Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10hr ago
So, this is very interesting. I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account? If he did expect people to find his account, I really have no idea what political outcome (if any) he was hoping to facilitate as a result of this attack.
On the one hand, his background as a former refugee from the Middle East makes him an incredibly unwieldy weapon for progressives to use to discredit immigration skeptics; on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing. Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12hr ago
Hey, I read non-fiction! 😡
I do engage with a ton of fictional content, although it’s generally not in the form of novels. (I’ve recently started reading novels again as part of a sort of two-person book club with my mother, but it’s still not generally my preferred mode of imaginative reading.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13hr ago
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
This is obviously false, though. Her primary target demographic, throughout her career, has been, “people of roughly the same age as Taylor Swift.” As she has aged, her fanbase has aged along with her, and her lyrical subject matter has evolved concurrently. Yes, many girls who are currently teenage are into Taylor Swift, but she doesn’t have the cachet among that demographic that she did 10 years ago, and the majority of people at her shows are millennials, none of whom are currently teenaged.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13hr ago
Has anyone actually seen a 'hipster' in real life recently? Is anyone still seriously going around trying to live the Goth or Emo lifestyle, are Metalheads still a distinct, recognizable class of music fans?
Yes, to all of the above. Have you actually been to any metal shows lately? I have, and I assure you that there are still tons of people there who are very visually-identifiable as “metalheads”. Sleeve tattoos, facial piercings, black band T-shirts, etc. There are still plenty of goths, too. To the extent that “hipster” ever meant anything coherent, there are still plenty of hipsters, too.
There are also plenty of musical subgenres all over — both new entries in genres you’d recognize, and totally new genres you wouldn’t know anything about unless you sought them out. Young people are still innovating musically, no more and no less than they were thirty years ago. Perhaps you are just out of touch with what’s new and hip among the new generation? There’s no shame in that; it happens to everyone.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13hr ago
The relationship between your food and you should be healthy.
I guess I don’t see anything unhealthy about the thought process, “Somebody who does this for a living, and whose job it is to cook food, is likely going to do a better job than I would at making this dish. Also, that person is on the clock at that restaurant anyway and would still be preparing someone else’s food, even if it’s not mine, whereas I’m off the clock and could be using this time for leisure instead of for cooking.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15hr ago
They wouldn't say that fat-shaming had no effect on humans, but that it had no positive effect and generally not engage with the serious tradeoffs at play.
They are engaging with the tradeoffs — they just arrive at a different conclusion than you do! Firstly because there’s a very real disagreement about the facts. Again, do you actually have any evidence that fat-shaming contributed significantly to why people were less fat a hundred years ago? I’m not saying it’s implausible, but I do think there’s a lot more going on and that the picture is genuinely quite complicated.
There is no consensus “leftist” position on obesity. Contrary to what you may imagine, dispositions toward the “fat acceptance” movement remain quite varied among progressives. Positions range from “fatness is entirely socially-constructed, there’s actually no serious health problems associated with fatness, why don’t we just rethink our society to make it more accommodating towards the obese” to “there’s clearly some factors, largely outside of the control of individuals, that are making people more fat than they used to be, and until we figure out what those are and how to fix them, it’s just pointlessly cruel to fat-shame people.” Most serious progressives don’t deny that things like portion control and not eating exclusively fast food have some contribution, but they would argue that these are far from the only things going on, such that shaming is not an effective tool in most cases.
And now that the potentially revolutionary technology of semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) offers a concrete solution to what might be making some large percentage of fat people fat, we might now be able to fix the issue without anyone having to get bullied! And now that we do have Ozempic available — and once we get a better understanding of its long-term effects and ways to mitigate any downsides — I think more progressives will be more comfortable utilizing shame as one tool in the toolkit when it comes to people who clearly have the opportunity to be thin and who still choose to be obese instead.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15hr ago
However, I think leftists ignore the degree to which social attitudes and shaming are part of the very environment that inform our actions.
Huh? What a strange claim. The entire basis of the critical-constructivist worldview at the heart of modern leftist social critique is a hyperfocus on how social attitudes and shaming have a deterministic effect on nearly every aspect of our lives. That’s a key pillar of what they mean by “systemic racism” and “fatphobia” and “heteronormativity”. They think about these things every bit as often as you do, if not more.
The difference is that they believe that reducing the amount of shame individuals experience based on unchosen identity characteristics is a key goal of social justice.
You claim that shaming fat people would have a direct impact on reducing obesity. The leftist rejoinder would have two parts:
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Do we actually have strong evidence that this is true? Sure, people in, say, the 1920’s were less fat than people in the 2020s. And yes, at that time, fat-shaming was also more common. But do we actually have any concrete evidence that there’s a causal relationship between these two phenomena? What if people were less fat because of material factors, such as the prevalence of cigarette smoking, the far greater average level of physical labor performed by the average person on both a professional and domestic basis, and the difference in the chemical composition of foods at the time? (Lack of preservatives, lack of seed oils, etc.) If that’s the case, then people’s relative lack of obesity at the time was not primarily due to some greater level of civilizational virtue, and certainly not primarily due to people consciously endeavoring not to be fat because of the threat of shaming. In other words, those people didn’t earn their thinness in some important moral sense. They simply followed the normal patterns of life at the time, and it happened that those patterns were less lipogenic — no idea if that’s a real word — than the normal patterns of life now. Those same people, even if exposed to the exact same level of social messaging about the dangers of fatness as they were in the 1920s, would still turn out fat nowadays because the material changes in our society make it much more difficult to remain thin given the exact same effort level. So, the shaming doesn’t do much of anything except make people feel miserable about things that are largely out of their control, barring very atypical levels of agency.
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Even if the shaming did have some measurable effect, it’s still morally wrong and we still shouldn’t do it. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. For every one fat person you manage to inspire to lose weight via shaming and bullying, you’ll just have twenty who spiral into depression and self-sabotage. Shaming has highly variable effects depending on the specific traits of the victim; not only that victim’s personality, but also his or her material circumstances. If that individual has a thyroid condition, for example, shaming is very unlikely to produce an impact on that person’s fatness, but is very likely to produce strong feelings of shame which will achieve nothing positive. And of course, this is all without getting into the frankly somewhat selfish, self-aggrandizing, and ugly motives underneath most actual acts of bullying. Bullying is rarely a prosocial act done for the benefit of the bullied; that’s a self-serving narrative concocted after the fact. Shaming degrades the shamer as much as it damages the shamed. It makes society coarser, more mean-spirited, lower-trust, etc. It encourages the worst and most predatory aspects of the human personality. All so maybe on the margins, 10% of fat people will be a bit less fat for some period of time. Not worth it at all!
Now, to be clear, I personally don’t endorse all of this. But it’s a coherent and sophisticated worldview. It’s certainly not that leftists just haven’t thought about shaming and its importance.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
16hr ago
Right, obviously. Just pointing out that Franklin isn’t the only non-president on U.S. currency.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20hr ago
He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation).
And Alexander Hamilton, who was also never president.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Also…. just look at the guy.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Was the Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs an example of “civic nationalism”, or was it “ethnic consciousness”? How about the unification of Italy? Was that inspired by “Jewish intellectuals”? (A pan-Italian identity is historically attested at least as early as 1741, a century before Marx’s works were published, and a version of the Italian tricolor flag was adopted as early as 1797 by the Cispadane Republic.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts
Monarchy is a model of government which has independently emerged in nearly every human civilization known to history. Why are you suggesting that the only reason to favor it is “giving into wild instincts”? As if it’s nothing more than some atavistic act by primitive savages, like ritual human sacrifice. Like, I grew up in America the same as you, and although the patriotism and the pro-revolutionary sentiments never really took root in me the way they appear to in you, I was certainly exposed to the same information and the same memes. I don’t recall the primary criticism of monarchy ever being that it’s the mere result of wild instinct.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
Altoona has a train stop on the Norfolk Southern Railway, which is served by Amtrak.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
This doesn’t strike me as a plausible account at all.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d ago
It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much
Why does this disgust you?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
12d ago
There would need to be a like mandatory "homecoming" of the diaspora (~9 million Romanians, for instance) before being allowed to vote on anything.
What percentage of that diaspora is gypsies, though? I observe that at least here in America, if you hear that somebody is “Romanian” — and in America, this is almost always in the context of learning that law enforcement has broken up some ring of professional thieves comprised of “Romanian immigrants — Romanian nearly always means “Roma” and not ethnic Romanian-speakers. My understanding is that this is mostly true throughout Western Europe, although I have no doubt that some reasonable number of actual Romanians also emigrated, particularly during the Ceaucescu years.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
13d ago
Is it realistic to hope that this can/will open a path to the repatriation of Syrian refugees/“refugees” currently in Europe? Like presumably a great many Syrians who fled the country did so because they were either direct opponents of the Assad regime or were otherwise threatened by Assad’s rule specifically. With a rebel Sunni-led government transitioning into power, will this be seen as plausibly obviating those asylees’ original claims?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
This is a great example of what I was complaining about. This demand that the author take a strong and explicit stand and clearly spell out the moral of the story. Certainly the “message” of Martin’s novels, to the extent there is one, is far more nuanced and interesting than your juvenile “war is bad” interpretation. Even if it wasn’t, though… so what? Why is that an invalid message for a series of fantasy novels?
He doesn't have to tell us that the world is full of piss and shit and cum and tax returns, we know that. There is a genre of Japanese novel, of which is called pillow books, which can be best summed up as... things happen. Things happen, in his underedited, over-bloated work, but nothing much of consequence actually occurs.
I think that actually a lot of people do need the reminder that even the most lofty ideals and heroic rhetoric is ultimately describing a series of mundane, gross, and often brutish Things Happening. Part of Martin’s whole project is to showcase the dramatic irony between, on the one hand, the lofty chivalric self-image and self-importance of the power players involved, and, on the other hand, the grubby and venal motives underlying it, and the hideous reality of the real-world outcomes of all of that rhetoric. He’s forcing the reader to stare straight into the abyss of that discrepancy, rather than escaping into the fantastical good-and-evil stories which still dominate so much of the fantasy novel oeuvre.
if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.
Why?
If you're going to be an indulgent ride where bad people do horrible things to worse individuals (Black Company is very fun) admit it.
Why can’t it be something in between? Why can’t he write a series in which many good people earnestly attempt to do good things, and sometimes succeed but often fail? Why can’t he write about people who are situationally bad — pursuing motives and methods which are legitimate in some circumstances, but catastrophic under others? Why can’t there be both moments of heroism, and moments of Bad People Doing Horrible Things? I don’t understand the insistence of forcing the author to “choose a lane” like this.
If Martin was honest about his anti-war and feminist beliefs, he would have written Vinland Saga, but he didn't
I think he is very honest about these views, but I don’t think he beats the audience over the head with them in his works, nor does he appear to want to. I think he does have genuine affection for certain parts of the historical era about which he’s writing, and I don’t think he set out to construct a narrative in which war is depicted as 100% bad, or modern feminism 100% good, or anything quite so morally clean as that. I understand that his behavior on social media is suggestive of a simplistic morality, but I think his writing illustrates that he’s capable of far greater insight than his Twitter or his blog comments let on.
The real world doesn’t have “a plot”. It’s not a series of carefully-woven interlocking events all building toward some satisfying conclusion. To the extent that Martin is going to fail to land the plane of the series, it’s because a novel must to some extent differ from the real world in that sense, and Martin couldn’t thread the needle between the parts of the form which are necessary, and the parts which can be effectively deconstructed. To that extent, I agree that a novel can’t simply be a bunch of Things Happening. But I don’t fault Martin for making the experimental effort to see just how far the deconstruction could be taken before it fell apart.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.
This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.
Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.
What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.
Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
14d ago
I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs.
Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)
Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.
One of the tendencies on the Online Right with which I often find myself in conflict is the insistence that good art ought to be didactic. The idea being that the purpose of art is to model and reinforce traditional virtues. Under this framework, of course Martin’s work is degenerate and poisonous: it provides a very persuasive, entertaining critique of the overly simplistic nature of those virtues, as well as the clearly disastrous historical consequences of a single-minded commitment to them. (Particularly, as you note, when those virtues are worn as a skin-suit by powerful men who need thousands of less-powerful men to die horribly on their behalf.) I’ve mentioned before how when I read about something like the Wars of the Roses — a barbaric affair unworthy of a virtuous civilization — I feel the instinctive pull of the liberals (and later Marxists) who grasped the profoundly predatory core which underlay the supposedly chivalrous institutions of feudalism.
I love Lord of the Rings for what it is - an escapist fantasy and an elaborate ersatz mythology for the ancient peoples of Britain - but frankly I don’t think it has much to teach us about the real world. Its story is contrived to contain purely-evil villains, allowing it to sidestep complicated questions of conflicting virtues and the possibility of non-violent resolution of conflicts. (Tolkien himself would have recognized how little the real war in which he participated — a pointless bloodbath which devoured the lives of the men who served under him — resembled the chivalric heroism which his novels depict.) Personally, I don’t want to have my legs blown off on some foreign shore because the men who have power over me decided that the real world can be modeled as a conflict between blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. I can recognize the so-called Classical Virtues as an interesting thought experiment and as something to aspire to, but when it comes to applying them to the modern globalized world, I think I’d much rather that the powerful people keep in mind the critical voices of writers like Martin.
So, here’s where I somewhat agree with you: There are far fewer people nowadays who define themselves in terms of their relationship to a single genre of music, in opposition to other genres. My mother is a traditional Gen X metalhead; she was going to thrash metal shows as a teenager in the 80’s, and has made “I listen to metal music” a central pillar of her identity for her entire adult life. I was raised around this (by her, at least — my father’s musical tastes are significantly more broad) and I have a very intimate exposure to the way that culture operated both when she was younger and when I was first entering into it.
One of its central tenets was: we hate pop music, we’re separate from mainstream culture, we’re proud to listen to metal and nothing but metal. Watching TV shows like VH1’s Most Metal Moments, this was driven home to me; being “metal” meant hating mainstream culture, and it usually also meant partying extremely hard and engaging in varying degrees of antisocial behavior. (Example: Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx fatally overdosed on heroin, but was resuscitated back to life. He partied so hard he literally died and lived to tell the tale! How metal is that?!)
Needless to say, I found these aspects of the culture extremely cringe and alienating, combined with the wanton interpersonal violence I witnessed and at times experienced in the “mosh pit” at metal shows. I drifted away from the culture, even as I continued to be interested in the music. I ceased to make “listening to metal, and making sure other people know I listen to metal” an important part of my self-image, and I embraced listening to a wide variety of genres. I saw no reason to feel embarrassed to listen to Job For A Cowboy and to Katy Perry in the same day. I think that most people my age and younger have embraced this sense of being musically and culturally omnivorous. Even someone who decides to cultivate a visual aesthetic of being a metalhead — the piercings, the tattoos, the dyed black hair, the black band T-shirts and ripped jeans and denim jackets with iron-on patches — is very often okay with also partaking in the fruits of other subcultures. In other words, millennials and zoomers don’t do “guilty pleasures”. If something brings me pleasure — especially something as harmless and anodyne as listening to a particular song — why on earth should I feel guilty about it? So yes, in that sense, subcultures have become more permeable and less dedicated to exclusivity.
As for specific musical genres/subgenres that have only become popular in the last 5-10 years, I could name a few: K-pop, hyperpop, synthwave/vaporwave, drill rap, rap-country, and, as you named, phonk. I’d also point to significant shifts or evolutions in particular genres which had been previously established. For example, Latin pop and reggaeton have undergone something of a renaissance and mass popularization with acts like Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Ozuna, Rosalía, and Anitta. Hip-hop and pop-punk have begun an interesting fusion at the hands of acts like Machine Gun Kelly, Sueco, POORSTACY, Iann Dior, and Magnolia Park. And then in the realm of indie rock, there’s been a sort of refinement of the vague constellation of the new-wave/post-punk-influenced dance-rock sound popularized in the aughts by bands like The 1975, The Killers, Phoenix, and Two Door Cinema Club. Newer bands like The Strike, Sub-Radio, Wild Cub, and The Griswolds have strengthened the 80’s synthpop influences, and have also integrated elements of disco as well as some of the African-influenced sounds from Paul Simon’s Graceland album.
As to the question of whether young people attend concerts as often as they did thirty years ago, my assumption is that they probably don’t, but I don’t have any strong data to back that up. Certainly some newer acts like Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Travis Scott, and Khalid can still fill up arenas of young people. They’re still breaking into the overculture, despite none of them merely aping older musical styles.
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