chronic phone poster, forgive my typos
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In the late 2000s, the New Atheist movement was at its height. Smart young people clustered around memetic weapons deployed by "The Four Horsemen" of the movement. They quoted The God Delusion and wrote passionately about the brave new world lying just beyond the the horizon, once we had finally swept away the last remnants of organized religion. That religion, you see, was the source of man's primitive and atavistic conditions. In the new age of reason and tolerance, we would all be heckin good people.
Now, had any of these clever youngsters (myself among them) bothered to dig into the arguments, they might have noticed some concerning faults. When faced with a legitimate theologian, the Horsemen had much less exciting debates. These were intellectual bloodsports, after all, and the people demanded a show. What use was a meandering talk about the Cosmological, Ontological, or Teleological Arguments? When these were presented, Hitchens would sidestep, guffaw, and point out that religion was very, very stupid. And the crowds would roar.
Removed from the certainty of being Young, Hip, and Aware of the New Thing, it might quite obvious that the Intellectual Rigor of the Horsemen was not, in fact, very rigorous. When confronted with the robust (boring) arguments for religion, they would answer with such daring ripostes as "we've never found heaven in the Hubble Space Telescope", "can God make a burrito so hot He cannot eat it?", or "imagine believing in a flying spaghetti monster."
Hardly arguments, at all. What they were, however, were social proof. You, the good and smart person, was laughing at the dumb and bad person, and all of your good and smart friends were laughing along.
The Four Horsemen did not kill God. They came upon a dead god, lying facedown in a ditch, and they pronounced themselves His vanquishers.
And what god did they find there?
That corpse was the husk of Western Inertial Christianity. It was the remains of dead words, quoted by fools and fraudsters.
Authentic Christianity was driven out of the West long before the New Atheists took over early YouTube with cartoon skits of "Bible Man." When had it been replaced by Inertial Christianity? I cannot say for certain, but at least as far as the Boomers.
I do not speak of doctrine. There are many forms of Christianity with all manner of doctrine, about which far smarter men than I can endlessly argue. We have all those doctrines, still written on their pages. What I am speaking of is animating spirit, of living faith, scaled to the level of state. There are many churches in our lands. I assume that there are many of those churches, in roadside cathedrals or common-room chapels, where the Word still beats. But I am speaking of societies. Where could we last call our civilization "Christian", in such a way that it would recoil at sin, weep for faith, and transmit itself forward not as secular morals but as the Only Way and Truth. What was the last Christianity that would compel princes and nations not just to "be good people", but to organize themselves beyond the letter of secular law.
What was the last form of Christianity that would kill and die for belief at the scale of governance?
History is replete with examples. If you roll back to Westphalia, you see the need to bind just these forces. The wars of religion were no dead letters.
But that's quite some time, and Westphalia solved that problem quite elegantly. So we can look, instead, to the reasons states organize for mortal endeavors.
Even into the Twentieth Century, the language of state spoke in Christian terms: who was in, who was out, why we suffered, why we labored. Not just endurance, either. Not just absorbing the ills, but turning upon them with artifice and force.
Looking at the documents of those eras, we can say that they at least believed themselves to be Christians, in the real sense of the word.
Certainly, modernity's acid must be the inciting incident in decay. The growth of materialist ideology, the flattening of the sacred, and the removal of the transcendent are a drip-drip-drip of erosion upon the faith, far more powerful than any Nietzschean refutation. But where was the flip? When was the last document written, invoking God, where more people rolled their eyes than looked down in reverence?
Growing up in Millennial and Gen X spaces, we were thoroughly dead letters. The religious Boomers above us roughly fell into two camps: crazy textual thumpers yelling about heavy metal and Satan, or cultured, erudite, functionally atheistic "believers" who understood that these parables and lessons were but a cast necessary to set a moral bone, not a Truth within themselves.
The former were mockable. They quoted words they didn't understand. They lacked temperance and prudence. They often lashed out from fear of their own iniquities, pressed into zealotry, and when pressed in an argument, they'd brandish the Bible and say "it says right here".
They would often misquote.
Those of my generation who followed this literal crowd rejected the secular world. They learned and adhered doctrinally to the Precise Text. These were the kids who could recite chapter and verse. But their faith was often brittle. When a precisely-memorized contradiction was forced to the surface by a more agile thinker, they would shut down. Faced with the inability to understand the verse they recited, they would collapse into a parody of religiosity (dumb, low status, hateful, etc) or their glass cathedral would shatter, and they'd plunge into hedonic liberation (self-annihilation).
The second set were barely Christian at all. The Boomers who believed such may have dressed as Christians. They may have believed themselves to be Christians. They may have even been clergy! (More than once was I informed, with sly and knowing wisdom, that nearly "all" high-functioning theologians were effectively just noble atheists, setting a moral narrative for the less developed.)
But remove this by one more generation, and the Inertial trappings of the religion made less sense. If the point of Christianity was "be tolerant" and you had to constantly explain those intolerant passages, wouldn't it make more sense to simply cut away the cast? The bone of secular humanism had set! It was time to be honest and cease the noble lie.
Those of my generation who followed this path didn't so much leave the Church as simply Stop Pretending to Be Part of It. One day, each of us simply didn't go to services. What was the point? We had learned the lesson, and the church (lowercase-c) itself was just a gathering place for the elderly, those in need, and the lunatics mentioned above. Good for them, and glad it existed, but not something I needed, certainly!
So when the Four Horsemen rode into town, what did they find? A new generation of "thinkers" who had been led out from the Church by the last generation of Shepherds, and a mass of lunatics and yokels just waiting to be defeated in glorious, live-streamed takedowns. If you lived on Midwit Mountain (and most of us always do), this was the show of the age!
If the Horsemen had been smarter, had their audience been more discerning, they might have put some thought into what god's corpse they were triumphantly dancing atop. The gods of Inertial and Pop Christianity were scarecrows, but with a little wisdom, more might have realized that the corpse of the god of Secular Humanism (Christian Atheism) was a mere ten yards further down that trench.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
This is our home. We have nowhere left to retreat to. Start a war at your own peril. This isn’t GWOT. There will be no ROE to save you.
I know I'm running against the grain of Current Thing "Sensitive Young Sith Lord Anakin Skywalker", but the structure of the Star Wars universe could very easily become cosmic horror.
The force extends from life. It moves through all life. It binds all life.
The force is not shown to have a supreme godhead or pantheon. It simply is. Life exists, so does the force.
Does the force have a will? Certainly not a personified one. Life exists, so does the force.
Which means the force, without will, precedes consciousness. Before morality. The force exists from the point of life.
And what is life?
A sustaining reaction. A replicating pattern which exists to perpetuate itself.
The force then, would grow.
And as creatures rise from the primordial soup, they develop in complexity. Hunger, fear, aggression. Procreation. These urges are below the rational, so crude that "emotions" is an inferior term. The irrational animal urges - the passions - are what drives life.
And life drives the force.
Even in our world, a world without the force, higher animals must grapple with these. Mark territory. Guard mates. Claim kills. Sire offspring.
By the time a little race of social tool-users had set in place the cognitive structures needed to consider a question of "should" above the base passions, they were preceded by structures and tribes from the animal kingdoms.
But these are not necessary for the force. The force is in all things.
The cougar at ambush has the force. The snake eating stolen eggs has the force. The bacterium devouring rotting meat has the force. All life has the force, and it is united simply by the compulsion to live.
The force has no morals. It has a compulsion, shared by all life, and those passions have only been bound within a cosmic wink by one tribe of curious tool-users on a single cerulean marble.
The stars will blink, and those reasons and restraints will pass with the toolmaker.
But somewhere on Rigel, a bacterium will begin to chew on chemical stew. It's complexity will tip into that self-replicating pattern which exists to propagate itself. And there will be the force.
---
So tell me, which philosophy within Star Wars most reflects the pressures and passions of that urge which seeks only to grow?
The Sith may be a corruption of the force, but the Jedi exist as an anti-force. A containment mechanism set around this cosmic sea of passions and oriented at forever stilling its waters.
The force elevates champions. The Jedi exist to serve.
The force feeds passions. The Jedi become a stone.
The force runs in bloodlines. The Jedi end their lines.
This is not that the Jedi are wrong and the Sith are right. But the Sith exist moving along the current of desire, want, and propagation, and the Jedi seek a stillness most perfected after all life is gone.
And where then is the force?
The only answer which makes the Jedi the correct interpretation is one where the force itself wishes to die. Alternatively, the Sith are closer to the true telos of the force (superior beings clawing ever upward for one more day in the eternal arms race of self-replication), likely now corrupted by the dominating goal to destroy the containment order which restrains them.
This doesn't make the Sith good - battling wizard kings are rarely benevolent figures - but it certainly calls into frame the purpose and direction of the Jedi order which restrains them, and might itself be steering into a desired universe of silent stone.
This is what a True Sith looks like. Every other Sith never reached this point because they realized how horrible this was and stepped back (cowards according to the Sith code) or they died (weaklings according to the Sith code).
The Jedi have an entire dogma of discipline and restraint. A True Sith doesn’t just reject that dogma; they create a new dogma of pursuing the EXACT OPPOSITE of those things.
To a True Sith, ‘enough’ is a MYTH.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
Working at Oculus would have been an utter waste of my time except for one thing.
While I was there, I realized what's wrong with leftists.
Not that they have been programmed, that's obvious. Not why they have been programmed. For power, that's obvious, too.
But how they have been programmed.
The exact method that their moral compass has been destroyed works like this:
Target a bunch of people with very few deeds and accomplishments, such as young people or incompetent people, or incompetent young people.
Create for them an environment where they are rewarded with moral approval, not for what they do, but for believing certain ideas.
The ideas don't have to be outrageous, or absurd, or have anything to do with what you actually need them to believe. In fact, it's better to start with something innocuous.
Why? Because the goal isn't to install those beliefs at all. The goal is to repeat this process until you create a person who measures his moral worth by what he believes, not what he does.
Keep at this until you have created a mass of people who not only reward themselves with a feeling of moral superiority for believing the right things, but who will reward each other for believing orthodox things, and who will compete with each other, not to do the most good, but to have the most orthodox beliefs.
Now, change one of the propositions you have programmed them with to a slightly more radical version of itself, and hold this up as a more correct version of the old belief, which has been newly discovered by scholarly investigations into culture and moral philosophy.
Sit back, watch, and give them a few weeks to compete with each other to adopt the new belief, and to condemn the "evil" of anyone who believes the old belief, the very thing they believed last month.
Repeat this process until they are used to rapidly changing their entire belief system in response to an external cue.
Congratulations, you have a population of entirely programmable people whose moral compass is not just broken, but entirely non-existent.
They don't care what any person in front of them actually does. Only that he believe the orthodox thing, which they just learned about in last week's memo.
They are willing to do anything, so long as it is done in support of their current belief system, which can be replaced whenever it's convenient to do so.
They are willing to burn down an entire city with no qualms whatsoever if they are doing it in support of the idea that black lives matter.
They are willing to murder a man in front of his children, and it doesn't matter if his actions were entirely peaceful and good, because all that matters to them is whether he believes the correct things or not.
And a man who builds cheap spaceflight for the human race, develops viable electric cars to save the environment, restores voices to the voiceless, and plans, for his next trick, to heal the blind... well, all those are deeds, so none of them matter. The only thing that matters is that he told people to vote republican once, which is wrongthink.
So what you have a horde of communist zombies, who can be steered to shuffle in any direction and attack the living, eat their brains, and turn them into more zombies.
Once someone becomes one of the zombies, you can't cure him, because a moral compass can only be repaired by understanding the consequences of actions in a new way... and they don't care about actions or consequences. They only care about beliefs, and not about consequences at all.
Their moral compasses aren't just broken. They are absent. There's nothing to repair.
You have to understand that the zombies are zombies now.
A well regulated noosphere, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear compute, shall not be infringed.
And they say right wing art doesn't exist.
Here’s the thing about spotting the horrendous, soulless AI-generated writing infecting every corner of the internet now: it’s not just about the words — it’s about the patterns.
And once you start noticing them, you can’t unsee them.
The unnecessary em dashes. The polished transitions. The examples given in groups of three.
The weird metaphors that kind of make sense but kind of don’t — like a parachute opening inside a submarine.
The load-bearing use of the term “load-bearing.”
The random one sentence paragraphs.
The way a bunch of bland gibberish is quietly reframed as a profound insight.
The on-going and un-necessary hyphenation of every-day words that really don’t need it.
The cliches.
Read that again.
Cliches.
Louder for people in the back.
Tons of cliches.
That’s not a typo.
Sit with that for a moment.
And the biggest red flag? Asking yourself a question and answering it.
Because honestly? No sentient human writes like this.
And truthfully? If you can’t identify these red flags, you might not actually be sentient yourself.
Because really? If this formatting doesn’t immediately strike you as awkward and artificial, it means you don’t read books.
Ever.
Seriously.
But here’s where it gets interesting:
It doesn’t.
The point has been made but I’ll keep going. That’s what AI writing is all about.
Let’s delve into real problem. It isn’t the technology. It’s the people using it because they’re too retarded to generate an original thought of their own.
That’s not thoughtfulness. It’s intellectual laziness wearing digital makeup.
It doesn’t make the internet more fun. It makes me want to throw my phone in the river and forsake all of humanity and live as a hermit in the woods for the rest of my life.
Seriously this shit fills me with despair. I’m not kidding.
And the distinction matters.
Especially when you’re saying the distinction matters without actually drawing a distinction.
But here’s what nobody tells you.
When you ask a machine to manufacture your personality, you’re not just automating your writing. You’re quietly announcing that you’re a boring, insipid dork with nothing interesting to say.
Let that sink in.
The uncomfortable truth?
AI didn’t turn these people into tedious midwits.
It quietly revealed what they already were.
And perhaps — just perhaps — that’s quietly the most important takeaway of all.
But what do you think? Let's unpack this together in the comments. 👇
I think they doubt the polling.
If you go to bed on election night and don't know who won a midterm congressional race, that's normal. And if you wake up the next morning and find that a candidate who was behind hours earlier has since pulled ahead, that's normal, too. (via @PolitiFact) to.pbs.org/4zqnWBa
Not gonna lie: if real, this is really cool.
Good on him.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
Ce soir à Varsovie, l’Europe fédérale a refermé son propre cercueil.
Quand Bruxelles et ses relais locaux envoient la police pour s’emparer d’un tribunal constitutionnel au nom de l’« État de droit », ce n’est plus de l’Union : c’est de l’occupation.
La Pologne vient de rappeler ce que trop d’États ont oublié : une nation qui se défend ne demande pas la permission.
Il est temps que les nations retrouvent leur souveraineté.
Apeluję do Pana Prezydenta Karola Nawrockiego o zwołanie Rady Bezpieczeństwa Narodowego jeszcze dziś w nocy.
To już nie jest kryzys konstytucyjny, jesteśmy na progu zamachu stanu.
Liderzy partii politycznych powinni jak najszybciej przedyskutować, czy nie jest to najwyższy czas, żeby się zatrzymać i dojść do porozumienia!
Panowie @KosiniakKamysz i @szymon_holownia jeszcze nie jest za późno na opamiętanie się!
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
PELOS DE PUNTA
🇵🇱 El Presidente de la República de Polonia, Nawrocki, acaba de llegar en persona para liberar el Tribunal Constitucional asaltado por el gobierno, y arropado por la multitud ha atravesado la barrera policial, mientras cantaban el himno nacional polaco.
Un verdadero líder y Jefe de Estado. Un patriota valiente.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
Zarządzam natychmiastową przerwę w czynnościach Prezesa Rady Ministrów Donalda Tuska, w tym w pełnieniu nadzoru nad wszelkimi służbami mundurowymi i służbami specjalnymi.
Liczę, że pismo zostanie potraktowane tak samo poważnie, jak ten świstek pani Korwin-Piotrowskiej, która w taki sam sposób zastąpiła prezesa TK pod dyktando bandy Tuska.
"But the admin hasn't done anything for us!"
#BREAKING: DHS revokes status of 2.2 million Biden-era migrants, clearing way for deportations.
A healthy society would put this man in a position of honor. His struggles would be lionized, his triumphs celebrated.
He is not landing on the moon. He is not conquering the wilderness. He is not winning the superbowl.
But the world runs on men like this choosing to get up and put in the hard work needed to build those beautiful things. The greatest failure of our society has been to invert and demean these quiet keystones of civic virtue in favor of the vapid, flashy, or outright parasitic. We have turned the local pillars into tax cattle to be mocked for their honest days work, and it is ripping our civilization apart.
Why bother, when the route to success is a pump and dump scheme? A rent-seeking racket? A state-funded ethno-nepo job? Why bother, when you can get clout by being an net-negative social degenerate on Twitch? Why bother, when you can post pictures of naked flesh and digital farm leveraged prostitution?
Why work at all (the job of filthy lower castes, after all), when you can simply defect, steal, or scam your way into the working man's tax money.
The humble dad, working past dawn and dusk at his unglamorous job, must be celebrated for society to flourish.
His noble daily grind should be rewarded with dignity, respect, and the ability to afford a little family trip without fearing for his financial health.
When he walks down the street, it should be with his head high and with the knowledge that he's doing it right. Young men should look at him and say, "Yeah, I can do that." Young women should look at him and say, "I'm looking for a guy who can do that."
When these men are held up, we grow. When they are diminished, we falter.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
“What has attracted you to Mike Rogers’ campaign?”
“Well, he’s an American. He knows what’s going on here in Michigan.”
This is exactly it. Real people in America do not care about foreign blood feuds or their senator’s stance on Palestine. They don’t want to elect someone with known terrorist associations.
Mike Rogers is going to win.
How I Mine for Fish? retweeted
The target is Marc Elias. Peltola isn't going to win Alaska now. The point is that Elias and his merry men have overreached and been caught promoting election fraud. And it's not in D.C. so jury nullification is unlikely.
Have a nice day, Marc...
🚨 BREAKING: **30 SUBPOENAS** have been fired off by the Trump DOJ into the people involved with Alaska's fake Dan Sullivan ballot plant — and legal expert Jonathan Turley says it's akin to a BOMBING CAMPAIGN
"These 30 subpoenas is equivalent of a saturation bombing campaign. 30 subpoenas is a LOT, and they are hitting every possible target here which is one of the reasons why the lawyers of this campaign should remove themselves immediately — because THEY'RE going to have to lawyer up!"
"A violation of 18 USC 1001 — and some of these people are going to cooperate. And so it's a very dangerous situation for many of the people in this scandal."
18 USC 1001 makes it a federal crime to lie to federal investigators, and it carries up to 5 years in prison.
Once DOZENS of people are all having to give statements to federal investigators, that can get MESSY
Peltola swears she had nothing to do with it. Guess we're about to find out. RAT HER OUT!
Think of what the "X as a Service" models do. What was once something possessed becomes a subscription. Instead of owning your car, you rent transit. Instead of owning the software, you rent the processing. It turns everyday things into enduring revenue streams, and it's become the goal of basically every industry. Instead of selling you one great product every few years (or worse, decades), they want to get you on a drip feed. Think of razor plans - instead of buying a good straight razor and sharpening it for years, the goal is to buy replaceable cheap units, or, even better, subscribe to a "shave club". Each individual month is cheap. The impact over time is like a thousand leeches on your finances.
Civilization as a Service is this same model, taken to the next horrifying level, since it's dissolving things owned without purchase. The public good (social bonds, traditions, community) is liquidated and financialized. Instead of your grandparents watching your kid for free, or the neighbor girl doing it for some side cash, you need to purchase "Child Care" for $1200 a month. (The Child Care, by the way, instead of being staffed by loving older relatives or the nice girl from three houses down, is now staffed by psychotic girlbosses, illiterate scam-employees, and, at best, an extremely overworked hourly employee.) Everyone is spending a lot more money to get a much worse outcome.
This applies across the board.
Instead of relying on a network of coworkers to keep your reputation (and knowing you have a solid job for 40 years and a retirement package), you have to grind premium LinkedIn rep.
Instead of kids hanging out in the neighborhood and being managed by the community network, they're steered into managed and structured (paid) programs.
Instead of meeting your future spouse through family, friends, church, or work, you need a subscription app that turns women into whores and men into johns.
From petty to large, the commercialization of social bonds has wound between people, and state power is used to prevent any community from congealing which might resist it, since anything that might act "as a bloc" runs afoul of the post Civil Rights Act civil order. A village, after all, is racist (locally minded), sexist (family-oriented), and otherwise -istaphobic (resistant to the moral liquidation which precedes financialization). These older bonds reduce the fungibility of the human being. They make atomic economic unit sticky, and, as such, cannot be tolerated.
After all, if you really wanted to feel you like you were part of something, you could just rent the "Belonging" service. Now available in Premium Tier on Apple Pay.
