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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   30953 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.

James has termed the actual right "woke right"

Can you define "actual right" in this context? Because it seems to me that users like @FiveHourMarathon, @ArjinFerman, and @OliveTapenade are correct. Yes you can fool people if you lie, but what does that prove?

You yourself are a person who quotes Lenin to dunk on conventional conservatives while claiming to be on the right, what does that tell others about you?

Can you define "actual right" in this context?

anyone who is to the right of james in this context. for eg those who have off mainstream views on ethnic relations, geopolitics and even normie christians since james hates thiests.

Im asking what it means to be "to the right" in this context, what is "off mainstream" supposed mean?

If by "mainstream" we mean the kind of views held by the professional managerial class and presented on conventional/legacy media then we're talking identity-politics, with the "mainstream" supporting it over the objections of the wider population.

As individual vs collectivist (class/racial) politics has historically been the chief axis of division between "left" and "right" in the US, "off-mainstream" and "anyone to the right of" James Lindsay or Carl Benjamin could easily be interpreted as including anywhere between 2/3rds - 4/5ths of the entire US population. Not exactly useful catagories for disussion.

I think I respond to this the same way I responded to the original affair - it is possible, after heavily editing a text so that it's saying something different, and deliberately lying to a small journal, to get a journal to publish something silly and then yell "gotcha!"

But what does that prove other than that people are sometimes gullible, or that if you're a bad actor you can eventually find a mark or two?

Just as the original "feminist Mein Kampf" communicated nothing of significance about feminism, this new "Christian nationalist Communist Manifesto" spoof communicates nothing significant about Christian nationalism.

Congratulations, James. You can trick people if you lie. So what?

I can agree it communicated nothing about feminism, I don't know if I can agree that it communicated nothing about academia. The entire reddit-tier cry of "muh peer review" rests on peer review being a good filter. Journals checking for plagiarism is supposed to be basic scrutiny, they even have automated tools for that now (I think one of them was used to illustrate the differences between the original Communist Manifesto and what got published in AmRef). Journals are also supposed to maintain some pretense of neutrality, and publish based on the quality of the argument, and the affair conclusively proved you can get garbage published as long as it flatters the ideology of the editors. This is in stark contrast to AmRef which is an openly ideological website.

Also compare the reactions to each hoax. Here people are saying "congratulations, you got 'em, but with the changes you made, what got published is a sound argument for AmRefs worldview", some are even saying Marx may have had a point here and there. By contrast in the Grievance Studies affair the hoax papers first got published or approved for publishing, some even won awards, then they got retracted when the hoax came out, and then people started arguing how this is a nothingburger and how there's nothing in these papers that should have tripped any wires. That reaction is incoherent, if the papers made a sound argument, they should not be retracted.

At the very least the original affair shows that academia shouldn't be taken seriously.

Sure, I'm willing to grant that. It's not a conclusion I'm inclined to quibble. Peer review is much less reliable than most people think it is, and a great many papers that are peer-reviewed and published are garbage.

How timely - Sargon/Carl Benjamin just released a video Lindsay and everything described above. I haven't watched it yet it but Sargon, unsurprisingly, seems critical of Lindsay.

I am reasonably sympathetic to Sargon. He's been somewhat cringe and said some stupid things in the past (especially when he ran as a candidate for UKIP a while ago), but it's clear his views have evolved and matured significantly from what they were even a few years ago, let alone from the GamerGate era which kickstarted his e-fame.

I hope this discredits these kinds of "hoaxes" in the future in right wing argument spaces. I'm tired of hearing about them. I don't think they really tell you much in the grand scheme of things. The idea that Mein Kampf or Marx are so hideously deformed as ideologies that even the shadow of them should lead to immediate invocation of some kind of intellectual gag reflex is frankly silly.

That said, it's fairly obvious that the anti-woke right is criticizing Capitalism as a system in most of the same ways Marx did in the Manifesto and that they would themselves do well to recognize it and study Marx to learn more about his thought. One cannot truly deny Marx's heroic genius; Capital has held some true geniuses in thrall, to deny it has anything to teach you is the height of intellectual hubris.

So much of the right wing critique of 21st century social problems, I see through the light of Marx's assertion that Capitalism must live off the Free Gifts of Human nature, that Capitalism is ultimately sterile absent humans acting as humans outside of Capitalism, that Capitalism cannot reproduce itself if humans choose to live as Capitalists, Capitalism requires humans to live as humans. As Capitalism has grown, it has destroyed much of the developed world's humanity, people act as Capitalists, and they cannot reproduce themselves on that basis. The DR seeks to claw that humanity back on their own terms, but many of them fail to recognize who their true enemy is.

Why would this discredit this kind of hoax? The people hoaxed in this instance have approximately zero relevance, and getting published in that publication will probably be a point against you getting tenure at a major university. Such is not true for the previously hoaxed places.

They didnt conduct a similar experiment in the least.

Marx's Capital is unironically a good book to read as long as you treat it like fiction rather than an instruction manual.

One cannot truly deny Marx's heroic genius; Capital has held some true geniuses in thrall, to deny it has anything to teach you is the height of intellectual hubris.

It's nothing against Marx or Marxism, I'm kind of done putting intellectuals on pedestals like that. It feels like a status game where some people get elevated to "heroic geniuses" and you're a pleb for not appreciating them, while others get buried and you're a kook for even knowing they exist. Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great.

Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great.

There's an argument I saw once that suggested we already do this.

It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it? Because their ideas really were so great, many people afterward have successfully understood them and extended them and found better ways to teach them, and because their ideas really were so great there's not much conflict between modern Calc 1 Textbook A and modern Calc 1 Textbook B; everybody agrees that you'll learn the important stuff either way, so we just quibble a bit over how easily or how well. Ask how to learn Calculus and you might get a recommendation from 1970 but you won't get one from 1700.

Shouldn't this have happened with Marx? Maybe the ideas should now have a more solid theoretical basis, or a more rationally organized terminology, or something, but they should be basically the same ideas repackaged in newer and better forms in a way so complete that the original becomes a historical text, completely obsoleted as an educational text. That's how things like science and math work.

But that's not how Marxism works. I think it's related to the problem where, when a bunch of Marxists try to implement Marxism, there seems to be an astonishingly high risk of some of them ending up with an ice axe to the brain. Even when the lucky ones get to claim that they've refined it into "Leninism" or "Stalinism" or whatever, they at least end up getting denounced by their successors posthumously. Perhaps Marx's genius was so heroic that he just got everything right the first time and nobody could improve upon it? But more likely he's just a Schelling point. He inspired some major far-left revolutions, so if you want to be a far-left revolutionary the obvious thing to do is to coordinate around him, but you have to rally around him, not his ideas, because there's just not enough substance in the ideas to latch on to. Everybody sees the objective truths in two random Calculus textbooks and agrees they're both still Calculus, but try to rally around two random analyses of Marx and there's too much risk you'll just get two warring groups each convinced that the other group aren't True Marxists.

I'd like to point out that your example is misleading. Math has advanced over time, and all inhuman things advance over time. But all human things simply do not. This is why the Tao Te Ching and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius still hold up today. Most wisdom does not seem to advance over time.

Some truths are universal. "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away". This is still true today. Feedback loops makes it easier to get more the more of something you have. If you are intelligent enough, you can see truths like this, even if they won't be named or made into concrete concepts for another 500 years.

Now, I haven't read Marx, and while I don't know if his ideas were wrong, I think he was wrong as a person. His work is a reflection of who he is, and the attempt to legitimize his own values and ideals. But even if his theory is largely correct, one cannot prove values. There's one more factor which complicates matters further, it's that at the high ends of intelligence, a slight difference in beliefs can lead to vastly different conclusions. Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and Jung agreed on a lot of things, but their takes on religion and human life are very different.

It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it?

This is certainly a valid point, and there's a real phenomenon there that needs to be investigated. However, Marx is a particularly poor example to illustrate @ArjinFerman's original point ("Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great"), because people do in fact talk about his ideas, much more often than they read his original texts. Phrases like "class struggle", "proletarian revolution", and "capitalism in crisis" are deployed frequently without specific reference to Marx's name or one of his texts. There have been plenty of avowed socialists who never read Marx. So clearly his ideas have taken on a life of their own beyond the confines of his original writing.

As for why there's still continuing interest in Marx's original texts themselves: think of philosophy like a giant thread on TheMotte. When you pick up a book written by a contemporary Marxist philosopher, you're reading a big post full of quote replies that's 20 levels deep, and it's replying to a bunch of other people, who were ultimately replying to Marx's OP. When you're trying to get up to speed on a long conversation with lots of back-and-forth arguments, isn't it better to read the whole thing yourself so you have the full context in all its nuance, instead of relying on someone else's paraphrase? Because that's what we're dealing with here: it's a dialogue between people about politically fraught issues, rather than a mathematical or scientific treatise.

If you wanted to understand someone's views on, say, abortion, would you rather read a paraphrase of their views, or would you rather read their own explanation of their views in their own words? Philosophy intrinsically deals with issues where the definitions of the principal terms are vague and contentious, and attempts at paraphrase and simplification are prone to distortion by preexisting biases. You probably wouldn't want to rely on a committed pro-choice advocate to give a sympathetic gloss to a pro-life article, especially when you can just, you know, read what the pro-life person said in the first place. Even another pro-life advocate might introduce inaccuracies into a paraphrase that the first pro-life advocate might reject, because despite being on the same side, they might not share the exact same conception of central concepts like "life", "murder", and "personhood". The contentious nature of the issues makes it harder to substitute out the original texts.

However, Marx is a particularly poor example to illustrate @ArjinFerman's original point ("Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great"), because people do in fact talk about his ideas, much more often than they read his original texts. Phrases like "class struggle", "proletarian revolution", and "capitalism in crisis" are deployed frequently without specific reference to Marx's name or one of his texts.

I'd dispute that. Marx seems like the central example of an author you're supposed to have read (preferably in original German) and if you haven't, you're a pleb. Few people defend his ideas in themselves, and the first defence of them tends to be "you haven read enough theory".

But one of the foundations of the Dissident Right is Nick Land's Meltdown, which, IIRC, posits that Capitalism doesn't even need humanity anymore.

The journal editors should feel bad for not recognizing the Communist Manifesto (they kept the form of the opening line, and enough of the style, that if the article had been legit it would have been a deliberate pastiche). But even if they didn't, they should feel bad for publishing a rather incoherent hack job.

But ideologically, the edited Manifesto does not seem to advocate for Communism, so it isn't the win Lindsay seems to think it is.

He should go back to studying the blade

Lindsay essentially replaced most of the words of the excerpts he quoted. This would fool most readers. It does not fool Claude / ChatGPT / MOSS, which have different intuitions from casual readers. (These algorithms tokenize a sentence into parts of speech so that even total find-replace changes will show no real differences to them.)

After seeing the extent of Lindsay's changes, I went from thinking this was embarrassing for the conservatives, to embarrassing for Lindsay. The journal's only mistake was not checking his submission for plagiarism, which would have turned this up -- expect that to become standard meta now that AI is so cheap.

Technically they never even published it officially and just uploaded it because he's famous

Is the controversy:

Lindsay seems to think that Conservatives are the Liberal party and therefore should be embarrassed at publishing a famous criticism of Liberalism (by someone most Conservatives don't like, but many who read Marx agree with him on this point.)

OR

The Christian rag should be sorry for publishing something clearly plagiarized.

From Lindsay's response to criticism, it seems like he thinks #1. I don't get it. Growing up in a Conservative household, "liberal" was an insult, synonymous with excess and licentiousness. There are some Conservatives where the thing they are trying to conserve is the Liberal order, and they lean Libertarian and vote Conservative. But I wouldn't expect every Conservative publication to be Libertarian.

Michael Oakeshott wrote:

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities...

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

None of this really requires the philosophy of Liberalism. Many writers are trying to ponder what the next best thing could be. If Liberalism has problems, lets do a Retrospective and figure out how to learn from it and find the next best thing from a Conservative stance. How can we use the lessons of History to preserve and bring back things we love? Catholics use the name Postliberalism for this, but I hope it doesn't stay a Catholic thing.

This bizarre drama is the party politics version of a Thucydides Trap. The right currently has two broad factions: one that wants to return to the 90s, and another that thinks that the 90s naturally led to 2020, so a reconfiguration of American politics, ideology, and society is needed. The first faction is larger but is seemingly losing the argument. People like Lindsay or Joel Berry, noticing this, are attempting to Gossip-Shame-Rally-Moralize the MacIntyre-adjacent right while they're still an obvious minority.

Usually, cancellers in this situation would draw the racist/fascist card. But ironically this accusation, despite being fairly plausible here, is so overdone and the right is so inured to it that everyone would ignore it. Thus the bizarre accusation that the target is "communist".

One is reminded of the unhinged factional battles in the French revolution, where the guy who ended the French monarchy was executed for being a crypto-royalist.

Usually, cancellers in this situation would draw the racist/fascist card. But ironically this accusation, despite being fairly plausible here, is so overdone and the right is so inured to it that everyone would ignore it.

It's not that they didn't try, there was some hand-wringing over "kinism" a while back. So far none of these attacks seem to have landed, but it's annoying. Everyone's acting like the Trump victory means Mission Accomplished and we can descend into infighting now, as if the first Trump term never happened.

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.

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:

  • authoritarianism
  • collectivism in general
  • a rejection of liberalism

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 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.

Carl, and a lot of 2019 liberals (myself included), had their break with liberalism so I don't know if this is completely fair.

Hell you could 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.

Indeed, the median black nationalist is not woke in any way, but an antisemitic cult member who happens to be black.

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.

Outright Holocaust denial is in fact kooky enough to be unwelcome by polite society, but white supremacy is just one kind of illiberalism. Where, exactly, do you want the line drawn in the name of ideological consistency? There’s plenty of people who would lump opposition to gay marriage in with white supremacy, would you?

The Right’s aggressive policing of its own kooks is in some ways quite admirable, but it’s also part of the reason it gets rolled so easily by the Left. When Holocaust denial eventually becomes popular on the radical left (it’s already starting to) I bet you won’t see Democratic politicians, breadtubers and CNN launching a crusade to eradicate it. They’ll just pretend it’s not a thing and gaslight anyone who says otherwise.

Where, exactly, do you want the line drawn in the name of ideological consistency?

I don't. Just trying to show some understanding for a classical liberal.

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.

Why are the first two things beyond the pale, but the second two aren’t?

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.

  1. "Outright race-hatred" - Christ commissioned his disciples to baptize all nations and commanded love of other peoples on the sermon on the mount.
  2. "Theocracy" - Ambiguous evidence. There is some scriptural evidence for separation of church and state, but on the other hand, the civil power of Pilate comes from God, and theocracy was tolerated for a least 1500 years in Christendom.
  3. "Monarchy" - Literally the default system of government commended. 'Christ is king.'

There is some scriptural evidence for separation of church and state, but on the other hand, the civil power of Pilate comes from God, and theocracy was tolerated for a least 1500 years in Christendom.

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?

Depends on what you mean by theocracy.

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.

"Monarchy" - Literally the default system of government commended. 'Christ is king.'

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

Keep in mind I said "could maybe understand" not "they're beyond the pale". Anyway when comes to holocaust denial, or historical revisionism in general, it can happen that the topic is complicated enough you end up losing ground even if you're on the right side of the issue. I don't think it's a good idea to declare the topic haram, but I can understand the temptation. As for race-hatred... well I don't know if you can have a productive conversation on the topic of "I hate your fucking guts", especially if the feeling of hatred are a response to how someone was born, rather than anything they did.

By contrast if you're declaring any competitor to your ideology as off-limits, you're basically showing that it can't stand scrutiny. It's particularly funny in the case liberalism who's claim to legitimacy rests strongly on the whole "marketplace of ideas" thing.

Firstly thanks for remaining me to post it on the right thread, I posted it on an older thread and got no views lol

My understanding is a little rudimentary. Woke isn't like Marxism, it doesn't have a single point of authority defining it so I would assume that most just describe the far left bent with it. I want to discuss this too but getting a correct definition down that people agree with is the first thing one needs to do to.

Obsession with oppressed oppressor dynamic is a good rough definition but it seems to lack something.

The right has a lot of hateful losers, no doubt about that. James made a mistake in picking fights with well meaning smart people who understand his worldview better than him.

Carl, and a lot of 2019 liberals (myself included), had their break with liberalism so I don't know if this is completely fair.

I discovered Moldbug that year thanks to the distributist on YouTube. People just want to uncover truth and have nice things. For a while 90s liberalism seemed amazing. The post sexual revolution US that has something for all is still seen as this nostalgic landmark but these are unstable positions. I agree with Yarvin on most issues and do look forward to a post liberal liberalism or discourse on it.

What do you think is a good definition of woke? Also because of the right getting some footing, punching right is now not seen as a good thing to do, Lindsay really made a mistake.

Woke isn't like Marxism, it doesn't have a single point of authority defining it so I would assume that most just describe the far left bent with it.

Marxism also doesn’t have “a single point of authority defining it.” It’s a whole corpus of thought, with hundreds of writers (maybe thousands) chiming in and adding their analysis and refinement of other writers’ ideas. It’s like how Christianity has long transcended sola scriptura and includes a massive world of commentary and schisms and church authorities and whatnot. “Woke”, to the extent that the word is anything other than a boo light, undoubtedly refers to a specific offshoot or sect of Marxism.

Sola Scriptura is actually extremely rare in Christianity; both Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe their church predates the codification and indeed writing of the scriptures and doctrine-heavy protestants in practice hold to definite-enough interpretations of scripture that tradition and church authority play a strong role(and have for a very long time; the Augsburg confession was literally written by Martin Luther). But almost all of these Christian branches have a single point of authority defining them, indeed rather notoriously so in the case of Catholicism.

The Protestants would also affirm that their church predates the codification and writing of the scriptures (at least of the new testament).

The Augsburg confession was written by Melanchthon. Edit: Luther did play a role in its drafting.

But this is pretty close to being true, at least, if you're construing sola scriptura as talking about use of other authorities in general, rather than whether there exist other final authorities accessible to the modern church.

Once upon a time a traveler on a weary road came across a man furiously beating another with a stick for no discernible reason. The traveler upon seeing this injustice dropped his belongings and rushed over to help. Together with the battered man they were able to overpower the attacker and take his stick. The traveler handed the stick over to the man he had just saved who immediately began to take revenge on his former assailant. Satisfied that justice had been done the traveler picked up his belongings and went on his way.

A short while later another traveler walking on the same road came across a man furiously beating another with a stick for no discernible reason...

Just two short years ago the right when they were down were openly pointing out how nasty and norm damaging the woke toolkit is. Now that they are ascendant they gladly co-opt the same toolkit when it gets them even an extra smidgen of power for themselves. Eventually they too will reach a point where their worst excesses drive reasonable humans to support their enemies rather than themselves regardless of how justified their hate is.

The cycle will then continue, with these exact same people who are now out there calling for blood screaming about how the left has gone beyond the pale and that they are the reasonable, sensible party.

Everyone seems to be predicting some sort of Reaganite return of the moral majority in the face of Trump's huge win, but I don't see it. We shall see. People certainly are afraid or/celebrating it.

People are over focusing on a tiny X-based fringe of the online right that isn’t reflected in the vast majority of Trump’s cabinet picks, in Trump’s personal politics and in the opinion of 90%+ of people who voted for him. In time, it will be seen as as cringe and poorly imagined as the “hail Trump, hail victory” Spencer stuff was in 2016.

I don't know what to feel about Lindsay because his position is insane, but it is insane in a way that is both directionally correct and understandable from my background.

Contrasting him with Carl Benjamin is interesting because they both come out of the same ideological substrate of classical liberalism, but ended up at radically different places through their handling of recent history.

Lindsay is a debate addict twitter shitposter extraordinaire who has read too much deconstructionist litterature and it has fried his brain to such a degree that he can now recognize mythological patterns accurately, but describes them in a way that sounds clinically insane.

Consider his claim that Macintyre and the rest of the ex-NRX right are in a cabal to manifest Archangel Michael into reality.

On the face of it this is fanciful nonsense, but if you understand the mythological implications of it and are ready to look past the evident lies he is telling about the actual people involved, there is a clear degree of truth to this. One that People like Macintyre are equipped to understand and would accept: the Right is slowly constructing a version of Christianity that is ready for violence, and isn't bound and shamed by Liberal memes like a good submissive Anglicanism.

This is unacceptable to Lindsay because he is committed dogmatically to Liberal ideals. He can't contenance that people would truly prefer "illiberal democracy" (as Orban would put it) if Liberalism can only offer the dissolution of one's nation and morals into a grey globalist sludge. And he can't face up to the fact that Liberalism is now a dead doctrine that nobody but him still believes in, because it has failed to retain legitimacy.

Contrast this with Carl, who to this day I believe genuinely attached to the sort of freedoms dear to classical liberals (seen clear in his enthusiastic support for Milei on one side and Bukele on the other). He instead has endeavoured to understand why Liberalism has failed to contain Wokism, and arrived at a set of lengthy post-liberal conclusions: that Liberalism though a fruitful doctrine, is founded on clear lies, and his series of posts on those myths is enlightening to who wants to contruct a new kind of freedom ideology that doesn't have the flaws of Liberalism but doesn't have to fall to, say, Fascism.

Lindsay would characterize this as Carl being brainwashed by the "woke right", and to a degree the claim has teeth: Carl has been moving rightward through his exposure to NRX ideas by way of his friend Parvini and his circle of reactionary analysts.

But what is really the more spirited and righteous approach: to stand on the ground of dogma and refuse any change to Liberalism in a time of strife and infiltration by enemies on all sides, or to accept that it got some things wrong and must turn into something different if its ideals are to survive?

Time will tell, but I think Lindsey is fighting a losing battle because Carl and his friends understand politics as it is, whilst he is only able to understand ideology.

the Right is slowly constructing a version of Christianity that is ready for violence, and isn't bound and shamed by Liberal memes like a good submissive Anglicanism.

It’s all le based ‘Christ is King’ memes, how many of these angry young men actually believe in Christianity? Most are no less atheist than Richard Dawkins fans in 2010, or the average /pol/ack. It’s not a genuine religious revival.

American Reformer, the publication he went after, is great, and fairly serious (fairly niche, though).

My sense is that there is genuinely some shift towards Christianity. Certainly some of those are only memeing, but not all.

I think many of them really do. Sometimes it doesn’t look like it because they grew up in an incredibly worldly secular environment without any doctrinaire religion or teaching in the scriptures, and they are desperately trying to claw back their faith. So it sometimes looks a bit cargo-culty and hypocritical, their twitter posts alternating schizophrenically between synthwave deus vult crusader memes and anime porn.

Even if the environment itself weren’t secular, I think it would still happen for the same reason that Pride parades happen. These people want to be seen, they have a need to reclaim the idea that it’s okay to be a loud and proud Christian and to reject the implication that there’s something shameful about having an actual belief in Christ and Christianity. I don’t even think it’s about them not understanding it, it’s about being in the faces of secular culture and saying that we are Christians and we’re not ashamed of it, and we’re not going anywhere.

The reverse memes are everywhere. Christianity is seen as backwards, bigoted, and something that only uneducated rubes take seriously. You’d rarely, if ever, see the religion itself portrayed positively in media that isn’t explicitly Christian. The best you can hope for is that the media ignores religion, but often there’s a hostility to it. The Cathedral hates believing Christians, most likely because they represent a stronghold they don’t have control over. The school system (unless it’s explicitly a Christian school) teaches secular atheism at every opportunity. TV and movies do the same, with a healthy dollop of “look at how stupid Christianity is, they’re hateful bigots, they’re Christian Nationalists, they’re kind of fascist and want to force everyone to live like them.” This doesn’t happen as much to other religions. Muslims are expected to secularize a bit, but nobody will shame a Muslim for being a Muslim. Jews get a complete pass — wearing a yarmulke doesn’t really bother the Cathedral so much. Buddhists get no pushback, in fact if a white person becomes Buddhist, it’s considered a good thing, and anyway meditation is popular as stress relief.

I find myself wanting to be more loud and proud in such an environment. Maybe not on Twitter, but I find myself wanting to buy and wear Christian clothing just to sort of show that I am one and we exist whether or not the rest of you like it. I’ve return to high church Christianity, and I think I’m getting tired of everything not explicitly made by and for Christians being outright hostile towards Christianity. Is such a thing a version of a Deus Vult edit? I don’t know, but I think it’s where a lot of people are right now.

I mean, do they believe in God? Do they believe in the literal truth that Jesus Christ is the son of God and part of God and was sent for the salvation of mankind? Do they believe that our father art in heaven? Do they believe in the resurrection? These fundamental articles of faith are central to belief in Christianity. Unlike the beginning of Genesis and other Old Testament stories they can’t be handwaved as metaphor.

I do. I can’t definitively speak for any of the others. But I think a lot of them do. Many people present their true beliefs in an ironic fashion on the internet.

I am basically this guy. Although I was raised culturally Church of England, my parents and intellectual climate growing up were utterly atheist. After spending my formative years in an environment where real belief was both ridiculous and infra dig, I am no longer capable of genuine faith.

I can consider myself Christian intellectually, but except through a miracle I will never be able to have the true faith that others have, and my little faith will never console me or sustain me against the secular gods that I worship despite myself. So it goes. I can only try to do better for the next generation.

I can consider myself Christian intellectually, but except through a miracle I will never be able to have the true faith that others have, and my little faith will never console me or sustain me against the secular gods that I worship despite myself. So it goes. I can only try to do better for the next generation.

Well, fortunately, if you consider yourself a Christian intellectually, then miracles are possible.

Yes :) I used the phrase entirely literally.

I get a lot of mileage out of the difference between IRL rad trads(who would, upon seeing the screen name 'tradcathgroyper1488', wonder what a groyper is that 1487 other people wanted to be one) and online tradcaths. But actual rad trads are far right enough to invite FBI surveillance and well organized enough to make the FBI stop it.

My wife and I have been having some very deep and thoughtful conversations about becoming practicing Christians, even though we weren't raised with it, and really don't believe in it. Funnily enough, both our sets of parents actively kept us away from religion due to their bonkers Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.

So why would we turn to Christianity in our 40's, after a lifetime of atheism? We are desperately seeking some sort of cultural and institutional protection from liberalism run amok. Or wokeness, or neoliberalism, or whatever you call it. We're willing to traumatize our daughter with stories of burning in hell over her being taught that she can mutilate and sterilize herself to solve all her problems in Kindergarten. It's not a choice we particularly relish, but it feels like a choice forced on us and it's an easy one to make.

But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences". This has slowly lead us to maybe trying to find an Orthodox church of some sort? Everything more Western European just feels totally pozzed these days, and we don't trust it.

And I'll be perfectly honest, something about the way Trump survived that assassination attempt just, I can't get over it. It's literally enough to make me wonder if there is a god and he saved him. Turning his head at exactly the right moment, exactly the right way, to get away with nothing but a minor flesh wound is nothing short of miraculous. Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before? I know politicians have been shot and survived before, but not like that.

I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?

Look into the old-style Protestant denominations. Not the mainlines, those are all got captured by the liberals, and most of the conservatives fled. And the evangelical megachurches won't have the sturdiness you're looking for. But look at an OPC, URCNA, PCA (though a bit less trad) and several others in the Reformed world, and LCMS or WELS for things in the Lutheran world. There's also ACNAs for anglicans, but my sense is that they're more hit-or-miss. (If you direct message me your area, I could look up some maps and find you some local churches.)

Why? I could get into details of theology, but I don't get the sense that that's currently the sort of thing that you care about. But the institutional Protestant denominations are certainly more American of a thing than e.g. Eastern Orthodoxy, if that matters to you at all. I imagine it's worth looking at, at least.

The publication that James Lindsay hoaxed, American Reformer, is actually pretty great. (See, for example, this recent gem.) You'll probably have trouble finding Protestant churches that are quite as based as American Reformer, but you should certainly be able to find some that are solid, if you know where to look.

I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?

Ideally, nation-scale repentance and belief, that expresses itself in reformation of life. Love of God and neighbor. Zealousness for good works. Piety. Striving to put to death the sin within us.

If you mean to ask whether your turn towards Christianity is legit, well, it sounds like you're not just doing it for the cultural benefits (you think God might exist). There's more to Christianity than the bare fact that God exists, but that's certainly a start.

I do affirm though, that our thoughts would suffice to send us to hell—Jesus is pretty clear, for example, that lusting breaks the law against adultery—but for those in Christ, his death atones for our sins.

The Church of Christ has been good for me. It has its foibles, but it's decentralized so there's no way to skinsuit it from the top. Individual churches may not be immune to lady ministers and Rainbow politics, but they are generally quite resistant to them.

As for belief, it seems to me that the best approach for most atheists moving in this direction starts with interrogating what human beliefs are and how they actually work. The popular narrative is that beliefs are forced by evidence through a deterministic process; once people have adopted this belief, they note that contrary beliefs are not being forced by the subsequent evidence they encounter, and so conclude that the evidence for those contrary beliefs must not be very strong, and so can be safely discarded. This creates a system of self-reinforcing circular logic that is nearly impervious to contradiction so long as it is not examined too closely.

If you examine the process by which beliefs are formed and modified, though, you will clearly see that this narrative is very clearly false. Beliefs are not forced by evidence through a deterministic process, but rather very clearly chosen through an act of will. We reason from axioms, and axioms are necessarily chosen pre-rationally.

It seems to me that people who find genuine belief in God impossible are trying to believe in God in defiance of their own axioms, which is never going to work well. The solution is to confront the axioms themselves in particular and the nature of axioms generally, and to internalize that the consensus Rationalist Materialist narrative is not nearly as seamless as it presents itself. This ought, it seems to me, free them up to allow doubt to work for their faith rather than only against it.

I am Eastern Orthodox and would be glad to recommend a church if you DM me (especially if you happen to live in the Southeastern US or the US in general - though if you feel like the walls of wokeness are really closing in I'm guessing you may live in a very blue area).

Thoughts on some of your questions/concerns:

  1. I don't think you have to choose between wokeness and the fear of hellfire. Traditional/high church Christians in this day and age tend to be fairly sophisticated when it comes to hell (you might be more likely to encounter people who have full blown universalist tendencies, though I may be generalizing too much from my own experience). The early church fathers tended to be fairly nuanced on damnation. CS Lewis' The Great Divorce is a good example that is more modern. My point is - I don't think you have to worry too much about someone feeling the need to scare your daughter in some crude way in order to teach her Christian orthodoxy.

  2. What is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like? I think it would look something like the strategy of the early Christians. Scott recently wrote about this, and N.S. Lyons writes about it here (he speaks of conservative strategy in the piece, but in the comment section he confirms that Christianity is a successful example).

(apologies if this is too promotional or inappropriate in some way - this is my first time posting after a year+ of lurking)

Depending on where you are you can also trying looking for a G3/Continuing Anglican parish. They've avoiding a lot of modern insanity by breaking away from the Episcopal Church over the ordination of women.

I guess my point is, what is a genuine religious revival supposed to look like?

Some thoughts.

Over the past year, I've trained my brain to be Christian after two decades of hard materialism since age 14 or so. Miracles didn't play a role. Rather, I decided there was at least a plausible chance personal theism was true — this came from meditating on why I'm not a p-zombie, and why I have powerful aesthetic preferences which seem unmoored from selection pressures. Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.

Have I brainwashed myself? Possibly. But it feels increasingly obvious that that something is there, and it has been speaking to me for a long time.

After this 'religious revival' came the task of seeking the most plausible source of divine revelation. IMO the evidence for the legitimizing claim of Christianity is an order of magnitude above any other candidate, and its actual theology (try Mere Christianity and Problem of Pain by CS Lewis) matches what "something" was steering me towards as an atheist.

Perhaps these online anons larping "Christ is king" and parents pursuing churches for their kids will brainwash themselves to real religion, too.

But we want to find a sect of Christianity that isn't pussies. We don't want a sect of Christianity that will start inviting drag queens to teach Sunday school because they don't want anyone to feel bad, or they feel like they need to appeal to "modern audiences".

I had good luck with my local Catholic parish. From what I can tell, female ordination, accepting divorce, and gay marriage initiates the pozzing death spiral in any Christian denomination, so watch out for those. Or perhaps it's that only pozzed churches can reconcile those with the scriptural evidence.

Baptist upbringing, which seemed to revolve around what a piece of shit they were and that every single thought they have will send them to hell.

Unregulated thoughts do indeed lead to hell. "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Hateful, lustful, or prideful thoughts reinforce themselves in a vicious cycle towards a mind consumed by hate, lust, and/or pride — this is the death of the psuche (psyche, 'soul-life') against which God mercifully cuts short bios life to prevent a descent into infinite depravity.

Yes, it is a hard teaching, and not one for four-year-olds. No, you will not find a "non pussy" church that doesn't take the wide gate leading to hell extremely seriously.

Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.

Are you able to expand on how you achieved that? Particularly how you got from suspending materialism to (a) and (b)?

Asking as someone curious who took two months out this year for a walking pilgrimage meditating on similar themes. I didn't have much struggle suspending my materialistic worldview (after all it's a model of reality, not reality itself, and as you say there are salient aspects of experience that it doesn't currently explain), and I'm about as sure as I can be that I was genuinely open to a religious or spiritual experience. While it was extremely beneficial and enriching, if anything I felt the absence of the something you describe.

Suspending my materialist assumptions, with great effort, I moved through life with the constant idea that (a) something was actively providing my existence, and (b) it was actively observing me.

Are you able to expand on how you achieved that? Particularly how you got from suspending materialism to (a) and (b)?

Sure!

I didn't know the word at the time, but the technique is something Catholics call "active recollection". Periodically throughout the day, I would perform a kind of rapid partial body scan, thinking 'Where does this there-ness in my hand come from?' or similar. And then I would close my eyes and ignore everything external, and "push" my mind's watchfulness inward, looking for someone looking back.

According to a prayer manual I read later, this is one method of 'putting yourself in the presence of God', which is precondition to mental prayer. Unfortunately, according to prayer theory, God initiates contact and you merely respond, so I can't promise this technique will work for anyone reading this.

"As the soul being diffused throughout the whole body is present in all parts, so God penetrates our whole being and dwells in its every part, imparting to us life and movement. And as the soul resides nevertheless in the heart in a more special manner, so God is in a most particular manner in your heart, in the very centre of your spirit, which He vivifies and animates, being, as it were, the heart of your heart and the spirit of your spirit" (St. Francis de Sales)

I performed this mental ritual especially in the morning when waking up. The awareness, or perhaps the fear, of God continued for ten, twenty minutes, an hour afterward, and eventually started riding with me as a constant companion, like a depersonalized super-superego perched on my shoulder.

What does God feel like? It is changing as my prayer life develops, and it changes within prayer as I go deeper. God (the Father) feels like an ocean: he does not seemingly come to greet you, but you descend into Him, where it is cold and dark and you fear for your safety. And then there is what Christians call the holy spirit, which is like rain, and it washes you towards the ocean. Depending on what it wants from your prayer, it can fall on you as tears, reconciliation, and immense catharsis (this is what most people want from religion); other times it is intellectual, and ideas will arrive fully formed in your mind, accompanied with a "gentle breath" of overpowering peacefulness, often at odds with the content of its ideas. (A few months ago, the holy spirit pacifically informed me that heaven is somewhat like being tortured to death.)

Come to think of it, here's something else.

When I was age 12, I learned to masturbate. I started creating a "wall" around my mind. I would imagine a small point in the center of my mind and "push" everything out, to a 5 foot radius around me. I would put my force field up whenever I was doing the deed or having sexual thoughts. To anyone observing me, I would say they weren't allowed, they weren't allowed.

I forgot I even used to do this until a few months ago. The universe felt dead and my thoughts "alone" for twenty-odd years between then and now.

In retrospect, my early meditations were unconsciously about breaking "the wall", and allowing for things "beneath", "between", or at any rate very intimate with my thoughts. (Psalm 139 relevant: "If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are.") Before, I had unconsciously felt there was some "private room" I could withdraw to and consider the world freely, from an spectator's remove. Ironically, I even assumed this when meta-contemplating my own thoughts and desires from a materialist perspective. Of course, whether one accepts the framework of materialism or theism, no such room can exist.

Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate it. I'll have a look into active recollection.

You could try a Latin mass if you're looking for something western and consistently very conservative(although much more normie than the motte). Remember among Orthodoxy there are groups which in practice are not much more conservative than normie episcopalians and there are groups which are very conservative and they freely cross-pollinate with each other.

Wouldn't the best option be to not do what your parents did but in reverse? They flee the bonkers traditionalism that pushed so many people away and create the woke movement, you flee the woke movement back into the arms your parents fled from.

Doesn't seem as if it is likely to go any better next time round does it? Then your daughter flees the hell and damnation you thrust upon her and becomes whatever replaces wokeness in 20 years time or whatever. Turbo-wokeness or Satanfarianism or something.

That doesn't seem as if it will actually be any better for her. Do you think your only options are risking she "mutilates" herself or "mutilating" her mentally by enforcing a fear of hell and damnation that you yourself don't even really believe? Just..don't do either. You can expose her to both points of view and educate her about the risks and rewards of each. Give her the tools to be her own person, however that turns out.

Without bragging, that was how I did with my three kids (adults now) and they all turned out to be well adjusted, either with families of their own or heading that way. You don't have to run from one extreme to the other.

And my parents story is very similar to yours for what it is worth, fleeing a restrictive religious sect (though in my parents case because this was Northern Ireland decades back they still had to take us to a Protestant church, for appearances sake), and becoming much more permissive and hating that upbringing.

You can expose her to both points of view and educate her about the risks and rewards of each. Give her the tools to be her own person, however that turns out.

Without bragging, that was how I did with my three kids (adults now) and they all turned out to be well adjusted, either with families of their own or heading that way. You don't have to run from one extreme to the other.

If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear. You weren't contending with the Kindergarten curriculum including propaganda about how you can choose your own gender. Or the fact that it's being done in secret as much as possible. How do you counter lessons you don't even know are being given? Once a teacher who may spend more time with your child than you do inculcates an evil world view unopposed in a four year old's mind, it's fiat accompli.

If you are dealing with teenagers, sure, you can present both sides of an issue and maybe they can make an informed decision. This simply does not exist with 4 year olds.

To say nothing of the fact that while it may be possible, we feel atomized, afraid, and alone. We want a community that can back us up and help us not feel like we're the lone holdouts against this new state religion.

If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear.

No they were raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the Culture war I was trying to stop infecting them was a rather more deadly one. Hatred of Catholics was very common (given I grew up in about the most Loyalist areas there are) and many kids ended up in the paramilitaries, which was the thing I was striving to stop, that particular pernicious influence.

But I think you are wrong, you can start from a very young age to explain the things you want them to understand, kids absorb things from their surroundings and you have to get ahead of that whether it is explaining what a Taig or Fenian is, to what the word trans means (obviously very simplified) You are not going to be able to control everything they learn, so you have to make sure you are ahead of whatever they are going to get exposed to, and that means you have to start young, whatever it is you fear they are going to pick up. By 3 kids can certainly understand the concept of private areas and bad touches, by 5 to 6 they can understand much more. They can't reason through the socio-political implications of the IRA, and the UDR, but they can tell you if someone was calling the lone Catholic boy in the school a Fenian, or talking about how their Daddy has a baseball bat with nails in for Catholics, or if someone tries to talk to them about their body not feeling like their own or what have you.

Community is valuable, but if part of the point of a community is to raise your kids better, one that drove your own family away with (in your own words) bonkers behaviours may not be the one to pick. We must learn from the histories of our forebears after all. I could have gone back to the Plymouth Brethren sect my Dad left, and certainly it would have avoided the paras..because they would have had no tv, no radio, and virtually no contact with the outside world. It is a tight knit community. But it is also a very restrictive one, and I think attempting to raise my kids in a belief system I do not personally believe in is also likely to be fairly corrosive.

I sympathize, and I hope you find a good solution for you and your family.

Unironically, have you considered Islam? Depending on how loosely you interpret "sect of Christianity" it may well satisfy that condition. You can basically guarantee it's not getting pozzed, at least not within your daughter's lifetime and regardless you can't deny that Muhammad's Arabian warlord inspired philosophy is a lot more Chad than Christian slave morality.

Unironically, it has been considered, but it's a hard sell for lots of reasons. In a world where there is not a single Christian sect that isn't fully onboard mutilating and sterilizing children as early as possible, I guess you make due with what you have. But short of that we're likely to exhaust all other options before we resort to Islam.

Has there ever been a failed assassination that failed by such a narrow margin before?

In 1912, while giving a speech in Milwaukee, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The bullet was slowed by Roosevelt’s steel eyeglass case and by a single-folded paper copy of his speech, such that Roosevelt’s injury was minor enough to allow him to deliver his scheduled speech in full, beginning with the lines, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot — but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Roosevelt also implored the crowd not to lynch the would-be assassin, and instructed the police to take him into custody without incident. (Roosevelt would carry the bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life.) Trump’s fist-pumping was undeniably badass, but I think Teddy has him beat.

As for your general question, I’ve had a similar thought process about religious conversion. I’ve found the Latter-Day Saints faith particularly appealing, particularly given my strong family connection to the church. Like you, I have no illusions about the fundamental truth claims at the heart of the religion, and I find the Christian foundation of it just as uninspiring as I found it fifteen years ago. However, while I could never credibly promise orthodoxy, I think I could manage Mormon orthopraxy — a commitment to the behavioral constraints demanded by the religion. Quitting coffee would be a massive stumbling block, although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it. Most of the other commandments are ones I’m already more-or-less observing, whether voluntarily or otherwise.

They seem prepared to weather the pressures of wokeness better than nearly any other Christian (or Christian-adjacent) denomination, and are also far more deeply-rooted in American culture than Orthodoxy is.

although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it

Caffeinated soda and energy drink are, as far as I know, not against the official rules.

I mean, I would have to drink a lot of caffeinated soda to match my current caffeine intake from coffee, and I’d be ingesting all of the sugar and corn syrup alongside it. Energy drinks would be a bit better, although still significantly worse for me than black coffee, and with a bunch of additives that make me jittery. Doable, but suboptimal for sure.

Energy drinks often have far higher caffeine than all coffee barring like 44oz of strong drip.

Oh I’m well aware. I switched from energy drinks to coffee for health reasons.

Not having any real knowledge of their positions or practices, I just did a search and got a few statements from them on the topic. Seems kinda vague. They don't seem to prohibit ye olde Trumpian diet coke. Frankly, they don't seem to prohibit just literally taking caffeine pills or putting caffeine anhydrous into any regular food/beverage. There are some typical warnings about caffeine addiction being bad (and it is, btw; from the sound of it, purely from a non-religious standpoint, you might want to consider changing your consumption to improve your material life), but it sure seems like one of those issues where if you're mostly quiet about it, they probably won't give you grief or even really tell you that it's going to wreck your spiritual soul or whatever.

I would have to drink a lot of caffeinated soda to match my current caffeine intake from coffee

This is exactly what Mormons do.

Quitting coffee would be a massive stumbling block, although as long as they’ve got some workaround allowing me to still consume a comparable amount of caffeine I could manage it.

As far as I know, caffeinated soda is seen as a viable workaround. I don’t think there is any prohibition on pre-workout type supplements, so there are definite alternatives.

As far as weathering wokeness, I wouldn’t bet money on it for long. They seem to be slower to modernize than all but tradcath and separatist sects like the Amish and Haredim, but the Mormon church has liberalized substantially over the last 30 years. The Mormon fertility rate has dropped almost to the national median. Age at marriage is going up. BYU has LGBT clubs, although though the honor code forbids sex outside of marriage.

Our family has done this, though not Orthodox.

Congregationalist but not affiliated with any of the woke denominations.

There are no pride flags, BLM banners or lady ministers. The other men in the bible study are normal, married, most with children. One or two would help me dispose of a body if necessary.

To be honest I have had similar thoughts from time to time. My conclusion is that I cannot be that dishonest with myself or the people around me and I could never justify it with pride to my children. I have talked to enough Mormon missionaries to know that I am not like them. They are not saying to themselves "well this is totally untrue but it's kind of based so I'll play along." If I joined them on those grounds it would be an insult to everyone involved and they wouldn't want me if I said that to them honestly. I have to believe there is a way forward that I can follow with intellectual honesty and I encourage you to do the same.

Why are you convinced it's false?

My conclusion is that I cannot be that dishonest with myself or the people around me and I could never justify it with pride to my children.

So, my last paragraph is trying to get at, we don't feel like we are being dishonest. I have no illusions that it's not probably motivated reasoning, but my wife and I have both found ourselves increasingly drawn to a belief in god we never had before due to the state of the world.

I don’t think it’s possible to be a Christian (or a Muslim, for that matter) and not truly believe. Judaism is a mixed bag since it’s more of an ethnotribal identity, but certainly there too belief is strongly preferable because it anchors most practice.

In previous phases of religious revival (including the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, and the great revival movements of the 19th century) almost all lay revivalists already believed in God even if their practice was limited or nonexistent and even if their lives were not necessarily particularly Christian. Without that, I’m not sure if it’s possible.

that Liberalism though a fruitful doctrine, is founded on clear lies, and his series of posts on those myths is enlightening to who wants to construct a new kind of freedom ideology that doesn't have the flaws of Liberalism but doesn't have to fall to, say, Fascism.

As someone who considers themselves an open-minded classical liberal can you actually express what these foundational lies actually are? This is the first time I've ever heard of any of this and I'm quite curious.

Why does all of this sound like weird terminally online drama between Z-list internet celebs?

I could expand in this case using, among others, De Jouvenel; but I think the best conversation starter in this context is Carl's own words in Five False Assumptions of Liberalism.

His list goes as follows:

  1. Pre-Social Man in the State of Nature
  2. Everyone is Equal
  3. The Universal Man
  4. The Blank Slate
  5. Equality of Opportunity

I won't expand further since his own explanation is already quite concise.

Why does all of this sound like weird terminally online drama between Z-list internet celebs?

Because that is what philosophical discourse is, ultimately.

Thank you and both FCfromSSC and Maiq. This gives me some reading and thinking to do over the weekend.

  • Tolerance is not a moral precept. "Tolerant" societies rely on their population having sufficiently coherent values such that the differences in values can be ignored. Observably, humans can and have sufficiently divergent values that "Tolerance" cannot bridge the gaps.

  • Humans do not default or even gravitate to the norms and views of a moderate California Liberal circa 1995; mutually incompatible values are quite common. A population's values drift over time, and the capacity for drift is large. Liberalism, at least as it has existed in the last two or three generations, has no comprehension that this is even possible, much less any plan for how to deal with it. Worse, Liberalism seems to actively encourage values-drift, removing the values-coherency that allows it to function in the first place.

  • Formalized rules cannot constrain human will. All rules have loopholes, and the more complex the ruleset the more loopholes they have. Rules organize cooperation, but are powerless to constrain defection. Liberalism appears to have no native comprehension of the phrase "manipulation of procedural outcomes"; I'm convinced that merely grokking the meaning behind that phrase makes one significantly less liberal.

  • Atomic individualism is, at a minimum, closer to Hell than Heaven. Humans are social creatures. Humans are hierarchical creatures. Humans need community and structure, and community and structure cannot coexist with monomaniacal maximalization of individual freedom. Social Cohesion and Social Trust do not spring eternal from the void, you have to build and maintain them or they go away, never to return to you.

Not him, but from my point of view:

1). That the nature of man is basically good, altruistic, and cooperative.

2). That the people as a whole are capable of understanding an issue and studying it objectively.

3). That manipulation of culture would not happen even though the legitimacy of any position depends on public approval.

4). That the government would not use the cover of protecting the public to appropriate itself powers undreamed of in ages past.

5). That any institution would be permitted to exist untouched by the manipulation of public opinion.

Carl was a meme, he was called the soyfather, lost debates to metokur, Spencer and was the biggest lolcow. People even made fun of his personal life for marrying a single mom.

Seeing him go from that to making decent critical remarks is astounding. He left for a bit, came back and rightfully criticised nationalism and the lib washing. People don't change much post 40 so I'm quite happy to see him change for the better.

Ubersoy is another guy who is on a similar quest, not same sincebut he calls his project right wing progressivism. The big question for me is how you would get people to cooperate only for values. Religiosity is necessary for cooperation on a society wide scale, spandrell is correct to point this out so I am ultimately not very optimistic about this. People need irrational myths to believe in to cooperate for generations despite bloodshed with their own kin. Still, it's a good project by these two.

Time will tell, but I think Lindsey is fighting a losing battle because Carl and his friends understand politics as it is, whilst he is only able to understand ideology

I do have sympathy for him, he's clearly not in a good place mentally for the past few months, I won't be surprised if he apolgises for this later like how kanye did for his remarks about the ss.

It's always acceptable to bully intellectuals. If there was a French chad in the 1970s who called Foucault a fag and exposed him as a homosexual pederast, then the modern world would be much more tolerable.

If Carl wasn't called the soyfather by some internet frog, he probably would have written a well-received, New York Times best selling 'How It's Based To Marry Single Moms and Raise Another Man's Child." Intellectualism is not an end of itself: you get off once you reach the desired destination.

Based af. Luke Smith has great videos agaisnt nerd spergery and another on why it's good to bully intellectuals like taleb.

Society needs to disincentivise bitch ass behavior. I got told pretty firmly by guys here when I acted like a wuss in my personal life, bullying works, kinda.

How It's Based To Marry Single Moms and Raise Another Man's Child

There is nothing wrong with raising another man's child (provided you have children of your own, or you're some sort of priest).

Lindsay reminds me a lot of Eric Weinstein, only if Weinstein’s IQ was subtracted by 3 SDs (that’s not an insult, by the by, it’s just that Weinstein is legitimately galaxy-brained and Lindsay is much closer to the median American).

All of that makes it much more of a travesty that Weinstein is basically doing what Lindsay is doing for the ‘dissident right’ to the actual mainstream right; he couldn’t even bring himself to vote for Trump due to the intensely ingrained patterns of liberalism that have been cemented meticulously in his youth, and Linsday continuing down the lines of calling anyone that actually suspects different races of having real contrasting qualities from each other ‘communist’ is just a diminutive version of that, projected against the further right. Not only do these counterarguments not make sense in either case: in the former, Weinstein couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump due to his personal character, despite his praise for characters like Feynman (going so far as to call him a ‘god’), a strip-club-enjoying woman beater, and in the latter Marxists obviously sees any deflection to race as a dividing issue as a distraction from actual class struggle. I would respect Lindsay if he attempted to actually make even the flimsy libertarian argument that National Socialism (which is not descriptive of the entirety of the dissident right) just replaces class consciousness with race consciousness, even if that’s totally reductionist (terminally it’s still an argument, as opposed to whatever Lindsay is doing in photoshopping Marx pages into arguing for things that are totally antithetical to Marx).

Lindsay reminds me a lot of Eric Weinstein, only if Weinstein’s IQ was subtracted by 3 SDs

I respectfully disagree, I've spoken with eric once and he was very nice, I still have to be honest and my opinion of him has significantly lowered since then. He feels very much like Lex, someone who seems completely astroturfed and genuinely thinks he's super competent without having done anything deserving of that aura.

Good chance Lindsays math PhD is more rigorous than Weinstein’s given that every physics or math guy whose come across it has criticised it, his grievance studies gimmick was more impactful than Eric's liberal IDW arc. He never revealed what he did at thiel capital or his days post Harvard and how he suspiciously left thiel capital during thiel's FBI issues.

Lindsay and Eric were never a part of the right, certainly never dissidents, eric was uncomfortable around the name Curtis Yarvin on Lexs podcast. James actually tried something and willingly talks to people, no matter how bad his positions maybe, he's not self censoring as much as eric who has takes how he can relate to black people because he's slow and whilst he didn't imply that blacks are slow, but that he was stigmatized and hence relates to them. This has to be a joke, how can a man seriously write this and expect to be taken seriously.

@IGI-111 take on this is correct. Both of them are 90s liberal, they are agaisnt any conservative value, let alone dissident or reactionary. Him getting publicly refuted is a good sign of progress imo.

Weinstein definitely was astroturfed, probably pushed by Thiel of all people, which basically cements in my mind that Weinstein is effectively a transitionary figure and was used for that purpose rather than anything else. My mental distance between Weinstein and Lindsay in terms of their intelligence is simply due to the fact that Weinstein seems to have been good enough to initially get within the circles to be pushed, while Lindsay just seems like someone who actually has an agenda he wants to carry out for the greater-good; Weinstein as opposed is just someone who saw an opportunity to talk about whatever he wanted, and clearly was verbally intelligent to have people swindled to the point where they believed that he was intellectual enough that he was someone they should listen to.

Lindsay seems to me to be someone seeing this entire Thiel-structure become visible after it had such a long time fermenting and attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, while Weinstein seems to be resigned to the fact that what he has is going to be the best he’s ever going to get; his tweets talking about how the people on the periphery of the administration are not calling him is another example of this, as he has obviously been left behind due to his unwillingness to accept the times as they’re changing. Weinstein is never going to change physics, or ‘bring people to the stars’ (which he sees as a calling from his Jewish destiny). His dream would be a transhumanist space-liberalism which Lindsay would call communist due to wanting to transcend the human condition through technological revolution or whatever. The only ‘rightism’ that Weinstein ever participated in was specifically anti-establishment in instrumentality only, as opposed to Lindsay in his view of terminal values being liberal only.

Lindsay doesn’t want that future, and the other people who do realized that the current structure of things isn’t good enough to actually get there; unlimited hoards of third-wordlists aren’t going to generate a population capable of creating the unified field theory as the center of the bell-curve is 80 IQ. This is the big filter, and the thing that IMO is actually the end of all these things which these people are seeing and yet being numb towards.

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