Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
It’s interesting, this is similar to my impression of the 2024 film Civil War. A lot of ink was spilled speculating about the degree to which it was an anti-Trump or anti-right-wing film, and criticizing the implausibility of the different coalitions in the civil war. (“Why are Texas and California allied? Don’t these dummies know that California and Texas are politically opposed to each other?”) When to me the film clearly seemed to want to capture the sense of fish-out-of-water befuddlement that journalists experience covering foreign war zones.
Some American journalist covering a civil war in some random African country is sure to have the same sense of “What the fuck is even happening here? Why is the Kibunda tribe allied with the Yojinga tribe, when all my research says these two groups have longstanding enmity toward each other? Why do any of these groups care about these obscure disputes, and why are they willing to kill each other (and innocents) and wreck their countries over something that, to an outsider, seems petty and incomprehensible?” I think the screenwriter wanted to get Americans to consider that their own country’s internal politics aren’t immune to being seen in this same way. To put it in terms Americans can relate to. Just like with that movie though, it sounds like Far Cry 5 hit a little too close to home and people weren’t able to view if with any sort of distance or detachment from current hot-button issues.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
You're the one that posited their existence!
Correct, I was asking you to accept that position as well, at least for the sake of argument.
What, "my cars are not selling because of vandalism and smears against my company triggered by my political activity" does not count?
Correct, that definitely does not count as “my life sucks” in anywhere near the same way as Oliver Anthony style “I’m personally oppressed and downtrodden, and it’s my outgroup’s fault” populism.
Yes, that's what "my life sucks" meant in TheDag's reductive summary.
I don’t think so. I think there’s an important qualitative difference between populist “rage and vengeance” grievance on the one hand — which is what the OP is attributing to Anglophone conservatism — and the technocratic/futurist “we’ve identified the problems, and it’s time to let smart and successful elites determine how to fix those problems” institutionalism of the factions I identified.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
29d ago
How do you square this with the existence of moderate, Western-aligned or neutral Muslim states like Jordan, the U.A.E., Bosnia, and Indonesia?
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
8mo ago
Alright, out with it: Which one of you motherfuckers is J.D. Vance? It’s pretty strange to know that the future Vice President of the United States of America may have personally read my shitposts.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit by in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership.
How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.
Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.
Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.
However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.
(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Two members of my family were, until recently, dealers at a casino. They were both somewhat clear-eyed about it; they loved how much money it brought in, as well as the opportunities to socially interact with a lot of interesting people, but they understood that their jobs only existed because of a substrate of gambling addicts whose hobby has the potential to destroy lives. I don’t know that I’d describe either of them as “proud” of their jobs, and I certainly was not proud on their behalf when telling people what they did for a living.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.
In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme
Zoroastrianism was the official religion of multiple dominant empires spanning over a millennium. Its influence didn’t wane because it was “an unsuccessful meme”; the final Zoroastrian Persian empire was militarily defeated by Muslims, who then ruthlessly persecuted the Zoroastrian holdouts, forcing them to flee to the Indian subcontinent, where, even as a minority religion vastly outnumbered by the populations around them, they managed to maintain their religion over a thousand years later. I don’t think it makes sense to treat it as some obscure sect that “lost out on the marketplace of ideas.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.
That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.
One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”
However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.
(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.
This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.
This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.
Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.
I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
I joined Bluesky yesterday out of curiosity. I haven’t stopped using Twitter, nor am I planning to at this time, but I’ll be posting on Bluesky, whereas I pretty much exclusively lurk on Twitter. Bluesky seems to be trying to optimize for a more amiable, relaxed experience, and hopefully the lack of chuds brigading people’s posts to call them Jewish faggots will contribute to that goal.
I have become acutely aware of my own radicalization as of late, and honestly I think it would be beneficial for me - both socially and intellectually - to reacclimate myself with intelligent libs, and to attempt honest and mutually-open-minded dialogue with them. I can do that here on The Motte, but the extreme selection effects and barriers to entry here mean that I’m not getting a lot of exposure to what actually-existing normie liberals and left-centrists are saying amongst themselves. I’ve already followed some arts- and gaming-related content creators on Bluesky, and my hope is that it will not just turn into a rebirth of pre-Elon Twitter where all of my favorite celebrities churn out 24/7 liberal outrage-posting.
That being said, on my very first day on Bluesky, some random rotund they/them woman apparently found my inaugural post briefly explaining why I voted for Trump, and the following exchange occurred:
Her: “Basically the argument comes down to one factor and one factor only: race. You want all the criminals (code: Black people) to be in jail (legalized slavery per 13A) and illegal immigrants (code: Brown people) to be sent away all while eradicating equity to preserve common sense (code: white people).”
Me: “Genuine question: Do you honestly think I consider this a fair representation of my views? Do you feel like you’re accurately modeling my mind?
Like, if this is what passes for intellectual discourse on Bluesky, I don’t really know what to say.”
Her: “The door is that way -----> Don't let it hit ya where the good Lord split ya on your way out.
I said what I said.”
Me: “Who said I’m leaving? It really does seem like you guys are unable to hack it in the open exchange of ideas, which is why you’ve fled to a place where nobody can argue against you and you get to feel hegemonic again. Pretty cringe, tbh.”
Her: “The idea of having my existence eradicated because I am not a cishet white person does not belong in the public square. There is no discussion about that. Talk is cheap, actions speak louder.”
Me: “You are a parody account, surely. Nobody forced you to reply to me, and I’m certainly under no obligation to flee the “public square” because you’re too fragile to have an adult conversation with another American. Hope you guys learn to toughen up a bit, or you’re in for some more election sadness.”
Her: “Hope you guys learn that we also carry as well. Your vote for Trump in this election meant you are willing to go to war to protect white capitalist patriarchy. See all y'all on the battlefield on January 20.”
So yes, some libs are very obviously planning for Bluesky to be a progressive hugbox where the left gets to regain complete ironclad control of the discourse, including leftists just being able to straight-up fedpost at people, in a way they’d never want RWers to get away with.
That said, I’m going to try and stick it out and see what I can contribute to conversations. If this exhange had happened on Twitter, as soon as she made her comment about “we can carry as well” I would have just made a mean-spirited joke about how I feel bad for the poor schmucks who have to try and carry her. I’m trying to be on my best behavior on Bluesky, though, and to use it as though Twitter had Motte-level expectations of charity and genteel discourse. Basically trying to recreate the vibe of in-person SSC/rationalist meet-ups back when I used to attend them, but with the added wrinkle that at least some moderately important content creators and companies are also there.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
26d ago
It increases the fear of violence level of the rest of society.
How so? If I’m not planning on participating in a protest, why would my “fear of violence” be increased by the knowledge that protestors may suffer negative consequences for protesting? Their circumstances do not appear to mirror my circumstances in any important way, so why should I draw any conclusions about what’s likely to happen to me based on what happens to them?
It devalues nearby property by increasing the crime rate.
including taking court and police time away from other crimes.
Not if the police agree to do only a cursory investigation, informed by the assumption “Eh, whatever happens to these people happens, no need to look too deeply into it.” In that scenario, no arrest would be made and no court resources would need to be expended.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything? The Great Famine of 1315-1322 so thoroughly devastated Western and Central Europe that some populations were even reduced to cannibalism and mass infanticide. And don’t even get me started on all the skulls from the medieval wars of religion, the Crusades, the Roman wars of Conquest, the wars against the Mongols and Huns, etc. (And, of course, that’s just in Europe; much of the pre-Enlightenment non-European world comes out looking even worse.)
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I would argue that the thing which we call the “American Revolution” was not in fact a revolution. In something like the French Revolution (ann actual revolution) the King of France was deposed and later killed. There was no more French monarchy; it no longer existed as an institution. Ditto for the Iranian Revolution, which completely removed the Iranian monarchy.
Contrast this with the state of the world after the American War of Independence. The British Monarchy was very much still intact and continue to be a powerful and geopolitically relevant institution for another century and a half. The American colonists were no longer under its power, and therefore they had to create new governing institutions for themselves from scratch; in that sense, the aftermath resembles the aftermath of a revolution. But the institution being rebelled against was never destroyed, nor even especially weakened.
Definitely not 1; if I’m wearing a hat, it’s almost certainly because my hair looks like shit. The real faux pas would be letting everyone see my bad hair day. 2 is totally fine by me as well.
I’m torn about 3, because on the one hand I recognize that this one will probably be the most popular answer, but on the other hand I sometimes have a pretty bad post-nasal drip; I always endeavor to spit somewhere where people won’t see/hear it and get grossed out, but occasionally that’s unrealistic. Spitting is definitely my most slovenly behavior.
Neither 4 nor 8 is a faux pas as far as I’m concerned, because neither is going to actually make anybody uncomfortable. They just look bad visually, and if someone is trying to look good — which, if he’s wearing a suit or a tie in the first place, he obviously is — he should avoid doing things that detract from that goal.
5, 6, and 7 are obvious [insert whatever is the correct plural of faux pas] to me. 9 is a spectrum, where it depends on what kind of food you’re chewing, how adroit you are at manipulating it in your mouth such that it’s not visible to your interlocutor and doesn’t significantly impact your diction, etc. If it’s a faux pas it’s generally a minor one.
With 10, I would need more context to judge. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t gotten laid in a while and my instincts about the finer points of the etiquette have atrophied.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I wish I knew who the hell that was.
Literally the guy the OP was mostly about. You know, the guy referenced several times by name in the post you replied to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Right, one of Taylor’s main goals in creating American Renaissance was to try and be the focal point of a movement of racially-conscious whites with impeccable optics: erudite, genteel, conservative-coded. No Roman salutes, no street brawls, no white-trash dysfunction, no scary pagan LARPing, etc. Early American Renaissance conferences featured several Jewish speakers, and Taylor has never made the Jewish Question a topic of his advocacy. However, American Renaissance and its surrounding movement had a separate problem, which is that — due mainly to the proud Southern heritage and pro-Confederate sympathies of Taylor and its other early figures like Sam Dickson and Sam Francis — it struck many as having a distinct odor of that other epochal white identitarian movement, the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, to be clear, Taylor himself is squeaky-clean: Yale-educated, a successful businessman, multilingual, an unimpeachable family life, and not a whiff of violence or disreputable behavior. The immediate circle he cultivated was respectable, denouncing anything resembling racial terrorism. He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example. This didn’t save him from being labeled a white supremacist, a hate-monger, and all other manner of opprobrious terms by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The most genteel figure imaginable was still basically a Klansman and an evil cult leader in the eyes of those people.
Nowadays, many of the leading lights on the so-called Dissident Right — which is largely an outgrowth of the intellectual current Jared Taylor helped create and nurture — do indeed have more of the disreputable and optically-unfortunate tendencies which more strongly trigger respectable people’s Nazi Alarms. It’s unfortunate that honorable men such as Taylor couldn’t do more to mainstream their cause back when it still could have avoided these failure modes. It’s encouraging, though, to see that many of their most dire predictions appear not to have come true to the extent they feared.
What is controversial about the claim that, on average, a person is less physically vigorous at age 80 than at age 30? I’m not aware of anyone who would say that this is controversial. Similarly, what person who has even a cursory knowledge of world cultures would consider it controversial that an Arab Muslim is less likely to consume pork and alcohol than a white German Protestant?
I would ask “what is controversial about the claim that a woman is more likely to have the ability to become pregnant than a man is”, but this is one issue about which there is, inexplicably, a controversy, and I’m very confident that you come down on the side of “Why would anyone dispute this very obvious claim? The entire point of our species having two sexes is that one of them gets pregnant and the other does the impregnating.” If you met an individual woman who is infertile — due to health issues, age, a hysterectomy, or any other reason — you would have no trouble understanding that this doesn’t in any way invalidate the general principle.
Yet you have no answer, nor have you even attempted to offer an answer, for why that’s different, and why every other category of individual must be treated as a total blank slate, whose observable characteristics provide no valuable predictive information whatsoever until you’ve had the chance to personally get to know the person and observe his or her behavior. This is an absurd standard and I don’t think you’d actually defend it, except for you feel morally obligated to do so when it comes to race and are too obstinate to admit that the principle holds in regards to the many other observable characteristics that people can have.
As a result, you’ve backed yourself into the corner of having to adopt the same stance as a stereotypical blue-haired college progressive: “Um, excuse me, did you just assume that person’s age? Did you just assume that person’s religion?” And so on. Apparently you’re an unexpected ally of the progs! Literally all you have to do, in order to dig yourself out of that hole, is to admit, “Yes, okay, obviously we can make assumptions about people, even if we don’t know them as individuals” and then explain why race is different from those other characteristics.
It’s not even hard to do so! There are plenty of strong arguments for why race, unlike age, doesn’t provide valuable predictive data. I could even make some of those arguments for your although I have no interest in bailing you out. It seems like you can’t make that argument, though, because, truth be told, you haven’t thought that deeply about it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I'd like to register that both Seder and the young woman didn't come out looking well.
Oh, she came out looking very well. Her ideas…. eh, whatever.
(I would do her, is what I’m getting at.)
The thing is, both she and Seder are correct about “what America is.” Both strains of thought have been equally prominent and influential throughout American history. The people who believe it’s purely a colorblind “propositional nation” of ideas divorced from ancestry need to explain the Naturalization Act of 1790, and why so many of the Founding Fathers — particularly Thomas Jefferson, who was obsessed with the specifically Anglo-Saxon character of America’s founding stock — wrote so much about their race and about the vast differences between themselves and both the Africans and the Amerindians with whom they shared a continent. The people who believe white Christian nativism is core to American history, though, similarly have to deal not only with the strongly universalist rhetoric of many of the Founding Fathers and of the religious denominations in which they were involved, but also the distinct lack of Christian belief among certain others important Founding Fathers.
There have always been lots of Americans who sincerely believe that America was a creedal land of universal promise, in which every immigrant can make good by working hard, and there have always been lots of other Americans who believed that America is an ethnos based, at least in part, on shared ancestral ties to a particular founding stock. America means very different things to different factions, and each of those factions is strongly and sincerely patriotic to its specific conception of what America means. This jockeying for control of the narrative, and the exclusion/suppression of the other side’s narrative, has been going on since before this country even properly began. Neither side in that exchange had any hope of moving the needle on that set of issues — especially considering someone on Twitter deduced that the pretty young right-wing zoomer is from Canada anyway!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
So, let’s take black women — and my sense is that the plight of black women is the primary subtext of your comment.
I have met, interacted with, worked alongside, and befriended numerous black women over the course of my life. I think I have about as much intimate exposure to black women, black culture, etc., as any other white American who has lived in a large diverse city and attended public schools in a non-wealthy area. My perceptions of them are not informed by stereotypes and media portrayals, but by direct and repeated interpersonal contact.
I would never deny that there are attractive, feminine, intelligent, pleasant, and sexually-appealing black women. I’ve met several myself, I’ve flirted with them, I’ve even kissed a few. Like most men of any race, I prefer mixed and/or lighter-skinned black women with gracile features and smooth hair, rather than dark-skinned heavily African-looking women with heavy features and kinky/poofy hair. That’s not to say I’ve never seen or met attractive dark-skinned, non-mixed black women — I think most men would agree that, for example, Simone Biles is a very attractive woman — but they’re fewer and farther between.
That being said, it simply is verifiably true that rates of obesity are significantly higher among black women than they are among white women, and that’s to say nothing of Asian women. Average differences in temperament (whether you want to identify them as culturally-informed, or genetic, or some combination of the two) are well-documented, and so are average differences in physical build, and even more subtle things like smell. Black women smell different from white women. Their skin feels different. It’s understandable that someone whose primary romantic/sexual experience is with white women might find intimate contact with black women to be unfamiliar, slightly disconcerting, and just less familiar.
Furthermore, when it comes to the relatively small segment of black women who are genuinely hot, feminine, intelligent, and able to perform middle-class respectability, they generally seem to find themselves catapulted into high-status roles which give them the pick of the litter of nearly all high-status black men, plus some portion of high-status non-black men. Those women are highly unlikely to come into contact with lower-status white guys like me — both because they are unlikely to share the cultural hobbies which would put them into everyday casual interaction with me, and also because they’re too busy being wined and dined by wealthier men than I.
So, for the average white guy, the odds of regularly encountering the kinds of black women who may interest him are quite low, and the probability of both him and her being xenophilic enough to overcome significant cultural differences and fall for each other is even lower. It’s not primarily because they are stereotyping each other; rather, they are fairly accurately perceiving each other, and deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
27d ago
So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.
Obviously, text on a plain background can still work for marketing; arguably the most widely-discussed and culturally-relevant album of 2024 used precisely that aesthetic, which was then adopted by cultural heights as lofty as the Democratic candidate for U.S. President.
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