. Everything anyone has ever worked for will cease to exist. Everyone will be forgotten, and it will not matter that anyone ever accomplished anything. Attempts to increase human wealth and happiness won’t really matter that much, because in the end the same effect could have been accomplished by mass suicide. Human existence would just be transitory and it won’t have much of any meaning. I suppose that’s fine, and we just do the best with what we’ve got, but I’m skeptical that anybody really believes that the destiny of humanity is just eventual inevitable extinction (at least without some hope of anything more).

In any case, I appreciate your takes on labor unions, the CRA, the vaccine, and even IVF. I hope you don’t let the haters get to you!

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Rich is very good at digesting disagreement. He's certsinly not above criticism, but he actually cares about building something that'd directly improve the lives of the vast majority of people, and bases his decisions on actually following where the data leads, even when that warrants a change in mind on his part.

We need more of that in the World.

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Valid criticism. I interpreted his comment as complaining that traditional religious often dodge reasoned debate because their epistemology is grounded in faith. I'm sympathetic to that gripe. But calling religious people cowardly is off and dumb... I'd like to see Richard clarify what he means here.

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I think Richard means intellectual cowardice.

And I see his point…traditional religion *works*. It’s a practical solution to a lot of hard problems. An evolved solution.

But those who adopt it are dodging the hard questions of theology.

I can see why many here are offended by the charge of cowardice. But I also see validity in what Richard is saying.

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On the contrary, I would claim that atheism gives one an easy out for most if not all difficult moral questions. If there is no eternal judge who will ultimately hold you to account outside of and above subjective human perception, then you are entirely justified in simply shapeshifting your beliefs to best fit whatever is convenient for you in any given moment.

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I didn't mention atheism at all.

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The claim is that the religious are cowards. My counter-claim is that atheism is more cowardly. So, if we really wanted to play that game, we're all cowards. Which then means that calling anyone cowardly on this particular subject is a meaningless label, and if we are determined to pin it on somebody, it belongs on atheists.

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He said "holding to a **traditional religious faith** is cowardly". (Emphasis mine.) That's not an endorsement of atheism, and I don't think a reasonable person would read it that way.

If he wanted to say "religion is cowardly" or "not being an atheist is cowardly" he could have. He didn't say that.

I believe Richard's point here is that holding to a traditional religious faith, where all the answers about God and creation and the afterlife and moral rules and and and... are just given to you, with no intellectual effort on your own part, is intellectually cowardly vs. thinking deeply about these things oneself and making up your own mind.

Because, of course, at most only one religion (out of thousands) can be true. And quite possibly not even one.

There are lots of things about the universe that we don't know, and perhaps can't know. Maybe an unitary God exists. Maybe many Gods exist. Or none. Or we are living in a simulation. Or the simulators are God. And if God(s) exist, why did they create the universe? Do they know we exist or care? Do we have a purpose in their plans or are we an accidental side effect? And countless other questions.

To accept or address our lack of knowledge, and deal with it seriously, requires intellectual effort and fortitude. (Which as you pointed out in another comment, is impractical for most people, even those few with the intellectual ability to tackle it.)

...

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What are the hard questions of theology?

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See my reply today (above) to Person Online.

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Mitt Romney cosponsored a bill with Tom Cotton to raise the minimum wage and increase border security. He used to be pro-choice until it was no longer convenient to his career. He marched with BLM. He no longer even supports the Paul Ryan agenda to roll back entitlements drastically. He also blamed Dems for delaying the Ukrainian aid package because they didn't do it in exchange for more immigration controls. His nativist theocratic compassionate conservatism seems inconsistent with your worldview. On top of that, his theocratic bent seems to have been driven more by electoral convenience than principle. Is opposing election denial sufficient to become the best politician? If so, wouldn't Justin Amash be your closest analogue since foreign policy would probably be the only big point of disagreement?

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Richard likes Mitt Romney mainly for esthetic reasons (no, I'm not writing the word in Latin). That came through pretty clearly in his essay about him.

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Why do women deserve automatic"respect"in the modern world?They are being allowed to have their cake and eat it too across the whole of western societies. In the workplace equal pay has been largely achieved but now it's the emotion driven " gender pay gap "that must be addressed using whatever means necessary. Cue automatic promotions and prefential hirings of women. The hideous irony is that not only is any gender pay gap definitely going to be the other way around now it's also going to be unequal pay too as women take more sick leave etc. And white women more often than not ally themselves with non whites and even Muslims in so many social and political issues. The JQ to me is clearly one of where exactly do they belong/see themselves belonging. Those in western countries clearly like to slide in and out of the" white"/historically oppressed minority dynamic whenever it suits them. But boy has that one come back to bite them hyena style right now.

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Funny rightoids have always problem about women having their part of their cake but not blacks and mexicans. Then you see who really control the Dissident Right and you understand why...

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As far as dissident right types go, I like the Zman’s (Dissident Writer) take on the JQ. He acknowledges it, but doesn’t obsess over it or allow it to obfuscate everything else he thinks about.

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This is all true! This encapsulates a lot of what I was trying to express in my criticism of Walt https://benthams.substack.com/p/beefing-with-bismarck.

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People always look for tells, or the more vulgar term “dog whistles”. “I think immigration is good because it increases GDP” is a tell that someone thinks that GDP is a useful stat for measuring the health or prosperity of a countries population. The meta politics is that most “dissident right” writers, but simultaneously most GOP voters reject this premise. So anyone still saying it is trying to shill for team blue.

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GDP per capita. And it is. It’s not everything, but it’s useful.

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One can see the effects of this high GDP per capita in the big cities with the most immigrants. When the past eight years have been voters and pundits saying “we don’t want that”, I would expect Hannia to have to work extra hard for justifying it. It is like saying, “the conservative case for DEI initiatives.”

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Rent is higher in those cities is still higher than it has ever been, and much higher than in rural towns. This indicates that people still prefer the economic activity of cities over the tranquility of the rural world.

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Rent is kept artificially high by restricting the supply of housing. Beyond that, campaign issues now are about creating more rural jobs, and nuking trade deals that historically eliminated rural jobs.

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Unemployment right now is at incredibly low levels, I don't think that the problem is too few jobs. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

Also , if a job disappears that is usually because it is useless. People doing less useless stuff is a good thing.

I agree that rent would be lower without supply restrictions. But the fact that it manages to increase so much tells you something about the demand side of the dynamics.

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Unemployment rate declined both due to more native jobs being created or given value due to trump era policies. Also due to a lot of immigration - all of bidens new jobs went to immigrants.

The bulk of useless jobs are in academia and government. Trying to focus on “inefficient” rural or factory jobs rather than the massive parasitism involved in academia is another tell.

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You just dislike Whites because they forced u to live around blacks and have a bizarre fetish for them; which to be clear, is the most legitimate case for disliking Whites anyone has ever made. Yes the Caths are cucks, and so are the evangelicals but goddamn it Hoste; don’t you see that you could rule the right if you kicked Fuentes off and became who u’ve always been?

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You’re right that becoming the leader of white nationalists or the edgy right is the most financially lucrative path, and it’s not even close. I just respect women and the Jewish people too much.

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Fuentes may be more popular and famous than Hanania, but elites actually read Hanania and take him seriously. No one subscribes to Fuentes with elite university emails.

Anyway, Fuentes is a hateful troll, not an intellectual.

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If Fuentes is technically more famous than Hanania, it's certainly not in any good way. I don't think he's more popular in the sense that more people actually like him. He has a tiny audience and much of his remaining engagement is likely fake. He's a joke whose 15 minutes of fame are long past.

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Elites do not take him seriously?

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Fuentes doesn't rule. There's the idea that your first day in prison you should start a fight with the strongest guy to show how unafraid you are; Fuentes is weak enough to make you seem cowardly (but at least he's not Jackson Hinkle).

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If you genuinely believe Jews are not over represented in positions of power relative to their intelligence and neoliberal economics is good for most people, you are just factual wrong. As someone who used to be an Alt Right writer, it's weird that you would be ignorant of these things. Jews have an average IQ of 107 which isn't nearly enough to explain making up half the upper class. Pretty much all great economic booms in history have come in times with protectionism and government investment in the economy. The quality of life is observable lower for most people in America than it was before mass immigration.

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It's about 110 not 107. And IQ is in fact the main thing causing Jewish overrepresentation, but there are other traits as well like higher general factor of personality and personality differences like lower agreeableness, higher interest in politics, etcetera. Hanania has said many times that Jews are overrepresented among political donors even controlling for billionaire representation. Cofnas has said many times that Jews are not indistinguishable from white gentiles with 10 extra IQ points. The point is that there is no conspiracy by Jews to use left-wing ideas to subvert Western civilization toward Jewish interests as the alt-right and Kevin McDonald allege, and as anyone who has had their opens for the last 8 months can figure out.

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You are just wrong on it being 110, they don't score high enough of tests like the SAT for that to be plausible. Personality doesn't give you half of the upper classes' wealth despite having a lower average IQ than many East Asian ethnic groups and only being 2% of the population, only nepotism does that. It's well documented that they are far to the left of the general population, with the exception of wanting to genocide brown people in Palestine, so I don't see why you would deny that. Theorizing that it's partially motivated malicious intent even has data backing it because many Jew's in surveys report that they want to use Affirmative Action to hurt White people.

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Did you see cremieux' piece on Jewish intelligence? It https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq estimates 110.

Genocide? Lol, yeah the only genocide where hundreds of thousands of civilians are evacuated to get out of harm's way, and a couple ten thousand civilians of a vastly weaker enemy that fires from behind hospitals. And brown? Yeah, https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1793439437415907673 ...

Jews lean left that's true, but I expect that to change in the future, it's already changing. Largely an American phenomenon. British, Australian, Canadian Jews lean right. A lot of it is just that the American right is very much Christian, anti-abortion, etcetera.

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Even at 110 they would still be over represented. https://www.josephbronski.com/p/jewish-iq-ethnocentrism-dissident?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Israel's average IQ is only 95 and they don't score that high on tests making me believe the lower estimates of 107 are closer to the truth.

They are also one of the most radical far left groups in the country so fantasies about them becoming based are pretty delusional.

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I agree, J overrepresentation is not just IQ. Anyway, cremieux used 2015 PISA to obtain an estimate for Israel of about 97, with ~85 for Arabs and 102-103 for Jews (~110 for Ashkenazi, ~99 for the others), see https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/updated-estimates-of-iqs-within-israel (paywalled though). On the most recent PISA 2022, all of Israel including the Arabs was just a few points behind the UK on the verbal section.

I expect J will vote more and more Republican over the next few decades. I don't think J's are super radical far-left, for instance they opposed Sanders in the primary and now the far-left hates them.

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No matter how high-IQ and creative someone is, the chud soul is a turn-off and can only be cured from within.

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It's also true that a big percentage of such types just mundanely probably have clinical depression and refuse to do anything about it because considering this might be true is icky and feminine and therapeutic. I'm completely amenable to the idea that therapy makes most people worse, but it's hard to see how a depressed, resentful, basement dweller could possibly be made worse by some therapist telling him to consider that maybe his emotions aren't necessarily caused by the rot in Western civilization or whatever and he could just have a chemical imbalance.

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It doesn’t even have to be therapy. If those guys just hit the gym, work on their social skills, join a church (instead as LARPing as a “based Orthobro” online), etc. they’d stop being obsessed with “da joos” all day.

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They can't. Heroin devoured their brain since they attended that high school party when they were teens...

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Nah, they are just a bunch of drug addicted.

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Agree. There's a deep connection between personal psychology and politics, and I wrote about my experience with this here - https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-myself-in-2015

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Pro-white authors appear to often mix up the categories "what is good for white people" and "what is good for nation-states and/or economies". These people could all very simply condemn Richard for being neither white nor pro-white, and that would be the end of it. Instead they're muddling up their own objection to him. I don't know why someone would do this beyond social desirability bias -- it's good to care about the country but not good to just care about white people.

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I think it comes down to this: Getting past one's own confirmation bias, to the extent humanly possible, is your superpower.

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OMG you like your own posts... Anyway, the most pronounced feature of internet discourse is that it tends towards metaconversations. I suspect this is because they tend to be moral in nature( what are someones motives, is yadayada a polite thing to say) and thus everyone can have an opinion. You can sound off, you don't have to wait for an expert that shares your values and passively support them. So, I agree, I will also like.

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I do not like my own posts,I restack, which is I think why it looks like a like.

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What is a meta-conversation. Like, we’re having a conversation now, if you respond. What would make it “meta”?

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A meta-conversation is a conversation about a conversation.

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"These are often the same people who are mad about “Jewish influence,” and seek nefarious explanations of why they are overrepresented among American elites, when that group’s combination of intelligence and interest in politics is enough to solve the apparent mystery."

sure, The Lobby doesn't have anything to do with it, does it? all those campaign contributions don't have the slightest influence, do they? Anyway, for someone who promised to use this article to explain away the "dissident right", you sure spent a lot of time talking about yourself

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It’s quite clear from the article that he talked about himself because he was addressing dissident right folks who question his motivations. However, I think you are correct that he is too glib about Jewish influence. It’s true that Jews are very smart, interested in politics, etc. but these facts do not contradict the fact that their political motivations often relate to Jewish concerns. RH has a carve out for the Jews because of their victimhood but whites are not entitled to a homeland because hardworking POC can’t get their act together in their own homelands.

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Greg Cochran's complaint about their concerns is that they have been crazy. Freudianism wasn't in anyone's interest, it was just a bad idea that got very popular for no good reason.

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Freudianism (which was later combined into Freudo-Marxism by Frankfurt School-types) was seen as a way to defuse anti-Semitism (seen as “irrational”) by opening the safety valves of repressed sexuality. Theodor Adorno, supported by the American Jewish Committee, developed the F-scale (F for fascism) to measure authoritarianism (the alleged root of fascism) in individuals. So, there does appear to be a group interest aspect. And why shouldn’t we expect a very smart, verbally precocious, but physically defenseless, group to take proactive measures against an often hostile majority?

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> Freudianism (which was later combined into Freudo-Marxism by Frankfurt School-types) was seen as a way to defuse anti-Semitism

What does "was seen" mean here? Certainly it might be seen that way by various antisemites, but this appears to be the result of absurdly selective focus of attention. For example, in all of Freud's writings, I'm aware of maybe two or three sentences that address psychoanalytic motivations for antisemitism, which occur in the middle of his 1939 book long after he'd successfully founded psychoanalysis, and when in fact he was mere months away from death. Now, I mercifully haven't read all of Freud, so maybe there's going to be a small handful of other passages like this somewhere if you look hard enough, but the point is that this topic was a tiny footnote in his oeuvre, however stupid that oeuvre ultimately proved to be, not some central focus from the very beginning that serves as any kind of plausible ur-motivation for the entire project.

If your point is not that Freud conceptualized psychoanalysis as a clandestine weapon for Jewish interests but that his successors in the Frankfurt School did, this also needs better justification. It's true that the Frankfurt School disliked antisemitism (as almost all leftists did at least in theory, Jewish or not), but most also seem to have regarded Zionism as equally ethnocentric and authoritarian. The most straightforward inference is that they were against ethnocentrism and authoritarianism full-stop, regardless of whether doing so advanced Jewish interests specifically - even if we now agree they were extremely bad at successfully identifying one or both of those traits.

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My recollection is that Szasz has some passages from Freud's writing in which he self-consciously thinks of himself as a Jewish champion, but I don't recall it being a matter of anti-semitism.

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There are definitely other parts of his writing where he says positive things about Jews and and talks about his own Jewish identity, mostly towards the end of his life while grappling with the explosion of national socialism. (Though maybe someone who's better read can correct me on the timing there.) But if I recall correctly, these aren't really instances of him trying to apply psychoanalysis to anything, much less antisemitism.

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Thank you for your well-written reply. I don’t think Freudians or Frankfurt School members needed to make explicit (non-public) statements that their intellectual movements and/or related political projects were more or less invented solely as clandestine efforts to make society safe for Jews and still contain a bias in the direction of Jewish interests. As you say, the most straightforward inference is that they were against ethnocentrism (but not their own) and authoritarianism—as we would expect them to be given the dangers to Jews from these problems. Freudianism, Marxism, Boasianism, etc. can be sincerely believed and also be perceived as solutions to anti-Semitism. Except for rabid anti-Semites, no one was more focused on the JQ than the Jews. This would more easily explain why very smart Jews stampeded into these pseudo-intellectual movements (and Leftist movements in general). Obviously, it won’t do to argue that they fell for pseudo-intellectual movements because they were so smart. There was literally nothing stopping smart Jews from blasting holes in these movements (of course, I happily concede that many did). To take an example from a non-Jewish (but much smaller) intellectual movement, Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique thesis can be sincerely believed by him and his followers and also be used as a tool to serve white nationalist interests.

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> As you say, the most straightforward inference is that they were against ethnocentrism (but not their own)

It's pretty mysterious why the allegedly ethnocentric Frankfurt School was heavily opposed to Israel and essentially called for its abolition by replacing it with a demographically majority-Arab single state. Not even MacDonald suggests this was a still-deeper layer within layers to their Rube Goldberg group evolutionary strategy.

Anyway, I can agree that motivations can be hidden, definitely from outsiders and even from their own bearers. My point is that unless you're a big fan of Freudian psychoanalysis yourself, you shouldn't trust yourself to tease these out by vague introspection and story-weaving, especially when there are very obvious alternate hypotheses that haven't been ruled out. In the case of the Frankfurt School, the alternate hypothesis is "They agreed with practically all other educated Western leftists of the time that all forms of ethnocentrism are bad, and for the same reasons; their opposition to anti-semitism was a mere corollary to this and not an explanatory cause."

It's also very easy to argue that they fell for pseudo-intellectual movements because they're smart. All you need for that is to develop in an intellectual bubble in which, despite being intelligent yourself, you're not heavily exposed to high-quality withering criticism of your academic subculture's foundational views that you're forced to confront rather than permitted to ignore. This happens all the time, all over the place. For example, I would bet a lot of money that all the most prolific self-identified Marxist academics at elite universities today (mostly in squishy humanities departments like comparative literature) will have IQ's in the 130's or higher regardless of ethnic origin; it doesn't stop them from believing crazy and arguably incoherent things because they're highly insulated, don't have professional obligations to think about much less respond to highly technical econometric arguments about historical GDP growth or inflation in this or that economy, etc.

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Elites become elites because someone lobbied them there? I think you should read Greg Clark on elite families.

I've seen capital 'L' "Lobby" used to refer to the Israel Lobby, my guess as to what you're referring to, but Hanania isn't talking about foreign policy there.

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