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Hoffmeister25

American Bukelismo Enthusiast

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joined 2022 September 05 22:21:49 UTC

				

User ID: 732

Hoffmeister25

American Bukelismo Enthusiast

8 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 22:21:49 UTC

					

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User ID: 732

One thing people haven’t brought up is the fact that the modern internet allows nude scenes to be stripped from their original context, slowed/brightened/zoomed-in, and widely distributed/collected for easy access.

In the 70s and 80s, a respectable actress could do an artistically-justified nude scene for some artsy, small-distribution film, and if people wanted to see that scene they would have to find a way to view or purchase that movie, and at least watch the whole movie up to that point. Now, if I want to see that scene, all I have to do is wait for some guy to get his hands on a digital copy, then post the scene to Reddit or to any of dozens of other places. A ten-second scene can be shared everywhere, with AI-upscaling and the ability to pause and rewind to make sure I see every detail as many times as I want to see it.

And that means also that that actress’ friends, family members, dentist, accountant, second-grade teachers, and everyone else can see it. And jerk off to it.

All while not only the actress makes no money whatsoever off of it, but the studio who’s paying her also makes nothing off of it either. There’s no upside anymore for anyone involved, unless the actress in question is just an exhibitionist and likes getting naked where people can see it. Certainly this does describe certain people who get into showbiz! However, most of the women with that personality type, combined with the kind of good looks required to make a living off of it, are probably better off just leaning into OnlyFans or a career as an influencer or something like that, since movie studios are no longer willing to pay them big bucks to get naked.

At the time he posted this comment, there had been no other posts in this thread, despite it having been up for several hours. I believe the joke is that the mods’ idea of “perfect moderation” is “no posts allowed at all.”

Either you yourself are Travis LeBlanc, or you have simply lifted substantial portions of this essay without crediting the author.

Right, I just wanted to have that formally documented for the mods to see. @cjet79 and others, if you were reconsidering the permaban, hopefully this might be useful.

@HlynkaCG why don’t you pony up and answer his question? It’s been ten hours since this question was posed to you, and you haven’t replied, despite answering other, less incisive, questions more recently.

You constantly claim that “nobody ever answer your questions” (despite having received countless high-quality answers of the years, all of which you forget immediately after reading them) so your lack of a rejoinder to this (presumably very easy for you to answer) question is pretty conspicuous.

But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them.

The very obvious explanation is that neither men nor most women actually enjoy watching a woman act like a man. An action movie featuring a thin woman punching, shooting, or otherwise overpowering men is not only wildly unrealistic, but also just aesthetically revolting on a primal level. Women are not actually strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badasses. The number of women who have ever lived who could truthfully be described in this way could probably all fit inside an average-sized parking lot. The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.

Now, it’s unclear if you’re identifying this phenomenon as “explicit misogyny”. The director could be fully correct that audiences reacted poorly to this show on account of its female leads, but also totally wrong that this is “sexist” or “misogynistic”. Men and women are different. The overwhelming majority of both men and women are aware of this. They strongly prefer media which accurately depicts men as men and women as women, and in which men and women embody the virtues typical of their respective sexes. I wouldn’t want to watch a film about a male nurse or caregiver; the only three films I can think of off the top of my head which feature males employed in those professions are Meet The Parents (including its sequels), Mr. Mom, and The Pacifier - all of which are comedies which treat this situation as inherently and hilarious incongruous and weird.

Whether we’re talking about action movies or romcoms - the two most broadly popular film genres of our age - the overwhelming default is men acting like men and women acting like women. To the extent that True Detective challenges this dynamic by treating two women as hypercompetent, dogged, logically-minded badasses, it’s doomed to fail. I haven’t seen any episodes of any season of the show, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s the case, but if it is then perhaps instead of blaming misogyny the director and the writers should blame themselves for making media that people didn’t ask for and didn’t want to watch.

The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception at this time.

Buddy, this is the same stuff I’ve heard about “what it is to be an American” my entire life. It’s as fake and subversive here as it is in France. If a country has no genetic/ancestral continuity with its founding population, it is a completely new and fundamentally different entity. Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.

I’m not saying that France should not allow anyone to live here who is not 100% ancestrally French. (And I’m well aware of the complicated nature of what “ancestrally French” means.) But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name. This, of course, means that few if any Arab individuals living in your country are currently French; perhaps they will become French if they truly and sincerely want to be - or at least their children will - but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more effort than what’s being undertaken right now.

France will endure even if the ethnic French do not

This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?

My first thought was, “Surely Salt Lake City…” I looked it up, and SLC’s current mayor is a leftist female activist with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. What a nightmare. (To be clear, it does appear that part of her appeal was her promise to deal effectively with homelessness, and when I visited SLC about a year and a half ago the homelessness problem was not very bad from what I can tell, so I guess there’s that.)

My understanding is that Japan had a highly polarizing culture war in the 1950s, with street violence and riots, in which right-wing nationalist parties and organizations duked it out with communists, Weimar-style. This of course boiled over into the assassination of socialist political candidate Inejirō Asanuma by a hardcore ultra-nationalist on live television.

While I think there’s something real that you’re pointing to - and though I’ve never been to Japan (although that will change this year!) my naïve outsider’s impression jibes with what you’re saying. Knowing that Japan was roiled by bitter ideological civil conflict so recently, though, is enough to make me deeply skeptical of the claim that its current cultural/political harmony is the result of some deep primordial aspect of Eastern communitarianism, as opposed to Western individualism/idealism. (See also: the entire history of China.)

In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.

This is an incredibly risible claim. In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party used her social media platform to raise money for bail for the protestors. Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization, is inextricably enmeshed with the funding apparatus of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century - something infinitely more “extreme” and widely unpopular than anything you can credibly accuse Republican “extremists” of supporting.

The responses by various commenters here reveal severe contradictions at the heart of “the case for Trump”. I think that this profoundly confused tweet by Martyr Made is illustrative.

People underestimate (or are not in a position to understand) how powerful it is for people to see Trump being attacked by the same people who have been maligning them in media and politics for years. Critics can say that that Trump is not a true enemy of the Establishment since he did x, y, or z, but it’s obvious to Trump supporters that the same powerful people who hate them also hate Trump, and that they hate Trump for taking their side.

I remember one middle-aged woman somewhere in Ohio being asked why she supported Trump. Was it his immigration policy, trade policy, what was it? She said: “Because he sticks up for us.”

It’s like the cool kids - the varsity QB, the homecoming queen, etc - sitting in the front of the class, forever bullying and mocking the “losers” in the back of class, who don’t play sports or cheerlead because their families are poor and they have to work after school. One day, one of the offensive linemen from the football team picks up and moves to the back of the class and starts giving it back to the cool kids. All the cool kids attack him, but he doesn’t care, he’s from their world and knows they’re nothing special, and anyway, they can’t threaten him because he’s too big, so he just keeps giving it back to him on the losers’ behalf. That guy would be a folk hero to the kids in the back, no matter how much of an obnoxious, vulgar buffoon he might be.

The kids in the front of the class - i.e. a pretty blonde woman who glides through life with door after door inexplicably opening before her - will never get it. They will always assume evil or irrational motives behind the linemen’s move, and they’ll imagine that the kids in back only support him out of jealousy and resentment toward the cool kids.

In this framing, Trump is the champion of the weird, socially-unpopular kids - the ones shut out of bourgeois normal society. The jocks and the pretty girls snub and bully them, but by banding together in a coalition with disaffected members of the social elite who have become awoken to their plight, they can launch a liberatory strike against the privileged upper crust who have historically marginalized them.

This is textbook leftism! This is literally the ur-narrative of the cultural and political left. It’s also the opposite of reality. Blonde jocks and rich cheerleaders are one of the core voting constituencies for Donald Trump! The weird alienated kids who got bullied in school, meanwhile, are a core Democrat constituency! One bloc of Trump voters are now apparently attempting to re-brand themselves, or re-contextualize themselves, as oppressed victims - the marginalized Other.

However, this is blatantly at odds with the original core appeal of Trump, which is that he was a champion of normal, well-adjusted, classic and confident America, here to take the country back from the freaks and faggots and pencil-necks who have essentially usurped control through subterfuge and used that power to resentfully force their unpopular obsessions on the mass of normal popular people.

And of course, it is manifestly risible for Trump voters to claim to hate bullying. Whatever else you want to say about the Trump phenomenon in 2016, it clearly involved a substantial amount of bullying, derision, and even rough-housing/violence at some of the rallies. (I’m not absolving the Clinton campaign, which of course also involved a different type of bullying and derision.) Trump supporters have also ruthlessly mocked and derided “DeSantoids”, using classic nerd-bashing behavior; see Scott Greer’s (admittedly amusing) unflattering impression of DeSantis’ nasal voice and spergy affect.

Trump voters have no leg to stand on if they wish to wear the mask of the oppressed and marginalized. That sort of maudlin victimhood-signaling has never been what conservativism or right-wing values are about. If anything, Trump voters should be proud to be the jocks and cheerleaders rightly excluding the maladjusted weirdos; playing this “no, you’re not the underdog, I’m the underdog” game is just totally conceding the left’s frame.

If anything, Trump voters most closely resemble the oppositional culture cultivated by blacks. When they are a minority or are relatively disempowered, they cry victim and throw out accusations of cheating and unfair privilege. When they are a local majority or gain any sort of power, though, they ruthlessly bully whites and Asians; they also bully those within their own ranks who “act white” by refusing to wallow in victimhood and who aspire to earn a spot in the majority culture via self-betterment and the adoption of bourgeois values. Blacks as a cultural-political constituency would rather destroy the mainstream American establishment - supposedly for excluding and “othering” them - than try to prove worthy of being embraced by that establishment. And when they don’t get what they feel they’re owed, they riot.

I say this all as someone who voted for Trump in 2020 and who will vote for him again this November, assuming he’s the GOP nominee. I just hate liars and cope. The people in power in Washington DC and in the media and academia are certainly not Chads and Stacys. They were not jocks and cheerleaders. They see themselves as champions of the marginalized and disempowered, the same way that [the Trump who exists only the minds of his ardent supporters] does. Oppositional populism is a great way to drum up votes and guilt your way into power, but it’s also the sign of a catastrophically unwell society. Give me a candidate who is proud to represent normal, productive, intelligent people, and maybe then I’ll start getting excited. That’s what Ron DeSantis was supposed to be, and Trump supporters called him a fraud and a sellout for not going to bat hard enough for J6 rioters or agreeing that the 2020 election was stolen.

Our country is fucked.

IMHO she's easily the most attractive prominent Hollywood actress right now.

This is a dispatch from an alternate reality. The multiverse is leaking and those of us in our reality are staring at conclusive proof of the exist of other timelines where up is down, backwards is forwards, and Zendaya is gorgeous.

The far better strategy by DR types would be to try to unwillingly recruit Swift and Kelce. The old “Aryan Princess” meme. Make them an icon of your side, and you make them problematic.

There is still a fair bit of that on the right; “Taylor Swift marrying Travis Kelce will save the white race” memes are going strong, although you and Hanania are correct that they’re currently being outcompeted on the DR by the edgier contrarian takes. I myself have half-joked that if Swift and Kelce get married and have at least a couple of beautiful, tall, talented white children, it could serve as a genuinely impactful cultural signal to other white Millennial women. If anyone could make having blue-eyed excellent babies cool again - and prove that such a thing is actually still possible even for women in their 30s like Swift - it’s those two.

However, Swift and Kelce themselves have certainly gone out of their way to make themselves poor vessels for right-wing hopes. Kelce acts black, in a very low-brow way, and my understanding is that Swift is the first white woman he has publicly dated; before that he was the center of a reality show where a bunch of ratchet (mostly black) women competed for his attention. The carping about his appearance in an ad campaign for the Pfizer Covid vaccine is cringeworthy and represents the DR at its most pointlessly oppositional and conspiratorial; that being said, it does suggest that Kelce might be willing and eager to act as a mouthpiece for whatever culturally-approved shibboleths he feels like he needs to parrot. He is apolitical in a way that makes him useful to forces larger than himself, and he appears to have no deeply-held principles which would countervail against attempts to leverage his cultural influence for political ill.

Swift, meanwhile, expresses political views that are totally typical and standard-issue for white women of her age and social class. This doesn’t reflect particularly poorly on her, so much as it just reflects poorly on women in general and of the ever-widening ideological gulf between men and women. I have no contrarian stance toward Swift; she’s a gorgeous, extremely talented woman, with considerable intelligence and impressive levels of personal agency, and she has a pleasant and dorky (and very very white) personality which I find very endearing. She’s a shameless theater kid; she appeared in the ill-fated Cats film, with zero concern for whatever damage it could have done to her career, even going as far as to co-write a new song for it with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, all because she had always loved the musical and wanted to dance around in a catsuit. (And say whatever you will about that film, but as far as that specific scene is concerned… furries, I kinda get it now.)

She is, though, also a serial monogamist who has slept with an order of magnitude more men than even the average slutty urban Millennial woman ever will. The extent to which this reflects poorly on her character is debatable. Perhaps her odd and sheltered upbringing doomed her to be susceptible to the entertainment industry’s temptations in a way that she wouldn’t have been if she’d had a more normal teenage years. From a conservative perspective, it’s undeniable that this makes her at best an imperfect role model for girls. Much of Swift’s lyrical content is still quite wholesome and aspirational toward conservative ideals of fidelity and young love, but it’s impossible not to notice the contrast between those sentiments and the way she’s actually lived her life.

However, a Swift-Kelce marriage - and especially some beautiful blue-eyed Swift-Kelce babies - could still be a momentous cultural whitepill for normal white people. Kelce’s black-centric cultural interests and Swift’s endless string of disreputable boyfriends are not heritable traits; their children, brought up with a stable wealthy upbringing and able to learn from the youthful mistakes of their parents, could unironically be ubermensch paragons of American bourgeois excellence. I’m rooting for the Swift-Kelce romance (although there’s still time for her to change her mind and decide that she’d rather go for the type of guy who leaves fawning racially-aware comments about her on rationalist-adjacent internet message boards) and I think Taylor can still be our Aryan Princess whether she wants to be or not.

You continually vacillate about your justification, though. Sometimes you actually come out and admit that you want Europe flooded by poor third world immigrants as a punishment, because you blame them (rightly or wrongly) for the plight of the third world, or because of more petty personal vendettas. (They expect you to drink at social functions and this makes you uncomfortable, don’t they know you’re better than them, etc.) I do wish you’d at least stick with that, instead of occasionally lapsing into pretending that this is somehow for our own good, or that somehow we’ll come out of this total societal collapse with a better and more sustainable set of moral principles.

You’re forgetting other obvious factors such as leaping - something which involves fast-twitch muscles - and wingspan, which is an incredibly important physical trait in the NBA. Blacks have significantly different bodily proportions than whites; their arms are proportionally significantly longer, as are their legs. Hand size as well. The bodily proportions particular to blacks are especially well-suited to basketball.

Did you and I listen to the same sports media in 2020? The sports media is absolutely still populated by a class of chattering scolds who are determined to bend sports leagues to their will by relentlessly manipulating narratives. This includes commentators who are employed by the NFL itself! I was there in 2020 when Steve Wyche and Patrick Claybon went on the Around The NFL podcast (an official NFL-owned media product) to literally drum up political and financial support for Democrat candidates.

I listened to these same commentators - Wyche, Claybon, Gregg Rosenthal, Mina Kimes, Cynthia Frelund - *refuse to say the name of one of the NFL’s teams (the Redskins) out loud for about a year, in a blatantly obvious attempt to force the league to force the owner to change the name.

Every time I listen to an NFL podcast I have to hear Cynthia Frelund read a long and lecturing ad about how the NFL is sponsoring programs to get more women involved in men’s sports.

I could bring up myriad examples of the same behavior by NBA commentators, NHL commentators, etc. (I finally stopped listening to the No Dunks guys - AKA The Starters, AKA The Basketball Jones - because they also had a whole episode where they fawning interviewed a Democrat political operative urging people to vote for Raphael Warnock. There was not a single piece of basketball commentary during the entire episode.) It’s just fundamentally not true that liberals have stopped hectoring people about politics just because they’ve had so many successes already; I’m sure I’m going to hear yet another offseason of incessant carping about why Eric Bienemy hasn’t gotten a head coaching job, and hmmmmm isn’t it interesting how so many other white retreads are getting offers but not him, our league still has so far to go, etc. Conservatives may be indulging their own cranks momentarily, but the left still absolutely owns the “can’t shut up and let people enjoy things” label.

The most prominent white nationalist publication, American Renaissance, routinely discusses the average Asian IQ advantage over whites’. Other than the occasional contrarian crank like Neema Parvini (who is not a white nationalist, and who, as his name suggests, would not be invited into most white nationalists’ ideal state) few if any of even the most hardcore racialists dispute the data about Asian or Jewish IQ.

Yes, I understand that French people at this time generally believe that. I simply believe they’re wrong and that their naïvety about this issue is creating a ticking time-bomb.

My experience was extremely similar. When I got my wisdom teeth removed, they gave me a massive bottle of vicodin. Dozens of doses, apparently intended to be taken daily for months. I took two doses: one several hours after the surgery once the initial anesthesia wore off, and then another two days after the surgery when the pain became very acute. The rest of the pills in that bottle went untouched.

It occurred to me how easy it would have been, and how profitable, to sell the rest of the pills. Although I’ve never used the “Dark Web”, nor do I have any familiarity with the sorts of websites or venues people use to buy and sell drugs, I can’t imagine it would have been difficult to figure out. And, sadly, there is at least one member of my family who would have taken them off my hands if I’d offered. I also did not want to throw them away in my dumpster, for fear of attracting a swarm of local homeless. I ended up returning the bottle of pills to the surgery center, over their objections, and told them to figure out what to do with it.

On the one hand, this could be read as a story about how easy it is for people to inadvertently become addicted to opioids; I went in for a minor surgery, was given a huge bottle of pain pills by a trusted medical professional, and told to use them to my heart’s content. I was fortunate in that I did not end up experiencing very much significant recurring pain as a result of my surgery, and therefore was not seriously tempted to use more than what was absolutely necessary. If my surgery had produced significant recurring pain, who’s to say that I would have had the fortitude and self-control to resist burning through that whole bottle of pills?

On the other hand, even if I had done so, I could not plausibly have claimed that it was inadvertent, or that I didn’t understand the risks. Every thinking adult with even a cursory understanding of current events is aware of the gravity of opioid addiction. Now, if there had been something laced into those pills without my knowledge - if I’d thought I was taking immunosuppressants and it turned out they had fentanyl in them - this would obviously be beyond my control. My sense is that people who talk a lot about the “opioid crisis” tend to imply that this type of situation - people taking opioids without realizing it, and becoming addicted - is very common. My naïve sense is that probably the much more common scenario is more similar to my experience, wherein people are given massively unnecessary and inflated doses of pain medication by doctors, and fail to exercise proper self-control over how much of that medication to use.

You seem to be under the impression that you’ve identified some previously-unexamined hypocrisy or blind spot within the DR, when actually this is a conversation topic that is discussed constantly and with great acrimony on both sides by different factions within the HBD-accepting right wing.

On the one side you have the populists. These people engage with HBD primarily as a defensive tool; if white people are being slandered as “privileged” and “systemically racist” because there are X number of white successful people and X> number of nonwhite successful people, being able to deploy scientifically-supported arguments to counter those accusations is invaluable. “No, these disparities are not because white people are doing anything wrong. They are a result of immutable realities which will not be ameliorated by your proposed corrective/redistributive measures. Therefore, it is illegitimate to discriminate against white people, to attack our civic institutions, to clamor for our replacement, etc.”

I think it might be fair to call these guys “soft HBD advocates” or “population-level HBD advocates”. It is not that they, as a rule, reject any intra-racial hierarchy of intelligence/competence. Most of them are happy to talk about “normies” and to discuss what rhetorical/political strategies are likely to appeal to the vast majority of people who are not members of the cognitive elite. However, they believe that the correct attitude for the white cognitive elite is essentially a form of noblesse oblige or paternal care. A 140-IQ white person should love and care for the white working class, and advocate for their interests, because they are basically family. Much as you wouldn’t abandon your family members and join a new family because the new family is smarter and better-looking and has a nicer house, you shouldn’t abandon your less-cognitively-gifted people to curry favor with a rootless cosmopolitan multinational elite. Consequently, these people also tend to be ethnic nationalists/particularists. “I love the Polish nation not because it has the smartest or most athletically gifted or most scientifically-accomplished people on earth, but rather because it is mine. This land is the home of my forefathers, whose blood courses through my veins.” A Polish nationalist would rather all of the doctors and engineers and politicians in Poland be ethnic/native Poles, even if that means Poland isn’t getting the tippy-top cream-of-the-crop most awesome candidates in the world; otherwise, what’s the point of having a Poland at all, as anything other than an economic zone?

On the other side of this debate, you have the “hard HBD advocates” or “elitists”. (The populists would use the derogatory term “IQ supremacists” or “IQ nationalists”.) These are guys like Hanania and Crémieux. For them, they really have internalized HBD - not only on an interracial level, but at the level of hereditary variation producing hierarchies of human individuals at any level of population granularity imaginable - as the key to understanding humanity. To these people, at the extremes, the way to maximize human flourishing is to unlock the full potential of the world’s elite human capital and basically let them remake the world in their own image. In practice, this means flattening and annihilating any and all regional particularities and communal attachments, such that a rootless high-IQ elite individual can set up shop anywhere and have maximum flexibility without needing to fear the interference of the ignorant and envious commoners who also happen to occupy that same location. Lest it sound like I’m being uncharitable, in this recent piece by Richard Hanania he says the quiet part at nearly deafening volume and makes this vision painfully explicit.

Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans. Society disproportionately benefits from the scientific and artistic genius of a select few. An important goal of government and public policy is to channel their energies in productive directions and leave them free to pursue their missions. As confirmed by modern behavioral genetics, heredity is the dominant force behind human variation. Egalitarian ideology and concerns over what is called “social justice” are primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority. While all rational beings must be utilitarians to some degree, everyone has non-utilitarian commitments. The best ones put an emphasis on beauty, freedom, and progress, rather than pleasing supernatural beings, fealty to some “natural” order, the glorification of imagined communities like nations, or equality of outcomes.

In addition to the standard arguments for porous borders, ethnic diversity can be seen as another factor introducing instability and division into society, which make people less likely to unify around shared goals.

Accepting liberal institutions is part of a general recognition that it’s too much to ask for people to have the right ideas, whether you put your faith in the masses or a technocratic elite. The best results have generally come from government being limited, and leaving a wide space for individual choice. Rather than reflecting the will of the people or any such nonsense, democracy is chaos, and chaos is the midwife of progress.

In this piece Hanania literally argues that the ideal society is one in which the common people - and by extension their elected officials - are so polarized and distracted by culture-war trivialities and general anomie that they are unable to coalesce around any shared goals or self-protective measures, allowing high-IQ cosmopolitan elites to essentially act unimpeded and not have to pretend to be responsive to the pig-headed superstitions and irrational communal attachments of the cattle-souled commoners. (Really makes you think…)

Personally, I, like most reasonable people, believe that there’s a middle path between these two extremes. I do agree that populism is doomed to fail because it demands that intelligent people cultivate an ultimately synthetic and unsustainable level of compassion and indulgence toward the great mass of people who are, by and large, not fully worthy of it. However, the hardcore elitists also fail because their ghoulish disregard for the basic non-chosen irrational attachments which make life worth living for the vast majority of human beings requires them to adopt a callousness and a siege mentality which puts them eternally at war against a population which massively outnumbers them and who could become awakened to that fact at any time. From the DR’s current acrimonious polarization is likely to emerge a healthier, more balanced synthesis that finds a way to help rootless cosmopolitans rediscover a natural and unforced love for the people over whom they rule, while also demanding in return that those people improve themselves and thereby make themselves worthy of love. (This will probably involve genetic engineering alongside a massive culling of the most dysgenic and unworthy elements of the population, both locally and on a global level.)

Actually no, average IQs among underclass/working-class Irish immigrants were substantially lower than WASP IQs - to say nothing of the rampant problems with predisposition to alcoholism prevalent among the Irish at the time - and these problems were substantially more pronounced among Southern Italian and especially Sicilian immigrants. The idea that the Irish and the Italians were every bit as capable and hard-working and freedom-loving as the native WASPs is a total fiction, only possible to believe given the intervening centuries during which the long and painful process of assimilating those populations into American society took place. The fact that many Irish and Italians intermarried into WASP families, thus reducing the genetic distinctiveness of those populations over time, does not mean that the populations were not originally genetically distinct, nor that they did not originally have significant hereditary differences which contributed to differential life outcomes between those groups.

We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style.

We’ve had a number of pro-car vs. anti-car arguments here on the Motte, in which both sides have made well-argued and not at all annoying arguments. I’m on the anti-car side in the sense that I personally hate driving and would strongly prefer to live in a place where owning and operating a motor vehicle is not only unnecessary but actually discouraged. Many others here are similarly disposed toward urbanism and against cars, and are far more adept at making practical/technical arguments in favor of that position than I am. The main topics of discussion in such arguments always seem to circle back to 1. Is it feasible/desirable to convert cities built for cars into cities built for walking/transit, and 2. Is a car-free lifestyle feasible for people who have multiple children. People on both sides muster the best arguments at their disposal, and few of the participants resort to cheap emotional argumentation or goalpost-shifting.

I think that perhaps you just personally find one side of that argument annoying for idiosyncratic reasons, and have convinced yourself that it’s impossible for people who disagree with you on the issue to do so for non-annoying reasons. I won’t gainsay any personal experiences you’ve had when discussing the issue in other spaces, but I can assure you that here at the Motte we are in fact perfectly capable of conducting ourselves in a dignified and intellectually-honest matter as it regards cars, and have demonstrated this capability multiple times since I’ve been here.

It can't be demonstrably untrue, because whether the country is fucked or not is not an objective question. It's a subjective one. You think it is, I do not.

I’m not saying it’s demonstrably true that the country is fucked. You’re of course correct that this is subjective.

I’m saying that it’s demonstrably untrue that 95% of Americans’ lives will not change at all depending on who is elected president. The president does obviously have the power to affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. The government’s response to COVID, for example, had very significant and tangible effects on the day-to-day lives of nearly every American. If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.

In other words if people turn against DEI or AA in then it will go no matter who is elected president.

Americans have opposed AA in large numbers for decades now. Multiple states - including California - passed ballot measures and laws to ban it. This did not have a significant effect on its spread or its implementation, because the ban was trivially easy for institutions to skirt around by appealing to the logical extrapolation of the Civil Rights Act, and to the decisions of unelected judges, including ones nominated by past presidents. Very very few Americans support DEI, and yet it is ubiquitous in both the public and private spheres.

The president is a figure head, a lightning rod, a symptom, not a cause.

Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep Americans out of the First World War; less than six months later, American soldiers were dying in Europe. Ronald Reagan’s voter base largely opposed mass immigration, yet Reagan himself signed the largest amnesty of illegal immigrants in American history. Presidents can simply lie about their intentions, or change their mind after being elected. It’s simply not true that they are merely catspaws of public opinion.

Nobody is willing to countenance just shooting them.

If you’re correct that other non-violent measures are exorbitantly expensive and/or ineffective, I am in fact willing to countenance just shooting them. You wouldn’t have to shoot very many before the rest of them would stop coming. (Or would start openly acting like proper invaders, in which case a lot more people would start being okay with shooting a lot more of them.)