Jim's Blog

Christianity was the basis of European civilization, and now it is dead save for a remnant smaller than mustard seed. Civilizations die with their animating religion, being devoured by demons.

Progressivism wears the religions it has devoured like a monster that dresses itself in the skins of people it has eaten. It has consumed Judaism, Christianity, and most of Islam, though the worst and most harmful religion, Islam, still lives and is fighting back. The martial Christianity of Charles the Hammer would serve our civilization well. The pragmatic, realistic, and cynical Christianity of restoration Anglicanism would serve our civilization very well, though it proved vulnerable to people whose beliefs were dangerously sincere, being reluctant to martyr them properly for reasons of mere pragmatism. Counter Reformation Catholicism would serve our civilization well. But none of these live, and their revival is unlikely.

More Right proposes a solution:  The universe is dead, but we live.  The universe does not know good or evil, but we know good and evil.  Therefore, let us write our religion upon ourselves, rather than upon the sky.

Tradition is the accumulated experience of our ancestors.  We should conduct ourselves as if, on death, one goes to the hall of one’s ancestors, and they pass judgment upon our life.  One can have ancestor worship without taking the proposition that our ancestors are literally still around too seriously.

It would be better if we could revive Christianity – that being the religion of our ancestors, but that looks difficult, and every day looks harder.

Previously I remarked that Christianity is dead, save for a remnant small as a mustard seed, which is a problem, for civilizations tend to die with their animating religion. Europe was the faith, and the faith was Europe – then, later Anglicanism, while it was alive, gave us the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Islam seemed, for the most part, to be going the same way, devoured from within by progressivism, which wears Islam like a demon dressing in a suit of human skin, but late it has been showing signs of life. (more…)

A woman running the Young Christian Activity Group is every bit as incompatible with Christianity as an openly gay bishop, and like gay bishops, results in most of the boys and all of the manly boys dropping out of their religion. People may tell themselves that Christianity can be compatible with progressivism, but each step to reconcile them empties the churches.

If you accept the progressive position on “marital rape”, that sex requires the continuing consent of both parties, and reject the Christian position that consent to sex is given once and forever, and that for a married couple to abstain from sex requires continuing mutual consent or physical inability, then you pretty much have to accept the position that divorce is at a woman’s whim, which is the end of marriage as traditionally understood.

Since the Church is the family writ large, an echo of the family between the earthly family headed by the father, and the divine fatherhood of god, abolishing marriage as traditionally understood ends Christianity. So, if Christians deviate from the New Testament on male authority and irrevocable consent to sex, Christianity ends, and it is apparent that it is ending.

Pagan morality differs from Christian morality because it is egoist. Attempts to revive paganism are fatally flawed in that they attempt to revive paganism with a universalist morality, a morality compatible with progressivism. The true pagan treats the loser as though he has an infectious disease. The pagan concept of virtue is barely distinguishable from the pagan concepts of strength in men, manliness in men, and femininity in women, if it can be distinguished at all.

Around 390 BC, Brennus, King of the Sennones, was negotiating with the Romans over their Etruscan intervention, an intervention suspiciously resembling conquest. The Romans murdered a Sennone diplomat sent by King Brennus. King Brennus sent some more diplomants. The Romans cut out their eyes.

The Sennones under King Brennus then marched on Rome. During the march his army purchased food supplies from the locals, rather than looting, raping, burning, and killing. The Romans fought the Sennones a short distance outside Rome. Their army was defeated and scattered, and the Sennones marched into the now undefended city. The Romans reformed on the Capitoline Hile, the oldest part of Rome, a wall within a wall. The Sennones looted and burned the rest of Rome. King Brennus demanded one thousand pounds of gold to leave Rome.

The Romans agreed, and Brennus set up a steelyard scale to weigh the gold. When they Romans arrived, they noticed that the weights were heavier than they should be, and complained the Sennones were cheating, to which King Brennus famously replied by throwing his sword on the scales and shouting, “Vae Victis!” which means, “Woe to the vanquished”. So the Romans, having given King Brennus a thousand pounds of gold, had to go back to the Capitol for more gold. A steelyard scale has arms of unequal length, so they had to provide many times the weight of King Brennus’ sword in gold.

Darwin, and Darwinian theory, predicts that social animals will evolve certain moral characteristics, to facilitate cooperation and avoid killing each other too often. Those conspecifics that Darwin thinks we should kill, and that Darwinian theory predicts that we will be inclined to kill, we call evil, and those that Darwin thinks we should prefer to associate with, and that Darwinian theory predicts that we will be inclined to prefer to associate with, we call good.

The resulting moral system has a fair resemblance to Randian enlightened egoism, Aristotlean ethics, and the moral principles expressed by Xenophon when justifying the conduct of the ten thousand.

Xenophon was an economist and a mercenary.  He was one of a group of mercenaries assisting a Persian King, far from Greece.  Their employer was killed.  The officers of the Greeks were invited to a parley, to which they went hoping for further employment.  Their officers were treacherously murdered.  Xenophon then announced he had received  a message from the Gods that they should elect new officers and get the hell out.  The ten thousand slaughtered,looted and burned their way from Asia to Greece.  Getting close to Greece, Xenophon was criticized for the trail of corpses the ten thousand had left across Asia.

To which Xenophon replied that they only slaughtered and looted when the locals tried to stop them from passing through, or denied them supplies, that when the locals provided a market, the ten thousand paid for their supplies.

A Darwinian should care about his offspring, and their offspring, and generally does, and therefore cares about the collapse of civilization.

Traditional Christianity would, and did, lead to the kind of society I advocate, in particular Restoration England. But traditional Christianity is dead, save for a remnant small as mustard seed, and shows no obvious signs of being more capable of revival than Greek paganism, though a Christian might reply that coming back from the dead is their specialty. Today’s Christianity is progressive, at most trailing behind the official and orthodox progressivism by a few years.

It is probably true that a society needs religious or quasi religious underpinnings, needs a theocracy, or something functionally similar. I am a big admirer of Restoration England, which founded the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. But the Established Christianity of restoration England can no more be revived than the official paganism of republican Rome. Julian the apostate tried and failed to revive the old paganism, and got an undead religion.

Christianity contains the seeds of the leftism that devoured it, in its universalism, and in its sympathy for losers.  The old paganism inherently had less tendency to head left.

Roissy proposes four possible motives for the UVA false rape accusation, of which sexual fantasizing is only one, the other three being political fantasizing.

Well, I suppose he is more expert at girls than I am, but it seems glaringly obvious to me that the UVA accusation was rape fantasy:

The story departs from realistic rape in numerous ways, and every departure is in the direction of female rape fantasies.  That the students are high status fits political fantasies.  The broken glass, and a whole pile of them sharing one girl, fits only female sex fantasies.

Men having sex with a girl amidst broken glass is an obvious female fantasy.  Gang rape by absurdly many high status males is an obvious female fantasy.  If I told you I had sex with the Swedish beach bikini volleyball team, would you believe me?

She is not raped by some random low status male, but by a whole team of the very highest status males in her social circle.  Instead of  being on the booty call rotation of one high status male with thirty other women, she has more than half a dozen of them all to herself.

And they are so frantically eager to rape her that they get down in the broken glass.

And they rape her for three hours, which works out at twenty two minutes per student.  The typical university student is lighting a joint after a couple of minutes.  The performance of these rapists tell me she has watched too many porn movies.

Now I can easily imagine that if the girl is in broken glass while being raped that might well make it more fun for the rapist, and more fun for her, but if the guy is in broken glass also – that is going to make it a lot more fun for her, but considerably less fun for him.

No highly attractive high status guy is going to share a girl with half a dozen other highly attractive high status guys, and if I was going to rape a girl for twenty minutes, would first turn on the light, get out a broom, and correctly position all the broken glass.  In fact, if going to have sex for twenty minutes, going to do it on a comfortable bed, and find some other more precisely controllable fun way of inflicting fun amounts of pain, such as a spanking.  Broken glass implies frantic eagerness, which frantic eagerness does not fit with twenty minutes per rapist, nor does frantic eagerness fit with high status highly attractive guys having sex.  The story in unreal in ways that provide the teller with the maximum sexual arousal.

Her being down in the broken glass makes sense if she is telling a political tale about cis heteronormative rape patriarchal oppression, but the oppressors being down in the broken glass only makes sense as  getting her off sexually.

Obviously the reason this appeared in Rolling Stone rather than a slash fiction is political, not sexual – UVA wants to shut down the fraternities.    But “Jackie”, the woman that composed it, and continues to claim it is true, was enthusiastically beating her pussy while she composed it.

Fake rape accusations featuring real people ruin lives.  The women that do this need to be destroyed.  “Jackie” needs to be identified.

I would like to revive the Roman word “Religio”, as a word for the shared rituals and solemn pronunciations on virtue that bind a nation together, and symbolize people’s trust in each other to do the expected thing, and a word for the suitably solemn and respectful observance of these rituals and pieties.

What we need is not religion, of which we have oversupply, some of them good but walking dead, some of them alive but disturbingly evil. What we need is Religio.

Thanksgiving, the fourth of July, and memorial day are good examples of American Religio: Japanese Shinto is the best example of Religio in the modern world.

Theoretically every Japanese believes that the emperor is a direct descendent of the Sun God. Of course they have not believed that for several hundred years, and yet at the same time, all of them believe it even today.

In Japanese movies, cartoons, comic strips, and video games, Shinto priests shoot down demons with lightning from their fingerprints. All other religions are depicted as corrupt, hypocritical, fraudulent, and rather silly. Buddhist monks are depicted as perverts, hypocrites, lechers and frauds. Christians are perverts and apt to ruthlessly engage in the most terrifying and shocking violence untroubled by the supposed pacifism of their religion. If Muslims are depicted at all, they are homicidally insane. If someone reads the Koran, he immediately concludes he is commanded to murder the main character. Christianity, as depicted in Japan, is pacifist, but Christians don’t much care. Islam, to the extent that it is depicted at all, is insanely aggressive.

Japanese are solemnly respectful of Shinto shrines and Shinto priests. They have lots of festivals, in which young people solemnly participate in all sorts of activities as if they believed in all sorts of ancient, and rather silly, superstitions.

If we had a nominally Christian Religio, all our movies, television shows, comic strips and video games would cheerfully depict Rabbis in the scorching and inciendary manner that Jesus depicted them in Mathew 23:3-7, while they would depict Christians as noble doers of good in the manner that World of Warcraft got away with depicting “The Religion of Light” before the Social Justice Warriors hacked the testicles off the World of Warcraft developers and forced them to demonize “The Religion of Light” because of its suspicious resemblance to the Christianity of Charles the Hammer and the Song of Roland..

And we would do this even if Christianity was a dead religion, without any need to restore it to real life and vitality. Indeed, if today’s Christianity is almost dead, the robotically animated corpse of a real religion, all the more convenient to celebrate the Christianity of Charles the Hammer. Children and teenagers would pretend to believe, in order to participate with their friends in the festivals, and their parents would pretend to believe, for their children.

But what of the risk of seemingly dead Christianity showing signs of life and mutating to greater virulence? Anglicanism around 1800 mutated from a state religion into a weapon to attack King George, the head of the Anglican Religion, and to undermine the aristocracy. Those advocating religious and sexual purity, which standards of purity were applied selectively against political enemies, should have been excommunicated for the heresy of phariseeism, but were not. I think this reflects the lack of private property rights in superior holiness. Shrines in Shinto tend to be family businesses, while Anglican Churches were captured by the most holy.

Shinto is nominally a private religion, and is showing tendencies to mutate to greater virulence as a result of competition between priests, but this is somewhat held in check by the fact that the valuable shrines are generally public/private, inherited in the family line, rather than being captured by the most holy. To operate a profitable Shinto operation, you need to inherit or purchase a suitably holy shrine, and to be suitably holy, needs to be suitably ancient, whereas in Christianity you can stick a cross on your barn, and claim it is as holy as any other Church. If you whip up your own Shinto Shrine, the authorities will ignore you, and you will have a hard row to hoe. It is working so far. Shinto is alive enough to give Japan cohesion, but we don’t see too many Shinto priests denouncing the Japanese establishment for being insufficiently Shinto and condemning large numbers of Japanese to eternal damnation for being the wrong kind of Shinto. And when a Shinto priest does do that, he finds that despite Shinto theoretically no longer being the state religion, the state nonetheless finds ways to make life hard for him. Alas, the Emperor can no longer cast him out, but the Association of Shinto Shrines, which is scarcely distinguishable from the state, can de-recognize his shrine. It would be a lot more effective, however, if the emperor did it.

The Association of Shinto Shrines in practice protects the establishment from being attacked for insufficient holiness by weaponized religion, and also protects the property rights of existing priestly families to own their existing holiness, protecting them from competition from ambitious outsiders claiming superior holiness for their newly minted shrines.

To prevent Religio from becoming an empty dead husk, need a certain amount of religious competition to maintain religious vitality. But to prevent dangerously vital religion from seeking secular power and secular status, need an Archbishop and Grand Inquisitor to do what the Association of Shinto Shrines does. We need sufficient pious hypocrisy that the established religion cannot be used to attack the establishment, nor used to cast out some large part of the population as insufficiently holy.

Spandrel argues that a semi hereditary priesthood, or an official priesthood, a state manufactured religio, is likely to be insufficiently sincere, and will therefore be defeated by dangerously sincere outsiders.

It is only going to be defeated by dangerously sincere outsiders if you give the competition a fair go and a level playing field. Don’t do that! Bribe the indolence of the clergy with ample privilege over the competition.

Japan shows how to do this right. Christianity in Japan is insignificant and probably shrinking in the same way as it is shrinking in the west, while Christianity in China is expanding in a way that terrifies the party and should terrify the party.

Communism is dead. In China a startlingly lively Christianity expands into the vacuum. China needs a state backed Confucian religio, and they have not got one. Christians in the west are for the most part merely progressives who are not quite up with the latest fashions. Christians in China are dangerously Christian. China is attempting to create a less threatening form of Christianity. In principle, this should be possible, since Christianity is quietist and other worldly, but they are doing it rather clumsily. Maybe they should try for a Christianity as infused with Confucianism, as Anglo Saxon Christianity was infused with paganism.

Japanese religio is today progressive and feminist, because MacArthur commanded it to be. Should international political conditions change, it could rather rapidly cease to be progressive and feminist.

Japan is sinking into crisis because of population collapse. It currently attempts to fix the problem with ever more extreme applications of Keynesianism. To really fix it, need to restore the pre MacArthur status of women. Japan’s strong and cohesive religio is a tool that could do such a thing, though the will to apply this entirely functional and dangerously potent tool is absent, being discredited by the things the tool was applied for in the events leading up to World War II. I don’t think Japan has the will to save itself, but it has the tools to do so, and these tools could be copied.

Originally, Google was famous for hiring the very smartest engineers, and this was reflected in the superiority of its products. Originally, it looked as if Google’s massive supercomputer was doing extraordinary things, that one would not expect of a mere computer.

And the very smartest engineers were all male and mostly white, and those of them that were not white were east Asian.

As Google became more and more intimate with the government, and in particular the NSA, it found it necessary to affirmatively hire women. (I conjecture that they managed to persuade someone to count east Asians as minorities. Either that or they had lots of their white engineers declare themselves black or Hispanic, much as some of their male engineers have declared themselves female.)

And it found it necessary to fire anyone who openly doubted that affirmatively hiring women was a good idea.

These women tended to be excluded from the work of the real programmers, because they could not do it, could not understand it, and did not much like it.

Google had an elaborate system of metrics to try to measure how people and teams performed, and these metrics showed that the women were no good. Therefore the metrics were sexist, since they had disparate impact. They were replaced by non sexist metrics, which metrics showed that women are wonderful. Metrics that show advantage men are disparate impact. Metrics that show advantage women are just a reflection of the fact that women are wonderful.

Sexist males were laid off, where sexism was largely manifested by doing work that females could not understand or participate in. Which is to say, they laid off their smartest males, in part because smartness tends to exclude women, in part because the new metrics that showed that women are wonderful also showed that their smartest people were doing a really bad job.

Some time ago, Google tried to leverage its existing institutions for billing large numbers of advertisers, and paying large numbers of content providers to carry advertising, into Google Wallet, a competitor to PayPal and the like. This failed dismally, and they are now retreating from the field. Google maps has been getting steadily worse. Looks as if Google is now dominated by incompetent engineers who can no longer produce great products.

Thus dies Silicon Valley.

You tube video of white woman walking for ten hours through the vibrant part of town. Numerous catcalls and numerous menacing pickup attempts, 108 catcalls and crude and menacing pick up attemps, one every six minutes, all of them from vibrants.

You tube video of white woman walking for ten hours through the white part of town. A few stares, mostly from vibrants, no catcalls, and two courteous pick up attempts, one every five hours.