Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
So, let’s take black women — and my sense is that the plight of black women is the primary subtext of your comment.
I have met, interacted with, worked alongside, and befriended numerous black women over the course of my life. I think I have about as much intimate exposure to black women, black culture, etc., as any other white American who has lived in a large diverse city and attended public schools in a non-wealthy area. My perceptions of them are not informed by stereotypes and media portrayals, but by direct and repeated interpersonal contact.
I would never deny that there are attractive, feminine, intelligent, pleasant, and sexually-appealing black women. I’ve met several myself, I’ve flirted with them, I’ve even kissed a few. Like most men of any race, I prefer mixed and/or lighter-skinned black women with gracile features and smooth hair, rather than dark-skinned heavily African-looking women with heavy features and kinky/poofy hair. That’s not to say I’ve never seen or met attractive dark-skinned, non-mixed black women — I think most men would agree that, for example, Simone Biles is a very attractive woman — but they’re fewer and farther between.
That being said, it simply is verifiably true that rates of obesity are significantly higher among black women than they are among white women, and that’s to say nothing of Asian women. Average differences in temperament (whether you want to identify them as culturally-informed, or genetic, or some combination of the two) are well-documented, and so are average differences in physical build, and even more subtle things like smell. Black women smell different from white women. Their skin feels different. It’s understandable that someone whose primary romantic/sexual experience is with white women might find intimate contact with black women to be unfamiliar, slightly disconcerting, and just less familiar.
Furthermore, when it comes to the relatively small segment of black women who are genuinely hot, feminine, intelligent, and able to perform middle-class respectability, they generally seem to find themselves catapulted into high-status roles which give them the pick of the litter of nearly all high-status black men, plus some portion of high-status non-black men. Those women are highly unlikely to come into contact with lower-status white guys like me — both because they are unlikely to share the cultural hobbies which would put them into everyday casual interaction with me, and also because they’re too busy being wined and dined by wealthier men than I.
So, for the average white guy, the odds of regularly encountering the kinds of black women who may interest him are quite low, and the probability of both him and her being xenophilic enough to overcome significant cultural differences and fall for each other is even lower. It’s not primarily because they are stereotyping each other; rather, they are fairly accurately perceiving each other, and deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I’m not going to touch on anything political; I’ve spoken many times here about my early days as a loudly and annoyingly vocal socialist, the way I damaged so many interpersonal relationships by letting politics supersede everything else, etc.
For me, especially at this particular juncture in my life, I spend a ton of time agonizing about just how badly I bungled my prime years by not managing to seal the deal on a long-term relationship. And it was absolutely not for lack of trying! I spent my entire teens and twenties desperately pining over a series of unrequited crushes. It’s just that I was doing the exact opposite of the things I should have been doing to actually give those overtures any chance of succeeding.
I bought hook-line-and-sinker into the alluring but false promise of certain romantic comedies - The Office being probably the biggest culprit - that the secret to getting a woman to fall in love with you is to become her very close friend first, orbit passively around her but putting yourself into scenarios wherein romance could blossom but which maintain plausible deniability if it doesn’t, and eventually she’ll give you a clear sign that she has fallen for you. This is all, of course, pretty much 180 degrees the opposite of what actually inspires attraction in the vast majority of girls and women. It is, however, very comforting to believe if you’re a gawky, profoundly insecure, sexually unconfident, low-T guy like I was (and in many ways still am) because it doesn’t require you to take bold action and risk catastrophic failure and embarrassment. (Except actually it still does lead eventually to embarrassment, because over time one must face the facts that a particular crush is going absolutely nowhere and she’s clearly drifting away from you, and you realize that the failure was just dragged out over time, losing you precious time and other opportunities.)
I did manage to have one relationship that was, for a relatively short period of time, seemingly very successful, with a very beautiful and intelligent woman, but again, my total lack of understanding of what women want out of a relationship with a man was so lacking that I couldn’t hold the relationship together. However, while I’ve at long last come to the painful realization that women are not seeking an egalitarian and companionate relationship with a man - a friendship that just happens to also involve sex and cohabitation - I also pretty much optimized my whole personality and lifestyle toward that.
I never developed many of the skills (practical or internal) that would be required of a genuine paterfamilias. I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman who might actually be interested in a companionate relationship with a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual; I’m also nowhere near what conservative “trad” women are, understandably, looking for.
@FiveHourMarathon is right about aging. I seem to have hit a real wall physically during the COVID lockdowns, losing a substantial amount of physical fitness that I’m now struggling to get back. (And some of my old crushes are starting to hit their own walls as well, such that even the ones who are still single are not nearly as appealing to me as they once were.)
Young guys, please do not waste your prime. It closes sooner than you think, and the dating scene once you’re out of it is, if not quite a wasteland, at least wasteland-adjacent. Find a good woman early and lock her down for life before she has a chance to experience all the guys she’s missing out on.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You know what? I think I’m just gonna go marinate in my own innumeracy for a bit here. I can’t really offer an excuse; just a total brain-fart. I was really confident about it, too, which makes it so much worse.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Yeah, as someone who commutes via public transit and who walks a lot, the lack of publicly-available toilets is a massive hindrance to my life, and is nearly entirely a result of the fact that homeless people cannot be trusted not to make those bathrooms filthy, or not to use them to shoot up drugs or clean themselves. When I visited Japan, I was blown away by the number of publicly-available toilets - surely a sign of the high trust level of the society. (As well as the generally small number of homeless people in that country.)
So, this used to be my favorite movie for years. I think I imprinted strongly on it because I saw it for the first time at age 8 and it was probably one of the first movies - along with Jurassic Park, which also had a profound effect on me at the time - I saw with actual dramatic stakes and spectacular visuals. (It’s also the first nude scene I saw in a movie, which probably contributed to my very positive first impression of it.) I also acknowledge that I was (and still am) a pretty low-T guy, and that my tastes and proclivities largely tended toward the feminine during my formative years.
Other commenters’ cynical and acidic takes on the film’s central romance are basically completely accurate; if you’re a man who is neither as virile and charming as prime DiCaprio, nor as rich and ambitious as Cal, the entire Rose plot is pretty blackpilling. It sucks to know that probably the best that most guys could ever hope to be is the nameless schmuck who later picked up those guys’ sloppy thirds, never being featured onscreen or even apparently occupying much of a place in Rose’s emotional landscape at all, despite being the father of her children. Far more realistic is being one of the innumerable guys who died horribly in frozen water, or just ended it all quickly by leaping off the deck. Me personally, I’d probably end up like poor First Officer Murdoch, gunning a man down in a panic and then offing myself.
The film really is a testament to the awesome power of artifice, spectacle, and aesthetics. On some level, nearly every modern person who appreciates Titanic does so because the world it depicts - no matter how much the nihilistic Hollywood shitlib James Cameron tries to paint it as stuffy and doomed - is glamorous, confident, impeccably classy, and features exclusively high-quality white people. Even the poorest people on the ship are charming European immigrants, with no signs of criminality or dysfunction, dancing a sprightly Irish jig. The music is lush and gorgeous, the effects are stunning, the sets and costumes are incredible. The emotional/ideological soul of the film is utterly poisonous and it doesn’t even matter, because the experience is so beautiful and tragic. (See also: Harry Potter)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.
I knew this was coming. I have read too many “conservative” commentators who decry mass immigration to European countries but celebrate it in America (“because we’re a different sort of country, built on ideas”) to expect anything else. People are perfectly capable of looking at Syrian gang members shooting each other in a Stockholm mall (shouting in Arabic the whole time) and recognizing Those men are not Swedes. They will never be Swedes. Nothing short of a magic spell could turn them into Swedes. And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.
America is not a special country that exists outside of history. It is not mysteriously immune from the realities of human biology and heredity. “American” is not a magical category that is infinitely capacious and malleable in a way that no other extant ethnicity or nationality is. It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading. Syrians are no more capable of becoming Americans than they are of becoming Swedes.
There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth. The Europeans who showed up to displace the Iroquois and the Cree did not become Iroquois and Cree. They were a new people, capitalizing on the weakness and decline of the existing population. The exact same is true of the Syrians moving into Sweden.
Unlike the Iroquois, though, Swedes have the actual power and numbers to easily repel this invasion by force of arms at any moment. The Swedish military could locate and forcibly deport or eliminate nearly every Syrian in the country within a month if they desired to. If you believe it would be cruel to do so, that’s fine; I don’t even necessarily disagree! But the fact that they choose not to do so in no way means that the country is benefiting from the presence of those people. The same is largely true of the United States - only the scale of the problem is different.
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra seems equally outlandish. Time for the flip-side I guess...
In what sense? Yes, I agree that based on contemporary reports about Cleopatra’s appearance, Elizabeth Taylor is considerably hotter than Cleopatra was, and probably a shade less swarthy, but Taylor looks far more like Cleopatra than any sub-Saharan does. It’s not even close.
@fuckduck9000 already brought the receipts regarding just how wildly miscalibrated your estimate of how many rationalists are atheists (to wit: the vast majority) so I’m not going to rehash that. I’m merely going to offer what I think is a plausible explanation for how you came to such a wildly inaccurate perception.
Many people here will be familiar with the classic essay The Asshole Filter. TLDR: a feminist complains that all men are assholes, but the actual problem is that she has made it so impossible for non-asshole men to approach her that the only remaining men who are willing to transgress against her stated wishes and approach her are, well, assholes. So her perception of the “asshole level” of the average man is wildly skewed due to a bubble that she herself is reinforcing, causing her to be blind to all the non-assholes with whom she is failing to interact, or who are avoiding interacting with her.
Similarly, if you’re a devoutly-religious person in rationalist spaces, most of us just basically don’t touch the subject with you. We understand that it’s a very important part of your life, that you do not wish to have your faith shaken, and that overall it’s just not a conversation worth having with you. Many of us recognize, on an intellectual level at least, the value that religion brings to the lives of its participants, and for my part at least I’m happy for you that it has enriched your life. We don’t actually accept any of the claims of your religion, and religion in general pretty much bounces off a lot of us - for reasons that could be aesthetic, empirical, practical, etc. - but we don’t begrudge you your faith. The only people who are willing to actively challenge your faith and engage antagonistically with it are those who either 1. have a much bigger problem with religion than the average rationalist does, or 2. lacks the social graces or sophistication to understand why that’s not generally an argument worth having, which means that the quality of discourse you’re likely to have with those people is unlikely to be very good.
I don’t think you’re intentionally projecting that asshole filter, but I also don’t think you understand the modal atheist very well at all, let alone the modal rationalist, given how inaccurate your naïve estimate of how many of them are atheists was.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
It’s just simply false that /r/nba is immune to conflict. Were you on that sub during the summer of 2020, when the Bucks refused to play a game because of the Jacob Blake thing, and the sub exploded into conflict until the mods came down like a hammer and began micro-managing all conversation involving anything race-related or political?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
I’ve been mulling over a top-level post about how I expect advances in AI art and photo/video manipulation technology to make it easier for activist “historians” and media creators to comprehensively alter future generations’ perception of history, such that people in 200 years will sincerely believe that every important society in history was racially-cosmopolitan and involved numerous sub-Saharan blacks in positions of power and prestige.
What we think of as “fringe Hotep shit” will be the mainstream consensus, but turned up to 11. Maybe a small core of archaeologists and anthropologists with access to otherwise-tightly-controlled information about archaeogenetics will know “the truth”, but it will be considered uncouth - even career-killing - to mention anything in public which would threaten this consensus. This Netflix production is just one more early salvo in what could easily become a full war on the past, and I’m sadly not confident that the past will emerge victorious.
In response to my last post, @FCFromSSC hit me with his trademarked signature move - “Hlynka was right about you” and then further clarified:
The thesis I was referencing is that WNs and alt-righters are, in fact, Blues applying a fundamentally Blue worldview. You are jointly your own closest brothers and worst enemies.
If I can say to you, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing", and mean it, live by it, raise my children and build my community by it, what does any of the above or below have to entice me? The standard response is that Christianity has failed... delivered, generally, by people who willingly chose to abandon the faith of their fathers to embrace an alien and alienating worldview, and refuse to let it go.
Your post honestly deserves a more detailed response than that, but this, to me, is the core of the issue: You're looking for a banner to rally behind, but you've rejected the most proven banner known to man because it's incompatible with fundamental elements of the Blue worldview, which you still hold. Meanwhile, the Reds that comprise most of the people you're trying to rally have no interest in the alternative banners you offer, because they recognize their fundamentally Blue nature.
To which I replied:
Right, this is all well and fair, and I don’t disagree with much of it. Where I differ from you and Hlynka is that I don’t actually believe Red and Blue are true enemies. They’re two complementary halves of a syncretic whole - two equally-valuable parallel strains of the European psyche, which function best when they can strengthen each other by checking each other’s worst impulses. They’re the two components of a Babble & Prune machine, cyclically working in ostensible conflict in order to ensure long-term mutual success. The fact that Red and Blue are locked into what appears to be an existential conflict is due to a complicated mix of factors, which have been discussed to death here already, but in the long run both must succeed equally for European man to continue in the next step of his cosmic journey.
(My separate exchange with Hlynka himself on the same topic can be found here.
FC promised a more detailed rejoinder from him would be forthcoming, but while he charges up his special move, I want to get out ahead of him and open a separate conversation, since I think this line of discussion is sufficiently divergent from the thrust of my original post - and might be interesting to users who would otherwise have no reason to weigh in on an inside-baseball rumination on white identitarianism - that it’s worth its own top-level post.
First off, I want to point out that it’s very rich for you, as a Christian specifically, to impugn me for “abandoning the faith of [my] fathers”, when getting millions of people to abandon the faith of their forefathers was literally the entire way Christianity spread across Europe. Like, the conversion of the pagans is a central element of the narrative of early Christianity, and was considered - rightfully so - a spectacular win for the faith. Every one of those Germanic and Celtic converts was repudiating the entire spiritual infrastructure which had sustained his or her ancestors for millennia, and I’m pretty sure you don’t look down on them for it. On the contrary, you celebrate this act of betrayal as an unalloyed liberation - a brave and enriching act. And to be clear, while a not-insignificant number of those early conversions were sincere and entirely voluntary acts of conscience undertaken by individuals, I think the evidence strongly suggests that the lion’s share of these conversions involved, let’s say, ambiguous consent.
That’s because Christianity was the globohomo, elite-imposed ideology of its day. The story of how it spread throughout Europe is pretty well-documented. Adopting Christianity was a way for the ruling class of a given polity to integrate that polity into the vast political-financial-mercantile patronage network linking an ever-expanding patchwork of formerly-sovereign peoples with the hyper-wealthy urban centers where the power centers behind the ideology were situated. For a Germanic or Slavic or Celtic king who agreed to publicly bend the knee to his new Christian backers - sorry, to accept baptism - it was generally a calculated political move and a way to secure access to resources, influence, and patronage, for himself and his court. Generally there would be a transitional grace period in which the normie citizens of the polity would be strongly encouraged to convert voluntarily; after that - and sometimes skipping that step entirely - laws would begin being passed, formally outlawing any public practice of the old faith, any display of its symbols, etc. And if some of the folks out in the boonies or in the vassal states started to get uppity and refused to abandon the faith of their forefathers, oftentimes the Christian power centers would just openly slaughter them - the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades are illustrative examples - and gleefully destroy their sacred symbols and houses of worship in front of them until they understood that resistance was futile. (Look how much clout good ol’ Saint Boniface earned himself by chopping down Donar’s Oakand using the timber to build a church to the new god in town, just to flex on the poor worthless chumps and rubes he had just helped conquer.)
My ancestry is pretty much 100% Anglo-Saxon as far back as I can trace it, which is a long way back. (Shout-out to FamilySearch.org, the extensive and meticulously-documented ancestry database operated by the Mormon Church.) As you’ve probably gathered, I’m very interested in the history of pre-Christian European religion, so I’ve tried to do some research into the religious practices of the early Anglo-Saxons, before they were converted to Christianity. It is surprisingly difficult to find much reliable information about what they believed in those days - certainly nothing like the comparatively well-attested beliefs of Norse pagans. That’s because within 80 years of the first conversion of an Anglo-Saxon regional king, the entire rest of the kingdoms were ruled by Christian kings - after they fought brutally-bloody battles to slay the remaining pagan kings and replace them with pliant Christian vassal kings - and those kings set right to work outlawing the practice of the thousands-of-years-old religious traditions of their subjects. This included literally destroying their sacred objects, burning their sacred groves to the ground and dismantling their temples, and even punishing the private practice of personal veneration at trees and wells by private individuals. This was a comprehensive crushing of the native religion and ideology of the normal working people, imposed by effete aristocrats who were tired of being looked down on as backward hillbillies by their betters on the continent. (Is any of this sounding familiar to you yet?) And it wasn’t enough to just outlaw the practice for openly pragmatic reasons - to say, “I’m banning this because if I don’t, our ESG score will get downgraded and the EU will cut our funding the Pope will excommunicate me. Nope, they had to officially declare that the old gods - who, again, less than eighty years ago everyone on this fucking island, including the kings and clergy who were making and enforcing these laws, were worshipping - were actually demons. They had been demons the whole time! The agricultural/fertility goddess we all used to get together and sing songs to in hopes that she would bless our crops and keep our wombs fecund? It was a demon! The talisman you wear around your neck, depicting the minor household spirit your grandmother taught you watches over your family’s homestead? A demon! That grove of sacred trees in which you would often sit in silent contemplation, connecting with the numinous and the sublime? You guessed it: treemons!
(And as far as I’m aware, that’s still a mainstream orthodox take on pagan gods, right? That they were in fact real, disincarnate supernatural/spiritual entities - not just juvenile figments of the imagination - but that rather than gods they had actually been malevolent demonic agents the whole time, corrupting the souls of the pagans for millennia before Christ came? I know there have been other theological approaches to what exactly pre-Christian religion was and how we should feel about their gods and myths, but I’m not totally hip to where the general consensus lies at this point.)
And I say all of this without commenting at all about whether or not the truth claims of Christianity are valid or not! One’s interpretation of these events, and one’s assessment of whether or not the people’s of Europe were better off after being forcibly converted to “an alien and alienating worldview” than they were before certainly depends a lot upon one’s assessment of the relative value of the new worldview in question. I just want to point out that men like Widukind, full of piss and vinegar and unwilling to bend the knee and “abandon the faith of his forefathers” were butchered, and their children and wives forced upon penalty of death and imprisonment to enthusiastically affirm the new worldview, to get us to the point where you can claim that Christianity is the only banner worth mustering under.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
I think it says something incredibly dire about our civilization that we stopped publicly executing people such as this guy. I truly believe that the vast majority of people who watch this video and learn about this man’s history experience a powerful atavistic desire to see him humiliated and then hung from a tree in a public square. This is the healthy, normal human impulse that drove approaches to criminal justice in, as far as I’m aware, nearly every human society in history until practically yesterday. Maybe this is just me projecting - I’ve been the victim of a crime and very nearly the victim of several more, so my desire to see these people violently dispatched is overwhelming - but it seems to me that the level of cognitive dissonance that most people feel living in soft-hearted Western countries who treat irredeemable human detritus with kid gloves will necessary boil over in the near future, producing a law-and-order backlash like we haven’t seen in centuries.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
So, I do want to make it abundantly clear that I am a genuinely passionate decades-long fan of Weird Al’s work, and if you’re accusing him specifically of lacking a sense of love and vision, I think that accusation is baseless. I’m intimately familiar with the world of pretentious, artificial status-signaling art you’re referring to, but I cannot stress enough that Weird Al’s work, like his life as a whole, has always been characterized by a palpable sense of joy and authenticity. The people in that room last night were, overwhelmingly, not there to impress anybody or signal status. Al’s work is far too lowbrow and affable to appeal to genuinely pretentious “artsy-fartsy” people, and being a Weird Al fan carries no cultural caché. He’s basically only respected by a) comedians, who largely revere him both for being a legendarily nice and wholesome human being, and b) Gen X and millennial white nerds who wouldn’t enjoy an arthouse film or post-modern novel any more than you would.
Your points as a whole are astute and absolutely well-taken, but I cherish Weird Al too much to let anything I’ve said give the false impression that he himself is a sneering progressive MAGA-hater. I’m confident that his personal politics are standard-issue Gen X California liberalism, but he’s certainly not shoving that down anybody’s throat, and he happily plays to audiences in Red states and Blue. I’m just saying that his work carries a set of implicit themes that naturally appeal to a subset of the population to whom culturally-left politics also appeal, whether or not he has any conscious intent for that to happen.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Or genetically analyzing them.
What does this even mean? Are you saying it’s against the rules to acknowledge another commenter’s racial/ethnic background? Even a commenter like @BurdensomeCount who brings up those same topics all the time and who speaks openly about his own fraught racial/ethnic relationship to his host society?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr 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.
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
2yr ago
In the last Culture War Thread, in a very interesting exchange about why white people in America (and the so-called West more broadly) tolerate being constantly denigrated from every corner of the intellectual elite, the always-insightful @FiveHourMarathon had an interesting comment that resonated with me. He finds the grievance-oriented, victim-mindset side of the white identitarian sphere viscerally off-putting and pathetic. Why, he asks, should I be proud to be white, if in fact being white means being weak and crying out for forbearance and mercy from the ascendant coalition of white-hating POCs whose power and vengeful intent increases daily? Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim, and what appeal would that self-identification have for those well-adjusted, successful, thriving individuals whose allegiance the white race ought to covet most assiduously, especially if it is indeed true that whites’ prospects are at a historic low point? While the downvote totals indicate that his perspective was poorly-received by many of our pro-white posters (for understandable reasons upon which I will touch shortly), I found his comments extremely instructive and worth reflecting on - a splash of bracingly cold water which ought to invigorate those on my side who wake up every day and wonder how white people let ourselves get to this point.
The conversation dovetailed wonderfully with Jared Taylor’s excellent essay, adapted from a speech he gave at a recent American Renaissance conference, in which he delves deep into the historical antecedents of white people’s current malaise. In this essay, Taylor points out that the ethno-masochism which pervades Western elite consciousness is consistent with a more general philosophical framework that has characterized the European psyche for centuries. He illustrates that the individuals who drove many of the most influential social/political reform movements of the last 300 years - from the Jacobins and the abolitionists to the temperance movement - have all demonstrated a fairly consistent psychological phenotype: a sort of Protagonist Syndrome, obsessed with virtue (and particularly with displaying that virtue to other white people) and with uplifting the underdog, and driven by an atavistic hatred of fellow white people who don’t share that same temperament.
In a sense, the leftist psyche - and, as a former committed leftie, I think I understand this temperament pretty well, and am still an example of it in many ways - is an extension of the “Faustian spirit” that many right-wingers love to attribute to European Man. In this telling of history, the most important defining characteristic of the European soul is its driving need to conquer, to transform, to bend nature to one’s own ends. This boundless desire for conquest drove the great achievements of Western man - from conquering the globe, to unlocking the secrets of wielding nature’s forces to our own benefit, to curing disease, to landing on the moon - but I think it also drives the leftist desire to transform humanity itself. To improve humanity from its basic, crude, unworked Hobbesian “state of nature” and to unlock its true potential. Hermetic alchemy applied to the human spirit - never accepting limits, never taking “that’s just the way things are” as an answer, always believing that we can keep pushing the limits of what is possible. Combine this with an almost pathological altruism, the anguish one feels when contemplating the plight of the downtrodden, and it’s very easy to see why Faustian man is so driven to “correct” the obviously-unjust vicissitudes of random chance that have produced the current distribution of human fortunes.
I know that I personally still feel deeply this instinctive sympathy for the underdog. It’s so ingrained in our national psyche that it’s incredibly difficult to overcome it. It has characterized my experience as a sports fan, and it was a major formative element of my self-conception as a college progressive. Wresting myself out of that mental framework as I’ve drifted rightward has been, and in some ways still continues to be, a psychologically disorienting experience. On the one hand, the recognition that unequal distribution of talent and fortune is an unalterable fact of reality, baked into the human spirit, is a bedrock element of the right-wing worldview. Hierarchy is right and proper, and the strong and capable shall always prosper while the weak and mediocre will always vainly envy them. On the other hand, this offends Faustian man’s innate sense of limitless ability to transform the world. Much as Europeans looked at grim realities such as the ubiquity of deadly disease, or man’s inability to traverse the skies, and said, “I have the power to change that,” we have the unshakeable sense that the injustice of fate which has rendered some less fortunate than others is yet another so-called reality just waiting for us to apply our ingenuity and boundless power to correct. A mere engineering problem which our best minds are rapidly working to solve. And hey, if I’m the process of fixing this problem we also gain the opportunity to ostentatiously display our own virtue and gain relative status accordingly, all the better!
This instinctive desire to uplift the underdog is, ironically, only rational if one believes that one’s own interests are not threatened by that underdog’s success. If I can help the underdog get his piece of the pie while my piece stays the same size, that means that in reality I must have been stronger than both the underdog and the supposed overdog against whom he was striving - I was so far above the conflict that I could observe it as a spectator. The underdog becomes, then, a sort of prop or vessel through which I can achieve emotional satiation of my altruistic instinct, at little to no cost to myself.
Where, then, does this leave racially-conscious whites, who assess the state of the world around us and see genuinely foreboding trends which appear to pose a serious threat to our people? Who observe the rising chorus of hatred and envy echoing from the halls of power, who dismay at the ever-worsening fertility differentials, and who see our own elected representatives seem to revel in our decline? What is the optimal rhetorical strategy to appeal to successful white individuals in order to get them to see the disturbing portents and to realize that things are not looking good for us? That this isn’t, in fact, an idle game, but in fact deadly serious? Well, one very appealing strategy is to appeal to that characteristically-European sympathy for the underdog. It’s to say, “Look, guys, we are the weak and vulnerable party in need of special concern and uplift! I know that you’ve been trained by the media to view white people as the permanent bully in need of humbling and people of color as the noble and scrappy up-and-comer just looking for a fair shot - and yeah, at certain points in history that was even true! - but at this point in time the tables truly have turned. We lay ourselves at the mercy of the victors, and ask only for their mercy and indulgence. Quit picking on us!”
This is also, I think, the motivation behind much of the “JQ” discourse on the right; Jews can be portrayed as an all-powerful enemy, against which we defenseless whites are fighting an impossible uphill battle which we can only win through a herculean effort. “Feel bad for us! We, too, know what it is like to suffer systemic discrimination against our rapacious racial overlords! It’s not faaiiiiir!” However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. There haven’t been a whole lot of limits or setbacks that we’ve faced in the past that we haven’t been able to overcome with some ingenuity and some elbow grease; why should something like collapsing fertility rates be any different? The only way we lose is if we beat ourselves, and we can choose to start winning again at any time once we put our mind to it.
This is, I think, a far healthier mindset than the doom-and-gloom, woe-is-me, why-won’t-the-Jews-stop-picking-on-me mindset that so alienates @FiveHourMarathon. Our problems are real, but they’re ones that we ourselves created, and they’re ones that we ourselves -and only ourselves - can fix. We haven’t even begun to conquer the stars yet - how are we going to let ourselves get bogged down by such comparatively quotidian setbacks? We only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs - all we have to do is untie them!
I don’t know, I’ve been sick with the flu all week and I might just be deliriously rambling. I’ve been ingesting a lot of blackpills as of late, so this line of thinking is a useful whitepill to counteract their toxic effects.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
What a monumentally cynical take by you. First off, do you have any solid evidence of the specific motives of the shooter? Please recall the coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting, which received massive and nonstop worldwide news coverage as the sine qua nom of anti-gay hate crimes. Well, it turns out that, as @Iconochasm notes below, the Pulse shooting had absolutely nothing to do with gay people, and the shooter literally picked it at random after he arrived at his planned target, the Disney entertainment complex in Orlando, realized that the security was too strong and that he stood no chance, and then searched “Orlando night clubs” in Google Maps and went to the closest one. We know this for a fact because it all came out in the trial of his widow. Still, to this day, Pulse is such a load-bearing part of the narrative that LGBT+ advocates continue to wield it totemically, either genuinely unaware of the truth or calculating in their dishonesty.
So, I think I’ll wait to render any judgment of the shooting (other than, of course, to unequivocally condemn it and its perpetrator) and hold off on assigning any blame to anybody.
That’s not even touching the obvious double standard which countless other commenters are noting, wherein catastrophizing about the perpetual threat posed by the very public existence of right-wing speech - let alone right-wing policies or actions - is routine, constant, and amplified daily and hourly by the most powerful people in the world. I don’t need or expect you to apologize for any of that - you have, as far as I’m aware, no power nor any significant public platform beyond this forum - but I find it profoundly cringeworthy that you would stoop to something like this.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
This post reads like a right-winger’s uncharitable parody of a rich liberal Jewish douchebag. You spent more money than my entire paycheck on pointless degeneracy, then on a random whim you bought some bum candy - not something useful that might get him through any extended period of time, but a bit of pointless temporary hedonism - sort of like your trip to the strip club, but in miniature - and now you’re congratulating yourself like you’re some kind of saint.
I’m perfectly happy to embrace being your enemy. As far as I’m concerned, what we as a society do with Smokey and Sean and Matt us that we take them far away, to some ranch estate owned by the government, and then they never come back. As for what happens at that estate, I’m not picky. Maybe it’s like an asylum, maybe it’s a labor camp, maybe they just put them to sleep. That’s pretty much where I’m at with it. I don’t need to suffer every day so that you can keep Smokey and Matt around as props to flatter your own undeserved sense of moral superiority or rub them in our faces.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
But you should have some damn sympathy for a fellow citizen's suffering.
Progressives, especially post-Hart-Celler, have diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship to such an extent that there are tens of millions of individuals in this country with whom I share almost nothing in common except for a legal fiction. There’s a good chance that the people you’re talking about do not even speak the same language I do, nor have they even needed to learn to do so in order to be considered citizens. They and I have no common bonds of kinship, of culture, of social context. Nothing!
I extend to them the basic human empathy I’d extend to any non-American, and I wish the situation were not such that this sort of nothing needs to happen to them. But the fact that they have a piece of (digitized) paper saying they’re as American as I am means nothing to me.
Sure, some major ones that come to mind are:
1: Which class/stratum of society is the state (or whatever scale of local decision-making body one prefers) designed to serve? Realistically in any polity comprised of human beings, there will be some sort of unequal distribution of talents and proclivities, with most people clustering around some nebulous middle.
The hard right is split between a faction who want to maximize favorable outcomes for the extreme right tail — to make society a playground for the most intelligent/strong/rapacious/ambitious among us to compete for spots at the top, while the feckless and disempowered middle class try to enjoy whatever downstream goods and services are produced by the 1% and the left tail of the distribution simply starve and die off — and a more collectivist right who want to use the state to crush both tails of the distribution — to dispossess the greedy capitalists, and also to smash and persecute the underclass — in order to secure safety and stability for the middle class. Both of these camps have strong purchase in different sectors of the so-called “Dissident Right”. If something unites these two factions, it’s that they both have zero interest in providing any indulgence toward the left end of the distribution; they despise the “undeserving poor”, the mentally infirm, the criminal underclass, etc. The concept of Christian charity is seen as highly suspect, given that it obligates a significant redistribution of resources from the productive classes to the unproductive parasitic elements of society.
On the modern left, meanwhile, the overriding concern is to siphon resources and status (which, given the Critical Theory focus on social status as the ultimate capital good, are in fact inextricably linked) toward the classes who are most deviant from the middle class. The extremely poor, yes, but also minorities of any kind. The middle class is seen as this sort of undifferentiated demiurgic mass of conformism and stasis; the process of the historical dialectic, ultimately, is the slow but steady revelation of contradictions within the unreflective worldview of the bourgeois class, allowing various elements within it to awaken their consciousness.
Factions on the left are split between what, ultimately, one who has discovered their inner spark of awakened consciousness is obligated to do with it. There are factions who wish to maximize individual and personal freedom, up to and including full transhumanism; their hatred of the middle-class is a manifestation of their visceral hatred of feeling that their life and choices have been pre-determined for them. A different faction of the left is far more invested in pure redistribution for its own sake, out of an overriding visceral hatred of inequality of any kind. They despise the idea of any one person/group having more than another person/group, as well as the suffering and feelings of inadequacy experienced by the one who has less. This leveling instinct drives their hatred of the middle class, who, in this telling, didn’t even earn the things they have, but who nonetheless derive personal validation from the fact that they have more than the lowest among us. (“They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.”) This faction is far more comfortable with anarcho-primitivist and third-worldist rhetoric, with the end goal a sort of deindustrialized communitarian hyperlocalism, in which the accumulated slate of financial and social capital formerly hoarded history’s unjust winners has been wiped away, leaving everyone to start from square one. Each faction of the left basically sees the other as useful idiots, to be wielded as a weapon against the mutually-hated middle/bourgeois class and then discarded.
2: What are the primary determinants of an individual’s life outcomes? The mainstream American idea, on both the mainstream/center right and left, is strongly and overwhelmingly oriented toward “personal agency and hard work” as the answer. Conservatives like Hlynka and @TequilaMockingbird seem to really, really hate anything that smacks of “determinism” — the idea that any individual’s life outcomes are largely constrained by factors outside of that individuals control. This leads to a hatred of eugenics, but also of any focus on socially-constructed factors — and the resulting unequal distributions of status and resources — playing a part. The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize.
I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes, but I do actually have to try and get some stuff done today. Hopefully this was a useful starting point.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.
Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.
As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Right, one of Taylor’s main goals in creating American Renaissance was to try and be the focal point of a movement of racially-conscious whites with impeccable optics: erudite, genteel, conservative-coded. No Roman salutes, no street brawls, no white-trash dysfunction, no scary pagan LARPing, etc. Early American Renaissance conferences featured several Jewish speakers, and Taylor has never made the Jewish Question a topic of his advocacy. However, American Renaissance and its surrounding movement had a separate problem, which is that — due mainly to the proud Southern heritage and pro-Confederate sympathies of Taylor and its other early figures like Sam Dickson and Sam Francis — it struck many as having a distinct odor of that other epochal white identitarian movement, the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, to be clear, Taylor himself is squeaky-clean: Yale-educated, a successful businessman, multilingual, an unimpeachable family life, and not a whiff of violence or disreputable behavior. The immediate circle he cultivated was respectable, denouncing anything resembling racial terrorism. He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example. This didn’t save him from being labeled a white supremacist, a hate-monger, and all other manner of opprobrious terms by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The most genteel figure imaginable was still basically a Klansman and an evil cult leader in the eyes of those people.
Nowadays, many of the leading lights on the so-called Dissident Right — which is largely an outgrowth of the intellectual current Jared Taylor helped create and nurture — do indeed have more of the disreputable and optically-unfortunate tendencies which more strongly trigger respectable people’s Nazi Alarms. It’s unfortunate that honorable men such as Taylor couldn’t do more to mainstream their cause back when it still could have avoided these failure modes. It’s encouraging, though, to see that many of their most dire predictions appear not to have come true to the extent they feared.
Man… talk about two screens.
She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?
Willie Brown.
She has a long and easily-accessible paper trail of taking very extreme positions, all of which she apparently just counted on journalists not to ask her about. She spent the summer of 2020 going on every program she could in order to raise funds for an organization that bailed out violent rioters and looters. This is not difficult to find! The second anyone confronted her about these things, she was, inexplicably, unprepared.
When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.
Yeah, this is an extremely bad problem. And of course the reality is that she didn’t actually repudiate them! She genuinely does believe that “equity” should be the central mission of government. She genuinely does want to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. During her brief tenure in the Senate, she was the farthest-left senator. Why would I believe for a second that she has changed her mind about these things? Her administration’s record speaks for itself.
I am honestly shocked to hear you say that she was “a good candidate.” Leave aside any herculean effort expended by her campaign team to try and drag her across the finish line. She was a lead balloon. A massive albatross around her party’s neck.
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