Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
Odd to bring that up when the specific attorney in question, Danielle Sassoon, is very obviously Jewish. (The Sassoon family is a very wealthy and influential Jewish banking clan of Baghdadi origin.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
So, this dovetails nicely with one of my pet theories, which is that people who are progressive — and if you weren’t aware, I am someone who was very firmly in that category for a long time — just genuinely live in a bubble wherein the sexes are less dimorphic.
Like, I am a short (5’7”ish) and not particularly strong man. My personality traits tend toward the feminine along a number of vectors. It was very easy for me to believe that men and women are not all that different on average, because I’m personally not that different from the average woman, at least not one of comparable intelligence and cultural background. And from an early age in school, I surrounded myself socially with people who are fairly similar to me. The guys I hung out with were mostly pretty nerdy and not especially masculine or alpha. And the girls whom I actually got to know reasonably well, because they were in the same advanced-placement classes and nerdy extracurricular that I was, were not extremely different psychologically from me.
So, when I started being exposed to all this data about the very large aggregate differences between men and women — not merely physical, but also in terms of personality — it was difficult to square that with my anecdotal experience. Because I had been ensconced within a filter bubble bringing together males and females within a relatively limited band of personality traits and interests! And this is true to some extent even today!
Sometimes I’ll be talking to my male friends who are significantly more masculine-brained than I am, and who spend a lot more time among significantly more feminine-minded women than I do, and they’ll make some claim about how inscrutable women are and how they act a certain way. And it’s tough for me to really participate because that has not been all that true of most of the women with whom I’ve had close personal relationships! However, that is more a reflection of the subset of women I spend time with than it is a reflection of what the unfiltered global population is actually like.
Like if I went to a chess club right now and talked to both the men and the (comparatively very few) women, I’m sure I could pick out some aggregate personality differences, but they would mostly be pretty similar along a number of axes. I’d expect pretty autistic- or autistic-adjacent personalities, systematizing styles of intelligence, etc. However, this wouldn’t actually help me draw accurate generalizations about the populace, because the vast majority of women would have zero interest in being part of a chess club! And look, to be clear, neither would the vast majority of men, although the reasons why the average man would find chess boring likely differ substantially from the reasons why the average woman would find chess boring.
Ultimately my move toward internalizing the significance of population-level differences, and actually changing my ideological outlook as a result of coming to grips with what those differences mean, required me to accept that while the lessons of that data still leave plenty of room for both outliers and considerable overlap, in order to develop workable theories for how all of humanity should operate, we need to be able to nail down a reliable understanding of probabilities. Learning that women are on average less likely to be geniuses than men — and that, for example, people of African ancestry are far less likely to be geniuses than people of Eurasian ancestry — helps me make better sense of real-world population outcomes. It doesn’t keep me from being able to appreciate the outliers I personally know, and it still requires me to think hard about how to apply that understanding to my own life, as someone who is also one of those outliers.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
So, your contention because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable conclusions about populations averages?
You would immediately recognize this as specious reasoning if applied to height. Suppose I said, “I once met a woman who was seven feet tall! That’s taller than I am! Therefore, we can’t say that men are taller than women.” You would understand that I’m failing to engage with what statistics and population averages mean. If I lined up a hundred men and a hundred women, I might end up with a handful of women who are taller than the average height of the men. The vast majority will not be, and I think you understand that. The existence of some overlap in the distributions due to outliers does not at all invalidate our ability to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
Suppose you and I are at a bar, and I offer to make a bet with you: The next time a straight couple walks through the bar, which of them will be taller, the man or the woman? If you predict it correctly, I’ll give you $50, and if you predict incorrectly, you give me $50. Now, maybe you’d hesitate to take the bet, suspecting that I’ve rigged it in some way. (Maybe I have my friends, Short Shawn and Tall Tracy, standing by to enter once I give them the signal.) But assuming no foul play, you’d have to be very misguided to predict that the woman will be taller than the man. Population averages are what they are, and we have very reliable measurement data to demonstrate it.
My contention is that personality traits work this way as well, to at least some extent. If you ask me to predict whether the child of two people with a Ph.D is also very intelligent, as measured by an IQ test, the SAT, etc., the very easy money is on “Yes.” If you ask me whether I guess that your friend who gets in fistfights all the time is male or female, obviously I’m going to guess male, because that’s a personality trait infinitely more common among men than it is among women.
And if you asked me to predict whether your friend who is a theoretical physicist is male or female, I’m similarly going to guess male, because that too is an extremely heavily male profession, due to (among other factors) aggregate personality differences between men and women.
Telling me that you’re funnier than your dad gives me almost zero useful information about how funny men are on average. Sure, humor is subjective, but only to some extent: there is actually a measurable end result, which is “did I make somebody laugh”. If I had ten randomly-selected men and ten randomly-selected women enter a room and try to make each other laugh, my prediction is that the men would have significant more success than the women in achieving this goal. This is based not only on my own anecdotal experience, which is only marginally useful, but also in more reliable population-level data.
For example, British researchers Gil Greengross and Paul Silvia aggregated 28 studies on sex differences in humor, and found that 63% of men are funnier than the average woman. Now, this obviously does not mean that no women are funny! Nobody on earth has ever claimed this! Nor has anybody ever claimed that every man is funny! But, just like height, there is a bimodal distribution here, with men clustered on one end and women on the other.
Visual-spatial intelligence is also unequally-distributed between men and women. The number of men who are very good at mental math and at mentally rotating shapes is significantly higher than the number of women. This does not mean that no women are great at these things! I’m a man, and my spatial reasoning is certainly a relative weakness of mine; I have no doubt that there are many thousands of women better at it than I am! This does not in any way invalidate populations-level aggregate data.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
I have no idea what their grip strength is but I'd hazard 50/50 have more strength than mine.
This is statistically extremely unlikely. On average, men have roughly twice the grip strength of women. Do you have some reason to believe that all of the men in your life are so far below the male median in grip strength that only 50% of them have higher grip strength than you do?
because I don't think the physical differences between the sexes has anything to do with a person's ability to be funny, or intelligent, or the myriad of other aspects of a personality.
The problem here is that you’re not engaging at all with any of the relevant knowledge we have about how genetics and heredity affect personality. The brain is a physical organ, same as any of the others in your body. Of course it is more operationally- and computationally-complex than your gallbladder; that does not make it exempt from being a product of physical processes mediated by the output of your genes. You apparently acknowledge that there are fundamental genetic processes which cause men to grow penises and produce motile gametes, and you appear also to acknowledge that the same basic genetic processes lead men to achieve significantly higher height on average than women do.
Why, then, do you refuse to acknowledge that these processes also act upon the physical architecture of the brain? You seem to have adopted as an article of faith the proposition that individual humans have 100% agency to develop each and every aspect of their personalities, shorn of any probability distributions produced by heritable traits. A pure tabula rasa view of human potential. But where is your evidence for this view?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Ehhhh this seems pretty dubious. Firstly because type-B hemophilia has been known to occur as a spontaneous mutation in the children of older fathers. Victoria’s presumptive father, the Duke of Kent, was 51 at the time of her conception. She’s also a spitting image of him, and of his father George III. Among plausible proposed alternatives for her paternity, such as John Conroy, I’m not aware that we have any record of hemophilia in their ancestry.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Are most, if not all, of the individuals you just brought up taller than you are? Do they have greater grip strength than you do? Assuming the answer is yes, do you believe it invalidates their agency? Do you think tall people just simply work harder at stretching their bones than shorter people do, and therefore the difference in height is a matter of agency?
Similarly, do you think it dehumanizes me to suggest that no matter how much effort and resources I dedicate to improving my appearance, I will never be as physically-attractive as Henry Cavill? That he simply has better baseline genetic potential than I do? Do you think that makes me less human than he is?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes.
How is this the same as “not seeing women as people”? You’ve focused on three specific vectors along which men have an innate advantage on women; men are, on average, better at making women laugh than women are at making men laugh. When we’re talking about intelligence differences between the sexes, it’s not a simple as “men are more intelligent than women”; rather, men are more represented at both tails of the intelligence distribution. There are more highly-intelligent men than there are highly-intelligent women, which is what you seem to care a lot about; however, there are also far more very stupid men than there are very stupid women.
I could easily focus on vectors along which women outperform men. Women are more conscientious, more kind and empathetic, and better equipped to navigate egalitarian and heavily procedural social-professional environments. (And given evolutions in the culture and structure of the modern workplace, this is one reason why women are beginning to economically outpace men in most strata of the white-collar world.) It would be absurd to accuse me of “not thinking men are people” because I have acknowledged women as superior in these specific ways.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Obviously I’m aware of the work the Gates Foundation is doing in this arena, and I applaud it. What I mean is simply that if the Gayes foundation did exactly the same work, but instead of presenting it as a fulfillment of liberal principles of female empowerment they presented it as a work of paternalistic technocratic imposition on a less-developed society for the protection/betterment of a higher civilization, that work would be utterly rejected by both the African populace and the donors. That the Gates Foundation, as far as I’m aware, does sincerely believe in the aforementioned liberal principles is simply the cherry on top.
To be clear, I do absolutely think it’s true that most African women who are currently having six or seven children would prefer to have less than that. (I had a previous post about declining fertility in advanced countries, in which I said that most women simply do not instinctively desire large families, and given the option to have a small number of children, the revealed preference of the average woman is to do so.)
Lowering African fertility is indeed a boon to those women, and to the countries in which they live, which do not have the economic infrastructure to provide gainful and productive employment to their current masses of young people. To the extent that African countries can be made less unstable and less likely to export tens of millions of unemployed and restless young black men to First World countries, the efforts of the Gates Foundation, and of USAID insofar as their efforts have been similar, are a net good for humanity.
However, my hope is that behind the curtain, at the upper echelon of organizations like the Gates Foundation and USAID, there is also a covert understanding of additional eugenic principles and that their work can be targeted, under the guise of charity, to take specific interest in improving the genetic stock of the relevant countries; to not only produce less Africans but also, in the long run, better Africans. Africans who are better equipped to be peer-level participants in the global order as their countries are further integrated into a global political infrastructure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
We still do it with Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius), Livy (Titus Livius), and Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus).
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure.
Presumably I’m one of the posters you have in mind here. For the record, I do think that researching birth control methods (experimental or otherwise) in Africa is a very worthwhile expenditure.
Now, should that expenditure come from USAID specifically? I’m less sure about that. I can see a good argument for it, which is basically: Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons. Not only would many Africans themselves understandably perceive this as a colonialist affront, but a great many westerners would also be made very uncomfortable by this and would not want their tax dollars employed in such a way. Therefore, laundering this mission through an ostensible charity organization creates the veneer (and, in fairness, also in some sense the reality) of both benevolence on our part and voluntariness on the part of the Africans.
Now, this attitude is directly at odds with the ethos of transparency and legibility which is motivating DOGE’s cuts to things like USAID. They don’t want the government doing things that look like one thing but are actually a totally different thing. They don’t want to continue to countenance the surreptitious laundering of funds for misrepresented ends. This is a respectable motivation, but I do wonder whether it is necessarily at odds with the important work that advanced nations need to be urgently performing in order to find every way imaginable to drive down third world fertility.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
There is an inherent, intrinsic spiritual bond between Yahweh and the Jews. This is so incredibly undeniable.
And yet you yourself actually seem to deny it. You answered one of Rafa’s other comments about your own spirituality by saying you believe religion is merely social technology. If this is the case — if there is no actual divine entity who has real and revealed demands and preferences — then it what sense can it be true that Jews have an inherent, spiritual bond with Yahweh? (Or with any other nonexistent deity?) At best you can say that pious Jews sincerely believe that they have an inherent spiritual bond with Yahweh, even though in actuality that Yahweh is merely an ancient literary device.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Trace even confirmed that he was clued into it by Sailer.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Is there any reason at all to believe that Elez’s personal antipathy toward Indians (to the extent that such antipathy is real and embodied, rather than simply a performative internet shitpost) will have any measurable impact on the budget-slashing decisions he contributes to in his role at DOGE? These things are just meaningless online comments. What reason do you have to believe they have any correlation with the quality of his judgment in a professional capacity?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
and "pathy," as a suffix, generally means disease
So, what it actually means is “suffering”, or even just “feeling” or “experience” more generally. The usage in telepathy is analogous to the usage in empathy or sympathy, more so than it is to uses in the names of afflictions.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Short for Racial Holy War. Coined, as far as I’m aware, by Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church Of The Creator, and a prominent member of the early White Power movement.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
US politics HBD tends to get lumped in with race-essentialism as a subset of collectivist/identity politics, which is in turn closely associated with the US Left, and the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in particular.
This is extremely typical of your output. You use vague passive-voice terms such as “tends to get lumped in with” and “closely associated with” in order to avoid having to explicitly delineate why one thing is, on a granular practical and analytical level, similar to the other. Literally zero of the people I know who enthusiastically promulgate HBD research are progressive. Not one.
The logical implications of HBD (both on a group level and an individual level) are simply not compatible with American-style progressive ideological commitments. Progressivism doesn’t mean “collectivism” or “identity politics”. Those things are, at best, orthogonal to progressivism. They have no inherent connection to the Democratic Party. “Atomized American-style meritocratic liberty-maximizing liberal democracy” is not the default human ideology against which all other ideologies should be measured. You are noticing that two wholly different ideologies differ from yours in the same way, and declaring them the same thing based on that.
In your mind, the only thing that matters in defining an ideology is “how distant is it from mine on the specific axis of ‘focus on population groups instead of individuals.’” But there are a great many other axes of ideological measurement that we can care about!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
It's only really been multi-ethnic since 1964.
Again, you’re playing pretend. Even if you want to discount blacks and Indians and the Irish (who became a massive and politically-enfranchised population long before 1964) you still have to explain the millions of (basically non-assimilated) Germans and Scandinavians who filled the American Midwest as the country expanded westward. You also have to explain the masses of Eastern Europeans who started coming here eighty years before Hart-Celler, and who were assimilated only with great effort and friction.
Look, man, I’m the direct descendant of Mayflower stock. My ancestors, the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Protestant (I have one Irish great-grandparent, although I’ve so far been unable to discern whether she was Protestant or Catholic) have lived in this country for centuries. I would like it to be true that America has been a mono-ethnic Anglo-Protestant project from the beginning, and I fully agree with you that the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin conclusively illustrate that they wanted that to be the trajectory of the country.
However, they realized very early on that this was not going to be a viable path to populating a continent. The native fertility of the founding stock simply was not sufficient to produce the sheer numbers of laboring adults to achieve the settlement of the western half of the country, and within a couple of generations the Anglo stock accepted this and started letting in masses of Europeans, and the ones in the South imported so many slaves they were outnumbered. Sure, efforts were taken to maintain the political disenfranchisement of those elements of the population, but those were transitory as well. Tammany Hall was already powerful as early as the 1850’s. The Freedmen’s Bureau secured significant political power for blacks in the 1870’s. The founding stock of this country simply has not been in sole control of its political and cultural trajectory for over 150 years, as much as I would like it to be otherwise.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
The key difference is that unlike the Indians — who lived in geographically-distinct territory and with whom colonists were in near-constant explicit military conflict and treaty negotiations — the Africans and indentured Irish lived side-by-side with Americans, interacting daily with them and participating in cultural exchange. (This is especially true of free blacks, who were a non-negligible part of the population of northern states from pretty early on. I don’t think it’s a situation remotely comparable to the Indians.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Enslaved Africans (and indentured servants from, among other places, Ireland) have been here since before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, and only about a decade after the establishment of Jamestown. Even if you exclude the Amerindians (which, fair enough, so do I) it’s simply a fact that a substantial portion of non-Anglo-Saxon people have always been a sizable part of the populace of this country, even if they were not integrated into the political fabric of society.
The less-conspiratorial explanations I’ve seen make some sense, at least as far as why Luka was traded, although they do very little to explain the specific circumstances of the trade, the way it was executed, etc.
Someone brought up some recent comments by Harrison that “defense wins championships”; Luka is a notorious turnstile on defense, and I could understand Harrison being frustrated by Luka’s lack of improvement on that end despite Mavs staff presumably making it a point of emphasis. Luka’s conditioning is also poor and it’s possible that this recent injury was a wake-up call to the organization that his long-term health trajectory is discouraging and will make his impending supermax contract a difficult pill to swallow. As much as I love Luka, I could see someone convincing me that in six years he’ll either be out of the league or a shell of himself physically. Besides the alcohol thing someone else brought up, there’s also been a lot of speculation that he, in true Slav fashion (consider the intriguing NBA what-if Milos Teodosić), smokes a lot of cigarettes and has failed to stop doing so despite the imprecations of the team.
Of course, none of this, even if true, would justify the clandestine, rushed execution of the trade. I think most sports conspiracy theories — even the ones I want to be true, like the one about the refs helping the Chiefs — are bullshit; however, this trade is so inexplicable it has me at least intrigued by the possibility. I’ve been out on the NBA for years now, for reasons which are also nicely illustrated by this trade: there just aren’t any superstar players left who will spend their entire career playing for one team. Curry, Jokić, and Giannis are the only ones I can think of at this point (EDIT: for some reason I thought Booker had been traded, so add him to the list, and I guess if you consider Trae Young a star you can add him as well) and frankly I think the writing is on the wall for Giannis to leave the Bucks too at some point in the not-too-distant future. The Mavs had the most likable star in the league — a borderline-schlubby white guy, who gives the visual impression that some random Slovenian everyman was granted basketball superpowers by a genie — in his prime and they still traded him away. If I had a hometown team I could be invested in no matter who wears the jersey, it’d be one thing, but since I don’t, it makes it very hard to stay invested in a particular team when the roster turnover makes it so that I can’t develop a sustained parasocial relationship with any particular individuals on that team.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
"A specific and as yet unexplained transformation into a jaguar involves a male child with jaguar ears and a jaguar tail"
The citizens of Duval County have managed to uncover the secrets of this dark and ancient ritual.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.
Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.
Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.
However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.
(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
Israel was just founded in a bad place.
This has been my stance on Israel for the entire time I’ve been politically aware. I almost wish there had been some sort of Ashkenazi European equivalent of Joseph Smith, who could have come up with some compelling theological innovation to get some number of Jews to reconceptualize Eastern Europe as the actual (or, at least, divinely ordained) site of the Promised Land.
There’s a tinfoil hat theory on the counter-semitic hard right about Khazaria, the supposed medieval Jewish nation which existed somewhere in modern Ukraine; the conspiracy theory is that (((they))) engineered the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to depopulate that part of Ukraine in order to make it a viable alternative homeland should Israel fall. Maybe the hypothetical Jewish Joseph Smith could have built something around a mythical vision of Khazaria.
It will be no great new beginning, but it will also be no final end, and its decline (destruction or not) will represent the end of the age of Ashkenazi Jewish overcontribution to modernity that began with the Haskalah.
I’m not sure about this. Now, my stance toward Jews is that, in the fullness of time, I would like them to lose their distinctive identity — built on a sense of separateness and specialness — and to become absorbed into a conglomerated elite world culture. For Jews to just become one of the constituent ancestries of the new dominant world ethnicity which is only just beginning to be forged. This will require the end of Israel as a sovereign entity, but I don’t think it will mean a decline in the overperformance of individuals with Ashkenazi ancestry. (If anything, it will help spread Ashkenazi ancestry even wider, albeit in an admittedly diluted form.)
In five hundred years, I can imagine the esoteric right-wing androids will promulgate knowledge of haplogroups, treating Ashkenazi ancestry as a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek badge of honor, the way right-wingers crow about their R1b ancestry nowadays.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5mo ago
If the guy was flying planes into buildings, or planting IEDs, it would make some sense. But he took a knife and started stabbing, most people can do that without so much as consulting a wikihow article.
My understanding is that he had planned to commit a much larger and more sophisticated act of terror; I believe the manual he’s consulted involved the production of sarin gas. The fact that he ended up committing such a rudimentary and small-scale attack instead supports the argument that he was mostly just a nutcase who snapped and acted impulsively.
(It could also support an argument that he was genuinely ideologically motivated, but that after reading the manual he realized that committing a sophisticated attack would be prohibitively difficult, expensive, or likely to be pre-emptively discovered by police. Or that he realized he simply didn’t have the smarts nor the wherewithal for it.)
Sure, plenty of Sassoons probably aren’t Jewish anymore, but Danielle Sassoon certainly is. She credits studying the Talmud as helpful preparation for law school. Her grandmother fled persecution of Jews in Syria. She’s also married to an “Adam Katz”, an investment analyst, so it’s not as if she’s marrying out of Judaism herself.
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