How I Mine for Fish?

In the late 2000s, the New Atheist movement was at its height. Smart young people clustered around memetic weapons deployed by "The Four Horsemen" of the movement. They quoted The God Delusion and wrote passionately about the brave new world lying just beyond the the horizon, once we had finally swept away the last remnants of organized religion. That religion, you see, was the source of man's primitive and atavistic conditions. In the new age of reason and tolerance, we would all be heckin good people. Now, had any of these clever youngsters (myself among them) bothered to dig into the arguments, they might have noticed some concerning faults. When faced with a legitimate theologian, the Horsemen had much less exciting debates. These were intellectual bloodsports, after all, and the people demanded a show. What use was a meandering talk about the Cosmological, Ontological, or Teleological Arguments? When these were presented, Hitchens would sidestep, guffaw, and point out that religion was very, very stupid. And the crowds would roar. Removed from the certainty of being Young, Hip, and Aware of the New Thing, it might quite obvious that the Intellectual Rigor of the Horsemen was not, in fact, very rigorous. When confronted with the robust (boring) arguments for religion, they would answer with such daring ripostes as "we've never found heaven in the Hubble Space Telescope", "can God make a burrito so hot He cannot eat it?", or "imagine believing in a flying spaghetti monster." Hardly arguments, at all. What they were, however, were social proof. You, the good and smart person, was laughing at the dumb and bad person, and all of your good and smart friends were laughing along. The Four Horsemen did not kill God. They came upon a dead god, lying facedown in a ditch, and they pronounced themselves His vanquishers. And what god did they find there? That corpse was the husk of Western Inertial Christianity. It was the remains of dead words, quoted by fools and fraudsters. Authentic Christianity was driven out of the West long before the New Atheists took over early YouTube with cartoon skits of "Bible Man." When had it been replaced by Inertial Christianity? I cannot say for certain, but at least as far as the Boomers. I do not speak of doctrine. There are many forms of Christianity with all manner of doctrine, about which far smarter men than I can endlessly argue. We have all those doctrines, still written on their pages. What I am speaking of is animating spirit, of living faith, scaled to the level of state. There are many churches in our lands. I assume that there are many of those churches, in roadside cathedrals or common-room chapels, where the Word still beats. But I am speaking of societies. Where could we last call our civilization "Christian", in such a way that it would recoil at sin, weep for faith, and transmit itself forward not as secular morals but as the Only Way and Truth. What was the last Christianity that would compel princes and nations not just to "be good people", but to organize themselves beyond the letter of secular law. What was the last form of Christianity that would kill and die for belief at the scale of governance? History is replete with examples. If you roll back to Westphalia, you see the need to bind just these forces. The wars of religion were no dead letters. But that's quite some time, and Westphalia solved that problem quite elegantly. So we can look, instead, to the reasons states organize for mortal endeavors. Even into the Twentieth Century, the language of state spoke in Christian terms: who was in, who was out, why we suffered, why we labored. Not just endurance, either. Not just absorbing the ills, but turning upon them with artifice and force. Looking at the documents of those eras, we can say that they at least believed themselves to be Christians, in the real sense of the word. Certainly, modernity's acid must be the inciting incident in decay. The growth of materialist ideology, the flattening of the sacred, and the removal of the transcendent are a drip-drip-drip of erosion upon the faith, far more powerful than any Nietzschean refutation. But where was the flip? When was the last document written, invoking God, where more people rolled their eyes than looked down in reverence? Growing up in Millennial and Gen X spaces, we were thoroughly dead letters. The religious Boomers above us roughly fell into two camps: crazy textual thumpers yelling about heavy metal and Satan, or cultured, erudite, functionally atheistic "believers" who understood that these parables and lessons were but a cast necessary to set a moral bone, not a Truth within themselves. The former were mockable. They quoted words they didn't understand. They lacked temperance and prudence. They often lashed out from fear of their own iniquities, pressed into zealotry, and when pressed in an argument, they'd brandish the Bible and say "it says right here". They would often misquote. Those of my generation who followed this literal crowd rejected the secular world. They learned and adhered doctrinally to the Precise Text. These were the kids who could recite chapter and verse. But their faith was often brittle. When a precisely-memorized contradiction was forced to the surface by a more agile thinker, they would shut down. Faced with the inability to understand the verse they recited, they would collapse into a parody of religiosity (dumb, low status, hateful, etc) or their glass cathedral would shatter, and they'd plunge into hedonic liberation (self-annihilation). The second set were barely Christian at all. The Boomers who believed such may have dressed as Christians. They may have believed themselves to be Christians. They may have even been clergy! (More than once was I informed, with sly and knowing wisdom, that nearly "all" high-functioning theologians were effectively just noble atheists, setting a moral narrative for the less developed.) But remove this by one more generation, and the Inertial trappings of the religion made less sense. If the point of Christianity was "be tolerant" and you had to constantly explain those intolerant passages, wouldn't it make more sense to simply cut away the cast? The bone of secular humanism had set! It was time to be honest and cease the noble lie. Those of my generation who followed this path didn't so much leave the Church as simply Stop Pretending to Be Part of It. One day, each of us simply didn't go to services. What was the point? We had learned the lesson, and the church (lowercase-c) itself was just a gathering place for the elderly, those in need, and the lunatics mentioned above. Good for them, and glad it existed, but not something I needed, certainly! So when the Four Horsemen rode into town, what did they find? A new generation of "thinkers" who had been led out from the Church by the last generation of Shepherds, and a mass of lunatics and yokels just waiting to be defeated in glorious, live-streamed takedowns. If you lived on Midwit Mountain (and most of us always do), this was the show of the age! If the Horsemen had been smarter, had their audience been more discerning, they might have put some thought into what god's corpse they were triumphantly dancing atop. The gods of Inertial and Pop Christianity were scarecrows, but with a little wisdom, more might have realized that the corpse of the god of Secular Humanism (Christian Atheism) was a mere ten yards further down that trench.

I think they doubt the polling.

Not gonna lie: if real, this is really cool. Good on him.

Halloween Malfoid. Spooky!

Can someone let me know what in the Rules Based Order is going on over there?

"But the admin hasn't done anything for us!"

A healthy society would put this man in a position of honor. His struggles would be lionized, his triumphs celebrated. He is not landing on the moon. He is not conquering the wilderness. He is not winning the superbowl. But the world runs on men like this choosing to get up and put in the hard work needed to build those beautiful things. The greatest failure of our society has been to invert and demean these quiet keystones of civic virtue in favor of the vapid, flashy, or outright parasitic. We have turned the local pillars into tax cattle to be mocked for their honest days work, and it is ripping our civilization apart. Why bother, when the route to success is a pump and dump scheme? A rent-seeking racket? A state-funded ethno-nepo job? Why bother, when you can get clout by being an net-negative social degenerate on Twitch? Why bother, when you can post pictures of naked flesh and digital farm leveraged prostitution? Why work at all (the job of filthy lower castes, after all), when you can simply defect, steal, or scam your way into the working man's tax money. The humble dad, working past dawn and dusk at his unglamorous job, must be celebrated for society to flourish. His noble daily grind should be rewarded with dignity, respect, and the ability to afford a little family trip without fearing for his financial health. When he walks down the street, it should be with his head high and with the knowledge that he's doing it right. Young men should look at him and say, "Yeah, I can do that." Young women should look at him and say, "I'm looking for a guy who can do that." When these men are held up, we grow. When they are diminished, we falter.

Think of what the "X as a Service" models do. What was once something possessed becomes a subscription. Instead of owning your car, you rent transit. Instead of owning the software, you rent the processing. It turns everyday things into enduring revenue streams, and it's become the goal of basically every industry. Instead of selling you one great product every few years (or worse, decades), they want to get you on a drip feed. Think of razor plans - instead of buying a good straight razor and sharpening it for years, the goal is to buy replaceable cheap units, or, even better, subscribe to a "shave club". Each individual month is cheap. The impact over time is like a thousand leeches on your finances. Civilization as a Service is this same model, taken to the next horrifying level, since it's dissolving things owned without purchase. The public good (social bonds, traditions, community) is liquidated and financialized. Instead of your grandparents watching your kid for free, or the neighbor girl doing it for some side cash, you need to purchase "Child Care" for $1200 a month. (The Child Care, by the way, instead of being staffed by loving older relatives or the nice girl from three houses down, is now staffed by psychotic girlbosses, illiterate scam-employees, and, at best, an extremely overworked hourly employee.) Everyone is spending a lot more money to get a much worse outcome. This applies across the board. Instead of relying on a network of coworkers to keep your reputation (and knowing you have a solid job for 40 years and a retirement package), you have to grind premium LinkedIn rep. Instead of kids hanging out in the neighborhood and being managed by the community network, they're steered into managed and structured (paid) programs. Instead of meeting your future spouse through family, friends, church, or work, you need a subscription app that turns women into whores and men into johns. From petty to large, the commercialization of social bonds has wound between people, and state power is used to prevent any community from congealing which might resist it, since anything that might act "as a bloc" runs afoul of the post Civil Rights Act civil order. A village, after all, is racist (locally minded), sexist (family-oriented), and otherwise -istaphobic (resistant to the moral liquidation which precedes financialization). These older bonds reduce the fungibility of the human being. They make atomic economic unit sticky, and, as such, cannot be tolerated. After all, if you really wanted to feel you like you were part of something, you could just rent the "Belonging" service. Now available in Premium Tier on Apple Pay.

"What would be better? An unequivocally pro-American politician winning power in order to boost young men, restore the nation, and puling a major party towards our views? Or losing and posting no-no words on BitChute?" Anyone favoring the latter is either a moron or a traitor.

Ice is avenging Charlie Kirk. Vote Republican!

A few American-in-name-only multinational megacorps need to be publicly field dressed and their spoils handed over to the American people. That will send the proper message, and then we can return to sending polite guidance. Microsoft would make a great example.