Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Fair enough, point #2 strikes me as particularly compelling.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
….Is a 20-minute walk seriously considered a major imposition by people? My walk to work each morning from the nearest rail transit stop is roughly that long, and I make that walk twice a day without it feeling remotely unreasonable or burdensome.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans.
This bears no resemblance to Hood’s argument. Both he and his interlocutor are celebrating the fact that Europe is full of Europeans, and their disagreement is regarding the degree of international cooperation and unity of identity/purpose that should prevail among those Europeans.
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.
He is from New Jersey, but lives in rural West Virginia. He literally made the exact choice you’re criticizing him for not making.
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
Hood - real name Kevin DeAnna - worked in the mainstream conservative movement for over a decade, working for conservative think-tanks in DC. That’s the milieu he came up in, and what he is now reacting against because he has seen it firsthand from the inside.
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 its 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.
Hood writes extensively about Rome, and about early American history. Just because you have no familiarity with his work doesn’t mean you get to accuse him of not knowing about or talking about these things. He does not mean that World War II is the important starting point of Western civilization; he means that it is the founding myth for the current narrative being pushed by academia and the media-political complex. The Boomer Truth Regime.
"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?"
Greg Hood has, I believe, four children at last count. So, presumably those ones.
You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against, but all of your fulminating is completely useless because it doesn’t address any of the basic facts about his actual life or work. It just makes you look ignorant and ineffectual.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This is an important insight about Queer Theory and the Critical tradition more broadly: permanent revolution is the primary, central goal of the entire intellectual framework. As soon as something has achieved any degree of stable cultural acceptance, it becomes conservative by definition and needs to be transgressed and sublated in turn. What is today’s radical fringe will be tomorrow’s normie cringe. Trans people who get “bottom surgery” might be on the cutting edge of transformation today, but if the Queer Theorists get their way, 100 years from now the same people will be seen as utterly reactionary for reifying the very idea that the physical body has any necessary relationship to identity at all.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
France will endure even if the ethnic French do not
This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?
I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.
While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.
However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.
Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.
This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.
Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.
There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.
While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.
I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think that you are the one who is out of touch with progressive rhetoric, given that you’re still assuming that these people are operating in a Marxist materialist frame, whereas I think the evidence is substantial that in a post-Gramscian, post-Marcusian paradigm, things have moved past the simple drive toward establishing an anarcho-communist society free of material coercion of labor, and has instead allowed the Gnostic/Hermetic theological elements - present in Marxism from the beginning via Hegel - to transcend the materialist elements of Marxism. I’m drawing mostly from James Lindsay’s analysis of Critical Theory or post-Marxism as a religious/Gnostic faith centered around the Hegelian dialectic, which seeks to totally transcend humanity and rebuild God.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.
There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.
This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.
Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
You make several very bizarre claims in this post, which reinforce my perception that you basically have no theory of mind as it regards people on what you call “the alt-right”. (Pro tip: pretty much nobody identifies with that term anymore; the “alt-right” as a movement splintered years ago.) You have correctly identified that we radically disagree with mainline American-style conservatism, but you go totally off the rails when you start imputing to us views that you associate with progressives.
For example, you consistently accuse me and others of believing in a “Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamic”. Surely you must know that many of us, particularly those who are inspired by figures like Moldbug, are sympathetic to the idea of an absolute monarch. Many of us reject the entire constellation of ideas about “human rights”, meaning that the concept of “oppression” is not really coherent under our worldview. A common through-line in most dissident-right thought (although certainly not all!) is a warm embrace of natural hierarchy, and a consequent belief that it is both right and proper for some people to have significant power over others as a result of the naturally unequal distribution of relevant qualities between different groups in society. Some on the more esoterically-inclined corners of the right are even interested in the ancient Indo-European “trifunctional hypothesis”, which holds that the division of society into three distinct and essentially impermeable castes - a theory of sociopolitical organization which recurred in basically all Indo-European-derived societies, and which has its most enduring expression in the still-extant Hindu caste system - is a reflection of the divine will. These are not people whom you will ever hear calling something “oppressive” or “unjust”. Sure, most of us believe that the current ruling class that has power in much of what you call “the West” is illegitimate and has lost the Mandate of Heaven, but in no sense are we opposed to the existence of a ruling class in general, nor of hierarchical and unequal distributions of power more broadly.
You also make several claims that suggest that you yourself are operating under a very sanitized and cherry-picked model of “Western” history itself. For example, you claim that
One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye.
How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history, doing so for several centuries, and did so while developing elegant theological and philosophical justifications for that slave trade, which they saw as entirely consonant with the “Western” and “Christian” worldview? If these men don’t count as “Western”, who does? Similarly, you claim that valuing women’s consent in regards to marriage is a hallmark specifically of “Western culture” - which you define is explicitly requiring Christianity (or “eastern mysticism”. Yet the Greek and Roman historians like Tacitus famously identified the pagan Germanic tribes - who had no exposure either to Christian mysticism nor to Greco-Roman formalism - as significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender than the Greco-Roman civilization. These historians would comment bemusedly on how much power women had in these cultures, relative to how much power the women back home in Greece and Rome had. (And this is to say nothing of the incomparably greater power that women had in, for example, many Bantu societies, which were even more profoundly removed from any remotely “Western” influence.) So, it’s very difficult for me to take seriously your claim that women’s liberation is something that sets “Western civilization” apart from other civilizations.
Overall, I think that you speak far too overconfidently about things that you lack the background to comment in an informed manner about. That’s totally fine; most of us in this sub are generalists who overestimate our own knowledge on certain subjects from time to time. What causes you to draw extra criticism for it is the specifically grouchy and condescending “get off my lawn” demeanor with which you approach these conversations; you seem to think you have some gatekeeping power, maybe as a result of your status as a former mod, and you seem to consistently act as though you know what people believe better than they themselves do. I’m telling you that you don’t, and that it might behoove you to have a far more open mind as it regards people telling you what they actually believe, rather than trying to fit everyone into an increasingly stale and restrictive schema whose limitations are becoming more abundantly obvious with every passing year.
You have failed to engage on even a cursory level with the distinction the OP is drawing between settlers and immigrants. If you think this distinction is specious or lacks explanatory power and utility, that’s fine and you should make an argument for it, but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You wrote an entire post about how he’s a hypocrite for not living the lifestyle you think he should be living, despite the fact that he does live that lifestyle. You accused him of being a Marxist who doesn’t care about pre-WWII history, when actually he’s a Rome obsessive, a monarchist, and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition.
Just for once admit that you spoke overconfidently about something without doing any research at all to determine if your assumptions were correct. Can you do that? Even just this once? You made multiple easily-disprovable claims about this guy, and those claims are central to your argument.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
I don’t see Israel, or the Jewish people, as the long-term enemy of my people. I see reconciliation between gentile whites and Jews as an absolutely necessary part of the destiny of the white race. I think we can recognize that in the short term Israel is a malignant actor, and still believe that what they are holding back is even worse. I look at it the same way I look at Japan in the 1940’s: it was a genuinely anti-white force, and it saw its participation in the war as explicitly anti-colonial. If you’d asked an American in 1944 whether Japan was an inevitable racial enemy of white American, he would obviously have said yes. (Polling of Americans at the time revealed that a large majority wanted the Japanese population totally exterminated.) In the fullness of time, though, Japan ended up taking very well to Western culture and becoming a highly beneficial contributor to the Western world order. Jews have in the past made undeniably positive contributions to Western history, and they inevitably will again in the future. Arabs never will.
So, I think there is a really interesting conversation to have here, because I am actually genuinely curious about the trad-con take on the issue of not-obviously-sexualized depictions of nudity displayed to children. While I differ from the tradcons on some important issues, I’m genuinely very favorably-inclined toward their approach to sexuality, and I can see a very compelling argument in favor of those parents’ complaints.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that instead of showing the class David, this teacher had Googled “nude man” and showed the top result to the class. Or, hell, in the interest of ensuring he doesn’t find porn, he Googles “nude man posed like Michelangelo David”. What, practically, in terms of its effect on the students, is the difference between that scenario and what the teacher actually did. Now, in terms of the teacher’s intent, or what the teacher is hoping to achieve, the distinction is clear: he wants to show the students a seminally-important work of Renaissance art, and the amazing skill demonstrated by the artist, and presumably isn’t doing so for any sexual reason. Still, in actuality, what he has shown them in either scenario is a very detailed (even graphic) depiction of a nude human male body. Presumably if there is any sexualized or prurient effect on the children that we would expect to result from showing them a naked man - particularly if they are young enough or sheltered enough to have never seen one before - that same effect would likely occur when showing them David.
(Perhaps that’s a key disagreement here - maybe people would argue that the statue is so obviously fake and non-sexual that there’s no way someone would be aroused or scandalized by looking at it. However, I’m not so sure this is true, and I’m frankly not even certain that Michelangelo himself did not have a conscious or subconscious prurient intent at least partially motivating his creation of the statue.)
So, if one takes it as a given that young kids shouldn’t be exposed to a graphic depiction of a dick and balls - or a pair of titties, or whatever - then does the fact that those genitals are made of marble instead of flesh make such an important difference that one ought not to object to the display of this statue where children can see it? I’m not so sure it’s such a simple question that we can just dismiss or gainsay these parents out of hand.
It may, in fact, be true that we are in a temporary lull as it pertains to concrete and public exercises of woke power. However, I think the great lesson of post-2014 wokeness is that its most enduring victories - the ones that create lasting changes to the legal and cultural infrastructure - are achieved directly after, or in the months following, specific events which get maximally weaponized into a coordinated outrage machine.
Before Michael Brown, the “cops are killing innocent black men for no reason” narrative was just not on the radar of most people; afterward, suddenly this narrative was everywhere, and activists were working every day to locate examples to turn viral, in order to maximize the salience of the narrative and to solidify as many concrete gains - and put as much money into the pockets of activists - as possible. Thousands of new jobs and tentacles of the NGO-industrial complex were generated in that roughly two-year-period - even while support for BLM began steadily declining among white Americans not too long after the initial 2014 spike.
Then, just as that level of support had finally dropped below a certain threshold, and most people had stopped thinking or caring about that narrative, George Floyd happened, and suddenly the outrage machine went right back into full gear and ratcheted everything one step further. The activist class had spent the intervening years quietly laying the scaffolding behind the scenes, waiting for the right viral event to light the fuse that would allow them to spring into coordinated action. Even as most Americans now start to lose interest in the narrative and things start to get pared back slightly from the new 2020 peak, the overall baseline level of power accrued to the activist class still vastly exceeds the old pre-2020 baseline, which was itself vastly larger than the previous pre-2014 baseline.
So, my question to the public who are belatedly starting to rethink things and to push back on the extremes which they themselves were willing to tolerate in the immediate aftermath of that viral event is as follows: Will you have the moral courage and willpower and hard-heartedness the next time a George Floyd level event happens, to say, “I don’t give a fuck”? When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”? Or, like the previous times, will you say, “I understand why you’re angry and I agree things need to change, but do you have to be quite so extreme about your response?” If all you can muster is the latter, then you’re allowing another ratchet of the dial one more step to the left and they’re going to claim as much more power as they can before you start to lose interest again.
There is talk on the Dissident Right - I was actually exposed to it initially by James Lindsay, who is himself only a lukewarm member of the DR - that the activist class is quietly laying the groundwork for a “Drag Floyd” or “Trans Floyd”; in other words, the increasingly aggressive pushing of things like Drag Queen Story Hour into as many Red enclaves as possible is a tactic designed to eventually provoke one or more violent responses which can be virally weaponized. Eventually somebody will get radicalized enough to take violent action against one of these drag queens, or one of these doctors who performs sex changes on minors, and that will be just what the outrage machine needed to light the spark. Will the parts of the public who matter be able to hold firm and say, “Well yeah, what did you think was going to happen? Sorry, we’re not interested in another ratchet”? I predict that they will not. That would require much more conviction and unity/clarity of purpose than the Anglosphere public is willing and able to muster. No, we’ll get another massive coordinated action, another permanent power grab, and it’ll take a few years for people to start forgetting about that narrative, during which a new baseline will have been established, from which we will never retreat.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This is an absolutely bizarre take, given that the actual academic, theoretical basis for the constellation of ideas popularly called wokeness is explicitly Marxist and was conceptualized by self-identified Marxists. These Marxists - who, again, are not subtle or covert about their Marxist analytics framework - then cultivated and recruited a legion of protégés and catspaws to populate a vast network of entities, both public- and private-sector, to institute this ideology on a mechanical policy level.
You can look up the Frankfurt School and its roots in Gramsci, or you can look up Paulo Freire (about whom I have previously spoken in this forum) and his profound and wide-reaching impact on modern “woke” education. You can look up Rudi Dutschke and his advocacy for a decentralized “march through the institutions” which was then implemented throughout North America and later Europe. These things are not difficult to research, and the only way these people’s explicit Marxist convictions and methods are not better-known is that they’re counting on people like you not to put in the effort of trying to learn about it.
It really seems like you don’t want to know about it. You have formed mental associations between anti-Marxism as an ideology on one hand, and your outgroup on the other hands. You’ve pattern-matched “hates Marxism and is vigilant about it” with “mustache-twirling villains and theocrats”, which is precisely what Marxists want you to do. They want you to continue to associate “socialism” with “lovely middle-class Sweden in the 80’s” instead of “Maoist Red Guards” and you seem to be perfectly comfortable with not seeking out the information that would undermine that association.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
The easiest solution here, as far as I can tell, is to have different legal regimes for rural life vs. urban life. Let urban life be for the bug-man law-and-order types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense legal regime, and for the rowdy teenagers and drunkards who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the rural areas where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle. (I don’t mean barbarian in a negative way, but simply to draw a contrast between that ethos and the cosmopolitan lifestyle I prefer.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that would have resulted in me being killed or severely punished under the type of legal regime I’m advocating. I’ve been drunk and stupid before, but never in a way that would cause strangers to feel threatened by me; maybe that’s just because I’m small and not physically-imposing, so my drunk behavior doesn’t present as menacing even if I’m performing the same actions as you and your friends did.
I do have the “privilege” of being white and middle-class-presenting, meaning that people are far less likely to assume the worst of me than they are of someone who looks and acts like Jordan Neely; fortunately, that disparity in perception is justified by statistical reality. People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Oh, you are dead-on about Trump, and I pegged him from the second he came down that elevator as a toxic grifter to be avoided at all costs. I do think that for all the ways I’m an odd fit for the Right, the fact that at no point was I ever a run-of-the-mill normie conservative gives me a bit of insight into some of the failure modes to which the Red Tribe is vulnerable, and I knew that Trump would be able to expertly exploit those vulnerabilities while actually doing close to nothing to help the people who voted for him. He is the ur-fabulist, someone so labile and bereft of sincerity that he will say and believe literally anything he thinks he needs to in order to secure adulation and power.
The PMC libs are the inheritors of the elite culture which they claim so conspicuously to hate, and the only conservatives left are the proles. If there is hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, is there any taste of tradition left. Proles and animals are free.
I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race? If the destruction of the PMC means the destruction of what’s left of our high culture, I’ve got to say that siding with the elites starts to look like a more attractive prospect. Say whatever you will about the PMC and their schizophrenic relationship to traditional high culture, but like I said, when I go to a classical concert or a ballet or an opera, it’s very obvious who is keeping these traditions alive, and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, and even more intense ethnic conflict.'
How does believing in HBD equate to wanting any of that? HBD is a descriptive theory; understanding that the differential in human capital between the white minority and the black majority does not suggest any particular course of action or policy recommendation for the country. In fact, the knowledge that the current precipitous decline in material and cultural standards is a direct result of the dispossession and disenfranchisement of whites can easily lead to a belief that the country needs more international investment and intervention by foreigners, given that it’s blindingly obvious that the native blacks are not ever going to be able to maintain anything close to the first-world standards that prevailed in the country during apartheid.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
there was a leftist constantly going on about how white nationalists are Nazis who should be deplatformed and disenfrachised - but always managed to write it long form posts that don't break the rules - can you honestly say there would not come a point where you would be asking us to tell him to give it a rest?
There already are, and there have certainly been significantly more in the past. Remember JeanStealers? I make liberal use of the report function if I feel that a post is uncharitable, if its central thesis is “outgroup bad”, or if I feel that ot contributes nothing of intellectual value. Obviously I’m far more likely to do so if I find the post in question ideologically unpleasant; I’m a human being, susceptible to normal human failures and perceptual blindspots, and I’m more likely to notice the flaws and shortcomings of a post I disagree with.
What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with? The whole “recruiting for a cause” thing has always been massively ill-defined. Does it mean “trying to get people to enroll in, or give money to, a specific organization”? If so, the user in question has, to my knowledge, never done so. Or does it mean the far more nebulous “trying to convince people that a specific issue or ideology is important and worth subscribing to”? If so, that describes roughly every single post here.
Also, for what it’s worth, the poster in question does, in fact, engage with other topics. He has replied to a number of my comments about non-Jew-related posts, which is how I know that to be the case.
A number of times on this forum, posters with right-wing sensibilities have solicited dating advice along the lines of “Every woman I talk to expresses progressive opinions, so how do I navigate around the inevitable political disagreements?” Each time, several posters have asserted that this is not in fact as much of a problem as it may appear to be; if everything else in the relationship is going well and the woman respects you for other reasons, she not only won’t have a problem with your politics, she’ll actually start to mold her own political beliefs to become more in line with yours!
This assertion has always struck me as equal parts intriguing and bizarre. Certainly I’m familiar with much of the copious amount of commentary around psychological differences between men and women, including Dissident Right discussion of the “Woman Question”. I fully accept that aggregate differences in temperament and political reasoning between the sexes are real and substantial. Still, it’s tough for me to wrap my head around the idea that most adult women’s beliefs are malleable to that extent. Perhaps I just haven’t managed to wrap my head around the unavoidable truth that, when it comes to men and women, the inner machinations of each sex’s mind are an enigma to the other sex, and that a regime of healthy relations between the sexes requires both men and women to contort themselves into a mode of external presentation that renders them legible to each other.
Although I am currently in a situation wherein the relevance of this line of questioning is probably going to become significant to me in the pretty near future, I’m not actually asking for advice here. I’m actually more just curious as to how this supposed process actually operates. The claim is that a woman who is in a long-term relationship with a right-wing man will become more right-wing herself over time. How does this work? Is this only true of women who did not express a strong political worldview before the start of the relationship? If the woman did have progressive opinions before the relationship, will she end up explicitly repudiating those opinions later on? (i.e. “I was wrong about that, and you were right. I can’t believe I ever believed that!”) Or will it just be a more subtle shift over time, with the woman beginning to express right-wing opinions and either not noticing or not acknowledging the way in which these opinions contradict her earlier views? Does the shift reflect a genuine change of worldview within the woman’s mind, or is it merely a change in the views which she verbally expresses? (The really alarming and potentially blackpilling answer would be “There is no difference between those two things.”) Also, is this shift only sustainable if the woman does not have a larger social sphere of women who will reinforce progressive views and thus act as a countervailing force against the influence of the husband?
I realize that this is a series of questions and that the subject matter might be too broad for the “Small-Scale Questions Thread”, but it doesn’t seem to be appropriate for the Culture War thread either.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I agree, but you did not express concern with low-effort link spam - your expressed concern was with white nationalists trying to “recruit” people. Given that this is your concern, shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting, rather than posting shitty low-effort links, which makes us look lazy and bad-faith?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
That’s a gorgeous piece! Also, I think this is the first male harpist I’ve ever seen. Certain instruments have a significant gender imbalance, and if there’s a more female-coded classical instrument than the harp, I’ve yet to discover it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Do you understand how, to somebody who is not a Christian and who is not invested in believing in the most favorable possible interpretation of your faith, this just seems like extra-special pleading? Surely there are a great many things which Jesus is recorded has having said which you consider deeply profound insights and statements of Jesus’ - and, by extension, God’s - true beliefs. Why, then, should we take seriously your contention that this particular statement - one which just happens to present an extremely inconvenient dilemma for your other non-religious philosophical and material commitments if taken literally and seriously - is just obviously a joke and Jesus didn’t really mean it, unlike all the other stuff he said that you agree with?
Why would that be absurd? Why do you believe the term is useful at all? Why do you believe that “racism” indicates a real and important phenomenon worth caring about? What if the word was never anything other than a boo light, intentionally devised as a way to pathologize what is actually a totally normal and healthy outlook?
There is nobody on earth who, upon honest reflection, would agree that “Yes, I just hate minorities because they’re ugly and stinky and it’s bad to look different from the way I look.” That is a caricature which exists only in the heads of racial egalitarians and “anti-racists”. In reality, even the least introspective, most unreflective “bigot” has actual specific reasons - even if it’s at the level of anecdotal examples and life experience - to believe that there are important differences between the traits and the history of various groups, and/or that limiting the interpersonal interaction of those groups is optimal. I don’t care if they wouldn’t put it in those high-falutin’ terms. Even if you gave them truth serum and ample opportunity to freely articulate the contents of their own minds, they wouldn’t commit to “just don’t like ‘em, simple as” as an honest reflection of their internal mental state.
Racism isn’t real. Believing in important racial differences is certainly real; I believe it, as do probably a plurality of commenters here. Believing that an optimal society ought to achieve some level of separation/segregation between groups is also real, and is a far more controversial position even in this community; I advocate for the managed and non-coercive separation of black Americans from non-blacks over time, but it’s not because “I just hate the darkies and want them to die”. I have (what I think are) sophisticated reasons for believing what I do; I reasoned myself into this position over time, and did not start from a simple visceral aversion to people who look different from me.
A small number of people today even still believe that some races ought to rule over others, or even that some racial and ethnic groups should be exterminated! I don’t believe that, and I’ve never interacted with anyone who does (I suspect that the vast majority of people who do say these things are simply LARPing or doing a bit) but I don’t deny that such people are real. However, they are still not “racist”. They have actual reasons for believing that the conditions of the world are such that extreme measures genuinely are necessary for the preservation and improvement of mankind.
I could turn this around on you and ask: “Do you own pets? You do? Oh, so you irrationally hate animals? You want them enslaved in your home, rather than free to rule themselves?” And you would rightly respond, “No, I just don’t think humans and animals are precisely equal, and that the natural order of things is for humans to domesticate certain animals and to use them for our benefit, as long as we’re not overly cruel to those animals. I love my cat, but I wouldn’t let him drive a car, or vote in a presidential election.” But if I was absolutely committed to the proposition that speciesism is a useful and important concept, it would be easy for me to distort your beliefs to make them fit into a model that pathologizes them.
This is essentially what I believe that you’re doing with the term “racism”. Let the term go. It was never valuable to begin with. Nobody here cares if you think we’re racist or not. The term has become fully disenchanted. You might as well call us all heretics. Or “enemies of the Emperor of Assyria”. Engage with our ideas on the object level, and stop worrying about whether or not they fall afoul of your made-up boo word.
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