Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
And with getting an audience when one does so. It’s probably worse when you’re competing for the attention of media executives with their own politics.
I don’t think that this is honestly much of a factor; my understanding is that Jennings has been very consistent and very vocal about his politics for many years before anyone was considering him for a major media role, and before those specific beliefs were fashionable. The guy genuinely is an old-guard Gen-X progressive, and I don’t see any evidence that he’s either played up or played down those opinions based on any mercenary career concerns. Nor do those politics appear to have had much bearing on his selection for the Jeopardy! hosting gig; he got the role because he was already an extremely well-known institution on the show, and because he genuinely earned it over a long period of time. That’d have been true whether or not his political commentary was frequent or sparse. (Although obviously his specific opinions didn’t actively harm him, which wouldn’t have been true if they’d been significantly right-of-center instead.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
I’ve been a colossal fan of Jeopardy! (a long-running American trivia game show, for those unfamiliar) for most of my life. My enthusiasm for the show skyrocketed during Ken Jennings’ historic 74-game winning streak in 2004. A geeky, witty, self-deprecating guy, Jennings’ prodigious knowledge was matched by his appealing personality, making him a TV phenomenon and boosting the popularity of the show.
After returning to various Jeopardy! exhibition tournaments, cementing his legendary status, he got into the running as one of the potential candidates to replace the show’s iconic decades-long host, Alex Trebek, whose cancer diagnosis had been made public and who was nearing retirement. In 2021, Jennings was officially announced as the new official host of Jeopardy!. He has breathed new life into the show; while Trebek’s personality was aloof and almost enigmatic, Jennings is warm and jocular, frequently engaging in witty repartee with the contestants and helping to bring out their personalities. Jennings also clearly knows a lot of the answers to the questions without needing to read off the cards, allowing him to make more informed split-second judging decisions about the acceptability of contestants’ answers, and allowing him to make certain edifying clarifications and to add cool fun facts about some answers. In other words, he’s the perfect host for the show, the perfect ambassador for the brand, and the perfect steward to carry the show for decades to come.
His politics are also very obnoxiously woke. I try not to use that word very often, considering it over-used and under-defined, but I think it fairly encapsulates his public statements on politics, which can easily be found by perusing his Twitter and Bluesky accounts and, apparently, by listening to his various podcast appearances. He has the typical smug, sanctimonious approach of a guy who was the smartest person he knew for his entire youth, and who was used to winning every argument he came across due to pure cognitive processing power and verbal agility. Political dunks phrased as though they’re so self-evidently obvious that only a total dolt would fail to agree with them. A deep and abiding belief that “supporting” trans people, abolishing borders, and ending “mass incarceration” are the urgent moral responsibility of every good-thinking person.
This commitment to progressive politics has bled over into Jeopardy! itself; since Jennings took over hosting, there has been a palpable increase in the number of questions related to black writers and activists, and a Jennings has made several on-air comments (mild, but obvious to those who are attuned to them) which reveal his own politics. It’s especially disheartening to know that a man with his depth of knowledge and clearly impressive mental faculties isn’t able to see the nuance around these issues, despite the ease with which the internet allows people with even a modicum of curiosity to expose themselves to the best arguments from the other side.
Now, I do hope/plan to meet Jennings some day; I have auditioned for Jeopardy! before, making it past the initial testing phase but never getting the call. I plan to continue to audition yearly until I eventually make it on the show, where I’m confident I could make a decent showing of myself and even win some real money. It crushes me to know that someone who’s something of a minor hero of mine would, upon learning my politics, want absolutely nothing to do with me, and may even not want me to be able to appear on the show, one of my life’s dreams. I try to studiously avoid hearing anything about Jennings’ politics, not wanting to further tarnish my warm feelings toward him. My single biggest fear about being doxxed, even above the effect it’d likely have on my personal and professional relationships, is the fear that it could prevent me from having my chance to compete on the show; I try not to think about whether Jennings would want me disqualified.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
We're already systematically and explicitly oppressed based on group identity! That it's not naked slavery doesn't matter one lick.
This is the crux of our disagreement. I just think it’s manifestly untrue that white people are “systemically and explicitly oppressed” in any country on earth. There are at least some number of people who want us to be — I’ve even met a couple of them — but those people have vanishingly little power at this moment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point them out and oppose them. It just means that you seem like a catastrophizing propagandist when you claim that those people are already actively oppressing white people right now, in America.
I don’t believe that having one’s culture disrupted/dismantled is oppression. I want very badly for many cultures in the world to be dissolved, including some within the United States. I don’t think it’d be oppressive at all for a government to do so. Mainstream early-20th-century white culture was one of the better and more functional cultures on earth. I want to preserve many of the remaining remnants of it; however even if we wanted to bring it back, it has been irreparably disrupted by technological advancements and the globalization of the world economy. That’s not inherently a bad thing.
What’s specifically bad is that, in the case of the United States, it has been partially usurped by a vulgar, consciously-hateful, anti-human gutter culture. Jews are by no means the primary creators of this culture, although many individual Jews have been influential in promulgating it. (Just as many Jews were influential in promulgating important parts of the previous American cultural era, the one you like; look up how many of the compositions in the “Great American Songbook” were written by Jews.)
I’m more-or-less fine with governments using heavy-handed tactics, including targeted population replacement, to change aspects of the culture(s) over which they have control. I just also want them to do so in favor of changes that are better for humanity, rather than worse. Smashing ghetto black culture should be a priority for future U.S. policymakers; they’ve already (probably not intentionally) partially achieved this in some major cities by facilitating mass Mexican immigration to those cities; the Mexicans have displaced blacks, taking over their neighborhoods and replacing their culture with a new one. There are plenty of things about Mexican culture I find grating, but it’s pretty much a wholesale improvement over ghetto blacks. This is one way in which population/cultural replacement can be a good thing.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that all mass immigration is good, or that every culture on earth should be smashed, or that every immigrant group will similarly be an improvement on what was there before it arrived. It’s pretty obvious that Sweden was better before a bunch of Somalis and Syrians showed up. (It remains unclear whether the counterfactual world in which Sweden did not embrace mass immigration, but also its fertility rates continued to plummet unabated, would be sustainable as a long-term project.) However, if, say, the Swedish government had invited in a bunch of Japanese immigrants, I think Sweden would have benefited quite a bit from that in the long run. Some cultural/population displacements are an improvement, some are a lateral move, and some are a downgrade. Smashing Appalachian hillbilly culture would also be a salutary goal of a future American regime, and that would potentially involve replacing white hillbillies with some non-white ethnicity. Depending on which ethnicity, that could be a strict improvement!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
Right, so, I acknowledge that this is by far the largest problem with Ignatiev’s beliefs. Again, I don’t think people should agree with him, I comprehensively reject his political project, and I want him to fail miserably and to die knowing that his entire life’s work was a pointless, cancerous failure.
There is a way for naïve white progressives — even ones who are as clearly maladjusted and full of spite as Noel Ignatiev — to be reintegrated back into a politically healthy discussion, but only once they have persuasively demonstrated that they understand the extent to which they’ve directly empowered the most worthless, destructive, spiteful, irredeemable elements of our society. Since that’s not happening any time soon, we can keep trying to crush the Ignatievs of the world. I just think we can do so without calling them liars and hypocrites.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Jews do not have anywhere near the level of explicit racial solidarity that whites had in, say, apartheid South Africa, or the Antebellum American South. Whatever covert influence some powerful Jews have to influence things in their favor at the expense of others, surely you can acknowledge that their actions (outside of, arguably, Israel) are of a qualitatively different form than, say, passing laws explicitly forbidding non-Jews from owning property, voting, patronizing the same businesses as Jews, etc. The worst thing a powerful Jew can do to white people in 21st-century America is write a mean book about us, produce a TV series where we’re the bad guys, and attempt (with intermittent success) to legislatively block border enforcement. Contrast that with the worst era of White Supremacy, in which a white person could own a black person as property. The two situations are not comparable.
This doesn’t mean I don’t think discriminating against white people is bad! It shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t be tolerated, and it certainly shouldn’t be celebrated on grounds of retributive justice, balancing the cosmic scales, etc. I’m white, I’m planning to continue to be white, and I will do what I can to resist efforts to dispossess me or to dissolve cultural norms which are good for me and mine. But I don’t believe that Noel Ignatiev has the power to make me a second-class citizen, or that there’s any realistic American future in which white people are explicitly and systemically oppressed based on group identity. Whereas there are plenty of countries where it’s at least realistic to believe that Jews could suffer that fate again, as they have in the past. (This doesn’t give anyone, Jew or gentile, a blank check to tear my culture to shreds in order to obviate the hypothetical possibility of future pogroms, to the extent that any of them are doing so.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
If I said: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the Jewish race" do you think Ignatiev would regard that as anti-semitism? Obviously he would. So you just switch "White" from "Jew" in his own rhetoric and it goes from "moral good" to "crime against humanity."
He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups. Whereas there was a period of several centuries wherein white people — conscious of their whiteness and the way it made them different/better than other people — had both the means and the willpower to travel around the world establishing states in which they were made the supreme/privileged race and others were treated as less-than as a result. And, Ignatiev would argue, this power differential favoring white people has continued to the present day. He would argue that Jewish people simply lack the concentrated power and the racial solidarity to place themselves in a position of supremacy over white people even if they wanted to.
Therefore, there is a context around the claim that “Jewishness must be abolished” — namely, that such a project has been actively attempted multiple times within fairly recent history and had demonstrably catastrophic results for Jewish individuals — that simply doesn’t exist (at this time) around the superficially-similar claim that “whiteness must be abolished.” Even if there were some not-insignificant number of powerful people working together to abolish whiteness, the methods they would realistically have at their disposal would not look anything like large-scale pogroms or the Holocaust or whatnot. White people do in fact still have the lion’s share of the money, the power, the resources, the access to nice things and prestigious employment, etc. Their enemies are forced to resort to more long-term abstract tactics such as tipping demographics through facilitation of mass immigration — something which affects countries on a long time scale, but doesn’t actually produce significantly negative impacts on the quality-of-life of individual white people in the present.
Now, of course, this is where you and I both disagree strongly with Ignatiev, given that we recognize that some ethnic groups actually are quite bad on average and have the ability to introduce a lot of pretty substantial negative externalities in a pretty short period of time when given any power/leeway. That being said, I would hope you can acknowledge that none of those externalities, as of yet, have risen to anywhere near a level of badness comparable to racial chattel slavery, industrial-scale pogroms, apartheid, etc. (You may believe that things could get that bad for a significant number of white people within our lifetimes. I think the probability of this is low but that it’s worth taking at least some basic measures to guard against. Ignatiev believes such an outcome is totally implausible, and that none of his political allies would ever dream of doing something like this even if they could.)
And again, as far as I call tell Ignatiev does believe that he personally benefits from a system of white supremacy. Unlike you, he doesn’t appear to just see himself as “white-passing, but exempt from all the really bad criticisms of white people because he’s Jewish.” He, like most people who are honest about it, recognizes that he’s white in every way that counts, and that this has benefited him tangibly. (Police officers are less likely to apply a heightened scrutiny to him upon clocking him visually. Service staff are more likely to treat him deferentially rather than warily. And so on and so forth.)
Most people, whose “Jewdars” are quite weak, would probably have no idea Ignatiev is Jewish unless they asked him, or unless they happened to have a reason to look up his early life on Wikipedia. Therefore, if Ignatiev does genuinely believe that a visibly white/European phenotype confers material advantages in this country, then he is advocating stripping himself of those advantages. I don’t think he sees “abolishing whiteness” as being in his cynical self-interest, in the way that Ben Shapiro sees pro-Jewishness as in his self-interest. Again, Ignatiev does not seem to have any affinity with the Jewish community, does not seem to wish to avail himself of protection within it while whiteness is being abolished, and opposes the continued existence of an Israeli state where Jews could escape to if they fall afoul of “anti-white” activity.
You, Hoffmeister, accuse me of being an equal-offender racist- racist against everyone
I have never called you a “racist”, and I don’t ever unironically use that word. What I do believe is that your identity commitments are too parochial. That you’re thinking too small by focusing on the centrality and purity of European-derived people only. That you’re unnecessarily excluding millions, potentially billions, of valuable contributors to the human race, because you’re too micro-focused on reifying whiteness.
It's telling then that you are defensive of Ignatiev who defends Black Identity on the basis that it musters resistance to White Identity. So his real position is the precise opposite of what you imagine. He supports using Black Identity as a tool to undermine White Identity
Does he? Genuinely, are there specific passages of his writing in which he does so? I’m not aware of any, although I’m far from a connoisseur of his work. If you have evidence of this it would likely change my assessment of him considerably.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
while declaring in-kind criticism of Jewish identity to be a Crime against Humanity.
I don’t believe that this is what he meant by “anti-Semitism”! I believe he meant a far more quotidian antipathy towards individual Jewish people as a result of their religion or ancestry. I believe that his frequently-expressed opposition to Israel is part of his larger opposition to the reification of unchosen identity groups. If “Jewry”, as you’re using it, means “Jews cooperating and seeing each other’s fates as inherently tied together, in both past and present, on account of their shared inherited identity,” then yes, I think he pretty clearly wants that to stop.
What I think you’re either ignoring or failing to recognize, though, is that as a leftist he believes it’s important to prioritize. Leftists believe in tackling the very big problem (the centuries-long privileging of fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, which is still ongoing and still profoundly negatively impacts the latter’s lives) right now, and then later on down the line, once that’s been done, future progressives can start working on dissolving the other, less currently-powerful unchosen identity groups.
Again, why would Ignatiev waste his time writing books and giving speeches about “abolishing blackness” when he knows full well that this would simply introduce massive friction and mutual recriminations within his political coalition? Just to prove to you that he’s not a hypocrite? It’s not like you’d hate him or oppose him any less if he did so. So why should he care about appeasing your sensitivities?
One possible answer is that it makes white people feel bad and defensive when he fails to do so, and that this is bad — either because it is a priori bad to make people feel bad about their race, or because it’s politically counterproductive and unnecessarily makes enemies of a numerous and powerful group. And certainly the latter, at least, is a good reason to not to what Ignatiev is doing, even if one shares his philosophical priors. I was precisely one of those white progressives who got scared off by the explicit anti-white antipathy expressed by guys like Ignatiev, and who discovered a positive white identity as a result. (I’ve since lost some of the enthusiasm I had about that identity at the time, but it was sufficient to ensure I could never again be a leftist.)
Still, there are, demonstrably, plenty of white people who are comfortable with the proposition that whiteness could be fully deconstructed, without that having any serious negative impact on the material reality of their lives. That the hegemonic culture centering whiteness could be dismantled, and that instead of another group taking up the whip hand and using it to take their own turn as the hegemonic oppressor, everyone could just all agree to be deracinated self-inventing individuals. You and I both agree that they’re wrong about this — that there will always be a hegemonic culture in any given polity, and that such a culture will likely always have something to do with unchosen/inherited identity groups. But that’s a testable claim, and committed leftists really do believe that, in the fullness of time, they can stop that pattern from recurring. And given that belief, I think it’s fair to say that they are anti-Whiteness™️ without being anti-White People.
Their main problem is that they are, unwittingly or otherwise, politically allied to vindictive non-whites who are very consciously committed to simply changing which group(s) will be the next up to hold the whip. I see Ignatiev as more of the naïve idealist who really believes this time will be different and we can finally defeat racial identitarianism for real. You appear to see him more as the consciously-vindictive aggrieved minority who wants to be the next one to hold the whip hand. Is this an accurate characterization?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Again, I’m not saying that Ignatiev’s beliefs are good — I oppose pretty much every aspect of his worldview — but simply that they are sincere and internally consistent. They’re not hypocritical. He doesn’t appear to want any special carve-out for Jewish people, nor does he seem to have any special affinity for Jewishness on account of his own personal ancestral background.
Like, yes, many Jews, Ignatiev himself, are hardcore believers in deracinated progressive abolishment of blood ties. So are many non-Jews! If you want to oppose their beliefs — and I do! — it is a useless distraction to try and smoke them out as secret Zionist special-pleading hypocrites. We can just oppose their actual stated beliefs, which are bad enough, instead of grasping at straws to call them liars.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
There are plenty, including within China, who want to see “the Han nation” — as in, a national self-understanding in which Han people are believed to be the central example of what a Chinese person is, in which their language and their customs are given pride of place, and in which they are “supreme” over other ethnic groups within the borders of the country” — abolished as such. This can be true even while also believing that every individual Han-descended person should live a happy, thriving life as a deracinated invidual.
I agree that this would be a foolish thing for me to advocate were I to move to China. It would also be laughable because I have no power whatsoever to effect such an outcome in China. Ignatiev does believe, with some justification, that he can do his part to move the needle closer to that outcome in America. He has been extremely open about that, and has also been equally extremely open about not wanting to replace the cold American white-centric paradigm with a new Jewish-centric one. He is, so far as I can tell, a sincere believer that the entire concept of a hegemonic “national ethnicity” should be abolished everywhere. This inherently means taking power away from hegemonic groups; there’s no time-sensitive reason, and therefore no reason to expend any political/intellectual capital, in also trying to abolish the folkways of minorities whose ethnic preferences are already not given pride of place within America.
Ignatiev does not expect to live to see the day when any non-white ethnic group(s) have achieved hegemonic dominance over America (and I assume he believes that such an outcome is both implausible and undesirable) so why would he waste his time distracting from the far more urgent need to discomfit and dispossess (culturally and otherwise) the dominant group? Thus, again, the “double standard” makes perfect sense and is entirely intellectually justifiable, given Ignatiev’s priors.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
You are being intentionally obtuse. You are obviously intelligent enough to parse Ignatiev’s actual beliefs, yet you intentionally flatten their nuance whenever they appear to deviate from your simplistic framing.
Let’s assume for a moment that Ignatiev is forthrightly representing his own beliefs. He wishes to abolish the cultural belief that appearance and ancestry should confer any prestige or preferential treatment upon any individual. He, like any committed critical theorist, believes that an inherent quality of “whiteness” — not simply a broadly European phenotype, but the cluster of meaning and historical importance retroactively applied to people with that phenotype — is a belief in a hierarchy in which white people are in some sense more important, more valuable, etc., than non-white people are.
In that sense, it is also true that he wants to “abolish the black race”; not to abolish the African phenotype, but to abolish the idea that anyone should care what ancestral group an individual appears to descend from. However, it means something different to lead with a call to abolish a powerful, hegemonically-empowered group than it does to lead with a call to abolish a more vulnerable, historically-persecuted group. When it comes to Jews, it makes sense for Ignatiev to say that Jewish people have just as much a right to their own private religious beliefs as anybody else, but that these religious beliefs should not be made into a template for policymaking, nor should Jews be treated as any more special than anyone else. (As they are in Israel, which is why Ignatiev has repeatedly expressed opposition to the existence of Israel.)
In this framing, anti-Semitism is bad specifically because it is one example of a larger category of beliefs: namely, that an individual’s ancestry or inherited religious beliefs should have any bearing on one’s treatment of, or expectations about, that individual. It happened that the context of the conversation Ignatiev was having centered around a Jewish-specific issue. (And one on which, as @Stefferi pointed out, Ignatiev came down on the side that did not advantage Jews rather than the one that did.) Had that conversation been about a black-centric issue, he would have said that anti-blackness is a crime against humanity.
Now, if all of these beliefs are his actual beliefs, there is no hypocrisy there at all. He is a standard-issue hardcore blank statist secular progressive who wants to abolish nations, dissolve unchosen bonds between individuals in order to liberate them to pursue a life of pure self-discovery and voluntary commitments. There’s no secret undercurrent of wanting to see Jewish people secretly privileging themselves while dissolving other macro-scale unchosen identities.
And of course you can say he’s lying, and that in fact his commitment to blank-slate liberated individualism does actually have a secret exception clause for Jews. (This appears to be your claim.) But then, if you’ve opened the door to accusing him of cynically lying, why are you certain that he’s honest about wanting to abolish whiteness, but also certain that he’s lying about not thinking anti-Semitism is any worse (or any better) than any other form of bigotry? Why couldn’t he be making a bombastic call to “abolish whiteness” because it’s catchy, provocative, and likely to get him a lot of attention, interview requests, and speaking engagements? Why is it that you believe Jews are liars, except when they say negative thing about white people?
Like, Ignatiev’s contention is that there is a society-wide belief that phenotypically-European people are more special than other races, and that’s it’s somehow important to keep them pure and make sure they continue to hold all the important positions of power in as many advanced first-world countries as possible, both because they’re entitled to those countries (“we built them”) and because they’re more qualified to competently run them, whereas other races would fuck it up. That’s what he means when he talks about “whiteness” and what he has explicitly argued for abolishing.
And this appears to be a pretty accurate descriptor of your beliefs! You do think those things about white people! When I’ve expressed enthusiasm about miscegenation between white people and East Asians, you’ve reacted with shock and horror, because you take it for granted that preserving the genetic purity of the white race is of considerable importance. When others have argued in favor of skilled non-white immigration into white countries, you’ve expressed fervent opposition because you don’t think non-whites would be responsible, capable, conscientious wielders of power within white countries. Basically you want non-white people to stay in the parts of the world that currently have all the non-white people, because you want them to stay separate from white people. You’ve made this explicit! The caricature of “whiteness” which Ignatiev attacks — one which, in truth, vanishingly few white people in the 21st century believe in — is the reality of your belief system.
If you want to claim that Ignatiev is making sone larger, more genocidal claim about wanting to directly harm all people of fair skin, or all people of European descent — and also that he wishes to exempt himself from this by retreating into a defensive and subversive Jewish identity — then you have to actually contend with the substance of his stated arguments.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
The problem is that you led with the claim that “Iranians are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [are].” This claim strikes most readers as extremely bizarre, given the many ways in which Israel’s culture (at least in their major cities) is manifestly more in-line with Western cultural norms than Iran’s is. (Israeli women can dress however they please, gay sex is tolerated and even mildly celebrated, they both happily consume Western media and produce media which is easily legible for Western audiences, etc. Many Israelis are originally from Western countries, and fluently speak Western languages.)
Therefore, for your claim to make any sense, it has to be about how Israel’s government is supposedly unfriendly to the West. This may or may not be true, but it’s at least a legible claim. If this is your claim, though, then it stands to reason to also interpret your claim about Iran to also be about the government. And the claim that Iran’s government — which openly funds organizations which have attacked Western shipping, committed terrorist attacks against Westerners, etc. — is more Western-friendly than Israel’s strikes a lot of observers as, again, bizarre.
Are you now saying that your original claim should be read as “Iranians [the people, not the government] are more friendly to Western civilization than Israelis [the government, not the people] are”? Or are you genuinely sticking to the claim that the average Israeli citizen hates Western civilization more than the average Iranian citizen does?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
Personally, I'd only wish success to someone banning Disney, rap etc.
To react to your bailey, @The_Nybbler haven't many in this community opposed this government and arana imperii, ascribing modernity's ills to it?
See, I knew this was coming. There is a consistent bait-and-switch deployed by defenders of the proposition that rogue/irredentist regimes such as Iran are actually secretly friendly to Western culture/interests. The initial claim is always “No, they’re not actually trying to ban Western culture or actively harm Western governments.” And then when someone brings up examples of those regimes explicitly opposing Western cultural imports or waging covert/proxy war against Western countries (particularly America), the claim switches to, “Okay yes, they are opposed to the West, but that’s good, actually, because the West is degenerate and its cultural imports deserve to be banned.”
Yes, I have issues with much of the lyrical/philosophical content of hip-hop music and the culture around it. I agree that much of Disney’s recent output is of questionable artistic quality, and that some of its messaging is insidious. However, if there is such a thing as “the West” (and I’ve expressed my skepticism that such a construct refers to something real and consistent) then surely one of its defining factors, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, is that it is extremely reticent to ban entire categories of art. As an American, I can effortlessly find the intellectual and artistic output of countries and cultures which are openly hostile to my own; I can follow Russian nationalists and Iranian mullahs on Twitter, and I can watch ISIS videos online without needing a VPN lest I risk imprisonment. Only a very insecure and consciously-insular regime would ban the output of its critics, either domestic or foreign. That the Iranian regime does so is a sign that it is not friendly to the spirit of Western-aligned cultures. (It is also, of course, openly very hostile to the political, economic, and military interests of Western-aligned nations.)
I agree with you that the Persian people have no inherently adversarial relationship with me and mine. They are one of the great historical cultures of human history, and I long to see them returned to their former glory. This would not be possible under an Islamic hard-liner regime with revolutionary and anti-Western sentiments baked into its DNA. A proud and high-IQ people deserve better than these incompetent, blustering, grubby mullahs. My problems lie almost entirely with the people on top in Iran, and not with the people who have to live under their boot.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
Right, that and the fact that, as I understand it, the Iranian regime strictly bans Western music and most other Western cultural output, to the point where their people have to find bootleg version of American artists’ music. Yeah, very “friendly to Western culture.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
Me: [looks at photo of Natalie Winters] “I would let her press my correspodent until my whole house is white, if you know what I mean!”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
GenX is as close to race-blind as an American generation ever got
This is only true of white Gen-Xers. A substantial share of black Americans never stopped caring deeply about race; add in the fact that Harris is the daughter of two leftist academics and her opinions become entirely typical of highly-educated black Americans of pretty much any generation since the 1960’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi)
I have to quibble with your calling Kamala Harris a Boomer. I think that rather than treating generations as having hard temporal cutoffs (“she was born in 1964, Wikipedia says that’s the final birth year of the Baby Boomer generation, checkmate!”) we should instead consider cultural affinities and, also importantly, the individual’s actual relationship to the American post-war Baby Boom. Kamala Harris’ parents were not Americans. Their happening to conceive her on American soil while in between academic positions doesn’t mean that they should be considered part of the American baby boom. Culturally as well, Harris is extremely Gen-X in her demeanor, her points of reference, and her visible youthfulness relative to the cohort you’re lumping her in with.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
It increases the fear of violence level of the rest of society.
How so? If I’m not planning on participating in a protest, why would my “fear of violence” be increased by the knowledge that protestors may suffer negative consequences for protesting? Their circumstances do not appear to mirror my circumstances in any important way, so why should I draw any conclusions about what’s likely to happen to me based on what happens to them?
It devalues nearby property by increasing the crime rate.
including taking court and police time away from other crimes.
Not if the police agree to do only a cursory investigation, informed by the assumption “Eh, whatever happens to these people happens, no need to look too deeply into it.” In that scenario, no arrest would be made and no court resources would need to be expended.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15d ago
I very much am in the process of investigating it. My big concern with it right now — and this may just be a result of the strenuous efforts of Freemasonry’s modern public-facing advocates to massively downplay its esoteric beliefs and emphasize its compatibility with normie Christian-inflected liberalism — is that it seems to demand a commitment to hardcore Enlightenment ideas of universal human equality and the centrality of the liberated individual. Since I think a lot of these ideas are wrong/incomplete, I’m wary of committing myself to an institution which treats them as bedrock axioms. I’m still doing my research, though.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
Right, I understand that much, I just don’t understand what their existence is supposed to imply about social relations on this continent. Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal? Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally? Maybe some of these things get explored later in the series, but for right now they just seem like a weird decoration or curiosity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16d ago
Audrey Hale’s “manifesto” has been released. It was never more than a rambling diary. The reason its release was delayed — which was hinted at by law enforcement at the time and has since been made explicit — is that it repeatedly refers to Hale’s personal relationship (and unrequited obsession) with a local public figure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
It could also be that his motives are non-ideological, or only tangentially mapped onto anything resembling a “Red vs. Blue” split. He could have been motivated by a (real or perceived) personal or professional slight which he blamed on the individuals targeted.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though.
I mean, “Vance Luther Boelter” is absolutely not a common name. No component of the name is remotely common; I can’t comment on the probability of this guy being wrongly accused/apprehended, but the odds of him getting mixed up with another individual with the same name are vanishingly low.
For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)
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