Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2d ago
Trace even confirmed that he was clued into it by Sailer.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4d ago
Is there any reason at all to believe that Elez’s personal antipathy toward Indians (to the extent that such antipathy is real and embodied, rather than simply a performative internet shitpost) will have any measurable impact on the budget-slashing decisions he contributes to in his role at DOGE? These things are just meaningless online comments. What reason do you have to believe they have any correlation with the quality of his judgment in a professional capacity?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
and "pathy," as a suffix, generally means disease
So, what it actually means is “suffering”, or even just “feeling” or “experience” more generally. The usage in telepathy is analogous to the usage in empathy or sympathy, more so than it is to uses in the names of afflictions.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
Short for Racial Holy War. Coined, as far as I’m aware, by Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church Of The Creator, and a prominent member of the early White Power movement.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5d ago
US politics HBD tends to get lumped in with race-essentialism as a subset of collectivist/identity politics, which is in turn closely associated with the US Left, and the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in particular.
This is extremely typical of your output. You use vague passive-voice terms such as “tends to get lumped in with” and “closely associated with” in order to avoid having to explicitly delineate why one thing is, on a granular practical and analytical level, similar to the other. Literally zero of the people I know who enthusiastically promulgate HBD research are progressive. Not one.
The logical implications of HBD (both on a group level and an individual level) are simply not compatible with American-style progressive ideological commitments. Progressivism doesn’t mean “collectivism” or “identity politics”. Those things are, at best, orthogonal to progressivism. They have no inherent connection to the Democratic Party. “Atomized American-style meritocratic liberty-maximizing liberal democracy” is not the default human ideology against which all other ideologies should be measured. You are noticing that two wholly different ideologies differ from yours in the same way, and declaring them the same thing based on that.
In your mind, the only thing that matters in defining an ideology is “how distant is it from mine on the specific axis of ‘focus on population groups instead of individuals.’” But there are a great many other axes of ideological measurement that we can care about!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
It's only really been multi-ethnic since 1964.
Again, you’re playing pretend. Even if you want to discount blacks and Indians and the Irish (who became a massive and politically-enfranchised population long before 1964) you still have to explain the millions of (basically non-assimilated) Germans and Scandinavians who filled the American Midwest as the country expanded westward. You also have to explain the masses of Eastern Europeans who started coming here eighty years before Hart-Celler, and who were assimilated only with great effort and friction.
Look, man, I’m the direct descendant of Mayflower stock. My ancestors, the vast majority of whom were Anglo-Protestant (I have one Irish great-grandparent, although I’ve so far been unable to discern whether she was Protestant or Catholic) have lived in this country for centuries. I would like it to be true that America has been a mono-ethnic Anglo-Protestant project from the beginning, and I fully agree with you that the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin conclusively illustrate that they wanted that to be the trajectory of the country.
However, they realized very early on that this was not going to be a viable path to populating a continent. The native fertility of the founding stock simply was not sufficient to produce the sheer numbers of laboring adults to achieve the settlement of the western half of the country, and within a couple of generations the Anglo stock accepted this and started letting in masses of Europeans, and the ones in the South imported so many slaves they were outnumbered. Sure, efforts were taken to maintain the political disenfranchisement of those elements of the population, but those were transitory as well. Tammany Hall was already powerful as early as the 1850’s. The Freedmen’s Bureau secured significant political power for blacks in the 1870’s. The founding stock of this country simply has not been in sole control of its political and cultural trajectory for over 150 years, as much as I would like it to be otherwise.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
The key difference is that unlike the Indians — who lived in geographically-distinct territory and with whom colonists were in near-constant explicit military conflict and treaty negotiations — the Africans and indentured Irish lived side-by-side with Americans, interacting daily with them and participating in cultural exchange. (This is especially true of free blacks, who were a non-negligible part of the population of northern states from pretty early on. I don’t think it’s a situation remotely comparable to the Indians.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6d ago
Enslaved Africans (and indentured servants from, among other places, Ireland) have been here since before the arrival of the Puritans in New England, and only about a decade after the establishment of Jamestown. Even if you exclude the Amerindians (which, fair enough, so do I) it’s simply a fact that a substantial portion of non-Anglo-Saxon people have always been a sizable part of the populace of this country, even if they were not integrated into the political fabric of society.
The less-conspiratorial explanations I’ve seen make some sense, at least as far as why Luka was traded, although they do very little to explain the specific circumstances of the trade, the way it was executed, etc.
Someone brought up some recent comments by Harrison that “defense wins championships”; Luka is a notorious turnstile on defense, and I could understand Harrison being frustrated by Luka’s lack of improvement on that end despite Mavs staff presumably making it a point of emphasis. Luka’s conditioning is also poor and it’s possible that this recent injury was a wake-up call to the organization that his long-term health trajectory is discouraging and will make his impending supermax contract a difficult pill to swallow. As much as I love Luka, I could see someone convincing me that in six years he’ll either be out of the league or a shell of himself physically. Besides the alcohol thing someone else brought up, there’s also been a lot of speculation that he, in true Slav fashion (consider the intriguing NBA what-if Milos Teodosić), smokes a lot of cigarettes and has failed to stop doing so despite the imprecations of the team.
Of course, none of this, even if true, would justify the clandestine, rushed execution of the trade. I think most sports conspiracy theories — even the ones I want to be true, like the one about the refs helping the Chiefs — are bullshit; however, this trade is so inexplicable it has me at least intrigued by the possibility. I’ve been out on the NBA for years now, for reasons which are also nicely illustrated by this trade: there just aren’t any superstar players left who will spend their entire career playing for one team. Curry, Jokić, and Giannis are the only ones I can think of at this point (EDIT: for some reason I thought Booker had been traded, so add him to the list, and I guess if you consider Trae Young a star you can add him as well) and frankly I think the writing is on the wall for Giannis to leave the Bucks too at some point in the not-too-distant future. The Mavs had the most likable star in the league — a borderline-schlubby white guy, who gives the visual impression that some random Slovenian everyman was granted basketball superpowers by a genie — in his prime and they still traded him away. If I had a hometown team I could be invested in no matter who wears the jersey, it’d be one thing, but since I don’t, it makes it very hard to stay invested in a particular team when the roster turnover makes it so that I can’t develop a sustained parasocial relationship with any particular individuals on that team.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
"A specific and as yet unexplained transformation into a jaguar involves a male child with jaguar ears and a jaguar tail"
The citizens of Duval County have managed to uncover the secrets of this dark and ancient ritual.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
9d ago
or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.
Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.
Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.
However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.
(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
10d ago
Israel was just founded in a bad place.
This has been my stance on Israel for the entire time I’ve been politically aware. I almost wish there had been some sort of Ashkenazi European equivalent of Joseph Smith, who could have come up with some compelling theological innovation to get some number of Jews to reconceptualize Eastern Europe as the actual (or, at least, divinely ordained) site of the Promised Land.
There’s a tinfoil hat theory on the counter-semitic hard right about Khazaria, the supposed medieval Jewish nation which existed somewhere in modern Ukraine; the conspiracy theory is that (((they))) engineered the Russia-Ukraine conflict in order to depopulate that part of Ukraine in order to make it a viable alternative homeland should Israel fall. Maybe the hypothetical Jewish Joseph Smith could have built something around a mythical vision of Khazaria.
It will be no great new beginning, but it will also be no final end, and its decline (destruction or not) will represent the end of the age of Ashkenazi Jewish overcontribution to modernity that began with the Haskalah.
I’m not sure about this. Now, my stance toward Jews is that, in the fullness of time, I would like them to lose their distinctive identity — built on a sense of separateness and specialness — and to become absorbed into a conglomerated elite world culture. For Jews to just become one of the constituent ancestries of the new dominant world ethnicity which is only just beginning to be forged. This will require the end of Israel as a sovereign entity, but I don’t think it will mean a decline in the overperformance of individuals with Ashkenazi ancestry. (If anything, it will help spread Ashkenazi ancestry even wider, albeit in an admittedly diluted form.)
In five hundred years, I can imagine the esoteric right-wing androids will promulgate knowledge of haplogroups, treating Ashkenazi ancestry as a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek badge of honor, the way right-wingers crow about their R1b ancestry nowadays.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
If the guy was flying planes into buildings, or planting IEDs, it would make some sense. But he took a knife and started stabbing, most people can do that without so much as consulting a wikihow article.
My understanding is that he had planned to commit a much larger and more sophisticated act of terror; I believe the manual he’s consulted involved the production of sarin gas. The fact that he ended up committing such a rudimentary and small-scale attack instead supports the argument that he was mostly just a nutcase who snapped and acted impulsively.
(It could also support an argument that he was genuinely ideologically motivated, but that after reading the manual he realized that committing a sophisticated attack would be prohibitively difficult, expensive, or likely to be pre-emptively discovered by police. Or that he realized he simply didn’t have the smarts nor the wherewithal for it.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
17d ago
Maybe it's not fair to bring up a US case, but... Dylan Roof killed nine black people in a racially-motivated attack ten years ago and he is, by and large, forgotten now. I had to do some Googling to even remember his name.
I disagree strongly with this. You might be correct that many Americans would struggle to recall his name, but that’s because normal people are terrible in general at remembering names. In progressive circles, though, Roof is still routinely brought up all the time in discussions of race and policing. “If you’re a black man in America, police can murder you for minor infractions, or even for just disrespecting them. Meanwhile, if you’re a white guy who murders a bunch of black churchgoers, the police will non-violently arrest you and buy you Burger King.” Roughly a decade ago I performed the lead role in a play inspired directly by Roof — oddly, a humanizing account showing how a dumb and impressionable young kid from a broken home could be lured into extremist beliefs by a makeshift father figure showing him love and acceptance for the first time in his life. (Leave aside the fact that this doesn’t, as far as I’m aware, accurately describe Roof’s actual life or the manner of his radicalization.) So, I do think that Roof has made a lasting impact on public consciousness.
Even Breivik, who killed 77 people including a bunch of kids in a politically motivated attack in a very "progressive"-leaning country, is barely remembered now. Ted Kaczynski is better remembered than Breivik, despite having killed many fewer people, simply because Kaczynski wrote a more interesting manifesto and thus it's easier to characterize him as the sort of "intelligent killer" that many people love reading about.
I think that if Breivik did what he did in America, rather than in Norway, he would be far more remember and talked about here. I don’t know to what extent Breivik is still discussed in Europe, but given how American media drives so much of the political discussion worldwide, I have to wonder whether Breivik would even be more remembered in Europe had he done the same crime, but in America. (The same is true of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand.)
For a long time, my dream job has been “game show host”. (Other professions near the top of the list have been “professional stage actor for a repertory theater company” and “tenured academic lecturer”.) My current side job is “local bar trivia host”, which is a small-scale version of that.
What do all these jobs have in common? Well, for one, they’re stable; you’re set up at an institution for a long-term contract, instead of having to constantly move around to chase better opportunities. You develop relationships with the other employees, and with the customers (audience members, students, contestants, etc.), such that you become a sort of local institution.
You’re also not having to constantly compete to keep your job. Obviously there’s competition to obtain one of these positions in the first place, but once you’ve got it, it’s pretty much yours for life until you decide to move on. The biggest reason I ultimately decided not to pursue professional acting, despite having both the training and talent for it, was that I realized that I would hate a life where half of my job is relentlessly auditioning for new gigs, with each audition being extremely competitive and high-pressure. I would much prefer a job where in exchange for accepting fairly low pay, I get to avoid the stress of competition and uncertainty.
These are also jobs where your charisma — your ability to cultivate a cozy and engaging social atmosphere, to present ideas creatively, and to generally be pleasant to spend time around — is the core of what you bring to the table. I would love being in academia if it meant I could just focus on being a competent lecturer, and not have to worry about constantly publishing “groundbreaking new works” within my chosen field. I don’t want to do a bunch of independent research to discover some new thing nobody’s ever discussed before. I just want to be really good at telling people interesting facts and crafting a compelling narrative presentation of information which, if they’d really wanted to, they could have found on their own.
Under an economic system in which people do not have to ruthlessly compete for scarce financial resources and job opportunities, and in which workers are under less pressure to produce quantifiable monetary value, careers like these would be more viable for more people. People could focus on being valued pillars of their local communities, instead of moving around to chase bigger paychecks. They could care more about cultivating reciprocal social bonds with those who enjoy and benefit from their work.
They will still want to constantly hone their respective crafts, both because they want to impress others, and because they find their professions intrinsically interesting, but there will not be any pressure to be “the best in the world”, nor even necessarily “the best” in one’s local context! I wouldn’t have to compete against strivers from around the world, nor would my job be outsourceable.
If AI can allow people like me — unambitious, head-in-the-clouds wordcels who primarily want to get along by being affable and verbally-loquacious — to ply our trades without having to produce economic value, then selfishly it is very appealing to me. What that would mean for the vast majority of actually-existing human beings is a different story.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
or refer to Kenti-Jackson as the first "black" supreme court justice without a hint of irony.
I have literally never heard anybody do this, because no matter what anyone thinks of Clarence Thomas, Thurgood Marshall preceded him on the Court by more than twenty years.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
18d ago
What's even more amazing is that he went back to England and ended his career as a rock musician, playing bass and occasional keyboard for Led Zeppelin.
And don’t forget Them Crooked Vultures!
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
I’m not trying to “invent” reasons why global white racial consciousness can’t become a reality. I’m simply observing that up to this point, it has not happened, and I’m trying to identify the reasons why. I also want a global imperium of sorts, although my vision of it is not limited only to people of European descent. I want to be clear-eyed about what the obstacles to that are.
You are correct to note that European identities are far less insular than they were a few centuries ago, let alone a thousand years. Nearly nobody cares about being a Burgundian, or a Moravian, or a Cornishman; those identities have been subsumed into larger and more inclusive identities. That process could certainly continue to erode petty-nationalist concerns. (Or it could see reversals — see the reawakening of Welsh language and consciousness, or the growing Catalan separatist movement.)
However, there are still very significant and (on a human-historical scale) very fresh wounds of enmity preventing integration of certain white countries into a larger pan-European project. (Russia most obviously, but also in the Balkans.) When I hear a Swede take potshots at a Norwegian, or a Fleming express enmity toward a Walloon, I find it as exasperating and cringeworthy as you do. It’s a bit harder for me to dismiss out of hand a Pole’s or Finn’s suspicions and hypervigilance about Russians. There are still very serious geopolitical tensions and conflicts of interests which seem to present a considerable impediment to full “pan-Aryan imperium”.
And yet... there's still a Congressional Black Caucus. And the NAACP. And many, many, many other organizations dedicated to black advocacy. All of these arguments also apply to Jews who often disagree among themselves vehemently.... And yet....
Those are two groups of people with a very specific history of persecution and conflict with larger and more powerful ethnic groups, though. Their ethnogenesis was forged in defensive struggle. Whatever you and I think about how much difficulty whites have suffered as a result of the black presence in this country, it’s simply not comparable in any way to racial chattel enslavement. Whites in Europe, even during the headiest days of the Saracen and Mongol invasions, have not suffered collective persecution on the level of the anti-Jewish pogroms. Whites have not had any good reason to assume a collective defensive identity, defined to exclude another more numerous group. Whites were too busy making war on each other.
I’m a big fan of an “aspirational white identity” (although my conception of “whiteness” is considerably broader than yours), and since we’re responding to OP’s post about Gregory Hood, I’ll bring up that Hood has made the point that “America was the original European Union.” In America, people of European descent had at least two distinct outgroups — blacks and Amerindians — against which to contrast themselves. It’s easier to recognize one’s similarities to other whites when they’re thrown into such stark contrast by the existence of a very different Other.
I am desperately hoping that whites, Asians, and other advanced peoples are able to develop a collective consciousness, without needing to first go through our own crucible of collective persecution by a dominant collective enemy. We need to be looking toward the future and projecting out threats which are, at this early stage, mere potentialities, and to start thinking collectively before they become stark realities.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
I don’t think you addressed the core of my point. I’m saying that the extent to which a given racial group has common interests worth coordinating around is extremely context-dependent. White advocacy potentially makes sense in a context in which white people are being systematically acted against, regardless of a given white person’s other characteristics.
To some extent, this is true of the current American political context. It does not appear to be remotely applicable to Europe. Hood wants Europeans to coalesce around a shared supranational White identity, but the current political and racial conditions in Europe simply do not seem conducive to this. Whites are not under attack as whites in Europe. There is nothing like the DEI edifice, the mass affirmative action disfavoring whites, etc. If current demographic trends persist in Europe, that could certainly change, but as of right now there is no strong external pressure compelling Europeans to defensively adopt a shared white identity.
The comparison to reparations is instructive, I think, because it reveals the cracks in the “black” racial coalition. When blacks feel collectively besieged, as though their collective destiny hinges on remaining in solidarity, then “blackness” is a meaningful identity to them. This has certainly been the case throughout the entire history of the black American experience. When things like affirmative action were introduced, it introduced another vector incentivizing blacks to stick together and to adopt a “big tent” understanding of blackness. However, reparations introduce a countervailing incentive: the reparations money is a finite resource, and the more people qualify for it and split the pie, the less each individual black person has to gain. Suddenly solidarity is the wrong approach. Suddenly the question of whether someone like Kamala Harris is black becomes very relevant. The question of whether Obama was black was at one point a live-wire question; once he became elevated as a figure around which blacks could politically coordinate in order to secure power and resources, it ceased being a question. But if he’d been trying to claim a limited resource to which another more “authentically black” person could have credibly laid claim, it would have stayed a potentially divisive issue.
Many whites in America understandably feel that way about the issue of who counts as white. Different camps of whites recognize political sovereignty as a limited resource which cannot be shared between groups of whites with radically different political and cultural sensibilities. There isn’t enough political and economic power to go around, such that every subset of white people gets an acceptably large share. That’s a recipe for division among whites, not solidarity, and people like Hood need to present a compelling case why white people should sacrifice their more local interests in order to secure resources for other whites whom they don’t even like.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
I always find this question to be pretty dishonest because it's never invoked for the advocacy of any other ethnic group.
This simply isn’t true. For example, during the discussions about reparations which have taken place at both the state and federal levels in the U.S. over the last few years, a major undercurrent is the desire to avoid having to face the inevitable controversy over who counts as “black” for the purposes of reparations. Are they only for descendants of American slaves? Could they be offered to descendants of slaves from, say, Caribbean countries? (Even though those slaves were never the property of Americans, but rather other colonial powers?) What about African immigrants, or the descendants of African immigrants who were never enslaved? (Could some wealthy second-generation Igbo-American get the same reparations check as a sixth-generation ADOS person?) And then how mixed-race could somebody be — How diluted can their black ancestry be? How white-passing? — before they no longer make the cut for the reparations check?
These are going to be very live and very sensitive issues if reparations ever become a serious policy proposal at the national level. It’ll become very clear how non-unified people of African ancestry in America are, once it’s no longer politically expedient to present a veneer of solidarity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20d ago
Greg Johnson is the most respectful white nationalist on the internet.
The article you’ve linked is by Gregory Hood — real name Kevin DiAnna, also known as James Kirkpatrick on Twitter — not by Greg Johnson. Greg Johnson is the founder of Counter-Currents, a different white nationalist website. Hood is certainly not anywhere near as respectable or genteel as Taylor; his speeches and podcast appearances are bombastic and full of vitriol and sarcasm. His affect — fashy haircut, explicit pagan beliefs, pugnacious New Jersey street-brawler physiognomy — certainly triggers people’s Neo-Nazi alarms in a way that Jared Taylor never has. It’s odd to present him as the new face of “respectable” white nationalism; Taylor is clearly grooming Hood as his successor as head of American Renaissance, and I expect the tone of its website and conferences to evolve in a direction more suited for the extremely-online Right of the 21st century.
As for the essay itself, I agree with you that it represents an ideological dead end. Blanket opposition to race-mixing is an archaic position which is profoundly unappealing to the vast majority of Americans, white or otherwise. (Wariness about black-white pairings is still a fairly common, if unspoken and subconscious, position, but it cannot be spoken about explicitly at this time.) Telling brainy white guys that they can’t be with cute Asian girls, or working-class white women that they can’t be with dark-and-handsome mestizo guys, is the easiest way to repel them from your movement.
As with much of Hood’s work, it is explicitly designed as a piece of propaganda; it exaggerates and simplifies very complex phenomena in order to craft a narrative convenient for his policy goals. He developed a knack for this style while working in mainstream conservative media. I don’t think he’s a grifter — he has always struck me as sincerely committed, and obviously being the second banana at a deplatformed white nationalist website is nobody’s idea of a lucrative sinecure — but he knows how to selectively massage issues in a way that’s favorable to his preferred message.
As for the nuances you bring up about who counts as white, Hood has hinted many times that he has a sort of esoteric spiritual approach to racial identity. He seems to believe in a sort of collective, vaguely supernatural model of race. The sort of materialist PCA-chart-informed scientistic view of race advocated by @SecureSignals below would be seen as useful by Hood only insofar as it can be used to launder his more esoteric beliefs into a legible and exportable framework. He cares about his volk, and he has explicitly advocated a worldwide cross-national white imperium. (In this, he differs from the man for whom you mistook him, Greg Johnson, who advocates a more decentralized small-nation model.) He doesn’t actually believe that white nationalism is “for everyone”, because he’s genuinely not concerned about the welfare of non-whites except in the most trivial and perfunctory way.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
I don’t think you’ve really thought through the practical implications of your stance on race. "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?
You acknowledge in one sentence that it is perfectly reasonable and salutary for businesses to preferentially hire applicants who have the requisite skills, traits, etc. You even acknowledge that many of those traits are inborn — that the NBA can and should discriminate based on height, which, outside of desperately poor and malnourished circumstances, is nearly entirely genetically-determined.
By implication, you acknowledge that many traits along which it’s justified for at least some businesses to discriminate are unequally distributed between population groups. Perhaps the least controversial would be that if you’re looking to hire an actor to play Ron Weasley, you’re only going to be auditioning male actors of Northwestern European descent. (Or, I suppose, Udmurts, a small Russian ethnic group who also have a lot of redheads. Although good luck finding one who speaks English as well as Rupert Grint does.) This is probably somewhat hurtful if you’re an actor who is a huge Harry Potter fan, and Ron is your favorite character, but you’re black, or female, or just have jet-black hair. Although there has been, as of late, a move toward “race-blind casting” in order to prevent precisely this (supposedly unfair) outcome, most people, even progressives, appear to agree that this is silly and wrong-headed. Film studios and theater companies are making reasonable and practically-justified decisions, and the disparate impact of those decisions is an acceptable byproduct of those decisions.
Only slightly less uncontroversially, the NBA has very few players with significant Amerindian descent; while part of that is cultural — people from Latin American countries generally prefer soccer to basketball — it’s primarily a function of average differences in height between population groups. (The NBA has only had the number of Chinese players it’s had because the Chinese government decided to eugenically breed exceptionally-tall individuals to play basketball. Otherwise the number of Asian NBA players would asymptotically approach zero, Jeremy Lin notwithstanding.) We can acknowledge that this might make aspiring Asian and Latino basketball players feel discouraged and underrepresented, but we recognize this as an acceptable byproduct of NBA teams making sensible business decisions instead of using affirmative action to reserve roster spots for short guys to make them feel included.
Moving up the controversy ladder, the strong preference for physical strength is going to result in fire-fighting being a heavily male profession; female firefighters are few and far between, and the reality is that they tend to be worse at their job on average than their male coworkers. Again, this is probably discouraging for young girls who dream of fighting fires. However, because affirmative action would require putting a thumb on the scale to force the employment of less-qualified applicants into a high-stakes profession whose performance has momentous important consequences, most people are willing to let firefighters keep being overwhelmingly male, even if that makes some women sad.
And I’m sure you would agree that there are a great many professions for which mental and personality traits are also extremely relevant. Doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, quantitative analysts, take your pick. And it’s not just intelligence; traits such as diligence, selflessness, punctuality, and empathy are all very important across a wide range of occupations. In fact it’s difficult to imagine many professions wherein an employer would not have a strong preference for employees who display more of those traits, rather than less.
And if you take seriously the available psychometric evidence about racial groups, you can see that there are differences between racial groups which go beyond simple mental computational capacity. It’s not just “black people are likely to be a bit worse at math on average than Asian people are.” It’s also “black people are likely to be less fluent at written communication.” It’s “black people are likely to have poorer ability to regulate emotional impulses.” And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average.
And black people are going to notice this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s going to result in them being poorer on average, since they are going to be underrepresented in professions which pay well. They’re going to feel less empowered, less valuable to the society around them in general, because they are underrepresented in professions which provide the capacity to significantly impact political and cultural trends within society. You and I might privately understand that these inequitable outcomes are the (inevitable, barring corrective measures) of an unequal distribution of valued traits. But there will be — there already is, and has been for over a century — important policy questions raised by this state of affairs which will demand answers. Will affirmative action be imposed in order to artificially balance out these outcomes? Are the potentially negative impacts on the overall performance of the affected industries a worthwhile tradeoff? If not, and if colorblind meritocracy is a non-negotiable end goal, how do we deal with the massive cultural and political fallout resulting from entrenched, generational resentment and low performance among a large, culturally-distinct, politically-unified, and visually-identifiable segment of the population?
All of these questions have obvious and unavoidable political implications. There has to be some answer to these questions, and if you believe HBD is true, I don’t understand how you can advocate for a solution that isn’t informed in some level by what you actually believe is true. Saying “it’s wrong to discriminate, unless the qualities for which you’re selecting are important to the job” has the same functional outcome as “it’s okay to discriminate based on inborn characteristics”, precisely because different groups have different characteristics on average! A “colorblind meritocracy” has the same end result as a “systemically racist” regime, assuming that psychometric differences are real and large.
It appears you’re trying to retreat to a position of “Actually, employers shouldn’t have a strong preference for smarter employees.” I suppose that’s one way of getting equitable results. Just decide that the unequally-distributed traits on which we’ve been filtering are actually not particularly valuable or desirable. An employee with an IQ of 120 isn’t likely to be any better at a randomly-selected job than an employee with an IQ of 90! If employers stopped caring about the qualities white people and Asians have more of than black people, we wouldn’t end up with more whites and Asian getting hired than black people!
This is utterly doomed to fail, though, because those qualities do matter quite a bit. Sure, pure cognitive acuity might not give one a decisive advantage as, say, a Jamba Juice employee. (Things like “reliably showing up on time” and “not ending up getting into trouble with the law and needing to miss work because of it” are, though, and those things are also directly correlated with intelligence and impulse control.) If your concern with “racism” is only about people not calling black people racial slurs, then you’ve already won; almost nobody does that. But that’s not what anyone actually cares about when it comes to the “racism” discussion. They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. (Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
As one of the most pro-law-and-order posters here, I would like to register that I think this is an awful decision — a total betrayal of those of Trump’s supporters who were (and still are) hoping that he will be an effective avatar for our ideology. Starting off your presidency by pardoning violent rioters is a highly counterproductive act as far as what I want from Trump is concerned.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
21d ago
This is a valuable and clarifying comment. I’m by no means even close to the most right-wing person on this forum; I’m sympathetic to progressives, because I used to be one, and one of the drums I’ve beaten most consistently (both here and elsewhere) is that progressives are mostly good people, and that their terrible ideas should not be taken as reflecting any poor character on their part.
That being said, I do genuinely think your stated positions are very bad. Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.
Believing that “every human being has an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare” creates a bottomless obligation on the productive and normal members of society to subsidize the self-destructive (and socially corrosive) behavior of the most dysfunctional, mentally-unsalvageable individuals among us. It is a blank check for parasites who either cannot, by nature, contribute productively to civilization, or who otherwise elect not to. It’s a nice-sounding truism, sustained only by the fact that the people advocating it will, by and large, not be held directly and personally responsible for providing the relevant shelter and healthcare to the individuals demanding it.
“The moral imperative of LBGTQ right and acceptance” is simply a poorly-defined applause light. It could mean anything. Some plausible interpretations are fairly uncontroversial, while others are clearly extremely tendentious and enjoy close to zero popular support, which is why it’s necessary to fold them all under a superficially-anodyne umbrella statement.
Now, I also believe that the praxis of so-called “wokeness” consists of behaviors and tactics which are bad, independent of the ideological positions they’re being used to advance: coordinated bullying mobs; censorship of true but politically-inconvenient information; the use of weasel words and strategic equivocation (AKA the “motte-and-bailey” approach) wherein public statements are tailored to create a certain impression of the speaker’s meaning/intent, while in reality the speaker knows that his or her actual intent is quite different from that surface-level impression, and that the esoteric will be correctly understood by politically-subversive behind-the-scenes actors. These would all be morally-blameworthy tactics even if employed by people whose political positions I share. To the extent that right-wingers do these things, it reflects very poorly on them.
In a better, more functional, less divided country, progressives would have to compete on equal footing with every other ideological faction; I would oppose most of what they’re attempting to achieve (because their ideas produce bad outcomes, and because their analysis of the world is based on false premises) but I would recognize them as a valuable counterweight and as a complement to other factions within an ideological spectrum. I wouldn’t want them ostracized or imprisoned (even in the fanciest and most comfortable crystals) because many of them are great people who contribute immeasurably to society, independent of their political beliefs. They’re my friends, my family members, my coworkers, the men and women who create the art I consume and the products I buy. I would simply have to coordinate, to the most effective extent possible, to thwart their efforts at political change, and to demonstrate to them the profound error of their ways. (As the error of my ways was persuasively demonstrated to me, which is why I no longer hold the beliefs I used to hold.)
This will, necessarily, involve the use of political power to not only reverse the effects of progressive governance, but also in some cases the disempowerment of progressive organizations before they’re able to achieve their stated ends. This will probably appear hypocritical to you — “I thought you guys said you just wanted to grill! I thought cancelling people was bad! I thought you don’t hate black people, or gays, or women, and that you just wanted everyone to live and let live!” — and to a certain extent you’ll be correct, because there are a lot of people who haven’t fully thought through their actual core disagreements with “wokeness”. People who barely understand what “wokeness” is. People who think the Civil Rights movement was the greatest thing to ever happen to America, but that somewhere along the way people just “took it too far”. (Or, amusingly, that modern black activists have “betrayed the vision of Martin Luther King”, not realizing that King was a socialist and that his speeches were ghostwritten by a literal member of the Communist Party.) For those of us who are actually committed to opposing the ends of progressivism — rather than just whatever means Fox News and Right-Wing Twitter are able to meme into the news cycle this week — I agree that it’s important not to get distracted by chopping at the branches instead of the roots.
You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive! Stop believing in ideas that are bad, and that have bad outcomes. Channel your pro-social impulses — which I believe are real and valuable — toward ends which are actually conducive to the flourishing of civilization. Keep your eye on the prize of climate change and vaccines, and you’ll have no conflict with me. Tinker around the edges of government policy, and find avenues to expand the safety net for the people in our society who are actually equipped to be able to create a return on that investment, rather than wasting your efforts (and other people’s money and safety) on worthless schizophrenic bums who will never appreciate nor reciprocate the compassion you’re trying to extend to them. Extend personal warmth and friendship to whomever you wish, but do not demand that equitable outcomes redound to populations with severely inequitable distributions of traits. (Or, alternately, join me in supporting non-coercive eugenic policies which will actually ameliorate those unequal distributions of intelligence and aptitude.)
I hope you stick around and keep posting here. We could use a lot more intelligent progressive voices here. (And, hopefully, over time your mind will be changed, as mine was, and you will be persuaded out of your progressive commitments.)
And yet you yourself actually seem to deny it. You answered one of Rafa’s other comments about your own spirituality by saying you believe religion is merely social technology. If this is the case — if there is no actual divine entity who has real and revealed demands and preferences — then it what sense can it be true that Jews have an inherent, spiritual bond with Yahweh? (Or with any other nonexistent deity?) At best you can say that pious Jews sincerely believe that they have an inherent spiritual bond with Yahweh, even though in actuality that Yahweh is merely an ancient literary device.
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