Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
The only American expat in the UK I know is my cousin, who married an English woman and moved to England. He’s a very standard-issue #Resist liberal stoner, as is his wife, although they clearly make good money, given the area in England where they were able to buy a home.
What else do you think might contribute to different levels of average intelligence between states? Have you considered that it might track substantially with the different demographics of those states?
Every time some progressive online shows a map of “average level of college completion” or “average literacy rates” or “average IQ” and the Deep South is a great big splotch of unfavorable results, I have to wonder whether it has occurred to this person that the *percent of the population who are black” is far, far higher in that part of the country than it is in places like California, which is only 6% black, less than half the national average. That difference alone accounts for the lion’s share of the IQ differences between states. Yes, there are some states, such as West Virginia, which are both very white and do very poorly on measures of average intelligence and education, but those are quite few and far between. Alabama’s educational deficiencies would flip in a heartbeat if the state were not 26% black.
But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired.
I’m not sure what type of jobs you’re referring to here, but I can confidently say that this is not how the hiring process works at all at my job, which is an extremely standard-issue white-collar/pink-collar corporate call center position. We have a whole HR/recruiting edifice to receive, sort, and filter out applications, and our company also does background checks. If an applicant called our HR department to “check in” at any point during this process, it would not make any difference in expediting any stage of the process. If the applicant got any response at all from our recruiting team, it would almost certainly be a generic “your application is still under review, please wait to hear back from our team with an update” email. Maybe you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a “normal job”.
and to my knowledge no evidence that he had stolen in the past.
Here is footage of Arbery being arrested in 2017 for attempting to shoplift a television with a group of teens. Greg McMichael had worked on a shoplifting investigation of Arbery in his capacity as an investigator for the Brunswick County District Attorney’s office.
You’re correct that as far as I’m aware there is no concrete evidence that Arbery was the one responsible for the theft of items from the construction site in question, but there had been a recent spate of thefts in the area, including from that site, and Arbery had been caught fleeing from the site late at night during a prior confrontation. The McMichaels absolutely did have specific reasons to suspect Arbery of attempting to commit burglary.
I'm sure this isn't a consensual opinion given how hot button age gap discourse has become, but it's how I see it.
Let the record show that @IGI-111 plied me with multiple gin-and-tonics, held me down, overpowered me, and forced me to read this opinion. I will be preparing a long and detailed Tumblr post, with accompanying YouTube video, detailing my accusations. Users here will be harshly scrutinized based on how fully and unflinchingly they believe and signal-boost my story.
There was actually a wide range of opinions about the level of top-down coercion that would be permissible/necessary/useful. Many progressives, as far as I understand, explicitly rejected coercive measures, while others argued that they would be needed, since the populations most in need of eugenic correction would be precisely the ones least likely/able to voluntarily practice it. Some people wanted to limit coercive sterilization only to criminals and psychiatric inmates, while others wanted it practiced far more broadly. It was a sophisticated constellation of issues with a lot of nuance.
The number of people being actually fully fluent in both languages is currently extremely low (when compared to existing countries with multiple national languages).
Is this true? Perhaps my perspective is skewed by living in San Diego, which is roughly one-third Latino and is deeply integrated with Mexican and Mexican-American culture. I personally know dozens of people who are fully fluent (in the sense of being able to competently converse about a wide range of topics) in both Spanish and English. When it comes to second-generation Latinos in most parts of the country, or at least in the Southwest, my perception is that bilingual fluency is actually very high. Sure, a given individual would probably struggle to write a novel or interpret a dense legal document full of technical jargon, but that’s true of a great many monolingual English speakers as well.
(And in fact in some cases, native Spanish-speaking Latinos may actually be more conversant with the formal grammatical structure of written English than they are with written Spanish, since they learned Spanish as a spoken language growing up, but didn’t receive any formal education in it since they attend English-speaking American public schools.)
I'd like to register that both Seder and the young woman didn't come out looking well.
Oh, she came out looking very well. Her ideas…. eh, whatever.
(I would do her, is what I’m getting at.)
The thing is, both she and Seder are correct about “what America is.” Both strains of thought have been equally prominent and influential throughout American history. The people who believe it’s purely a colorblind “propositional nation” of ideas divorced from ancestry need to explain the Naturalization Act of 1790, and why so many of the Founding Fathers — particularly Thomas Jefferson, who was obsessed with the specifically Anglo-Saxon character of America’s founding stock — wrote so much about their race and about the vast differences between themselves and both the Africans and the Amerindians with whom they shared a continent. The people who believe white Christian nativism is core to American history, though, similarly have to deal not only with the strongly universalist rhetoric of many of the Founding Fathers and of the religious denominations in which they were involved, but also the distinct lack of Christian belief among certain others important Founding Fathers.
There have always been lots of Americans who sincerely believe that America was a creedal land of universal promise, in which every immigrant can make good by working hard, and there have always been lots of other Americans who believed that America is an ethnos based, at least in part, on shared ancestral ties to a particular founding stock. America means very different things to different factions, and each of those factions is strongly and sincerely patriotic to its specific conception of what America means. This jockeying for control of the narrative, and the exclusion/suppression of the other side’s narrative, has been going on since before this country even properly began. Neither side in that exchange had any hope of moving the needle on that set of issues — especially considering someone on Twitter deduced that the pretty young right-wing zoomer is from Canada anyway!
Wait… “Moskau” is by Dschinghis Khan. “Rasputin” is by Boney M. Fake fan!!!
I said that there is a very loud contingent, not that they represent a majority. (And to be clear, they were much louder and more active a year ago than they are now.)
It works fine for me…
Here’s one from less than two weeks ago, although at less now there are people pushing back on it, in a way that they wouldn’t have a year ago.
I’m sorry, but the discourse about Russia I’ve seen both online and IRL since the very early days of the war (and even some before the invasion began) has gone far past “supporting Ukraine for utilitarian reasons.” I frequent several subreddits dedicated to architecture and classical music, and any time a Russian building is posted — even if it was built hundreds of years before this war — or any time there’s discussion of the great Russian composers, there’s a very loud contingent of people either saying that Russia has no great culture, or else expressing disgust that anyone would post anything that paints any aspect of Russia in a good light.
Speaking of classical music, a year and a half ago I attended the San Diego Symphony’s annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular, which always concludes with the 1812 Overture. When I arrived, I was handed a program with an insert informing me that the orchestra had decided — and not informed its patrons until we arrived at the venue — to omit the 1812 Overture and to perform a music lesser-known (and inferior, although still good) piece by Tchaikovsky because “we feel that it is inappropriate to perform a piece of music that glorifies a Russian military victory, while there are Ukrainians dying every day defending their country from this indefensible invasion.” What the fuck does Tchaikovsky have to do with Putin’s invasion? The overture in question was written to celebrate Russia’s army repelling an invading army! It honors a battle that took place two centuries ago!
What, other than a jingoistic, atavistic, propagandistic hatred of Russia would motivate a decision like this? It’s disconnected from reality and causality. It doesn’t even attempt to provide a consequentialist or utilitarian reason why we have to disfavor aspects of historical Russian culture which were nigh-universally beloved before the current war began? It’s very clear that places like Reddit have decided that since the current fifth-generation warfare paradigm involves psyops, propaganda, and control of social-media messaging, it’s imperative to impose a blanket policy of negativity toward anything Russian or Russia-adjacent in order to aid (in whatever way possible, even if it has no basis in reality) Ukrainian morale and international standing. This goes way beyond just wanting to punish and degrade Russia’s military.
I dunno, it’s had multiple articles a day for as long as I was reading it. (I finally bailed on the site a few months ago, but I was a regular reader for a few years.)
You have made Malaysia sound very charming! I had already planned to do a combined Singapore-Kuala Lumpur trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, and you’ve inspired me to want to visit more of the country! I’m nowhere remotely as well-traveled as @2rafa, so I’ll almost certainly hit you up for some tips and recommendations once my trip idea actually starts congealing into concrete plans.
(EDIT: I picked a random spot in Malacca on Google Street View, and I’m immediately confronted with a food truck advertising, in English, “Luojia Stinky Tofu.” I am committed to being as adventurous an eater as possible during this trip, but I may have to draw the line at anything where “stinky” is considered a selling point.)
Here are all of the articles he wrote for Counter-Currents, and here are the articles he wrote for the now-defunct AlternativeRight.com.
(And here is Hanania’s own apology post.)
I mean this is pretty much word-for-word the apology offered by Richard Hanania in regards to his past writing for white nationalist publications under the pen name Richard Hoste, and the apology appears to have been broadly accepted. His substack is popular and, as I understand it, widely read among very powerful people in America, and his book (about the need to dismantle and repeal the Civil Rights Act, no less!) doesn’t appear to have suffered any decline in sales as a result of the revelation of his past views. I think an apology seen as sincere because it’s backed up by an observable alteration in behavior is easy for most people to accept in good faith.
Yeah that’s fair, I probably did express myself too harshly initially. Probably a better way to frame it would have been, “You have consistently failed to engage effortfully and in good faith with the reasons why people here disagree with you. You haven’t demonstrated a serious approach to discussion.” And in fairness to @justawoman, I did acknowledge that I have had at least one back-and-forth with her which, though I don’t consider it to have been especially fruitful in changing either my mind or hers, at least demonstrated her capability to seriously engage. I think it’s very lamentable that she has elected not to apply that ability to discussions about Ukraine.
It’s interesting, this is similar to my impression of the 2024 film Civil War. A lot of ink was spilled speculating about the degree to which it was an anti-Trump or anti-right-wing film, and criticizing the implausibility of the different coalitions in the civil war. (“Why are Texas and California allied? Don’t these dummies know that California and Texas are politically opposed to each other?”) When to me the film clearly seemed to want to capture the sense of fish-out-of-water befuddlement that journalists experience covering foreign war zones.
Some American journalist covering a civil war in some random African country is sure to have the same sense of “What the fuck is even happening here? Why is the Kibunda tribe allied with the Yojinga tribe, when all my research says these two groups have longstanding enmity toward each other? Why do any of these groups care about these obscure disputes, and why are they willing to kill each other (and innocents) and wreck their countries over something that, to an outsider, seems petty and incomprehensible?” I think the screenwriter wanted to get Americans to consider that their own country’s internal politics aren’t immune to being seen in this same way. To put it in terms Americans can relate to. Just like with that movie though, it sounds like Far Cry 5 hit a little too close to home and people weren’t able to view if with any sort of distance or detachment from current hot-button issues.
But if a specific user’s output is consistently unserious, I don’t see an issue with offering commentary on that user as a whole, rather than simply on individual positions they might take. Personally I’m in favor of a bit more of a rough-and-tumble exchange that acknowledges users as having consistent personae over time, rather than just taking shots at individual claims each time.
Alright, then let me offer a clarification: I think that refusing to engage with the substance of people’s arguments, and instead accusing them of being unwitting stooges of a hostile foreign power, is the mark of someone who is not willing/able to be a serious interlocutor.
I think that probably a lot of your opinions are rooted, ultimately, in your exposure to top-down messaging which I would characterize as, if not overt propaganda, then certainly propaganda-adjacent. I’m sure you think the same of me! However, this does not give me license to simply dismiss those opinions as “regurgitating propaganda” and making a big show of being scandalized by the fact that someone here would dare to express them. If I did so, I think it would be extremely fair to accuse me of not taking the spirit of open debate seriously. And if I did it repeatedly, I think it would be fair to accuse me of not being a serious person generally. Perhaps that would be an insult, but I personally believe it’d be permissible within the rules of this forum because it is directly related to the question of whether you ought to continue to participate. (Not, to be clear, whether or not you ought to be allowed to participate; I’m certainly not calling for you to be banned or censured.)
Yes, of course you can call me unserious! I wouldn’t be offended if you did! (Particularly because I know it’s not an accurate characterization of me, and also because I don’t respect the source!) I don’t interpret the rules of this site as prohibiting any commentary on the quality of a user’s output, provided that said commentary is not egregiously acrimonious or ad hominem.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person, or even that you’re dumb. In the last extended exchange I had with you, while I strongly disagreed with your arguments and I don’t believe you’re conversant with all of the available data, I think it’s fair to say that you engaged in a serious and effortful way. That’s the opposite of what you’re doing now, which is just saying that any discussion of a particular topic you don’t like is tiresome and illegitimate, and threatening to pick up your toys and leave because some people here have the temerity not to share your same visceral aversion to the discussion of those topics. That is corrosive to the purpose and ethos of this forum; me calling you unserious in response is small potatoes in comparison.
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In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.
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