BANNED USER: /comment/193024
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
Failed repeatedly in his attempts to die a hero and has now lived long enough to become the villain.
User ID: 659
Banned by: @cjet79
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
5mo ago
I dont think you know what you're talking about
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
8mo ago
They bought so much they own all of classic pop culture and yet I'm left asking: who is going to care about Disney IP in ten years? Versus, say, Nintendo.
Basically this.
They burned a bunch of bridges and are now acting surprised at the lack of foot traffic, much like Anheuser Busch, one gets the impression that they didn't understand who their core market were.
Gregory Hood illustrates why White Nationalism as it currently exists within the continental US should not be taken seriously as an intellectual movement.
This essay is a load of psuedo-marxist nonsense written from a place of deep historical ignorance that is presumably aimed at disaffected white progressives.
The obvious problem with advocating a for "a white homeland" is that the homeland already exists, it's called Europe. Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans. Funny how that works out. The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.
I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere. The choice to place the start of history at the end of World War II is such a common rhetorical trick that it has become something of a 'tell'. The reason that American Marxists might wish to avoid discussing history prior to World War II (and prior to June 22nd 1941 in particular) in anything but the broadest strokes is left as an exercise for the reader.
Hood wants his readers to believe that "World War II is the foundation of our entire civilization." because it is convenient to the narrative that he is pushing. The problem of course is that this patently and obviously stupid. Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging it's founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose.
Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion. What Hood (and I suspect you) are really interested in is this bit here...
Whites of all economic classes are being displaced or prevented from moving up the socioeconomic ladder. Smart, ambitious, young whites are the ones who are hit hardest, and that’s traditionally who you want as a revolutionary class. -emphasis mine.
And thus, the mask comes off and the wannabe Bolshevik under the skin-suit is fully revealed. I catch a lot of flak on this forum for pointing out that much of the so-called "Dissident Right" is really just the "Woke Left" under a different name, but it's right there in their own words for anyone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty to see.
"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?". The funny thing is that in my personal life I am what the white nationalists say they want. I am teaching my kids to read and enjoy the classics. I am teaching them to, hunt, fight, cook, and work as part of a team. I go out of my way to be active in my community, to build relationships with the other folks at my church, my job, the gym, my local sports bar etc... In short, I am working to secure a future for my children. Or at least give them a sturdy foundation upon which to secure it for themselves. What are you doing?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
3mo ago
What's with that?
As a general rule, Republicans do not share the Democrats' fixation on race essentialism.
Same with migration, migrants are not and should not be expected to accept literally every cultural thing about their new host country and should be completely free to take steps making their experience more pleasant for them
Going to have to hard disagree there. The migrants presumably had either some notion of the price and thus the refusal to pay it is on them, or are fleeing an even worse situation. In either case the correct/pro-social response is not accommodation, but rather an admonishment to "suck it up buttercup". Imagine someone who buys a house under the approach line of an airport and then spends the rest of his life whinging about how he has to listen to the sound of airplanes all day. The airport was here first buddy, either stick a sock in it or move back to your old place.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Yes it's the culture. The same country, comprised of the same people, and subject to the same material and economic constraints can be a dynamo under one regime's leadership and a complete basket-case under another's.
Ironically your dog example only reinforces my point, you really should have chosen a Pomeranian or a Yorkie because chihuahuas are hunting dogs. The material reality is that the difference between Paris Hilton's Purse Puppy and a Mexican Rat-Catcher is in the upbringing rather than the breed.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Then I ask you the same question that I keep asking and that no one here seems to have an answer for. Assuming for the sake of argument that HBD is true and that group differences are, as a rule, more determinative than individual variance, what of it? What value does "HBD Awareness" add over individual assessments of merit? Why promote "HBD Awareness" if not for the purposes of justifying discrimination based upon it?
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
5mo ago
The idea that there is a meaningful difference between the old testemant God and the new is a lie that was sold to you by your aithiest college professor. It aint guys like me who are trying to get rid of the old testamant God, its you.
First off you seem to be conflating immigration with naturalization/citizenship. The US didn't start restricting immigration at federal level a until 1866, prior to that our borders had basically been open with anyone who could afford the boat ride welcome to settle. What was regulated was who could vote or run for office, the requirement being that you had to own property within the states and been a resident for a minimum of 5 years. Slaves obviously weren't going to be owning property, so they were out, which is where the old "wealthy white landowner" line comes from. However, the "white" part is complicated by the fact that we also see multiple occasions in the northern colonies of free blacks successfully asserting their "white" status in court by dint of being both Christian and (in kind of an inverse of the one-drop rule) being of English/European descent.
Given that most of the immigration laws of the 19th and early 20th century were specifically targeted against "Asians and other non-Christians" I think the annoying Evangelicals have a much stronger case for arguing that the US had been founded as an explicitly Christian nation, than the woke white kids do of claiming that it was founded on white nationalism.
Coming back to the issue of slavery, reading contemporary accounts of the founding it's clear that it was a very contentious topic at the time and one who's can kept getting kicked down the road. It was so contentious in fact that one of the bloodiest wars in recorded history up to that point would be fought over it. The anti-slavery camp won that one.
As for more recent history I'm not "denying that conservative whites are racist" so much as questioning your definition of "conservative". The coalition of business-owners and conservative Christians that originally backed the civil rights act and ultimately defeated segregation was largely Republican and has remained so.
The typical woke retort is to bring up the alleged "southern strategy" but this is just another one of their talking points/bludgeons that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Contra popular narratives about the two major parties pulling a switch-a-roo in the 60s as a result of the CRA, it's not until the mid to late nineties that the south becomes reliably republican which is kind of awkward for democratic partisans because it suggests that as the South became less racist, they also became less inclined to vote for the party of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
7mo ago
Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?
The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.
What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".
If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against
I literally know nothing about this guy beyond what writings of his I've read and what you've said here.
If anyone has reduced Gregory Hood to a straw-man, it is Gregory Hood.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
11mo ago
Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.
And again this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that there is a giant Hobbes-shaped whole in the discourse. The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left. A cynical man might even theorize that the absence of this concept is why the philosophical left seems to be so much more prone to devolving into totalitarianism and mass-murder that the ostensibly more authoritarian right.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
The obvious anser to me would seem to be that academia is not a particularly rigorous field and that especially at the highest levels it's primary role is to sort aspiring members of the chattering class into "winning" and "loosing" buckets rather than to educate, hence why so many professors grade on a curve rather than against knowledge of the material.
As such I think claims made based on anything produced by academia in the last half-century or so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Anecdotally the sort of naive symbol manipulation that seems to be measured by IQ tests and academic achievement seems to be only tangentially related to conscientiousness, foresight, and ability to take-on/integrate new information. In fact, there seems to be a tipping point +1 or 2 SD where it actually becomes negatively correlated with outward signs of intelligence as the Higher IQ/Symbol-Manipulation Quotient gets turned towards rationalizing previously held opinions/beliefs rather than updating one's model to reflect changing circumstance or generating accurate theories of mind.
Meanwhile correlation to income and criminality is easily explained by academia's role as a means of sorting aspiring members of the chattering class into "winning" and "loosing" buckets, though I would question the "criminality" claim. Are we certain that the Bidens are less crooked than the median family "unlicensed pharmacist" living in the projects? Or are "the elite" just looking out for their own? Personally, my money would be on the latter.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
6mo ago
In defense of the illiterate post-apocalyptic Greeks, given how much of their literature has survived to the present day they couldn't have been that illiterate.
That said, I think you raise an excellent point. In contrast with the classical age and early Christian era from which numerous primary sources have survived pretty much everything do we know of bronze age culture comes either from secondhand sources after the fact or has been inferred from archeological evidence. That doesn't mean we can't draw reasonable conclusions from recurring themes and motifs.
I actually started writing this as a reply to your post about Tolkien down thread, but this strikes me as an even better example.
I feel like this sort of commentary underlines just how provincial and illiterate our academic class has become. Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal. "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." Is just one of those sentiments that just doesn't compute to someone who's entire worldview/life-experiance has been filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories about Freud, Nietzsche, and "the will to power". But it computed to Tolkien, and it evidently computed to a great deal of his audience.
I read academic commentary about how lines in Homer like "the wine dark sea" prove that bronze age people were color-blind and I want to ask, have you ever looked West over the ocean at sunset? I have. Maybe my brain is just less evolved but, on those evenings, when the reflections of the oranges and reds off the sky turn the water a grape-juice purple, comparing the sea to wine feels rather apt.
Come on guys, Get on my level.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
2mo ago
Fine, you want me to speak plainly let us speak plainly.
It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives. Thomas Sowell might not have mentioned HBD directly in Conflict of Visions but it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in pretty much everything that gets posted on the topic. Personally, the breaking point/scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and the bulk of the users here defended it. On a dime I saw users (including some who are active in this very thread right now) flip from "the data is obvious and supports our conclusion" to "we must manipulate the data to better reflect the truth". This is what might be called in another forum; "saying the quiet part out loud" and it cuts to the quick as It exposes HBD as a normative belief rather than a descriptive one. An argument over "ought"s rather "are"s.
I know I catch a lot of flak for maintaining that Utilitarianism is a stupid and evil ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing, but I feel that the discourse surrounding the topic here is an apt illustration of the problem. Once you have gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you? Contra the Sequences, information does not exist in a vacuum, and arguments do not spring fully formed from the either. The proles are not stupid. They recognize that the Devil can quote scripture, and that a liar can tell the truth when it suits them. Thus the fundamental question one must always be prepared to ask is not whether a statement is true or false, the question is "Cui Bono?".
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who sure as hell doesn't benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
You, (that is the mod team) have made it clear my dismissal of HBD as a product of Bay-Area rationalists looking to paper over their preexisting racial and class resentments with a thin veneer of "Science!", is uncharitable and unkind and will eventually see me banned and yet if the shoe fits...
As @ArjinFerman says, this isn't about "replacing humans with soulless automata" it's about replacing you in particular. I'm asking you whether you believe that the sum of your existence (your thoughts, feelings, memories, physical existence, output here on theMotte, etc...) is meaningfully distinct from that of an arbitrarily complex random number generator in any way?
If so, why do you believe that?
Ironically for how often I get accused of not understanding how machine learning works, I suspect that I have far more practical "hands-on" experience designing, implementing, and working with machine learning algorithms than most users here.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms.
A major component of FC's point is that while they may not be synonyms they are of a kind.
I recognize that to a Marxist Revolutionary the subtle nuances that differentiate Stalinism from Trotskyism will feel critically important, and that Stalinists will be offended by being lumped in with the Trots and vice versa. But to someone who is opposed to Marxism in general these are distinctions without a difference.
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
8mo ago
They were a little too successful and in so being present something of the two-fold problem to people like Freddie and Scott. First is the issue of "cream-skimming"/"brain drain" second, and I suspect the real sticking point, is that "School Choice" in many states means having the option to opt out of the progressive education industrial complex and I suspect that they are starting to recognize just how much of a threat this represents to their business plan.
Yes you have been following me around and yes it has been kind of annoying partially because I strongly suspect you're a sockpuppet, and partially because you still haven't havent explained how McNamara displaying an attitude towards the lives of his nation's troops that would be more at home in a 19th century Tzarist Army than a 20th Century Western one is supposed to prove that generalizations about group differences in IQ are more predictive of future success than say living in a household with both parents present, or disprove the utility of colorblind policies.
You're just another single-issue commentor/vandal grasping at anything he can to justify his issue and his vandalism.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
7mo ago
And liberals being explicitly pro-promiscuity and pro-homosexuality is even older so who's the real hypocrite here?
Arguments like "New York doesn't allow private citizens to concealed carry!" "Heh u still can 😎" don't really go anywhere.
Perhaps they should though.
As @crushedoranges observes down thread there seems to be this paradoxical complete confidence in the power of the state while simultaneously existing in a world where public defecation and getting attacked on the street are just things the public are expected to tolerate. The only reasonable conclusion from my perspective is that the citizens of New York want to live in filth, that they want to live in Hobbes' state of nature, and this is what I mean when i say that there seems to be a massive Hobbes/Burke shaped hole in the discourse.
Edit to add.
I think the "illegal = flat out impossible" conceit is much more common here than you give it credit for. At the very least it seems to be a reasonably common failure mode of the "systematizing" personality type in general, and rationalists in particular. I actually think it's a large part of the whole "rationalists as quokka" meme. There seems to be this endemic belief in the fundamental correctness of "systems" and "inductive reason" that is simply not supported by observed reality because any scenario involving multiple actors/agents is by its nature going to be anti-inductive and actively resist systematization.
All "laws" must ultimately reduce to the consent of those governed by them.
HlynkaCG
old man yelling at clouds
9mo ago
Chihuahuas are not meaningfully hunting dogs - they're tiny!
And yet they hunt.
The following is an adress that delivered the upperclassmen of Harvard Universtity by Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr on Memorial Day 1894. Allegedly amongst the audience was a young up-and-coming politician by the name of Theodore Roosevelt and that the impression that this adress left upon him was a major factor in Roosevelt choosing to nominate Holmes to the US Supreme Court.
I have said before that one of the reason I enjoy reading old books and primary sources is that they lay bare just how little changes in a century or more. The old men have always been complaining about "kids these days" the devil has always been in the details. Some might find this percieved lack of progress frustrating or even frightening but I can't help but find it comforting. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
In anycase, I feel that Holmes makes some observations here that are if anything even more relevant today than they were 130 years ago so on the occasion of Memorial Day...
Any day in Washington Street [in Boston], when the throng is greatest and busiest, you may see a blind man playing a flute. I suppose that some one hears him. Perhaps also my pipe may reach the heart of some passer in the crowd.
I once heard a man say, "Where Vanderbilt sits, there is the head of the table. I teach my son to be rich." He said what many think. For although the generation born about 1840, and now governing the world, has fought two at least of the greatest wars in history, and has witnessed others, war is out of fashion, and the man who commands attention of his fellows is the man of wealth. Commerce is the great power. The aspirations of the world are those of commerce. Moralists and philosophers, following its lead, declare that war is wicked, foolish, and soon to disappear.
The society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing is one in which they may be comfortable and may shine without much trouble or any danger. The unfortunately growing hatred of the poor for the rich seems to me to rest on the belief that money is the main thing (a belief in which the poor have been encouraged by the rich), more than on any other grievance. Most of my hearers would rather that their daughters or their sisters should marry a son of one of the great rich families than a regular army officer, were he as beautiful, brave, and gifted as Sir William Napier. I have heard the question asked whether our war was worth fighting, after all. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife's tale, to be replaced by interest in a labor union, or, under the name of cosmopolitanism, by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.
Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented, and a whole literature of sympathy has sprung into being which points out in story and in verse how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail.
Even science has had its part in the tendencies which we observe. It has shaken established religion in the minds of very many. It has pursued analysis until at last this thrilling world of colors and passions and sounds has seemed fatally to resolve itself into one vast network of vibrations endlessly weaving an aimless web, and the rainbow flush of cathedral windows, which once to enraptured eyes appeared the very smile of God, fades slowly out into the pale irony of the void.
And yet from vast orchestras still comes the music of mighty symphonies. Our painters even now are spreading along the walls of our Library glowing symbols of mysteries still real, and the hardly silenced cannon of the East proclaim once more that combat and pain still are the portion of man. For my own part, I believe that the struggle for life is the order of the world, at which it is vain to repine. I can imagine the burden changed in the way it is to be borne, but I cannot imagine that it ever will be lifted from men's backs. I can imagine a future in which science shall have passed from the combative to the dogmatic stage, and shall have gained such catholic acceptance that it shall take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy. But we are far from such a future, and we cannot stop to amuse or to terrify ourselves with dreams. Now, at least, and perhaps as long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle, and he has to take the chances of war. If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds. Sooner or later we shall fall; but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.
Behind every scheme to make the world over, lies the question, What kind of world do you want? The ideals of the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood. For all our prophecies, I doubt if we are ready to give up our inheritance. Who is there who would not like to be thought a gentleman? Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier's choice of honor rather than life? To be a soldier or descended from soldiers, in time of peace to be ready to give one's life rather than suffer disgrace, that is what the word has meant; and if we try to claim it at less cost than a splendid carelessness for life, we are trying to steal the good will without the responsibilities of the place. We will not dispute about tastes. The man of the future may want something different. But who of us could endure a world, although cut up into five-acre lots, and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed, without the divine folly of honor, without the senseless passion for knowledge outreaching the flaming bounds of the possible, without ideals the essence of which is that they can never be achieved? I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.
Most men who know battle know the cynic force with which the thoughts of common sense will assail them in times of stress; but they know that in their greatest moments faith has trampled those thoughts under foot. If you wait in line, suppose on Tremont Street Mall, ordered simply to wait and do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that of Beacon Street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear --if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of. You know your own weakness and are modest; but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face anniliation for a blind belief.
From the beginning, to us, children of the North, life has seemed a place hung about by dark mists, out of which comes the pale shine of dragon's scales and the cry of fighting men, and the sound of swords. Beowolf, Milton, Durer, Rembrandt, Schopenhauer, Turner, Tennyson, from the first war song of the race to the stall-fed poetry of modern English drawing rooms, all have had the same vision, and all have had a glimpse of a light to be followed. "The end of wordly life awaits us all. Let him who may, gain honor ere death. That is best for a warrior when he is dead." So spoke Beowolf a thousand years ago.
Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O Young Mariner,
Down to the haven.
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas.
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam.
...continued in reply...
Congratulations you've accidentally reinvented the electoral college.
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