Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
By the way, this is one of Trump’s plays I actually support. Canada should be annexed by the US. The completion of Manifest Destiny would be an extraordinary achievement, and any Anglo-Canadian identity that stood out from American identity has, as our dear friend Kulak has chronicled, vanished almost entirely. There is nothing left; might as well join the US.
I find it amusing that you and I both agree that the United States should do something extravagantly impressive and historically novel, but we disagree so strongly on the particulars of what that thing should be. I understand your fondness for empire and for your desire to be a citizen of an imperial core.
However, I think there’s an important dissimilarity between the British Empire of old and what you’re proposing for the American Global Empire: namely, that the British Empire was bringing the genteel Anglo-European culture to places which were genuinely backward and benighted, and whose populace and their posterity stood to gain immeasurably from being annexed by the British.
When you lament America losing its grip on Europe, though, or you long for the American annexation of Canada, you’re talking about the conquest and vassalization of civilizations which are, at worst, at the same level of civilizational development as America. I understand that America is richer than the U.K. and Canada, and perhaps you think that alone is evidence enough of American superiority that it justifies geopolitical domination of those countries. In terms of American cultural output, I don’t think what America is putting out into the world is generally impressive or indicative of a culture that the rest of the world ought to want to emulate or be absorbed into. Even leaving aside our repellently boorish president — a man about whose personal qualities you and I seem to be in resounding agreement — the culture we’re exporting to the world right now is, largely, vulgar and soulless trash: Marvel movies, The Fast & The Furious, race-swapped remakes of blockbusters from the 80’s, and hip-hop culture. These are not the artifacts of a civilization which deserves to rule the world and lord over other white first-worlders.
Like, I’m not some blanket Europhile who thinks all things European are sophisticated and all things American are crude. But it’s tough to see Donald Trump of all people talking down to valuable allies who are ailing — due in part, yes, to the fecklessness of their leaders, a state of affairs which can be reversed, and without Trump’s interference. If anything he’s making it much less likely that these countries will want to be more culturally and politically integrated with America. He’s highlighting differences and exacerbating the instinctive resistance to vassalization which the people of these countries still feel viscerally. I don’t want America to be like imperious Britain imposing the Raj on the benighted Indians; I want countries to be lining up to voluntarily integrate into it, because the example it sets is so undeniably great and impressive that they can’t fail to recognize the better deal that awaits them in America’s embrace. Trump’s shambolic bullying and lowbrow populism are the last things I would expect the leader of such a country to lead with in its outreaches to the rest of the world. If America does eventually annex Canada it will be a welcome reconciliation — perhaps by an American president married to a Canadian woman and with deep cultural ties to both countries, highlighting our nations’ shared past and shared future. It won’t be by idiot Donald Trump braying incoherently about fentanyl.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
It’s unfortunate because I don’t think most of the content they’re posting is even particularly inflammatory. Sure, it’s ideologically unpleasant for the majority of commenters here, but there’s nothing inherently inflammatory about anti-Trump content. I thought that many of the posters in questions brought up very salient and valuable points, and that a strongly and well-argued anti-Trump perspective is sorely lacking in this community. It’s a real pity that so many of the individuals who come here to post such content appear to either have ulterior motives, or to otherwise be unwilling to stick it out and defend their positions in a persistent manner.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Yes, but would those corporations all actually coordinate in suppressing all anti-war or anti-conscription content? Im not sure that they would. I suppose in theory it depends on the war. If the U.S. declared war on Iran, for example, in order to protect Israel, I cannot imagine platforms like Reddit and TikTok all getting into lockstep and suppressing all content skeptical of the legitimacy of that war. These platforms are currently full of content hostile to Israel and to American adventurism in the Middle East; it would represent a very abrupt 180-degree turn if they suddenly started censoring such content.
Now, your original claim was about the likelihood that the British government could get young men to comply with a draft to fight Russia. You probably have a much stronger argument in favor of that narrow and specific claim; the extent to which media platforms have been able to gin up jingoistic hatred of Russia has been very eye-opening to me, and it didn’t even require lockstep, heavy-handed, coordinated suppression of contrary viewpoints. Do you believe that these same platforms could just as easily inculcate the same level of jingoism and bellicosity toward another non-Russia country such as China, though?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Consent can be manufactured. With AI, gaming, ultra-addictive short form video, convincing zoomer Brits of all races to die in a war against Russia will be a breeze. 19 year old boys aren’t making reasoned judgments about the demographic future of England, for good or ill. As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.
It’s unclear to me whether this is true or not. The popular perception in America about the Vietnam War is that there was a very significant movement among young men to resist conscription, whether through open defiance (burning draft cards, etc.), fleeing the country, or the pursuit of various educational and/or medical exemptions. There was also, famously, a significant issue of fragging of officers, which would strongly suggest a considerable anti-war or anti-conscription sentiment within certain parts of the military.
That being said, only a third of the military personnel during the war were conscripted — the other two-thirds were volunteers. (This is pretty much the mirror image of WW2, in which approximately two-thirds of American men who served were drafted and only one-third volunteered.) So, clearly the instruments of social control and propaganda available to the American government were strong enough at the time to drum up significant interest in military service. There’s probably a very substantial portion of the young male population of nearly any country who are very easy to convince to go to war.
However, it seems like the question here is: how effective would a 21st-century first-world regime be at convincing the recalcitrant portion of the male population to willingly comply with conscription? By definition, the men who are conscripted are the ones who were not enthusiastic enough to volunteer.
In Vietnam, despite all of the huge cultural concerns at the time about the draft, in the end only about 12% of the men who didn’t enlist ended up being drafted; the number in WW2 seems to be closer to 27%. Yet the level of resistance to the draft among eligible men seems to have been considerably higher in the Vietnam era, even as the actual likelihood of getting called up for service was considerably lower. (Maybe there was actually a massive effort to resist conscription during WW2 and I’m just not aware of it; I’m aware of the significant anti-draft movement during WW1 and of the Wilson administration’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress and persecute it, but I’m not aware of anything similar during WW2.)
So then the question is: are the tools available to first-world governments today more effective or less effective than the tools available to the American government in the 1960’s and 70’s? Naïvely I would expect they are less effective; in the Vietnam era, media was still far more centralized and there was no internet to be censored. Do you believe that the brainwashing capacity of the internet is stronger than its ability to provide access to anti-war content? That essentially the whole of the internet could be mobilized in favor of social control and propaganda by regimes attempting to conscript men who would otherwise be ambivalent or hostile to military service?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
So, a substantial part of the Indian population has the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is a European lineage almost certainly introduced to India by the Aryan steppe invasion which conquered the existing Dravidian culture in the north of the subcontinent and introduced Indo-Aryan language and culture.
However, there is a gradient of R ancestry which is stronger in the north and much more rare in the south of the continent, where more South Asian Y-haplogroups such as L and H are far more prevalent. And of course once you look at mitochondrial ancestry, which comes from female ancestors, you see far more Asia- and India-specific lineage, such as the M haplogroup. This is consistent with the story of male conquerors intermingling with local women of Dravidian ancestry in the north and spreading their DNA in areas where they had political and cultural control. Over time their ancestry has been diluted substantially by intermarriage with people of ancient pre-Aryan Indian ancestry — people related to the Austronesian peoples of Southeastern Asia.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him.
You know there are many millions of men in the world who are significantly smaller and weaker than the upper end of the male height and strength distribution, right? Like I’m pretty sure at least 30% of adult men have encountered at least a handful of other men who are unambiguously larger and more powerful; personally, I experience this regularly, and there are plenty of guys who are even shorter and weaker than I am.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Yes, obviously many great musicians have been drug addicts. The frontman of my favorite band, a man whose music has brought much joy to my life, is a former heroin addict. I don’t know if he ever OD’d to the point of needing Narcan, but if he did, I’m glad they saved him!
However, such individuals represent only a very small percentage of total hard drug addicts. More importantly, they are important enough to a large amount of people — and are paid accordingly — such that they have a support system and financial cushion. In other words, if they OD and the police and EMTs show up to save them, they can pay for the Narcan themselves out-of-pocket, or else have someone else pay on their behalf. If they want to pursue a personal habit which is not only expensive but also extremely dangerous, they better have some money saved away for just such an occasion. I’m sure Jimmy Page and Kurt Cobain could have afforded it.
They can pay for it on credit, of course, and if the expense is too onerous, they can appeal to their fans to crowd-fund the payment of the subsequent debt. If the fans aren’t willing to bankroll it, I guess that particular musician was not generating enough fan enthusiasm to be worth saving. And if they can’t pay the debt, they go to debtors’ prison, which we also need to reintroduce.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I think it’s probably good to help create a minimum effort threshold for suicide; things like putting railings on bridges and nets on high buildings make it so that individuals struck by an acute but fleeting suicidal urge are protected from doing something they’d almost immediately regret.
The people accessing medically-assisted suicide, or using other high-effort methods of suicide requiring persistent and focused intent, are probably people who genuinely are better off dead. Not every human life is destined to last until a peaceful death in old age. Not every person is psychologically constituted in a way that’s resilient to all of the various tribulations that life throws at us. I probably wouldn’t personally pull the trigger or inject the deadly solution myself if one of those people asked me, but I’m fine with professionals existing who are willing and able to do so.
As for hard drug addicts, my impression is that only a small percentage of junkies are the sorts of people who’d be very valuable contributors to society if we managed to fix their addictions. Drugs are not taking our best, in other words. I’m aware that there are some unknown number of totally normal middle-class individuals who got hooked on opiates because they were led astray by unscrupulous doctors overprescribing them; my impression is that this represents only a very small percentage of addicts, and that their numbers are being inflated by a populist coalition determined to treat impoverished white Americans as hypoagentic victims.
Junkies killing themselves, whether through overdoses or other means, is overwhelmingly a boon to society, and I think almost zero effort should be taken to prevent them from doing so.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Huh? Literally some of her biggest hits are not breakup songs. “You Belong With Me”. “Mine”. “Love Story”. “Shake It Off”. “Delicate”. “Wildest Dreams”. “End Game”. “Lavender Haze”. “Fearless”. “Anti-Hero”. All of these are either very sincere love songs, or about something other than relationships entirely.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
No, she literally has a ton of songs that are not about break-ups, not about disappointment or angst about a former partner, etc. This idea that all of her songs are breakup songs is nothing but a meme, assisted by the fact that she’s, well, had a lot of breakups in her personal life. It’s not hard to look up her lyrics, though, and a large chunk of them are actually something close to the polar opposite of what you’re suggesting.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Taylor Swift is neither Jewish nor a Zoomer, but you're correct: every single one of her songs is about exactly this.
This is not even a remotely accurate characterization of her lyrical content.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves. (I’m happy to provide multiple examples if people insist on it.) The tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that these songs are being written by (((Them))) as intentional propaganda warfare to stoke division and mistrust between the sexes. Assuming that’s mostly or entirely untrue, though, it does reveal a very concerning element of young people’s consciousness.
And to be clear, I don’t think this began with Zoomers, although I think it’s gotten worse under them. Personally, I have a ton of neuroses about sex that I picked up as a result of being exposed to all of the (frankly, quite vindictive) complaints about men’s sexual performance by Millennial female comedians and cultural commentators. It makes it very hard to simply lose oneself in the moment sexually if one constantly has a voice in the back of the head saying, “What if she’s actually hating this right now? And she’s going to tell her friends or social media followers how bad it was later?” I don’t know how Zoomer men are supposed to function if this cultural norm is exacerbated further.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
That’s wild because it’s not even a good song.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Was the song used in some sort of video game or extremely online meme? I think I’m at least in the 95th percentile for this site’s user base in terms of knowledge of popular music, and I was not familiar with this song, despite having been a big fan of MGMT’s debut album Oracular Spectacular when it came out. I’d be surprised if this is the sort of ubiquitously-recognizable song you’re saying it is.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I believe the user you’re responding to is saying that the 2020’s are, in some important sense, a “Little Dark Age”, which is why that song would be an apropos soundtrack.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
In some ways it really is the perfect European music. It's trans-national. Much like the disconnected global elite, it is not from a place. It is from anyplace. It is generic, bland, almost always in English, etc... Swedish, Dutch, Irish, who cares? It's all the same.
Based. The greatest European music has always been transnational. Classical music was very intentionally cosmopolitan, and even the more nationalist composers were still working within a template that was extremely recognizably Pan-European. Even when it came to opera, which requires the use of a specific language and thus presents some thorny questions of national specificity, composers would set their operas in languages other than their native tongues.
The development of a shared culture transcending borders is an extremely positive development in European history, and I’m happy to see it recapitulated in European pop music. It’s not true that these musicians could be “from anywhere”; I don’t see them taking much influence from Southeast Asian music, or Amerindian folk music, or anything like that. Their music is clearly descended from a European tradition.
Today? There is some small commercial stuff.
To be clear, are you claiming that there are no massively-commercially-successful musical artists today? Thats just demonstrably and profoundly false.
As for your claims about how musicians in the 2020s don’t have the power to mold young people’s entire brains and ethos the way the big 60’s and 70’s acts did, that’s partially a result of those acts’ legacies being inflated retroactively by the use of their music in media created by the very Boomers who grew up listening to them. Yeah, we associate Creedence Clearwater Revival and Buffalo Springfield with the Vietnam War now because Boomer liberal filmmakers intentionally cultivated that association.
There’s nothing going on in America today which unites a cross-section of the young people in opposition to the government quite the way that the Vietnam War did. We haven’t had military conscription in this country in two generations. Whatever you want to say about all the bad things the government is doing, none of them are as viscerally threatening as forcibly shipping you across the world to get shot at. If the next Big War pops off in the 2020’s — and it’s not exactly looking unlikely that it will — and it results in a reintroduction of the draft, it’s going to forge a shared culture among young people that’s only nebulous today. It’s amusing to imagine films (or whatever the next step in media content will be) about World War III, with montages of mass drone strikes set to the music of Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, and for those to be the retroactive associations future generations perceive when they think about our time period.
In the meantime, the soundtrack of the 2020s is not difficult to identify if you just look at what artists are selling the most albums, having their music streamed the most often on Spotify and other similar services, whose concert tours are the most successful, who appear the most on TV, etc. Taylor Swift still dominates, plus the aforementioned Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Doja Cat, BTS, Chappell Roan… and that’s not even getting into the resurgence of country music as mass culture, with Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time being the longest-running #1 album of the decade so far.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I think you’re right but European dance music has little cultural relevancy.
All of the artists I named have major followings, and perform at festivals that attract tens of thousands of attendees. David Guetta has sold over 10 million albums and 65 millions singles globally, and has over 30 billion streams on Spotify. These artists’ music is played ubiquitously on the radio, and again, they collaborate with some of the most famous singers in the world.
Yes, you’re correct that nobody cares what Armin Van Buuren has to say about philosophy or geopolitics or whatever. This is a good thing! It’s actually a terrible thing for our culture that young people started taking the political opinions of drug-addicted twentysomething musicians seriously! Disco kicks ass! Hedonistic pop music is infinitely preferable to supposedly “deep and counter-cultural” music by midwit pseudo-intellectuals like Bob Dylan seeking to poison relationships between the generations.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Did you intend this as a top-level post? Or was it supposed to be a reply to @Rosencrantz2’s post about the state of EU-USA relations?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I think this is a delusional take, and that major music artists are still an extremely important part of the cultural zeitgeist. I don’t know what it would take to convince you otherwise.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Right, as soon as I posted my comment I thought, “I forgot to mention the metal scene!” Obviously metal has dramatically declined from a commercial standpoint, but artistically it’s still going strong and Europe is at the forefront of it. (Particularly in genres I love, like symphonic power metal, gothic metal, etc. I presume the black metal scene is still chugging along, although I haven’t personally been paying attention to it for a long time now.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Culturally EU is dead. In the past there were at least some italian spaghetti westerns, some interesting French movies and music. This is now completely overwhelmed by USA. There is basically nothing produced in EU, the culture is thoroughly US based.
I will point out that Europe is still a major force in music. Particularly in the realm of electronic dance music; DJs and producers like David Guetta (French), Martin Garrix (Dutch), Armin Van Buuren (Dutch), R3HAB (Dutch of Moroccan ancestry), Alesso (Swedish), Tiësto (Dutch), Sebastian Ingrosso (Swedish), Ofenbach (French), the recently disbanded Daft Punk (French) and the late Avicii (Swedish) have all been massive figures in dance-pop music for decades, including composing and producing mega-hits with famous artists from America, the UK, Australia, etc.
Yes, this is not a cultural achievement on the level of the great European orchestral music tradition, nor even of the intellectually-stimulating European high cinema of the 20th century, but I think it’s at least as respectable as Spaghetti Westerns, and certainly considerably more popular and lucrative.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
I'm not going to discuss murder methods in depth on an open forum that has a bunch of murderous lunatics on it.
You’re talking about The Motte here? I would assign extremely high confidence to the assumption that not a single poster here has ever murdered anybody. (I know we have some military veterans, and it’s possible that one or more of them have contributed either directly or indirectly to the deaths of other human beings, but that’s not the same thing as “murder”, nor in any case would you posting about effective ways to surreptitiously kill a specific individual in a non-military context be likely to have any value for those specific posters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
No doubt! And to be clear, FedSoc is generally speaking a pretty WASPY milieu. I’m not claiming that Sassoon’s Judaism or ancestry played any part, positive or negative, in her role in this ongoing scandal. I just mean that clearly there are important and influential members of FedSoc who are not WASPs, and that one of them is heavily involved in the story under discussion.
I’m sorry, but you are a deeply unserious person. Ukraine was widely recognized as a highly corrupt country (as was Russia) by neutral international observers for a very long time before this war began. It is simply verifiably the case that government in Ukraine, from the federal level on down, features a ton of shady money changing hands, graft, oligarchic patronage, etc. You would easily identify these features as “corrupt” in the Russian context; why are you so willing to excuse or overlook them in a Ukrainian context? It’s completely possible — trivially easy, even — to acknowledge that Ukrainian government was (and still is) corrupt and ineffectual, without thinking Russia is any better or that it gives Russia a legitimate mandate to invade.
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