Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
To foment a Color Revolution
They’ve been decaying into a progressive mouthpiece for years now. Clare Malone has been a frothing leftist scold from the jump, and once they brought on Perry Bacon Jr. as their “here’s why anti-black racism explains every single political trend in America” guy, their analysis stopped being even remotely useful. After the 2016 election it was clear to me that everyone on that staff other than Silver was determined to atone for why they didn’t do more to stop Trump. I haven’t cared about them or paid attention to them in ages, and I’m not remotely sad to see them crumble to dust.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3mo ago
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 identity of the man who choked Jordan Neely on the NYC subway has been made public.
The man now gets to become the center of a media firestorm, and will certainly be subjected to credible threats, to say nothing of the likelihood that the activists in charge of Manhattan’s criminal justice system will indict him. If he ever gets to live a normal life again, it certainly won’t be in New York, and probably not in any urban blue-heavy environment in this country. Future prospective employers will know him as the guy who murdered a defenseless man and beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who was experiencing homelessness and needed help. This will be how he’ll be perceived by a substantial number of important people who will have the power to determine important things about the future of his life, regardless of any legal outcomes for him, favorable or otherwise.
I told the story previously of how I was assaulted on public transit by a mentally-ill black lowlife, and how I was very close to being severely injured and nobody in the vicinity would have been able nor willing to stop it from happening. (Sorry, the comment search functions both here and on Reddit are terrible, such that it would be too much work for me to track down that comment thread.) Since posting that story, a very similar situation happened to me yet again - with a predictably similar antagonist - and once again, I was sickened and humiliated not only by the actions of the schizophrenic loser who accosted me, and by my relative inability to effectively defend myself if the guy had started attacking me, but also by the inaction of the other grown men standing nearby. Without telling the whole story, I ended up in that position because I attempted to stop the lunatic from harassing a different guy, and then that guy stood around and watched the assailant menace me and did not intervene in any way.
I have fantasized about doing exactly what Daniel Penny - the NYC subway hero - did. Except for in my fantasies, I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident; I just kicked the absolute shit out of him, taking him by surprise and beating him within an inch of his life, or stabbing him before he could get a hand in me. These fantasies are just that: unrealistic power fantasies, the stuff I would do if I were a much stronger, taller, more physically-powerful, more experienced with interpersonal violence than I actually am. I’ve never been in a proper fistfight, and even if I knew how to properly defend myself, in both this situation and the previous one, I allowed the guy to close distance on me and get into an advantageous position, such that they had me right where they wanted me.
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
I’ve also thought about what would have been the consequences for me if somehow I really had been able to put these guys in their place and seriously injure or kill them. I’ve imagined being at trial - a highly-publicized media shitstorm of a trial, given the demographics involved - and having to answer questions that are designed to get me to hang myself with their rope. I’ve thought about what would happen if they found my posts on The Motte. If they asked me, “Are you glad that Mr. Schizo is dead?” How could I credibly answer “no, this is a terrible tragedy, I never wanted to take someone’s life” when I’ve got a backlog of posts here saying explicitly that I believe that schizophrenic street criminals’ lives have no value whatsoever and that the world would be better if all of them were summarily rounded up and sent to gulags or executed? If they were to ask me “did you do this because Mr. Schizo is black”, no matter how sincerely I would answer “no, it’s because he was attacking me”, how can I be confident that they won’t drag up all my posts here and paint me as a “hate criminal”?
I have no idea how racially-aware Daniel Penny is. I have no clue if he has similar opinions about the scourge of worthless criminal crazies and what to do about them, and I have no reason to assume that his lawyers are lying when they say that he’s devastated that Jordan Neely died, that Mr. Penny never wanted nor foresaw this outcome, etc. It’s very easy for me to say “I’m glad Jordan Neely is dead, you did the world a favor, this was a wonderful thing you did and you shouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt or sadness about it”, but in the actual event that I did what Mr. Penny did, I probably would be pretty shaken-up about it. For most people, taking a life - especially when you hadn’t planned to - is probably pretty psychologically destabilizing, even if it was totally necessary and justified.
Still, though, what if Penny thinks the same way I do about the homeless population? What if he truly does believe, as I do, that Jordan Neely was human garbage who had no redeeming value, and that his death is a great boon to the entire population of NYC? He can’t say that in court, even if it’s true. He would be pilloried and convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison. His only legal hope is to vociferously insist that Neely’s death is a tragedy, that he would never have done what he did if he could have foreseen that it would result in a death, that he is 100% innocent of the crime of racial consciousness or animus toward the experiencing-homelessness population. His future depends on his ability to persuasively perform colorblind egalitarian liberalism, regardless of whether or not he believes in it or not.
Outside of the edgy dissident-right spaces I frequent, every other commentator, even putatively conservative ones, are doing the expected throat-clearing about how Neely’s death is a tragedy, that we all wish he “could have gotten the help he needed”, etc. If anyone believes, as I do, that the first step to saving our civilization is for tens of thousands of people to pull a Daniel Penny on their local subway-screaming bum, they’re sure not saying it out loud. The veil of self-censorship and paying homage to liberal pieties will persist no matter what happens to Daniel Penny, and nobody will get the public catharsis of hearing a powerful or important person say out loud that Jordan Neely’s death was a good thing and we need more of it. Those who do say something like that out loud better hope and pray that they’re never thrust into a courtroom and asked to defend those opinions under oath; the defense stand is no place for hard-nosed honesty, and neither is our society.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially
This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)
I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.
We absolutely do not agree on this. First off, we would have to ask a number of very important questions which you hand-wave away. Does the man know she’s 18, rather than 21? (If he met her in a bar, the answer is almost certainly “no”.) Does he know that she “doesn’t know her limits”? Why would he assume that a grown adult is unable to exercise basic agency over her own decisionmaking?
Your scenario doesn’t mention anything about misdirection, subterfuge, etc. (i.e. spiking a drink without her knowledge) He’s just offering her drinks, and she’s willingly accepting those drinks.
And once she’s finished all of those drinks, how “visibly drunk” is she, actually? Surely you are aware that there is a wide spectrum of intoxication; someone can be buzzed or tipsy without being genuinely unable to exercise basic control over his or her faculties. Someone can be drunk enough to make decisions which one would not make if stone-cold sober, and in some cases that’s the whole point of drinking in the first place. (“Liquid courage” is a term for a reason.)
And an observer cannot always reliably detect, based on observing outwardly-obvious behavior, a person’s internal level of confusion/inebriation. Nor can simply knowing how many drinks she has had reliably tell you the extent to which she has lost control of her faculties. I know plenty of people who can down five shots of tequila and still maintain quite a bit of mental acuity and functionality; I also know plenty of people who will have one mixed drink and then be a stumbling mess.
You are requiring this man to be able to accurately gauge everything about this situation, at penalty of going to prison for a substantial chunk of his life, and having a permanent felony record, if he misjudges any of it. I thought I was one of the more authoritarian and pro-law-and-order posters here, but apparently you put me to shame.
All of this would, of course, be quite different if we lived in a culture in which it was widely understood to be extremely aberrant behavior for a woman to consume alcohol and then have sex with a man she just met, or barely knows. If we lived in a culture where the vast majority of women were chaste, monogamous, and averse to the mere thought of having casual hook-ups, then in the rare scenarios when a woman does do that, we could at least assume that foul play and predatory behavior on the man’s part may be involved.
However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.
I am strongly in favor of a sea change in cultural morality toward a far more sexually-conservative set of cultural norms. However, that whole suite of norms would have to develop basically simultaneously, with all parties involved holding up their respective ends of the bargain. In the meantime, you’re asking far too much agency from men and none at all from women, with predictably disastrous consequences.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11mo ago
That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.
I knew this was coming. I have read too many “conservative” commentators who decry mass immigration to European countries but celebrate it in America (“because we’re a different sort of country, built on ideas”) to expect anything else. People are perfectly capable of looking at Syrian gang members shooting each other in a Stockholm mall (shouting in Arabic the whole time) and recognizing Those men are not Swedes. They will never be Swedes. Nothing short of a magic spell could turn them into Swedes. And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.
America is not a special country that exists outside of history. It is not mysteriously immune from the realities of human biology and heredity. “American” is not a magical category that is infinitely capacious and malleable in a way that no other extant ethnicity or nationality is. It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading. Syrians are no more capable of becoming Americans than they are of becoming Swedes.
There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth. The Europeans who showed up to displace the Iroquois and the Cree did not become Iroquois and Cree. They were a new people, capitalizing on the weakness and decline of the existing population. The exact same is true of the Syrians moving into Sweden.
Unlike the Iroquois, though, Swedes have the actual power and numbers to easily repel this invasion by force of arms at any moment. The Swedish military could locate and forcibly deport or eliminate nearly every Syrian in the country within a month if they desired to. If you believe it would be cruel to do so, that’s fine; I don’t even necessarily disagree! But the fact that they choose not to do so in no way means that the country is benefiting from the presence of those people. The same is largely true of the United States - only the scale of the problem is different.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
You wrote an entire post about how he’s a hypocrite for not living the lifestyle you think he should be living, despite the fact that he does live that lifestyle. You accused him of being a Marxist who doesn’t care about pre-WWII history, when actually he’s a Rome obsessive, a monarchist, and a devotee of Ebola’s esoteric spiritualist tradition.
Just for once admit that you spoke overconfidently about something without doing any research at all to determine if your assumptions were correct. Can you do that? Even just this once? You made multiple easily-disprovable claims about this guy, and those claims are central to your argument.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2mo ago
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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Some thoughts on the conversation this post has generated this far:
Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice? It’s very interesting that @Meriadoc intuited immediately that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue. That proposition probably wouldn’t have occurred to many of the more right-leaning users here - it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me - but in hindsight it is somewhat obviously true. So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue: Was it by accident? On purpose? Were they tricked? Did they do so in a moment of aberrant psychosis or a self-destructive impulse, which is not representative of their normal behavior? Or is their choice symptomatic of a larger pattern of behavior/shortcoming, such that given the choice to redo the selection several times, they’d still pick blue every time?
Recognizing that this poll isn’t merely a frivolous internet meme, but rather a chance to publicly hash out and enforce local political/philosophical default norms, we can extrapolate this to thinking about the types of real-world societal dilemmas the poll is supposed to invoke, and we can recognize that progressives believe that there are people who are born having already picked blue. Racial minorities, gays, trans people, the disabled, etc. They were never actually given the opportunity to pick red. By the simple fact of one or more of their identities being inherently blue, they will on some level always be reliant on the communitarian protective instincts of the larger society. Taking it as a given that such people exist, and that they will never have the option to “switch pills”, blue becomes a far more compelling moral option even for those of us who personally gain nothing by picking blue.
Someone who refuses to decouple the poll from its larger political implications will also intuit that even though the poll specifically fails to enumerate any actual benefits from selecting blue - it’s merely a choice to avoid bad outcomes, and offers no positive-sum outcome over and above that - in the real world the communitarian option actually does offer very clear benefits to everyone involved, including the selfish fucks who picked red. Subsistence farmers may not be reliant on the kindness of strangers, but they’ll also never successfully launch a rocket to the moon, nor cure cancer, nor build Notre Dame Cathedral. Thus, a poll that sought to more accurately model real life would have to include a clause that “if 50% or more people choose blue, all participants are given $5000, and anyone who chose blue gets an additional $5000.”
Also in real life, many people do have the ability to “switch pills” at any time, based on an observation of the choices made by those around them. People who made terrible choices early in life can choose to make better choices in the future. Drug addicts can get clean, people can go to trade school or get a second degree to improve their economic prospects, etc.
So then we have to actually parse out which people are genuinely stuck with blue no matter what, versus how many people were just demoralized and psyopped into picking blue, because they thought they could never hope to hack it on their own without society propping them up, whereas they were in truth fully capable of thriving independently if just given more effective coping strategies. Psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with profound mental disabilities will never be able to Git Gud, but people with minor depression and transitory suicidal ideation mostly can just choose to snap out of it at any time if nudged in the right direction.
But then what do we do with the people who actually are stuck with blue? The people who will definitely die, or at least have very bad life outcomes, unless we all dedicate some not-insignificant level of effort and resources, and incur some level of personal risk, in order to provide a safety net for them?
One way to think about it is to deny that they are stuck with blue; to harangue them into making a better choice, to deny that they are innately blue, to blame their “culture” and to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe every time they pick blue, we insult them and tell them to pick again, until they pick red. (Except of course, as we established, you could do this a thousand times and they’re still gonna pick blue.) By convincing yourself that they had agency the whole time, you not only absolve yourself of feeling any responsibility for the consequence of their decision, you also maintain the certainty that your own choice was 100% the result of agency, and therefore you morally flatter yourself.
The other way to think about it is: Yes, they’re stuck with blue, I could never have saved them, and it’s actually a good thing that they’re gonna die. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you could have saved them - in the poll, it was possible, but in real life? I’m not so sure - we do have to actually grapple with the question of whether or not the vast majority of us are better off without the people who were stuck with blue. The profoundly mentally/physically disabled, those who are born with the psychological equivalent of glass bones and paper skin, etc. Those who are essentially utility monsters - burdens with no hope of creating a positive-sum contribution, into whom we must continually sink our own resources to keep them from destroying themselves.
Several users brought up children; the thing with children, though, is that the vast majority of them will eventually grow up into people with agency. Any sacrifices we make for them now are actually an investment, made with the assumption that it will produce a positive future outcome. This is fundamentally different from the sort of sacrifices we make for adults with Down Syndrome, who will still have Down Syndrome at every point in their life, and will never “get better” and never repay the investment. How many times do I need to pick blue, putting myself at significant risk, in order to stave off the inevitable for these people? Because that’s the other thing about picking blue: you don’t actually get to just pick it once and then everything works out for everyone. You’re actually going to be given the same choice over and over throughout your life, and so will your children and their children and so on into perpetuity. But perhaps if enough of us pick red enough times to cull the people who keep forcing us to make these choices, we can buy ourselves some length of time wherein we can just thrive for a while as productive, normal people, until enough people who are blue-by-default start to accumulate again and we’re once again forced into unpleasant choices.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
They do better than blacks. Crime statistics for Latinos in this country are significantly worse than whites on every metric; the fact that they do better than native blacks is a sign of just how low blacks set the bar, rather than any sort of salutary reflection on Latinos.
There is some evidence that legal immigrants - people who went through the whole process of obtaining citizenship, rather than people who came here illegally and were then retroactively made into citizens - commit crimes at reasonably low rates; however, their children generally regress to the rate of criminality one would expect based on their racial background.
This was also true of Irish and Italian immigrants for many decades - their rates of criminality were considerably worse than native Anglo whites - and they really only began to assimilate to Anglo norms after the 1924 Immigration Act cut off the supply of further immigrants from their home countries. At some point I’m going to do a big effort post about how the fact that the Irish and the Italians eventually became more like Anglos, only after many decades of not doing that, and after massively contributing to the shocking levels of corruption and inter-ethnic violence which blighted American cities during the Gilded Age - is not in fact the sunny and optimistic pro-immigration story that 21st-century immigration advocates think it is.
Furthermore, if you want to come and see non-assimilated multigenerational immigrant communities in America, come to my home city of San Diego and spend some time around the East African neighborhoods; you’ll see loads of women in hijabs and men in traditional dress, and I went to public school with these people’s kids and saw how different they were from the “assimilated” groups. They are not a useful data point in favor of your thesis.
So, this used to be my favorite movie for years. I think I imprinted strongly on it because I saw it for the first time at age 8 and it was probably one of the first movies - along with Jurassic Park, which also had a profound effect on me at the time - I saw with actual dramatic stakes and spectacular visuals. (It’s also the first nude scene I saw in a movie, which probably contributed to my very positive first impression of it.) I also acknowledge that I was (and still am) a pretty low-T guy, and that my tastes and proclivities largely tended toward the feminine during my formative years.
Other commenters’ cynical and acidic takes on the film’s central romance are basically completely accurate; if you’re a man who is neither as virile and charming as prime DiCaprio, nor as rich and ambitious as Cal, the entire Rose plot is pretty blackpilling. It sucks to know that probably the best that most guys could ever hope to be is the nameless schmuck who later picked up those guys’ sloppy thirds, never being featured onscreen or even apparently occupying much of a place in Rose’s emotional landscape at all, despite being the father of her children. Far more realistic is being one of the innumerable guys who died horribly in frozen water, or just ended it all quickly by leaping off the deck. Me personally, I’d probably end up like poor First Officer Murdoch, gunning a man down in a panic and then offing myself.
The film really is a testament to the awesome power of artifice, spectacle, and aesthetics. On some level, nearly every modern person who appreciates Titanic does so because the world it depicts - no matter how much the nihilistic Hollywood shitlib James Cameron tries to paint it as stuffy and doomed - is glamorous, confident, impeccably classy, and features exclusively high-quality white people. Even the poorest people on the ship are charming European immigrants, with no signs of criminality or dysfunction, dancing a sprightly Irish jig. The music is lush and gorgeous, the effects are stunning, the sets and costumes are incredible. The emotional/ideological soul of the film is utterly poisonous and it doesn’t even matter, because the experience is so beautiful and tragic. (See also: Harry Potter)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
This seems excessive. I agree that the post could use more original analysis than she offered, but this is a breaking-news sort of situation that could have important implications, and I think it’s reasonable to want to spark a quick discussion of the major questions sparked by this development.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
@DradisPing brought up the founding of Liberia, but in fact that was only one of several large-scale but ultimately abortive attempts to achieve what was called, at the time, “colonization” of freed blacks. Liberia was a project primarily of the American Colonization Society, an organization about which I’ve spoken in this forum numerous times, and which included as its members and supporters an absolute all-star cast of American Founding Fathers and political heavyweights. Unfortunately, the ACS could not achieve the level of funding and logistics necessary to undertake the process on anywhere near the scale they had hoped for. They were not the only ones attempting to make it happen, though.
Abe Lincoln, a supporter of the ACS and of “colonization” since early in his political career, invited a delegation of black political/religious leaders to the White House in 1862 to try and convince them to support the mass deportation of blacks - this time, to a proposed Central American colony which he wanted to name Linconia. The black leaders were opposed, though, as were the various Central American nations who felt threatened and/or had their own territorial designs on the region. After Lincoln’s death, his particular proposal was never pursued by any of his successors.
However, in 1869 Ulysses S. Grant attempted to initiate the annexation of what is now the Dominican Republic (called “Santo Domingo” at the time) for similar purposes. Grant was actually able to secure a treaty proposal with the Dominican president; Grant also sent a committee, which included Frederick Douglass, to investigate the country and the feasibility of annexation. Sadly, this treaty was defeated in Congress.
There was also a private initiative in 1862 by Floridian entrepreneur and plantation owner Bernard Kock to purchase the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache and to invite blacks to come work there, offering Haitian citizenship (and revocation of American citizenship) to any takers. This initiative also failed after the financiers reneged on their promised investment.
Ultimately, the staggering costs and logistical realities of mass deportation of blacks were simply insurmountable at the time, to say nothing of the political difficulties and opposition from various important political constituencies.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
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.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
Either you yourself are Travis LeBlanc, or you have simply lifted substantial portions of this essay without crediting the author.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
Of course the problem with Europe from the point of view of an American White Nationalist is that Europe is full of Europeans.
This bears no resemblance to Hood’s argument. Both he and his interlocutor are celebrating the fact that Europe is full of Europeans, and their disagreement is regarding the degree of international cooperation and unity of identity/purpose that should prevail among those Europeans.
The alternative of course is to move to a state like Iowa or Vermont which is >90% white but living in one of those States doesn't confer the status or "validation" that guys like Hood so desperately crave. A white guy wearing a nice button-up in Iowa is just another white-guy. It doesn't convey the separateness from the laboring class that it might in a far more stratified place like Coastal California.
He is from New Jersey, but lives in rural West Virginia. He literally made the exact choice you’re criticizing him for not making.
I don't know much about Hood's background, or whether he would consider himself a "Berkely Marxist", but in any case his writing strikes me as representative of that genere
Hood - real name Kevin DeAnna - worked in the mainstream conservative movement for over a decade, working for conservative think-tanks in DC. That’s the milieu he came up in, and what he is now reacting against because he has seen it firsthand from the inside.
Any story of World War II and the societies that waged it that doesn't at least acknowledge the aftermath of World War I is going to end up an as incoherent mess. It would be like starting the story of the Illiad with Hector already dead. Similarly, you can't meaningfully discuss the story of the US as a nation, without acknowledging its founding conditions as a frontier colony. Or the bloody crucible of the American Civil War from which so much of our industrial might and martial ambitions arose. Of course, Hood is not interested in meaningful discussion.
Hood writes extensively about Rome, and about early American history. Just because you have no familiarity with his work doesn’t mean you get to accuse him of not knowing about or talking about these things. He does not mean that World War II is the important starting point of Western civilization; he means that it is the founding myth for the current narrative being pushed by academia and the media-political complex. The Boomer Truth Regime.
"The 14 words" get bandied about a lot in these discussions but I find it telling that those who go on about them the most often seem the least inclined to actually build or secure anything resembling that future. It begs the question "Who's Children?"
Greg Hood has, I believe, four children at last count. So, presumably those ones.
You have reduced this man to a straw-man archetype to rail against, but all of your fulminating is completely useless because it doesn’t address any of the basic facts about his actual life or work. It just makes you look ignorant and ineffectual.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10mo ago
I had a conversation about the Majors accusations a few months ago, with some hyper-progressive and movie-obsessed friends. One of them, a black guy who recently broke into Hollywood himself by landing a decent-sized role on a new TV series, seemed utterly shattered by the situation. (I’ll call him Desmond from here on in.) He is strongly invested in the success and public image of black male celebrities, and though he can generally be counted on to ostentatiously take the wokest imaginable position on any given topic, he seemed to be feigning exasperation as a way to avoid having to express a definitive opinion on the veracity of the accusations. Meanwhile, my other friends - one female, and one physically male but spiritually an AWFL in every way - took Majors’ guilt as an absolute given, and were utterly stunned when I expressed even the slightest amount of doubt. (As you all can probably imagine, I generally do not reveal even a microscopic fraction of my actual worldview to any of my IRL friends.)
I brought up several recent examples of accusations, made against notable public figures, which had turned out to be totally fabricated by vindictive, insane, and/or greedy women. I drew special attention to the case of a star college athlete, with whom all of us are familiar, who, right after being drafted into the NFL, had his career completely exploded by a rape accusation which later turned out to be false. Of course, all three of them had piled on invective at that man when the accusations came out, certain he was guilty and gleefully celebrating his downfall. I reminded them of this, and also lamented that Marvel had so quickly jumped the gun on distancing themselves from Majors, given that they had previously erred in prematurely jettisoning James Gunn as a result of flimsy and overblown accusations made during a period of social hysteria.
Desmond seemed quietly relieved to have been presented with an “out” to be able to safely express some level of skepticism toward the accusations, while the two goodwhites were adamant about pushing ahead with certainty about Majors’ guilt. They gave me some paper-thin justifications for why the Majors situation is different from the examples I’d brought up. The progressive coalition has done a ton of work, in the decades since the OJ Simpson trial, to desperately paper over the faultlines between the sensibilities of black men - who are naturally inclined to treat criminal allegations against prominent black male celebrities with severe skepticism - and those of white female liberals - who are deeply invested in the narrative of pervasive sexual impropriety committed by (racially-unspecified) powerful men.
Interestingly, this same faultline around the issue of whether or not to believe accusations against black male celebrities exists on the Dissident Right. Many DR commenters were eager to point-and-laugh at yet another apparent example of black male sexual misbehavior; other commenters pushed back, expressing doubts of the “bitches always be lyin’” variety. Personally, I fell into the latter camp; I’ve just seen too many of these sexual misconduct/abuse allegations against rich and powerful men turn out to be nonsense. The fact that Majors is black could credibly be used to slightly adjust one’s priors toward assuming his guilt, but I just didn’t feel that it was remotely enough to overcome my instinctive mistrust toward these kinds of situations.
I am interested to see what kind of interesting discourse will take place in progressive spaces now that the accusations appear to have been debunked. Will there be articles titled “America needs to have an uncomfortable conversation about why we were so ready to believe Jonathan Majors, a black man, was guilty” competing with articles about how “Why is America so ready to let Jonathan Majors, a rich male sexual abuser off the hook?” Whose umbrage will be taken more seriously? Will anyone learn anything at all from this?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4mo ago
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.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6mo ago
I kept running into the same problem I always run into on these political self-report surveys: I had to answer “Neither Agree Nor Disagree” on a number of questions not because I don’t have a strong opinion or stance on the issue in question, but because I reject the framing or ideological vocabulary of the way the question is written. I fear that my responses may skew the survey toward seeming to reflect that I’m apathetic about a host of hot-button issues, when actually my opinion is too complex to be adequately expressed by answering a single-sentence question.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8mo ago
Hlynka, how many fucking times are we going to do this dance? There are other things someone can be other than progressive or mainstream conservative. I have never claimed to be a conservative, nor to have views anywhere remotely close to the median American. My views are also nowhere remotely close to the median progressive. There are other options! How obstinate do you have to be to keep doing this “if it ain’t my specific ideology, it’s progressive” thing? There’s a whole world of possible world views out there, but you are totally incapable of seeing outside of the fake binary you’ve constructed within your own head.
And as for your inability to recognize a simple hyperbolic joke, I don’t really know what to tell you. I’m not going to magically obtain dictatorial power, I wouldn’t actually want it even if it were given to me, and at no point in my life am I going to have any power to put anybody up against the wall. I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody, which is why idly joking about your personal petty enemies should “get the wall” is not actually that uncommon, nor is it indicative of my real political program. I do believe that political violence is coming to this country, and I think it will largely be a good thing when it happens, but I don’t want it to happen to my idiot ex-friends in the San Diego theatre community.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9mo ago
I vacillated about whether or not to reply to this, but I think it would be almost cowardly not to. It’s a moment where the rubber of my ideology meets the road of actual interpersonal relations with a real human being.
I hope that you are unsuccessful in your attempts to make it to America. I wish that you’d been unsuccessful in making it to the UK, and barring some future event forcing you to go back to India entirely, I hope you’re stuck in the UK in perpetuity and find it less and less to your liking.
This has little-to-nothing to do with you personally. Every interaction I’ve had with you has suggested that you’re a genial, intelligent, and interesting guy, and I have no doubt that you and I could get along swimmingly in person. Still, you’re just one individual, and I’ve got an entire country - an entire civilization, really - to worry about rescuing. Your individual quest for self-actualization - which, sorry to say it, strikes me as overwhelmingly acquisitive and materialistic - doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
If the demographic/cultural situation in America were different, I would be very happy to have you in my country, and even in my city specifically. Individual immigrants, when coming here in small and selective numbers, can be a wonderful addition to the social fabric. However, we live in a country with a sprawling racial spoils system, and in which highly-educated Indians such as yourself are being imported en masse to create a new synthetic overclass more compliant to the regime.
“But Hoffmeister, I won’t be compliant to the regime! I’m not like the other Indians!” Well, first off, I’m not actually convinced that this is true; your paean to America, much like that of so many other smart and materialistic immigrants before you, seems centered around how many opportunities it provides you to obtain large amount of material wealth and an obnoxiously large house. Am I to believe that you would represent a genuine ally in the struggle of people like me to take back our country, once doing so presents a significant opportunity obstacle to your ability to obtain wealth and status?
And even if you will be, it definitely doesn’t sound like your girlfriend will. No, she’ll fit right in with the class of vindictive America-hating South Asians who play the progressive politics game expertly in order to bolster their own status at the expense of shredding the sociocultural fabric of this country. And moreover, your children will almost undoubtedly do the same. I know plenty of second-generation Indian-Americans, and a lot of them have parents who are every bit as over-the-top enamored of the “American Dream” as you are, yet they’re happily joining the America Is Systemically Racist grift so that they can get ahead. And a lot of them actually believe in it! Indian-Americans are either the highest-income or second-highest-income (the numbers on Jewish-Americans are hard to nail down) ethnic group in America, the American government is doing everything in its power to bring them here and to set them up for success; and yet these ungrateful scumbags still want to lecture me about all of the evils my ancestors released on the world. And I don’t believe that you yourself have the genuine ideological foundation needed to prevent your children from becoming that way.
Now, assuming that you are dead-set on coming to the States and want to scope out cities to live in, someone below recommended San Diego and I would strongly second that recommendation. Since I’ve lived here my whole life I can’t help but fixate on all of the negatives, especially since it’s gotten so much worse upon particular metrics like homelessness and general disorder, but it stills blows pretty much every similarly-sized American city out of the water on nearly every other metric, and the weather is famously incredible. Come visit La Jolla if you want to see how wealthy people live here, and go to North Park for bars and restaurants. If your goal of emigrating here is successful, you could do worse than living here, and I’d rather you end up in a city that’s already so racially-diverse that it’s unsalvageable from a white-identitarian perspective, rather than that you end up in a city that hasn’t yet lost the demographic battle.
Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.
Well, as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” - I can tell you from direct personal experience that the people who have been the most vindictive, the most ready to pounce at the slightest hint of wrongthink, the ones who have done the most to sully my personal reputation and those of others far less off-the-progressive-reservation than I am, have been uniformly non-white.
The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions. That’s the reality: most white progressives whose careers or social standing are wrapped up with their ability to stay ideologically up-to-date are terrified of stepping out of line, in a way that this simply far less true of most non-white individuals in the same milieu. Whites are far more cancellable than non-whites. Able to draw on a far smaller pool of mercy and benefit of the doubt, because they lack any sort of shield of “marginalized identity” on which they can fall back when questioned. Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities? I’ve seen this process play out a number of times among people who, again, I personally know. If you’re a white guy in these spaces, you are literally vulnerable at all times and have to watch what you say at all moments, because you’re inherently suspect. So, you grow your hair out, maybe wear sort of ambiguous clothing, and declare yourself non-binary to give yourself some modicum of breathing room. Yes, many non-white progressives are doing the same, and I do not want to overstate the level of relative immunity from cancellation they enjoy, but the bar is undeniably set higher for them than it is for similarly situated whites. “White progressives” are not the ones primarily driving the dynamics you’re pointing at, and I think it’s a distraction tactic, or maybe part of a personal vendetta you’re prosecuting, to act as if they are.
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