Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
In the tiny pool of female standup comedians successful enough to make a living off it, there are essentially zero lookers
Iliza Shlesinger, Sarah Silverman, Nikki Glaser, Whitney Cummings, Kelsey Cook, Taylor Tomlinson, Maddy Kelly… and that’s just off the top of my head. And of course if you expand the criteria slightly to successful improv/sketch comics the field expands even more and you get people like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kaitlin Olson, Tina Fey, Veronika Slowikowska, Ashley Padilla, Jane Curtin…. I could keep going, but I think the point is made.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
I can understand death penalty advocates feeling moral revulsion at criminals being kept alive and healthy on their dime, but hoping for increased deterrence to me really seems like an instance of "what feels good must be good" just-world fallacy.
No, I’m operating on the belief that the failure of capital punishment to effectively deter crime in the 21st century is precisely because of the massive temporal gap between conviction and execution, and because of the absurd behind-closed-doors way in which it is carried out.
My preference is for executions that are carried out in a public place, and in a visually evocative manner. We could bring local inmates — especially juvenile detention inmates — and force them to watch. “That’s your homeboy, or a member of the gang you’ve been curious about joining, being strung up in front of you. If you don’t change your life really fast, that will be you soon.” I do believe that this could be a very effective deterrent, because it would stress the reliability of the punishment and underline its immediate relevance to onlookers.
I’m not worried about deterring jihadists. You’re correct that the kind of guy who would consider becoming a terrorist is not going to be fazed by watching one video of a fairly sterile and bloodless execution; the possibility of that outcome is already priced into his worldview. And if it remains the case that this sort of execution is only in the cards for the absolute worst-of-the-worst, once-in-a-generation criminals, then you’re right that it won’t have much of an effect on the average criminal. If, on the other hand, it’s made clear that this is the sort of thing that will happen to you, young man, then I think it’d be a different story.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle? As someone who does not support the death penalty, if it must be carried out, the firing squad seems like the best method in terms of lethality and dignity.
Specifically that it is a process that preserves the dignity of the state while also not lending any dignity to the condemned. The condemned becomes a macabre prop, which is right and fitting for what he did.
jumping from zero to one thousand by breaking new ground in live-streaming the execution (which I believe has no precedent from an internationally recognized nation state, only via terrorists and cartels) as red meat for the base is obviously not the way to do it.
The goal of any forward-thinking person who’s at all sympathetic to a Yarvin-style post-liberal critique must be to grapple with this question: how to aggressively move the Overton window in our direction without knocking down any load-bearing legal/institutional elements that would generate massive backlash when disturbed. I am concerned about the optical ramifications of this administration skipping some intermediate steps, but I’m also intrigued by the sort of Propaganda Of The Deed effects that could redound from just ripping off the bandaid and showing that none of the “landmark” jurisprudential developments of late 20th century America are actually sacred or load-bearing in any way. We can actually just do this important and widely popular thing; it won’t lead to any massive negative downstream consequences, it won’t turn us into savage barbarians, it won’t erode everything we hold dear, etc.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22d ago
I’ve made my strong support of the death penalty — and specifically of public executions — abundantly clear over the years. (For a primer, you can listen to this episode of the now-defunct Motte-adjacent Bailey Podcast, my first and to date only podcast appearance.) My initial reaction to this news was jubilant: talk about getting what I voted for! While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging, a firing squad is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of de-medicalizing capital punishment and emphasizing its fundamentally violent and retributive nature.
My observation of the discourse around it has given me pause, though. The apoplectic relationship from the political left has been predictable, and was unfortunately always priced in; the reaction from some on the right, though, has been sobering. Professionally Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect. (“This makes us no better than Al Qaeda! We aren’t some third-world dictatorship! This isn’t Who We Are™️!”) Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists. (We’re giving Hasan exactly the attention and validation he always wanted!”)
These arguments give me pause not because I agree with them, but because they highlight the way that this is a rubber-meets-the-road moment for my ideology. To what extent have I allowed myself to become so radicalized by hermetically-sealed online discourse, such that I imagine my beliefs to be far more popular than they are in reality? Is what I imagine to be a broadly common-sense perspective actually going to prove deeply unpopular and massively polarizing once implemented publicly? Scott Greer, generally a reliable barometer for where the normal Middle American opinion sits, thinks so.
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty. (There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors.) There is a part of me that wishes that the first public execution in America since 1937 should be postponed until it can be overseen by an administration that is less inherently polarizing than this one. To some extent, about a third of the country is fully committed to hating whatever Trump does, no matter what it is; perhaps under a future administration with a higher baseline level of public trust, this event could serve as an opportunity for genuinely restrained public discourse about capital punishment, rather than an opportunity for retrenchment of existing political fault lines. If done incorrectly, this event has the potential to set back the political hopes of death penalty maximalists such as myself for a generation or more.
I’m still planning on tuning in to watch this execution. As someone who discovered the snuff film parts of the internet at a relatively young age, I’m pretty thoroughly desensitized to images of death. (And frankly, having seen a number of videos of firing squad executions, they’re a lot more mild than you might think.) I hope that perhaps there will be some small number of individuals who might find it inspiring — and that there may be others who are in some way deterred, even marginally, from future criminality. The executioners need to strike a delicate balance during the proceedings: solemnity and restraint, acknowledging the humanity of the condemned while also not getting bogged down by mawkish faux-contrition about having to end his miserable wasted life. Keeping the proceedings focused primarily on the victims, including testimony by survivors such as this guy may help to quell any instinctive sympathy for the condemned that viewers could otherwise experience.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I mean, even the most hardcore British/English nationalist would likely dispute that being born in Britain is necessary to define Britishness; otherwise we would exclude such eminently and obviously British figures as Rudyard Kipling (born in Bombay, India) and Richard Dawkins (born in Nairobi, Kenya).
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Yeah no, at no point in the NBA could the game have been accurately characterized in the way you described it. It was always a very agile, skillful game; the difference is that the three-point era changed the spacing of the game. Its absolutely not the case that in the pre-3-pointer era the players were all lumbering, clumsy giants with no athleticism or skill.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
At what point in the NBA’s history do you believe this was an accurate description of the game?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Same reason thé NFL is heavily black in the US- but the star players are not.
I mean this just isn’t remotely accurate. Excluding quarterbacks (of whom, several “star players” like Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, and Jalen Hurts are black) and tight ends, the NFL’s high-level talent is extremely black/non-white. (Justin Jefferson, Myles Garrett, Micah Parsons, Ja’Marr Chase, Jaxson Smith-Njigba, Jahmyr Gibbs, Bijan Robinson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, etc.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
I believe his point was that the most promiscuous men are gay men.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
European elites who only became relevant millenia after Jesus's death?
You’re claiming that Greece and Rome only became relevant millennia after Christ’s death? That would certainly be news to Christ and his followers.
Also, Christianity was spread bottom up not top down in Europe.
Untrue. In most of Northern Europe, Christianity was spread at the point of the sword; Charlemagne, for example, fought a series of bloody wars against the pagan Saxons, who represented a genuine populist resistance against a foreign faith being spread by an expansionist power. Similarly, the pagans of the Baltic states were Christianized via a brutal crusade by much richer powers at the behest of Rome. Yes, there were plenty of sincere Christian conversions by individuals in Europe, but that was in no way sufficient to make it the majority religion.
Also, is it not the more logical and simpler explanation that the reason we know of Jesus and not the other guys is because Jesus's story was actually true?
How is this not an equally valid argument for the divinity of Mohammed, or of Buddha, or of Joseph Smith? If you disbelieve the veracity of their claims, despite the sincere and fervent testimony of their millions of modern adherents, why do you believe that the veracity of Jesus’ divinity is bolstered by his religion’s relative popularity and longevity?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
That’s the whole point: that these men weren’t “literally whos” in their day. That people who knew them testified to their miraculous abilities with the same sincerity that Christ’s followers attributed to Him. One logical extrapolation being that we only take the claims about Christ’s miracles as seriously as we do today because of contingent factors that caused Christianity to be adopted and spread by European political elites, and not because of any especially unique or compelling evidence of Christ’s miracles specifically.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Have you looked into Zoroastrianism at all? It has the same (flawed and myopic, IMO) system of moralistic dualism, complete with an evil entity constantly manipulating humans to give into their dark and selfish predilections. All developed several centuries before Christ.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
were apparently able to navigate the seas millennia before agriculture
As I understand it, they wouldn’t have had to navigate very far, as at the time both the Sunda Shelf and Sahul were above water; these seafarers would have been able to travel between a series of close-together islands in between the two supercontinents.
286, with the technology/computer stuff predictably clobbering me.
Edit: I overlooked the instruction about there always being 5 correct answers the first time I took it. After learning that I retook it and got 299.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
or something of that kidney.
If you have dingeroth in your kidney you should call a doctor immediately.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
See the war on poverty
The percentage of the American population living in poverty has in fact decreased considerably from where it was at in the late 1950’s (roughly 22%) to where it is in the 2020’s; in 2019 the number hit a record low of 10.5%. We can argue all day about whether this has any causative relationship with LBJ’s specific policies, but can you at least understand why a good-faith political operator could look at that and not see the War on Poverty as a failure? Do you think that anything less than a full elimination of poverty means that the effort was not worth trying and that we should scrap every program that’s even trying to move the needle? Can you see how somebody who is t a “utopian” could have a reasonable disagreement with you about the answer?
Many of the people you’re identifying as “utopian or as “wanting to perfect humanity” would actually describe what they’re doing as an attempt to incrementally improve the human condition through sustained effort. And I think there are concrete observable examples all around us which can at least plausibly be interpreted as a demonstration of their successes!
Obviously I agree with you that human beings are not blank slates, and I do agree with you that, for example, racial gaps in educational attainment have not closed nor even significantly narrowed as a result of progressive theories of education. I think that progressives are wrong about some pretty important bedrock facts about humanity. However, I think they’re wrong in a different way than what OP described, and I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
I don’t think this remotely captures the contours of the actual arguments and beliefs taking place in 21st-century America. Firstly because almost nobody on either side reads 18th- and 19th-century philosophy. More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future. It’s just not a live issue, politically or otherwise. “Conservatives” and “liberals” are far more focused on object-level political and aesthetic concerns than they are about the nebulous world of utopian philosophy.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Stories in antiquity were never purely entertainment, by the way, they were means of communicating and teaching social values.
Citation extremely necessary.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Under what rubric are you claiming that the Odyssey is “bedrock literature” but Antigone — which is not only centrally about family obligations, but also primarily about a woman — isn’t? If anything, shouldn’t Antigone be a more example of what constitutes “Greek civilization”, as it was written when Greece was at a considerably higher level of technological and artistic development than it had been when the Odyssey was composed?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
But your original claim was that “family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.”. You then brought up Greece and Rome as central examples of “Western civilization.” But both Greece and Rome did have family as the bedrock of their civilization for a very very long time! It still occupied a massively important part of their society long after the point when they had collectively achieved elements of social and technological development that you identify in this post as preconditions for civilization: art, philosophy, and industry.
Were they “civilized” but not “Western civilization” at that point? When, chronologically or otherwise, did they officially become Western?™️ (Surely “Western” in this peculiar usage must not have any consistent relationship with geography, as you believe that the Greeks (and somehow the Hebrews, presumably) are more “Western” than the Celtic and Germanic tribes who were physically situated farther to the geographic west.
I’m open to conceding that there is some combination of societal and technological development at which a polity can be said to be (lowercase c) “civilized”: some identifiable factors might be the ability to coordinate large-scale public works, pooling of resources, economies of scale, the ability of the centralized power structure to reliably feed its constituents, the facilitation of leisure activities, etc.
However, under that understanding, the Third Reich was extremely “civilized”. It was wealthy, highly politically centralized, had a thriving artistic and philosophical life, and was in every way a peer competitor to the other rich European powers. Whatever Chesterton seems to mean by “civilized”, it has only a tenuous connection to those elements.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
This is exactly the thing I predicted you would do, though! You acknowledge, apparently, that during the period in which the various Aryan peoples speciated into their various proto-nations (a period which lasted at least a thousand years) they were highly clannish, with each family having pervasive control over the legal and religious life of its members; you just don’t think they counted as “a civilization” (let alone as “Western civilization”) until they began moving away from that paradigm by introducing a political superstructure on top of it. This means that even though the Hellenic peoples spent a much larger period of time without such a superstructure than they did with it, all the before stuff doesn’t factor into your analysis.
You get to pick and choose the precise moment when you think a multi-thousand-year-old societal evolution began to count as a civilization, which means you conveniently discard the preconditions that led to it as long as they don’t satisfy the parameters you want a civilization to look like. In my opinion this reveals the fundamentally constructed and aspirational nature of “Western Civilization” discourse. Do you acknowledge it as such?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
The family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.
I’m currently reading Fustel De Coulanges’ The Ancient City, which goes into extreme, meticulously-researched detail about just how profoundly family-centric were all of the ancient legal and religious institutions of Rome, Greece, India, and all of the other major Aryan-derived civilizations. It is simply not remotely tenable to claim otherwise, given a cursory survey of the available information. The extended family — the gens in ancient Rome — exercised totalizing control over the lives, property, inheritance, and legal standing of individuals. Said individuals’ level of kinship was meticulously catalogued and determined their legal standing toward each other, their religious obligations, etc.
You can claim that those civilizations only began to count as “Western Civilization™️” once they began to introduce reforms to mitigate/complicate this paradigm; my observation is that boosters of the “Western Civilization” framing are fairly shameless in the way they selectively pick the parts of ancient history that they want current society to recapitulate now, and fully ignore/misrepresent every counter-example or inconvenient element which would cast their narrative into doubt.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
In fairness, my buddy met his wife on Discord. (Although, counterpoint, she suuuuuuucks, so be careful what you wish for, I guess.)
You are already moving the goalposts. (And revealing that you just don’t follow stand-up very closely, making the value of your takes on the industry pretty questionable.)
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