Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22hr ago
How do you square this with the existence of moderate, Western-aligned or neutral Muslim states like Jordan, the U.A.E., Bosnia, and Indonesia?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
22hr ago
What country has responded to urban aerial bombings with surrender?
The Serbs during the Yugoslav wars come to mind.
As long as Israel and their western support bloc shows absolutely no love or friendship for the Persian people, they're not going to throw the Ayatollah out and replace him with western moderates, they'll replace him with a hopefully more competent Ayatollah.
Possibly, yes, although it’s far from clear to me that a more competent Ayatollah is on offer. Furthermore, I don’t interpret the U.S.’s or Israel’s enmity toward Iran as an expression of enmity toward “the Persian people”; it’s pretty obviously the Islamist revolutionary government that is the issue here. Neither Israel nor the United States have resorted to significant bombing of civilian urban infrastructure within Iran, so far as I am aware. All of the Israeli strikes I’m familiar with have been extremely targeted at Iranian regime leadership, which is in marked contrast to the more indiscriminate bombing campaigns against the Gazans by Israel, or of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
I mean, is that an example of “brute force violence”? If those American hostages had been captured by, say, ISIS, we would have seen high-definition videos of them being decapitated, set on fire, etc. Instead, the Iranians released all of the hostages unharmed. The only casualties from the entire incident were caused by the American military’s own incompetence in Operation Eagle Claw. (Obviously if Kenneth Kraus had been killed instead of injured and subsequently released, the story would be different, if only slightly.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
This is the same question I have: how many sustained humiliations can a government endure and still maintain a sufficient level of popular support? Like you can only blame the perfidy of the Great Satan for so long before the buck eventually stops with you. I’m seeing that Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out. If this sort of thing happened to the American military, I have no idea how the government could continue to stand.
Is the fear of what regime collapse would mean for the country so pervasive that the Persian people will continue to tolerate the status quo? Perhaps I’m just a naïve American, wildly overestimating how much power the people of Iran have to effect a regime change even if they wanted to. Are the traumatic memories of life under the Shah, fifty years ago, really still so fresh that the Iranian people will continue to roll the dice on the Ayatollahs?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
He started his Substack and wanted to focus on that; additionally, in general he had grown quite distant — ideologically and otherwise — from some of the other original core participants. I have some (although not a ton) of insight into more of the behind-the-scenes specifics, but out of respect for individuals’ privacy I will not share what I know.
Having some knowledge of the inner workings of the podcast, I can say that there have been half-hearted discussions of resurrecting it with a new host; @ymeskhout is definitely done with it.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
Obviously, text on a plain background can still work for marketing; arguably the most widely-discussed and culturally-relevant album of 2024 used precisely that aesthetic, which was then adopted by cultural heights as lofty as the Democratic candidate for U.S. President.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
You seem not to actually be paying attention to anything going on in American popular music today, if you think that there is no “melodically complex” music being “played on real instruments”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
You’re eliding two very important questions:
- Which Americans are getting replaced?
- Which immigrants are replacing them?
For example, in Los Angeles, Latinos have totally replaced blacks in many neighborhoods. This process has not simply been a matter of numbers; there have been many instances of actual racial violence, in which Latino gangs have intimidated blacks into moving away. As David Cole has extensively documented, this has been an overwhelmingly positive development for the city. Even foreigners who speak broken English are, on the whole, preferable — in terms of their crime rates, their effect on civic life, their contributions to the economy — to native English-speaking black Americans.
Are Mexicans the population group I would ideally prefer to take over those parts of LA? No. Obviously I’d prefer a million white Danes, or a million Japanese. I don’t personally want to live in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and listen to awful Mexican music at 2 in the morning. But the Mexicans are undeniably a step up from what was there before, even though they were undoubtedly a foreign population replacing a “heritage American” ethnic group. The fact that blacks have some ineffable historical “claim” to be a long-standing part of the fabric of American culture is of very little importance compared to all of the observable material aspects of day-to-day life.
Similarly, if a million Vietnamese immigrants streamed into West Virginia and displaced the native hillbilly whites, West Virginia would be a better place to live for anyone who remained. There would be a short-term culture shock, as those immigrants’ English fluency would be low, their customs unfamiliar, etc. But within one generation, educational outcomes in the state would likely skyrocket as a result of the introduction of a conscientious and academically-diligent population, in comparison to the “founding stock” who had been there before.
Now, obviously, the outcome would be different if instead of a million Vietnamese it was a million Afghans. Appalachian white trash are a quite dysfunctional population, but they’re still way better than Afghanistan. (I am speaking, of course, in term of population averages; there are, of course, plenty of Appalachians who are good Americans, and plenty of Afghans who are good people.) I’d even rather live among ghetto blacks than among Afghans. Speaking about “replacement migration” as a pure negative is misguided.
Now, this is all separate from the question of whether or not it’s legitimate for elected political representatives to consciously think and act this way about their own people. It’s all well and good for me, a private citizen, to opine about how my black fellow citizens should get run out of town by Japanese foreigners. But if I had actual power to effect these changes, wouldn’t I owe some debt of care to the current constituents over which I serve? Can a purely elitist technocratic government, shorn of any sense of obligation to the people it rules (however imperfect and suboptimal those people may be) truly be said to have any legitimate mandate?
Ultimately that is the great political question of our time. To what degree is populism (however attenuated) simply a mandatory obligation of a government? How much do the elites owe to the least functional, least successful elements of their own society? (And how much can they realistically get away with, if they decide not to take the desires of their constituents into account, before it all comes crashing down?)
Definitely not 1; if I’m wearing a hat, it’s almost certainly because my hair looks like shit. The real faux pas would be letting everyone see my bad hair day. 2 is totally fine by me as well.
I’m torn about 3, because on the one hand I recognize that this one will probably be the most popular answer, but on the other hand I sometimes have a pretty bad post-nasal drip; I always endeavor to spit somewhere where people won’t see/hear it and get grossed out, but occasionally that’s unrealistic. Spitting is definitely my most slovenly behavior.
Neither 4 nor 8 is a faux pas as far as I’m concerned, because neither is going to actually make anybody uncomfortable. They just look bad visually, and if someone is trying to look good — which, if he’s wearing a suit or a tie in the first place, he obviously is — he should avoid doing things that detract from that goal.
5, 6, and 7 are obvious [insert whatever is the correct plural of faux pas] to me. 9 is a spectrum, where it depends on what kind of food you’re chewing, how adroit you are at manipulating it in your mouth such that it’s not visible to your interlocutor and doesn’t significantly impact your diction, etc. If it’s a faux pas it’s generally a minor one.
With 10, I would need more context to judge. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t gotten laid in a while and my instincts about the finer points of the etiquette have atrophied.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
I’ll commend you for cleverness, inasmuch as you added enough new material/adaptation to the modern American context to the 25 points of the NSDAP to prevent them from being immediately recognizable to people who weren’t already in on the joke.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
I wish I knew who the hell that was.
Literally the guy the OP was mostly about. You know, the guy referenced several times by name in the post you replied to.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
You're the one that posited their existence!
Correct, I was asking you to accept that position as well, at least for the sake of argument.
What, "my cars are not selling because of vandalism and smears against my company triggered by my political activity" does not count?
Correct, that definitely does not count as “my life sucks” in anywhere near the same way as Oliver Anthony style “I’m personally oppressed and downtrodden, and it’s my outgroup’s fault” populism.
Yes, that's what "my life sucks" meant in TheDag's reductive summary.
I don’t think so. I think there’s an important qualitative difference between populist “rage and vengeance” grievance on the one hand — which is what the OP is attributing to Anglophone conservatism — and the technocratic/futurist “we’ve identified the problems, and it’s time to let smart and successful elites determine how to fix those problems” institutionalism of the factions I identified.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
You claimed that
currently the entire political spectrum is based on "my life sucks, boo out group".
Even if you can find example of the people I’m pointing to saying their outgroup sucks, you’re still missing the “my life sucks” part. Elon Musk’s life manifestly does not suck, nor does he appear to be under any illusions that it does. To the extent that he criticizes his enemies (political or otherwise) it is because he believes they’re making America worse, or making the world worse; he definitely doesn’t seem to be claiming that they’re making his own life worse. (Except for maybe on the trans issue specifically, given the way it has impacted his family life.)
Similarly, the main figures in the “Abundance Democrats” — assuming such a faction does indeed exist — focus their criticism on “NIMBYs” — again, let’s assume for the sake of argument that such people exist and are reliably identifiable — because they believe that such people are actively preventing American society from addressing a major issue that is negatively impacting the lives of many people. Notably, though, the Abundance Democrats are largely financially successful people who can currently afford housing without too much difficulty. (Or who live in subsidized housing, as students, academic faculty, etc.) The housing crisis isn’t wrecking their lives, and they’re not motivated by personal grievance. They do genuinely appear to want to fix a problem, even if that problem isn’t a problem for them specifically.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
but currently the entire political spectrum is based on "my life sucks, boo out group".
You don’t actually believe that’s true, do you? Like, clearly there are many people — people well within the mainstream Overton window of the two major American political parties, and certainly those within the mainstream of other Anglosphere countries — who do not fit this description at all. One could point to the “Abundance Democrats” and the “Tech Right” as two ascendant factions made up very largely of successful, optimistic, non-resentful individuals.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
There are many other things we could do with these people instead of killing them that will still make society safer.
Like what? I’m trying to imagine some institutional entity set up to try and maximize the productive labor value of people like this girl; such an entity would need to devote a very onerous amount of money, time, and resources just to making sure she doesn’t fuck something up massively. This is money spent just to make sure she isn’t a huge net negative; that’s long before we’ve gotten anywhere near turning her into a net positive. We also need to make sure such an entity does not give her access to anything important with which she could channel her obvious devotion to cause into a genuinely destructive action.
So, what sort of menial, non-impactful tasks are we setting her to, such that if she decides to do something horrible she can’t have much impact, but she still has the capacity to represent an economic (or even social) net positive, after taking into account everything required to keep her from doing something horrible?
Playboy magazine’s path to profit wasn’t selling subscriptions, it was setting the organization as a prestige knower of what made a hot woman hot, which it then as an organization certified and sold.
Sadly, this is where Hef is directly complicit in one of the great crimes against an entire generation: the promulgation of bolt-on tits — volleyball-sized, perfectly spherical breast implants — as the beauty standard preferred by the great unwashed mass of late Boomer and Gen X men. All three of the women featured on The Girl Next Door had them, and of course Hef’s greatest victim (though he was far from her only victimizer) was Pamela Anderson, who was turned from a girl-next-door with a gorgeous face and a natural figure into a dead-eyed plastic simulacrum of a woman. I thank God every day that we are finally free from the volleyball-titty, Living Barbie Doll era of female sex symbols — the specters of Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra, and Anna Nicole Smith no longer haunting the boners of virile young Americans — and can, instead, just appreciate a tasteful set of naturals, like Hef could in the 70’s.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
Sure, all of these are good reasons to want more white British doctors. But, other than the paperwork thing, which can’t plausibly represent some massive expense passed on to the consumer, what does any of this have to do with making things cheaper, which was the original claim?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
The actual alternative for Brits is to kick out their unproductive, non-British population, tighten their belts, and spend a decade or two training up new doctors and nurses from the natives. That would drive down costs and reduce wait times in the long run,
What is the mechanism by which replacing foreign-trained doctors with native British doctors is supposed to make healthcare more affordable for patients?
My naïve assumption is that doctors from, say, the Indian subcontinent are willing to accept lower pay and less favorable conditions than comparable Brits, simply because the opportunity to live and work in Britain is worth so much more to them than it is to a native Brit who takes that opportunity for granted. This is, as far as I can tell, pretty uniformly the story of nearly all immigrant labor, skilled or unskilled, throughout the developed world. And presumably the ability to furnish such doctors lower wages and less benefits would in turn redound to the patient in terms of lower costs.
I’m extremely sympathetic to many of the arguments for deporting foreign laborers — even doctors — and thereby clearing the field for natives to move into their remunerative positions; however, the argument that it will make things cheaper for the end users of those services seems to be quite dubious. Perhaps I’m missing something. Am I wrong that Indian doctors accept lower pay and that this causes healthcare costs, ceteris paribus, to decrease relative to the counterfactual in which all doctors are white Brits?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I didn’t need to read the entire Book Of Mormon to know that, either. You can even read just some small selections of it to get the gist of their theology, much as you can with the Bible.
Like, all of this is Google-able, Wiki-able, etc. Unless there’s some secret esoteric Mormonism going on in deep catacombs hidden not only from the public but also from run-of-the-mill members of the church — which I suppose we can’t rule out — none of the important doctrines of the church are remotely hidden from any curious outsider who is curious enough to access them. (Plus, you know, the church famously sends thousands of missionaries to publicly proselytize the faith.)
To the extent that most non-Mormons know almost nothing about the church’s theological claims is simply downstream of the fact that most human beings are profoundly incurious about other religions — particularly ones which they perceive as low-status. Hindus aren’t secretive about their beliefs, either, it’s just that almost no non-Hindus ever ask them about it, and would find a brief description befuddling.
There are plenty of things to criticize about the LDS church if one is so inclined, but “they’re hiding their beliefs from the public” is not one of them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I mean, the Book Of Mormon is freely available as an audiobook on, for example, Apple Podcasts. I listened to the entirety of it, plus the whole Pearl of Great Price and a decent chunk of the Doctrine & Covenants. It’s not difficult for a layman to access these texts.
I want to make sure I actually understand what you’re claiming here.
Is the claim something like: blacks, by being an unassimilable block and a thorn in the side of any project aiming toward American political/cultural reconciliation, are actually performing a positive service. They’re what’s preventing non-black Americans from coming together to form some sort of cultural consensus, and this is a good thing, because the rise of such a consensus — at least, if it were to arise under current ideological conditions — would be shaped largely by progressives. Therefore, blacks should be encouraged to continue to be a pain in the ass (or at least no active steps should be taken to force them not to be) because if they were marginalized or mollified, white people might start forming a “mass conformist” culture like the ones in Europe.
Am I getting this right? I don’t want to misinterpret or misrepresent your view.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
Presumably I am one of the individuals you have in mind. I can understand why you find it baffling: your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic. I don’t expect that a fully-committed partisan such as yourself will be able to put aside your grudges and live in comity with true-Blue progressives.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people. In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
Perhaps I am the pot calling the kettle black, and that in fact it is I who am wildly overestimating the salience and centrality of my pet issue. No doubt I am, to some extent. But I truly do believe that most non-black Americans can return, with not insurmountable difficult, to the relative comity of the 90’s, if and only if there is a significant marginalization of blacks as a cultural and political entity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I’m about halfway through Anna Karenina. After that I’m finally gonna crack open Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition.
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.
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