Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

86 comments - 1776 thread views 13hr ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

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Quality Contributions Report for September 2026

17 comments - 1895 thread views 4d ago by naraburns nihil supernum (text post)

Healthy Communities Post-"Closure of the Internet"

0 comments - 11 thread views 1hr ago by SneedNibba (text post) Edited 1hr ago

I just found this place on an idle lurk through /r/slatestarcodex. As far as I can tell, it's a surviving remnant of the more iconoclastic elements of the rationalist/postrat/lesswrong sphere, similar to the community surrounding Scott Alexander in the pre-AC10 days.

I've visited a lot of similar communities that splintered off of Reddit and Twitter during purges or censorship escalations, and seen them live out their lifespans. Voat, the original, was the most interesting, since it started out in the era when free speech was still acknowledged as universally a good thing, and had majority support, with Pao being seen as a single bad actor acting independently. Unfortunately, it coincided with the crackdown on the entire infrastructure stack, and it eventually became too expensive to keep online.

Since then, a bunch of other communities showed up, each with technically interesting stories.

.win, anchored by The_Donald's still fairly sizable userbase, is reasonably healthy but has one big community, a few minor ones that are semi-active, and little else.
TRP and its surrounding subreddits all made independent sites, some of which came together under the banner of TRP.red. It doesn't really seem active at all, though the big subreddits in it are still not banned, even after everything else was.
A number of Voat clones, all pretty unremarkable, cropped up here and there. Poal.co, which gradually petered out, Voat.xyz, likewise, and Ruqqus, whose admins decided to ban edgy speech after journalists doxed one of them and closed the site due to lack of interest shortly thereafter.
On the infrastructure side, Kiwi Farms deserves a mention, surviving attacks (both DDOS and infrastructure loss - related) that would have killed earlier attempts handily, rolling their own DDOS mitigation system when Cloudflare backed down.
During the peak of Twitter censorship, something called the Fediverse cropped up, aiming to solve the fundamental coordination problem of countless tech-savvy dissidents all being willing to throw their hats into the ring, but no one individual having the pull or funding to do it singlehandedly. A number of servers, all set up and branded independently, could connect with each other and aggregate their posts and users. In practice, a few servers exist, but Gab would have been the flagship and it shut off federation early on. Poa.st is the current flagship, largely hosting a core group of imageboard-adjacent users, but the vaunted robustness of the system didn't count for much when it briefly went down a little while ago and, as far as I could tell, most users just went quiet in the meantime rather than jumping to other instances. Most instances don't have open signups, even. Kiwi had its own instance at some point, but no longer does.
Nostr took the Fediverse idea a step farther, using a bunch of cryptography to establish a protocol that lets users tie their accounts to a file on their computers, and use it across a wide variety of services. It had all manner of very impressive guarantees against censorship, but the onboarding friction was high enough that the only users I could find were a small handful of diehards talking to themselves and each other.
Amusingly, a bunch of lefties whose views weren't remotely targeted by Reddit's administration made a bunch of federated Reddit clones during the API fiasco. As far as I know, they still exist and are 90 percent low-effort political slop, with the remaining 10 percent amounting to low-effort memes that aren't very good. I'd expect that activity is largely botted, simply because it doesn't pass the Turing Test.

By virtue of sheer stubbornness and dedication to the (worthy) cause of free discourse, The Motte seems to have a core group of devoted users who followed it here from Reddit, but most of what I see is automatically-created weekly discussion threads. I've certainly seen many individuals out there who share its demographic and general sentiment, but all of them are basically individual bloggers or Twitter users who established themselves pre-Closure of the Internet.

All of that said, it seems to me like the survival of our culture depends on finding a way to not just preserve an archipelago of different communities' remnants, but to find a way to re-create the frictionless, organic internet that could easily onboard new people. It seems like that would be a common topic of discussion here, and that people would have opinions on how to achieve this.

As it stands, my best proposal would be something like the ill-fated Dissenter extension, which added a separate comments section to every website as a tacked-on sidebar, but done more elegantly. Dissenter's failure case was that it was banned from Google's app store, but Brave is used widely enough, especially among our core demo of tech-savvy 20-something men, that sideloading a browser extension is no longer a huge hurdle. As for doing it more elegantly, I was thinking of something like:

Every major social media website gets its own custom integration, bundled with a bunch of quality of life features that users ask for. E.g. region-blocking and a chronological timeline on Twitter, better post filtering on imageboards, and so on.
When users post to these social media sites, their content is mirrored to a separate, federated service of their choosing (with a default for users who don't want to set up their own), and users of the extension can see when another Reddit/Twitter user is a fellow user of the extension, as their posts will be highlighted in the native view. This provides a backup of their posts and OC, limiting the chilling effect of a high-effort post potentially being removed or deboosted. Additionally, posts can be made exclusively to the extension's Fedi instance, visible to other extension users but not ordinary users of the social media website being interacted with, so that conversations can be had on e.g. Reddit without the local moderators stepping to say that "Y'all can't behave".
Users can go directly to a given instance's URL and see (and message) other users across all platforms, with extension-specific notifications visible in the notification feeds of all augmented sites.
As far as onboarding, I think the various anti-censorship social media people have missed the mark by treating friction as a weed-out. People are exhausted with the state of the world, and aren't going to take an hour of their day to figure out what Nostr is on their own. Instead, a simple, memetically-transmissible onboarding image outlining the process in simple steps, flattering the user as a cyberpunk hackerman rather than a refugee or tech enthusiast, could do a lot better. Dating myself, I remember the fun of the first days of 8chan, where users reveled in being technically hardcore and somewhat exclusive while still being happy to get new lads up to speed. I think that kind of culture is vital to anything that wants to bring back what was lost.

Essentially, the minimum viable product is the equivalent of being able to draw a fish in the sand back in the early days of Christianity - a way to indicate to fellow users on Closed websites that they aren't alone, and that there's a place they can get in touch with you if you get b&.

Do people have other ideas, in this general direction? I feel like we're in a critical time, where enough people remember the free internet that it can be brought back without the need to remake everything from first principles.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 4, 2026

84 comments - 1165 thread views 1d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Qeekly Finance Thread - 10/3/2026

5 comments - 259 thread views 2d ago by birb_cromble (text post)

Friday Fun Thread for October 2, 2026

104 comments - 1568 thread views 3d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Transnational Thursday for October 1, 2026

26 comments - 655 thread views 4d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for September 30, 2026

45 comments - 1059 thread views 5d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Tinker Tuesday for September 29th, 2026

11 comments - 307 thread views 6d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

1479 comments - 24581 thread views 7d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1479

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Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-09-26

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Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

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Christian Controversy over Contemplation

36 comments - 1131 thread views 11d ago by ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου (shapesinthefog.substack.com)

Hey folks! Posting another article from Substack, link is here if you'd like pictures, otherwise text is reproduced below in full. Overall discussing Christian contemplation & meditation, especially with regards to Buddhism and the overlap there.

If you’ve paid any attention to modern online Christian discourse lately, you may have noticed a lot of controversy around meditation, Buddhism, New Age spirituality, and Eastern religions.

Oftentimes, the conversation will go something like this: a modern Buddhist or New Ager talks about how useful meditation is, and a Christian comes in and says something along the lines of, “Oh, meditation is sinful or evil.”

Sometimes Christians will say that meditation is emptying the mind so that demons can possess you, or that trying to use meditative techniques is sinful because you are trying to achieve grace yourself rather than allowing Christ to do it for you.

Unfortunately, these Christians are speaking out of a deep, deep ignorance of their own tradition.

If you actually look back into the ancient historical record, you’ll see that from the very beginning, the apostles (in line with their Second Temple Jewish tradition) likely did deep meditative visualization practices and other contemplative practices that modern Christians, especially Protestant and evangelical Christians, would see as demonic, evil, or sinful today. You can reference the book The Religion of the Apostles by Father Stephen De Young if you’re curious for some more details here.

In short, meditation and contemplative prayer have a deep, important, and long-standing tradition throughout Christianity from the very beginning.

In this article, I want to lay out some of the background of this controversy, and explain why the Christian arguments above are in fact dead wrong. Throughout Christian history, ancient meditative practices have been attacked multiple times. I also want to discuss some of the historical factors that have led to modern American Christians, especially, being so incredibly opposed to any sort of meditation or contemplative practice for deepening their connection with God.

Then I’ll get a little spicy, and make the case that many Western Buddhists are actually better at Christian contemplative practice than we are. ;)

Christian Contemplation Has Often Been Controversial

There have been a number of periods throughout Christian history where contemplation, a retreat from the world, and trying to connect directly with God have caused the hackles of the more exoteric-focused Christians to rise.

One of the major and well-known examples is the exodus of the Desert Fathers from Roman society after Rome was Christianized around the fourth century. Now, this was largely controversial because Christian Roman society was becoming corrupt at the time, and many of the Desert Fathers explicitly spoke out against the Church for becoming too concerned with worldly politics. These people wanted less politics, and more of a direct connection with God. (a common drive for mystics and contemplatives)

In fact, you can see some Protestant parallels there, and the more intellectual and historically aware Protestants have even called back to the Desert Fathers to argue their case for rejecting clerical authority during the Reformation.

Later on, in the 14th century, we see in both the Orthodox and Catholic Church another rise of attacks against contemplatives. On the Orthodox side, we have Barlaam of Calabria attacking Athonite monks and other contemplatives, outright mocking their practices. On the Catholic side, you have more contemplative or esoteric approaches to the faith coming under scrutiny, including famous Catholic contemplatives like Meister Eckhart, whose teachings became the subject of an inquisitorial investigation and later papal condemnation.

Now we move on to the Protestant Reformation. This is an extremely complicated topic because the Protestant Reformation obviously involves a ton of different groups, but I want to sketch out the broad history, especially in America, of contemplative prayer and how Protestants viewed it.

So initially, the Protestant colonists actually had a strong contemplative tradition. You see this the most in groups like the Quakers, that heavily focused on inward silence, attention-training practices, and other meditative, contemplative types of prayer.

During the 18th century and the First Great Awakening, you still see some focus on prayers of the heart. Many of the famous preachers during this time, like Jonathan Edwards, were positively disposed towards contemplation: “True Religion disposes Persons to be much alone, in solitary Places, for holy Meditation and Prayer.”

Unfortunately, over the last couple of centuries, especially with the rise of biblical fundamentalism, American Protestants have moved farther and farther away from quiet contemplation and more into a focus on conversion, evangelizing others, reading Scripture, preaching, and spontaneous, emotional, verbal prayer. In the most extreme forms, you see the Pentecostal speaking in tongues, that sort of thing.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that contemplative prayer goes away, but it does start to come under some suspicion, especially by Christian groups that align themselves with conservative worldly politics in America.

Another dynamic here is that Protestantism essentially wiped out the monastic tradition, especially in America. Historically, the Christian contemplative tradition has been mainly kept alive by monastics, and I mean, this is true in Buddhism and pretty much every major religion as well. It’s not unique to Christianity.

But regardless, by wiping out the monastic tradition, Protestants sort of shot themselves in the foot because while, yes, it’s great for lay people to practice contemplative prayer, and I definitely encourage people to, ultimately it’s a lot easier for folks living in a monastic community to keep the deep contemplative tradition alive.

It doesn’t help that modern life, after the Industrial Revolution, in general has made contemplation and meditation harder. Despite our incredible material wealth, modern people tend to have less free time, attention, and generally just less ability and inclination to rest our minds than our ancestors did.

The pace of our lives is incredibly fast, and even when we do have free time that our material wealth buys us, our spiritual condition is such that we find it extremely difficult to rest and put down our busy, hurried schedules in order to contemplate and meditate and be watchful over our own hearts and minds.

There’s also a dynamic where Protestants hate Catholics (back in the day more than now, to be fair), and because the Catholics had a stronger focus on contemplative prayer, occasionally you see Protestants associating contemplation with the evil papists.

Now, during the 20th century, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s, when Zen Buddhism, yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and general New Age spirituality became incredibly popular in America, you have a sort of perfect storm where most Christians in America know very little about their own contemplative traditions. They don’t meditate. They don’t even understand that Christians are supposed to meditate.

And then the Eastern religions start popping up and teaching meditation. They try it. They’re like, “Oh my God, this is amazing,” and they get converted pretty quickly. Because if you’ve ever spent much time in meditation, you realize that, yes, the effects are profound and quick, and they do allow a connection with the divine.

Unfortunately, the Christian reaction, by and large, instead of educating people and telling them, “Hey, this is a part of our own tradition,” has been instead to demonize Buddhism, Hinduism, and other traditions, even when there are extreme similarities between our historical practices and the sort of New Age Western Buddhist practices that many people are actually doing nowadays.

Contemplation Is Not a Replacement for the Church

Now, I want to be clear here that not all of these persecutions of contemplatives were entirely unfounded. In some of these cases, depending on the specific author or person who was pushing meditative and contemplative practices, there genuinely was a real problem with their approach to the faith.

Meditation and contemplation are not able to bring us to God entirely on their own. We do need the liturgical life of the Church. We need the sacraments, and especially the Eucharist, in order to be united with Christ. This is a clear teaching of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and I do believe it strongly.

While it may be possible to approach God via various meditative and contemplative practices on their own, I don’t think we can achieve full union and theosis with God without being wedded to His Church.

Furthermore, I think that for the vast, vast majority of people who seek a closer relationship with God, they would be far better off coming home to Mother Church, coming home to the hospital where their souls can be healed, rather than trying to do everything on their own.

Western Buddhism Is Overwhelmingly Compatible with Christianity

Now for the controversial part.

One of the funniest, or I guess sadly ironic, things about modern Christians hating on Buddhist meditation is that many Buddhists in America are actually better at practicing fundamental disciplines of the Christian spiritual life than they are!

I’ll admit that there is a grain of truth in critiques of Buddhist practices. The scare tactics Christians use when they talk about meditation being meant to empty your mind so that demons can fill you up do have some basis in reality. Especially in Vajrayana and other esoteric schools of Buddhism, there are explicit practices where the goal is to take on some sort of aspect of a deity and invite them to possess you.

However, it should be obvious to anyone who has met many Buddhists in America that the vast, vast majority of people who call themselves Buddhists and meditate regularly are not doing anything like this.

When it comes to American and Western Buddhists in general, most of them are just practicing what we in the Christian tradition would call watchfulness. They are paying attention to when their mind wanders. They are noting when difficult emotions come up that distract them or bring them into difficult and closed-off states. Perhaps they are repeating a mantra in order to help center their mind, as we do in Christian hesychasm with our prayer or prayer word. Sometimes they use meditation beads, which we also use, especially in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions. The common depiction in media is the Catholic rosary.

Furthermore, most Western Buddhists and New Agers believe in a sort of generally benevolent, all encompassing "Source” that aligns quite well with Christian theology, albeit minus the Christ part.

Compare basic Buddhist meditation practices to St. Hesychios the Priest explaining the Christian practice of watchfulness:

One type of watchfulness consists in closely scrutinizing every mental image or provocation.

A second type of watchfulness consists in freeing the heart from all thoughts, keeping it profoundly silent and still, and in praying.

A third type consists in continually and humbly calling upon the Lord Jesus Christ for help.

These types of watchfulness, my child, act like doorkeepers and bar entry to evil thoughts.

St. Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness, in The Philokalia.

Or St. Theophan the Recluse explaining Christian ‘mantras’:

In order to teach the mind to rest on one thing, the Holy Fathers used short prayers and acquired the habit of reciting them unceasingly.

St. Theophan the Rescluse, The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology

Frankly, I would be surprised if more than 1% of self-described Buddhists in the West have ever actually done any sort of ritual or meditation where they explicitly invite a demon to come and possess their mind. It’s just not a very common thing. The vast majority of Buddhists are doing simple meditative practices to cultivate watchfulness and basic attention. I’d bet if the Holy Fathers were to observe these Buddhists (the vast majority that are only training attention, not inviting demons in) they would likely approve of their discipline in developing watchfulness!

A lot of fearmongering Christians in the modern world spread the absurd idea that if you spend 10 minutes listening to a Buddhist teacher telling you to focus on breathing deeply, or focus on feelings of loving-kindness, you’re somehow inviting demons to come possess you. The same thing is true of polemics against yoga.

Unfortunately, the state of most Christians’ prayer life in the West is dramatically impoverished compared to the history of our traditions. I personally believe that one of the major things we must do if we want to get closer to God is revitalize the ancient Christian tradition of watchfulness, meditation, and contemplation.

If we aren’t able to guard our thoughts and our hearts from distraction, from our own sinful habits, and yes, from actual demonic influence, then we have very little hope of learning to live a Christian life and become more like Christ.

As a caveat, know that I am a relatively new convert to the Orthodox faith and to Christianity in general. I’m not speaking with any real authority outside of my own experience and opinions. Please feel free to challenge the claims I’ve made in this piece.

Regardless, I hope that this article helps change your mind on contemplative prayer and perhaps convinces some of you to take at least 10 or 15 minutes a day before or after your daily prayers to sit in silence and spend some time in self-emptying so that God’s grace and love can fill your heart in the space left behind.

Transnational Thursday for September 24, 2026

13 comments - 518 thread views 11d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

Wellness Wednesday for September 23, 2026

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Tinker Tuesday for September 22nd, 2026

10 comments - 400 thread views 13d ago by ArjinFerman Tinfoil Gigachad (text post)

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

1293 comments - 23005 thread views 14d ago by PaperclipPerfector (text post)

1293

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Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-09-19

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Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026

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Transnational Thursday for September 17, 2026

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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"Battle" of the "Sexes"

Christian Contemplation Has Often Been Controversial

Contemplation Is Not a Replacement for the Church

Western Buddhism Is Overwhelmingly Compatible with Christianity

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