Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans.
This bears no resemblance to Hood’s argument. Both he and his interlocutor are celebrating the fact that Europe is full of Europeans, and their disagreement is regarding the degree of international cooperation and unity of identity/purpose that should prevail among those Europeans.
The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.
He is from New Jersey, but lives in rural West Virginia. He literally made the exact choice you’re criticizing him for not making.
I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere
Hood - real name Kevin DeAnna - worked in the mainstream conservative movement for over a decade, working for conservative think-tanks in DC. That’s the milieu he came up in, and what he is now reacting against because he has seen it firsthand from the inside.
Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging its founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose. Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion.
Hood writes extensively about Rome, and about early American history. Just because you have no familiarity with his work doesn’t mean you get to accuse him of not knowing about or talking about these things. He does not mean that World War II is the important starting point of Western civilization; he means that it is the founding myth for the current narrative being pushed by academia and the media-political complex. The Boomer Truth Regime.
"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?"
Greg Hood has, I believe, four children at last count. So, presumably those ones.
You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against, but all of your fulminating is completely useless because it doesn’t address any of the basic facts about his actual life or work. It just makes you look ignorant and ineffectual.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
This is an important insight about Queer Theory and the Critical tradition more broadly: permanent revolution is the primary, central goal of the entire intellectual framework. As soon as something has achieved any degree of stable cultural acceptance, it becomes conservative by definition and needs to be transgressed and sublated in turn. What is today’s radical fringe will be tomorrow’s normie cringe. Trans people who get “bottom surgery” might be on the cutting edge of transformation today, but if the Queer Theorists get their way, 100 years from now the same people will be seen as utterly reactionary for reifying the very idea that the physical body has any necessary relationship to identity at all.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
France will endure even if the ethnic French do not
This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?
I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert last night. For those who are unfamiliar with his work, Weird Al is an American comedy/novelty singer, known best for his parodies of popular songs, although he also has a large body of non-parody original comedy songs. I assume that there is a large overlap between the users of this sub - at least those who grew up in America or Canada - and the kinds of people who would be fans of his work. And there definitely is a specific “type” of person to whom Weird Al has always appealed, which is what this post is about.
While the concert itself was a wonderful time - on this tour, Al is only performing his non-parody songs, without the frenetic costume changes and multimedia content for which his live shows used to be known, so this was definitely a “for the hardcore fans only” kind of experience - I was taken aback by something I experienced during the opening act. A stand-up comedian named Emo Philips opened the show. Philips’ onstage persona is an oddball autistic type, and his material is generally self-deprecating, ironic, and full of absurdism and clever wordplay - very much in the same vein as the style of humor that appeals to Weird Al’s fans. The first thing Philips said that raised an eyebrow for me was the statement, “I don’t think there’s a single person in this room who wasn’t bullied.” This got a relatively positive vocal response from the crowd. Then a bit later, he started talking about COVID. “How many people in here have a vaccination card?” (Wild applause and raised hands.) “Now, be honest, how many people here have a fake vaccination card?” (Some scattered hoots and raised hands.) “See, those are great, because you get to have the vaccination card and you can still die of COVID-19!” (Raucous laughter and cheers.) My brother and I, both right-wing COVID skeptics, shared an exasperated look, but the joke sure seemed to kill with this crowd. Later in the set, Philips made some more political comments and jokes, basically along the lines of how “you Californians shouldn’t let anyone make fun of you for being from this state, because they’re just all extremely jealous and resentful.” Now, I am well-aware that comedians play to their crowd, and that this stuff all could have just been naked pandering to the local sensibilities; maybe when he does a set in Tulsa, he tells mocking jokes about COVID paranoia and the scourge of Californian transplants. Still, I found it extremely odd that he would get political at a Weird Al concert - Al’s music is decidedly non-political and infamously inoffensive - and, moreover, that he predicted (correctly) that this type of material would do so well with this crowd in this context.
However, after the show, I reflected on this, and I concluded that it’s not surprising at all. I bet if you took a poll of the political affiliation of the audience at a Weird Al concert in any venue around the country, no matter how deep-red, the results would show overwhelmingly left-of-center. You would get a lot of open SJ progressives - I certainly saw a number of individuals in the crowd whose dress, demeanor, and mask-wearing marked them as MSNBC devotees - and almost certainly the farthest-right you would get would be “both parties are crooked, throw the bums out” apathetic centrism. The demographics of this crowd were overwhelmingly - quite possibly exclusively - white, middle-class, college-educated, and above-average IQ. Even above those reliable correlates of Blue Tribe affiliation, though, there was an additional set of selection effects that would skew the politics of this particular fandom.
Al’s oeuvre - not only his music, but also his cult-classic film UHF and his various other comedic endeavors - is clever, self-deprecating, absurdist, full of obscure cultural references, and, well, weird. His parodies generally take mass-culture popular works, strip them of their cultural context, and transfigure them into absurdist comedy songs totally disconnected from - and appealing to a very different audience from - the source material; many of Al’s parodies, especially his parodies of hip-hop songs, introduced the original songs to an audience who would otherwise have had no engagement with the pop-culture apparatus that generated them.
This sense of being outside of the mainstream, and of only engaging with it in an ironic, deconstructive, and alienated way is a key element of his appeal; this phenomenon is probably best exemplified by his song “White And Nerdy”, a parody of the rapper Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’”, which became an anthem for his socially-awkward (and overwhelmingly white) fan-base. I would wager that nearly everyone in that concert venue last night considers himself or herself “an outsider”. Not in any concrete demographic/“identity” sense - fre if any of these people qualify as a member of a recognized “marginalized community” - but in the sense of belonging to a fictive identity centered on personality traits and aesthetic preferences outside of, or in opposition to, “normie” culture.
Decades before the Marvel ascendancy catapulted “nerd culture” into the mainstream, Al cultivated a following among genuine weirdos and the socially maladroit. Even though they’re no longer truly “outcasts” in any important material sense, their internal self-image is still tied to their sense of being simultaneously victimized by and superior to the people who comprise the “normal” or “mainstream” culture. This affective orientation is a central component of leftism in an atavistic, visceral, pre-political sense. People with that orientation, of course, also tend to gravitate strongly toward leftism in the political sense.
There is also an additional component to Weird Al’s music - a slightly “darker” side, if you will - that tends toward poking fun at certain characteristics of what might be considered natural outgroups for the people to whom he appeals. I recall, years ago, reading a thinkpiece - I believe it was in Slate, but I don’t care enough to check - in which the author argued that Al’s song “Word Crimes” (a parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, in which Al assumes the character of a pedantic grammar-Nazi taking the listener to task for making various common grammar/spelling errors) reveals the elitism and “punching down” that underlies much of his work. His popular parody song “Fat” is another great example of this; it’s the type of casual mockery of fatness which would be deeply taboo in most mainstream-media circles today. There is certainly an element of mockery in some of Al’s work, and it all tends to target people who are low-IQ, low-class, and physically unappealing.
While it is indeed odd for a fandom full of self-proclaimed weirdos and outcasts to find such enjoyment in the mockery of other ostensibly subaltern identities, I don’t actually think there’s much of a contradiction there. While being fat, poor, uneducated, and lacking in middle-class cultural capotal are all markers of an “outsider”, they’re markers of a very different kind of outsider than the modal Weird Al fan. They’re the qualities that a middle-class nerd would associate, on a conscious or subconscious level, with the Red Tribe. Never mind what any empirical data say about which identity groups are most likely to be poor, fat, and stupid; in the mind of an urban white nerd, when you say “imagine a fat and stupid person” the mental image conjured is always a conservative rural white. And if you have built your identity around finding ways to be different from, and superior to, that class of people, you will find your prejudices well-reflected in the Democratic coalition. Is it actually true that a white jock is more likely to bully you than a member of the black underclass? Certainly not - unless you don’t know any underclass blacks, and the white jock is the only thing remotely like an enemy that you have any experience with. That doesn’t matter, though; what matters is whom you identify with, or more importantly whom you identify in opposition to, that’s determinative of your political tribe.
I often ask myself, “Why were you a leftist when you were younger. What about it appealed to you?” And the inescapably obvious answer is that it provided me with an outlet to express my sense of contempt for, and superiority to, regular run-of-the-mill non-nerdy white people. It was pure atavistic chauvinism that led me to identify with the “nerd culture” of the time - which had not yet become fully commercialized at that time - and with pseudo-“outsider” figures like Weird Al Yankovic. I was lamenting to my brother that if my political views were somehow made known to those in that room, many if not nearly all of them would want to see me hounded out of the room and banned from any venue they expect to attend in the future. I might be an outsider - in a much more important material sense than whatever these people still think marks them as outsiders - but I’m an outsider of the wrong kind, and there’s probably no longer any room for me in the coalition of the fake, self-indulgent, marginalized-in-their-own-heads community that comprised the people in that room last night.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
I think that you are the one who is out of touch with progressive rhetoric, given that you’re still assuming that these people are operating in a Marxist materialist frame, whereas I think the evidence is substantial that in a post-Gramscian, post-Marcusian paradigm, things have moved past the simple drive toward establishing an anarcho-communist society free of material coercion of labor, and has instead allowed the Gnostic/Hermetic theological elements - present in Marxism from the beginning via Hegel - to transcend the materialist elements of Marxism. I’m drawing mostly from James Lindsay’s analysis of Critical Theory or post-Marxism as a religious/Gnostic faith centered around the Hegelian dialectic, which seeks to totally transcend humanity and rebuild God.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves. (I’m happy to provide multiple examples if people insist on it.) The tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that these songs are being written by (((Them))) as intentional propaganda warfare to stoke division and mistrust between the sexes. Assuming that’s mostly or entirely untrue, though, it does reveal a very concerning element of young people’s consciousness.
And to be clear, I don’t think this began with Zoomers, although I think it’s gotten worse under them. Personally, I have a ton of neuroses about sex that I picked up as a result of being exposed to all of the (frankly, quite vindictive) complaints about men’s sexual performance by Millennial female comedians and cultural commentators. It makes it very hard to simply lose oneself in the moment sexually if one constantly has a voice in the back of the head saying, “What if she’s actually hating this right now? And she’s going to tell her friends or social media followers how bad it was later?” I don’t know how Zoomer men are supposed to function if this cultural norm is exacerbated further.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
the preoccupation with racial identity is pretty much exclusive to PMCs
You cannot honestly be attempting to claim that racial identity is not important to most black Americans of all socioeconomic classes.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
What I find really hilarious about a lot of replies to both this thread and the original one is how many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx, as if it pains them to see people “misrepresent” his views.
You have me and FC and Arjin pointing out very specific quotes by people who are deeply immersed in Marxist discourse, who have studied the massive corpus of theory and commentary and praxis that have sprung up in the two centuries since Marx was writing (the kind of stuff you can find on marxists.org, for example), and who lay out very sophisticated explanations for why their work is a valid and important extension of Marx’s work, and people here are basically just saying, “Nope, you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing. I know what Marx wanted better than you do.” It’s very reminiscent of the New Atheist era, where atheists would quote scripture at Christians and say, “I know your Bible better than you do. Jesus would hate you.”
Marxism has been an evolving umbrella of thought for a long time. Marxists, for all of their flaws, really do think very deeply about this stuff and talk about it, out in the open. I compared it to Christianity earlier, with the many splits and theological developments and infighting that has taken place within Christian thought, and nobody seems to have a good explanation for why this is not a valid comparison. There are plenty of individuals today who see themselves as church authorities, and who believe they are qualified to interpret, expand upon, and even advance Christ’s statements. It’s very possible that if Jesus were here right now to speak to us, he would set the record straight that some or all of those guys are wrong! But he’s not, so we’re stuck doing the best we can to figure out how to apply his ideas to a modern world that is profoundly different from the one in which Jesus lived. (What would Jesus say about artificial intelligence, or nuclear weaponry? We can only try our best to reason it out.) Marxists are doing the same thing with applying Marx’s ideas to a very different paradigm. Why is this so difficult for some people to accept? Why is it so important to you to maintain the belief that Marx only cared about economics?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
I find it bizarre that you consider basketball players to be unimpressive athletes because their sport requires a specific set of physical attributes (height, long limbs) while celebrating Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, whose extreme and atypical genetically-determined physical attributes (both men look as though they were designed in a lab to excel at their respective sports) were absolutely vital to their success.
Why is LeBron James’ incredible success at basketball invalid because he couldn’t have achieved the same feat if his height had maxed out at 5’7”, but Usain Bolt is an incredible athlete even though he couldn’t have achieved what he did if his leg length had maxed out two inches shorter? At the top level of most sports, no amount of obsessive work ethic is enough to put one over the top without prodigious God-given physical traits. Sprinting is one of the most genetically-based sports - far more than basketball, where a great many of the all-time greats are on the lower end of the league’s height distribution. There is no sprinting equivalent of a Steve Nash, a player with limited physical tools who excelled due to hard work, intelligence, and savvy.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.
There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.
This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.
Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2yr ago
You make several very bizarre claims in this post, which reinforce my perception that you basically have no theory of mind as it regards people on what you call “the alt-right”. (Pro tip: pretty much nobody identifies with that term anymore; the “alt-right” as a movement splintered years ago.) You have correctly identified that we radically disagree with mainline American-style conservatism, but you go totally off the rails when you start imputing to us views that you associate with progressives.
For example, you consistently accuse me and others of believing in a “Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamic”. Surely you must know that many of us, particularly those who are inspired by figures like Moldbug, are sympathetic to the idea of an absolute monarch. Many of us reject the entire constellation of ideas about “human rights”, meaning that the concept of “oppression” is not really coherent under our worldview. A common through-line in most dissident-right thought (although certainly not all!) is a warm embrace of natural hierarchy, and a consequent belief that it is both right and proper for some people to have significant power over others as a result of the naturally unequal distribution of relevant qualities between different groups in society. Some on the more esoterically-inclined corners of the right are even interested in the ancient Indo-European “trifunctional hypothesis”, which holds that the division of society into three distinct and essentially impermeable castes - a theory of sociopolitical organization which recurred in basically all Indo-European-derived societies, and which has its most enduring expression in the still-extant Hindu caste system - is a reflection of the divine will. These are not people whom you will ever hear calling something “oppressive” or “unjust”. Sure, most of us believe that the current ruling class that has power in much of what you call “the West” is illegitimate and has lost the Mandate of Heaven, but in no sense are we opposed to the existence of a ruling class in general, nor of hierarchical and unequal distributions of power more broadly.
You also make several claims that suggest that you yourself are operating under a very sanitized and cherry-picked model of “Western” history itself. For example, you claim that
One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye.
How the hell do you square the latter claim with the very easily verifiable fact that the societies you identify as “Western” happily operated the largest and most sophisticated global chattel slavery operation in human history, doing so for several centuries, and did so while developing elegant theological and philosophical justifications for that slave trade, which they saw as entirely consonant with the “Western” and “Christian” worldview? If these men don’t count as “Western”, who does? Similarly, you claim that valuing women’s consent in regards to marriage is a hallmark specifically of “Western culture” - which you define is explicitly requiring Christianity (or “eastern mysticism”. Yet the Greek and Roman historians like Tacitus famously identified the pagan Germanic tribes - who had no exposure either to Christian mysticism nor to Greco-Roman formalism - as significantly more egalitarian in terms of gender than the Greco-Roman civilization. These historians would comment bemusedly on how much power women had in these cultures, relative to how much power the women back home in Greece and Rome had. (And this is to say nothing of the incomparably greater power that women had in, for example, many Bantu societies, which were even more profoundly removed from any remotely “Western” influence.) So, it’s very difficult for me to take seriously your claim that women’s liberation is something that sets “Western civilization” apart from other civilizations.
Overall, I think that you speak far too overconfidently about things that you lack the background to comment in an informed manner about. That’s totally fine; most of us in this sub are generalists who overestimate our own knowledge on certain subjects from time to time. What causes you to draw extra criticism for it is the specifically grouchy and condescending “get off my lawn” demeanor with which you approach these conversations; you seem to think you have some gatekeeping power, maybe as a result of your status as a former mod, and you seem to consistently act as though you know what people believe better than they themselves do. I’m telling you that you don’t, and that it might behoove you to have a far more open mind as it regards people telling you what they actually believe, rather than trying to fit everyone into an increasingly stale and restrictive schema whose limitations are becoming more abundantly obvious with every passing year.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
This is the same question I have: how many sustained humiliations can a government endure and still maintain a sufficient level of popular support? Like you can only blame the perfidy of the Great Satan for so long before the buck eventually stops with you. I’m seeing that Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out. If this sort of thing happened to the American military, I have no idea how the government could continue to stand.
Is the fear of what regime collapse would mean for the country so pervasive that the Persian people will continue to tolerate the status quo? Perhaps I’m just a naïve American, wildly overestimating how much power the people of Iran have to effect a regime change even if they wanted to. Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I’m sorry, but you are a deeply unserious person. Ukraine was widely recognized as a highly corrupt country (as was Russia) by neutral international observers for a very long time before this war began. It is simply verifiably the case that government in Ukraine, from the federal level on down, features a ton of shady money changing hands, graft, oligarchic patronage, etc. You would easily identify these features as “corrupt” in the Russian context; why are you so willing to excuse or overlook them in a Ukrainian context? It’s completely possible — trivially easy, even — to acknowledge that Ukrainian government was (and still is) corrupt and ineffectual, without thinking Russia is any better or that it gives Russia a legitimate mandate to invade.
You have failed to engage on even a cursory level with the distinction the OP is drawing between settlers and immigrants. If you think this distinction is specious or lacks explanatory power and utility, that’s fine and you should make an argument for it, but you appear to just be accusing OP of lying, whereas the failure here is on the part of your reading comprehension.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
you are still trying to argue that knowledge of group differences is more valuable and informative than fine-grained information about individuals
I am literally and explicitly arguing the opposite, and you’re just obstinately insisting otherwise, despite (again) not actually demonstrating that you’ve made an attempt to understand the specific arguments I’ve made and why.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Oh boy.
I mean, this really is the central DR3tard article of faith. “Egghead white communists taught blacks to care about race. If it weren’t for them, black people would all be good old-fashioned American individualists.” It’s delusional. Sure, many middle-class blacks don’t go around screaming about race all the time. But I guarantee you most of them were raised, by their family members and not just by white liberal teachers, that their race and heritage are important. They’ve gotten “the talk” about how police can present a potential threat, and how they need to take extra care to put their best foot forward around white people, so as to not feed into stereotypes. When they see a news story about a black guy who got himself killed by police, there’s a little part of them that says, “That could have been me.”
You and guys like you are always smugly going on about how “PMC liberals” — your ever-present outgroup, whose machinations are directly responsible for every last bad thing in the world — don’t know what everyday, salt-of-the-earth black people are like, so they have to rely on the accounts of grifters pushing an agenda. (An agenda taught to them by, of course, PMC whites.)
But no, this is nonsense. We can see what black people are like and what they value not only by speaking directly to them — something which I’ve done thousands of times in my life — but also by observing their voting patterns, their choices of entertainment, the ways in which they choose to spend their private lives largely in the company of other black folks. They go to black churches, listen to black music (whether that’s hip-hop, or gospel, or Motown, or jazz), and watch black movies. They have a distinct culture, which tracks almost one-to-one with race, and they don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re not doing this for “identity politics”, or to get gibs from da white man, or because scheming communist white people are pulling their strings. It doesn’t mean they can’t productively interact with white people; many of them have white friends, or at least white coworkers. But they know who their people are, and their inner lives are directed primarily toward the betterment of their larger community. This is healthy and normal. It’s not a pathological behavior, and it’s not something “the PMC” taught them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
President-Elect Trump is starting things off with a major bang, announcing his intention to honor the 250th anniversary of America’s independence by sponsoring a new wave of World’s Fairs.
I’ve been very critical of certain aspects of Trump’s first administration, his personality, his leadership style, his viability as a long-term political force, etc. My support for him has always been qualified and half-hearted. So, I have to acknowledge that he’s hitting pretty much exactly the right button to get me genuinely excited and inspired less than one full day into his budding second regime. Just a few months ago I lamented the ways that the Online Right™️ was disappointing and alienating me. I expressed a desire for a new political coalition that would revivify the sort of ideology and political culture which produced the World’s Fairs of the 1890s.
Well, I’m still far from convinced that Trump’s larger coalition is worthy to carry forth that vision; between liberal states openly defying or subverting the vision and purpose of the project on the one hand, and tasteless red-state hobbits serving up mediocre chintzy slop on the other, there are plenty of potential pitfalls facing this project. (It’s also not exactly unlikely that the United States will be embroiled in a serious shooting war by this point, which would render the whole thing fairly moot.) However, I want to give him very sincere and vociferous credit for this idea; between this and the fact that he (or possibly, by that point, his Vice President) will preside over the next Summer Olympics, Trump will have the opportunity to genuinely glorify this country and contribute to a cultural renaissance. Whether or not he makes the most of such an opportunity is anyone’s guess, but there’s no part of me that can even entertain the idea that a Kamala Harris administration would have been a more capable steward of such a momentous occasion.
Sampling early reactions on Reddit, I’ve seen a wide range of opinions about What Went Wrong For Democrats last night. While I’m encouraged by the amount of “what did you people expect when you decided to call everyone Nazis” scolding, I’m very intrigued by one of the counter-narratives I’ve already seen congealing: Kamala ran too far to the right, alienating and demoralizing millions of committed progressives and black voters, causing them not to vote this time around. She courted and crowed about the support of neocons, made noises about securing the border and getting tough on crime, and progressives turned on her by staying home.
Now, how much of this is just a knee-jerk coping mechanism by people desperately attempting to make sense of what just happened while preserving their egos? I have no idea. I sincerely hope that in the fullness of time, at least some of these people attempt some level of soul-searching, however abortive and ultimately futile, about why they have been so comprehensively rebuked by the American people. Presumably they will have ample time and opportunity to do so while imprisoned in crystals
However, I actually hope that this leads to massive finger-pointing, pouting, lashing out, and crybullying by black Democrats. One of the big stories last night is that, despite a very modest shift toward Trump among black men, Trump[EDIT: Harris] still carried roughly 90% of the black vote. While nearly every other sizeable ethnic group in American shifted heavily toward Trump, blacks - at least, the ones who voted - remained unfailingly loyal to the Democratic Party. My sense is that blacks are going to take this loss extremely personally, and that it will sting them to no end.
I watched CNN’s coverage last night, and while nearly every single on-air analyst was refreshingly clear-eyed about the reasons why Kamala was losing and how this should not be some huge surprise to anyone, Van Jones was a maudlin mess, on the verge of sobbing as he lamented how black women, who “dared to dream that they might make up tomorrow and see one of their own get a turn in power”, were hurting. Well, I hope they are! And I hope that they become very obnoxious about it, hurling invective and accusations at their non-black friends and colleagues. I want them to be so overbearing about this that even the most committed “ally” begins to feel the Fatigue™️. Black women are convinced that the rest of America doesn’t want to see a Strong and Aggrieved Black Woman in charge. I hope that they’re right, and that their behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy!
I hope that as racial polarization between various non-black interest groups begins to dissipate, polarization between blacks and everybody else accelerates. And I hope that this alienation leads to a nation-wide reconsideration of delusions about crime, about policing, about affirmative action/DEI/reparations, about “racial justice issues”, and about the profound and long-lasting overreaches of the Civil Rights Revolution. I am in favor of literally any development that could cause the Democratic Party to permanently pivot away from their pandering to the black vote, black issues, black guilt-tripping, etc.
I’m saying all of this, fully aware that it is itself a delirious overreaction. Like probably many of you, I got to sleep very late last night and am still coasting on a political sugar high. I want this to have sweeping, seismic effects on the future of America, and of the Democratic Party. Hell, I want to be able to be happy to vote Democrat again someday! I want the Democrats to offer me even a marginally preferable product, such that I can one day extricate myself from the “multiracial working-class populist coalition” that apparently catapulted Trump to victory last night. If Democrats want me back, somewhere far down the line, I’m going to need to see some hardcore soul-searching alongside tangible results before I can ever consider taking a step back into the fold. In the meantime, I’m daring to believe that over the next four years Trump and his team of consultants genuinely can start Making America Great Again.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
Some of the people on this forum seem a bit blase about executing homeless. I'm not sure if they'd all maintain that attitude if they were the specific ones delegated the task of carrying out the executions.
So, I am certainly one of the posters whom you would consider “blasé” about executing homeless. I consider the question “would I be able to pull the trigger myself” frequently. It’s very easy for me to ask, “Will no one rid me of these turbulent bums?” But would I capable of meting out that type of violence myself, if tasked to do so? Now to be clear, I do not believe that it’s illegitimate to advocate for a particular policy unless one is willing and eager to sign up to be a law enforcement officer, security guard, etc. It’s okay to have specialized positions which employ only individuals with the physical and psychological qualities appropriate for that job, and for others outside that position to still have a say in what policies will be carried out. But, it’s still worth asking whether my rather cavalier attitude about the topic is purely a consequence of my own distance from the ugly part of the process I’m advocating. I have personally never meted out any sort of interpersonal violence; I’ve never even been in a fistfight - I’ve been punched, but have not thrown a punch in return - and I’ve only fired a gun a handful of times. (My marksmanship leaves much to be desired.) So the question of whether I’m capable of carrying out executions, and the adjacent question of whether it would break me psychologically to do so, are appropriate questions to ask.
For those that do maintain the blase attitude, I certainly wouldn't want to be neighbors with them.
Now this, I don’t understand at all. What, specifically, are your concerns about having me for a neighbor? I’m an extremely respectful, quiet, and orderly neighbor. It is precisely my preference for orderly, clean, and peaceful environments which causes me such distress at being surrounded by homeless and the disorder they bring. What actual actions do you predict I would perform, as part of being your neighbor, as a result of my stated beliefs? Clearly I’m not saying that I personally am planning on going John Wick on random bums any time soon; I’m very much in the “be nice until you can coordinate meanness” camp, and am not a loose cannon.
Now, I did recently get in a very heated verbal confrontation with a bum who had decided to camp on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex, and whose long chain of tied-together shopping carts was blocking our exit path. That confrontation, in which I did not lay a hand on the man, resulted in him leaving almost immediately, taking all of his garbage with him, and he has not been seen since. Do you think this makes me a bad neighbor? Do you think I’m a coward or hypocrite for arguing with him instead of shooting him in the head, since the death penalty for chronic homelessness is what I advocate here? I would venture to say that the vast majority of those who advocate a similar position would act exactly the same way I did in that scenario.
To get at the heart of it though, violence is a slippery slope and a spreadable disease all in one.
I think this whole paragraph is asserting things which are not actually generalizably true. For example, Singapore is notorious for applying the death penalty for a far wider array of crimes than any European country does in this day and age. Furthermore, Singapore (like Japan) uses a method of execution - hanging - which has been out of use in European countries for over a century now due to its violent optics. However, Singapore (also like Japan) is one of the least violent societies on earth. It is perfectly able to contain the violence to one very small but important facet of society - the criminal justice system - in order to prevent its spread to the larger society as a whole. The men responsible for carrying out executions in Singapore do not, as far as I’m aware, also go out and blow off steam by murdering people for sport in their spare time. I’m not even sure if they have higher rates of corporal punishment of children than the average Singaporean or Japanese. (And, if they do, are you so sure that corporal punishment, within reason, of children for transgressions is ineffective at shaping those children into responsible and pro-social adults?)
A decade ago I absolutely would have agreed with you that civilizational progress is all about reducing the amount of interpersonal violence across the board, and I still share your basic visceral aversion to violence in terms of the way I live my own life. However, I’ve come to believe, through observation, that actually reducing violence requires the carefully targeted and process-based application of non-arbitrary violence against the most anti-social elements of society in order to maintain sustainable peace. Those anti-social elements are not going to stop being violent and unstable just because the rest of us forswear violence; rather, we need people who are not inherently prone to extreme violence to be willing to step up and do a little bit of it, in small doses, so that we can then go back to living our normal lives.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
When our prisons were filling up with people who plead down to felonies when cops lied about having witnesses, and prosecutors told them to take this deal or risk dying in prison?
Oh please. Your contention is that our prisons are full of innocent people, imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, as a result solely of lies told by police? What percentage of incarcerated people do you think can accurately be described this way?
One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
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