Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I was born in the north, if that matters.
So, this is very important. The whole thing I’m drawing attention to is to the extent that “Red Tribe” refers to any actually-existing culture, that culture is very much still centered in the parts of the country whose cultural and ancestral folkways lie in Dixie. For such people, seeing themselves as opponents of the Confederacy and the Southern culture which underpinned it is a rejection of their own ancestors. And that’s fine! I also reject their ancestors, and I believe their ancestors’ culture is worth rejecting. But to actually try and pin that culture on 21st-century Democratic voters is a different story entirely.
Now, I’m also wary of assigning to you views which you yourself personally do not hold. Again, though, if we’re talking about “the Red Tribe” as a real political coalition, surely among its ideological commitments (at least pre-Trump) would be things like a strong suspicion of the federal government, hostility toward Catholicism and non-Anglo-Irish immigration, and a valorization of small-town rural Protestant communities. Whereas the Union, especially the actual membership of the Union army, contained a massive number of Catholic Irish and German immigrants, and was far more urbanized than the South.
While some of these trends are changing - for example, the GOP becoming more comfortable with Catholic Latinos - it’s still an accurate assessment of the core of culturally-conservative Americans in the South and Midwest. Do you disagree with this characterization?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Oh absolutely, I agree that the ideology of, say, Curtis Yarvin has no genealogical continuity with Dixie. I’ve spent as much time on this site fighting with and distancing myself from heartland Christian conservatives as I have bashing progressivism.
However, I just think it’s simply untrue to posit some schism between Dixie conservatives and Appalachian conservatives, and especially untrue to suggest that the modern “core Red tribe” is in some sense built on a rejection/repudiation of the Confederacy. No, John Wilkes Booth would not be a Kamala Harris voter today. No, “the Democrats” of 2024 are not “the party of slavery”. No, Trump voter in Georgia, you are not the descendant (ancestrally or ideologically) of noble abolitionists who fought against “racism”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It is an unincorporated territory. Residents of Puerto Rico are American citizens, but they cannot vote in federal elections and generally do not pay federal income taxes. The island is largely self-governing, and its residents are highly culturally-distinct from the American mainland. It’s as much “a part of America” as, say, Guam, which is to say, only in a complicated political sense. Like I said, Puerto Rican separatist terrorism was a significant political issue in the 1960s and 1970s, and although that violence has subsided, my understanding is that Puerto Ricans are deeply divided in regards to what degree of political/cultural integration they want with the mainland United States.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I am consistently flabbergasted by the extent to which modern American conservatives have managed to convince themselves that they have no continuity with the Confederacy.
Conservatives very often (and justifiably) criticize 21st-century progressives for the way in which they deny that they have anything in common with past figures who believed now-unpopular ideas (eugenics being a major one, as well as deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill) based on progressive premises. In fact progressives have done a spectacular job of convincing themselves that it was actually conservatives who primarily championed those policies! Well, American conservatives have done their darndedest to attempt the same sleight of hand with the Civil War. “It was Democrats who supported slavery! John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, and he assassinated the great Republican Abe Lincoln because, like all Democrats even today, he was racist against black people and hated America.” This is utterly risible.
wasn't it mainly the Cavaliers who drove secession, while modern Red Tribe seems to descend more from the Borderers, concentrated in Appalachia,
This is why it’s so clear that “the Red Tribe” was never anything more than a fictional projection of Scott Siskind’s ultra-bubble. Why anyone would take it seriously, let alone self-identify with it and derive personal validation from it is utterly beyond me. Apparently nobody even within this supposed “tribe” has any idea what actually comprises it, nor where it descends from historically and ancestrally!
The Cavaliers were an elite faction in the South, and certainly their political interests drove secession. But who do you think actually fought and died for the South? Do you think the millions of Southern boys who killed and died for the Confederacy were all direct descendants of the small number of pro-monarchy aristocrats who fled Britain during the English Civil War? No! There simply were not enough of those people to make up an army. The bulk of the Southern army was precisely the Scots-Irish poor whites who make up the majority of the Southern and lower-Midwestern population today.
If you believe that these men were duped into fighting for a Cavalier planter class who looked down on them and saw them as disposable, this is a perfectly respectable position, but if a “tribe” means anything, ancestral descent must necessarily have some bearing on it, and the core Republican constituency today is undeniably descended from the men who fought for the Confederacy.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
We've never "turned to less conciliatory options" before.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So when Hinchcliffe calls Puerto Rico a trash island and the audience laughs (from listening to the video, my guess is that a lot of them don't, but Hinchcliffe treats the half-laugh as a slow audience to warm up rather than a joke that went down badly, which does the Democrats' work for them spinning it), the message sent is "MAGA considers Puerto Ricans to be the kind of people it is okay to clown on straight after the national anthem at a unity rally." And that message is not consistent with the appeal to assimilated Hispanics that Trump has, to date, been making successfully.
An alternate reading would be that well-assimilated Hispanics would see an attack on Puerto Rico as a jab at non-assimilated Hispanics. A few reasons:
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There is nothing stopping Puerto Ricans from moving to the mainland, as a great many have. The ones who have elected to stay on the island, in this reading, would be the ones who intentionally chose not to assimilate into America.
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My understanding is that Puerto Rico is still very culturally different from America, despite being an American territory, and that rates of English fluency on the island are quite low. I also gather that the larger Latin American world sees Puerto Rico as a shithole, and Puertorriqueños as lazy, stupid, and heavily admixed with African ancestry. Thus, assimilated Hispanic Americans would see a jab at Puerto Rico the way upper-middle-class coastal Americans would see an attack on inbred hillbillies.
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As someone else pointed out, Puerto Ricans in America are a reliably leftist voting bloc. As recently as the 70’s, Puerto Rican independence activists were shooting Congressmen and committing waves of bombings all over America. In NYC they are a core Democratic voting/power bloc. Even wealthy and well-educated Puerto Ricans like Luis Miranda (father of Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda) are often hardcore racial chauvinists and have deep ties to Puerto Rican separatists, including terrorists. I don’t think they should be considered examples of “well-assimilated Americans”, at least not in a political sense.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Trump and Harris are pretty much the nadir, IMO.
Actually, Nader’s last run for president was in 2008.
Spielberg himself openly stated that Miller's mission cannot be justified on moral grounds. If that doesn't say something about the absurdity and arbitrariness of war, I don't know what does.
Yes, Spielberg acknowledges that at least some of the American lives lost during the war were thrown away for cynical and arbitrary reasons, and that this is unspeakably tragic.
What he is unwilling to acknowledge is that the deaths of those German boys were also equally tragic and unnecessary.
I’m not willing to call the film “corny patriotic schlock”. It is an incredibly masterful film, and I agree with you that the battle scenes are thrillingly intense. However, you’re also correct that the film influenced battle scenes that came after it, and I don’t think this influence is wholly positive. Throughout the film, the Germans are almost universally treated as faceless foes, who die bloodlessly and instantaneously when shot. In contrast, American casualties writhe in pain, spurt blood everywhere, and cry for their mothers. It’s very affecting and humanizing, but it’s never applied to the Germans. There’s a YouTuber who does great analysis of this aspect of the film. The Germans can be mowed down without inspiring sympathy, because they are just villainous mooks.
This is not an anti-war film, and certainly not an anti-WWII film. It’s just an acknowledgement of how utterly horrible the sacrifices were that American soldiers needed to make in order to save the world from an unambiguously evil force of insane, feral monsters vaguely resembling human beings. It doesn’t ask you to stop and wonder whether the German soldiers felt the same way, let alone whether they would be correct in thinking so.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
TBH there are only like three good scenes in the whole movie. The D-Day scene gives the impression that the film is going to be a gritty, morally-grey story about how war is a pointless, hellish slaughter. However, it quickly pivots to an all-too-typical morality play of good guys vs. faceless evil Germans. The only part of the film that humanizes the Germans in any way - the arc with Steamboat Willie - ends up being a story of how treating a Nazi mercifully was a blunder with horrible consequences.
I think the film squanders an opportunity to tell a genuinely interesting story about how the war was a ghoulishly unnecessary waste of millions of the best young men that the West had to offer. However, that is clearly not the story Spielberg wanted to tell; nor, frankly, is it a story America would have wanted to hear, so I can’t blame Spielberg any more than I would have blamed any other director.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I’ll be honest, I found his speech at that dinner very grating. Yes, his speechwriters supplied him with a couple of mildly funny lines. The lead-up to those lines was 15-20 minutes of rambling, political self-promotion (I’m aware that politicians routinely attend these functions as part of campaigning, but the talented ones are able to be far more subtle about it than Trump was) and mean-spirited, unfunny jabs at Kamala Harris, Bill DeBlasio, and Chuck Schumer. Now, look, I hate all three of those people. I’ve said far meaner things about all three of them than what Trump said. However, that’s totally against the spirit of an event like this.
I’m not sure that Trump really grasps the purpose of a “roast”. It’s supposed to be compliments disguised as insults. Celebration disguised as denunciation. Love disguised as hate. And the disguise is supposed to be thin enough that anyone with a modicum of subtlety and tact can easily discern what’s really going on. Whereas Trump genuinely loathes the people he’s talking about (and to) so there is no warmth.
And perhaps that’s inevitable, when you invite powerful and controversial individuals (like Chuck Schumer, or Bill DeBlasio, or Donald Trump) to such an event. Maybe the “roast” style is just fundamentally unsuited to accommodate differences of opinion and interests this divergent. Certainly I’m not gonna weep for Chuck Schumer’s hurt feelings, or Kamala Harris’ tarnished dignity. As someone with a lot of genuine love for roasts as a comedic/social art form (and someone who has participated in a few of them myself) the whole thing came of as very unseemly and inappropriate to me.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
[Alex Jones voice]
“They’re turning the frickin’ bugs trans!”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean, I’m assuming that San Diego would have very significant military value, such that it would be a worthwhile target for a nuke no matter how limited their supply is. Perhaps I’m overvaluing it as a target.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Yeah same, if China nuked the U.S., San Diego would likely be one of the first targets (what with the Naval bases and shipyards) so I and everyone I care about would be deleted before we knew what hit us. I too am unfit for the post-apocalyptic lifestyle.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
In terms of personality that makes sense, but in terms of appearance it’s immediately obvious who’s who.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
but the major difference is that the Dems have (correctly) corralled their idiots and generally have more of a problem with the galaxy-brained wing of the party.
You are correct about the GOP, but dead wrong about the Democrats. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was until her death this year a long-serving Democratic congresswoman and a member of several important committees, was shockingly stupid. She recently claimed that the moon is made mostly of gases. She asked, at a 1997 visit to the Mars Pathfinder operations center, whether the Pathfinder rover had taken a picture of the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. In 2010 she asserted that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are still separate countries.
Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, a police abolitionist and black racial chauvinist, is the elected Democratic mayor of Chicago. Maxine Waters, an extremely politically powerful Democratic congresswoman, is a long-time associate of Louis Farrakhan. The Democratic party is full of dim-witted and politically radical black officials, and is powerless to sideline them because of the stranglehold their constituencies wield over the party.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think you're completely wrong that white women envy black women's comfort with direct confrontation. They are afraid of it.
I have literally made this exact same point before! (I’m not going to try and sift through this site’s awful search function to try and track down the comment, but I know it made the AAQC list.) The reality is that it’s both! They are terrified when black women’s “righteous anger” is turned on them, absolutely. However, I believe that white women see black women as their avatar - their “anger translator” - who can say to the powerful white men in their lives the things that the white women themselves are too acculturated, too bourgeois, too timid to say themselves.
I work in a pink-collar setting (I’m literally the only man on my team) and I can tell you that the number of “sassy black woman” GIFs shared by the white women on my team daily is staggering. Each of them seems to want to believe she has a little “black woman” inside of her - the unrestrained, unabashedly emotional part of her personality - and that only black (and to a somewhat lesser extent Latina) women are able to reliably access. Note that white women almost never want to actually be black women themselves; they just want to have one (1) black woman around for when some white man is being unpleasant or unreasonable, so that somebody can say to his face what all the white and Asian women have been saying behind his back.
But you (soy blue-tribe ex-progressive, by your own description) still seem perversely fond of the mythology you claim to have left behind, that progressives are the "radical" ones who aren't afraid to stand up and thrown down.
I’m not fond of it, because I don’t think that the “brave iconoclast” is an unambiguously admirable figure. I think that being a contrarian is very often overrated (I say this from experience, because being a contrarian has largely wrecked my life in many ways) and that actually our society would be far better off if we stopped valorizing the archetype of the “individual genius standing alone against the close-minded majority”. Our culture has a dearth of social harmony. Even if the progressives of today were still the real transgressive nonconformists, I’m not sure that would speak positively of them!
They imagine themselves to be so- which is why you see people wearing S&M puppy gear or spreading their cheeks to show their rectums on Folsom Street, to try to retain some sense of actually "shocking the normies."
This absolutely still does shock the normies! The whole “groomer” discourse on the right demonstrates conclusively that the queer left is still successfully scandalizing normal people. Yes, obviously the ratchet has turned significantly since the 70s in terms of how vulgar something has to be in order to shock people. Maybe in fifteen years we’ll be saying, “Man, I wish gays could just go back to the time when all they did was expose their gaping anuses to people.” Maybe we haven’t seen the true depths of depravity people are willing to stoop to in order to maintain shock value. Will every pride parade in 2040 be indistinguishable from a GG Allin concert? Perhaps!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Direct confrontation, bravery to go against the crowd, and immunity to personal attacks and shaming are all extremely destabilizing to the progressive psyche.
Direct confrontation happens in progressive spaces frequently; the most typical example would be a black woman haranguing some hapless white “ally” for transgressing some implicit taboo. (In fact, I have a theory that one reason PMC white women worship and defer to black women so thoroughly is because they envy black women’s comfort with direct confrontation.)
Similarly, “bravery to go against the crowd” and “immunity to personal attacks and shaming” are key pillars of the 21st-century worldview and ethos! That’s what “pride parades” and “letting your freak flag fly” are all about! Transgression of “bourgeois norms”, garish expression of difference, etc.
Now, of course I’m familiar with the counterarguments. “When transgression is the norm, the people who think they’re transgressing are actually conforming!” “We’re not talking about the weird antifa freaks, we’re only talking about professional-class white-collar workers who profess progressive politics as a tribal signifier!” Okay, then people need to speak more precisely. Because conservatives can’t simultaneously be the party of normal middle-class people with conventional folkways on the one hand, and on the other hand attack progressives for being too conformist.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
There have been rumors circulating for a bit, at least on right-wing Twitter, that Kamala has a serious drinking and/or pills problem. That for many public appearances she’s on some combination of substances in order to quell her paralyzing anxiety. I have absolutely no idea if any of this is true, but if it is then it could explain why someone who, in her youth, was fairly cognitively acute could now, decades later, have lost a lot of that acuity or could be unable to demonstrate it when under the influence.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Go their own way where? Liberia?
No, certainly not. The American Colonization Society - the last hope this country ever had of solving this issue once and for all - failed to seal the deal. Black Americans are not going to be deported to Africa. They would never do so willingly, and nobody would countenance the sort of coercive measures necessary to force them there against their will. I’m not advocating it, nor is anybody else.
No, the goal is simply to accelerate the process already taking place: blacks willingly consolidating their population in a handful of Southern states. This remigration is already taking place, and nobody is forcing anyone to do it. Blacks actually do want to live around their own people, when economic circumstances allow them to do so. Let them achieve such a supermajority in these places, along with strengthening the political domination they already have in most of the places I’m talking about, and then we can work on formalizing and reifying things from there.
Or just ethnically purge Atlanta and ban whites from every coming in there?
The ethnic purge of whites from the places I’m talking about has already happened. The white population of Atlanta proper is minuscule. The white presence in the suburbs can only hold for so long before whites do what they’ve always done in this country whenever blacks start to gather strength: move somewhere else. Whites will of course still be able to travel to Atlanta - just as I can travel to Toronto, or London, or Paris, or Shanghai. It’s just that the actual citizenship and the power that comes with it will be formally restricted to blacks. Atlanta will be a black city the way that Tokyo is a Japanese city, even though Tokyo contains thousands of non-Japanese visitors at any given time.
But nowhere (at least not among developed countries) it's as central to literally everything as in America.
Right, the racial history of America really is unlike that of any other country on earth. No other country contains a population of this size which is still visually and culturally this distinct and which is only in the country as a direct result of centuries of chattel slavery and subjugation. Other countries have minority populations with grievances against the empowered majority - First Nations in Canada, Aboriginals in Australia, even the Ainu in Japan - but none of them have anything remotely like the power and numbers that American blacks have. (The closest comparison, I suppose, would be the Māori in New Zealand.)
Which also, paradoxically, means it is possible for it to be better - because it has been
When? When was it better? People can literally only point to a roughly 15-year period. In the entire 400 years of black-white relations in the history of this country, we’ve had not even twenty years of sustained peace. (And even this period saw its share of flare-ups.) This does not paint the picture you think it does.
Blacks are not mere puppets of powerful partisan operators that can toggle levels of racial grievance up and down with a magical dial. They are responding to reality as they perceive it, which is informed by their actual lived experiences. They correctly perceive that whites largely do not like them, do not want to live around them, and would coordinate to take harsh action against a large portion of the black population if offered a roadmap to do so.
Hell, the halcyon days of the 90’s and 00’s you wish to depict as a colorblind success was also the time when by far the largest proportion of the black population was incarcerated. That was the only way to maintain the illusion of peace! By literally locking away the most execrable 10% of the black male population out of the sight of white people for a decade. The second blacks started successfully agitating against mass incarceration and the worst elements of the black population were once again thrust out in front of whites’ eyes, that’s when race relations fell apart again.
But it can be much better than it is now, and the only thing that is really necessary if for people to want to make it better.
Oh! What an idea! This whole time, I’ve been trying to make things worse! Why did nobody consider trying to make it better?!
We’ve tried everything in the book to make it better. We’ve tried everything from Jim Crow segregation, to colorblindness, to affirmative action and No Child Left Behind, to active anti-white discrimination. We’ve tried mass incarceration and mass de-incarceration. The one thing that never got fully implemented along racial lines was eugenics, but it’s not like many intelligent and important people (both white and black) didn’t discuss it. (Look into what W.E.B. Dubois had in mind as far as that was concerned.) I’m not going to say that none of it has made a dent. That would be dishonest. But you yourself admit that it hasn’t made anywhere near enough of a difference. What fresh new solutions do you propose, beside sweeping this stuff under the rug and praying really hard that nobody notices the lump?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
If you’ve read my previous posting on race, you will already know my answer: racial separation of blacks and non-blacks. American blacks go their own way, and forge the best polity they can without the specter of racial wounds from the past weighing them down.
Black-white conflict will never cease in this country so long as blacks continue to lag so far behind other races, which will always be the case barring either a seismic shift in their culture and folkways, a highly effective application of eugenics, or some combination thereof. Since those things are extremely improbable, the alternative is separation.
We don’t have to keep having these fights into perpetuity. However, I think I’ve made a persuasive case that the peace terms you are proposing - unilateral disarmament by blacks, despite no structural changes that could plausibly lead to a future favorable outcome for them - are unrealistic and unsustainable.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
a white guy rushing the Divine Nine would be pilloried as a racist for showing up looking white
Would he? This actually doesn’t seem plausible to me at all. I think he would just be seen as either A) a troll, and criticized as such, or B) an eccentric and/or naïf, and treated with amused curiosity by the members of the fraternities. They would just quickly dismiss him, and nobody would even pretend he has any power to dispute it or claim discrimination or anything like that.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It’s the tragedy of how affirmative action has impacted the formation of black communities in the United States, the Talented Tenth is pulled off and fawned over by whites, handed easy diversity positions, when they could be improving the quality of black neighborhoods and communities.
This is, of course, one of my main arguments in favor of geographic and/or political resegregation of blacks in America. (And it was in fact the argument that some, both black and white, made in favor of segregation prior to the Civil Rights revolution.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Okay but can you see how this doesn’t inspire confidence? It’s great that you think that the minimum level of effort required is X, but your opinion (presumably) doesn’t carry any more clout than @netstack’s does, and if the modding is going to be inconsistent, with some mods being more overzealous than others, than I think it’s pretty understandable that users (especially those without the post history and reputation that provides some armor) might feel very apprehensive about posting anything less than a maximally-effortful essay about something they find interesting.
Now, for my part, the relative rarity with which I make top-level posts is almost entirely self-imposed. I hold myself to a high standard, and I routinely encounter topics or links about which, while I’d like to participate in discussion about them, I don’t feel like I have enough of a unique or interesting insight to offer to make it worth composing a post I’d feel proud of. So I’m not one of the people who just blames the mods for their unrealistic expectations. But clearly there are other users who do feel intimidated/discouraged by the seemingly capricious way in which effort requirements are enforced.
So, for all of a bare links repository’s potential flaws, at the very least it would not foster any doubt or require people to discern the intentions of all of the various mods.
Stuff like this is exactly why I support a more inquisitorial model of criminal justice. One that does not require a complicated trial process, necessitating multiple layers of in-person testimony, for a crime that can easily be verified with a simple sharing of a video file, or even just by the police finding a shoplifted item on the person of a shoplifter. The dispensation of justice in such a scenario should be trivially simple and quick to administer, and should not require so many individuals to burden themselves.
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