In the late 2000s, the New Atheist movement was at its height. Smart young people clustered around memetic weapons deployed by "The Four Horsemen" of the movement. They quoted The God Delusion and wrote passionately about the brave new world lying just beyond the the horizon, once we had finally swept away the last remnants of organized religion. That religion, you see, was the source of man's primitive and atavistic conditions. In the new age of reason and tolerance, we would all be heckin good people. Now, had any of these clever youngsters (myself among them) bothered to dig into the arguments, they might have noticed some concerning faults. When faced with a legitimate theologian, the Horsemen had much less exciting debates. These were intellectual bloodsports, after all, and the people demanded a show. What use was a meandering talk about the Cosmological, Ontological, or Teleological Arguments? When these were presented, Hitchens would sidestep, guffaw, and point out that religion was very, very stupid. And the crowds would roar. Removed from the certainty of being Young, Hip, and Aware of the New Thing, it might quite obvious that the Intellectual Rigor of the Horsemen was not, in fact, very rigorous. When confronted with the robust (boring) arguments for religion, they would answer with such daring ripostes as "we've never found heaven in the Hubble Space Telescope", "can God make a burrito so hot He cannot eat it?", or "imagine believing in a flying spaghetti monster." Hardly arguments, at all. What they were, however, were social proof. You, the good and smart person, was laughing at the dumb and bad person, and all of your good and smart friends were laughing along. The Four Horsemen did not kill God. They came upon a dead god, lying facedown in a ditch, and they pronounced themselves His vanquishers. And what god did they find there? That corpse was the husk of Western Inertial Christianity. It was the remains of dead words, quoted by fools and fraudsters. Authentic Christianity was driven out of the West long before the New Atheists took over early YouTube with cartoon skits of "Bible Man." When had it been replaced by Inertial Christianity? I cannot say for certain, but at least as far as the Boomers. I do not speak of doctrine. There are many forms of Christianity with all manner of doctrine, about which far smarter men than I can endlessly argue. We have all those doctrines, still written on their pages. What I am speaking of is animating spirit, of living faith, scaled to the level of state. There are many churches in our lands. I assume that there are many of those churches, in roadside cathedrals or common-room chapels, where the Word still beats. But I am speaking of societies. Where could we last call our civilization "Christian", in such a way that it would recoil at sin, weep for faith, and transmit itself forward not as secular morals but as the Only Way and Truth. What was the last Christianity that would compel princes and nations not just to "be good people", but to organize themselves beyond the letter of secular law. What was the last form of Christianity that would kill and die for belief at the scale of governance? History is replete with examples. If you roll back to Westphalia, you see the need to bind just these forces. The wars of religion were no dead letters. But that's quite some time, and Westphalia solved that problem quite elegantly. So we can look, instead, to the reasons states organize for mortal endeavors. Even into the Twentieth Century, the language of state spoke in Christian terms: who was in, who was out, why we suffered, why we labored. Not just endurance, either. Not just absorbing the ills, but turning upon them with artifice and force. Looking at the documents of those eras, we can say that they at least believed themselves to be Christians, in the real sense of the word. Certainly, modernity's acid must be the inciting incident in decay. The growth of materialist ideology, the flattening of the sacred, and the removal of the transcendent are a drip-drip-drip of erosion upon the faith, far more powerful than any Nietzschean refutation. But where was the flip? When was the last document written, invoking God, where more people rolled their eyes than looked down in reverence? Growing up in Millennial and Gen X spaces, we were thoroughly dead letters. The religious Boomers above us roughly fell into two camps: crazy textual thumpers yelling about heavy metal and Satan, or cultured, erudite, functionally atheistic "believers" who understood that these parables and lessons were but a cast necessary to set a moral bone, not a Truth within themselves. The former were mockable. They quoted words they didn't understand. They lacked temperance and prudence. They often lashed out from fear of their own iniquities, pressed into zealotry, and when pressed in an argument, they'd brandish the Bible and say "it says right here". They would often misquote. Those of my generation who followed this literal crowd rejected the secular world. They learned and adhered doctrinally to the Precise Text. These were the kids who could recite chapter and verse. But their faith was often brittle. When a precisely-memorized contradiction was forced to the surface by a more agile thinker, they would shut down. Faced with the inability to understand the verse they recited, they would collapse into a parody of religiosity (dumb, low status, hateful, etc) or their glass cathedral would shatter, and they'd plunge into hedonic liberation (self-annihilation). The second set were barely Christian at all. The Boomers who believed such may have dressed as Christians. They may have believed themselves to be Christians. They may have even been clergy! (More than once was I informed, with sly and knowing wisdom, that nearly "all" high-functioning theologians were effectively just noble atheists, setting a moral narrative for the less developed.) But remove this by one more generation, and the Inertial trappings of the religion made less sense. If the point of Christianity was "be tolerant" and you had to constantly explain those intolerant passages, wouldn't it make more sense to simply cut away the cast? The bone of secular humanism had set! It was time to be honest and cease the noble lie. Those of my generation who followed this path didn't so much leave the Church as simply Stop Pretending to Be Part of It. One day, each of us simply didn't go to services. What was the point? We had learned the lesson, and the church (lowercase-c) itself was just a gathering place for the elderly, those in need, and the lunatics mentioned above. Good for them, and glad it existed, but not something I needed, certainly! So when the Four Horsemen rode into town, what did they find? A new generation of "thinkers" who had been led out from the Church by the last generation of Shepherds, and a mass of lunatics and yokels just waiting to be defeated in glorious, live-streamed takedowns. If you lived on Midwit Mountain (and most of us always do), this was the show of the age! If the Horsemen had been smarter, had their audience been more discerning, they might have put some thought into what god's corpse they were triumphantly dancing atop. The gods of Inertial and Pop Christianity were scarecrows, but with a little wisdom, more might have realized that the corpse of the god of Secular Humanism (Christian Atheism) was a mere ten yards further down that trench.

A candidate wins an election and immediately begins seizing passports and locking up all of his rivals. The "judicial process" is so obviously and odiously corrupt that nations around the world start rejecting extradition requests. The USG allows the leaders of the persecuted opposition to claim asylum. Suddenly, the people who think that 87 Quadrillion people deserve "asylum" to escape a lack of free US tax money are convinced that the particular and proper use of political asylum for persecuted foreign allies is a scandal.

Someone made Grok ultra spergy recently. Not sure why this switch got flipped, but it's definitely on rails right now.

Much democracy. Such freedom. Extraordinary rules-based order.

"Vote blue guys, we don't need supply chains."

This is the lamest Snowpiercer remake I've ever seen.

No company performing layoffs, buyouts, or offshoring should be permitted to bring in ANY visa workers. All liquidations MUST start with visa workers, first. No Americans should be fired, except for cause, while any visa scabs remain on payroll.

One might be tempted to pin this cultural shift in the judiciary to the shifting makeup of the nation (and judiciary) after the big waves of immigration brought in new folk ways and common sense. Now look how the dead letter of the law is read by the nu-Americans on the bench.

This man is campaigning hard to build bridges with the urban communities.

The sweet spot for most degenerate but not overtly harmful things is around 1.5. Effectively banned but selectively prosecuted on those who encourage it. Eg: the cops bust up a gambling ring but not guys playing poker on their back porch, dumb kids drinking get sent home but the bum screaming at ghosts goes into the drunk tank, etc. The problem is that modernity (in politics: liberalism) demands systematization. The rules must be made to fit all and be applied without judgment. If drinking is illegal, the vagrant terrorizing the subway and the kids sneaking a beer get the same prison sentence. If gambling is illegal then the mobbed up racket and Dave's Charity Euchre tournament both get hit with flashbangs. To grant an exception is to bring the ire of the system, which can only tolerate compliance. The great push of the late 20th century progressive movements was to point out the mindless cruelty of zero tolerance and mandatory minimums, and then to call out the assorted -isms implied when selective enforcement was used to mitigate the aforementioned mindless cruelty. Eg: "Why did Timmy get suspended for beating Billy, but not Billy for beating Timmy?" (That Timmy jumped on Billy from behind and unprovoked is neglected - the policy was "zero tolerance for fighting".) Once selective enforcement (discernment) was de facto illegal, and mindless enforcement was unnecessarily cruel, the system moved to the next iteration: total permission. The rule can never be wrong if the rule does not exist. If theft isn't a crime, then there's no questions about degree or application. There's no debating need, aggravating, or mitigating factors. There's no icky -istaphobic concerns about separating seven year old Johnny (stole a candy bar) and eighty-two year old Phyllis (stole a can of tomato paste) from twenty-five year old Marcus (stole a TV). The prior solutions would have required throwing Johnny and Phyllis in prison (cruel) or making a special exception for Marcus (sounds problematic - do we know he wasn't a protected category?). But if we make all theft under $1000 no longer a crime, then these questions go away. Sure, we get more theft and everything gets worse, but that's someone else's problem. The system would love to hear your solution (provided your solution doesn't require judgment or discernment, since those are illegal). And once something is not banned, how can it be wrong? Who says it's wrong? Are you doing a discrimination? That's gross. So the ratchet on every abnormality and malaise ticks towards celebration, and the only backlash the system will accept is "mindlessly authoritarian repression of everything", since as cruel and awful as zero tolerance may be, at least it doesn't require judgement.

Gotta love when someone blatantly lies like this. If the midterms go poorly, it's because of: 1. historical cycles on second-term midterms 2. the 18 year zombie economy 3. the Iran war no one asked for Now, I'm not diehard anti-Iran-war. I thought it was a bad idea because of the electoral gas price issue, but I'm open to arguments that it was necessary because of national security concerns, and I think the mullahs had it coming. But the attempt to blame the fallout from this war that Americans didn't want (but neocons did) on everything the neocons ALSO don't want isn't just dishonest, it's malicious.