Top all-time · #1804
Richard Hanania
Personal blog · richardhanania.substack.compoliticsphilosophy
Richard Hanania's personal blog at richardhanania.substack.com covers politics and philosophy. Since 2020, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Foreign policy, American politics, and social science. Click to read Richard Hanania's Newsletter, a Substack publication.
Most-linked posts?
- Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-06-02
- Why Is Everything Liberal5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-04-21
- /p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case3 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-10-16
- Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-17
- A Psychological Theory of the Culture War3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-10-23
- Tetlock and the Taliban3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-25
- How I Overcame Anxiety2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-23
- Reflections on 20212 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-19
- I Changed My Mind on Social Media and Teen Depression2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-02
- A cost-benefit approach to the crackdown in El Salvador2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-09
What Hacker News says?
There is absolutely nothing liberating about central banking. It is a monopoly on money creation, and that monopoly is enforced through an apparatus of violence (police, courts and prisons, used to compel compliance). It leads to a small elite being in control of trillions of dollars in national capital allocations every year, with virtually no democratic oversight. It leads to financial institutions capturing 42% o…
Comment linking /p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
on “What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)”Submitted Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets as a story · 150 points
HN discussionAnd Twitter is helping get around elite failures that are causing those problems to persist: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/actually-twitter-is-re...
Comment linking /p/actually-twitter-is-real-life
on “Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold”Submitted Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech as a story · 140 points
HN discussionThe "complaint" is on point. Most of the major US mainstream media outlets are indeed biased in a particular direction. See for yourself: find a list of major news outlets [2] and check their political leanings [3][4]. Fox is mostly an outlier. You could perhaps argue that they are more "woke" than "progressive". [1]: And many other institutions, see https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe... [2…
Comment linking /p/why-is-everything-liberal
on “Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong”Submitted US foreign policy is driven mostly by short-term politics, not coherent strategy as a story · 69 points
HN discussionWokeness is first and foremost a legal phenomenon. You must check the box, because your manager must check the box, because the VP must check the box, because otherwise some regulator or lawyer might get angry and sue. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation, we should all be grateful for that. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous…
Comment linking /i/36007039/wokeness-is-government-policy
on “What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft”Submitted The Weirdness of Government Variation in Covid-19 Responses as a story · 46 points
HN discussionIt's because of the law. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
Comment linking /p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
on “What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft”Submitted Are Covid Restrictions the New TSA? as a story · 32 points
HN discussionBinding arbitration is not perfect, but to deem it a failure based on a few melodramatic accounts of it producing unfair outcomes is premature. It's entirely possible it's the only thing that has prevented anti-discrimination lawyers from hollowing out corporate America with lawsuits https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
Comment linking /p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
on “Is Web3 anything?”Submitted Gerontocracy versus Western Civilization as a story · 16 points
HN discussionBirthrate may play a role too, turns out. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-the-great-sa...
Comment linking /p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the
on “Nord Stream 2 declares bankruptcy”Submitted Affirmative Action as a Magic Bullet as a story · 15 points
HN discussionGoFundMe should be political neutral, but it openly turns left. I recommend a long post explaining this phenomenon: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe...
Comment linking /p/why-is-everything-liberal
on “Florida governor to investigate GoFundMe over Canada trucker donations”Submitted Tetlock and the Taliban as a story · 9 points
HN discussionAnother good take on the subject is Richard Hanania making the case that "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law": https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
Comment linking /p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
on “The takeover of America's legal system”Submitted I Changed My Mind on Social Media and Teen Depression as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe evidence the essay provides is compelling to me. This follow up article provides yet more evidence, including a recent $100 million + judgement against Tesla under Civil Rights Law: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment: https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment…
Comment linking /p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
on “Harvard won’t require SAT or ACT through 2026 as test-optional push grows”Submitted Be on Substack as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis needed to be rooted out at the legal level: civil rights laws need to be radically scaled back: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j... There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
Comment linking /p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
on “Harvard won’t require SAT or ACT through 2026 as test-optional push grows”Submitted Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j... : > … in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) [1], … the Supreme Court ruled that intelligence tests, because they were not shown to be directly related to job performance, could not be used in hiring since blacks scored lower on them, and it did not matter whether there was any intent to discriminate. > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power…
Comment linking /p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
on “The rise of remote work may reshape college towns”Submitted Why Is Everything Liberal as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRichard Hanania had some interesting comments about this ( https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/reflections-on-2021 ) > When I’m on Twitter, how rude should I be? > I tend to admire thinkers who are civil and think less of those who are rude. Usually, I try to emulate those I admire and not those I don’t, but I actually think there’s an intellectual case to be made for rudeness and snark as long as it’s used in def…
Comment linking /p/reflections-on-2021
on “54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level”Submitted Why the Media Is Honest and Good as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm for destigmatizing mental illness so that people who need the help don't have to face that barrier to getting help. However, could it be that the focus on mental health is in a perverse way making things worse? The way it is analogized here [1] was interesting to me: "If we told people that fear of flying was something everyone struggles with, that it was the result of what others have done to them, or structura…
Comment linking /p/how-i-overcame-anxiety?r=3rgcb&utm_medium=ios
on “Silicon Valley has a mental health crisis too (2019)”Submitted Iran and the Hopelessness of Social Conservatism as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>>If Tesla is losing court cases — which they are — then that’s because the judge and jury believe based on the evidence presented and argued that Tesla, as a company, was at fault. Or the law itself is impossible to comply with: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... >>Even after the case has been litigated, we still do not know what exactly Tesla could have done to avoid the $137 million j…
Comment linking /p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case
on “Lawsuit: At Tesla, racial discrimination is “standard operating procedure””Submitted A Psychological Theory of the Culture War as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
