Courage Cannot Be Outsourced
From a just published review of the book:
Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do About It
By Stephen Baskerville
Since the early months of 2020, what Stephen Baskerville fittingly describes as “a junta of amateurish, semi-adolescent ideologues” has been able to seize control of America while millions opposed to them were “forced to sit by, virtually helpless.” In rapid succession we witnessed a manufactured epidemic accompanied by demands for compliance with absurd response measures, orchestrated rioting in America’s larger cities, government-led censorship of the internet, the elimination of electoral safeguards and a stolen election, mass incarceration of citizens who protested, staged trials of opposition politicians and their supporters, the abolition of the nation’s border controls, and a reckless response to the Ukrainian crisis that risks plunging us into nuclear war. It is the closest thing to a revolution this country has witnessed since the radical phase of reconstruction.
Some good accounts of these events have already been written, but Baskerville claims his new book is the first to try to explain why they occurred—or more precisely, why they were not prevented. For the motives of those who carried out the coup are less important than the inability of wiser men to stop them.
The author begins from what he calls the Iron Law of Washington: People who are paid to solve problems acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they are paid to solve. In other words, ineffectiveness is a consequence of the perverse incentives created by professionalization: “We are now experiencing the culmination of the long tragedy of Americans delegating and abdicating their civic responsibilities to a professional political class.”
Most efforts to influence policy are now the business of “public interest” lobbying firms staffed mainly by attorneys. The resulting mindset is typified by conservative columnist Rod Dreher; after bemoaning the decline of religious freedom, he exhorts his readers: “We have to fight!” But how does he suggest we do this? “If you aren’t donating to the Becket Fund and/or the Alliance Defending Freedom, please consider it.” Citizenship now means writing a check to a bunch of lawyers.
Continued in the review
I need to be off, it's a day of obligation after all.
Ah, if you’re Catholic know that I have no qualms with the individuals, just the system that controls them
That's a milquetoast motte definition of gnosticism, as is gospel of Thomas itself. That definition isn't all that objectionable on its face, and nor is this one example text.
What’s your definition?
That's a big assumption. That it even is. You seem to object to verse 114 in particular being included.
Well, most of the quotes are in the Bible too. And no, I personally have no issue with verse 114, that text is included in the source I copied and pasted…
One or the other must be rejected, and I think it's clear which.
The one currently controlled by pedophiles, who have used lies to cook up additions to canon and then used those additions to justify killing hundreds of thousands? Or you mean the one which says “think for yourself”?
Well they range from goofy and easily dismissed to dogmatic beliefs built on lies and enforced through the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocents.
You have the “gay priests” and the “lesbian pastors”, which I won’t even bother finding links for, and which represent the worst of “Churchianity” or the notion that you can just “pick your favorite interpretations” such that the religion is one of your own making. Easily dismissible, these people are just part of random churches with no broader affiliations, ok whatever fair enough
Next you have issues like the fact that Joe Biden hasn’t been excommunicated from Roman Catholicism despite all the times he’s supported abortion. That’s just a hyper specific example, but I make it to show that even the “trad”, “based” strains have been subverted, not just these random no name churches with the gay trans pastor-of-color. One need look no further than the pope for confirmation of this point.
“Ok”, you might say, “so what, it’s been corrupted recently, all that means is we just need to look at the history of the Church with an analytical mind and determine the truth from that” - I mostly agree with this hypothetical I just made you say, but I want to show one example of just how far back this corruption went:
The Johannine Comma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannine_Comma
Basically, the exact specifics of Trinitarianism is one of the oldest topics of debate in Christianity. The Catholic Church has never liked this, because they are defined by their Trinitarian beliefs. The specifics are nuanced, but effectively, what was once perhaps a marginal note (the “comma”), a wise insight left by a reader, was transformed into Canon, which was enforced with murder most commonly. I can’t write a dissertation on the subject but I personally don’t see Trinitarianism as a dogma supported by scripture, you might find some interesting information on the subject in this loooong wiki page or related ones on specific sects who were slaughtered en masse. Newton for example was a Unitarian, what a different world we would live in had he been killed for his unorthodox thinking!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontrinitarianism
Whole sects of nontrinitarians have, for the last ~1800 years, been systematically murdered by the tens of thousand. And this wasn’t just in the brutal early days of the Roman church but continued basically up until the Protestant Reformation and for a while after.
So all that is to say, “Christianity” today already consists of so many (conflicting) interpretations and views and perspectives. How I understand “gnosticism” is basically just “use your wisdom and the knowledge you can glean from the world around you to determine the truth”, thus “Christian gnosticism” is basically just “use your wisdom to interpret scripture, never thinking you already have ‘all the answers’, but instead humbly seeking His wisdom in His word”. Which is probably effectively what most real Christians these days are already doing, I’m just willing to look beyond the bounds of these books selected and edited and selectively edited by the liars and murders discussed above. Hence I’ll look at something like the Gospel of Thomas with an open mind, and see the beauty of the New Testament in the lean form of 114 sayings by the wisest teacher men have known, Jesus
Gnosticism seems more logically consistant to me than mainstream Christianity.
Do you think a lot of subversion has snuck into Christianity in the last 2,000 years? I ask that rhetorically because I think it’s obvious that there has been a lot, but if you want me to point to specifics I can.
Thus, if “the true faith” of Christianity can be apparently subverted, what makes you so convinced that true gnosticism and true Christianity are in opposition?
One of the most interesting threads of “gnosticism” I’ve come across is the conjoined ideas that
1)the Essenes were “gnostics”
2)the Essenes were the sect that John the Baptist came from, and thus logically the sect that his cousin Jesus of Nazareth came from
Have you ever come across any of that?
Secondly, the “foundational text” of Christian gnosticism is the (so-called apochrypha) the Gospel of Thomas.
https://communities.win/c/Manna/p/17teNpu1o2/the-gospel-of-thomas/c
Copied and pasted^ the full text into a post recently. I’m interested in any flaws there you can point to, because based on my studies I’ve not come across anything specific that Christians can point to when they call gnosticism “satanic”. They often like to say it is too dualistic in the way it portrays our existence, yet will neglect the exact same dualism present in the canonical text of the Bible. Gnosticism is cast aside for calling the physical world corrupted and for saying satan (in various names across various groups) is “the god of this world”. Well one need only look at Genesis 1 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 for those notions to be echoed in scripture.
Why are you convinced to “throw the baby out with the bath water” on the subject of gnosticism and Christianity?
Who gives a fuck what 4 random Brazilians have to say about the geographical boundaries of Asia?
I think you’re tapping into something vital here but slightly missing the mark:
I don’t see the problem here as “women voting” per se, but I think the way that atrocity propaganda works can absolutely be understood as “exploiting feminine thought patterns”. Because I think it’s safe to say that at some point in our lives every man here has believed in some piece of atrocity propaganda. Whether that’s The Big One™️ or one of the smaller ones, none of us were born immune to this.
[Left|logical|masculine] brain / [right|emotional|feminine] brain dichtomy might be an “oversimplification” but I think it’s a far more valuable starting point than the current standard model of the tabula rasa/blank slate ideology. The feminine mind has its appropriate place in the order of existence, and sending/manipulating men to fight is absolutely not within that remit
Because the accounts are “sleepers” who have been “seasoned” in some way. Here is the most recent one to slip by:
https://communities.win/u/donaldxgoofy/
If you look, it’s over a year old, despite being a handshake still
+39 -37? What the actual fuck. Admins should ban whichever faggots have been manipulating and astroturfing this forum recently. Fat chance of course.
This community is mostly eurofags and people who are “over” the political system. Yet I’m supposed to believe it’s full of die hard drumpfers? Uh huh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Z%C3%BCndel
On 5 February 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by local police in the U.S. and deported to Canada, where he was detained for two years on a security certificate for being a foreign national considered a threat to national security pending a court decision on the validity of the certificate. Once the certificate was upheld, he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement of Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s. On February 15, 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison. All these imprisonments and prosecutions were for inciting hatred against an identifiable group.[9] He was released on March 1, 2010.[10]
If they even TRY with Americans then Trump would grandstand telling them to get fucked to their face.I can think of NO country, not even Canada or Australia or even the EU, that would extradite it's citizens for 'breaking UK speech laws'.
It wouldn’t be totally without precedent… though I suppose Zundel’s citizenship status complicated things, he had been a resident of Canada from 1958-2000
Coming up next week:
>Guess who debunked out-of-Africa? https://x.com/MauricePinay/status/1662171844147855366
I like his work, and watched a fair bit of it across the subjects he touches on. It’s all interesting and mostly good, but his “answers” are scant more than nods in what look like promising directions, imo.
Communism as practiced? Yes, but I see the same vices manifest in Capitalism as practiced (or whatever label you want to give the ideology “opposed” to communism).
On the flip side, I see many of the values of Christianity in “communism” as written (not marxism per se but the more general ideas of communal-ism which can be shown to long predate marxism (for instance, the reason that the Jerusalem Church collapsed while the Church of Rome thrived was that the Jerusalem Christian community was largely operated “communistically” while the Church of Rome imposed a capitalistic tithing system which helped contribute to their practically ruling the world for a time - one might point to this as yet more proof that “communism is idealism and not achievable in reality”, I wouldn’t disagree but I simply point to it to enrich the conversation which draws threads between “communism” and “Christianity”).
The ultraright version of: the Western world is controlled by WHITE MEN.
This doesn’t even make sense, they’re waging a war against white men…the ruling class, even by your definition, hates white men. How tf do you explain that if they are only white men with no outside coordinated and malicious influences on their perspectives?
Now let's be real, are all the people here who say "the Holocaust wasn't real but it should have been" interested in a good faith explanation?
Not to a large extent, but if one were achieved, I think far far more than you give credit for would be open to it. However that number shrinks and shrinks as the charade goes on and polarization continues. We are currently at a precipice that has been approached by our ancestors (both) many times but never with success and always with mass needless suffering. Whatever that “burnt offering” was, precisely, it has been turned into a cudgel of the charade. Just like I said about the subject in general, that subject in specific cannot be wholistically addressed until the veil of ignorance is ripped away.
Unexplained to you, or others, is not quite the same as being 'inexplicable'.
Go ahead and explain it then. Your argument is dead on arrival because they’ve all been tried and found wanting. It requires stepping outside of the Overton window.
Regardless, you made the same mistake as the woke in assuming that the default situation is equality. No, it is inequality. That is what is universal. That is why the Chinese in Malaysia outperform Malays massively, despite being discriminated against.
So your good faith explanation is just, “they’re smarter than you, goy”? Pathetic.
If holders of capital say to let in many millions of immigrants, they will, because those holders are in a position to reward them.
“Holders of capital” golly that’s ironic. Is there anything in common about these holders of capital and where their anti-human beliefs and ideologies come from? Anything at all you can think of?
Besides, your simplistic reduction again neglects vital context - the only reason the ruling elite was able to get away with “replacement migration” was because of the reality that the local population had ceased to propagate itself at “economically necessary” rates. That subject alone requires an in depth analysis before you ever step foot near “and so it’s the fault of rich white people who wanted to pay mexicans to pick all the fruit consumed by Americans, grown inside of America. “Ultimately” serves no one but ignorance and the Father of Lies in these conversations, imo
So now 'subverting' previous theories is a terrible thing. Wait till you hear about plate tectonics.
It’s funny you mention that. Did you know plate tectonics was originally conceived of as a “catastrophist” explanation for the evidently rapid shifts in the location of the continents relative to the planet’s poles? In fact, it was a shady campaign of accusations of “Science Denier!” that eventually cowed Wegener and his eventual re-writers into the orthodoxy of the “gradualists”. Now we know that the catastrophist interpretation is far more accurate than the Scientific Establishment™️ could ever allow for
So you accidentally have brought up yet another example of valid theories being smashed and contorted to accommodate dogmatic ignorances. Just found that funny.
I don't think it does, and even then, you'd have to show that this was the actual intent of the theory.
No I don’t, I directly addressed this dude why waste a paragraph on this:
I take less issue with the actual data the theory is based on (basically attempting to reconstruct a history of haplogroup migration), than I do the broad and absurd popular delusions that have been constructed on that theory and data.
Also, out of Africa or not, ultimately, all humans share the same ancestors - so why?
Because, like you demonstrate in this pat, one-sentence reduction, it allows for woefully incomplete analysis to appear to be some kind of “ultimately honed in on” insight. Which it’s the farthest thing from. It’s a very messy and broad series of claims based on a very messy and broad array of data and the picture it sets out to paint is so incomplete as to be harmful in its reductionism. let me give it to you in a hypothetical - let’s say atleast 0.1% of every human can be traced to some dna we found in africa - that doesn’t actually say anything of value about the nature of the world, certainly nothing with counteracts the valid study of group differences, yet it’s used, ultimately (as you demonstrated) to dismiss these differences with ideas like “we’re all the same, ultimately”
I don't care if it stands or falls. The claims made in this thread are strange at best though.
Yeah, the theory definitely isn’t incorrect because this guy was jewish. It’s an unfortunately reality of the polarization of the current times. I wish it was more clear to me how to introduce nuance back into discussions of black and white.
And for that, you'd rather scapegoat a small group rather than acknowledge the reality that the entire Western ruling class consists of traitors.
Wrong, I acknowledge the latter and make the further observation that this “Western” “ruling class” is disproportionately made up of that small group. This reality demands a genuine, good faith explanation beyond “we’re smarter than you, goy” - or the equivalent delivered by a designated “shabbos” spokesgoy. Personally, I believe that this “small group” you mention, and accuse me of blaming, is in fact more of a “sacrificial goat” than the Evil Masterminds. BUT!!! That explanation of mine cannot even be broached while the veil of ignorance surrounds the initial point of disproportionate and currently (within the Overton Window) inexplicable domination of this “ruling class”.
People with an undying hatred for a particular group are hardly impartial observers trying to 'unearth motivations'.
Agreed, unfortunately these populations are growing, on both sides of all relavent polarities. One could say something like “misery loves company”, to diagnose the symptom, but what is the cause of the initial illness? Instead of addressing valid concerns, the “ruling class” plays dumb, and always fans the flames. Clearly they aren’t dumb, so what’s going on? Are we being (b)led to another ”burnt offering”?
Agreed. But the cause is not 'da Joooz are evil'.
True, but one must consider the possibility that the talmud is evil, and that the people responsible for its evil had and have a larger role in “world jewry”/da joooz than is evident on the surface.
I believe there’s an interesting case to be made for a type of ancient communism which seems to have persisted through to the Classical era:
Biblical scholars have argued that the mode of production seen in early Hebrew society was a communitarian domestic one that was akin to primitive communism.[26][27]
The early Church Fathers, like their non-Abrahamic predecessors, maintained that human society had declined to its current state from a now lost egalitarian social order.[28] There are those who view that the early Christian Church, such as that one described in the Acts of the Apostles (specifically Acts 2:44–45 and Acts 4:32–45)[29][28][30] was an early form of communism.[31][32][33] The view is that communism was just Christianity in practice and Jesus Christ was himself a communist.[34] This link was highlighted in one of Marx's early writings which stated: "As Christ is the intermediary unto whom man unburdens all his divinity, all his religious bonds, so the state is the mediator unto which he transfers all his Godlessness, all his human liberty".[34] Furthermore, the Marxist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people.[35] Later historians have supported the reading of early church communities as communistic in structure.[36][37][38]
Pre-Marxist communism was also present in the attempts to establish communistic societies such as those made by the ancient Jewish sects the Essenes[39][40][41] and by the Judean desert sect.[clarification needed][42]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Marxist_communism#Classical_antiquity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism#Example_societies
It’s not even humans keeping track or selecting which hospitals/refugee camps to blow up anymore, it’s fucking skynet being run on AWS servers (oh and they snuck in some blasphemy while they were at it):
The latest Israel-Hamas war has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the IDF to use such tools in a much wider theatre of operations and, in particular, to deploy an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel”, which has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets that officials have compared to a “factory”.
Well, it certainly “subverted” (or atleast was part of the effort to subvert) all the prior theories of human racial separation. It allowed every moron on earth to bleet out pat phrases like “there’s more genetic diversity within Africa than outside Africa” and have literally zero idea what they’re talking about, or what their useful idiocy is being used to achieve. “Out of Africa” basically exists to subvert all notions of racial differentiation, since “we wuz Africans 6 gorillion years ago”.
I take less issue with the actual data the theory is based on (basically attempting to reconstruct a history of haplogroup migration), than I do the broad and absurd popular delusions that have been constructed on that theory and data. But one piece I’ll point to debunk the broadest strokes of the theory is to point to the up to 20% of the subsaharan genome which doesn’t appear in any other genome on earth (also referred to by the popsci label “ghost DNA”). Out of Africa has no plausible mechanism by which this reality could exist while also maintaining its core notions.
The problems caused by invaders being here are caused by invaders being here, obviously. However, we can’t neglect the fact that invaders are here only because the gates of Toledo have been swung wide open for them. Whatever motivates that pattern must be unearthed and revealed in its totality (the root cause), otherwise we just treat the symptoms, blindly (aka “you’ve got a cold? let’s get you intubated and on a respirator”)
Here you go again - presented with a discussion prompting short text piece, you began with personal attacks and hostility and have continued ever since. Frankly it’s ironic you say:
If you want to have a good faith discussion…Take a step back and look at the questions you're being asked
without a utilitarian lens first; you might find they're not the questions you've been answering.
Because that’s exactly what you’re doing. It’s an interesting piece to get the noggin joggin on such interesting subjects as have so far been merely scratched at here, yet you want to turn it into a personal “own” on a “midwit philosophy”, by….misreading people’s points, not answering their discussion prompting questions in good faith, and fixating on semantics and word choice instead of just accepting the reality that your failure to understand my opening reply is, perhaps fittingly to the conversation, a shared responsibility, and moving on in good faith.
rather than showing why the example is invalid
As a sign of my good faith, I’ll explain what I thought was self-evident from all my previous comments, maybe then this can get back on track:
The thief who takes 1 dollar from 100 hungry mouths has captured the system to a far greater degree than the thief who takes 1 dollar from 100 tips left on the table at a fancy restaurant. Following the logic of the piece, this higher degree of capture would necessitate a higher degree of punishment (hence, logically, the prevalence of hand-removal in subsistence cultures for thieves, or the execution of cattle thieves, and the relative disappearance of those punishments as cultures develop/grow). Analogous to the example I laid out as a more clear replacement to your own
Crazy, so at some point your ancestors chose to leave their home country, travel somewhere new, and brought so much value that they could be said to have legitimately helped build their new country.
What year / where is the clear demarcation between such valuable, productive builders coming as colonists, and the valueless scum coming as immigrants? I guess late arrivals like von Braun and Musk are temporally excluded from consideration?
noun: immigrant a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
What country was your great grandfather born in? What country were you born in? Why are you such a parasitic immigrant?
> it’s ok when we do it! Here’s why that’s a good thing
Hypocrisy seems like an odd hill to die on
America is being colonized right now. Parasites colonize too genius
I'm not sure you understand how 'devoid' is typically used in English.
See you just can’t help but be a prick. It’s not my fault you have poor reading/context comprehension and a shallow understanding of philosophical concepts like Boltzmann brains and game theory.
A human, in the total absence of other humans, or even the total absence of the possibility of other humans. still has worth.
Sure, debatably. Does that same human have more or less potential worth when part of a system of other people? It should be obvious that any intrinsic moral value of a person is dwarfed by the moral value they can achieve in a system of other people (moral harm too)
He still had worth prior to the creation of Eve. After all, how could it be "not good" for him to be alone if he had no worth?
What kind of worth did he have if he was incapable of comprehending that worth without another person present?
As an example:
Poor example. Let’s look at the child who took from the cookie jar, the thief who stole a loaf of bread, and bill gates seizing control of 50%+ of Americas farmland recently. The child can be talked to or have the jar moved out of reach. The thief can be brought to the stockades and shamed, and gates can have his hands cut off. Can you follow the progression between “success of the system” and “degree of punishment for overstepping the system”?
I have. You clearly don't understand what Game Theory is. At a fundamental level, it has nothing to do with determining moral action, merely… to study ethics and the development of social mores
Lmao
Those are value judgements made by the actor, not incentives given by a 'structure' he is a part of.
Except for the fact he’s standing at the switch making his decision based on who he wants alive more.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8U18EuNN2D0&pp=ygUfRHVrZSBudWtlbSBibG93IGl0IG91dCB5b3VyIGFzcw%3D%3D
They’re remaking one piece? The 1500 episode show which is still on-going (or has it finally ended?) Why? Condensing it like dbz Kai?