Chaucer depicts three priests: The Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner. All of the them are corrupt and avaricious. The Summoner and the Pardoner are low testosterone gays, and the Pardoner is a predatory pedophile gay. The Friar has seduced many women, and been forced, therefore, to pay dowries to get them married off.
The Moldbug canon is that the professors rule, with the mass media as the mid-level priesthood. But lately Donald Trump and the alt-right have been giving the mass media a hard time.
Which tells me that the world is starting to lose faith in the superior virtue of our priesthood.
The disturbances in Hong Kong were a good example of priestly power. Cathedral astroturf protestors were able to disrupt the city because backed by police. The police did what was virtuous, (they supported democracy and all that) rather than what their duty required.  (The police should have arrested criminals and troublemakers, and kept the roads open. It was police, rather than protestors, that closed the roads. When a tiny handful of protestors declared a road closed, if police had walked away, drivers would have driven over the protestors.)
Had the same thing happened in Tiananmen Square, the Cathedral would have successfully mounted a “democratic” takeover of China, and Wall Street would have looted China the way it looted Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Contrary to Cathedral myth, nobody got killed in Tiananmen Square. The authorities, having the warriors cheerfully obey them, were able to quell the protests with very little fuss. You only get real violence when the priests succeed in sowing disunity among the warriors. Recall what happened when “Occupy Wall Street” ran into Wall Street rentacops.
What happened, I hear you ask?
Answer: Absolutely nothing happened, because Wall Street rentacops were certain of their duty and the righteousness of performing their duty. If you are a rentacop, you believe in private property rights. It is part of your training, and if you don’t believe in private property rights, you fail your training. So when Occupy showed up to violate private property rights, the rentacops said “No” and Occupy failed to violate private property rights. And similarly, nothing happened in Tiananmen Square.
Priestly power rests on moral authority, on superior virtue, while warrior authority rests on the ability to kick ass. We know the priesthood is virtuous because they are ceaselessly nagging us to be virtuous. All of us white males are racist and misogynist, and should be ashamed. Our evil thoughts lower black and female self esteem, and thus cause black and female misbehavior and underperformance. All black and female misbehavior is evidence of just how bad we white males are, and how ashamed we should be. Similarly the extremely high death rate among gays from disease, suicide, and gay-on-gay violence is all our fault. HIV is a heterosexual disease because it is caused by heterosexuals thinking bad thoughts about gays and denying them the opportunity to make blood transfusions. When blacks burn down the cities built by white people that they stole from white people, and drive out the few remaining whites, that demonstrates what evil racists we whites are. Whenever females get in trouble through underperformance and bad behavior, in particular when they render children fatherless, we males should pay the costs of female decisions.
All of which goes to show how much more virtuous the priesthood is than you and me. Their standards are so very very high that it is very difficult for sinners like myself to live up to such high standards.
I notice that the going price for refusing to take rapeugees in Europe is about 250 000 US$ per rapeugee rejected. Diversity is good for you and if you don’t want the immense benefits of diversity you have to pay 250 000 per diversity. Which is about the same as the price that our priests pay to live far away from the victims of white oppression. Which, realistically, sets the value of diversity as negative US$250 000 per browner person.  It is harder to perceive prices for avoiding single women, since men like to meet them and visit them while not living too close to them, but I would guess the price for living away from women lacking male supervision to be about US$100 000. The traditional connotations of the word “bastard” implies that female misconduct has substantial negative externalities, and residential patterns suggest a willingness to pay a substantial amount of money to avoid these externalities.
Remember all that indignation about blacks being forced to go to the back of the bus? Well now, we don’t force blacks to go to the back of the bus … and whites don’t ride buses where they are likely to encounter significant black ridership, for excellent, obvious, and entirely unmentionable reasons.
In the time of Chaucer, summoners had the job of punishing people for their sins against religion, pardoners had the job of selling people indulgences for their current and future sins, while friars had the easier and more popular job of forgiving people their recent sins, supposedly conditional on repentance – thereby giving them immunity against the summoner. Of course, you found the friar more easily impressed by your repentance if you made a small donation, but this was generally cheaper than buying an indulgence or bribing a summoner.  So friars, summoners, and pardoners were in competition and did not much like each other.
Chaucer’s Pardoner cheerfully admits to his own evil and corruption. Chaucer’s Friar exposes the corruption of summoners, whereupon the Summoner gets vehemently stuck into friars, root and branch. The summoners excessive interest in assholes becomes apparent. Recall the conspicuous lack of testosterone and the popularity of gay sex amongst our priesthood today.
And then in due course we had the protestant reformation and the wars of religion.
Fertile age women should always be under the supervision and control of husbands or fathers, and if due to misfortune or misconduct, a fertile age woman is not under such supervision, she should be placed under male supervision one way or another. If you don’t believe this, you will find it hard to handle women, will be inclined to credit our priesthood with immense virtue, and will be ashamed of your irresistible sinfulness.
People whose misconduct adversely affects other people’s property values should suffer various forms of exclusion, segregation, and apartheid. Persistent petty criminals and vagrants, people profoundly disinclined to earn a living, should be enslaved. In profiling individuals for their likely adverse affect on property values, and their likely future criminality and potential for productive free employment, race, sex, and ancestry (such as bastardy) should be legitimately part of the profile. The deserving poor should be taken care of. The undeserving poor should be dealt with. Since the apple does not fall far from the tree, it should be legitimate to discriminate in favor of the children of productive people raised by their parents, and against the children of unproductive people and people who caused problems.  If you don’t believe this, property prices and living patterns make no sense, you will unnecessarily expose yourself to danger, will be inclined to credit our priesthood with immense virtue, and will be ashamed of your irresistible sinfulness. Why won’t your ride the bus, you wicked man?
Jim, Do you believe if the Hong Kong protests were recreated in Tianamen, the Beijing police would have looked the other way and let the protestors win? On what basis do you make such a claim?
Obviously that is the opposite of what I believe. The Hong Kong protests were the Tianamen Square protests recreated. In one case the police supported them, in the other case they did not.
The local police did support them, which is why they brought in non-local military.
Reading the last paragraph. It almost seems that you endorse the Old Indian Caste System Jim. Though their reasoning was different, their conclusions match yours like a glove.
How much time before such discrimination as you endorse, crystallizes into a caste system and leads to economic and social stagnation? You really want to go down that route?
I don’t think you can attribute Indian stagnation to the old Indian Caste system. When the Europeans arrived the Indians were at about the same level in mathematics, metal working, and weapons technology. Europeans were feudal, and Indians were caste, so you need to ask why did the Europeans advance more rapidly.
And I would say that we advanced more rapidly for the same reason as we invaded India: The joint stock corporation with double entry accounting.
Or, the reason could have been England’s downward mobility, which created a strong eugenic effect.
>Or, the reason could have been England’s downward mobility, which created a strong eugenic effect.
Yes, this. India’s caste system basically amounts to eugenics for some castes and uncontrolled and destructive dysgenics for others castes. This is how India came to have one of the lowest national IQs in the world, lower than many SSA countries, but also possess so many really intelligent people who have achieved so much success both in India and abroad.
The Indians who went to South Africa were indentured labourers. On no account could you call them the cream of Indian society. Yet at the time of the apartheid reaching their poverty levels were lower than those of whites. Your views are the result of persistent propaganda from childhood at which the cathedral is very good.
>The Indians who went to South Africa were indentured labourers. On no account could you call them the cream of Indian society. Yet at the time of the apartheid reaching their poverty levels were lower than those of whites.
Yes, but those whites include many Afrikaners, who, despite whatever the Cathedral propaganda might say, were always fairly poor. People were complaining about ‘white poverty’ in South Africa since the late 19th Century.
In any case, according to the available evidence, Indians in South Africa have an average IQ in the mid 80s. The last number that I saw was 86.
When judging a people, I would rather go with how they are doing economically rather than some pseudo-scientific measure such as IQ. Wherever Indians go, they do financially well, Are among the top earners, they don’t do crime, they don’t get on welfare, they pay their taxes. I would any day trust that measure over IQ. Besides they say Israel’s average IQ is 95. That just does not make sense. Israel? A small country of 8 million that punches way above it’s weight in technology has an average IQ of 95? This is where all intelligent people smell a rat, much like the entire Global warming scam. I say this IQ measure is not all Kosher or Halal!
There’s nothing pseudo-scientific about IQ. And in any case, it correlates very well with economic achievement.
Correlation is not proof.
>Wherever Indians go, they do financially well,
except for in India
Besides they say Israel’s average IQ is 95. That just does not make sense. Israel? A small country of 8 million that punches way above it’s weight in technology has an average IQ of 95?
It is only Ashkenazi Jews who have a reputation for having high IQs. The other Jews, who are together a majority in Israel, such as the Arab, Ethiopian and Indian Jews, do not.
Yes, Indians do not do well in India. This is true. And it could be that Indians are unable to organize and co-operate with each other as well as whites do. India is not a high trust society the way European societies are. This is the crucial difference between Indians and the Europeans. While the Indian does not yield anything to the European when it comes to Individual intelligence. He is slightly less courageous than the average European. But he is noticeably inferior to the European in his ability to organize and cooperate with other Indians as compared to how well Whites are able to organize and cooperate with each other. If you say that this is the crucial point where Indians are inferior to Whites, then I will find it hard to contest your point.
But on intelligence, he does not yield much.
Depends on the caste, ethnic group, whatever you call it. Some kinds of Indians are reasonably smart. Most are not. Some kinds, quite a lot, are as dumb as blacks.
I have no stake in proving that Indians are inferior to whites, as I’m neither Indian nor white. I like India, and Indians, but the only point that I was making was that there is little disparity between what the relevant research tells us is the average IQ in India, and the socioeconomic condition that most Indians are currently living under.
I really feel that those IQ scores were back calculated based on socio econonic conditions. Can we get some National IQ data from the early or mid 20th century when china and kore were economic basketcases. Want to see what IQ the chinese-koreans were measured as having then.
>I really feel that those IQ scores were back calculated based on socio econonic conditions. Can we get some National IQ data from the early or mid 20th century when china and kore were economic basketcases. Want to see what IQ the chinese-koreans were measured as having then.
Jim is the guy you want to ask on this, but FWIW, Americans have known for a long time that East Asians were bright, and potentially slightly brighter than whites, even before the IQ data was collected to confirm their suspicion. This suspicion, in fact, was partly the reason why there was such virulent anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment in America in the last 19th and early 20th Century
The Hindus claim that they were subjected by the British because they were exhausted after a millennium of battling the Muslims
>The Hindus claim that they were subjected by the British because they were exhausted after a millennium of battling the Muslims
Had India not been colonized by the British, India would have been fully Islamized by now, though I admit that the Maratha put up a valiant if largely unsuccessful fight against the Mohammedans, and that the British were wrong to co-opt the Mohammedans in their fight against the Maratha.
Actually this is completely false. By the time the British had come on the scene, the marathas had almost eliminated the Muslims. Islamic power was on the downlow, while the marathas were on the upswing. The fact is that the British Took India from the Hindus not the muslims. I encourage you to do some more research in this area. Wikipedia is a good place to start. Look at the extent of Maratha power in the 1770s. You will see that the marathas controlled about 85% of India then.
What you are mentioning is British propaganda which was the cathedral of the day.
>By the time the British had come on the scene, the marathas had almost eliminated the Muslims. Islamic power was on the downlow, while the marathas were on the upswing.
Give me a break. By the time the British got to India, the Muslims were solidly entrenched in north India. The Maratha had of course secured central and southern India for the Hindus, but in no way were they ever in a position to eliminate Islam from India. Indeed, north India will likely never be de-Islamized, and in fact, from what I’ve read, they seem to be demographically overtaking the Hindus today, such that north India may one day becoming completely Islamized.
>The fact is that the British Took India from the Hindus not the muslims
Which is what I said, the British co-opted the Muslims in their fight vs. the Hindus.
>You will see that the marathas controlled about 85% of India then.
85% of modern India, perhaps.
Sorry mate. You don’t know your Indian history. The Marathas went all the way up to Attock in Afghanistan at one point. The Mughals were shattered by the 1740s and were no longer a force. The rest were petty kings living in perpetual fear of Marathas.
85% of modern India is still 70% of British India. Check your land area stats. Of the remaining 30%, 15% was under control of the Sikhs and Rajputs of whom the Sikhs were slowly taking territory from the Afghans as in mission creep. At the time the brits starter taking territory in India, the only Islamic power worth reckoning with was Mysore of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. That is still just 5% of the area of British India.
The muslims were broken politically by the time the Brits began and the Hindus were exhausted after a millenia. Look at the significant British wars of the time. The battle for India was technically the Second Anglo maratha war of 1803-1805. This was the war in which the Brits superseded the Marathas as the dominant power in India. The rest of the wars until 1857 were merely a mopping up operation with one exception being the Anglo-sikh wars of the 1840s. That was a hard fought battle too.
To give credit to the Muslims, the Anglo-mysore wars were also hard fought. And yes, the British opponents were the muslims there. But the real power was the marathas and the 1803-1805 battle was the one that decided the fate of India. The battle of Assaye in that war was also fought by the Future Duke of Wellington who remarked that Assaye was harder than Waterloo.
I also see you changed your viewpoints. You started by saying that that Maratha struggle was unsuccessful. But it now seems that you concede that the Marathas might have controlled 70% of the India of those days. This is very good. It is good to change one’s stance based on previously unknown information instead of rigidly digging in one’s heels because it shows intellectual honesty.
“The muslims were broken politically by the time the Brits began and the Hindus were exhausted after a millenia.”
This is a Just-so story.
The British had also been fighting for a millennium. So had essentially all other peoples that had existed that long. The British were not less exhausted than the Hindus, they were just more disciplined and more competently led.
Sorry, the Brits were not fighting any foe as deadly and as ruthless as Muslims for any length of time. And Sorry, the spanish and the French do not match up. If Hindus lost, they lost everything. Complete cultural genocide period. Apart from the invasion of Britain by the Angles and the Saxons around the 7th century which led to Romano-Brit Genocide, The Brits were not engaged in an existential struggle the way the Hindus were. Existential struggles are sapping, mate.
If a Russian claims that their struggles with the Mongols were similar, I can consider his statement seriously. If the Austro-Hungarians claim that their struggles with the Ottomans were similar, I can accept that. I ain’t accepting any of that from the Brits.
As an analogy, I would have beaten either of Nadal or Djokovic in an immediate match after they played their gruelling 2012 australian open Final. Just for context
And if Russians, Austrians had subsequently collapsed against their enemies, perhaps this would be less of a Just-so story.
What does it even mean to say a nation is exhausted? Exhaustion is an attribute of individuals, and even then only a temporary one. Lack of men and money? The Indians did not lose because their armies were smaller or worse equipped but because they were inferior.
At Assaye, which Welington regarded as a greater victory than Waterloo, the British attacked almost 100,000 Indian troops entrenched on a hill across a river, and routed them with fewer than 10,000 own troops including just three white regiments.
The British did not win because they were inflicting casualties 10x faster than the Indians were, because they were not. The British won because when a British general ordered a British soldier to march across a river and up a hill to attack a position 10x as strong as his own, that man would obey. The Indians lost because when an Indian general ordered an Indian soldier to stand his ground on a fortified position with a 10-1 advantage, he would run away.
“Sorry, the Brits were not fighting any foe as deadly and as ruthless as Muslims for any length of time. And Sorry, the spanish and the French do not match up. ”
Both the Spanish and French had fought and conquered Muslims driving them out of their homelands (as recently as the 15th century for the former, 8th century for the latter).
>Both the Spanish and French had fought and conquered Muslims driving them out of their homelands (as recently as the 15th century for the former, 8th century for the latter).
In fairness to the Indians, whereas the Spanish and French were fighting Arab and Berber Muslims, the Indians were fighting Persians and Afghans, the latter groups of Muslims being far superior to the former.
@Steve Johnson and @Irving. Both of you have raised crucial points. Yes, when India compares itself to the French and the Spanish in dealing with muslims, it is hard to contest that the French and Spanish come out on top. This is a fact and it can’t be contested.
I think because India never had someone as ruthless as charles martel or queen Isabella who thought nothing about organizing an inquisition to root out any remaining traces of muslims in their midst after throwing out the Berbers. This is something no major Indian king did. And the Flaw here is in Hinduism itself which considers all religions expressions of the truth. So even when the Hindu kings reconquered areas from the muslims, they never considered demolishing all mosques or re-converting the Muslims to some Hindu sect. So many territories changed hands several times. When muslims won, they merrily demolished Hindu temples and ordered general massacres. The Hindu kings who re-took those areas never did any thing as demolishing mosques. And this, as an sane person can agree, is a disaster when you are dealing with Muslims. So perhaps, this too can be used an example that Hindus are not quite at the level of Europeans when it comes to dealing with serious problems.
Still, one only has to watch with interest to see how modern day Europeans deal with Islam that has again taken root in their societies. Will they have the courage and clarity of queen Isabella and Charles Martel or will they go the Hindu way resulting in a soft genocide for themselves
Let’s see what happens. History is being made before our eyes.
>And the Flaw here is in Hinduism itself which considers all religions expressions of the truth. So even when the Hindu kings reconquered areas from the muslims, they never considered demolishing all mosques or re-converting the Muslims to some Hindu sect.
yes, this is a major problem. I’d have to double check but I’m pretty sure I’ve even read of Hindus funding the construction of mosques in reconquered territories.
What you read about hindus funding mosque reconstruction in reconquered areas is true. Hindus can be quite obtuse and stubborn in their fanatical beliefs regarding the equality of all religions. This I see among western liberals as well.
>I don’t think you can attribute Indian stagnation to the old Indian Caste system.
Just look at India’s PISA scores. Now that the previously illiterate lower castes are becoming literate, and are being forced to attend school, where they can now take IQ tests, we are seeing the damage that the caste system has wrought on Indian society. Even kids from the relatively developed parts of India are performing dismally on these tests, and are getting scores that translate to IQs in the low 70s.
Surely it is the other way around. The lower castes are lower, because genetically inferior. They are not low IQ not because treated as lower, but are treated as lower because low IQ.
The caste system prevented inferior races from damaging society.
Observe what happens when white do gooders adopt a black child. It is like adopting a chimp. The white environment does not cause improvement in the behavior of the black child, and indeed may well make the behavior worse, since black parents are aware of the need for frequent beatings, while white adoptive parents tend to be blindsided and shell shocked. By the time they realize the necessity for frequent beatings, they find their adoptive child has grown to adult size considerably faster than a white child would and is beating them.
The caste system is not, of course, based on IQ, but on other factors, although of course those other factors may be proxies for IQ.
In any case, consider that by stratifying society into a set of rigorously defined, autonomously governed and for all intents and purposes impermeable castes, the lower castes were left to breed irresponsibly, without the regulative oversight of the higher castes. So if those who were initially made lower caste were made so on the basis of their antecedent inferior quality, it stands to reason that their quality deteriorated even more over time.
The question is why did India not have eugenic fertility:
If India had had eugenic fertility, lower castes would have disappeared.
If marriage consists of a handshake between the groom and the father of the bride, or a handshake between the father of the bride and the father of the groom, then women are not emancipated.
If marriage involves the bride covered in gold, umpteen bridesmaids, a huge crowd, a big party, and a priestly busybody, then women are emancipated.
Since India has long suffered dysgenic fertility I would guess that the Brahmin castes have been having the big wedding for a very long time, and lower castes have been having the handshake.
Should subjugate upper caste women, rather than abolish the caste system.
The main thing, Jim, is that the caste system is the reason why India hasn’t had eugenic breeding. Your recommended adjustments may fix that, but that’s besides the point.
Not seeing it. How is the caste system causing disgenic breeding?
If the top castes had eugenic breeding for themselves, they would impose it on everyone. Trouble is that the smartest castes are failing to reproduce.
>Not seeing it. How is the caste system causing disgenic breeding?
If the caste system were causing eugenic breeding, than we would have been able to see a consistent improvement of the lower castes over the 4 or 5 thousand years that it has been in existence. What we do see, however, is that besides the extraordinary achievements of the higher castes, who were themselves numerically small, Indians seem to have always been of extremely low quality. To repeat, from the evidence that we have, the average IQ in India is in the low to mid 70s. So, although I don’t have sufficient information to say that the caste system is dysgenic, although I strongly suspect that it is, I do think it obvious that it most certainly isn’t eugenic.
>If the top castes had eugenic breeding for themselves, they would impose it on everyone.
Hinduism doesn’t work this way. Each caste has its own distinct duties, and it is widely accepted that what is proper for one caste is not necessarily, indeed not usually, proper for another, especially where the rules regulating the family are concerned. For example, Brahmans are allowed to divorce, but the other castes aren’t, etc.
The caste system is a result of a relatively small number of Aryans (“whites”) conquering a mass of Dravidian aborigines.
The inferior castes did not breed out of control. They started off much larger than the Aryans.
The proportion of superior Aryan DNA in India today is in fact relatively high, considering the initial conditions. Of course it can and should be higher.
Today, the caste system has negative influence because the Fabians who rule India want the inferior castes to breed out of control while the superior castes die. Just as in England they tried to destroy the upper and middle classes while making them pay for the working class to breed out of control.
If the caste system didn’t exist they would pursue the same policy but it would look more like inferior-supremacy in England than inferior-supremacy in the US, which is also a racial caste system (blacks on top, asians on the bottom).
>The caste system is a result of a relatively small number of Aryans (“whitesâ€) conquering a mass of Dravidian aborigines.
It really isn’t so simple. India had civilization before the Aryans arrived. The Aryans, though they did militarily conquer the place, they hadn’t completely imposed their own culture and laws on the indigenous aborigine population. In fact, the Aryans were themselves assimilated–which is to say, conquered–by the Dravidians in several important respects. For instance, notice that in the Mahabharata epic, which was written by Brahmans, and which is among other things an account of the major war that ensured with the Aryan invasion, that the reader is meant to identify with the Dravidians as opposed to the Aryans.
>The proportion of superior Aryan DNA in India today is in fact relatively high, considering the initial conditions. Of course it can and should be higher.
Isn’t it the case that the smartest Indians are typically South Indians, which is to say the least Aryan Indians?
>Today, the caste system has negative influence because the Fabians who rule India want the inferior castes to breed out of control while the superior castes die.
Another problem, too, is that Hindu nationalists, like those of the BJP that are currently in power, are trying to co-opt their lower castes into taking their side in the struggle against encroaching Islam, and they do this by plying them with affirmative action programs, enhances public services, free health care, etc.. Also, since their war with Islam is essentially demographic, Hindu nationalists are trying to get their lower castes to breed.
In other words, Hindu nationalists are doing exactly in the way that white nationalists would like to in the west, with their own white lower classes, i.e. co-opt lower class whites into a war with non-whites by offering them free gibs, etc..
Your children most likely read books about your history in which they are meant to identify with aborigines. Does not mean that the aborigines actually won.
Of course had the superior races fully won, there would be no aborigines, or at least the strict racial separation would not have degenerated into a permeable caste separation. But total victory is quite rare in history.
@Oliver cromwell there is no evidence for any ancient Aryan invasion of India. This is again British propaganda to account for the fact that Indians of ancient times were far more advanced than the British of those times. The only way to justify British racial superiority of Brits over Indians was to come up with that Silly theory.
History is always government propaganda and the cathedral of those days did propaganda extremely well. He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future. The government of the day always spends huge amounts of effort in getting history right and ensuring that the public comes to see the present government of the day as the acme of historical evolution. Come on! Guys like you who understand the cathedral so well should take these historical claims from court historians with a few pots of salt.
There is ample, overwhelming, and undeniable evidence – which evidence some people find politically inconvenient.
“@Oliver cromwell there is no evidence for any ancient Aryan invasion of India.â€
Huh?
Even if you knew nothing about history at all it is overwhelmingly obvious that in the North of India Indo-European languages are spoken, while in the South totally unrelated aborigine languages are spoken. In the North of India, people have pale skin and often light eyes, while in the South people look black.
This is strong prima facie evidence of an invasion even if there was in fact no invasion – these facts would have to be explained away, presumably with great difficulty.
I regard the Victorian British, and especially the Victorian British right, as a generally reliable source of information. The Cathedral of that day was saying the same thing as the Cathedral of today – Indians can and should rule themselves.
We also have archaelogical evidence for the cultural and political unity of the early aryans. While there is no indication that Aryans ever had a single King, or if they ever did that is lost in prehistory, Aryan nobles of high rank tended to exchange daughters over enormous geographical distances, and in this sense there was once a time where most of the lands that now speak Indo European languages were ruled by one people and this one people ruled from India to the frozen North.
>Your children most likely read books about your history in which they are meant to identify with aborigines. Does not mean that the aborigines actually won.
This would mean that I have been, at least in part, conquered, either by the aborigines or their sponsors.
Which you have [sponsors], but that doesn’t mean you are living in aboriginal society.
People in the Soviet Union were forced to read books about the victory of the working classes but the “All Union Head Man” AA prole President survived all the purges of the 20s and 30s because he wasn’t important enough to kill, at a time when they were killing the commanders of Siberian infantry divisions.
India is apparently independent but I don’t see many Maharajahs riding around on elephants, while the educational background of the typical Prime Minister of India looks suspiciously similar to that of a typical Viceroy of India, and nothing like that of a typical Maharajah.
Most post-colonial countries are intellectual facsimiles of Harvard and the LSE where the government is composed of English speakers and organised according to the US Constitution, but their foundation myths are all about sticking it to the British and their present national myths are all about sticking it to the Americans.
As far as I’ve seen, Aryans always like identifying with the soil and the mud people, see the Dune sci-fi novel, the Americanists of the 19th century who took mud people for wives to create an American race separate from European races, etc. It does not surprise me that Aryans would feel that way about Dravidians any more than Scottish heritagefags eating fermented sheep bladder oatmeal sausage and telling each other how much they like it.
Jim wrote:
However, the fact is among the Brahmins, for a long time and almost unto today, marriage was arranged by the father of groom and bride, and also involved gold and big party etc. And women were not emancipated.
I know a Brahmin woman who personally escaped an arranged marriage by the only expedient possible: stealing her passport from her father who had confiscated it, sneaking out of the house and flying to the US to arrive with $20 in her pocket. Her teenage grandmother saw her much older husband for the first time at the wedding, and burst into tears.
Gold and a big party, I believe, is a display by the father, not a tribute to the woman.
For classes to crystallize into castes, you have to (artificially) eliminate any kind of mobility/marriage/sex between classes.
Take Brazil, which is fairly young, and let it age like whiskey for 2 or 3 thousand years, and you get India. India is an admixture of two populations, caucasian, and whatever dark brown indigenous population was already there. There was admixture, and then stratification into castes over the centuries.
“Take Brazil, which is fairly young, and let it age like whiskey for 2 or 3 thousand years, and you get India.”
Maybe. I’m not entirely convinced. Do we have other examples besides India of stratification into castes occurring?
I agree that Brazil is similar to India in that both start with white/black admixture which then proceeds into breakdown of correlation between skin color and other “whiteness” traits. But does this necessarily cause stratification into castes after 2000 years?
Also, as Steve Sailer has pointing out, even if you start with a uniform tan population, where allowed by nature (e.g. NOT equatorial Africa) “white”/fair skin, will always rise to the top. This is because fair skin is a sexually selective train in women, and wealth/power is a sexually selective trait in men. In as much as these two feature are genetic this will come to pair wealth/power with fair skin over many generations. Over time this will form a cline with the fairest at the top and the darkest at the bottom.
This makes perfect sense from evo-psych perspective, but again, do we have an example of it actually happening?
“This makes perfect sense from evo-psych perspective, but again, do we have an example of it actually happening?”
Sure. Just look at the class structure in Mexico.
Compare Hugo Chavez’s second wife, after he became powerful, with his first wife, from before he became powerful.
Look at all the cosmetic skin lighteners for women all over the third world.
Look at Beyonce
Those are not examples of starting with a uniform population and ending up with a fairest-darkest cline.
That’s exactly what happened with Whites.
What Sailer leaves out is that monogamy is the White sexual behavior that makes that evolution possible. Niggers in Africa don’t have a man choosing one woman, which is why that didn’t happen to them. Instead, nigger sows traditionally choose their men, as evidenced by the looks of niggers, nigger sows, and the behavior of nigger sows.
>and whatever dark brown indigenous population was already there
basically Negritos
The caste system will have been a relative softening of the separation.
When the Aryans conquered India it will have been impossible for them to simply exterminate the aborigines because too numerous. Therefore they must be ruled.
However personally interacting with aborigines in daily life will have been extremely dangerous, just as it is extremely dangerous for a lone white man to wander into an unselected mass of blacks in the US.
Hence there will have been two castes: Aryans and aborigines.
The caste system of today is a result of intermarriage, not a bar to it.
See my earlier comment. Once again, there is no evidence for the ancient Aryan invasion of India. The word Arya in Sanskrit and Pali and modern Indian languages all mean a noble person. A noble person being defined as someone whose morality is Unshakeable. People of all castes were given the title Arya based on their moral conduct.
There is no Aryan caste
In other words, India is South Africa after a few thousand years, not Brazil?
Uh huh. You made the exact same mistake I made: throw out the church lock, stock and barrel because fags. Pedos. Hypocrites. Shysters. Throw out the morals and ethics with ’em! Ain’t none of it good! Been there and done that. Today those ex-Christian pedos, fags, shysters, shamers and shammers are “scientists” and SJW’s. Most jumped ship when the moral authority of the church collapsed back in the 70’s.
Today, if you actually WENT to a church today you would likely find a small congregation of old grey hairs with a smattering of youth who have stubbornly hung onto their faith AND their morals. Your zealotry, Jim, prevents you from seeing any of that. Not to mock you because there was a time not too long ago when I would agreed word for word, 100%.
The ladies chatter like happy birds as they do their bake sales and run soup kitchens for the homeless. The men fire up their trucks, load up the belongings of a disabled lady with health issues, pony up her first month’s rent out of their own pockets, and do the heavy lifting as they move her in to her new apartment. The weekend they were doing that, most of us guys were probably flopped out on the couch in front of the TV, or down at the rod and gun club or hitting the golf course.
But all that’s just mindless ‘virtue – signalling’ right? No way are YOU gonna get off that couch and actually do something to help your community just to impress a bunch of nobodies! The niggers will be along shortly to ruin everything anyways!
the question I have for you is this: Are you slagging the faith out of willful ignorance or are you doing it because you are intimidated by honestly virtuous people? If you mean to tell me that those men and women aren’t virtuous and good – how would you define those qualities?
G, keep in mind the Moldbuggian Law of Sewage…if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage.
Excellent post Jim.
Well that is indeed the pickle, isn’t it?
So it’s your position then, that because the leaders of the church are corrupt – so are the men and women I see doing real street level charity work for the disadvantaged?
I’ve read a little of Moldbug; and like Jim here – he’s certainly a deep thinker. Dunno if that comparison is all that applicable here though.
For me, it means that no matter how you try to dilute it, anything…you, me, the church, whatever…is now tainted with sewage.
Admit it , move on, and do the best you can to avoid sewage.
For you and your good people doing good works, perhaps your own church or organization, untainted with the church leader’s sewage? I dunno…my 2 cents.
For the “disadvantaged” – aka black thugs and such. And adopting black babies. They are earning brownie points for progressives. I would be impressed if they did street level work for the men and women who attend their church. Saint Paul tells us to look after near, not far.
I don’t think so. The count of Church girls is pretty similar to the count of non church girls. And most of the guys in that count are way more desirable, as girls consider desirable, than anyone who is likely to marry them. After they have fucked Jeremy Meeks, never going to want to fuck their husbands.
Hypergamy means that if females are allowed to make their own sexual choices, a few men are winners, and most men are losers.
Well at my church, before I stopped going, there were a lot of wall hitting sluts, often with multiple bastards in tow with baby daddies in prison, looking to cash out and spend their husband’s money while refusing to have sex with him. Their were also a lot of betas married to sluts who tried to cheat with me. They did their best to believe the priests when they keep repeating “everything is fine” and kept trying to hook me up with post wall sluts to quite literally “save” them. They were quite open about it. About using me to pay for women’s shitty choices and pay for some thugs bastards. Laughable.
Do you think the advice about marriage Jake Rapp received from his youth pastor was better or worse than receiving no advice at all?
Mmmmmmm.
And on any dating site you click up with your mouse – there are veritable hordes of desperate ageing single women who will take anyone that will have them. Most would give anything to have their old husbands back.
LOL – it’s your position that all the women in church are there to meet guys?
Yes. Women are in church to meet alpha guys to fuck, and beta guys to take their money.
Holy shit. Where are single women not looking for men, other than the ladies room, if the tranny isn’t confident enough? Looking for men is literally the only thing single women care about.
‘We should be good to people’ somehow always turns out to be ‘obey our virtues or face consequences’. Makes libertarianism look so silly.
This was a pretty fun post!
Although I do want to suggest that it isn’t entirely clear that the Summoner is full blown gay. It’s definitely implied that he’s getting banged by the Pardoner, but it’s only offered as an implication. And there are also these lines during his portrait from the General Prologue:
He wolde suffre, for a quart of wyn,
A good felawe to have his concubyn
A twelf-monthe, and excuse hym atte fulle;
Ful prively a fynch eek koude he pulle.
The last line implies that he, too, could have a secret concubine for a year, just like the hypothetical guy he’s excusing in exchange for a quart of wine. But it’s only implied, since “pull a finch” just means “pull a clever trick” in general, and the phrase could refer to something entirely different. I’m assuming that “fynch” is an implied reference to the aforementioned “concubyn.” But who knows!
Holy shit man. So countries are paying $250,000 for each refugee NOT let into their own borders. And if Turkey, or wherever, takes the money, changes their mind, and then lets the darks loose anyway? You can be sure they’re not giving back that $250,000.
The minute you put a negotiated dollar-value on something, pow, people can start making comparisons and judgments. And wow, what a dollar-value.
Likewise, perhaps Detroit can pay its debts by fencing itself in charging the state of Michigan to NOT let the people out. Just like North Korea charging South Korea. Fricking WOW.
“people profoundly disinclined to earn a living, should be enslaved”
the only thing in this post I disagree on. You’ve already dealt with that with vagrants and deserving vs. undeserving poor. There are consequences for being too much of a hard ass. Too much power is not good and attracts the sociopath and the corrupt. If a man wants to sit by a stream and fish all day, let him.
Even the comments on putting women under the dominion of a man not her husband or father are not necessary. Whipping for misbehavior and starvation for undeserving poverty, as well as removal of children from her bad care will all solve that problem as well. Although as an emergency measure (like right now), it will have to be done.
The libertarian solution for misbehaving women is that they should suffer the consequences of their actions. This was tried and led to far too many women giving birth to fatherless children in the rain in dark alleys. That solution was just unacceptable. Victorians tried to address the problem by endless escalating what we now call Victorianism, and it just failed dismally. Some women, quite a lot of women, need firmer measures than mere social pressure. We would not let children make their own decisions and suffer the consequences of their own decisions, and when women are allowed to make their own decisions, the results are so bad that no one is willing to let women suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
“Les Miserables” is progressives criticizing the libertarian solution for female bad behavior. The Les Miserables’ position on criminals is ridiculous, but the Les Miserables’ position on female bad behavior is correct. We should not let women suffer for their bad decisions, because you cannot really expect them to make good decisions.
>“Les Miserables†is progressives criticizing the libertarian solution for female bad behavior.
I don’t know about this. I’m not defending Fantine, but she lost her job specifically because she had a child out of wedlock, which seems excessive, and not in accordance with libertarian views on female bad behavior, which say that women should suffer the consequences of their choices, but shouldn’t be punished for their choices alone.
>The Les Miserables’ position on criminals is ridiculous, but the Les Miserables’ position on female bad behavior is correct. We should not let women suffer for their bad decisions, because you cannot really expect them to make good decisions.
The only reason to want to save women from the consequences of their bad decisions is because the consequences usually involve people that have had nothing to do in the way of responsibility with the bad decisions that women make, e.g. Fantine’s daughter.
Oh baloney.
If that is the reason for forcing taxpayers and people who get sluts pregnant support sluts, is it not even a better reason for forcing sluts to marry the fathers of their children, forcing them to honor them, obey them, to always be sexually available to them and never sexually available to anyone else? Is it not an even better reason to coercively and violently restrain them from further slutting around? A solution that would give Victor Hugo the vapors.
“If that is the reason for forcing taxpayers and people who get sluts pregnant support sluts, is it not even a better reason for forcing sluts to marry the fathers of their children, forcing them to honor them, obey them, to always be sexually available to them and never sexually available to anyone else?”
Considering you support polgyny, which is an affront to Jesus Himself, and considering you (allegedly) have a wife and several girlfriends on the side, are those women not sluts? I thought honorable men refrain from having sex other than their wife. Here’s praying you are wearing protection…
Now, what would happen if you knocked up one of your (supposed) girlfriends? You would have to marry her, right? But, I thought you don’t marry sluts, you pump and dump them, like your boy, Roissy? Are you not actually supporting slutdom by having your own brigade of women other than your wife (if you are even married and have children)?
Praytell, do your (again, alleged) girlfriends obey you? How about your wife? Does she honor you without fail?
See, this is why you are so entertaining. You really believe in what you write without realizing you’re a crackpot.
“Pump and dump” is a rationalization for performing for girls like a dancing monkey. Serial monogamy is what happens when women have all the power, polygyny is what happens when men have all the power. If most relationships that fertile age women engage in are serial monogamy that means women are getting their way at that age and men are not getting their way with women of that age.
The world being what it is, sometimes you have to be the dancing monkey if you want to get laid. But that is not what men want, not what most men would choose, and not what the world should be like. I want to remake the world so that it is not like that any more.
In those places and times where men have power and women do not have power, most woman know the touch of only one man in all their lives.
The bible is arguably somewhat ambiguous on polygyny. But is absolutely clear on serial monogamy, and particularly and especially female serial monogamy. And yet you will never hear a word in church against serial monogamy, because everyone knows that serial monogamy is women behaving badly, not men behaving badly.
Jim lives in the world and would leave single women with bastards. Which does not contradict the fact that someone should be prohibiting those women from sleeping with Jim, and that person shouldn’t be Jim’s wife, who should obey him, and only complain if she thinks he’s going to ignore her children by him.
Zebra women put up a formal amount of protest when their new man murders their children by their old man.
I was too much of a moralfag to fuck all the women I could have in college. As a result, I’m not married to one of them now. I thought it was cool to not do what the other men were doing, but in reality, those men had the right idea without having any ideas, because biology. I was wrong and only failed myself. At least I didn’t preach cuckoldry and lead others astray, the way Christcucks do.
Jim shouldn’t chase other women too hard because the Mannerbund needs men to leave the sexual marketplace when they get theirs, but it doesn’t need men to avoid sluts. It does, however, require men not to support bastards.
The reason nationalism is rising now is that Christcuckoldry is falling. Christcucks point to this and say that if the left lets them do their thing they’ll stop nationalism. This is why they are cuckolds.
How cute to come to Jim’s defense.
“Jim lives in the world and would leave single women with bastards.”
Did you not read what he posted? “Force sluts to marry the fathers of their children”. Should Jim not adhere to his own advice, he is decidedly a hypocrite.
“Which does not contradict the fact that someone should be prohibiting those women from sleeping with Jim…”
Yes, that would be Jim himself, as the more moral and higher IQ of the sexes. Yet he uses every trick in the book to plow them, because biology, then has the audacity to claim he is other than responsible for what took place. Can you say hypocrite, Peppermint? Good for you.
“and that person shouldn’t be Jim’s wife, who should obey him, and only complain if she thinks he’s going to ignore her children by him.”
What if the congregation would admonish Jim for his continued transgression? Does he have a duty to honor they request?
The entire sanctity of marriage falls if one uses Jim’s approach–he can marry, have kids, and cheat perpetually, without his wife (or anyone) else questioning his immoral and unholy conduct. YET, he laments about the fall of Western Civilization because women are slutting it up. Do you even see how illogical you and Jim are?
Wait, no you wouldn’t, you’re both nuts.
“I was too much of a moralfag to fuck all the women I could have in college”
Because you exerted self-control.
“At least I didn’t preach cuckoldry and lead others astray, the way Christcucks do.
“It does, however, require men not to support bastards.”
So, you are saying even if Jim sired a bastard child, he shouldn’t support it, because the woman offered up her “services” as a result of his own advancements–which he recognizes as contributing to the decline of Western Civilization–despite clearly articulating that sluts need to marry the man who got them pregnant.
Are you truly this irrational and delusional?
I’ll support forcing Jim to pay for his bastards when that becomes the law. The world is as it is, we change it by changing it, not by cucking. Cucking is how the world got the way it is.
The fact of the matter is Jim wasn’t forced to have a congregation by social pressure which could then exert soft power to stop him, because of the cucking on universalism. Instead, churches can only compete for sheeple by promising good feels and forgiveness, and do good works by supporting bastards for men who don’t go to church, i.e. being literal cucks. That’s in addition to the race cucking, and the cucking on trannies if not gays.
There should be someone to stop Jim. That needs to be someone with actual authority over the sluts, so, not the church that the sluts’ single mothers tried to raise them into so they could tell Jim how liberating it is to be with him.
And no, self control was a mistake, as usual when you try to outsmart a billion years of evolution. The young men who fuck lots of women in college, they don’t know that they’re doing it to try to get married any more than the women they fuck know that they’re doing it to try to get the biggest man to give them children and maybe support them as well.
“but in reality, those men had the right idea without having any ideas, because biology.”
Best succinct/pithy description of the wisdom of mother nature I’ve read in a long time.
Back in the ’70s, the worst you christcucks could do was try to feed White women to niggers. I know some White women who were fed to niggers. Seeing my girlfriend make body language of offering herself to niggers that we step out of the way for in the supermarket makes my blood boil. Three of the White women I met my first day of college would before the year ended be raped, not consensual sex but outright raped by niggers.
Today you protest abortions of other mens’ children and don’t protest the much bigger threat to children that should sink an icy dagger of horror into every parent, the clinics that take healthy children who have been brainwashed into requesting mutilation and mutilate them. Are your children safe from the transgederers? Giving children at random to progress is Kafkaesque, Orwellian, and Lovecraftian, and the fact that Christcucks spend what energy they have left on feeding White women to niggers proves that Christianity was never pro-family.
Your disgusting cuckold religion is dying and I say ‘amen’ to that, which is Jew for ‘let it be’. If only it could have died sooner.
Above comment that looks like it’s directed at cloudswrest is actually for the smug christcuck who has been supporting feeding White women to niggers with his tithes for his entire life. I was just hearing some audio of children talking happily about getting transgendered and adults talking about how great it is to transgender children on The Daily Shoah and all I could see was red, didn’t check the thread for further replies before unloading.
Incidentally, as I’m sure anyone whose mind isn’t pozzed with cuckstainty or atheism+ can guess, a lot of the children being transgendered are mixed race abominations, and of the ones who are White, they have a single mom. I don’t know how often it happens to a father that he can’t protect his child, but the very thought is sickening.
PS. https://youtube.com/watch?v=erHR0V5jxsE
“… and of the ones who are White, they have a single mom.”
Or two.
You left out two priests (technically, four); the Nun’s Priest, and the Parson (the Nun had two other priests, but they tell no tale). They are both depicted well. The Nun’s Priest tells a Gospel allegory, the story of Chaunticleer – one of the best gems of the lot, I think. Chaucer has a bit of fun with this, having the Host make fun of the priest (who has portrayed the Gospel through the allegory of a Cock put to mischief for love of his bride, Pertelote the Hen) and hinting that if he were a secular he’d need an harem of his own hens to match the lusty tale (a fine thing to say to a priest at a convent)! But overall the tale and the jest is all in good fun, and has a good moral.
Chaucer had very kind words for a good and simple parish priest, who led first by example and then spared no obstinate sinners of whatever class.
You are correct that the priestly class leads by virtue and example; I despair sometimes that people seem to think clergy never succeed in being truly holy. I’ve met holy clergy – granted, I’ve met many more mediocre, awful or fake clergy, but I have met truly holy clergy, nonetheless.
Chaucer recognized that, in his time as in ours, too many people with no priestly vocation or other skills saw the priesthood as a career opportunity for a moderately literate person (or, in our time, meagerly bright people with no serious academic interests or abilities find academia, “journalism” and “public service” to be welcome career options). But he respected the man who really was a priest, who truly lived that vocation. Chaucer’s words for the Parson (forgive the line numbering):
A good man was ther of religioun,
480
And was a povre PERSOUN OF A TOUN,
But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
485
Benynge he was, and wonder diligent,
And in adversitee ful pacient,
And swich he was ypreved ofte sithes.
Ful looth were hym to cursen for his tithes,
But rather wolde he yeven, out of doute,
490
Unto his povre parisshens aboute
Of his offryng and eek of his substaunce.
He koude in litel thyng have suffisaunce.
Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer asonder,
But he ne lefte nat, for reyn ne thonder,
495
In siknesse nor in meschief to visite
The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lite,
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.
This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,
That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte.
500
Out of the gosple he tho wordes caughte,
And this figure he added eek therto,
That if gold ruste, what shal iren do?
For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
505
And shame it is, if a prest take keep,
A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.
Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.
He sette nat his benefice to hyre
510
And leet his sheep encombred in the myre
And ran to Londoun unto Seinte Poules
To seken hym a chaunterie for soules,
Or with a bretherhed to been witholde;
But dwelt at hoom, and kepte wel his folde,
515
So that the wolf ne made it nat myscarie;
He was a shepherde and noght a mercenarie.
And though he hooly were and vertuous,
He was to synful men nat despitous,
Ne of his speche daungerous ne digne,
520
But in his techyng discreet and benygne;
To drawen folk to hevene by fairnesse,
By good ensample, this was his bisynesse.
But it were any persone obstinat,
What so he were, of heigh or lough estat,
525
Hym wolde he snybben sharply for the nonys.
A bettre preest I trowe, that nowher noon ys.
He waited after no pompe and reverence,
Ne maked him a spiced conscience,
But Cristes loore, and Hise apostles twelve
530
He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.
Heaven forbid people don’t recognize the holiness of the clergy of a sect that has by now lost everything but control over whether women can be priests or whether they have to recognize gay marriages, but in exchange told their followers to support their replacements and not question their genocide and oppose abortions as vigorously as deep down inside they want to oppose transgenderism which is permitted.
Oh, but selling us out isn’t not holy, it can’t be because it’s a thing of the world. All they need to do to be holy is dispense sacraments, keep the commandments regarding personal conduct, and pray a lot.
Priests are gay because they are ineffectual, wear dresses, and have and can accomplish nothing for their nation, whether or not they’re literal buttsexfags. The reason priests are buttsexfags is that in the ’70s everyone knew they had conclusively lost and their sole job was going to be maintaining the appearance of having a church to take tithes from oldfags to use to pay for niggers to rape the granddaughters of said oldfags, so only buttsexfags who wanted to wear dresses and be respected by oldfags signed up.
Francis and the vast majority of clergy presenting themselves as “Catholics” are neither Catholics nor clergy, by the laws and doctrine of the Catholic Church itself. They deserve death for what they have done, and continue to do. If ever a sane regime returns, one of its first priorities should be deposing, trying and executing the lot of them.
They are not representatives of the Catholic Church, since they manifestly do not hold the Catholic Faith. Most of them are acting in barely concealed malice against the Catholic Church and Faith.
since the See of St. Peter has fallen into heresy, does that mean that the Orthodox were right all along?
>They are not representatives of the Catholic Church, since they manifestly do not hold the Catholic Faith
The main job of the priest is to confer the sacraments, not to represent the Church, as the Church is represented by both clergy and laity. And, of course, the sacraments of a validly ordained priest, or of a validly consecrated bishop, are efficacious, even if the priests and bishops are all atheists or, worse, progressives. Sorry, but this is how things work in the Papist religion.
Jim is sorta giving the “Chaucer-as-crypto-Lollard” interpretation, which is definitely not the best way to think of him. After all, Chaucer was highly revered in the fifteenth century, at a time when the Orthodox Church was fighting the Lollards and highly worried about anticlerical ideas spreading around. But whatever! Chaucer definitely does throw a ton of anticlerical satire into the Canterbury Tales, and the three most virtuous-seeming people in all of CT Prologue are the Parson, the Clerk, and the Ploughman — the third of whom might be a reference to Langland’s Piers Plowman. Jim also neglects to mention two other damning portraits that mock church corruption: they are of the Monk (who goes hunting regularly and ignores his church duties, and Chaucer pretends to agree with him!) and the Prioress (who feeds expensive meats to her dogs, but then cries if she sees a mouse get killed. She also wears a brooch that says “love conquers all”).
It’s worth pointing out that Estates Satire had always been a part of the Christian tradition in Europe, and it was there to basically bash all of the estates: the priests are being corrupt, the merchants are being greedy, the knights are getting lazy, the women are being whores etc….. Gower’s “Mirror of Mankind” is probably the best late-fourteenth century example, written in Anglo-Norman. So when you see an attack against some estate in the medieval period, it isn’t necessarily a sign of some advanced state of corruption. It’s just sorta conventional.
Oh, actually, let me offer a quick correction, since I just looked it up and rechecked: estates literature starts around the twelfth century, then continues into the fourteenth — so it hadn’t “always” been in the Christian tradition.
Wife of Bath is not a whore, but a feminist, and feminism is depicted quite kindly. The knight is not lazy, but rather a perfect holy warrior, the living embodiment of chivalry.
The merchant is a worthy man, whose chief weakness and failure is that he lives above his means and is unduly impressed by international fashion and outspending the Joneses. He is not depicted as squeezing out an unfair profit.
Chaucer’s plowman is, damnit, Christ on earth. He performs his humble job well out of love of God and duty. The miller is drunk, but this does not show him to be a drunkard, and the wife in his tale is easily led astray, as the nature of women is well known, but is no whore.
Chaucer is not whomping into the estates generally. He is whomping into clerics in particular and especially. The knight and the plowman are virtue, courage, and ancient wisdom. The clerics are, for the most part, evil scammers.
I don’t seen anyone else who really gets depicted so harshly. The wife of Bath is not a harsh parody of feminism, indeed arguably she and her tale are an argument for feminism. The knight is knightly, a perfect holy warrior. The worst people Chaucer depicts are clerics, and those clerics are depicted far more brutally by far than anyone else. They are savagely condemned. No one else, not even the Wife of Bath, is savagely condemned.
I’d argue that the church people are the worst and the best.
The Nun’s Priest is depicted just fine, and his story is often seen as Chaucer’s most mature and impressive work. It’s interesting that Chaucer would assign his best tale to a guy who’s supposedly bad.
The Parson is the guy who concludes the whole Canterbury Tales, with the longest tale: a prose piece resembling a sermon, reminding everyone of the virtues of Christian Orthodoxy. No one has seriously attempted to suggest that the Parson’s Tale is anything other than a solemn work of absolute Christian truth.
The Clerk (a first estate guy) presents a very disturbing exemplum about the importance of staying faithful to God, evoking the Book of Job, but every attempt I’ve seen to interpret it as a satire has been weak. It is, after all, a translation of Petrarch!
As far as the other people go:
The Miller is depicted as a drunken, foolish churl, but likable all the same. The Reeve is depicted as an aging, upwardly mobile pervert concerned with status seeking.
The Wife of Bath is given a complex depiction, true, but I’d say it’s mostly negative. At best, a contemporary audience would sort of laugh with her, but then conclude, “She is a very pathetic old woman! Let us pity her and her foolish ignorance!” Chaucer uses a ton of unflattering stuff from the Latin comedy tradition to depict her, like the perverted old woman from Pamphilus, the perverted old woman from Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, some of the negative complaints about gold-digging women from previous Estates literature, and more. To the extent that Chaucer agrees with any of her ideas in her prologue, it is that Chaucer may take issue with some of the ideas in Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, which she criticizes. Chaucer himself *seems* critical of some of its ideas, too. But even then, I have my doubts, because that same text is presented very well in the Miller’s Tale: the main character January tries to marry a much younger woman, his adviser says “don’t do it,” cites Jerome, and he turns out to be right to warn him.
The Merchant is given an ambiguous depiction in the General Prologue, but in the prologue of his tale, he makes it clear that he sees the story as a reflection on his own failed marriage, and doesn’t even seem to know the allegorical meaning of the story he tells.
Overall I don’t think Chaucer had much of an axe to grind.
Ah, sorry, I really need to start proofreading better. In this part: “But even then, I have my doubts, because that same text is presented very well in the Miller’s Tale: the main character January tries to marry a much younger woman, his adviser says “don’t do it,†cites Jerome, and he turns out to be right to warn him.”
I meant to say Merchant’s Tale, not Miller’s Tale.
Also, while we’re on this subject, for anyone who wants to read some fun 4th century manosphere stuff, definitely check out that Saint Jerome text: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/30091.htm
Just check out the quote from Theophrastus. Ancient MGTOW.
Saint Jerome tortures the text of Saint Paul to reach the conclusion that women should not marry and husbands should not have sex with their wives, an interpretation that, to put it mildly, has never been Christian orthodoxy.
The problem is priestly power. Do priests have special access to truth and virtue? If they don’t, priests should not have power.
Chaucer attacks the justification for priests having power.
No one suggests that Chaucer is anti Christian, or even anti theocracy, any more than Martin Luther was anti Christian or anti theocracy. He is anti the actually existent theocracy.
The whole problem with your interpretation is that attacking the clergy was a common thing in medieval Catholicism. Consider it as a sort of internal hygiene.
It seems weird now, because Protestantism made Catholics get defensive, so you’ll never see them attack their own in quite that way anymore. The competition has proved to be an existential threat. So they don’t have the ability to attack their own priests for sexual scandals and simony, and then broadcast those attacks across the Western world to anyone who could read. But they sure did back then.
Based on your reasoning, you might as well say that Dante was a proto-Protestant as well, since he throws a bunch of Popes in Hell. Or Bernard of Cluny, who viciously attacks the clergy in his De Contemptu Mundi. Or even Bernard of Clairvaux, who attacks their gluttony in certain texts as well. Chaucer isn’t doing anything new; he’s drawing from a long tradition of clergy-bashing.
The pope says indulgences are just fine, and all those indulgences the pardoner was selling were ultimately issued by the pope. Chaucer leads us to believe that indulgences are a scam, in which case the Pope is as much a scammer as the pardoner.
The church exercised power in this world, and the aristocracy exercised power in this world. The aristocracy exercised power though the knight, and the Church exercised power through the summoner. The knight is depicted as manly, brave, and entirely good, the summoner is a pervert, and entirely evil. Chaucer is saying the strongest possible way that the priesthood is unfit to hold power.
We are always ruled by priests or warriors. Then as now the priesthood argues they are nice guys, so better to be ruled by priests.
Chaucer’s knight is a trained killer and good at it. Would you rather be ruled by Chaucer’s knight or Chaucer’s summoner? More importantly, which of them is worthy to rule?
Of course Chaucer is not saying that protestants should rule. There were no protestants back then do any ruling. He is saying that aristocrats should rule, and priests should not rule.
MGTOW is a modern idea that women are so worthless, easy to lay, and high maintenance as gfs, that it’s just not worth doing if you’re not in a position to marry in the short to medium term. MGTOW would make no sense in any historical context, because women could never have been this easy to lay.
Jim: Yeah, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on this one, man. Obviously the most virtuous person in the Tales is the Parson, whose lecture forms the seal of the entire Canterbury Tales; he is presented as the most unambiguously good and doctrinally pure. The Knight is a great guy and everything, but his tale is an adaption of Boccaccio’s Teseida, peppered with some of Chaucer’s own influence from Boethius. A good tale, but no indication that he should rule over everything.
We have zero reason to suspect that Chaucer wanted to flip the first and second estates other than subjective interpretation.
peppermint: I don’t purport to be an expert on the MGTOW. I’m just saying, the quote from Theophrastus looks like the kinda stuff they say.
Who? (Looks up the parson)
There are six priestly characters, and all of them are bad except the parson, who leads by example. All the really bad people are some kind of priest (or religious cleric, if you are going to make a fuss about who is a priest and who is not).
Further, if you want to argue that Chaucer is not pushing lollardism, notice that the parson, the one good cleric, shows indications of being a lollard.
There is one noble character, and he is actually noble.
What Chaucer is clearly pushing, however, is not lollardism, but that nobles should rule and priests should not rule. The Knight, arguably the best person, and Summoner, arguably the worst person, are enforcers for the nobility and the Church respectively.
The knight is himself noble and worthy of ruling, and the knight’s tale depicts nobles nobly engaged in noble violence, violence conducted for important cause and limited by rules. It shows a noble ruling, and depicts all the nobles involved as the kind of people worthy of ruling. The summoner is vile scum, and the summoner’s tale depicts clerics acting vilely and treacherously. Warriors good, clerics bad.
Nobody doubts the truth of the expression that “a fish rots from the head first.” In Chaucer’s day a decadence had set in amongst the do-nothing ranks of the clergy; venial and disgusting people are always attracted to the halls of power, and will go wherever it is. But the nobility had some power, too, and even more after the Protestant apostasy. A man would be an idiot, to argue that the nobility and the knightly class of that period were particularly good people! But I will flatly admit that a profound corruption had set in to the Church, which many of the Counter-Reformers also hastened to admit, and that the Protestant revolt was in large part a reaction to this.
That said, it is not accurate to read Chaucer as an enemy of the Church; indeed, he hates the do-nothing clergy all the more, precisely because he loves the Church, and they are corrupters and exploiters of her goods. In the Parson’s Tale, he constantly quotes the Saints and Fathers, exposits the Catholic doctrine on contrition and its necessity to confession and repentance, and repeatedly makes reference to the authority of “Holy Church,” even saying that those who slander the Church and her laws are “loathsome and evil,” “tools of the devil” and “enemies of the angels.”
All of this argues against any Lollardist interpretation, especially since the Parson who is so praised, is explicit about the need for making confession to a priest (a key protestation of the Lollards)… not to mention the fact that the whole tale is of a pilgrimage (which Lollards hated) to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket (whose cult they rejected), the EVIL CLERIC KILLED BY THE SAINTLY WARRIOR CASTE (!), as an act of penance, which is so central to the Tales. His problem seems to be with folk who try to sell Christ and penance for money; his highest praise is for a simple priest who loves the Saints, the Scriptures, the Church and insists upon honest confession to priests as necessary, helping people to reform at his own cost.
Chaucer’s work is so great precisely because it is not grinding any particular axe, but rather is a profoundly human work of great insight into our nature: it sees the good and the bad, the humor and the tragedy in them, and, in the end, boils it all down to this: amidst the vicissitudes and varieties of the world and all its vanities, penance should be the touchstone of man’s life; the people walking the road of penance are a motley crew, some of whom get it better than others. Chaucer ends the work in an act of penance, retracting his other works which he calls “vanities,” and concludes thus:
“I thank Our Lord Jesus Christ and His blissful mother, and all the saints of heaven, imploring them that from henceforth, until my life’s end, they may send me the grace to lament my heinous crimes and to direct my studies to the salvation of my soul; and to grant me the grace to achieve true penitence, confession and satisfaction through penance in this present life, through the benign grace of He who is High King and priest over all priests…”
And, of course, the Protestants immediately set about building their revolutionary society on the bases of theft, usury and the incoherent principles of Liberalism, demonstrating amply that once power was concentrated primarily in the hands of the noble and warrior (rather than clerical) classes, these classes, already less than virtuous at that time, proved themselves to be corruptible more swiftly and profoundly. The headlong rush thence into democracy and universal vice has brought us to our present state… where, yes, make no mistake, the things emanating from the Vatican Hill these days are not the result of Catholicism (which condemns everything they stand for), but of the complete triumph of Liberalism and Protestantism over all the institutions of Western Society. Francis is a Protestant – or, what is the same thing, a Liberal. The Conciliar movement posing as the Church, is a Protestant sect. Thus far, I agree with your assertion that Chaucer was not specifically against the Catholic Church, but was against the elite at that time. That elite did deserved to be opposed; the tragedy is that the opposition would go off the rails as it did.
Finally, I can’t agree that the depiction of the Wife of Bath is a positive depiction, though, like most all his portrayals, there is substantial nuance. I read it thus: an educated man (knowing that St. Jerome is himself a complex author who refers to himself as a satirist and often behaves as one), is writing a satire, in which he sympathizes with a rather practical hussy (in all its Middle-English connotations) and her inability to understand the complex tradition that has produced social norms that vex her – both because they contradict her obvious vices, but also because that tradition, by virtue of its very complexity, can sometimes be appealed to in unjust or imperfect ways by imprecise or unscrupulous persons. There is also a fair amount of Chaucer’s instinctive sympathy for women, who compel our attraction and protectiveness, but are usually foolish. Indeed, that seems to be an important key to his understanding of the Gospel, as in the allegory of Chaunticleer. The Masculinity of the Deity finds something compelling in His creature and lets Himself be brought to mischief on her account, though the creation is foolish and undeserving.
All nobles depicted in Chaucer’s tales are worthy to exercise power, are in fact noble. All religious clerics depicted in the tales are unworthy to exercise power, except the one cleric who declines power.
And the Church and her laws includes indulgences, which Chaucer depicts as fraudulent.
[…] Immigration chain reaction. Rapewave continues (etymology). Media elites conceal, Cathedralize. Diversity flops. Humanitarian hubris. Demotyranny. The Crack-up. Trump’ed Alt-Right. Non-fascism. Priest problems. […]
“Contrary to Cathedral myth, nobody got killed in Tiananmen Square.”
A Chinese woman who is now a chemist in this country once told me otherwise. A university student in Beijing at the time, she went to the demonstrations out of idle curiosity once but soon grew bored with the affair and did not return. She was studying one night in her dorm room when she heard what she thought must be a large number of firecrackers going off and checked her calendar, wondering if there were some holiday that she had forgotten about; there wasn’t. Not long afterward she went to bed. The next day on the way to class she rode her bicycle past a hospital and to her horror saw dozens and dozens of bodies covered with sheets on the sidewalk outside the entrance, as if the facility had run out of space inside to store them.
This particular woman is highly intelligent but always struck me as being at bottom quite apolitical. I have no reason to doubt her story.
There was some violence somewhere, but it was not at Tiananmen square. Who got killed and why is not clear. But the public protest part of the problem was squared away with no fuss.
Maybe it was necessary to kill some people somewhere to make it possible to bring in troops willing and able to take care of the Tiananmen square protest with no fuss.
Analogously, if Trump faced an occupy type protest, wanted to shut down Occupy before people got bored with Occupiers living in their own shit, he would probably need to spray the justice department with machine gun fire, and roll tanks into Harvard, but would not need to do anything similar on the Occupy protests.
“Instead, the fiercest fighting took place at Muxidi, around three miles west of the square, where thousands of people had gathered spontaneously on the night of June 3 to halt the advance of the army.
According to the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of internal Communist party files, soldiers started using live ammunition at around 10.30pm, after trying and failing to disperse the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets. Incredulous, the crowd tried to escape but were hampered by its own roadblocks.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html
As an aside, it is interesting to note that part of what inspired the Tiananmen square protests was the fact that the Chinese government at the time, by way of showing off their Marxist internationalism, were bringing in university students from Africa, most of whom were males. These African males were screwing all of the Chinese women in sight — because of course the Chinese men were no competition for them — and so the male university students began a protest against the Africans, which would soon inspire and finally merge with the Tiananmen square protests.
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Jim said,”…When blacks burn down the cities built by white people that they stole from white people..”
That leapt out at me. So true. They’re destroying housing in Baltimore Maryland at the rate of 20 to 30 thousand houses a year.