Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
To be clear, I’m not talking primarily about the boomerwaffen, I’m talking about much smarter and edgier DR figures like, again, Auron MacIntyre, who can normally be counted on to dunk on conservatives for being too naïve and lowbrow. My general observation is that the farther-right a commentator gets, the more intense he is about the groomer discourse. Like I said, I’m observing what to me is obviously a purity spiral, in which “being absolutely obsessed with rooting out pedophiles” is seen as a badge of honor and based-ness. Are you seeing something different?
I actually just recently listened to OP’s (if I’m correct in assuming that OP is himself the author of the linked piece) appearance on Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast, and he is indeed an engaging podcast speaker. Pleasantly surprising to see him posting on this forum!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead?
To some extent, I do! As I laid out in this thread back on Reddit, I see whiteness as a category which is at least partially constructed, despite having a mostly-biological substrate. East Asians, for example, are not even remotely related to Europeans (unless one accepts deeply esoteric theories about the contribution of Tocharian/Indo-European-descended people to the genetic ancestry of the Yamato people from whom modern Japanese are mostly descended - a topic about which I’m totally unqualified to even offer speculation) yet since the end of World War II certain Asian countries have been some of the most productive and important contributors to first-world industrialized society of any peoples on earth. Personally, I’m happy to welcome Japanese and Koreans into the fold of people with whom I see myself as sharing a common destiny and at least some level of common patrimony, as long as they continue to seem willing to behave similarly toward me and mine.
However, the vast majority of people in the world do seem to achieve the highest degree of fulfillment and self-satisfaction when living among people with whom they share a common ancestry and deep history. Now, perhaps that’s simply an incidental consequence of the fact that in such parts of the world, genetic kinship tends to have a nearly one-to-one correspondence with cultural/linguistic/political similarity.
Maybe in a hypothetical world in which “values” were randomly distributed among people, such that it would be impossible to draw any sort of reliable inference about a person’s “values” or personality based on observing that person’s outwardly-apparent racial/ethnic background, it really would make no sense to place any value whatsoever on racial/ethnic similarity when deciding whom to associate with and share political sovereignty and resources with.
All available evidence, though, would seem to indicate that we do not, in fact, live in that hypothetical world. In the world in which we do live, cultures and “values” did not fall from the sky and pick ethnic groups at random. Things like personality are, in fact, heritable to a great degree. Consequently, people who are closely related genetically/ancestrally do in fact have a greater likelihood of having similar “values” than do people who are not related genetically/ancestrally. To the extent that this is true, it actually does make complete sense to see people with whom I share genuine documentable kinship to have a greater claim to my “patrimony” than do those with whom I share no kinship.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have flooded across the southern border this year. We have documented evidence that a great many of them are Africans. Nobody is stopping them from coming here. Why do you believe that the immigration status quo is insufficient to allow that number to balloon to the numbers @omfalos predicted? Who or what is going to stop all those Africans from coming here, without any change to the current formal immigration regime?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
What about all of the African migrants who are joining the hordes of illegal immigrants surging across the southern border? What is stopping an African from hopping on a plane to Mexico or Guatemala and hoofing it across the border, same as all the Mexicans and Central Americans?
Tough to say, how about you throw some my way?
Edit: I now see that FC substantially edited and fleshed out his comment after I had already responded to it, leading to Hlynka’s response below, which I found confusing until I went back and saw FC’s edit.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think that coming to terms with the failure of the “American idea” - the realization that it was a house of cards from the very beginning - entails a sort of “death of the author” interpretation of the Founding; these men, to the extent that they had any coherent idea of what they were creating, were basically super-fallible autists who were LARPing as Enlightenment-flavored Platonic philosopher-kings. Their project should not be taken seriously as a credible long-term basis for a functional society.
Whatever we have now looks nothing remotely like what they had in mind. While part of that is due to a failure of stewardship on the part of the intervening generations, the bulk of the failure rests on the guys who actually thought you could found a whole-ass country around some academic theories and poster-board slogans. That the country succeeded for as long as it did is a testament not to “the founding documents”, but to the very high level of human capital of the founding ethnic stock of the country, and to some incredibly favorable geographic factors.
That none of this allows us to project forward a coherent vision for how future generations, unrelated in any way to the founding stock of the country, can achieve buy-in to this interpretation of events… well, that’s why, as I’ve made clear in previous posts, I’m not “patriotic”. There’s no “there” there at this point. The story was too full of plot-holes, and the authors barely understood their own motivations for writing it in the first place.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
This is a compelling point! Obviously I think there’s an HBD element in effect here, and I also agree that these men display an obvious contempt for European society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
All very solid points, and I genuinely don’t intend to minimize the suffering that women of that era experienced. I merely brought up the Minoans as a sort of metonymical allusion to draw attention to parts of modern society that I want to criticize. For what it’s worth, a lot of recent archeological/historiographical work has cast a ton of doubt on the whole theory of a gynocratic Minoan state anyway; a lot of that was probably just Marija Gimbutas and her acolytes overfitting to insufficient data.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
To be clear, I’m referring to having a large proportion of your population descended from the Third World. Shouldn’t have darkly hinted about it, but I figured it’d be obvious based on all of my other posts about the matter.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Seems to me like in this post and your replies to people, you did publicly touch it in a space like this.
I’m keeping my commentary very much at the object level of the article and of the efficacy/coherence of the “groomer” discourse, but there’s a much larger discussion about the range of possible right-wing views about the “age of consent” policy sphere that I’m just not willing to stake any public position on at this time.
That’s fair, but I think that most people do the MLK thing, which is to say, “Yes, the real Founders were hypocrites and not particularly impressive, but the idea of the Founders - the most positive and charitable interpretation of their own words - is a great and morally significant mythos.” Whereas I’m saying, “No, even if those men genuinely believed every word they said and lived their lives as exemplars of those Enlightenment values, those values are bad and not something on which we should try to build a society. In fact, to the extent that the Founders were hypocrites, this is actually a point in their favor, because it implies that on some level they understood that their lofty ideals were not a reliable guide to actual living.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.
Leaving aside the fact that I personally am certainly not worried about offending “BIPOC people” - I direct you to peruse my larger body of work on this site, in which I do precisely the opposite - your larger point stands and is valuable. Progressives will contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for every self-defeating thing a poor minority does, while not only hearing no excuses for similarly self-defeating behavior from downscale whites but actually reveling in it. The pattern you are outlining is real.
However, hypocrisy can be reconciled in two directions. One would be to see all downtrodden and marginalized communities as equally worthy of sympathy and uplift; a populist “champion of the little guy” who gives every bit as help to every unfortunate and exploited person, regardless of race or tribal loyalty or whatever. That appears to be what you’re advocating, and I understand the appeal. However, I can also resolve the hypocrisy by extending the same disdain and feeling of superiority to the “BIPOC people” as I do to the “trailer trash”; this is the elitist position that some people are better than other people, and that generally speaking power and resources are effectively distributed based on the quality, productivity, and value of individuals. This is certainly an oversimplified worldview and does not accurately describe the whole picture; however, I believe that it is directionally correct.
I have been to the dirt-poor part of Appalachia - I was in eastern Kentucky - and if I were to give one of those people a free ticket to a classical music concert - which, by the way, one can purchase for like $25 at most venues and get decent seats, so this isn’t some massive expense - that individual would probably not appreciate the experience even given the chance. I’m confident that this is the cad because even wealthy or middle-class Red Tribe people - people with no material concerns preventing them from participating in high culture - overwhelmingly do not do so, and prefer lower-brow fare. There’s a cultural/psychological/tribal element here that has nothing to with people just being too poor to afford a ticket to the ballet.
As for your contention that someone would only go to the ballet “to feel a little superior to the people around them”, I can assure you that that’s not the reason I go to the ballet. I go because so genuinely experience it as sublime and beautiful. It makes me feel connected to a larger corpus of important cultural output that represents the absolute pinnacle of what my people have been able to create, during the period when their culture was at its most powerful and dynamic and confident. I have difficulty relating to people who can’t experience the sublimity of something like that. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying lowbrow entertainment - I go to punk rock concerts all the time, which are not intellectually-stimulating or artistically refined - but I think there’s something really limited and unfortunate about someone who hasn’t even been able to cultivate a base-level appreciation for the boundless world of free and instantly-accessible high culture that’s out there at the fingertips of the people for whom you’re making excuses.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Except it wasn't though. By the time of the Edict of Milan Christianity was already so prevalent in the Roman Countryside and amongst the urban working class that many modern historians posit that Emperor Constantine's conversion was in fact a cynical ploy to cut his rivals off at the knees by buying the loyalty of the plebs. It wasn't the "salt of the earth" who were resisting conversion (that phrase itself bein an explicit reference to Christ's Sermon on the Mount BTW), it was the cosmopolitan elites who were trying and failing to suppress it.
I made it abundantly obvious in my post that I was referring to the Christianization of Western and Northern Europe, and not the initial conversion of Rome and its immediate surroundings. All of the examples I provided were clearly about the regions outside of direct Roman rule, so you bringing up Rome is either an intentional dodge - because you’re not conversant in the history of the regions and era that I’m talking about, or because you don’t have a counterargument against my interpretation of the events in question - or (once again) a failure of reading comprehension on your end.
As for everything else here, you’re correct that we have incredibly orthogonal worldviews. I’m primarily interested in questions about whether or not Red and Blue are analytical categories that can be applied to people across a wide geographical and temporal field of comparison - was Oliver Cromwell a Blue? Was Charlemagne? Whereas you are very intent on keeping the conversation about these categories firmly rooted in the specific cultural and political context of the modern United States. As a result of this fundamental difference in analytical frameworks, you’re probably correct that you and I are indeed doomed to always talk past each other.
Ultimately I would love for someone in my faction - probably not me personally, since you very obviously find my specific style very grating - to convince you that we’re not your enemy, but rather an ally of convenience, with whom you’re going to have to coexist both before and after the eventual victory of our coalition. We’re Blues, but we’re not leftists, and that means we’re not your real enemy. I truly do believe that, and I haven’t given up hope that one of us will eventually break through to people of your inclination.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Yes, absolutely; in fact, I would have no a priori reason to distrust any of the individual women that I’ve talked to about it. It’s when all of them are telling me the same somewhat fishy-sounding thing that I start to be suspicious.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Fair enough, it wasn’t a good or high-quality statement, and I agree that it deserves a mod warning.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Can anyone recommend a good resource for learning Russian? I had been using Duolingo, but I didn’t feel like it was truly helping me become conversational in the language. I would take night classes, but I have a side job that requires me to keep most of my weeknights free. Something I could use while at work would be optimal, but I’m open to whatever recommendations people can provide.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You did, but right after that you argued that anyone who believes that all things need a cause must necessarily believe that God also himself needs a cause, but this doesn’t follow, because anyone who believes in God by definition believes that God does not require a cause. Since you yourself believe that the universe doesn’t require a cause, it doesn’t make sense to then argue that God does.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Based if true.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
It’s always the ones you least expect.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
I’ve also compared the spread of Christianity to the spread of Woke, so I understand why you would extrapolate this parallel to predict that Christianity’s effect on Rome’s trajectory was exactly as monotonically disastrous as Woke appears to be for European-descended cultures. However, I think it’s every bit as likely that European cultures eventually end up molding Woke toward our own needs and purposes, much as they did with Christianity, defanging its most destructive aspects to achieve some sort of sustainable equilibrium.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I have no complaints with this. I think it’s both reasonable and salutary to encourage people here to act like humans with varied interests and to inculcate some level of social participation in the community.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Of course he can bring up Pinochet and Mussolini as right-wing failure modes, he just can’t use them as examples of right-wing governments that have produced bad results in his lifetime, nor of Anglosphere right-wing governments more generally.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Every year on my birthday, I eat a delicious piece of salted caramel cheesecake, as a treat. It’s pure sugar and fat, an indulgence of atavistic hungers programmed in me by evolution. It’s orgasmically delicious in the moment, but also terrible for me, which is why I do it once a year. Is there intellectual content in my consumption of the cheesecake? Does it “produce a change in me”? Is the cheesecake art? It is a physical artifact produced by hand by a human being, with the intention of generating an emotional/aesthetic experience in the consumer. Like a classical symphony, it produces a transitory, evanescent sense of elation in me. (Thank God Beethoven’s 9th Symphony doesn’t put 1,300 calories of pure junk food into my body every time I listen to it.)
I used to draw a distinction between “art” and “entertainment”, using an exclusive definition of art the way you are now. Over time, though, I accepted that the distinction is illusory, and that there is nothing wrong with consuming content that is designed purely to excite me aesthetically and to cater to my current preferences, rather than to alter them.
If you watch 500 marathons and every time the winner is black, then when marathon #501 comes around and you’re getting ready to place your bets, you would be a complete moron to approach those bets with the attitude, “I have no opinion about which race the winner will be from. It could be the white guy this time, we have no way to know beforehand!” When surveying the slate of runners, you are completely justified in looking at the white guys and saying, “Bad bet, safe to ignore.”
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes. If the only information given to me about two competing candidates is that one guy’s name is Connor Przyewski, and the other guy’s name is Anquon Washington, I have to use outside information - like my observations of patterns - to supplement the explicit info I was provided. This means that I have to judge the candidates based on the information I have, which, if skin color has a demonstrated correlation with observable disparate outcomes, would include skin color as a useful proxy for important information.
More options
Context Copy link