Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother last year. She is a fairly standard-issue Gen X liberal, although somewhat open-minded about certain conservative issues, and guilty of Noticing™️ certain things about race and gender that gave me no shortage of distress back in my days as a dedicated progressive. She caught a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome after 2016, though, and began ensconcing herself ever more deeply into the MSNBC bubble. She and I hadn’t talked politics for years, until last year, when she was ranting about Trump and his voters and how stupid they are, and how she could never imagine having an intelligent conversation with one, at which point I hit her with the “you’re talking to a Trump voter right now”. This was utterly shocking and disorienting for her. She couldn’t imagine that someone well-informed, sophisticated, and obviously intelligent - her own son, no less! - could see any value in Trump. Every conversation she had ever had with a Trump voter up to that point had been like pulling teeth - nothing but Fox News talking points, uneducated ranting, shit-tier conspiracies, and an evident lack of even a basic curiosity about the world.
I brought up an article called [The Asshole Filter] (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html). This article is about how women navigate the dating world, and how for certain women, if they make it clear that any guy who approaches them in public will be rebuked, the only guys who will approach them in public are going to be uncouth assholes with no social tact. If a guy is conscientious and desires to be respectful of your boundaries, and he is aware that you will be offended by his overtures, he’s not going to commit the faux pas of transgressing your explicity- or implicitly-states wishes. An asshole, though, doesn’t care about your boundaries, or isn’t smart enough to intuit them, so he will transgress them without a second thought. Eventually, as this process is iterated, the only strange men who will ever approach you in public are going to be assholes, and you will begin to get the strong impression that all men are assholes, because the only ones you meet are assholes. You unintentionally set up a filter that has screened out all the normal nice men you would have met, and the only men who made it through the filter are the ones you wanted least to meet.
I told my mom that she had unintentionally set up a similar effect when it came to talking politics. She is a very outspoken person, and is not shy about broadcasting her liberal views. Therefore, most people in her life are well-aware of where she stands and the kinds of statements that will make her mad or will start an argument. If they value maintaining a cordial relationship with her - for example, a coworker, or an acquaintance who likes hanging out with her without needing to have a deep level of agreement with her - will be conscientious enough to avoid making those statements. They will let her spout off about her opinions, and they will not challenge her on them or bring up their own more conservative/Trump-oriented views, since it’s not worth offending her or rocking the social boat. However, if someone doesn’t care about offending her - maybe they don’t particularly like her, or maybe they’re just not smart or self-aware enough to predict the negative consequences of expressing pro-Trump opinions around her - then they’ll happily say something Trumpy around her. That means that the only pro-Trump opinions she will ever hear will come from hostile, stupid, or unsophisticated people. All the smart Trump voters are invisible to her because they know better than to say anything where she will hear it.
The vast majority of liberals and progressives have set up precisely this type of political asshole filter. When you go on Facebook and post something like “If you don’t support a woman’s right to choose, unfriend me right now,” you’re not expecting any of the people you see as your actual friends to unfriend you. Your real friends would never have such an ugly opinion; if they did, surely you would know about it. Well, no, they just know how much it would piss you off if they expressed disagreement to you, and they care about your friendship more than they care about winning an argument. So, they stay silent. However, the people who don’t actually care that much about preserving a friendship with you - or the people who are dumb enough to think they’re actually going to change your mind with a public argument on Facebook - will take the bait and argue with you. Of course those arguments will be stupid or hostile; only a stupid or hostile person would have gotten into it with you in the first place. All the smart people realized it wasn’t worth it.
Any right-winger in a heavily left-wing social context - myself, for example - has long since realized the futility of attempts to persuade, or even of publicly outing yourself as a dissenter. They’ve decided to keep their heads down, only discussing politics in (usually anonymous) forums like this where they won’t be dogpiled or doxxed. The fact that this woman was willing to publicly display her GOP allegiance in that context should have been an immediate red-flag: she is either someone with nothing to lose socially, or someone who’s not smart enough to realize she’s about to lose it. A smart conservative would have avoided the whole situation and moved on with her life.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way. Certainly this far from the first time I’ve felt conspicuously out-of-place and unwelcome on the Right; my sparring with @HlynkaCG and @FCfromSSC in this space, and with a number of users when I was an active poster in /r/CultureWarRoundup, have reinforced my acute awareness of how my upbringing and personality profile make me somewhat of an uncomfortable fit in the right-wing ecosystem. But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.
The question of “why are artistically-inclined people nearly universally left-wing” has occupied my thoughts extensively ever since I began my journey to the Right. As I’ve mentioned here before - probably extremely ill-advisedly, from an OpSec perspective - I have a theatre arts degree and spent over a decade heavily involved in the local theatre scene (both musicals and “straight plays”) in my city. At one point I was incredibly enthusiastic about pursuing a professional career in that field, and made my participation in it a central part of my identity. My political conversion isn’t the only reason I’ve drifted away from theatre (even my use of the British spelling gives me away as a Theater Kid), but it was by far the biggest accelerant of that decision. Another reason, though, is that even aside from their politics, theatre people can be… difficult to be around in certain ways that made me stick out like a sore thumb sometimes even without politics entering the equation.
So, when I see right-wing commentators taking potshots at “Theater Kids”, part of me wants to not only applaud, but to amplify their criticism: “Oh, you don’t even know the half of it!” I’m far more intimately aware of the particular failure modes of artists, because I saw them up-close and personal for a huge part of my life, and can recognize some of those failure modes in myself. Another part of me, though, becomes very defensive and wants to leap to the defense of the creative class; not only because, despite my current politics and estrangement from that scene, I’m still one of those people at heart, but also because I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.
It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?
Remember that the great literary classics of Ancient Greece - the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Theogony - were epic poems delivered orally and accompanied by music long before they were written down and codified in literary form. The bards who would have invented, transmitted and augmented these epic poems were real people with real personalities, and I think there’s a significant likelihood that they were not too different from the actors and rockstars of today. Besides implying a degree of narcissism and superciliousness that we associate with artsy people today, does it also suggest that they would have been the “shitlibs” of their day?
There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero. Odysseus is a trickster and fabulist; he achieves his heroic deeds largely through craftiness, subterfuge, deception, and pretending to be anybody other than who he actually is. He can conjure whole worlds and identities at a whim through the magic of wordplay and storytelling. He is labile and mercurial, indirect and full of what we might call chutzpah. He prefigures more modern examples of the “trickster/bullshitter with a heart of gold” archetype epitomized by musical theatre characters like Harold Hill in The Music Man, J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and the funhouse-mirror version of P.T. Barnum presented in the movie musical The Greatest Showman. The guys writing these musicals can’t imagine themselves as Herculean heroes of might and action, but they can imagine themselves saving the world by being so good at spinning a compelling story that they make it come true.
So, what does this imply about the self-image of artists, and what can it teach us about the likely consequences of giving the reins of power (cultural, political, or otherwise) to people who come from this milieu and/or have this personality type? Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality. There’s a persuasive case to be made that democracy inherently rewards and gives power to that exact type of person. I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
And yet. By telegraphing its open hostility to artists and creatives - by throwing up a big sign that says, “people with liberal arts degrees, go away!” - I believe that the Right severely cripples itself. Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people. Right now, the only interesting art that most people in first-world countries will ever be exposed to is made by leftists. We can talk about the reasons for this; certainly some of them are structural, and are downstream of the fact that Hollywood and creative industries more generally are dominated by powerful leftists who limit the ability of right-wing content creators to access the kind of resources and backing required to produce and distribute media. But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.
Why is that? Is part of the reason why right-wingers (myself included) are so interested in pre-modern art is that they can keep Retvrning to it and are relieved of the burden of having to create something new? Why is it that the only people who go to classical music concerts and operas are PMC shitlibs? If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose? Distrustful of art and self-expression for fear that it breeds degeneracy? Forever fighting a battle to suppress artsy types who will corrupt the youth and bring the poison of leftism back from the dead? Should creative types who are otherwise on board with the Rightist project be concerned that we are helping to build a future that will have no place for us?
Maybe the fact that I’m asking these questions is proof that Red Tribers are right to be suspicious of people like me. If a conservative and traditional life is ideal for the vast majority of people, who cares what a tiny minority of whiny self-obsessed “artists” want? Aren’t people like me the reason we got to this point in the first place? It’s a tough subject for me to think about. To what extent can I whole-heartedly commit to a political project that will marginalize the people most similar to myself, in order to secure the greater good for the great mass of other people on earth? Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?
Native Angelenos are
40% immigrant
Do you even read what you’re typing before posting it?
Everything important and valuable in Los Angeles was built by Americans from other parts of the country. The Tongva Indians who lived there before the Spanish arrived were hunter-gatherers and built no advanced settlements. Once the Spaniards showed up, they established a small mission, which had a few hundred people living in it at its peak. Later under Mexican sovereignty it grew to a small city of less than 2,000 people, which was still the population when Americans conquered it during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s. Even in 1870 its population was only about 5,000. By the year 1900 it was over 100,000 people - the overwhelming majority of them Americans from different parts of the country. It was those people that built Los Angeles as you know it: Anglos from the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. You are merely a squatter on their patrimony. The “native” brown Angelenos you want to pretend are the “real” founding stock of the country were an afterthought to the people who actually built everything around you.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Keep in mind that in the cases of both Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, and Italian immigration around the turn of the century, the people coming to America were not a totally representative sample of the native populations of the source countries. The waves of Irish who flooded into America after the Potato Famine were destitute peasants. Subsistence farmers. “Shanty Irish”. The Sicilians who came over to America were coming from arguably an even more backward and violent society than that. Selection effects are very real.
And yes, there is in fact a substantial native Irish criminal class today, involved in drug trafficking and petty crime. An Irish person from that stratum of their society would indeed be expected to be a highly suboptimal addition to American society. Ditto for an unemployed Sicilian goombah. There are very substantial cultural and genetic/ancestral differences between people from different parts of Italy; a fair-haired descendant of Milanese Lombards is, on average, going to display reliably different traits than a heavily Mediterranean-descended Neapolitan or Sicilian. (And both will be different from a Sardinian.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
This is just demonstrably untrue. Have you considered that some of us believe that current levels of mass immigration are an existential threat to the future of this country? That whether or not DEI and affirmative action programs expand or retract will have a measurable and significant effect on the efficacy of our institutions and infrastructure? That one presidential candidate is more likely than another to create the conditions that will plunge the country into a large-scale war?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer?
Steve Sailer is not Jewish. His ancestors were primarily Swiss. He has discussed this numerous times. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
To foment a Color Revolution
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
The role of female soldiers in the IDF has always been somewhere between fascinating and horrifying to me. The below post by @CrashedPsychonaut mentions that the capture of an IDF garrison near the border fence involved a number of hapless young female soldiers, isolated at their posts and overrun. I imagine that some of these women were shot and killed, and I presume that others surrendered and were rounded up as hostages; the subsequent fate of these women is very distressing to imagine.
Some quick Googling indicates that approximately 40% of the IDF’s conscript soldiers were female as of 2021, comprising 25% of officers and 18% of combat soldiers. The latter two numbers, and especially the last one, are shockingly high to me. I had been under the impression that the IDF’s female conscripts were overwhelmingly shunted away into positions where a whole lot of things would need to go very unexpectedly wrong before there was any significant chance of them facing real combat. And, to be fair, it seems like in the case of that garrison, a whole lot of things did go very unexpectedly wrong. Still, it’s insane to me that a country with such overwhelmingly security concerns and so many threats surrounding it would put literally any important responsibility in the hands of female soldiers.
I’ve always been under the vague impression that the IDF’s inclusion of so many female soldiers was mostly a PR ploy; filling their ranks with photogenic young women makes people more likely to feel positively-inclined and prescribe towards it. It also allows them to circulate photos of busty women in camo wielding large guns, an archetype which seems to have significant (and, to me, inexplicable) appeal to a certain segment of the American mainstream right. The thought that these smiling young women could actually be sent to the front lines to do hand-to-hand urban combat against battle-hardened men is both inconceivable and appalling to me. I would expect most of them to surrender almost immediately if confronted with life-threatening combat situations. The impact on IDF morale of having a substantial number of its female soldiers captured or killed seems like it would be catastrophic, to say nothing of its practical strategic effects.
Can anyone offer more insight into the role of women in the IDF, and specifically their role in actual combat operations? Both historically and in terms of what we can expect to see in whatever upcoming operations are going to take place as a result of the current crisis?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now.
This is a dispatch from an alternate reality. The multiverse is leaking and those of us in our reality are staring at conclusive proof of the exist of other timelines where up is down, backwards is forwards, and Zendaya is gorgeous.
They’ve been decaying into a progressive mouthpiece for years now. Clare Malone has been a frothing leftist scold from the jump, and once they brought on Perry Bacon Jr. as their “here’s why anti-black racism explains every single political trend in America” guy, their analysis stopped being even remotely useful. After the 2016 election it was clear to me that everyone on that staff other than Silver was determined to atone for why they didn’t do more to stop Trump. I haven’t cared about them or paid attention to them in ages, and I’m not remotely sad to see them crumble to dust.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo 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.
It’s child abuse to… strongly encourage your child to have the same beliefs and behavioral norms as the vast majority of people he or she will meet and interact with? To set your child up for a smooth and healthy social life rather than encouraging him or her to be an atomized contrarian?
Look, man, as someone who staunchly refused to stand for the national anthem starting in high school and continuing up until a couple of years ago, I probably share nearly all of your complaints about the thought-terminating clichés implied by standing for the national anthem. I personally derive very little patriotic feeling or inspiration when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner; its lyrics are a mawkish and clumsy paean to an irrelevant battle from a war which America didn’t even win, and to a country which no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
But saying it’s child abuse to want one’s child to fit in and to have normal run-of-the-mill beliefs that will allow that child to go through life successfully and have healthy relationships with others? That strikes me as a completely ass-backwards accusation.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
People say men and women can't be friends.
I believe the actual claim is that men and women can’t be just friends. So, it is indeed possible for a man and a woman to develop a close friendship, but only if they’re attracted to each other, at which point that friendship will either escalate to a relationship, or fall apart when one party (usually the woman) romantically rejects the other party.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
but his mother's Jewish
Is she? This is genuinely the first I’m hearing of that. Where did you find that info? A cursory search turned up no results for that claim.
That's on me for not really paying attention to who's-who in the WigNat/dissident blue tribe.
You already know what I’m going to say. This seems like Example #846 of you making a bold claim about a figure in your outgroup, and then having to walk it back when someone points out that you made it up or mixed up two completely different people. You keep claiming to have some valuable insight into what makes your outgroup tick, and yet so often your statements about them are not only wrong, but are directly contradicted by reality. You don’t know anything of value about the people you’re talking about, which might be why you have to keep making things up about them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
The most prominent white nationalist publication, American Renaissance, routinely discusses the average Asian IQ advantage over whites’. Other than the occasional contrarian crank like Neema Parvini (who is not a white nationalist, and who, as his name suggests, would not be invited into most white nationalists’ ideal state) few if any of even the most hardcore racialists dispute the data about Asian or Jewish IQ.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
literal white jocks and cheerleaders are both. They are democrats and republicans.
My sense is that the partisan split among white adults who are former football players or cheerleaders leans heavily Republican, although you’re correct that there would still be millions of Democrat voters who fit this demographic profile. As a total percentage of Trump’s versus Biden’s constituency, though, I would say that white “former popular kids” are a much larger part of the former than of the latter.
Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansen aren't dorks are they?
As Hollywood actors, they’re highly atypical of their general demographic profile. (Johansson is also Jewish, so it should actually be very unsurprising that she’s not a Trump fan.) The incentives pushing Hollywood actors toward expressing liberal views are so strong that it’s nearly impossible to get a sense of what these people truly believe in their heart of hearts.
you were a nerdy theatre guy right? And you are a Trump voter! Are you the only freak?
I am extremely atypical. The percentage of American adults with theatre arts degrees who voted for Trump has to be less than 10%.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
I kept running into the same problem I always run into on these political self-report surveys: I had to answer “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” on a number of questions not because I don’t have a strong opinion or stance on the issue in question, but because I reject the framing or ideological vocabulary of the way the question is written. I fear that my responses may skew the survey toward seeming to reflect that I’m apathetic about a host of hot-button issues, when actually my opinion is too complex to be adequately expressed by answering a single-sentence question.
The identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Let’s take a step back and check the extent to which you and I actually disagree.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as a slur? By this, I mean a word which is inherently designed to contain within it the implication that the thing being indicated is bad? And such that there would be no way to use the word in a value-neutral way?
Take the word “faggot”, for example. If I call a gay man - let’s call him Travis - a faggot and he protests by asking me to stop using that word, I can defend my usage of it in two ways. One of those ways - riffing, perhaps, off of the famous Chris Rock bit, is, “I’m not calling you a faggot because you fuck guys. I’m calling you a faggot because you’re mincing all over the place, acting all effeminate, and a man shouldn’t act like that. A straight guy can be a faggot too, if he acts faggy. Nothing specifically gay about it.” But of course, Travis is well aware of the history of this word, and that it was always designed and intended to target gay men, and simultaneously to conglomerate a number of behaviors commonly associated with specifically gay men and to anathematize those behaviors. So Travis understands that I am either mistaken or (more probably) lying.
The second way I can defend my usage of the word is to say, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be a faggot! Being faggy is a totally normal and reasonable thing for a person to be.” Travis would likely respond, entirely reasonably, “Then why didn’t you use a word that doesn’t carry an insulting connotation? Why not call me, I don’t know, a queen? It’s not something everyone likes to be called, but at least it’s not a word that someone has only ever used to insult me.” If I were to reply, “No, I’m going to continue to say faggot. Everyone knows what it means, and yes, the vast majority of people who use it and/or have ever used it meant it insultingly. But I don’t think it is, so I’ll keep using it.” Do you think Travis would believe that I am being fully up-front with him?
By tabooing the word “faggot” and forcing me to describe him in a more value-neutral way, or at least to disaggregate the various assumptions contained within the word, Travis can at least get me to try and explicitly demonstrate that the various aspects of a supposed “faggot” are, independently, things worth caring about or drawing attention to. I would also need to demonstrate that such aspects do, in fact, typically come together in a particular package, and that the person whom I’m currently calling a faggot possesses all of those aspects.
What I’m saying is that “racist” has always been a slur. That it was coined by someone who intended it to refer to a cluster of things he thought were bad, and that it was popularized exclusively by people who all agreed that being racist was a bad thing. And that it is impossible to use in a value-neutral way due to its history. With which parts of this do you disagree?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
He’s making a reference to Curtis Yarvin’s “dark elves and hobbits” essay.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Some thoughts on the conversation this post has generated this far:
Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice? It’s very interesting that @Meriadoc intuited immediately that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue. That proposition probably wouldn’t have occurred to many of the more right-leaning users here - it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me - but in hindsight it is somewhat obviously true. So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue: Was it by accident? On purpose? Were they tricked? Did they do so in a moment of aberrant psychosis or a self-destructive impulse, which is not representative of their normal behavior? Or is their choice symptomatic of a larger pattern of behavior/shortcoming, such that given the choice to redo the selection several times, they’d still pick blue every time?
Recognizing that this poll isn’t merely a frivolous internet meme, but rather a chance to publicly hash out and enforce local political/philosophical default norms, we can extrapolate this to thinking about the types of real-world societal dilemmas the poll is supposed to invoke, and we can recognize that progressives believe that there are people who are born having already picked blue. Racial minorities, gays, trans people, the disabled, etc. They were never actually given the opportunity to pick red. By the simple fact of one or more of their identities being inherently blue, they will on some level always be reliant on the communitarian protective instincts of the larger society. Taking it as a given that such people exist, and that they will never have the option to “switch pills”, blue becomes a far more compelling moral option even for those of us who personally gain nothing by picking blue.
Someone who refuses to decouple the poll from its larger political implications will also intuit that even though the poll specifically fails to enumerate any actual benefits from selecting blue - it’s merely a choice to avoid bad outcomes, and offers no positive-sum outcome over and above that - in the real world the communitarian option actually does offer very clear benefits to everyone involved, including the selfish fucks who picked red. Subsistence farmers may not be reliant on the kindness of strangers, but they’ll also never successfully launch a rocket to the moon, nor cure cancer, nor build Notre Dame Cathedral. Thus, a poll that sought to more accurately model real life would have to include a clause that “if 50% or more people choose blue, all participants are given $5000, and anyone who chose blue gets an additional $5000.”
Also in real life, many people do have the ability to “switch pills” at any time, based on an observation of the choices made by those around them. People who made terrible choices early in life can choose to make better choices in the future. Drug addicts can get clean, people can go to trade school or get a second degree to improve their economic prospects, etc.
So then we have to actually parse out which people are genuinely stuck with blue no matter what, versus how many people were just demoralized and psyopped into picking blue, because they thought they could never hope to hack it on their own without society propping them up, whereas they were in truth fully capable of thriving independently if just given more effective coping strategies. Psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with profound mental disabilities will never be able to Git Gud, but people with minor depression and transitory suicidal ideation mostly can just choose to snap out of it at any time if nudged in the right direction.
But then what do we do with the people who actually are stuck with blue? The people who will definitely die, or at least have very bad life outcomes, unless we all dedicate some not-insignificant level of effort and resources, and incur some level of personal risk, in order to provide a safety net for them?
One way to think about it is to deny that they are stuck with blue; to harangue them into making a better choice, to deny that they are innately blue, to blame their “culture” and to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe every time they pick blue, we insult them and tell them to pick again, until they pick red. (Except of course, as we established, you could do this a thousand times and they’re still gonna pick blue.) By convincing yourself that they had agency the whole time, you not only absolve yourself of feeling any responsibility for the consequence of their decision, you also maintain the certainty that your own choice was 100% the result of agency, and therefore you morally flatter yourself.
The other way to think about it is: Yes, they’re stuck with blue, I could never have saved them, and it’s actually a good thing that they’re gonna die. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you could have saved them - in the poll, it was possible, but in real life? I’m not so sure - we do have to actually grapple with the question of whether or not the vast majority of us are better off without the people who were stuck with blue. The profoundly mentally/physically disabled, those who are born with the psychological equivalent of glass bones and paper skin, etc. Those who are essentially utility monsters - burdens with no hope of creating a positive-sum contribution, into whom we must continually sink our own resources to keep them from destroying themselves.
Several users brought up children; the thing with children, though, is that the vast majority of them will eventually grow up into people with agency. Any sacrifices we make for them now are actually an investment, made with the assumption that it will produce a positive future outcome. This is fundamentally different from the sort of sacrifices we make for adults with Down Syndrome, who will still have Down Syndrome at every point in their life, and will never “get better” and never repay the investment. How many times do I need to pick blue, putting myself at significant risk, in order to stave off the inevitable for these people? Because that’s the other thing about picking blue: you don’t actually get to just pick it once and then everything works out for everyone. You’re actually going to be given the same choice over and over throughout your life, and so will your children and their children and so on into perpetuity. But perhaps if enough of us pick red enough times to cull the people who keep forcing us to make these choices, we can buy ourselves some length of time wherein we can just thrive for a while as productive, normal people, until enough people who are blue-by-default start to accumulate again and we’re once again forced into unpleasant choices.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Oh god yes, I was internally terrified. This guy was a bit shorter than me (and I’m a short guy) but could almost certainly have kicked my ass if he’d decided to fight me. (I’ve never been in a fight and have no confidence in my capacity for interpersonal violence.) He was clearly an immigrant, presumably from Central America, and I wonder if fear of deportation was the main thing that caused him not to escalate things to a physical altercation. He got in my face at one point and made a vague physical threat, and that’s when I told him, “You just threatened me? Cool, that’s exactly what I needed in order to get the police involved.” He seemed to immediately regret it, and that’s when he started gathering his shit and preparing to leave.
I have gotten very close to getting beaten up by unstable homeless people, because I am too proud to passively accept their insults or let them colonize public spaces. If a time traveler from the future informed me that my cause of death will be “stabbed by homeless black guy at the trolley station following an avoidable verbal altercation” it would not surprise me in the least.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Right, yes, human history is one long story of one group taking things - usually by force - from another group of people. I am very happy to be a direct descendant of a group which was extremely successful at taking things from other groups, and then using the newly-acquired land and resources to build something vastly better and of more importance to the future than anything the dispossessed group would or could have built using the same land and resources. If, some day, some even more advanced group conquers the territory currently occupied by my group, this will be very bad for my descendants, and it is a fate which obviously I am keen to try and prevent. If it happens, though, at least I can hope that they use their conquered territory and resources to build something glorious and important, as opposed to simply squandering and uglifying it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
I think you are highly underestimating how horny 12-year-old boys are. I would gladly have had sex in sixth grade if any of the girls at my school would have let me. I’m sure the sex would have been very awkward and very short, but it certainly would not have been nonconsensual. I knew some kids who were sexually active; we had some very physically-developed kids at my school - both girls and boys - and some of them bragged very persuasively about having had sexual encounters.
I feel like this is an area where your extreme prudishness about the subject is causing you to significantly (and perhaps intentionally) misunderstand the realities of the psyche of (at least some) kids that age.
Reese Witherspoon - she’s the prom queen
Bill Gates - captain of the chess team
Jack Black the clown, and Brad Pitt the quarterback
I’ve seen it all before… I want my money back!
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