Showing posts with label eschatology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eschatology. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 May 2016
Tuesday, 17 November 2015
A letter to friends
Learned and freethinking gentlemen,
Sorry I haven't been in touch. I took some time away from Maddingcrowdbook in order to hear myself think. The herd found me anyway. Even in the mountains I can hear them move.
Here's something of where I've uncomfortably been for the last few months. I promise I'm not coming from a place of racism, sexism, or (worst of all) conservatism, but--
~~~
I read Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. He suggests that evolutionary psychology can clarify the unconscious motivations of certain ideologues, with a certain persistent tribal identification, who assert that healthy Western cultural norms are secretly pathological.
There are good historical reasons for Jews to have led the argument in favour of multiculturalism, and against European ethnic hegemony.
This means that there actually is an internal coherence and logic to my education in the denigration of Western civilisation (post-structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory, et cetera). It's not just that it was frustratingly mystical and pretentious; it was wrong, and it was wrong for reasons.
A little psychology and history applied to my lessons makes them appear less like a misanthropic shit test. This recasts my failure to engage in the bad faith performance necessary for my final papers. Of course I couldn't get my Honours! The field of cultural studies wasn't honourable!
The reasons for that are understandable, and not at all a conscious conspiracy by scheming Jews to undermine our culture, but the whole tenor of my studies is rendered suddenly comprehensible by this transgressive observation--that a significant portion of the people I read in university were Jewish atheists who believed in the moral exceptionalism of the Jewish people.
~~~
So I've just read in MacDonald's book--about academic theory--that immigration policies in the West were changed in the 60s and 70s against popular sentiment, and not by elected politicians, but by government officials responding to lobby groups. Canada quietly abandoned a policy of favouring immigration from the cultures that constituted it because that's what it had to do to play ball with the UN. It was not a democratic decision.
All of this is swirling around my head, when the biggest migration since the last world war breaks into the news, and browbeaten Swedes and Germans scramble to welcome refugees who have crossed half a dozen safe countries to get there. What am I to make of this?
~~~
More conscious of the origins of intersectional grievance politics, I take a closer look at the works of people who got degrees like mine, but actually believed them. Gamergate, Shirtgate, Elevatorgate; each time the media just repeated what professional victims said about the oppressive patriarchy. That kind of talk is grounded in opaque poetical political philosophising, not any kind of science.
They have not one, but two Jewish prophets: Marx and Freud. It's inevitable that the oppressed female proletariat will throw off the shackles of those bourgeois boys with all their unfair power. It's clear that white people repress how hateful and unbalanced they really are (just like all men want to fuck their mothers) and your vehement denials really just prove how deeply true it is.
This is old stuff, adapted and polished for a new age, but people live and breathe it as gospel truth -- and they know the god they don't believe in is on their side.
~~~
Where have I heard this before? But of course!
This is the "ressentiment" of slave morality. Nietzsche was talking about Judaism by way of Christianity, but the psychological calculus tracks perfectly.
Resentment of the powerful leads to a reversal of values whereby the weak and powerless turn their lack of power into a virtue. Where the nobles before called the things that were not great "bad," the slaves now call the things that are great "evil." Where "goodness" before was a sense of strength and health and the power to effect one's will in the world, "goodness" in slave morality glorifies being a victim.
Nietzsche was writing about Social Justice Warriors in the fucking 1880s!
~~~
In the service of this narrative of oppression, regressive progressives have abandoned any pretense of classically liberal values. The academy and the wider public discourse have become actively hostile to the free expression of ideas, to say nothing of facts and reason. What passes for moral and rational is frequently a barrage of ad hominem, ab absurdo, straw man, and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments.
People think that repeating the received dogma is what constitutes thinking. How can I be surprised? Other than the philosophy courses I took, that was the measure of success in my seminars.
Universities are not about reading widely and learning how to assess information, the media is not about objectively reporting the facts and showing all sides, politics is not about defending the interests of the people and the land, and the agora, the marketplace of ideas, has been reduced to the exchange of instinctive feelings, recycled reasons, and decadent distractions. 2500 years of intellectual, political, scientific, and moral development have earned us the privilege of not simply neglecting those gifts, but denying their value.
Franz Boas said that cultures are relative and can't be compared, which our radicals have taken to mean that only our culture can be criticised, and certainly not praised. And why bother cultivating an elevated sense of possibility, if nothing we could ever accomplish would be any better than savagery?
Maybe the epidemics of mental illness and addiction and suicide in our society have something to do with the consequences of not honouring our ancestors (something codified as a religious rite by some cultures, but perhaps developing from a naïve psychological instinct for health). We're the culture that chose to end institutional sexism, to end the most obvious forms of colonialism, to end legal slavery, and instead of pride for our self-overcoming, we accept the blame for inventing these injustices, reversing our accomplishments into a listless and demented ethnomasochism.
~~~
And then...
Those people didn't choose to bomb Syria. They didn't colonise Algeria. They didn't deserve it. So why are some people--my father, for one--seemingly more interested in understanding and defending the motivations of jihadists than in deploring a dangerous ideology?
No amount of cultural relativism makes it not wrong. Of course we shouldn't meddle with other regions. Of course our nations have done terrible things in our name. It's still wrong. There's no moral equivalency that can absolve terrorism. It's wrong without the need for a song and dance to lend context and nuance. That's my culture.
If the people who value liberty, equality and fraternity can be gunned down for peacefully enjoying their way of life, and they shrug and say they probably deserved it, what competition can we hope to muster against a theocratic religion still in its petulant teenage years?
~~~
In Missouri, where the president of the state university was forced to resign after someone made a swastika out of poo, activists began using the hashtag #FuckParis, because those Parisians don't understand the institutional oppression of a townie driving by and shouting the n-word.
In Peterborough, the city where I got my schooling in what turned out to be cultural Marxism, someone set fire to the only mosque.
Sorry I haven't been in touch. I took some time away from Maddingcrowdbook in order to hear myself think. The herd found me anyway. Even in the mountains I can hear them move.
Here's something of where I've uncomfortably been for the last few months. I promise I'm not coming from a place of racism, sexism, or (worst of all) conservatism, but--
~~~
I read Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. He suggests that evolutionary psychology can clarify the unconscious motivations of certain ideologues, with a certain persistent tribal identification, who assert that healthy Western cultural norms are secretly pathological.
There are good historical reasons for Jews to have led the argument in favour of multiculturalism, and against European ethnic hegemony.
This means that there actually is an internal coherence and logic to my education in the denigration of Western civilisation (post-structuralism, deconstruction, critical theory, et cetera). It's not just that it was frustratingly mystical and pretentious; it was wrong, and it was wrong for reasons.
A little psychology and history applied to my lessons makes them appear less like a misanthropic shit test. This recasts my failure to engage in the bad faith performance necessary for my final papers. Of course I couldn't get my Honours! The field of cultural studies wasn't honourable!
The reasons for that are understandable, and not at all a conscious conspiracy by scheming Jews to undermine our culture, but the whole tenor of my studies is rendered suddenly comprehensible by this transgressive observation--that a significant portion of the people I read in university were Jewish atheists who believed in the moral exceptionalism of the Jewish people.
~~~
So I've just read in MacDonald's book--about academic theory--that immigration policies in the West were changed in the 60s and 70s against popular sentiment, and not by elected politicians, but by government officials responding to lobby groups. Canada quietly abandoned a policy of favouring immigration from the cultures that constituted it because that's what it had to do to play ball with the UN. It was not a democratic decision.
All of this is swirling around my head, when the biggest migration since the last world war breaks into the news, and browbeaten Swedes and Germans scramble to welcome refugees who have crossed half a dozen safe countries to get there. What am I to make of this?
~~~
More conscious of the origins of intersectional grievance politics, I take a closer look at the works of people who got degrees like mine, but actually believed them. Gamergate, Shirtgate, Elevatorgate; each time the media just repeated what professional victims said about the oppressive patriarchy. That kind of talk is grounded in opaque poetical political philosophising, not any kind of science.
They have not one, but two Jewish prophets: Marx and Freud. It's inevitable that the oppressed female proletariat will throw off the shackles of those bourgeois boys with all their unfair power. It's clear that white people repress how hateful and unbalanced they really are (just like all men want to fuck their mothers) and your vehement denials really just prove how deeply true it is.
This is old stuff, adapted and polished for a new age, but people live and breathe it as gospel truth -- and they know the god they don't believe in is on their side.
~~~
Where have I heard this before? But of course!
This is the "ressentiment" of slave morality. Nietzsche was talking about Judaism by way of Christianity, but the psychological calculus tracks perfectly.
Resentment of the powerful leads to a reversal of values whereby the weak and powerless turn their lack of power into a virtue. Where the nobles before called the things that were not great "bad," the slaves now call the things that are great "evil." Where "goodness" before was a sense of strength and health and the power to effect one's will in the world, "goodness" in slave morality glorifies being a victim.
Nietzsche was writing about Social Justice Warriors in the fucking 1880s!
~~~
In the service of this narrative of oppression, regressive progressives have abandoned any pretense of classically liberal values. The academy and the wider public discourse have become actively hostile to the free expression of ideas, to say nothing of facts and reason. What passes for moral and rational is frequently a barrage of ad hominem, ab absurdo, straw man, and reductio ad Hitlerum arguments.
People think that repeating the received dogma is what constitutes thinking. How can I be surprised? Other than the philosophy courses I took, that was the measure of success in my seminars.
Universities are not about reading widely and learning how to assess information, the media is not about objectively reporting the facts and showing all sides, politics is not about defending the interests of the people and the land, and the agora, the marketplace of ideas, has been reduced to the exchange of instinctive feelings, recycled reasons, and decadent distractions. 2500 years of intellectual, political, scientific, and moral development have earned us the privilege of not simply neglecting those gifts, but denying their value.
Franz Boas said that cultures are relative and can't be compared, which our radicals have taken to mean that only our culture can be criticised, and certainly not praised. And why bother cultivating an elevated sense of possibility, if nothing we could ever accomplish would be any better than savagery?
Maybe the epidemics of mental illness and addiction and suicide in our society have something to do with the consequences of not honouring our ancestors (something codified as a religious rite by some cultures, but perhaps developing from a naïve psychological instinct for health). We're the culture that chose to end institutional sexism, to end the most obvious forms of colonialism, to end legal slavery, and instead of pride for our self-overcoming, we accept the blame for inventing these injustices, reversing our accomplishments into a listless and demented ethnomasochism.
~~~
And then...
Those people didn't choose to bomb Syria. They didn't colonise Algeria. They didn't deserve it. So why are some people--my father, for one--seemingly more interested in understanding and defending the motivations of jihadists than in deploring a dangerous ideology?
No amount of cultural relativism makes it not wrong. Of course we shouldn't meddle with other regions. Of course our nations have done terrible things in our name. It's still wrong. There's no moral equivalency that can absolve terrorism. It's wrong without the need for a song and dance to lend context and nuance. That's my culture.
If the people who value liberty, equality and fraternity can be gunned down for peacefully enjoying their way of life, and they shrug and say they probably deserved it, what competition can we hope to muster against a theocratic religion still in its petulant teenage years?
~~~
In Missouri, where the president of the state university was forced to resign after someone made a swastika out of poo, activists began using the hashtag #FuckParis, because those Parisians don't understand the institutional oppression of a townie driving by and shouting the n-word.
In Peterborough, the city where I got my schooling in what turned out to be cultural Marxism, someone set fire to the only mosque.
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Our world is descending into chaos, have you noticed?
"Whether or not the 'mandate of heaven' has basis in reality, history
shows that the human experience is broadly defined by a succession of
more or less corrupt ruling elites and that those elites reached the
peak of their corruption at the times of destruction of the great human 'civilizations'. In addition, there is a wealth of evidence, most of it
not in standard history text books, that shows that these human 'colony
collapses' were caused by major geologic and cosmic upheavals, and were
preceded by the kind of environmental, social and political chaos,
ignorance, lies and greed that reign on our planet today. For those who
had knowledge of this cyclical nature of human civilizations and were
watching the events unfold, it may have seemed that the collapse
occurred progressively. But for the majority, who submitted or succumbed
to the official exhortations or subtle temptation to ignore or shut out
the reality of the world around them, it came as a 'thief in night'."
"Most of all it is integral to develop a philosophy which connects us to the universe. We can look to many sources to understand our union with reality, such as the quantum sciences, religion or spirituality. No matter what we personally resonate with most, as long as we treat our fellow universe and everything in it with the same love and respect that we should be treating ourselves, we’re on the right track."
"Most of all it is integral to develop a philosophy which connects us to the universe. We can look to many sources to understand our union with reality, such as the quantum sciences, religion or spirituality. No matter what we personally resonate with most, as long as we treat our fellow universe and everything in it with the same love and respect that we should be treating ourselves, we’re on the right track."
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
The Turning Point?
"It is no longer unreasonable to think that the war is approaching and
that it will be a new world war. This will not be a 'clash of
civilizations' (for this to happen one needs some civilizations), nor a
war between 'Islam' and the 'West.' Again it will be a war between the
East and the West. A 'final battle' between the powers of the Earth and
the powers of the Sea, between the continental powers and thalassocratic
powers, between the money system and the principle of reality."
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
Creepy
Researchers Gregory Martin of Emory University and Ali Yurukoglu of Stanford University have been examining the effect of cable news on voting patterns. It's not news that this effect exists, but it turns out to be even more insidious and arbitrary than might be imagined.
Follow the reasoning, and try not to weep: popular channels are usually older channels, and so have lower numbers. People flip around on commercial breaks, but don't stray far. This is the only reason most people would be watching Fox or MSNBC anyway. They catch a few minutes of news while waiting for their show about cakes to come back on, and this is enough to inform their political opinion. Which news channel has the lower number in a given area is apparently random, but political preferences generally follow the channel guide.
Four more minutes of Fox per week will make you 0.9% more likely to vote Republican, and four more minutes of MSNBC will make you 0.7% more likely to vote Democrat. It's just that simple.
This is horrible.
This kind of zombie public, too apathetic to do more than repeat things they've heard from the television, pretty much spells the end of the world. Fortunately, Ted Turner prepared for such an eventuality during his time at CNN, preparing a creepy video to be played at the end of the End of Days. There's a note on it to hold for release until the end of the world is confirmed. This video is now available for viewing. We're on the other side of time.
Follow the reasoning, and try not to weep: popular channels are usually older channels, and so have lower numbers. People flip around on commercial breaks, but don't stray far. This is the only reason most people would be watching Fox or MSNBC anyway. They catch a few minutes of news while waiting for their show about cakes to come back on, and this is enough to inform their political opinion. Which news channel has the lower number in a given area is apparently random, but political preferences generally follow the channel guide.
Four more minutes of Fox per week will make you 0.9% more likely to vote Republican, and four more minutes of MSNBC will make you 0.7% more likely to vote Democrat. It's just that simple.
This is horrible.
This kind of zombie public, too apathetic to do more than repeat things they've heard from the television, pretty much spells the end of the world. Fortunately, Ted Turner prepared for such an eventuality during his time at CNN, preparing a creepy video to be played at the end of the End of Days. There's a note on it to hold for release until the end of the world is confirmed. This video is now available for viewing. We're on the other side of time.
Tuesday, 6 January 2015
Controversial DNA startup wants to let customers create creatures
“It is the most powerful technology humans have ever created,” Heinz said. “Hydrogen bombs can destroy whole planets, but this is a
technology that can create planets. This is the greatest human
achievement of all time — the ability to read and write life, because
that’s who we are.”
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