Hoffmeister25's profile

Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 18hr ago

On the contrary, the HBD-curious faction of the right has a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to categorize people of various ancestries; many are bringing back old, but at one point widely used, terms like castiza, quadroon, mulatto, etc. Such people would see Zegler not as “brown” in some absolute sense, but rather as simply too brown to play a character named after how pale she’s supposed to be.

We can quibble about how “European” she is — although she apparently describes her paternal ancestry as “Polish”, “Zegler” doesn’t sound like a Polish surname to me, but rather like an Ashkenazi surname — but if she’d self-identified as basically white from an early age, and not made a big deal out of her partial Amerindian/Latino ancestry, I think most people would probably look at her, hear the name “Rachel Zegler” and think, “Yeah, that’s white enough for me.” If I knew nothing about her and you showed me a picture of her, I could imagine being persuaded that she’s Cypriot or Lebanese or something like that, which I would consider at least contingently white.

Obama is a tougher case because, as you note, people with African history have been set apart, legally, culturally, and otherwise, for so long in this country that Americans do still have a pretty keen eye for identifying who’s “black” and who isn’t. Obama’s not light enough to pass for “ethnically ambiguous”, let alone “white”, even though his level of European admixture is probably roughly the same as that of someone like, say, Rashida Jones, who is far more white- or -white-adjacent-passing.

That being said, Obama was not raised as black, did not have any connection or interaction at all with black culture until college (there were few black people in Hawaii, and none at all in Indonesia), and still decided that he was going to lean into his black identity. If he’d never gone to Occidental, never fallen in with black culture, and kept going by “Barry Obama”, I don’t think people would be very hung up on his African ancestry. He’d just be seen as some sort of “mixed” and people wouldn’t dwell on the specifics.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 20hr ago

You’re just using uncharitable framings of the most extreme versions of your political enemies’ beliefs, in order to avoid having to engage with the specifics of my question. Nobody here is disputing that certain low-level elements of the American left’s coalition were, and perhaps will be again in the not-too-distant future, willing to use extrajudicial violence and criminal activity.

What I’m disputing is the plausibility of that element of the coalition gaining significant political power at the federal or state level, such that they could totally remake not only the party apparatus’ official position, but also the common constitutional interpretation of what crimes merit the death penalty, and could then get the Supreme Court to agree with their novel interpretation, and that rank-and-file members of the criminal justice apparatus would willingly carry out such executions. You’re proposing so many moving parts all coming together in a very particular way which, again, seems to have zero analogue in the history of this country.

I just don’t think there’s any realistic through-line via which we get from “some random black felons started fires in some major cities” to “a high-level progressive government official declares that hate speech, and only hate speech, is now a capital offense, and everyone at all levels below this — and horizontal to this, such as, again, the courts — signs off on this and carries it out. The conditions necessary to facilitate a series of developments like this would really only be possible in the case of full state collapse, catastrophic military defeat, etc.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 21hr ago

They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 21hr ago

The political coalition in this country who would find any of this logic appealing is also the one that is dead-set against the death penalty. They’re not even willing to support execution for actual murder and rape, so I don’t see how you can imagine them getting to “death penalty for hate speech”. It just does not strike me as a remotely plausible series of events.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 1d ago

I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.

In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 1d ago

No, his analysis went far beyond that, and he explicitly claimed on countless occasions not only that there is a set of psychological/lifestyle traits uniting both the far-right and the far-left, but also that in very many cases they are literally the same individuals — pointing out that many people he identified as “dissident right” (mercifully, the term “woke right” had not yet gained purchase prior to Hlynka’s perma-ban, or else he’d have embraced its usage with gusto) were, at one point or another in their lives, at least tepidly interested in leftism.

One effect of the fact that he has been banned is that it’s not difficult to sift through the most recent of his comments on his user page, wherein you can find many representative examples of his claims.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 1d ago

Huh? This does not match my interpretation of anything that figures such as Yarvin have advocated. “Totalitarian” means the populace is fully politicized and expected to interface thoroughly, on both a practical and, more importantly, an *affective level, with the state. Yarvin’s model is a depoliticized populace whose relationship with the state is either that of an employee to his employer, or otherwise that of a consumer to a provider. He doesn’t want the average person to have any reason to form an opinion regarding state policy, nor to have any illusion of political input regarding policy decisions. This might be authoritarian, but I don’t see much resemblance between that and, say, North Korean juche or Third Reich state-worshipping rallies. Perhaps you and I have differing understandings of what totalitarianism implies.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 1d ago

I interpreted @Belisarius as accusing @TequilaMockingbird of being the return of Hlynka — a suspicion which I share, although my confidence has been too low for me to publicly level the accusation myself — not that you are. You’re significantly more articulate, and your ideas on a far stronger footing, than most of what Hlynka ever contributed, in my opinion.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Sure, some major ones that come to mind are:

1: Which class/stratum of society is the state (or whatever scale of local decision-making body one prefers) designed to serve? Realistically in any polity comprised of human beings, there will be some sort of unequal distribution of talents and proclivities, with most people clustering around some nebulous middle.

The hard right is split between a faction who want to maximize favorable outcomes for the extreme right tail — to make society a playground for the most intelligent/strong/rapacious/ambitious among us to compete for spots at the top, while the feckless and disempowered middle class try to enjoy whatever downstream goods and services are produced by the 1% and the left tail of the distribution simply starve and die off — and a more collectivist right who want to use the state to crush both tails of the distribution — to dispossess the greedy capitalists, and also to smash and persecute the underclass — in order to secure safety and stability for the middle class. Both of these camps have strong purchase in different sectors of the so-called “Dissident Right”. If something unites these two factions, it’s that they both have zero interest in providing any indulgence toward the left end of the distribution; they despise the “undeserving poor”, the mentally infirm, the criminal underclass, etc. The concept of Christian charity is seen as highly suspect, given that it obligates a significant redistribution of resources from the productive classes to the unproductive parasitic elements of society.

On the modern left, meanwhile, the overriding concern is to siphon resources and status (which, given the Critical Theory focus on social status as the ultimate capital good, are in fact inextricably linked) toward the classes who are most deviant from the middle class. The extremely poor, yes, but also minorities of any kind. The middle class is seen as this sort of undifferentiated demiurgic mass of conformism and stasis; the process of the historical dialectic, ultimately, is the slow but steady revelation of contradictions within the unreflective worldview of the bourgeois class, allowing various elements within it to awaken their consciousness.

Factions on the left are split between what, ultimately, one who has discovered their inner spark of awakened consciousness is obligated to do with it. There are factions who wish to maximize individual and personal freedom, up to and including full transhumanism; their hatred of the middle-class is a manifestation of their visceral hatred of feeling that their life and choices have been pre-determined for them. A different faction of the left is far more invested in pure redistribution for its own sake, out of an overriding visceral hatred of inequality of any kind. They despise the idea of any one person/group having more than another person/group, as well as the suffering and feelings of inadequacy experienced by the one who has less. This leveling instinct drives their hatred of the middle class, who, in this telling, didn’t even earn the things they have, but who nonetheless derive personal validation from the fact that they have more than the lowest among us. (“They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.”) This faction is far more comfortable with anarcho-primitivist and third-worldist rhetoric, with the end goal a sort of deindustrialized communitarian hyperlocalism, in which the accumulated slate of financial and social capital formerly hoarded history’s unjust winners has been wiped away, leaving everyone to start from square one. Each faction of the left basically sees the other as useful idiots, to be wielded as a weapon against the mutually-hated middle/bourgeois class and then discarded.

2: What are the primary determinants of an individual’s life outcomes? The mainstream American idea, on both the mainstream/center right and left, is strongly and overwhelmingly oriented toward “personal agency and hard work” as the answer. Conservatives like Hlynka and @TequilaMockingbird seem to really, really hate anything that smacks of “determinism” — the idea that any individual’s life outcomes are largely constrained by factors outside of that individuals control. This leads to a hatred of eugenics, but also of any focus on socially-constructed factors — and the resulting unequal distributions of status and resources — playing a part. The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize.

I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes, but I do actually have to try and get some stuff done today. Hopefully this was a useful starting point.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 2d ago

Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.

Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.

As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 2d ago

it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.

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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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 7d ago

Do not cite the deep magic to me, witch — I was there when it was written.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 8d ago

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.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 9d ago

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.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 12d ago

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”.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 16d ago

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.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 17d ago

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.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 18d ago

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.

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 18d ago

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.)

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Hoffmeister25 American Bukelismo Enthusiast 19d ago

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!

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