Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
None of the track-and-field events - sprinting, marathon, long jump, etc. - have given out medals yet. Neither has basketball. Those are the sports that people are talking about when they point to the Summer Olympics specifically having lost a lot of its national specificity; that’s where you’re going to see a lot of people of obviously African ancestry competing under various non-African national flags.
Your point is valuable, though. Those of us on the racialist right often overstate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon we’re pointing to. There are, in fact, still a great many successful Olympians with deep ethnic roots in the respective countries they’re representing. We’re nowhere near the point where you turn on the Olympics and everyone is African, which is the impression one would get if one only follows Olympic commentary on right-wing Twitter.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
I always knew there was something fishy about this whole story…
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.
Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.
What new music have you been listening to recently?
My favorite band dropped a new album last week! It has been five years since Marianas Trench released their last album, and Haven was well worth the wait. It continues the cinematic 80’s-inflected pop-rock the band first perfected on their 2015 album Astoria.
What I love most about Marianas Trench is that they are determined to keep album-oriented rock alive; Haven is a thirteen-song semi-autobiographical meditation on Joseph Campbell’s theory of the archetypal literary/mythological hero’s journey, with each song representing a specific juncture within that journey as it applied to frontman Josh Ramsay’s own life. Ramsay was inspired partly by the impending birth of his first child, and what this means for the small-scale “hero’s journey” of his own life.
While many of the album’s songs are long, epic, and complex (including the opening and closing tracks, both of which are between six and nine minutes long) others are tight and incredibly catchy pop songs - Ramsay wrote and produced the bubblegum-pop mega-hit “Call Me Maybe” for fellow Canadian Carly Rae Jepsen back in 2011, and his ear for melodies and musical textures is unimpeachable - elevated by Ramsay’s powerful falsetto and the band’s multi-layered vocal harmonies. Several of them sound like they were lifted straight from the height of 1980’s dance-pop; Ramsay channels Prince and Michael Jackson on the infectious “Remember Me By”, and the bouncy love song “Ancient History” contains a saxophone solo that I assume was recorded by the ghost of The E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons.
I get the vague sense that many people here have little interest in new music - particularly new pop music - but for those who want to see rock bands continue to release full-length albums with thematic and narrative through-lines, perhaps my recommendation might inspire you to give Haven a listen. You could find worse ways to spend 52 minutes. I’m seeing Marianas Trench in concert (for the sixth or seventh time - I can’t keep track) in two weeks, and I can’t wait to see how they recreate this thing live.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Honestly, this is one of a number of pretty massive recent blunders by the conspiratorial wing of the online right (which is basically the entire Twitter right at this point) and it’s at the point where it’s getting increasingly difficult to take any of them seriously. The same people who insisted over and over and over again that we know this diary contains information that must be incredibly damaging to The Narrative™️ are the same people who, within minutes of the Trump assassination attempt, confidently asserted that the progressive media was directly responsible for inspiring the shooter to commit the act, despite nobody knowing anything concrete about the shooter. It’s getting extremely cringeworthy and grifter-esque at this point. Is nobody going to be held accountable for making overconfident and wildly-inflated claims for partisan purposes? Auron MacIntyre, The Prudentialist, everyone else in that sphere.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Schmittian dynamics aside, splinter in my eye, log in yours.
I’m not sure what about any of my post history in this community would lead you to believe that I’m pro-progressive-media, or that I see the online right as my outgroup. My claim here is that both sides have an equally massive log in the eye, and that this is extremely disappointing to me because I’m recognizing the exact same infuriating tendencies on the right as I used to when I still read leftist media.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
That’s a good comparison! I think both bands have a similar flair for the cinematic and bombastically-expressive. I saw Thirty Seconds To Mars in concert years ago, and they had an ensemble of taiko drummers playing massive drums onstage while Jared Leto went far out into the middle of the arena seating to perform. Really great live act.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
No, this is absurd. First off, I’ve been posting here for years now, so the idea that the second I use the same (accurate, appropriate) words as you think a leftist would use, it’s now reasonable to pattern-match me to a leftist and consequently dismiss my argument, is utter self-serving garbage.
I don’t play pathetic tribal language games, trying to coat my argument in the shibboleths of my supposed “ingroup” just to get them to not immediately reject the substance of the point I’m making. If rightists have become so mindkilled that they will instinctively lash out at even the most blatantly correct criticism of their favorite Substack grifters, then why should I take any of them seriously anymore?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I absolutely did not do the latter!
To be clear, I made it explicit that I was referring to Twitter and Substack personalities such as Auron MacIntyre, not anyone on The Motte.
If people don't course correct after a while, then you can shit on us.
No, sorry, knee-jerk wild accusations of perfidy by your outgroup, backed up by baseless speculation in the total absence of concrete evidence, is clownish behavior no matter who does it. I’m not sympathetic to it at all, and if I ever (in a fit of irrational pique or misplaced credulity) appear to engage in it myself, I expect to be ruthlessly raked across the coals for doing so. It’s one of the most disastrously poisonous aspects of our current media/political environment, and if the right continues to prove that they’re every bit as bad as the left on this matter, I’m going to be beside myself with angst.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Why not just delete these people from your feed?
Right, that’s precisely what I’m considering doing. Which is very unfortunate, because these precise accounts are some of the major current thought leaders of the online right, who have historically had some very interesting things to say about topics relevant to my interest. Cutting myself off from them would represent a significant step away from the right-wing discourse sphere and accelerate my fast-increasing alienation from that set of ideas and norms.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
No, they’re not. I criticized right-wing Twitter accounts, @crushedoranges replied with “splinter in my eye, log in yours”. Which I interpreted as an accusation that I am not criticizing progressive media figures for doing the same thing, or at least not to the same extent. So I think it’s appropriate and worthwhile to point out that I have leveled the exact same criticism against the left-aligned media vociferously and frequently for the same behavior. I hate it when progressive Twitter starts making wild knee-jerk accusations against, for example, police officers who used deadly force against a black person; that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t also hate it when right-wing Twitter starts making similarly wild and knee-jerk accusations. Both are bad! “The left is more powerful than me, so their bad behavior matters more than mine” is left-wing logic.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Because, as I hope I made clear in my post, it’s not clear to me that low fertility is necessarily a long-term crisis.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end.
Which society expects military service of men? As far as I’m aware, there are only a handful of countries on earth with compulsory military service, and most of those impose the same requirement on women! American society, maybe outside of some fairly insular subcultures with a multigenerational history of military service, absolutely does not expect, let alone demand, military service of men. This is made obvious by the fact of how few American men serve in the military; I can’t imagine how much smaller the percentage is in other Western countries.
Modern Western society instead makes pretty much the exact same demand of both men and women: go to college, get the most remunerative job you’re able to, and work it until retirement age. American society very explicitly looks down upon women who are financially dependent on men, and mocks men who allow “gold diggers” to leech off of them financially. I think this myth that society demands everything of men and nothing of women is bizarre and clearly incorrect.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Well! I readily acknowledge that I was wrong, by an order of magnitude, regarding how many countries still have active conscription. I have to imagine that my somewhat Euro- and Asia-centric news diet caused me to not really give much thought toward how African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries handle conscription.
Still, I think my point about expectation of military service absolutely still stands as it pertains to First World countries. Of the European and East Asian countries, only a handful practice active and enforced conscription, and of those, several do conscript women. While it’s undeniably true that those women are overwhelmingly shunted toward non-combat roles, few of those countries is currently at war, so the men aren’t seeing any combat either.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Please direct this comment at the person who made this claim, rather than to me.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Countless women throughout history have sought methods to prevent pregnancy. The fact that these methods were often crude, unreliable, ineffective, or only available to women of considerable means is certainly one reason why such women so often ended up still having children despite their best efforts.
What made the Sexual Revolution so incredibly society-altering is that it went hand-in-hand with mass availability of The Pill - the first widely-available, affordable, safe, wildly reliable and effective contraceptive ever created. The first time that sexually-active women could exert anywhere near this level of control and agency over whether or not they would become pregnant. And within a few decades of its introduction it had become nearly-ubiquitous in every society able to reliably produce and/or distribute it. If this isn’t a textbook example of revealed preferences, I don’t know what is. What reason do we have to believe that if the Pill had been invented in Victorian England, women wouldn’t have adopted it en masse?
Appealing to what evolution has created doesn’t hold much weight with me, because evolution has produced all sorts of utter horrors for the various species of the world. If the male praying mantis had the ability to conceive of and actively choose whether he would still like to reproduce, knowing full well that it will nearly-inevitable lead to him being violently decapitated, do you think we’d still see comparable mantis TFR numbers? Or how about male bees, whose dicks straight-up fatally detach during the act of conception? How many of them do you think would still answer nature’s call, given the knowledge and ability to choose otherwise?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I also thanked her for the same.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"
Sorry if you think I fell off.
For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.
Is this genuinely true? I had no idea. Do you remember what the post was about?
Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss?
There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally. As for your question about careers: You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization? Sure, there are plenty of women in bullshit jobs - and plenty of men, myself included! - but the idea that every woman, or even the lion’s share of women would be more fulfilled by motherhood than by a career… that seems like the real “typical mind fallacy” here.
I think I’m just starting to return to my primordial wariness and contrarianism about “what human beings are hard-wired to be like” because of the recent and unrelenting discussion in online right-wing spaces about how “within every man there is an innate and burning desire to conquer, to struggle, to do great violence and to hear the lamentation of the enemy’s women”. I get told that my life is meaningless and empty and degenerate - that I’m a bugman - because I would rather attend classical music concerts than get my arm hacked off in a muddy field, or get blown to smithereens by an artillery strike. And that this should just be instinctively obvious to me as a human man, and that there’s something broken and mutated within me if it’s not. Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans living under traditional models of society.
I think there’s a huge amount to glean from the past, and I recognize the value of respecting time-honored understandings of humanity. I also recognize, though, the extent to which so much of life under those traditions was simply a matter of making the best of the things we had no power to affect or change. But what happens when we do gain that power? When agency can be effectively applied to reducing suffering? Surely nobody here would voluntarily refuse anesthesia during surgery simply because “suffering inculcates virtue” and “sometimes the hard thing needs to be done.” When humans have the opportunity to reduce pain and inconvenience, we eagerly do so, and that’s a great thing! It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming. And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to, then I think we need to be open to exploring ways to do so.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
So, for that matter, are Africans, mostly not followers of Abrahamic religions.
Huh? 93% of Sub-Saharan Africans self-identify as either Christian or Muslim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I mean, even if you turned every single one of those Muslims back into African Pagans, you’d still have 63% of Africans identifying as Christians, and your claim would still be wildly wrong.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
My NFL loyalties are split, in a complicated dance, between the Chargers and Jaguars. (The 2022 AFC Wild Card game was one of the strangest sports watching experiences of my life.) Both teams are in a somewhat similar position, and my excitement for the upcoming season is about the same for either team.
In terms of QB, the Chargers have the obvious advantage; Justin Herbert is a more experienced, more proven, more well-rounded, and significantly less turnover-prone than Trevor Lawrence. The Chargers also have the clear advantage on the offensive line, with maybe the best young tackle tandem in the AFC. The Jaguars’ offensive line, while they’ve hopefully patched the disastrous liability at center, is still a bottom-6 O-line, which risks yet another year of Lawrence scrambling for his life and unable to manifest his sky-high potential. The Jaguars do, though, have a very impressive group of offensive weapons around Lawrence, and if the O-line play is even league-average I expect a very effective passing offense. The Chargers’ passing game, on the other hand, is a giant question mark. Having lost veteran pass-catchers Keenan Allen and Mike Williams in the off-season, Herbert will be offloading passes to… Josh Palmer? Rookie Ladd McConkey? First-round-bust-in-the-making Quentin Johnston? With the addition of Jim Harbaugh as head coach - a move which increased my confidence in this team by about 5000% - and Greg Roman at OC, I expect the Bolts to run the ball approximately 900 times a game; they even directly imported the RB duo from the Ravens’ last few seasons.
Both teams suffer from the same fundamental flaw, though, which is that they stand almost no chance of being the best team in their respective divisions. The Chiefs are the undisputed best team in the AFC, and nothing I saw from them last night caused me to question this. The odds of the Chargers making it out of that division intact, let alone out of the AFC playoffs, are nonexistent. The Jaguars do not have to compete within their division with a buzzsaw quite as comprehensively unstoppable as KC, but they will be facing the seemingly ascendant Texans - freshly bolstered by the additions of Stefon Diggs, Joe Mixon, and the expected stratospheric second-year leap by CJ Stroud (the centerpiece of my fantasy football team, which is projected to win my league) who have all of the pieces to challenge for the upper echelon of offenses in the entire league. I just don’t think the Jags can measure up against that, especially not with our piss-poor defensive backfield.
I expect an encouraging leap from both teams in the regular season, dashed hopes in the early round of the playoffs, and a spectacular triumph for my fantasy team.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Right, this is where it once again becomes clear that Huxley utterly failed to write an actually dystopian world, and had to resort to the cheap tactic of making things gratuitously and unnecessarily ugly to make sure readers understand that the Brave New World is supposed to be bad, actually.
At this point I no longer care whether people think I’m right-wing enough. As this recent post of mine probably makes clear, I’m getting increasing disillusioned with a number of trends that I see congealing on what passes for the “intellectual Right” these days, and I’m searching for a sphere that’s far more akin to the early-20th-century “Progressive” intellectual movements that inspired works like Brave New World. Thinkers who had a profound optimism about humanity and technology, instead of the dour, overly-cautious naysaying of the Christian conservative right - a movement I’ve explicitly distanced myself from many times. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a techno-optimist who wants to live in a hyper-modern mega-city on Mars surrounded by effete Hapa urbanite aesthetes, because I’ve said that openly more than once.
Perhaps something like William James’ “the moral equivalent of war”
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