Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
Oh certainly, I’m not denying that. The key difference being that both police and the judicial system, at least in a Republican jurisdiction, are very likely to have your back if you shoot a mugger in self-defense. They will not have your back if you open fire in a crowded area because a bum made a creepy noise, or asked you for money, or even if he made a vague verbal threat to you.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it.
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect. Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun; even if the bum is thinking in that way, I would assume he’d also recognize the likelihood of an otherwise-law-abiding citizen would fire his gun on the subway as very low, and therefore not weight it significantly in any cost-benefit consideration.
I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.
The correlations you’re observing are simply an artifact both things being true under Republican government. As @hydroacetylene notes, Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy, and these areas also independently tend to support expansive gun rights. The former policy has a lot to do with curbing the behavior of bums, whereas I believe that the latter policy has very little effect.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
I’m not sure what you’re even talking about. The man who was deported is not an American citizen. His wife, who is, married an illegal immigrant — presumably aware that she was doing so — and bore him a son. Don’t you think she should have foreseen, as a reasonable outcome, that he would eventually be identified as an illegal immigrant?
We separate criminals from their spouses and children every day. Inmates don’t get to bring their wives and children to prison with them, and presumably you would not advocate for them to be permitted to do so. Similarly, we separate illegal immigrants from their citizen spouses and dependents when we deport them. This is a totally reasonable outcome. Don’t marry illegal immigrants!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7d ago
Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.
You never answered my question about what specifically liberal gun laws are doing to facilitate this state of affairs. Is there even a single recorded case of a transit rider firing a gun at a homeless person in Houston? If there is, do you believe that this would be the correct course of action for a gun-carrying rider on a bus? (Homeless guy asks me for money, I quick-draw my gun and start blasting, and hope none of the bullets hit anybody else on the bus?) I’m as anti-homeless as anybody on this website — I’ve argued that they’re an inherently parasitic class with essentially zero legal rights, and that an appropriate course of action might be to round them all up into something like concentration camps — but this strikes even me as a dangerous and wildly irresponsible overreaction.
I maintain that you continue to posit causal relationships between different things which are, in reality, only correlated.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened
The consensus among whom? Which proponents of the Enlightenment today do you believe would earnestly claim that the Jacobins better encapsulated the positive core of their beliefs than the Founding Fathers did? Surely you’re aware that a substantial majority of the users of this site would self-identify as fans of the Enlightenment, broadly construed; of those users, how many do you believe agree with the supposed “consensus” that you’re claiming exists? My support for the Enlightenment is guarded and contingent at best, so perhaps I don’t count, but I would certainly say that the naked bloodlust evinced by the Jacobins — the ardent, unthinking zeal with which they pursued their aims, the hasty and slapdash nature of their kangaroo courts, and the resulting devolution into vengeful recriminations and purity spirals — pretty clearly mark them as failing, in a catastrophic way, to hew to the better natures to which the Enlightenment purports to urge us all to aspire. (Note that I’m no great booster of the American Founding either, so this isn’t meant to let them off the hook.)
Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down
This strikes me as a disastrously shortsighted comment. You’re just begging to end up looking foolish, making predictions like this. I see no signs that technological advancements (“bedazzling” or otherwise) are slowing down any time soon. My accusation of Traditionalism Of The Gaps is, I’m sad to say, somewhat vindicated by your comment.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
Yes, this could potentially work. Maybe also have that user select 3-5 of his or her Motte posts which are most representative of that user’s output, or about which that user is most proud, and maybe also have that user select either a specific post or, more broadly, an idea about which he or she has had a change of heart or been persuaded out of by another Motte poster. This could showcase not only that user but also highlight the value of the Motte as a place for genuinely valuable intellectual exchange.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
I’ll be honest, I was always terrified of being nominated for that. I have my particular areas of interest, about which I’ve done a moderate (by this forum’s standards) level of research; however, there are a ton of topics of interest to the Motte user base about which I know little to nothing, and thus have no valuable opinion. (What do I know about the future of LLMs? Why are you asking me?! I work a dead-end normie job! I’m just a guy!)
If we were to bring it back, I think it would need to focus on the selected user’s specific areas of interest, and maybe probe those in a sort of interview format. Otherwise it would just end up selecting for only the users who feel most confident at expounding upon the widest range of topics.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
But you should have some damn sympathy for a fellow citizen's suffering.
Progressives, especially post-Hart-Celler, have diluted and deconstructed the meaning of citizenship to such an extent that there are tens of millions of individuals in this country with whom I share almost nothing in common except for a legal fiction. There’s a good chance that the people you’re talking about do not even speak the same language I do, nor have they even needed to learn to do so in order to be considered citizens. They and I have no common bonds of kinship, of culture, of social context. Nothing!
I extend to them the basic human empathy I’d extend to any non-American, and I wish the situation were not such that this sort of nothing needs to happen to them. But the fact that they have a piece of (digitized) paper saying they’re as American as I am means nothing to me.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
8d ago
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
I mean I actually do think that a bad outcome of the Enlightenment is that it led to overpopulation, particularly of populations groups which are not cut out for industrialized modernity. I’m not as big a booster for the Enlightenment as my posts today might indicate; I believe that the Enlightenment focused too much on the inalienable intrinsic moral dignity and importance of each individual human life; this was due to those philosophers operating in a very homogenous context.
With the common knowledge we have now, not only of HBD but also of the unarguable fact that we have (at the very least) millions of human individuals walking among us who are totally incapable of empathy, rational behavior, and forethought, we can see that at least one aspect of the Enlightenment was based on faulty/incomplete premises. That doesn’t require us to scrap the whole edifice, but it does obligate us to at least reconsider and correct for those particular weaknesses. (Yes, my primary criticism of the Enlightenment is in many ways the popular opposite of the mainstream conservative criticism, insofar as I believe that we actually care too much about individual liberties and the sanctity of human life.)
Weather and disease did not cause Stalin's purges.
Surely you can only blamed in what you had a hand in creating.
But if a direct result of the Enlightenment is that states developed the ability to far more easily counteract the ill effects of weather and disease, then shouldn’t pre-Enlightenment societies be held accountable for not developing those same capacities? Weather and disease kill an order of magnitude less people in modern times than they did in premodern times, and it’s not because weather has gotten any better, nor that diseases no longer exist. We’re simply able to deal with them far, far more effectively than we were before. Sure, in some sense technological and medical progress do not necessarily need to go hand-in-hand with liberal/individualist philosophical development. However, the fruits of technological and medical progress can only be broadly distributed by a state with the sort of top-down centralized capacity which the Enlightenment paradigm facilitates.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning, as it brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment if doing so only leads to equivalence rather than avoiding the issues of the past.
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes. It is, though, a fact that since the end of WWII — a duration of 80 years — the world has enjoyed the most consistently peaceful, prosperous unbroken period in human history. How much longer would such a period need to persist before you’re willing to admit that the Enlightenment is working out well for us? You can always point to the World Wars as a failure mode or black mark on modernity, but surely you have to compare how things actually look over time, instead of hyper-focusing on one very bad, but historically very brief, period.
If it can be shown that, as @self_made_human points out, the Enlightenment has produced incredible flourishing of life-saving technology, peace-facilitating international institutions, prosperity via reliable trade, and general improvement of quality of life for rank-and-file individuals worldwide, then it seems extremely shortsighted to criticize the Enlightenment for failing to be perfect. It’s like people who criticize rationalists for falling short of perfect rationality; okay, fine at least we’re making an effort! Have you seen how much worse the rest of you are doing?!
I think a lot of criticism of the Enlightenment come down to a sort of Traditionalism of the Gaps. You take for granted all of the positive aspects of modernity which you’d be loath to give up, yet pile criticism onto the relatively small number of kinks which Enlightenment rationalists haven’t yet been able to solve.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
This is Beethoven 3 erasure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything? The Great Famine of 1315-1322 so thoroughly devastated Western and Central Europe that some populations were even reduced to cannibalism and mass infanticide. And don’t even get me started on all the skulls from the medieval wars of religion, the Crusades, the Roman wars of Conquest, the wars against the Mongols and Huns, etc. (And, of course, that’s just in Europe; much of the pre-Enlightenment non-European world comes out looking even worse.)
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
None of the things you named are revolutions, in my opinion. They are revolts, certainly, but not revolutions. An independence movement simply secedes from an existing institution, while a revolution dissolves that institution. After the Russian Revolution there were no more tsars, and almost certainly never will be. Mao’s revolution in China totally dissolved the traditional governing institutions of China. I think you absolutely need to have some way to distinguish that sort of process from the far more common secession of smaller units from a larger political whole.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
It is simply another form of expressing a rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing politics.
What is this sentence supposed to mean? There are a few sentences in your post which have unclear meaning due to (in my opinion) garbled writing, but this one in particular stood out as presumably the result of a typo.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Was there something ideologically objectionable about the American Revolution just because it took the form of a revolution?
I would argue that the thing which we call the “American Revolution” was not in fact a revolution. In something like the French Revolution (ann actual revolution) the King of France was deposed and later killed. There was no more French monarchy; it no longer existed as an institution. Ditto for the Iranian Revolution, which completely removed the Iranian monarchy.
Contrast this with the state of the world after the American War of Independence. The British Monarchy was very much still intact and continue to be a powerful and geopolitically relevant institution for another century and a half. The American colonists were no longer under its power, and therefore they had to create new governing institutions for themselves from scratch; in that sense, the aftermath resembles the aftermath of a revolution. But the institution being rebelled against was never destroyed, nor even especially weakened.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d 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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d 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.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11d 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.
I recognized it as definitely Germanic in origin, but assumed it came to us in this case via Yiddish.
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