Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
It can't be demonstrably untrue, because whether the country is fucked or not is not an objective question. It's a subjective one. You think it is, I do not.
I’m not saying it’s demonstrably true that the country is fucked. You’re of course correct that this is subjective.
I’m saying that it’s demonstrably untrue that 95% of Americans’ lives will not change at all depending on who is elected president. The president does obviously have the power to affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. The government’s response to COVID, for example, had very significant and tangible effects on the day-to-day lives of nearly every American. If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.
In other words if people turn against DEI or AA in then it will go no matter who is elected president.
Americans have opposed AA in large numbers for decades now. Multiple states - including California - passed ballot measures and laws to ban it. This did not have a significant effect on its spread or its implementation, because the ban was trivially easy for institutions to skirt around by appealing to the logical extrapolation of the Civil Rights Act, and to the decisions of unelected judges, including ones nominated by past presidents. Very very few Americans support DEI, and yet it is ubiquitous in both the public and private spheres.
The president is a figure head, a lightning rod, a symptom, not a cause.
Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep Americans out of the First World War; less than six months later, American soldiers were dying in Europe. Ronald Reagan’s voter base largely opposed mass immigration, yet Reagan himself signed the largest amnesty of illegal immigrants in American history. Presidents can simply lie about their intentions, or change their mind after being elected. It’s simply not true that they are merely catspaws of public opinion.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo 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
No, because you are not making any claims about any intrinsic qualities of hockey players in particular. You’re using “skate to where the puck has been” in a metaphorical sense to refer to the geopolitical future of India vis-a-vis Russia.
In the analogy made by Martyr Made, though, he is claiming that there are specific intrinsic qualities of Trump supporters: marginalized, unpopular, needing to be “rescued” by a defecting member of the well-adjusted mainstream. He is also claiming that there are intrinsic qualities of Trump’s enemies: popular, privileged, good-looking and well-adjusted.
However, the observable reality is that the relative distribution of these qualities is actually reversed. Trump supporters are, in fact, more likely to be popular and socially-well-adjusted members of their local communities. Meanwhile, a massive part of the Democrats’ coalition is people who are outside of the core American mainstream: racial/sexual minorities, neurotic middle-aged women, childless adults. These people may be feted by the media, and affirmative action has allowed them to carve out patronage networks within certain PMC industries, but they are in fact still the people who got bullied, and still the people who feel alienated by the American culture that existed at any time before the election of Barack Obama.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I’m not arguing whether or not Jews’ antipathy toward Trump makes sense or not. It’s just a fact that Jews voted overwhelmingly (I believe it was 80-20) in favor of both Clinton and Biden.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo 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
4mo ago
I’m not criticizing my outgroup; I am involved in multiple group chats where people, including myself, use that word without feeling bad about it. I wouldn’t call somebody that on the Motte, because I respect the norms of this community. But I want to be very clear that I don’t think it reflects particularly poorly on Trump voters (or anybody else) if they use that word.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
But it’s a poor analogy precisely because it doesn’t actually resemble observable reality. Analogizing Democrats to jocks and cheerleaders, and Republicans to freaks and geeks, only works if the actual ground-level reality isn’t the opposite of that. Literal (white) jocks and cheerleaders, in real life, are in fact Trump voters. The kids who are the most likely to be bullied in school are future Democrat voters who despise Trump - in many cases precisely because they see him as the guy who will help jocks and cheerleaders persecute the losers!
The linked tweet could have chosen to analogize Trump voters to any number of different things or groups, but instead he chose the one group which is least like Trump voters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.
People underestimate (or are not in a position to understand) how powerful it is for people to see Trump being attacked by the same people who have been maligning them in media and politics for years. Critics can say that that Trump is not a true enemy of the Establishment since he did x, y, or z, but it’s obvious to Trump supporters that the same powerful people who hate them also hate Trump, and that they hate Trump for taking their side.
I remember one middle-aged woman somewhere in Ohio being asked why she supported Trump. Was it his immigration policy, trade policy, what was it? She said: “Because he sticks up for us.”
It’s like the cool kids - the varsity QB, the homecoming queen, etc - sitting in the front of the class, forever bullying and mocking the “losers” in the back of class, who don’t play sports or cheerlead because their families are poor and they have to work after school. One day, one of the offensive linemen from the football team picks up and moves to the back of the class and starts giving it back to the cool kids. All the cool kids attack him, but he doesn’t care, he’s from their world and knows they’re nothing special, and anyway, they can’t threaten him because he’s too big, so he just keeps giving it back to him on the losers’ behalf. That guy would be a folk hero to the kids in the back, no matter how much of an obnoxious, vulgar buffoon he might be.
The kids in the front of the class - i.e. a pretty blonde woman who glides through life with door after door inexplicably opening before her - will never get it. They will always assume evil or irrational motives behind the linemen’s move, and they’ll imagine that the kids in back only support him out of jealousy and resentment toward the cool kids.
In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.
This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.
However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.
And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.
Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.
If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.
I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.
Our country is fucked.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
How many times are you going to shoehorn this phrase into every single comment you make?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
This could be a result of selective reporting on the part of either right-wing media, left-wing media, or both. I have seen tons of video of migrant caravans, and of migrants camped out near border checkpoints or in front of migrant processing centers, and it’s always at least 75% young men. Now, again, this could be due to the narrative being pushed by the sources of media that I consume. And, similarly, I’m sure you can acknowledge that The Atlantic is strongly pro-migrant and would at least be tempted to selectively display the most sympathetic images possible.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
He’s making a reference to Curtis Yarvin’s “dark elves and hobbits” essay.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
The overwhelming majority of the people currently streaming across the border are military-age men. If shooting broke out, the odds of a family of children getting smoked is far lower than the odds of some brazen young men.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them.
If you’re correct that other non-violent measures are exorbitantly expensive and/or ineffective, I am in fact willing to countenance just shooting them. You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming. (Or would start openly acting like proper invaders, in which case a lot more people would start being okay with shooting a lot more of them.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
so I'll stay bogged down here in the mire of Papist idolatry of the bread-god.
You are an i-dough-lator!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo 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
5mo ago
In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.
This is an incredibly risible claim. In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party used her social media platform to raise money for bail for the protestors. Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization, is inextricably enmeshed with the funding apparatus of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century - something infinitely more “extreme” and widely unpopular than anything you can credibly accuse Republican “extremists” of supporting.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?
That’s not the point of shooting paintballs at them. The point is to make them go away. To send the very clear message, “You are not welcome in this area. The next time you come to this area, something even worse will happen to you.”
My neighborhood has a very bad homeless problem. They have colonized several areas, setting up elaborate multi-tent encampments on residential sidewalks and next to businesses. Recently, one of them decided to set up his encampment - which included multiple shopping carts roped together - right in front of my apartment complex, with the carts blocking the footpath. I walked out and berated him, calling him a bum, telling him I’ll call the police on him, threatening to wreck his shopping carts and destroy the items inside, etc. None of this was designed to help him better himself, or to show him a path forward to reintegrate with society. It was intended only to dissuade him, in the strongest possible terms, from ever showing his face near this complex again. And sure enough, I haven’t seen him since. I did the same to a different bum whom I caught digging in our dumpster. Haven’t seen him since that day either.
As far as I can tell, very few of these long-term homeless have any chance of effectively reintegrating into normal society. Furthermore, I do not care if they do. I don’t concern myself with their wellbeing. My only concern is doing everything in my (very limited) power to get them as far away from me as possible.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
You see racial divisions between people as extremely important
Define “extremely important”. I think that they have some importance. Do you believe they have none? Can you honestly tell me, after, for example, the mass rioting and looting in the summer of 2020 - committed by people who saw themselves as part of a racial group or otherwise on behalf of that racial group, and believing that the distinct experiences of that racial group mark them as divided from mainstream “white” society - that racial divisions have zero relevance to American society? Surely this is not your claim.
and would like to completely restructure society along its lines
Again, what specific ways do you imagine I wish to “completely restructure society”? Americans are already engaged in a Big Sort - masses of people moving from one state/region to another for reasons of cultural affinity and political polarization - and have been for decades. This has been true as well of black Americans, who have been migrating back to the South - to Atlanta and the surrounding area in particular - in order to be in cultural and special communion with their own identity group. This process is accelerating, and I believe that it will continue to accelerate as America continues to polarize along political and racial lines.
My hope is that this process leads to a gradual self-segregation of blacks into something roughly approximating a discrete de facto ethnostate, at which point the process of formalizing that reality can begin. None of this would require a radical restructuring of society. My model for this is the Velvet Divorce in the former Czechoslovakia, in which two distinct ethnolinguistic identity groups decided voluntary to part ways and to pursue the political sovereignty of their respective identities. The subsequent population transfers can be achieved peacefully and non-coercively, likely with substantial financial assistance and redistribution by the federal government.
I consider the extent to which you care about this, the extent to which you think racial division is important, to be extremely irrational - so irrational that the only way I can really try to understand it, though I would keep this to myself normally, is to start postulating things like trauma, depression, a ridiculously sheltered upbringing, and so on, to explain to myself how someone can get to where it seems like you are.
This is honestly very amusing to me. I really think you need to talk to more people who disagree with you. I think you will find that a surprising number of fairly well-adjusted, reasonable, world-wise people have views not dissimilar to mine. I’m certainly not “ridiculously sheltered”; I attended very diverse public schools for my entire upbringing, in arguably the most racially-diverse major city in America. (San Diego) I’m not “traumatized”, and though I dealt with some mild depression during my mid-twenties, I have a decent if unfulfilling life, a steady full-time job, and an active social life. My belief in racial differences and racial friction is a direct result of ample observation of those realities throughout my life.
I understand that it may be very difficult for you to empathize with someone who has observed the same realities as you have, but yet who has reached profoundly different conclusions about how to interpret those realities. I’m not consumed by hate, nor do I spend all day perseverating about race. My boss is a black woman, with whom I have an excellent professional and personal relationship. The majority of my coworkers are non-white. I have zero issues interacting cordially with them. Yet this does not prevent me from noticing consistent patterns, nor does it require me to shy away from what I consider uncomfortable implications of those patterns. I take public transit every day, multiple times a day, which affords me ample opportunity to observe those patterns. I watch the news. I consume online commentary and video content. I read about history. Why is it so confounding or difficult for you to grapple with the idea that a person who does so could reach the conclusions I’ve reached?
at least descriptively, basically every American, including almost every attendee in the crowd at CPAC, would agree that the policies you're calling for can be accurately called "racist".
I think you’re really underestimating the groundswell of people who are starting to flirt with a lot of the same observations I’m talking about. Go read the comment sections under police bodycam videos on YouTube. Some portion of the American populace - I will not pretend to have an accurate read on the actual numbers, since most of them at this time are still only willing to express such opinions anonymously - are beginning to reach the “we don’t have to live with this people anymore” stage. White flight has happened before in this country more than once; why are you so confident it won’t happen again? It already is happening again! What do you think people mean when they say they want to move to an area with “good schools”? If you ask them if it’s “racist” not to want to live around underclass black people, most of them would probably say yes. And then they would carry on not wanting to live around underclass black people.
The people at CPAC can prostrate themselves before the altar of Martin Luther King all they like, but a substantial number of them are beginning to suspect that perhaps there is in fact some reliable correlation between “color of skin” and “content of character”. They can say it’s a result of “culture”; the practical effect will be the same. In the aggregate, on the macro level, black people and white people have radically different preferences and do not actually thrive when forced into close day-to-day contact with each other, such that they are made to compete for public space and political power. If you disagree, how about you lay out a case for why, instead of just dismissing me as mentally ill?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo 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
5mo ago
policies and an ideology that would, under any reasonable definition, be considered "racist"
This is precisely what I am disputing! I have to believe that you are not actually this dim and mendacious. My entire point is that it is not in fact reasonable to consider my ideas “racist”. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s reasonable! You’re simply appealing nakedly to consensus and pretending like you’ve made an argument.
Racism clearly does exist
No, it doesn’t!
Would you argue that the many black people who hate white people are not racists? Are @BurdensomeCount's triumphalist screeds about how white people deserve to be made to lick the boots of his folk not racist?
Yes! Obviously, yes! I am explicitly saying that these people are not racist. I have never said anything otherwise. Have you ever once seen me complain about “anti-white racism” or “reverse racism” or anything like that? No! They are anti-white, and I dislike them for that reason. Their beliefs are bad for my people, which is why I oppose them. But in many cases they are based on completely sensible, well-reasoned motivations. I don’t oppose them because they’re “racist” in some abstract sense of “it’s bad to prefer one group over another and to advocate in favor of that group, even when such advocacy negatively impacts another group” or “it’s bad not to like people because of their group identity”. It’s perfectly fine to do either! I just don’t want it done against my group, because that would be bad for my group. What about this is difficult for you to understand? Why do you keep acting like you’ve exposed some secret ulterior motive of mine?
Again, as both I and @SecureSignals noted, your argument here is structurally identical to an accusation of heresy. “Well, clearly you recognize that God is real, and the Bible is true - you just hate them!” And we are responding with “No, actually we reject your whole frame.” Again, just because a lot of people believe something does not mean it’s reasonable, or that people who reject it are doing so dishonestly.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Mo was happily married and living well, and sacrificed it all to preach his message to unfriendly audience, faced hatred, persecution, and finally had to flee his hometown to save his life.
This sacrifice was, of course, quite ephemeral, as he then became an ultra-powerful warlord with multiple wives and an army of devotees. Yeah wow, poor guy, his life sure must have been hard.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
I was not expecting a @FarNearEverywhere self-doxx/face reveal today, but I’m here for it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
If I’m arguing for a particularly restrictive definition of racism, one that requires unambiguously and consistently stated personal animus against certain groups for being those groups as opposed to any contingent factors, then won’t basically all of the most classic and widely accepted examples of racism (“the races should remain separate as God intended”, “race mixing is unnatural”, “separate but equal”, “I have nothing against the Jews other than that they are all Communists” [reportedly a Hitler quote according to I believe Max Planck], “I assume any black man is a thug or criminal until proven otherwise”, “African slavery is the natural order of society and in fact benefits the slaves”, and yes, many strong forms of what people around these parts call HBD) not actually count as racism according to my definition? And that would be absurd, right?
Why would that be absurd? Why do you believe the term is useful at all? Why do you believe that “racism” indicates a real and important phenomenon worth caring about? What if the word was never anything other than a boo light, intentionally devised as a way to pathologize what is actually a totally normal and healthy outlook?
There is nobody on earth who, upon honest reflection, would agree that “Yes, I just hate minorities because they’re ugly and stinky and it’s bad to look different from the way I look.” That is a caricature which exists only in the heads of racial egalitarians and “anti-racists”. In reality, even the least introspective, most unreflective “bigot” has actual specific reasons - even if it’s at the level of anecdotal examples and life experience - to believe that there are important differences between the traits and the history of various groups, and/or that limiting the interpersonal interaction of those groups is optimal. I don’t care if they wouldn’t put it in those high-falutin’ terms. Even if you gave them truth serum and ample opportunity to freely articulate the contents of their own minds, they wouldn’t commit to “just don’t like ‘em, simple as” as an honest reflection of their internal mental state.
Racism isn’t real. Believing in important racial differences is certainly real; I believe it, as do probably a plurality of commenters here. Believing that an optimal society ought to achieve some level of separation/segregation between groups is also real, and is a far more controversial position even in this community; I advocate for the managed and non-coercive separation of black Americans from non-blacks over time, but it’s not because “I just hate the darkies and want them to die”. I have (what I think are) sophisticated reasons for believing what I do; I reasoned myself into this position over time, and did not start from a simple visceral aversion to people who look different from me.
A small number of people today even still believe that some races ought to rule over others, or even that some racial and ethnic groups should be exterminated! I don’t believe that, and I’ve never interacted with anyone who does (I suspect that the vast majority of people who do say these things are simply LARPing or doing a bit) but I don’t deny that such people are real. However, they are still not “racist”. They have actual reasons for believing that the conditions of the world are such that extreme measures genuinely are necessary for the preservation and improvement of mankind.
I could turn this around on you and ask: “Do you own pets? You do? Oh, so you irrationally hate animals? You want them enslaved in your home, rather than free to rule themselves?” And you would rightly respond, “No, I just don’t think humans and animals are precisely equal, and that the natural order of things is for humans to domesticate certain animals and to use them for our benefit, as long as we’re not overly cruel to those animals. I love my cat, but I wouldn’t let him drive a car, or vote in a presidential election.” But if I was absolutely committed to the proposition that speciesism is a useful and important concept, it would be easy for me to distort your beliefs to make them fit into a model that pathologizes them.
This is essentially what I believe that you’re doing with the term “racism”. Let the term go. It was never valuable to begin with. Nobody here cares if you think we’re racist or not. The term has become fully disenchanted. You might as well call us all heretics. Or “enemies of the Emperor of Assyria”. Engage with our ideas on the object level, and stop worrying about whether or not they fall afoul of your made-up boo word.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Modern immigrants, yes. But OP’s question was implying that there was no important dissimilarity between 19th-century European immigration and 21st-century European immigration. The modern American immigration regime for non-border-jumping legal immigrants is indeed very selective and expensive, and for that reason I would expect an Irish or Italian immigrant in 2023 to be highly dissimilar to an impoverished Ellis Island immigrant.
There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.
However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.
Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)
She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.
However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.
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