Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have flooded across the southern border this year. We have documented evidence that a great many of them are Africans. Nobody is stopping them from coming here. Why do you believe that the immigration status quo is insufficient to allow that number to balloon to the numbers @omfalos predicted? Who or what is going to stop all those Africans from coming here, without any change to the current formal immigration regime?
What about all of the African migrants who are joining the hordes of illegal immigrants surging across the southern border? What is stopping an African from hopping on a plane to Mexico or Guatemala and hoofing it across the border, same as all the Mexicans and Central Americans?
Tough to say, how about you throw some my way?
Edit: I now see that FC substantially edited and fleshed out his comment after I had already responded to it, leading to Hlynka’s response below, which I found confusing until I went back and saw FC’s edit.
I think that coming to terms with the failure of the “American idea” - the realization that it was a house of cards from the very beginning - entails a sort of “death of the author” interpretation of the Founding; these men, to the extent that they had any coherent idea of what they were creating, were basically super-fallible autists who were LARPing as Enlightenment-flavored Platonic philosopher-kings. Their project should not be taken seriously as a credible long-term basis for a functional society.
Whatever we have now looks nothing remotely like what they had in mind. While part of that is due to a failure of stewardship on the part of the intervening generations, the bulk of the failure rests on the guys who actually thought you could found a whole-ass country around some academic theories and poster-board slogans. That the country succeeded for as long as it did is a testament not to “the founding documents”, but to the very high level of human capital of the founding ethnic stock of the country, and to some incredibly favorable geographic factors.
That none of this allows us to project forward a coherent vision for how future generations, unrelated in any way to the founding stock of the country, can achieve buy-in to this interpretation of events… well, that’s why, as I’ve made clear in previous posts, I’m not “patriotic”. There’s no “there” there at this point. The story was too full of plot-holes, and the authors barely understood their own motivations for writing it in the first place.
It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much
Why does this disgust you?
As I’ve made clear before, I don’t believe that there is such thing as “the red tribe”, nor do I believe that there is any meaningful number of progressives in positions of power who believe in executing people for expressing conservative opinions.
Right, I’m not even saying most of them have done anything morally wrong or worthy of prosecution or anything like that. I’m saying that in my ideal justice system most of their jobs would simply be obviated. They wouldn’t be needed anymore, because there would no longer be a need for trials for most criminal proceedings, and therefore no need for this whole process of haggling over plea deals. Many criminals would also not be entitled to legal representation, so there wouldn’t need to be this mass of public defenders.
What about option 4: Political and geographic separation?
Charles Guiteau supported the Stalwart faction of the Republican party in the 1880 election. His big stated reason for assassinating Garfield is that he wasn’t given the political patronage job that the Republicans owed him for his pivotal role - giving a rambling speech in support of Garfield (a speech which had originally been written in support of Ulysses S. Grant before Garfield received the nomination) and then passing out pamphlet versions of the speech at the Republican Party convention - in getting Garfield elected. Like, nothing whatsoever about his motivation can be accurately summarized as “Democrat wanted to kill Republican president.”
Their civil liberties are being violated by being pushed through a system that de-facto requires them to confess without trial, regardless of whether they are actually guilty or not.
Nobody is forced to take a plea deal. If someone actually is totally innocent of the crimes in question - as in, there’s no murky questions of intent, evidence that could be interpreted either way, etc. - taking a plea deal strikes me as a very poor choice. The fact is that the vast majority of people who take plea deals do so because they are in fact guilty, or at least they’re adjacent enough to a crime that a reasonable jury could assess them as guilty.
I knew they didn’t because I never committed the crime, but I was under enough pressure that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in my shoes took the plea deal anyway.
Why? It sounds like you didn’t take a plea deal because you were certain there was no evidence of your guilt. Why would someone in that type of situation take a plea deal, short of being a person who lacks good judgment?
This is a compelling point! Obviously I think there’s an HBD element in effect here, and I also agree that these men display an obvious contempt for European society.
All very solid points, and I genuinely don’t intend to minimize the suffering that women of that era experienced. I merely brought up the Minoans as a sort of metonymical allusion to draw attention to parts of modern society that I want to criticize. For what it’s worth, a lot of recent archeological/historiographical work has cast a ton of doubt on the whole theory of a gynocratic Minoan state anyway; a lot of that was probably just Marija Gimbutas and her acolytes overfitting to insufficient data.
To be clear, I’m referring to having a large proportion of your population descended from the Third World. Shouldn’t have darkly hinted about it, but I figured it’d be obvious based on all of my other posts about the matter.
Seems to me like in this post and your replies to people, you did publicly touch it in a space like this.
I’m keeping my commentary very much at the object level of the article and of the efficacy/coherence of the “groomer” discourse, but there’s a much larger discussion about the range of possible right-wing views about the “age of consent” policy sphere that I’m just not willing to stake any public position on at this time.
That’s fair, but I think that most people do the MLK thing, which is to say, “Yes, the real Founders were hypocrites and not particularly impressive, but the idea of the Founders - the most positive and charitable interpretation of their own words - is a great and morally significant mythos.” Whereas I’m saying, “No, even if those men genuinely believed every word they said and lived their lives as exemplars of those Enlightenment values, those values are bad and not something on which we should try to build a society. In fact, to the extent that the Founders were hypocrites, this is actually a point in their favor, because it implies that on some level they understood that their lofty ideals were not a reliable guide to actual living.”
Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.
Leaving aside the fact that I personally am certainly not worried about offending “BIPOC people” - I direct you to peruse my larger body of work on this site, in which I do precisely the opposite - your larger point stands and is valuable. Progressives will contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for every self-defeating thing a poor minority does, while not only hearing no excuses for similarly self-defeating behavior from downscale whites but actually reveling in it. The pattern you are outlining is real.
However, hypocrisy can be reconciled in two directions. One would be to see all downtrodden and marginalized communities as equally worthy of sympathy and uplift; a populist “champion of the little guy” who gives every bit as help to every unfortunate and exploited person, regardless of race or tribal loyalty or whatever. That appears to be what you’re advocating, and I understand the appeal. However, I can also resolve the hypocrisy by extending the same disdain and feeling of superiority to the “BIPOC people” as I do to the “trailer trash”; this is the elitist position that some people are better than other people, and that generally speaking power and resources are effectively distributed based on the quality, productivity, and value of individuals. This is certainly an oversimplified worldview and does not accurately describe the whole picture; however, I believe that it is directionally correct.
I have been to the dirt-poor part of Appalachia - I was in eastern Kentucky - and if I were to give one of those people a free ticket to a classical music concert - which, by the way, one can purchase for like $25 at most venues and get decent seats, so this isn’t some massive expense - that individual would probably not appreciate the experience even given the chance. I’m confident that this is the cad because even wealthy or middle-class Red Tribe people - people with no material concerns preventing them from participating in high culture - overwhelmingly do not do so, and prefer lower-brow fare. There’s a cultural/psychological/tribal element here that has nothing to with people just being too poor to afford a ticket to the ballet.
As for your contention that someone would only go to the ballet “to feel a little superior to the people around them”, I can assure you that that’s not the reason I go to the ballet. I go because so genuinely experience it as sublime and beautiful. It makes me feel connected to a larger corpus of important cultural output that represents the absolute pinnacle of what my people have been able to create, during the period when their culture was at its most powerful and dynamic and confident. I have difficulty relating to people who can’t experience the sublimity of something like that. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying lowbrow entertainment - I go to punk rock concerts all the time, which are not intellectually-stimulating or artistically refined - but I think there’s something really limited and unfortunate about someone who hasn’t even been able to cultivate a base-level appreciation for the boundless world of free and instantly-accessible high culture that’s out there at the fingertips of the people for whom you’re making excuses.
Except it wasn't though. By the time of the Edict of Milan Christianity was already so prevalent in the Roman Countryside and amongst the urban working class that many modern historians posit that Emperor Constantine's conversion was in fact a cynical ploy to cut his rivals off at the knees by buying the loyalty of the plebs. It wasn't the "salt of the earth" who were resisting conversion (that phrase itself bein an explicit reference to Christ's Sermon on the Mount BTW), it was the cosmopolitan elites who were trying and failing to suppress it.
I made it abundantly obvious in my post that I was referring to the Christianization of Western and Northern Europe, and not the initial conversion of Rome and its immediate surroundings. All of the examples I provided were clearly about the regions outside of direct Roman rule, so you bringing up Rome is either an intentional dodge - because you’re not conversant in the history of the regions and era that I’m talking about, or because you don’t have a counterargument against my interpretation of the events in question - or (once again) a failure of reading comprehension on your end.
As for everything else here, you’re correct that we have incredibly orthogonal worldviews. I’m primarily interested in questions about whether or not Red and Blue are analytical categories that can be applied to people across a wide geographical and temporal field of comparison - was Oliver Cromwell a Blue? Was Charlemagne? Whereas you are very intent on keeping the conversation about these categories firmly rooted in the specific cultural and political context of the modern United States. As a result of this fundamental difference in analytical frameworks, you’re probably correct that you and I are indeed doomed to always talk past each other.
Ultimately I would love for someone in my faction - probably not me personally, since you very obviously find my specific style very grating - to convince you that we’re not your enemy, but rather an ally of convenience, with whom you’re going to have to coexist both before and after the eventual victory of our coalition. We’re Blues, but we’re not leftists, and that means we’re not your real enemy. I truly do believe that, and I haven’t given up hope that one of us will eventually break through to people of your inclination.
Yes, absolutely; in fact, I would have no a priori reason to distrust any of the individual women that I’ve talked to about it. It’s when all of them are telling me the same somewhat fishy-sounding thing that I start to be suspicious.
But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
Right, so, I acknowledge that this is by far the largest problem with Ignatiev’s beliefs. Again, I don’t think people should agree with him, I comprehensively reject his political project, and I want him to fail miserably and to die knowing that his entire life’s work was a pointless, cancerous failure.
There is a way for naïve white progressives — even ones who are as clearly maladjusted and full of spite as Noel Ignatiev — to be reintegrated back into a politically healthy discussion, but only once they have persuasively demonstrated that they understand the extent to which they’ve directly empowered the most worthless, destructive, spiteful, irredeemable elements of our society. Since that’s not happening any time soon, we can keep trying to crush the Ignatievs of the world. I just think we can do so without calling them liars and hypocrites.
They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.
Hey, I read non-fiction! 😡
I do engage with a ton of fictional content, although it’s generally not in the form of novels. (I’ve recently started reading novels again as part of a sort of two-person book club with my mother, but it’s still not generally my preferred mode of imaginative reading.)
So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.
This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.
Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.
What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Like I said it's not even strictly speaking about inferiority.
Then what is it about? You’re talking in circles. I asked you what racism is, and you said it’s about believing in broad racial inferiority, except actually it’s not really about inferiority. Is it just about treating everyone as an atomized individual and consciously avoiding making probabilistic judgments about people given limited information?
If you want a "no blacks allowed, no matter what other hoops you jump through" club (which, by the sound of it, you do) that seems pretty straight-forwardly racist to me as well.
Can you articulate why?
It doesn't matter if you believe it's only 3% of blacks that are an exception to the rule, if you're against "race norming" you're not racist. It similarly doesn't matter if you think it's the 97% that are the exception to the rule (I know this is non-sense mathematically speaking, just go with it rethorically), if you're for "rece norming", you're still racist.
Your original comment said that noticing racial differences isn’t racist. Now you appear to be saying that actually it is.
I don’t think you’ve thought very deeply about this word, where it comes from, and why we should or shouldn’t use it.
To some extent, I do! As I laid out in this thread back on Reddit, I see whiteness as a category which is at least partially constructed, despite having a mostly-biological substrate. East Asians, for example, are not even remotely related to Europeans (unless one accepts deeply esoteric theories about the contribution of Tocharian/Indo-European-descended people to the genetic ancestry of the Yamato people from whom modern Japanese are mostly descended - a topic about which I’m totally unqualified to even offer speculation) yet since the end of World War II certain Asian countries have been some of the most productive and important contributors to first-world industrialized society of any peoples on earth. Personally, I’m happy to welcome Japanese and Koreans into the fold of people with whom I see myself as sharing a common destiny and at least some level of common patrimony, as long as they continue to seem willing to behave similarly toward me and mine.
However, the vast majority of people in the world do seem to achieve the highest degree of fulfillment and self-satisfaction when living among people with whom they share a common ancestry and deep history. Now, perhaps that’s simply an incidental consequence of the fact that in such parts of the world, genetic kinship tends to have a nearly one-to-one correspondence with cultural/linguistic/political similarity.
Maybe in a hypothetical world in which “values” were randomly distributed among people, such that it would be impossible to draw any sort of reliable inference about a person’s “values” or personality based on observing that person’s outwardly-apparent racial/ethnic background, it really would make no sense to place any value whatsoever on racial/ethnic similarity when deciding whom to associate with and share political sovereignty and resources with.
All available evidence, though, would seem to indicate that we do not, in fact, live in that hypothetical world. In the world in which we do live, cultures and “values” did not fall from the sky and pick ethnic groups at random. Things like personality are, in fact, heritable to a great degree. Consequently, people who are closely related genetically/ancestrally do in fact have a greater likelihood of having similar “values” than do people who are not related genetically/ancestrally. To the extent that this is true, it actually does make complete sense to see people with whom I share genuine documentable kinship to have a greater claim to my “patrimony” than do those with whom I share no kinship.
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