coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
The “young” Right re-learned the importance of religion for survival only recently, I’d argue, around the time of the Benedict Plan in 2017. And public thinkers like Jordan Peterson only recently brought serious arguments for religion to the public, in a way that can satisfy the more “rational” conservative cohort who would otherwise be stuck on Nietzsche and new atheism. So it’s not surprising you haven’t seen this development immediately.
I don’t get your point about the Satanic Temple. Satanism is not a culture, it’s pretty much only an aesthetic, so it lacks the motive to utilize tax exemption for the purpose of maintaining a culture. If I were to bet, practicing “Satanists” are usually anti-natalists who think that their cultural heritage sucks. I similarly don’t get your point about the Amish; they were established at a time when no one policed how you established towns and schools… when there was no mass media… they just plopped themselves in Ohio and created, effectively, a micro-nation because they could… and there were few taxes then. So you’re comparing apples to orangutans here, in that there is genuinely no comparison to be made.
your solution to almost any issue is more dakka religion
Approximately, yes. More accurately, it’s “hierarchical organized communities which use stories and rituals and social competition to guide human behavior, whose leaders are chosen by virtuous conduct and who are prevented from having any material bias of self-gain eg accumulating wealth or women.” This just so happens to be religious in nature due to quirks of the flesh human nature. It’s hard to look at the demise of South Korea, the resilience of the Pashtuns, the birth rates of the Abrahamic Orthodox, the beauty of renaissance art, the economic waste of consumerist sexual competition, and the quasi-religious attitudes of political radicals and not come to the conclusion that what we need is Optimized Religion(s).
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
You should post it as a parent comment in main thread
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Can we really not domesticate monkeys and employ them in repetitive labor like collecting fruit and removing trash from beaches? Does the world not yearn for monkey-based saffron plantations?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
What is the cognitive difference between someone who uses a living experienced figure of speech, versus a dead metaphor only understood through conversation? Examples: run a tight ship, get on board.
When sailing was commonplace in English culture, these phrases would convey salient and significant experiences: the idea of strict rank inherent to seafaring, the idea of one singular authority deciding life and death with no one else around for hundreds of miles, civilized cooperative order versus chaos (ship versus rough seas), the prospect of status enhancement from obedient conduct; and the “board” of the ship meant near-claustrophobic proximity, rank-and-file, before tasks were dispersed. None of this meaning is transmitted in the expression today, only the connotation of when the phrase was previously heard by you. So, if you heard “run a tight ship” today, you would probably just imagine a manager who likes to be hands-on… and that’s it.
Some questions:
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Am I just wrong here? I don’t think so. Consider the new zoomer expression “delete your account”. This expression conveys meaning which would be lost on someone living in 1860. It implies an immediate, swift, final action which totally eliminates a type of socializing (a type alien to the 19th century). We can easily imagine “delete your account” becoming an offline expression in the future, but then it would only connote basic shaming.
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Are metaphors, in some sense, vastly more important for cognition than we think? How do we understand a word without metaphor? A word like “sufficient” seems to connote less than a phrase, just a small intellectual feeling without image, emotion, sound, texture — a hunch.
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Should we kill off dead metaphors, and somehow replace them with living metaphors?
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Should we give children a breadth of metaphorical experiences in the Montessori sense for cognitive gain?
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
Football has for decades been a way to stave off unrest. First, the sport attracts the attention of violent men without impressive economic prospects, as the sport itself is visibly violent and masculine. It is the closest similitude to war (armor, helmets, commands, clashes). It gives these men a castrated, impotent tribal identity in the form of regional teams, which are corporations motivated by capital without any serious tie to a region or interest. The men wear the insignia and colors of their favorite team and recite the assigned warcries. This establishes the attention of the cohort who are at most risk of unrest. Now that they have your attention, they push domestication propaganda in the form of rituals (national anthems, even the new “black” national anthem) and spectacles (ads, half time shows). After a Super Bowl there are occasional riots, but this is like when the waters of a flooded dam are redirected so as to keep the integrity of the dam — the Super Bowl brought tens of thousands of the most passionate fans, and not all of them will have their masculine energy siphoned off completely; they are allowed to expend the rest of their energy in a controlled way.
You might think, “but what about the kneeling for the flag controversy? Didn’t this create more controversy rather then unity?” No, this acted as a marketing campaign to give football more attention in the at-risk cohorts (black nationalists and MAGA guys). Both of them are now tuning in to football news, maybe they watch and want the kneeler to lose, maybe the opposite. Were they to ignore that controversy, they would not be capturing the full cohort they want and neither would they be accomplishing the sublimation ritual. Adding gambling to football culture was another way to do this (while producing an enormous profit), because gambling was already in video games but you want attention given to football as well. I think this is also why the “Sketch” streamer is being astroturfed. This is where Travis and cowboys and TSwift come in. They code right, they bring in more viewers.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Connotation plays a big role here. “Stuck in a forest with a man” is a phrase that has horror movie connotations, and isn’t going to be analyzed in some dispassionate objective meticulous way (the median forest of median size, with the median man, some random distance away). That’s just not how humans will interpret questions on the fly. The question begs to be understood in terms of conflict: why else would you be stuck? Why else would man be compared to bear? The question would be a lot different if it was: “[points to a random man] would you rather be 200ft from that man in a forest, or 200ft from a bear?” Women also do not want to signal that they are interested in strange men, but they do want to signal that they like animals, which is feminine-coded in America.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
America has rolled out a new national anthem, except only for black people: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sQ0B7cF3DQk
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Political goals are accomplished through influence. Communal political influence requires (1) the conscious saving of money which is reinforced socially especially for the rich members, (2) the directing of the money to a centralized lobbying arm which can efficiently accomplish goals, (3) protection against out-group propaganda. Read about the political influence of Kiryas Joel if you’d like, which at one point was the poorest town in America, yet senators would make a speech every year to them because of their donations and block voting; and they then benefitted from that politician’s funding of amenities and lack of investigation into crimes. Political goals are also accomplished through consumer behavior. Religious cultures direct consumer behavior toward in-group providers, and boycott companies against their goals. Religions take the money that is ordinarily spent on wasteful consumerism and direct it to communal goods. They also hire among their own.
vastly overstate said religious protections
No I do not. Every Protestant church has religious protections.
isn't this just "instrumentalizing religion”
That depends if you believe in it or not. If you don’t believe in it, then obviously you shouldn’t do it. Personally, I have had divine revelations in dreams and given an understanding of mystical meaning behind Biblical symbols and allegories. But that’s just me, you know? I’m also tired: of people who don’t understand how people work, of my dog eating deer poop, of hubris, of the cost of a double cheeseburger at Wendy’s. I am not sure what tiredness has to do with this conversation.
ridiculous idea
Yeah, civic nationalism has really been working hasn’t it? Was it Einstein who said that the mark of a genius was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Meanwhile, I will stick to my understanding of how culture operates which is informed by thousands of years of history and a hundred years of social psychology.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
that cannot be emulated
If you lack creativity, then nothing can be emulated. You should just accept defeat at that point. Consider that Hebrew is a reinvented language.
tax exemption
It’s so difficult yet virtually every small non-denominational Christian church is tax exempt? This is another case of defeatism. No one said change is trivially easy; this level of defeatism is unwarranted.
these just so happened to give you true belief in the specific doctrines of the denomination you found it most convenient for your political goals to join
They give me insight into a lot of things, most of them have absolutely no political consequences. But some have political consequences, sure. Is it surprising that God wants his people to thrive? This is the basis of all religion.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
“Consider that Hebrew is a reinvented language” means consider that at one time a group decided to re-invent their in-group language. And yes, there’s a structure in place, which was started by people creating the structure, between the 18th and 20th century, depending on schism.
religions" invented whole-cloth tend to be much harder to get past "tax scam" skepticism
Like what? Satanism? What is more difficult than inventing a religion that worships literal Satan? How about the Rastafarians or the Nation of Islam. I dismiss the objections because they aren’t legitimate. You do not need an in-group language, although you can re-invent one; you don’t need history, although that helps — all history begins somewhere.
implication that one can have politically-useful divine revelations
Boy do I have some Abrahamic religions to show you. How many wives did Joseph Smith get to have after his revelation? How many riches, wives, and conquered nations did the early Arab expansion obtain? Was the Moses story invented to explain why Moses was kicked out of Egypt? Here’s a less outlandish tale: Western culture is uniquely chosen by God and the revealed texts are the Western classics. This can be your religion, if you’d like it to be (nota bene: it is not mine).
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I enjoy chewing ginger and thyme. What else should I try chewing on?
What if white people would have retained their tribalism in the absence of Jewish anthropologists and social scientists who promoted the elimination of white identity? Would this change things?
Conversion to Judaism in Christian white spaces is starting to become a small thing
A singular former Goldman Sachs analyst converts to Judaism and this is supposed to be a “thing” among white people? I don’t think so. What does Shia LaBeouf tell us, who has a much larger cultural influence?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I mostly agree with them, but what do they expect to be different about today than in 2014-2016? Trump ran on combatting illegal immigration with tremendous passion; nothing happened. We can try the same thing next time, but I doubt anything will happen. “45 percent of Hispanics support deportation” means that the more Hispanics you import the harder deportation gets. I imagine that as Indian Americans ascend as a political force, they will push for greater Indian migration like in Canada.
It just strikes me as an ineffectual hope that there is ever going to be a change in immigration policy. Maybe a national boycott of companies that donate / are complicit in replace migration would be more helpful? That is at least halfways feasible.
edit another thought: in order to create an energetic political culture which can actually expand, regenerate, and effectively complete its goals re: immigration or something else, you need the kind of political culture that thrived in the 19th and early 20th century in America. Politics was intwined with drinking, music, dancing, fashion, brotherhoods, art, unique magazines, and so on — they weren’t a spectator sport, they made up most of your social identity. When I try to imagine a conservative youth movement that forms a brotherhood, shouts political chants, meets for drinks and dancing, and wear the same attire… the media will go 100 on declaring this fascism. Any viable and energetic conservative political expression is fascism, literal Hitlerism. See how they hate VDare and their castle when it’s mostly innocent old men? University clubs and the infrequent conference is not enough culture to create the political culture necessary to curb illegal immigration.
I can’t help but feel that Elon purposefully drew attention to Fuentes, by posting multiple replies about him. Yeah, he can say “well akshually I’m philosemitic”, and maybe he is, but by his actions he is making hundreds of thousands check him out. I also find the Andrew/Tristan Tate interactions notable; it’s hard to overstate how influential Andrew Tate is for, like, 9-16yo boys of diverse backgrounds. Tate essentially stamping approval on Nick Fuentes is a strange phenomenon which is leading impressionable young boys to his influence. It’s also pretty funny how the ADL has negligible public support: The ADL’s tweet about Nick Fuentes and Nick Fuentes’ first tweet had the same views for a time, but Fuentes had 80x the likes (adjusted for his persona non grata status among normies, maybe 120x the likes?). The ADL is the arm of wealthy donors — it has no backers among the common folk.
coffee_enjoyer
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6hr ago
The far right has little knowledge of how ultra orthodox communities operate, which is a shame because it’s the perfect discursive weapon: either you must defend the orthodox practices (and then approve of similar white aspirations), or you must criticize them (and then ask, “how did they steal one billion dollars in public funds and not be prosecuted”)? It is a win-win discursive tool.
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
I think the argument would fail in this case, because there is clearly no greater evidence of power than the ability to steal billions for your group and go unpunished — indeed to have your reputation unstained. Only the most propagandized progressive would fall back to the “powerful tautology”, if you will — so about 5% of them.
The only realistic move is to organize into a tight religious in-group, because: religion is the best way to train the young’s’ spiritual/mental immune system against political propaganda, religion is the best way to transmit cultural/philosophical concerns, and (most of all) America offers strong religious protections which would allow you to live sequestered away from normal life in America. Note that (while I think Western Christianity is the best) your religion need not be fantastical or even really theistic. Unitarian Universalism for instance is simply the progressive worldview codified into religious dogma and adorned in tax protections. There’s nothing stopping a conservative from establishing a religion that believes in Spinoza’s God, believes that the Western classics were divinely inspired, or even believes that certain developed populations are God’s chosen people. Now your community’s resources can be pooled together without taxes, you can establish schools with a religious and conduct requirement, etc
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