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James Lindsay of the grievance studies fame has been targeting the right for the past few months. The grievance studies was fairly popular when it came out and he even went on JRE and podcasts run by IDW and adjacent people but is now punching right.
His article summarizes his points about getting parts of the communist manifesto published with a healthy bit of editing in a Christian journal but unlike the last time it is not being taken as seriously as of now.
James has termed the actual right "woke right" and routinely gets hammered in his own comments by everyone to the right of trump, including Auron Macintyre who is not even a strict ethno-nationalist. James like the rest of the IDW is in a wierd spot as the temporary thermidor and rollback of censorship on X (formerly twitter) has allowed people to explicitly talk culture war without being de-platformed which for him is "woke". The IDW ran out of ideas a while back, Auron who i mentioned beforehand was anonymous for a while back when he strictly made NRx videos and is now working with the Blaze without any fears of being cancelled. Joe Rogan has slowly aligned with the Trump VC camp and others have just become plain irrelevant.
The criticisms have already started pouring in with one of our own in tracingwoodgrains chiming in too. I don't expect excessive amounts of rigor from the publication involved here and am neither well-versed in Christianity nor Marxism or any philosophy for that matter but this seems kinda worn out at this point. James yearns for this unstable equilibrium of 90s liberalism without realising that political systems are dynamic. The 90s which he misses were always going to be just temporary and were 2020s for plenty of people, not as much as today. Those who are true believers of christ will rightfully call him out for being a bad-faith actor trying to pull stunts on a publication whilst being too afraid to discuss taboo topics.
Members of babylon bee, the satire website agree with James whilst most like Cernovich are trying to point out that Lindsay is conceding ground and the edits he made render the headline "Christian journal publishes the communist manifesto false". Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin also found this [unappealing] (https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1864247964442538324), Carl is a noted atheist who routinely wanted ethnonationalists and rabid Christians to be taken less seriously so not far off from Lindsay if we start from 2019.
I would be happy to read what he wrote and learn his claims' accuracy. I have little idea about formal logic or epistemology of any kind. Also I'm pleasantly happy to see sargon improve as a political figure, he did streams with nrx people and didn't repeat cuck right talking points about Marx, genuinely nice improvement from his days losing debates to Richard Spencer on warskis show.
I was hoping we can get a convo about it going on here, as the rest of the internet is a bit of shitshow, and with our anti-woke bias it feels like this could be a topic that cuts right down the middle of the Motte.
I find what James is doing pretty frustrating because the concept of "woke right" feels quite coherent to me. To me, it would mean right-wing people viewing the world through the same oppressor-oppressed lens, deindivudialized to the point where any personal merits would be dismissed due to belonging to an oppressor class. I think there are people like that on the right, and they tend to spend their time putting forward theories about the Jews controlling the world. James seems to go a lot further than that, I can't find the relevant tweet, but from the firehose I saw in the last few days some of the relevant criteria were:
The problem I have here is that as far as I'm concerned these are not sufficient criteria to call the left woke. I've always said you can be socialist / communist / etc. and not be woke. Hell you could be a feminist / LGBTQ++ / black nationalist but without that distinct "uplift the voices of the oppressed over the voices of the oppressors / your opinion is invalid you cishetwhitemale" it just doesn't seem all that woke to me.
Now, if he wants to pick a fight with the illiberal right (and I think that's a better label for what he's going after) that's fair game, but the other frustrating thing is that in doing so the liberals seem to deploy cancel-culture-y tactics. For all the talk of how they are illiberal and want to limit free speech, all I see from the lib-brigade is ostracism, trying to generate a stink around people they don't like, and quarantining conversations. I could maybe understand it, if what they wanted to section off was holocaust denial or outright race-hatred, but if you're too afraid to debate a theocrat or a monarchist the very core of liberalism becomes a joke.
Carl, and a lot of 2019 liberals (myself included), had their break with liberalism so I don't know if this is completely fair.
Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?
There's no hard reason. Christian ethics are the water we swim in, so people don't bother to provide counterarguments for things that are clearly wrong in the Christian tradition.
Depends on what you mean by theocracy. Sharia-style religious law as a substitute for civil codes is something that is forced on Christianity occasionally(eg in the millet system), but it's not an endogenous tendency. On the other hand, technically England is a Christian theocracy based on its legitimating principles today.
I tend to take the view that true theocracy is something foreign to Christianity, because Christianity tends to nearly always, when it has a choice, put a lay ruler in command who has an understanding of the boundaries of religious influence in his kingdom(and historically it has been a kingdom, or at least some form of one-man rule). But at some level this is a category/definitional debate- was Ireland a theocracy in 1950? Spain?
I also see this term as well as "separation of church and state" as very confusing. After some deliberation looking into constitution of my country to me theocracy means that the power of government rests in religious institutions. As an example, if local archbishop or some religious council has power to unilaterally declare a new religious public holiday or enforce blasphemy laws, then it is theocracy.
However, this does not mean that people any society where religion has sway is automatically a theocracy. If local church preaches blasphemy laws and general public votes in religious leaders who establish such laws via structure like parliament then it is not a theocracy. To me it is sufficient to have differentiation between government and church structure, not that religious people cannot be part of government implementing their religious ideas.
Paradoxically this is often lost on many secular atheists, who deem anything not in line with their own secular ideology as theocracy. It is just a power move where they want to make secular atheism as reigning state religion preventing other ideas from establishing themselves.
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Well, yes, but otoh if Christ is King, that other guy can't be. Or at least that's how I've heard it explained by Christian anarchists.
In fact 'king' doesn't imply absolute authority; there can be a whole hierarchy of kings, high kings, and so on. "King" is cognate with 'kin' and means the patriarchal figure of a kin-group; a nation. An emperor is a different concept.
At no point in this post am I verging upon my own takes on the matter, just by the by.
Christ is King of Kings, afterall
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