Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
No, she literally has a ton of songs that are not about break-ups, not about disappointment or angst about a former partner, etc. This idea that all of her songs are breakup songs is nothing but a meme, assisted by the fact that she’s, well, had a lot of breakups in her personal life. It’s not hard to look up her lyrics, though, and a large chunk of them are actually something close to the polar opposite of what you’re suggesting.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
Taylor Swift is neither Jewish nor a Zoomer, but you're correct: every single one of her songs is about exactly this.
This is not even a remotely accurate characterization of her lyrical content.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
There is a related trend in pop music made by female Zoomers (or at least performed by them) wherein there’s this surprisingly huge corpus of songs about how bad guys are at sex and how women are better off pleasuring themselves. (I’m happy to provide multiple examples if people insist on it.) The tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that these songs are being written by (((Them))) as intentional propaganda warfare to stoke division and mistrust between the sexes. Assuming that’s mostly or entirely untrue, though, it does reveal a very concerning element of young people’s consciousness.
And to be clear, I don’t think this began with Zoomers, although I think it’s gotten worse under them. Personally, I have a ton of neuroses about sex that I picked up as a result of being exposed to all of the (frankly, quite vindictive) complaints about men’s sexual performance by Millennial female comedians and cultural commentators. It makes it very hard to simply lose oneself in the moment sexually if one constantly has a voice in the back of the head saying, “What if she’s actually hating this right now? And she’s going to tell her friends or social media followers how bad it was later?” I don’t know how Zoomer men are supposed to function if this cultural norm is exacerbated further.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
That’s wild because it’s not even a good song.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
Was the song used in some sort of video game or extremely online meme? I think I’m at least in the 95th percentile for this site’s user base in terms of knowledge of popular music, and I was not familiar with this song, despite having been a big fan of MGMT’s debut album Oracular Spectacular when it came out. I’d be surprised if this is the sort of ubiquitously-recognizable song you’re saying it is.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
I believe the user you’re responding to is saying that the 2020’s are, in some important sense, a “Little Dark Age”, which is why that song would be an apropos soundtrack.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
In some ways it really is the perfect European music. It's trans-national. Much like the disconnected global elite, it is not from a place. It is from anyplace. It is generic, bland, almost always in English, etc... Swedish, Dutch, Irish, who cares? It's all the same.
Based. The greatest European music has always been transnational. Classical music was very intentionally cosmopolitan, and even the more nationalist composers were still working within a template that was extremely recognizably Pan-European. Even when it came to opera, which requires the use of a specific language and thus presents some thorny questions of national specificity, composers would set their operas in languages other than their native tongues.
The development of a shared culture transcending borders is an extremely positive development in European history, and I’m happy to see it recapitulated in European pop music. It’s not true that these musicians could be “from anywhere”; I don’t see them taking much influence from Southeast Asian music, or Amerindian folk music, or anything like that. Their music is clearly descended from a European tradition.
Today? There is some small commercial stuff.
To be clear, are you claiming that there are no massively-commercially-successful musical artists today? Thats just demonstrably and profoundly false.
As for your claims about how musicians in the 2020s don’t have the power to mold young people’s entire brains and ethos the way the big 60’s and 70’s acts did, that’s partially a result of those acts’ legacies being inflated retroactively by the use of their music in media created by the very Boomers who grew up listening to them. Yeah, we associate Creedence Clearwater Revival and Buffalo Springfield with the Vietnam War now because Boomer liberal filmmakers intentionally cultivated that association.
There’s nothing going on in America today which unites a cross-section of the young people in opposition to the government quite the way that the Vietnam War did. We haven’t had military conscription in this country in two generations. Whatever you want to say about all the bad things the government is doing, none of them are as viscerally threatening as forcibly shipping you across the world to get shot at. If the next Big War pops off in the 2020’s — and it’s not exactly looking unlikely that it will — and it results in a reintroduction of the draft, it’s going to forge a shared culture among young people that’s only nebulous today. It’s amusing to imagine films (or whatever the next step in media content will be) about World War III, with montages of mass drone strikes set to the music of Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, and for those to be the retroactive associations future generations perceive when they think about our time period.
In the meantime, the soundtrack of the 2020s is not difficult to identify if you just look at what artists are selling the most albums, having their music streamed the most often on Spotify and other similar services, whose concert tours are the most successful, who appear the most on TV, etc. Taylor Swift still dominates, plus the aforementioned Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Doja Cat, BTS, Chappell Roan… and that’s not even getting into the resurgence of country music as mass culture, with Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time being the longest-running #1 album of the decade so far.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3d ago
I think you’re right but European dance music has little cultural relevancy.
All of the artists I named have major followings, and perform at festivals that attract tens of thousands of attendees. David Guetta has sold over 10 million albums and 65 millions singles globally, and has over 30 billion streams on Spotify. These artists’ music is played ubiquitously on the radio, and again, they collaborate with some of the most famous singers in the world.
Yes, you’re correct that nobody cares what Armin Van Buuren has to say about philosophy or geopolitics or whatever. This is a good thing! It’s actually a terrible thing for our culture that young people started taking the political opinions of drug-addicted twentysomething musicians seriously! Disco kicks ass! Hedonistic pop music is infinitely preferable to supposedly “deep and counter-cultural” music by midwit pseudo-intellectuals like Bob Dylan seeking to poison relationships between the generations.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Did you intend this as a top-level post? Or was it supposed to be a reply to @Rosencrantz2’s post about the state of EU-USA relations?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
I think this is a delusional take, and that major music artists are still an extremely important part of the cultural zeitgeist. I don’t know what it would take to convince you otherwise.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Right, as soon as I posted my comment I thought, “I forgot to mention the metal scene!” Obviously metal has dramatically declined from a commercial standpoint, but artistically it’s still going strong and Europe is at the forefront of it. (Particularly in genres I love, like symphonic power metal, gothic metal, etc. I presume the black metal scene is still chugging along, although I haven’t personally been paying attention to it for a long time now.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Culturally EU is dead. In the past there were at least some italian spaghetti westerns, some interesting French movies and music. This is now completely overwhelmed by USA. There is basically nothing produced in EU, the culture is thoroughly US based.
I will point out that Europe is still a major force in music. Particularly in the realm of electronic dance music; DJs and producers like David Guetta (French), Martin Garrix (Dutch), Armin Van Buuren (Dutch), R3HAB (Dutch of Moroccan ancestry), Alesso (Swedish), Tiësto (Dutch), Sebastian Ingrosso (Swedish), Ofenbach (French), the recently disbanded Daft Punk (French) and the late Avicii (Swedish) have all been massive figures in dance-pop music for decades, including composing and producing mega-hits with famous artists from America, the UK, Australia, etc.
Yes, this is not a cultural achievement on the level of the great European orchestral music tradition, nor even of the intellectually-stimulating European high cinema of the 20th century, but I think it’s at least as respectable as Spaghetti Westerns, and certainly considerably more popular and lucrative.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
I'm not going to discuss murder methods in depth on an open forum that has a bunch of murderous lunatics on it.
You’re talking about The Motte here? I would assign extremely high confidence to the assumption that not a single poster here has ever murdered anybody. (I know we have some military veterans, and it’s possible that one or more of them have contributed either directly or indirectly to the deaths of other human beings, but that’s not the same thing as “murder”, nor in any case would you posting about effective ways to surreptitiously kill a specific individual in a non-military context be likely to have any value for those specific posters.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
No doubt! And to be clear, FedSoc is generally speaking a pretty WASPY milieu. I’m not claiming that Sassoon’s Judaism or ancestry played any part, positive or negative, in her role in this ongoing scandal. I just mean that clearly there are important and influential members of FedSoc who are not WASPs, and that one of them is heavily involved in the story under discussion.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Sure, plenty of Sassoons probably aren’t Jewish anymore, but Danielle Sassoon certainly is. She credits studying the Talmud as helpful preparation for law school. Her grandmother fled persecution of Jews in Syria. She’s also married to an “Adam Katz”, an investment analyst, so it’s not as if she’s marrying out of Judaism herself.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Odd to bring that up when the specific attorney in question, Danielle Sassoon, is very obviously Jewish. (The Sassoon family is a very wealthy and influential Jewish banking clan of Baghdadi origin.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
So, this dovetails nicely with one of my pet theories, which is that people who are progressive — and if you weren’t aware, I am someone who was very firmly in that category for a long time — just genuinely live in a bubble wherein the sexes are less dimorphic.
Like, I am a short (5’7”ish) and not particularly strong man. My personality traits tend toward the feminine along a number of vectors. It was very easy for me to believe that men and women are not all that different on average, because I’m personally not that different from the average woman, at least not one of comparable intelligence and cultural background. And from an early age in school, I surrounded myself socially with people who are fairly similar to me. The guys I hung out with were mostly pretty nerdy and not especially masculine or alpha. And the girls whom I actually got to know reasonably well, because they were in the same advanced-placement classes and nerdy extracurricular that I was, were not extremely different psychologically from me.
So, when I started being exposed to all this data about the very large aggregate differences between men and women — not merely physical, but also in terms of personality — it was difficult to square that with my anecdotal experience. Because I had been ensconced within a filter bubble bringing together males and females within a relatively limited band of personality traits and interests! And this is true to some extent even today!
Sometimes I’ll be talking to my male friends who are significantly more masculine-brained than I am, and who spend a lot more time among significantly more feminine-minded women than I do, and they’ll make some claim about how inscrutable women are and how they act a certain way. And it’s tough for me to really participate because that has not been all that true of most of the women with whom I’ve had close personal relationships! However, that is more a reflection of the subset of women I spend time with than it is a reflection of what the unfiltered global population is actually like.
Like if I went to a chess club right now and talked to both the men and the (comparatively very few) women, I’m sure I could pick out some aggregate personality differences, but they would mostly be pretty similar along a number of axes. I’d expect pretty autistic- or autistic-adjacent personalities, systematizing styles of intelligence, etc. However, this wouldn’t actually help me draw accurate generalizations about the populace, because the vast majority of women would have zero interest in being part of a chess club! And look, to be clear, neither would the vast majority of men, although the reasons why the average man would find chess boring likely differ substantially from the reasons why the average woman would find chess boring.
Ultimately my move toward internalizing the significance of population-level differences, and actually changing my ideological outlook as a result of coming to grips with what those differences mean, required me to accept that while the lessons of that data still leave plenty of room for both outliers and considerable overlap, in order to develop workable theories for how all of humanity should operate, we need to be able to nail down a reliable understanding of probabilities. Learning that women are on average less likely to be geniuses than men — and that, for example, people of African ancestry are far less likely to be geniuses than people of Eurasian ancestry — helps me make better sense of real-world population outcomes. It doesn’t keep me from being able to appreciate the outliers I personally know, and it still requires me to think hard about how to apply that understanding to my own life, as someone who is also one of those outliers.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
So, your contention because there is a non-zero number of funny women, and a non-zero number of non-funny men, we can’t draw any reliable conclusions about populations averages?
You would immediately recognize this as specious reasoning if applied to height. Suppose I said, “I once met a woman who was seven feet tall! That’s taller than I am! Therefore, we can’t say that men are taller than women.” You would understand that I’m failing to engage with what statistics and population averages mean. If I lined up a hundred men and a hundred women, I might end up with a handful of women who are taller than the average height of the men. The vast majority will not be, and I think you understand that. The existence of some overlap in the distributions due to outliers does not at all invalidate our ability to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
Suppose you and I are at a bar, and I offer to make a bet with you: The next time a straight couple walks through the bar, which of them will be taller, the man or the woman? If you predict it correctly, I’ll give you $50, and if you predict incorrectly, you give me $50. Now, maybe you’d hesitate to take the bet, suspecting that I’ve rigged it in some way. (Maybe I have my friends, Short Shawn and Tall Tracy, standing by to enter once I give them the signal.) But assuming no foul play, you’d have to be very misguided to predict that the woman will be taller than the man. Population averages are what they are, and we have very reliable measurement data to demonstrate it.
My contention is that personality traits work this way as well, to at least some extent. If you ask me to predict whether the child of two people with a Ph.D is also very intelligent, as measured by an IQ test, the SAT, etc., the very easy money is on “Yes.” If you ask me whether I guess that your friend who gets in fistfights all the time is male or female, obviously I’m going to guess male, because that’s a personality trait infinitely more common among men than it is among women.
And if you asked me to predict whether your friend who is a theoretical physicist is male or female, I’m similarly going to guess male, because that too is an extremely heavily male profession, due to (among other factors) aggregate personality differences between men and women.
Telling me that you’re funnier than your dad gives me almost zero useful information about how funny men are on average. Sure, humor is subjective, but only to some extent: there is actually a measurable end result, which is “did I make somebody laugh”. If I had ten randomly-selected men and ten randomly-selected women enter a room and try to make each other laugh, my prediction is that the men would have significant more success than the women in achieving this goal. This is based not only on my own anecdotal experience, which is only marginally useful, but also in more reliable population-level data.
For example, British researchers Gil Greengross and Paul Silvia aggregated 28 studies on sex differences in humor, and found that 63% of men are funnier than the average woman. Now, this obviously does not mean that no women are funny! Nobody on earth has ever claimed this! Nor has anybody ever claimed that every man is funny! But, just like height, there is a bimodal distribution here, with men clustered on one end and women on the other.
Visual-spatial intelligence is also unequally-distributed between men and women. The number of men who are very good at mental math and at mentally rotating shapes is significantly higher than the number of women. This does not mean that no women are great at these things! I’m a man, and my spatial reasoning is certainly a relative weakness of mine; I have no doubt that there are many thousands of women better at it than I am! This does not in any way invalidate populations-level aggregate data.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
I have no idea what their grip strength is but I'd hazard 50/50 have more strength than mine.
This is statistically extremely unlikely. On average, men have roughly twice the grip strength of women. Do you have some reason to believe that all of the men in your life are so far below the male median in grip strength that only 50% of them have higher grip strength than you do?
because I don't think the physical differences between the sexes has anything to do with a person's ability to be funny, or intelligent, or the myriad of other aspects of a personality.
The problem here is that you’re not engaging at all with any of the relevant knowledge we have about how genetics and heredity affect personality. The brain is a physical organ, same as any of the others in your body. Of course it is more operationally- and computationally-complex than your gallbladder; that does not make it exempt from being a product of physical processes mediated by the output of your genes. You apparently acknowledge that there are fundamental genetic processes which cause men to grow penises and produce motile gametes, and you appear also to acknowledge that the same basic genetic processes lead men to achieve significantly higher height on average than women do.
Why, then, do you refuse to acknowledge that these processes also act upon the physical architecture of the brain? You seem to have adopted as an article of faith the proposition that individual humans have 100% agency to develop each and every aspect of their personalities, shorn of any probability distributions produced by heritable traits. A pure tabula rasa view of human potential. But where is your evidence for this view?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Ehhhh this seems pretty dubious. Firstly because type-B hemophilia has been known to occur as a spontaneous mutation in the children of older fathers. Victoria’s presumptive father, the Duke of Kent, was 51 at the time of her conception. She’s also a spitting image of him, and of his father George III. Among plausible proposed alternatives for her paternity, such as John Conroy, I’m not aware that we have any record of hemophilia in their ancestry.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Are most, if not all, of the individuals you just brought up taller than you are? Do they have greater grip strength than you do? Assuming the answer is yes, do you believe it invalidates their agency? Do you think tall people just simply work harder at stretching their bones than shorter people do, and therefore the difference in height is a matter of agency?
Similarly, do you think it dehumanizes me to suggest that no matter how much effort and resources I dedicate to improving my appearance, I will never be as physically-attractive as Henry Cavill? That he simply has better baseline genetic potential than I do? Do you think that makes me less human than he is?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes.
How is this the same as “not seeing women as people”? You’ve focused on three specific vectors along which men have an innate advantage on women; men are, on average, better at making women laugh than women are at making men laugh. When we’re talking about intelligence differences between the sexes, it’s not a simple as “men are more intelligent than women”; rather, men are more represented at both tails of the intelligence distribution. There are more highly-intelligent men than there are highly-intelligent women, which is what you seem to care a lot about; however, there are also far more very stupid men than there are very stupid women.
I could easily focus on vectors along which women outperform men. Women are more conscientious, more kind and empathetic, and better equipped to navigate egalitarian and heavily procedural social-professional environments. (And given evolutions in the culture and structure of the modern workplace, this is one reason why women are beginning to economically outpace men in most strata of the white-collar world.) It would be absurd to accuse me of “not thinking men are people” because I have acknowledged women as superior in these specific ways.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
Obviously I’m aware of the work the Gates Foundation is doing in this arena, and I applaud it. What I mean is simply that if the Gayes foundation did exactly the same work, but instead of presenting it as a fulfillment of liberal principles of female empowerment they presented it as a work of paternalistic technocratic imposition on a less-developed society for the protection/betterment of a higher civilization, that work would be utterly rejected by both the African populace and the donors. That the Gates Foundation, as far as I’m aware, does sincerely believe in the aforementioned liberal principles is simply the cherry on top.
To be clear, I do absolutely think it’s true that most African women who are currently having six or seven children would prefer to have less than that. (I had a previous post about declining fertility in advanced countries, in which I said that most women simply do not instinctively desire large families, and given the option to have a small number of children, the revealed preference of the average woman is to do so.)
Lowering African fertility is indeed a boon to those women, and to the countries in which they live, which do not have the economic infrastructure to provide gainful and productive employment to their current masses of young people. To the extent that African countries can be made less unstable and less likely to export tens of millions of unemployed and restless young black men to First World countries, the efforts of the Gates Foundation, and of USAID insofar as their efforts have been similar, are a net good for humanity.
However, my hope is that behind the curtain, at the upper echelon of organizations like the Gates Foundation and USAID, there is also a covert understanding of additional eugenic principles and that their work can be targeted, under the guise of charity, to take specific interest in improving the genetic stock of the relevant countries; to not only produce less Africans but also, in the long run, better Africans. Africans who are better equipped to be peer-level participants in the global order as their countries are further integrated into a global political infrastructure.
Huh? Literally some of her biggest hits are not breakup songs. “You Belong With Me”. “Mine”. “Love Story”. “Shake It Off”. “Delicate”. “Wildest Dreams”. “End Game”. “Lavender Haze”. “Fearless”. “Anti-Hero”. All of these are either very sincere love songs, or about something other than relationships entirely.
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