Curt Doolittle

Theme: Religion

  • “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enou

    —“Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan. Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good.”— Netanyahu, quoting historian Will Durant

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-20 02:04:50 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2034813382831051075

  • Interesting. The Israelis are pushing the chips all in against both Iran and the

    Interesting. The Israelis are pushing the chips all in against both Iran and their proxies in Lebanon.

    The strategic problem with authoritarian states like Russia and Iran is their dependence upon large domestic police and paramilitary organiztions to contain the population. This is made worse when the mullahs are in charge since they are the equivalent of neighborhood activists. And unlike bureaucrats we have in most developed countries, who will merely lose their jobs (at least for a while), The regular police, then, the mullahs (political agents), the morality police (Gasht-e Ershad or Guidance Patrols), The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FARAJA), Basij paramilitary force, and the IRGC with the IRGC functioning as the ideological army.

    Local mullahs help maintain oppression by providing ideological cover, local compliance, and mobilization support—especially in conservative communities—but they are not the primary enforcers. The oppressive apparatus relies far more on the IRGC/Basij for coercion and the Supreme Leader’s centralized clerical oversight for structure. High-level clerics (not local ones) hold veto powers via constitutional bodies.

    What does this mean? It means you have to ‘off’ a lot of people, and in most cases that takes a military on one end or a population that can gain access to arms on the other.

    The Israelis have no problem doing the ‘offing’ as we have seen. But there is a lot of it to be done.

    The regime’s structure is deliberately layered, resilient, and decentralized in key ways to survive leadership decapitation, internal crises, or external pressure.

    Why “Offing” Senior Positions Isn’t Enough

    The Islamic Republic was engineered post-1979 to avoid the vulnerabilities of a single-point-of-failure system (like the Shah’s monarchy). Power is distributed across interlocking institutions, with ideological loyalty baked in at multiple levels:

    Supreme Leader → Symbolic and doctrinal head (velayat-e faqih). Killing or removing him triggers constitutional succession (e.g., Assembly of Experts or interim councils), but the system has mechanisms to replace him quickly—often with someone from the same hardline clerical-IRGC ecosystem.

    Clerical establishment → Bodies like the Assembly of Experts, Guardian Council, and Expediency Council vet leaders and policy. These are networks of thousands of mid- and lower-level clerics who provide religious legitimacy and local ideological control. Many are regime-dependent (salaries, perks), so they resist collapse.

    IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) → The real backbone. ~150,000–200,000 elite forces, plus control of the Basij paramilitary (hundreds of thousands of volunteers/mobilizable members embedded in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools). The IRGC isn’t just military—it’s an economic empire (controlling oil, construction, telecoms) and intelligence apparatus. It exists explicitly to protect the revolutionary system, not just one leader.

    Basij and security layers → Neighborhood-level surveillance, morality enforcement, and rapid-response repression. They form a “dense web” for grassroots control and crackdowns (as seen in 2022 and January 2026 protests).

    Other pillars → Judiciary (hardline-aligned), intelligence (VEVAK/MOIS), regular police (FARAJA), and even parts of the conventional army (Artesh) that can be co-opted in crises.

    Recent events (Khamenei’s death in late February 2026 airstrikes, followed by an interim council and rapid succession moves) illustrate this: The regime didn’t collapse. Instead, power shifted toward IRGC-aligned figures, with warnings of a potential “garrison state” or hardened militarized rule emerging from the vacuum.

    What Full Regime Change Would Actually Require

    Analysts and recent assessments agree that meaningful change (ending velayat-e faqih, dismantling theocratic-IRGC dominance, allowing secular/democratic transition) demands disrupting or dismantling multiple layers simultaneously:

    Massive internal uprising — Sustained, nationwide protests that overwhelm security forces (as attempted in January 2026 but brutally suppressed with 30,000+ deaths reported in some estimates).

    Significant defections or fracturing — Within the IRGC, Basij, or Artesh. Without this, loyalists regroup and repress (no major defections occurred post-Khamenei).

    Neutralizing the coercive apparatus — Targeting IRGC command structures, Basij networks, intelligence, and economic assets to break their ability to hold neighborhoods and crush dissent. Air/missile strikes alone degrade capabilities but don’t eliminate the embedded, ideological forces.

    Often external pressure — U.S./Israeli actions can weaken the regime (e.g., destroying nuclear/missile sites, killing leaders), but historical cases show air campaigns rarely achieve regime change without ground/internal follow-through (Libya, Iraq parallels cited).

    Some scenarios predict:

    IRGC takeover → A more openly militarized “garrison state” if clerics weaken.
    Survival/hardening → Regime consolidates under new hardliners.
    True collapse → Only if protests + defections + sustained external weakening create a tipping point (possible but not yet realized in 2026).

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-18 23:27:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2034411288517017832

  • Catholics as Better Supreme Court Judges and Protestants as Better Presidents I

    Catholics as Better Supreme Court Judges and Protestants as Better Presidents

    I do not mean this as a sectarian claim, nor as a claim of individual superiority, nor as a claim that theology mechanically determines office performance. I mean something narrower and more operational: different religious formations tend to cultivate different habits of mind, different relations between person and office, different modes of legitimacy, and different tolerances for authority, continuity, discretion, conscience, and mission. Those differences map unevenly onto the distinct demands of judicial office and executive office.
    The intuition, then, is not: Catholics are better people, or Protestants are better leaders. The intuition is: Catholic formation tends to produce one kind of civilizational psychology, Protestant formation another, and those psychologies fit the role-demands of judge and president differently.
    The argument begins with the offices themselves.
    A Supreme Court justice and a president do not merely exercise power in different branches. They perform different civilizational functions.
    The justice is charged with preserving continuity, constraining novelty, interpreting under inherited rules, preserving legitimacy by restraint, and subordinating will to office, text, doctrine, procedure, and precedent. The office is custodial. It is not primarily creative. It is not supposed to be prophetic. It is not supposed to be a theater of self-expression. Its legitimacy depends upon the minimization of arbitrariness and the preservation of a continuous adjudicative order across time.
    The president is charged with deciding under uncertainty, personifying political unity, acting in public time rather than merely interpreting it, imposing direction on conflict, absorbing responsibility for consequence, and converting legitimacy into motion. The office is executive. It is not primarily interpretive. It does not have the luxury of waiting upon full certainty. It does not exist merely to preserve continuity. Its legitimacy depends in part upon agency, decisiveness, representation, and the visible bearing of responsibility.
    So the first distinction is simple:
    The judge is a custodian of continuity.
    The president is an agent of directed action.
    Once that distinction is clear, the rest follows.
    The contrast at issue is not only doctrinal. It is civilizational and psychological. It concerns the kind of person each tradition tends to habituate.
    Catholic formation tends to cultivate:
    • comfort with hierarchy,
    • loyalty to institution,
    • reasoning within a transgenerational canon,
    • mediation through office and tradition,
    • willingness to distinguish principle from prudential application,
    • willingness to operate within layered authority,
    • tolerance for inherited grammar,
    • and often, a disciplined separation between person and office.
    A person formed this way tends to think: I am not the source of the order. I am a participant within an inherited order. My task is to preserve, interpret, and apply that order without dissolving it into myself.
    That is extraordinarily judge-like.
    Protestant formation tends to cultivate:
    • conscience-centered agency,
    • direct accountability,
    • moral seriousness,
    • direct relation to text,
    • reformist impulse,
    • initiative,
    • self-command,
    • willingness to act without waiting for sacramental or institutional mediation,
    • and often, a stronger tendency to internalize responsibility personally rather than institutionally.
    A person formed this way tends to think: I stand before truth more directly, bear responsibility more personally, and must act when institutions are insufficient, inert, compromised, or silent.
    That is far more president-like.
    So the contrast can be stated very plainly:
    Catholic formation tends to train fidelity within order.
    Protestant formation tends to train agency under judgment.
    The former fits judicial office more naturally.
    The latter fits executive office more naturally.
    What I am calling “Catholic” and “Protestant” here can be reduced to a difference in moral-political grammar.
    Catholic grammar tends toward mediation, hierarchy, office, continuity, canon, inheritance, commentary, and discipline under institution.
    Protestant grammar tends toward conscience, direct textual encounter, reform, mission, responsibility, initiative, and action under judgment.
    Neither grammar is universally superior. Each has virtues and liabilities. But they are not equally useful for every role.
    A high judge needs legitimacy through constraint.
    A president needs legitimacy through agency.
    The judge must preserve the authority of an order larger than himself.
    The president must bear responsibility for acting through an order that cannot move without him.
    This is why the intuition has force. It is tracking role-fit.
    A Supreme Court justice is not primarily valuable for personality, inspiration, or moral charisma. He is valuable insofar as he can subordinate appetite, faction, and improvisation to a durable interpretive order.
    He must be able to live inside inherited rules. He must distinguish text from mood, doctrine from preference, institution from self, legitimacy from applause. He must often manage difficult edge cases without abandoning the coherence of the whole. He must tolerate ambiguity without collapsing into personal will. He must preserve continuity while still adjudicating particulars.
    Catholic intellectual and institutional culture has spent centuries refining exactly this problem. Canon law, scholastic method, layered authority, doctrinal continuity, the distinction between principle and application, the habit of reasoning within an inherited structure rather than beginning from self-authorized conscience: all of this maps well onto high judicial office.
    Put simply: Catholic culture often trains for ordered interpretation under authority.
    That is why Catholic formation often looks native to appellate and especially high-court judging.
    The virtue of the Catholic judge
    The virtue is institutional self-restraint. At his best, the Catholic judge preserves order without dissolving law into personality. He knows the office is larger than the self.
    The liability of the Catholic judge
    The liability is excessive deference to institution as such. He may become too protective of continuity, procedure, or elite consensus. He may preserve the institution after justice has already begun leaking out of it. He may prefer equilibrium to clarity, stewardship to correction, prestige to confrontation.
    But this liability is still recognizably judicial. It is a distortion of the correct virtue. It is the vice nearest the judicial good.
    The presidency demands something different. The president cannot merely interpret. He must decide. He must often act before consensus, before certainty, before full information, and under conditions of conflict. He must name the conflict, bear the responsibility, unify or mobilize a public, and convert office into motion.
    Protestant culture tends to produce personalities more comfortable with precisely these burdens. The direct relation to conscience, the moral seriousness of standing personally accountable, the textual and rhetorical tendency toward proclamation rather than commentary, the reformist and mission-bearing temperament, the willingness to act without mediation: these are executive traits.
    Put simply: Protestant culture often trains for personal responsibility under judgment.
    That is why Protestant formation often looks native to presidential office, especially in the American setting where the presidency is not merely administrative but symbolic, narrative-bearing, and public-moral.
    The virtue of the Protestant president
    The virtue is responsible agency. At his best, the Protestant president bears the burden of decision openly and acts. He is willing to stand in exposed relation to consequence. He can personify national purpose and absorb blame.
    The liability of the Protestant president
    The liability is voluntarist overreach. Conviction can become crusade. Personal rectitude can be mistaken for public legitimacy. Mission can outgrow law, prudence, or institutional limit. The office can become a theater of self-righteousness, improvisation, or moral exhibition.
    But again, this liability is recognizably executive. It is the vice nearest the executive good.
    This is perhaps the clearest compression of the distinction without loss of substance.
    A great judge says: I must reduce myself so that the law can appear.
    A great president says: I must bear this office through conflict, uncertainty, and decision.
    The judicial office requires depersonalization.
    The executive office requires personification.
    Catholic formation, broadly speaking, is better at the former.
    Protestant formation, broadly speaking, is better at the latter.
    Or stated another way:
    The justice must obey the office more than himself.
    The president must often impose himself through the office.
    Catholic formation better trains the first disposition.
    Protestant formation better trains the second.
    The American regime intensifies this pattern because its legal and political institutions pull in different moral directions.
    American mass political culture is structurally Protestant even when citizens are not personally devout. It favors conscience, self-authorship, reform, mission, directness, rhetoric, individual accountability, and leadership by declaration. It expects the president not merely to administer but to signify. The president is expected to mean the nation.
    At the same time, the Supreme Court has increasingly taken on a quasi-sacerdotal character: textual, procedural, interpretive, cloistered, continuity-bearing, legitimized by restraint and inherited form. That role is congenial to Catholic formation because Catholicism has long refined the arts of institutional continuity across time.
    So America is mixed in a revealing way:
    • its political psychology is Protestant,
    • its highest judicial function is quasi-Catholic.
    That is why the intuition feels plausible even before one formalizes it.
    The clearest way to state the whole structure is by crossing religious formation with political office.
    1. Catholic × Judge
    This is the strongest fit.
    The Catholic judge tends toward institutional discipline, comfort with layered authority, continuity-preserving reasoning, and disciplined interpretation under inherited forms. He is well suited to a role whose legitimacy depends upon restraint, continuity, and the separation of person from office.
    At his best, he is a disciplined custodian of continuity.
    At his worst, he becomes an institutional apologist, preserving form after substance has decayed.
    2. Catholic × President
    This is a mixed fit.
    The Catholic president may bring seriousness, long time-horizon thinking, stewardship, and awareness of institutional consequence. Those are real virtues. But the presidency also requires decision, symbolic command, public-moral direction, and willingness to impose action under uncertainty.
    The Catholic failure mode here is managerial caution: administration where command is needed, stewardship where direction is needed, consultation where decision is needed.
    At his best, he is a prudent steward of continuity.
    At his worst, he governs as a chamberlain rather than a ruler.
    3. Protestant × Judge
    This is also a mixed, and often more dangerous, fit.
    The Protestant judge may bring moral seriousness, textual directness, honesty, and resistance to ornamental sophistry. Those are assets. But he also carries a temptation toward conscience overriding office, moral seriousness displacing legal discipline, and reformist impulse becoming jurisprudence.
    At his best, he is a grave and serious textualist.
    At his worst, he is a preacher in judicial form.
    4. Protestant × President
    This is the strongest executive fit.
    The Protestant president tends toward direct responsibility, mission-bearing rhetoric, initiative, comfort with conflict, and public agency. Those are central executive virtues. He can more easily bear the loneliness of command and act under uncertainty.
    At his best, he is a decisive national agent.
    At his worst, he becomes a crusader, mistaking private rectitude for public legitimacy and mission for limit.
    This typology is not a theorem, but it can be tested against American examples.
    Catholic justices who fit the pattern
    John Roberts
    Roberts strongly exemplifies Catholic × Judge. He is institutional, cautious, continuity-oriented, and deeply concerned with the legitimacy of the Court as such. His strength is disciplined stewardship of the institution. His liability is precisely the Catholic judicial liability: protecting equilibrium or prestige where clarity or confrontation may be warranted.
    Antonin Scalia
    Scalia is more vivid and combative, but still substantially fits the type. He operated inside a legal grammar larger than himself, argued from interpretive method rather than free-floating moral intuition, and treated law as a structured adversarial practice bounded by office. His rhetorical force gave him some Protestant energy, but his method remained deeply judicial and tradition-conscious.
    Samuel Alito
    Alito likewise fits the Catholic judicial pattern. He is disciplined, serious, and less susceptible to public applause as a governing criterion. He reads as office-conscious and tradition-conscious rather than morally performative.
    Protestant justices who illustrate the opposite risk
    Earl Warren
    Warren is a powerful example of executive moral temperament inside judicial office. He displayed moral seriousness, reforming impulse, and a willingness to use the Court as an instrument of national correction. One may praise or criticize the outcomes, but the office-psychology is clear: he often felt less like a custodian of adjudicative continuity than like a reformer seated on the Court.
    William O. Douglas
    Douglas also illustrates the liability. Personal temperament, expansive moralism, and less disciplined submission to inherited legal form made him feel more self-active inside the office than the judicial role ideally allows.
    Harry Blackmun
    Blackmun increasingly came to exemplify conscience pressing forward through office. Again, the point is not agreement or disagreement with his conclusions, but the underlying structure: moral judgment carried through role, rather than role constraining moral judgment.
    Catholic presidents who fit the mixed pattern
    John F. Kennedy
    Kennedy complicates the model. He had charisma, decisiveness, and executive bearing, but he was not psychologically a “clerical Catholic.” His elite formation, war experience, class style, and modernity partially overrode confessional pattern. So he is mixed evidence: neither a refutation nor a clean confirmation.
    Joe Biden
    Biden fits the Catholic-president pattern more clearly. He reads as a steward, a restorer, a maintainer of continuity, a broker, and a manager of coalition and process. That is not necessarily incompetent, but it is archetypally managerial rather than presidential in the strongest executive sense. He appears more comfortable preserving regime continuity than embodying and directing the polity through decisive public command.
    Protestant presidents who strongly fit the executive pattern
    Abraham Lincoln
    Lincoln is perhaps the clearest example of Protestant × President. He fused moral gravity, textual seriousness, direct responsibility, willingness to decide under radical uncertainty, and the capacity to personify the nation in crisis. He is almost the executive archetype of conscience-bearing agency.
    Woodrow Wilson
    Wilson shows both the virtue and vice of the type. He was mission-bearing, rhetorically powerful, morally purposive, and direction-setting. But he also showed the vice: moral abstraction, self-righteousness, and missionary overreach.
    Ronald Reagan
    Reagan strongly fits the Protestant executive grammar: directness, moral framing, comfort with mission, symbolic leadership, and the ability to animate public direction rather than merely manage institutions.
    George W. Bush
    Bush likewise exhibited responsibility-bearing executive language, willingness to decide, and clarity under conflict, along with the liability of simplification and moralized overreach.
    Donald Trump
    Trump is not Protestant in the conscience-burdened, morally grave sense. But he does fit a broader Protestant political anthropology: direct relation to the public, anti-mediating agency, self-authorization, combative personification of power. He is evidence that the executive side of the pattern may survive even when its moral discipline has decayed.
    So the strongest defensible version of the thesis is not theological triumphalism. It is this:
    Different religious-civilizational formations train different virtues of office.
    Some offices reward those virtues.
    Some offices punish them.
    Catholic formation tends to produce office-centered, continuity-preserving, institutionally mediated reasoning, which is advantageous in judicial roles where legitimacy depends upon restraint and inherited form.
    Protestant formation tends to produce conscience-centered, mission-bearing, directly accountable agency, which is advantageous in executive roles where legitimacy depends upon decision and public action.
    That is the real claim.
    This can also be stated in terms of reciprocal duty.
    A judge’s reciprocal duty is to all parties under a common rule. He must preserve a stable adjudicative order that minimizes arbitrariness. That requires impersonality. The intrusion of self is a threat to legitimacy.
    A president’s reciprocal duty is different. He must preserve the polity through action. He must coordinate, decide, deter, symbolize, and bear consequence under uncertainty. That requires accountable agency. The absence of self is a threat to effectiveness.
    So:
    • judicial reciprocity favors impersonality,
    • executive reciprocity favors accountable agency.
    Catholic formation better habituates the first.
    Protestant formation better habituates the second.
    The cleanest statement I can produce is this:
    Catholic formation tends to produce persons more comfortable subordinating themselves to inherited office, doctrine, hierarchy, and institutional continuity, which better fits the judicial role. Protestant formation tends to produce persons more comfortable bearing direct responsibility through conscience, conviction, and action, which better fits the executive role. The justice must minimize the self so that the law may rule. The president must use the self so that the polity may act.
    Or, in the shortest acceptable formulation:
    Catholics tend to make better custodians.
    Protestants tend to make better agents.
    Judges are custodians.
    Presidents are agents.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-12 18:48:02 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/2032166746887766093

  • Relevant: The History of Expulsions and Remigrations Expulsions, forced migratio

    Relevant: The History of Expulsions and Remigrations

    Expulsions, forced migrations, and ethnic cleansings have occurred throughout human history, often driven by conquest, religious intolerance, nationalism, territorial disputes, or political ideologies. These events involve the systematic removal or extermination of ethnic, religious, or political groups from specific areas, sometimes escalating to genocide. While no list can be exhaustive, below is a comprehensive chronological overview based on documented historical incidents worldwide, drawing from various regions and eras.
    This list highlights the recurring nature of such events across continents, often linked to power struggles or identity conflicts. For deeper dives, historical sources like Wikipedia’s list or academic works on specific regions provide more context.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-10 18:05:18 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/2031431213295218747

  • It’s neither false nor retarded. There is no reason we didn’t hit the industrial

    It’s neither false nor retarded.
    There is no reason we didn’t hit the industrial revolution well before the year 1000, and we didn’t recover from the christian destruction of the ancient world until the time of napoleon.
    I’m not hostile to the church. But the truth is what it is. The faith did in the ancient world what marxism did in the modern world, and for the same reason and by the same methods.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-18 01:51:43 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2023938446616920468

  • That’s false. Before christianity was imagined we had conquered the despotisms o

    That’s false. Before christianity was imagined we had conquered the despotisms of the middle east. It was our foolish tolernance of an effeminate superstition that prevented our recovery from invasion and plague. Christianity resulted in the dark ages of ignorance and superstition that only a reserve of northern germanic peoples were able to overcome, restore greco roman reason and empiricsm, birth science, and conquer the world.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-17 21:50:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2023877816207712300

  • Every western country should declare itself a christian country and remain intol

    Every western country should declare itself a christian country and remain intolerant of any religion that seeks parallel institutions. Private is different from public.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-06 06:21:00 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2019657558999593035

  • I remember when we did. It’s just been undermined. On purpose. And the axis of u

    I remember when we did. It’s just been undermined. On purpose. And the axis of undermining has been women, just like the christian destruction of the roman world.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 23:17:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015202246041256289

  • Um. European law at the time was greco-roman law and greek philosophy, reason, a

    Um. European law at the time was greco-roman law and greek philosophy, reason, and proto-empiricism. All of the middle east used mythicism instead. We call it lying but … it’s just their religious tradition. So yes, rabbinical judaism after 300ad was an attempt to copy the legitimacy and organizing principles of a much more advanced civilization: greece and rome.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 23:16:06 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015201975709921757

  • Yes. Really. But of course moral scope is relative. But the British act of endin

    Yes. Really. But of course moral scope is relative. But the British act of ending slavery and spreading rule of law, trade, and the church’s spread of christian ethics, are evident, empirically, in the difference between their colonies, everyone else’s, and those never colonized. Even today the UK is committing suicide out of virtue signaling.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-06 13:55:20 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2008537873176555822