Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
That’s not remotely the same as your straw-man claim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped"
Literally nobody is claiming this.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
That’s reasonable but not guaranteed. Again, I’m just trying to game out different explanations, and fitting the (very scant) available evidence into different interpretations to see what appears most plausible.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
Exculpatory of what? If he didn’t do anything wrong, there wouldn’t be anything to film.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
Well yes, my theory is that either these girls were part of a group that was harassing people, or that they were picking on other kids and that the guy filming confronted them. This would explain why suddenly they seem (or are pretending to be) afraid.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere. She’s obviously quite young and is probably just starting to carry these as a way to look/feel tough. I’d be surprised if she’s used them on anybody yet, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait around and let her keep carrying them until she finally does use them in earnest.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)
Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.
I have personally been harassed and threatened by roving gangs of feral kids in this country, and in many cases they were certainly no older than this girl. Now, those kids were pretty much exclusively from demographics which many people here (myself included) instinctively sort into “outgroup”, and therefore right-wingers have no difficulty taking seriously accusations against them. Like the girl in the video, those teenagers, if and when confronted by adults, effortlessly shifted from brash aggression to the performance of fear and vulnerability. (“We’re just kids! Stay away from us, you weirdo!”) It is trivially easy to see through this tactic when imagining a gang of, say, black teenage carjackers.
What Americans in particular seem not to grasp about Britain is just how terribly dysfunctional its white underclass is. American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon. However, Scotland and the North of England have had an entirely native class of dissolute criminal youths for a very long time. Drug abuse and broken homes have gutted these communities long before brown immigrants started showing up in any significant numbers. Yes, the mass immigration is obviously bad; it has both compounded existing problems, and introduced a slew of new ones. But trying to sort this altercation into a clear tribalist frame — “I see a white British girl and a subcontinental man, so I know everything there is to know about who’s in the right” — is widely irresponsible given the total dearth of solid information.
What I see as the likely explanation here is that these two girls, possibly as part of a larger group, were acting disorderly and aggressive in this park. The man filming and another woman (apparently his sister) either confronted the girl, or were approached by her, and began filming. He did so because he believed that, if this escalated, he would be served by having video evidence of her wielding weapons. (That way if she tried to ditch them somewhere and deny having them, he’d have counter-evidence.)
These girls are likely from a very broken family environment and may well have suffered abuse in the past — either from brown immigrants, or from their own white family members, their gangster boyfriends, etc. — and their fear in that moment could be genuine. (As could their fear of being caught.) That doesn’t make this guy wrong for filming them or approaching them. If these girls are old enough to roam around unaccompanied, carrying bladed weapons, they are also old enough to be filmed. That can be true even if their reasons for carrying the weapons end up being totally innocent/justified! Multiple people involved in this altercation can all have legitimate motivations and be acting rationally according to their perceived interests.
If the agitprop narrative ends up being fully corroborated, I won’t find it especially surprising. Obviously there have been massive negative consequences resulting from mass immigration to the U.K., including rape gangs targeting precisely this sort of dissolute underclass girl. This city, Dundee, has a foreign-born population of 9%, including apparently roughly 4,000 Asian residents. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of those guys have been caught harassing/propositioning white girls! Still, at this time we lack anything remotely close to enough evidence to confidently assume that’s what happened here.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic
This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.
As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
As for what I think religion is going to look like in the future, I think it’s very tough to predict what AI is going to do and how it will shape people’s religious experiences. I’m loath to make an attempt at prediction just yet.
What I’d like future religion to look like, once the hyper-advanced one-world technocracy takes over, is a paradigm that leaves room for both a High Religion and a Low Religion. The High Religion would be highly centralized, universalized, and cosmopolitan, filling a similar social role to medieval Catholicism. It’d be the religion of the State, a hierarchical and orderly religion with grand cathedrals, inspiring awe.
I’d like this to look, theologically and aesthetically, something like Zoroastrianism, or, for a fictional example, the Faith Of The Seven in A Song Of Ice And Fire. There is a central overarching godhead, but it is split into multiple personae/sub-identities which act as intermediaries between its incomprehensible hyperintelligence and mankind. Those personae don’t all share the same motivations and intentions, which can explain why so much of the world seems chaotic and not guided by some grand unified “master plan”.
The Low Religion would look more like Shinto or Proto-Indo-European religion, centered around ancestor worship and personal tutelary deities. Guardian angels, the spirits of specific locations or families, nature spirits, etc. It would allow for a far more eclectic and personalized range of worship practices rooted in specific communities, and could be theologically integrated in some way with the High Religion such that they are understood not to be in inherent tension.
As for my personal spirituality, I’m very much still trying to figure that out. Like you, I’m trying to balance the competing demands of, on the one hand, attempting to locate a worldview which intuitively seems true and meaningful, and on the other hand trying to make sure my religious practices can integrate me into a larger cultural and communal framework that isn’t a total weirdo LARP. If there was a thriving modern Hellenist community in the United States today I would probably join it in a heartbeat, but there isn’t, so I have to try and figure out what actually-existing thing works for me. I’ve been reading into Hermeticism and esotericism more generally, in the hope that it will allow me to engage in an existing religious tradition on a level beyond the literal/exoteric.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.
How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed? Perhaps people who are inclined toward pro-social and conservative temperaments are more likely to express religious belief to pollsters because that’s the social software into which they were raised? Meanwhile the people with the same basic temperament (and same basically successful and pro-social life patterns) who live in Japan — a country where Christianity has had very little impact, and in which most people’s engagement with religious practice is extremely sporadic and surface-level — would either express wishy-washy belief in Buddhism, or honestly report that they are not sincerely religious.
Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect
Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do? African and Haitian Christians routinely have families of 6-7 children, and that certainly hasn’t made their lives or their countries better. I’d much rather those places have smaller families, but for geopolitical reasons and for their own good.
Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
This forum has a ton of lurkers and users who at some point switch from only posting sporadically to suddenly becoming more active. It’s very plausible that TequilaMockingbird is one such user, and that seeing Hlynka banned inspired him to “take up the mantle” of defending the cultural/ideological corner that Hlynka had previously occupied. There has always been a contingent of users here who (bizarrely) found Hlynka’s posts profoundly insightful and important, and who thought he was fighting the good fight against the (imagined) “Blue Tribe” consensus of the community.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
To be clear, I have never been nostalgic for Hlynka and have been glad he’s gone since the second he caught his ban.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
I would find that extremely surprising, given my interactions with Kulak and my observations of his personal interactions with others. (There are places other than TheMotte where he dwells, and I’ve also been known to dwell in some of them.) Mostly I’d just be very surprised to learn that Kulak has a second, way less strident, persona. I’ve watched him have embarrassing and quite personally-vindictive crash-outs over relatively minor disagreements — something which I’ve never seen from @hydroacetylene.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Both @Belisarius and I speculated four months ago that @TequilaMockingbird may be the return of Hlynka, but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now. The “Steve Sailer is actually a liberal” thing is so inexplicable a delusion that it’s tough to believe two people could arrive at it independently, but I guess it’s plausible, given a certain set of intellectual priors (and generalized mistrust of urban Californians) which Hlynka and TequilaMockingbird might just happen to share.
I support the ban because anyone who peppers their post full of “dude I’m totally gonna get banned for this one, the mods are gonna be soooo pissed” ban-baiting deserves to get what they’re asking for. This can be true even if he’s not truly a ban evader.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
I think @problem_redditor was referring to “other humans” as aliens.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
When I was a kid in that actual era, I listened to a ton of music from the 80’s and 90’s, as well as contemporary music. I think that’s extremely normal and doesn’t say much about the quality of current music.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Well… you’re right about white, American, and not bald! Sadly you struck out on the rest. Although I’m intrigued by that last part. Hopefully at some point in my life I’ll make you right about that!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I can’t resist the temptation. Do me do me do me!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You probably know he's hugely popular
Yeah, I definitely wanted this to be my bridge back into the genre, and had heard a lot of great things about it. I agree that the characterizations are dicey at times and that much of the dialogue writing is awful. I find the cosmology interesting, though, and I admit I’m a sucker for the “here’s a list of factions with distinct personality traits and iconography, sort yourself into the one that you’d be a part of” trope.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I have not read any of his other stuff (I read a lot of fantasy literature in middle school and high school, but took a very long break from the genre) so I have no preconceived notions.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Oh good. The worst parts of the books so far have l been Sanderson’s various pathetic attempts at insult humor, which he apparently considers the height of wit, and that entire mini-arc brought out the nadir of it.
A terrible example; Greenland’s population is almost 90% Inuit, and they’re pretty damn brown. Were you thinking of Iceland?
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