Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
and observed that both the peddlers and consumers there of tend to be of a certain type.
But the writer in question is not of that type. Is that relevant to you at all? Does it give you any pause at all, or cause you to rethink your blanket assumption in any way?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
So, I’m going to offer a tepid defense of the sensitivity readers, by drawing a comparison to what’s on offer as an alternative. In short, I think this is about the search for “a usable past” as we transition into a new political/cultural paradigm.
In comparison to the world in which you and I grew up, the sensitivity readers appear very extreme. They immediately bring to mind Orwellian horror stories and… real-life Communist horror facts. But, I would argue that the people trying to publish mostly-intact versions of old classics, with only the most “problematic” parts excised or modified, are actually the squishy centrists compared to what’s coming down the pike behind them. There is a real Year Zero contingent on the left, with real intellectual heft in the circles that are driving political developments. These people really would like the works of Ian Fleming and Ronald Dahl and all the other toxic white men consigned to the dustbin of history. Compared to them, what the sensitivity readers at these publishing companies are doing is quite limited in scope and preserves infinitely more of these works than the more radical activists to their left would prefer.
I’ll draw an analogy to a couple of things. The first is the Broadway musical Hamilton. For the first few years after it came out, it was one of the most popular and culturally-relevant pieces of media among the liberal/progressive-lite PMC. While many on the far right - especially the racially-conscious right - saw the presentation of the Founding Fathers as a bunch of black rappers as a desecration (the Great Replacement not only proceeds apace in the present, it has now been able to reach into the past!) some on the right had a more nuanced and perceptive take: they realized that this was liberals trying to preserve a usable past.
For people who have one foot in the Successor Ideology and one foot in 20th-century liberalism, dealing with the past is a really difficult and fraught balancing act. If your values are sufficiently attuned to progressivism, staring straight at the reality of the American founding and the men responsible for it, shorn of all the mythologizing and contextualizing and white lies, at some point you’re going to realize you have to choose to either discard them or discard the values you hold dear. Something like Hamilton is an off-ramp from that dilemma. You can slap a fresh new coat of paint on the Founding, sand off some of its most problematic parts, selectively emphasize plausible readings of it that are most amenable to modern sensibilities, and suddenly it’s okay to love the Founders again. A new and diverse generation can hopefully see themselves in the Founding, carrying on a genuine love and admiration for a modified and sanitized version of them. Well, the real hardcore Left realized, correctly, that this was happening, and they tore Hamilton to shreds. It’s pro-Founder propaganda, trying to make us love cisheteropatriarchal slaveholders and rapists, thinking we’ll forget who they were and what they did by dressing them up as rapping POCs. They’re trying to deny liberals that off-ramp. Similarly, I can imagine one of these sensitivity readers, after chugging a pint of Truth Serum, saying to you, “You don’t like our bowdlerized version of James Bond with the yuckiest parts taken out? Okay, you know what you’re going to hate a lot more? Fifteen years from now when every last copy of a James Bond novel gets shredded and its spot on the bookshelf taken by a novel about a strong flawless black female super-scientist who kills conservative white men. We were trying to save this series and give you the best version that was political possible given the world that’s coming, and you rejected it. You let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and now you ended up with a result infinitely worse than the one we tried to offer you. Hope you’re happy.”
I also want to draw an analogy, drawing on a previous post of mine, to the Christianization of northwestern Europe. Part of the reason why the conversion of the Germanic and Celtic pagans succeeded is that missionaries found a way to adapt existing pagan festivals and cultural practices to the new Christian theological paradigm. This video demonstrates in great detail how, for example, what we now celebrate as Christmas is very obviously just a rebranding of long-existing pagan practices, with a thin paint of syncretized Christian gloss slapped on it so it didn’t have to be totally discarded. I can imagine some Christian monk telling a horrified pagan reactionary, “Look, man, do you want to be able to keep 80% of your tradition, or do you want to keep none of it? Those are the options on offer here. Is it really that massive a deal to you to let us fiddle around with certain aspects of this tradition to reconcile it with the new paradigm that’s already here whether you like it or not? Let us modify it, because there’s some hardcore dudes on the other die of me who would prefer we scrapped it entirely and started punishing you guys for celebrating it at all.” There were obviously aspects of pre-Christian society that simply could not be allowed to survive once the conversion took place. Explicit worship of idols representing pagan gods had to go; the theological proscriptions against it in Christianity are simply too clear to allow any wiggle room. Ditto for animal sacrifice, which used to be a ubiquitous part of the daily religious life of pagan cultures; Christ is supposed to have been the final sacrifice, so it would be too sacrilegious to allow people to keep doing what they had been doing. But some of the stuff that’s less problematic from the perspective of the new Christian system? Eh, let them keep it, and just call it something new and find some way to call it Christian.
Something like that is what the sensitivity readers are doing. There are certain aspects of these works that are a bridge too far, and their removal is non-negotiable. Assuming progressivism continues its ascent, there’s simply no way that kids in a hundred years will be able to read a book in which the main character insults black people or disrespects women. But there is a world in which they can still read Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, with a new coat of paint slapped on and some of the yucky parts quietly removed. The future generations won’t know the difference. It’s that or Year Zero - take your pick.
Obviously I’m not happy that the continuing ascent of progressivism makes these the only two realistic outcomes on offer. I want to believe that the backlash is still coming, and that a collapse of this system is in the cards. If it’s not, though… those sensitivity readers might be the only think standing between us and something unimaginably worse.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
See, I know that people in the rationalist sphere like to believe that thought experiments such as this one are very useful and compelling, but personally I see no value in entertaining something like this. You’re asking what would happen if humans were entirely different than they actually are, in a fundamental way, and if we had access to magic. Why is this worth spending time thinking about? Your hypothetical scenario is wildly implausible. We don’t have technology even remotely close to what you’re proposing. Do you have any concrete reasons, aside from general techno-optimism, to believe that anything like this will be possible, let alone affordable for the great mass of humanity? If not, you might as well ask, “If everyone woke up tomorrow with the ability to read minds, what would be the legal and philosophical ramifications of that?” Answer: They won’t, next question.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
literal white jocks and cheerleaders are both. They are democrats and republicans.
My sense is that the partisan split among white adults who are former football players or cheerleaders leans heavily Republican, although you’re correct that there would still be millions of Democrat voters who fit this demographic profile. As a total percentage of Trump’s versus Biden’s constituency, though, I would say that white “former popular kids” are a much larger part of the former than of the latter.
Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansen aren't dorks are they?
As Hollywood actors, they’re highly atypical of their general demographic profile. (Johansson is also Jewish, so it should actually be very unsurprising that she’s not a Trump fan.) The incentives pushing Hollywood actors toward expressing liberal views are so strong that it’s nearly impossible to get a sense of what these people truly believe in their heart of hearts.
you were a nerdy theatre guy right? And you are a Trump voter! Are you the only freak?
I am extremely atypical. The percentage of American adults with theatre arts degrees who voted for Trump has to be less than 10%.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
See my reply to Hlynka. The “get the wall” comment was intended to be read as an obviously hyperbolic joke. I do not want to kill my ex-friends in the San Diego theatre community.
I do advocate political violence in a limited capacity, and you’re correct to note that in this sense I am profoundly different from the median conservative who just wants to restore some sort of détente, but I don’t believe it’s in any way necessary or morally right to extend that violence to individuals whose “power” was ultimately nothing more than hyper-localized and entirely social in nature.
We will ultimately need to see certain public officials killed, maimed, or permanently jailed. I truly do believe that healing in this country will need to include that. This doesn’t mean that I want the jerk who told people not to be friends with me because I’m a problematic white man to suffer this fate.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
And if you believe that everything must have a cause, then that applies just as much to God as it does to the universe, so bringing God in does not actually solve the problem.
This is probably the worst of the atheist arguments against a creator, because it seems to result in a failure of basic comprehension. Theists (and deists) are saying “God is, by definition, the exception to the rule that all things must have a cause. He is the Unmoved Mover, and the Uncaused Causer.” And you’re saying, “But wouldn’t an Uncaused Causer need a cause too?” No, obviously not, that’s literally what makes him the Prime Mover. You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument, whereas the reality is that you just refused to acknowledge that they made it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I vacillated about whether or not to reply to this, but I think it would be almost cowardly not to. It’s a moment where the rubber of my ideology meets the road of actual interpersonal relations with a real human being.
I hope that you are unsuccessful in your attempts to make it to America. I wish that you’d been unsuccessful in making it to the UK, and barring some future event forcing you to go back to India entirely, I hope you’re stuck in the UK in perpetuity and find it less and less to your liking.
This has little-to-nothing to do with you personally. Every interaction I’ve had with you has suggested that you’re a genial, intelligent, and interesting guy, and I have no doubt that you and I could get along swimmingly in person. Still, you’re just one individual, and I’ve got an entire country - an entire civilization, really - to worry about rescuing. Your individual quest for self-actualization - which, sorry to say it, strikes me as overwhelmingly acquisitive and materialistic - doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
If the demographic/cultural situation in America were different, I would be very happy to have you in my country, and even in my city specifically. Individual immigrants, when coming here in small and selective numbers, can be a wonderful addition to the social fabric. However, we live in a country with a sprawling racial spoils system, and in which highly-educated Indians such as yourself are being imported en masse to create a new synthetic overclass more compliant to the regime.
“But Hoffmeister, I won’t be compliant to the regime! I’m not like the other Indians!” Well, first off, I’m not actually convinced that this is true; your paean to America, much like that of so many other smart and materialistic immigrants before you, seems centered around how many opportunities it provides you to obtain large amount of material wealth and an obnoxiously large house. Am I to believe that you would represent a genuine ally in the struggle of people like me to take back our country, once doing so presents a significant opportunity obstacle to your ability to obtain wealth and status?
And even if you will be, it definitely doesn’t sound like your girlfriend will. No, she’ll fit right in with the class of vindictive America-hating South Asians who play the progressive politics game expertly in order to bolster their own status at the expense of shredding the sociocultural fabric of this country. And moreover, your children will almost undoubtedly do the same. I know plenty of second-generation Indian-Americans, and a lot of them have parents who are every bit as over-the-top enamored of the “American Dream” as you are, yet they’re happily joining the America Is Systemically Racist grift so that they can get ahead. And a lot of them actually believe in it! Indian-Americans are either the highest-income or second-highest-income (the numbers on Jewish-Americans are hard to nail down) ethnic group in America, the American government is doing everything in its power to bring them here and to set them up for success; and yet these ungrateful scumbags still want to lecture me about all of the evils my ancestors released on the world. And I don’t believe that you yourself have the genuine ideological foundation needed to prevent your children from becoming that way.
Now, assuming that you are dead-set on coming to the States and want to scope out cities to live in, someone below recommended San Diego and I would strongly second that recommendation. Since I’ve lived here my whole life I can’t help but fixate on all of the negatives, especially since it’s gotten so much worse upon particular metrics like homelessness and general disorder, but it stills blows pretty much every similarly-sized American city out of the water on nearly every other metric, and the weather is famously incredible. Come visit La Jolla if you want to see how wealthy people live here, and go to North Park for bars and restaurants. If your goal of emigrating here is successful, you could do worse than living here, and I’d rather you end up in a city that’s already so racially-diverse that it’s unsalvageable from a white-identitarian perspective, rather than that you end up in a city that hasn’t yet lost the demographic battle.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Some time last year - I believe it was before the exodus from Reddit - there was a post in the Friday Fun Thread asking the question: “What is the greatest rock song of all time?” I can’t find the post now, but the OP was asking whether AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” is the correct answer to the question, and various users submitted different interesting arguments and alternative answers. Most people seemed to agree on certain baseline criteria: Would early rock & roll musicians such as Chuck Berry recognize the song as being within the same genre as the one they were writing in? Does the song contain the specific elements of rock music - not only the familiar instrumentation, but also the lyrical themes (sex/romance, rebellion, partying, strong emotions, etc.) - that have given the genre such a mass appeal? Is it well-known, influential, timeless, and broadly popular with a wide audience? (i.e. It’s not too heavy, too abrasive, or too proggy to make it off-putting or inaccessible for a general audience.) The OP’s choice of song seems like a very promising one, but many other good answers were given, as were many arguments why “You Shook Me All Night Long” either fails one or more criteria, or is otherwise not the best answer to the question.
For my part, I missed the boat on the thread and only saw it after it was too late to meaningfully contribute, but I was surprised to see that (unless I overlooked it) nobody brought up the song that I would have suggested: “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N’ Roses.
Now, let’s see how this song performs on various metrics:
Is it well-known, influential, timeless, and broadly popular with a wide audience?
Obviously, yes. We’re talking about a multi-platinum-selling single, consistently ranking on various publications’ lists of greatest songs of all time. This song is ubiquitous in many different radio formats and is catchy enough to be played at weddings and in grocery stores, while still maintaining credibility among the snobbier rock critics. I am supremely confident that in fifty years, people will still be bumping “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, and that it will not be considered overly dated or cheesy at that point.
Does it have the elements of rock & roll that people find appealing, in terms of lyrical content, melodic/structural content, and instrumentation?
Again, yes. It’s a romantic song about loving a beautiful woman, but doesn’t feel cloying or juvenile. It’s mid-tempo, pulsing enough to dance to or even bang your head at times, but not too fast or heavy to turn casual listeners away. It is beautifully melodic at times, but has some heavy glam-metal kick, especially in the final minute or so of the song, once they kick things up a notch after the “where do we go now” section. Pop-hating 80’s metalheads and genial melody-loving grannies and kids can all enjoy this song.
Is it recognizably “rock and roll” and would Chuck Berry agree with that categorization?
This is the metric where, arguably, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is pushing the limits. First off, the song is long - almost six minutes! Most prototypical rock songs are much tighter and more compact; “You Shook Me All Night Long” is a brisk three-and-a-half-minutes long, pretty much the golden mean for a rock song. “Sweet Child” is also more complex than the classic rock formula; it arguably doesn’t have a traditional “riff”, and its structure is more varied than the classic “verse-chorus-bridge-chorus” structure of early rock songs. It straddles the boundary between “rock” and its offspring genre “heavy metal”; it’s soft enough and melodic to be played on mainstream rock or even pop radio stations, but its guitars are at times heavy enough, and Axl Rose’s vocals piercing enough, to almost push it over the line into a genre that Chuck Berry would think has “gone too far”. So, going strictly by this criteria, “Sweet Child” has failed the test and has to be disqualified.
However, I would argue that “Sweet Child O’ Mine” strikes the perfect balance between pushing the limits of the genre while still remaining rock and roll at heart. This song is challenging to perform - the famous guitar intro was originally a string-skipping exercise that guitarist Saul “Slash” Hudson used to play as a warm-up/étude to keep his chops up, the vocals are outside of the range of most male singers, with Axl Rose wailing out, if I’m identifying the note correctly, an E5 at a couple of points, and don’t sleep on Duff McKagan’s limber, syncopated bass line - but does not feel show-offy or intentionally overcomplicated in the way that a lot of instrumentally-difficult rock music often does. This isn’t something that your average group of teenage neophytes and musical amateurs could get together and play in their garage, but it’s something they could aspire to learn without having to go through music school and years of meticulous training to master.
It’s miles ahead of “Sweet Little Sixteen” in terms of creativity and musicianship, but it’s not trying to be Dream Theater and isn’t primarily about showing everyone how great they are at playing their instruments. The average non-musician listening to the song might be vaguely aware of the impressive musicianship - Slash’s solo definitely shreds, in a way that’s obvious enough to impress non-guitarists - but it’s not the main takeaway or the main point. It’s just a kick-ass, catchy, anthemic rock song, and I’m personally willing to say that on all of the relevant criteria, it might well represent the pinnacle of the genre.
Anyway, that’s my contribution to a months-old, dead conversation topic, the OP of which will probably never see this and can’t respond. I thought it was a fun enough question to maybe resurrect here for another go-around, though.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Well gosh, I feel such deep pity for you having to be so clever and talented and live in the hustle and bustle, unlike us dumb beasts of the field
Oh, you don't like that characterisation? Then stop imagining that you and yours are somehow special in the entire history of humanity.
This reaction - this visceral defensiveness, this searing chip on the shoulder, this hyper-vigilance that reads contempt and derision into any insinuation that people like you have different optimal life strategies, different skill sets, different strengths and weaknesses than people like me - is a pattern that I observe constantly, and it reinforces my thesis. Not a single thing I said was intended to call anything about your lifestyle worse than mine; in fact, I explicitly acknowledged that for a vast number of people, the Shire life is better and more fulfilling than life in the hyper-complex modern city. This is not because those people are dumb and bad, while I’m smart and good. These people have much stronger moral fiber than I do, and they are incredible at the roles which they perform, both in their local context and within civilization as a whole. Their life path is lower-variance than the big-city striver’s life path, and as someone who basically lit my twenties on fire in pursuit of the high-variance path and am now figuring out how to pick up the pieces, I am acutely aware of the very obvious upsides of your preferred life path.
I believe - at least, my reading of history and my good-faith observation of the world around me leads me to tentatively favor the belief that - humans have largely-hereditary proclivities which make a given individual better suited for some life paths than others. While I absolutely do believe that some people have particular proclivities which make them unworthy of life in any society which I want to live in, I also think that the vast majority of people have important roles to play, and that a healthy society uses subtle social engineering to, as effectively as possible, sort people into the roles which suit them best. In the case of the small town life, that role is fairly broad, in contrast to the more highly-specialized roles needed in complex urban life. It is an admirable and vitally-important role. I wish there was a way I could have this conversation without you guys immediately detecting derision and contempt, and I’m still striving in earnest to figure out a way to do so, but as I said, your optimal strategy is to over-detect outside threats from arrogant social engineers who want to exploit you and destroy your way of life, so it’s natural for you to detect that in me, regardless of what I believe I’m trying to do.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
How about David Cole, who is Jewish?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr 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.
It’s child abuse to… strongly encourage your child to have the same beliefs and behavioral norms as the vast majority of people he or she will meet and interact with? To set your child up for a smooth and healthy social life rather than encouraging him or her to be an atomized contrarian?
Look, man, as someone who staunchly refused to stand for the national anthem starting in high school and continuing up until a couple of years ago, I probably share nearly all of your complaints about the thought-terminating clichés implied by standing for the national anthem. I personally derive very little patriotic feeling or inspiration when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner; its lyrics are a mawkish and clumsy paean to an irrelevant battle from a war which America didn’t even win, and to a country which no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
But saying it’s child abuse to want one’s child to fit in and to have normal run-of-the-mill beliefs that will allow that child to go through life successfully and have healthy relationships with others? That strikes me as a completely ass-backwards accusation.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Because I’m not only interested in your closing question. I’m interested in the other 80% of your post that came before it. Are you going to make another attempt to defend the rest of the post, or have you now retreated the motte of defending only the part of it that didn’t make specific falsifiable claims?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
I think that a lot of this comes down to the fact that modern men living in many European/Anglosphere countries have lived for a decade+ under a system in which women wield a massive amount of power over citizens’ lives, and men can see very clearly the failure modes inherent in the way that women’s psychology interacts with access to power. (A recent and revealing example of which is this brief clip of an interview with Biden’s new pick for Director of the CDC, a textbook demonstration of the catty and supercilious nature of a woman given far more power than she should ever have tasted.)
It may at some point have been possible to believe that women given power under the right circumstances, if thrust into power and forced to perform, might do as well as men. Certainly history contains salient examples of exceptional women - Elizabeth I of England, Boudica, etc. - ably wielding power even under extraordinary pressure. (For a fictional example, many would point to Ellen Ripley from the Alien film series.) However, now that so many men are living under the direct consequences of a feminized power structure - in which even most male officials have to cater to and navigate around female preferences and sensibilities - it’s extremely natural for men to bristle against a regime that is always going to feel on some level like an unnatural imposition.
I will say that young boys, for whom sexual ideation has not yet come to totally dominate their interactions with females, might have an easier time connecting with fictional female characters. I might be shredding some of my already-scarce Dissident Right credibility by admitting that I was a massive Harry Potter fan up into adulthood, and I always found Hermione Granger extremely relatable. She’s exactly the sort of spergy, fastidious, precocious pedant that so many of the commenters on this forum almost certainly were as kids. Of course, now we are confronted with the consequences of living under a political regime controlled by Hermione Grangers - the great majority of whom don’t even have the courtesy to look like Emma Watson while crushing us under the might of the longhouse - and reading the series over again with that life experience makes it far more difficult in hindsight to feel any warmth or empathy toward the character.
A world in which a precocious and hyper-intelligent girl could have her energies directed in a positive direction is certainly desirable; I don’t want Hermione forced to be a housewife, her prodigious mental faculties dulled by menial drudgery. Female scholars and researchers have done wonderful work in the past - see Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin - as have great female artists and writers. What I don’t want is a world where those same women’s political sensibilities come to dominate the cultural production, and consequently the political priorities, of our society. (This is leaving aside discussions of hypergamy, and whether or not by opening up more avenues for women to accrue significant power, resources, and status, we throw reproductive/romantic relations between the sexes into chaos.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.
Yes, correct, that is precisely what we are arguing. There has been no right-wing government in the Anglosphere in living memory. Hell, a government wouldn’t even need to be as far right as Pinochet or Franco or Mussolini to qualify; sadly, we haven’t gotten anything even in the same ballpark as those guys. To me that’s just indisputably obvious. So, telling me that right-wing Anglosphere governments have failed in your lifetime is a non-sequitur.
No, I can’t. First off, nobody forced him to commit those first two crimes. In my preferred system, he wouldn’t have been out and about after the first one, let alone the second, so he shouldn’t even have been in the position to commit that third felony in the first place. Secondly, let’s say you have a guy who has committed two armed carjackings. That’s a guy who, if given the opportunity and enough time, will commit a third armed carjacking. Or some other serious crime. Carjacking is not something that any normal, functional person would ever do to another person even once, let alone twice.
So, do you want to wait until after he has violently carjacked a third person - or, hell, graduated to an even more horrible and traumatizing and destructive crime - or do you want to jump on the chance to get rid of him when he has done something less horrible, and save some poor individual having their life ruined before we can finally say, “Alright, D’Quandre, we’ve given you enough chances to act like a human.”
This is my fundamental issue with progressive/liberal theories of crime: they are utterly allergic to thinking probabilistically. The mainstream consensus in the Western world is so infected with the braindead Christian focus on forgiveness that they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you can accurately and reliably predict people’s future behavior based on their past behavior. Of course, people can readily accept this idea in nearly every other walk of life, but when it comes to criminal justice suddenly they are determined to pretend that it’s some horrible delusional idea. Minority Report and the idea of “pre-crime” gets thrown around as if it’s some knock-down argument against dealing with very obviously dangerous and impossible-to-live-around individuals before they are able to ruin even more lives than they already have.
Me personally? If you’ve already committed a serious violent felony, done your time in prison for it, and then you so much as jaywalk, that’s society’s perfect chance to execute you and I won’t miss you one bit.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
See, I agree with everything you’re saying here, and have argued the same things multiple times in this space. That’s what’s so odd to me about how hostile you get towards me and other users here who have advocated a formalized geographic and/or cultural separation of blacks from other higher-performing racial groups in this country. I believe it would be a genuine act of care and would drastically improve the lived experience of most black people, for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined. Yet you continue to (usually by implication but occasionally explicitly) accuse me of having other, more malicious motives.
I understand why you might have other concerns which would stop you from carrying through the argument you’re making to (what I believe is) its most appropriate conclusion, but I ask that you take this opportunity to at least reflect on why someone would conclude from the argument you’re making that maybe the best solution is to engineer a future in which black people will not have to live every single day of their lives being forced to unfavorably compare themselves to whites and Asians.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
All I'm getting from these posts is that you, personally, have had a really hard time
No, I haven’t! My life could definitely be a lot better, but a huge amount of that is because of poor choices I’ve made! Apparently my posts have given people the impression that I’m some sad-sack burnout with no prospects or something like that. My income is nothing like what most of the people on this sub make, but I’m not struggling to make rent or pay bills or anything like that. I even have some discretionary income that I use for frivolous things! My love life is a mess right now, but there was a period where it wasn’t, and a lot of why it is now is, again, due to things I’m doing wrong and choices that I’m making. I don’t feel “oppressed” or anything like that.
As for why my views are “extreme”, I don’t think that’s actually true when you look at the full scope of human history. In fact the norm historically has always been that major regime changes have been incredibly bloody affairs. This was true long before Robespierre and Cromwell. When the ruling class of a country fails spectacularly, and especially when those failures seem not only avoidable but to actually be the result of specific bad ideas or corrupt motives which that ruling class actively chose, then usually blood has been spilled.
Liberal democracy was supposed to “fix” this. It was supposed to structure society in such a way that this bloodletting would no longer be necessary, nor even desirable. And for some length of time, in some countries, it even accomplished this for real! That was no mean feat, and I’m not going to pretend like it wasn’t an improvement over a lot of what came before it. The problem now is that I think the Gods of the Copybook Headings have begun to reassert themselves. I believe that some public officials in nearly all European and Euro-diaspora countries have failed their people so comprehensively - in fact, they haven’t merely failed the people, they’ve actively conspired against them - that the burning rage, the despair and hopeless and sense of injustice which have begun to proliferate among the common people of these countries is going to boil over at some point.
And I’m not even a populist! I think that some of the complaints that common people have about the government, and some of the things which they accuse the government of doing, are actually illegitimate and ill-considered! That doesn’t change the fact that the rage is real. I certainly feel it. When I see career criminals continually released back into the streets by DAs who are actively pro-criminal and anti-white, and when I see what used to be actual borders reduced to open doors, I feel burning rage at the people responsible, and a profound sense of injustice when I reflect on the fact that none of them will suffer any consequences or accountability whatsoever. Even if they get voted out, they’ll immediately land on the board of a non-profit, or get a show on a cable news network, or an academic sinecure, which in some cases will make them even more powerful - and certainly more wealthy - than they were when they were in formal elected office!
This cannot continue indefinitely. We are so far past the point of no return, as far as I can tell. And my reading of history is that these situations always end in bloodletting. And that this is not always a bad thing. In this case, since I’m not expecting to die myself, or for anyone I know or care about to die, as a result of the coming bloodletting, it’s especially easy for me to be comfortable with expecting it.
Do you disagree with my assessment of what’s coming? Or do you merely disagree that it will be something other than a calamity? Do you think that the targeted persecution of specific individuals responsible for catastrophic failed policies is the historical norm? Or do you think it’s “extreme”? Can it be both? What does “extreme” mean in this context?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
My entire point is that none of those things used to be the exclusive province of progressives. Classical music was a very right-wing tradition for a long time. Ditto for literature. We find ourselves in a very odd and atypical moment in history, in which the vast majority of smart and high-human-capital people are left-wing. There’s no reason this needs to be the case now, it hasn’t been the case for very long, and my contention is that it will not continue to be the case for very much longer.
Abandoning the cities, deriding high culture as faggy elitist status-signaling (as a number of conservatives on this very site have done) and going all-in on rural populism is a toxic dead end for the right wing, and I would rather actually try and rescue those parts of our culture - the BEST parts of our culture - from the mind virus of minoritarian identity communism. Being a white identitarian is inextricably tied up with this; I believe that white people are largely doing this to ourselves, and that all we need to do is stop. However, if we don’t stop very soon, things genuinely will be out of our hands and those who hate us truly will have the whip hand. Right now, white progressives are allowing vindictive race communists, like the individuals I mentioned in my original comment, because they’ve forgotten what made white people great, and forgotten that they have the strength to fight back.
It’s like if a huge jacked guy was allowing himself to be bullied by a scrawny manlet, simply because he had some psychological condition that caused him to forget that he has muscles. Some perceptual blindness that causes him to ignore the evidence of his own strength right before his eyes. He could snap out of it in a second and flatten the bully, but something is stopping him from doing so. And there are people like me standing off to the side yelling, “Bro, you’re fucking massive, just pummel this guy!” And he’s like, “Nah man, I’m puny and weak, and plus, even if I was super strong, it would be morally wrong of me to fight back.” That’s essentially how I see racial dynamics in this country, at least as it concerns whites and blacks.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Can anyone recommend a good resource for learning Russian? I had been using Duolingo, but I didn’t feel like it was truly helping me become conversational in the language. I would take night classes, but I have a side job that requires me to keep most of my weeknights free. Something I could use while at work would be optimal, but I’m open to whatever recommendations people can provide.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I had a conversation about the Majors accusations a few months ago, with some hyper-progressive and movie-obsessed friends. One of them, a black guy who recently broke into Hollywood himself by landing a decent-sized role on a new TV series, seemed utterly shattered by the situation. (I’ll call him Desmond from here on in.) He is strongly invested in the success and public image of black male celebrities, and though he can generally be counted on to ostentatiously take the wokest imaginable position on any given topic, he seemed to be feigning exasperation as a way to avoid having to express a definitive opinion on the veracity of the accusations. Meanwhile, my other friends - one female, and one physically male but spiritually an AWFL in every way - took Majors’ guilt as an absolute given, and were utterly stunned when I expressed even the slightest amount of doubt. (As you all can probably imagine, I generally do not reveal even a microscopic fraction of my actual worldview to any of my IRL friends.)
I brought up several recent examples of accusations, made against notable public figures, which had turned out to be totally fabricated by vindictive, insane, and/or greedy women. I drew special attention to the case of a star college athlete, with whom all of us are familiar, who, right after being drafted into the NFL, had his career completely exploded by a rape accusation which later turned out to be false. Of course, all three of them had piled on invective at that man when the accusations came out, certain he was guilty and gleefully celebrating his downfall. I reminded them of this, and also lamented that Marvel had so quickly jumped the gun on distancing themselves from Majors, given that they had previously erred in prematurely jettisoning James Gunn as a result of flimsy and overblown accusations made during a period of social hysteria.
Desmond seemed quietly relieved to have been presented with an “out” to be able to safely express some level of skepticism toward the accusations, while the two goodwhites were adamant about pushing ahead with certainty about Majors’ guilt. They gave me some paper-thin justifications for why the Majors situation is different from the examples I’d brought up. The progressive coalition has done a ton of work, in the decades since the OJ Simpson trial, to desperately paper over the faultlines between the sensibilities of black men - who are naturally inclined to treat criminal allegations against prominent black male celebrities with severe skepticism - and those of white female liberals - who are deeply invested in the narrative of pervasive sexual impropriety committed by (racially-unspecified) powerful men.
Interestingly, this same faultline around the issue of whether or not to believe accusations against black male celebrities exists on the Dissident Right. Many DR commenters were eager to point-and-laugh at yet another apparent example of black male sexual misbehavior; other commenters pushed back, expressing doubts of the “bitches always be lyin’” variety. Personally, I fell into the latter camp; I’ve just seen too many of these sexual misconduct/abuse allegations against rich and powerful men turn out to be nonsense. The fact that Majors is black could credibly be used to slightly adjust one’s priors toward assuming his guilt, but I just didn’t feel that it was remotely enough to overcome my instinctive mistrust toward these kinds of situations.
I am interested to see what kind of interesting discourse will take place in progressive spaces now that the accusations appear to have been debunked. Will there be articles titled “America needs to have an uncomfortable conversation about why we were so ready to believe Jonathan Majors, a black man, was guilty” competing with articles about how “Why is America so ready to let Jonathan Majors, a rich male sexual abuser off the hook?” Whose umbrage will be taken more seriously? Will anyone learn anything at all from this?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
As I made clear in another comment, this passage had nothing to do with race - I get why people assume that everything is racial in my mind, but actually there are other things I care about as well - and everything to do with the fact that the guy has a massive criminal rap sheet, is homeless and wholly dependent on others, and is a drain on society; also the fact that he has a (currently) incurable mental illness that renders him a permanent danger to other people. He’s a perfect example of someone who needs to be removed from the gene pool, improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.
As for whether or not I’d be fine with being humiliated by my betters… it depends on the reasons they’re humiliating me in this hypothetical scenario, and whether or not I stand to ultimately gain from it. While I’m skeptical about some elements of the structure and culture of military initiation - basic training, boot camp, etc. - I recognize that the whole “the drill sergeant treats you like dirt and makes a humiliating example out of you” thing has an impressive history of creating an effective fighting force. This would be a scenario where a man is being dominated by his social better, in order to forge him into something improved. He’s suffering a temporary loss in status in order to not only enhance his own status later on down the line, but also to increase the total quotient of effectiveness and status of the group as a whole.
This is markedly different from a situation in which I’m being dominated by my social inferior; it lowers my own status immensely, but produces no corresponding rise in status later on - unless, of course, I respond with force that could get me judicially lynched by a regime that hates me and finds the schizos useful/sacred - and it also immiserates others around me who watch the situation and either feel powerless to intervene, or who have to sublimate the shame of being too apathetic to care.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I must confess my frustration comes from the broader internet. When I look at ways to swap out short-range car use for more efficient modes, I get bullshit evasive argument people, not rational arguments. There seems to be a consensus among them that operating large machines is scary and gives them anxiety, and they want rich/functional people to be forced to travel and live with poor/dysfunctional people, so that the rich/functional people will be forced to fix things for the benefit of the poor/dysfunctional (hence the hatred of the private house/car).
So, I largely agree with your assessment that anti-car advocates do make evasive and disingenuous arguments for their position. I have certainly been guilty of this in the past. My real objection to cars is “driving makes me very anxious, and I would prefer to live around other people who feel similarly, and that way people wouldn’t think I’m a neurotic man-child because I’m not good at driving.” All of the other anti-car arguments, about carbon footprints and air pollution and fatality risks from car accidents, are tools I can deploy when trying to argue my case in front of people who do not share my visceral aversion to driving. They are not my actual reasons, but they do seem to be substantially more rhetorically successful than my actual reasons, which is why I have deployed them in the past.
This is presumably what is motivating so much of the extremely poor argumentation you’re noticing. However, I believe that a lot of the same cynicism and evasion is typical of most pro-car people as well. It all comes down to basic aesthetic personal preferences, to which people deploy various disingenuous but superficially-public-spirited practical arguments in order to lend the veneer of intellectual respectability.
Now, in terms of your accusation that many anti-car people want to force rich people to interact with poor people, that is probably an argument that is deployed by many anti-car commentators - and in fairness, there is probably a substantial overlap between anti-car people and socialists - but I do want to point out that at least in America we have a long and storied history of conservative/right-wing urbanism, typified by publications such as City Journal, and that the polarization that has caused conservatism to lurch in the direction of rural/suburban populism is very recent and could easily be reversed. For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.
I’m at work right now and unable to read the whole report at this time, but the question that jumps immediately to mind is: How many of the people surveyed are so-called “hidden homeless” - people who are couch-surfing, living in their cars, staying with a succession of family members and friends without officially establishing a long-term residence, etc. - versus the “chronic homeless”, i.e. the ones living on the actual streets?
If I lost my job tomorrow, I feel like I could find a new one fairly quickly, but let’s say for some reason I couldn’t. I have some savings that could get me through for a while, and even if I didn’t, I have a network of family and friends on whom I could rely on temporary financial/housing assistance.
So, even though I live in a very high-COL major city in California, that cost of living would not result in me living in the street unless a ton of other things went wrong in my life simultaneously. Namely, I would have to burn bridges with a lot of different people in my life in order for things to get to that point.
Even if my entire family and social network were much poorer than they are, presumably they would still have couches I could sleep on and bathrooms which I could use to shower and shave. They wouldn’t let me get to the point where I’m a filthy bum sleeping on the sidewalk.
So, yes, I can fully understand how high COL could contribute to a larger number of “hidden homeless” - functional individuals who are down on their luck and temporarily relying on help from others - but I don’t think it does much to explain the proportion of homeless people who become “chronic homeless”; these people must have been real fuck-ups to have exhausted the generosity of all of the people in their lives who could have pitched in to prop them up while they get back on their feet. Again, I understand that people who grow up in an impoverished family/social situation have a smaller pool of assistance to draw from, but I still don’t understand how a person with family and friends ends up out on the streets unless they have consistently done something to wear out their welcome with the people who could have at least provided the bare minimum support, namely a roof over their heads.
Some examples of how someone would wear out their welcome with the people in their lives: chronic alcoholism/drug abuse, stealing from others (like, for example, to feed the aforementioned alcohol/drug habits), domestic violence/threats, being so mentally ill that you’re considered a liability by others, being generally insufferable to be around, etc. People get to the point where they give up on helping you because their investment is wasted, and they can’t bear to be responsible for you any longer.
So, I don’t know to what extent high COL explains those people. Again, I haven’t yet read the report, and maybe it explains a lot of this stuff.
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