Iâd just like to clarify that my blogroll should not be taken as a list of âworthy figure[s] who [are] friend[s] of EAâ! Theyâre just blogs I find often interesting and worth reading. No broader moral endorsement implied!
I have little patience with polite society, its inconsistencies in which views are and are not acceptable, and its games of tug-of-war with the Overton Window. My own standards are strict and idiosyncratic. If I held everyone to them, Iâd live in a lonely world, one that would exclude many my own circles approve of. And if you wonder whether I approve of something, Iâm always happy to chat.
I find it so maddeningly short-sighted to praise a white supremacist for being ârespectfulâ. White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people! Expand your moral circle!
A recurring problem I find with replies to criticism of associating with white supremacist figures like Hanania is a complete failure to empathize with or understand (or perhaps to care?) why people are so bothered by white supremacy. Implied in white supremacy is the threat of violence against non-white people. Dehumanizing language is intimately tied to physical violence against the people being dehumanized.
White supremacist discourse is not merely part of some kind of entertaining parlour room conversation. Itâs a bullet in a gun.
fyi, I weakly downvoted this because (i) you seem like youâre trying to pick a fight and I donât think itâs productive; there are familiar social ratcheting effects that incentivize exaggerated rhetoric on race and gender online, and I donât think we should encourage that. (There was nothing in my comment that invited this response.) (ii) I think youâre misrepresenting Trace. (iii) The âexpand your moral circleâ comment implies, falsely, that the only reason one could have for tolerating someone with bad views is that you donât care about those harmed by their bad views.
I did not mean the reference to Trace to function as a conversation opener. (Quite the opposite!) Iâve now edited my original comment to clarify the relevant portion of the tweet. But if anyone wants to disagree with Trace, maybe start a new thread for that rather than replying to me. Thanks!
If white supremacists are by definition non-respectful to non-white people, and Hanania appears fairly respectful to non-white people, perhaps that allows us to conclude that Hanania does not, in fact, qualify for your definition of âwhite supremacistâ?
The comment youâre replying to has somewhat sloppy language and reasoning. Unfortunately your comment managed to be even worse.
If white supremacists are by definition non-respectful to non-white people, and Hanania appears fairly respectful to non-white people, perhaps that allows us to conclude that Hanania does not, in fact, qualify for your definition of âwhite supremacistâ?
This line of reasoning is implausible. If having a single nonwhite person over on a podcast without being rude is strong evidence against white supremacy, trusting nonwhite people enough to ally with you in a war is surely even better evidence.
The literal historical Nazis allied in a literal war with literal historical Imperial Japan (a country which is mostly nonwhite). While I donât personally like to throw around phrases like âwhite supremacyâ very often, I think reasonable people can agree that Nazis are white supremacists.
This line of reasoning is implausible. If having a single nonwhite person over on a podcast without being rude is strong evidence against white supremacy, trusting nonwhite people enough to ally with you in a war is surely even better evidence.
The literal historical Nazis allied in a literal war with literal historical Imperial Japan (a country which is mostly nonwhite). While I donât personally like to throw around phrases like âwhite supremacyâ very often, I think reasonable people can agree that Nazis are white supremacists.
I think you must have missed the âIfâ clause at the beginning of my comment, or the reference to âyour definitionâ in my sentence.
Iâm not sure how much simpler I can make this, but Iâll give it a try.
Either disrespect towards non-white people is characteristic of white supremacy, or it is not. (Law of the excluded middle.)
If it is, then by conservation of expected evidence, respect towards non-white people is limited evidence against white supremacy.
If it is not, then Yarrowâs original claim âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â would appear to be false.
So, it sounds like maybe youâre trying to argue against Yarrowâs original claim that âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â, by giving the concrete example of Nazis respecting their Imperial Japanese allies? Thatâs the simplest way for me to read what you wrote.
This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue âby definitionâ, or argue about term definitions. Set aside all word-definition disputes for a minute: The relevant question was whether Richard Hanania is a bad person to invite to conferences because heâll be disrespectful to non-white people. Respectful interactions with a non-white podcast guest are perfectly good, if limited, evidence pertaining to that question. Can we agree on that, at least?
Espousing white supremacist views is in itself disrespectful to non-white people, regardless of whether the white supremacist sometimes has polite and cordial conversations on topics unrelated to race and racism with non-white people.
Well, your original statement was: âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â I suppose I mustâve misinterpreted youâI interpreted it to mean that you thought Hanania would be disrespectful to non-white conference attendees in a conference social setting.
When someone is pushing for our society to destroy, oppress, enslave, or exile millions of human beings, whether they mask their hatred with a veneer of politeness is not really the crux of the matter. It is extremely alienating and hostile to the people they hate and are seeking to severely harm to in any way endorse, promote, normalize, or empower them. That would include inviting them to a conference.
This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue âby definitionâ, or argue about term definitions.
You keep inserting words into peopleâs mouths lmao. Nobody said âby definitionâ before you did. (Control-F for âby definitionâ if you donât believe me).
I did not miss your âif.â I didnât think it was necessary to go into the semantics dive because I thought the analogy would be relatively clear. Let me try again:
In general, when someone says X group is Y, a reasonable interpretation is that members of X group are more likely to be Y. If you are being Gricean, somebody saying A is a member of X implies that they think A is a fairly central member of X and thus are more likely to exhibit Y.
In colloquial English, âX is Yâ almost never means âif X, then Y, for all values of X and Yâ. Eg, if somebody said âmen are taller than womenâ you should take this as a claim about statistical averages, not a claim that all men are taller than all women.
Similarly, if you see someone say something like âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhitesâ you should interpret this as a claim that Nazis are on average significantly less respectful to nonwhites than other people would be to nonwhites. If you assume someoneâs being Gricean when they said that, you might further assume that they believe that the specific Nazi theyâre referring to exhibits similar behaviors to other Nazis on at least this dimension.
You should not interpret it as âevery single Nazi is disrespectful to every single nonwhite person, in every case and in full generality.â I donât think this is difficult. I donât think youâd genuinely object to a claim âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhites,â despite cases like allying with Imperial Japan, or adopting a swastika from Indian culture, or John Rabe. Even if the Nazis writ large made an entire exception for an entire ethnicity of people (eg suppose they were never disrespectful to the Japanese), Iâd still consider the basic claim âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhitesâ to be approximately correct, and would not go all out of my way to continuously correct every incidence of that remark with âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhites who are not Japanese.â[1]
Analogies aside, letâs go back to Yarrowâs original claim:
I find it so maddeningly short-sighted to praise a white supremacist for being ârespectfulâ. White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!
I think your attempt at a gotcha fails. For the same reason that itâs reasonable for someone to say men are taller than women without being immediately disproven as soon as you find a woman whoâs taller than a man, or that Nazis are disrespectful of nonwhites despite allying with Japan.
Before writing angry/âinflammatory replies, I recommend reading the actual text.
Some examples of Hananiaâs endorsement of white supremacist views and organizations, from an article in the Huffington Post:
Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name âRichard Hosteâ in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a ârace realist.â He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of âlow IQâ people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed âmiscegenationâ and ârace-mixing.â And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of âThe Turner Diaries,â the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
Hoste [a pen name for Hanania] wrote for antisemitic outlets like The Occidental Observer, a site that once argued Jews are trying to exterminate white Americans. He wrote for Counter-Currents, which advocates for creating a whites-only ethnostate; Takiâs Magazine, a far-right hub for paleoconservatives; and VDare, a racist anti-immigrant blog.
In 2010, Hoste was among the first writers to be recruited for AlternativeRight.com, a new webzine spearheaded and edited by Richard Spencer, the white supremacist leader who later organized the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, âdonât have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.â He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that âthe ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.â
âIf we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,â he wrote.
He lamented what he saw as the growing preponderance of âmiscegenation,â or white and Black people dating each other. âFor the white gene pool to be created millions had to die,â Hoste wrote once. âRace mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art. Itâs shameful.â
Hosteâs racism was also evinced by the writers he chose to cite. In a 2010 article on AlternativeRight.com, Hoste described learning about a December 1997 speech by William Pierce called âThe Lesson of Haiti.â
Hoste linked to a transcript of Pierceâs speech, without acknowledging who Pierce was: the leader and founder of the National Alliance, a violent neo-Nazi group, and the author of a novel called âThe Turner Diaries,â a murderous race war fantasy that has inspired multiple white supremacist terrorists, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Hosteâs article on AlternativeRight.com was basically a recapitulation of Pierceâs speech about Haiti, recounting how a British explorer in the early 20th century traversed the country to answer the question, âCan the Negro rule himself?â The explorer had come to the racist conclusion that no, Black people cannot govern themselves â a conclusion that delighted Pierce in 1997 and seemingly energized Hoste in 2010.
âThe biggest enemies of the Black Man are not Klansmen or multinational corporations, but the liberals who have prevented an honest appraisal of his abilities and filled his head with myths about equality and national autarky,â Hoste wrote.
As far as I can tell, thereâs no disagreement in this thread that Hanania held some repugnant views in the early 2010s. In terms of deciding whether to shun him in the present, it seems like the key issues are
(a) what the statue of limitations should be
and
(b) whether he said something repugnant recently enough that the statue of limitations would not apply
Perhaps you believe that Hananiaâs early-2010s comments somehow reveal a âmore authenticâ version of his beliefs that heâs hiding from the public nowadays. That seems unlikely to me, given the more recent posts of his that I linked elsewhere in this thread. If he still held his early-2010s beliefs secretly, I donât think he would argue against them so explicitly now.
Even the Hanania article you linked to entitled âDiversity Is Our Strengthâ contains as one of its core arguments the suggestion that Hispanic immigrants might be won over to his support for âwar with civil rights lawâ by âcomparing them favorably to genderfluid liberals and urban blacksâ.
The next sentence links to one of his own tweets about how âselling immigrants on hating liberals would be the easiest thing in the worldâ, featuring a video of Muslims protesting in favour of LGBT book bans.
Perhaps you donât find this style of politics repugnant, perhaps it even represents a marginal improvement on his prior beliefs, but I donât think itâs one EA should be endorsing.
Just to expand on the above, Iâve written a new blog postâItâs OK to Read Anyoneâthat explains (i) why I wonât personally engage in intellectual boycotts [obviously the situation is different for organizations, and Iâm happy for them to make their own decisions!], and (ii) what it is in Hananiaâs substack writing that I personally find valuable and worth recommending to other intellectuals.
Iâd just like to clarify that my blogroll should not be taken as a list of âworthy figure[s] who [are] friend[s] of EAâ! Theyâre just blogs I find often interesting and worth reading. No broader moral endorsement implied!
fwiw, I found TracingWoodgrainsâ thoughts here fairly compelling.
ETA, specifically:
I find it so maddeningly short-sighted to praise a white supremacist for being ârespectfulâ. White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people! Expand your moral circle!
A recurring problem I find with replies to criticism of associating with white supremacist figures like Hanania is a complete failure to empathize with or understand (or perhaps to care?) why people are so bothered by white supremacy. Implied in white supremacy is the threat of violence against non-white people. Dehumanizing language is intimately tied to physical violence against the people being dehumanized.
White supremacist discourse is not merely part of some kind of entertaining parlour room conversation. Itâs a bullet in a gun.
fyi, I weakly downvoted this because (i) you seem like youâre trying to pick a fight and I donât think itâs productive; there are familiar social ratcheting effects that incentivize exaggerated rhetoric on race and gender online, and I donât think we should encourage that. (There was nothing in my comment that invited this response.) (ii) I think youâre misrepresenting Trace. (iii) The âexpand your moral circleâ comment implies, falsely, that the only reason one could have for tolerating someone with bad views is that you donât care about those harmed by their bad views.
I did not mean the reference to Trace to function as a conversation opener. (Quite the opposite!) Iâve now edited my original comment to clarify the relevant portion of the tweet. But if anyone wants to disagree with Trace, maybe start a new thread for that rather than replying to me. Thanks!
Now I wonder if youâre actually familiar with Hananiaâs white supremacist views? (See here, for example.)
See also this comment.
If white supremacists are by definition non-respectful to non-white people, and Hanania appears fairly respectful to non-white people, perhaps that allows us to conclude that Hanania does not, in fact, qualify for your definition of âwhite supremacistâ?
Alternatively, see Scottâs post The noncentral fallacyâthe worst argument in the world?
The comment youâre replying to has somewhat sloppy language and reasoning. Unfortunately your comment managed to be even worse.
This line of reasoning is implausible. If having a single nonwhite person over on a podcast without being rude is strong evidence against white supremacy, trusting nonwhite people enough to ally with you in a war is surely even better evidence.
The literal historical Nazis allied in a literal war with literal historical Imperial Japan (a country which is mostly nonwhite). While I donât personally like to throw around phrases like âwhite supremacyâ very often, I think reasonable people can agree that Nazis are white supremacists.
I think you must have missed the âIfâ clause at the beginning of my comment, or the reference to âyour definitionâ in my sentence.
Iâm not sure how much simpler I can make this, but Iâll give it a try.
Either disrespect towards non-white people is characteristic of white supremacy, or it is not. (Law of the excluded middle.)
If it is, then by conservation of expected evidence, respect towards non-white people is limited evidence against white supremacy.
If it is not, then Yarrowâs original claim âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â would appear to be false.
So, it sounds like maybe youâre trying to argue against Yarrowâs original claim that âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â, by giving the concrete example of Nazis respecting their Imperial Japanese allies? Thatâs the simplest way for me to read what you wrote.
This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue âby definitionâ, or argue about term definitions. Set aside all word-definition disputes for a minute: The relevant question was whether Richard Hanania is a bad person to invite to conferences because heâll be disrespectful to non-white people. Respectful interactions with a non-white podcast guest are perfectly good, if limited, evidence pertaining to that question. Can we agree on that, at least?
Espousing white supremacist views is in itself disrespectful to non-white people, regardless of whether the white supremacist sometimes has polite and cordial conversations on topics unrelated to race and racism with non-white people.
Well, your original statement was: âWhite supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!â I suppose I mustâve misinterpreted youâI interpreted it to mean that you thought Hanania would be disrespectful to non-white conference attendees in a conference social setting.
When someone is pushing for our society to destroy, oppress, enslave, or exile millions of human beings, whether they mask their hatred with a veneer of politeness is not really the crux of the matter. It is extremely alienating and hostile to the people they hate and are seeking to severely harm to in any way endorse, promote, normalize, or empower them. That would include inviting them to a conference.
You keep inserting words into peopleâs mouths lmao. Nobody said âby definitionâ before you did. (Control-F for âby definitionâ if you donât believe me).
I did not miss your âif.â I didnât think it was necessary to go into the semantics dive because I thought the analogy would be relatively clear. Let me try again:
In general, when someone says X group is Y, a reasonable interpretation is that members of X group are more likely to be Y. If you are being Gricean, somebody saying A is a member of X implies that they think A is a fairly central member of X and thus are more likely to exhibit Y.
In colloquial English, âX is Yâ almost never means âif X, then Y, for all values of X and Yâ. Eg, if somebody said âmen are taller than womenâ you should take this as a claim about statistical averages, not a claim that all men are taller than all women.
Similarly, if you see someone say something like âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhitesâ you should interpret this as a claim that Nazis are on average significantly less respectful to nonwhites than other people would be to nonwhites. If you assume someoneâs being Gricean when they said that, you might further assume that they believe that the specific Nazi theyâre referring to exhibits similar behaviors to other Nazis on at least this dimension.
You should not interpret it as âevery single Nazi is disrespectful to every single nonwhite person, in every case and in full generality.â I donât think this is difficult. I donât think youâd genuinely object to a claim âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhites,â despite cases like allying with Imperial Japan, or adopting a swastika from Indian culture, or John Rabe. Even if the Nazis writ large made an entire exception for an entire ethnicity of people (eg suppose they were never disrespectful to the Japanese), Iâd still consider the basic claim âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhitesâ to be approximately correct, and would not go all out of my way to continuously correct every incidence of that remark with âNazis are disrespectful to nonwhites who are not Japanese.â[1]
Analogies aside, letâs go back to Yarrowâs original claim:
I think your attempt at a gotcha fails. For the same reason that itâs reasonable for someone to say men are taller than women without being immediately disproven as soon as you find a woman whoâs taller than a man, or that Nazis are disrespectful of nonwhites despite allying with Japan.
Before writing angry/âinflammatory replies, I recommend reading the actual text.
And I certainly wonât say the claim overall is false just because of a class [2]of exceptions! This is very much not how English works.
Itâd be even more absurd to rate the claim as false due to a single exception
Some examples of Hananiaâs endorsement of white supremacist views and organizations, from an article in the Huffington Post:
As far as I can tell, thereâs no disagreement in this thread that Hanania held some repugnant views in the early 2010s. In terms of deciding whether to shun him in the present, it seems like the key issues are
(a) what the statue of limitations should be
and
(b) whether he said something repugnant recently enough that the statue of limitations would not apply
Perhaps you believe that Hananiaâs early-2010s comments somehow reveal a âmore authenticâ version of his beliefs that heâs hiding from the public nowadays. That seems unlikely to me, given the more recent posts of his that I linked elsewhere in this thread. If he still held his early-2010s beliefs secretly, I donât think he would argue against them so explicitly now.
Even the Hanania article you linked to entitled âDiversity Is Our Strengthâ contains as one of its core arguments the suggestion that Hispanic immigrants might be won over to his support for âwar with civil rights lawâ by âcomparing them favorably to genderfluid liberals and urban blacksâ.
The next sentence links to one of his own tweets about how âselling immigrants on hating liberals would be the easiest thing in the worldâ, featuring a video of Muslims protesting in favour of LGBT book bans.
Perhaps you donât find this style of politics repugnant, perhaps it even represents a marginal improvement on his prior beliefs, but I donât think itâs one EA should be endorsing.
(Agreed that I wouldnât want EA endorsing this style of politics)
Just to expand on the above, Iâve written a new blog postâItâs OK to Read Anyoneâthat explains (i) why I wonât personally engage in intellectual boycotts [obviously the situation is different for organizations, and Iâm happy for them to make their own decisions!], and (ii) what it is in Hananiaâs substack writing that I personally find valuable and worth recommending to other intellectuals.