2rafa
5hr ago
Hard to tell what the Chinese game plan is here. The partial ambition for their intervention in support of the rebels was to deal with the Chinese crime lords who were tolerated by the junta and who were involved in a lot of corruption, scamming, bribery, organized crime in China proper and harboring wanted Chinese fugitives that the CCP didn’t want to let disappear. But if the whole country collapses that problem will only get worse for the Chinese since absolute lawlessness will likely only allow for further criminal activity, make it easier to disappear and so on.
2rafa
5hr ago
It’s interesting. The thing that seems to be driving popular outrage against mass immigration in Ireland and Canada is that the government does it with a smile on its face, calls those who oppose it bigots, winks at them, then dares them to blink. Kind of like being patronized by an annoying teacher.
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
There has been some of this thing (rioting against migrant camps) in Britain, but proportionally it has been much, much rarer than in Ireland. And in Canada one senses even normal centrists are getting increasingly angry about their own situation. I wonder if the Irish politicians will clock on and embrace the Tory policy of talking the talk on migration and then just not doing anything about it (or indeed increasing it further).
You really do encounter some idiosyncratic characters now and again. It sounds fake, but the boyfriend of one of my good friends, an Arab woman, for about a year at college was a black Muslim African guy (raised in Europe, but first generation and his family mostly still lived in their home country) who was a huge fan of Moldbug and Pat Buchanan. He was ambivalent about HBD/The Bell Curve (which I’ve always found is a remarkably widely-read book for wrongthink) but would discuss it with almost everyone he did coke with, which was a lot of people.
2rafa
6hr ago
I’m sympathetic to monarchism (I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power). I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.
2rafa
8hr ago
Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.
2rafa
9hr ago
I think views on conversion in Hinduism vary widely by religious flavor since there are so many different kinds of Hindu belief. For example the Hare Krishnas, despite their new-age-cult reputation, are situated within Hinduism proper and obviously accept, embrace and proselytize to converts. Historically caste was based on profession and there were limited ways in which people could change caste (for example some Brahmins historically changed to the warrior/leader caste iirc). Today the system is more ossified. Converts to Hinduism who have no Hindu background almost always do so for marriage and so would become part of the caste they are marrying into; I know of some cross-caste marriages in India, I'm not sure which caste the children become. Hypothetically if some larger group converted to Hinduism they could be assigned a caste, although there has been a debate about whether the government might issue a "no caste" certificate.
Most Hindus have no problem with foreign converts to Hinduism and the Hare Krishna founder who brought it to the West is often quite respected by at least some religious Hindus, but perhaps it would be best to ask one of our Indian regulars like @self_made_human.
2rafa
10hr ago
I would hope that my ideal regime would help to make me (and you) not a useless parasite. But perhaps that just means you have more self-awareness than me!
2rafa
10hr ago
Again, I don't think I or @To_Mandalay are defending this viewpoint, but I've seen this perspective argued many times online. The argument is that for most of European modernity ancient philosophy, Greek and Roman texts, language, culture, architecture, aesthetics, poetry, theater and so on were core parts of the way young men of wealth and power were educated.
These texts obviously largely predated early modern Christian Europe, although the way they were interpreted did not. Even in the 19th century British imperial administrators learnt Latin and Greek (Classics), studied Classical Civilization, went on Grand Tours to see the remnants of Roman civilization and so on. They could quote Virgil and recite Greek aphorisms, and saw themselves in the tradition of their civilizations.
Therefore, as Mandalay says, the argument goes that even though they were (mostly) Christians, they retained some aspect of the pre-Christian or extra-Christian European identity, which held Christianity's egalitarian / slave morality aspects in check. As this faded by the mid 20th century, Christianity and its implications paradoxically or unexpectedly became more central to the way that elite culture imagined itself even though religious observance itself began to fade from the early 1960s.
2rafa
10hr ago
Monotheism, certainly Abrahamic religion, seems uniquely good at supplanting paganism. Christian missionaries in West Africa and Southeast Asia - even under full colonial rule - often barely even attempted to convert Muslims whom the Arabs had already converted, for example, because they always rejected Christianity and it caused social tensions and civil conflict when they killed or expelled the white missionaries. Pagans almost always embraced it. Muhammad very quickly replaced polytheism in Arabia. Even where it took longer there were major inroads in the Indian subcontinent, in East Asia and so on. In the Americas it happened quite quickly.
It took just a few centuries for the Egyptians to abandon paganism (there were a couple of remote sanctuaries that made it to 500, but most Egyptians had converted within 150 years of Christianity being introduced). By contrast, it took 800-1000 years for the Arabs to convert the majority of Egyptians from Christianity to Islam, often using much harsher methods. To some extent it's almost a historical quirk that some of the Asian civilizations retained aspects of their earlier religious traditions; without the Portuguese and British an Islamic conquest of the Hindus was probably inevitable, and in the case of the Chinese the Taiping rebellion which involved a twisted form of quasi-Christian belief was only defeated with the help of the British and French. By the time Christians conquered Japan in 1945 they didn't really care to convert defeated populations anymore.
Pagans can arguably be easily converted because the Abrahamic God can initially live 'alongside' their other gods, and then supplant them/become dominant, and then the others can be abandoned or forgotten. This is, of course, what happened to the Jews themselves in their ancient history.
2rafa
10hr ago
The reasons Americans use it is that during the heyday of American civic nationalism that saw a resurgence of interest in the War of Independence around the bicentenary in 1976 one of the big things that was supposed to be different about America was that Americans were 'citizens' (ie. members) of a country rather than 'subjects' of (ie. submissive to) the Crown. I don't think it was really about the empire (at least post-18th century) or British identity per se.
I completely agree. All political radicals face this issue, no communist thinks they’d be a manual laborer on the collective farm, they think they’d be a playwright in good standing or an academic or on the politburo.
But I also think you need to look at our current level of economic development. If a Western country became an absolute monarchy tomorrow there wouldn't be millions of peasants because farmwork has been largely automated; it would just look like a modern country that is an absolute dictatorship, and there are many examples of those.
2rafa
15hr ago
I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
2rafa
16hr ago
I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
2rafa
17hr ago
For sure, but it’s also ahistorical to say “none of them believed blacks and whites were actually equal”. Some, many even, did. There was a wide spectrum of positions on the subject.
2rafa
18hr ago
Those concepts are all largely true about Islam and Judaism too. For hardcore Nietzscheans who consider all Abrahamism slave morality that tracks, but I’d say for those specifically down on Christianity alone, it’s more that the New Testament lacks a certain martial character that is found in both Jewish and Muslim history, in the latter case especially in the life and conquests of Muhammad.
Actually, Christian observance in America reached a new high in the postwar era. The height of weekly church attendance in America was in the 1950s. America was less religiously observant in 1920 than in 1950, hard as that may be to believe.
On a typical Sunday morning in the period from 1955-58, almost half of all Americans were attending church – the highest percentage in U.S. history
Meanwhile, the height of Protestantism in the US was probably the 1840s as a percentage of the total population. It’s just that American Christianity was never staunchly ethnonationalist, it existed alongside ethnic nationalism but it wasn’t of it. The same is true in the Islamic world today, you can have tribes with a strong sense of ethnic identity, but it’s not because of Islam, it just exists alongside it.
2rafa
18hr ago
I also think there needs to be a more nuanced understanding of what people mean when they talk about historic Christian racism. For example, not only were almost all abolitionists devout Christians (and indeed believed that Christianity required an end to slavery) but even many slavers, for example, acknowledged that the practice seemed un-Christian and struggled with it; Washington owned slaves his whole life, but considered it “wicked, cruel and unnatural”.
Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races, including Washington, but even in the 18th century it was not unheard of to believe in the actual equality of man along modern blank slate lines; particularly in England as slave narratives became popular literature, many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable, some hoped to settle free black people from Africa (as citizens!) in the Caribbean colonies where they would own land and farm etc. There was a strong and widespread belief that Africans could be taught to fully adopt English civilization that persisted through the 19th century, although it increasingly conflicted with Darwinian racialism that emerged later in the Victorian era.
So there were in fact devout Christians who considered that the implication of Christianity was the equality of races even centuries ago, it was just that temporal political interests were stronger.
2rafa
18hr ago
Islam has a much stronger emphasis on anti racism than Christianity, see here
Islam is a substantially anti-racist religion, and even the vast majority of Khaleeji (and therefore to some extent ‘founding stock’) Islamic scholars have essentially the exact same blank slatist view of race as a woke American college professor. Racial prejudice exists throughout the Islamic world, but it’s the petty prejudice of local peoples, it broadly isn’t religiously endorsed. Even in the West, while largely lay Muslim communities are grouped by country of origin, hardcore Islamist groups and mosques are often remarkably multiethnic and some groups arrested for planning attacks feature variably Arab, black, Desi, Chechen and white converts. And Muslim countries like Turkey with Syrians and Jordan with the PLO have been very tolerant (arguably much moreso even than modern Europe when you look at the percentage of the total population taken in) of refugees until, in the latter case, they literally tried to militarily overthrow the government. Sure, many Gulf Arabs are still racist against Africans, but that’s nothing you won’t hear from many Southern Italians about their recent arrivals. ISIS obviously had Muslims from every corner of the earth fighting alongside each other; the Arabs who led it were happy to hand over captured non-Muslim Arab girls as bribes and spoils of war to non-Arab Muslim fighters, which again shows the primacy of religion over race among devout Islamists. In Malaysia there were big campaigns about the global ummah and billboards about racial tolerance lol. I work with a lot of Muslims around the world, including conservative ones, and their views on race are - in the case of the devout - indistinguishable from white leftists, even if they disagree on everything else.
I agree that Christianity is less explicitly anti-racist. Still, I think anti-Christian reactionaries would say that its more generally less martial affect, pacifist origins, emphasis on turning the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth and so on are ultimately more conducive to DEI ideas than not. Also, we tend to see historical Western figures (say early Americans, or slave traders, or imperialists) as uniformly devout Christians. Almost all would have believed in God and considered themselves Christian, but actual levels of religious devotion varied considerably, in many historically Christian communities the majority of people have never attended Church every Sunday for example, not in 1750 and not today.
2rafa
19hr ago
Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian.
In large part the only Americans who care about Palestinian casualties at all are already pro-Palestine.
2rafa
20hr ago
I wouldn’t say that Christianity guarantees slave morality, Christians had after all conquered and subjugated the majority of the world a century ago. I just think it lacks any safeguards against slave morality the way that Judaism (with its inherent ethnonationalism and more vigorously harsh Old Testament) and Islam (with Muhammad the conqueror cemented as ultimate example for mankind) have. If your civilization has a brief slave morality cult or phase, there’s nothing in Christianity or Christian-descended secular society to say ‘stop’.
Overall European countries have increased defense spending by about 20% since the Ukraine invasion, but this is heavily weighted to countries near the Russian frontier like Finland and Poland that have seen budgets increase by 50-75%. The Baltics have each tripled or quadrupled spending. Britain and Germany increased spending by 7-9% YoY. The Germans are still only spending 1.5% of GDP on defense despite promising to go up to 2% but are facing issues with their constitution which has (effectively) a balanced budget clause that limits large rises in government spending.
However, given the main issue is munitions - which are not the primary cost center for Western militaries (which is salaries and pensions, and to a lesser extent buying expensive hardware like ships and fighter jets) - the question is more about whether munitions factories can be rapidly scaled up. That’s as much a logistics question as a financial one.
I think you’re referencing a few different trends.
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The distaste for Christianity on parts of the dissident right is substantially Nietzschean, it precedes mass immigration. That perspective would say that the West is still post-Christian and still deeply embraces slave morality in policy areas like homelessness, justice, welfare, immigration, foreign policy and so on. Nietzsche is a very popular figure on the intellectual hard right. The argument in this case isn’t that Europeans aren’t capable of being tough under Christianity, clearly they are (and of course all of the greatest ages of Northern European civilization occurred in the Christian era) but that Christianity has an inexorable tendency toward worshipping victimhood and guilt that eventually led to cultural modernity, which these people broadly dislike.
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The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism. This did not bother earlier generations of Christian antisemites, but…
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Residual Christian antisemitism largely ended after WW2, certainly as a matter of policy. The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism, and so did most large Protestant denominations. Over time, some, like American Evangelical Christianity, even embraced a quasi-philosemitic and certainly staunchly pro-Israel worldview. Even denominations that saw less ideological evolution like Orthodox Christianity significantly reduced their hostility to Jews. If you were an antisemite in 1900 it was quite easy to find a Church that agreed with you. In 2020, certainly in the United States, you would be hard pressed and would have to rely on a few small splinter groups that are very far from mainstream Christianity and not well-distributed around the country. This both led to a dislike among antisemitic dissident rightists for Christianity in general and a desire for some kind of certainly-not-Jewish alternative, which eg. Scandinavian paganism obviously is.
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As secularism increased and religious observance decreased in the West, the ingrained ideological hostility to paganism as savage or backwards (and certainly as ‘wrong’) declined with it. Young men aren’t afraid of going to hell if they become pagans, so the ‘ward’ against ‘deconversion’ is lessened. That said, pagan or quasi-pagan cults have had a long history in esoteric European intellectual circles, certainly back to the 19th century if not before. The popularity and then decline of New Age religions starting in the 1940s and 1950s may also be related to this.
We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.
Well, we can just make it Portland. Or Skid Row. The problem comes when every downtown starts to look like Skid Row.
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