Richard Hanania Cope: "Left-Right isn't real"

"Yet this essay presents a different spectrum, one that puts Mao, the Taliban, ISIS, SJWs, Jacobins, early Christians and abolitionists on one side, with military juntas, Republicans, nineteenth and twentieth century monarchies, and US puppet regimes in the third world on the other. This TV-reading spectrum"

Internationalism is a hell of a drug.

I haven't read anything else in the essay and I can already tell you what's going on: a selection effect. Publishers are colonized by more-leftists, driving away any less-leftist. By default, TV became less-leftist, driving away more-leftists. 

Hanania has to attribute parochial coincidence to inherent timeless facts, because he's a Platonist. Performatively blind to local conditions. 

--

"This is a very long piece (about 9,000 words). I thought about breaking it up into different essays, but concluded this is one of those things where you need to see the argument in its entirety to appreciate the constituent parts."

Rectified: "I am very dumb and very impressed by my slightly-less-dumb-than-usual arguments. I'm sure nobody has ever said anything like this prosaic cold take before." 

 

"Political psychology interested in the question has fallen into two camps: narratives that flatter the left and insult the right, and those that work in the lab but don’t explain all that much in real life."

Here we learn Hanania reads idiots and then talks about the idiot things they say, rather than trying to find non-idiots.

Reminder: high O low C vs high C low O. Second, irresponsible vs. responsible. 

In a non-Satanic country those two are decoupled such that the low-C population is allowed to be as responsible as it is capable of, and not allowed to be irresponsible except via voluntary, personal charity.

High O is a good thing. Not coincidentally, high-O high-C codes for libertarian, but of course being top X% on two axes is inherently much rarer than being top X% on any one axis. Libertarians are good people corrupted by a catastrophically bad environment. Less-bad people, anyway.

"I want to present a new theory of American politics: liberals live in a world dominated by the written word, while conservatism is something of a pre-literate culture."

Yeah this doesn't look like partisan kto kogo at all. Definitely not status posturing pretending to be abstract theory. Nope.

Reality: high-O low-C means you can get suckered by Sophistry and you don't care about principles. There's no reason not to just profess whatever ideas are currently winning...in the short term, at least.

"On both sides, only a minority reads any particular newspaper, but having half of your supporters read something instead of 15%, or whatever the exact numbers are, creates a completely different culture."

Wet streets cause rain.

Journalism is an inherently parasitic, irresponsible, leftist profession. On top of this, the Regime has captured every newspaper. 

Why don't less-leftists enjoy being berated, guys? It's so hard to explain how the rain gets from the wet streets up into the clouds so it can rain.

"they have apolitical content and should actually be considered more news than sources of entertainment."

lol

Oh yeah my side is vastly more objective and mature and non-narcissist than your side. I'm so totes credible. 

"Some just didn’t like the fact that we had a black president, or were motivated by the same things conservatives have hated about liberals since the 1960s."

My motivations are pure rationality; your motivations are all about psychological needs.

Super duper credible and not biased at all.

"But while Vox has an agenda, it’s somewhat subtle"

You would literally be better served by watching paint dry rather than reading Hanania. Go for a walk. Literally anything else. Really. This article constitutes self-harm.

"Liberals being more ideological is not necessarily a good or bad thing"

We're all fundamentalists here, right? Being more fanatically obsessed with the latest fatwas is super defensible, right? 

"Republicans, because they are tribal and not ideological, do not punish their politicians for non-directional lying, or simply making things up." 

Yeah. Subtle agenda. So subtle. 

"Yet these are lies (or more usually, kinds of self-delusion)"

When ""liberals"" lie, it's practically excusable! They just can't help themselves, the poor dears. 

"Perhaps the most dishonest and annoying form of conservative non-directional lying"

See, conservatives are just not beer-worthy, unlike us terribly ingroup ""liberals."" We're so ingroup you guys. Like, whoa. 

"Liberals don’t do this."
"This difference can be explained by Democrats having a base that cares about ideas"
"rooted in the worlds of journalism, academia, and activism"
"Ideological movements can commit atrocities, but they tend to be less corrupt."

Sorry, no quips, I threw up in my mouth a little. 

"And polls say most people support gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws for LGBT"

Lie. Even California voted against it. Polls flipped because, once the legislation was rammed through, they became resigned to the "new normal." Resignation != support, you disgusting Satanist.

Well, we do expect literal sodomites like Hanania to be φαγγωτς. Not one of the good ones. (Milo isn't/wasn't either.) We also expect φαγγωτς to be followers of fellow sodomite Plato. That makes sense.

Morality is dictated by the top; democracy is inherently a lie.

"I can see why conservatives do the “Dems are the real racists” thing. [...] Republican politicians continue to do things like oppose [BLM spiking the black-on-black murder rate through the roof]."

Remember that ""liberals"" will repeat every racial slur they know, then say, "It's bad, you shouldn't say these things," to put the act at one remove. Hilariously, every ""liberal"" list of banned slurs includes new slurs you've never heard of. They know more derogatory language than you do, because that's what they care to know. What will liberals actually not do? Genuinely praise non-whites. "Oh those terrible republicans keep saying blacks have a higher crime rate! So terrible! You should never say that." Hanania is defending this proud tradition.

 

"Yet going from pro-civil unions to pro-gay marriage to pro-trans is not the same as going from democratizing Iraq to not caring about Iraq and opposing universal vaccinations."

Given everything else is a journalism, this is likely also a journalism. At least this Sophistry has some sophistication to it. 

It's actually pretty easy. Leftism is not entropy, but it's certainly more about pushing water downhill. 

Leftism is about picking an issue and making it worse and worse over time, in an egalitarian/Fascist direction. This works because leftism only has to win once, whereas rightism has to win every time. (The fact they lose every time, because they're less-leftist instead of rightist, is merely an intensifier.) 

The less-left is running around trying to put out all the fires started by the left. At each moment, they're trying to put out the biggest fire. However, they have a handicap: they're not allowed to interfere with the arsonist. 

America has legalized arson. In fact it pays cash bounties for most houses burnt down. The less-left can't argue that arson should be re-criminalized, because that would be rightist. Inegaliarian. Undemocratic. AntiFascist. Instead they're reduced to trying to douse the biggest blaze at any given time. 

They in fact do try to put out blazes when they're still small embers tucked into a corner, but there are so many arsonists - the cash prizes, dontcha know - that even this is a losing battle.  

P.S.Hanania is very surprised that politicians use motivated reasoning:
"For example, some have claimed that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than liberals. When you ask people whether individuals should like the military and defer to cops, surprisingly enough conservatives are more “authoritarian.” Yet change the elites in question, and suddenly liberals become the authoritarians. Attempts to explain that conservatism is rooted in prejudice similarly fail because it turns out both sides are prejudiced, just against different groups."

Weird, local cultures prefer local authorities rather than hostile foreign authorities. How did that happen. I am 12 and what is this. 

"Jonathan Haidt showed that in the abstract conservatives and liberals will adopt different values, but moral foundations matter a lot less than partisanship in the real world."

Weird, why is this partisan so partisan. So strange. 

"Practically speaking, Left is a direction while Right is brownian motion."
https://nitter.42l.fr/Outsideness/status/1455399396732915712

Yeah, why are less-leftists so bad at being not-leftists? Such a puzzle.