I predicted that Trump would have taken power by now. Obviously he has not. But, he is working on it. Unwise to bet against Trump.
In return for Israel not funding his enemies, he recognizes Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel. State Department furtively instigates world wide outrage against this move, which world wide outrage fizzles out dismally. The elite is maximally indignant, the Pope condemns the move, but the masses fail to show up on cue.
As I said earlier in regard to the president re-legalizing oil extraction and coal mining:
the mighty and justifiably enraged masses are no longer spontaneously demanding whatever the permanent government wants them to spontaneously demand this morning and are no longer spontaneously enraged about whatever the permanent government wants them to be spontaneously enrage about this morning.
The sackings I have long hoped for are actually taking place. The State Department, which has been industriously working on a color revolution in the United States against Trump, is being purged.
At that link you will read a diplomat who recently “resigned†(one step ahead of being fired) telling us what good and important work he and the State Department has been doing Sudan. That would be the Sudan plunged into civil war with both sides believing that the State Department has been playing both sides against each other. He helped Americans escape Sudan, he tells us, neglecting to mention they had to flee because the State Department has pissed off the Sudanese government, rebels, and military. If a diplomat has to flee, his diplomacy has evidently been seriously unsuccessful.
The Blue Empire of the consulates has lost in Libya and Sudan. OK, those are merely far away cesspits, but Afghanistan was a far away cesspit, and Soviet defeat in Afghanistan prefigured the fall of the Soviet Empire. Add to Libya and Sudan, the Philippines and Hungary. Not cesspits, and not so far away.
Most of the empire continues to servilely move ever leftwards, and ever against local identity, electing a new people. We are still losing, and losing quite badly. But if you are a diplomat who just got fired by Trump, does not necessarily look that way.
And Mueller is biting the dust. Flynn’s guilty plea is a massive strategic defeat for Mueller.
What was supposed to happen is that Trump’s associates would plead guilty of a very long laundry list of extremely evil things that they did for Trump, at his orders, and in service to him. Then they get let off, the Republicans come under pressure to impeach him, if no impeachment, then Mueller indicts Trump, and Trump gets the perp walk.
Lying to the FBI is a fundamentally frivolous charge. If you open your mouth to the FBI, you are guilty of lying to them, if you keep your mouth closed, you are guilty of conspiracy. It is what you get convicted of when you are pure as the driven snow. What Flynn was supposed to say was “I am guilty of lying to the FBI in that I said Trump was innocent, but actually he is guilty of this long, long, long list of charges, that I wrote out while Mueller steadied my trembling handâ€. But the content, or rather lack of content, of Flynn’s guilty plea indicates that Flynn has not flipped. If Flynn had flipped, we would be seeing it already. Which indicates insider judgment that there is a good chance that Trump will actually take power.
I am in favor of American empire. But the trouble is that soft power is insecure power, so your proconsuls tend to act like mobile bandits, rather than stationary bandits. The State Department and its NGOs are a horde of locusts. Recollect the utter devastation and ruin that they inflicted on Haiti. I favor an empire based on colonialism and hard power, and we cannot do colonialism without colonials, and we will not have colonials until we first fix elite fertility. You need colonials for empire, because they care about their homeland, and also care about the colony.
[…] The Blue Empire of the consulates gets it in the nads […]
I’m glad it appears that Trump is winning, and that he appears to be the real deal, a genuine pro-American President.
But the US empire will die as its currency dies, slowly buy surely over the next 13 years.
A dying empire drags down its currency, not the other way around. No one cares about your budget deficit as long as you’re the baddest mofo on Earth.
Of course.
You may have reading comprehension issues.
Communicating badly then acting indignant when misunderstood is the kind of self-trolling vainglory that the cardinal virtues are supposed to prevent. If you can’t stop sinning against yourself, that’s what the theological virtues are for: faith in His Majesty the God-Emperor, hope that America will be made great again, unconditional love for our nation that despite how it treats us without it we are nothing.
You’re the most odd Internet person I’ve encountered.
I’m glad you seem attached to me.
One way of looking at these developments is that Trump is securing the periphery and then moving into the center.
This is similar to the way these scandals and corruption cases feature mid-level perps but then work up the chain.
To take down Clinton say, you first bring down here aids: Huma, Mills, Podesta etc.
When you take down Clinton, you make her squeal on Obama and on it goes.
“I favor an empire based on colonialism and hard power, and we cannot do colonialism without colonials, and we will not have colonials until we first fix elite fertility.”
This is a good point. But you Americans do not seem to like leaving America and going and governing a foreign country for years at a time, the way the British did.
We discus this here:
https://imperialenergyblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/crypto-imperialism-an-anglo-american-adaption-to-empire/
The question is who would want to go and govern Kabul or Basra for ten years?
Nobody wanted to rule the British empire when the British started hating on their colonialists.
If colonialists are seen as OK, or neutral, lots of people will merrily go forth to govern. Nobody wants to go forth and govern Kabul because in 1840, when the British sent forth some Britons to govern Kabul, they proceeded to shoot them in the feet.
Notice also that the British lost interest in colonialism twenty years after fertility started to fall. If we reverse female emancipation, pretty soon people will become interested in colonialism, because the ruling elite will start worrying about jobs for their numerous younger sons, and lo and behold, a pro-colonialist ideology will mysteriously become part of the Zeitgeist.
That’s good.
[…] Source: Jim […]
You said before that before the election Deep State made plans to arrest Trump on bogus charges after he loses the election, and that despite that he won, decided to proceed with the plan as if he was failed candidate, not a sitting president.
What are the odds that now that Flynn pledged guilty to something no-one sane will mind much president pardoning him for, after president pardons him they’ll act as he he committed yet another irredeemably evil act that, for which this time GOP congress _has_ to impeach him for real, and once they refuse to, will try to arrest him? Can you give us guesstimate as to when they’ll try to physically arrest him?
That State Department officials are “resigning” and being laid off makes coup or impeachment substantially less likely than it was a short time ago.
Right now, not making predictions, because as we approach the left singularity, the unexpected becomes increasingly probable.
But the key is taking control of the FBI, the CIA, and the inJustice Department. Attempts to take control of these are likely to be denounced as “interfering with the course of justice”, and might well lead to impeachment or “indictment” (Indictment being a coup supposedly legitimized by an order for Trump’s arrest from some judge no one has ever heard of.)
That the Republican party has switched from believing accusations of sexual misconduct made forty years after the events, but a couple of weeks from an election, to doubting them, makes impeachment less likely – and thus makes an outright coup (“indictment”) more likely.
That Flynn does not appear to have flipped indicates that insider judgment is that Trump will take power, which makes a preference cascade against a coup likely.
If Trump takes power, if Trump gains control of the CIA, the FBI, and the Justice Department, it is likely that he and his heirs will win every election from now on, much as Caesar and Augustus did. If he fails to do so, another lurch far leftwards is inevitable.
Trump might back off from taking control, in fear of coup or impeachment – which would make coup or impeachment more likely.
He might proceed to take control, which might well lead to coup or impeachment to prevent him from taking control.
But, if he succeeds in taking control, safe against coup or impeachment, and chances are that if he does take control, he and his heirs will, like Caesar and Augustus, never lose an election.
How will that be possible? Eventually a Democrat is going to win the presidency again and likely undue everything Trump has and will do.
With every election, elections matter less and less.
By 2020, 2024 at the latest, elections will have entirely ceased to matter. Either leftists rule absolutely and until they all murder each other, or Trump and his heirs rule for a very long time.
Yup, the Roman “Emperors” before Diocletian and Constantine were elected to various Republican offices.
I am surprised you think the end of democracy is that close, scary, let’s hope Trump does the business then.
Any thoughts on the UK or Europe?
I have a conspiracy theory that the swing right will happen everywhere, but after the USD collapse, a NWO will emerge, that will look good (laissez-faire economics), but the globalists will still be hand-in-glove with all governments, and we’ll be stuck with global NAZIism, and nowhere to run.
People laud Hungary, but Orban is literally Hitler, nationalising key industries, whilst stoking nationalism. Same in Russi, China, South Africa.
Add in a few tens of trillions of QE into stocks in due course, and you’ll have de facto merger of state and capital.
All very scary, but we’ll think we’re OK.
Laissez-faire’s very bad news. Sure it feels bad when a small business has to comply with utterly meaningless and absurd regulations just so that some parasitical local bureaucrat gets paid this week, but when applied to the nation as a whole, the free movement of capital means globalism and all that goes with it.
Laissez-faire also means the end of jobs for life, which ultimately means welfare and socialised medicine, always and everywhere. It also generally leads to state education in order for people to have “equality of opportunity”.
At the heart of laissez-faire is a call for equality: no longer shall the aristocracy have the final say over who and what may produce and be produced – any willing provider should be able to provide.
No, that way leads to hell. A Whig is a Whig is a Whig.
Laissez-faire is surely the opposite of all the things you describe.
No central planning of the economy, no monetary shenanigans, no welfare state. No attempts to avert recessions.
Would it kill you to see things from another perspective? How can you be a reactionary if you only know about today? Does the volcano demon of the kikes tell its’ chosen to trade accoding to laissez-faire? Where do you think we got the word laissez-faire from?
Hello again my little friend.
May Jehovah bless you, despite your blasphemy.
The end of democracy will not be all that dramatic. Nobody noticed that the Roman Republic had fallen for centuries, and no one noticed the Roman Empire had fallen in the West – though mysteriously the roads had become unsafe, with the result it was impossible for goods to move any distance, with the result that everyone had to fall back on the entirely local economy, which they lacked the technologies to do.
“I am surprised you think the end of democracy is that close…”
Twitter doesn’t disappoint.
https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/940319098323398656
“I am surprised you think the end of democracy is that close, scary”
SCARY? It’s the only thing that gives me hope.
Depends what follows its demise.
A rightist God-fearing ruler will be fine.
Anything else is scary.
Delete Democrat voters from the rolls.
Of course the Democrat voters are guilty of treason under the Constitution by its plain original meaning, but banning them from voting isn’t good enough.. What we need is repeal of 16th and 17th amendments, and voting restricted to married White men with at least three children and a house (or equivalent assets if we want to enfranchise urbanites). None of it’s going to happen until well into His Majesty’s open reign, in which Congress will probably be weakened into an advisory committee anyway.
His Majesty has repeatedly astounded me with the audacity of His grand designs. Who would have expected the total destruction of normal feminist credibility during a lull in fighting back on World War T? I thought He was just cleaning up Hollyweird. Who would have expected Him to make the GOPe so thirsty for legislation they would pass a tax bill that helps most Whites and harms the professional left?
The tax cuts and shreiking trannyism will keep dhimmicrats from winning before He can ban the party.
“The State Department, which has been industriously working on a color revolution in the United States against Trump, is being purged.”
[reads article]
“Elizabeth Shackelford, who most recently served as a political officer based in Nairobi for the U.S. mission to Somalia, wrote to Tillerson that she reluctantly had decided to quit because the administration had abandoned human rights as a priority”
Oh, now I understand. She’s peeved because we’re not importing the entire population of Somalia quite fast enough. Nothing about actually fixing Somalia, which [good point] would require Somalia to become an American colony over which we could exercise sufficient control to achieve something approaching the desired fix. Provided we had enough muskets.
Jim, we can’t lose. Literally.
The pattern is always the same: whenever leftists come to power or take over an organization – the organization invariably dies. The press can’t sell a subscription. The schools are cranking out papered morons that can’t think. The courts are putting violent criminals on the street. These guys are literally self-defeating. Their leaders are dead men walking – and they will get theirs the second the free money runs out.
Take heart, fellas: illegal immigration is at an all time low; liberal states are running on fumes and are bankrupt, and as you yourself pointed out – us ignorant dirt people aren’t voting the way we’re told to anymore. Their feral women are castrating their degenerate men with fake rape hoaxes every other day. They’re eating themselves everywhere.
Trump? He’s only a middle finger raised at the looney left. The next guy will be an iron fist unless things improve. Guys like you are now looking like visionaries rather than crackpots. The tide is turning. It can do nothing else.
In Peru and Chile a purge involves freee helicopter rides. In other places, the purge involves lining people up against the wall and shooting them. In America, the purge consists of feral women sending Sexual Harassment Panda against the purged…
True. Unfortunately the organization in question is the United States, Europe, and the white race.
Baizuo can’t win because they have no win condition. Jleft can’t win because when they go full anti-White in the US they lose in ru, pl, hu. The American people can and will lose a lot more, but the Jleft can’t run things from elsewhere like when Rhodesia was executed without even getting a cctld, so the American people will probably continue to exist.
It’s true that they can’t win, but that doesn’t mean we can’t lose. All sides could lose, as e.g. in Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
I hope your optimism’s justified.
From over here, I still see decisions being totally undermined and reversed: today The Pentagon declared that trannies SHALL be hired, Trump be damned. This kind of thing is absolutely typical, not exceptional in the slightest. Other than the tax&deficit-spend stuff, I can’t think of much that’s been achieved and not overturned.
The Israel thing worries me no end. The EU has come out very strongly against Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem. It’s not just domestic establishment figures who are opposed to this: it’s a powerful international cabal that touches the entire globe. At its heart, this is a socialist phenomenon: the Left despises Israel.
I know the Right isn’t too keen on it either, and for what it’s worth I’m with Jim and Moldbug all the way on that: envy is an unworthy motivation, always and everywhere.
The point though is that this Jerusalem thing may be very serious indeed for Trump. Sure the riots haven’t taken off very much so far, but there’s plenty of time for the EU and other parts of the problem to stir things up. The media would not hesitate for a moment to point to Trump as the root cause of the new war in the Middle East once one’s been funded and drummed up.
If I *were* an anti-Semite, I’d look at it this way: someone came to Trump and feigned tragic demeanour – “could you not find it in your heart to do this small thing for we who have done so much for you Mr Trump? They are calling you a Hitler. We God’s Chosen People know you are not, but appearances are important my dear friend: you should do this thing for us because it’s the right thing to do and it’ll show your kind heart to the world”. (LOL)
Then they sneak out and call Soros: “mission accomplished, the goy scum fell for it”.
I believe the Jerusalem thing and the Saudi changes are all part of the same plan. They want an excuse to take out Iran and Turkey.
These two nations will be soon identified as the last remaining hotbeds of radical Islam, and will be invaded. The Saudis, Israel, Russia and the US (possibly Europe too) will unite to defeat this (supposed) evil. North Korea will also be sorted out.
Then, finally, all nations on earth can have a BIS central bank, they can attempt to merge the religions of the book, and stitch up the entire globe.
They do want it all for themselves, whoever they might be.
True. But a little while ago it was declared that they were going to bring in four hundred million male military age black Muslims from subsaharan Africa to live on crime and welfare, Trump be damned, and in the end he got his way.
We are seeing a pattern of Trump not getting his way. But we are also seeing a pattern that it is a really bad idea to go up against Trump. How this will end is difficult to predict, but Mueller, rather than Trump, looks like the one who will be hanging from a noose.
Jerusalem is the only city in Israel that anybody knows the name of. The average person’s response to Trump’s announcement was surprise that Jerusalem was somehow not the capital. What was it before? Bethlehem? Nazareth? Jericho?
The capital of Israel has always been Jerusalem. The embassy has been in Tel Aviv (Israels largest city).
Jim believes that jews are relatively benign, and also believes in the idea of the holiness spiral, a christian holiness spiral being the cause of all our problems.
But like moldbug, jim suffers from history beginning with the printing press, when history did not begin with the printing press.
For a thousand years before the printing press, jews had religious sovereignty in Europe but not political sovereignty, and therefore if we believe jim we should expect that jews experience massive and pervasive holiness spiralling, since jews by definition could not have political sovereign controlling religion.
This holiness spiralling should have resulted in absurd and depraved jewish practices, which indeed are historically recorded, but are rejected by modern historians because no one would possibly be that absurd and depraved. Meanwhile those same modern historians assert that there are biological differences between men and women.
When the printing press appearance, aryan religion began its holiness spiral, as aryan religion suddenly won some independence from the state. But so did jewish religion, which had been independent of the state for a millennium.
Henry Finch, who was an aryan religious holiness spiraller, and leading legal scholar of England, asserted that the jews, the literal jews, the jewish race, would inherit the earth, and rule it, as a race, because they were a superior race, god’s chosen race. A belief that no doubt religious aryans originated independently, and inspired all those who were to follow.
If you begin your history with the printing press, our problems are aryan and christian. But history did not begin with the printing press.
For a thousand years, Jews have been escalating arbitrary and silly rules. And then, when they get too inconvenient, finding extremely clever loopholes through them. Because rabbis do not have state power backing them, a rabbi that gets too keen on escalating the rules is likely to lose to a rabbi who is keen on escalating the loopholes.
Judaism has been endlessly running up and down escalators driven by holiness spiraling.
Judaism said Jews should rule the middle east, but, inconveniently, Romans were ruling the middle east. So the Jews repeatedly attacked their neighbors (who were arguably just as oppressed by the Romans as the Jews were) and repeatedly got hammered, resulting the exile.
After they were exiled, they forswore naked violence as a means to rule, and got ever cleverer about dietary rules and suchlike, exhibiting superior holiness in ways somewhat less likely to get up the noses of their neighbors.
The entire history of Judaism, recorded since about 400 AD, has been holiness spiraling in circles.
As, for example, dual dishwashers. The entire idea of preventing accidental mixing of milk and meat through plates is only a few hundred years old, and has escalated dramatically within my own lifetime. And the idea that carrying a baby on the sabbath constitutes dishonoring the sabbath is probably less than a hundred years old.
As a result of loophole boring and holiness escalation, Judaism gets turned upside down, inside out, and arse over tit every century or two.
This does not result, however, in leftism, because leftism is memes selected for propagation through state power, while Judaism, out of power, was subject to somewhat different selective pressures.
Should temple Judaism be restored, then selection of memes for propagation through state power will be a problem that will have to be dealt with.
As I’ve mentioned on your blog before, one idea floating around is to dismantle the central rabbanut, letting Jews belong to autonomous communities operating in subsidiary fashion, both legalistically and financially/politically. This is not dissimilar to Nassim Taleb’s preference for decentralized Swiss cantons confederacy arrangement: the central government gives generic laws, leaving it up to local governments to implement them, including filling in details, as they see fit.
The proponent of this idea for Jews is Moshe Koppel. Basically, the intent is to limit the central government’s power, allowing Judaism to develop bottom-up, and letting the central government as the final inter-mediator between those Jewish communities.
He is not arguing that all decisions are to be left in local purview, just that most are.
My own perception is that, in general, managing the interplay between central and local governments is a very non-trivial thing. Just witness the progressive intrusion of the power of D.C. bureaucrats into States’. It seems to me, that by virtue of holding the power of the purse (including via collecting taxes and printing money) the central government is able exert ever more power. If the state religion becomes corrupt or depraved, things escalate from there quite badly.
I think that in your previous post (and comments) about BitCoin you touched on something important: what does it mean for King to govern? It seems to me, taking the view that King’s power should stem from his universally-recognized and enshrined right to intermediate, that this power to intermediate plus the right to compel all loyal feudals/governors to act militarily by obeying him, should likely be the *only* two powers assigned to the King. Basically, the King of a confederacy is the final judge and the highest-ranked warrior. It is between him and G-d alone to intermediate justly (i.e. not to succumb to bribes from local governors) and to act responsibly in a military conflict.
This is my view of what King of Confederacy should be. In such a Confederacy (which is close to how Israelite tribes operated, all the way till King David) the local/tribal governors/judges wield most of the actual power. (I think that King Solomon’s government started wielding way too much power and amassing way too much wealth. You can also see how freely he was parting with Israel’s territorial possessions.)
It seems to me, generalizing it further, that more subdivisions are even better. Ultimately, a hierarchy of rights and responsibilities all the way down to communities as the natural terminus is the right model.
I think it might not be too far from how you view it. It seems, your natural terminus is the patriarch, whose rights and powers in his household are to be enshrined. I am more open to less patriarch-as-individual and more paternalistic (as in community’s elders empowered to decide matters, including internal family’s) approach as also a viable one. Not that I am against yours — yours is obviously robust — but I see that what might be optimal in one community, might be somewhat more relaxed in a different one, depending on other factors.
Back to BitCoin: I think that local governments in a Confederacy should be free to issue their own currency and collect own taxes. In fact, I would prohibit the central government (the King) from printing their own money. The King’s power ought to come from traditional arrangements and prestige. Supporting King’s court should come from a levy taken from each household/freeman (a man of adult age who is not a slave). Such levy should not be excessive, where “excessive” is something understood popularly and intuitively, and which can vary based on times. Said levy should collected in terms of local currency (which can a cryptocurrency) or, if said currency is deemed unstable, can be collected in terms of gold/silver/goods that are obtainable from the locale.
Stabilizing a religion is a hard problem. I don’t really have answers. The Rabbinate gives itself are too much authority, but look what is happening to Roman Catholicism, and what has already happened to the reformation Christian religions.
When the Romans besieged them, the Zealots destroyed their own foodstocks in an effort to force God to rescue them. Obvious holiness spiraling disaster. But when Judges ruled, I don’t see any signs of out of control holiness signaling – the objection to Samuel’s sons was that they were corrupt, not that they were crazy. And, similarly, priests under Kings. I attribute this to a hereditary priesthood.
Icelandic priesthood was property based. You became a priest by buying a holy place. Japanese priesthood is a mixture of property and hereditary. You acquire an officially recognized shrine, but the acceptable and preferred way of acquiring it is by inheritance from your father or your father in law.
These religions did not have a holiness spiral problem.
So my preferred solution for Christianity is a married semi hereditary priesthood, plus we take seriously the ancient practices of people who practiced long surviving and successful forms of Christianity.
Rabbis claim a rabbinate existed all the way back, but I see no indication of this. Looks to me that rabbis appear under Roman rule, because Roman conquest discredited the official priesthood, because of Roman religious tolerance, and because the official hereditary priesthood lost its Kingly backing.
Jews take seriously the ancient practices of Jews, but they tend to apply them as decoration on top of modern practices – which is still better than Christians cheerfully ignoring what yesterday’s christian’s thought a Christian life was.
Rabbinic Judaism certainly did not exist during the period of Judges. However, by the end of Persian rule it certainly did. In fact, I would further assert that, just like Mishna, it is not so much an Arab/Amorite/Israelite (pastoralist) tribal phenomenon (as expressed by those carrying J1 Y-DNA marker), but a more autochtonic, Canaanite/Phoenician one (J2 marker). Obviously, the phenomena of hereditary priesthood (of Yah), of tribal judges, and the Jewish King were not of Canaanite provenance.
Canaanites and Phoneicians are, in essence one people. Ionian Greeks, the non-warrior/non-royal population at least, were part of that Levantine people as well. These are the same people who gave rise to schools that are nominally considered to be Greek, but are, in fact Phoenician/Canaanite (general “Levantine”). For example, the founder of Stoicism was of Phoenician descent. Taleb, btw, is fond of pointing this out.
Anyway, those schools of thought and philosophy go back to at least 3rd century BC, possibly even earlier. In some ways the Hasmonean revolt (Chanuka is upon us, btw) was helped by proto-rabbis, the Hasideans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasideans). You can see that craziness existed back then already, as the Macabeans, before effectively inventing the modern-termed pikuach ha-nefesh exemption, would rather die than violate Shabbat (you can see connection with Stoicism just in that alone). Shaye Cohen also wrote about the connection of rabbinical patriarchate and the institutions of (Ionian) Greek philosophy during the later period of our era (http://greek.rabbinics.org/Cohen%20-%20Patriarchs%20and%20Scholarchs.pdf)
So, basically, the rabbinical institution didn’t appear as a reaction to Romans, but considerably earlier and was an organic phenomenon.
Having said that, however, rabbis had to really re-invent the institution after the destruction of Jerusalem, progressive loss of sovereignty and, especially, after communities started leaving what became Palestine altogether.
This is a very interesting speculation, but Seneca’s letters really don’t look much like the Mishnah — not even like Pirkei Avot.
Druidism reminds me more of Rabbinism.
Never said Stoicism derives from any rabbinic school or vice versa. What I am talking is sacrificing one’s life for an abstract principle (not for kin or for leader, but for principle).
I dare you to give any example of that from the ancestors of Irish trash.
Sabbath is just a flag to rally around. Plenty of Irishmen gave their lives for a banner.
You declare one day to be a day of rest so that all members of the ingroup will take time off at the same time, thus tend to socialize with each other and be able to recognize each other. Same principle as Crips wearing colors. Pretty sure lots of crips have died for their colors.
I know that you weren’t claiming that one derives from the other — you were just claiming a common mindset that might be indicative of a common population-source. It’s a very interesting claim, as I said. The idea that the Ionians (including Homer!) were closely related to the subjects of the House of David in Eretz Yisrael is very interesting. Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras just have a very different feel from the material in Genesis, Isaiah, and Kings, that’s all.
According to Roman historians, the Druid-inspired Britons sacrificed their lives by the tens of thousands for the abstract principle of Independence. Druidism reminds me of Rabbinism because of the decades of study in special schools and the status of Druids primarily as legal experts rather than priests (although they may have been that as well). I like both — my attitude’s not at all hostile.
@Garr: thanks, I see. My knowledge of Druids is rather limited, I admit.
These are the people who invented agriculture:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture
The EFF (early European farmers) that first settled Southern and Central Europe by 5000 BC are their descendants, pushing away and mixing with local hunter-gatherers. The Minoan culture is also from that stock. The Levantines who remained gave rise to Canaanites , Phoenicians and Ionians.
Mycenaean Greece is Minnoans with Indo-European-derived royal and military strata, who invaded into the area circa 2000 BC.
The Northern Natufian-derived branch, arriving in mountains of Turkey and Caucasus also includes local hunter-gatherers (this mix gave rise Hurrians and their relatives, who came south into Mesopotamia, Sumerians).
The Mitanni or, more generally Hittite, dynamic is similar to Mycenaean civ (the Bible has some confusion about “Hittites”, btw): local farmers (Hurrian people) with Indo-European royal/military strata.
The Canaanite/Phoenician dynamic is different from the above in that instead of being invaded by Indo-Europeans, they were invaded by an Amorite people, the Eastern branch thereof. This is portrayed in the foundational myth about Abram/Abraham, his son, and grandsons.
The Israelite tribe confederacy that ultimately exited Egypt during Bronze Age collapse were some of the descendants of those Amorite groups of Abraham. Curiously, however, they included “mixed multitudes” i.e. various other tribes, one of which is not even Semitic. This is the tribe of Dan (you can do some exploration on that separately) which is most likely of Achaean (Indo-European) origin. Philistines were also of Indo-European origin (and were foresworn enemies of Dan).
Eventually, they all mixed into the Canaanite/Phoenician population. The Israelites gave their cult (insistence on Yah as the primal god (and for the Levites, including Moses, sole G-d), but pretty much autosomally disappeared in the huge population that absorbed them.
Of course, those who are Cohens still mostly carry the J1 Y-DNA marker, which is an Amorite marker, of the pastoralist/”Bedouin” heritage. Personally, I carry J1 marker as well, even though I’m not a Cohen (though a Jew). This marker is very much present in the Gulf Arab population, btw, because both the lack of population density (due to arid conditions in the region in our era) and Islam helped spread the Amorite marker universally throughout the territory.
Sorry, not EFF but EEF
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/autosomal_maps_dodecad.shtml
Another correction:
“they were invaded by an Amorite people, the Eastern branch thereof”
Into:
” they were invaded by an Amorite people, the *Western* branch thereof”
Btw, there was also a gradient to absorption. In the North (Israel) the local Canaanite population density was very high, so the Israelite tribes (incl Ephraim) very much got absorbed. In fact some of the local Canaanite population, notably in Jezreel valley was left virtually untouched by Israelites. Israel’s king Omri who usurped the throne, was from there and was likely not of Israelite ancestry, but of Canaanite one, which is extremely unusual in matters of royalty in Israel and Judah. It is not surprising that he married off his son, Ahab, to a Phoenician princess (the famous Jezebel).
In the South, Judah’s kingdom had a more prevalent J1 marker, because the South (Judean region) is more arid. Canaanite population density was markedly lower there.
Curiously, the purest Amorite/Israelite-like ancestry was in Edom (descendants of Esau), who were, later, forced to convert into Judaism by the Hasmoneans. They lived in semi-nomadic conditions all the way till their migration into Cis-Jordan (from Trans-Jordan). King Herod came from that stock.
So is this aboriginal creation-myth of the Natufian people?:
(ll. 116-138) Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all (4) the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether (5) and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire. [Hesiod, Theogony, trans. Evelyn-White)
@Garr: I am by no means an expert in ancient myths, including Greek ones, even though I still remember immersing myself in Greek and Roman mythology during early teen years.
I do have to raise a note of caution, Hesiod lived in 700 BC, by which point the Indo-European element, cultural and genetic, was well past absorption.
I cannot find where exactly, but James Darmesteter, a noted scholar and Iranist (essentially, singlehandedly founding the field) in the 19th century, who has studied Indo-Aryan people extensively, advanced the hypothesis that, before the split of steppe people into Indo-European and eastern Indo-Aryan branches, they all possessed a common main god (possibly even *the only* G-d — though I doubt it, despite it fitting all too nicely with Maimonidean claim that all nations were originally monotheistic). The name of the god is: Deus Pater.
For Greeks, Deus Pater is”Zeus” (Deus).
For Romans, Deus Pater is “Ju Piter” (Deus Pater).
For Indo-Aryan tribes settling India, in the Vedas, Deus Pater is “Dyeus” or “Dyaus Pita”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyeus
Anyway, while it is possible that local deities were incorporated into Hellenic pantheon, I do not know about foundational myths that stretch a chasm of several thousands of years of no writing (i.e. pre-history).
It seems to me, though, that the stories in Genesis, i.e. Noah’s flood and Tree of Knowledge might have been incorporated from prevalent tales of the region, with added homiletic intent.
We can probably look at Minoans and Canaanites and try to find similarities there. It seems, for example that imagery of bulls has high significance, both for Minoans and for Canaanites (via the cult of Baal).
It’s possible that the deity Cronus that Hesiod wrote about was Greeks’ interpretation of Minoan version of Baal. Maybe they retroactively made him into Zeus’s (Deus Pater’s) father, just to pay homage to the fact that he preceded him in the timeline but then got kicked out by his “son:”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_bull
Pretty sure this is true. My certainty comes not from history, but from human psychology and white people’s psychology. I know we evolved on the savanna, because we take the savanna with us everywhere we go, and I know that whites all worshiped God the Father similarly, though likely as the primary god amidst a bunch of local gods of tree and stream, plus numerous family gods, more gods than people. Monotheism came considerably later. We were not originally monotheists.
If Hasideans prefigure Essenes, then holiness spiral is not sending the entire society mad, is not a collective holiness spiral.
If Hasideans prefigure Rabbis/Pharisees, then holiness spiral infecting the entire society, but not entirely mad, since the Macabeans won.
The Rabbis would very much like the Hasideans to be proto Rabbis, because the Hasideans won against the Greeks, and the Rabbis intended to win against the Romans and against absolutely everyone in the general vicinity.
But, the fact that the Hasideans won, and the Rabbis lost, inclines me to doubt that the Hasideans were proto Rabbis.
Victory, they say, has a thousand fathers. Thus a present day movement tracing its ancestry to an ancient victory needs to be viewed with suspicion.
Weak salt. Granted, what I wrote is educated speculation, but your rebuke is even worse.
I base my argument on the sources of ancient laws of Akkad, Babylon, Hittites, etc. (S. Greengus discusses those at length, with parallel to Mishnah and Gemora; you can also look up those things yourself).
You lose some, you win some, you lose again etc. This is the nature of life. The argument here is not about linking with the winners. Hasmonean revolt happened in the second century. My argument is that proto-rabbinic schools already existed as far back as 3rd century BC, along with other philosophical schools.
I would not be surprised if it’s eventually discovered that those schools started popping up somewhere around the time of Persian hegemony in the region, when exchange of ideas and trade was more intense than before. In other words, they existed already in the time of building of the Second Temple and return of the aristocratic elite from Babylonian exile. Some Canaanite schools probably had became Judaic in character. But I think that, in general, the spirit of inquiry and exploration was at the core of Phoenician (Canaanite) psyche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochus
After all: they are of same descent as those who settled the Mediterranean by 5500 BC (known as “EFF”), before any Yamnaya or Indo-Europeans were even on the map of Southern Europe.
Proto anything existed at any date. Everything has roots.
At the time of Jesus, rabbis had power and claimed to sit in the seat of Moses, and this claim was taken seriously and was somewhat successful. How far back does the success of that claim go? Pretty sure it does not predate Roman conquest. If they had tried it before Roman conquest, the hereditary priesthood would have cut off their heads.
Once that claim was somewhat successful, then you had the preconditions for a holiness spiral that led them into unwise wars.
Holy people succeed in getting the goodies. If there is open entry into that group of holy people, pretty soon people with get holier, and find all manner of new things to be holy about. In the time Pontius Pilate, the things they were being holy about were fairly reasonable. In the time of Josephus, not so much.
The rabbis have been in the power seat since the fall of Davidic monarchy (ie the First Temple and Babylonian exile of the aristocracy and the Judean elite).
Curiously, the power of rabbis weakened considerably under certain Hasmonean Kings (namely, Alexander Jannaeus). Rabbinic tradition portrays him as an evil guy, but what was really happening was that they were after him and he kicked them in the nuds.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Jannaeus:
“The greatest impact of the war was the victor’s revenge. Josephus reports that Jannaeus brought 800 Pharisee rebels to Jerusalem and had them crucified, and had the throats of the rebel’s wives and children cut before their eyes as Jannaeus ate with his concubines.”
Right after that king, the rabbis (or, rather, still proto-rabbis) were again firmly in charge.
No mention of rabbinic power during the resettlement of the Jerusalem and the building of the Second Temple. The high priest and the mighty men have all the power.
No mention of anything that looks like a rabbi during the revolt of Mattathias ben Johanan. He is the leader of the hereditary priesthood, and all power is in his hands. He establishes a dynasty of warrior priests. Hard to imagine anyone that looks less like a rabbi. He marches in victory into the temple and ritually cleanses it, uniting the mighty man role, the priestly role, the Kingly role of leader of the mighty men, and the high priest role of leader of the hereditary priesthood, in one person. Maybe there were some people who looked to you like rabbis, but clearly all power was in the hands of the hereditary priesthood who ritually exercised the ancient and traditional role of the hereditary priesthood, led by a high priest of the line of Aaron who united in one man the role of high priest and the Davidic role of leader of the mighty men.
Moses is warrior power. Aaron is priestly power under the power of a God fearing warrior. Similarly the Davidic monarchy. Restoration of Israel is going require the same. Military rule, plus a hereditary priesthood under military rule.
The Davidic monarchy was an seizure of priestly power by warrior power, by the mighty men. According to the Old Testament God OKed this, because the Hebrews were too wicked for religious rule, and needed the more directly coercive government of Kings to keep order, with hereditary priests administering and interpreting the law under God fearing Kings. In the refounding of the Jerusalem and the building of the second temple, we see priestly power and warrior power side by side. No rabbis. In the revolt, we see hereditary priestly power and warrior power united in Priest Kings descended from the line of Aaron.
Rabbinic power is the usurpation of priestly power, open entry into the priesthood by men not necessarily of the line of Aaron, and we just do not see that until the priesthood of the line of Aaron is discredited by Roman conquest.
Moses is warrior power, Aaron is priestly power under the rule of a God fearing warrior. Similarly the Davidic monarchy. The Jews have returned from exile. For Judaism to return from exile, needs the temple and the priesthood. Military rule, a hereditary priesthood in the line of Aaron under military rule, and the Rabbis have to politely bow out, and announce their job done. Rabbinic Judaism is an inherently subversive religion of defeat and exile. Israel needs a state temple. The reason you don’t have the Temple and Judaism, rather than progressivism, as the state religion of Israel, is because the rabbis do not actually want it back. They want Judaism to remain in exile. This present day misbehavior of the rabbis recapitulates and demonstrates the ancient history I just told you in this comment. They rather like being in permanent opposition while the US Government State Department rules Israel with Harvard as its priesthood.
Slight correction: he kicked in the nuds only a group of them. I consider Sadducees to be also from a group of proto-rabbis. Although Sadducees were oriented towards representing priestly (cohens) elite and the latter’s tradition — more in touch with with the ancient Mosaic, (Amorite) pastoralist understanding of the Law, as opposed to the ways and interpretations of the settled people, the Canaanites-cum-Jews.
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