Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
Whether the shooter conceived of themselves
I’m not doing this to pick on you specifically, but I’m going to use this as an opportunity to express exasperation at this weakness of English which is laid bare when people attempt to talk about an individual whose gender is unknown or unspecified.
What is the word “themselves” doing here? Specifically the “selves” part. Does this one individual have multiple selves? Clearly not! Therefore, the correct reflexive pronoun — presuming we all agree that “they” and “them” are valid when discussing a single individual — should be “themself”! However, as a lifelong monolingual English speaker, I intuitively recognize “themself” as invalid. Not a word!
Now, apparently there are attestations of “themself” from 1350-1400; however, all of the written usages of this pronoun I was able to find on a cursory search were extremely recent. (Like, from less than a month ago.) It appears that there may be a concerted push by writers who, recognizing the dire need for a standard reflexive pronoun to refer to a single individual of unspecific sex/gender, are trying to make “themself” a thing. And, frankly, good for them! It’s shocking that a language as old and as rich as English lacks what seems to be a basic and invaluable word.
Every time I see “themselves” used to refer to a single person, I want to die. Sorry you had to be the immediate recipient of this rebuke, as you are nowhere near the first to commit this grievous offense, nor will you be the last.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
This seems obviously correct to me, and has a ton of explanatory power when considering the motivations of advocates for childhood puberty blockers. There is a subset of the larger trans activist sphere who clearly see puberty as (at least in some cases, for some children) a profoundly traumatic and unwelcome experience. They want to introduce methods by which kids can have more control and more agency around their pubertal experiences, because they assume most kids (and even most adults) are dealing with the same level of angst about it that they are. These people are obviously typical-minding to an extreme degree — the vast majority of people navigate puberty without too much trauma and get over the awkwardness pretty smoothly — but it’s useful to understand their perspectives.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
This is just a long way of expressing the favorite point of retreat for reactionary (in the sense of “reacting irrationally and overconfidently” sense, not the ideological sense) conspiracy theorists after they’re proved wrong: “The fact that I could have believed it speaks volumes about how bad my enemies are.”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
It’s perfectly reasonable to film preteens in public if they’re acting like assholes, or if you get into a confrontation with them and they attempt to accuse you of trying to molest them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
A cursory perusal of my output on this website will reveal that I’m a pretty hardcore statist. Kids should be doing way better things with their time than bothering productive adults in public, acting like shit-heads, and that means somebody is going to need to make them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
I believe that my theory is the most plausible of the available explanations I’ve considered.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
At no point in my life have I ever been a libertarian.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
I register a strong prediction that anyone referred to as 'Bulgarian' is actually 'Bulgarian', including if they stand accused of serious crimes.
As I mentioned in another comment, gypsies alone probably constitute up to 10-11% of Bulgaria’s population, and then an additional 8-9% are Turks, so you’re looking at up to a fifth of its population that’s visibly non-Bulgarian. Yes, Bulgaria is poor and its native Slavic population is far from impressive in terms of development, but it’s still the case that a Bulgarian committing crimes abroad has a strong probability of being non-ethnically-Bulgarian.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
What makes you think that? They seem to be mostly running away in the video.
Yes, this is extremely typical of teenage troublemakers. The second the threat of consequences or being caught/embarrassed appears, their brash aggression is replaced by the performance of fear and vulnerability.
So what? A twelve year old yelling at people is not a police matter, even if she has a hatchet.
So it’s not a police matter, but also regular civilians are not supposed to intervene or even film? This is a recipe for utter chaos and disorder.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
The Bulgars, much like the Magyars whose language managed to persist in Hungary, did not intermarry with, and thus left little to no genetic impact on, their Slavic subjects. What did leave a Turkic ancestral legacy (and the legacy of Islam) in the Balkans was the Ottoman Empire, which conquered the Slavic Bulgarians in the 14th century. Many in the Balkans today do have some Turkic ancestry, but it’s not because of the early medieval Turkic confederations, which were Turkic only at the most elite levels.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
I suspect that the kids were walking about acting disorderly, yelling at people and/or waving weapons around.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
This is a terrible response to public disorder. These youths are able to get away with this stuff precisely because of the attitude of resigned acceptance with which they’re treated by passersby.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
If you hear about a sexual assault case in Greenland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown.
A terrible example; Greenland’s population is almost 90% Inuit, and they’re pretty damn brown. Were you thinking of Iceland?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
That’s not remotely the same as your straw-man claim.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
If you saw that video, and thought "Ah yes, this 13 year old girl holding a knife and hatchet wrong is clearly a hardened criminal who is harassing an innocent adult male who is following her for purely altruistic reasons, like returning a wallet she dropped"
Literally nobody is claiming this.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
That’s reasonable but not guaranteed. Again, I’m just trying to game out different explanations, and fitting the (very scant) available evidence into different interpretations to see what appears most plausible.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
Exculpatory of what? If he didn’t do anything wrong, there wouldn’t be anything to film.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
Well yes, my theory is that either these girls were part of a group that was harassing people, or that they were picking on other kids and that the guy filming confronted them. This would explain why suddenly they seem (or are pretending to be) afraid.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
Every weapon-wielding chav has to start somewhere. She’s obviously quite young and is probably just starting to carry these as a way to look/feel tough. I’d be surprised if she’s used them on anybody yet, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait around and let her keep carrying them until she finally does use them in earnest.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
19d ago
I want to register my prediction that the story of this video is far, far more complicated than what is being presented by agitprop Twitter accounts. (A bold prediction, I know.)
Is there at least a decent possibility that this girl and her sister are helpless victims of harassment by scummy Pakistani men and neglect by a heartless police bureaucracy? Sure! But we have plenty of teenagers here in America who carry weapons to use on each other, or occasionally on bystanders from outside their social class.
I have personally been harassed and threatened by roving gangs of feral kids in this country, and in many cases they were certainly no older than this girl. Now, those kids were pretty much exclusively from demographics which many people here (myself included) instinctively sort into “outgroup”, and therefore right-wingers have no difficulty taking seriously accusations against them. Like the girl in the video, those teenagers, if and when confronted by adults, effortlessly shifted from brash aggression to the performance of fear and vulnerability. (“We’re just kids! Stay away from us, you weirdo!”) It is trivially easy to see through this tactic when imagining a gang of, say, black teenage carjackers.
What Americans in particular seem not to grasp about Britain is just how terribly dysfunctional its white underclass is. American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon. However, Scotland and the North of England have had an entirely native class of dissolute criminal youths for a very long time. Drug abuse and broken homes have gutted these communities long before brown immigrants started showing up in any significant numbers. Yes, the mass immigration is obviously bad; it has both compounded existing problems, and introduced a slew of new ones. But trying to sort this altercation into a clear tribalist frame — “I see a white British girl and a subcontinental man, so I know everything there is to know about who’s in the right” — is widely irresponsible given the total dearth of solid information.
What I see as the likely explanation here is that these two girls, possibly as part of a larger group, were acting disorderly and aggressive in this park. The man filming and another woman (apparently his sister) either confronted the girl, or were approached by her, and began filming. He did so because he believed that, if this escalated, he would be served by having video evidence of her wielding weapons. (That way if she tried to ditch them somewhere and deny having them, he’d have counter-evidence.)
These girls are likely from a very broken family environment and may well have suffered abuse in the past — either from brown immigrants, or from their own white family members, their gangster boyfriends, etc. — and their fear in that moment could be genuine. (As could their fear of being caught.) That doesn’t make this guy wrong for filming them or approaching them. If these girls are old enough to roam around unaccompanied, carrying bladed weapons, they are also old enough to be filmed. That can be true even if their reasons for carrying the weapons end up being totally innocent/justified! Multiple people involved in this altercation can all have legitimate motivations and be acting rationally according to their perceived interests.
If the agitprop narrative ends up being fully corroborated, I won’t find it especially surprising. Obviously there have been massive negative consequences resulting from mass immigration to the U.K., including rape gangs targeting precisely this sort of dissolute underclass girl. This city, Dundee, has a foreign-born population of 9%, including apparently roughly 4,000 Asian residents. It wouldn’t be surprising if some of those guys have been caught harassing/propositioning white girls! Still, at this time we lack anything remotely close to enough evidence to confidently assume that’s what happened here.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic
This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.
As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1mo ago
I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.
No, it’s not, because Anglo-Saxons and Normans were extremely genetically-similar populations even before intermixing. Whereas gypsies originate in the Indian subcontinent. They have also practiced a large degree of endogamy, meaning that they have maintained a very large non-European component to their ancestry despite their long existence living alongside Europeans.
Yes, they have inhabited the European geographical area for a long time, but surely you can understand that that’s not what people are referring to when they call them “non-European”. There is a genetic/ancestral cluster from which the peoples of Europe collectively descend, since many thousands of years ago. Gypsies are highly peripheral to this, as their arrival into Europe is comparatively very recent and they maintain significant genetic difference — manifested in their obvious phenotypic differences from the surrounding populations — from that genetic cluster.
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