Donnadogsoth

Now, according to the feminist cultural terrorists, even noticing a woman's physical form is forbidden. That innocent and beautiful part of human experience is now verboten. Too bad a popular Hollywood celebrity is helping normalise this abnormality by caving in to his critics.

What do you suppose the ingredient is that tips a person with a bad upbringing towards afertility? Intelligence, perhaps?

Interesting. Could one of the base human drives be pride? A man, even an absent father with twenty children by twenty different women, might still feel pride at his "accomplishments".

Anyone?

Nihilism

The ancap project seems to have two simultaneous justifications. 1, it's good for the individual not to have to pay to support a bureaucracy, and 2, it provides for the general welfare even better than the State can. This seems like serving two masters, hence we can imagine two types of ancapists, the former who just want to stop paying taxes and being drafted, the rugged individualist, and the latter, the collectivist who sees ancap as the better way to achieve collectivist goals.

Another point: What makes AI research special, in that it will be easier to make an inorganic thinking machine equivalent or superior to a human brain, than it would be to cybernetically or biologically enhance already existing brains?

2.A computer is going to be able to crunch logic at infinite speed, and that's good at parties, but this will only enhance the operations of its operator, it won't replace it. GIGO. If the operator is immoral, he is going to use the machine to rig the results. If the operator is incompetent, the machine isn't going to make him competent. Imagine a knife: its understanding of its own sharpness doesn't help it cut anything, if a well-guided hand isn't there to wield it, and no degree of sharpness will matter, and may even prove dangerous, if the hand has a palsy.

1.See 2, below. 2.Then it wouldn't be what it will be heralded as, a kind of person, a super-duper person. It would be just an advanced toaster, a giant Plinko game working itself out according to electronic laws, utterly unable to grasp the moral problems of man. It would, at best, be Scientological technology that lets humans read the minds of other humans. Sound like a good idea? To put toasters in charge? 3.Yes. 4.TV is a PSYOPS I try to avoid.

1.You're presuming governments wouldn't co-opt "general AI" as soon as it is manufactured. 2.You're presuming the AI wouldn't have emotions, which is absurd, since all conscious thought is powered by emotions. 3.You're presuming that brain-prostheses will not lead to widespread brain-atrophy, just as widespread sedentary lifestyles have lead to body-atrophy. 4.You're presuming technological solutions to moral problems.

There is a type, the fundamentalist materialist, who would deny any merely empirical-miraculous proof, such as burning Hebrew letters 30° in the nighttime sky, reading "I AM GOD WHO EXISTS". It would be rationalised away by them, as a bit of underdone potato or what have you. They are operating on a rational-logical level but not an intellectual level (Cusa). Go through what I have written again and consider that you may be missing the point because of your idol-worship.

The word "growing" in my post referred to agriculture. Gatherer economists are not "growing" anything, they're just gathering whatever they find.

Think in terms of potential population density. A gatherer economy will support orders of magnitude fewer souls than an agricultural one.

A little in advance, here's wishing all of you a very merry Christmas and profitable New Year. Courtesy rense.com Christmas is the time of year symbolising the beast in us dying, frozen in awe like a gentle cow before the small, helpless, yet universally powerful human mind being born. We of good will are all born on Christmas, born into humanity, given a fresh chance at engaging the great project of our souls, both within (self-improvement) and without (improvement of society). Here's to all the good things that have happened that have increased the chances the human mind has to develop itself and further the interests of mankind. Here's to all the good people here who see that better is possible, that the beast will not rule the future as it has ruled the past. Here's to all the good families and friends, sources of warmth and sanity in this most European of holidays, the yuletide of the frozen North. Merry Christmas, Donnadogsoth

Ideas are the source of power. Land is useless for growing food until the principle of the seed meets the principle of the plough and the principle of patience. Gold is worthless until one discovers principles of minecraft and metallurgy. Luna is forever beyond our reach until we discover the principle of universal gravitation, and so on. And classical art serves the same function except in terms of educating the emotions to make us more civilised. Without these ideas Western Civ falls to pieces, no matter how rich it may be materially, no matter how good the ignorant intentions of its leaders are. And of course there are always new principles to discover, giving our Civ no natural end-point, but rather that we are forever striving, living to discover and discovering to live.

Don't know why you got negged, you made a good point. The Civ is the product of the Ideas. It's like in Superman where Kent throws the magic crystal into the Arctic ocean and this fortress emerges. The keystone is that crystal. Our civ is created out of crystals, and those crystals are the principles or ideas, including principles of science and, equally importantly, art. Through them we reorder the physical and, more importantly, the moral spheres. So, if we want to save the West we have to round up those principles and re-seed them--and hopefully find new ones to seed.

Fascinating stuff, Dylan. It serves as a riposte to the fatalism of Spengler The Decline of the West, which you might care to compare to Quigley. It's available from the Internet Archive here. The Western difference is that it is founded on the principle of man being made in the image of God, combined with the Greek intellectual heritage to produce classical science and art which produce principles whereby society can be re-ordered to increase its power over nature. Achieving a Fifth Age of Expansion depends on whether we return to this heritage or not. If not, our economy will continue to spiral out of control as our populace operates mentally in terms of clinical insanity, not in terms of how nature actually works. I would add to Quigley's list 3d. Fourth Expansion, 1944-1973 (destruction of gold standard) 4d. Fourth Conflict, 1974- (globalisation, clash of civilisations) Core Empire: 2016 (Trump)

NOTE: I put this in General Messages because it relates to the political project, not merely to personal faith. Christianity is necessary to the success of the modern project of breaking the grip of the anti-Western globalist oligarchy, and here's why. Stop for a moment and consider sustaining a broken bone. Not a pleasant thought, but that's part of the point of the thought exercise: broken bones get your attention in an unfortunate way. Now, imagine through an act of will “rising above” the level of the pain and shock of the injury, to reach a “higher consciousness” that allows you to accept what has happened and work around it--instead of pretending it didn't happen and resenting it and panicking—and, so, act in some way so as to reach medical help. The same goes for your life in general. There will be highs, and lows, but over a long enough time anyone with sufficient learning ability will achieve a bit of wisdom that lets them look down on the wave pattern of ups and downs and so come to exist in a kind of low-key sagely bliss to one degree of durability or another. Of course this applies to politics, too, where the enlightened leaders will exchange rage for laughter. So, where does Christianity fit it? The characteristic Christian act: forgiveness, is the most pressing demand in all of human history to see things from a different and higher perspective. It demands we realise that all men are depraved, all men are wicked at the cores of their brains and will do all evil if the chains of God's grace were removed. Realise this and you realise you cannot any longer hate your enemies as if they were a different and inferior species from yourself. If you don't wish to be a hypocrite, you must extend forgiveness to your enemies. You must view the matter from a higher consciousness, the notion that all men, no matter how strange, are brothers and worthy of love. That this commandment, to love one's neighbour, and its corollaries, needs intellectual working out in order to apply is not in question. Christianity does not absolve its adherents of the obligation to think. Indeed, the Christian-influenced West is the most thoughtful civilisation in history. So, we realise there are bad actors in the world that innocent people need protection from. Wars are sometimes necessary. Walls are sometimes necessary. But overall we should be viewing these situations with the agape or divine love or higher wisdom, so that as it unfolds the world order inclines towards justice and mercy. The West cannot withstand the removal of this wisdom, underlying this commandment to forgive. It would gut-shoot us. Lacking the understanding of the sinfulness of man, the so-called golden rule of “give as one would get,” has transmogrified into the horrifying, Soviet-themed multicultural egalitarianism that is, uniquely, dissolving our borders, our culture, and our race. With the understanding that man is wicked, but with a divine spark that makes his salvation worthwhile, we have the cynicism needed to protect ourselves and the idealism needed to keep our eyes on the road of principle towards a just and merciful society. Without it, we are stuck in a brain-state where we are controlled by our lower thoughts. Without Christianity we focus futilely on the broken bone—the vagaries of politics--the fruits of diversity—the uncultured impulse--and miss the higher consciousness of the educated emotions. The Christian is the natural defender of the West, in the specific sense that Christianity is built into the structure of what we are trying to defend. Trying to establish a secular purity is like tearing out the electronic wires of your car. The question arises, “Should I be a Christian?” And the answer is, when one approaches Christianity one should eschew the warring factions as such. One can play an Atheist game, a shell game really, of pointing out the thousands of sects of Christianity and throw one's mental hands up in an air of futility. But that's not what we have to look at. What's important is that there is a general understanding of what the religion is about, as an apostolic succession and priesthood reaching back to St. Peter, and as a kind of initiation into a higher life. So, imagine a baptism in a house in Syria in 200 AD. There is an arch above the baptismal pool decorated with simple designs of grapes and wheat. There are no crucifixes or crosses, just some brethren holding candles and anointing oil, and an initiate and a priest in the pool. Imagine what this means: the person is being brought onto a plane of love of Creator, and love of Man. A very quiet thing, not dramatic, he is just being lifted up an inch or two, so he can see further. The initiate isn't a flake, or a fool, or retarded for standing in this little marble pool with a priest's hand on his head, he is seeking to be human, and has had the luck of finding the religion that best accords with humanity. The essence of Christianity is in the mystery of the Crucifixion, the ultimate symbol of the love of the Creator for His Creation. Deepen it through the commandment to love one's neighbour: who is one's neighbour? If one could, should not one seek to help all mankind, for all men—even those dead and those yet to be born—are one's neighbours. One should get and grapple with a sense of the sweep of human history, both tragic and joyful, as part of the evolutionary process of lifting humanity higher towards a more orderly existence--one that through participating in we are helping all of humanity, past, present, and future, by helping build what would fulfill the hope they held in their hearts. The divine spark—being made in the image of the Creator—is the basis for our hope, and our understanding of the historical need for Christ. Forgiveness, love of man, higher-order thinking in terms of what we need to survive as a Civilisation, all flow from our understanding of the value of man juxtaposed with his wickedness, and all concentrate on the Cross.

A good case can be made that power is masculine in nature. The male mind, the male body as a symbolic echo of that mind, the male gang as an expression of the possibilities of mind and body, comprise the locus of power throughout all of known historical time and space. This power is not unified. Men can fight other men. But the best way to fight a man is to get him to fight himself, through the application of the spellcraft known as words. Control what a man believes, and you control how he behaves. Historically this power of spellcraft is found in three sources: religion, state, and women. Religion and state usually go together, as seen in ancient priest-ridden Ægypt, caste-bound India, witchdoctored Africa, imperial and later communist China, and communist Russia. Compared to these societies the religion-states of the West, even Mediæval Europe at its height, are shamefully un-totalitarian. The closest things Europe has historically to that impulse are imperial Rome and its imitators such as Napoleonic France and Hitlerian Germany—though now it is moving increasingly towards totalitarianism of a deeply insalubrious nature. Women are a prize to normal, healthy men. The female face is the most meaningful thing in the world to such a man—what it betokens by way of romantic emotions, of sex, of childbearing, of honour and dignity and decency and purpose—everything worth fighting for is in that face. It is a visual word. It is magic. And the guileful woman can get her man to work, to fight, to be killed using that “word”. It makes sense, then, that the religion-state would use women to control men. It does this by exploiting women as the natural hard-core of religionists who exert magical influence over their homes, to the point where men become infected by this religiosity both by their mothers and wives and by the (always mostly or wholly male) clergy. Men find their place in the world reinforced by the religion of their women, even if that religion makes those men the masters of those women, even vicious and mean masters. “Happy wife, happy life” is a popular credo in the West for a reason, and betrays the truth of feminine influence. Unhappy women can make life miserable for men and therefore get their way. So the power of powerful men, through religion-state-women, deploys spellcraft against the ordinary man. Relevantly to today, we see the administration of a potion of universal solvent, called the Alcahest, to men. This potion is made very sweet to taste by the modern consumer economy and the sexual revolution, but within it is a brew of identity politics guilt, anti-principles thought-scrambling, and social, economic, and political shocks. It is refined and distributed by our mass media and our schools, which are basically covens at this point. Concocted and poured, this alchahest controls the minds of its partakers, bewitching them into voting for politicians who work to dissolve borders to capital and people, thereby dissolving the white race, the Western languages, Western culture high and low, and, in true baby-with-the-bathwater style, the hated Christianity itself. Thus power is transferred from ordinary men to the age-old, parasitic oligarchy that is benefitting and generally overseeing the dastardly operation. The traitors and usurpers have concentrated all their magical firepower against ordinary men in order to entrap them in a spiritual Alcatraz and so prevent them from acting to save their race, language, culture, religion, and territorial integrity. If that happens, we face a technocratic New Dark Age of which the present premonitions will seem gaily benign.

Interesting, Will, because I agree with you in terms of the human justice system. Its concern should be neutralisation, not retribution.

“[Justice] denotes a sustained or constant willingness to extend to each person what he or she deserves.”--IEP Thomas Aquinas: Moral Philosophy What a man ultimately deserves depends on his attitude towards beatitude. If he aligns himself with God as his highest happiness, then justice is to give him that. If man rejects this beatitude, then justice is to withhold that. No justice would mean Good never ultimately vanquishes Evil, and never in such a way as to right all the wrongs of history and to profit from the exercise. Atheism doesn't allow for this. Pantheism allows Good no ability to profit and thus Good is cancelled out by Evil, nor is the wheel of karma ever stopped, only reset. Only Christianity allows for Good to profit in its triumphant conflict with Evil whilst righting all wrongs. (Note that Christians are called to refrain from “judging” in the sense that we should not say what each person deserves in an æternal sense. We are not the judge of souls. But, that does not mean Christians should not make judgements on other matters, such as whether or not to cast pearls to swine, or whether one should give all of one's money to the first beggar who asks for it.)

Christianity cuts to the eschatological quick. Primarily speaking, it does not measure deeds or even virtue, but belief. Strange, that, eh? I think so, too. But, let's think about it. Beliefs rule a man's life. His virtues will come as a result of what he believes. And his deeds will flow from his virtues or his lack thereof. This is all in accord with what Stefan teaches. So belief is the primary thing, in terms of judging a man's worth, even his æternal worth. Why just one life to determine said worth? you may ask. Why not one life? If man has free will, and if God is just, then God will ascertain whether or not if man's opportunities to believe were fair or not, and judge accordingly. And we must be wary of condemning the ancients or the heathens, who, too, are subject to judgement on belief, and who are subject to what the Church terms the Baptism of Desire. Remember that we are talking not of a superficial assent to a statement of faith, we are talking about a movement of the heart, even towards that which it has no external, explicit experience of. Is Hell too awful to countenance for anyone, even those popularly deemed the worst? If you had the full, complete, fair opportunity to align yourself with that which grants you origin, meaning, morality, and destiny—that from whom you have acquired your life itself and all the good opportunities that life contains, then why should your æternal sentence not reflect that? So, you may underestimate yourself. You may already be a Christian implicitly, in your heart, and find that the explicit expression of Christianity has due to corruption and bowdlerisation jars. Or, contrariwise, you may be secretly in rebellion against God and are using conceptual tactics to deny his legitimacy. If we have a reasonable faith that God is just, then we should work more on ourselves to improve our hearts, and on the world, than we should on God trying to second-guess his authority.

That your best shot?

What justice is there for the poor, the put-upon, the unjustly imprisoned, the desperate, the murdered? What justice is there for those who suffered any of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? There are three cosmologies to consider when asking whence cometh justice. 1.Atheism, or materialism, simply put: there is no justice to be found here. “Justice” is what we call our paltry temporal efforts at exacting revenge upon people who have offended our idiosyncratic senses of fair play, or simply attacked our property. In the end, there is no justice, just apes beating other apes, with no final destination but the grave. 2.Pantheism, or Hinduism: the doctrine of reincarnation, that individual souls jump from body to body to body in an endless wheel of lives. Justice here is getting for what one has given. Sounds reasonable, except when we ask, to what end is this game played? Why was it started? And the second question, how can the countless souls stuck at the bottom of the karmic chain ever pass through the bottleneck of enlightened humans to escape the wheel? And if the wheel is perfectly just, why escape it? Hinduism cannot say. 3.Monotheism, or Christianity: justice is found in the judgement of souls based on whether they had honestly sought God, and whether they gave what they would receive. The game was started to give gifts to man and glorify God through their communion. Justice's purpose is not merely to give as one got in this life, but to sieve out the hopeless rebels and purify the potential saints, for the sake of escaping the history of the fallen world and contemplating the essence God in the afterlife. Those are our three options: Either a world of nihilism, a world of endless repetition, or a world of historical purpose. Objection: Judaism and Islam are both monotheistic religions of historical purpose. Therefore they should be considered as valid alternatives to Christianity. Answer: a.Judaism is completed in a Messiah. It is ironic that a religion so dedicated to finding meaning in the historical reality failed to grasp the total historical zag that is Christianity. What does justice mean in such an oversight? b.Islam is dominated by Allah, who is lacking in triune structure and therefore is loveless, making man as nothing more than slaves or toys. What does justice mean outside of love? Objection: Polytheism offers a variety of gods who collaborate on the destiny of man. Answer: Polytheism merely makes religion more superficially interesting. The options of justice remain the same.