Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I mean I actually do think that a bad outcome of the Enlightenment is that it led to overpopulation, particularly of populations groups which are not cut out for industrialized modernity. I’m not as big a booster for the Enlightenment as my posts today might indicate; I believe that the Enlightenment focused too much on the inalienable intrinsic moral dignity and importance of each individual human life; this was due to those philosophers operating in a very homogenous context.
With the common knowledge we have now, not only of HBD but also of the unarguable fact that we have (at the very least) millions of human individuals walking among us who are totally incapable of empathy, rational behavior, and forethought, we can see that at least one aspect of the Enlightenment was based on faulty/incomplete premises. That doesn’t require us to scrap the whole edifice, but it does obligate us to at least reconsider and correct for those particular weaknesses. (Yes, my primary criticism of the Enlightenment is in many ways the popular opposite of the mainstream conservative criticism, insofar as I believe that we actually care too much about individual liberties and the sanctity of human life.)
Weather and disease did not cause Stalin's purges.
Surely you can only blamed in what you had a hand in creating.
But if a direct result of the Enlightenment is that states developed the ability to far more easily counteract the ill effects of weather and disease, then shouldn’t pre-Enlightenment societies be held accountable for not developing those same capacities? Weather and disease kill an order of magnitude less people in modern times than they did in premodern times, and it’s not because weather has gotten any better, nor that diseases no longer exist. We’re simply able to deal with them far, far more effectively than we were before. Sure, in some sense technological and medical progress do not necessarily need to go hand-in-hand with liberal/individualist philosophical development. However, the fruits of technological and medical progress can only be broadly distributed by a state with the sort of top-down centralized capacity which the Enlightenment paradigm facilitates.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning, as it brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment if doing so only leads to equivalence rather than avoiding the issues of the past.
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes. It is, though, a fact that since the end of WWII — a duration of 80 years — the world has enjoyed the most consistently peaceful, prosperous unbroken period in human history. How much longer would such a period need to persist before you’re willing to admit that the Enlightenment is working out well for us? You can always point to the World Wars as a failure mode or black mark on modernity, but surely you have to compare how things actually look over time, instead of hyper-focusing on one very bad, but historically very brief, period.
If it can be shown that, as @self_made_human points out, the Enlightenment has produced incredible flourishing of life-saving technology, peace-facilitating international institutions, prosperity via reliable trade, and general improvement of quality of life for rank-and-file individuals worldwide, then it seems extremely shortsighted to criticize the Enlightenment for failing to be perfect. It’s like people who criticize rationalists for falling short of perfect rationality; okay, fine at least we’re making an effort! Have you seen how much worse the rest of you are doing?!
I think a lot of criticism of the Enlightenment come down to a sort of Traditionalism of the Gaps. You take for granted all of the positive aspects of modernity which you’d be loath to give up, yet pile criticism onto the relatively small number of kinks which Enlightenment rationalists haven’t yet been able to solve.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
This is Beethoven 3 erasure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything? The Great Famine of 1315-1322 so thoroughly devastated Western and Central Europe that some populations were even reduced to cannibalism and mass infanticide. And don’t even get me started on all the skulls from the medieval wars of religion, the Crusades, the Roman wars of Conquest, the wars against the Mongols and Huns, etc. (And, of course, that’s just in Europe; much of the pre-Enlightenment non-European world comes out looking even worse.)
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
None of the things you named are revolutions, in my opinion. They are revolts, certainly, but not revolutions. An independence movement simply secedes from an existing institution, while a revolution dissolves that institution. After the Russian Revolution there were no more tsars, and almost certainly never will be. Mao’s revolution in China totally dissolved the traditional governing institutions of China. I think you absolutely need to have some way to distinguish that sort of process from the far more common secession of smaller units from a larger political whole.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
It is simply another form of expressing a rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing politics.
What is this sentence supposed to mean? There are a few sentences in your post which have unclear meaning due to (in my opinion) garbled writing, but this one in particular stood out as presumably the result of a typo.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I would argue that the thing which we call the “American Revolution” was not in fact a revolution. In something like the French Revolution (ann actual revolution) the King of France was deposed and later killed. There was no more French monarchy; it no longer existed as an institution. Ditto for the Iranian Revolution, which completely removed the Iranian monarchy.
Contrast this with the state of the world after the American War of Independence. The British Monarchy was very much still intact and continue to be a powerful and geopolitically relevant institution for another century and a half. The American colonists were no longer under its power, and therefore they had to create new governing institutions for themselves from scratch; in that sense, the aftermath resembles the aftermath of a revolution. But the institution being rebelled against was never destroyed, nor even especially weakened.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
On the contrary, the HBD-curious faction of the right has a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to categorize people of various ancestries; many are bringing back old, but at one point widely used, terms like castiza, quadroon, mulatto, etc. Such people would see Zegler not as “brown” in some absolute sense, but rather as simply too brown to play a character named after how pale she’s supposed to be.
We can quibble about how “European” she is — although she apparently describes her paternal ancestry as “Polish”, “Zegler” doesn’t sound like a Polish surname to me, but rather like an Ashkenazi surname — but if she’d self-identified as basically white from an early age, and not made a big deal out of her partial Amerindian/Latino ancestry, I think most people would probably look at her, hear the name “Rachel Zegler” and think, “Yeah, that’s white enough for me.” If I knew nothing about her and you showed me a picture of her, I could imagine being persuaded that she’s Cypriot or Lebanese or something like that, which I would consider at least contingently white.
Obama is a tougher case because, as you note, people with African history have been set apart, legally, culturally, and otherwise, for so long in this country that Americans do still have a pretty keen eye for identifying who’s “black” and who isn’t. Obama’s not light enough to pass for “ethnically ambiguous”, let alone “white”, even though his level of European admixture is probably roughly the same as that of someone like, say, Rashida Jones, who is far more white- or -white-adjacent-passing.
That being said, Obama was not raised as black, did not have any connection or interaction at all with black culture until college (there were few black people in Hawaii, and none at all in Indonesia), and still decided that he was going to lean into his black identity. If he’d never gone to Occidental, never fallen in with black culture, and kept going by “Barry Obama”, I don’t think people would be very hung up on his African ancestry. He’d just be seen as some sort of “mixed” and people wouldn’t dwell on the specifics.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
You’re just using uncharitable framings of the most extreme versions of your political enemies’ beliefs, in order to avoid having to engage with the specifics of my question. Nobody here is disputing that certain low-level elements of the American left’s coalition were, and perhaps will be again in the not-too-distant future, willing to use extrajudicial violence and criminal activity.
What I’m disputing is the plausibility of that element of the coalition gaining significant political power at the federal or state level, such that they could totally remake not only the party apparatus’ official position, but also the common constitutional interpretation of what crimes merit the death penalty, and could then get the Supreme Court to agree with their novel interpretation, and that rank-and-file members of the criminal justice apparatus would willingly carry out such executions. You’re proposing so many moving parts all coming together in a very particular way which, again, seems to have zero analogue in the history of this country.
I just don’t think there’s any realistic through-line via which we get from “some random black felons started fires in some major cities” to “a high-level progressive government official declares that hate speech, and only hate speech, is now a capital offense, and everyone at all levels below this — and horizontal to this, such as, again, the courts — signs off on this and carries it out. The conditions necessary to facilitate a series of developments like this would really only be possible in the case of full state collapse, catastrophic military defeat, etc.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
The political coalition in this country who would find any of this logic appealing is also the one that is dead-set against the death penalty. They’re not even willing to support execution for actual murder and rape, so I don’t see how you can imagine them getting to “death penalty for hate speech”. It just does not strike me as a remotely plausible series of events.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.
In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
No, his analysis went far beyond that, and he explicitly claimed on countless occasions not only that there is a set of psychological/lifestyle traits uniting both the far-right and the far-left, but also that in very many cases they are literally the same individuals — pointing out that many people he identified as “dissident right” (mercifully, the term “woke right” had not yet gained purchase prior to Hlynka’s perma-ban, or else he’d have embraced its usage with gusto) were, at one point or another in their lives, at least tepidly interested in leftism.
One effect of the fact that he has been banned is that it’s not difficult to sift through the most recent of his comments on his user page, wherein you can find many representative examples of his claims.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Huh? This does not match my interpretation of anything that figures such as Yarvin have advocated. “Totalitarian” means the populace is fully politicized and expected to interface thoroughly, on both a practical and, more importantly, an *affective level, with the state. Yarvin’s model is a depoliticized populace whose relationship with the state is either that of an employee to his employer, or otherwise that of a consumer to a provider. He doesn’t want the average person to have any reason to form an opinion regarding state policy, nor to have any illusion of political input regarding policy decisions. This might be authoritarian, but I don’t see much resemblance between that and, say, North Korean juche or Third Reich state-worshipping rallies. Perhaps you and I have differing understandings of what totalitarianism implies.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
I interpreted @Belisarius as accusing @TequilaMockingbird of being the return of Hlynka — a suspicion which I share, although my confidence has been too low for me to publicly level the accusation myself — not that you are. You’re significantly more articulate, and your ideas on a far stronger footing, than most of what Hlynka ever contributed, in my opinion.
Sure, some major ones that come to mind are:
1: Which class/stratum of society is the state (or whatever scale of local decision-making body one prefers) designed to serve? Realistically in any polity comprised of human beings, there will be some sort of unequal distribution of talents and proclivities, with most people clustering around some nebulous middle.
The hard right is split between a faction who want to maximize favorable outcomes for the extreme right tail — to make society a playground for the most intelligent/strong/rapacious/ambitious among us to compete for spots at the top, while the feckless and disempowered middle class try to enjoy whatever downstream goods and services are produced by the 1% and the left tail of the distribution simply starve and die off — and a more collectivist right who want to use the state to crush both tails of the distribution — to dispossess the greedy capitalists, and also to smash and persecute the underclass — in order to secure safety and stability for the middle class. Both of these camps have strong purchase in different sectors of the so-called “Dissident Right”. If something unites these two factions, it’s that they both have zero interest in providing any indulgence toward the left end of the distribution; they despise the “undeserving poor”, the mentally infirm, the criminal underclass, etc. The concept of Christian charity is seen as highly suspect, given that it obligates a significant redistribution of resources from the productive classes to the unproductive parasitic elements of society.
On the modern left, meanwhile, the overriding concern is to siphon resources and status (which, given the Critical Theory focus on social status as the ultimate capital good, are in fact inextricably linked) toward the classes who are most deviant from the middle class. The extremely poor, yes, but also minorities of any kind. The middle class is seen as this sort of undifferentiated demiurgic mass of conformism and stasis; the process of the historical dialectic, ultimately, is the slow but steady revelation of contradictions within the unreflective worldview of the bourgeois class, allowing various elements within it to awaken their consciousness.
Factions on the left are split between what, ultimately, one who has discovered their inner spark of awakened consciousness is obligated to do with it. There are factions who wish to maximize individual and personal freedom, up to and including full transhumanism; their hatred of the middle-class is a manifestation of their visceral hatred of feeling that their life and choices have been pre-determined for them. A different faction of the left is far more invested in pure redistribution for its own sake, out of an overriding visceral hatred of inequality of any kind. They despise the idea of any one person/group having more than another person/group, as well as the suffering and feelings of inadequacy experienced by the one who has less. This leveling instinct drives their hatred of the middle class, who, in this telling, didn’t even earn the things they have, but who nonetheless derive personal validation from the fact that they have more than the lowest among us. (“They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.”) This faction is far more comfortable with anarcho-primitivist and third-worldist rhetoric, with the end goal a sort of deindustrialized communitarian hyperlocalism, in which the accumulated slate of financial and social capital formerly hoarded history’s unjust winners has been wiped away, leaving everyone to start from square one. Each faction of the left basically sees the other as useful idiots, to be wielded as a weapon against the mutually-hated middle/bourgeois class and then discarded.
2: What are the primary determinants of an individual’s life outcomes? The mainstream American idea, on both the mainstream/center right and left, is strongly and overwhelmingly oriented toward “personal agency and hard work” as the answer. Conservatives like Hlynka and @TequilaMockingbird seem to really, really hate anything that smacks of “determinism” — the idea that any individual’s life outcomes are largely constrained by factors outside of that individuals control. This leads to a hatred of eugenics, but also of any focus on socially-constructed factors — and the resulting unequal distributions of status and resources — playing a part. The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize.
I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes, but I do actually have to try and get some stuff done today. Hopefully this was a useful starting point.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.
Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.
As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.
In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
The only American expat in the UK I know is my cousin, who married an English woman and moved to England. He’s a very standard-issue #Resist liberal stoner, as is his wife, although they clearly make good money, given the area in England where they were able to buy a home.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
What else do you think might contribute to different levels of average intelligence between states? Have you considered that it might track substantially with the different demographics of those states?
Every time some progressive online shows a map of “average level of college completion” or “average literacy rates” or “average IQ” and the Deep South is a great big splotch of unfavorable results, I have to wonder whether it has occurred to this person that the *percent of the population who are black” is far, far higher in that part of the country than it is in places like California, which is only 6% black, less than half the national average. That difference alone accounts for the lion’s share of the IQ differences between states. Yes, there are some states, such as West Virginia, which are both very white and do very poorly on measures of average intelligence and education, but those are quite few and far between. Alabama’s educational deficiencies would flip in a heartbeat if the state were not 26% black.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired.
I’m not sure what type of jobs you’re referring to here, but I can confidently say that this is not how the hiring process works at all at my job, which is an extremely standard-issue white-collar/pink-collar corporate call center position. We have a whole HR/recruiting edifice to receive, sort, and filter out applications, and our company also does background checks. If an applicant called our HR department to “check in” at any point during this process, it would not make any difference in expediting any stage of the process. If the applicant got any response at all from our recruiting team, it would almost certainly be a generic “your application is still under review, please wait to hear back from our team with an update” email. Maybe you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a “normal job”.
Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
More options
Context Copy link