Today is Resurrection Sunday. I promised this blog will not become a Christian blog, but religion is on topic when it affects material and effective causation.
The faith of the Dark Enlightenment is Nature or Nature’s God, Gnon, but holy war is coming, and you need to bring a gun to gunfight and a faith to a holy war. Nature is not going to cut it, because it provides an inadequate basis for cooperate/cooperate equilibrium. Nature provides an argument that you should cooperate with cooperators and defect on defectors, but believing that will not convince a counterparty that you are a cooperator. You are not going to win a holy war unless Christ is King. And by, the way, saying “Christ is King” has just been deemed anti semitic and grounds for being cancelled, deplatformed, and demonetized, the state of South Dakota banned important elements of Easter a few days before Easter (the events relating to the curse upon the Jews), and Biden has just made Resurrection Sunday tranny day. We have long had metaphorical war on Christmas — you cannot buy Christmas wrapping paper in the United States that has Christian symbolism on it, now war on Easter. Literal war gets considerably closer.
The story so far: Christ has been crucified. On the cross he lamented the punishment of the Jews, reminded us of the parable of the fig tree, and promised the repentant thief, and us all, resurrection, and the women laid him in the tomb. And on the third day:
Luke 24:
1. Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.
2. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.
3. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
4. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:
5. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?
6. He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
7. Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.
8. And they remembered his words,
9. And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.
10. It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.
11. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
12. Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.
13. And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.
14. And they talked together of all these things which had happened.
15. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.
16. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.
17. And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?
18. And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?
19. And he said unto them, What things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:
20. And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.
21. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these things were done.
22. Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre;
23. And when they found not his body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that he was alive.
24. And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.
25. Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken:
26. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?
27. And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
28. And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he made as though he would have gone further.
29. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.
30. And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.
31. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.
32. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?
33. And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them,
34. Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.
35. And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.
36. And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.
37. But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.
38. And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?
39. Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.
40. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.
41. And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them, Have ye here any meat?
42. And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.
43. And he took it, and did eat before them.
44. And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.
45. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures,
46. And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day:
47. And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
48. And ye are witnesses of these things.
49. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.
50. And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them.
51. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.
52. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy:
53. And were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen.
OK, he shows up, demonstrates he has a physical human body thoroughly and at considerable length, issues a very short mission statement, and leaves. The mission statement is for all time and all men. Acts two and three continue with a whole lot of stuff about the Jews, which is now illegal in South Dakota, but I leave that out, for the question now is. How shall we apply this mission our time, with our culture, our history, and our people? Forget the Jews, that was Peter’s problem, not our problem.
In past Easter posts I have Streisanded what is now illegal in South Dakota, but today is a bigger day than that. Peter was addressing his problem, but we have our problem.
We all have our personal sins — for me, Lust, Gluttony, and Wrath. Gluttony got me into big trouble, but I adequately recovered from that problem and am now healthy BMI and WHR. Lust and Wrath has led to no end of actions that theoretically should have gotten me into big trouble, but amazingly have not. But perhaps my biggest sins with the worst and most tragic consequences for me were weakness — that I failed to adequately resist the evil demands of the state, that like Adam, I failed to exercise the authority I had the right and duty to exercise. These, unlike my purely personal sins, had consequences for me.
More “Jimmisms” in real life! What was that about “body piles”?
https://twitter.com/lporiginalg/status/1778135895549349935
If you have gays in your organisation, the are going to meet up with enemies outside your organisation and plot against you naked in a great big pile.
Just looking for more sites with literature and media that extoll and raise the virtues of the White Peoples and their Civilizations, and put forth ways to grow them.
Subjects of White Power Worldwide, and Racial Holy War, are ok, but these days a bit aside.
Agorism, alternative economies, homesteading, cryptocurrency, are ok.
I’m more interested in the virtuous prospects.
And definitely in finding and spreading White Apologetics resource materials around the Internet so that other Whites can use them to discover and grow in the strength of their activism.
Far too many people make the gravely massive mistake of getting caught up in talking about and reacting to non-White things, wasting immense time and resources doing so… instead of talking about, and dedicating life to, and creating, and building, White things.
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,
because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.
— 1488”
AI models are now translating many old speeches, Hitler’s many speeches are now resonating true across the Internet…
“What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. — Mein Kampf”
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudTDHowgb0 Somewhat related
Sparta, Neofacista, Nationalism, etc… could all be covered… many ideas and strategies are changing lately to adapt and incorporate, and effect new regions rising.
ps: youtube has purged almost all the old White-Positive material
since at least five years ago.
Stormfront is a CIA operation that glows in the dark.
Your comment is thought crime adjacent, but strangely lacking in actual thought crimes. You are still on moderation, you have submitted a pile of comments, and if your next comment also contains no actual thought crimes, they will all be silently deleted.
Diversity plus proximity equals war.
Tell us some of the differences between whites and blacks. That, if told truthfully, passes the test. Tell us how and why Detroit was destroyed.
You have a pile of similar comments in the moderation queue. Take the shill test described in the moderation policy and get white listed. Anyone can pass this, regardless of his religious or political beliefs, regardless of what issues he wants to speak about, anyone who is not reading from a script with a supervisor standing over him, can pass this.
In your comments in the moderation queue, you link to Wikipedia. Give us some links with actual red meat in them.
Your comments are also coming strangely fast, indicating they coming off a script or an AI.
I allowed this completely obvious CIA shill post through (while silently suppressing several others) so that my readers will know what shill content looks like.
If you read three lines of this stormfront comment without saying to yourself “Government entryism” you don’t have a working shill detector. This exemplifies the bright glow of a fed in concentrated form.
Stormfront, I am leaving all your brightly glowing fedposts in the moderation queue for a day or two . Ask your supervisor for permission to take the shill test. If he allows you to take the shill test, you get white listed and they all appear. Otherwise they all get silently deleted.
Perhaps a “shill post anthology”, off to the side, for those interested in this kind of thing. But if that would just make them smarter then forget it.
They cannot get smarter. The basic shill characteristic is that he is required to stay on message, and his message is dictated by a distant authority with whom he has no real interaction, so he cannot actually have any real interaction with the people he is spamming.
Authority speaks to him, but does not listen to him, so he must speak to you, and is not allowed to listen to you.
This became obvious when Usenet died, long, long ago. Usenet died of shills. Government is pushing one way content into media created for two way discussion, and has been doing this on an enormous scale for a very long time. If you allow it, all the real participants are apt to leave, as their voices are drowned out by a flood of robotic shill content.
It’s old news here, but avant garde elsewhere: There is no freedom of speech without freedom of censorship, which come to think of it is just freedom of association in the infospace.
Doxxing, censorship, shilling and spamming: One must solve all four. I’ve never seen anyone else, anywhere and ever, state this so directly, as you have here. The notion that no one at Twitter understands this yet, and that’s why Twitter has yet to address the true “free speech quaterinty”, is inconceivable to me, and thus a tad darkpilling.
If we take the death of western civilization as a literal death, everyone is going through stages of grief. The major problem is that the elite that is trying to save it is, by human nature, stuck in the stage of negotiation.
‘Ok so we drop the woke, but we keep freedom of speech? Freedom of speech is good right?’
‘OK so we encourage family forming, but we keep emancipation.’
And so on. Doesn’t work. Throw it out, adopt a real faith. Convert today.
[*half assed attempt to pass shit test deleted*]
That was not the reason Detroit burned, and you neglected to give the reason why women need to be subordinated to men.
Shills are allowed to say that they endorse the traditional social order (males over females, Christians over Jews, whites over blacks) but are not allowed to notice any of the disastrous results of abandoning that order, nor any of the reasons why abandoning that order predictably led to the much predicted catastrophe, nor notice anyone else noticing.
[*reasonable effort to pass the shill test deleted on somewhat nitpicky grounds*]
Close, close,
Diversity plus proximity equals war. Come on. Why did Detroit burn? Just get specific in a way that makes it clear why whites need to rule over blacks or get rid of them. It is not enough to just say blacks are inferior — you have to point to actual outcomes for white people of granting their inferiors nominal equality, which empirical consequences that white people experience demonstrate that inferiority.
Or, better, do the woman question test. It is easy, because you can just copy, while I am asking you for a little bit of exposition on the differences between races and the destruction of Detroit.
Or you could do Jews, which is also just copy and paste, but you would have to hunt through the blog a bit for material to paste.
I have made comments over the years to this blog and a few months ago I predicted a pivot by the left against the Jews. At the time I made the prediction it was seen as impossible but knowing the left holds to no center and the conservatives position was firmly entrenched with Israel I made the prediction with that in mind.
I also predicted a hot conflict beginning in 2023 in the form of civil or global war and I was wrong about that. I still believe that’s inevitable but I was wrong about the timing. Most evidence points to war in the near future.
Many predictions are wrong as seeing the future and the vast web of potentials is beyond the scope of any man to do accurately and with consistency. But I’m gaining some confidence in my ability to get some of them right more than chance would dictate.
So I’m making some more predictions based on my current understanding of the world. I’m going to stay away from dates as the “when” is much harder to gauge than the “what” so I’ll leave it to be ambiguous.
1. Iran will launch a full war against Israel or a western proxy within the next few years. This is based on the bombing of the embassy in Damascus. Iran promised retaliation but offered a chance for peace if the US could broker a peace deal in Israel. That failed. Then nothing has happened which means Iran called off the war. Except they didn’t. They are already at war and this is the period of buildup for the military before launching an assault. If I were Iran I would bait Israel and the US to attempt an invasion of Iran. If they fought a defensive war they could win.
2. Trump will win the 2024 election. TDS is now falling away from the eyes of many people with rabid Trump haters now going neutral or switching sides. I doubt the fraud needed to bridge the gap in this election will be possible with so many influential people not willing to ignore it. The election will be rigged but not enough to make a difference. Democracy is still dead and the election will be contested by whichever side loses.
3. Russia will quietly win the propaganda war. The war in Ukraine is lost to the fickle attention span of the west being more divested in the new shiny thing-Palestine-than in ol’ Ukraine. I expect no trumpets, no announcements, or fanfare and a slow, quiet withdrawal of western support from Ukraine and a media blackout vanishing it down the memory hole. I expect little attention given to it during the US presidential debates. Compare it to how Mike Pence made a platform based on the Ukraine war. Now just whispers.
That’s all, folks.
Israel can handle Palestine and much of Islam, [*deleted for failure to attempt the shill test described in the moderation policy*]
No nation with a gay parade has yet won a war against a nation without a gay parade. Israel has not won a war since it went gay. If Israel cannot defeat Hamas, can it defeat Iran?
Israel isn’t trying to defeat Hamas- in fact, they even funded Hamas.
Israel’s goal is to displace/genocide Palestinians.
There’s such a thing as “justifiable homicide”, why not “justifiable genocide”?
https://blog.reaction.la/war/how-to-genocide-inferior-kinds-in-a-properly-christian-manner/
Obviously before you genocide anyone, you have to make an honest and costly effort to have a peaceable deal. Obviously neither the Palestinians nor the Jews have done this, so, the arabs can reasonably argue justifiable genocide of the Jews, and the Jews can argue justifiable genocide of the Palestinians.
The Palestinian beef is that violence by Jewish settlers and restrictions on Palestinian movement is driving them off their land, and crowding them into ever smaller places. To which the Jews reply, that misbehavior by Palestinians necessitates a whole lot of oppressive measures (which have the convenient side effect of driving Palestinians off their lands)
Palestinians piss people off wherever they go, and their hosts always want to get rid of them. And Jews piss people off wherever they go, and we need to get rid of them. I did not used to think we needed to get rid of them, but the ban on important elements of Easter completely pissed me off. If Easter is illegal, Christianity is illegal. We have to ban the Jews or ban Christianity. As with gays, coexistence just is not working.
The Palestinians don’t control my politicians and steal my tax dollars. They are very much the lesser of two evils in this case.
1. Unlikely, because there seem to be better strategic objectives for Iran to start with, if they want to fight in the first place. On the other hand, Israel seems to like the concept of a war with Iran.
2. Everything still seems very managed though. It’s still possible that they permit Trump 4 years to clean up the mess and take the blame. I’m thinking most of them can accept either outcome (perhaps the disloyal MIC would strongly prefer Biden). Then it’s Newsome time.
3. Yes; it seems at the moment like Russia has already won the war and what’s left is running out the clock, and perhaps flying the team off to the next game in East Asia. The points of interest to those who remain will be who pays to reconstruct rump-Ukraine (I suppose the US wants the EU to do it, but can they?). Now they want Ukraine to join Nato and perhaps the EU too, which is something of a poison pill. Also, will Nato remain an at all viable organization?
What objectives does Iran have which trump not getting bombed by Israel? There’s never been a time when support for Israel has been less in the western world. Every city and college has turned against Israel. If Jim’s theory is correct and the conspiracy of Harvard is true it would follow that culture and politics will follow what happens on campus.
I always operate under the assumption that men want to fight wars as they like violence. They have a legit casus beli now that’s become public and undeniable. I’ve heard from Iranians that the government is inept and incapable but they will need to take a public action if the consequence of not doing so will threaten their power.
On 9/11 I remember people asking “why did this happen?” The US was clueless about what was going on. To contrast this if Iran bombs Tel Aviv no one would wonder why. Everyone already knows the why. If it doesn’t happen people will ask “why not?” which points blame up to the top.
I can’t see that they’re anywhere near powerful enough to take on the Great Satan, who will inevitably be coming to help little brother.
A direct war with Israel seems awkward since there is no shared border. Using Hezbollah might work to an extent, but they probably should have done that earlier. Lobbing missiles seems ineffective, except if they are nukes. But they probably don’t have nukes.
So it looks to me like Iran will do best on defense. If they get closer to Russia, they could perhaps get some of those S-300s/S-400s to make the flyboys nervous (like in Syria). But they will need more to fend off the Great Satan.
The great satan just got decisively routed from the seas and the skies by the Yemenis. And from the land by the Afghans before them.
The Houthis are Iranian proxies. Which means Iran is now, already waging a proxy war against the GAE, and so far is winning it. For the moment they’ve pinned the snake; GAE loses face if they cede the Red Sea, they lose face if they keep dancing around the edge of it, and they lose a carrier if they contest it directly. What then does Iran have to gain from making the war open and direct?
Perhaps public opinion is that pressing on them, or perhaps the strategic situation changes within your prediction time frame. I am open to education on these.
I recently ran across a story that I thought some people might want to see here, since it has to do with women and the “Rape-Pill” if you will.
Basically the guy mentioned that in the past he had had several girls ask him to be rough or “rape” them during sex, but he was too “nice” to do what they wanted without consent for every little thing. The story he then told is about how that changed for him.
It starts with him meeting up with a girl and a friend she brought along. Since he hadn’t discussed anything in advance, he had figured that it would just be getting coffee and nothing more. They all quickly ended up going to his hotel, where their plan was to dominate him, but he didn’t know that at the time. He then said that he choose to skip over some details, since he didn’t think them relevant to share, but they basically were trying to push him into doing things he didn’t want to do. He kept trying to politely decline, but they kept getting more and more forceful.
They eventually tried something that crossed a line for him, and he started to fight back. One of the girls kept at it, and he ended up in a “physical battle of wills.” She put up a good fight, but since he is stronger, he won. He then fucked the hell out of her as punishment. The other girl sat on the side, ready to cry, from seeing what he was doing to her friend. Once he was finished, he worried what the aftermath would be, since he had never acted like that before. The girl was very affectionate to him afterwards. She told him that nobody ever fought back before. In hindsight, he recalls that the girl was being both disrespectful and dismissive of him before the event happened. After it happened, he realized she wasn’t angry at him. So he decided to ask them if they wanted to go get food. While they went out for food, she walked next to him, and kept trying to slide herself under his arm. She also kept giggling and snuggling with him.
The feeling of how she changed before and after changed his outlook on sex. After that he craved “forceful sex” with no hesitations. He feels “addicted” to the reaction of the girls afterwards. He has never been “nice” since then.
He finishes what he wrote by saying that he now realizes that it was something that was always inside of him, but was scared to bring to the surface. That is was something missing from his life, but never realized it was something missing from his life.
Not sure if there’s been an Islam thread in years.
What is there to know about Islam and Muslims?
I see our masters are in a panic because the Muslims they imported to kill off the Christian wing of the alt right are instead making common cause with us over the genocide in Gaza.
Take the shill test described in the moderation policy and get white listed. Anyone can pass this, regardless of his religious or political beliefs, regardless of what issues he wants to speak about, anyone who is not reading from a script with a supervisor standing over him, can pass this. Once white listed, your words should appear immediately.
And then we can discuss Islam all you like.
Hey Jim.
Clearly you won’t discuss Islam.
[*deleted*]
I would love to discuss Islam with someone who is not a Jewish or dot Indian employee of the FBI of a Soros ngo.
It hates dogs, music, representational art – Islam is evil and anti-human. But it’s still a hell of a lot better than Progressivism.
A couple months back, I saw a few videos of Ukrainian frontline female soldiers; some dead in the trenches, others under bombardment, hopping aboard trucks, etc. It just occurred to me that I haven’t seen any such videos since then. I wonder whether the Ukrainians tried woman soldiers in combat, found they were a disaster, and quietly gave up. Anyone heard anything about this?
There was female battalion in the route of the Russian advance, and I was looking forward to news of that battle, but it did not happen. I conjecture that they were pulled before they could manage to get themselves captured.
With Microsoft closing the door on old windows,
I am trying to setup a secure machine using linux
@jim
Do you recommends any distro for security ?
I use Debian Mate. For remote hosts, no Mate, no gui.
Though it is not hard to setup a remote gui. You use xrdp. Securing rdp is easy. When you ssh in to set up xrdp, you inspect the certificate. Then, when you first connect over rdp, the rdp client complains about the certificate. You inspect the certificate, and tell your rdp client to trust that certificate in future.
Trouble is I am pretty sure the rdp certificates are backdoored, while ssh 25519 keys are not (some of the ssh keys, for example, all the nist protocols, are know to be backdoored, and most of them are distinctly suspicious). So to do rdp securely, you need run your rdp connection over wireguard, which is a major pain.
So actually securing rdp over the internet to a remote host is hard. I usually cannot be bothered, so I don’t use remote gui if I can avoid it.
I have a slightly off topic and maybe naive question on Original Sin:
If Adam and Eve were meant to live in the Garden of Eden for eternity, given the fact that there was a non-zero probability for them to be tempted, that means that eventually they would have eaten the forbidden fruit for sure, as any event with a non zero probability will eventually happen given infinite time.
So was the downfall inevitable or even part of a plan?
The answer to your question-with-a-questionmark is “who knows?”
But to your prelude, there is an error: Any event with a non zero probability will eventually happen given infinite time _and_ non-decaying probability each time the dice are rolled. If the probability goes down each time, the infinite sum is less than certainty.
In colloquial terms: Someone who has successfully rejected a temptation once is not equally likely to give in the second time.
Not necessarily true. The series 1/2±1/3±…±1/n+… does not converge.
That, and applying mathematical logic to a story portraying mythological truth as opposed to physical reality truth is a bit absurd.
It could be finite series/self solving- if the problem with the knowledge of good and evil is the temptation to do evil, then resisting temptation is a skill you build up before receiving it.
I honestly get the sense that Adam and Eve were to be educated and trained into the knowledge of good and evil, but they were still like innocent, stupid children when they were tempted and fell. It was too soon. Had they persisted in obedience and learning, perhaps the forbidden fruit would have been offered freely.
Maybe God always wanted them to be like unto gods, knowing good from evil, but they weren’t ready for it. Perhaps they could’ve been like Jesus had they persisted; possessing of all power and possibility, wise as a serpent to all evil and temptation, but strong and holy enough to choose what is right and become like God.
I don’t know, maybe this is heresy. If it is I give it up. It’s just a thought.
There’s also the possibility that God would not have allowed the tempting to go on forever. After a point He would have removed the serpent.
https://www.brownpundits.com/2024/04/03/dharma-in-the-bharatiya-frontier-multan/
Interesting article on the Multan Sun temple.
Interesting that for 1100 years Muslims hung cow flesh around the neck of a Hindu idol.
ਅਕਾਲ
Christianity is [*deleted*]
Non Christians are seldom a reliable source on what Christianity is.
[*deleted for telling Christians what real Christianity is*]
Real Christianity is the Christianity of the Christians that conquered you. London was subsequently taken over by Socinians who got hold of those Christians leash.
Hahahahaha! So he’s given up on trying to get Hindu and Christian reactionaries to fight? What has he been saying real Christianity is all about?
Hippy pacifist Jesus the Jewish community organiser.
Which is true enough of most of the “Christians” that afflict India.
Satan is in hell.
The villains of the Hindu epics become Gods in their own right after attaining a valorous end in War.
Don’t even compare your hippy cult to Vaidik Dharma.
Before the full might of the Mughal Empire and Hill Rajas were able to lay siege
Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh in preparation for battle, spoke to the three
paths of liberation and recited the Gobind Gita.
ਇਕਪ੍ਿਨਸਰਬਸਭਾਸੁਲਗਾਈ॥ਉਰਿੇਸਯੋਸਿੀਅਨੰ ਿਰੁਰਰਾਈ॥ਮੁਕਤਹੋਨਕੇਤੀਨਰਿਕਾਰਾ॥ਸੁਨਹੁ
ਖਾਲਸਾਜੀਸਰਿਾਰਾ॥
One day a gathering of the Sanga(t) was held and the King of Anandpur (Guru
Gobind Singh) gave a discourse. Hey Khalsa Sardars! listen: there are three paths
to liberation.
ਕੈਕਰਗਯਾਨਤਰੈਭਵਰੰ ਥਾ॥ਕੈਕਰਰਿੇਮਤਰੈਪ੍ਨਪ੍ਧਮੰ ਥਾ॥ਨਾਤਰਖਗੜਛੇਤਿਮਪ੍ਹਜਾਈ॥ਤਜੈਰਿਾਨਸਾ
ਮੁਪ੍ਹਨਲਜਾਈ॥6॥
One is the path of wisdom, second of devotional love & worship – churning the
world ocean with love, one gets delivered from the cycle of birth & death. The
third path is the path of the warrior – to proceed to battle, face the enemy straight
on without fear and give your life.
ਤਾਪ੍ਹਮੁਕਤਹਰਹਾਲਤਮਾਈ॥ਸੁਨਹੁਖਾਲਸਾਜੀਸਕਨਾਹੀ॥ਛਤਿਰੰ ਥਯਹਅਸਧੁਜਕੀਨਾ॥ਮਾਤਾ
ਮਹਾਕਾਪ੍ਲਕਾਿੀਨਾ॥7॥
These are all the paths of liberation, listen respectable Khalsa and do not doubt.
The path of the warrior under the Insignia of the Sword, The Mother, the Great
Death, has Herself ordained.
ਛਤਿਧਰਮਮਪ੍ਹਯਪ੍ਹਕਠਨਾਈ॥ਸਮਰਸੂਰਨਪ੍ਹਸਕਤਰਲਾਈ॥ਸਾਮੁਪ੍ਹਰਿਾਨਿੇਤਜੋਜਾਈ॥ਸੋਰਾਵ
ਨਸੁਰਰੁਰਬਪ੍ੜਆਈ॥8॥
There is one difficulty on the Warrior’s path; when clashing head on, one must not
flee. Those who charge ahead and give their life, those pure warriors achieve the
status of God(s).
ਅਕਾਲ
And there is your problem right there. Demon worship.
That is why we wound up conquering you, back when we were actually Christian, almost by accident, and largely as an incidental side effect of trying to improve the flavour of our meals.
What would happen was that brother would fight brother for the throne, the treasury, and the castle, one brother or both of them would invite the British in, the British would wind up in possession of the treasury and the castle, and both brothers wound up sitting bare assed in the dust.
Similarly Alfred conquered his pagan enemies and united England, because the enemy leaders were always killing allies, friends, and kin. Nearly all Alfred’s victories were the result of an enemy leader getting nailed in internal quarrels among pagans. And while the pagan war bands were killing each other off, the Christians were peacefully (well, mostly peacefully) uniting into one Kingdom by treaty and marriage.
The Christian command of peace on earth to all men of good will results in Christian forces having substantially better logistics than their enemies, and logistics is what wins wars. Valor without logistics just gets you killed. You need valor and good logistics.
The British defeated the Sikhs partly because they were ruled by a woman, partly because her court was full of vipers struggling for power, and partly because the Sikh army had to feed itself by pillaging the countryside, and rapidly ran out of stuff to pillage.
[*no clear relevance to anything*]
Gay sex with a jewish corpse does not lead to Heaven.
The relevance is that the majority of the court & armies of the Lahore Darbar were Hindu/Muslim.
The homogenously Sikh states across the Sutlej control the politics of E Panjab even today.
Either way w/e white genocide is the path to TND.
Regarding the focus of the next generation of L1’s…
“You cannot innovate new changes into improvement when the precise problem you should’ve been solving in the first place is to achieve immutability where the need to change is irrelevant. — Broyles”
… the coming competition of new L1’s must therefore of course be fair satoshi launches, whose designs are intentionally minimal, endeavouring to solve only ONE problem… MONEY. That’s it. Anything more is simply out of scope.
Sure, you *might* be able to “solve” all shorts of shit, and add all sorts of “features”, but by doing so you’ve explicitly ignored what the entirety of Humanity wants, it’s one simple request of crypto… Money at scale.
Do that, and nothing else… and your protocol, and those who started running it at launch, and indeed all of Humanity… will be highly rewarded.
Crypto speculation is an excellent pursuit for people with good critical thinking skills, understanding of psychology, time to research. And lots of risk tolerance.
No idea what you’re on about here though.
Speculation will lose you money, because you are always speculating in manipulated markets, scammers scamming scammers.
I don’t speculate. I hodl.
Right now I am evaluating the liquidity of Litecoin, which has been stagnant and stable for a very long time, but is now benefiting from its scaling advantage over bitcoin as bitcoin hits its scaling limit.
The manipulation is generally predictable and leaves tell tale signs.
Consider the american election manipulation.
It was clear that Trump’s chances were under-estimated in October. You could buy him below 30c. It was predictable that on election night his odds would surge as results surpassed polling. Why not hold Trump up to 100c? Because it was equally predictable that Biden’s chances would surge again as more ballots were “discovered.” So you sell Trump at 70c the moment you hear fire alarms in Georgia. Rebuy Biden at 30c and sell him again at 70.
You could have held Biden to 100 but it was possible that Trump would cross the Rubicon, so you walk away with 4x your bet. 2x if you couldn’t hold your nerve or miscalculated, 6x or better if you were very bold. All with in 72 hours, in a field you probably spent years researching.
The most liquid market for these bets was FTX. If you traded there you had about 12 months to withdraw your profits before it collapsed.
There are opportunities like this constantly in crypto, though of course they rarely overlap with politics.
If that kind of thing is not for you, but you hold Ethereum you should make yourself eligible for the L2s that are launching. Yes there is risk but that’s what Ethereum is all about, L2’s and risk. The rewards are liquid and very interesting. If you hold Bitcoin you should consider making yourself eligible for bitcoin L2s. The risks are higher, and Bitcoin L2s are a bit absurd but it can be lucrative too.
For Ethereum the safest and most interesting I think is Eigen Layer. For Bitcoin I don’t feel comfortable recommending but I any of the 4 leading L2s have a better chance than Litecoin.
I shouldn’t say that the manipulation is generally predictable. It is predictable often enough that if you choose your battles wisely you can do quite well.
Goes without saying that it is a dangerous game on many levels. With over confidence it becomes very hard to choose battles carefully. With losses or wins, you can easily distract yourself from more productive or meaningful things. You can do everything right and be victim to a hack.
That said it can be worthwhile for the right kind of man. And from time to time there are things to do be done with coins you simply hold. The clearest example was dumping the Bitcoin Cash fork in 2017. The L2s launching this year require a bit more work and trust but imo very much worthwhile. Certainly they don’t require looking at charts or anything too close to gambling.
In the long run, no one wins against the house.
Speculating on crypto is like betting against a one armed bandit.
Even holding is a form of speculation imo.
Your investigations into litecoin might like informed speculation from a certain angle.
I think crypto is more like blackjack.
It is possible to have an edge. Of course, if 1000 men think they have an edge, only 10 actually have one. Of the 10 who do, some will fall to hubris or worse. But many readers here are in the top 1%, the same way that on a mathematics blog there will be many readers capable of counting cards.
Discouraging people is for the best though. Simply holding bitcoin is an excellent strategy and stress free which is crucial.
It’s a heatsink for real crypto interest. Look at the asinine construction of the L2s, designed specifically to centralize everything. Look at the events surrounding tornado. Look at the people surrounding vitalik. Fuck, look at the “”totally organic”” sudden rise of nft and memecoin scams. It’s not just a casino, it’s a childish casio designed to make participants in crypto look both scammy and idiotic.
The events surrounding tornado?
The only relevant thig about tornado is that every wallet that used it was eligible for a five figure airdrop, which was completely predictable.
Borrowing ETH against your BTC and pimping that ETH out to win airdrops is a valid strategy.
TORN was worth 0.3 BTC at worst, or a good handful of LTC if you prefer.
But with all respect to Jim, Litecoin is anything but stable, and much worse than stagnant.
It has bled value vs Bitcoin since it was created. There have been speculative pumps along the way, but it has been a trail of tears for holders since creation. No BCH bonuses, you can’t use it as decentralized collateral, and no chance for L2 bonuses as far as I know.
To see 7 years of stagnancy, look at Doge through 2020. Holding Doge, even without modest profit taking during Elon’s shilling, is a winning strategy.
I believe that Doge is an organic phenomenon, but regarding the inorganic shit, they run the same playbook again and again. With pattern recognition there are opportunities, but that is one game among many at the casino.
If you don’t want to hold Ethereum that’s fine, it can be clownish sure.
But if you do hold, don’t be completely passive, claim the things you’re eligible for, and make yourself eligible for things like TORN. Likewise, with more caveats, consider the same for bitcoin L2s.
All the things you list as downsides are the absence of an ecology of scams, scams in which all the outsiders involved lost money. What has happened is I actually need to use litecoin, because bitcoin fees are right up. And then I wonder. How many people are actually using litecoin. Looking into that now.
I hope that you will share your findings.
I would wager that more people use dogecoin. It has a modest scam ecology, less than bitcoin. It is also reasonable to speculate that Musk will be sorely tempted to pump it again.
I can’t help adding to what Fidelis said.
The casino isn’t designed to make anyone or anything look idiotic.
The casino is designed to make money. Clearly.
It takes an enormous blind spot to suggest otherwise.
The guys who pump cumrocket69 don’t care if you feel like a genius or an idiot, they care about doing more coke.
They don’t care about distractig you or from building or investing in solid cryptography, they care about cocaine.
If this this blind spot is what it takes to keep you from seating at the casino then it may well be a form of divine protection so I shouldn’t insist too much.
There are demons in crypto, certainly, some of them very dark.
Probably more suckers invest in dogecoin. I have not looked into it. In part because the promotion smells to me. I am not aware of a use case for dogecoin. I experience an actual use case for litecoin.
For small payments, liquidity isn’t an issue for any coin you can name. For large payments neither BTC nor ETH fees are an issue.
To the extent that liquidity can be an issue, it’s a function of the liquidity on the recipient’s favorite exchange. If their exchange has poor liquidity for litecoin it doesn’t matter what the liquidity is like globally.
So the best approach is to simply ask what they would prefer to receive.
If you’re lucky they will prefer Monero, but it has unique liquidity issues even with small amounts, and is in general intimidating to normies.
If they are total normies and don’t have a preference, anticipate that crypto will probably be a pain in the ass. You’re asking a lot and they’re doing you a favor for accepting it.
For their sake I suggest you send them some form of USDC in the west or USDT on Tron in the east.
Stables are generally easier for everyone. Not for life savings but for payments. Solana is best if you rule out stable coins. They can figure it out on tiktok. In 2025 maybe something will be easier than Solana but for now it’s the best for normies.
I find something cheerful about about sending dogecoin, but even that is likely to be confusing. Don’t mistake me for a doge shill, I bring it up as a contrast to LTC not as a wise purchase.
tl;dr
To make it easier on them, just ask what they want and send that.
To make it easier on yourself, don’t bother with in depth research for small transactions, since you have no need to hold these coins yourself, you’re just sending them.
Litecoin will serve your purpose fine, it is liquid practically everywhere.
You presuppose that the only rational use of crypto currency is gambling on KYC exchanges.
If so, it is all just a tulip mania and all crypto currency will eventually go to zero.
The ultimate driver of the price of crypto currency is the expectation that it will replace fiat as a medium, a measure, a standard, a store. And when I transact, I am frequently not transacting with people who keep their money on KYC exchanges.
What is happening on the big exchanges, which is all you are focused on, is irrelevant in the long run, even though it is driving the hour to hour and day to day changes in price.
Right now the self destruction of the US$ is driving a big movement of central banks to gold, which is likely to result in the catastrophic collapse of paper gold on Global American Empire exchanges. But because the countries moving to gold just do not trust each other, and therefore face considerable logistic difficulty in moving gold around, and because private trade between those countries, and between those countries is increasingly happening in crypto currency, primarily and overwhelmingly in bitcoin, those central banks will eventually have to move to cryptocurrency, probably bitcoin. But the private traders are now encountering grief from the high fee environment, which begins to look ominous for bitcoin, even though it is as yet just a small cloud on the horizon.
Those aren’t my presuppositions at all.
First, we are on the same page about bitcoin vs fiat and gold.
If anyone does chose to gamble, I would strongly suggest doing so on chain rather than on centralized exchanges, for countless reasons.
My previous comment doesn’t make any assumptions about KYC and it applies to both dexes and cexes. Not all cexes require KYC btw.
When someone asks to receive crypto, they provide you with an address. Do they own the keys to that address? Does it belong to an exchange? Are they going to use what you sent to gamble? Are they going to hodl it? Cash it out to their bank?
None of that concerns you, it’s their money now.
That said, in my opinion the wisest thing they can do is either to convert the money you sent into fiat for their daily life, or to accumulate bitcoin.
Forget gambling. Dexes and cexes are the only practical way to accumulate bitcoin in small amounts. It can not be done on chain due to fees and the nature of the utxos.
It’s a sad state of affairs, because on chain should be superior. In that sense the storm clouds are not merely approaching us but here already. But this will not push people to litecoin of all things, which I strongly feel will continue to lose value vs Bitcoin. Bitcoin has by far the best chance of avoiding the fate of the tulips. It is ironic, but the best way to encourage someone to buy and hold Bitcoin is to send them USDT.
Even though investment uses of Bitcoin absolutely and overwhelmingly dominate its use as a medium, a measure, and a standard, the investment use of bitcoin is all predicated on its ultimate use not only as a store, but also as a medium, a measure, and a standard, without which it will be as useful a store as tulips were.
And due to the high fee environment and the user hostility of non custodial lightning, it is running into some storm clouds because of the high fee environment and seems to be getting some competition as medium of exchange for goods.
Yes, lightning is a trainwreck.
Centralized exchanges are yucky.
Decentralized exchanges rely on wrapped bitcoin, which has issues.
In this context it is natural to investigate altcoins so I see where you’re coming from. But it’s a highly speculative activity in more than one sense.
Also I strongly feel that litecoin in particular is a poor alternative.
A more fruitful way to spend your time, I would suggest, is to investigate Bitcoin L2s.
This is speculative as well, but much more aligned with Bitcoin. Signaling your support for an L2 that you have researched is likely to win you a nice airdrop, which you can dump for more BTC. You can also send small amounts of bitcoin without worrying about fees.
I will also suggest that what happens on centralized exchanges is not as irrelevant as you might think.
Currently governments and ETFs prefer not to hold their own keys, they use coinbase custody services to hold and sell their bitcoin. Even Michael Saylor accumulates via coinbase and he is not irrelevant by any means.
When state actors and central bankers begin to accumulate bitcoin, it won’t all be from mining. Although they would be well advised to avoid coinbase itself, they are likely to purchase, hold and even settle payments via centralized exchanges.
I don’t like it but that’s how things are headed.
Nothing I see has the capability to replace BTC and it is only in small part the cold start problem.
Every new currency is attempting to launch via some version of proof of stake, which is hard to trust that network participants won’t fuck with issuance or consensus even in the best case, but even worse most of the nodes just end up on AWS or equivalents. It’s all so fake and gay. Even all this talk of airdrops, you know why airdrops became so popular? It’s attemtping to pretend the project isn’t just run by a dozen or less guys and fits some obtuse definition of ‘not a security’ to try and run around the legal system by distributing shares. It’s all facefags who will cave instantly, and half the time they bake KYC trapdoors directly into their protocols.
Market is too full of fake and gay for a convergence of energy and capital onto anything new right now. We’ll end up with BTC for the initial transition as the sovereign debt crisis hits, as anything else either will hit the same scaling problems or is already compromised on the hardware level. BTC scaling problems dont matter for big money movements, and for small money it doesnt matter really what medium you end up using, small money has little friction in conversion.
In the mid-long run eventually BTC either gets divided into some sort of layers upon layers of cryptographic mess that’s at least less fragile and painful to use than current lightning, or slowly loses market share to something that is actually better, but that’s not now and its not even next year as far as I can tell. Next couple years is everyone trying to make the various protocol layers you can stack on BTC utxos work, while the tools for something else actually worth replacing the BTC consensus with get built out. Then it will be a battle between network incubency of BTC and the actual monetary utility of the better protocol. Something like LTC or XMR won’t hit incubency as they’ll hit the same scaling problems. Something like ETC won’t hit incubency because it’s a GAE shell game fakenet, same as all the rest of the AWS hosted pos chains.
BTC is expensive and clunky but as a base money of the entire p2p digital money ecosystem, it still has no real competition. Which is terrible really, but at least we have something. We could be heading into digital communist hell with zero escape valve instead.
Yes. Exactly so.
Litecoin currently has a substantial tech lead over both Monero and Bitcoin, and the noisy crowd of scammers, shills, and spammers that surround every crypto project have faded away and wandered off to greener pastures where suckers can more easily be found. But it has no funds promoting the necessary software development. Looking into it, not recommending it. For it to actually compete with Bitcoin, needs lightning. And needs an actually usable lightning, all the self custodial lightning wallets are barely usable or horribly flawed. Needs a pile of software likely to be costly and lengthy to develop.
Fidelis I agree 99%, the only thing is that I think the airdrop game has high r/r. They are desperate to solve the cold start issue and the solution they have is to throw free money at you. I won’t say no.
We agree that Bitcoin has a lot of problems, I just reframe this in such a way that I view even cold wallet bitcoin as a serious gamble. And at that point, modest risks to win airdrops doesn’t bother me.
To accumulate and hold Bitcoin is to speculate that its strengths will overcome its weaknesses.
The difficulty is that its most notable weaknesses push bitcoin towards centralization, which risks defeating the purpose of crypto. (We might also speculate that certain actors will see that weakness as a strength.)
Bitcoin’s biggest strength is that it was the first crypto. The Schelling point. If Ethereum or Solana or any other L1 you can name, had been first? If Satoshi gave us something with better tech, his creation would already be worth a lot more than 1.4 trillion. Gold would already be on its knees.
But if bitcoin was released today it wouldn’t be worth 50 cents. That’s how clunky it is.
The weaknesses of Bitcoin fuels a constant search for stronger alternatives, which is what Jim is currently doing with litecoin.
Bitcoin is often called the king. But it’s a weak king, which fuels constant intrigues about a successor. Many things follow from this, and I think that readers here are strongly situated to understand the dynamics and profit from the situation as it unfolds.
A casino isn’t a terrible metaphor, but it isn’t all games of chance. Many of the games are still dangerous though, and there’s no shame in sitting it out.
I think that’s my final word
First mover advantage is a mighty big advantage. On the other hand, there are lots of first movers that eventually lost to some upstart. For a long time while looked as if Bitcoin was going to be pushed over by Ethereum, but I never believed that, because at its formation, Ethereum fell under the control of quasi state elements, with key founders being dragged off in the middle of the night by the FBI and told they were going to jail for fifteen years and would never see their children again. And after spending a little time in jail, were told that if they played ball …
And, of course, for the most part they did play ball. Which gave Ethereum a fundamental disadvantage, even though quasi state backing seemed to look like an advantage, and continues to look like an advantage.
This was always the fatal weakness of Ethereum. And then Bitcoin copied its technological advantage: Contracts on the blockchain. And as soon as Taproot came through, Bitcoin had the tech lead over Ethereum, plus Metcalfe’s law on its side.
Satoshi was in a hurry. He did the best he could, given his need to ship something, just something, that would pretty much “work” and get the idea across.
Even in early 2020 I assumed there was plenty of time to “get it right”. You too? Now we both know better. Normalcy bias is such a bitch.
Yes, Satoshi was an absolute genius but his haste left a power vacuum.
Power vacuums leads to chaos.
Readers here naturally abhor chaos, but shouldn’t deny that as a rule it provides opportunities to the ambitious. Not to mention the unscrupulous.
You can hate the game. You can hate the players too. But it’s wrong to dismiss the game as entirely rigged. It’s a real struggle because the king is weak.
At some level, projects need a figurehead to survive. Not just distribution of funds, but making decisions on how the protocol should change, or more importantly not change. However a fleshy CEO is a very soft target for coercion. In the context of friendly visits from shady government offices, do you have any ideas on solving this?
What makes sense to me is a protocol tax that feeds a fund pool to pay for development, and some form of voting scheme to elect people to decide how the money is spent. Being too clever is probably not in your best interest, the most complexity should be electing representatives that elect a CEO, with some level of play as to how much of the funds the CEO is allowed to disperse and how quickly, and some level of play as to how much say the representatives get. This concept is fairly well tread, but it’s well tread because it’s smart. If you as the CEO keyholder get a friendly visit from luminous gentlemen, you can simply resign. Same for boardmembers. This resolves the issue of unofficially official leaders as points of failure, and allows at the same time for real human decision making as opposed to opaque committee decisions played out across the internet. I also believe it falls in line with what you have written in your own protocol details, but I cannot recall if there were more specifics as to who gets elected by whom and through what means of vote weight. If you have any clarifying thoughts on solving the, ahem, human resources coordination problem, I would be glad to hear them.
Sovereign corporation.
Whose officers need to be hard to identify and find — observe what happened to insufficiently cooperative members of the Ethereum foundation.
These days mining and air drops do not really work as a way of getting your currency into initial circulation. Too many scams.
I think the solution is to premine the lot, and it belongs collectively to the foundation, who expend it to individuals for development work and so forth. Observe how effective the Ethereum foundation was. Observe all the coins of the Dexs and the Daos. They get liquidity by making it highly exchangeable with existing currencies, and creating exchange services where you need the exchange currency to use the services. That is what works now. Litecoin has the best technology, but no foundation backing it.
Imagine I sit down with someone in Lagos to sell him $1000 of Bitcoin (minus his commission) for some walking around money.
How long do we have to sit there and watch the hand-over go through, and how much bitcoin do I need to pay to make it happen even that quickly?
A minute? An hour? 0.1%? 1%? 10%?
For an L1 transaction, you set it up several hours in advance over the internet, and then when you meet in person, give him the secret that finalises the transaction, and it only takes a moment.
For an L2 transaction, only a moment. Albeit the guy in Lagos would probably have a custodial wallet.
The software to do this on L1 exists, (Bisq) and is used from time to time, but is arguably unusable for regular mortals. It does not need to be. There seem to be very few such transactions in the US, quite a lot of such transactions in Argentina. There also is an L2 market, but I have no idea how big it is.
Bisq is not too bad, but I doubt there are many people in Lagos that could use it.
The problem is that in most jurisdictions this is money laundering, and a money changer needs a well guarded office in a known location, so is easily findable by the authorities. If it was legal, it would be reasonably big.
There are remittance agencies that are used by third world expats that transfer a lot of crypto. Presumably the expat sends crypto, and his relatives cash out. They move a lot of money. I don’t know the details.
What is doable, but probably not done, is a phone wallet for remittances, where the recipient has on his phone a list of local cash out entities. He selects one, and after a while, the phone says “your cash is available for pickup at so and so, and will remain available from time X to time Y. If you do not pick it up, your bitcoin will be reclaimed, minus transaction fees”. He goes there, touches phones to prove he is the guy entitled to the cash, and, on receiving the cash, touches phones again to finalise the transaction. But to do this, the cash out agency would need permission from the authorities to function. Governments would not like phone that worked like that. So the remittance agencies work on KYC. Maybe they are no longer working on KYC in Argentina.
As far as I know, there is no wallet around that makes an in person L1 transaction as easy and fast as it could be, as easy and fast as is needed to make L1 a viable method of sending remittances without KYC. Bisq is most nearly usable. But there are L2 wallets around that are fast and easy. That is what makes El Salvador viable. El Salvador moved to bitcoin because it found that the Global American Empire finance system was screwing over its remittances. Remittances now go to El Salvador over lightning. Works. Easy, cheap.
Funny you mention Nigeria
The primary platform for that kind of deal was Binance P2P which was shut down recently in Nigeria because it was destabilizing the Naira, or so the government claimed.
The advantage to that platform is that you wouldn’t have to meet in person. Quite an advantage in Nigeria I would think. A small chance of getting scammed for $1000 but no chance of being mugged. In some countries it would be helpful to have a local bank account but that’s generally not necessary.
For an in person deal like you describe, the person giving you cash needs to wait until the bitcoin hits his exchange. He has already taken out the cash and calculated his commission so he doesn’t need to wait for multiple blocks.
Expect 20 minutes with a good fee, though it could be faster. 40 minutes is not unusual, +60 possible.
Stable coins would likely be preferred and the limiting factor would be your tourist internet speed, or your own exchange if you are sending from a custodial wallet.
It’s annoying to see airdrops dismissed as scams, a lot of interesting experiments have been happening recently. Generally for applications, but also in the context of L1s.
How do you convince users to risk serious capital on your new project? Giving early users a share of the equity not only decentralizes the network but rewards risk takers. If you launch the perfect L1 you are going to need liquidity from somewhere.
If your L1 was VC funded then the VCs are likely to insist. Without VCs you will likely struggle even more to attract liquidity, you will have burned through most of your own resources during development, and you will have to spend even more via marketing. The easiest solution is to incentivize users through the coins you have just premined.
Off topic. No one here cares about KYC solutions. KYC is not crypto currency.
If you are not transacting through a self custodial wallet, what you say is irrelevant.
We care about overthrowing post modern quasi state finance capitalism. Which custodial assets exemplify. We care about forestalling the prophecy of the beast.
As I already commented, you don’t have to wait around for confirmations, since you can set up a utxo on the blockchain such that you can instantly pass ownerership and control over it to a particular second party, and then meet him in person after it has been confirmed, and there are lots of wallets that implement that technology, and some people using it, though mostly in other countries.
My comment starts with a description of how P2P transactions actually occurred in Nigeria until I think 2 months ago. Binance KYC is relatively recent and far from rigorous.
Then I discuss how face to face peer to peer transactions work in practice, without KYC of course.
Even true peer to peer zero KYC transactions are most often not face to face. Both parties are at risk of mugging, and organizing a rendez vous can be a lot of work. In these cases a centralized party provides a reputation score and escrow but do not require KYC.
What else are you going to do, ask Nigerians or Congolese on the street if you can send them Bitcoin?
Then I mention airdrops in the context of starting an L1 which I thought pertinent to discussion further up the thread.
At the present moment, I believe the best way to start an L1 would be to launch as an Ethereum L2. You can onboard people frictionlessly and make use of lots of prebuilt infrastructure to get started in a reasonable timeframe. The L2s are famously quite centralized, no one will bat an eye at your premine.
In the background you prepare your L1 built from scratch. When the time is right, you announce your brilliant L1 and get loads of excitement. Stab those fake and gay ethtards in the back. Dydx is an example, not perfect, of this playbook.
Ethereum is owned by our enemies, and anything launched on Ethereum winds up being owned by enemies. Or they shut it down.
That, however, is not how face to face level one transactions work in practice. You set up the transaction in advance, then you go to the spot and you exchange keys and cash on the spot. The slow part is counting the money. The key exchange is one click and it is done.
The key to understanding the entire crypto currency ecology is Metcalfe’s law and the fact that in the age of the internet, secrets are wealth. If your attention is focused on what is happening on the KYC exchanges, you will not understand what is under way.
To directly answer Grumpus’s question of what fee would ensure fast confirmation you need to know the current state of the network and the utxos on your custodial wallet, not to mention the current BTC price.
$20 isn’t too far off, though with luck it could be much cheaper. You don’t want to be twiddling your thumbs making small talk with your new Nigerian friend and chance it with a lowball fee, and on certain days it could be higher. If the bitcoin price were 10x higher then so would the fee.
Excuse me, of course I meant the utxos on your NON custodial wallet.
On custodial wallets utxos are naturally of no concern.
The current fee to withdraw from binance is .0005 BTC or about $35 which gives some idea of the price to transact on main net. Of course they inflate it as part of their business model.
It probably varies around the world, but the P2P guys I know do not exchange keys.
They want to see the crypto settle in their own wallet, custodial or otherwise. I suppose Bisq has a method for transferring keys securely, but without knowing more about that, the difficulty with transferring private keys is that there could be another copy of the keys.
If you start proposing a complicated or novel method of sending crypto to your counterparty, he is likely to suspect a scam and flake on you. We’re talking about walking around money in Nigeria, not a 10 BTC transfer for scud missiles or something.
Maybe in Germany, or for a high value transaction, your counterparty will be open to a novel mechanism, and confident that he can catch you if you tried to pull a fast one. But you’re likely to be dealing with a third worlder even in Germany.
The most important advantage to doing the transfer at the meeting point is that the exchange rate can be as up to date as possible. With luck, Mr Grumpus might end up transferring $1050 worth of BTC. We shouldn’t exaggerate the volatility of BTC, and your counterparty is already going to charge a big commission to cover price swings and the fact that you insist on meeting face to face.
But if I agreed 5 hours ago to meet Mr Lagos to sell him BTC at the price of 60K but the price pumped to 66K in the meantime then I might flake on him.
So the rate is negotiated in advance, say 5% lower than the market price. The final sums are calculated at the last moment with the fresh market price. As soon as Grumpus’s bitcoin hits his counterparty’s wallet he closes his hedge, if he is professional enough to have made one.
On moderation for opining on cryptography while out of your depth.
How do face to face transfers work in practice?
I’m sure we can agree that practice varies between countries and depending on which circles you walk in.
I believe you that in many countries, key swaps are preferred.
In the countries I am familiar with, people prefer to see the crypto hit their wallet.
I don’t know which system is more widespread. There may be others that neither of us know about.
I am quite confident though that regardless of which system is better, no one wants to deviate from familiar procedure.
Regarding KYC
If you are a straight white (or indian?) guy with some interest in technology or just the internet, everyone suspects that you own some amount of crypto. You could constantly counter signal against it, but that is tiresome and bad for you.
I think that part of good opsec is to keep a small amount of bitcoin on a KYC account so that you can plausibly explain that that is all you own. If you tell people you’ve never touched the stuff they’ll assume you’re lying and have something hidden away.
Your KYC account might also come in handy if you ever get into a jam in Lagos. If it’s a bad enough jam you can even use paypal if they take it. Don’t worry you aren’t betraying the spirit of crypto.
Also if you are mugged or kidnapped you can show your aggressor your measly coinbase balance and be done with it.
Plus, when bitcoin hits 1M you can smoothly cash out the 1% of your stack that is KYCd, pay taxes with no drama and buy yourself something nice.
With the other 99% it’s fine to do the face to face stuff we’re talking about here, but it’s nice to have something liquid.
Admittedly I am out of my depth recommending the best way to launch an L1. Carried away.
Flabbergasted if you don’t believe I’m familiar with to peer to peer crypto transactions, or that I only know about KYC’d options.
regardless, good day
Sorry, there is no end of work on this stuff. And it is something of a mess.
And the huge rise of Bitcoin has drawn no end of scammers out of the woodwork who are using the complexity and the mess to cover their scams.
People are more comfortable and familiar with custodial assets, and find it hard to get their minds around crypto currency. So I tend to react with undue and excessive hostility to misinfo, because misinfo is usually maliciously intended.
Thing is, you were unaware of all the work that has been done on addressing the problem of people trading on the spot for bitcoin. And, in practice, not a lot of people are doing it, which has been a huge disappointment among developers. An enormous weakness and failure of Bitcoin is that people are not using it as they would credit cards and paper money. It something of a sore spot. Which people have been trying to address. And though it is doable, and sometimes done, it could be made a lot easier.
Thank you for answering my questions, and then arguing with each other about your answers. I’m not kidding. It’s helping me learn. I had no idea how ignorant I actually was. Merci from Lagos.
Hookers and drug dealers in various countries are using telegram right now, ‘people nearby’ , and ‘groups nearby’. Seems ridiculously traceable, yet, being ‘street level’, authorities do not care. Seems a perfect market for creating a self-contained little economy based upon lightning taps, if a good wallet existed. Some of them already experiment with things like phone credit pins or factory-sealed luxury/branded goods (matching a public wishlist) to reduce the amounts of physical cash
I hope Jim lets Grumpus see my explanation of utxos before I fuck off.
The only thing that might have looked ignorant in grumpy’s comment was to think of bitcoin fees as a %
It’s more of a flat fee that varies according to the utxos involved.
If you have $1000 in your wallet it is important to know what that $1000 is composed of.
Is it ten $100 chunks?
Uh oh, your fee is going to be 10x higher.
Is it a thousand $1 chunks?
Sorry mate that’s not BTC that’s worthless dust.
Is it one $900 chunk and four $25 chunks?
Not the end of the world but a bit awkward.
Is it a single $1000 chunk?
You’re in luck! That is, unless the price changes before you can spend it. If we return to your scenario, say the guy only brought $1000 in cash but your utxo is worth $1100 now. Now you’ll have to figure something out, either setting up a new utxo or a transaction on the spot.
Is it a single $1010 chunk?
Try to get get another $10 out of him but if you can’t, it’s easier to let him keep the change.
Is it a single $2000 chunk that needs to be split into a $1000 chunk with change left over?
That’s more costly than a perfect clean 1000 transfer but not too bad.
FYI most other crypto is not utxo based. Like a paypal account it doesn’t matter how your $1000 was accumulated.
If $20 is a high but reasonable expectation of what a speedy transaction costs these days, you can see how this becomes a problem when bitcoin increases in value.
$20 on $1000 is not that bad.
But if 1 bitcoin is $500,000 then you’re going to need to get used to fees well over $100 even without mempool congestion. The fee is the same amount of sats but the sats are worth more.
Of course, to transfer one million dollars would cost you the same $100 assuming the same utxo situation, so that’s nice.
This critique of the high fee environment is right on target. It is a problem. It is a huge problem.
Bitcoin has hit its long predicted scaling limit. Lightning is a solution, but self custodial lightning just sucks. Liquid is a solution, but liquid is furtively centralised. It unavoidably has some suspicious resemblance to a CBDC.
if Jim lets it through I’ll add a last thought
It is good to practice these things in advance.
If bitcoin is worth 500K and you want to sell some, you don’t want to be nervous, fumbling around face to face with some guy.
You want to have practice, and to be dealing with someone you’ve known for a while. Even more so if you’re stuck in Lagos.
Personally I will ask around and look into the utxo method Jim describes and see if I can find a counterparty to do that locally. The worst I get is a good story.
I know Jim insists we only discuss zero KYC peer to peer stuff, but my advice is the same if you happen to hold a portion of your crypto on KYC accounts.
Practice both onboarding and offboarding to your bank before you need to do it.
If your account is flagged, you can get experience now in how to deal with the paperwork, rather than in a future situation where you might need fiat ASAP. If your first three transfers go through without being flagged, the less likely your fourth and fifth transfers are to be flagged, so it’s a good idea regardless. The only downside could be taxes in your locality.
You don’t find a counterparty by looking around. You find a counterparty by looking at the marketplace in a wallet that supports it, such as Bisq.
Thanks Jim,
it wasn’t written to be a critique, I had just seen Grumpus’s nice remark and thought he might appreciate a breakdown of utxo mechanics.
it probably comes off as critical because it’s hard to to explain without making it sound like a headache.
It’s a good problem to have, but if you consider this a scaling limit then that limit was hit long ago, it’s just a question of what sized payments we are talking about. Today 1K is starting to look marginal but is still fine. In 2016 we might have had a similar conversation about $10.
Even with a 2 sat/vB fee in an empty mempool, nothing is cheap if bitcoin is 1M.
For anyone not well grounded in crypto but somehow still following along, this might be a good juncture to look into the debates about scaling bitcoin that came to a head in 2017.
More generally, if bitcoin hits 100K this summer, this spring might be the final opportunity you have to give yourself a sober education in crypto. It is already difficult to filter out the scammers and moon boys. I doubt that everyone reading this is already a hodler. Well, in an environment where Bitcoin is soaring past 100K even people who brushed it off till now are likely to feel fomo.
And people feeling fomo are easy marks. Even stolid bitcoin maximalists will be tempted to look into altcoins. Even litecoin can be a gateway drug.
The casino metaphor is helpful, but you can also think of it as a warzone. The fog of war is dense. Please consider that your opponents are interested in your money, not in stealing your power or attention to distract from true cryptography. Maybe that happens in a bear market, or maybe they use psyops or force against gifted cryptographers, but that is not the dynamic you face as retail in a bull market, sovereign debt crisis or not.
Besides, it is only the lowest pleb scammers who want your money. The prize is generally your liquidity. Know what you’re worth.
If you’re a bitcoin man through and through, steel your heart now before the storm. Make sure you have enough, now. Work on your utxo hygiene on a weekend with low fees. If you suspect you won’t be able to resist a waver, then waver early, today, and investigate things before the fog is too dense. Don’t show up in October flailing around for airdrops, downloading a counterfeit metamask.
Regretfully I keep tripping Jim’s moon boy alarms myself, and this isn’t a crypto blog either, so I will respectfully return to lurking unless someone responds to a few questions I posed a few days ago about Mary and Pope Pius IX.
Can you at least imagine what a decently-working (if physically expensive and/or clunky) self-custodial Lightning wallet could be?
Mind you I don’t really understand what Lightning is either. What I’ve picked up on here is that Lightning a nearly Holy Grail when it comes to upping the Bitcoin transaction limit, but non-custodial versions of it are all functionally crappy. It has to maintain a local and ever-expanding copy of a great many records, such that the local storage is constantly churning, hard, which means storage is going to fail eventually, upon which might lose all his damn coins, at least for a long time.
Could this be as simple as a Raspberry Pi surrounded by carefully-done always-on redundant storage, battery and power supply stuff?
That is, can the software/algorithmic imperfections be smoothed over with a well-done brute-forcing of certain hardware facilities? Because if so, there’s 100X more guys out here who can help with THAT, than can engineer a better self-custodial Lightning app.
Such a thing may be useless to a street corner bodega vendor, but might be genuinely helpful for my paranoid buddy and his cash man in Lagos. Or am I wrong about that too?
Your summary is accurate. The solution is watchtowers plus some new functionality. A watchtower gets (almost) all the data you need to restore a channel. Why then, not all? The stuff that they do not need to know, send encrypted so that only the sending party can read it.
So the way it should work is that is that whenever Bob sets up a channel with Dave, they agree to set up a couple of watchtowers for a couple of channels — Dave sets up a couple of watch towers to watch a couple of Bob’s other channels, and Bob sets up a couple of watchtowers to watch a couple of Dave’s other channels. And from time to time Bob sends to the watchtowers watching his channels a list of vertices watching his channels, in encrypted form so that the watchtower cannot read it, but Bob can.
So, if Bob’s wallet goes up in flames, and he has to restore from seed, he has to find one of the watchtowers that was watching his channels. We store that data on a DHT, so that the wallet can find the DHT key from its seed.
And now you have a lightning wallet that can be restored from a paper wallet.
Let me attempt a simple explanation that hopefully captures the essence of what is happening.
Two parties put money in a single ‘slot’ (utxo) on the BTC chain with certain rules for how it can possibly change hands. These two parties can now settle the balance in that slot between each other without talking to BTC. In this way the BTC chain doesnt get clogged, but Alice and Bob need records of their dealings with each other in order to keep everything in order. This is a lightning channel.
The lightning network is a network of these channels. Take a simple pattern, two channels, Alice Bob, Bob Charles. Alice can now, with some complex handshakes, pay Bob to pay Charles for her. Scale up this concept, and you now have the Lightning network.
Unfortunately it’s hard to explain the flaws of lightning from this high level overview, as they are a result of the specific mechanics through which people are able to do this stuff without trust. Briefly, in low resolution, not addressing everything: you cannot forever avoid talking to the BTC network directly, so at some point you’re incurring that high and getting higher cost — network topology here favors very large nodes with lots of channels, which means centralizing forces — your channel, in order to do the necessary stuff for sending and receiving money, and not getting rugpulled, has to have an always on computer with a private key that holds access to all your money.
OK so.
Fidelis says that yes, at bottom, there’s an always-on computer somewhere with all my coins in it, and all that implies.
And Jim introduces this “watchtowers” concept that are effectively off-site, distributed and encoded backups of tiny person-specific (or channel-specific?) sub-sets of all transaction history. But as of now there’s no concept inside Lightning that these “watchtowers” are mandatory for Lightning to work. Rather, perhaps an etiquette could evolve that watchtowers are something we do for people we trade with, and might show up as a “rating”, like someone’s 1-5 stars on Yelp.
Is there any conflict or disagreement between these two above paragraphs?
Did you ever actually take a shill test? No one with honest intentions, at the mention of tornado, immediately thinks about airdrops.
They recall how all the actual infrastructure in lockstep worked to shut down the protocol, and how the developers are currently facing trumped up charges of money laundering. This was an incredibly important event that lay bare the intentions and alliances of everyone involved in that network, and even people in it for the casino wouldn’t immediately mention the airdrop in this context.
The context is speculation and in that context the airdrop is very memorable to me.
If you got it then yeah, you immediately think of the $$$ rather than politics about it 18 months later. Instead of following new reports about a trial why not skate where the puck is going and look at the fresh privacy projects that are launching?
In other discussions I included slurs to demonstrate good faith. If I enter a discussion about women I will be sure to lead with something to make my mother blush. I can’t pass the Christianity stuff, but hopefully the responses I’ve got here help me in the long run.
For a crypto shill test the appropriate thing would be to dox a wallet to Jim, but if the discussion isn’t productive then why bother?
Regardless it’s a public ledger, you can see who has made money historically and simply follow their lead. Most are too lazy.
The man pulling lever on a one armed bandit remembers all the times the one armed bandit paid out and forgets everything else.
I can’t help myself, even in moderation jail.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a guy running a P2P operation in Nigeria.
I want us to put ourselves in his shoes to see how helpful it is for him receive Bitcoin on an L2.
Properly understood, exchanges are extremely centralized L2s. So centralized that they make a mockery of crypto, especially when they require KYC. I heartily agree.
A good L2 provides liquidity, which is mission critical to the Nigerian’s operation. I shouldn’t need to explain this.
CEXes obviously have liquidity. CEX is short for centralized exchange.
Bitcoin L2s are on the way to providing this. They have DEXes or decentralized exchanges.
A good L2 provides privacy. This is not essential but extremely helpful for the Lagos operation. I will spell this out.
When you interact with someone’s CEX account, you have no idea what his balance is, unless you have contacts at that CEX or subpoena power. If both parties are transferring to and from their respective exchanges, both parties benefit from this privacy.
Some Bitcoin L2s are working on this degree of privacy, but while it is trivial for a CEX but it is harder for crypto. Zk tech and account abstraction are in the works. I also hear that Monero’s long awaited L2 launches soon but I don’t know much. You may suspect that developers will sell out and L2 privacy will not be extremely deep. Fair enough, but just hiding your balances from your counterparty is 80% of the benefit to users like the Nigerian and his expat customers.
A good L2 provides cheap transaction fees.
This is not essential for P2P but good for everyone. Self evident.
This is usually provided by using centralized servers.
That’s not an option for Bitcoin L2s but they do the best they can.
A good L2 provides ULTRA cheap fees.
Exchanges have this if parties transfer between accounts on the same exchange. Nominal fees.
Bitcoin L2s are working on this by trying to win market share, to keep everyone on the same layer. Transferring between two L2s with good liquidity is reasonable, but if everyone is on the same L2 everything improves. Concentrating liquidity is the biggest thing but UX benefits including ultra cheap tx also help. Metcalfe’s law.
A good L2 provides easy off and on ramping.
This is borderline essential to the Nigerian’s operation. How is he going to access the cash you want?
Centralized exchanges, but only KYC’d ones, provide this.
Bitcoin L2’s are a bit behind here. The first priority is to create off and on ramps to CEXes ie other L2s who already provide this service.
A good L2 provides an escrow system for P2P exchanges and possibly a reputation systems.
Most users don’t need this but it obviously makes the Nigerian’s life easier.
Some exchanges provide this, but only the largest. As we see with Binance’s platform in Nigeria they can be shut down.
I’m not sure this is a priority for bitcoin L2s but that’s what smart contracts are for. Bitcoin friendly platforms which did not rely on smart contracts have been shut down in the past.
A good L2 makes it so that you don’t need to meet counterparties in person.
This is extremely helpful for a P2P operator. If he has to fight Lagos traffic for every meeting he can’t scale his operation and faces risks of violence.
If you want CASH for your bitcoin, no KYC involved, but neither of you want to meet in person, how is this going to work? First remember that this is a niche use case. I don’t see L2s working on it. Maybe CEXes are but I’m not aware. I have seen the logistics tackled in various ways around the world. I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader. If you’re stuck you can check telegram. Jim has brought up Bisq as a method that doesn’t settle on an L2.
Finally, a good L2 rewards you for your loyalty.
This doesn’t really effect the Nigerian’s business but it’s a nice bonus.
Centralized exchanges have ways of doing this.
Bitcoin L2s have much better ways, but specifics are inappropriate.
I hope this helps point you in the direction of Bitcoin L2s and helps you see the advantages they have or will soon have over lightning and Bisq. If they aren’t the Future, they are the Next Hot Thing. (The earlier you look into them and get your hands dirty, the better? Caveats to follow pending moderation.)
Hot Things in crypto tend to fly very high until they get too close to the sun and crash and burn. Sometimes they rise again. The attempt to predict these patterns fuels speculation. These are the more highbrow areas of the casino, or the warzone if you prefer.
I also hope I have helped you see why the Nigerian is likely to do much of his business in stable coins and other cryptos.
If you are a Bitcoin supporter, the competition from other crypto should fire you up to support Bitcoin L2s.
Finally I hope this comment gives readers a good framework to understand the current debates about modularity vs monolithic designs. Solana is the leading monolithic project that is trying to do EVERYTHING on a single L1 so that L2s are not necessary.
When you read that L2s are not necessary understand that it also means that CEXes are not necessary. Solana’s approach is controversial. Basically centralization is just pushed into other areas. Centralization? Other areas? Why? Where? Isn’t this supposed to be crypto?
Maybe the explanation is that Solana glows in the dark, or worse worse. I won’t argue. But the official explanation is that processing the sheer amount of transactions necessary to do every last transaction on a single layer demands a degree of centralization.
This brings us back to the scaling debates, and can help you see why they were so contentious. Imagine if Bitcoin had scaled to the degree that Solana plans to. All of finance on Bitcoin. It isn’t just that you wouldn’t need lightning or L2s it is that you wouldn’t need CEXes or even wall street. This is a very seductive vision and led to very high passions that carry on and add to the fog of war.
Comment went through but I edited it poorly, I’m sorry.
I want to address Jim’s remark about the one armed bandit.
It’s a great line, but I assure you that many of the losses are unforgettable too. Even normies will remember FTX for a few more years.
Degens will pass their trauma on to their kids. Some are too broken to start families.
So that’s the risk of being early to experimental L2s, or corrupt L2s like FTX or Mt Gox.
To drive this home I’m going to push my luck by opining about Tornado again.
What happened with Tornado, and why it was cancelled?
First of all, it wasn’t fully cancelled. If you can pull off a hack on ethereum you can manage to use tornado to this day.
So why did they fuck with it, why did they fuck with the developer?
Remember that when $TORN was launched, binance and other CEXes had no problem listing it. It was celebrated.
If the Ethereum community had entirely sold out, how did tornado get off the ground in the first place?
The first thing to understand is that ethereum smart contracts are impossible to secure. The auditors responsible for securing them are fond of discovering flaws, not alerting anyone, and waiting until the contract fills up with money before running off with it themselves.
After they rob you they run the funds through Tornado.
At a certain point, a few years ago, it got ridiculous. Multiple times a month, 100M hacks passed through Tornado. Legitimate users did good volume too but could never keep up.
When Tornado was just normal users people keeping their opsec tidy, a bit of money laundering here and there, and a few nerds ripping each other off, everything was fine.
I contend, though I’m sure many will disagree, that if it had stayed that way, no one would have been fucked with and $TORN would still trade on a few big CEXes. At least, the fuckery would have been less outrageous.
The problem is that the hackers weren’t regular nerds. A lot of the guys washing 100s of millions were literal North Koreans agents funding WMD programs.
The victims weren’t regular nerds either, a lot of them were well connected high net worth individuals and funds.
Pressure to take the website off the clear web was inevitable. The Ethereum community was cowardly for the most part, but again for the record the protocol is still functional.
This is a controversial narrative that might distract from my point.
I present this narrative as as a roundabout way to underline smart contract security has not been solved, and these issues are likely to be repeated on Bitcoin L2s. So if you venture onto them, be very cautious.
Just above, I said that the earlier you get your hands dirty the better. That’s not always true, because the earlier you are the less polished things are, and the more chance of malicious and non malicious bugs.
Your funds can vanish and YOU WILL NOT FORGET IT!
Your funds can vanish if you do not understand what is happening. And it is hard for normies to understand, so crooks, scammers, spammers and shills abound.
Hence my unkind hostility when I see inaccurate information.
Laundering hundreds of millions is exactly what tornado was set up to do. And exactly what we want and intend to happen. They are not “North Korean Agents” They are wealthy people trying to escape the oppression of government overreach.
Financialization, postmodern capitalism, and finance capitalism, which are all slightly different aspects of the same thing, or different ways parts of the elephant, are government and quasi governmental entities trying to control the wealth that actual producers actually produce. And these actual producers, some of them immensely rich, try to find ways around it.
>muh norks
People’s eye’s still hurt from staring at the ecplise, try to glow a little less bright.
Why are we fixated on the third world again? Congratulations you escaped haiti in canada with your memorized seed phrase welcome to lagos you’re so rich here now? Who fucking cares what the africans are up to or capable of.
Crypto matters for paying for shit on the internet anonymously and for stashing large amounts of wealth outside the reach of bureaucrats. The first one could be better, and would be well solved with easier atomic swaps before we even concern ourselves with the complexity of secondary layers. The second one, geting LARGE amounts of wealth out, means friendly state entities of one sort or another. Whether that friendliness is leaving the exchanges open, or some bureaucrat not very interested in where that money came from when the chinaman comes and buys up all the real estate before moving.
I am trying to say that almost NO ONE understands what is going on with smart contracts, even their designers.
Many smart contracts have secured millions of dollars for years and are hacked out of the blue. The flaw was there the entire time and no one noticed them because they are so complex.
In theory smart contracts rely on audits but in practice it is the Lindy Effect, crossed fingers and white hats.
The North Korean narrative with regards to some of the hacks may be psyops. I recall authorities I trust saying that that is where the signs pointed.
I’m not familiar with the psychology of the Tornado devs but I suspect they were autists who built it because it was an interesting problem to solve that was easy to monetize. There are legitimate use cases for it that they probably liked to think would be the primary ones. Most users transacted with a single ethereum which was $300 or lower when it was launched, right? It was certainly built long before +10 million hacks were common.
For me, the moral of this narrative is that even crypto ecosystems that start of “cool with” privacy or true decentralization can fold under pressure. Even principled libertarians or what have you take pause when they see, or believe they see, millions of their own funds being spent by Kim Jung Yoong or whomever.
Of course it’s a rather blue pilled narrative and I understand if you redact it. But I think it helps people be cautious. Even people you thought were reliable can flip.
I tried to use the imaginary man in Nigeria as a conceit to make my very long comment more readable.
I wanted to add a bit of color, not to focus on the third world. Personally I imagine him as a Lebanese, not a true African.
Regardless. My intention is to show how helpful it is to receive crypto not as an awkward utxo but as a fungible currency in a dynamic, liquid environment. I hope that Bitcoin L2’s become such an environment. Such environments make bitcoin more attractive as a store of value, unit of account and overall means of doing all kinds of business.
In the absence of such environments, even well intentioned users are forced, yes forced, to rely on CEXes. Michael Saylor relies on them which is my strongest example to support my disagreement with Jim that they are irrelevant. I agree that I wish they were and I think Saylor does to.
Imagine a merchant selling goods for bitcoin in El Salvador with state support or in the third world with an oblivious or hostile government. All or most of my points hold, or I think they do.
I am happy to clarify anything else that makes you suspect that I glow.
In my second to last paragraph I meant to say FIRST world.
I’m perfectly fine with CEXs. They operate like libertarians because they want to make money, most only start KYC when their arm gets twisted, and then they only roll it out in the places that police it. It’s been heartening to watch. If soverign governments catch up and adopt big digital currencies, they’re going to end up communicating with the fagefags running the CEXs to buy it. Which is why I repeatedly mention the need of friendly jurisdictions.
Until we get the real deal scalable, secure, private currency that can run on anyone’s cheap phone, and people bother to adopt it, we’re going to be totally reliant on CEXs to bridge into fiat to buy your basic goods on the ground. P2P crypto-fiat markets I don’t think will ever scale, despite the fact I would be terribly glad if they did, and I don’t see a way for a soverign corp to own fiat bank accounts to be able to run an exchange that descends into the fiat system. There’s ways on the edge to get smaller amounts between the two worlds, but nothing, that I know of at least, that can transform your 10m USD worth of BTC into real estate.
Glad to see a friendly comment Fidelis.
To convert crypto into real estate you need to do a lot of networking.
I am less impressed by CEX behavior and attitudes myself. Maybe it’s a cheap example, but SBF was no libertarian. The corruption behind the scenes at CEXes would be disgusting even if it funded impeccable political projects.
For me the ideal is less to have well developed crypto to fiat marketplaces and more to create something that can replace fiat when it dies. I have zero faith in lightning though I don’t follow it these days. I’ve had nothing but poor experiences with atomic swaps too.
Obviously the more people who have onboarded before things get ugly, the better. And obviously the easier it is to use on a phone, the better. Privacy is a double edged sword but for now I am a big fan.
What blockchains were you doing atomic swaps on, what wallets, what dexes?
I need to know what normies are experiencing. Atomic swaps are an essential technology, and there is no reason why they cannot be safe and user friendly.
To restore modern capitalism (we currently have postmodern capitalism, and it is failing badly) we need a system where a company’s shares are colored utxos on the blockchain, and you can atomically swap them for the base currency. We also need atomic options, where you can buy or sell the right, but not the obligation, to make an atomic swap at a certain price.
Watching cheeky CEXes drag their feet and put off tough KYC is amusing to watch and cheer but I wouldn’t call it heartening. I really doubt it ever comes from a place of principle. Tthey just want more revenue, probably to throw dumb nerd parties.
I’m sure some CEX CEOs are libertarians at heart, and some say there are clues that some are on the libertarian to reactionary pipeline. I can never tell, or maybe I just don’t look hard enough.
What will the world look like when Michael Saylor is the world’s richest man? Can Moldbug convert Vitalik’s tribe into dark elves if Ethereum takes the throne? I don’t even know the big Solana whales if God forbid that really takes off.
[*deleted*] prefer if you delete this comment once you see it,[deleted]
I am aware of the problems with those not altogether atomic swaps. This is inherent in the protocol mismatch, and not easily fixable.
The difficulty with observing normies is that when a normie wants to switch chains he will almost by definition use a CEX. Realistically most power uses do likewise.
Bitcoin to Monero swaps are out there but people who use monero are likely to be cagey, not speak up on social media, and anyway that UX isn’t representative of most crypto.
As a reference point you can observe normies complaining about bridging between Ethereum L2s, or onto other L1s. If you try that for yourself I think you’ll see it’s rather painless, and yet normies scream and moan about it. Cosmos users are quite proud of IBC, their method of going between chains. You can play with this on Osmosis.
To make atomic swaps better than that will be quite a task, but those might be a good reference points for where the bar is. You could also find a list of utxo chains and look at their social pages or discords.
The CEX fees are savage, they have a multitude of complicated scams running, they front run you, and they are not in fact all that easy to interact with.
If a normie is using a CEX, it is because he wants to have his conversion from fiat to to crypto currency government compliant, or he is just used to custodial assets, and it is too much of a harsh, long, and complicated learning curve to change.
The enormous volume on USDT would suggest that increasing numbers of normies, some of them very wealthy, are not using CEX’s.
Thanks for the deletion.
I imagine you are most familiar with BTC to LTC swaps? That ought to be smooth.
If you are hunting normies in the wild you might hold your nose and look at atomic transactions on Doge to BTC. I’m pretty sure that was built, and the interfaces and wallets would have been designed with normies in mind.
For non atomic swaps between chains the hot thing is thorchain. They have LTC and BTC and you could contrast that with the atomic experience.
Another place you could observe a sort of utxo interface are NFT platforms.
Obviously those remain on one chain, but you might find the way you trade for discrete units has an analogy to utxo trading.
The evolution from Opensea to Gem to Blur to Pandora may be of interest, particularly the blur interface and the way that Pandora fractionalizes the NFTs. Solana would be the cheapest place to do play with your own transactions. Magic Eden in particular.
You’ll have to excuse the ugly jpegs.
Feel free to redact the paragraph where I mention specific places to look, or the entire comment if I am too far off base especially the NFT idea.
Since NFTs are an obvious scam, never looked at that.
An NFT can only be valuable if it represents an off chain promise of some service or enforcement. Which does not exist for most NFTs.
I looked at thorchain, and immediately concluded enemy action. It is hot because full of scammers scamming scammers and shills promoting scams.
So I am full of good advice on where not to go.
Litecoin BTC atomic swaps are inherently simpler and more reliable.
Regarding those NFT marketplaces the interest is less in the UI or the broad UX and more specifically in the dynamics of the liquidity.
Liquidity is so important to any discussion of crypto.
A proper capitalist future will include less games with liquidity but some current experiments are interesting to study.
These days BY FAR the most valuable NFTs are not jpegs, they are liquidity positions on uniswap v3.
For me the big innovation of uniswap was the way it made it easy for normies to be LPs.
I completed a few atomic swaps, sure, once upon a time. I think I downloaded a few QR codes? Well, Tornado had you do something like that too. I said the experience was poor, not that it reduced me to tears or anything.
So it wasn’t terrible but it never ever crossed my mind to become an LP. With uniswap it is set and forget, though with v3 you can be more active.
Ignoring the fact that most normie LPs were lambs being led to a slaughter, you have to admire the way that liquidity was sourced for extremely long tail assets, in a flash.
Tornado is a dead project but the ETH in the tornado contracts is still earning TORN. Those rewards are still liquid on chain. They do about 30K of volume most days, just missed 300 recently. I would say I have no idea who the hell is trading that but the addresses are right in front of me if I care to look.
I wanted to compare the liquidity here to LTC BTC or other atomic swap platforms but I’m not sure where to find those stats. Looking for that I came across some sad atomic swap interfaces, but mostly out of date articles. Can you point me in a better direction? If you like I could try things out for myself and report to you via email or in the comments.
Someone must have kicked the blog up in priority somewhere again, so you get squid ink plants instead of the usual scripted plants.
If I was trying to be disruptive the first thing I would do is jump onto other people’s threads and imply that their perspectives were shared in bad faith.
If I’m being unclear please let me know.
There is a lot of bad faith enemy action going around. Sometimes I jump the gun, so unsurprising other people do also.
Well yes, it is unclear. Clouds of breath exhaled without much certain indication of what exactly the speaker is in favor of or opposed too. Vaguely non-committal takes with somewhat off-kilter undercurrents coloured by baizuo weltanschauung. Whether Christianity or cryptocurrency, certainly pertinent issues to uneasy and confused about, and express this unease and confusion in discourse for associated effect.
There are lots of ways to be disruptive, some more subtle than others.
Overall I was pleased with the interactions I had, asking about the Bible. Overall I thought the crypto discussions were going pretty well too.
I don’t really want to argue with you about whether or not I’m an off kilter baizo, I’d rather someone help me find the right exchange to play with atomic swaps. Maybe you can help me Pseud?
You want committed takes?
How about the very first thing I said.
Anyone with the time on their hands and attention span to follow the discussions on this blog, to say nothing of this thread, likely has what it takes to make good money in crypto, above and beyond what he’ll get from hodling bitcoin.
I insisted, but Jim disagreed.
Then he called me a degenerate gambler, so I told him to suck a dick and have fun staying poor.
Wait no, he did kinda say that about me but we moved on to more technical discussions about bitcoin utxos. We talked past each other for a while but sorted it out.
Just now I was trying to help him understand normie perspectives on cross chain swaps, because he told me directly that he was eager to learn about those exact perspectives.
What else have I committed to?
Sort out your utxos on Sundays, that’s when it’s cheaper.
What else can I say? Bridge onto new Bitcoin L2s because the risk return is incredible, and what’s even crazier are the bribes ETH L2s throw at you? BODEN to the moon?
Look, I have faith in Jim’s audience, but at the same time, who really knows who reads this blog let alone or the 250th comment? Some of us are probably in our 80s. Some of us are broke. Some of us probably have latent gambling issues.
Of course my advice is going to sound wishy washy. There’s no firm ground in crypto. You think it’s firm but whoosh there goes the rug.
So I don’t know, if you ask something specific I’ll try to help. Or don’t ask anything and let the thread die. I let the Christian stuff go when I stopped getting responses I’ll do the same here.
There’s not much you can say to convince me obviously since I’m coming from a position of prejudice – as is only appropriate in our most Current of Years – not in one post anyways. I am simply making the impression known, we shall see how the pattern shakes out.
Fair play on being suspicious.
I think there are less catty, more direct ways to go about it. If someone is subtly disruptive, point to a productive inquiry he interrupted and argue he should be banned. Otherwise it sounds like you’re trying to win “i told you so” points or something if Tyrone slips up later.
Regarding thorchain and the NFT things I mentioned, I hope it’s clear I mentioned them in the context of understanding user behavior, and how dumbed down things need to be to make people happy. I thought thorchain was pretty dumbed down but if it gets easier I’d like to try.
Where do you recommend for bitcoin to litecoin swaps?
I don’t want to publish what I am in fact using. The dex that talks the best talk is Basic Swap, which is still in beta. And normies should not use stuff that is in beta, and people who understand what the beta is doing need extreme care.
Basicswap absolutely does not look competitive to me. Even at the end of their road map they wouldn’t compete with 2022 DEXes. That’s trouble because current DEXes are uncompetitive against CEXes and CEX-like L2s. So it doesn’t look good to me.
It’s a lot of things but above all liquidity. But I’ll sound contentious or boring if I go on.
Personally I don’t think it’s a bad idea to use beta software, you just shouldn’t risk anything you’re not prepared to lose.
I was trying to think of a way to encourage people to try it for themselves in spite of your warning, but not only is that a fool’s errand to ask someone to do technical work in contradiction to your direct advice, test transactions would only graze on the real issue.
One of the things that smells shilly about you, is that you are always arguing that the ethereum chain and the ethereum dexes cexes are the center of the universe. Which are being promoted by all the usual scammers and shillers. I have come to the conclusion that you are not one of them, but you are marinated in their message.
The Ethereum foundation made the huge mistake of organising in the open. As a result their key personnel were dragged away in the middle of the night and threatened with fifteen years and never seeing their children again, and ever since then Ethereum has played ball with the state, a state that does not much like crypto currencies, and been run by the radical left, a radical left that does not much like crypto currencies. Why do you think Satoshi is still a man of mystery? We all knew what was coming down.
Ether had a good run when it had contracts and Bitcoin did not, and for a while it seemed likely it would become the one. But Bitcoin implemented contracts, and is back in the saddle. It is the one, and Ethereum and all that crowd are slowly being crushed under force of Metcalf’s law. All that stuff is headed down to zero. There is no room for it now that bitcoin swiped, and arguably improved upon, their underlying technology. Litecoin and Monero are not doing too well, but they have their own technological superiorities, that give them a safe niche — a rather small niche, but one that cannot be crushed under the might weight of Bitcoin and Metcalfe’s law. They are each the one in their respective niches, albeit Litecoin is thinking about taking Monero’s niche.
Until some other currency become the one, everything will live or die by its connection to Bitcoin. The writing is on the wall for the entire ethereum ecology.
They manufactured a vast pile of activity, a big ecosystem, which is slowly going away. It is all scammers scamming scammers, the illusion of function. The big investment money goes into bitcoin, and the actual exchanges of goods for money are Bitcoin, Bitcoin lightning, and, in some few markets, roughly equal amounts of Bitcoin and litecoin, due the high cost of bitcoin transactions, and the user hostility of lightning wallets.
With the US$ dying, Bitcoin lightning is going to take over the world. Or, I hope, a better crypto currency, one that solves the scaling problem. It was many many years before I made my first purchase of physical goods using bitcoin (this was long before lightning) It will likely be many many years before the full lightning wallet you are running is useful. And right now the software is difficult to use, and exposes you to a large risk of losing your bitcoin. It is a whole lot easier and safer to use a custodial wallet like alby. But if you are running a full lightning wallet as well as something like alby, you are a netizen, while if someone only has alby, he is almost as much a peon as if he only had a fiat credit card and fiat bank account.
Just as Americans used to rule the world, the time will come when netizens rule the world.
Regarding Ethereum. I have spoken very highly of Monero and Bitcoin, especially Bitcoin L2s.
I admit to being a speculator. Liquidity is crucial for many things besides speculation, but obviously where the liquidity is, that’s where the action is. The ethereum ecosystem is extremely liquid so I naturally dabble there.
I would prefer that the liquidity be on Bitcoin L2s. I hope and think that’s where things are headed and I have suggested many times that people get in early, ahead of the curve. This is mostly possible to the smart contracts now available on L1 as you say, but the L2s have better user facing smart contracts and you can check them out today.
I really don’t follow the politics around who the feds got to or who they didn’t get to. I can’t debate you there. I try to squeeze money out of the ethereum ecosystem and I buy more bitcoin.
As a bitcoin fan I am more concerned about CEXes than ethereum. I argued with Fidelis that they are not our friends.
I can study up on what happened, pass a sort of anti ethereum shill test if that would help.
For every Ethereum guy who was compromised and subverted that network, let’s also not forget that three more left ethereum to start his own chain.
hoskinson wood breitman larimr off the top of my head. Don’t let those projects off the hook either.
But imagine the sovereign debt crisis hits tomorrow.
Some of the infrastructure that is being built by enemies will work in spite of itself. It will have been stress tested.
Some of the infrastructure you prefer will not have been stress tested, will not have liquidity.
I prefer to be familiar with all kinds of tools, ready for whatever.
I appreciate jousting with you.
I don’t know if it’s a philosophical difference or personality or just different priors about risk.
But I really don’t understand why you would suggest people avoid beta software. Not even with $50? To check it out? What’s the worst that can happen, I lose $50?
Financial crisis may hit at any time. Personal crisis or global crisis.
All of crypto will still be in beta, and the pressure will be high.
You’ll need to move money around. In the course of some transactions, your funds may appear to be lost. Vanished. They may pop up five minutes later, or you may need to get help to recover your money. It is better to experience this with $50 test transactions than with money you are counting on. Five minutes believing you lost 1 BTC is a terrible feeling.
In a global crisis, networks will be swamped, performance degraded. No one has time to answer your questions, you can’t think straight to even find the right place to ask. You ask in the wrong place, then realize you were careless, probably compromised your opsec on top of what you lost.
The the masks will come off, the one armed bandits start glowing an ominous green, and the crypto casino will be revealed to be a warzone.
For now, things are relatively friendly. A great time to learn. Are there scammers? Who cares, you’re only playing with $50. When the pressure is on, there will still be scammers on the prowl. Better you get hit for $50 today than serious money when you need it.
Guys at work are talking about meme coins? Throw in twenty bucks, you’ll have a laugh and learn a few things.
This is the opposite of squid ink. It has nothing to do with ethereum. I am suggesting people check things out for themselves. If I have mentioned any specific infrastructure, feel free to avoid it like the plague, there’s plenty where that came from.
This is separate from my feeling that many reading this can outperform bitcoin if they apply themselves. Even there betting on Trump vs Biden was my first example, nothing about crypto even let alone ethereum.
Trying beta software here and there isn’t speculation it’s more like, before you’re in a survival situation make sure you’re in shape to walk a few miles and know where your gun’s safety is.
Or even go to the gym properly and the shooting range too, because it’s a good pass time even if the crisis never comes.
10 years later, and still nothing to show for all that effervescent marketing hot air…
https://twitter.com/SimplyBitcoinTV/status/1776425972901830854
Will some REAL L1’s please stand up!
ProNews: BIS launches CBDC with 7 countries…
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/04/03/central-bank-group-starts-tokenization-project-to-enhance-monetary-system/
They’re gonna fuck everyone with CBDC’s in a few years.
And you still have no real L1’s to escape from and route around them in everyday life.
Because MonkeyPegs, ShitCoins, and TabLayers are cool right, somehow not psyop Traps?
> Speculation
Speculation… let’s say trading… is high work, high risk, and low luck.
Identifying and holding long term outpacers is easier.
Unfortunately BTC is still one of them, even the leading one among them, sadly.
A real nextgen cypherpunk L1 will come to replace it soon.
Create and/or find, and Invest in that one 🙂
[*deleted for misinformation*]
Your link does not claim what you claim that it claims.
[*Take the shill test described in the moderation policy*]
There can only be one. Bitcoin has the first mover advantage, the most software development and it has Metcalfe’s law and the cold start problem working on its side. That is the truth, and pretending it away does not address the problem of fixing the gross flaws in Bitcoin. Needs to be fixed or replaced. Which involves an immense amount of programming work, which has to be paid for.
While I might agree that long term there might only be one Real L1 digital money, that time is definitely not present, not ready, nor time, now. We are nowhere near that determistic. That’s at least 25 more years of exploratory development away before being able to even think about making that call.
I am also absolutely NOT worried about Metcalf, network effects, cold start, dev, first mover, or anything else.
When BTC arrived, it was ZERO, and it took 15 years to get slowly to now.
When a better L1 arrives it will also be ZERO, as were all before,
yet just as BTC was recognized as marginally better enough than Fiat to adopt,
and thus it began being invested in,
SO TOO will a better L1 than BTC slowly begin to be
recognized and invested in, in time.
Just as stock of companies birth, grow, and trade away unto their death,
SO TOO will BTC be traded off for a better L1 over time.
If and when a better L1 is made, it will thus eventually take over in decades.
It is foolish to presume that no better L1 is possible.
People who claim that list of worries matter are ignorant or frauds…
– they do not understand the rises and falls inherent to all of history
– they demand impossible instant gratification in year one
They are frauds, FUDsters, and self-bag-preserving shills.
In FACT, BTC was not the first digital money, and was just
another better L1 than what attempts at cryptos and
“gold-backed” and digitals and fiats existed before.
When a better L1 than BTC arises, it will win out over time.
BSD and Linux and Bitcoin were not “paid for”, they were hobbies, volunteered and donated from pre-existing funds, even MSFT and everything else was. “Paying for” dev via various forms of unfair launches and distribution is a FRAUD upon the coin that will never be forgiven or forgotten.
Satoshi was fair.
And a better L1 will appear in time.
Even if that better L1 is BTC itself that evolves the “fixes” first,
but then not even Maxi’s would be able to call it the
“unchanged and unchangeable” BTC that they claimed
for a decade that it is.
Since time is passing by, I suggest getting the Rhocoin Protocol
written and out into the competitive L1 marketplace of ideas.
Of a better L1 than today’s current Bitcoin Protocol snapshot form,
I am absolutely certain. It’s only a matter of time.
Money in our lifetime, it will happen 🙂
I hereby wager 1 BTC that I am right about a better L1 Protocol than BTC (today’s git commit) emerging and reaching market cap parity with BTC, and at least 5000tps, within the next 15 years.
If anyone is brave enough to stand on their silly BTC hill, reply below and I will split my 1 BTC loss among you. Else, you all owe me $70k adjusted for 15 years inflation.
Wager by actually making it happen.
There are a pile of better L1s, though none with properties required to be a worthwhile competitor to Bitcoin. Immense amount of work is required.
And no one should take you up on that bet, because where will you be in fifteen years?
On moderation for ignorant idiocy.
>> I am also absolutely NOT worried about Metcalf, network effects, cold start, dev, first mover, or anything else.
> ignorant idiocy.
Name calling and ad-hom declarations are not a valid refutement.
I posted rationale for my lack of worry.
Either attempt to refute that using reason, or retract your name calling.
There is no point in discussing with the ignorant and the stupid.
If you do not understand first mover advantage, the cold start problem, and Metcalfe’s law, your opinions on crypto currency are not welcome here.
Your rationale was too stupid and ill informed to be refutable. You cannot make sense of what is happening in crypto because you do not understand these things, and blame an evil conspiracy of bitcoin maxis for the fact that things are not happening in a way that makes sense to you. You bitcoiners of lying because they say things that do not make sense to you. You do not understand what they are saying.
If, as commonly happens, someone just clones up a me-too blockchain, pre mines it, and then promotes it by shilling the hell out of it, it is a fraud, and there are an enormous number of such frauds and pump and dump schemes.
However information wants to be free, but engineers want to be paid. We have reached the point where a coin that provides useful new technology needs a good software ecosphere around it — a self custodial lightning routing wallet is never going to be easy, but the software is just awful. It could easily be a whole lot easier and safer to use. Good software is not being done because good people don’t get paid for doing it. The success of Ethereum happened because people paid for it to succeed. Premining is a valid model for software development, and and in the dexes we see a lot of good software that is paid for in substantial part by pre-mining.
Every Day that is wasted away talking about Other Stuff and not doing a Rhocoin, and whatever other Competing Privacy Capable Sound Money L1’s, is another Year gone by and wasted that you will never ever see any change In Your Lifetime from.
Yes, Other Stuff will Change The World, eventually, over hundreds to thousands of years, but not In Your Lifetime where it Matters.
And once you’ve Changed The World In Your Own Lifetime with Crypto,
most of the Other Stuff will desireably change, faster, being enabled by,
and coming forth from the Crypto change anyways.
Other Stuff has been around, talked about, and wasted away, for thousands of years and got everyone effectively nowhere.
Crypto is roughly 15 years old, and still needs reborn in better Next Generation forms.
Forget all the Other Stuff, it’s a useless waste of time.
Focus on Crypto.
I tend to agree about the importance of crypto, well, actually cryptocurrency… money.
I often see little point in debating religion. That noise has been going on for 10000 years.
He who creates and adopts a good L1 first, will have advantage moving in and around the religious wars, and possibly win many of them, just as those who used real gold had at least some advantage before.
At the moment, Islam might be moving faster toward sound crypto than Christianity.
Observe the donation methods.
[*deleted for failure to conform to the moderation policy,*]
I am sick of gay Jewish demon worshippers telling Christians what Christianity is.
Whosoever comments from the frame that he is more Christian than his interlocutor must first have affirmed that Jesus Christ is Lord, born in Bethlehem, died at Jerusalem, and is, is from before the beginning of the world. Fully God and fully man. God is three and God is one.
What does First Corinthians 6:9 and Leviticus 20:13 say about LGBTQIA++?
[*deleted*]
[*thank you for attempting to comply. I have given thought to your points, but I have a few minor quibbles I would like you to address*]
You were ambiguous about a few bits: The eternity of Christ — that he existed from before the beginning, and through him all things were created — he did not come into being in Bethlehem. He became flesh in Bethlehem, and still is flesh.
You did say “co-eternal”, but that could mean a few things, and clever people (the Socinians among others) have made it mean all sorts of strange things. Given the massive manufacture of cleverness on this question, need to be a little clearer.
You also left out that a man who lies with a male is an abomination, which difference between “man” and “male” ropes in all the ++ of LBGTQ++, and you left out that there is no blood guilt in killing them.
You also left out that the effeminate will not inherit the Kingdom of God — which covers the cross dressers, many of whom would never have genital sex with anyone. Most of the middle aged transitioners stop having any genital sex at all, ever. And are damned because of that, not in spite of that. Your paraphrase was thought crime, so you passed the shill test, but does not quite qualify you to lecture Christians about sex, because your paraphrase falls short of the biblical position..
You seem to be saying that it is only what you do with your dick that can damn you, not what you fail to do with your dick. Not so. It is also what you fail to do with your dick. The middle aged transitioners generally ditch their wives and their families, along with genital sex with their wives or anyone else.
Your paraphrase would not damn the Biden administration trannie who kept stealing other people’s luggage at airports, because he got off on nothing physical or material that a normal person would recognise as sex. There are a pile of really strange fetishes in the Biden administrations ++.
But from what you did say, I would guess you to be a gnostic. And the killer affirmation to pick out gnostics is something I left out of the short affirmation, since most of our enemies are outright demon worshippers. Through him all things were created.
I have been trying to keep it short. The creeds are too long, and thus leave too much room for excessive cleverness. They are for allies, not for potential enemies. I try to focus on our primary enemies of the moment.
The vast majority of our enemies are clearly unable to say the Nicene creed, but the Roman Catholic Church is full of obvious demon worshippers, who some of whom can cleverly say the Nicene creed with invisible commas in the right places, and invisible special meanings of the words. They worship serpent Christ. It has failed to keep out obvious enemies.
I would really like to see if you can affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord, born in Bethlehem, died at Jerusalem, and is, is from before the beginning of the world. Through him all things were created. Fully God and fully man. God is three and God is one.
That the “him” is not in the Nicene creed, though its equivalent is in the bible, provides an invisible comma on whose exact position no end of mischief can hang. That is the problem when a creed gets longer and longer in an effort to keep out more and more very different enemy groups. Its very length provides more room for mischief. And over time, there have been no end of very different enemy groups. If you try to make a creed to keep out all of them, going to have a problem. The longer the creed, the more opportunities to cleverly come up with a complicated and ingenious perverse meaning for it.
#1: I am not a gnostic. I am Orthodox.
I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not created, of one essence with the Father through Whom all things were made. Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; And He rose on the third day, according to the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father; And He will come again with glory to judge the living and dead. His kingdom shall have no end.
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Creator of life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, Who spoke through the prophets.
In one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.
Amen.
If praying the Nicene creed isn’t enough, then I ain’t passing.
#2. You are correct, I focused on the G in LGBTQIWTFBBQ. My apologies. Sodomites turn even the stomachs of the demons, and men and women who dress in the garb of the opposite sex are anathema, and those who affect effeminacy are similarly damned
As for “what is done and not done with the dick.” The Jews had consecrated virgins. Origen’s biggest critic, Demetrius, lived as brother and sister with his wife for 40 years. Marriages may be invalidated if not consummated. A man wounded in the stones may not marry. Sex is regulated, positively and negatively, in the OT and the New. And not all things are for all people. Some are set apart. It is no great leap that the Theotokos would be set apart from men. Not because sex is unholy, but because not everything is for everyone.
Christ did not marry.
Jim, I don’t care if you publish this or not. In fact, please don’t. I am asking you to reconsider, prayerfully, your thinking on the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos. You’re down the wrong path, perhaps for the right reasons, but still wrong. You would not have sex on top of the Ark of the Covenant. You would not blow your nose with a single, blank page of the KJB. You would not let your dog drink water out of the Holy Grail. You would not eat ribs off the Tablets of the Law. You would not use Jesus’ robe as a diaper for your child. Perhaps not even for a blankie. How much more holy and set apart the body of she who bore Christ?
You would not have sex with your mother. How, then, could anyone consider such a thing with the New Eve, the new Ark, the God Bearer, the Mother of God, the literal Theotokos, whose own flesh was one with Christ, and who by her yes became the mother of us all?
That’s just crass and retarded. The position of both the east and west is easily reachable, through contemplation and logic. No Protoevangelion required.
The original Ark killed at a touch.
Who says? Our enemies keep attributing their evil and malicious positions to our allies. The tradition that Demetrius failed to perform his marital duties appears long, long after his days, if we talking about the same Demetrius.
It just does not seem likely that a warrior neglects his marital duties for forty years. He just does not seem like the kind of person who would do that, if we speak of the same Demetrius.
The problem is your presumption that marital sex is gross and icky. No. It is sacred. And conspicuous among those pushing the position that it is gross and icky are the usual suspects. As I am found of reminding people, Origen was highly radioactive from the day he first attempted to join the Church, and remained highly radioactive for a thousand years.
The Christian position has always interpreted “what God has joined together” as God joining them together in the act — that until the act is performed, the bride is merely the bride, not yet the wife, that you are not actually married till the deed is done. Sex with the intent and ability to stick around till death do us part is a sacred act, and the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary desacralizes it, literally desecrates it.
If marriage is God joining us together, he joined Joseph and Mary together. And if he joined Joseph and Mary together, they did the deed.
You compare it to blowing one’s nose. When you blow your nose, what comes out is reject waste. When you ejaculate, what comes out is life.
It is always the same argument and it boils down to “sex is bad and so is the body and it has to be kept separate from what is holy.”
The Incarnation itself disproves this line of reasoning. If Christ is holy then He should have been kept from anything that would render Him unholy. But He remained holy in a physical body and all that went with it. The Ark of the Covenant was holy because of God’s making it so. The scriptures, the tablets of law, the robe of Jesus were all made holy by their contact and origin in Him but only as He deemed them so. So if Jesus is what makes a thing holy as He wills rather than holiness being inherent in any of those things due to simple contact with Him, then God can make other things holy if He chooses or not as He chooses.
The ark killed those who were not authorized to bear it, not because it was magic, but because God decreed it so and demonstrated that principle in a particular instance. The sons of Aaron carried it. Yes, they were consecrated and set apart but it was the decision of God that made them able to bear it and not the decision of man. No washing, anointing, or ritual cleanliness made the priests themselves clean. Only as God made them clean.
Consequently, if Christ is Himself the source of holiness He cannot be tainted by any of these things Himself. Except if He willed to do something contrary to His Father’s will. Which He did not do.
Let me be crass: Jesus was a baby in swaddling clothes. He burped, spit up, and defecated. Did that make Him unholy? On the other hand did those items suddenly become rendered magically holy thereby? No. He was neither made unlean by them nor did He make those items suddenly holy by their contact with Him.
Was Jesus a healthy teenage boy with a teenage boy’s body? Do you think He was spared the fact of nocturnal emission? Under the law semen would have made Him ritually unclean. Do you think it made Him unholy? On the other hand, it isn’t like Jesus’ semen encrusted underclothing was rendered holy just by His contact with it. He would have to will those items to be holy.
The idea that Mary would be some how tainted, defiled, desecrated, made ritually unclean, or otherwise rendered an unfit vessel for Jesus because after His birth she had sexual relations with her husband to whom she was joined is to state implicitly that sex is defiling between a husband and a wife.
There’s no other conclusion to draw from that line of reasoning. She was a virgin before His birth and was overshadowed by the Holy Ghost and in some fashion we do not understand, allowed to bear Jesus Christ. But was her womb forever rendered sacred? No. And Jesus swats down this reasoning in scripture.
Luke 11:27-28 “And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.
28 But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.”
In the same way that Jesus’ leaving fecal matter in swaddling clothes as a baby didn’t make them sacred, His mother’s womb and breasts were not made eternally holy thereby. It is not a necessary condition for Mary to be blessed among women or to be the chosen handmaid of the Lord.
“The problem is your presumption that marital sex is gross and icky. ”
My example of “blowing your nose on the KJV” was ill-chosen, and I anticipated the pushback.
However, the other examples stand. I do not presume that marital sex is gross or icky. I am married, and have no hang-ups of the sort.
What I do think is that, and all Christians believed, until very recently, that for some reason, the Theotokos was set apart. It is obvious, for instance, that God considered her virginity to be important at least up until the conception of Christ. For some reason, she was not only a virgin, but had refrained some intercourse with Joseph, even though they were already married (betrothal was legal marriage, not simply an engagement or a promise to be married.) Their marriage was unconsummated, and, by any standard definition, illegal and invalid at that point. Joseph could have sued for divorce, and would have been legally correct if he had done so. But he didn’t.
Mary’s virginity was important for some reason, at least prior to Christ’s conception. Why? Sure, we have the prophecy, born of a virgin. But why of a virgin? To prove God can perform miracles? That was already well-proven, and Christ’s own ministry didn’t rely on miracle-working (in fact, raising Lazarus is what got Him killed by the Jews) and besides, who would prove that Mary was a Virgin, anyway? I believe that the Protoevangelion gives an answer: that her hymen was examined and found intact. But even then, we know that a women can become pregnant without intercourse, that sperm will hunt. So why important that Mary was a virgin?
Do you claim that after Mary announced her pregnancy, that Joseph engaged in relations with her, while she was pregnant with the unborn Christ?
I, for one, would not have sex on top of the ark of the covenant, or eat ribs off the Tablets of the Law. The Jews certainly already refrained during periods of ritual uncleanness (menses, and after child birth.) How much more during a period of ultimate holiness? Again, not because sex is bad, but because Bearing God Inside sets apart. She was flesh and blood united with God, via her unborn Child, who was Christ. She was divinized, at least during her pregnancy.
Would you have sex with God?
Let us presume that Joseph refrained from exercising his absolutely legal marriage rights on his young wife while she was pregnant (for the same reason he did so prior to the conception of Christ) and for the same reason as he had done so prior to the conception of Christ, and that by doing so, he had a legal case to nullify their unconsummated marriage, but for some reason didn’t.
Why? Was he a cuckold, as the devil worshippers say? Was he perhaps wounded in the stones himself? Doubtful, or no one would have allowed them to marry. It seems more likely that he was told, before marrying Mary, what the deal was. And he accepted the deal, and didn’t complain, despite the sacrifice of something good (his sexuality) and chose to live as a monastic, and to care for Jesus as an adopted father, and to care for God’s Mother as he would care for his own. A sacrifice born of love, but because “sex is icky.”
Why did God demand perpetual virginity from Mary? Because she said yes. Because He was all-consuming. Because bearing Christ made her the New Ark, and because you don’t have sex on the Ark. Not that there’s anything wrong with sex, but you don’t have sex with your mother, and you don’t have sex on the altar at church, and you don’t have sex in the Holy of Holies. Which Mary’s womb was, more than the Holy of Holies ever was. Not because sex is bad or unholy, but because some things, even if good and holy, aren’t done at certain times or at certain places. A woman would not climb into the Ark and give birth. Not that there is anything wrong with birth-giving.
You don’t need to be a gnostic or a puritan (or do I repeat myself) to agree with both the East and the West (and Martin Luther and Jean Calvin and ‘Enry the Eigth) that Mary remained a virgin. Special case (bearing God) leads to special outcome (perpetual virginity) which serves both as an archetype of nothing (as it is a singular event) and of everything (since we are all wedded to Christ, since the Church is His Bride, and returned to our original dignity, pre-fall.) Christ is all-consuming, and His Spirit is a flaming fire.
Any other take on it is an innovation from the Protestant Deformation, which gives us Adam, Eve, and the dinosaurs, Sola Scriptura, and all manner of other kabbalistic black magic.
Obviously not all Christians believed in the first few centuries of Christianity — it was a fake consensus retroactively attributed to previous centuries. And if we look back to how it was promoted, it was promoted in the same dishonest way and by similarly dubious church “fathers” as will tell you the Bishop of Rome was always the Bishop of everything, and the Patriarch of the West was always the Patriarch of everything.
It was promoted in very much the same way as the twenty first century shills and entryists operate on Gab, and attempt to operate on this blog. It as if five centuries from now, someone will read some shill on Gab confidently saying that the earth is flat, Musk is a Jew, space travel is fake, and Trade Tower Building Seven fell straight down onto its foundations like a demolition, as if no one doubted it and everyone agreed, and conclude that since there was obviously no controversy, thus argument from silence, that the entire alt right, myself included, must have supported these doctrines.
The Bible says they had sex. Sometimes the bible should be understood as spiritual poetry, giving the spiritual meaning of events, rather than a literal record of events, (there obviously is no physical mountain from which one can see all the Kingdoms of the world) but this sounds mighty like a literal record of events. Obviously James the Just would know (and he was probably the only mortal around who would know), so would it would not have been incorporated in the Gospels unless true, since Gospels, except for the Book of Revelations, appear to have been written in their final form or something very close to their final form during the lifetime of James the Just
The people who promoted the perpetual virginity of Mary are the same people who promoted clerical celibacy, and they do not give a rats ass what the bible says. They decide what the eternal unchanging consensus of Christianity always was every night while having sex in a great big pile.
Is anyone familiar with the greek writing of this line? The English translation is only ambiguous if you squint while willing it to be different.
Jim at first I thought the perpetual virginity thing was a strnge hobby horse, but the words of this man changed my mind. Something about the metaphors he uses with respect to marrital consummation makes my skin crawl.
It is like faggots being disgusted by youthful breasts indicative of youthful fertility. Faggot asks “Is not that disgusting and creepy?” No, that the faggot is disgusted by is disgusting and creepy. It is like PETA being disgusted by puppies and kittens.
I have been thinking about this a lot, and I believe they’re us a lot of taking past one another that happens when discussing things like this.
In this case, I believe that one of the major impediments to effective communication is the modern protestant man’s tendency to collapse two biblical categories into one: Unclean and guilty. These are two separate, almost unrelated states that are central to Christianity. The new testament becomes nearly impossible to comprehend if they merge into a single state, but everybody tends to, because the concept of unclean VS. Holy doesn’t really exist in western thought outside of Christianity.
Here is an example. The children and spouse of a Christian, even if they are unbelievers, are sanctified (or holy) according to st Paul. They might be guilty, but are not categorically unclean.
Why it’s important to the question of whether the doctrine of Mary’s virginity is a weapon or not is this: sexual intercourse (just like burying the dead and using the bathroom) is not sinful, but does make one unclean. This is explicit in the OT. Lots of good things make one unclean. The line between the correct understanding and a gnostic weapon is (exactly) claiming these things make one guilty. Avoiding a good thing (sex) in certain situations where uncleaness must be avoided (like the night before a priest celebrates the eucharist or offers sacrifice) is a different thing than avoiding it because it makes one guilty. That’s calling Good evil–judaizing.
So suggesting that Joseph didn’t have relations with Mary can be done for reasons OTHER THAN delivering a gnostic payload. Obviously suggesting that he didn’t can and has also been done precisely to deliver the gnostic payload.
It is a reasonable good-faith error for a man like Jim who is (rightly) wary of the gnostic torpedo to blur the distinction. Or at least it can be. But Jim is 100% right about looking for the fruit. In my case, I tend to believe in the perpetual virginity, and my life demonstrates that it hasn’t been an agnostic torpedo for me. My children can’t be counted on two hands. Obviously that statement doesn’t carry a lot of weight in anonymous comments, but that’s just how it is.
Typical papist jesuitical word tricks to justify bullshit. Celibacy is a doctrine created by and for demon worshipping faggots, period. Its fruits are poison.
Cominator, are you even married? Can you calm your wife down with a word? How many sons do you have? How many godchildren? How many great grandchildren will be at your funeral, assuming you die at 75, based on current trends in your life? Why are you so angry?
I know all about the great big pile of faggots in the Vatican, brother. I also know, personally, dozens of people who believe in the perpetual virginity who are out-breeding every demographic on earth, and marrying their obedient daughters off to masculine men. The Christian patriarchy exists, and many patriarchs believe in the perpetual virginity. Modern fake/gay Christians exist, and many don’t believe in the the perpetual virginity. Adjust your model to fit reality or don’t, and enjoy your delusion. Forceful language by an enthusiastic mapmaker changes nothing about the territory he hasn’t seen yet.
And I’m not a papist. You are incorrect about that as well.
That’s cool and all, but Jesus had a brother, and that means Mary and Joseph fucked to make him.
If Joseph had a son by his first wife, and Mary was his second wife, in his old age, as the church has been teaching for at least 1600 years, but probably a lot longer, then would that son be jesus’ brother despite not being Mary’s child?
What are the earliest sources for this teaching?
If ‘out-breeding every demographic on earth and marrying obedient daughters off to masculine men’ is a good thing, then why are you implying that Mary was a sinful harpy who forsook her marital duties, and holding up hypothetical sinful harpies who forsake their marital duties as a model for women?
Works extolling sexlessness and preaching that all sexual desire is inherently icky, such as the “Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs,” the “Shepherd of Hermas,” the “Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan,” and so on and so forth, have been kept out of the canon and relegated to the dank and dusty attic (or closet) where they belong, while the earlier, authentic, pro-breeder stuff has been canonized. Faggots will always be found hovering around religious establishments like vultures over a decaying carcass, and they will stealthily penetrate through the back door the first instance they can. At least the early church kept them away for a while by excluding their scriptural mockeries of marriage – the religious rohypnol that facilitates their schemes.
The epitome of scriptural faggotry is, of course, the Acts of Paul and Thecla (part of the Acts of Paul). If this text doesn’t make you reel with indignation, you’re not really heterosexual & you should probably apply for TRT. Tl;dr – a young betrothed virgin is persuaded by Paul to dump her fiance because God is most pleased with absolute chastity, and we’re told of her pious, brave, and stunning quest to escape the horror that is matrimony. Anti-marriage texts abounded in that dismal era, often associated with the Gnostics, and “Paul and Thecla” encapsulates in pure form that mind-cyanide spillover, the inevitable result of allowing faggots any access to pen and papyrus.
If you don’t remove the gay, the gay removes you.
Jimmy persausively argues that some branches of orthodoxy are doing fine. And they are — pretty much the only remaining examples of above ground Christianity in the Global American Empire.
But they are doing fine because of nukes and in spite of the perpetual virginity of Mary. They have been crushed in the Ukraine by terror and murder. As things escalate between Nato and Russia, the same may well happen here.
Small heresy when left unchecked tend to spiral into big heresy over time. Perpetual virginity dogma has proven to be a reoccurring problem.
@Jimmy
It’s very possible to hold the framework of others, even your enemies, without realizing it. Over the historical scale, perpetual virginity heresy has largely been Papist in origin and nature.
You went personal in a knee jerk reaction to TC’s comment. I can follow up your rhetorical questions with why you felt the need to respond in such a way. Did it invoke fear you may hold the same framework as your enemies?
TC is not elegant, nor gentle in his delivery, but he’s not off the mark.
“Do you claim that after Mary announced her pregnancy, that Joseph engaged in relations with her, while she was pregnant with the unborn Christ?”
Why do people like you keep asking such questions? The Bible makes it plain that Joseph only consummated his marriage after Jesus was born.
That said, the problem I see with this whole “oooh Mary was sooo holy and consecrated and uber-saintly” stuff is that Jesus did not come to Earth to save only holy and consecrated and uber-holy people – He came to save all who would believe in Him.
And to do that He had to become a human, and to become a human He had to be born to a human mother.
If you make Mary out to be something very different from a standard-issue daughter of Eve, are you not undermining the whole point of the Incarnation?
With all due respect, “through him all things were made” is in the Nicene Creed. That’s how I was taught it, that’s how it’s said at my church and when I looked it up it shows up as such on several different denominational websites.
Which obviously implies that all things were made through Christ, if one is not unduly clever with invisible punctuation.
So yes, it is in the Nicene creed, contrary to what I said. But when some people say the Nicene creed, it manages to not be.
Jim, could you explain the Serpent Christ heresy / conspiracy a bit more at some point? Google searching only turns up things like the typology of the bronze serpent in the desert.
Do a search for Christ+serpent+gnosticism
And/or check out my post on Satanic symbolism at the Vatican.
The theology in question does not seem to me to make much sense, and I am not interested in making sense of it.
It looks to me like a pile of motivated reasoning to rationalise evil in this world in the name of virtue in the next — virtue that does not require anything in this world that might be inconvenient. Also to provide a creative interpretation of the Creeds and the book of Revelations. I cannot be bothered disentangling motivated reasoning. There are usually knots in it that cannot be undone.
https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-book-of-revelation/#comment-2878696
What baffles me is how there are those who can affirm the “Nicene Creed” in which God is three and God is one.
Yet they are staunchly LGBTQIA++ and are egalitarian in sex roles.
There are many things concern trolls can seem to be baffled by.
You can say that. But the phenomenon remains real.
Is it real? I have remarked many times on invisible commas and special meanings, and complicated and clever theology created to give a very specific wording special meaning, which comes undone under minor changes.
The closer to DC, the more paranoia (and suspected signals collection). DC News Now is hilariously bland and out of touch like it’s stuck in the late 90s. DC bubble is mightly big. Cohesion among young Officers is noticeably worse when compared to just a few years ago. Standards in the training pipeline have been “modernized” yet again. Current year euphemisms get thrown around all the time, but what is said in the bricks among trusted peers… Easter, for the majority, was still Easter even if they are ignorant about Gospel. NVGs are pretty sweat.
How secure is GAB?
Welcome back.
I missed your invaluable input
Thanks. I’m not fully back, not for a good while… if ever. Been crazy busy breaking shit in the woods.
It’s ok, a little bit is better than nothing.
[*deleted*]
Take the shill test described in the moderation policy,. Also tell us if you are Christian, or trying to ask Christians what you think to be gotcha questions. If you say you are a Christian, give us the Christian affirmation and get white listed.
What’s the answer to the Judiciary question?
What should be done about the legal system?
If “we” win, what would the legal system look like? Would the current judges remain who they are? Would you want to totally rework Common Law, or maintain its structure?
First victory, then order. After order, then law.
The existing judiciary has been utterly discredited by its performance in the election fraud cases, the Trump cases, and the collapse of order in the big blue megalopoli. We will need legitimacy for our enforcement system, but they have no capability to provide that. They will be hostile to us, being priests of the old priesthood, and useless to us.
Henry the lion of Justice did a mighty good job, which lasted for seven centuries. Would have worked a whole lot better with remote procedure calls rather than bits of slate coated with beeswax. It is preserved in its last functioning form in Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England.
The value of a judiciary to Henry the lion of justice was to ensure that justice was seen to be done, so that he did not get nailed like William the second. But the existing judiciary is unlikely to persuade anyone that justice is done. They have burned their capability to provide legitimacy for authority, and have no value to power.
Henry’s judiciary was useful to the state by providing legitimacy for the use of force by the state. Our existing judiciary has burned that, and pretty soon the state is going to have to start over, whoever wins. When Duterte was Mayor of Davao, he ignored the judiciary and used death squads, and it seemed to me that almost everyone I talked to saw death squad justice as more likely to be just than the judiciary. He got away with it because the judiciary had burned their credibility. It did not take people long to figure out that the death squads were a lot less likely to act unjustly than the judiciary.
But what we have is a crisis of enforcement. With AI and instant communications, it becomes possible to grant cops a whole lot of discretion. In the Judge Dredd comics, they depict a system where the cops have tremendous power, but they have to record everything they do with AIs in their bike, their gun, and their helmet, which are of course in constant communication with the AI at headquarters.
The Australian Border control under Abbot worked on something like this. Border control could detain people at their discretion indefinitely without bothering with lawyers and judges, and did so, but had to report the grounds for doing so. It seemed to work very well, in that the leftists were endlessly looking for a poster girl plausibly detained unjustly, came up empty. If arrested, you can appeal up the chain of command, but unless the cop did something grossly wrong, this is at best ignored, and at worst gets you into bigger trouble.
So I would favour something of both: Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, which allowed for a whole lot of private enforcement. But private enforcement works a whole lot better if you are required to report in immediately. And, of course, when creating order, and not yet too worried about creating law, you have enforcement by people subject to a chain of command and specially privileged to enforce.
Duterte’s solution to the collapse of order and a grossly political judiciary in Davao worked well and was extremely popular. He faced exactly the problem we face in the big blue megalopoli, solved it, and was loved for solving it.
“It is preserved in its last functioning form in Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England.”
the commentaries is the triumph of the letter of the law over the spirit of the law
the beauty of the common law is that it is a reflection of a society ruled by decrees a king’s decree and his court, and as the decrees accumulated it formed a body of laws that supported and strengthen the kings rule. order fundamentally is predictability not so much in letter but in spirit. when lawyers (as blackstones) start to (innovate) in their field expect troubles. the commentries were popular in the colonies and taken up by the revolutionaries, they even applied his idea of starting “a school of law”.
this is the biggest problem in law and order organizations; is how to make and apply the laws while making sure that those who apply it stay clear from becoming too clever with the laws .
The popular theory of jurisprudence over the early modern period was that judges are simply extensions of the sovereign, procedurally administering decisions already made in lieu of the sovereign doing so himself. If a judge were to concern himself with matters of consequence or interpretation, then he would himself in effect be arrogating kingly power, ‘legislating from the bench’.
In reality, of course, there is no such thing as non-activist judges, because all thought and action inherently arises out of judgement. Therefore, where there are courts, they should be literal courts; the local count or baronet arbitrating some dispute or punishing violations of the King’s Peace.
The old anglo-saxon concept of ‘outlaw’ means someone who is literally outside the law; there are no privileges according to rank or status for such men, anyone can do anything they like with them.
The Laws of Humungus:
1. Only the strong survive.
2. You keep what you kill.
3. A glorious death will ride eternal, shiny and chrome!
You must never fear death, because he is always there waiting, waiting. Ready to wash over you like a warm blanket. Fear is for your adversary. So you must always make a friend of death, for if you do not death is an enemy to be feared, a true enemy to be sure. It is fear that defeats us.
And that’s why Imperial Japan drubbed those baka gaijin and we’re all typing this in Japanese.
We all die. Some will be remembered for their valor, others for their cowardice. Fear, can be turned into rage which you can use to lash out at your foe.
The pagans, who held that those remembered for their valor would live forever, were defeated by the Christians. King Alfred the Great won in large part because enemy kings kept killing each other.
The Dark Enlightenment version (Nature, but not Nature’s God) is that you cooperate with cooperators, and defect on defectors. Valor is an important virtue, but is not in itself a reliable indicator of cooperativeness. And, if one has only nature and not nature’s God, nothing can be a reliable indicator of cooperativeness, since a defector will always fake it.
Well, there is no shortage of people faking Christianity also. Hence my frequent rants about gay Jewish demon worshippers telling Christians what Christianity is, and the fans of hippy pacifist Jesus the Jewish community organiser. Also see demon worship at the Vatican. But it is not hard to tell the difference.
“Hail fellow Christian, I am more Christian than thou, and Christianity requires that …”
“Are you? Say the magic words then.”
“Well, actually I am a Deist”
Odd how that works.
Humungus will need time to think about your words. Perhaps cooperation could work. It might be to our advantage to trade gasoline for women or extra food rather than just take.
And thus the mobile bandit settles down to stationary banditry, and his grandson eventually becomes a king… And then his great great great grandson fucks kids on Little St. James Island, and gives the kingdom away to niggers because some Jew told him to. It’s the Circle of Life.
Humungus understands now.
Cooperation, while beneficial in the short term and giving rise to market economies, will lead to lackadaisical minds that give rise to perversion, pederasty, and sloth.
Humungus wants his people to be strong, so he rejects the ways of the old world which have failed mankind.
We must take what we need from the weak. Those who choose their abode in underground dwellings storing up foodstuffs and ammunition will be harvested.
Blackpill resolving the quantum uncertainty by creating enemies to fulfill it; poetic.
I’m not a Christian and experience no difficulty in saying your words, nor do I burst into flame if I do. So you can color me skeptical as to the effectiveness against modern infiltrators more sophisticated than Shaneequa.
Sure you are not a Christian — but you are not a demon worshipper either, nor are you working an FBI desk with a supervisor or HR that worships demons.
And if you say the words, you might find that Christ notices, rather than demons, and gives you a heads up. But if someone belongs to demons, he fears the magic of the words.
Jesus Christ is Lord. Born in Bethlehem, crucified for the sins of the world, died, and was buried. On the third day rose from the dead. God is three and God is one.
(Can confirm I waited a little while after typing that, no response of any kind. So I remain skeptical.)
And, if there is one thing that characterizes a demon in any story you care to tell from any culture in the world, it is skill at dishonesty. The words are very easy to say for someone who places no faith in them – see for example official state churches in various commie lands.
Well I have seen no end of cases where it works. Which I agree is very strange, but it does work.
You may genuinely have no faith, but our enemies do have faith. Your logic iss undeniable. And yet it works.
Humungus acknowledges that true warriors have spiritual needs also. So they will not hold back in battle. Love of self does not serve the greater good. Warriors must know their sacrifices will be rewarded.
“The words are very easy to say for someone who places no faith in them – see for example official state churches in various commie lands.”
The words seem to be easy to say for people with no faith in anything, but people with no faith in anything are not trustworthy. If one thing Progressivism has, it is internal cohesion.
I believe in God, just not Christianity, and I could pretty easily “hello fellow Christian” if I felt like doing so.
In the Soviet days, the Orthodox churches were full of true believer communists who nonetheless had no problem with mouthing the necessary creeds when they had to. You only have to peek at the archives to see how many of them were outright KGB stooges. Hence my dubiousness about their effectiveness.
You could do “hail fellow Christian” because you are the kind of person who does not want to. If you were the kind of person who wanted to, out of hostility to Christians, Christianity, and Christ, you would find certain words strangely difficult.
The communist stooges who ruled most of the Orthodox churches throughout the 20th century didn’t seem to have that problem, and if their faith didn’t count as demonic enough I don’t know what would.
Stalin did a U turn. Pretty sure the people he sent in to keep the Orthodox Church on message were genuine Christians. Look at Orthodoxy today. Only major Christian denomination that is still Christian, and still fine with Stalin’s message. If genuine now, genuine then.
The difference between Stalin stooges and Global American Empire stooges, is that for Global American Empire stooges, the enemy is Christ, Christianity, and Christians, and the message is worship of Ishtar and Moloch, while for Stalin’s stooges, the enemy was Germany, and the message was loyalty to the sovereign.
Lenin installed his people in the Orthodox churches too, as did all the assorted commielands of eastern Europe. Again, read the archives. You had people in the highest echelons who were bunch of atheistic commies with, in many cases, total contempt for the people beneath them and viewed their job as more or less managing stupid cattle. Priests who would use confessions as ways to induce snitching for party, things like that. Still said the words when required.
Which failed to work. No one believed Lenin’s churches were orthodox. Today’s Orthodox Church is perfectly comfortable with Stalinist message, erased its Leninism from its history.
The same thing is quietly happening in the west today, with Global American Empire converged churches quietly disappearing and fading away, becoming mere real estate holdings.
I think I remember Jim discussing the Laws of Manu. Can I get some help finding those posts, and perhaps a recommendation of a good translation?
I ask because I just reread Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ and he was a fan.
If anyone hasn’t read N in a while, I’d be happy to summarize his thesis with emphasis on the political. In shortest form, Jesus was a mostly harmless mystic but Paul was a raving bioleninist with blood on his hands.
I doubt anyone will ask for a rehash though, since summarizing N is BAP’s project and Jim has firmly moved on, so I’d be happy with a few links to the Hindu stuff.
I don’t know $#!% about the laws of Manu. Just enough to know that current Barhminism is a long way holiness spiraled from it. Obviously the Indians on this blog would know more, and they did not post disagreement with my take on what is in it — which means that they did not discuss it at all.
The East India Company took for granted that the Law of Manu was authoritative for Hindus, enforced it on Hindus, and Hindus did not disagree with them. Neither do Hindus pay much attention to it, preferring to pay attention to sages who snatched a word or phrase out of context from a previous sage who had snatched a word of phrase out of context from a previous sage who had snatched a word or phrase out of context from the Law of Manu.
I would probably enjoy reading more about Rome anyway. Any tips? Gibbon?
In N’s eyes, as it stood under Octavian, the Roman Empire was a work of art, the most glorious achievement of man. It was transitioning from paganism to epicureanism, a healthy development. More importantly, it was on the threshold of great things. The rally had cooled off, but it was bullishly consolidating before another leg up. Roman boots on Mars by AD 500 ect
Except that Paul fucked it up.
With the lie that all souls are equal, formerly humble normies were transformed into resentful anti fascist freaks clamoring for “rights.”
Paul’s lies about sin undermined the aristocracy, shattered their self confidence. They doubted their worthiness to rule.
The Empire contained a lot of rabble, so it was a fatal blow.
Similar story in the Renaissance. Borgia Popes?! Halleluiah! Gnon be praised! Paulianity on its last legs. The old virtues are being reborn, the nobility vitalized. Science returns.
But Luther spoils the party and plunges Europe into the darkness of the Enlightenment and all that we have today.
Nietszche’s case doesn’t hinge on this, but it’s always a pleasure to read about Rome. I’m on The Ancient City now.
How bad were things towards 1 AD? Dead in the water? What to read?
This is a completely nuts version of Roman history which has been refuted far too many times. Also a demonic and absurd spin on what Christianity is.
Rome was going to hell in a handbag until Constantine established Christianity as the state religion, whereupon it made a modest recovery for a considerable time, then resumed going to hell in a handbag.
You cannot blame the Christians for Rome going to $#!%, when it was going to $#!% for a considerable time before Christians had significant numbers and power.
We can assess how the Rome empire was going from Mediterranean shipwrecks (more trade, more wrecks) and from the smelting pollutants found in the Greenland ice layers. (More prosperity, more metal) And the correlation with Christianity is favourable, and indicates that Christianity had a some significant protective effect against the decline and fall of Rome.
Shipwrecks are masure of Roman wealth and power (more order over wider areas, more trade) and pollutants from metal smelting a measure of wealth.
The Roman aristocracy died in the civil wars. Shortly after Christ, and long before Christianity could be a significant factor. By the time Christianity was a significant factor, he could not undermine them. They were gone.
Plus, observe the completely self confident aristocracy of the middle ages.
Observe how Christianity created an aristocracy in Britain. Christianity brought post Roman Britain out of its horrifyingly dark dark age. While the role of Christianity in restraining the decline of Rome is not all that impressive, its role in bringing Britain out its very dark dark age into the middle age is dramatic, clear, and overwhelming.
Rome had a terminal case of feminism. We even have a repeat of financial incentives in order to get people to marry under Augustus.
‘Rights’ in Rome were a product of the mob- the grain dole predates Christianity by at least a century.
The Roman dole predates Christ by about a century. By the first century, you had an enormous population living on the dole. Christianity did not have power until the third century, and the overwhelming majority of the population was not Christian (not anything really, the Old Gods were dead, and a long series of state efforts to manufacture a replacement had received only lukewarm and reluctant acceptance)
Nietzsche believes Rome was on track to become Epicurean or sort of Western Buddhists, but he basically admits to being demon possessed so I can see how that disqualifies him as a serious commentator.
What are some of the best books about the Roman Empire? Also good reading about the Renaissance and Borgia popes much appreciated.
Modern genetic evidence shows that the Rome of the Roman Republic is principally North European, whereas the Rome of the Late Republic is increasingly East Mediterranean, and the Rome of the Empire is principally East Mediterranean.
In other words, Rome underwent a demographic transition from looking like a civilized Gaul or Germania to looking more like how Sicily or Greece did at the time of the Republic.
The lead data from Greenland ice also shows the Republic as a period of economic growth, the Empire as a period of (sometimes managed) decline.
Caesar didn’t fix Rome, principally becuase he did not fixed the demographic question, probably because he did not fix the woman question. Caesar is a very questionable choice of idol for the would-be civilization restorers today.
The story of Rome under the empire is essentially the story of Rome becoming a Middle Eastern state like the Sassanids, and indeed Spengler argues that the Roman Empire’s constitution under the theocracy of the sole god Sol Invictus (about which surprisingly little specifically is known, given this is a complete theological revolution on par with Akhenaten in Ancient Egypt) was essentially a copy of the Sassanian constitution and not an indigeneous Roman development.
Paul was primarily preaching a Middle Eastern religion to a Middle Eastern proletarian in Rome.
“Caeasar” is shorthand for “The time of Republics has ended.”
If we are looking at people who brought a clean recovery from a holiness spiral, Charles the Second is the exemplar.
If we are looking for someone to fix a dark age, King Alfred.
I’ve seen some of this on twitter, the genetic analysis and of course the shipwreck stuff in longer form a while ago.
Are there any good books that bring things up to date? I enjoyed Rubicon by Tom Holland many years ago but didn’t finish his Dominion.
I will cheerfully admit that I do not know a whole lot about the Laws of Manu, but I do know a few things. As regards Manu on Beef eating, we require the cow as a schelling point against Mohammedans. I understand that it is useless as a schelling point against the Cathedral, but it is too valuable against Mohammedans and it stays.
Islam is a blood enemy of the Hindus while the cathedral is a Johnny come lately.
“The faith of the Dark Enlightenment is Nature or Nature’s God, Gnon, but holy war is coming, and you need to bring a gun to gunfight and a faith to a holy war.”
The Gospels do little/nothing to counter-signal Gnon. They’re very consistent with Christ himself worshipping Gnon. This is not true of all/most religions. If there is any baggage in the Gospels, it is Jewish baggage, and while the Old Testament is not nearly as divergent as Rabbinism, and contains much genuine wisdom, it’s also not exactly Christian.
What do you make of the following claim:
https://archive.md/7PLwC
If this is true, would seem to suggest that it’s not really holiness spiraling at the root of priestly celibacy, but a practical consideration of keeping the priests focused on priesting rather than on acquiring property for their progeny and prestige for their families.
The roots of celibacy are the lavender Mafia.
When you argue with any regular Christian about celibacy, he is going to start by presupposing the truth of the story told in the protoevangelium of James, that Joseph, Mary, and all the apostles were celibate, though we know that many of them were married, that some of them were accompanied by their wives on their rounds, and that the wife of James the Just, brother of Christ, was martyred with him. And we also know that the Protoevangelium of James was a fraud, written over a century after James was martyred, and that this fraud was first promoted by a priest widely believed to be a gross sexual deviant.
No holiness spiral is ever motivated by holiness, but is rather a conspiracy by evil men to claim the indicators of their evil as indicators of holiness.
Bob telling Dave that Bob is holier than Dave is unlikely to fly. What makes a holiness spiral work is Bob telling Dave that Frank is holier than Dave, which is far more persuasive than Frank telling Dave that Frank is holier than Dave, if Dave does not know that Bob and Frank and half a dozen others are having sex in a great big pile. So conspiratorial groups take over and creatively interpret the religion so that their sexual deviations, laziness, corruption, and general looting and mooching, are evidence of superior holiness. Thus our current state religion of gay race feminist communism. Gay because of the Lavender Mafia, communist because the priestly class always want to shake down the merchant class, and negrolatory and feminism because blacks and single women are an easily manipulated and controlled vote bank helpful in maintaining the appearance of Republic. Holiness spirals always wind up looking very like this.
>negrolatry
>vote bank
Ever since the events of fentanyl floyd I’ve been convinced that the ‘blaqs are useful idiot pawns’ storyline holds no weight. The whole event was some sort of demonic inversion, hence the immediate attack on images of St Michael as the story broke, hence them marching his corpse around and ‘baptizing’ people in his name as if he were a saint. It would be easier to convince me that the curse of ham narrative is true than to convince me this is some cynical power calculation.
Going back, it looks like it’s always been this way. The “civil rights” paid script reading monkey making a mockery of the name of Matin Luther for example. The particularly demonic among the left have the biggest obsession with blacks, and I couldn’t tell you why, but it’s a consistent pattern. Just as you say, after demoting Christ to ‘our buddy Joshua’ the next step is attacking ‘man and women He created them’ and immediately after that its ‘how can we replace everyone with more africans’.
Sainting George Floyd was just what Wiccans do in the black mass, what Kabalists do with the Old Testament. Demon worshippers parody and invert the things of Christianity
No Jim…
Catholic celibacy is necessary as they are conducting the sacrifice daily. Just as the Levite priests of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem were required to abstain from sexual contact (in order to achieve ritual purity) for a lengthy period prior to the periodic performance of the sacrifices of the temple, somtoo,the Catholic priest need such purity,for,the daily sacrifice..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directa_Decretal#:~:text=Just%20as%20the%20Levite%20priests,required%20by%20ecclesiastical%20law%20to
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_purity_en.html#:~:text=The%20Book%20of%20Leviticus%20makes,birth%20through%20marriage%20to%20death.
On Maundy Thursday, Christ tells the apostles: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Some of those apostles were married, among them Peter and James the Just, brother of Christ. You think they were not allowed to do the sacrifice?
Peter was head of the Church until the heat came down, and he went underground, perhaps to protect his wife and family. Then James the Just was first among equals in the Church. You think they could not conduct the sacrifice?
The levite priesthood was hereditary, therefore not celibate, and on some interpretations of the Law, forbidden to be celibate.
We don’t have direct information as to what the rule was for the priesthood of the order of Melchizedek, but he was King and Priest, and Kings are required to have sons, for big trouble ensues if they do not. Since King and priest, hereditary like the Levite priesthood. And since the Levite faith was a priesthood of the faith of Abraham, and thus the faith of priest and King Melchizedek, the order of Melchizedek was presumably hereditary and fertile also, so we have two lines of evidence that the priesthood of the line of Melchizedek was hereditary and required to have sons.
The idea that celibacy was required does not comport with the known facts. The New Testament is clear that bishops, i.e. overseers of the flock and those with priestly authority to direct specific flocks, are to be the husbands of one wife i.e. faithful to the wife they have. Which mean they are married and there was no general requirement of celibacy for administering the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Paul’s writings are clear that many engaged in church service at the time which included much traveling in a missionary role like he was engaged in, may be better able to serve in an unmarried state but there is no argument that bishops should be unmarried nor that marriage was a bad state or that celibacy was a requirement for priestly service.
Paul’s response in 1 Corinthians 7 was to a question asked him by the Corinthians in a previous letter in which they said, “It is good not to touch a woman.” Paul is responding to the context of that letter. Basically, the city of Corinth itself was a hotbed of sexual immorality, something that there were strict prohibitions against in the teachings of Christ. In fact, there was a situation in Corinth of someone having sex their dad’s wife. Which is messed up and Paul and the Corinthians understood that. The problem is that some of the early Christians in Corinth had drawn the wrong conclusion from this situation because there was a countervailing force in the eastern Mediterranean that was on the opposite side of the rampant hedonism. It appears as dualistic belief which eventually emerges in full flower in gnostic thought which basically says, “spirit good, matter bad.”
Which is why you get so much emphasis in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians about the resurrection. The reason is he could see where the Corinthians were starting to head with their reasoning. Because if you follow their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion then you get to the gnostic point of view i.e. the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t actually a real physical resurrection with a real body that could be handled and that could eat but some kind of magical spiritual resurrection that didn’t really involve a human body because human bodies are gross and God wouldn’t let Jesus take one up again for real because that would be gross.
It is from this strain of thought that you get Docetism which believes Jesus wasn’t actually really crucified which is basically the same view that Islam has at this point. Jesus was never really crucified, according to the Muslims, because God wouldn’t let a prophet die that way so it was faked. It seemed like he died but he didn’t. Which also does not comport at all with the scriptural record.
The gnostic view, on the other hand, just took the strict body/spirit dualism to its logical conclusion: if bodies are gross then so is physical matter. If physical matter and bodies are bad, then God cannot be the creator of them. Therefore, God didn’t make man in His image and likeness but it was the Demiurge instead and Jesus came instead to free us from the chains of physical matter and usher us into a purely spiritual realm which makes actual resurrection something that is not only not desirable but the opposite what Gnostics were about. It is this dualistic view which made many of the Hellenized peoples of the eastern Mediterranean see the whole doctrine of resurrection as foolish. Why would you want your gross nasty body back after death if you could be transmuted into a pure, abstract, Platonic spiritual form? Resurrection contradicts this. That’s why the Corinthians were struggling with that teaching and why Paul emphasized it.
While the notion of pure, abstract, spiritual form might have been attractive to people in Corinth who saw people raping kids and sodomizing one and son’s having sex with their stepmoms, there was just one problem with it: if that notion were true then Christianity was a lie because everything is premised on Christ’s resurrection. So, if there is no resurrection which is the definitive proof of Christ’s divinity, then the whole thing pretty much falls apart.
Which brings us back to celibacy: the early Christians struggled with how to reconcile some of these things and later when they dealt with Gnosticism, they were not wholly able to eject its strains of thought from the beliefs that circulated in the church. If the body is bad, then so is sex. If sex is bad, then so is marriage. If marriage is bad, then celibacy is the best thing you can do. If celibacy is the best thing you can do then it calls into question the necessity of the body itself. If the body isn’t useful for much it calls into question God’s creation of it and Christ’s own resurrection and the promise of resurrection for all. And if all of that is in question then the basic claims of Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world are eroded.
To recap: If the body is bad/useless then why does God go through all the trouble to begin with both in creating it and in providing for a resurrection? If man is just going to exist in a purely spiritual, realm of Platonic abstracts after death then Christianity makes no sense and is untrue. This is why this strict dualism calcified in too much of Christian thought is ultimately destructive of Christian belief.
It’s also why arguments for the perpetual virginity of Mary are ultimately destructive of the belief in the divinity of Christ Himself. For if Mary must be believed to be a perpetual virgin the question is why? What is lost if we acknowledge the virgin birth of Christ but acknowledge the brothers of Christ as half-siblings through Mary and Joseph? What does it detract from Mary’s role if she is not a perpetual virgin following the birth of Jesus? Does it call into question His paternity? That objection is already satisfied by scripture. No, the reason people cling to it is because of internalized gnosticism. Jesus is holy and, per this chain of logic, so must Mary be. But holiness in this context is defined as “spiritual” in contrast to “physical.” Therefore, for her to be holy she must be “spiritual” and to be “spiritual” means she cannot have had sex because that is of the body, is gross and carnal, and would therefore make her unholy. Therefore, she never did have sex. Therefore, she is a perpetual virgin. But this merely calls into question the whole reason for the Incarnation in the first place. If we are calling into question the reality of the Incarnation…well…that is pretty much cutting off the branch that Christianity sits on. And you can’t really have it both ways. Either Christ really lived in the flesh, died in the flesh, and was resurrected in the flesh, or it’s all not worth worrying about.
Mary’s perpetual virginity and priestly celibacy are two sides of the same coin: a view, not unlike that of the Cathars, that there is a “higher” way of living that excludes sex in general. Not a higher way of living that puts restrictions on sex. It is clear to any observer that you must have restrictions on sex or things get out of control and humanity and love and society etc. end up being destroyed. But to view sex, even within the confines of marriage, as inherently spiritually degrading is to believe that it is “lesser” beings that have sex and that the truly holy do not. That’s gnosticism at work in Christian beliefs. It is also the root of certain weird kinds of Christian asceticism.
Monasticism is basically a response to this gnostic ideal: a desire to withdraw, to go into hiding from everything physical in order to preserve oneself holy, and be alone with one’s own “holy” self and God. At this point in time, there are two kinds of monastics: those who are basically autists who withdraw to focus on purely “spiritual” things because they want to exist in a realm apart untroubled, or troubled less by the things of the flesh, and those who were looking for other men to have sex with in the cloister. The former are a kind of holy fool that God can sanctify and use in His service. The latter…well…we know what the latter are.
But the problem with the former is that many of them turn their own weakness of not being able to cope with the responsibilities of being a man, marrying, and dealing with a wife and children into a symbol of holiness rather than to acknowledge it as evidence of a personal defect or even spiritual immaturity.
I do not dismiss the selfless service of those of pure motives who entered upon this path in the true belief that it is the best way they can render devotion to God. I do question the validity of that belief and the necessity of it. There will always be single individuals who cannot marry. These are generally persons afflicted in some way and there must be a path for them to contribute and for their personal spiritual development. But for most, assuming the responsibilities of husband and father is a more spiritually edifying path, and it promotes more maturity and grounds them in God’s design for His children more evidently than it does those who withdraw from it or eschew it.
Really great comment on many levels.
I think this is how it looks to thread the needle, to explain the pitfalls to either side without hairsplitting legalism with a clear train of thought.
Christianity is anti gnostic but a lot of people fall into gnostic interpretations and then on to atheism. Hedonic interpretations seem rarer these days unless the gay flag stuff counts.
What is the solution? You’ve clearly done a lot of studying. What about the average believer, maybe stuck in a crappy denomination, sleepwalking towards gnostic emptiness?
I always wince when I find an interpretation that seems correct, but to be correct implies that hundreds of millions of people lived in error for centuries.
On your last point, I don’t think there is ANY interpretation of Christianity that does not imply that hundreds of millions of people lived in error for centuries. There’s really no getting away from that.
But I don’t think it follows from that that such people were irredeemable or not devoted to Jesus Christ. I think that’s an entirely different issue.
Celibacy for priests and the perpetual virginity of Mary are not really connected, except in the minds of protestants. The link you propose falls apart when you consider the fact that the orthos exist and have one without the other. Also old style Lutherans and Anglicans (not many of either of those left around, but they aren’t completely gone).
I’m with Jim that requiring celebacy is novel, contrary to the word of the apostle, and problematic, although I see why the Romans enacted the rule. It was a bad work around to treat a symptom of a very real and difficult problem. And over the centuries has probably created more trouble than it’s prevented.
In the tradition I’m in currently, there is no requirement for celibacy. Priests and bishops are encouraged to father children, and are judged by the conduct of their wives and children. That said, there are a fair amount of celebate priests, and it’s good. They can do some things (like missionary work) much easier than family men. I think both are great and this should properly fall under Paul’s “parts of the body” concept. Having the vast majority of bishops be husbands and fathers works wonders for preventing the entry of homosexuals into the priesthood. It’s just not a problem.
I have to differ with our gracious host on the perpetual virginity of Mary. It was a part of Christian doctrine from the very beginning, not because it serves a logical purpose, but because it was his things really were. All the apostles knew her while she lived. Everyone believed it. Nobody argued about it. Even Luther and Calvin believed it. Doubting her perpetual virginity is a modern phenomenon.
I realize I’m pushing a car uphill with a rope by staking out this position here, but I can’t help it. I promise it’s in good faith: She was a consecrated virgin. Joseph was an elderly widower. Their marriage was somewhat unique and did not serve as a pattern for our marriages (one of St Joseph’s epitaphs is “her most chaste spouse” and we are specifically warned against witholding sex from our spouses). He was not cuckholded by the Holy Ghost. He was already a father of many children by his first wife (Jesus’ brothers) , many of them were named as witnesses and one was even an apostle. They are called out as “Joseph’s sons” in the NT, but Mary is never explicitly named as anyone else’s mother. Joseph was chosen by God to be her guardian and protector for a brief period before Jesus was grown. Jesus gave her into the apostle John’s care when he was on the cross–this makes no sense of she has living sons. Etc. Etc. Mary’s “ever-virgin” epitaph has been undisputed from the very beginning and nobody thought it was an open question, or more importantly, a contrived insertion point for gnostic heresy. Even during the worst period of gnostic onslaught.
Argument from silence: if this concept were novel, there would have been a huge controversy when it was introduced and writings produced during that controversy would have survived. Consider the massive amounts of ink spilled over the precise mechanics of the interaction between the father’s will and the son’s.
You are arguing that the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary is “from the beginning.” That’s not really true. The first reference is the Protoevangelium of James. 2nd century. So roughly 200 years after Christ’s birth is when we first start to see the idea mentioned. Which, incidentally, is the same period in which gnostic teachings become really popular. Why was gnosticism able to become such a going concern at that stage?
Because the intellectual ferment of the period was such that it “made sense” to a lot of people among the early Christians.
As to the perpetual virginity not being a controversy, there wasn’t a controversy precisely because of when and how it came on the scene. It came on the scene because people were already thinking that way because it was the Zeitgeist in which they were marinating. Look at the process we have all undergone and to some extent seen the culmination of with doctrines relating to the “equality of women.”
Your average churchian believes that teaching to the marrow of his bones. You get some pushback here and there but most major denominations accept it as fact even if their documents do not fully affirm it and even if scripture says very different things. The interpretive lenses have been co-opted. The language has been changed and the meanings scrambled in the minds of people.
It’s the same process that is starting to happen with hippie Jesus today. Millions affirm that Jesus is totally happy with the concept of transing kids. They have the “scriptures” and arguments they use to “prove” it. Lots of churches have already bought into that hook line and sinker.
I am not arguing that the perpetual virginity of Mary is that noxious, I am saying that I do not believe holding that view is required by scripture and I don’t see any reason why it is important to believe and I do see a lot of reasons why it creates problems downstream. Might it be true? Sure, it might. But ask yourself why it is important that people believe it? What does believing it provide for the believer? Does it give them some greater faith in Christ’s Divine Sonship beyond the proofs provided by His life, miracles, and resurrection?
Is it a miracle? Not in any conventional sense. If, as you allege, Joseph was already an old man (an allegation which I see no reason to accept but will note for the sake of argument) and had his own children then it isn’t like advanced age and impotence might not do the same thing as something truly miraculous.
What does it say about Mary and her importance that is not already said or acknowledged in the biblical account about her being blessed among women and overshadowed by the Holy Ghost as a virgin?
I submit that it adds nothing to any of those proofs. What it does do, like the idea of Immaculate Conception, which is yet another one of these kinds of gnostic ideas, is splits Mary off of any sexual activity or some how makes sex “clean” as in the case of the Immaculate Conception because of the view that sex transmits the veneral disease of original sin which would make her an unfit vessel for Christ. But that’s again, a later doctrine that conflates sex and sin and makes man dirty for the mere fact of his existence. Man is conceived in sin. But what does that mean? It means that those that conceive man are sinners. Not by the act of conception itself but by the simple fact that they have lived in this world long enough to conceive a child.
If God could efface the effects of Adam’s sin through the mechanism of Immaculate Conception as He was purported to do for the conception of Mary, why would He not have simply waved His magic wand and done so for all of mankind? Again, what need for Jesus to come into the world to die if God already had the means to stop the transmission of sin in that way? Could He only do it once? It creates more questions that it resolves.
You see the problems that holding to those doctrines creates for the central message of Christianity.
“The first reference is the Protoevangelium of James. 2nd century. So roughly 200 years after Christ’s birth is when we first start to see the idea mentioned.”
I can’t argue with your facts here. But consider the frame. I might say, with equal precision: the oldest explicit written record is only a hundred years after the death of St. John, who cared for Mary in his home until her death”
When the protevangelium was circulating, there were people alive whose grandparents had seen the Apostle John. We can disagree on exactly how long it takes for a novel and disruptive doctrine to become universally accepted in the church. But in this case, if that period is longer than the ministry of 3 consecutive bishops, it doesn’t apply.
I’m not saying that you have to believe it. I’m just saying that it’s not crazy, and it’s not entryism. It’s a thing reasonable people might disagree about. And that is you have any Christian heroes that lived prior to the enlightenment, they all believed in her perpetual virginity. So it’s OK. If it’s error (it’s not) , it’s not the kind of error that inevitably leads to heresy.
The Protoevangelium is a fraud. It purports to be written by James the Just, brother of Christ. That “there were people alive whose grandparents had seen the Apostle John” means that the Christians at the time were able to know that James the Just did not write it. And said so.
Fraud and lies is what hostile entryists do. And for a millennium, Origen was represented as a sexual deviant and a hostile entryist.
What is our source for the idea that many of the apostles were married and accompanied by their wives on their travels? The Bible, and early Church fathers who were,as you say, close to these events.
What is our source for the idea that they were celibate? A fraud associated with a hostile entryist.
I am arguing that the perpetual virginity of Mary is that noxious. It is an attack on marriage and the family by perverts and gnostics using fraud and lies.
They are directly connected, in that they are both attacks on marriage and the family and in that our sources for perpetual virginity are our sources for the celibacy of the apostles: the lavender Mafia and the gnostics. Who did not give a rats ass for what is in the Bible any more than the fans of Hippy Pacifist Jesus the Jewish Community Organiser do today.
The accusation that Origen was a sexual deviant and hostile entryist arose when he applied to join the priesthood, and was never settled. It continued for a millenium, and was not settled, merely forgotten.
The Orthodox use the same arguments as the Catholics for the perpetual virginity of Mary. The Orthodox allow married priests, Catholics don’t. I don’t see the connexion.
Orthodoxy requires celibate Bishops. Which is heretical since Paul twice specifically says that Bishops should be recruited from married men with well behaved children.
In general it is safer to recruit married men with children for any post requiring trust and the expectation that the employee is in it for the long haul. If you want someone to make and manage a long term investment, get someone who has made and successfully managed a long term investment.
How do you know? A fraudulent book, pushed by a suspected pervert and hostile entryist, written long after everyone involved was long dead, tells you so.
What makes the book fraudulent is that it claims to be written by James the Just, brother of Christ, and the Christians of the time knew that it was not. One lie, all lies.
And there was huge controversy. Unkind depictions of Origen began immediately and continued for a thousand years, and the Christians of the time swiftly rejected the claimed authorship of the ProtoEvangelium of James. There may be controversy about some of its claims, but the controversy about authorship swiftly ended. Everyone concedes the claimed authorship is a lie. You think my attacks on the Lavender Mafia are crude? You should see the medieval attacks on Origen. NSFW.
I know about the protoevangelium and about origen. I an not defending either one. Neither one of those sources is THE source of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity. I didn’t mean to hitch my wagon to the document.
I tend to believe in the perpetual virginity because it is in all the Christian liturgies. All old-type Christians believe it and believed it. I visited a coptic church once–completely alien to me culturally, and only partially in English–but I understood just about everything that happened in the service because the ancient liturgies didn’t get monkeyed with very quickly for century upon century. Prior to the protestant reformation, novelty was hard to introduce into the liturgy at all. The hymns are a fossilized record of the drift in what the church really believes, at the ground level, in different times and places. In the coptic worship service? Big old Marian hymn right in the middle, to the ever-virgin mother of God. The Egyptian congregation we were visiting was full of week behaved children. Women mostly had their heads covered. No women were filling masculine roles in the service.
We all agree that the gnostics and modernists have been gunning for (real) marriage from the beginning, as it was ordained by God to produce children made in his image. They hate God, they hate Christ, they hate man, they hate themselves. I agree that they have used his mother’s virginity as a weapon, I disagree on why they found it a stick ready at hand to beat the weak minded with. I’m just saying it was not their stick, and, when understood as it was prior to Roman excesses in the high middle ages, it isn’t a problem anyway. It’s not for those cops. It’s not for people in my parish. It’s not for the Russians. The trad-caths are doing OK on real marriage, for the most part, and they are as hard on the doctrine as anybody.
If the doctrine of the perpetual virginity were the cause of the disease, everybody who shares in the cause would have the disease. Clearly they do not. On the other hand, the biggest group of living Christians today who hold that (real) marriage is contrary to the teaching of scripture uniformly and strongly rejects the perpetual virginity–that’s evangelicals.
There are earlier references to it, But such references began more than a century or so after all involved were dead, there were many centuries before it could be plausibly claimed to be consensus, and its primary proponent remained violently radioactive for a thousand years. It is just not true that there was early quiet consensus and silence.
The claim that there was early consensus on the perpetual virginity is the same as the claim that there was early consensus that the Bishop of Rome was the Bishop of everything and the Patriarch of the West was the Patriarch of everything. Bullshit.
It was the Lavender Mafia and the Gnostics claiming false consensus.
Since it is not plausible when Bob tells Dave that Bob is holier than Dave, Bob asks Frank, when they are having sex together in a great big pile of faggots, to tell Dave that Bob is holier than Frank. Argument by consensus.
“See, everyone agrees.” The Protoevangelium is a lie, and the claim of early consensus is a lie. Faggots lie and entryists lie. That is how you know they are hostile entryists.
Until I got more thorough at purging entryists on this blog, they were always telling me that some other notable of the Dark Enlightenment or the reaction said X, when in fact he said not X. And, similarly Basil is always telling me that notable pro Russian voices endorse the Cathedral narrative on Russia. The hell they do. Entryists lie about notables of the enemy faith, and endorse and link to their fellow entryists. Their father is the Devil, the Devil is the father of lies. Everything they say is a malicious deception, intended to harm the hearer.
The perpetual virgnity of Mary is the same as the claim that Trade Tower Building Seven was undamaged in the terrorist attack and fell straight down onto its foundations like a demolition. If you read the fed shills on Gab, you would think there was universal quiet consensus on the right that the earth is flat, that Building seven fell straight down on its foundations, that Musk is a Jew, that there was no commercial airline wreckage around the Pentagon, and that moon landing was fake. It was a fake consensus confidently asserted by organised enemy operators.
The shills on this blog were always telling me what the consensus on the alt right is, the shills on Gab are always telling us what the alt right consensus is, and the shills in the early Christian Church were always saying what the consensus was, back when it was very plain that it was not the consensus.
There was no consensus on the perpetual virginity of Mary until centuries after the earliest claims that there was consensus. Their father is the devil, the father of lies.
On Gab today enemy operators will tell you that everyone on the right knows and agrees the Trade Tower Building Seven fell straight down onto its foundations, because they are running cover for the FBI being strangely pally with the terorists, and in the early centuries of Christianity, enemy operators were telling the Christians that all Christians know and agree that Mary was perpetually virgin, because they were running cover for themselves having sex in a great big pile of faggots.
Respectfully, belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary and the universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome are not at all alike. A great fraction of all the Christians who ever ever lived have held fast to one and completely rejected the other. And they date from different periods, even if one is taking the latest plausible date for the former and earliest plausible for the latter. And there is no argument from silence from Universal jurisdiction. It was one of the issues that lead up to schism.
I’m not saying that it’s something people have to believe, I’m just saying that when we (almost every living Christian today who actually still believes in marriage 1.0) say “ever-virgin” each week, we aren’t saying Joseph was cucked. We aren’t pushing celebacy within or instead of marriage for those who are given to marry. We aren’t pushing the gnostic or modernist paradigm. For Christ’s sake, Jim, we are the only humans on earth today giving daughters in marriage 1.0: please extend some Christian charity.
Sure there is an argument from silence and consensus on universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome and Patriarch of the West. Just ask any Roman Catholic. He will tell you the universal consensus goes all the way back to the beginning, and the eastern Church caused the great schism by breaking away from the universal and accepted consensus.
Whenever you hear this argument, whether it is trade tower building seven falling straight down on its foundations, or the perpetual virginity of Mary, or the universal jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome and Patriarch of the West, it is the devil at work, and those making this argument are his sons, or have been deceived by credulously accepting the authority of the sons of the devil.
I repeat. Bob tells Dave that Bob is holier than Dave. Dave looks right through him. So, when Bob finds Frank in the big pile of faggots he is having sex with, he asks Frank to tell Dave that Frank and everyone else agrees that Bob is holier than Dave.
The claim of consensus on the Perpetual virginity of Mary was made for centuries when that claim was not yet plausible. You can see the anger, the evil and the malice in that claim. Fags hate “breeders” and it shows.
An early source for the perpetual virginity of Mary is also an early source for the celibacy of the apostles, which has never been the consensus. The bible mentions the wives of the apostles accompanying them in their travels, the wife James the Just was martyred with him — likely because was accompanying him on his rounds, and the dispute with Nicolaitanes appears to have been over an analogous issue — wife swapping promoted as unusual piety and chastity.
The evidence for the widespread acceptance of the perpetual virginity of Mary comes from the same time and same people as evidence for the widespread acceptance of clerical celibacy. One lie, all lies.
I am attempting to conduct marriage 1.0. It is difficult and extremely dangerous, and you guys are not helping. It is a hostile marriage environment, and some of that hostility goes all the way back. Fags hate “breeders”.
You say your Church is OK, but I bet that there is plenty of material in the sermons and proceedings where they attempt to weaponize wives against husbands. “Wake up call”. Women are supposed to be silent in Church, and wives are supposed to accept wrongful decisions by husbands without chiding, reprimanding their husbands only by their wordless modesty and virtue. (Fat chance — I doubt that any of the apostles had much luck with that one.) But at least the Church promoted it, rather than backing the wife’s shit tests as it does today, as the serpent used Eve against Adam.
I stand in Adam’s shoes. Cut it out.
All men need to stand together to maintain an order in which the husband is guaranteed respect, fidelity, and obedience permanently, and the wife is guaranteed supervision and care, permanently (For women are ill suited to making important decisions about their own lives.) Fags and whiteknights are attacking this order.
The Christian requirement for generosity and forgiveness presupposes that this will shame the offender. How can we deal with self righteous offenders except as Jesus dealt with Pharisees? Every fag and every white knight should be furtive and ashamed, and instead they are arrogant and intrusive.
No one believes me when I write it out on the internet, but I have personally seen parishes where women are silent and do not usurp. Wives are happy and submissive. Teenage daughters are cheerful, modest, and obedient. Sons are masculine and strong. I worship with men I trust my children’s lives to every week. I never have to contradict the sermon in the van on the way home. I will have more grandchildren than I can count on my fingers and toes, based on extrapolation, not good intentions. I live the life that reactionaries want to bring back. I am an old-type Christian.
Christ’s church is sick, not dead. Anybody can find a good one in/near most small American cities, but you have to look hard. Google won’t find this blog. It won’t find a healthy Christian church either. Then when you find it, you’ll have to put up with something that isn’t perfect, but doesn’t strike at the heart of the gospel. For example, you might get nicean Christianity, marriage 1.0 and functional patriarchal community, but you have to put up with “ever-virgin.” If you can’t let Christian charity cover over it (whatever it is) then you opt out of Christian community. The perfectionist can wait for the eschaton–I want my sons to have Godly wives.
By their fruits you will know them. You are there, I am not.
There should marriages in the congregation every now and then. Is the rate of marriages reasonable in proportion to the number of marriageable people in the congregation, and are the women in congregation getting married near their time of maximum fertility, rather than the time when they drop off the bottom of Mister One in Thirty’s booty call list?
Yes. Marriages and babies abound. The women getting married now are college age, but they are not children of the parish. Marriage age is falling. When the next crop starts marrying, who are children of the parish, it looks like the age for girls will be 17-19 for those who have a suitable mate ready at hand.
Finding mates and arranging affordable housing are the things i the men are currently struggling with.
As a former Orthobro that has attended a few Ortho churches of different branches in two different states, I can tell you that the Orthodox are not traditional when it comes to the woman question. Lots of girls with colored hair in yoga pants means fathers don’t own their daughters and wives publicly henpecking their husbands means the church is not backing husbands against shit tests. Sure you had some young attractive newlyweds with the wife in traditional dress but that does not mean you have biblical patriarchy. Most churches embrace some form of complementarianism, a kind of lukewarm patriarchy, which is really just a compromise with feminist demon worship. It’s more of the same “first-wave feminism was reasonable” NAWALT purple-pilled pseudo-masculine bullshit.
The problem is that while you, Jimmy, are tolerant of others disbelieving Mary’s perpetual virginity the Orthodox and Catholic churches are not. The Second Council of Constantinople anathematized anyone who doubts the doctrine meaning that if you believe that the sacraments offered by either of those churches is necessary for salvation then I am in a spiritually precarious position simply because I disagree about a doctrine that has very little to do with the actual person or work of Christ.
The church is insisting that we embrace a doctrine that is explicitly contradicted by Matthew 1:25 and implicitly contradicted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:1-5 and elsewhere when he tells wives to submit to their husbands. If Mary can deny sex to Joseph then any wife can deny sex in the name of “holiness.” Not only is it a part of the general “sex is icky” pathology that has and continues to plague Christianity, it is also part of an extra-biblical theological tendency to pedestalize Mary. Bible accords Mary sufficient honor so dogmatic statements about her sinlessness and ever-virginity were never necessary.
Would anyone argue that the Bible is ambiguous regarding Mary’s virginity, but that this ambiguity is a feature?
Different churches, different cultures can teach what they like and that’s a good thing.
Frankly, perpetual virginity seems like quite a stretch, a stretch not worth making in modern times. But I think I can see enough wiggle room in the text that it’s not crazy for Catholics and Orthodox to believe it if that’s how the spirit moves them.
For individuals who can’t swallow the wiggling and stretching, the extreme stance of the Catholic church has a bright side:
Fine. If you’re going to kick me out for not believing that then I’ll kick myself out and embrace Protestantism with no hard feelings.
Nuts.
Bible is clear: — not whether Mary remained virgin, where there is a bit of wiggle room if you read it cross eyed and upside down, but that had she remained virgin, this would be morally wrong on both her part and her husband’s.
Which parts of the Bible the perverts do not like. The Perpetual Virginity of Mary is an attack upon some of the most important parts of the Bible. And the people doing this attack are the usual suspects, using the usual tactics.
Jesus was invited to a wedding and it must have been quite festive since they ran out of wine.
I don’t know the customs back then, and Jesus might not have taken credit for the miracle, but it seems likely He would have been asked to make a toast, if not a blessing.
I am beating a dead horse, but I wish the evangelists had recorded that toast, it was probably very beautiful and marriage 1.0 affirming.
His words to Mary are curious
Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.
Jesus is frequently frustrated at people demanding miracles from him, on their schedule. I read this as him being irritated even with his mother when she asks him to do something about the wine shortage. He does do it though.
I don’t know the traditional reading of that remark but it comes just before another mention of his brothers. Is the Immaculate Conception just as perverted a doctrine? Pope Pius seems like one of Our Guys otherwise?
This is a silly point. Of course Jesus and the apostles drank wine from time to time. The bible takes that for granted. It is bad if someone gets so drunk he has to head for the nearest horizontal surface and go to sleep — it is worse if he continues to stagger about and fails to head for a suitable place to sleep it off in time, and worse if so incapacitated that other people have to gently assist him to some place suitable for sleeping it off, and encourage him to lie down and stay down. We may suppose Jesus did not drink so much wine as to lead to these problems. But, to get to these problems, you have to knock back quite a bit of wine. You can get to that state a whole lot faster on my favorite drink, moonshine.
Didn’t mean to discuss drinking, it was just a passing comment, tiresome I’m sure, how a wedding would have been a nice time for Jesus to give a young couple some advice for their marriage.
Please take it as a meandering way to ask about the Immaculate Conception and the general blamelessness of Mary.
I think I fell asleep reading Carlyle on Pope Pius IX but he dioesn’t sound like one of the usual suspects.
Jim’s sarcasm/satire made manifest by the mainstream media!!!!
“Jesus would approve of trannies!”
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1774733776360177934
Happy Easter everybody! Christ is king!
The assertion that Jesus = Logos
Is that kind of like Nietzsche proposing that Truth is a woman?
Like, you thought that Logos was this thing that you could dissect in your autistic stoic discourses, but it turns out that Logos is a man who weeps and laughs and gets angry and forgives you?
Or is it more inductive?
Like, look at what Jesus did. Look at His actions, teachings and miracles. Only the living avatar of the Logos could pull that off.
I recall that Paul had some trouble in Athens, which was dominated by stoics at the time, I think.
Those are the exact guys who should have been thrilled to discover the logos in human form.
By analogy, the Jews looked past strong inductive signs that Jesus was the Messiah. Like, look at all these fulfilled scriptures. Only the Messiah could have pulled that off.
Were the Athenian Stoics missing strong signs? Besides the insight into game theory, what are the strongest signs that should have made it click that Jesus wasn’t just a Jewish phenomenon, but that Paul was describing the Logos made flesh?
Or did the stoics misunderstand what the logos really was, so they weren’t prepared for it when it came in an unexpected form?
Not so much that Jesus = Logos but that Logos = Jesus.
The Christians under Marcus Aurelius saw that Jesus was the Logos of Marcus Aurelius, but Marcus Aurelius did not see that his Logos was Christ.
Aurelius and a Christian
Christian invites Marcus to visualize the logos in human form, to imagine his life and character
Marcus imagines a sort of cross between Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, and his favorite philosopher king. Maybe with some Alcibiades and Alexander thrown in.
Basically, a master of mathematics and dialectic, skilled in every craft, a lawgiver and dispenser of justice, an incredible soldier and general with total mastery of his passions.
Christian says:
But this human/logos superman can’t just rule the world and die on his throne like a normal guy.
But if he’s human he can’t live forever.
If he has to die, it has to involve some kind of amazing sacrifice, a blaze of glory.
And the sacrifice has to win an amazing prize.
Marcus has a few reservations but is still on board, so they brainstorm what a worthy prize would be.
Marcus already believes in the immortality of the soul, but maybe the prize would have something to do with extending life. Preserving our flesh indefinitely, through logical means. A fine prize! Even better it it was available to everyone.
But, Marcus is reminded
What could be worse than an extended life of wrong doing? Thousands of years of disobeying Zeus? No good.
No, you’d have to solve that problem somehow. . .
And simply teaching people to obey obviously wouldn’t work, they’d look for loopholes no matter how clear the Logos laid things out. It has to go beyond logic.
Marcus is a bit stuck
Christian shares the good news!
All this happened, just 150 years ago!
Jesus wasn’t the superman you’d expect from how you normally think of the logos. But that’s not a sign that he wasn’t the logos, it’s more of a sign that the logos wasn’t what you thought it was.
Marcus is doubtful. Sure, the logos probably has some surprises up its sleeve, and he shouldn’t have presumed to know exactly what it would look like in human form, because that’s already hard to wrap your head around. But this Jewish guy? Water into wine? A carpenter? Prophesies from the torah?
Look, Marcus says, I can see how cool this story is, but it’s not adding up. Maybe the Logos will descend to earth a few thousand years. Maybe there will be multiple incarnations. I look forward to it. But Jesus doesn’t sound like the guy.
What does the Christians say next?
Or what signs show that, whatever else he was, Jesus was the Word made flesh?
Or is it already time to move past logic and into faith and prayer?
tl;dr
a rough bullet point list of Jesus’ qualifications as the Jewish Christ is easy to make and involves fulfillment of multiple scriptures. I’d be grateful for an analogous list of Jesus’ qualifications as the Stoic Logos.
Frankly, the case that he is has always seemed weak and ad hoc to me, far more driven by social pressure than anything else.
The case that Jesus is the Jewish Christ is counterintuitive at first, but there are a lot of OT scriptures to look at, the evangelists point out the signs, and pastors frequently bring them up and clarify in sermons.
The case that Jesus is the Stoic Logos I have never heard or can’t recall. I’ve heard the assertion but not the reasoned arguments. I can see reading certain things into Plato or Epictetus but it doesn’t click for me.
The scriptures provide the gramma/letter but the logos/logic I don’t see. Unless you reconceptualize the logos to match Jesus?
Gnon seems to hold the key, I just can’t fit the pieces together myself.
Putting you on moderation for idiocy. Obviously Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and obviously the Stoic Logos.
Dark Enlightenment: We should infer what is right from what is,
Stoics: we should infer what is right from what is. And nature is a person.
Christianity: We should infer what is right from what is because existence is a manifestation of the will of God that cannot lie and cannot change, and because all things were made by God through Christ.
Dark enlightenment one tit for two tats, due to imperfect information.
Stoics: Forgiveness, generosity, and mercy, due to imperfect information.
Christianity: one tit for two tats, because God says so.
Dark Enlightenment. Durable marriage and male supremacy, because family formation and reproduction impractical otherwise
Stoics …
Christianity: Durable Marriage and male supremacy because God Says so.
As for being the Jewish Messiah: The Messiah will be an eternal priest in the line of Melchizedek, Which foreshadows the Jews and Israel getting ditched by the Jewish Messiah if they screw up, which is the only thing that I can see that is counterintuitive about him. How is he counterintuitive? Kingdom not of this world was not what the Jews expected and wanted, but Kingdom of this world is far from being apparent in the prophecies.
And most Jews did eventually convert, so …
Sorry Jim, that was not my best comment, tried to reframe my question a few too many times.
I’m happy to wrestle with the relationship between Jesus and the Stoic logos off the blog.
Initially the disciples suspect that Jesus is Elijah. Not the Messiah himself, but his messenger.
But specific things happen that make it clear that he IS the Messiah, not just a prophet.
Enumerating these specifics is common on Sundays
A stoic or Gnon fan might suspect that Jesus was an envoy of the logos, someone superlatively in tune with nature and reason.
My question is, what specific things happen that make it clear that Jesus IS the logos, not just its prophet.
These specifics are rarely enumerated, and never on Sunday in my experience.
Jim’s work is the closest I have seen to an enumeration, and I am thankful for that. I will let it rest unless someone else sees where I am coming from and carries the discussion forward. Otherwise, I’ll get myself to a library.
Well that is a matter of faith. And Jesus himself is somewhat opaque on the matter. I am not going to appeal to reason, evidence, or empirical data. And the meaning of the question itself is opaque — observe the mountains of useless and incomprehensible Christology generated in the first few centuries of Christianity.
The formulas “God is three and God is one”, and “fully God and fully man” imply you just should not go there. It is not only difficult to answer the question, hard to even ask it without falling into one heresy or the opposite heresy, or two opposite heresies at once.
There’s nothing wrong with this blog becoming more Christian. Do not apologize for it.
I don’t comment here any more, but still reading it. Don’t agree with everything written, but still appreciating it.
I’m still somewhat suspicious about claims of (paid) progressivist agents shilling here, or on many other web-places, but I still find it totally fascinating how some tests conceived here work great in real life, especially demon worshipers test. 🙂
Happy Easter everyone, Christ has risen.
Humungus sends his greetings once again, wishing all a Happy Easter and a reminder that Christ is King!
Put me down for sloth and despair. I am weak, but I am upheld by the strong right arm of the living God, who conquers son and death today.
Happy Easter Jim and company. We’re listening. Onwards and upwards gentlemen. Christ is King – In Christ all things are possible.
Jesus had his chance, and his teachings led us directly to gay communist negrolatry. We do need a religion for a holy war, but this one isn’t up to the task, and there are no other options.
We shall drown and no one will save us.
That we are in gay communist negrolatry both a shocking and trivial point depending on who you are talking to. ‘Led directly’, on the other hand, is a much more risible claim.
May as well say aristocracy leads directly to communism. Confusionism led directly to communism. Thine mater led directly to communism.
Aristocracy led to communism in the sense that it came before it and its failings allowed communism to take power. It’s mostly the same the with Confucianism.
Christianity led to gay race communism in that same sense, true, but it also led to gay race communism in another sense. Christian teachings look and feel awfully similar to gay race communist teachings, and while we can argue interpretations all day long, the gay race communists conquered the Christians by convincing them that they (they gay race communists) were better Christians than the Christians. The (old-fashioned Soviet) communists did not conquer the aristocrats by convincing them they were better aristocrats. A part of how the Soviet communists conquered the aristocrats was convincing them they were better Christians than the aristocrats were.
You’re not making a great case as to how the traits of Christianity are particularly worse than the traits of other unifying belief systems. You are lamenting decay, everything is subject to decay. Can you point us to some other system, living or dead, that is not subject to decay and failure modes, that also allows for high civilization?
You say we need something new, but then say that the something new doesn’t exist, and that the something else is impossible. Then what was the point of your comment? What did you hope to accomplish?
I have my own qualms with Christianity, but they are very different from yours. Too much of the justification of the belief lies on miracle. Why do we say Christ? Well he was pulled back from the dead. I don’t know about you, but I never stuck my finger in any wounds. Why should I be willing to martyr myself, if the need calls? I have seen no glimpse of anything beyond the sense doors, no light of Heaven or scent of deepest hell. So, the argument is, if no evidence, then faith. Sure, but why faith in this one above others? The only stories I care about in the Bible, I care about not because I feel like they’re telling me how to live, but because they seem to have touched on something beyond the sense reality. These same stories are found in various forms across time and space, so why take the baggage of everything else? Its not like people actually care enough to follow the rules actually written anyway, it’s not a better schelling point than any other compilation.
All this to say that I am with you that I don’t exactly care so much that society must be guided by these passed down writings of the witnesses of some miracle I wasn’t a party to. But in lack of something else, it’s pointless to dwell on flaws. If you want to synthesize something, and I find it compelling, I will go along with you.
Well I have. And, like doubting Thomas, I am a stubborn, cynical, and suspicious fellow who takes a lot of convincing.
But this is a Dark Enlightenment blog, not a Christian blog. I am not going to make arguments for the truth of Christianity, which cannot be argued anyway. Christ will let you know, if you seriously ask him. He is not going to respond to “prove that you exist”, but when you need him, he will be there.
[*deleted*]
There was nothing wrong with your comment. It was a good, relevant, and responsive, comment. But this blog is under hostile attack by a storm of shills and entryists. So please take the shill test described in the moderation policy, or give the Christian affirmation and get white listed.
Why do women misbehave?
18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
16 To the woman he said,
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
When the Holy Spirit reaches out to you those moments can range from a full personal envelopment and revelation of the Trinity, to more oftentimes being very subtle or difficult to recognize and or interpret, especially if they came spread over many years or in dreams and visions that typically fade. So try to keep them all close in memory, and know that they are all leading you closer to the Lord God the Father and Creator. None of us are perfect in that, and we even continue reject and doubt him so many times. But in those private moments when his love for you has brought you to tears and you confess to Jesus and ask for his forgiveness saving and help, and even dare to mention his name Jesus Christ in public, trust me, you are becoming stronger with the Spirit as he guides your every step along the way 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYDKBgTE4oM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg0JH_Cu5lw
“and in the wilderness where you saw how the Lord your God carried you, just as a man carries his son, on all of the road which you have walked Deut1:31”
It is becoming harder to find brothers who will help, so try
to support and carry each other when in need on this earth,
as he carries you towards him in the next.
Wishing you all are growing stronger, even through difficult times, as am I.
It is not unreasonable to, within reason of course, demand evidence. I demanded evidence. Or some sign.
And very curiously, I have received it. What has happened to me one too many times for me to ignore, is that several times I would make an important decisions in life which I thought was best. But then something unexpected would happen, generally outside of my power, often something that was negative in the moment, which forced me to make a very different decision, and that ‘forced’ decision has several times now steered my life into a much better direction than had I been in complete control of my destiny.
Obviously you may chalk up such things to ‘luck’ or ‘positive randomness’ or whatever, instead of God watching over my shoulder. But from my perspective, it is hard not to imagine something or someone watching over my shoulder.
A final thought of which I have no idea if it has any merit: I sometimes wonder if God’s influence on this world is something like that thing in quantum mechanics, where a process changes when one observes it. Like, God steers, or rather, influences events in the direction he thinks would help, but it has to be unobservable from our point of view, otherwise the ‘miracle’ collapses.
I hold two competing narratives, hypotheses, in my head as to how the paradox of Being resolves itself. Not in the sense of solving the mystery, but in the sense of providing a satisfying answer to my human perspective.
The one I came to first, is that all of Being is sort of act of boredom. A great aesthetic work to be played out for the sake of exhausting the inexhaustible. All of our human suffering — because that’s the most pressing question here, if we exist why do we suffer, why is it not some great perfect harmony, why do we sense wrongness at any point instead of being entirely absorbed in a state of total intoxication with our own existence — all of our suffering is nothing, smaller than the smallest speck of dust, as it’s all played out on the backdrop of an eternal Being. That at the dissolution of our body the mind is revealed to have been an illusion cast by matter twisted and piled upon itself, and in a great unwinding we are returned to the ground, that source that Being from which we branch.
This all feels very logical and correct, but it misses something. It seems wrong on some deep level, in some place my logical engine cannot take me to. On the level of speakable things, it also rationalizes some fairly terrible behavior from a human perspective. Nothing matters, its all a play, do as you want, don’t just satisfy any pathological urges, but take them to the furthest extremes. After all this is just killing time. When you get bored and have exhausted your resources in this lifetime, just let your blood run onto the dirt and start a new one.
The second hypothesis involves Mystery. The Mystery of Faith, the Mystery of Meaning. All of this humanity I’ve been subjected to is part of a process greater than eternity. It’s unknowable, as knowledge is a thing of this reality. This hypothesis says: this lifespan is working towards something it cannot possibly understand, but is more important than Eternity itself. I find this particular hypothesis somehow sits better with some gut feelings, but it so thoroughly disposes of my sense of reason that it is hard to trust or even use as a guiding principle. Okay, I accept the limits of knowledge, I accept the weight of meaning, but what now?
No his teachings did not lead directly to gay communist negrolatory. The direct ancestor of gay communist negrolatory were the Socinians, who furtively denied the eternity of Christ. Dethroning Christ came first, negrolatory and so forth came second.
And to this day there is an obvious and strong correlation between those who hold that Christ is the Logos made flesh, and those who hold to the Old Christian teachings on women, hierarchy, and property. Globohomo makes coveting and abortion sacraments, but a Christian who is unambiguously trinitarian with no ifs and buts nor abstruse too clever by half complications, is also going to hold that God created us man and woman, and Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
There is an obvious correlation between a purported Christian’s other worldly beliefs, and his this worldly beliefs. There was back in the days of the Socinians, and there is today.
I’m not well-versed in the history, but I’m familiar with the Socinians from your writing. They infiltrated and conquered the Anglicans because their faith was stronger and then they got everyone to believe that they were the best Christians around. This didn’t come out of nowhere. There’s a lot of egalitarian, antinomian, subversive stuff in Christianity, and it mutates very easily into gay race communism.
I did a quick skim of the Wikipedia entry on Socinianism, and I learned they descend from the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists, of course, were a bunch of fanatical polyamorist commies who formed damn quickly after Gutenberg let the Bible into the hands of the common man. The Church did a fairly good job keeping a lid on the holiness spirals until they lost control of the texts, and then all hell broke loose and is still breaking loose to this day. The holiest Christian is the faggiest, most tolerant (except of intolerance), least judgmental (except of those who judge), and readiest to share (your) property with the less fortunate. You can argue that this is a perversion or misinterpretation of Christianity, but the rest of the Christians keep falling for it and that’s where the Christian holiness spiral always goes. Jews holiness spiral on cooking with microscopic particles of cheese, Muslims holiness spiral on slaying the infidel, and Christians holiness spiral on crying about Kunta Kinte and hugging faggots.
There is indeed. And it does. And did the egalitarianism, antinomianism, and subversion lead to dethroning Christ, or dethroning Christ lead to egalitarianism, antinomianism, and subversion. You could make a good case that the egalitarianism, antinomianism, and subversion led to dethroning Christ, but it is obvious that the one is connected to the other.
And just a few days ago, saying “Christ is King” was deemed antisemitic (which of course it is) and grounds for deplatforming, cancellation, and demonetization. And a day or so ago, Resurrection Sunday was made Trannie appreciation day. The enmity gay race communists have for Christ is obvious, and always was obvious, even back in the seventeen hundreds: English Socinians, French Church of Reason.
Yes, that problem arguably showed up with the chaster than thou Nicolatians, and it obviously showed up with the Donatists. But the end result of that holiness spiral is always demon worship, over and over again. It rapidly becomes an unholiness spiral.
And when they start displaying overt fear and hatred of Christ, which they always do in the end, it is never difficult to trace that fear and hatred all the way back to their very beginnings. Christ as King and high priest is the wall and guardian against the egalitarian, antinomian, and subversive tendencies in Christianity.
In effect, NEET is trying to blame Jesus for the wrongdoings of people who reject His teachings.
Jim, what would you say is the root cause of holiness spirals? Why do humans do that?
It seems to me to be motivated by a hidden desire to be superior to others. One-upmanship. It could be explained in sociobiological terms quite easily.
A holiness spiral happens when the state religion has power and goodies, and outsiders want in and want to take over. It is not individuals saying “I am more holy than thou/” It is politics. It is a leftism. Disorder in the organs of governance, because people are organising to knock over the apple cart and grab some apples, organising to destroy order, and it always winds up looking like twentieth and twenty first century leftism. Even among Muslims and Hindus.
It does not happen because individuals want to tell their neighbour that they are holier than he is. It happens because an organised faction tells individuals that other hostile entryists who are secretly members of their faction are holier than he is. Bob telling Dave that Frank is holier than Dave is far more persuasive than Frank telling Dave that Frank is holier than Dave, if Dave does not know that Bob and Frank and half a dozen others are having sex in a great big pile.
If Christianity proceeds from the Logos why would those tendencies ever exist in the first place?
ROFL. I wonder how many people in general, not necessarily this blog, are old enough to get this reference? He reincarnated later to wearing an air filter over his eyes.
Then again, maybe they show it regularly in public schools like To Kill a Mockingbird, in which case, the speculation is moot.
“Christianity is not a suitable religion to bring to this holy war” is only said by people who do not know the stats on Christians in America. American evangelical Christians voted 80% for Trump. Which means the Christian men voted 90% for Trump. Which means white Christian men voted 95% for Trump. (The stats for Catholics are not quite that spectacularly good but still very good.) Christians were also the large group that was statistically most opposed to vax, mandates, lockdowns etc.
American Christians are a dream demographic , the most resistant to evil large group on planet earth. It simply doesn’t get any better.
As Jim frequently points out, any church that goes woke empties out. Meanwhile the stronger a stand a church’s leaders take against leftist evils, the more it fills up. There is also a strong correlation between the extent to which a Christian group believes in God’s real supernatural involvement in human lives today, and the extent to which it is resistant to evil.
Since we are all doomed and we will drown without anyone to save us, it would be awesome if you would go first. Make sure to place the barrel of the shotgun into your mouth pointed upwards at approximately 45 degrees. You would not want to accidentally lobotomize yourself but survive. Much cleaner to simply end it in one go, since you are out of options and out of answers.
Nah. There’s still schadenfreude to keep me going. If I can hang on long enough, I can watch the holy Negroes devour the White Leftist fags.
Day of the Machete. “I’m not white, I’m Jewish, I’m on your side!” screams the leftist as he’s hacked to pieces by his beloved diversity, who use their free cell phones to film the carnage for our amusement.
Niggers are inferior because they are criminal, lazy, stupid, a burden and a menace to the white man when it is illegal to put them to better use as slaves, or to apply harsher penalties for misbehavior. No amount of social engineering will produce nigger physicists, rocket scientists, architects, composers since there is a fixed ceiling to their development that is genetically determined. Much the same can be said of the other dark-skinned southerly races.
Female mate choice has not evolved much beyond the chimp stage, where the alpha male is the most aggressive and violent in the group, and since women are hypergamous, they will keep shit-testing men in order to draw out the most aggressive and violent, and compete amongst each other for the top spot in the harem of General Butt Naked / Jeremy Meeks / Mr. One In Thirty. Monogamy is an absolutely necessary conspiracy imposed by men on women in order to achieve cooperate-cooperate equilibrium, whereas any system that leaves women in charge or even gives them free choice will immediately backslide into defect-defect. Many girls hit puberty as early as age nine or ten, and begin flirtatious or even overtly sexual behaviors earlier than that, and once they reach that stage, will crawl over a thousand miles of broken glass to be with their demon lovers, thus the only way to actually achieve something resembling monogamy and eugenic fertility is for women to be property, owned by their fathers until given to their husbands, preferably as soon as they show the first sign of any interest in boys. Marriage requires a woman to honor and obey her husband, reciprocal vows are gay marriage.
Just go into any of these supposedly “Christian” churches and say something blasphemous about Christ. See how they react. Then say “nigger”, “faggot”, or just quote Paul on women out loud. Notice their reaction. Whatever they are more offended by tells you whom they really worship. Don’t mistake nigger worship for Christianity.
You either love niggers or you love God. And no one really loves niggers so if you are trying to love niggers then you are not trying to love God. Nigger worshippers pretend to be Christian because they think Jesus loving niggers validates their nigger worship. “See, even God worships niggers.” There is no color blind gender neutral Christianity just as there is no Judeo-Christianity or Satano-Christianity.
When the demon worshippers exercising state power demand effeminacy and androgyny, it is our duty to be men.
Happy Easter, Jim. Thanks for these sermons.
Today I honor Christ, tomorrow I will think about the battles ahead.
A strategy is needed that cuts through the chaff and boils the poison from the Vatican. Christians have forgotten their common cause.
The problem we have is something more like sloth, is it not? An unwillingness to perform an act we are duty-bound to perform. Our sloth leads us to fail to do the things that needed to be done to protect our neighborhoods and families.
Also fear. Sloth makes it easy to submit to fear, when in truth we have little to fear. I have done many far more dangerous acts and gotten away with them. Partly due to prudence, a silver tongue, and expensive lawyers, but mostly because the enemy is corrupt, inefficient, incompetent, and lazy.
But because of sloth, I submitted to fear.
If you are willing to face martyrdom, you will seldom be called upon to actually face martyrdom. Our enemies fear martyrs, and will not go there. Our enemies have overwhelming power to harm us, and we have almost no power to harm them, but they are afraid.