Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
The problem is that you led with the claim that “Iranians are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [are].” This claim strikes most readers as extremely bizarre, given the many ways in which Israel’s culture (at least in their major cities) is manifestly more in-line with Western cultural norms than Iran’s is. (Israeli women can dress however they please, gay sex is tolerated and even mildly celebrated, they both happily consume Western media and produce media which is easily legible for Western audiences, etc. Many Israelis are originally from Western countries, and fluently speak Western languages.)
Therefore, for your claim to make any sense, it has to be about how Israel’s government is supposedly unfriendly to the West. This may or may not be true, but it’s at least a legible claim. If this is your claim, though, then it stands to reason to also interpret your claim about Iran to also be about the government. And the claim that Iran’s government — which openly funds organizations which have attacked Western shipping, committed terrorist attacks against Westerners, etc. — is more Western-friendly than Israel’s strikes a lot of observers as, again, bizarre.
Are you now saying that your original claim should be read as “Iranians [the people, not the government] are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [the government, not the people] are”? Or are you genuinely sticking to the claim that the average Israeli citizen hates Western civilization more than the average Iranian citizen does?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Personally, I'd only wish success to someone banning Disney, rap etc.
To react to your bailey, @The_Nybbler haven't many in this community opposed this government and arana imperii, ascribing modernity's ills to it?
See, I knew this was coming. There is a consistent bait-and-switch deployed by defenders of the proposition that rogue/irredentist regimes such as Iran are actually secretly friendly to Western culture/interests. The initial claim is always “No, they’re not actually trying to ban Western culture or actively harm Western governments.” And then when someone brings up examples of those regimes explicitly opposing Western cultural imports or waging covert/proxy war against Western countries (particularly America), the claim switches to, “Okay yes, they are opposed to the West, but that’s good, actually, because the West is degenerate and its cultural imports deserve to be banned.”
Yes, I have issues with much of the lyrical/philosophical content of hip-hop music and the culture around it. I agree that much of Disney’s recent output is of questionable artistic quality, and that some of its messaging is insidious. However, if there is such a thing as “the West” (and I’ve expressed my skepticism that such a construct refers to something real and consistent) then surely one of its defining factors, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, is that it is extremely reticent to ban entire categories of art. As an American, I can effortlessly find the intellectual and artistic output of countries and cultures which are openly hostile to my own; I can follow Russian nationalists and Iranian mullahs on Twitter, and I can watch ISIS videos online without needing a VPN lest I risk imprisonment. Only a very insecure and consciously-insular regime would ban the output of its critics, either domestic or foreign. That the Iranian regime does so is a sign that it is not friendly to the spirit of Western-aligned cultures. (It is also, of course, openly very hostile to the political, economic, and military interests of Western-aligned nations.)
I agree with you that the Persian people have no inherently adversarial relationship with me and mine. They are one of the great historical cultures of human history, and I long to see them returned to their former glory. This would not be possible under an Islamic hard-liner regime with revolutionary and anti-Western sentiments baked into its DNA. A proud and high-IQ people deserve better than these incompetent, blustering, grubby mullahs. My problems lie almost entirely with the people on top in Iran, and not with the people who have to live under their boot.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Right, that and the fact that, as I understand it, the Iranian regime strictly bans Western music and most other Western cultural output, to the point where their people have to find bootleg version of American artists’ music. Yeah, very “friendly to Western culture.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Me: [looks at photo of Natalie Winters] “I would let her press my correspodent until my whole house is white, if you know what I mean!”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
GenX is as close to race-blind as an American generation ever got
This is only true of white Gen-Xers. A substantial share of black Americans never stopped caring deeply about race; add in the fact that Harris is the daughter of two leftist academics and her opinions become entirely typical of highly-educated black Americans of pretty much any generation since the 1960’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi)
I have to quibble with your calling Kamala Harris a Boomer. I think that rather than treating generations as having hard temporal cutoffs (“she was born in 1964, Wikipedia says that’s the final birth year of the Baby Boomer generation, checkmate!”) we should instead consider cultural affinities and, also importantly, the individual’s actual relationship to the American post-war Baby Boom. Kamala Harris’ parents were not Americans. Their happening to conceive her on American soil while in between academic positions doesn’t mean that they should be considered part of the American baby boom. Culturally as well, Harris is extremely Gen-X in her demeanor, her points of reference, and her visible youthfulness relative to the cohort you’re lumping her in with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
It increases the fear of violence level of the rest of society.
How so? If I’m not planning on participating in a protest, why would my “fear of violence” be increased by the knowledge that protestors may suffer negative consequences for protesting? Their circumstances do not appear to mirror my circumstances in any important way, so why should I draw any conclusions about what’s likely to happen to me based on what happens to them?
It devalues nearby property by increasing the crime rate.
including taking court and police time away from other crimes.
Not if the police agree to do only a cursory investigation, informed by the assumption “Eh, whatever happens to these people happens, no need to look too deeply into it.” In that scenario, no arrest would be made and no court resources would need to be expended.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I very much am in the process of investigating it. My big concern with it right now — and this may just be a result of the strenuous efforts of Freemasonry’s modern public-facing advocates to massively downplay its esoteric beliefs and emphasize its compatibility with normie Christian-inflected liberalism — is that it seems to demand a commitment to hardcore Enlightenment ideas of universal human equality and the centrality of the liberated individual. Since I think a lot of these ideas are wrong/incomplete, I’m wary of committing myself to an institution which treats them as bedrock axioms. I’m still doing my research, though.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Right, I understand that much, I just don’t understand what their existence is supposed to imply about social relations on this continent. Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal? Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally? Maybe some of these things get explored later in the series, but for right now they just seem like a weird decoration or curiosity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Audrey Hale’s “manifesto” has been released. It was never more than a rambling diary. The reason its release was delayed — which was hinted at by law enforcement at the time and has since been made explicit — is that it repeatedly refers to Hale’s personal relationship (and unrequited obsession) with a local public figure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
It could also be that his motives are non-ideological, or only tangentially mapped onto anything resembling a “Red vs. Blue” split. He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though.
I mean, “Vance Luther Boelter” is absolutely not a common name. No component of the name is remotely common; I can’t comment on the probability of this guy being wrongly accused/apprehended, but the odds of him getting mixed up with another individual with the same name are vanishingly low.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
How do you square this with the existence of moderate, Western-aligned or neutral Muslim states like Jordan, the U.A.E., Bosnia, and Indonesia?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
What country has responded to urban aerial bombings with surrender?
The Serbs during the Yugoslav wars come to mind.
As long as Israel and their western support bloc shows absolutely no love or friendship for the Persian people, they're not going to throw the Ayatollah out and replace him with western moderates, they'll replace him with a hopefully more competent Ayatollah.
Possibly, yes, although it’s far from clear to me that a more competent Ayatollah is on offer. Furthermore, I don’t interpret the U.S.’s or Israel’s enmity toward Iran as an expression of enmity toward “the Persian people”; it’s pretty obviously the Islamist revolutionary government that is the issue here. Neither Israel nor the United States have resorted to significant bombing of civilian urban infrastructure within Iran, so far as I am aware. All of the Israeli strikes I’m familiar with have been extremely targeted at Iranian regime leadership, which is in marked contrast to the more indiscriminate bombing campaigns against the Gazans by Israel, or of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I mean, is that an example of “brute force violence”? If those American hostages had been captured by, say, ISIS, we would have seen high-definition videos of them being decapitated, set on fire, etc. Instead, the Iranians released all of the hostages unharmed. The only casualties from the entire incident were caused by the American military’s own incompetence in Operation Eagle Claw. (Obviously if Kenneth Kraus had been killed instead of injured and subsequently released, the story would be different, if only slightly.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
This is the same question I have: how many sustained humiliations can a government endure and still maintain a sufficient level of popular support? Like you can only blame the perfidy of the Great Satan for so long before the buck eventually stops with you. I’m seeing that Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out. If this sort of thing happened to the American military, I have no idea how the government could continue to stand.
Is the fear of what regime collapse would mean for the country so pervasive that the Persian people will continue to tolerate the status quo? Perhaps I’m just a naïve American, wildly overestimating how much power the people of Iran have to effect a regime change even if they wanted to. Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
He started his Substack and wanted to focus on that; additionally, in general he had grown quite distant — ideologically and otherwise — from some of the other original core participants. I have some (although not a ton) of insight into more of the behind-the-scenes specifics, but out of respect for individuals’ privacy I will not share what I know.
Having some knowledge of the inner workings of the podcast, I can say that there have been half-hearted discussions of resurrecting it with a new host; @ymeskhout is definitely done with it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Obviously, text on a plain background can still work for marketing; arguably the most widely-discussed and culturally-relevant album of 2024 used precisely that aesthetic, which was then adopted by cultural heights as lofty as the Democratic candidate for U.S. President.
I don’t believe that this is what he meant by “anti-Semitism”! I believe he meant a far more quotidian antipathy towards individual Jewish people as a result of their religion or ancestry. I believe that his frequently-expressed opposition to Israel is part of his larger opposition to the reification of unchosen identity groups. If “Jewry”, as you’re using it, means “Jews cooperating and seeing each other’s fates as inherently tied together, in both past and present, on account of their shared inherited identity,” then yes, I think he pretty clearly wants that to stop.
What I think you’re either ignoring or failing to recognize, though, is that as a leftist he believes it’s important to prioritize. Leftists believe in tackling the very big problem (the centuries-long privileging of fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, which is still ongoing and still profoundly negatively impacts the latter’s lives) right now, and then later on down the line, once that’s been done, future progressives can start working on dissolving the other, less currently-powerful unchosen identity groups.
Again, why would Ignatiev waste his time writing books and giving speeches about “abolishing blackness” when he knows full well that this would simply introduce massive friction and mutual recriminations within his political coalition? Just to prove to you that he’s not a hypocrite? It’s not like you’d hate him or oppose him any less if he did so. So why should he care about appeasing your sensitivities?
One possible answer is that it makes white people feel bad and defensive when he fails to do so, and that this is bad — either because it is a priori bad to make people feel bad about their race, or because it’s politically counterproductive and unnecessarily makes enemies of a numerous and powerful group. And certainly the latter, at least, is a good reason to not to what Ignatiev is doing, even if one shares his philosophical priors. I was precisely one of those white progressives who got scared off by the explicit anti-white antipathy expressed by guys like Ignatiev, and who discovered a positive white identity as a result. (I’ve since lost some of the enthusiasm I had about that identity at the time, but it was sufficient to ensure I could never again be a leftist.)
Still, there are, demonstrably, plenty of white people who are comfortable with the proposition that whiteness could be fully deconstructed, without that having any serious negative impact on the material reality of their lives. That the hegemonic culture centering whiteness could be dismantled, and that instead of another group taking up the whip hand and using it to take their own turn as the hegemonic oppressor, everyone could just all agree to be deracinated self-inventing individuals. You and I both agree that they’re wrong about this — that there will always be a hegemonic culture in any given polity, and that such a culture will likely always have something to do with unchosen/inherited identity groups. But that’s a testable claim, and committed leftists really do believe that, in the fullness of time, they can stop that pattern from recurring. And given that belief, I think it’s fair to say that they are anti-Whiteness™️ without being anti-White People.
Their main problem is that they are, unwittingly or otherwise, politically allied to vindictive non-whites who are very consciously committed to simply changing which group(s) will be the next up to hold the whip. I see Ignatiev as more of the naïve idealist who really believes this time will be different and we can finally defeat racial identitarianism for real. You appear to see him more as the consciously-vindictive aggrieved minority who wants to be the next one to hold the whip hand. Is this an accurate characterization?
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