New book!

I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.

 

Correcting Some Errors in Lippincott’s Culture War Essay

[JM Smith beat me to the punch, but my punch is different.]

At American Greatness, Josiah Lippincott opines that conservatives need to back off from culture war and focus on saving the country via immigration control, tariffs, no foreign wars, and law and order. These are all needed, but they’re not enough.

At a first reading, Lippincott’s thesis seems to be that conservatives must stop fighting the culture war because doing so will cause them to lose elections and therefore be unable to save the nation. A closer reading reveals that he counsels backing away from culture war at the national level, but acknowledges that cultural victories are still possible at the state and local levels.

Problem is, this nuance will be lost on many readers. The impression one gets from the article is that all conservative politicians and the voters who support them need to back off from culture war because they’ll only get crushed. That’s not right.

Also, Lippincott’s main thrust – – judging by how many words he devotes to it – – is that Christianity is too weak to win political fights over cultural issues. If that’s correct, his distinction between what’s possible at the national versus the state and local levels becomes irrelevant.  If Christendom is too weak to win then it’s too weak to win at all levels of government, in which case Lippincott should be counseling us to avoid cultural combat at all levels. And if it’s strong enough sometimes to win then his counsel needs to be more nuanced.

I have copied Lippincott’s text in full below the asterisk, with my comments in italics, preceded by AR.

What One Sentence Conveys the Most Information About the Modern World?

In his celebrated Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman posed a thought experiment. If the record of all scientific knowledge save one sentence were destroyed in a great cataclysm, what single sentence would pass on to our successors the greatest amount of useful scientific information in the fewest words?

Feynman’s answer:  “All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

In a similar spirit I ask, what one sentence conveys the most information in the fewest words about the current situation in America and the West?

This is not an academic exercise. There are millions of ordinary people who do not know what is going on. They need to wake up.

*

My proposed maximally-informative sentence:

American society has become revolution in the name of leftism, atheism, and egalitarianism but with the apparent actual goal of destruction, and the revolutionaries are punishing Christians, white people, and men.

ChatGPT and Intellectual Heat Death

It is speculated that ChatGPT may replace many professions: teacher, journalist, legal assistant, anyone who writes for a living.

ChatGPT scours the Web and internalizes the majority beliefs about everything it encounters. Thus the recent buzz about how ChatGPT declared it would be better to allow a nuke to slay millions than to disarm it by saying out loud the Dreaded N-Word.

It’s possible that ChatGPT is being controlled so that it does not simply internalize the majority view but has a baked-in woke bias. For this article I’m assuming it is as presented.

Since it only “knows” the majority beliefs (or rather, the textual expressions of these beliefs) which exist on the Web, if ChatGPT takes over the bulk of mankind’s production of text then heterodoxy and heresy will be averaged out. Outlying concepts and beliefs will be averaged away from the contents of the Web as ChatGPT ignores outliers and swamps them with its own output. Outlying beliefs will become more and more rare, and regime-compliant beliefs will become increasingly common.

Hi You Pathetic Dickless FBI Weenies

Now that we know that the FBI has been targeting traditionalist Catholics such as we *in our own churches* – and, no doubt, the devout in the temples also of our Evangelical and Orthodox brethren – we can be *absolutely sure* that they have been tracking all of us here.

We all of us here are known to the FBI. They have all our contact info, and all our email traffic. Those utter fools consider us enemies.

So pathetically sad. You infamous impotent weenies of the FBI. How can you live with yourselves?

Probably you compensate for your profound weakness with sadism of some sort. How forsooth could you bear up from one day to the next, otherwise?

So absurd; so sad, your lives, so wicked and so sordid.

May God bless and keep you, and may he make his coruscant light to shine upon you. It can’t give you peace, unless you repent.

Repent, I beg you. Don’t go to Hell.

Blackface Bad, Dragface Good

The  President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.

Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).

For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.

So funny.

The Vipers Are Now in Charge

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 3:7

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34

The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.

Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

FFS Are You Kidding Me is the Gedanken Policy Test Writ Small

Every human is from birth imbued with the filter of the Gedanken Policy Test. After all, the Test is that of Reality; so, no real can but apply it, so as to discern which way it should go. Thus no organism subject to selection pressure – i.e., to the Test – can long do without an intimate acquaintance, and indeed agreement, with its dictates.

It is a harsh and implacable Test. It is the Test of conscience. Nobody gets out of it. Nobody is in the end ignorant of this fact; or as well, of his own failures in respect to the Test.

The failure of a policy under the Test is registered in the normal and healthy human by a reaction of disgust thereat. If a policy fails the Test, it almost always is viscerally disgusting to most people. At least, a bit. What right mind, after all, can abide a policy that manifestly fails the Test? Only a mind wholly corrupt, and lost to corruption.

Now, in the natural course of a life these days, the reaction of disgust to this or that perversion – this or that failure of the Test – is likely to have been somewhat attenuated, by considerations of political correctness (which is to say, of expedience), or of confusion, or of divided loyalties (i.e., “I don’t want to valorize x, but if I don’t, I shan’t so readily be able to excuse my own y”).

No matter. The Test is inexorable.

FFS Are You Kidding Me is then where the rubber of social life meets the road of the Test.

Attend to your feelings of disgust. They propose something real.

Iterated Gedanken Policy Tests on Social Power of Virtue End at Monarchy

The Gedanken Policy Test is simple: of 2 societies otherwise completely and exactly alike, and facing exactly the same historical circumstances, which is likely to do better, all things considered: the one that allows x, or the one that does not?

For “allows,” one may substitute with like effect “encourages,” or “promotes,” or “tolerates” or “does not punish.”

When x is singled out this way, the Test almost always generates a finding that in retrospect appears an obvious, and indeed incontrovertible result.

When we iterate the Test on some x, the findings tend toward some optimum of social order. When we iterate the Test on the degree to which any of the virtues are rewarded with social power, the findings tend in the limit to monarchy.