Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.
That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.
One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”
However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.
(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.
This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.
This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.
Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.
I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
So, this is very interesting. I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account? If he did expect people to find his account, I really have no idea what political outcome (if any) he was hoping to facilitate as a result of this attack.
On the one hand, his background as a former refugee from the Middle East makes him an incredibly unwieldy weapon for progressives to use to discredit immigration skeptics; on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing. Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.
For a long time, my dream job has been “game show host”. (Other professions near the top of the list have been “professional stage actor for a repertory theater company” and “tenured academic lecturer”.) My current side job is “local bar trivia host”, which is a small-scale version of that.
What do all these jobs have in common? Well, for one, they’re stable; you’re set up at an institution for a long-term contract, instead of having to constantly move around to chase better opportunities. You develop relationships with the other employees, and with the customers (audience members, students, contestants, etc.), such that you become a sort of local institution.
You’re also not having to constantly compete to keep your job. Obviously there’s competition to obtain one of these positions in the first place, but once you’ve got it, it’s pretty much yours for life until you decide to move on. The biggest reason I ultimately decided not to pursue professional acting, despite having both the training and talent for it, was that I realized that I would hate a life where half of my job is relentlessly auditioning for new gigs, with each audition being extremely competitive and high-pressure. I would much prefer a job where in exchange for accepting fairly low pay, I get to avoid the stress of competition and uncertainty.
These are also jobs where your charisma — your ability to cultivate a cozy and engaging social atmosphere, to present ideas creatively, and to generally be pleasant to spend time around — is the core of what you bring to the table. I would love being in academia if it meant I could just focus on being a competent lecturer, and not have to worry about constantly publishing “groundbreaking new works” within my chosen field. I don’t want to do a bunch of independent research to discover some new thing nobody’s ever discussed before. I just want to be really good at telling people interesting facts and crafting a compelling narrative presentation of information which, if they’d really wanted to, they could have found on their own.
Under an economic system in which people do not have to ruthlessly compete for scarce financial resources and job opportunities, and in which workers are under less pressure to produce quantifiable monetary value, careers like these would be more viable for more people. People could focus on being valued pillars of their local communities, instead of moving around to chase bigger paychecks. They could care more about cultivating reciprocal social bonds with those who enjoy and benefit from their work.
They will still want to constantly hone their respective crafts, both because they want to impress others, and because they find their professions intrinsically interesting, but there will not be any pressure to be “the best in the world”, nor even necessarily “the best” in one’s local context! I wouldn’t have to compete against strivers from around the world, nor would my job be outsourceable.
If AI can allow people like me — unambitious, head-in-the-clouds wordcels who primarily want to get along by being affable and verbally-loquacious — to ply our trades without having to produce economic value, then selfishly it is very appealing to me. What that would mean for the vast majority of actually-existing human beings is a different story.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Alright, out with it: Which one of you motherfuckers is J.D. Vance? It’s pretty strange to know that the future Vice President of the United States of America may have personally read my shitposts.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
When the based regime takes over, mass disbarment of probably 75% of defense attorneys needs to be a priority. They know they’re getting guilty people released and they think that’s just great. Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
Everyone I've seen, including Zelensky and myself, has seemed rather confused/upset by Fridman's very strong desire to do the interview in Russian, since the symbolic concerns seem to obviously outweigh those.
It’s not clear to me at all why these “symbolic concerns” should “obviously” outweigh the fairly straightforward practical reasons why an interview conducted in a language both participants speak fluently would be more intimate, more personable, and less stilted than one conducted via interpreters. And in this situation reinforces one of the central arguments of the Russian-sympathetic side; having Zelenskyy conduct the interview in the language he grew up speaking would inspire uncomfortable questions about why he grew up speaking Russian, despite growing up in Ukraine (supposedly a nation with deep historical pride and cultural distinctiveness), and why (as I understand it) he only felt compelled to become fluent in Ukrainian as an adult.
I don’t have a strong dog in the Ukraine-Russia fight, and I have assiduously avoided wading into previous Motte discussions of the conflict, which have shocked me with their low quality, contentiousness, and total lack of intellectual charity. I’m just pointing out how Zelenskyy’s “symbolic” posture in this interview could be fairly described as a method of maintaining the polite fiction — Ukraine has always been culturally distinguishable from Russia, Ukrainian cities don’t have any deep Russian history, Russianness has always been imposed upon Ukraine, etc. — which the larger global community has been asked to respect since the invasion began. I can understand why he’s doing it, but can you understand why it doesn’t strike neutral observers as “weird” for Fridman to want to put aside that artifice for the sake of what he hoped would be an incisive interview?
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
22d 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
7mo ago
Is it realistic to hope that this can/will open a path to the repatriation of Syrian refugees/“refugees” currently in Europe? Like presumably a great many Syrians who fled the country did so because they were either direct opponents of the Assad regime or were otherwise threatened by Assad’s rule specifically. With a rebel Sunni-led government transitioning into power, will this be seen as plausibly obviating those asylees’ original claims?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
This criticism only works if you assume that the target of it believes that “racism” is a priori a bad thing. What do you say to someone who doesn’t believe that this is the case, or who at least has a substantially different understand about what “racism” is or what specifically about it is bad?
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
6mo ago
So, let’s take black women — and my sense is that the plight of black women is the primary subtext of your comment.
I have met, interacted with, worked alongside, and befriended numerous black women over the course of my life. I think I have about as much intimate exposure to black women, black culture, etc., as any other white American who has lived in a large diverse city and attended public schools in a non-wealthy area. My perceptions of them are not informed by stereotypes and media portrayals, but by direct and repeated interpersonal contact.
I would never deny that there are attractive, feminine, intelligent, pleasant, and sexually-appealing black women. I’ve met several myself, I’ve flirted with them, I’ve even kissed a few. Like most men of any race, I prefer mixed and/or lighter-skinned black women with gracile features and smooth hair, rather than dark-skinned heavily African-looking women with heavy features and kinky/poofy hair. That’s not to say I’ve never seen or met attractive dark-skinned, non-mixed black women — I think most men would agree that, for example, Simone Biles is a very attractive woman — but they’re fewer and farther between.
That being said, it simply is verifiably true that rates of obesity are significantly higher among black women than they are among white women, and that’s to say nothing of Asian women. Average differences in temperament (whether you want to identify them as culturally-informed, or genetic, or some combination of the two) are well-documented, and so are average differences in physical build, and even more subtle things like smell. Black women smell different from white women. Their skin feels different. It’s understandable that someone whose primary romantic/sexual experience is with white women might find intimate contact with black women to be unfamiliar, slightly disconcerting, and just less familiar.
Furthermore, when it comes to the relatively small segment of black women who are genuinely hot, feminine, intelligent, and able to perform middle-class respectability, they generally seem to find themselves catapulted into high-status roles which give them the pick of the litter of nearly all high-status black men, plus some portion of high-status non-black men. Those women are highly unlikely to come into contact with lower-status white guys like me — both because they are unlikely to share the cultural hobbies which would put them into everyday casual interaction with me, and also because they’re too busy being wined and dined by wealthier men than I.
So, for the average white guy, the odds of regularly encountering the kinds of black women who may interest him are quite low, and the probability of both him and her being xenophilic enough to overcome significant cultural differences and fall for each other is even lower. It’s not primarily because they are stereotyping each other; rather, they are fairly accurately perceiving each other, and deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
the emphasis we place on individual merit is a key trait of Western Civilization.
“The West” had racial chattel slavery for centuries, which coexisted quite comfortably with a robust (far more pervasive and sincere than nowadays) Christianity. (The same “Western Civilization” very comfortably celebrated hereditary monarchy and nobility, again a slap in the face to “individual merit”.) The “West” you’re grasping at is a phantom. That it existed in the heads of so many does not make it real or coherent.
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
“Racism”, in the sense that Yglesias is using it in the OP’s linked essay, is simply the recognition that although there is a substantial variation among individuals, it is still not only possible to draw reliable probabilistic conclusions about a given individual’s likely traits based on observable characteristics (many of them immutable), but also that in the absence of detailed information about that individual, it’s often necessary (or at least valuable) to make those probabilistic assumptions. Once more fine-grained detail about the individual is available, then it becomes possible to adjust one’s assumptions. This is entirely consistent with a belief in broadly-predictable population-level averages.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.
As I’ve pointed out a million times before, it was not a good Schelling point, because it was inherently unstable. It required a massive, society-wide coordinated effort to pretend not to notice something that’s obvious. And more specifically, it required black people to participate in that coordination, and to sacrifice a huge amount psychologically as a result. This is a culture with multigenerational stories of (what they consider) grievous mistreatment that has never been made right, and which (as they see it) is directly responsible for the profound differences in achievement and prestige between themselves and other racial groups.
In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.
A plurality of blacks were willing to temporarily accept this new paradigm because they earnestly believed that, given a procedurally (if not materially) level playing field, blacks would inevitably start to move toward parity with whites. Thirty years later that absolutely has not happened, and shows no signs of even getting closer to happening. Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie. HBD-aware whites disagree with blacks about what exactly that lie was, but neither side fails to recognize that it was indeed a lie.
Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold.
Sadly, this is where Hef is directly complicit in one of the great crimes against an entire generation: the promulgation of bolt-on tits — volleyball-sized, perfectly spherical breast implants — as the beauty standard preferred by the great unwashed mass of late Boomer and Gen X men. All three of the women featured on The Girl Next Door had them, and of course Hef’s greatest victim (though he was far from her only victimizer) was Pamela Anderson, who was turned from a girl-next-door with a gorgeous face and a natural figure into a dead-eyed plastic simulacrum of a woman. I thank God every day that we are finally free from the volleyball-titty, Living Barbie Doll era of female sex symbols — the specters of Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra, and Anna Nicole Smith no longer haunting the boners of virile young Americans — and can, instead, just appreciate a tasteful set of naturals, like Hef could in the 70’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
“Racism”, in the sense that both Yglesias and yourself describe is about devaluing individual merit by in favor of an emphasis on group differences/membership.
How? How does it “devalue individual merit”? I genuinely have to wonder whether you don’t understand what I’m actually talking about, or are just unable to accurately model the mind of someone who believes as I do.
There are many observable qualities about an individual which can allow someone to make probabilistic assumptions about that person! If you see a man with a long black beard, olive-colored skin, and wearing a keffiyeh, you can pretty safely assume that the man is from the Middle East. Given that assumption, you can assume that he is most likely Arab, although there is a smaller possibility that he’s Kurdish or even Yazidi. If he is Arab, there’s a high likelihood that he’s Muslim; depending on which country or region he’s from, one can assess the probability that he’s Sunni or that he’s Shia. If he is Muslim, you can assume that he probably drinks alcohol either rarely or not at all; that he eschews pork; that he prays daily, etc.
Any of these assumptions could be wrong! He could be born and raised in the U.K., or America, or Canada, and not be from the Middle East, though he’s dressed in a manner more common in that part of the world than it is in Anglo countries. He could be a Greek or a Persian, and not one of the ethnicities I previously named. He could be irreligious, even though most Arab men are not. He could even be a Christian, or a Druze, or, as mentioned, a Yazidi. If he is Muslim, he could be Sufi, or from some other fairly small sect. He could be a non-observant Muslim who professes Islam but still drinks alcohol and doesn’t pray. He could even be a white guy in a costume, wearing a fake beard and some bronzer!
Still, though, I think you would agree that my initial assumptions about what’s most likely to be true about him are broadly accurate and representative of reality. In order to discover what’s actually true about him, I would need to personally get to know him, or somehow otherwise obtain accurate information. Without being able to do so, I may need to rely on probabilistic assumptions.
The same types of assumptions can be made about a woman (likely to be able to become pregnant, to be sexually attracted to men, to have interests more common among women than they are among men, etc.) even with the full knowledge that some not-insignificant portion of women have some other combinations of traits. You can do it with people from different parts of the world, people who dress a certain way, etc. If someone has MS13 tattoos, I would have some major concerns about hiring him to babysit my kids, unless he has a very convincing story about why he came about those tattoos by totally innocent means.
Literally all I’m saying is that race carries useful, if not perfectly dispositive, information that can be used to make similar probabilistic assumptions. The question of “individual merit” doesn’t even enter the occasion, because the entire point here is that we usually do not have very much information about the “merit” of strangers. We have to use other methods to predict their behavior. Most of the time this process is pretty low-stakes, and we can assign both low confidence and low salience to our assumptions while we wait for more fine-grained info to become available. If I have to make an important snap judgment, though, stereotypes are far more useful than simply pretending as though I have no information to go on.
Again, I think you would trivially recognize this as true when it comes to all sorts of categories of people! Old people are likely to be weaker and less energetic than young people, even though there are wacky outliers who run marathons at age 90. Fat people probably have less self-discipline than skinny people, and are probably going to be worse at basketball, if you’re picking people to be on your team. Most of these assumptions are totally non-controversial outside of the contrarian upside-down world of academia. Why, then, is race the one category from which we must totally taboo gleaning any useful information?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
It's about being near white people.
I don’t think this is true. It is about getting away from blacks, but most whites appear to have few if any qualms about moving to places like the Bay Area which have heavily Latino and Asian populations, but few blacks.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
6 paragraphs of why that's actually a good thing doesn't change the underlying argument.
Nowhere did I say anyone should “focus” on group differences. In fact I made it very explicit multiple times that when fine-grained information about an individual is available, you should use it to override the assumptions you made before you had it.
You didn’t make any effort to actually engage with the specifics of any of the examples I brought up, the distinctions I drew, etc. This is by far the most common outcome of my interactions with you. You just repeat some stock phrases and act like they’re knockdown arguments for every situation. It’s very tiresome, and I feel that you’re an especially poor ambassador for the general constellation of ideas you ostensibly advocate.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Just about everything about your life is a “waste of resources”…but human life is valuable.
No, it’s not. I contribute to the world around me in many very tangible ways, and I’m certain that everyone in my life would readily agree. I barely even interface with the healthcare system, I have never taken one cent of welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. I just don’t know which resources you believe I’m wasting.
If you have a heart attack and need an ambulance to take you to the hospital, isn’t it a waste of diesel, and an inconvenience to everybody having to wait for the ambulance to go through lights?
The reason I’m on the ambulance is so they can take me someplace where I can get better. The health condition I’m suffering is, hopefully, temporary. This is fundamentally different from an infant with anencephaly or cyclopia or some such condition. That child will never ever recover from this; their body has failed to develop in a way that is necessary for life. There is no chance whatsoever - barring medical technological advances that we can’t even currently imagine - that such a child will live long enough to even make it out of that operating room. Such a child is often in significant pain - it lacks lungs, so it can no longer breathe once removed from the womb, etc.
If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs. These children are set up to die; whether they die on the operating table, or they die a few hours later in an incubator, there is nothing we can do to keep it from dying very soon after birth. I don’t think you’re really grappling with the question of what it even means to say that such a life “matters.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
I’ll consolidate my replies to @SecureSignals, @Walterodim, and @Belisarius, since they’re all making similar points.
Firstly, I agree that this guy should not have been allowed to live in Germany. Now, to be clear, he came as an asylum seeker in 2006, nearly a decade before Merkel’s Mistake; at the time, Arab migration to Germany was, as I understand it, quite minimal (it was Turks who were by far the largest source of Middle Eastern immigration at the time) and it’s significantly more understandable that he would have been let in. There was no large insular Arab community in Germany into which he could have ensconced himself to obviate the need to assimilate. He was fluent in English, and had clear and explicit anti-Islam sentiments. He seems basically like an Ayaan Hirsi Ali type, and given how live a threat Islamist terror seemed at that time, I think it was understandable to expect this guy to act as a potentially impactful voice steering young Arab men away from Islamist radicalization. (And, to be clear, it’s entirely plausible that he did have some impact, substantial or not, of that nature at the time.) Given what we know now in hindsight, not only about him personally but about the larger effects of Arab immigration to Europe, it’s clear that the stance toward asylum seekers should have been far more exclusionary than it was at the time.
However, I want to make sure that opposition to Arab immigration is based on specific, articulable, predictive claims. I oppose large-scale Arab immigration because of the specific qualities that I expect most Arabs (and, especially, most Arabs choosing to emigrate to Europe) to possess, and because of the specific actions they are likely to take and the motivations behind those actions. Let’s look at what specific problems/pathologies I expect to accompany large-scale Arab immigration, and analyze the extent to which this guy embodied those pathologies:
I expect Arabs to create culturally-insular ethnic enclaves, in which they are able to continue to replicate the cultural practices of their homeland rather than assimilating. Well, this guy was fluent in English, and had already marked himself as not only culturally-distinct from the vast majority of Arabs, but actively in opposition to them. It is true that he brought baggage and cultural grievances with him from his homeland; however, those grievances toward Arab Muslims are pretty much exactly the same grievances that liberal Westerners had about Arab Muslims at the time. “They’re culturally backward, they mistreat women, their culture is anti-Western, and anti-science, they’re susceptible to radical jihadist beliefs.” All of those grievances are true and valid! This is the Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali line about Arab Muslims. They’re not the sort of arcane inter-ethnic blood feuds and tribal jockeying we normally associate with foreign ethnic groups immigrating and co-mingling in places like the U.K. and Canada.
I expect a large percentage of Arab immigrants to be uneducated, unskilled, to spend a long time (potentially their entire lives) unemployed and on welfare. Well, this guy was a doctor — okay fine, a psychiatrist, so barely a doctor, but at least it’s a well-paying job that kept him gainfully employed and interacting economically with the German public. He certainly doesn’t pattern-match to the average Arab in Germany; as @Walterodim points out, he’s more like the average educated Indian in Canada.
I expect large numbers of Arab men to fall into lives of crime, both petty and organized. Well, again, this guy does not appear to have any criminal record. He hasn’t fallen in with Arab gangs, he hasn’t become some listless glowering thug milling about the town square acting like a savage.
I expect some small number of Arab men to commit serious acts of terrorism, motivated by jihadist beliefs and by a hatred of their host societies. This is where we have to carefully discern what happened here. In pretty much all of the other terror attacks committed by Arabs in Europe, the ideological motivations were clearly religious and specifically Islamist in character. The Bataclan attackers, the guys driving their trucks into markets, the guys cutting priests’ heads off — they all make their Islamist beliefs very explicit. That’s not why this guy appears to have done what he did.
So, why did he? If we want to talk about ideology, his views are difficult to pattern-match to other large ideological trends. On the one hand, he was very consistent about Germany’s need to resist Islamization. In that sense, he aligns very strongly with the AfD and other right-wing nationalist groups. However, he also wanted more immigration of a very specific class of Arab Middle Easterners: ex-Muslim/anti-Islam refugees, and particularly educated women. In that sense he’s not only similar to the more moderate right (what wignats derisively call “the kosher right) but also to some of the more eclectic right-wingers who say the West should let in plenty of attractive female refugees, while cutting off all or nearly all male immigration. And of course his stated commitment to progressive values such as feminism and economic leftism puts him almost more in line with the sort of leftist terrorism Germany faced in the 70’s. (Although that terrorism had a strong pro-Palestinian valence, whereas this guy was a Zionist.) But in this case his choice of targets doesn’t really seem to align with any expected ideological movements. This was no act of right-wing nationalist terrorism — he’s no Anders Breivik or Brenton Tarrant — because his victims were (at least presumably) white Germans. He really did seem to resent Germany and to want to strike a blow against it on behalf of his in-group, but his in-group isn’t Arabs as a whole, it isn’t Muslims, and it isn’t even Saudis. It appears to just be “ex-Muslim apostates (especially women) fleeing the Middle East.” I was joking yesterday, “Is this the first Reddit Atheist terror attack?” Yes, he’s a brown Arab, but in terms of his worldview he’s got more in common with murdered Dutch anti-Muslim filmmaker Theo Van Gogh than with the Muslims who killed him.
So, in what ways is this guy’s terror attack similar to previous acts of Arab terrorism? What patterns does it match? Certainly in terms of its specific methodology it’s similar to other terror attacks we’ve seen in Europe, both with the use of a car driving through a Christmas market, and with the (thankfully unused) explosive device. But in terms of its motivations I think it’s sufficiently different from previous acts of terrorism that it’s not really instructive. While obviously there are genetically-influenced psychological differences between population groups, and Arabs are a population group with heritable traits, I don’t think anyone’s found any evidence for a “terrorism gene” among that population. If Arabs tend to be more violent than Europeans, it’s because they tend to be lower-IQ and to live in low-trust backward societies wherein violence is an effective and sanctioned way to obtain power and resources. It’s not because some voice in the back of their head, whispering to them like the Orc god Gruumsh, instructs them to drive their cars into crowds.
I saw some DR commentator (probably Captive Dreamer) say, “If that’s the model migrant, imagine how much worse the rest are.” This is probably effective propaganda, but it doesn’t seem very intellectually substantive. This guy’s pathologies, and the reasons he shouldn’t have been in Europe, were of a markedly different character from those of the true dregs of the Arab world which have been washing up on the shores of Europe. The “model migrants” in, say, Canada are problematic largely because they use their political power to facilitate bringing in more of their countrymen. In that narrow sense, this guy’s story is certainly instructive. It is true that his #1 loyalty was to his in-group, which did not include most white Germans, and that in the end he was willing to commit savage violence against his host country in order to (in some twisted, confused, politically aimless way) earn concessions for people like himself.
There are, though, two distinct sets of concerns when it comes to the immigration discussion - one is about the dangers presented by the importation of educated foreigners who will use political and cultural power to advocate for increased immigration, and who will dilute the political and cultural power of the native population. Whatever you want to say about these types of people, likelihood of committing terror attacks has simply never been a plausible vector of attack against them. This is, so far as I can tell, the first high-profile attack of this kind committed by a guy with this background and these specific beliefs, and I don’t think we’ll see many more examples in the future.
The other half of the immigration discussion is about low-skilled, unassimilable, criminally-inclined young, susceptible-to-jihadist-radicalization men and their welfare-dependent spouses. While this has largely been the story of Arab immigration to Europe (particularly post-2015) it is not this guy’s story. Whatever he is, he’s not an example of that. He did assimilate to an ideology with a lot of Western adherents; he was just willing to do what few of those Westerners would have done as a result of that ideology. (And I want people to be careful in their speculations about why he was willing to do so.)
People like Keith Woods would like to essentially merge these conversations and say that it’s all the same conversation: All foreigners in Europe are bad, none of them belong there, even the supposed best of them bring problems, they’ll never be assimilable, they’ll always work against us. And what I’m saying is that I don’t think this is credible. There are foreigners in Europe — for example, East Asian immigrants — who have not, so far as I can tell, created any problems for their host societies. If Germany let in 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants tomorrow, my prediction is that those immigrants would flourish, as they have in America. It’s not simply “being foreign” that makes Arab immigrants a bad fit for European society; it’s their specific traits, the specific beliefs they have, their lower IQ and lower impulse control, their hatred for Western norms, their parasitic dependency on the largesse of the welfare state, and the difficulty in integrating them into society. This guy’s problems don’t really map onto any of those concerns, except in a roundabout and strained way.
One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22d 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
2mo ago
What reason can you divine for the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? If God does indeed work in mysterious ways, this one has to be the most mysterious of them all. Unlike many calamities which can be said to have a proximate cause rooted in human activity, this one was pure Nature’s Wrath. The only part any person played in it was having had the misfortune to live in, or even to have visited, the vicinity. Nearly 230,000 people dead in the course of a single day. Many of them Christians, no doubt, whose prayers appear not to have availed them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?
Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
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