Bloody Shovel 3

An interesting experiment is going on.

Via Vox

Paganism has been included in an official school religious education syllabus for the first time. Cornwall Council has told its schools that pagan beliefs, which include witchcraft, druidism and the worship of ancient gods such as Thor, should be taught alongside Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Paganism is cool. I confess I have lots of fun reading about Norse mythology, the lost Slavic pantheon, or some strange Uralic tribes who still keep their ancient faith. The actual documentaries done about their religious practices are in reality quite lame though. Just a bunch of peasants putting on some wooden idols in the forest and cooking a horrid looking stew. But I wouldn't want these people Christianized.

Well it seems that some Cornish officials are set on reviving paganism in their land. I understand their motives, but I'm afraid that Brits don't know what they're doing. Playing with religion must sound fun for atheists, but there's a ton of reasons not to do it. Especially when you have millions of foreigners in your country who take their religion very seriously.

From Ed West:

Islam has made London a more conservative place than it was 50 years ago

He go...

A Jewish acquaintance of mine, an old man, told me once: "You Christians are nuts. What's that about rich people going to hell? Blessed are the poor? You should praise the rich, they might be useful to you."

I guess he had a point. Christianity, well understood, is not very conducive to doing business. This idea was confirmed on seeing a shrine for the Chinese Money God. How can we compete with a people for whom money is a god? See how the fuckers translate it to Mammon (see below the main banner in the website). Mammon is the bad guy, you know!

Nah, they have it right.

This news just cracked me up: 40k orthodox Jews gather at a New York Stadium to talk about the dangers of the internet. My first thought was about our friend Bill, who uses to admonish us of the dangers of modernity and consumerism. Well I am an internet addict, but perhaps these Jews have a point. The Internet is a very dangerous thing for an immature mind.

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The I sa...

There's a funny paradox in all us reactionary bloggers. On one hand we believe that politics should be abolished. That a firm, inviolable power structure would make life safer, the economy wealthier, the people happier overall. With caveats of course, but surely the modern glorification of constant struggle, the micro civil war that democracy forces upon all of us is a bad thing.

Yet we are obsessed with politics. Writing a blog, commenting everywhere, fighting the liberal hordes wherever we find them. Some more than others, but we are way more involved than the average person. I don't know about others, but I was always like that. I started to argue at primary school, my teachers hated me. Then came the internet, BBSs, Usenet, IRC, you name it, I've been there fighting for my ideals. I used to gang up with friends and crack leftist's email accounts, then send erotic stories fetched from the web to all the female names in the address book. Damn, it was fun.

As a kid I first was a fairly typical rightist partisan, by late adolescence become a libertarian, then quickly grew up and realised none of it made much sense. Not that I met any intelligent debater who convinced me of the folly of any of it. In fact at the same time that I grew out of libertarianism, came an increasing feeling of tedium over political arguments. First I quickly got bored of debating with dimwits who did little else but parrot partisan lines. But arguing with smart people wasn't much bet...

I always heard about those Muslim suicide bombers, and the boring MSM outrage about those "poor" and "desperate" souls who kill themselves for the cause. How can that happen? The act of killing oneself is thought to be so alien, so extreme, so utterly incomprehensible that the common causes the western commentariat comes up with are evil white colonialism or its modern descendant, evil Zionism. The assumption is that something as unfathomably bad as suicide bombing can only be caused by the supreme evil, the trascendental victimiser: white people. What else can it be?

Letting aside the fact that suicide bombers end up killing and victimising way more people besides themselves, in the end Liberalism is the cult of autonomy, and suicide just doesn't make sense. It's arguably a worse evil to forsake one's autonomy and kill oneself, than just kill random people. Killing others is a choice, an act of the will, so it's not that bad in the end. It's just "tragic". Killing one's own will though, that is sheer madness. That's beyond evil. It's sacrilege.

For others like me whose brains aren't tainted by liberal memetic retardation, suicide bombing makes a lot of sense. This people get to go to heaven! And they get 72 virgins all for them!! And they die by explosion, in the act, with little pain involved. If you believe in the stuff, it's a hell of a deal. So I'm not surprised at all by suicide jihadis. I'm surprised there's not more of them. Then again people are peo...

Back in my libertarian days I remember reading a piece (or was it an interview?) by David Friedman, about the future of freedom or something like that. He said that there are 2 mainstream wings of libertarians. There are those who think that what is needed to further freedom is a change in the culture, i.e. we need to persuade people into valuing freedom. And there are others who think that it is a legal problem, that what we need is more libertarian laws, a better designed constitution, etc. Then he said that both views were shortsighted because they fail to take into account the fact that statism may not be contingent, but a necessary by-product of states. That all bureaucracies, by their sole nature, will necessarily grow bigger and push for more statism. That the intrinsic structure of power will always push for more power. I was young and I thought this guy was a genius. What I failed to understand is how his conclusion didn't make him stop being a libertarian. It certainly helped me grow out of it.

In a way this reminds me of a similar issue in the altright movement. We are the enemies of leftism, and at the present stage most of us writers and thinkers are mainly engaged in the analysis of the leftist hegemony. The Cathedral's rule is so pervasive than rather than think "how do we get out?", many of us are still mostly concerned with the "how did we get here?". There are three mainstream etiologies of leftism circulating among us. Most famous, old, and simp...

So Sunmyung Moon has died. No Moonies in the Old Continent, so I first knew of the Unification Church in Japan, where it has a sizable following and is quite famous for its ties with some rightist politicians. Only then I knew that for decades there were thousands of 'Moonies' in the US, and all that comedy about mass weddings. Amusingly there's little else weird about the Moonies, except that Moon made a lot of money which he used to buy politicians in the US and North Korea. The Unification Church is the owner of both the Washington Times and Pyeonghwa motors. Moon was as comfortable with US congressmen and with Kim Il Sung. I don't know if he's the Messiah, but he proved the farce which is modern politics.

Europeans have a hard time thinking clearly about religion. We have a strong bias towards thinking that religion is about truth (if you like it) or about power (if you don't). We used to have a Universal Church, which then splintered into state churches. Religion meant tradition, continuity, order. It was structured as pretty much part of the state bureaucracy. Most people seldom put much thought on the thing, and combined an utter disregard for moral precepts with an eager enthusiasm for the yearly rituals.

The conventional wisdom over here is that religion is dead because science has made us all rational and we don't need blind faith. Of course that assumes that religion is about truth. But is it? Undoubtedly it was so for some people. There were alwa...

The Chinese in their ancestral wisdom, have proverbs for every single situation. In fact one of the hardest parts of learning the language is their reliance on idioms, which tend to be verbatim quotes of classical works. 3000 years of writing in the same language means there's a vast pool of wise insight and sharp wit to choose from, but the old language isn't intelligible as such, so you have to memorise the idioms by rote. Once you do though, you literally have a comeback for everything.

It's so much part of the culture, that the tradition doesn't only rely on classical texts. Chinese are prone to make up idioms in the vernacular just as often. There is one I particularly like, which describes people who do pointless stuff. Some time ago Xi Jinping, the recently declared big boss in China, had these words to say:

有些吃饱了没事干的外国人，对中国指手划脚.

This was translated by the South China Morning Post as: "Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us". The translation is quite literal, and pretty good as it is. The point on this sentence is "full bellies and nothing better to do". This is the standard way of describing people who do something pointless out of what it's assumed is too much leisure. As any beginner learner of Chinese knows, full bellies in China used to be a very uncommon sight, to the point that people...

What is the supreme personal virtue for liberals? Tolerance. You have to be nice and accept others and their opinions. Voltaire wrote a whole Traité sur la tolérance to argue that we are all humans, sons of the same god, and should tolerate each other. It doesn't get any more liberal than that. In 1763.

Funnily though, tolerance is very polysemic, and it has another well-known meaning. In pharmacology tolerance is the progressive loss of reaction to a given dose of substance, meaning that you need to increase the dosage to get the same effect as before. So you need a gram of cocaine to get a dopamine high, you keep doing that every day, after a week you need 2 grams to feel anything.

But surely this stimulant-brain chemical correlation is not limited to physical substances. After all there are many things that can cause to get high and happy, and only very few of those involve putting refined chemicals into your bloodstream. You can get high after climbing a mountain, while screwing a hot girl. Or you can get the most sublime high after giving an interview to the media trashing some racist scum. Oh, the sanctimony high. That one's awesome. It's like a female orgasm. It's the best thing after Soma.

So Stephen Hawking is in the news for joining an academic boycott on Israel.

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