Bloody Shovel 3

We will drown and nobody shall save us

Posts tagged as: religion

We need a new religion

Posted on by Spandrell

Schopenhauer used to write that Judaism is not a religion, but a tribal cult, because it lacked any teachings about the afterlife. What kind of religion is that who doesn't tell you what's happening after you die? Isn't the afterlife THE big question of existence? The ultimate enforcer of morality is the threat of everlasting hell after all.

Well now that you think of it, isn't modern liberalism kinda jewish too? In that it has obnoxious moral codes, a pretty dense theology, but no teachings about the afterlife. Which makes it all pretty stupid. Why should I care about anything if, as Keynes said, long term we are all dead? Who cares about doing good things? About caring for posterity?

This sort of nihilism is often pointed out by those Christian rightists as the origin of all evil. On the other way the only thing Christianity has for it these days is that it has hell. Religion can coherently enforce morality. Liberalism can't. Therefore we should go back to Christianity. Well I don't know about that.

But the lack of faith in an afterlife really does poison everything. As any fairly philosophical person has surely noticed, given enough time all intelligent discussions end up talking about God. Because all morality has to ultimately be based on some ultimate authority. Reading today Steve Sailer's, he has a post with summarizes perfectly the great divide between left and right. Continue Reading →

We need a new religion, 2

Posted on by Spandrell

One of the best rightist blogs around there is Lawrence Auster's View from the Right. Auster himself while having occasionally very brilliant insights, is no scholar, but the sheer force of his personality, or his chutzpah if I may put it that way, attract all kind of brilliant people. Today an outstanding post there, where a commenter of his says:

Politics is the religion of leftists. Since there is no divine agency in the world it’s all up to man, omnipotent man, who controls the destiny of all worldly affairs in his hands through the science of political activism. So they obsess endlessly over politics, political theory, and political strategy, investing all their passion and hope in political argument, action, and intrigue. For only politics can bring about their perfect world where all problems are solved, all conflict resolved, and politics the pivot around which the world revolves. So every problem in the world, reduced to politics, is of deep concern. Not a sparrow falls to the ground but politics could have prevented it. If a tree falls in the forest it makes a political statement. Every man, woman, and child on earth must concern himself with politics. All art, science, medicine, education, leisure—they all must be about politics. The personal is the political. Embroidery and millinery are political. Look up at the sky at night and what do you see?—politics. To the leftis...
Continue Reading →

Slave Morality taken to its logical conclusion

Posted on by Spandrell

There's something weirdly addictive about Daily Mail. Its a sort of Decadence Times, they mix celebrity gossip with all the fucked up news they find around. And if there's something not lacking in the UK is fucked up news. I'm always trying to stop reading it, but then I always stumble upon some other gem.

Now please read this news: A woman gives her kidney to a total stranger.

I was not going to write about the race angle, but fuck it. Of course only white people do things like that. And they mostly do it to non-white people. I wonder how can we stop immigration when things like this happen. Imagine when the news arrives into Laos! "You can get free kidneys in that country!!" First it was black immigration, then Muslim, now it'll be Disabled immigration. The kidney have-nots. Just great.

Ok now stop thinking on those pesty NAMs, and try to forget the race of the recipient. Think like a liberal for a minute. And now read the comments.

What a fantastic woman. I wish there was many more like her.

What a moving story, and what an exceptional, brave, beautiful person. If anyone deserves our adoration, and may be a medal, she does.

What a fabulous story, and how amazing that they matched the kidneys for the procedure! Wouldn't it be great if 2012 co...

Continue Reading →

Unintended consequences

Posted on by Spandrell

Atheism is a funny doctrine. They tend to be first rate mathematicians, but what they do is basically denying the law of cause and effect. Using logic that honestly I can't understand, they reach the conclusion that you need no first cause for the world to exist. So there is effect without cause. For the same token they must have thought there is cause without effect.

Atheism causes a very funny chain of philosophical changes. It denies the existence of a higher being. Meaning that human beings are the highest being. If human beings are the highest, we can't really discriminate between them, because there's no criteria above humanity you can use to judge them. So we are all equal. And we are highest. So we are subject of worship (Humans just dig worshipping).

Now if human are worthy of worship, we must care for them. For every single one. Can't let them be poor (gotta Eradicate Poverty), can't let them starve (gotta give food to the Somalis), and we can't let them be sick (Doctors without Borders). Having Human DNA entitles one to godly status, and as such it can't suffer. No if we can't help it. Now, Somalis for example have the damn habit of breeding till there's no food left for anyone, then refuse foreign help. They do it again and again. So we try to help them, we really try, but there's logistics constraints there. So some poor fellas do die.

There is something we can do though, and that is fight disease. Doesn't take much to settle a field hospi...

Continue Reading →

On Mystics

Posted on by Spandrell

Zhainan asked me some time ago to follow up in my post about atheism, so here are my views. I apologize for the delay but I wasn't in the right mood until today. Today it's Sunday and it feels proper.

There's a quote in Aldous Huxley's best novel, that says:

If you've never had a religious experience, it's folly to believe in God.  You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can't eat them without being sick

Well I have never had one. I am not a faith person; in fact I find the concept quite abhorrent, personally. Still, as I said in my last post, the fact that I find no need for religion doesn't mean that there is no God. In fact there can be no sound philosophy without an idea of the transcendent. Logic as a system requires a first cause, if it is to be true. And as we all want logic to be true, we might as well think there is some fancy creator out there. That doesn't mean that we all should go back to sing in latin at Church every Sunday. Criticism of particular religions is on the whole very justified. But the fact that all religions are false doesn't imply that there's nothing out there.

This is the logical critique of atheism. Then there's the psychological critique. Why would anyone deny there's some kind of God, and an afterlife? What do you gain by that? The atheists logic is as faulty as the t...

Continue Reading →

On Ethics 2: Children

Posted on by Spandrell

Foseti links to Laura Wood's blog, aptly named "The Thinking Housewife". She's a longtime commenter at Lawrence Auster's, and gives a fresh perspective as a Traditionalist woman, who wants neither to work outside the home, nor vote, nor dominate her husband. Her blog is also much fun because it resembles so much a stereotypical Victorian house, with all those housewives debating moral topics while drinking tea, and the odd wimpish man participating.

Yet on the whole the tone of discourse is just... womanly. Which is to say simple, and prone to long tirades of moral outrage without much argument. Well there is some argument, and she must be commended for it. But its mostly Mrs Wood who does the thinking. Her tea-mates, not much. In  this post (h/t foseti, who I guess makes his wife read that blog?), they comment this news:

ETHICISTS ARGUE IN FAVOR OF ‘AFTER-BIRTH ABORTIONS‘ AS NEWBORNS ’ARE NOT PERSONS’

The news talks about how some ethics experts (not fat guys on suits this time though) argue that, once you think about it, infanticide and abortion aren't really that different. And abortion is good, so why not kill children? At least...

Continue Reading →

Leftism is the mind killer

Posted on by Spandrell

I remember as a kid reading about Congenital Analgesia. That's a rare genetic disorder that renders people unable to feel pain. How cool is that? You could play around, burn myself, jump off buildings, get in fights, all without fear of getting hurt. Awesome!

Then I thought it better. Why does pain exist anyway? It must serve a purpose. And then I realised that are supposed to be afraid of pain, because pain is proxy for other nasty problems like burning yourself (tissue gets burned), jump off buildings (bones get broken), etc. In fact, the unfortunate kids with this condition all end up having all kinds of problems, for example they get severe eye damage because they are  unable to feel foreign objects inside them.

So you see, pain is bad, nobody likes it, but it's useful. It serves a purpose, which makes it good for you. But how can that be? Bad things are bad, aren't they? They can't be bad and good at the same time. Bad things are nasty and unacceptable, and must be made away with. Preferably with pills of some sort.

That's the kind of reasoning modern leftists do. You can see that I as a kid was more perceptive and profound than modern leftist. I'm not bragging, it's true. See this:

Heart disease drug 'combats racis...
Continue Reading →

Natalism revisited

Posted on by Spandrell

I've been thinking a lot on religion these days, as you can see in some of my last posts. In part it's because of Vox Day's blog, where he has been talking theology a lot lately. I particularly enjoyed his debates with what he calls "Team Calvin", which is a bunch of american calvinists. In Europe religion is mostly a thing of the past, and discussions on religious doctrine is seen as a freaky medieval pastime. But I'm fascinated by it, I always liked reading philosophy, and theology is the most hardcore part of it.

Now Vox, and many on the reactionary sphere are partial to Catholicism. I understand the attraction. We all like European Civilization, and the Church mostly built it. Catholicism evokes a distant past where men were men, women were women, and everyone knew its place.

Fair enough, but a closer examination of Catholic doctrine, and the actual behaviour of the Catholic Church quickly breaks the charm. The Church doesn't acknowledge hbd, and it insists in its futile efforts to christianise African and South American savages.

And what personally bugs me the most is its passion for natalism. No abortion, no birth control. Keep the babies coming. It's just nuts. We don't need more people. We need better people. I simply cringe everyt...

Continue Reading →

Sola fide 2: The Enforcers

Posted on by Spandrell

Liberals have been in power for over 100 years already, and we are more than used to their insanity. We dissenters have spent a long time thinking about their positions, have written long texts analyzing their creed, and since Tocqueville at least, have concluded that liberalism is a suicide cult, and that it cannot last. Equality as Paradise and Man as God is simply too detached from reality. Liberalism eventually must perish.

And so we still believe, but it's been some time already, and Liberalism still hasn't collapsed. The question is why a worldview with denies the most basic facts about reality is still around. There's basically two factors: one that technological progress has made engineering the world to make it safe for Equality easier than it would otherwise be. The other that Liberals are very capable of accepting reality when they have to; but they don't know it themselves. Larry Auster calls them 'unprincipled exceptions', and he's mostly right. Of course all religions function in the basis of unprincipled exceptions: Christians don't always give the other cheek. And Muslims aren't constantly looking behind the rocks for Jews to kill.

Reality always has a way of asserting itself. But dogma keeps the hold over people's brains. So while people keep doing exceptions to make life possible, the creed advances through correction events. That is when some smart true-believer uses some logic and sees that people are...

Continue Reading →

La Douceur de Vivre

Posted on by Spandrell

Tayllerand allegedly said that people in the post French Revolution age couldn't even fathom how nice life was for an aristocrat in the Ancienne Regime.

If only because of the leisure. If only I had the leisure of an old French noblemen I would have fixed every problem in the world by now.

But I don't, and have been crazy busy this last week or so. Thanks for all those who still found time to visit. I'll try to resume my old blogging pace in the next days.

On the meantime for those haunted by the crazy shit that's happening over at Cathedral HQ, just read this discussion started by Jim Kalb.

I want Mr. Kalb and Moldbug in a bloggingheads.tv showdown without time limit. I'll start the donations campaign if necessary.

Let them go

Posted on by Spandrell

Back when Pope John Paul II died, I let myself be bothered by all the media coverage. I heard that the new pope, Joseph Ratzinger, was known as a conservative figure, and went on to read one of his books, written before getting the big job. I don't remember the exact quote, but he said in some place that the modern liberal assault on Christianity will continue, and the Church will continue losing numbers. But a small core of believers will remain, and after liberalism collapses, he foresees that small core of hardcore Christians to rise again and rebuild the world.

Of course he doesn't say that now that he is pope. But I thought his thinking interesting. If you think about it carefully, it's not only Church attendance what has decline in the last century. Public morals have collapsed, and taste in art has also declined precipitously. Does the Church really want to be relevant in a world in which people don't have manners and artists build ugly stuff?

Few churches have been built in the last century, but see the few that have been done.

Basilica of our lady of Guadalupe, Mexico.

 

Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool

...Continue Reading →

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

Profiteering done right

Posted on by Spandrell

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.

Payots for sale! Nice and cheap!! Made only with hair from chinese girls!

The I saw the punchline:

Continue Reading →

The fragility of logic

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

Jihadis are amateurs; or ethnocentrism done right

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

Dicks versus leftism

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

Tribes and Cults

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

Stuff White People do

Posted on by Spandrell

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...

Continue Reading →

He just can't get enough

Posted on by Spandrell

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.

Continue Reading →

Diversity > Religion

Posted on by Spandrell

Mormon Mom Arrested For Allegedly Smuggling Drugs During Trip To Mexico

Average Mormon Mom circa 2050

Jewish soul

Posted on by Spandrell

I have my reserves towards the, let's call it Moldbug theory of Jewish leftism, which argues that Jews aren't a causative agent of leftism, but that during Emancipation the Jews contracted the virus of Progressivism, and being highly talented, they caused the virus to mutate and grow further into the catastrophic malady that it became.

I really have my reserves. In the end it's all about assigning blame, and when you think about it carefully, the whole idea is quite misguided. Assigning blame for particular memes is hard enough when talking about individuals; when talking about groups, the very concept of agency becomes quite fuzzy. So trying to come up with a comprehensive theory on blame or the origins of anything is quite probably the wrong way of looking at it.

Nonetheless it is always interesting to look at particular examples, particular people and particular ideas. Notwithstanding my reserves towards clearing the Jews of all blame about leftism, I have found a quite persuasive data point towards them being victims of infection by the progressive virus.

This is from a recent BBC documentary series on the Jews, led by Simon Schama. Simon Schama himself is quite a good example of Jews being victims of English ideology, but just watch the video.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x17a5tm

Lol. The shtetto and the ghetto. That's just humiliating. If you let that happen at your place of worship, you're not dominating the world. Just saying.

<...
Continue Reading →

Rationality

Posted on by Spandrell

Claim: "Every Cause wants to become a Cult." (Eliezer Yudkowksy)

Truth: "Upper class cults are but a cover for a swingers club" (Spandrell)

Proof:

DSC_5109-1934681119-O

Claim: The rationalist community is about Overcoming Bias.

Truth: "Everyone I know fears the truth in their private lives. We all want to live delusion that we are something more/better/greater/more powerful than we actually are and most people become extreamlly hostile when you’re blunt and honest with them" (Red)

Proof:

“Haha, how about those girls who say they prefer to be ‘one of the guys’ or that most of their friends are male, huh? Isn’t that always a huge warning sign?”

I see this so often, most recently on Reddit. “Never trust a girl who doesn’t have female friends” or “They don’t get along with other girls because they themselves are usually bitches”, just to choose two comments from the thread on this pressing issue.

Well, I’m the male version...

Continue Reading →

Black herrings

Posted on by Spandrell

There are many theories of what drives elite madness. Peter Turchin thinks it's about elite overproduction, we have too many educated people with ambitions of high status, so they fight each other to see who's holier-than-thou and gain status for themselves. Moldbug thinks it's Puritanism evolved, getting ever more virulent. There also other theories: bureaucratic religion, mass-media induced cognitive failure. Choose your favorite one.

Whatever the cause, the disease is increasing and getting worse. It seems to be getting close to the terminal phase, when it goes berserk and kills the patient. See the Ebola crisis. A quite easily controlled tropical virus is growing out there because people would rather use it to compete for holiness rather than try to stop people from dying.

Spain has the only Ebola crisis in Europe, because a Catholic priest was in West Africa and got the virus. The 75 year old fucker, instead of dying among his flock of meek Africans who will inherit the earth, he moved all his contacts to get the Spanish government to send an airplane to take him to Spain for treatment. The 75 year old fucker obviously died. Then it became apparent that the medical team he was assigned was quite half-assed, so one of his nurses got the virus herself.

The very stupid nurse apparently has no children, but she has a dog. Some brighter minds in the government thought that the dog must be immediately be put to death. But the proud Span...

Continue Reading →

Shinto

Posted on by Spandrell

I was typing this as an answer to Jim's comment, but I might as well make it a post and be done with it. I don't really have much time to spend hours reading on religion in ancient Japan, interesting as it is. So I'll just start typing and see what comes out of it.

The gist of the issue is that Shinto was usual local animism, and the introduction of Buddhism with their holy ascetic monks and sutras and shit basically killed Shinto and replaced it for all purposes. Shinto animism was just your typical local spirit worship, and some clan god worship. Everybody had their dear gods/spirits who they prayed to or appeased, and that was it. The priests or wizards usually came from the same family of retainers of the local lord.

Then in the 6th century the imperial family's relatives in the Korean peninsula bring Buddhism, saying it's The Truth, and it's awesome. The Yamato court agrees, and Buddhism starts to spread like wildfire, together with their huge fancy temples, weird sutras in classical chinese, and ascetic monks.

Apparently the court start building temples next to any Shinto shrine of significance. I imagine it was a power coup to make the local clans understand who was boss now. Sure, you can pray to your clan god; but see this amazing temple just next to it! So much bigger and colorful. Eventually people got the message.

Continue Reading →

Tradition

Posted on by Spandrell

So the slowest year on record for this blog is over. If you think this is just the beginning of the decline, you might be right. I'm not blogging as frequently as I used to, and there are good reasons for that. One being my recently started family. Another being that my comment threads aren't as rewarding as they used to. Another that I'm going through a reverse Dunning-Kruger effect: the more I know the less I think I know. It's starting to get harder to write a post that I can be proud of, and I just don't have the time or energy to do the necessary research to write really good posts.

This may just be me being too hard to myself; substandard content doesn't seem to bother a lot of bloggers out there, even fairly famous ones with academic careers. I should probably just loosen up and just go on writing, maybe on a fixed schedule. Thing is I'm very bad at fixed schedules; my brain just doesn't do self-discipline. My ego always pairs up with my id. Or I'm just very bad at fooling myself, which might not be a bad thing.

I can do monthly though, if only to avoid gaps in the archive list in the right sidebar. So here goes a light post for December 2014.

A lot gets written around about religion, the importance of tradition, rituals, all that. There's the old debate on whether religion is either something you believe in, or something you do. These are likely to be different things. Religion is often treated as a gestalt, but that is fallacious. Religion is ...

Continue Reading →

Religion is absurd. But we need it anyway.

Posted on by Spandrell

Watch this.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x2j2jud_atran2

This comes from this video, but I took the time to edit out all other speakers; it really boggles the mind why Atran even agreed to share the panel with that borderline retarded drivel. But I must also thank that he had the patience to listen to that drivel so that we can listen to his superior insight.

I'll transcribe most of it here for those who can't watch the video; but do watch it when you can.

 

I think truth and reason have always been slaves to the passions (…) truth is not very much a part of how humans deal with things except at a very mundane level; we have to know what’s true when we cross the street; but the quest for truth is subject to persuasion and victory in argument. And I think what’s really has motivated human beings out of the caves, what’s driven their civilization forward, what drives political movements,  as well as religions, are transcendental beliefs, that go beyond material self-interests of people or even evolutionary concerns like fitness.

Humans had had our present bodies for 200,000 years, but were still stuck in Africa; while our more primitive cousins such as homo herectus or Neanderthals are roaming around the planet, homo sapiens are down to 2,000...

Continue Reading →

The Easy Way Out

Posted on by Spandrell

A modest proposal. Don't take it too seriously.

Western elites are hell-bent in allowing unrestricted immigration into Europe and America. Even if they're all ISIS operatives. Muslims are not deemed to be a threat to the progressive establishment the same way that white-nationalism is, and they're mostly right about that.

Given present demographic trends, at this rate large swathes of the West will be Muslim in 20 years time; and again the progressive establishment will do nothing about that; because doing something about that would strengthen the hand of white-nationalists, and that directly threatens the power of the progressive establishment. So odds are for a Brazil - Mexico style situation, where a white-ish progressive elite rules over a mixed demographic of various shades of brown. Living standards plummet on average, but the elites still do great, and a white middle class which keeps the lights on still manages to make a tolerable living. But note that progressivism is still the state religion, and that means a large proportion of white people will still buy the whole package, i.e. hedonism, low fertility, feminism, the whole thing. That means dysgenic fertility goes on forever; the end of that road is South Africa.

The only way out is for whites to stop being progressive. And that means whites to stop being white. This means whites must stop being distinctly white, i.e. they must join non-whites at something so that the state can't just point ...

Continue Reading →

PEGIDA

Posted on by Spandrell

I wonder what Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) are going to say when 100 million Christian Nigerians come to Europe saying that they need refuge from the evil Boko Haram Muslims from the North.

The Nigerians probably go to Church more than we do.

 

churcges

Muh Faith, 2

Posted on by Spandrell

Let me first say that my previous post wasn't about shitting on Mormonism or on Mormons as a whole. I have many Mormon readers, and they have been kind to me. I'm a great fan of Mormons and I wish more people were like them.

That said, I think Mitt Romney is an evil profiteer and a dishonest hack, "weeping" when his church finally kneeled to Leftist pressure and accepted blacks in their church. Aren't you supposed to follow your church leadership, whatever they say? Why do you weep when they say something which just happens to be good for you? You'll note that Mitt Romney's father was the man who presided over the Detroit riots, and made a career of his "moderate" conservatism, i.e. swimming left and dragging his church with him.

Rumor has it the GOP establishment wants to nominate Romney again. Which again shows they don't really want to win. If all they want is to lose, they could nominate Cruz and lose even worse. But what they want is to send a message about what is tolerated. People like Trump will be crushed; people like Cruz aren't tolerated either. People who weep when freedom of association is abolished in favor of blacks are to be favored and lionized.

A common theme of this blog is that people using religion for their personal benefit is not only possible; it's to be expected. People ten...

Continue Reading →

The Informed Position on Tibet

Posted on by Spandrell

Years ago I used to read a lot View from the Right, the blog of Lawrence Auster. Auster was a very peculiar guy. A Jew convert to Christianity, chanting the joys of social conservatism when being single (and most likely gay), he spent half his time criticizing progressive ideology, and half his time criticizing fellow critics of progressive ideology. His criticism was vivid, sharp and often accurate. Some of his criticism of rightist pundits was very good (Auster's law of race relations is brilliant and more relevant than ever), in many ways anticipating what today is called cuckservatism. Much of his material wasn't that good though, especially his awkward attacks of Steve Sailer for not defending Israel. The best part of his blog was how often he updated it (I was bored at college and appreciated the entertainment), and the comments by Jim Kalb. I wonder what Auster would've thought of Trump.

Auster was also quite obviously a man of the right, but he wasn't part of anything. He wasn't a paleocon, he wasn't a white nationalist. He was his own man. Being your own man is underappreciated. See this blog. It started as a neoreaction blog. At times I wrote quite actively about the "movement". Then the Eternal September happened and hordes of retards fell into neoreaction, driving the level of discussion down to the left half of the bell curve. Is this still a neoreaction blog?

See, I studied linguistics, and this sort of questions always interested me t...

Continue Reading →

Tibet and Tradition

Posted on by Spandrell

Speaking of Tibet, the Dalai Lama just gave a long interview to the BBC. He went out of his way to make it easy for reactionaries to have an opinion on his country.

For some reason, the interview isn't published in the English website, which shows only a small lame news article.

The BBC Chinese version though has a long and juicy account. Dalailama.com also has a longer account.

What did the Dalai Lama say? He said he is in favor of abolishing all traditional Tibetan culture and formally become yet another NGO in the payroll of the US State Department.

As the Chinese headline says: "Dalai Lama claims reincarnation system is obsolete, must to adapt to Democracy.

The way the Dalai Lama institution works is that Buddhism, as most Indian religions, claims that souls are reincarnated after death, so after someone dies, it's soul goes into some baby. That needn't mean anything in particular; but of course Great Men are Great Men, so when a Great Men dies, his soul goes to some baby, then that baby by definition becomes a Great Men.

Tibetan monk leaders thus are not chosen amongst the monastery; instead some baby is brought up from the middle of nowhere, claimed to be...

Continue Reading →

Signaling spirals

Posted on by Spandrell

1800: Oh, you still have slaves? I freed all of mine.

1860: Did you know they still have slaves in the South? My sons have enlisted to kill those evil slavers.

1920: You listen to classical music? I go to a Jazz Club, there's a black musician who is so awesome.

1950: I have a black secretary.

1970: I have a black friend.

1980: I have many black friends. I even slept with one.

1990: I have a black child. Well, half black.

2000: I adopted a fully black child. Straight from Africa. Zero white admixture.

2010: I adopted two black children. One from West Africa and one from East Africa.

2016:

This past Sunday, my gorgeous wife – a white evangelical, like me — gave birth to our beautiful African-American triplet daughters whom we adopted as embryos. These sweet girls will hopefully soon be coming home to meet their 3-year-old African-American brother and 2-year-old biracial sister, both of whom we adopted as infants.

People forget that Christians invented holiness signaling.

As a friend said, hopefully liberals will see that they can't compete with evangelicals and will move to the other side. If that happens I'll salute Mr. and Mrs. Halbert for saving civilization.

We need a new religion, 4

Posted on by Spandrell

We need a new religion. We sorely need one. And we will likely get one. But we might not like how it turns out.

In 200 AD, the Roman Empire was the largest, richest and most powerful empire on Earth. Roman civilization extended from Britain to Mesopotamia. Vast trade networks allowed for large and advanced industries that provided a very high standard of living, far above anything in the past. Rome was so great it seemed it would last forever.

Then a couple of substandard emperors, a military setback and a mutiny suddenly saw the Empire fracture into 3 parts, hundreds of thousands of barbarians entering the borders, plundering and murdering as they pleased. It took 50 whole years until Aurelian rebuilt the army, expelled the barbarians, and reunified the realm. But it was never the same. Too many people had died. Cities now had to build high walls to defend themselves, trade routes had been destroyed, the whole administrative apparatus had to be rebuilt from scratch.

All that was taken care of, especially by Docletian, who was very much interested in how to run a government. But still, as much as Roman emperors reformed the army and the administration, the virtue of the empire, the real power of Rome, the roman people, that was over. Any Roman of learning knew that. And they all wanted to do something to get it back. To fix Rome, to bring it back to its golden era. Romans used to be virtuous, strong, hard-working, just men. Not anymore. The Romans of t...

Continue Reading →

Holiness Escalation

Posted on by Spandrell

Remember this? The lily-white couple who implanted 100% black embryo and gave birth to black triplets? They were so happy of themselves. So proud of it. The holiest people on earth. Surely nobody could be holier than us!

babies

Oh boy. There's a Japanese saying, 上には上がある (ue ni wa ue ga aru). It means that as high as you get, there's always somewhere higher. As good as you think you are, there's always someone better. The world's a big place. And humans can be so annoying.

Another white  American Evangelical couple are on the news. They have a black adopted child, but that's obviously old fashion, don't get points for that. So they had to do something. Now they have adopted a baby with no brain. That's right. No brain. And they made a video about it! Take that. The black embryo-couple only had some boring picture of themselves holding three babies. But we have a video. On Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN-1O_nVZzY

 

Besides, the black implanted babies have brains. How 2015 is that? You don't go to heaven by adopting babies with brains. That's just like, racist. Are you IQ-worshippers or something? Why do you need a br...

Continue Reading →

The Loudspeaker

Posted on by Spandrell

Well it's been a while since I wrote a post. I apologize, but I have been busy, and everybody's attention is on the American election, Trump or not Trump. That is the question. Quite predictably the Cathedral has focused all its resources in fighting Trump with every tactic on the books, and then some. Twitter is banning thousands of people, every single newspaper in the US has openly abandoned any pretence of unbiased reporting. Some people on the left have hinted that democracy may not be such a good idea, given that someone like Trump could possibly win.

I like the train of thought; but they've managed to probably knock Trump out of the race. How? With a tape where he spoke like 80% of men do in a normal country. Where he talked about pussy and how much he likes it. That is the true fault line of Western politics. Feminism is the strongest Schelling Point of the progressive system, the indestructible idea that will bury us all. Again Houellebecq is provided right all along.

Anyway, let me do what I do best and introduce a funny story I saw in a Chinese website. It's unrelated only if you want it to.

I was born and raised in a small village in Henan, in central China. In some of the neighboring villages there are some Muslims (the Hui people, Chinese-speaking Muslims), and since I was a kid the adults in the village always told us kids the we should never go to Muslim villages, as the Muslims liked to beat up Han-Chinese kids. I was a sma...
Continue Reading →

The balance of the natural and social world

Posted on by Spandrell

Apparently I missed this kind post by Jim where he calls me clever but pessimistic. Guilty as charged. I agree with his point though. Irrational optimism works. I'm just not very good at it. Which is why I've been reading and writing on how to generate it exogenously, i.e. for people like me.

The discussion there at Jim is uncharacteristically good. The main issue people ask is that you can't just make up a new religion. That's a good point. It's also a bummer, given that my shtick for 5 years has been that We Need a New Religion (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). But once you understand what religion is about, what it is for, it's obvious that you can't just make one up from thin air. Any coordination mechanism for groups, any set of ideas to generate loyalty is more likely to work if it feeds upon previous ideas which are out there, preferably for a long time. If only to make people not feel inadequate about their past ideological stances. If you want Christians to join your group you should make them feel good about having been a Christian; at least parts of it. Ever read the Quran? The writer was very, very familiar with Christianity and Judaism. Christianity was of course also based on Judais...

Continue Reading →

Faith

Posted on by Spandrell

Every time I get more Twitter hits than usual I run a Twitter search to see what are people blabbering about me. It's usually quite interesting. See here:

https://twitter.com/28ShermanSOBL1/status/795426241641934849

Heh. See also Alfa NL, who perhaps should call himself Maurice of Orange-Nassau or any cool soldier from Dutch history, wrote a post where he very kindly called me his Final Boss. I kinda like the attention. He writes how I'm a very compelling advocate of atheism. But he believes in God, and he wants to make God's will a part of my theories.

He is misunderstanding me, as many do. I actually get quite a lot of correspondence by sympathetic Christians telling me that I could accommodate Christianity in this or that way. The very fact that I get sympathetic Christians reading my blog should tell you that I'm no atheist. I've explicitly said so myself long ago. And I've said so with the very same argument that Alfa NL makes in his post. There's no point to atheism. It's completely self-defeating. I totally get that. I've always got that, and over the years I've learned what I think is the exact mechanism that makes atheism useless and religion useful.

So why be an atheist? I'm certainly not. But as a writer I can't be a theist. Thomas Huxley was in the same conundrum when he coined the word "agnostic", which I think is a brilliant way to ...

Continue Reading →

Trump needs Friends

Posted on by Spandrell

Say Trump wins. Trump may very well end up winning next week.

So say he wins. He'll then be at the top of the Federal Government. A lair of snakes if there ever was one. Every single agency of government, and every single unofficial agency of government (Academia, the Press, all those QUANGOs, basically every organization which belongs to the Cathedral but is not technically part of USG) is against him; against him to the point of willing his assassination.

This is going to be tough. Trump needs friends. Lots of friends. He needs to purge the whole establishment and put people he can trust on their place.

But who can he trust? Who are his friends? It's not that he has no friends. He has plenty of supporters and sympathizers. Even inside USG. But how can he find them? Of course he could ask them to stand up; but plenty of evil entryists would stand up too and try to destroy his projects from within.

So Trump has a big problem here. He needs to find loyal people and he needs a good way to identify them. How can he do that?

If you've been reading this blog for some time, you may have some hint at the answer. But let me do some historical analogy. Of China, of course. It's not a very good one; but it's what I'm reading right now so I might as well write about it anyway.

The Mongols conquered China in two stages; In 1234 they destroyed the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty, which controlled North China, and in 1279 they conquered the Southern Song...

Continue Reading →

Gnon Theology

Posted on by Spandrell

I propose a short ritual for when reactionaries meet each other. You go to a church, or some nice old building. Emphasis on old, more than nice. You get there, and the master says the following string, which the apprentice is to repeat.

There is no God but Gnon. Kek is his avatar. And Jordan Peterson is a pretty good prophet.

Once that is done, the master shows a red pill to the apprentice, hands it to him. And the apprentice swallows it. No. He bites it. Munchs it. He chews it. It's hard. It's bitter. It's really hard to chew really. But at the very end it leaves an awesome aftertaste. Then Dark Enlightenment occurs.

Listen to this short clip (starts at 1:04:50), up to the end.

https://youtu.be/RcmWssTLFv0?t=1h4m57s

 

The Dark Enlightenment is based in evolution. This admits no discussion. Criticism of modernity on non-evolutionary grounds is just plain old reaction. Religious traditionalism. That's a thing. It's not my thing, but it's out there, even here on my comments, most often by a kinda annoying Jew. All in all it's a good thing that it's out there, annoying as it is. But there's a reason why reaction is a thing and neoreaction is another thing. Arnold Kling called Moldbug "neoreactionary" because he saw he wasn't just some plain old Crown Church and Country guy. Moldbug mentioned (not very heavily) HBD and that's about evolution. But there's more about evolutionary critiques of modernity than mentioning the biol...

Continue Reading →

Power

Posted on by Spandrell

There's this stereotype that says that people who apply to join the police force are the kind of people that enjoys having power and using it over others. Power is nice but not everybody is equally driven to it. But some people just love the stuff. To lord over others. Give orders. The right to be nasty. Innate bullies, so to speak. I don't know how accurate that is, but there must be something to it.

Well, take a look at this, hat tip to Handle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clNDUoxzSIc&feature=youtu.be

Before somebody on frog twitter publishes a copy of this video with a rhythmic BGM signing "cuck" all the time (please do it). Take a serious look at that policeman. Look at those closeup shoots. Now that physiognomic analysis is kosher again thanks to AI, take a good look at that guy. That's the face of a man who 200 years ago would have been a priest, a clergyman. A man who gives sermons for a living. Which is a very similar job to a policeman, really. The job comes with legal privileges. It's kinda high status, at least inside a small milieu.

I guess in order to get promoted inside a modern police force you gotta be both. You gotta enjoy bullying people with force, *and* with insufferable sermons. Stronger than you *and*  holier than you. Take that. That's like the ultimate powerlust. The prerequisite for real power in the modern bureaucracy.

Anyway, I hope this guy is enjoying is Policepriest job in Vancouver. For when Chinese imm...

Continue Reading →

The Money is in Religion

Posted on by Spandrell

Haven't posted in a while, but everything's ok. Just been busy. Worry not, my dear readers, this blog isn't going anywhere. I might be lazy but I'm quite resilient. And I like my blog very much, so you can expect this blog to last for as long as I have fingers to type. If I go offline I'm either dead or in some hidden CIA prison for thought criminals. I expect to have good company if either of that happens.

Speaking of crimethinkers, Anatoly Karlin had a good review of the alt-internet at his blog. The conclusion is quite clear: the old far-right is quite healthy. The alt-right, defined as Kek-worship and assorted Spencerites is very small. And NrX* is just tiny. Like really tiny.

*I'll just stop fighting the, in my opinion, lame branding and just surrender to the fact that everybody categorizes me as NrX so I might as well own it.

I've said it before, and others have said it before and better than I have. But that's how it is: there is no great media revolution. Most people still get their news from TV. To the extent people get their news from the Internet, they like their mainstream stuff first, and to the extent they like edgy stuff, they like the edgy stuff that has always been around. Stormfront is still big, fellas. Or it was until a few months ago. Think about that.

This shouldn't be something to worry about, and it should surprise anyone. For one thing, the popu...

Continue Reading →

The Jordan Peterson movement

Posted on by Spandrell

Jordan Peterson is an old friend of this blog, which I'm sure he reads, even though for obvious PR reasons he can't quite admit to the fact. Mr. Peterson is getting increasing amounts of mainstream attention after he utterly and completely destroyed some dumb journo British woman a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54

 

I won't pull the hipster move of saying I was into Peterson before he was cool. But I have written quite a lot about the man, his ideas, and why he's so popular. Do check it out.

In short, the reason why Peterson is so successful is that he's selling a single proposition. It's OK to be Christian. More precisely, he's selling It's OK to be a White, Christian Man. That is of course a revolutionary slogan, as White Christian men are the officially most low-status people in the West. They're not even just deprivated, they're the enemy of the state. Not just low, positively evil. Well,  we know that selling hope and validation to low-status people is very good business. And as it happens, the low status of White Christian Men is not the result of any natural law, but the highly unnatural result of a centuries old political endeavor. Peterson slightly hints at that. Just pull yourselves together, White Christian Men, and you'll be the ruling class again. Nature Says So.

Anyway, the mainstream m...

Continue Reading →

The State Religion

Posted on by Spandrell

https://youtu.be/JF4GFGMNm3g?t=16m3s

This is David Irving. A man famous for writing a hagiography of Adolf Hitler. And by heaping untold amounts of scorn to Winston Churchill. A man with all the balls in the world, the probably most prominent denier of the narrative that underpins the international power structure, the world order of our day.

A man who has suffered dearly for his ideas, a man who was thrown in jail for being too jealous in his labor as a historian.

That man, the man who was thrown in jail and lost much of his fortune because he denied the Holocaust. That man asked God for forgiveness because he said a mean word to a feral black in Florida.