Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Would you expand the death penalty to public corruption? I'd would have rather seen Judge Michael Conahan hanged than pardoned.
I’m a bit conflicted when it comes to corruption committed by obviously intelligent, competent individuals whose talents can clearly still be put to good use. On the one hand, the crimes of powerful individuals can usually impact a much larger number of people than the crimes of low-level street criminals; in that sense, punishing the powerful is extremely important not only because of the gravity of their crimes, but also the punitive/restorative value to the public of seeing them laid low. On the other hand, Michael Conahan has abilities that can be put to good use, as a sort of intellectual chain-gang labor. I’d be wary about wasting him by executing him. Ultimately I think I’d come down on the side of execution, though.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races)
I mean, that’s the thing: in the American context, both execution and caning would be wildly disproportionately applied to the “non-blue-blood races”. I obviously have no objection to hanging or caning a white felon; the demographic disparities are, at least in the short term, simply the reality.
I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
When it comes to non-violent crimes, it’s more about the habitual aspect of crime. If someone commits shoplifting, I’m perfectly happy to see them caned once and then everyone can move on. If someone has committed shoplifting 47 times, this person is very obviously an intolerable burden and incapable of being rehabilitated. Career criminals are what I’m trying to focus on.
There are, however, certain non-violent crimes which I’d be perfectly willing to have someone very severely harmed for: scammers, for example. People who steal not from large impersonal entities, but from vulnerable individuals. A very close family member of mine lost his entire life savings to a scammer, who exploited his naïvety and conscientiousness. I myself had a phone stolen because a guy begged to use it to call his mother, then ran from me the second I handed it to him. These people are irredeemably sociopathic and must be culled. Generally any crimes which demonstrate a depraved mind must be dealt with through making it onerous or impossible for this person to reproduce.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Your point about hanging is well-taken. I’m trying to optimize for a method that the American public could actually stomach. Hanging has a long and lindy history in Anglophone countries — although, much like my concerns about the optics of caning, hanging does of course suffer from the association with lynching, regardless of how long the practice existed both before and after the era of Lynch Law. Hanging can also be performed in a public square, using an apparatus which can be reused many times, and which can execute multiple individuals simultaneously. It is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Current “medicalized” execution methods such as lethal injection are too sterile and do not carry any of the desired psychological effects, neither on the condemned nor on onlookers. The gas chamber is similarly medicalized, cannot be carried out before the eyes of the public, and of course suffers from an even more taboo optical association: that of the Holocaust.
The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic; watching someone get decapitated and bleed out from their neck stump is simply too much for most modern people to stomach. It also suffers from an inescapable and unacceptable association with the subversive, anarchic, populist aesthetics of the French Revolution.
As for the firing squad or other forms of execution by firearm, I feel they suffer from three major drawbacks: firstly, like the guillotine, they are simply very visually violent and not something a lot of psychologically-healthy Americans would wish to watch; secondly, it is the method of execution which, barring the old-fashioned execution by axe, might be the most traumatizing for the individual(s) tasked with carrying out the execution; thirdly, since my fervent hope is that in the long run America loses its fixation with guns, a method of execution by the state which prominently features firearms sends the wrong message.
I’m sure some enterprising inventor can (and hopefully will) develop a method of execution which more wholly satisfies the criteria I’m looking for. A method which requires the condemned to, directly before the eyes of the public, come to grips with the enormity of the consequences for his crimes, and to experience both the visible terror and the humiliating stripping of social status which are appropriate for the circumstances. I’m sensitive to avoid methods which overly select for sadism in the executioner(s), and those which risk inculcating such sadism over time. Methods like hanging which involve an apparatus, rather than a direct violent action by an individual, are preferable for that reason among others.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What I’m saying is that getting from “self-ownership of my body” to “ownership of items I obtained using my body” is not a useful line of reasoning, because it doesn’t deal well with questions of why only the first person to obtain an item has eternal first priority of ownership over it, even when others expend equal effort and physical agency in order to obtain the item in turn. (It’s an especially incoherent line of reasoning when we get to talk about purchasing items at a store, wherein all of the items were harvested or built by the physical bodies of others, as as the “customer” the only sense in which my “physical body” gained “ownership” of the items is by swiping a piece of plastic acknowledging the transfer of imaginary “funds”.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Ah yes, that’s fair. I’m a fairly ardent critic of mainstream Christian conservatives, and of the “conservative mindset” generally. I’d just say that I’m some third thing rather than a “liberal”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I mean look, I’m not interested in approaching this as a challenge. I want to avoid the temptation toward “vice signaling” so common on the right, so I’m not going to try and show off how “based” I am. If it turns out that you’re more authoritarian than I am, I have zero problem with that.
I wish to enshrine the principle that our justice/carceral system is, first and foremost, about punishment and about making an example of criminals. Rehabilitation is a pipe dream for the vast majority of felons in this country; there are bad people in this world, and they weren’t made bad by society. The death penalty has always been a salutary means not only of removing such people permanently from society, but also of making a public spectacle to impress upon potential future criminals the humiliating death that awaits them. We should expand the death penalty to be applicable to a far broader spectrum of crimes (including property crimes) than those for which it’s currently on offer. The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous. The condemned should experience terror and humiliation — ideally visually obvious to onlookers — during the lead-up to the execution, but not too much actual prolonged physical suffering during the execution itself.
We should also stress the extremely low probability of a false conviction in the age of ubiquitous video surveillance, DNA, and advanced forensics. The entire “presumption of innocence” upon which our current system of jurisprudence rests is, in many ways, a relic of a bygone era. What does it mean to “presume the innocence” of a man caught on camera committing a criminal act, using a gun on which we can find his (scientifically verifiable) fingerprints and unique DNA? The massive amount of appeals, legal loopholes, and protections afforded to criminals in this country is a travesty. I would instead favor an inquisitorial model of criminal justice, with little or no room for the “jury trial” as a method of ascertaining guilt.
If I thought we could actually administer it in America, I would also favor the reintroduction of public corporal punishment (caning, etc.) as an alternative to incarceration and fines for certain crimes. The problem, of course, is that the optics of (mostly) young black men being publicly whipped would be intolerable to a plurality of white Americans. The ghost of slavery still haunts the American consciousness to a great degree, preventing us from being able to embrace a healthy punitive approach to crime. We can do prisons because they lock these men away from the view of squeamish right-thinking white people, but if they were to be corporally punished right out in the open it would be psychologically unbearable for too great a portion of the populace to bear.
I would also love it if we could reach a point where we could carry out an easing-out and eventual abolishment of nearly all personal firearm ownership. This is impossible and intolerable under current conditions in this country, due to the continued existence of a massive criminal underclass. If we could get that problem under control, though, the only ideological dragon left to slay would be the vestigial delusion of an armed populace “as a check against tyranny”, and frankly I think that paper tiger would be easy for a future government to slay. The simple example set by the obviously-not-tyrannical societies which are thriving in our world without widespread individual firearm ownership are simply too visible to most people. Japan is not a tyranny, nor are its citizens suffering under the yoke of oppression because they can’t own guns. Clownish sputtering about “COVID tyranny” aside, nobody can make any credible argument that the citizens of Australia live in a dystopian state of oppression.
I also favor a full redemption of eugenics as a means of improving the human capital of this country, although I’m ambivalent about the extent to which this could, or should, be achieved via coercive measures. I have no special attachment to “bodily autonomy” or “sexual freedom” as important philosophical considerations, but I’m cognizant of the limits of feasibility when it comes to applying those sorts of measures to a modern populace marinated so throughly in feminism, egalitarianism, and dystopian media like GATTACA and Brave New World. Eugenics is still fiercely opposed on both the mainstream right and left, and I don’t want to get over my skis in terms of over-committing to a wildly unpopular proposal.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I use 'my' body to extract resources from the world, and because I own my body, I likewise have a claim to resources I gained control of using my body, and my claim is inherently stronger than any 'second-comers.'
So if some guy uses his body to attack me and physically obtain my possessions, what claim do I have over ownership of those items under your paradigm? He gained control of them using his body; ought I to have any recourse to regain possession of them, besides using my own body to take them back from him in turn?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I am… perplexed as to why I was chosen as your representative of liberalism. I’m on record saying that the obsessive focus on the inalienable rights of the individual is the cancer at the heart of American society. You’re absolutely correct that I’m not a “social conservative”, but I also favor a more authoritarian approach to government/policing than I think almost anyone else on this forum does. (I’m also one of this forum’s leading proponents of “racism is good, actually”.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I was literally composing a post about it, preparing to post it on Monday if the guy went undrafted, if the media meltdown about it rose to a fever pitch, if a major journalist/outlet stopped tiptoeing around and just flat-out accused NFL teams of racism, etc. Now that he got drafted in the 5th round and might actually get to legitimately compete for a starting job (including over the kid they just drafted two rounds ahead of him) I feel like there won’t be enough culture war meat on the bone to justify actually making a top-level post about it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
The last civilized society run by an elite with Indo-European religious beliefs was what, Persia in the 600’s? Abrahamaic religions, Confucianism, and communism have all shown they can run a civilized and technological society. It may not be to your or my preferences, but they can. In contrast Indo-European religions have not.
Many pagan societies were at the same level of technological development as their Abrahamic/Confucian contemporaries, though. They weren’t comparatively primitive. They were defeated militarily, yes, but it’s nowhere near as simple as saying that this was because their societies were not able to maintain civilization and technology while the non-pagan ones were.
My ancestors stopped practicing Indo-European paganism under king Clovis for a reason. Some beliefs are just better.
A huge number of the “conversions” of pagans to Christianity were compelled by military force and just straight-up slaughter and torture. Charlemagne had to fight the brutal thirty-year Saxon Wars to conquer, subjugate, and forcibly convert the pagan Saxons, who were a peer society.
The Northern Crusades were fought in the 12th century to conquer and forcibly convert the pagan Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic people, who had managed to resist Christianization over a thousand years after the birth of Christ. These peoples were not savages living in mud-huts.
The Muslim conquest of the Zoroastrian Persians led to such brutal persecution of those who refused to accept Islamization that they had to flee all the way to the Indian subcontinent, where their modern descendants, the Parsees, are very disproportionately successful and wealthy relative not only to Hindus but also to the Abrahamic Muslims who, in your formulation, should be the ones who are the most successful and civilized.
Abrahamic religions didn’t simply “win in the marketplace of ideas.” Certainly a great number of conversion were sincere! A much larger number of them, though, were made either out of political/economic considerations — leaders wishing to become integrated into the political and financial networks emanating from the Christian Mediterranean — or by force. We didn’t have any opportunity to observe how a pagan society with a European level of human capital would have handled the Industrial Revolution, as they’d all been wiped out hundreds of years prior. The closest example we do have — Japan post-Meiji Restoration — is one of the most successful and civilized industrial societies on earth. I think it’s wildly dishonest to claim that paganism can’t sustain civilization or technology, when we simply have no idea whether or not it could. We have little to no data to work with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I would say you’re ignoring the upper crust of blacks — journalists, academics, high-ranking activists — who have built their lives and identities around an ostentatious anti-whiteness. I agree with you that there’s a large black middle class, among whom the percentage who’d be likely to donate to Karmelo Anthony is fairly small (though certainly non-zero), but I imagine there’s quite a bit of that money coming from affluent chattering-class blacks who’ve made that money spreading anti-white animus.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
FC is presumably referring to Jake Gardner
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Do you have any evidence that the relatively small portion of the American black electorate who voted for Trump do not otherwise see themselves as part of a (capital-B) Black community with shared cultural interests, a shared fraught relationship with greater white America, etc.? Couldn’t it just be that those people did not believe that in 2024 the Democratic Party was the optimal vehicle through which to express/protect those interests? I haven’t seen enough evidence to suggest that this represents a larger fracturing of black culture and identity. Kanye West presumably voted for Trump, after all, and he is still very recognizably culturally black, still has a very defiant attitude toward White America, etc.
I don’t think we have to be at “literal race war imminent” to recognize that race relations (specifically between blacks and non-blacks) in America are in a very bad state and show no signs of long-term improvement.
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
2mo ago
This seems like a massive oversimplification. I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of Orthodox content, including by people with whom I’m in direct contact, and they all seem to be in lockstep agreement that the pagan “Gods” were in fact demons — they use that word over and over — to whom their worshippers were giving profane worship. It seems like the Orthodox mostly don’t directly blame those people for being so fooled, especially as Christ had not yet arrived to spread the good word, nor do the Orthodox apparently believe that such “demons” were (or are) purely malevolent beings. But it seems pretty clear to at least Orthodox Christians — unless I’m somehow misunderstanding their words — that pagans who believed their Gods were supreme and benevolent beings were totally mistaken about the true nature of the beings which they worshipped.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Mass shootings that aren't explicitly political or religious in motivation tend often to turn into this (three of the four most famous American examples are "I managed to get myself locked into an elementary school classroom while on the run from the cops, my life is over anyway, might as well shoot a few for fun" [Uvalde], "I'm a jilted lover so I'm going to shoot her, she works at a school, no harm in racking up a few more on the way out" [Sandy Hook], and "the cops aren't coming in, I'm bored, might as well shoot some more" [Pulse nightclub]).
None of these are accurate descriptions of the shootings you’ve named, as far as I’m aware. The Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos, didn’t just end up at the elementary school by accident while on the run from police; he DMed the German teenager with whom he’d been in communication after meeting her on Yubo, first telling her he was about to shoot his grandmother, then subsequently telling her that he’d just done so and was about to drive to a nearby elementary school and shoot some kids. (That girl, “Cece”, was later criminally prosecuted in Frankfurt for failing to alert authorities.) The police weren’t even aware, before the school shooting, that he’d shot his grandmother, and were not pursuing him.
As for Sandy Hook, what information do you have that Adam Lanza was “a jilted lover”, or had any connection to Sandy Hook elementary school besides having attended it himself as a small child? I’ve never encountered any claim that he was “a lover” at all, jilted or otherwise; everything I’ve ever read about him makes it very clear that he was a total shut-in, who didn’t even have any IRL friends, let alone a “lover”. If you have any info to the contrary I’d be interested to see it.
And then when it comes to the Pulse shooting, first off, your claim that the shooting wasn’t politically motivated is simply untrue. Omar Mateen did intend to commit a mass shooting in revenge for civilian bombings in Afghanistan and the Middle East by the U.S. military. He did not attempt to commit a mass shooting against gay people; he’d originally planned to commit the shooting at the Disney entertainment complex, but, upon getting near there and realizing how well-secured it was, he panicked and literally just searched “Orlando nightclubs” and went to the first one nearby, not even having any idea Pulse was a gay club. But again, he fully intended to shoot up the place before he even got there.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Spaceballs sequel in which Pizza the Hutt has become Pizza the Pope.
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
2mo ago
Why is it India, which has famously low human capital in its vast hordes of low-caste peasants, and not, say, Japan, which is still essentially pagan in character and on which Christianity has never had any significant impact?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
Of course it does; it tells us that disagreeableness is not especially concentrated in either East or West. You are the one who made the strong claim that what specifically differentiates “the West from China* is that Europeans cannot be at peace with themselves and that they persecute religious/intellectual/political reformers. Yet China also has a huge history of conflict, and also has a fraught history with its reformers and rebels. To me that makes a pretty compelling case against your original claim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
I think it’s pretty wild to posit “disagreeableness” as the key trait distinguishing “the West” from China, given China’s famously extensive list of civil wars, rebellions, splintering religious movements, etc.
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
2mo ago
6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.
Nowhere did I say anyone should “focus” on group differences. In fact I made it very explicit multiple times that when fine-grained information about an individual is available, you should use it to override the assumptions you made before you had it.
You didn’t make any effort to actually engage with the specifics of any of the examples I brought up, the distinctions I drew, etc. This is by far the most common outcome of my interactions with you. You just repeat some stock phrases and act like they’re knockdown arguments for every situation. It’s very tiresome, and I feel that you’re an especially poor ambassador for the general constellation of ideas you ostensibly advocate.
Commissioner of the NBA, and one of the wealthiest ayyylmaos in America.
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