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Actually, I think the nuance is lost. Social justice warriors weren’t simply inspired by Christianity. They don’t have similarities by coincidence. They are a direct evolutionary branch of mainline Protestantism. There is path dependency.
ArmedTooHeavily
16m ago
I think phrasing it as "Progressivism is atheistic puritanical christianity" captures some nuance that "it came from protestantism" doesn't.
Hieronymus
17m ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
Pynewacket
24m ago
While my first impulse is to deny and defend the church, with examples like these and seeing lady bishops and whatnot in some denominations, I can't really deny the reality that there is truth to that statement. Always a disappointment to see the religion of the Crusades being so limp wristed with statements like
As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins. Jesus tells us to care for the poor and vulnerable as we would care for him, and we must follow that command.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
24m ago
Speaking just to the specific question of how one understand’s Christian love, I tend to take Brand’s stance on it.
What the world calls by that name “Love”,
I know not and I reck not of.
God’s love I recognise alone,
Which melts not at the piteous plaint,
Which is not moved by dying groan,
And its caress is chastisement.
What answer’d through the olive-trees
God, when the Son in anguish lay,
Praying, “O take this cup away!”
Did He then take it? Nay, child, nay:
He made him drink it to the lees.
Never did word so sorely prove
The smirch of lies, as this word Love:
With devilish craft, where will is frail,
Men lay Love over, as a veil,
And cunningly conceal thereby
That all their life is coquetry.
Whose path’s the steep and perilous slope,
Let him but love,—and he may shirk it;
If he prefer Sin’s easy circuit,
Let him but love,—he still may hope;
If God he seeks, but fears the fray,
Let him but love,—’tis straight his prey;
If with wide-open eyes he err,
Let him but love,—there’s safety there!
God’s love is infinitely more than our human conception of love, and it is bundled up together with his righteousness and wrath and holiness. The same God who says “Love one another as I have loved thee,” is perfectly, rightly capable of wiping out peoples and places. Failure to grasp this is how you wind up with “Love wins” and “Hate has no home here” churches that would never tell anyone they are living in specific sin. But it is clear from Scripture that whatever else God is, he is not what is conceived of in the modern understanding of “God is love.”
I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Amos 5:21-22
I make the argument that when Christianity, taken as a whole, was most adherent to God’s commands and intentions, is also the time it was riding high in the world in terms of temporal power. It was the time when it had made itself strong enough to resist outside conquest and to, from that base of operations, eventually evangelize the world, however imperfectly. At that time it was confident in itself, assertive, and had not yet fully fallen under the sway of the “The only thing that matters is love” heresy.
Similarly, the interpretation of agape gives the pre-arranged conclusion away from the beginning. Agape isn’t just for comrades in the cause, it is meant, in varying degrees, for everyone.
In theory, I should have agape for Slavoj Zizek, just like I should for a fellow parishioner. It has nothing to do with comrades in the Communist or cause-oriented sense and I would argue demonstrates Zizek’s extremely weak understanding of or an intentional misrepresentation of the concept in order to bolster an otherwise weak argument.
FtttG
26m ago
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
Quantumfreakonomics
31m ago
A lot of people wonder why Curtis Yarvin is taken seriously. There’s been a lot of drama lately about whether Moldbug Sold Out, or whether there is any reason to take him seriously. A lot of this comes from an overfocusing on his monarchy prescriptions, but this really misses a lot of the deeper intellectual content. Social justice came from American Mainline Protestantism. They are the same thing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
32m ago
I think for a lot of genre fiction, an AI book edited by a human would probably be just fine for the median reader. Most of the published books in genre fiction are written to be read quickly and forgotten just as quickly, written more for people who want to read in transit between places (say on a bus, train, or plane) or as a pastime on vacation. It’s not nor was it ever intended to be serious reading. And while I don’t think AI at present can write well enough to be read as a beach read, it can produce something that would be publishable with a reasonable amount of developmental and line editing.
The advice for producing such novels is actually pretty cookie cutter. There are known plot development tools (save the cat is the most common), character development sheets, and style advice. Training an AI to use the beat sheets and other advice would produce a reasonable rough draft of a novel. Editing those novels might still require a human touch, but it’s probably not prohibitively expensive.
Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.
Sounds like they may align with RFK Jr.'s stance. It'd be interesting if that creates enough of a market for hormone-free cattle that it shifts U.S. production as a whole.
I don't have any specific insight as to intentions there, but I assume markets will respond to shifted incentives like that.
As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.
I'm pretty sure the main goal of that particular provision is to give the U.S. a "stake" in Ukrainian independence that falls short of bringing them into NATO, but justifies them having some kind of presence in country to act as a deterrent.
Like holy cow, your own article points out:
“There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell”
So if the U.S. has an official agreement granting an interest in those deposits, even if its not mineable now, its a decent deterrent to future Russian incursions into the border areas that Russia would have to cross through to drive into Ukraine. It gives a future U.S. president some basic cover to drop some troops or similar in, if needed.
The U.S. keeps finding deposits of rare earth elements and other resources within its own territory (whether they can be extracted economically is a different question).
There is no SOLID reason the U.S. should have any stake in the security of Ukraine, but contriving one that's enough to give plausible cover for future actions is helpful towards leveraging a peace agreement.
This is what I'm trying to get across, if you assume Trump is JUST trying to secure the first order goal, getting more minerals for the U.S., rather than using that as leverage to work towards a lasting peace agreement, you're severely underestimating the man. Hell, he's apparently gotten Ukraine actually paying for U.S. weapons now. A second step seems to be using American companies to rebuild Ukraine, but I'll go on record saying that rebuilding probably won't solve their their population nosedive so in the longer term it'll be a bit pointless.
Motte and Bailey. Maybe Christians should hold everything in common, selling property and possessions to give to anyone in need. Is that how Zizek lives or does he need to remove something from his own eye? Nowhere does the New Testament call Christians to advocate the violent redistribution of the fruits of non-believers’ labor.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
42m ago
I might take a stab at guessing which countries might try calling his bluff and letting the timer run out
I expect Canada to call the bluff; I also expect this one to, uniquely, be a bit less of a bluff than it is for everyone else. I think a lot of the onshoring is, or could be reasonably expected to, come from factories and personnel in Ontario- it might legitimately be easier for the US to increase the size of the US and onshore manufacturing that way. Fortunately for him, the people who are working in those factories just lost an election to a bunch of welfare queens (and the losers know it); all Trump need do now is stay the course and have the Premiers sue for peace on their own terms.
I continue to think my Model of Trump is far better at predicting his actions than virtually any pundit out there, and he's far more of a rational actor than even people here credit him
The problem is just that the negotiations are, unusually, public; everyone else just has to wait (and get their panties in a twist, and complain on the Internet). It's only been 4 months.
TowardsPanna
44m ago
That's a different question. You asked what made the holocaust worse than the holodomor. Afaik the holocaust was more intentionally sadistic and drawn out, intended to maximize suffering for every victim.
Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible because Christianity’s is individualistic. Every soul matters. Every soul is redeemable. There are no chosen people. Every person is worthy of god’s love.
These ideas are destructive to communism, which is a collectivist ideology. Christians are saying that you should love each other, and that people are all, each, valuable individuals—communism says you should love each other insofar as it serves the emergent gestalt that sits on top of it.
How to integrate this into a functioning society: hardcore individualistic ruthless capitalism is in tension with the morals of the religion. Christian ethics act as a governor which serves to prevent stuff like becoming a wage slave to Amazon, and aborting your children so you can keep working.
You need both of these things, although the “hardcore ruthless capitalism” I’m talking about is not so much a “thing” as it is the base state of human existence. You have the base individualism, free association, etc. and then are Christian morals on top of it to make it all work.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
Again, those things are bad, but what makes Jews special?
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
The Jew-targeting wasn’t what made the Holocaust evil. The mass murder was.
Are you forgetting the 10+ years of worse and worse bullying, terrorizing, marginalization, robbery, deportations, starvation, pogroms, slave labor, etc - gradually worsening systematic destruction of every jew and group of jews at the level of body, mind and soul? It wasn't just killing. The sadistic, dehumanizing killing process started a very long time before their eyes closed on this world.
In somewhat similar vein I care not a zilch about some acquaintances’ complaints about AI coming to music and overriding everything with slop. From my point of view that already happened 25 years ago, only with human slop (aka modern trends) not just overwhelming quality stuff in volume but outright putting it in front of execution squad and pulling all the triggers at once to ensure none of it remains except as old recordings.
successfully pivoted
There was no pivot; Easterners were always going to vote for themselves and were hungry for an excuse.
a hate symbol during the trucker protests
Who/whom. The flag being used to represent people it's not intended to represent, in a way it wasn't made to represent them, is powerful symbolism. Same thing with the SuperStraight flag- the Canadian flag is for Easterners, by Easterners; that tree doesn't naturally grow outside Upper/Lower Canada.
He invoked concepts of [the East has the moral right to fuck up everything]
Indeed.
Cons only win if the left is split
The West (the free, productive part of Canada) only wins when the East is split. The NDP/Western Left- what used to be our mechanism of co-operation between West and East- has collapsed in favor of Eastern imperialism (the Western Left tried to out-East the East and failed). We were on the road to reconciliation, but Easterners blew it up, and they did so deliberately because they wanted to play culture warrior.
We have very little national identity to begin with
Fortunately for the rest of us, the Easterners are hell-bent on sabotaging it every chance they get. We'd be better off on our own.
yunyun333
1hr ago
The U.K. is apparently going to buy U.S. Beef
Britain and the EU won't buy beef from hormone-fed cattle. The way they talk about it, this probably won't change.
Ukraine Mineral Deal
As discussed previously this is a nothingburger, but if it makes Trump happy, good job Zelensky.
cjet79
1hr ago
skimming through the volumes I didn't find many references to concentration camps. (I did find one in volume 6 that was complaining the germans would starve if too much german land was given to poland, the comparison was with how terrible the conditions would be in a german concentration camp).
But I'm also realizing how much of a nothingburger this is. This was basically a dry administrative account of the war effort. The bombing of Dresden gets a single line. Hiroshima only gets mentioned 4 times. Only one of which is to dryly mention that it was nuked.
Even finding references to London being bombed was difficult.
One of the few times the nuremberg trials came up was in reference to a massacre of polish officers that was probably carried out by the Russians. The reason it was brought up is that it was causing frictions between Russia and Poland, and Churchill just wanted to smooth over those frictions.
This is the exact quality of evidence I'm talking about with the conspiracy theory thing. "Why did this news station say a thing on 9/11 and then never talk about it again? Must be because they were silenced!" Nevermind that they were confused and scared on the day it happened.
"Why doesn't churchill mention it in his super high level summary of the war effort?! Must be cuz it didn't really happen." Nevermind that he directly mentions it elsewhere in different works.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.
Yes, there is. "Keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living" is not a requirement for what remains a Communist dictatorship.
Grant_us_eyes
1hr ago
Given all the horror stories I've casually heard regarding chinese sellers and re-sellers on Amazon, I doubt they care at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
So, I ask- what makes the Holocaust worse than the holodomor to you?
Killing all the members of a group is worse than killing a lot of people.
Genocide, in its literal sense of cide ie completely killing a genos ie an ethnicity or race, is viewed as uniquely bad because of reification of race and ethnicity as concepts. Stalin killed many millions of Slavs, but there was no possibility that he would kill all of them, that left to his own devices there would be no more Slavs remaining. Hitler killed many millions of Jews, and his intention was very much that there would be zero Jews remaining in the areas under his control at the conclusion of his process. Hitler's intention was to exterminate the Jews, Stalin's was never to exterminate the Ukrainians.
So I think the core of privileging killing millions of Jews over killing an equivalent number of Slavs is simply that there are more Slavs, while Jews were reasonably close to being, as it were, an endangered species. The number of Jews has been permanently reduced, the number of Slavs remains large. The rule would be: It's worse to kill all of some group than it is to kill 10% of a 10x larger group.
With regards to animal species, where we can say definitively that two species aren't equivalent and one can't produce the other, I agree with this concept. I'd find it much more abhorrent to kill a California Condor than to kill a Turkey Buzzard, and I'd find it almost infinitely more abhorrent to kill 500 California Condors than to kill 500 or 5,000 or even 50,000 Turkey Buzzards; regardless of the method or motive or degree of cruelty involved. Because the death of a Turkey Buzzard (1/5,600,000 in the USA) is just the death of a bird; the death of a California Condor removes a piece of genetic diversity from the world, some fraction of some utils from everyone.
With regards to humans, I'm a little more skeptical but still see the logic. This attitude reflects a reification of the idea of nationality and race as ideas more important than mere lives. If one recognizes a superhuman value attached to the idea of a nationality as a cultural project, ending that cultural project is much worse than mere murder. If one deeply believes in HBD and one values diversity, either genetic or cultural or whatever, then wiping out a branch of the tree of life is much worse than merely killing a lot of folks.
If one identifies instead by class, than one ends up at Mao's infamous remarks on the subject of nuclear war: Mao expounded at an international conference that China had (at the time) 700 million people, and that even if half of them were wiped out in Nuclear War the remaining 350 million would be able to build world socialism. An Italian communist asked how many Italians would survive. Mao replied "None, but what makes you think Italians are so important to World History?" For a Communist, whose identification is with the international proletariat rather than with race or class, killing every Italian is a small price to pay for permanent liberation from Capital.
Of course this adds obstacles to the cultural diversity arguments. Ok, you still have Ukrainians, but you killed all the Kulaks, so you lost their culture, you lost their unique class of genetics, you might still have Ukrainians but they're not the same Ukrainians. But this lapses quickly into absurdity: any cultural change reduces diversity by killing off what came before, and any lack of cultural change kills off what might have been. Humans are malleable.
faceh
1hr ago
Unless China is absolutely fudging their population numbers to UNDERCOUNT their population drastically (which would be a galaxy-brained move) then they are absolutely fucked in the medium term. There is no way to counterbalance a population where there's a massive class of consumers (the old and decrepit) and not nearly enough producers (young-middle aged workers) to keep everyone at a reasonable standard of living.
Its baked in. The collapse will come, Wile-E-Coyote already ran off the cliff, but they may be able to keep him from looking down for a while with propaganda and manipulation, or manage the fall down better than expected.
So... Trump blinked? These are the tariff numbers we would have if Trump had just imposed the flat 10% rate on China he did on every other country. What benefit did the United States get out of this pause on trade with China? I guess Trump and his inner circle probably made a killing on insider trading this announcement.
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