Form: Excerpt

  • Lying: The Currency of Cowardice

    by Paul Franklin —“In every case I can think of, there is no difference between a liar and a coward (in the meaning of liars we use). In other words, you can judge for one or the other: veracity or cowardice, they are both the same. Basically that’s it. No need for any complicated tomes. I have spent many years, defending myself from cowards, in every place in society, who always unite in their cowardice – with lies being a form of currency over which they might unite. And all too often, it is nearly always some coward – a yellow-backed worm (and I don’t care if he showed bravery elsewhere) – putting some woman up to do his dirty work for him. And I never met a woman who wasn’t up to it. Some women have had the balls themselves to initiate their own attacks. And I know not one single woman who is not utterly shameless when push comes to shove. And you can call that cowardice too.”—Paul Franklin

  • Frames….

    by Bill Joslin So to distill this down a bit more. As far as I can tell, cognition has three broad frames, experiential (perceptual), imperative (action-reaction), and consequential (perceptual feedback of action-reaction). The progress of disambiguation of grammars has been the incremental movement toward accounting for all three frames. The ambiguous grammars have been a reduction in accounting to all three frames (ussually preferences one frame over others). The accounting and interplay between each frame (a market) decontextualizes the information to the consequential frame (the only frame which encompasses the other two). What we are doing with testimonialism is translating experiential and imperative data into a consequential frame where it can be tested (falsified)

  • We Depend Upon Morality

    —“We depend upon Morality in the negotiation between oursleves and others for front row seats (or even seats half way) in the present theater of life. The strong have less of a need to negotiate than the weak. The weak are more fanatic about morality precisely because they lack the (inner) strength to manifest themselves in life. They need the approval of others. And the weaker you are, the more nonsense you drag into the moral negotiation.”—Roger Dols Good articulation – yes. Also. If you are very wealthy (which i have been), with any degree of influence (power), then you come to understand that nothing changes whatsoever, other than the wealth and influence of those who you compete with, and their decreasing compatibility of interests with you. and you can trust no one. It is nearly as difficult to defend wealth as it is to make it.

  • We Depend Upon Morality

    —“We depend upon Morality in the negotiation between oursleves and others for front row seats (or even seats half way) in the present theater of life. The strong have less of a need to negotiate than the weak. The weak are more fanatic about morality precisely because they lack the (inner) strength to manifest themselves in life. They need the approval of others. And the weaker you are, the more nonsense you drag into the moral negotiation.”—Roger Dols Good articulation – yes. Also. If you are very wealthy (which i have been), with any degree of influence (power), then you come to understand that nothing changes whatsoever, other than the wealth and influence of those who you compete with, and their decreasing compatibility of interests with you. and you can trust no one. It is nearly as difficult to defend wealth as it is to make it.

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status. JOSLIN HITS IT OUT OF THE PARK. by Bill Josli

    Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    JOSLIN HITS IT OUT OF THE PARK.
    by Bill Joslin
    (Just want to say that no one else has made it this far, and bill is rocking it.)

    1 ———-

    PSYCHOLOGY
    Psychology – ostensive (experiential) argumentation to account for behavior.

    Incentive: seek a monopoly on perception via ostensive grammars

    Alternative: Aquisitionism where by human behaviour can be fully accounted via incentives.

    Outcome: a market for coherence via descriptive explanations of behaviour which can be tested with low or no context (declarative).

    2 ————

    POLITICAL *-OCRACY
    Any *-ocracy (democracy, oligarchy, Plutarchy, monarchy etc) are systemic moral justifications for control of nomocracy argued through imperatives.

    Incentive: to obtain a monopoly on the creation and execution of law – power over others argued via preferences for one “the good”.

    Alternative: propertarianism whereby all transactions must meet the criteria of perfect reciprocity.

    Outcome: disambiguous execution of law. A market for the creation of many “goods”.

    3 ———-

    RELIGIOUS THEOLOGY
    Religio-philosophical are sets of arguments for prefered criteria of measuring truth.

    Incentive: obtain a monopoly on truth (justify god like proclamations about reality). Unwarranted declaration.

    Alternative: Testimonialism which uses all available criteria to demonstrate due diligence in eliminating error, bias, and deception

    Outcome: a market for coherence.

    4 ———

    MONOPOLY(DECEPTION) VS MARKET(TRUTH)
    In all cases above, the former uses ostensive or imperative grammars to obtain a monopoly.

    Each alternative “deframes” arguments, converting ostensive and imperative grammars into declarative statements.

    Why? Because only the declarative has the quality of being testable.

    This results in the destruction of monopolies over perception, law (violence) and truth allowing reality to dictate decisions and actions.


    Source date (UTC): 2018-07-08 23:53:25 UTC

  • FRAMES…. by Bill Joslin So to distill this down a bit more. As far as I can te

    FRAMES….

    by Bill Joslin

    So to distill this down a bit more.

    As far as I can tell, cognition has three broad frames, experiential (perceptual), imperative (action-reaction), and consequential (perceptual feedback of action-reaction).

    The progress of disambiguation of grammars has been the incremental movement toward accounting for all three frames. The ambiguous grammars have been a reduction in accounting to all three frames (ussually preferences one frame over others).

    The accounting and interplay between each frame (a market) decontextualizes the information to the consequential frame (the only frame which encompasses the other two).

    What we are doing with testimonialism is translating experiential and imperative data into a consequential frame where it can be tested (falsified)


    Source date (UTC): 2018-07-08 20:10:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle updated his status. CLASS HIERARCHY AND THEIR METHODS OF ASSERTIO

    Curt Doolittle updated his status.

    CLASS HIERARCHY AND THEIR METHODS OF ASSERTION
    by John Mark

    I like to try to put Curt’s stuff in language the avg IQ tier can understand more easily (forces me to understand it better). Here’s my attempt at this one:

    Aristocracy: War “We will apply violence in whatever way necessary/beneficial – up to and including war conquest and colonization – in order to suppress parasitism upon our productive group/tribe and to keep it from becoming weak or losing (any form of) capital.”

    Upper: Law “Due to our wealth and influence we have the opportunity to affect the rules of society in a way that benefits us – sometimes the way we affect the rules can be good, sometimes bad (e.g. buying/owning corrupt politicians to write rules that allow us to privatize gains and socialize losses to everyone else).”

    Upper Middle: Science (Econ) “We are looking for a competitive advantage so we like to use science/R&D/innovation to give us an edge. We make economic arguments (often libertarian) because we don’t want our efforts to get ahead to be hindered.”

    Middle Class: Philosophy “We wish we had more power than we do, but we feel we have a shot at getting more power or at least affecting those in power, plus we often don’t like what the upper class does when they act in their own interest, so we put a lot of effort into thinking and talking about how to make sense of the world and what those who have more power than us *should* do (what we wish they would do). (What we often don’t realize is the upper class doesn’t give a rip about what we think they should do.)”

    Working Class: Religion “We want/need something to make us feel better about life and give us a safe, reassuring sense of community (we don’t have much else). Religion fits the bill.”

    Underclass: Intuition “We are not smart but we don’t know it (Dunning Kruger), and we are low status, hate being so, and don’t know how to (are unable to) fix it, so we instinctively feel the world is not fair and those more successful than us must be cheating somehow. Thus leftism/socialism/communism/SJWism tells us what we want to hear and we are extremely enthusiastic about it because we have no other strategy in life, or ability to come up with or carry out any other strategy.”


    Source date (UTC): 2018-07-06 00:01:04 UTC

  • There Is Zero Chance the Government Would Win

    THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN By Anon. The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY DO THAT.) Their conclusion is as follows: They don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It’s just a matter of how long it takes. A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points. 30% of the American population will actively revolt. This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10% of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15% of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70% of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30% of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow That’s how discontent the people are and how much the people don’t support the government. The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would. Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishment’s ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford. Taking America in a land war is almost impossible. The United States is absolutely full of natural terrain chokepoints, making marching an army across it against armed resistance almost impossible, and it is large enough that no sustained air campaign would be possible. The Japanese Admiralty realized this themselves during WWII, which is why many of them were against attempting to invade. Also, by an interesting coincidence, most of those chokepoints are in hard conservative states, where the resistance would be strongest. The government would lack the ability to reclaim its own land by force, especially when the previous point about infrastructure is taken into account. President Lincoln, on the matter of potential European involvement in the first American Civil War, stated, “All the armies of Europe with a Bonaparte as a commander, could not take a drink from the Ohio.” A significant majority–between 55 and 70%–of the military would defect to the side of the citizens. The problem with suppressing the people with a military, that literature and fantasy tend to overlook or ignore, is that the military is the people, too. In order to get any military to fight their own, you first have to convince them that it is necessary to do so–that it is justified. The Communists also ran into this problem, but they overcame it with psychological conditioning and creating a dog-eat-dog atmosphere within the military. The American government having actively recruited people who are patriotic, practical, brave, who have civilian families, and having reinforced those values throughout their training process, lacks the ability to convince the majority of their fighting force to engage against their own people. The moment a civil war breaks out, over half of the American military will defect to the rebel side. They will bring military gear with them and, more dangerous, military training. lt only takes one Navy Seal or Army Ranger to potentially train hundreds of civilians into a dangerous resistance force. They’ve done it before, in other nations. You can be damn sure they can do it on their own home turf. But it gets better. At least 10% of the people who defect to the civilian side would not do so openly, and they would not abandon their posts. The moment a civil war starts, not only does America lose over half its military to the cause, but their own command structure will suddenly be infested with moles, plants, and “traitors.” There would be almost no way of knowing who is actually on their side and who is supporting the uprising. Worse yet, if one of those people happens to be the captain of one of the nuclear submarines on standby in dark water, the civil war is already lost before it even gets started. Russia has already publicly stated that it will support any rebellion in the United States against the established government and will send troops and aid to support the resistance. This is pretty self-explanatory. The last thing the government would need during a civil war is Russia breathing down its neck, but they would get exactly that. To supplement two-thirds of their own military leaving and civilians being trained by military elites, Spetsnaz would drop in and the resistance would get armor and air support from the only other nation on the planet that stands a decent chance of fighting us openly and winning. The media fearmongers because it’s profitable. The media, for all of its paid shillery, would give coverage of everything the resistance does because it is immensely profitable for them to do so. It would be guaranteed views. The only response the establishment would have would be to either allow it or order a total media blackout on the rebellion. Either way they lose, because both outcomes would awaken hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of people. We can only win on the media arena, and they can only lose. It’s merely a matter of what they think will minimize their losses. American civilians are armed and dangerous. In spite of all of the illegal attempts from the political left to disarm the American people, there are approximately 89 guns for every 100 Americans. Furthermore, we are one of the top three arms manufacturers on the planet (the others being Russia and France). The establishment would be in trouble even if their opponents were unarmed, but any rebellion of the people in America is, by definition, an armed one. They could be easily armed further by stealing weapons or even outright being given them by sympathetic interests (unsurprisingly, an overwhelming number of weapons manufacturers on American soil are deeply traditionalist, and the odds are good that many minor–and at least one major–would side with the rebels). The last resort Catch 22. The United States has an enormous stockpile of munitions and explosives, up to and including a massive number of nuclear warheads. But they cannot use any of this in this Civil War. The establishment has to play a game of “we’re the good guys” with the rest of the world while this is all taking place. There will be lines they cannot cross, because to do so would elevate the issue from being an internal matter to an international one. The moment they throw an ICBM at Ohio or drop a nuke on Austin, Texas, it stops being a civil war and becomes an international relief effort where the other militaries of the other first world nations come to save the American people from their own out-of-control and tyrannical government. The rebellion, meanwhile, is not nearly so limited re: the hypothetical nuclear submarine captain. The rebels could threaten–without bluffing–to nuke Washington DC, but the establishment has no equivalent threat they could return. ===== COMMENT ====== Former red team planner for the government here. If there was a revolution in the US, the rest of the world would get involved, fast. Depending on the type of uprising, there is a large chance that it would not be a quick affair. It would be brutal, it would be bloody, and the US government could start a global scale war. Here are the top ten issues that came up. 1) The US power grid can be taken down by a series of “surgical strikes” with the exception of the Texas grid. By surgical strikes, I mean a few marksmen (US army-tier Marksmen–the minimum requirement) hitting certain spots on the grid would fuck a lot of the military and government because they need the grid more than Bubba and his friends do. Additionally, while all government agencies have backup generators, they will be hard pressed dealing with the resultant looting and other madness that would come with power outages. This would effectively create another front for the military. It would also turn the people against the government more quickly and paralyze the government’s propaganda machine. Worse still–the key points of the US power grid are publicly obtainable information, and not only are the points too many to be effectively guarded, they are not guarded anyway. 2) The estimated desertion rate in case of a civil war is 75% in the case of a left-wing president. 50% of that would be assumed to immediately betray the president. The remaining (treasonous) military would be fighting its own. Yet another front created in the war. Additionally, there is an assumed 25-50% desertion or outright betrayal rate in three letter government agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, ATC, TSA, etc.). Additionally, it is assumed that 5% of the initial 50% betrayers would stay in their job and become saboteurs. 10% of that 50% would contain key information that would be of critical danger to the US government. Of that 10%, 1% would be able to deliver that information to the US’ foreign enemies. What you should get from this is that the second the United States government declares war on its own is the second it ceases to exist as the state we know it. 3) “Tea baggers,” “right-wing extremists,” and “oath keepers” which are considered untrained racists who aren’t “good with a gun” often are A) veterans who now have more time to have fun at the range, sometimes more than some Army units or Marine units. In addition to previous military training, B) often camp and do other outdoor activities–more than many in the military do, as the focus has gone away from field exercises, and C) often have better equipment–outside of armor and heavy weapons–than the military. However, C) is kind of irrelevant because many of the places in which these people could hide would make the kind of war the US fights with the equipment they use pointless. 4) Outside influence is a huge problem. Russia has already stated they would back a Texas separatist movement, and right now we already have enough problem keeping Islam in check. The second the US has to fight in a “civil war” is the second it becomes a proxy war between NATO and whoever wants to mess with America. While America has amazing nuclear and air defense, if it comes to a civil war you have to assume that in a best cast scenario the US military is going to be operating at 50% capacity at best. Shit would go down. Hard. And fast. And if Russia–spoiler alert: one of the best militaries in the world at fighting in an urban environment–sent trainers and helpers to rebels, you can reliably bet that they would also possibly deliver weapons to them. So instead of fighting “Timmy TeaBagger,” you are fighting “Timmy TeaBagger who is buddies with Vlad.” 5) A civil war is not just the US versus the rebels. There will be looting. There will be rioting. Cities will burn. The National Guard cannot fight both the rebels and rioters in a city that would also cut off their supplies. Additionally, if you don’t think that the rebels will send in instigators into the cities–or worse, stand alone actors (A Lone Wolf on steroids. Think Timothy McVeigh, but instead of one van they have a whole fleet of them. A good movie example would be Bane)–you would be mistaken. If the US government cannot even help its own people, why would its own people support the remaining (treasonous) military? Worse yet, if someone emptied out prisons (There are more prisoners in the US than there are people in the entire Chinese Army), you would have more crime than the police could ever handle. 6) Logistics and infrastructure in the US are crumbling and failing. Any war fought against a rebellion in the US would be a logistical nightmare, even before the rebels started going full Al-Qaida and putting IEDs in the road. A retired general who was contracting with us on the team said, “The only thing holding together the US’ infrastructure is duct tape and the will of the Department of Transportation. And often enough, there isn’t enough duct tape.” Your most loyal cities to the US government, as we polled, are also the most logistically easy to cut off. NYC? San Fran? L.A.? D.C.? Baltimore? Most of them require crossing water to enter, from certain directions. Most of them have critical airports. Some of them have critical ocean ports. If anything happened to just TWO of the cities on the list, it would create a logistical clusterfuck. 7) Your “Johnny Reb” and “Timmy TeaBagger” states (i.e., “red” states) all have something most of your “oh so progressive,” “Aren’t we so European,” “Oh my god, we are just like Sweden,” blue states don’t. Blues are mainly consumer states. Reds are producer states. Urban areas don’t have farms. The second that shit goes down, realize a lot of those blue areas are likely to starve. In a civil war scenario, we predicted that at least 10,000 people would die of starvation if the war was not finished in a year. The numbers get worse after that. Or better, rather, for the country after the war. 8) The US has way too many choke points, and the government forces would often be on the wrong side of them. This ties into the logistical nightmare, but it also has to do with an odd phenomena. Liberals like to live near the ocean. Many of the dividers of the country, like the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, Appalachia, the Missouri River (fun fact: the biggest choke point for the US government is in Missouri) are red state areas. Sure, air travel is a thing, but a majority of the US government’s needs would have to travel by ground. Even still, many of the major airports are outside of the city. Of course, the US would use military base air fields, but if civil war did break out… which bases would be safe? Which ones would have fallen to the deserters? 9) PR Nightmare. Every rebel killed on CNN would be spun as “the US government killed X Civilians today in a strike” on foreign news and pirate media not owned by the government. That is–as pointed out earlier–if the US media could even function in a civil war or uprising. Your “rebel scum” know that the main thing that holds together the US–nay life in the US as we know it–is the 24 hour news cycle and the media. The second it’s gone, you are going to have urban anarchy. If you are from America, can you imagine a day without TV, newspaper, or Internet? Your average urban youth can’t. If you don’t think that isn’t going to cause rioting, you must have a real high regard for how much restraint they have. Assume in a civil war that your ability to talk to the people is compromised. Also assume that in the case of a civil war that rebels may know how to monitor conversations like the US does, as there are manuals online on how to do so. 10) This one is either 1 or 10, depending on who is asked. The US will never nuke its own. The second it does, they have lost the civil war and other countries will come to “liberate” the US from its own “repressive regime.” Additionally, if any general, minuteman, nuke tech, or nuke sub captain decided to side with the rebellion, the US government is immediately SOL. In short: The second that a “civilian uprising” or “extremist group terrorist attack” turns into “civil war” is the second the US loses. As a result, you will never see a civil war. You will see Waco, you will see Bundy Ranch, you will see all sorts of militant group confrontations and maybe even some skirmishes. But the US government fears its own people way the fuck too much to ever start a civil war. As an American, I want all other Americans here to remember this. The government is against you, almost openly now, but they also know that they cannot win if it comes to open war. We have a trump card they cannot match. If it comes to a fight, THEY WILL LOSE, so there are elements in the establishment who will do absolutely everything in their power to prevent it from coming to that. The US Government is not in support of its people, and the people are not in support of the government. It is within the means of certain interests to start World War III simply as a distraction to avoid an American Civil War, because, by their reckoning, it is better to ruin other “lesser” nations like Syria and spill the blood of patriots than lose their own grip on power. ***********YOU HEARD RIGHT. WORLD WAR III ITSELF COULD BE A DELIBERATE FALSE FLAG TO PREVENT A POWER CHANGE IN AMERICA. REMEMBER THIS.***********

  • There Is Zero Chance the Government Would Win

    THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN By Anon. The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY DO THAT.) Their conclusion is as follows: They don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It’s just a matter of how long it takes. A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points. 30% of the American population will actively revolt. This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10% of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15% of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70% of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30% of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow That’s how discontent the people are and how much the people don’t support the government. The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would. Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishment’s ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford. Taking America in a land war is almost impossible. The United States is absolutely full of natural terrain chokepoints, making marching an army across it against armed resistance almost impossible, and it is large enough that no sustained air campaign would be possible. The Japanese Admiralty realized this themselves during WWII, which is why many of them were against attempting to invade. Also, by an interesting coincidence, most of those chokepoints are in hard conservative states, where the resistance would be strongest. The government would lack the ability to reclaim its own land by force, especially when the previous point about infrastructure is taken into account. President Lincoln, on the matter of potential European involvement in the first American Civil War, stated, “All the armies of Europe with a Bonaparte as a commander, could not take a drink from the Ohio.” A significant majority–between 55 and 70%–of the military would defect to the side of the citizens. The problem with suppressing the people with a military, that literature and fantasy tend to overlook or ignore, is that the military is the people, too. In order to get any military to fight their own, you first have to convince them that it is necessary to do so–that it is justified. The Communists also ran into this problem, but they overcame it with psychological conditioning and creating a dog-eat-dog atmosphere within the military. The American government having actively recruited people who are patriotic, practical, brave, who have civilian families, and having reinforced those values throughout their training process, lacks the ability to convince the majority of their fighting force to engage against their own people. The moment a civil war breaks out, over half of the American military will defect to the rebel side. They will bring military gear with them and, more dangerous, military training. lt only takes one Navy Seal or Army Ranger to potentially train hundreds of civilians into a dangerous resistance force. They’ve done it before, in other nations. You can be damn sure they can do it on their own home turf. But it gets better. At least 10% of the people who defect to the civilian side would not do so openly, and they would not abandon their posts. The moment a civil war starts, not only does America lose over half its military to the cause, but their own command structure will suddenly be infested with moles, plants, and “traitors.” There would be almost no way of knowing who is actually on their side and who is supporting the uprising. Worse yet, if one of those people happens to be the captain of one of the nuclear submarines on standby in dark water, the civil war is already lost before it even gets started. Russia has already publicly stated that it will support any rebellion in the United States against the established government and will send troops and aid to support the resistance. This is pretty self-explanatory. The last thing the government would need during a civil war is Russia breathing down its neck, but they would get exactly that. To supplement two-thirds of their own military leaving and civilians being trained by military elites, Spetsnaz would drop in and the resistance would get armor and air support from the only other nation on the planet that stands a decent chance of fighting us openly and winning. The media fearmongers because it’s profitable. The media, for all of its paid shillery, would give coverage of everything the resistance does because it is immensely profitable for them to do so. It would be guaranteed views. The only response the establishment would have would be to either allow it or order a total media blackout on the rebellion. Either way they lose, because both outcomes would awaken hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of people. We can only win on the media arena, and they can only lose. It’s merely a matter of what they think will minimize their losses. American civilians are armed and dangerous. In spite of all of the illegal attempts from the political left to disarm the American people, there are approximately 89 guns for every 100 Americans. Furthermore, we are one of the top three arms manufacturers on the planet (the others being Russia and France). The establishment would be in trouble even if their opponents were unarmed, but any rebellion of the people in America is, by definition, an armed one. They could be easily armed further by stealing weapons or even outright being given them by sympathetic interests (unsurprisingly, an overwhelming number of weapons manufacturers on American soil are deeply traditionalist, and the odds are good that many minor–and at least one major–would side with the rebels). The last resort Catch 22. The United States has an enormous stockpile of munitions and explosives, up to and including a massive number of nuclear warheads. But they cannot use any of this in this Civil War. The establishment has to play a game of “we’re the good guys” with the rest of the world while this is all taking place. There will be lines they cannot cross, because to do so would elevate the issue from being an internal matter to an international one. The moment they throw an ICBM at Ohio or drop a nuke on Austin, Texas, it stops being a civil war and becomes an international relief effort where the other militaries of the other first world nations come to save the American people from their own out-of-control and tyrannical government. The rebellion, meanwhile, is not nearly so limited re: the hypothetical nuclear submarine captain. The rebels could threaten–without bluffing–to nuke Washington DC, but the establishment has no equivalent threat they could return. ===== COMMENT ====== Former red team planner for the government here. If there was a revolution in the US, the rest of the world would get involved, fast. Depending on the type of uprising, there is a large chance that it would not be a quick affair. It would be brutal, it would be bloody, and the US government could start a global scale war. Here are the top ten issues that came up. 1) The US power grid can be taken down by a series of “surgical strikes” with the exception of the Texas grid. By surgical strikes, I mean a few marksmen (US army-tier Marksmen–the minimum requirement) hitting certain spots on the grid would fuck a lot of the military and government because they need the grid more than Bubba and his friends do. Additionally, while all government agencies have backup generators, they will be hard pressed dealing with the resultant looting and other madness that would come with power outages. This would effectively create another front for the military. It would also turn the people against the government more quickly and paralyze the government’s propaganda machine. Worse still–the key points of the US power grid are publicly obtainable information, and not only are the points too many to be effectively guarded, they are not guarded anyway. 2) The estimated desertion rate in case of a civil war is 75% in the case of a left-wing president. 50% of that would be assumed to immediately betray the president. The remaining (treasonous) military would be fighting its own. Yet another front created in the war. Additionally, there is an assumed 25-50% desertion or outright betrayal rate in three letter government agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, ATC, TSA, etc.). Additionally, it is assumed that 5% of the initial 50% betrayers would stay in their job and become saboteurs. 10% of that 50% would contain key information that would be of critical danger to the US government. Of that 10%, 1% would be able to deliver that information to the US’ foreign enemies. What you should get from this is that the second the United States government declares war on its own is the second it ceases to exist as the state we know it. 3) “Tea baggers,” “right-wing extremists,” and “oath keepers” which are considered untrained racists who aren’t “good with a gun” often are A) veterans who now have more time to have fun at the range, sometimes more than some Army units or Marine units. In addition to previous military training, B) often camp and do other outdoor activities–more than many in the military do, as the focus has gone away from field exercises, and C) often have better equipment–outside of armor and heavy weapons–than the military. However, C) is kind of irrelevant because many of the places in which these people could hide would make the kind of war the US fights with the equipment they use pointless. 4) Outside influence is a huge problem. Russia has already stated they would back a Texas separatist movement, and right now we already have enough problem keeping Islam in check. The second the US has to fight in a “civil war” is the second it becomes a proxy war between NATO and whoever wants to mess with America. While America has amazing nuclear and air defense, if it comes to a civil war you have to assume that in a best cast scenario the US military is going to be operating at 50% capacity at best. Shit would go down. Hard. And fast. And if Russia–spoiler alert: one of the best militaries in the world at fighting in an urban environment–sent trainers and helpers to rebels, you can reliably bet that they would also possibly deliver weapons to them. So instead of fighting “Timmy TeaBagger,” you are fighting “Timmy TeaBagger who is buddies with Vlad.” 5) A civil war is not just the US versus the rebels. There will be looting. There will be rioting. Cities will burn. The National Guard cannot fight both the rebels and rioters in a city that would also cut off their supplies. Additionally, if you don’t think that the rebels will send in instigators into the cities–or worse, stand alone actors (A Lone Wolf on steroids. Think Timothy McVeigh, but instead of one van they have a whole fleet of them. A good movie example would be Bane)–you would be mistaken. If the US government cannot even help its own people, why would its own people support the remaining (treasonous) military? Worse yet, if someone emptied out prisons (There are more prisoners in the US than there are people in the entire Chinese Army), you would have more crime than the police could ever handle. 6) Logistics and infrastructure in the US are crumbling and failing. Any war fought against a rebellion in the US would be a logistical nightmare, even before the rebels started going full Al-Qaida and putting IEDs in the road. A retired general who was contracting with us on the team said, “The only thing holding together the US’ infrastructure is duct tape and the will of the Department of Transportation. And often enough, there isn’t enough duct tape.” Your most loyal cities to the US government, as we polled, are also the most logistically easy to cut off. NYC? San Fran? L.A.? D.C.? Baltimore? Most of them require crossing water to enter, from certain directions. Most of them have critical airports. Some of them have critical ocean ports. If anything happened to just TWO of the cities on the list, it would create a logistical clusterfuck. 7) Your “Johnny Reb” and “Timmy TeaBagger” states (i.e., “red” states) all have something most of your “oh so progressive,” “Aren’t we so European,” “Oh my god, we are just like Sweden,” blue states don’t. Blues are mainly consumer states. Reds are producer states. Urban areas don’t have farms. The second that shit goes down, realize a lot of those blue areas are likely to starve. In a civil war scenario, we predicted that at least 10,000 people would die of starvation if the war was not finished in a year. The numbers get worse after that. Or better, rather, for the country after the war. 8) The US has way too many choke points, and the government forces would often be on the wrong side of them. This ties into the logistical nightmare, but it also has to do with an odd phenomena. Liberals like to live near the ocean. Many of the dividers of the country, like the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, Appalachia, the Missouri River (fun fact: the biggest choke point for the US government is in Missouri) are red state areas. Sure, air travel is a thing, but a majority of the US government’s needs would have to travel by ground. Even still, many of the major airports are outside of the city. Of course, the US would use military base air fields, but if civil war did break out… which bases would be safe? Which ones would have fallen to the deserters? 9) PR Nightmare. Every rebel killed on CNN would be spun as “the US government killed X Civilians today in a strike” on foreign news and pirate media not owned by the government. That is–as pointed out earlier–if the US media could even function in a civil war or uprising. Your “rebel scum” know that the main thing that holds together the US–nay life in the US as we know it–is the 24 hour news cycle and the media. The second it’s gone, you are going to have urban anarchy. If you are from America, can you imagine a day without TV, newspaper, or Internet? Your average urban youth can’t. If you don’t think that isn’t going to cause rioting, you must have a real high regard for how much restraint they have. Assume in a civil war that your ability to talk to the people is compromised. Also assume that in the case of a civil war that rebels may know how to monitor conversations like the US does, as there are manuals online on how to do so. 10) This one is either 1 or 10, depending on who is asked. The US will never nuke its own. The second it does, they have lost the civil war and other countries will come to “liberate” the US from its own “repressive regime.” Additionally, if any general, minuteman, nuke tech, or nuke sub captain decided to side with the rebellion, the US government is immediately SOL. In short: The second that a “civilian uprising” or “extremist group terrorist attack” turns into “civil war” is the second the US loses. As a result, you will never see a civil war. You will see Waco, you will see Bundy Ranch, you will see all sorts of militant group confrontations and maybe even some skirmishes. But the US government fears its own people way the fuck too much to ever start a civil war. As an American, I want all other Americans here to remember this. The government is against you, almost openly now, but they also know that they cannot win if it comes to open war. We have a trump card they cannot match. If it comes to a fight, THEY WILL LOSE, so there are elements in the establishment who will do absolutely everything in their power to prevent it from coming to that. The US Government is not in support of its people, and the people are not in support of the government. It is within the means of certain interests to start World War III simply as a distraction to avoid an American Civil War, because, by their reckoning, it is better to ruin other “lesser” nations like Syria and spill the blood of patriots than lose their own grip on power. ***********YOU HEARD RIGHT. WORLD WAR III ITSELF COULD BE A DELIBERATE FALSE FLAG TO PREVENT A POWER CHANGE IN AMERICA. REMEMBER THIS.***********

  • The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

    The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey The clash between the classical order and Christianity is a tale of murder and vandalism wrought by religious zealotry, evoking modern-day parallels Tim Whitmarsh Thu 28 Dec 2017 02.30 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 09.17 EST “The theologian,” wrote Edward Gibbon in his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” Gibbon was a child of the European Enlightenment, and he viewed his task as a historian of early Christianity as a dispassionate, scientific one: to see things as they are, rather than as the pious would want them to be. The conclusions he reached were, perhaps inevitably, controversial in his day. The pre-Christian Roman empire, he believed, was characterised by “religious harmony”, and the Romans were interested more in good governance than in imposing religious orthodoxy on their many subjects. A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its “exclusive zeal for the truth of religion”, a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a class of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel and punitive. Christianity is painted as brave and principled This spirit permeates Catherine Nixey’s book. In her view, the standard modern picture of the Roman empire’s conversion remains, even 200 years after Gibbon, glossed by Christian triumphalism. History, she believes, has given the Church an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel, arbitrary and punitive; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, “a chilly, nihilistic world”. Christianity, conversely, is painted as brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The task she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the error and corruption of the early Church. This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyra in the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger. The story of the destruction of Athena is the amuse-bouche for a feast of tales of murder, vandalism, wilful destruction of cultural heritage and general joylessness. We hear of the brutal end of Hypatia, the Alexandrian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a Christian crowd in the early fifth century (an event dramatised in the Spanish movie Agora). Less well known, in the anglophone world at any rate, is the case of Shenoute. A contemporary of Hypatia’s, he lived further south, in rural Egypt, where he became the abbot of the complex now known as the White Monastery (which still stands in today’s town of Sohag). Shenoute is now considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a particularly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would break into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and smash up any property they objected to on religious grounds. Even more than the physical violence, it is the cultural devastation that draws Nixey’s eye. Early in the book, she describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased. Destroying a pagan statue or burning a book becomes a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb Where did this appetite for destruction come from? Nixey’s short answer is a simple one: demons. Many ancient Christians believed that the world we inhabit is a perilous place, crowded with malevolent supernatural beings, who sometimes manifest themselves in the form of fake gods. It is the Christian’s duty to root these out. Destroying a “pagan” statue or burning a book, then, is a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb: you save the healthy whole by preventing the spread of the infection. If you think that a marble statue is possessed by a demon, then it makes a kind of sense to dig out its eyes and score a cross in its forehead. If you think, along with the North-African theologian Tertullian, that “Satan and his angels have filled the whole world” and laid traps for the virtuous in the form of sensual pleasures, then avoiding the Romans’ bathhouses, dinners and spectacles is perfectly rational – as is a disdain for sexuality. The early Christian world was in a state of perpetual metaphysical war, and choosing sides inevitably meant knowing your enemies. But demons are only half of the story. The real blame, for Nixey, lies at the door of the church fathers, whose spine-tingling sermons ramped up the polarising rhetoric of violent difference. They wove “a rich tapestry of metaphor”, construing theological opponents of all kinds as bestial, verminous, diseased and – naturally – demonic. It was language itself – the forceful, lurid language of a handful of elite males – that stoked the fires of Christian rage against its enemies, fires that blazed for a millennium: “the intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.” Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would expect from a distinguished journalist, every page is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an expert eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill. Writing critically about Christian history is doubly difficult: not only are the ancient sources complex, scattered and disputed, but also there are legions of modern readers waiting to pounce on the tiniest perceived error, infelicity or offence. If there is a weakness in this book, it stems precisely from its Gibbonian roots. This is, fundamentally, a restatement of the Enlightenment view that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilisation’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). Nixey studied classics, and her affection for classical culture runs deep: she writes with great affection about the sophisticated philosophies of the stoics and epicureans, the buoyantly sexual (and not infrequently sexist) poetry of Catullus and Ovid, the bluff bonhomie of Horace and the unsentimental pragmatism of men of affairs such as Cicero and Pliny. When she speaks of classical culture and religion she tends to use such descriptions as “fundamentally liberal and generous” and “ebullient”. How, then, do we explain the Romans’ unfortunate habit of killing Christians? Nixey thinks, like Gibbon, that they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the civic order that the unruly Christians imperilled. Ancient accounts, she argues, show imperial officials who “simply do not want to execute”; rather, they are forced into it by the Christians’ perverse lust for martyrdom. Now, martyrdom certainly has a strangely magnetic allure, as we know from our own era, but the Romans were hardly bemused, passive bystanders in all of this. There is something of the zero-sum game at work here: in seeking to expose the error and corruption of the early Christian world, Nixey comes close to veiling the pre-Christian Romans’ own barbarous qualities. But this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to judge it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.