domain:betonit.substack.com
FistfullOfCrows
8m ago
The Christian memeplex is the biggest driver of tabula-rasa like egalitarian belief. A your usual christian boomers will not be sold on ethnonationalism or racismlite while they believe we all have souls that are the same created by the same being who just so happened to sprinkle them randomly in the people of the earth.
So yes, the alt-right is completely right about Christianity and even more right about the catholic church which has leaned heavily into thirdworldism, taking the white population as granted and gunning for as many black and latin targets they can get their geriatric hands on.
SteveKirkland
15m ago
I'm not talking about people online. That doesn't bother me.
stav
32m ago
Those people doing this never cared about disrespecting the troops. They only cared about magnifying it to people who do.
ResoluteRaven
44m ago
Every time I've gone online since I was 10 years old I've seen some braindead take or fallacious reasoning or contradictory position being expressed. The world is full of people who are ignorant, immature, incoherent, insane, and intransigent and no amount of arguing on my part is going to make a dent in their number. If I tried anyway and blew up at every instance of what appeared to me to be deranged hysteria, I would in fact become one of those deranged hysterics myself (I believe we call them Twitter People). Since that still wouldn't accomplish anything and is, as the kids say, a bad look, I choose to channel my time and energy towards more productive tasks instead. That's all there is to it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
54m ago
There's no universal consensus on the matter, but like you say, the overwhelming majority of Hindus are overjoyed when someone converts, even to the kooky cults like the HKs.
Half of the BJPs regional shtick is the "Ghar wapasi" (Bring 'em home and back into the gold) movement, where Muslims are 'encouraged' to return to their ancestral Hinduism.
A foreign convert? That's a cherry on top. But I'm not aware of any formal way to assign caste, since well, Hinduism for most of its existence wasn't proselytizing, so there was not much need for it. The funny part is when people convert to Islam or Christianity to escape their lower caste status, only to find that those buggers still stick to it, de facto.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
58m ago
Bangalore traffic is notorious even for Indians. Like, you can't pay me enough to drive there. Even the largest motorways drive at the pace of an arthritic snail (xe/xer only has the one foot anyway).
Even more aggravating is that the auto-rickshaws literally charge more than an Uber for equivalent distances, the public transport is absolutely fucked.
stav
1hr ago
I haven't looked too much into it because it's clearly not true and can be dismissed, but one of the guys Richard Spencer has been promoting is Adam Green who in my opinion is insane. I've also seen him promote this book: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Hoax-Pauls-Fooled-Thousand/dp/B0CHX1XV68
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
Oh there are laws, this isn't Mombasa, though the primary concern for those keeping them is the stiff bribes the police demand if they catch you.
It's more that things like proper lane keeping, courteous passing, sensible pedestrian traffic and the like are non-existent. So at the very least my reflexes and my resting heart rate will remain honed. I intend to drive here only long enough to get accustomed to the rote actions of driving while following traffic laws as they nominally exist. Not long enough to develop bad habits like fishing for my wallet when the cops pull me over, or joining in the demolition derby.
ResoluteRaven
1hr ago
Under a worst-case scenario I would expect Chinese economic and political support and perhaps a limited military intervention to stabilize the Kachin and Shan statelets on their border as a buffer zone. There isn't any other country that would want to get involved, so they might even be able to get the UN to foot the bill for such an operation if they play their cards right.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Medicaid may cover a dietician
From what I've seen (with respect to relatives trying to see a dietician), the answer to that is "no." Besides, I'm not sure what more information they can give me.
Your primary care may have some routine health suggestions
"Eat less, work out more." That's what she always says.
And the key point is — why should I even bother with all this effort, anyway? It sounds like so much effort… to what end?
Why shouldn't I just let the fat pack on and on?
FeepingCreature
1hr ago
I don't think this shows preference so much as path dependence. All of those are Schelling points where just having an agreed standard is more valuable than having the best or most culturally resonant one.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Many also claim that Christianity was created by Jews to control Whites.
How would that even work? The Jews (who back then would not have been under any genetic pressure to be cleverer than similar societies) develop Psychohistory a la Asimov around 100-30 BCE, see that they will eventually annoy their eventual Roman occupiers enough that they will destroy the Second Temple, and while they can not prevent that (e.g. by trying to rebel less against Roman rule) because reasons (???), they can at least sow the seeds of their revenge. They create Christianity as a memetic superweapon and task their Agent Jesus with spreading it. For three centuries Christianity survives in the underground before finally Constantine converts (exactly as planned!), leading (as per a straw-Gibbon) to the inevitable decline and fall. (Ok, East Rome managed to hang on a bit longer despite being 'handicapped' by Christianity. And the slave mindset of Christianity did not prevent Europe to colonize most of the world. Details, details.)
Of course, in this silly fantasy history the target of the memetic weapon would still be the Roman Empire, not the descendants of various Mediterranean and barbarian states who would eventually self-identify as Whites. To get to that point one would have to go totally batshit crazy with the plot. Like "Evil reptiloid aliens give the Jews time travel technology" or something.
fishtwanger
1hr ago
On the contrary, it might sometimes be the case that society will follow the rule more if I (1) break the rule, (2) keep it secret that I broke the rule, and (3) use my ill-gotten gains from breaking the rule to promulgate the rule.
I don't think it could never happen, but I think it doesn't happen very often, and has a chance of severely backfiring. SBF comes to mind. I think it much more likely that someone who breaks the rule and keeps it secret, will be less likely to follow through on promulgation, and more likely to continue to break rules and keep them secret. I think that anyone who actually cares about promulgating the rule shouldn't use high-variance strategies that risk destroying everything they worked for.
Or do you claim that secretly breaking a rule for the purpose of strengthening the rule is moral if the rule is a good one?
I think that's classic self-delusion, and while it might happen to lead to a correct conclusion in some instances, the chain of thought that leads to it is corrupt.
Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it?
Not solely because, but yes, among other things it contributes to the collapse of civil society, especially if it's never punished.
Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
Not very much, but it's better than not hiding the theft, and better than using the proceeds from the theft to do more evil. Do you disagree?
I believe that B and C have done more damage to the moral prohibition against stealing than A has.
Partly this depends on whether A ever gets caught. (SBF, again.)
If so, should the actions of B and C be illegal, and punishable by prison terms longer than what A would serve if he had gotten caught stealing the horse?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an organization that advocates for the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America?
I don't think we humans have a good track record at using laws to propagate virtue. Especially when it comes to people acting in good faith who we think happen to be wrong. Are you suggesting that everything bad should be illegal, and that the law should be a perfect mapping of all possible actions to their ethical value and from there to the punishment or reward that is appropriate? (Should I report your comment for advocating for a system under which the comment itself might be bannable?)
All I recall advocating for was integrity and a bit of forethought. The alternatives, while not uniformly worse, seem quite lopsidedly worse. Hopefully we (humans) are in this (civilization) for the long haul.
If it makes you feel better, the protestors are getting rekt by the powers that be, certainly the number of arrests of students/faculty is now over a thousand across the nation. Some manifestations of deranged hysteria are patronized by the elite apparatus, and others are brutally suppressed. The Israel protests are falling under the latter category, whereas 2020 had the unanimous support of the political and cultural elite, because that was directed at white people and not Israel's war that the United States is responsible for.
2D3D
1hr ago
Not that it matters, but it wasn't me. For what its worth you're right, and the steam rules are, as others have noted, remarkably nebulous. I think there're incest-adjacent visual novels on Steam, and literal nazi dating sims, but those haven't attracted the eye of sauron. It is more likely Steam is reactive than proactive, and it only needs a moralizer to flag a game and put it under review. Look (not so) hard enough and almost all the adult games will have something objectionable.
laxam
1hr ago
Also, Scots are Celts
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
laxam
1hr ago
If anything, it has a lot to do with urbanization and industrialization in general.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
The thing about Kowloon Walled City is that it was, you know, walled. Once you go in, it's not easy to go out. The homeless neighborhoods of American cities are just constantly leaking.
laxam
1hr ago
'Christianity' declined in America when elite institutions started getting filled up with Catholics and jews. This happened in the 1940's and by the 1960's the new 'elite' was throwing their weight around. The old WASP ideals were pushed aside. That's all there is to the story of modern America. 1,2
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.
You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/
Hyperion
2hr ago
There is some in the Balkans, but you have to remember that after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were massive population transfers between Turkey and the Balkans. Ataturk, father of the Turks, is almost certainly just a Turkicized Albanian, what with his bright blue eyes.
fishtwanger
2hr ago
I think I got it from "The Modern Mind" by Peter Watson, an "intellectual history of the 20th century":
BahRamYou
2hr ago
I would have said at the church serving free all-you-can-eat warm meals every weekday, when they're serving, but it doesn't make a dent in the people panhandling outside the grocery store half a block away. I asked, and one woman thought for a moment and said that she'd lose her spot if she went to get the free food.
Food is generally one of the easiest things to get when you're homeless in a modern american city. Between food stamps, charities, and dumpster-diving, there are all sorts of ways to get food. The problem is more... everything else. That church won't let you stick around after the meal, not even to sleep, and they're certainly not going to let you just hang out there smoking or turning tricks to earn cash.
I'd argue that Paul actually does significantly advocate for treating women and men the same way. The same standard applies to both. It's very striking if you compare, for instance, Paul's writing on sexuality and relationships compared to anything contemporaries were saying. Consider 1 Cor 7, for instance - every time Paul presents a piece for advice for one sex, he then immediately presents an identical piece of advice for the opposite sex. Thus:
But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
You notice how he says something about one partner and then immediately says it about the other, including the at-the-time surprising statement that the wife has authority over the husband's body, in a way exactly equivalent to the way the husband has authority over the wife's body. When he talks about the regulation of the couple's sexual life, he emphasises mutual agreement - he could have described only a unilateral decision by the husband, but his emphasis is always harmony between the two.
Likewise:
To the married I give this command—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does separate, let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
[...]
To the rest I say—I and not the Lord—that if any believer has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. And if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
[...]
Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband. Husband, for all you know, you might save your wife.
[...]
The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the affairs of the Lord, so that they may be holy in body and spirit; but the married woman is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please her husband.
You get the idea. Paul's approach to marriage and gender relations appears to be very much "that which is good for the goose is good for the gander". It is even more striking if you have any sense of the cultural background - the Law, the ascetic/celibate practices of the Essenes, the Greco-Roman household.
Now, sure, in a few places this is moderated a bit. I'm not going to discuss 1 Timothy on the grounds that it's likely pseudonymous, and not a good view on what Paul specifically thought, but there is whatever the heck is going in 1 Corinthians 11, and of course there's Ephesians 5:21-33. In Ephesians we get a bit more of a concession to propriety - you can see the same basically mutualist ethic from 1 Cor 7, but he applies it metaphorically to Christ and the church and therefore adds an image of hierarchy. Even so, I think it's still noticeably a very different ethic to that of the surrounding pagan or even Jewish world (parallel Eph 5:28 and 1 Cor 7:4), and emphasises a kind of devotion and mutual service.
I'm not saying that Paul thinks men and women are literally one hundred percent identical (though there is an interesting trend; much as the eschaton is "already but not yet", for Paul gendered divisions are beginning to dissolve, even as outward expressions of the same remain normative, as in 1 Cor 11), but rather that he does see them as possessing a spiritual equality ("there is no longer male nor female") which has consequences for the ordering of the family and of sexual life ("the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does"). The gender binary in a sense remains, but it remains so as to be transfigured by holiness into a sign of Christ's relationship with the church (cf. Eph 5).
As such I continue to firmly reject the idea that the spiritual equality of believers, along both lines of sex and by analogy lines of race, does not have consequences for the ordering of society. Of course it does. Christians will behave differently to pagans because of who they know themselves to be spiritually.
We see Paul outlining this specifically! He devotes large portions of this letters to both the relations between the sexes (as in 1 Cor) and the relations between different ethnic groups (as in Romans and Galatians), and in both cases the trend is to assert a new spiritual equality in Christ which changes and transfigures communal behaviour. Male and female believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. Jewish and Gentile believers will relate to each other differently and more equally because of who they are in Christ. As far as slavery goes, Paul never really talks about it because for Paul it is genuinely irrelevant. Political status in the world is meaningless to Paul - or if there's any kind of priority, if anything, it is the poor who have the highest priority (cf. his discussions of his own poverty or his status as a prisoner). He assumes that there will continue to be slaves and masters, and judging from history he was quite correct there, but his point, as with outward expressions of gender propriety, is that this distinction no longer matters. Thus his advice in Philemon 15-16 is that Philemon will receive this runaway slave "no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother". Paul isn't so much pro-slavery or anti-slavery as he is a-slavery. It just does not matter, because the master-slave distinction is dissolved and overwhelmed by the new identity that Philemon and Onesimus possess in Christ.
He was very much aware of such issues and addressed them, in a way that is frankly quite powerful both in his own day and I would argue today. You should not just read Paul and shrug and go, "Oh, well, nothing there about how society is to be ordered." As Paul himself might say, may it not be so!
I wouldn't take input on the way society should be organized from someone who's suicidally depressed for the same reason I wouldn't take any from those who place themselves at the apex of the proposed pyramid - clear conflict of interests with not only myself but the majority.
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