Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
They on no account permit wine to be imported to them, because they consider that men degenerate in their powers of enduring fatigue, and are rendered effeminate by that commodity.
Is this supposed to imply that the Suevi prohibited alcohol consumption entirely? Or just wine? Obviously the Nordic peoples of the Viking age were famously producers and drinkers of mead, and contemporary Germanic peoples famously enjoyed ale, so unless those were cultural innovations that arose centuries after the Suevi - or unless the Suevi were an outlier - I would assume that alcohol consumption was not unknown among their people.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Jane Austen would understand, to the point where "Elizabeth Bennet rushes Bama" is a crossover fic I would consider reading.
That is something we need.
Tide and Prejudice
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Have you been to Japan? I spent two and a half weeks there, spending time in various parts of the country, and I think I can count the number of police officers I saw on one hand.
I've not heard of 'Rushing' before
It’s where the fraternities line up potential pledges and have them foot-race as fast as their legs can take them. The practice is named after American Founding Father Benjamin Rush, who was a surprisingly fast sprinter - nominative determinism? - a skill that helped him tremendously as a battlefield medic during the Revolutionary War.
(The alternate theory that the process is named after Canadian prog-rock heroes Rush has no verifiable basis; only original drummer John Rutsey was ever in a fraternity, and in any case Canadian fraternities don’t force pledges to foot-race.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The Rams weren’t missing half their receiving corps in that game.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think the trend you’re observing is probably real, although in my case one of my contributions is a post where I express an opinion I myself am not 100% comfortable with and that is a change from my prior position. (Specifically, the one about how efforts to raise fertility are probably a lost cause.)
I do think we have a few high-effort contributors who don’t sort easily into any of the major ideological “camps” on the Motte, and I also think that most of the people who have fled the site entirely were not actually the squishy moderates but rather those who were most ideologically rigid and could not deal with the enforced charity rules. That being said, I haven’t been a Motteposter for nearly as long as some others in this community, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
although maybe also a sign of something else.
What do you have in mind?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think the Lions have looked pretty convincing in all of their games. They haven’t had any embarrassing stinkers yet.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think this sounds like the sort of thing that would do very well here. I’d certainly be interested in it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I will say that the main counterargument I’ve seen on the right is that Adams was indicted precisely because he has defied the Biden administration on immigration and policing. He notably said at a public event that the mass influx of “asylum seekers” into NYC would “destroy this city.” He will also, if removed from office, be replaced (pending a new election) by a very far-left black anti-police extremist named Juwaane Williams; this has led some to believe that Adams is being cleared out precisely to allow Williams’ ascent.
Ha! I fully admit that I had not seen the post; I originally replied to your comment from the new comments thread, rather than seeing it under the parent post.
So, yes, I agree that @Highlandclearances’s comment claiming a link between national happiness and homogeneity looks very odd considering the post to which he was replying, especially considering that even besides Israel, another country in the top 5 (Serbia) has its own internal ethnic divisions, including an ethnically-separate breakaway region it refuses to recognize as a sovereign nation. Hell, even the #1 entry, Lithuania, has a substantial ethnic Russian minority.
So yes, I would agree with you that the link between homogeneity and happiness is not as straightforward as might be assumed. However, I would also be very interested in the methodology of the report under discussion. In the case of Israel, for example, I’d be curious to know how representative their sample was. (Were the Palestinians included?) I’d also want to see where Israel has ranked on that same report in previous years. (I’m indisposed right now or I would look into it myself before commenting.) That being said, my argument does look a bit comical when juxtaposed with the post that it’s under. It could just be that Israel is an extreme outlier and that the general link between ethnic homogeneity and happiness is generally true and observable.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Israel has been engaged in a decades-long violent campaign, with periodic mass-casualty events on both sides, against a hostile ethnic group within its own borders. This is your example of a happy country?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, first off, I don’t believe I have ever heard a single person describe Israel as homogenous. Any country where a full one in four of its citizens is from an ethnolinguistically and religiously different group from the other three is, by definition, not homogenous.
And yes, you note that even within the Jewish Israeli population there are significant divisions. That’s also true, and also a source of political and cultural tension within Israeli society! My understanding is that the tensions between the Ashkenazi founding stock and the later waves of Sephardic and especially Mizrahi Jews produced massive friction in Israel for the first decades of its existence. Israel is also still to this day having major issues with the differences between its Ultra-Orthodox/Haredi population versus the other strains of Judaism.
So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The distinctions between Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons, Normans, etc. washed out hundreds of years ago, though. Nobody in England has spoken Norman French in over 500 years. Back when these groups were still linguistically and culturally distinct, they absolutely did not get along - see the wars between the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and then famously the conquest and subsequent violent subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans. It’s only in hindsight, after a centuries-long process of mixing and integration, that we consider these to be constituent ancestries of a unified population. (And of course the existence of Wales as a separate entity, and the revival of the Welsh language, are testaments to the fact that the pre-Anglo-Saxon Britonic people were in fact never fully integrated, despite centuries of effort.)
Meanwhile, in Lebanon and Afghanistan these groups are still very distinct, generally geographically segregated, and - again, most importantly - have been in open violent conflict at various times even within your and my lifetimes.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean that’s just not remotely accurate. Lebanon has several religious groups who have been in open conflict many times over its history. Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, Alawites, and that’s to say nothing of the masses of refugees from the Syrian conflict currently residing within its borders.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, has always been an incredibly ethnically diverse and fractious region. Pashtun, Balochs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, plus all kinds of obscure insular groups that still practice otherwise dead religious traditions, or who credibly claim direct descent from Alexander the Great’s wars against the Parthians a few thousand years ago.
Like, you’ve picked two of the least homogenous countries in the entire region.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
While I don’t disagree with the main thrust of your post, you appear to have taken the bait of a troll. See this comment by the same user, whose profile is presumably private to keep people from keeping track of the various troll posts, for a general flavor of said user’s meager output.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
When I visited the UK I stayed in a little hamlet in Gloucestershire, about halfway between Bristol and Gloucester. I visited Bristol, Bath, Gloucester, Cardiff, and Salisbury. None of these places (with the exception of a particular section of Bristol) struck me as “depressingly poor”, although that might just be because I wasn’t living there everyday, or because things that seemed “quaint” to me were actually just signs of poverty. I’m sure things in the Midlands and up North are probably worse, but at least in the parts of the UK I saw, not much depressed me except for the demographics in Cardiff and the piss-poor adaptation of The Magic Flute I saw in Bristol. Maybe I just haven’t seen the high life in London so I don’t know what to compare things to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
And sure enough, the person lined up to replace Adams if he’s removed is an insane ACAB ideologue.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” he was expressing his deeply-felt leftism?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
im being a theater person from a family of theater people coupled with the "Sic semper tyrannis" shtick is surely a gesture in that direction.
This is the flimsiest straw I have ever seen anybody attempt to grasp at.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
And what do you think any of that has to do with John Wilkes Booth?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
or that some behavior was so beyond the pale that the best response is to let the guilty walk free to disincentivise similar misconduct in the future.
I believe this is pretty much never the best response.
A defense attorney who gets their client of the hook, even with some far-fetched technicality, is doing their job.
I want that to stop being their job.
If you don't like the common law trial system imported by the founding fathers, there are plenty of jurisdictions where a defense attorney is always just a figurehead, consider moving there perhaps?
OR I can attempt to change the system in the jurisdiction where I already live. Do you believe this is illegitimate?
Yes, a good lawyer might get their criminal client to walk away freely by playing the role society has assigned for them to play, and that criminal might commit further crimes.
This would not make him or her a good lawyer. It would demonstrate competence, but not virtue. It would produce an intolerably bad outcome for society. I no longer want society to assign this role for them to play.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
And our legal system is built on the premise that "reasonable doubt" is enough to acquit, and it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. You might disagree with these premises, but then you have to convince everyone else; it's not something no one has actually put thought into.
Convincing people is precisely what I am attempting to do! I’m well aware that you don’t think I’m doing a very good job of that. I’m well aware that my position is very much a minority one, both on the Motte and in American society at large.
And it’s not as though I haven’t acknowledged counterarguments throughout this discussion and others. I just ultimately believe, after thinking it through and examining the arguments, that my position is correct. It was not always my position! Again, as you know, I used to be extremely pro-civil-rights! Justice William Brennan was a major hero of mine. When I took a constitutional law class in college, I was consistently the one arguing for the most expansive protections for defendants possible! I’ve been persuaded away from that position over time, but it’s not like I don’t understand the arguments for it.
I strongly suspect the probability of that happening not bothering you is because you know who would be railroaded more often than not, and you think that would be a good thing because you have openly stated you don't really care about the procedural ethics or truth valence of any particular charge against blackcriminals as long as they get got for something.
My outgroup here is “individuals with long criminal rap-sheets, including multiple felonies.” These are not normal upstanding middle-class people who get roped up unjustly and at random. Do you genuinely think, based on anything I’ve said, that I’d be happy to see some respectable black guy with a wife and a mortgage and a full-time job get snatched up by police and railroaded for a crime some white junkie committed? No, I wouldn’t, and that doesn’t happen. The people who would get expedited through the justice system under my proposed regime would be people who have conclusively demonstrated their inability to participate in a non-criminal manner in society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I disagree and not simply with the position itself, but also with the prospects of such a comment leading to a reasoned discussion that could arrive at some interesting conclusion.
Look at the rest of the thread and my participation in it. Do you believe that I contributed nothing of intellectual value to it? Again, I’m not pretending that the particular comment you picked on was high-effort; however, I’m clearly quite capable of offering much higher-effort expansions of my position, which I did, in numerous parts of that same comment thread. That is the difference between me and someone who contributes nothing but low-effort swipes. If your belief is simply that no commenter, no matter how long-standing and high-quality-on-average, should ever be able to get away with posting anything low-effort, that’s fine, but it is not my position, nor does it appear to be the mods’ position.
Do you think that the discussion writing something like this would lead to is going to be high level?
Yes, absolutely! We see very high-effort and interesting threads branch off from arguments like that frequently here. I agree that you would also probably incite a lot of low-effort and/or uncharitable replies as well, but that doesn’t mean the post itself wouldn’t ultimately be worth it. If you genuinely do hold that belief, why not make an effortful post about it?
See, you say this, but then I believe that @4doorsmorewhores easily cleared the bar you are claiming is the minimum expectation with this post, yet he still got modded for supposedly not putting enough effort into his commentary/contextualization.
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