Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reasonâ€. Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist. Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the Cornaro family gained status by patronizing great art, such as …
Death of Christendom
Calvinism in New England was scorned by the heresy of Unitarianism, which deemed itself holier, but Unitarianism only lasted about a generation before it collapsed into Emersonian subjectivist Transcendentalism, which then swiftly (in less than a generation) collapsed into politics (abolition, feminism etc). If we look at the New Testament position on slavery it is of course passivist and pacifist. Christians are encouraged, but not required, to free their slaves. Slaves are discouraged from rebelling and running away. Masters are …
Demonic possession and Donald McCloskey
I am a materialist. I don’t believe in demons that come from outside. Demons come from within, a part of oneself that hates life, hates the living, and, most of all, hates oneself. Sometimes people indulge such a part of themselves, and it takes them over, possesses them. This happens a lot to leftists. It happens one hell of a lot to transexuals, hence the high suicide rate. Spandrel recent wrote of one such, McCloskey The voice of evil So …
Who is allied to Israel?
Egypt proposes a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in which everyone ceases to fire. The (Jewish) US Secretary for state proposes a ceasefire in which Hamas gets a new route to import rockets, now that Egypt is trying to stop them from being smuggled through Egypt, and a big pile of money with which to import them. There are a lot of things wrong with Jews, but being sneakily cohesive is not one of them.
Need to kill a lot more civilians in Gaza
One of the things that the fans of the theory of Democratic Peace, the theory that democracies tend to be at peace with each other, tend to forget is that Gaza and Israel are both democracies. If you are a Muslim, you demonstrate superior holiness by voting in favor of wars with infidels that may well result in your death, just as if you are white, you demonstrate superior holiness by voting for your country to become non white. If …
The cure for IQ shredders
Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce. Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus. Just as the cure for Chinese poverty was to import the economic laws and …
The false life plan
Men and women are happiest if successfully performing their traditional roles. This is to be expected, since whites and east asians, the descendents of civilizations, are descended from those that did perform their traditional roles. The Cathedral, however, presents girls, in school and on television, with a false life plan: That they will follow the same path as males, and marriage and family will just spontaneously happen while they are fucking Jeremy Meeks. So girls followed that plan. With the …
The future belongs to those that show up
A fertility of slightly over 2.0 is a stable population.
Sarah Perry on the Economic Value of Children
Sarah Perry argues that children have been nationalized, have become property of the state and ceased to be the property of their parents, so have become a cost to their parents and a profit to the state, so parents decline to produce so many. Makes sense, certainly part of the story, but not what I seem to observe, not the main story. What I seem to see happening is that the major cost deterring people from children is not economic, …
Sandra and Woo notice repression
One of my favorite web comics is Sandra and Woo, which comic notices that cute funny animals are still inclined to eat other cute funny animals, and that little girls develop a sex drive at a disturbingly early age. Recently the comic committed an act of political incorrectness. I fear they will be brought to heel as Sinfest was. Sinfest has never been funny since they turned politically correct. The entire Sinfest premise is gutted if the comic cannot make …