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[PLEASUREMAN]

From the blog Foseti, Foseti talks Moldbug and Dark Enlightenment.  Actually it's couched as a review of Moldbug's entire blog, of which Foseti says he's gotten through 30%, which seems insane.  Possibly Hillary had similar reasons for scaling Everest.

As Foseti notes, people actually calling themselves reactionaries is a recent development.  Part of this is that it's not a very nice thing to be called (it suggests unthinking opposition), and part of it is that it doesn't mean much politically.  While we can say, for example, that a liberal is in favor of greater freedom and equality, and a conservative is in favor of conserving social and political institutions, a reactionary is either just another word for conservative (in which case it is useless), or it is an ill-defined not-ness.

In support of the latter definition, each reactionary tends to drift untethered until he washes up on his own island of fuddy-duddy affectations, distinct from that of other reactionaries.  He then tries to work out why these fuddy-duddy affectations are the best, convinces a handful of other weirdos, and--another neoreactionary blog is born.

Foseti writes:

Foseti:

The term “reactionary” has been taken up by people whose ideologies are not new. For example, let’s say you’re basically a Russell Kirk-style conservative. That’s an admirable thing to be. I’ve read and enjoyed Kirk. I plan to read more Kirk. Nevertheless, his sort of thinking is a cornerstone of modern, mainstream Conservatism. If you agree with Kirk on all points, calling yourself a reactionary is just silly – absent some sort of clear distinction.

Quite.  Well, you might think this is pedantic, that Moldbug and crew call themselves neoreactionaries and that this has a specific meaning, which if you read 100% of Moldbug's blog you will be reasonably clear on.  And even if you just skim it, you can gather that it involves Thomas Carlyle, anti-Enlightenment, boo to democracy, and some other stuff (possibly concerning black people).  I'm going to wait until the Advanced Dark Enlightenment rules come out.

But it's actually just drifting through a void.  The universe of the neoreactionary is barely two dimensional.  They neglect to account for many sociological and environmental conditions which serve to channel political movement.  They embrace a simplistic form of political heritage, attempting to trace all bad things back to Calvinism, or as they call it the Cathedral.  It culminates in inanity such as this, quoting Foseti:

Foseti:

This first segment of UR ends with the brilliant series on Richard Dawkins (by far my favorite series of UR posts). In this series (more later), Moldbug argues that Richard Dawkins – instead of being an atheistic critic of Christianity – is a hardcore adherent of the world’s most successful sect of Christianity. Instead of arguing against Christianity, Dawkins is arguing for one sect of Christianity over all others. How’s that for a red pill? If that’s correct – and I think it is – almost everyone is wrong about everything.

If pressed, I’d go further. If I was forced to pick the one key tenet of the neoreaction, I’d pick this understanding of Progressivism. To the reactionary, Progressivism is a nontheistic Christain sect. If you don’t understand Progressivism in this way, you simply don’t understand Progressivism.

Progressivism is the strain of liberalism dealing most directly with sociopolitical equality, originally through the use of technology and science although these days they mainly prefer to shout.  In the United States progressivism and liberalism are synonymous, and I think it's clearer to describe liberalism as having progressive and libertarian offshoots, with libertarianism having a greater emphasis on liberty and individualism.  Of course if you go too far into these labels you'll never come back, as they are used completely inconsistently everywhere by everyone.

Progressivism has nothing to do with atheism or Christianity, and the fact that it arose when virtually everyone in the West was Christian and continues to this day when most of its agents are atheist or agnostic seems to prove that point.

But Moldbug and Foseti think it is clever to call Richard Dawkins, the man who cannot shut up about his hatred of Christianity, a Christian.  Not just any Christian, mind you, but a zealot.  I don't know if Foseti is a Jew, so I can't automatically extend to him the same excuse I can give Moldbug, which is that Moldbug simply doesn't know the first f**king thing about Christianity, its spirit, its practice, or its history.  He apparently can only see the intellectual movements that were incidentally held by Christians but that actually have no basis in the New Testament or the Church that Christ founded.  To make an analogy, it's not Buddhist just because I, after a confused reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (and ignoring its own disclaimer), say it's Buddhist.  And it's especially not Buddhist if I take the most anti-Buddhist thing I can find and declare, "A-ha!  This looks like a particularly vigorous form of Buddhism!"

This form of silliness arises from people who sit in hermetic blogospheres for too long.

Foseti:

From this understanding of Progressivism [i.e. gross error -PM], all other reactionary ideas flow. For example, here’s reactionary history in one sentence is: “Massachusetts, of course, later went on [i.e. after conquering the US in the Civil War] to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites in 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.” Similarly, political correctness and diversity-worship really can’t be understood unless they’re viewed as religious beliefs – at which point their operation becomes startlingly clear.

The term "religion" actually does mean something, it's not any old collection of views.  My eyes roll when I hear rightists talk about the "religious" nature of progressive beliefs.  What they usually mean is "superstitious" or "bigoted" or "dogmatic", but instead of saying that they insult religion by calling progressive ideology one so they can kick it like a drunk's dog.

Calling every strong feeling a religious belief cretinizes language, and when it leads you to refer to the foremost secular atheist as a rabid Christian, you should have to explain yourself (and not in circuitous blog prose).

Foseti:

More importantly, in the neoreaction we’re not concerned with the difference between religion and ideology. As Moldbug says, “You can go from religion to idealism and back simply by adding and subtracting gods, angels, demons, saints, ghosts, etc. . . . Therefore, we’ll just use the word prototype to mean either religion or idealism.” [He goes on to basically never use the word prototype in this way, but the idea is useful].

Well, Moldbug is full of s**t, and repeating him makes you no wiser.  It actually sounds like more of Moldbug's Hebraic D&D house rules, to which he has added "divine being encounters".  Add them in, take them out.

Christianity isn't "be good to each other" + Christ's resurrection.  Such a definition is pathetic.  Moldbug has an excuse--he's a legalistic Jew whose mind is closed off to religious experience--so what's Foseti's?

Finally Foseti quotes Moldbug the only way you can quote him, at length:

Moldbug:

If there is one general weakness in the conservative strategy, it strikes me as this unwillingness to admit that “liberalism” is actually mainline Protestantism, which is actually Christianity. Whether or not it obeys any specific detail of Christian or Protestant doctrine, such as the validity of the Holy Trinity, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, the predestination of the elect, etc, etc, etc, is entirely irrelevant. We are talking about a continuous cultural tradition whose superficial features constantly mutate. It’s a waste of time to generate antibodies to metaphysical doctrines.

The divinity of Jesus isn't a superficial feature of Christianity, retard.

You can see Moldbug really does believe it's "be good to each other" + resurrection.  He states his ignorance fearlessly.  But funny that Moldbug should mention "a continuous cultural tradition whose superficial features constantly mutate".  It puts me in the mind of something quite different from Christianity, something that often disguises its defensive behavior as a universal aspiration or value, and then lectures you about it in pharisaic manner.

Foseti cannot stop repeating Moldbug's errors, he's like a slave organism whose mind is controlled by a parasite:

Foseti:

The series begins by treating progressivism as a sort of infection of the mind. Assume progressivism is a virus that is solely concerned with spreading itself into as many minds as possible. We see the idea’s evolution, in which it starts as a fundamentalist religious belief and ends up discarding theism so as to better propagate itself in an officially secular system of government. Shed of overt theism, Progressivism “can be propagated by American official institutions, which are constitutionally prohibited from endorsing its ancestor or competitor [ie theistic Christianity].” The devil’s greatest trick . . . and so on.

Why assume progressivism is a virus when it's pretty clearly a set of sociopolitical values?  This is partisan self-indulgence, namecalling that is elaborated on frivolously until orgasm.  Why not also assume progressivism is a cult, a sexual paraphilia, and a kidney infection?  It would make as much sense as calling it a virus.

And once a religion discards its own theology, it ceases to be a religion.  At best it's a social club or something people do at renaissance fairs.

Foseti (and Moldbug) go on about Dawkins, and even Foseti seems to recognize the silliness of it, for he then adds as an excuse:

Foseti:

Fine. So what? Who really cares if Dawkins is religious zealot?

This is important because Progressivism can’t be understood without this religious framework, and it’s important to understand Progressivism since it’s the world’s dominant ideology.

But Foseti and Moldbug never establish that progressivism has a religious framework (or that it's actually dominant)--they just say it over and over while ignoring everything that progressivism doesn't have in common with religion (such as having no actual theology, scriptures, or ceremonies).  Foseti implies that everything thought or said in the West is reductively Christian (perhaps as an acrostic), which just makes it meaningless to claim something is Christian in the first place.

In his attempt to show that Moldbug does establish progressivism's religious framework, Foseti comes up with this:

Foseti:

Ultracalivinsts believe in:

1. The universal brotherhood of man – i.e. equality

2. The futility of violence – i.e. peace

3. The fair distribution of goods – i.e. social justice

4. The managed society – i.e. community run by benevolent experts

Where to begin!  First of all, you find these vague concepts in dozens of cultures.  Second, these are normal sociopolitical developments as societies scale up and deal with resource distribution and expansion--they don't hinge on religious belief and clearly have nothing to do with Christianity.  Third, the progressives believed violence was futile but then ran a civil war anyway?  This is how Moldbug runs his shell game.

Foseti's commenters cover a wide range.

Steve Johnson:

In a later post Moldbug analogizes progressive government and heroin addiction in that both are painful to stop and the longer they go on the worse the pain of stopping becomes. This isn’t accidental – something as harmful as progressivism has to evolve some defense to being rooted out.

In other words, Moldbug doubles down on his ridiculous metaphors, ironically using half-assed Dawkins "selfish gene" analogies.

Josh:

So what I’m getting at is this, fundamentally leftism is not a memeplex, but an irreducible essence, specifically it is the fundamental destructive force, evil, satan. The trappings that surround this essence may vary, any movement or philosophy will be a watered down version, the form is more real than

Thanks for the update, Josh.

Sonter Dunningham:

Great post. I would even go further and say that the left is in serious denial that life is tragic, and is in a desperate attempt and futile attempt to undo this fact. This leads to a hatred of the right because the right reminds them of this fact and causes psychological projection. That is, the left blames the right for the fact that life is tragic in the first place.

Joke left as an exercise for the reader.

Finally someone with sense:

The Reluctant Apostate:

I think it’s a fair criticism. One of the weakest points of neoreactionary commentary that I have seen thus far is the cladistic analysis of ideologies, which analogizes them to biological species when a much better analogy is biological races (or subspecies). For the former, cladisitic analysis works brilliantly, as save for the rare instance of horizontal gene transfer, members of a species only breed amongst themselves and thus speciation leads to the nice tree structure that lends itself to cladistic analysis.

However, when dealing with races that can and do interbreed, a cladisitic analysis is prone to falling on its face. Are the Uyghurs East Eurasians or West Eurasians? Are Labradoodles Labradors or Poodles? Is modern progressivism Christian, Jewish, Communist, Socialist, Humanist, or Utopian? Are these the right sort of question to ask? The insight that progressivism shares many characteristics with formal religions is an important one, and digging back in time to discern its parentage and the selective forces that shaped it is a worthwhile exercise, but calling it ultracalvinism is sloppy at best.

Sailer joins in:

Steve Sailer:

Moldbug’s theory that America is a Protestant-dominated country was a commonplace not that many decades ago. I have an old set of Encyclopedia Britannicas that are filled with an amazing number of entries on American ministers and Protestant theologians whom nobody has mentioned in the New York Times in this century, at least not with respect.

The reason this theory seems new is because, while it used to be true, you don’t hear much about it these days. Why not? Because it’s obviously not true anymore.

In a follow-up he asks, pertinently:

Steve Sailer:

How do we talk about the ideological lay of the land in 2014 without talking about the role of the neocons over the last 45 years?

Well if you're Moldbug it's easy, you come up with a conspiracy theory about Calvinists and call the rulers of America "the Cathedral" and carefully refrain from mentioning any development after 1924.

Anon:

If you’re going to call everyone crypto-Calvinists and claim that Rawls’ supposed pure philosophy is really Calvinism, while at the same time claiming you yourself practice pure philosophy free from any religious influence, you’re opening yourself to criticism. At the same time he proudly announces his atheism, he claims that atheism is a way to smuggle theology into the state. Then there is his emphasis on the law above all, clearly in the Jewish tradition. In any case, turnabout is fail play; his method of archeology/geneology of beliefs, complete with the smuggling in of hidden theology, should be applied to his own writing. Someone smarter than me should read Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, especially books 11 – 14 and compare it to Moldbug’s thoughts on law and legislation.

And then there's this wag:

Paul Fallavollita:

I love it! You hear a lot of homespun conservative types talk about how “atheism is a religion.” Wouldn’t they be shocked if they fully grasped exactly which religion it is!

Indeed, Paul!


Source: http://foseti.wordpr...vations-part-1/

Related Posts: http://mpcdot.com/fo...-enlightenment/, http://mpcdot.com/fo...e-it-seriously/, http://mpcdot.com/fo...tenment-dorkly/

[Oskar Dirlewanger]

Ultra-Calvinist riots in the memeplex

While I admire PMAN's ability to swim through the Mariana Trench of 888 that is Moldbug and Moldbug Accessories, I can't help but feel that those guys are a lost cause.  I've scrolled (and scrolled) through that blog before, and didn't once feel like there's a serious effort to _convince_ the reader.  Instead, the reader is bludgeoned with meandering rhetoric, infused by the occasional dubstep bass drop of a quote from obscure 17th century literature.  The analysis in this thread only affirms my suspicion that this is a deliberate strategy.

The more unconventional one's philosophy is, the harder he must work to get others to appreciate it.  This especially means patiently walking them through whatever foundational concepts he takes for granted that they might not even be aware of.  Haphazard name/quote-dropping and bloviating doesn't accomplish any of this.

What it does provide is fodder for smug internet Free Thinkers to (a) feel like they're part of an elite brain trust and (b) season their own half-baked theories to dazzle their associates and blog commenters.  It's like a pyramid scheme of feigned erudition.

[SK: Addicted to Beef (Broth)]

Moldbug in one sentence; "intentional category errors designed to serve as shock treatment for adherents of the status quo."

A good goal, but a questionable tactic, I think. It's questionable in spite of being relatively effective (Moldbug has changed more people's minds than most bloggers) because clear categories and straightforward communication are more important than emotional affect. A convinced Moldbug reader will hate the Cathedral with all his heart, soul, and mind, but he won't be able to communicate cogently about that, because persuasion always builds on shared definitions, and nobody will share Moldbug's until they're 20,000 words in.*

To the extent the masses will ever leave the Cathedral, they'll march out on their knees. Muscular Christianity ALWAYS takes the legs out from under the idea that the State (and the University/Business/Media complex, they are all practically a single entity now) is God. Moldbug's not really helping with that, either.

*I'm a Moldbug completist. I've read every word he's ever posted on his blog. I don't recommend that practice to normal people.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger, on 08 January 2014 - 07:19 AM, said:

What it does provide is fodder for smug internet Free Thinkers to (a) feel like they're part of an elite brain trust and (b) season their own half-baked theories to dazzle their associates and blog commenters.  It's like a pyramid scheme of feigned erudition.

I think that really sums up Moldbug and his fans.  It's sad that there's a cottage industry of those blogs and substantive discussion is still hard to find in any political circles.

[Rob S.]

Father Foseti, sternly: "back to the catechism please!  Remember that staunch rightism was invented in 2007, except for Thomas Carlyle."

Unless he's some false flag, which I really doubt -- even though the whole 'movement' is kind of an (unintentional?) entryist thing vis-a-vi the 'real' right -- Foseti is a man of proper breeding, ie pure Northwest European.  

But yes, he has specific reason to be a Jew proxy and is miles less honest than Jim or B (Jewish) -- or even the original zionists -- on the JQ.  I haven't read it, but I know the original Godfathas of Sion-Itself (the approximate likes of Herzl and Ben Gurion) admitted that sharing a society with Jews had downsides for Europids.  

Even Moldbug, as of 30 seconds ago, is more honest about this.  Catch up!

Like you say, Apostate hit the nail -- a lot of this stuff is just nonsense.  The weirdest thing about these people is their ungoverned reductionist libido.  The whole 'America is a communist country' thing, the English Civil War is the only thing that ever happened in 2,500 years, or the rigid use of 'left/right' -- as if they were a rock, a tree, rather than mildly-fuzzy predicates like all natural-language predicates are.

Incidentally, while he's a converted or newly-impassioned christian and I'm post-nietzschean, so I guess we will never agree, Josh is really not someone to blow off.  Any opportunity you get to learn from him, take it.

Probably half of college-age Yidn are half-blood, and these breed out.  Soon enough, almost all mainstream Jews will have Europid siblings-in-law and such.  It's possible they will finally cool it, but god only knows.  So the JQ may finally end up passe in a certain respect, 150 years after Nietzsche hoped it would.  Or it may not.  Regardless, western renaissance still demands telling the truth about the past: not indulging in compulsive, covertly guilt-ridden attempts to cook up some innocent and pure historical Jew, and absurdly pin the entire pathetic 2,500-year melodrama of W-Eurasia on the Roundheads and Levelers, crappy as the latter are.  And of course Holocaust worship needs some deconstruction, ie the event needs to be restored to context.

Otherwise we go nowhere.  All those lies are a demoralization.  Whatever they may 'say', even intend to say, they whisper: 'making an effort for the West and/or for general eugenesis is futile'.  That way lies the End.  You need to actually believe in what you are doing.  For real, at heart.

Tell the truth.  Its the only way I can think of to stop all this gay arguing and start building civilization.

[Bixxy Noodles: Emotional Terrorist]

I know you guys are offended by the idea that modern progressivism or liberalism or universalism or whatever name is written in the Poz' passport these days is a direct lineal descendent of mainline Protestantism and the Puritans, but it is. This is obvious as soon as you start looking at any of the history surrounding its players and chain of custody on ideas. Do moldbug et al point this out in goofy ways? Yes. Does that make them wrong? No. Churchill used to describe communism as "Christianity with a tomahawk," which is glib but sufficiently accurate as characterizations go. In the same vein, modern progressivism is Christianity with a lab coat and police baton.

More importantly, is this historic reality inconsistent with the observation that Jewish influences during the 20th century have pushed progressivism way into the deep end of self-destructive insanity? No. But suggesting that the Poz started with the Jews and then infected mainline Protestantism has the facts and chronology wrong.

tl;dr - Foseti (and moldbug) are right about this. Modern Universalism (a much more accurate and less goony name for what they are incorrectly calling ultra-Calvinism, etc.) is the contemporary manifestation of a religious tradition that goes back a thousand years in one form or another to the earliest instances of Anglo-dissenter Christianity. If you want to oppose it, you need to at least acknowledge it for what it is.

[GhostfaceCracka]

I hate to rehash Pman's great post, but something that clearly and explicitly rejects Christ cannot in any sense be called Christian. There is no such thing as Christianity without Christ, and trying to maintain there is makes you a clever silly jackass or (in Moldbug's case) a grifting Jew. I don't care if fat drunk Limey warmonger Churchill said it, no Christ = no Christianity. Whatever it grew out of, it has long since ceased to be Christian in any sense and continuing to call it so simply libels Christ. I can understand why a Jew like Moldbug would want to do this, human "reactionaries" like Foseti I'm less clear on. Maybe he's an esoteric Odinist or something, there's a lot of those in the alt right scene I'm told.

[GhostfaceCracka]

Also Pman's post has the first few Sailer - Foesti exchanged but it's worth reading to laugh at how obviously Sailer floats the JQ in front of Foseti over and over, and Foseti has no idea what he's talking about.

[TRUSTED LEADERSHIP FOR A STRONGER AMERICA]

"Cathedral" is an affected way of saying the "elite" or the "ruling class." It has the same intended effect as when Stormfront refers to Zionist Occupational Government.

[Hell is other mice]

Ok, call it post-Christian if that makes you more comfortable.

The left took Christian morals, dropped Christ and ran with them in a rather predictable direction.

This much is obvious.

But the neo-reactionaries are engaging in some slight of hand. They focus on early leftism and then stop at a certain point and skip ahead to the modern era, leaving much of a century almost untouched.

Specifically, they skip the part where the Jews take over leftism.

So the reader is mislead. He is encouraged to assume that modern leftism is a direct and natural outgrowth of early Christian and post-Christian leftism. To assume that modern leftists are post-Christian zealots.

When you re-insert the decades that the neo-reactionaries ignore, the picture changes. Leftism becomes much more malicious and destructive after the Jews take over. And modern leftists may have some elements of post-Christian zealotry, but they, like America, have also been significantly Judaized.

Thus, the incomplete neo-reactionary version of history puts the blame on Christians and post-Christians, rather than properly assigning it to Christians, post-Christians and Jews.

Neo-reaction is an attempt to make the coming reaction good (or at least "less bad") for the Jews. Neo-conservatism 2.0.

[Chuck U. Farley]

Ghostface and Pman are right, this progressive atheism as Christianity 2.0 meme is pure horseshit.  Likewise, alt right terms like the Cathedral are insanely inaccurate and ahistorical.  The vaguely egalitarian or communitarian statements of random protestants through history doesn't show a connection between protestant movements and left wing progressive liberalism.  

One need not resort to "ultra calvinism" to explain that industrial revolution era workers may be attracted to ideas that may improve their miserable lives, such as suffrage, public education and broader distribution of resources.  Egalitarianism naturally exists in some modal form in the human psyche.  In certain conditions this desire can have concrete opportunities to express itself.  Instead of looking at those concrete conditions, such as literacy, population density, etc., these fags work off a false premise and rationalize into knots of absurdity.  Somehow Jews, militant atheists, and f****ts comprise "the Cathedral", go figure.  A fierce anti Christ like Dawkins, is actually a zealous Christian!  A chickpea is neither a chick, nor a pea...discuss amongst yourselves.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Bixxy Noodles, on 08 January 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

I know you guys are offended by the idea that modern progressivism or liberalism or universalism or whatever name is written in the Poz' passport these days is a direct lineal descendent of mainline Protestantism and the Puritans, but it is. This is obvious as soon as you start looking at any of the history surrounding its players and chain of custody on ideas. Do moldbug et al point this out in goofy ways? Yes. Does that make them wrong? No. Churchill used to describe communism as "Christianity with a tomahawk," which is glib but sufficiently accurate as characterizations go. In the same vein, modern progressivism is Christianity with a lab coat and police baton.

Offense has nothing to do with it--I'm critical of the misuse of Christianity whether it is Pope Francis sounding like he's been smoking some wicked reefer or insane evangelicals who think the Bible means we should import Somalis into the Midwest.

The error, which I've touched on here and written more about elsewhere, is that there is no such thing as a "political lineage", there is rather demographic and sociological change in which groups struggle for supremacy.  There is no "chain of custody on ideas", which actually sounds like something Moldbug came up with (not a compliment).  How could there be?  Ideas can be influenced by anyone at any time and can mean different things to different people.  An idea is not a concrete object or even a phenotype.  Two people talking about "equality" and separated by two hundred years are barely speaking the same language.  They're not brothers.  We see that with the very word "progressive" that Moldbug relies on to carry his argument up the hill.

Intellectuals often try to link their ideas to past thinkers because it gives them a sense of ancestry, but it's true of neither progressives nor of Moldbug.  Both are formed by the environments of their present along grooves worn down by their genes, not by some Socratic dialogue with truth or a Nietzschean will to power elapsing over centuries.

Take Moldbug, who isn't some disciple of Carlyle or Evola or whatever he thinks, but rather a 20th-21st century Mischling in an outsized managerial society who thinks irresistably along a pattern of Judaic legalism with a subconscious (perhaps unknown to him) desire to shift blame from his kind--people who think and talk and act a whole lot like him.  It makes sense to a Jew that there can be Christianity without Christ, because isn't there after all Jewishness without the Torah?  But Christianity doesn't map to a race--someone tell Moldbug.  He thinks progressives are Christians who stopped going to temple.

Churchill's statement is just bizarre, and I can't imagine how he dragged tomahawks into it.  Perhaps he was staring blearily at a wooden Indian.  It's only sufficiently accurate if you approach Marx and Engels' ideology as an evangelical mission influenced by the Navajo.  An original theory, anyway.

"Christianity with a lab coat and police baton"--if we're going to keep on with this silliness, why not say Christianity in leather chaps and a bucket of condoms?  We can even apply this to societies predating Christ.  Ancient Rome was Christianity with a Senate.  The Greeks were Christianity with hoplites.  Egypt was Christianity with giant pyramids.  Anything and everything is Christianity, just like the Jew says.  What, maybe you're going to tell me that giant pyramids have nothing to do with Christianity.  Go on!

Bixxy Noodles, on 08 January 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

More importantly, is this historic reality inconsistent with the observation that Jewish influences during the 20th century have pushed progressivism way into the deep end of self-destructive insanity? No. But suggesting that the Poz started with the Jews and then infected mainline Protestantism has the facts and chronology wrong.

No one is making that argument.

Bixxy Noodles, on 08 January 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

tl;dr - Foseti (and moldbug) are right about this. Modern Universalism (a much more accurate and less goony name for what they are incorrectly calling ultra-Calvinism, etc.) is the contemporary manifestation of a religious tradition that goes back a thousand years in one form or another to the earliest instances of Anglo-dissenter Christianity. If you want to oppose it, you need to at least acknowledge it for what it is.

I see:  anything that wants to spread is a form of Christianity.  Caesar's Rome was Christian and didn't even know it.  If atheism wants to spread, it's Christian too.  What does this silly belief gain anyone?  What does calling atheists Christians help us understand?  I think I will stick with understanding societies based on demographics, complexity, and size, expressing a culture and interacting messily with other societies.

[Probably Not Posting Here Anymore]

I'm unpersuaded by Moldbug or his followers. Here's why:

Quote

The left took Christian morals, dropped Christ and ran with them in a rather predictable direction.

First, there's a radical upheaval of world view involved in "dropped Christ." That upheaval by definition does not arise within Christianity. Moldbug et al. do not appreciate this, most likely for cultural reasons as Pman mentions.

Second, what "Christian morals"? The examples of what "ultracalvinists" believe in are so wide-ranging as to apply to many world religions. And speaking as someone who has studied Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion" in detail, I simply don't buy it as a foundation of poz. Something else intervenes, and that something does not arise within Calvinism.

When someone argues that modern progressivism is "Christianity with a lab coat and police baton," I find this unenlightening. The lab coat and police baton are proof that something of non-Christian origin is involved. I don't even know what's meant by "Christianity" in this phrase.

[Hell is other mice]

Probably Not a Danish Hellcat, on 08 January 2014 - 01:40 PM, said:

First, there's a radical upheaval of world view involved in "dropped Christ." That upheaval by definition does not arise within Christianity. Moldbug et al. do not appreciate this, most likely for cultural reasons as Pman mentions.

Sure, but it's not the as if the shift occurred in one generation. People gradually lost faith in the religious aspects of Christianity, but retained the basic morality. And they had to go somewhere with it.

Probably Not a Danish Hellcat, on 08 January 2014 - 01:40 PM, said:

Second, what "Christian morals"?

http://en.wikipedia....#Slave_morality

Christianity defined the values of Western civilization. Over time, people lost faith in Christ, but they were too steeped in Christianity's slave morality to reject it and adopt master morality, the very idea would be alien and horrifying to them after 1,000 years plus of slave morality. They still wanted to be "good people" by the moral standards of the day.

So, they ran with the slave morality and eventually took it too far.

Probably Not a Danish Hellcat, on 08 January 2014 - 01:40 PM, said:

When someone argues that modern progressivism is "Christianity with a lab coat and police baton," I find this unenlightening. The lab coat and police baton are proof that something of non-Christian origin is involved. I don't even know what's meant by "Christianity" in this phrase.

Dawkins and his fellow atheists may not be Christians, but they are fanatic about one particular version of slave morality, which they got indirectly from Christianity. If you zoom out really far, it could be argued that they look like Christians.

Dawkins, et al. are atheists, everything is permitted. They could believe whatever they want. But almost all of them believe the same things. Weird, huh?

[PLEASUREMAN]

Hell is other mice, on 08 January 2014 - 02:26 PM, said:

Probably Not a Danish Hellcat, on 08 January 2014 - 01:40 PM, said:

Second, what "Christian morals"?

http://en.wikipedia....#Slave_morality

Christianity defined the values of Western civilization. Over time, people lost faith in Christ, but they were too steeped in Christianity's slave morality to reject it and adopt master morality, the very idea would be alien and horrifying to them after 1,000 years plus of slave morality. They still wanted to be "good people" by the moral standards of the day.

If the study of morality had ended with a mentally imbalanced German, this might still have relevance to the discussion.  Nietzsche's master/slave morality dichotomy is just the sort of thing that introvert bookworms use as a foundation for their thinking--they need to read some real social science, not a blathering philologist nutcase.  It is typical Nietzsche, who was obsessed in a very muscular academic way with strong vs. weak--it runs through his whole worthless corpus.  He also despised Christianity.

Fortunately the study of morality has progressed since then.  What you seem to be referring to is what I call harm-based morality, which isn't a product of Christianity but of a materialist rejection of group-related moral foundations.  It's linked to radical individualism, which is straying a pretty good ways from Christian brotherhood.  I believe this all comes out of mass society, which is why looking at coinciding intellectual trends just distracts from the actual causes.

Hell is other mice, on 08 January 2014 - 02:26 PM, said:

Dawkins and his fellow atheists may not be Christians, but they are fanatic about one particular version of slave morality, which they got indirectly from Christianity. If you zoom out really far, it could be argued that they look like Christians.

Dawkins, et al. are atheists, everything is permitted. They could believe whatever they want. But almost all of them believe the same things. Weird, huh?

Weird that you think they all believe the same things, yes.

[Sassy Danny Ramirez]

Bixxy Noodles, on 08 January 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

I know you guys are offended by the idea that modern progressivism or liberalism or universalism or whatever name is written in the Poz' passport these days is a direct lineal descendent of mainline Protestantism and the Puritans, but it is. This is obvious as soon as you start looking at any of the history surrounding its players and chain of custody on ideas. Do moldbug et al point this out in goofy ways? Yes. Does that make them wrong? No. Churchill used to describe communism as "Christianity with a tomahawk," which is glib but sufficiently accurate as characterizations go. In the same vein, modern progressivism is Christianity with a lab coat and police baton.

More importantly, is this historic reality inconsistent with the observation that Jewish influences during the 20th century have pushed progressivism way into the deep end of self-destructive insanity? No. But suggesting that the Poz started with the Jews and then infected mainline Protestantism has the facts and chronology wrong.

tl;dr - Foseti (and moldbug) are right about this. Modern Universalism (a much more accurate and less goony name for what they are incorrectly calling ultra-Calvinism, etc.) is the contemporary manifestation of a religious tradition that goes back a thousand years in one form or another to the earliest instances of Anglo-dissenter Christianity. If you want to oppose it, you need to at least acknowledge it for what it is.

What was so bad about 19th century poz though? The american version of slavery was repulsive. Not because of physical punishment or hard labor, but because it allowed the alienation of people from their families, and the deformation of normal human moral functioning. I hate naggers as much as the next guy, but american slavery was an abominable institution, and John Brown did nothing wrong.



The "poz" wasn't "poz" before the jews. Also, refering to the origin of  Moldbug's grievances (the Cathedral) as poz is stupid because he is all for f****ts, porno, financial jewry, etc. He's thrilled with what we call "the poz". Basically, he has defined the "the Cathedral" as the ruling class and unsurprisingly this used to be the protestants (many of whom weren't "calvinist" or had anything to do with his particular theology). Why he doesn't go back further and decide it wasn't Christianity at all but aristocratic germanic tribesmen who are "the cathedral" eating rotten meat shivering in longhouses, I have no idea.

Edited by Sassy Adam Mordecai, 08 January 2014 - 03:37 PM.

[Chrome]

These internet reactionaries remind me a lot of Freudians, Marxists, and Randroids. They have their Theory of Everything which is perfect and complete. It all relies on the chicanery of a verbally talented cult leader who has produced so many millions of words that their followers can find a rationalization for anything they see somewhere in the pile.

Also, I found this, which I think is a good example of how absurd these people are:



Radish! And it's nice to see that Andrew Jackson is to the left of Robespierre.

[Lord Stanfield]

Bixxy Noodles, on 08 January 2014 - 10:04 AM, said:

More importantly, is this historic reality inconsistent with the observation that Jewish influences during the 20th century have pushed progressivism way into the deep end of self-destructive insanity? No. But suggesting that the Poz started with the Jews and then infected mainline Protestantism has the facts and chronology wrong.

This comes up in the documentary "Arguing the World" about the rise of the jewish New York intellectuals in the early 20th century.  The largest socialist party of the time was the Socialist Party of America headed by Eugene Debs and it was was almost exclusively christian and working class.  Debs and his followers were marxist, but really only to the extent that it applied to immediate questions of workers rights and issues of poverty.  Obviously the New York leftist faction felt a great deal of disdain toward this culturally homogeneous and unsophisticated brand of socialism, but they also recognized that it had laid the groundwork for their ideological and political designs to permeate American culture.  The end result was that they gained control of the political left in America, but they alienated the actual "proletariat" class and turned it into a noxious facet of university culture and upper-class intellectual life.  I'll try to find the full thing online and put it up in the documentaries thread.

"ever since I can remember I've been a neo-something"  -Irving Kristol

Edited by Lord Stanfield, 08 January 2014 - 09:15 PM.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Speaking of which, here is Moldbug dissembling wildly in the comments to Age of Treason back in 2007:

Quote

American Jews of the influential sort - again, assimilationists - tend to be quite anti-Israeli. Increasingly so, in fact, as the distant memory of the days when Israel was actually something of a Soviet client state fade.

And ethnocentrism, or really any nontrivial intellectual descendant of the Jewish tradition, is extremely hard to find in the beliefs or practices of assimilated American Jews. Even Jewish cooking is nasty (boiled chicken) and has largely disappeared.

The one place where I do think that McDonald's arguments hold some water is his point that assimilating American Jews in the first half of the 20C tended to be drawn to the liberal (progressive, socialist, communist, etc) traditions which opposed American ethnocentrism and pointed toward Universalism. Inasmuch as they threw their considerable talents behind these movements, they can certainly be said to have helped steer the ship.

The question of whether liberalized mainline Protestantism would have assumed its present form without the Jewish injection is unanswerable. I think the answer is yes, because I think the First Amendment is practically a formula for "secularism." But your mileage may vary.

Certainly, however, unless Horace Mann's real name was Rosenbaum, the universalizing and liberalizing tendencies in the American tradition existed well before the great influx of Jews. (In fact, many Jews were on the Confederate side in the War of Secession - eg, Judah Benjamin.)

http://age-of-treaso...i-semitism.html

Who knows where to start with this, it's basically bullshit all the way through.  Moldbug apparently never heard of neocons and doesn't think they have any influence (I assure the Jew, they don't hate Israel).  I mean, all they did is co-pilot a presidential administration for eight years, run the banking system, run virtually all "conservative" media orgs, nothing special.

Moldbug can't find ethnic chauvinism in media Jews the way I can't find time to clean out the garage.  He doesn't want to look and has built up this phenomenally obtuse line of reasoning about it that allows him (he thinks) to safely filibuster with a lot of garbage claims.

Notice how he also tries to imply, or rather prevaricate, that the Jews were friends to the noble slaveowner.  If true in substance (which I doubt), it's a trivial data point as Jews didn't start coming over in numbers until the 20th century.  Moreover the institution of slavery was a human evil and Jews wouldn't get any credit for supporting it no matter what Moldbug's ridiculous argument about "ultracalvinists" is.  Moreover what a bunch of antebellum Jews thought has zero relevance to the rise of Jewish power and its thorough perversion of progressivism in the 20th century (examples far more numerous than Moldbug's anecdotes about antebellum Hebrew racists, but Moldbug's calculator only counts goyim).

Maybe Moldbug can dig up a few oddball relics who argued (with Talmudic tenacity) in favor of the Southern plantation system, but all the rest of them were out marching with King and running the NAACP et al.  It's thoroughly dishonest of him to pretend the scales are equal.

Moldbug can't be fixed or reasoned with, as the above quote shows his programming is wrecked at a very deep level.  And if you look at his responses to the Dark Enlightment critics, he's not interested in discussion anyway.  He's running a crappy little cult, calling it "neoreactionary", and serving koolaid and cupcakes to weirdo bloggers who wander by.

[Bixxy Noodles: Emotional Terrorist]

Sassy Adam Mordecai, on 08 January 2014 - 03:29 PM, said:

The "poz" wasn't "poz" before the jews.

This is just plain wrong. Ever hear of the Transcendentalists? They were a popular Christian movement in the 1830s, originating among New England blue-bloods (Emerson is a distant relation of mine - remember that I'm an old-school WASP) and very influential. Most of the Poz can be seen with them in embryonic form. Guess what? No Jews. Just WASPy WASPs.

Or how about the Oneida Community, founded in 1848 as a Christian utopia complete with free love, abolishment of marriage and family bonds, and kiddie diddling. No? Doesn't ring a bell? No Jews there either, though they did manage turn out some nice merchandise from their sweatshops despite that handicap.

You may also want to read up on the history of the Quakers in Pennsylvania and Congregationalists in New England. The Quakers in particular have a lot in common with modern shitlibs. This is not in any way accidental. Hell, look at thus list of well-known adherents of UU: http://www.adherents..._unitarian.html

That's quite a genealogy.

And that's way before abolitionism and methodism and progressivism and social gospel and missionary ecumenism and unitarian universalism, all of which form a continuous progression and evolution of ecumenical protestantism until we get to the post-war period and they shed God altogether but kept right on going with a healthy leavening of Talmudic nonsense (oy vey!) picked up from promiscuous contact over the years.

Hell, even many modern-day Progressives openly acknowledge their ideological debts to ecumenical Protestantism (at least, the more honest and educated ones do).

What I find really curious is that Christian conservatives would deny all this, especially when it's so obvious. You'd think if anybody could appreciate a story so clearly illustrating the hazards of tolerating and encouraging heresy, it would be them. But apparently not. Maybe because they'd have to examine their own heresies too - mote, beam, and all that.

It was that rampant, unchecked heresy which is the source of the Poz. As it progressed in morbidity, we became weak and developed a terminal case of Jews. But they are an opportunistic secondary infection feeding on us in our weakened state, not the killer retrovirus itself that made us sick in the first place.