Thanks for the context. I think both your initial comment and reply, without further context (I personally did not have more context; I have not been following these discussions), lead to an innacurate picture of Hanania’s views. The title is provocatory, but my understanding based solely on skimming that post would be that Hanania is not “someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide”. Hanania thinks genocide is worse, but then focusses on pronouns due to personal fit considerations? From the post:
Hearing about what the Current Thing in South Korea was [“a man had molested a little girl, a judge gave him a light sentence, and society was outraged”] gave me an idea for an article. I would talk about how deformed liberal morality is. Deep down, leftists care about racial slurs more than genocide, misgendering more than cancer, fake gender income gaps more than factory farms and torturing children. But it didn’t take long for me to realize I’m not all that different. As Scott Alexander recently wrote,
“sometimes pundits will, for example, make fun of excessively woke people by saying something like “in a world with millions of people in poverty and thousands of heavily-armed nuclear missiles, you’re really choosing to focus on whether someone said something slightly silly about gender?” Then they do that again. Then they do that again. Then you realize these pundits’ entire brand is making fun of people who say silly things (in a woke direction) about gender, even though there are millions of people in poverty and thousands of nuclear missiles. So they ought to at least be able to appreciate how strong the temptation can be. As Horace puts it, “why do you laugh? Change the name, and the joke’s on you!””
Deep down, I know wokeness is not the most important issue facing humanity. I would contend it’s more important than most people think, say top 5-10 depending on how you count. Twice this year, there have been stories of women’s tears bringing down male scientists of unusual ability, one who had been working at MIT, the other running the “cancer moonshot” at the White House. I suspect that there might be some correlation between unique male talent and the likelihood of inspiring a PC mob to come after you (see also Roland Fryer). Regardless, wokeness is probably not as important as, for example, advancing anti-aging research. Part of my choice to write about it is that I feel like I have something unique and original to say on the topic. That means I can be most effective when talking about it, but that’s partly by design. I’ve hated wokeness so much, and so consistently over such a long period of my life, that I’ve devoted a large amount of time and energy to reading up on its history and legal underpinnings and thinking about how to destroy it. If I’d studied anti-aging research or space travel as much, I would probably have something interesting and useful to say about those topics.
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
Thanks for the context. I think both your initial comment and reply, without further context (I personally did not have more context; I have not been following these discussions), lead to an innacurate picture of Hanania’s views. The title is provocatory, but my understanding based solely on skimming that post would be that Hanania is not “someone who thinks that using they/them pronouns is worse than committing genocide”. Hanania thinks genocide is worse, but then focusses on pronouns due to personal fit considerations? From the post:
Hanania is a frequent and intentional provocateur. He knows exactly what he’s doing with this article. He has made clear explicit intent to use outrage towards himself to build a platform to overturn the US Civil Rights Act.
“I’ll tell you a secret to success. Always be pushing the envelope. As soon as you’ve done or said something that gets attention, resist the temptation to go rest on your laurels and become risk averse. Keep pushing, always give them a twist.”—Richard Hanania
This appears to be the source of the ‘pushing the envelope’ quote if anyone is interested:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1699223634349629771