Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Altoona has a train stop on the Norfolk Southern Railway, which is served by Amtrak.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This doesn’t strike me as a plausible account at all.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much
Why does this disgust you?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.
What percentage of that diaspora is gypsies, though? I observe that at least here in America, if you hear that somebody is “Romanian” — and in America, this is almost always in the context of learning that law enforcement has broken up some ring of professional thieves comprised of “Romanian immigrants — Romanian nearly always means “Roma” and not ethnic Romanian-speakers. My understanding is that this is mostly true throughout Western Europe, although I have no doubt that some reasonable number of actual Romanians also emigrated, particularly during the Ceaucescu years.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Is it realistic to hope that this can/will open a path to the repatriation of Syrian refugees/“refugees” currently in Europe? Like presumably a great many Syrians who fled the country did so because they were either direct opponents of the Assad regime or were otherwise threatened by Assad’s rule specifically. With a rebel Sunni-led government transitioning into power, will this be seen as plausibly obviating those asylees’ original claims?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This is a great example of what I was complaining about. This demand that the author take a strong and explicit stand and clearly spell out the moral of the story. Certainly the “message” of Martin’s novels, to the extent there is one, is far more nuanced and interesting than your juvenile “war is bad” interpretation. Even if it wasn’t, though… so what? Why is that an invalid message for a series of fantasy novels?
He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs.
I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.
if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.
Why?
If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it.
Why can’t it be something in between? Why can’t he write a series in which many good people earnestly attempt to do good things, and sometimes succeed but often fail? Why can’t he write about people who are situationally bad — pursuing motives and methods which are legitimate in some circumstances, but catastrophic under others? Why can’t there be both moments of heroism, and moments of Bad People Doing Horrible Things? I don’t understand the insistence of forcing the author to “choose a lane” like this.
If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't
I think he is very honest about these views, but I don’t think he beats the audience over the head with them in his works, nor does he appear to want to. I think he does have genuine affection for certain parts of the historical era about which he’s writing, and I don’t think he set out to construct a narrative in which war is depicted as 100% bad, or modern feminism 100% good, or anything quite so morally clean as that. I understand that his behavior on social media is suggestive of a simplistic morality, but I think his writing illustrates that he’s capable of far greater insight than his Twitter or his blog comments let on.
The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.
This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.
Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.
What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.
Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs.
Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)
Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.
One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Oh I’m well aware. I switched from energy drinks to coffee for health reasons.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean, I would have to drink a lot of caffeinated soda to match my current caffeine intake from coffee, and I’d be ingesting all of the sugar and corn syrup alongside it. Energy drinks would be a bit better, although still significantly worse for me than black coffee, and with a bunch of additives that make me jittery. Doable, but suboptimal for sure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before?
In 1912, while giving a speech in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The bullet was slowed by Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and by a single-folded paper copy of his speech, such that Roosevelt’s injury was minor enough to allow him to deliver his scheduled speech in full, beginning with the lines, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot — but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Roosevelt also implored the crowd not to lynch the would-be assassin, and instructed the police to take him into custody without incident. (Roosevelt would carry the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life.) Trump’s fist-pumping was undeniably badass, but I think Teddy has him beat.
As for your general question, I’ve had a similar thought process about religious conversion. I’ve found the Latter-Day Saints faith particularly appealing, particularly given my strong family connection to the church. Like you, I have no illusions about the fundamental truth claims at the heart of the religion, and I find the Christian foundation of it just as uninspiring as I found it fifteen years ago. However, while I could never credibly promise orthodoxy, I think I could manage Mormon orthopraxy — a commitment to the behavioral constraints demanded by the religion. Quitting coffee would be a massive stumbling block, although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it. Most of the other commandments are ones I’m already more-or-less observing, whether voluntarily or otherwise.
They seem prepared to weather the pressures of wokeness better than nearly any other Christian (or Christian-adjacent) denomination, and are also far more deeply-rooted in American culture than Orthodoxy is.
It’s both! Obviously my consumption of this content profoundly affects my perceptions of American policing, and that shines though in my posting about the topic (and about other topics, such as race) on this site, as well as my appearance on the Motte-adjacent podcast The Bailey.
Ultimately, though, it is a hobby which originated out of a genuine intellectual interest. I was in college when the Trayvon Martin shooting happened, and fresh out of college when the Black Lives Matter movement started gaining steam. I was a dutifully-committed progressive at the time, and I cared deeply about whether or not the conversations I was involved in were grounded in actual verifiable reality. That inspired me to start doing a bunch of research on policing, and to expose myself to the (at the time very limited) police bodycam footage I could get my hands on. Discovering just how wildly the narrative deviated from the reality I encountered was the single biggest contributing factor to my ideological evolution.
If officer Darren Wilson had been equipped with a bodycam at the time he shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, the public could have been exposed to footage of Brown attacking Wilson in his car and attempting to grab his holstered firearm, and subsequently charging at Wilson outside of the car. This could have smothered the nascent BLM abomination in its crib and saved this country ten years of racial fabulism and misery. The ubiquity of bodycams — sold to the public as a way to document widespread police misconduct — has demonstrated to curious Americans the sheer barbarity with which law enforcement deals on a daily basis, and has certainly helped to take the wind out of the sails of the police-abolitionist movement.
As for why I watch it nowadays? It’s mostly a nice way to blow off steam by indulging my schadenfreude toward criminals, but it also allows me to stay abreast of any notable policing incidents and to acquaint myself with the details before the story goes viral and the narrative begins to take over.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Okay, I’ll respond only to the explicit claims you are making here:
I think that searches, SWAT calls and other similar "they come to your house because they think there is a threat in it to neutralise" situations in particular are a scenario in which I would feel much less safe around US police than around European police.
If you find yourself in this scenario, there is likely a very good reason the feds are after you, and frankly I don’t mind that people in that scenario are not safe. Again, I think that most uses of deadly force by American police are a good thing — not a tragic-but-unavoidable outcome which we should strive to eliminate, but rather something that produces a long-lasting positive good for society at large — so I’m perfectly comfortable with the outcome in which some substantial percentage of the targets of federal raids get smoked in the process.
Data supports that US police in general are much more likely to injure and kill those they interact with than European police
Yes, but not for the same exact actions, as far as I’m aware. American police do not appear to be significantly more likely to injure or kill blameless, non-violent, unarmed, compliant suspects — a descriptor which describes a much higher percentage of the individuals encountered by European police than by American police. The significant discrepancies are due to the much higher incidence of violent/armed noncompliance in America.
Personal experiences support that US police are more hostile and less helpful than their European counterparts. This is in their interactions with me as a Caucasian academic with naive good-kid vibes; who knows what they would do if they were responding to a SWAT call or following a lead from someone in the computer security "industry" I know.
I cannot comment on this, as I have not had any interaction with European police. I’m willing to believe that there might be some average difference, and I can imagine a number of plausible explanatory mechanisms. American police turnover is quite high, and a large part of that is simply that American police officers get worn down into a siege mentality by the absolute scum of the earth with which most of them are forced to interact regularly.
but I see no evidence that they are not like that to everyone, i.e. that the hostility is precisely targeted at the uniquely American problem elements. There are more YouTube bodycam videos of American police roughing up harmless-looking white kids than total incidents of German police doing that.
As someone who watches a massive amount of police bodycam content daily, I can only say that you are being exposed to a very different type of bodycam content than I am. I see very little of police “roughing up harmless-looking white kids”, and I contend that this simple is not happening with any great frequency.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
[P]olice turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand
This was your original narrative. Now you have retreated to a much more defensible and empirically-supported “American police use deadly force more often than European police” narrative, which no serious person denies, but which bears almost no resemblance to your cartoonish original statement.
I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly
Are you? That wasn’t the thrust of your initial post, in which you implied that American police use deadly force just because they feel like it, and that their application of deadly force is arbitrary and capricious. If, for example, the high rates of deadly force in federal searches are due to the fact that the feds generally only get involved when an individual is suspected of being involved in particularly serious crime, and therefore is almost by definition a particularly dangerous (and desperate) individual, that reality looks nothing like the narrative that the feds are shooting people because they’re having a bad day.
No serious observer of American policing denies that American police use violence more often than Euro police do. It’s just that every honest analysis must inevitably conclude that this is due at least in large part to the very different populations, and very different levels of access to firearms, that American police are forced to contend with.
You assert that every comparison makes American police “look worse”, but why should I think it makes police look bad when they kill people who deserve it? Why should that be considered a worse outcome than not using deadly force? Why should I wish for dangerous criminals to be suffered to live, when the opportunity arises to eliminate them from the population? You seem to want American police to put the cart before the horse; you want them to act as though the populace they’re policing is already at a level of human capital comparable to the populations of Europe, when that is obviously not the current reality they’re facing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, you’ve had a grand total of two interactions with American police - at least one of which seems like you just getting unlucky with two local beat cops whom you may have caught off-guard or who may have been occupied by something else when you approached them - and you’ve used these two interactions to form, and double down on, a perception of American policing which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.
Im having trouble deciphering what your claim is. Are you saying that 2% of federal searches result in a deadly shooting? Or are you saying that 25% of them do?
Also, why are “federal searches” - a vanishingly small percentage of the total interactions between law enforcement and the public - an issue that weighs seriously on your perception of law enforcement practices in the United States? The vast majority of policing in this country is done at the local level, and to a lesser extent at the state level. Federal law enforcement is a tiny segment of American policing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Woke isn't like Marxism, it doesn't have a single point of authority defining it so I would assume that most just describe the far left bent with it.
Marxism also doesn’t have “a single point of authority defining it.” It’s a whole corpus of thought, with hundreds of writers (maybe thousands) chiming in and adding their analysis and refinement of other writers’ ideas. It’s like how Christianity has long transcended sola scriptura and includes a massive world of commentary and schisms and church authorities and whatnot. “Woke”, to the extent that the word is anything other than a boo light, undoubtedly refers to a specific offshoot or sect of Marxism.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I could maybe understand it, if what they wanted to section off was holocaust denial or outright race-hatred, but if you're too afraid to debate a theocrat or a monarchist the very core of liberalism becomes a joke.
Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What an absolutely ghastly comment.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand
Do you genuinely believe this is an accurate description of reality? What percentage of interactions between police and the public in the United States do you believe result in the use of deadly force?
Monarchy is a model of government which has independently emerged in nearly every human civilization known to history. Why are you suggesting that the only reason to favor it is “giving into wild instincts”? As if it’s nothing more than some atavistic act by primitive savages, like ritual human sacrifice. Like, I grew up in America the same as you, and although the patriotism and the pro-revolutionary sentiments never really took root in me the way they appear to in you, I was certainly exposed to the same information and the same memes. I don’t recall the primary criticism of monarchy ever being that it’s the mere result of wild instinct.
More options
Context Copy link