Christianity

[Harry Baird]

Wow. Do Aborigine tribes that STOLE land from other tribes also give back land?

Which indigenous Australian tribes have stolen land from which other indigenous Australian tribes? Please be specific.

who does everyone give the land back to - the descendents?

Clearly, groups of people (occupiers of land) are identifiable, or you wouldn't have relied upon that concept in your opening quote with respect to "Aborigine tribes". Groups persist over time, and thus their claims to land persist over time.

In the case of Aborigines what happens where the descendents are mixed race...omg, what a nightmare.

I'm not sure why you consider this to be a fatal problem. There are clearly those who are more entitled to ongoing land claims than others. It can be worked out from there.

Good luck with that Harry, and who would have thought a " do gooder" lefty would re-ignite racial tensions

In what way am I igniting, let alone "re"igniting racial tensions?

[attofishpi]

Wow. Do Aborigine tribes that STOLE land from other tribes also give back land?

Which indigenous Australian tribes have stolen land from which other indigenous Australian tribes? Please be specific.

Aborigines don't have a written language, thus never documented their tribal histories. However, there are cave paintings in the Northern Territory depicting tribal warfare that occurred around the time that the sea level rose - hence they were fighting over resources (land).

who does everyone give the land back to - the descendents?

Clearly, groups of people (occupiers of land) are identifiable, or you wouldn't have relied upon that concept in your opening quote with respect to "Aborigine tribes". Groups persist over time, and thus their claims to land persist over time.

NO Harry, people hundreds of years later are not clearly identifiable as descendents of land 'custodians'.

In the case of Aborigines what happens where the descendents are mixed race...omg, what a nightmare.

I'm not sure why you consider this to be a fatal problem. There are clearly those who are more entitled to ongoing land claims than others. It can be worked out from there.

..and you don't think Aborigine's would prefer to move on rather than re-ignite racial divide as you are doing. I have a large family of mixed race (Aborigine\British), they would scoff at your crazy proposal.

Good luck with that Harry, and who would have thought a " do gooder" lefty would re-ignite racial tensions

In what way am I igniting, let alone "re"igniting racial tensions?

IF you can't see that, as per my above point...well.

Again, WHERE are you going to move to Harry?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Consider this . . .

I'm curious to know what conclusions and assessments you think we should draw after considering that video (which I have just watched). In other words, what contribution do you think it makes to the ongoing conversation in this thread?

Presently, though you might not realize it if you pay attention to the media, SA is now bankrupt. Now, after 30+ years of extremely bad management, largely on the part of the ANC, a more serious phase of collapse begins. Now the country will fall into far more serious crisis if my sources are correct.

My larger point (stated) had to do with ‘outcomes’ that result from the imposition of ‘liberal ideals’. South Africa is a ‘case in point’ of that in my view. But so too the post 1965 changes in immigration policy in the US. The ‘right thing’ results in a bad outcome. Bad = leading to breakdowns within the culture. Simply put degeneracy. These are concerns defined, often, by the dissident right and heatedly resisted by the left-progressives.

The kind of analysis I am doing must examine changes (to notice degeneration) occurring over larger segments of time. A decade, twenty-five years, fifty years. It has taken the ANC (et al) 30 years to drive the country into the ground and toward ruination. But now the real losses begin.

As to your recent response post to my larger one: we come from perspectives that do not allow exchanges or bridge-building. You likely have some terms for your impression of mine. I have offered my definition in so many words.

I do have one comment in respect to the ‘theft’ example you brought up. A bit later perhaps.

[Belinda]

The fundamental or foundation of morality is the well-being of all life forms. Our own myopia assures our self-interest comes first, but we are of a common carbon-based biology of beings, that have the ability for both suffering and joy. The harsh reality of life is that life lives upon life but if we are to claim humanity as a virtue, compassion must be addressed to all living things and termed morality. Life and the earth that sustains it, must then be seen as sacred. None of the desert religions of today are up to the manifestation of truth virtue.

Excellent summary that implies the future of compassion transcends humans, to transcending the whole biosphere, to transcending the biosphere, to the blue planet itself. Maybe we are entering another axial age when compassion will extend to beyond Earth.

A side note about the desert religions: these began as tribal religions. Jesus of Nazareth, who fully intended to model his teaching and provenance on Isaiah, lived about five hundred years after Isaiah and was an influential supporter of compassion. Compassion for the individual,as opposed to the honour of the tribe, is the central and fertile message of the axial age.

[Harry Baird]

Wow. Do Aborigine tribes that STOLE land from other tribes also give back land?

Which indigenous Australian tribes have stolen land from which other indigenous Australian tribes? Please be specific.

Aborigines don't have a written language, thus never documented their tribal histories. However, there are cave paintings in the Northern Territory depicting tribal warfare that occurred around the time that the sea level rose - hence they were fighting over resources (land).

I still don't think you're engaging in good faith, but I'll respond in any case:

So, you can't point to any specific indigenous Australian tribe which stole land from any other specific indigenous Australian tribe - you simply infer that some tribes stole from other tribes based on cave paintings that you claim depicted tribal warfare.

OK, let's say you're right. The short answer to your original question (quoted above) is, in any case: yes. It is incumbent upon whoever stole from whomever to return the stolen property. You'll need to identify them first though.

who does everyone give the land back to - the descendents?

Clearly, groups of people (occupiers of land) are identifiable, or you wouldn't have relied upon that concept in your opening quote with respect to "Aborigine tribes". Groups persist over time, and thus their claims to land persist over time.

NO Harry, people hundreds of years later are not clearly identifiable as descendents of land 'custodians'.

You're simply wrong here. Many indigenous Australians maintain an ongoing connection to their land. Even where they don't, they have a far greater right to "Australia" in general than do non-indigenous Australians.

In the case of Aborigines what happens where the descendents are mixed race...omg, what a nightmare.

I'm not sure why you consider this to be a fatal problem. There are clearly those who are more entitled to ongoing land claims than others. It can be worked out from there.

..and you don't think Aborigine's would prefer to move on

Of course they would, but not without wrongs having been righted, at the very least to the extent of a treaty, which is really not good enough, but which, after all the brutal and consistent mistreatment to which they've been subjected over the years, they might have been beaten down into accepting.

rather than re-ignite racial divide as you are doing.

That which is already burning fiercely due to occupying forces cannot be "re"ignited.

I have a large family of mixed race (Aborigine\British)

I see. So, not only are you of Indian heritage, but you are also of indigenous Australian and British heritage. Am I understanding correctly?

they would scoff at your crazy proposal.

On what basis?

Good luck with that Harry, and who would have thought a " do gooder" lefty would re-ignite racial tensions

In what way am I igniting, let alone "re"igniting racial tensions?

IF you can't see that, as per my above point...well.

To which point are you referring?

Again, WHERE are you going to move to Harry?

Again, I've addressed this.

[Harry Baird]

My larger point (stated) had to do with ‘outcomes’ that result from the imposition of ‘liberal ideals’. South Africa is a ‘case in point’ of that in my view.

Oh, and what about the 'outcomes' that result from systemic land theft and the imposition of 'the colonist's ideals'? Talk a little about that, if you will.

As to your recent response post to my larger one: we come from perspectives that do not allow exchanges or bridge-building. You likely have some terms for your impression of mine. I have offered my definition in so many words.

So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.

I do have one comment in respect to the ‘theft’ example you brought up. A bit later perhaps.

It's not an example. It's the reality. But all in good time.

[Harry Baird]

As to your recent response post to my larger one: we come from perspectives that do not allow exchanges or bridge-building. You likely have some terms for your impression of mine. I have offered my definition in so many words.

So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.

To put it in words that might actually register with you: it looks as though somebody is trying to shut down the conversation. It sure isn't me though.

[Alexis Jacobi]

So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.

The principles that you work with are binary in the extreme. They lead you to totalizing assertions which, as you well know, are designed to be answered in one way only. Your latest *set-up* was to present a simple model of the theft of, say, a pencil and the answer you seek, which in your mind is unavoidable, leads to your interlocutor admitting that point which is your sole and primary point.

Those issues that have to do with human populations, their expansion; with the encounters between modern and technologically advanced people and those living at a stone-age level, especially when the examples are historical such as the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the same to the southern tip of Africa -- these issues are non-amenable to the simplistic analysis that, through your own choices I think, has you in its grip.

So when I converse with you in written form, and present larger blocks of ideas that should be taken in blocks and responded to reciprocally, you hunker down into your cherished reduction from whence all your *analysis* proceeds.

I have asserted that this binary system, this ethical-moral model, derives from Christian ethics. The ethical principles in question are one thing naturally, but I am more interested in the adoption of the *philosophy* (such as it is but it is a social philosophy that you recommend and on its base you make extraordinary demands) which when I examine it seems to be more similar to *religious conviction*. You objected to the term 'woke' (and I said I had trepidation using it) yet I am at a loss as to what terms to use to describe you, on one hand, and this class or segment of people, usually white and usually middle or upper middle class, who take issue with everything that has made them them, and provided all they have, and develop what I call a *poisonous* philosophy which then is conveyed to others through processes that remind me of religious enthusiasm.

As Bowden said:

This is a white European grammar and we have stumbled through the early phases of . . .

Religious enthusiasm

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as “enthusiasts” those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. John of Leyden, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and George Whitefield all shared the label “enthusiast.” This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there—from Pilgrim Fathers to pietistic Moravians, from the martyr-bound Quakers to heaven-bent revivalists of the 1740s.

This study of the role of religious enthusiasm in early America tells us much about English attitudes toward religion in the New World and about the vital part it played in the lives of the colonists. Both friends and enemies of enthusiasm revealed in their arguments and actions their own conceptions of the America they inhabited. Was religion in America to be an extension of Old World institutions or truly a product of the New World? Would enthusiasm undermine civilized institutions, not only established churches, but government, social structure, morality, and the economy as well? Calling enthusiasts first heretics, then subversives and conspirators, conventional society sought ways to suppress or banish them. By 1776 enthusiasm had spilled over into politics and added a radical dimension to the revolutionary struggle.

One idea I am working with, and my topic area is the contemporary United States, deals with an examination of social hysteria and social manifestations that begin around some inspiring event (a police shooting of an alleged criminal) and then get *invested* with a great amount of other content, all of which is bound up in intense sentiment and unloosed feelings. What, for example, really animated the mobs who went on *righteousness rampages* with a nearly religious zealousness to attack and topple hundreds of monuments of important historical personages? It is not *idea* that moves them but emotions about what they are doing. Thus the experiences are 'enthusiastic' in this religious sense.

However, most of those who are participating are certainly post-Christians and yet, it seems to me, they are still captured by and moved by zealotry that has a religious tone to it. So what interests me in you (when you reveal the core and animating ideal of your existential philosophy) is that it is (as I say) totalizing. You have taken a very limited theme and blown it up into a 'totalizing' political philosophy. You genuinely believe that it not only can be applied but that it should be applied, and you are serious when you (unreally) indicate that you would submit an opinion-survey to the Aboriginals asking them Should we stay or should we go? I'll abide by your decision! (with your wee suitcase dutifully packed in anticipation, some sunscreen in your pocket, a map, etc.)

So while it is true that I would not have placed you among The Woke (which is not precise enough of a term) you are, in certain ways, definitely linked to these sorts of ideas. That is, the social justice warriors, etc. Those who define, who have and who hold (i.e. who work as activists) the lists of the politically-correct views which are inculcated among others inclined to them.

If in regard to what we have just recently been discussing -- South Africa -- I am to set out a set of principles I would say that they are definitely revealed in what I am writing and what I have written. The issue is that you are fundamentally unfamiliar with their matrix and, at the same time, vitally and also zealously oppose to them whatever they are or might be. I ask you therefore to participate in a conversation you are largely unprepared for (or unqualified). You do not read. You have no real interest in the affairs of the day. But you do seem to have a *pet focus* which, as I say, seems enthusiastic and obsessive. But this is not just you. Many share a similar *position* or *location*).

I have alluded to those I am examining (Guénon, Evola) who start from extremely different points of analysis vis-a-vis 'modernity' and certainly 'liberalism'. I think that you gather that I am inclining away from conventional liberal notions, and also that I tend to see them leading to what I have termed 'liberal rot'. The ascendency and domination of American Liberalism has led (is leading) to fracturation and dissolution. So, with that said, you seem to focus down into minutia where you can play philosophically with *righteous ideas* (that you establish a priory as unassailable) whereas I am examining *things* from a wider perspective, or in any case one that I consider to be removed or elevated (a position above).

I suppose that those who read what I write imagine that I am attempting to redefine or perhaps *apologize* for Apartheid? Or that I am looking at things through racist or racialist lenses? I do not think that my ideas fit into those frames. And I also think that those frames are terms which have been so intensely politicized that they can hardly function anymore as proper designations. Could these ideas be talked about on this forum and among this group of people? I wonder. I don't think so though. The reason? Everyone here has been so deeply programed in the terms of the *politically correct* that entire conversations are conceptually off-limits. So much preamble is necessary to counter the established ideas, and this is so intensely conflictive, that it simply becomes *ugly*. So I have to at least say, because it is fair to do so, that I have read so many of those who are progressive and liberal proponents of the core tenets of left-progressivism. I have their books and I can cite from them.

And I have also read a whole range of writers who are *forbidden* and are not allowed to be read. I mean this seriously. Not allowed to be read (thought about, referred to). Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wilmot Robertson and many others. What I find is that the *picture* that the Left-Progressives offer is always skewed and tendentious. They offer *re-descriptions* and *paraphrasing* and when they do this the restate. When you read the original sources of those whose ideas have been pushed out of the acceptable zone of allowed conversation, you see that they are making sense and, in my view, that their ideas should not be uniformly dismissed. It does not help me, necessarily, to arrive at solidified and certain positions (it may hinder that in fact) but it does indeed widen my perspectives on how different people think and interpret their world.

Finally, I find that conversing with you is similar in some ways to conversing with Immanuel Can. You are totally fixed in your idea structures. They are reduced, binary and absolute. He will not be moved, and you will not be moved. And that is one more reason why I have to wonder at how it came about that you wind up in this state. And then the larger question is How have we all wound up in the state we are in?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Should I stay or should I go?

[Belinda]

So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.

The principles that you work with are binary in the extreme. They lead you to totalizing assertions which, as you well know, are designed to be answered in one way only. Your latest *set-up* was to present a simple model of the theft of, say, a pencil and the answer you seek, which in your mind is unavoidable, leads to your interlocutor admitting that point which is your sole and primary point.

Those issues that have to do with human populations, their expansion; with the encounters between modern and technologically advanced people and those living at a stone-age level, especially when the examples are historical such as the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the same to the southern tip of Africa -- these issues are non-amenable to the simplistic analysis that, through your own choices I think, has you in its grip.

So when I converse with you in written form, and present larger blocks of ideas that should be taken in blocks and responded to reciprocally, you hunker down into your cherished reduction from whence all your *analysis* proceeds.

I have asserted that this binary system, this ethical-moral model, derives from Christian ethics. The ethical principles in question are one thing naturally, but I am more interested in the adoption of the *philosophy* (such as it is but it is a social philosophy that you recommend and on its base you make extraordinary demands) which when I examine it seems to be more similar to *religious conviction*. You objected to the term 'woke' (and I said I had trepidation using it) yet I am at a loss as to what terms to use to describe you, on one hand, and this class or segment of people, usually white and usually middle or upper middle class, who take issue with everything that has made them them, and provided all they have, and develop what I call a *poisonous* philosophy which then is conveyed to others through processes that remind me of religious enthusiasm.

As Bowden said:

This is a white European grammar and we have stumbled through the early phases of . . .

Religious enthusiasm

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as “enthusiasts” those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. John of Leyden, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and George Whitefield all shared the label “enthusiast.” This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there—from Pilgrim Fathers to pietistic Moravians, from the martyr-bound Quakers to heaven-bent revivalists of the 1740s.

This study of the role of religious enthusiasm in early America tells us much about English attitudes toward religion in the New World and about the vital part it played in the lives of the colonists. Both friends and enemies of enthusiasm revealed in their arguments and actions their own conceptions of the America they inhabited. Was religion in America to be an extension of Old World institutions or truly a product of the New World? Would enthusiasm undermine civilized institutions, not only established churches, but government, social structure, morality, and the economy as well? Calling enthusiasts first heretics, then subversives and conspirators, conventional society sought ways to suppress or banish them. By 1776 enthusiasm had spilled over into politics and added a radical dimension to the revolutionary struggle.

One idea I am working with, and my topic area is the contemporary United States, deals with an examination of social hysteria and social manifestations that begin around some inspiring event (a police shooting of an alleged criminal) and then get *invested* with a great amount of other content, all of which is bound up in intense sentiment and unloosed feelings. What, for example, really animated the mobs who went on *righteousness rampages* with a nearly religious zealousness to attack and topple hundreds of monuments of important historical personages? It is not *idea* that moves them but emotions about what they are doing. Thus the experiences are 'enthusiastic' in this religious sense.

However, most of those who are participating are certainly post-Christians and yet, it seems to me, they are still captured by and moved by zealotry that has a religious tone to it. So what interests me in you (when you reveal the core and animating ideal of your existential philosophy) is that it is (as I say) totalizing. You have taken a very limited theme and blown it up into a 'totalizing' political philosophy. You genuinely believe that it not only can be applied but that it should be applied, and you are serious when you (unreally) indicate that you would submit an opinion-survey to the Aboriginals asking them Should we stay or should we go? I'll abide by your decision! (with your wee suitcase dutifully packed in anticipation, some sunscreen in your pocket, a map, etc.)

So while it is true that I would not have placed you among The Woke (which is not precise enough of a term) you are, in certain ways, definitely linked to these sorts of ideas. That is, the social justice warriors, etc. Those who define, who have and who hold (i.e. who work as activists) the lists of the politically-correct views which are inculcated among others inclined to them.

If in regard to what we have just recently been discussing -- South Africa -- I am to set out a set of principles I would say that they are definitely revealed in what I am writing and what I have written. The issue is that you are fundamentally unfamiliar with their matrix and, at the same time, vitally and also zealously oppose to them whatever they are or might be. I ask you therefore to participate in a conversation you are largely unprepared for (or unqualified). You do not read. You have no real interest in the affairs of the day. But you do seem to have a *pet focus* which, as I say, seems enthusiastic and obsessive. But this is not just you. Many share a similar *position* or *location*).

I have alluded to those I am examining (Guénon, Evola) who start from extremely different points of analysis vis-a-vis 'modernity' and certainly 'liberalism'. I think that you gather that I am inclining away from conventional liberal notions, and also that I tend to see them leading to what I have termed 'liberal rot'. The ascendency and domination of American Liberalism has led (is leading) to fracturation and dissolution. So, with that said, you seem to focus down into minutia where you can play philosophically with *righteous ideas* (that you establish a priory as unassailable) whereas I am examining *things* from a wider perspective, or in any case one that I consider to be removed or elevated (a position above).

I suppose that those who read what I write imagine that I am attempting to redefine or perhaps *apologize* for Apartheid? Or that I am looking at things through racist or racialist lenses? I do not think that my ideas fit into those frames. And I also think that those frames are terms which have been so intensely politicized that they can hardly function anymore as proper designations. Could these ideas be talked about on this forum and among this group of people? I wonder. I don't think so though. The reason? Everyone here has been so deeply programed in the terms of the *politically correct* that entire conversations are conceptually off-limits. So much preamble is necessary to counter the established ideas, and this is so intensely conflictive, that it simply becomes *ugly*. So I have to at least say, because it is fair to do so, that I have read so many of those who are progressive and liberal proponents of the core tenets of left-progressivism. I have their books and I can cite from them.

And I have also read a whole range of writers who are *forbidden* and are not allowed to be read. I mean this seriously. Not allowed to be read (thought about, referred to). Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wilmot Robertson and many others. What I find is that the *picture* that the Left-Progressives offer is always skewed and tendentious. They offer *re-descriptions* and *paraphrasing* and when they do this the restate. When you read the original sources of those whose ideas have been pushed out of the acceptable zone of allowed conversation, you see that they are making sense and, in my view, that their ideas should not be uniformly dismissed. It does not help me, necessarily, to arrive at solidified and certain positions (it may hinder that in fact) but it does indeed widen my perspectives on how different people think and interpret their world.

Finally, I find that conversing with you is similar in some ways to conversing with Immanuel Can. You are totally fixed in your idea structures. They are reduced, binary and absolute. He will not be moved, and you will not be moved. And that is one more reason why I have to wonder at how it came about that you wind up in this state. And then the larger question is How have we all wound up in the state we are in?

Binary principle of right and wrong notwithstanding, the problem of economic underdevelopment is dealt with by improving education and training among economically underdeveloped peoples. We have "all wound up in the state we are in" because rich countries and rich regimes have not sufficiently organised and paid for education and training. It's a sad state of human decency when education and training in economically deprived places is largely paid for by Christian and Islamic missionaries, and charities financed by middle class individuals.

[Gary Childress]

So, despite our conversing on a philosophy board, and despite my explicitly outlining my basic principles in this respect, you're not interested in debating or even just discussing those principles, nor even in supplying your own principles.

The principles that you work with are binary in the extreme. They lead you to totalizing assertions which, as you well know, are designed to be answered in one way only. Your latest *set-up* was to present a simple model of the theft of, say, a pencil and the answer you seek, which in your mind is unavoidable, leads to your interlocutor admitting that point which is your sole and primary point.

Those issues that have to do with human populations, their expansion; with the encounters between modern and technologically advanced people and those living at a stone-age level, especially when the examples are historical such as the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the same to the southern tip of Africa -- these issues are non-amenable to the simplistic analysis that, through your own choices I think, has you in its grip.

So when I converse with you in written form, and present larger blocks of ideas that should be taken in blocks and responded to reciprocally, you hunker down into your cherished reduction from whence all your *analysis* proceeds.

I have asserted that this binary system, this ethical-moral model, derives from Christian ethics. The ethical principles in question are one thing naturally, but I am more interested in the adoption of the *philosophy* (such as it is but it is a social philosophy that you recommend and on its base you make extraordinary demands) which when I examine it seems to be more similar to *religious conviction*. You objected to the term 'woke' (and I said I had trepidation using it) yet I am at a loss as to what terms to use to describe you, on one hand, and this class or segment of people, usually white and usually middle or upper middle class, who take issue with everything that has made them them, and provided all they have, and develop what I call a *poisonous* philosophy which then is conveyed to others through processes that remind me of religious enthusiasm.

As Bowden said:

This is a white European grammar and we have stumbled through the early phases of . . .

Religious enthusiasm

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as “enthusiasts” those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. John of Leyden, Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and George Whitefield all shared the label “enthusiast.” This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there—from Pilgrim Fathers to pietistic Moravians, from the martyr-bound Quakers to heaven-bent revivalists of the 1740s.

This study of the role of religious enthusiasm in early America tells us much about English attitudes toward religion in the New World and about the vital part it played in the lives of the colonists. Both friends and enemies of enthusiasm revealed in their arguments and actions their own conceptions of the America they inhabited. Was religion in America to be an extension of Old World institutions or truly a product of the New World? Would enthusiasm undermine civilized institutions, not only established churches, but government, social structure, morality, and the economy as well? Calling enthusiasts first heretics, then subversives and conspirators, conventional society sought ways to suppress or banish them. By 1776 enthusiasm had spilled over into politics and added a radical dimension to the revolutionary struggle.

One idea I am working with, and my topic area is the contemporary United States, deals with an examination of social hysteria and social manifestations that begin around some inspiring event (a police shooting of an alleged criminal) and then get *invested* with a great amount of other content, all of which is bound up in intense sentiment and unloosed feelings. What, for example, really animated the mobs who went on *righteousness rampages* with a nearly religious zealousness to attack and topple hundreds of monuments of important historical personages? It is not *idea* that moves them but emotions about what they are doing. Thus the experiences are 'enthusiastic' in this religious sense.

However, most of those who are participating are certainly post-Christians and yet, it seems to me, they are still captured by and moved by zealotry that has a religious tone to it. So what interests me in you (when you reveal the core and animating ideal of your existential philosophy) is that it is (as I say) totalizing. You have taken a very limited theme and blown it up into a 'totalizing' political philosophy. You genuinely believe that it not only can be applied but that it should be applied, and you are serious when you (unreally) indicate that you would submit an opinion-survey to the Aboriginals asking them Should we stay or should we go? I'll abide by your decision! (with your wee suitcase dutifully packed in anticipation, some sunscreen in your pocket, a map, etc.)

So while it is true that I would not have placed you among The Woke (which is not precise enough of a term) you are, in certain ways, definitely linked to these sorts of ideas. That is, the social justice warriors, etc. Those who define, who have and who hold (i.e. who work as activists) the lists of the politically-correct views which are inculcated among others inclined to them.

If in regard to what we have just recently been discussing -- South Africa -- I am to set out a set of principles I would say that they are definitely revealed in what I am writing and what I have written. The issue is that you are fundamentally unfamiliar with their matrix and, at the same time, vitally and also zealously oppose to them whatever they are or might be. I ask you therefore to participate in a conversation you are largely unprepared for (or unqualified). You do not read. You have no real interest in the affairs of the day. But you do seem to have a *pet focus* which, as I say, seems enthusiastic and obsessive. But this is not just you. Many share a similar *position* or *location*).

I have alluded to those I am examining (Guénon, Evola) who start from extremely different points of analysis vis-a-vis 'modernity' and certainly 'liberalism'. I think that you gather that I am inclining away from conventional liberal notions, and also that I tend to see them leading to what I have termed 'liberal rot'. The ascendency and domination of American Liberalism has led (is leading) to fracturation and dissolution. So, with that said, you seem to focus down into minutia where you can play philosophically with *righteous ideas* (that you establish a priory as unassailable) whereas I am examining *things* from a wider perspective, or in any case one that I consider to be removed or elevated (a position above).

I suppose that those who read what I write imagine that I am attempting to redefine or perhaps *apologize* for Apartheid? Or that I am looking at things through racist or racialist lenses? I do not think that my ideas fit into those frames. And I also think that those frames are terms which have been so intensely politicized that they can hardly function anymore as proper designations. Could these ideas be talked about on this forum and among this group of people? I wonder. I don't think so though. The reason? Everyone here has been so deeply programed in the terms of the *politically correct* that entire conversations are conceptually off-limits. So much preamble is necessary to counter the established ideas, and this is so intensely conflictive, that it simply becomes *ugly*. So I have to at least say, because it is fair to do so, that I have read so many of those who are progressive and liberal proponents of the core tenets of left-progressivism. I have their books and I can cite from them.

And I have also read a whole range of writers who are *forbidden* and are not allowed to be read. I mean this seriously. Not allowed to be read (thought about, referred to). Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wilmot Robertson and many others. What I find is that the *picture* that the Left-Progressives offer is always skewed and tendentious. They offer *re-descriptions* and *paraphrasing* and when they do this the restate. When you read the original sources of those whose ideas have been pushed out of the acceptable zone of allowed conversation, you see that they are making sense and, in my view, that their ideas should not be uniformly dismissed. It does not help me, necessarily, to arrive at solidified and certain positions (it may hinder that in fact) but it does indeed widen my perspectives on how different people think and interpret their world.

Finally, I find that conversing with you is similar in some ways to conversing with Immanuel Can. You are totally fixed in your idea structures. They are reduced, binary and absolute. He will not be moved, and you will not be moved. And that is one more reason why I have to wonder at how it came about that you wind up in this state. And then the larger question is How have we all wound up in the state we are in?

Binary principle of right and wrong notwithstanding, the problem of economic underdevelopment is dealt with by improving education and training among economically underdeveloped peoples. We have "all wound up in the state we are in" because rich countries and rich regimes have not sufficiently organised and paid for education and training. It's a sad state of human decency when education and training in economically deprived places is largely paid for by Christian and Islamic missionaries, and charities financed by middle class individuals.

I think China's emergence as a global superpower raises some serious questions about development in less-developed parts of the world. I've heard it said that they now have the world's single largest military and they are developing their own desires and wishes that diverge from those of the more developed nations. In essence, they are demonstrating the reasons why developed nations are reluctant to share technology (as you call it "education and training") with smaller nations in the first place. Are we building them up only for them to potentially start telling us what to do and how to do it? That's one of the elephants in the room here.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Shhhhhhhh …. shhhhhhhhh!!!

Australia is thinking!

[Gary Childress]

Shhhhhhhh …. shhhhhhhhh!!!

Australia is thinking!

Is that directed at me and what is it supposed to mean?

I mean, I'm all for cooperation and sharing among nations. However, as far as I can tell, this is a vital discussion that everyone here needs to participate in and know what is being talked about.

[Belinda]

The principles that you work with are binary in the extreme. They lead you to totalizing assertions which, as you well know, are designed to be answered in one way only. Your latest *set-up* was to present a simple model of the theft of, say, a pencil and the answer you seek, which in your mind is unavoidable, leads to your interlocutor admitting that point which is your sole and primary point.

Those issues that have to do with human populations, their expansion; with the encounters between modern and technologically advanced people and those living at a stone-age level, especially when the examples are historical such as the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the same to the southern tip of Africa -- these issues are non-amenable to the simplistic analysis that, through your own choices I think, has you in its grip.

So when I converse with you in written form, and present larger blocks of ideas that should be taken in blocks and responded to reciprocally, you hunker down into your cherished reduction from whence all your *analysis* proceeds.

I have asserted that this binary system, this ethical-moral model, derives from Christian ethics. The ethical principles in question are one thing naturally, but I am more interested in the adoption of the *philosophy* (such as it is but it is a social philosophy that you recommend and on its base you make extraordinary demands) which when I examine it seems to be more similar to *religious conviction*. You objected to the term 'woke' (and I said I had trepidation using it) yet I am at a loss as to what terms to use to describe you, on one hand, and this class or segment of people, usually white and usually middle or upper middle class, who take issue with everything that has made them them, and provided all they have, and develop what I call a *poisonous* philosophy which then is conveyed to others through processes that remind me of religious enthusiasm.

As Bowden said:


Religious enthusiasm


One idea I am working with, and my topic area is the contemporary United States, deals with an examination of social hysteria and social manifestations that begin around some inspiring event (a police shooting of an alleged criminal) and then get *invested* with a great amount of other content, all of which is bound up in intense sentiment and unloosed feelings. What, for example, really animated the mobs who went on *righteousness rampages* with a nearly religious zealousness to attack and topple hundreds of monuments of important historical personages? It is not *idea* that moves them but emotions about what they are doing. Thus the experiences are 'enthusiastic' in this religious sense.

However, most of those who are participating are certainly post-Christians and yet, it seems to me, they are still captured by and moved by zealotry that has a religious tone to it. So what interests me in you (when you reveal the core and animating ideal of your existential philosophy) is that it is (as I say) totalizing. You have taken a very limited theme and blown it up into a 'totalizing' political philosophy. You genuinely believe that it not only can be applied but that it should be applied, and you are serious when you (unreally) indicate that you would submit an opinion-survey to the Aboriginals asking them Should we stay or should we go? I'll abide by your decision! (with your wee suitcase dutifully packed in anticipation, some sunscreen in your pocket, a map, etc.)

So while it is true that I would not have placed you among The Woke (which is not precise enough of a term) you are, in certain ways, definitely linked to these sorts of ideas. That is, the social justice warriors, etc. Those who define, who have and who hold (i.e. who work as activists) the lists of the politically-correct views which are inculcated among others inclined to them.

If in regard to what we have just recently been discussing -- South Africa -- I am to set out a set of principles I would say that they are definitely revealed in what I am writing and what I have written. The issue is that you are fundamentally unfamiliar with their matrix and, at the same time, vitally and also zealously oppose to them whatever they are or might be. I ask you therefore to participate in a conversation you are largely unprepared for (or unqualified). You do not read. You have no real interest in the affairs of the day. But you do seem to have a *pet focus* which, as I say, seems enthusiastic and obsessive. But this is not just you. Many share a similar *position* or *location*).

I have alluded to those I am examining (Guénon, Evola) who start from extremely different points of analysis vis-a-vis 'modernity' and certainly 'liberalism'. I think that you gather that I am inclining away from conventional liberal notions, and also that I tend to see them leading to what I have termed 'liberal rot'. The ascendency and domination of American Liberalism has led (is leading) to fracturation and dissolution. So, with that said, you seem to focus down into minutia where you can play philosophically with *righteous ideas* (that you establish a priory as unassailable) whereas I am examining *things* from a wider perspective, or in any case one that I consider to be removed or elevated (a position above).

I suppose that those who read what I write imagine that I am attempting to redefine or perhaps *apologize* for Apartheid? Or that I am looking at things through racist or racialist lenses? I do not think that my ideas fit into those frames. And I also think that those frames are terms which have been so intensely politicized that they can hardly function anymore as proper designations. Could these ideas be talked about on this forum and among this group of people? I wonder. I don't think so though. The reason? Everyone here has been so deeply programed in the terms of the *politically correct* that entire conversations are conceptually off-limits. So much preamble is necessary to counter the established ideas, and this is so intensely conflictive, that it simply becomes *ugly*. So I have to at least say, because it is fair to do so, that I have read so many of those who are progressive and liberal proponents of the core tenets of left-progressivism. I have their books and I can cite from them.

And I have also read a whole range of writers who are *forbidden* and are not allowed to be read. I mean this seriously. Not allowed to be read (thought about, referred to). Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wilmot Robertson and many others. What I find is that the *picture* that the Left-Progressives offer is always skewed and tendentious. They offer *re-descriptions* and *paraphrasing* and when they do this the restate. When you read the original sources of those whose ideas have been pushed out of the acceptable zone of allowed conversation, you see that they are making sense and, in my view, that their ideas should not be uniformly dismissed. It does not help me, necessarily, to arrive at solidified and certain positions (it may hinder that in fact) but it does indeed widen my perspectives on how different people think and interpret their world.

Finally, I find that conversing with you is similar in some ways to conversing with Immanuel Can. You are totally fixed in your idea structures. They are reduced, binary and absolute. He will not be moved, and you will not be moved. And that is one more reason why I have to wonder at how it came about that you wind up in this state. And then the larger question is How have we all wound up in the state we are in?

Binary principle of right and wrong notwithstanding, the problem of economic underdevelopment is dealt with by improving education and training among economically underdeveloped peoples. We have "all wound up in the state we are in" because rich countries and rich regimes have not sufficiently organised and paid for education and training. It's a sad state of human decency when education and training in economically deprived places is largely paid for by Christian and Islamic missionaries, and charities financed by middle class individuals.

I think China's emergence as a global superpower raises some serious questions about development in less-developed parts of the world. I've heard it said that they now have the world's single largest military and they are developing their own desires and wishes that diverge from those of the more developed nations. In essence, they are demonstrating the reasons why developed nations are reluctant to share technology (as you call it "education and training") with smaller nations in the first place. Are we building them up only for them to potentially start telling us what to do and how to do it? That's one of the elephants in the room here.

We citizens of the world need to risk that as the alternative is worse. I don't consider "us" to be the US super power or NATO.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Shhhhhhhh …. shhhhhhhhh!!!

Australia is thinking!

Is that directed at me and what is it supposed to mean?

I mean, I'm all for cooperation and sharing among nations. However, as far as I can tell, this is a vital discussion that everyone here needs to participate in and know what is being talked about.

Sorry, it was a jab directed at Harry. All good-natured I hope. It was not a commentary on what you had just written.