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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Time for current culture war item, reviving 20 years old controversies in much different world.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian

Some feel it as betrayal, some as vindication, but all see it as big thing. But is it a thing of any importance?

Reading through the manifesto, it seems strange. First, it does not contain the word "Jesus", not even once. Neither the word "salvation".

So what it talks about?

Threats to precious Western democracy, freedom, rules based international order and Judeo-Christian tradition

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

historical facts as accurate as "Cleopatra was black"

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities.

and mid-life crisis. Permanent Middle Eastern crisis is child's play compared to eternally recurring middle life crisis.

Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

So why Christianity?

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.

How is Christianity supposed to help in fighting "China, Russia and Iran" is left unclear. Of these coutries, Russia explicitly claims to fight for Christianity against Western Jewish Nazi homosexual Satanism.

How would AHA answer Putin, how would she prove that his interpretation of Christianity is wrong and her "Judo-Christian" faith is the true Christian tradition and true message of Jesus?

And for wokeism, Christianity hadn't proved not to be very effective in fighting it.

(and if you need Christianity do defeat something so absurd as wokeism, you already lost)

SENIOR: What would you like for your birthday, son?

JUNIOR: I want to chop off my dick, dad.

SENIOR: Do not do it, son!

JUNIOR: Why?

SENIOR: (long pause and head scratching) The Bible! The Bible forbids it, son!

JUNIOR: Where?

SENIOR: (fast and frantic searching through book) Wait, son! It must be here, somewhere!

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

Curious what exact church AHA joined. Churches that simultaneously reject wokeism and support "civilization war" against Axis of Evil, churches that fly Ukraine, Israeli and Taiwan flags but lack rainbow, trans and BLM flags tend to be rather thin of the ground.

I dislike people dancing around the issue.

There is a massive population of white Americans, mainly Evangelicals, who had been indoctrinated with this meaningless Judeo-Christian gibberish that just means "everything good in the world". Invoking «Judeo-Christian» is the master key to getting their cooperation in literally any matter: they'll automatically recall "everything good" (freedom, democracy, tradition, civilization, antiwoke, diversity, LGBT rights, Christ, Rapture, our Middle Eastern allies – doesn't matter, details of what counts as goodness will be prompted by the context of the Current Year, they don't really have stable moral doctrines) and associate it with you, then go and kill or die for whatever cause you propose… Or, at least, that seems to be the theory driving Republican politics (and politicking on Republican-coded but in actuality bipartisan issues). The problem is that these people were a little bit too successfully dunked upon in years where great power conflict seemed less probable, and warm bodies less needed, than in the near future. They've been somewhat jaded and demoralized and alienated and their demographic representation has simply shrunk. New Atheism has been complicit in this.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks). We'll also be seeing more "based" recruiting ads for the Army. As Trump has proven, the Republican base only asks for tokens of respect, nothing more, so I expect this vulgar pandering to work well.

So now we will be having New Atheist influencers peddling this stuff harder (and old fighters for Pure Reason like Gad Saad will be asked to pipe it down with habitual anti-whitey remarks).

Right on cue: now the problem isn't Whitey from Nebraska, it's unassimilable migration that is causing the Death Spiral of the West. These Jews adopting 2016 alt-right talking points for their immediate benefit aren't going to convince anyone.

Jews say things you disagree with: Perfidious, deceitful

Jews say things you agree with: trickery that won’t convince anyone

The irony (and I say this as someone who doesn’t like him) is that half the people clowning on Saad for saying hardcore white antisemitism still exists in the US are literally hardcore white antisemites such as yourself on dissident right Twitter. Saad says “yeah midwestern whites can still be antisemitic” and then some midwestern white American in the tweet replies says some implicit or explicit version of “this treacherous Jew is so wedded to his destructive leftism and hatred of whites that he doesn’t recognize that white antisemitism doesn’t even exist anymore”, which is an interesting way of disagreeing with him.

In the end, every donor cent that no longer goes to progressive causes is good for the American right. Getting upset about Jews turning against mass immigration because they have the temerity to acknowledge your own (real) contempt for them seems cheap. The only thing these dissident rightists would accept from Jews is crying, apologetic prostration along with maybe ritual suicide after tearfully admitting all the wrongs they have done to the Huwhite race.

Come on now. Gad Saad's long-running beef with the archetypal "Roscoe" is entirely motivated by Roscoe being a rural white hick on whom it's acceptable, fashionable and fun to dunk, not by him buying into SS-style politics.

I don’t know who Saad is other than that I suppose I vaguely typecast him into that generic midwit-bait Israeli pseudointellectual category like Yuval Harari. Nevertheless, I thought the linked tweet did not seem particularly unreasonable.

Expecting Jews in general to become wignats overnight after brave DR types ‘call them out’ on apparent hypocrisy over ethnonationalism is clearly hostile. Here is Saad realizing, just as rightist whites (although far from all whites, of course) have, that mass immigration from the third world is a bad idea, and all SS can imply is that he only did it because he finally realized they’re a threat to him and his kind. This is true, but that same logic, of course, applies to many a gentile white anti-immigration activist too.

Ok but he's literally having some fixation on this Roscoe person, I had to check https://twitter.com/search?q=roscoe%20from%3Agadsaad&src=typed_query

I defer to you as someone with more knowledge of his posting history. Still, surely you understand my point? It's as if someone on the left says "well, you know it's just ridiculous to say that most progressives want children to be able to have gender reassignment surgery without their parents permission. Oh, me? Well, I actually do believe that, sure, I was speaking in general terms". This may be true, but it's still a strange argument, and one that would get rather a lot of pushback from many here.

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