Friday, April 30, 2021

More Pompous Pronouncements

It's a truism that people are conservative about what they know best. Which is why people who know nothing are the ideal liberals.

Systemic racism. What, like the minimum wage? 

Neither causality nor purpose are intelligible without the element of chance, AKA  holy happenstance; without it, what is, is.

Surprise must be a primordial category, contained eminently in God. Without it, creation is a machine and art an algorithm. Determinism is absolute boredom. 

For a child, an immutable parent would constitute the ultimate nightmare. It is a living death.

The message of the internally related Trinity: don't absolutize the Absolute.

Logic is circular. But there are larger and smaller circles, not to mention a sphere.

Traces of spirit etched in time. Metahistory and history.

Knowledge is the conquest of ignorance, wisdom its restoration.

Let's start with what we don't know. It's the first step to sanity.

Tradition is an ensemble of successful adaptations and solutions to problems we no longer remember precisely because they were successful. Which is why solutions proposed by the left are predicated on not understanding the problem. 

Intelligence is the power without which humans are deprived access to whole worlds, including the most interesting material ones.

Political correctness is a declaration of war by omniscience on curiosity.   

Virtue signaling alerts us to toxic narcissism and dangerous psychopathy. Understood this way, the snake's  rattle is a courtesy.

A wise man said that without God, even truth is an idol. Which is why the first commandment precedes the second and third. No God, no truth, all vanity.

To be the man you gotta beat The Man. Or god and God, in the case of the left. 

 

More Pompous Pronouncements

It's a truism that people are conservative about what they know best. Which is why people who know nothing are the ideal liberals.

Systemic racism. What, like the minimum wage? 

Neither causality nor purpose are intelligible without the element of chance, AKA  holy happenstance; without it, what is, is.

Surprise must be a primordial category, contained eminently in God. Without it, creation is a machine and art an algorithm. Determinism is absolute boredom. 

For a child, an immutable parent would constitute the ultimate nightmare. It is a living death.

The message of the internally related Trinity: don't absolutize the Absolute.

Logic is circular. But there are larger and smaller circles, not to mention a sphere.

Traces of spirit etched in time. Metahistory and history.

Knowledge is the conquest of ignorance, wisdom its restoration.

Let's start with what we don't know. It's the first step to sanity.

Tradition is an ensemble of successful adaptations and solutions to problems we no longer remember precisely because they were successful. Which is why solutions proposed by the left are predicated on not understanding the problem. 

Intelligence is the power without which humans are deprived access to whole worlds, including the most interesting material ones.

Political correctness is a declaration of war by omniscience on curiosity.   

Virtue signaling alerts us to toxic narcissism and dangerous psychopathy. Understood this way, the snake's  rattle is a courtesy.

A wise man said that without God, even truth is an idol. Which is why the first commandment precedes the second and third. No God, no truth, all vanity.

To be the man you gotta beat The Man. Or god and God, in the case of the left. 

 

Thursday, April 29, 2021

More Brain Droppings

Just some more aphorisms I've been toying with...

Race, class, and gender are shorthand for the reduction of essence to existence, subject to subjection, bee to hive.

"Social justice" was invented to enable losers and criminals to launder their envy, hatred, and destructiveness.

The left declares war on the very hierarchy that is the cause and consequence of liberty and equality.

Progressivism: a lawsuit against the real on behalf of the perfect.

Crimes of the left are purified of their criminality by the angels of good intention.

In the left's war on civilization, language is a battlefield: words are the POWs, concepts the wounded, and souls the dead. 

In order justify its greed for power, it is prudent for the state to attempt the impossible. Its inevitable failure justifies the seizure of more power.

Liberation and social justice, AKA chaos and theft.

Direct assaults on liberty are more difficult than attacks on the order that renders it possible.

White liberals will never forgive black conservatives for having no need of them.

The left is always clamoring for an honest conversation about race. In order to smoke out and denounce the honest.

There's no White Privilege like the privilege of pretending it exists in order to gain more of it.

Progressivism: time become demonic.

Denying the existence of evil is naive, but comprehensive schemes to abolish it are diabolical.

I have a theory called Climate Stasis. It's also always wrong.

Does God require narrativity because history exists, or vice versa?

The left isn't abandoning colorblindness because it failed but because it succeeded.

Even in dreams we are "in" a world. Just watch the news.

There exists an eminent contingency in God: his creativity.  

To say time is an illusion is to say there is no essential distinction between concrete facts and abstract possibilities, or in other words, nothing is possible. 

More Brain Droppings

Just some more aphorisms I've been toying with...

Race, class, and gender are shorthand for the reduction of essence to existence, subject to subjection, bee to hive.

"Social justice" was invented to enable losers and criminals to launder their envy, hatred, and destructiveness.

The left declares war on the very hierarchy that is the cause and consequence of liberty and equality.

Progressivism: a lawsuit against the real on behalf of the perfect.

Crimes of the left are purified of their criminality by the angels of good intention.

In the left's war on civilization, language is a battlefield: words are the POWs, concepts the wounded, and souls the dead. 

In order justify its greed for power, it is prudent for the state to attempt the impossible. Its inevitable failure justifies the seizure of more power.

Liberation and social justice, AKA chaos and theft.

Direct assaults on liberty are more difficult than attacks on the order that renders it possible.

White liberals will never forgive black conservatives for having no need of them.

The left is always clamoring for an honest conversation about race. In order to smoke out and denounce the honest.

There's no White Privilege like the privilege of pretending it exists in order to gain more of it.

Progressivism: time become demonic.

Denying the existence of evil is naive, but comprehensive schemes to abolish it are diabolical.

I have a theory called Climate Stasis. It's also always wrong.

Does God require narrativity because history exists, or vice versa?

The left isn't abandoning colorblindness because it failed but because it succeeded.

Even in dreams we are "in" a world. Just watch the news.

There exists an eminent contingency in God: his creativity.  

To say time is an illusion is to say there is no essential distinction between concrete facts and abstract possibilities, or in other words, nothing is possible. 

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

The Wisdom of a Fool

Lately I feel like I have nothing much to add to the argument, or at least nothing I haven't said before. I do, however, have a bunch of aphorisms, such as 

Faking intelligence is easy. Pretending to be witty is impossible. 

It's no one's fault if you reject free will.

Biden's spending plan: ripping off the future and passing the savings along to you!

Social Justice is envy with a PhD. 

Climate models may not be perfect, but at least they're more accurate than the climate.

Progressivism is natural selection in reverse: rewarding failure to adapt.

Civil rights activism, the grift that keeps grifting.

White privilege: the right to have a low IQ without blaming another race.

History will not be kind to those who anthropomorphize history. Nor are those who think history has sides on the right side of history. 

If we can put a man on the moon, then surely we can come up with a better cliché.

It only looks like the left wants to normalize pathology. The real goal is to pathologize normality.  

Gentlemen, you can't defend the Constitution here! This is the Supreme Court!

Bruce Jenner for governor: The Man Who Would be Queen.  

Happiness is pretty simple for a leftist: something to blame, someone to hate, and someplace to wreck.   

Socialism only killed 100 million people in the 20th century because the wrong people were in charge. With more effective leaders, they would have surpassed 200 million.

The most disordered among us are ordered by the perception of oppression. Without the projected structure of perceived racism, they'd have no structure at all.

Theories that can neither predict nor be falsified are maps to utopia.

If a woman has the right not to be sexually harassed, what is the corresponding responsibility? 

I'm old enough to remember when black was a race and not just an ideology.

Only liberals mean what they say. Everyone else is secretly motivated by their worst instincts.

The left isn't totally opposed to free speech; rather, they just want to ensure that it remains safe, legal, and rare.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; for the rest, politics and journalism.

Blaming greed for income inequality is like blaming gravity for my failure to make the NBA.

The Green New Deal will create full employment by giving everyone a job pulling their neighbor's rickshaw.

Joe Biden is only incompetent to control his own affairs and family, not you and yours.

We need to eliminate scores to give more people access to athletic success.

If raising taxes makes you charitable, then supporting the military makes me a hero. 

Behead those who say Islam is violent! And loot those who say blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime!

Free college = nationalizing the means of unproductivity.

Paranoia was given to socialists to explain their failure.

The Wisdom of a Fool

Lately I feel like I have nothing much to add to the argument, or at least nothing I haven't said before. I do, however, have a bunch of aphorisms, such as 

Faking intelligence is easy. Pretending to be witty is impossible. 

It's no one's fault if you reject free will.

Biden's spending plan: ripping off the future and passing the savings along to you!

Social Justice is envy with a PhD. 

Climate models may not be perfect, but at least they're more accurate than the climate.

Progressivism is natural selection in reverse: rewarding failure to adapt.

Civil rights activism, the grift that keeps grifting.

White privilege: the right to have a low IQ without blaming another race.

History will not be kind to those who anthropomorphize history. Nor are those who think history has sides on the right side of history. 

If we can put a man on the moon, then surely we can come up with a better cliché.

It only looks like the left wants to normalize pathology. The real goal is to pathologize normality.  

Gentlemen, you can't defend the Constitution here! This is the Supreme Court!

Bruce Jenner for governor: The Man Who Would be Queen.  

Happiness is pretty simple for a leftist: something to blame, someone to hate, and someplace to wreck.   

Socialism only killed 100 million people in the 20th century because the wrong people were in charge. With more effective leaders, they would have surpassed 200 million.

The most disordered among us are ordered by the perception of oppression. Without the projected structure of perceived racism, they'd have no structure at all.

Theories that can neither predict nor be falsified are maps to utopia.

If a woman has the right not to be sexually harassed, what is the corresponding responsibility? 

I'm old enough to remember when black was a race and not just an ideology.

Only liberals mean what they say. Everyone else is secretly motivated by their worst instincts.

The left isn't totally opposed to free speech; rather, they just want to ensure that it remains safe, legal, and rare.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; for the rest, politics and journalism.

Blaming greed for income inequality is like blaming gravity for my failure to make the NBA.

The Green New Deal will create full employment by giving everyone a job pulling their neighbor's rickshaw.

Joe Biden is only incompetent to control his own affairs and family, not you and yours.

We need to eliminate scores to give more people access to athletic success.

If raising taxes makes you charitable, then supporting the military makes me a hero. 

Behead those who say Islam is violent! And loot those who say blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime!

Free college = nationalizing the means of unproductivity.

Paranoia was given to socialists to explain their failure.

Monday, April 26, 2021

Racism, Antiracism, and Anti-Antiracism

The following represents a preliminary attempt to wrap my mind around a very large subject.

Lately I've been reading a book on evolutionary psychology called Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, by Kevin MacDonald (see sidebar). Like anyone else who honestly considers the evidence of racial differences that are more than skin deep, the author is smeared as a hatethinker. Such heretics call themselves "race realists," while progressives call them Nazis. I suppose I would call myself as moderate race realist, which is still more than sufficient for banishment to the hate community.  

Granted, it's a touchy subject for a number of reasons, but it needn't be. Compare it to something a little less controversial, sexual differences. Despite the insane propagandizing of the left, normal people not only understand that men and women are fundamentally different, but prefer it that way. 

The sexes evolved through different evolutionary pathways, but are obviously complementary, one specializing in strength, competition, and abstract intelligence, the other in nurturing, intersubjectivity, and emotional intelligence, with obvious overlap in between. Why is this a problem?  

It's a problem because it clashes with progressive theology, the first principle of which is Thy Slate Shall be Blank, or Else! If we are born a blank slate, then the state can push us around like so many bags of wet cement in order to bring about utopia. 

At the same time, the evidence of evolutionary psychology implies that human nature isn't necessarily a simple and straightforward concept. For if the races are different, which is the real human? 

Here again, I don’t see this as a big problem, for just as human nature is fully instantiated in both men and women, so too is it present in all human beings of any race. Essence cannot be actualized in the absence of a form that simultaneously expresses and constrains it. 

Ah, but here’s an interesting catch, for where did this concept of a transcendent human nature come from? We don’t see it in Africa, or Asia, or India. Here at One Cosmos we regard it as a Christian idea, but for a strict evolutionist this begs the question and puts the cultural cart before the genetic horse.  

Suffice it it to say, I’ve been pondering this question for several weeks, and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory resolution. Those who have read the book of the same name will recall that I tackled this subject in my own freewheeling and somewhat naive way in Chapter 3, Psychogenesis: the Presence of Mind.    

I say "naive" for two reasons, first because I didn't understand back then that evolutionary psychology was such an offense against the one true faith of progressive Blank Slatism, and second, because I actually succumbed to a bit of B.S. of my own, since I... how to put it... overemphasized the discontinuous leap into universal human freedom, while underemphasizing the particularized genetic continuity.  

Because of the latter, it is as if human nature is present in different musical keys, or perhaps like pure light passing through a prism and coming out different colors. Thus, human nature is simultaneously no race and all races. It reminds me of the pseudo-controversy of Jesus' race. The fact that he was of Middle Eastern descent is entirely accidental to his incarnation as and of human nature as such, which no mere race can ever exhaust, otherwise we could ourselves be perfect men. 

The fact that no man can be perfect tells you a great deal, for it means that he has an essence he can never reach but is perpetually striving toward. 

The other aspect of my resolution to this problem involves the difference between belief and discovery. For example, we don't dismiss the universal truth of the theory of relativity because it was discovered by a Jew. Just as there is no such thing as "Jewish physics," I would say there is no such thing as "Christian personhood," even though Christians are responsible for discovering personhood (with all its cosmic and meta-cosmic implications).

Conversely, evolutionary psychologists regard any and all religious belief as constrained and determined by genes -- as if there is a gene for "belief," with no possibility that the belief might actually conform to transcendent truth. Obviously, biologism doesn't allow for transcendent truth, even though -- like all ideologies -- it makes an exception for the affirmation of its own truth.

On the practical/political side of the equation, the only possible solution would be a passionate embrace of the objective principles animating western civilization (rooted in genuine discoveries about human personhood), and an insistence that anyone coming into this country understand and live by them. But the left embodies the opposite: a passionate rejection of those timeless truths, accompanied by a cynical strategy of killing them via the democide of open borders. 

Let's end with an observation by Schuon, in order to deflect attention from myself:

Races exist and we cannot ignore them, less than ever now that the time of closed [genetic] universes has come to an end....

If racism is something to be rejected, so is an antiracism which errs in the opposite direction.... the fact that races are not separated in completely watertight compartments in no way means that pure races are not to be found as well as mixed ethnic groupings. Such an opinion has no meaning for the simple reason that all men have the same origin and that humanity as a whole -- often wrongly referred to as the human race -- constitutes one single species.
Or this:
the existence of Christ or of the Vedantic doctrine adds nothing to the value of a white man with a base nature any more than the barbarism of certain Africans tribes takes anything away from a black man of saintly soul...

foreign races have something complementary in relation to ourselves without there being in principle any 'lack' in us or in them either. 

And about progressives who deny the provenance of progress?

Now, there are few things so absurd as the anti-Westernism of those who are themselves westernized.

Racism, Antiracism, and Anti-Antiracism

The following represents a preliminary attempt to wrap my mind around a very large subject.

Lately I've been reading a book on evolutionary psychology called Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, by Kevin MacDonald (see sidebar). Like anyone else who honestly considers the evidence of racial differences that are more than skin deep, the author is smeared as a hatethinker. Such heretics call themselves "race realists," while progressives call them Nazis. I suppose I would call myself as moderate race realist, which is still more than sufficient for banishment to the hate community.  

Granted, it's a touchy subject for a number of reasons, but it needn't be. Compare it to something a little less controversial, sexual differences. Despite the insane propagandizing of the left, normal people not only understand that men and women are fundamentally different, but prefer it that way. 

The sexes evolved through different evolutionary pathways, but are obviously complementary, one specializing in strength, competition, and abstract intelligence, the other in nurturing, intersubjectivity, and emotional intelligence, with obvious overlap in between. Why is this a problem?  

It's a problem because it clashes with progressive theology, the first principle of which is Thy Slate Shall be Blank, or Else! If we are born a blank slate, then the state can push us around like so many bags of wet cement in order to bring about utopia. 

At the same time, the evidence of evolutionary psychology implies that human nature isn't necessarily a simple and straightforward concept. For if the races are different, which is the real human? 

Here again, I don’t see this as a big problem, for just as human nature is fully instantiated in both men and women, so too is it present in all human beings of any race. Essence cannot be actualized in the absence of a form that simultaneously expresses and constrains it. 

Ah, but here’s an interesting catch, for where did this concept of a transcendent human nature come from? We don’t see it in Africa, or Asia, or India. Here at One Cosmos we regard it as a Christian idea, but for a strict evolutionist this begs the question and puts the cultural cart before the genetic horse.  

Suffice it it to say, I’ve been pondering this question for several weeks, and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory resolution. Those who have read the book of the same name will recall that I tackled this subject in my own freewheeling and somewhat naive way in Chapter 3, Psychogenesis: the Presence of Mind.    

I say "naive" for two reasons, first because I didn't understand back then that evolutionary psychology was such an offense against the one true faith of progressive Blank Slatism, and second, because I actually succumbed to a bit of B.S. of my own, since I... how to put it... overemphasized the discontinuous leap into universal human freedom, while underemphasizing the particularized genetic continuity.  

Because of the latter, it is as if human nature is present in different musical keys, or perhaps like pure light passing through a prism and coming out different colors. Thus, human nature is simultaneously no race and all races. It reminds me of the pseudo-controversy of Jesus' race. The fact that he was of Middle Eastern descent is entirely accidental to his incarnation as and of human nature as such, which no mere race can ever exhaust, otherwise we could ourselves be perfect men. 

The fact that no man can be perfect tells you a great deal, for it means that he has an essence he can never reach but is perpetually striving toward. 

The other aspect of my resolution to this problem involves the difference between belief and discovery. For example, we don't dismiss the universal truth of the theory of relativity because it was discovered by a Jew. Just as there is no such thing as "Jewish physics," I would say there is no such thing as "Christian personhood," even though Christians are responsible for discovering personhood (with all its cosmic and meta-cosmic implications).

Conversely, evolutionary psychologists regard any and all religious belief as constrained and determined by genes -- as if there is a gene for "belief," with no possibility that the belief might actually conform to transcendent truth. Obviously, biologism doesn't allow for transcendent truth, even though -- like all ideologies -- it makes an exception for the affirmation of its own truth.

On the practical/political side of the equation, the only possible solution would be a passionate embrace of the objective principles animating western civilization (rooted in genuine discoveries about human personhood), and an insistence that anyone coming into this country understand and live by them. But the left embodies the opposite: a passionate rejection of those timeless truths, accompanied by a cynical strategy of killing them via the democide of open borders. 

Let's end with an observation by Schuon, in order to deflect attention from myself:

Races exist and we cannot ignore them, less than ever now that the time of closed [genetic] universes has come to an end....

If racism is something to be rejected, so is an antiracism which errs in the opposite direction.... the fact that races are not separated in completely watertight compartments in no way means that pure races are not to be found as well as mixed ethnic groupings. Such an opinion has no meaning for the simple reason that all men have the same origin and that humanity as a whole -- often wrongly referred to as the human race -- constitutes one single species.
Or this:
the existence of Christ or of the Vedantic doctrine adds nothing to the value of a white man with a base nature any more than the barbarism of certain Africans tribes takes anything away from a black man of saintly soul...

foreign races have something complementary in relation to ourselves without there being in principle any 'lack' in us or in them either. 

And about progressives who deny the provenance of progress?

Now, there are few things so absurd as the anti-Westernism of those who are themselves westernized.

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