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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31903 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.

The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.

Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.

The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

That's what they want you to think. But there's a some amount of evidence Christianity is just disguised Imperial Cult that went a bit astray. Of course we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

See:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-mark-antony-2-parallel

So, Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans, although they kind of fumbled it at the end by not managing to deprecate the old testament entirely.

Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans

Yeah, sure, that really works out, given the support of the Hasmodeans by the Romans. They invented a new religion to convert the Jews. Instead of, you know, stomping all over them as per usual practice when conquering a new province.

Excuse me while I stoop down to pick up my eyeballs, they fell out of their sockets after rolling too hard.

I was really hoping he wasn’t channeling Joseph Atwill’s thesis. It’s a historical conclusion that’s ‘very’ far reaching and implausible.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

A hero character who loves the poor isn’t that uncommon, in fact Buddha fits this fairly well too. Buddha is a prince who essentially renounced his throne to become a religious aesetic. He had disciples, was a traveling preacher, and so on. So you can put this “character” onto both Jesus and Buddha and if memory serves Krishna as well.

As to the specific events, they only fit if you take very vague descriptions of the events themselves. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan, he wasn’t crossing as a conqueror. Jesus didn’t just say “don’t be scared,” he calmed the storm. The Sanhedrin had mostly theological disputes with Jesus, and not that he was looking to establish a kingdom or something.

The other part is that Jesus is very interested (mostly in Mathew, though he teaches the Law in other places) in Judaism itself. The Shema quote (this is the most important credal statement in Judaism— Hear Oh Israel, the Lord year God, the Lord is One), concerns over Jewish temple sacrifices, and the Jewish Sabbath are things that just don’t fit. Roman’s were polytheistic and their sacrifices were not identical to Jewish sacrifices, and Romans don’t keep any sort of Sabbath. It simply doesn’t make sense to insert Jewish ideas into the mouth of a character invented to absorb the imperial cult.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

You're telling me that Julius Caesar and Jesus both just happen to have crossed a river at some point in their lives? That's stretching it too far to be a coincidence, it must be a secret code.

My God, we're overlooking the most obvious piece of evidence literally staring us in the face!

JC!

JC - Julius Caesar/Jesus Christ.

They told us what they were doing right from the start!

If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

Try it.

Someone already did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Here you go.

Did you never hear of folktale classification? This is breaking down story elements into what we'd now call tropes which are commonly shared by different stories from different places. It's how Jung gets his notion of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes:

A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, tried to evaluate the time of emergence for the "Tales of Magic" (ATU 300–ATU 749), based on a phylogenetic model. They found four of them to belong to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stratum of magic tales:

ATU 328 The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure (= Jack and the Beanstalk and Thirteen)

ATU 330 The Smith and the Devil (KHM 81a)

ATU 402 The Animal Bride (= The Three Feathers, KHM 63 and The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat, KHM 106)

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (= The White Snake, KHM 17 and The Queen Bee, KHM 62)

There's an entire cottage industry from the 19th century of dismissing Christianity as just another Middle Eastern mystery cult (the dying and resurrected saviour motif from Osiris to Dionysius), as well as the valiant attempts of Frazer and others to reduce all mythology ultimately to the Solar Myth and fertilty myths. Comparative religion is the field for "hey DAE the resemblances between X and Y?"

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

...Girard's "grievances" against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."

We also get 19th ethnographers trying to classify 'primitive' beliefs according to that sort of schema, and the euhemerists culminating in the philogist Max Müller and his famous phrase that "mythology is a disease of language":

He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language". By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.

we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

People who insist on their harebrained pet theories as UNTHINKABLE to those obviously small-minded people they live alongside are an incredible tedious lot. Academia historians talk about minute details and obscure theories all the time. Constantly. They don't stop. The degree to which they dig into minute things honestly scares me, occasionally. If they aren't collectively convinced by one guy's substack posts, consider that they are unconvinced for a reason, and that it isn't because they just are too brainwashed by the man to see the REAL truth.0

Academia historians talk about minute details and obscure theories all the time. Constantly. They don't stop.

There's a difference between 'minute detail' and 'most everything we've been taking to be true' is BS. E.g. there's a hell of a lot of controversy with something as 'minute' as hellenic influence on the old testament.

Admitting you've overlooked something of this importance, even if the reasons were obvious is on completely another level.

If they aren't collectively convinced by one guy's substack posts

It's not "one guy's substack post", it's an entire book. The substack presents a slightly modified version of the theory.

See ~the public lecture of the book's author, Francesco Carotta.

https://www.carotta.de/subseite/echo/tumult-e.html

I started in on your John Carter (John Carter - JC - more of the secret conspiracy uncovered!) post and skipped out at this part:

This camp will note that, outside of the gospels themselves – which can’t really be taken as historical documents, given the incredible events narrated within – there is no credible historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. There are a couple of paragraphs in Josephus and Tacitus, sure, but these are obvious fabrications given that they’re inserted without rhyme or reason in the middle of otherwise coherent narratives, and are written in entirely different styles from those of the putative authors. Essentially, at some point in the past some monk or other was reading through old historical records and said, ah shit, there’s nothing in here about Jesus, people might take that as a reason to doubt! And then proceeded to get out his quill pen and make up the data to fit the model.

Guy is a bog-standard Jesus Mythicist, nothing to see here folks, there's enough rebuttal elsewhere of the loony-tunes.

Now, Carotta: the idea is not as batshit insane as it may sound, because we have an example of something like this happening - the Buddha re-imagined as a Christian saint.

But the rationale for turning a recognised historical Roman into a Jew isn't at all convincing. The Jews were despised, why on earth would you make your great national hero into one of the conquered and inferior peoples? This would be like swapping out George Washington for Benedict Arnold.

Okay, so if the Romans had no reason to turn Caesar into a Jew, turn it around; maybe the Jews (or a small cult of them) wanted to improve things for their people by having a god modelled on Caesar that would appeal to the Romans and ensure they got better treatment.

How did that work out with the sack of Jerusalem and the persecution of Christians within the Empire?

As for "[Caesar's] character shares many of the personality traits associated with Jesus – most notably the strong emphasis on mercy, and the over-riding concern with the welfare of the poor".

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

The guy that the following anecdote is told about, had a strong emphasis on mercy? When he was twenty-five and on his way to study oratory in Rhodes, a little diversion of his journey happened:

In 75 BCE, Julius Caesar was captured by Cilician pirates, who infested the Mediterranean sea. The Romans had never sent a navy against them, because the pirates offered the Roman senators slaves, which they needed for their plantations in Italy. As a consequence, piracy was common.

In chapter 2 of his Life of Julius Caesar, Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (46-c.120) describes what happened when Caesar encountered the pirates. The translation below was made by Robin Seager.

[2.1] First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was that they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty.

[2.2] Then, when he had sent his followers to the various cities in order to raise the money and was left with one friend and two servants among these Cilicians, about the most bloodthirsty people in the world, he treated them so highhandedly that, whenever he wanted to sleep, he would send to them and tell them to stop talking.

[2.3] For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner.

[2.4] He also wrote poems and speeches which he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness.

[2.5] However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them.

[2.6] He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to [Marcus] Junius, the governor of Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners.

[2.7] Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case. Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.

"By the way, when I'm free, I'm going to execute the lot of you" versus "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do". Yes, the resemblance is uncanny.

he Jews were despised, why on earth would you make your great national hero into one of the conquered and inferior peoples? This would be like swapping out George Washington for Benedict Arnold.

No. You make up a historical figure of theirs , or embellish the tale of some historical figure with properties of your cultic hero, and then these guys are unknowingly worshipping someone they'd much prefer to hate. It's liek the best form of joke, and a useful one if it includes such messages as 'obey the secular authorities, pay your taxes, you'll get your due in the next world'.. .

What do you say about points from 20. onward at the https://www.carotta.de/subseite/echo/tumult-e.html#bronnen

?

Cilician pirates

Mercy

..we were talking about pirates, mind you. Which is a form of long-running organised armed robbery. Was Jesus ever stressing the need to be merciful to people whose way of life was based on preying on others ?

39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

That article is the lowest form of conspirational thinking.

Caesar went north into Gallia; Jesus went north into Galilee.

Caesar went to SPAin to cleanse it of pompeian forces; Jesus went to a SPA to cleanse his feet.

This is the equivalent of "American historians in the 19th century noticed they had no Great Military Leader for the Revolution, so they copied the Duke of Wellington and instead called him George Washington".

WASH-ING-TON, WELL-ING-TON, I mean they're practically the same name! And you WASH with water that you get from a WELL. Could they have made it any clearer?

There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:

It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Caesar had an infamous love affair with Cleopatra, widely regarded by Romans as a whorish seductress; Jesus had an affair with the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁

He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:

His funeral, however, was rather interesting. Mark Antony had a wax effigy of Caesar created, in the pose in which Caesar had been found dead, wounds and all, which for the purposes of display was affixed to a cross together with his bloody robes. The effigy was raised in front of the crowd so that the plebs could see for themselves what had been done to their champion. Antony was a showman that way. From Appian (amusingly, at the link, it says the translation was done by none other than John Carter):

When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer. Howling and lamenting, they surrounded the senate-house, where Caesar had been killed, and burnt it down, and hurried about hunting for the murderers, who had slipped away some time previously.

There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.

He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:

The mechanical device in question was a tropaeum, a cruciform device on which things were hung for display. Caesar was known for showing off his various war trophies on tropaea, and often placed the device on his coinage, to the degree that tropaea became symbolically associated with him

Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.

"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.

Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.

(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).

EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:

When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia1, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.

There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:

Then, swept very easily on to passionate emotion, he stripped the clothes from Caesar's body, raised them on a pole and waved them about, rent as they were by the stabs and befouled with the dictator's blood.

Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.

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