When Losing One War Isn’t Enough

Already on their knees due to NATO’s war on Russia, the leaders of the EU nevertheless appear to be determined to open a second front with China as well.

AFP: The European Parliament Vice President Nicola Beer is visiting Taiwan this week. She said today that Europe must stand firm with Taiwan and avoid turning a blind eye to the mainland’s threats to Taiwan. Do you have any response to these comments?

Zhao Lijian: Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The one-China principle is a widely recognized basic norm in international relations and the political foundation of China-Europe relations. The European Parliament is an official institution of the European Union. Hence its members and senior officials are expected to abide by the one-China principle. 

Over the past two years, the European Parliament has promulgated multiple Taiwan-related resolutions to support and embolden “Taiwan independence” forces. Such moves have gravely violated the one-China principle and poisoned the atmosphere of China-Europe relations. China firmly opposes all forms of official interactions between the EU side and the Taiwan region. We urge the EU side to earnestly abide by the one-China principle, speak and act with prudence on issues related to Taiwan, and prevent any serious disruption in China-Europe relations. 

It’s not exactly a mystery why China is siding so strongly with Russia and ignoring all the desperate pleas to join the failed economic sanctions. And just in case the European leaders didn’t get the message being sent by multiple members of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the Global Times spelled it out for them.

Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the European Parliament (EP) on Wednesday for having seriously violating the one-China principle and urged the EU body to stop any forms of official exchanges with China’s Taiwan region.

The responding remarks came after EP’s vice-president Nicola Beer arrived on Taiwan island leading a delegation and kicked off a three-day visit to show support to the secessionists in the island. Taiwan’s secessionist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities hyped the fact that Beer is the first EP official at this level to visit the island in an official capacity.

Upon her arriving, Beer said the EU would not turn a blind eye to “China’s threats” toward the island, as she maintains that “Taiwan’s bloom is Europe’s bloom,” Taiwan-based media reported. Beer is scheduled to meet Taiwan’s regional leader Tsai Ing-wen during the visit.

“Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The one-China principle is a widely recognized basic norm in international relations and the political foundation of China-Europe relations. The EP is an official institution of the EU. Hence its members and senior officials are expected to abide by the one-China principle,” said Wang Wenbin, spokesperson of Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday.

Over the past two years, the European Parliament has promulgated multiple Taiwan-related resolutions to support and embolden “Taiwan independence” forces. Such moves have gravely violated the one-China principle and poisoned the atmosphere of China-Europe relations, Wang stressed.

“China firmly opposes all forms of official interactions between the EU side and the Taiwan region,” Wang said, “We urge the EU to earnestly abide by the one-China principle, to speak and act with prudence on issues related to Taiwan, and to prevent any serious disruption in China-Europe relations.”

Zhao Lijian, Foreign Ministry, 19 July 2022

This diplomatic recklessness and retardery is breathtaking. If it weren’t for what we’ve witnessed over the last two years, it would be almost impossible to believe it was real.

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Why Globalism Cannot Survive

Vladimir Putin correctly points out that globalism is inherently doomed to failure due to the same sort of structural incoherencies that afflict communism, feminism, and imperialism.

A new epoch of world history is approaching and only “truly sovereign” states will be able to succeed in the changed environment, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a business forum, Putin claimed that “truly revolutionary,” “enormous” changes would lead to the creation of a new, “harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe” world order. In this new epoch, “only truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics,” he said.

By the term ‘sovereignty’ the Russian president means “freedom of national development, and thus of each person individually,” as well as “technological, cultural, intellectual, educational viability of the state” and a “responsible, active and nationally minded, nationally oriented civil society.”

Such a state, the president said, will serve as an example for others when it comes to “the standards and quality of people’s life, the protection of traditional values and high humanistic ideals.”

This kind of world is in sharp contrast to the Western-dominated unipolar world order, which, in Putin’s opinion, is “becoming a brake on the development of our civilization.”

He accused the West of being “racist and neo-colonial,” saying that its ideology “is becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism.”

The president argued that despite attempts by Western elites to preserve the existing world order, the changes are “irreversible.”

Globalism is simply another form of imperialism that involves a self-selected, self-serving elite ruling over a diverse collection of different peoples with different beliefs, capabilities, and interests. It utilizes the influence of money rather than the force of military might, but both the effects and the consequences are the same.

However, globalism is even less tenable than standard imperialism because the money it is built upon is an illusion created by the manufacture of debt through finance capitalism. This means that once the debt structure becomes overloaded and begins to collapse, the influence upon which the entire governing system rests begins to vanish as well.

Furthermore, the satanic element that elevates incompetents and degenerates to positions of power relies in part upon rewards that can no longer be provided once the system begins to break down. In the absence of the carrot, this leaves only the systemic stick, the pervasive blackmail, to hold the elite together and there are far too many people who are either immune or unconcerned to it, thus permitting the rise of a rebellious rival elite who have no loyalty to the globalist elite or the system.

This is why globalism has no choice but to become totalitarian and abandon all of its purported Enlightenment ideals, which were never more than propagandistic lies in the first place. And this is why nationalist leaders such as Putin can be so confident that the changes to the world order are irreversible, because the existing neo-liberal one is already collapsing under the weight of its debt and structural incoherencies.

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The Human Handgrenade

It does not appear things are going to get any more sensible in Great Britain anytime soon. Boris Johnson is going to be replaced as the Conservative Party Prime Minister by either a) a corrupt Indian with shady connections or b) a Remain lunatic who does a convincing neocon impression.

ITEM: It’s Liz vs Rishi for next PM! Truss will face Sunak in ballot of Tory members after surging to leapfrog Penny Mordaunt by just EIGHT votes in frantic day of wooing MPs

  • 137 Rishi Sunak
  • 113 Liz Truss
  • 105 Penny Mordaunt

Dominick Cummings clearly saw this coming, as he shared his thoughts on the leadership race, and the woman he dubbed The Human Handgrenade in particular, four days ago on his substack. Keep in mind that in spite of Sunak getting the most votes in every round, the early polls of the Tory MPs indicated that either Mordaunt or Truss would beat him in the final head-to-head competition. While those polls are not entirely reliable, one would have to say at this point that the highest probability outcome is that Britain will have a pro-EU globalist warmonger at the helm before the autumn.

I gave Truss the nickname ‘human handgrenade’ when she worked in the Department for Education. She said this week it was a ‘compliment’ because she gets things done. No. It was because she caused chaos INSTEAD OF getting things done. Truss is the only minister I shouted at in No10. The reason was her compulsive pathological leaking. As soon as she left any meeting she would call people like Harry Cole (The Sun) and blurt out what had been said. This routinely caused chaos and often damaged the UK. I called her over to No10. I sat in that tiny little room near the Cabinet room next to the loos (G39). I said to her: what are you doing leaking everything, stop, focus on your real job where you’re failing to grip your department, focus on that… The eyes had a thousand yard stare. ‘What do you mean the real job?’ she said. It was pointless to go on. For her, leaking to the media was the ‘real’ job. And in many ways, inside the Simulation, it is the real job!

Boris is supporting Truss. Why? 1) He thinks it’s the best way to stop Sunak. 2) He knows Truss is mad as a box of snakes and is thinking, ‘there’s a chance she blows, there’s another contest and I can return’.

And with the human handgrenade, she may catastrophically escalate the war — remember she has defined the goal as pushing Russia out of Crimea, which if seriously attempted would be seen by the vast majority of Russians (including anti-Putin Russians) as an attempt to destroy Russia and could lead to nuclear weapons.

Dominick Cummings, 16 July 2022

Truss is fully on-board with both the EU and the NATO Nazis, which suggests that the chances of the NATO-Russian war going hot will rise if she is elected.

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A Tale of Two Capitalisms

Michael Hudson explains the difference between industrial capitalism and finance capitalism, and how the latter has destroyed the US economy and impoverished the American people.

Most people think of all kinds of capitalism as being the same and the assumption is that industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century somehow was always financialized because there were always banks but financial capitalism is you just pointed out is a political system and as a political system it’s very different from the industrial capitalism dynamic. In industrial capitalism, the whole aim or the hope of the industrial capitalists in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany and central Europe was that banking would no longer be just usury, it wouldn’t be just consumer lending to exploit labor, and it wouldn’t be lending to the government somehow.

The financial system would recycle the economy savings and money creation and credit into industrial production and would finance the means of production to make that productive instead of predatory and parasitic as it became and that seemed to be the way that industrial capitalism was evolving up until World War I. Everything changed after that all of a sudden you had the financial system take over as a result of the crisis caused in the 1920s by the German reparations debt that couldn’t be paid and the inter-ally debt that was insisted upon to repay the United States for the arms that have supplied Europe for a century into World War I. Well, the result was a huge depression.

The allies said, well, we didn’t expect to actually have to pay the United States. If we have to pay the United States, then we have to charge reparations on Germany and for a decade there was a debate between John Maynard Keynes and Harold Moulton and others saying that these debts can’t be paid. How are you going to handle a situation where the debts can’t be paid?

The finance capitalists then were the basically the ancestors of today’s neoliberals and they said any amount of debt can be paid by any country if it just lowers the living standards and squeezes labor enough and that’s what basically the philosophy of the IMF ever since world war II when third world countries can’t pay the debt, the IMF comes in with an austerity program and say you have to lower wages, you have to break up labor unions, if necessary you have to have a democracy, and you can’t have a democracy unless you’re willing to assassinate and arrest the labor leaders and the advocates of land redistribution because a democracy means basically rule by the financial sector centered in the united states. And so finance capitalism ever since WWI and especially WWII and especially since 1980 is the nationalistic doctrine of American banks and the American one percent, and the American financial sector that is sort of merged into a symbiotic unit with the finance insurance and real estate.

In other words, finance capitalism instead of trying to promote overall economic growth for the 99 percent, instead of financing the industrialization of an economy with rising productivity and rising living standards, is now cannibalizing the industrial sector, cannibalizing the corporate sector. As you’re seeing in the U.S., finance capitalism is the economic doctrine of deindustrialization that has occurred in America in England and is now occurring in Europe.

Well, the problem is how do you survive if you’re not industrializing, if you’re not producing your own means of subsistence and how are you going to get this from other countries? Well, the answer is you don’t go to war with them like countries used to go to war with each other to grab their money and their land, you use finance as the new means of war so finance capitalism is the tactic of economic warfare by the United States against Europe and the global south to sort of draw all of the economic surplus of these countries in the form of debt service and the debt service is supplied by basically economic rent seeking from land rent, natural resource rent, and just plain interest charges on economy. So, none of these are really the result of industrial profits that are made by employing labor and uh selling its products at a markup.

Finance capitalism is not based on surplus value like industrial capitalism was. In fact, it destroys industry and in this cannibalizing of industrial capital, it basically dries out the economy and makes it unable to break even or even to function and in the United States today, for instance, if you look at the balance sheets of corporate revenue much of it is spent on stock buybacks. You buy back your own stock or dividend payouts. Only eight percent of corporate earnings are spent on new capital investment research and development: factories, machinery, and means of production to employ labor.

How did General Electric (GE) go broke? Basically, Jack Welch said let’s use our income not to continue to invest in making more electronic goods and services and appliances, let’s use it to buy our own stock that’ll push up our stock and essentially, we’ll just sell off our divisions and we’ll use the money of selling off our washing machine companies and stoves and sell it off and we’ll just pay it to the stockholders. That’ll push it up and by the way his salary was based on how much he could push up the stock of GE and he was paid in the form of stock options. Well, all of this is now the normal corporate behavior in the United States and corporations are no longer led by industrial engineers as they were a few centuries ago in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

They’re led by financial engineers of the chief financial officer and the ideal of these corporations is to make money financially not by industrial investment….. so on the narrow microeconomic level finance capitalism is a way of basically selling out a company and giving the proceeds to the stockholders and the bondholders but as a political system, because it is so destructive of the economy as you’ve seen in the United States and you’ve seen in Britain through de-industrializing it, it becomes belligerent in an attempt to make other countries just as equally paralyzed by making these countries pay tribute to the U.S. and England and the financialized economies by means of financial engineering, by means of debt service, by means of selling their mineral resources, their public utilities, their land, their roads all to foreign investors–basically to who borrows the money that’s just simply created in the U.S. and to save all of their money in their central bank reserves in the forms of loans to the U.S. treasury holding treasury bonds which is how the international monetary system worked until just a few months ago when everything changed.

So if you’re England and America right now you can look at President Biden’s speeches and he said well, China is our number one enemy because it’s competing unfairly. China is actually subsidizing industrial development by having its own infrastructure. It gives free education instead of privatizing education and making its labor pay for it. It has public health instead of privatizing social medicine like we do in the United States and making employers and workers pay for it.

Well, industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century was all in favor of strong government infrastructure. The ideal of industrial capitalism was to keep the wage costs of production down not by reducing wages but having government provide a basic infrastructure to cover the basic
needs of employees. The governments would provide free education so that employers didn’t have to pay for it. The governments would provide medical care so that employees didn’t have to pay for it and employers wouldn’t have to pay employees enough money to cover the education costs and to cover the medical care costs. The government would build roads and infrastructure and everything to facilitate the overall cost of doing business by industrial capital.

Well finance capitalism is just the reverse. Finance capitalism wants to privatize and take education, medical care, roads, turn the roads into toll roads, and take all of these and privatize them and make them financial corporations that will essentially pay out their economic rent to the bondholders and the stockholders and this economic rent adds to the cost of education and everything else that workers need to live on so the result is to make it a high cost economy and that’s why Biden has said China and Russia are America’s enemies because the only way that America can succeed given our privatized economy, given the fact that Americans have to pay up to forty three percent of their income for rent, given the fact that eighteen percent of America’s GDP is for medical care, given the heavy student loan debt–only if other countries tie themselves in the same knot, only if other countries impose the same economic overhead on their labor force and on their industry can there be equal competition.

If other countries have a mixed economy and are more efficient because they have an active government providing basic needs, that’s “autocracy” and that’s the opposite of “democracy.” Democracy is where everything is privatized and ultimately the one percent own everything.

Autocracy is any government that’s strong enough to have its own public investment. Any government strong enough to tax or regulate the financial sector is called “autocracy” so the U.S. in the 19th century would be called an autocracy as I guess the Austrian school called it – civilization is basically an “autocracy.”

There never has been an unmixed economy without government regulation, without a government investment, although Rome began to get to that point at the end of its empire and we all know what happened to it. So basically, finance capitalism is a predatory international economic policy aimed at draining the rest of the world all to pay the leading one percent of wealth holders in the U.S. and their satellite oligarchy in England and a few European countries.

Notice how, as always, evil lurks in the endless redefinitions and word spells. The inversions, subversions, and perversions are endless, and remember, we have been told that the root of all evil is the love of money. Therefore, it should be no surprise that an economic system entirely focused on money would prove to be unmitigated evil.

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The Potemkin “Tech” Industry

Russia and China have figured out what Westerners should have known for decades:

Russia has fined Google about US$373 million for allowing users to access, “prohibited” material about the war in Ukraine and other restricted content. The material was said to include materials attempting to discredit Russia’s military, as well as exhortations to protest the Russian government, according to Roskomnadzor, the country’s communications regulator. It added that the company has proven a “systemic” violator of national laws regarding content.

Google has not commented on the fines.

The company’s local subsidiary had declared bankruptcy last month after Russian authorities had seized its bank account to recover 7.2 billion rubles, or US$130 million which the company had been fined for similar violations last year.

The moves are part of a broader regulatory push by the Russian government to place pressure on tech firms, which they accuse of not moderating their content in accordance with Russian laws, and of trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs.

The key phrase: “trying to meddle in the nation’s internal affairs”. AC spells out the obvious conclusion.

It is clear at this point all of these tech companies are just subsidiaries of our intelligence apparatus. And given it is no coincidence that every top tech company is just taking orders from intel, that means intel has been throughout our economic system deciding who wins and who loses, and making sure it is their operations who win every time. We were never in a capitalist system, any more than we elected our leaders. All along, the idea you could have a killer app, form a business, and be just like Bill Gates was just a myth. Intel was always deployed domestically, even throughout the world of American business, working against any American who was not on their payroll and under their control.

We’re going to need a new economic theory simply to explain the way in which the “capitalist” system has been functioning since the 1980s at the absolute latest. Everything that we’re taught in microeconomics is observably untrue; the winners in far too many industries are evidently not determined by efficiency or competition or even luck, but rather by the hidden, but heavy hand of secret government funding.

It’s very much like the oft-criticized industrial policy of Japan, only on steroids. Instead of MITI selecting key industries in which to invest for maximizing economic growth, Big Brother is selecting favored corporations in every industry in which to invest for a) gathering information for the Panopticon and b) establishing official narratives.

Among other things, this absconomic theory will explain why modern corporations, from technology to entertainment, are increasingly unable to address the basic needs and preferences of their nominal customers.

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Does a Bear Glow in the Woods?

In which Owen and the Beartaria team are accused of being a federal operation:

What I Think Comprises the “Op”

My best guess: I think that there will be four phases of the operation. I believe we are currently nearing the end of Phase One.

Phase One: Information Collection and list making. Owen is collecting the names and addresses of non-op-team “Bears” via two methods:
All letters sent directly to him have the name and address of the “Bear” recorded.

All Telegram links in the BTA (Beartaria Times App) that the Op team runs try and identify the Bears on the Telegram chat and then proceed to collect as much information and possible about the person’s views on controversial topics.

Phase Two: Initial roll-up of subset of the “Bears” that Owen and the team has identified and categorized as fitting into the preferred Operational Target (I describe the “Operational Target” in the following section) To provide believable cover for himself, just like those 1980’s Miami Vice episodes, he will ALSO be arrested and it will be a spectacle that is recorded by the op team for purposes of mass media dissemination.

My best guess is that the timing of will coincide with one of the meet-ups or happen during a meet-up, because of the convenient proximity of the operational targets. Because of this, I predict that Phase Two will happen all in one day sometime during the upcoming Bear Meet-up in the Ozarks.

Phase Three: Phase 3 will be the prosecution and confinement of the preferred Operational Targets identified in phase 1. It will also include, of course, the slipping away of Owen Benjamin or his release based on some legal reason or technicality. This is consistent with prior ops where the leader escapes punishment. Typically, these leaders are on the payroll of security services and make a LOT of money if they are good. Owen Benjamin is the best person I’ve ever seen play the role of “oppressed victim of The System.”

Owen will have to re-convince his audience that he’s NOT an insider to the operation; some will believe him and others will not. If he plays that role effectively, then Phase 4 will be more successful for the op team.

Phase Four: Phase 4 will be the identification and possible apprehension of those individuals who express vehement anger or rage at the operation, whether they be on social media or otherwise. Given the emphasis of Owen on his family and all of the heart-rending content he posts, this last phase could actually be substantial. All individuals identified will either be 1) Intimidated or 2) Arrested.

Is it possible that Owen is the largest and most unlikely honeypot in FBI history? Sure, it’s possible. Anything is possible. But that’s not the right question. The right question is “what is the probability that Owen and the entire Bear infrastructure are feds?” And the answer to that is: very, very low.

The two things that immediately leaped out at me are: a) this came out not long after Patriot Front was, and in my opinion, correctly, ID’d as a federal op. So, a little poisoning of the independent well would make sense at this point in time. And b) the title “Son of Yeshua” is deeply suspect and strongly indicates we’re dealing with a Gamma caught up in the throes of a self-delusion right from the start. Characters with these sorts of appellations almost invariably believe themselves to be some sort of prophet and enjoy predicting future events that never come to pass.

You would not believe some of the emails and “warnings” that I receive on a regular basis. Suffice it to say that they are never, ever genuine in any way.

The good news here is that the aforementioned gentleman was kind enough to provide us with a clear predictive model. So, after no one is arrested for anything this summer, we can safely conclude that he’s full of complete nonsense and await the next attempt to discredit another pillar of the Unauthorized community.

And before the attention of the Panopticon returns to me again, I will confirm that I am not employed or associated with or compensated by any intelligence, surveillance, military, investigative, or police organization. I can’t speak for anyone else on the subject, but I will speak unequivocally for myself.

As for the accuser, he would do well to keep in mind that “bearing false witness” is not a legitimate activity for the Christian.

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A Satanian Lectures Churchians

Jordan Peterson, who is a “little satan” if there ever was one, literally accuses the Christian churches.

It is of course completely presumptuous of me to dare to write and broadcast a video entitled message to the Christian churches but I’m going to do it anyway because I have something to say and
because that something needs to be said.

It is completely presumptuous. It is completely absurd. He’s now gone beyond his conventional luciferian Babelism to literal satanry. And Peterson is leaving out something rather vital, he’s attempting to mislead young men and subvert Christianity and its institutional organizations because his new masters at the Daily Wire hired him for precisely that purpose.

We in the West are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the faux logo-centric conceptual structure of civilization itself. To take that apart, that’s a society centered on the encouraging adventurous masculine spirit and that privileges – that hated word – of all things, the divine logos, and what should we worship and celebrate properly other than that deconstructionists the words of that mass murderer Karl Marx, and it is precisely those young men who are deeply conscientious, capable of guilt and regret, who have come to believe in pain, that every deep impulse that moves them out into the world for the adventure of their life, even that impulse drawing them to women, is nothing but the manifestation of a spirit that is essentially satanic in nature.

This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically, and scientifically, it is literally
anti-true. It’s not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality, a minor conceptual error, but something that literally could not be farther from the truth and something that distant from the truth comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from Hell.

This is pure Judeochurchian bafflegarble. The assault on the West has been spearheaded by the very people for whom Jordan Peterson now draws a paycheck. And it comes from Hell, not “a place that cannot be distinguished” from it. The satanic war is first against Jesus Christ, second against the European nations, third against the Greco-Roman philosophic legacy, and fourth, against the rest of humanity. It’s not a war against masculinity or young men; the assault on young women has been even more serious and devastating, as many young men can readily attest.

The Christian Church is there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find a garden, to walk in a family, to nurture an ark, to build a land, to conquer a ladder to heaven, to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.

Invite the young men back. Say literally to those young men: you are welcome here. If no one else wants what you have to offer, we do. We want to call you to the highest purpose of your life, we want your time and energy and effort and your will and your good will. We want to work with you to make things better, to produce life more abundant for you, and for your wife and children, and for your community and your country and the world.

No. A thousand times no! The Christian church is absolutely not there to remind people to pursue certain specific material goals. The Christian church is there to worship Jesus Christ, to care for the flock, and to spread the Gospel. It is not there to more efficiently produce material goods for the betterment of the world; to the contrary, it is there to war against the fallen world and its myriad of falsehoods! And one reason so many young men and women have left the institutional churches is because those churches have replaced Christianity with the very Churchian materialism Peterson is now claiming is the purpose of the Christian Church!

Peterson’s understanding of the role of the Church doesn’t even rise to the level of an evil pagan occultist like Hitler, who at least understood that “Kirche” was something fundamentally distinct from “Kinder” and “Kuche”. And life is not “a terrible catastrophe”. This is not only subversion, it is pure inversion, and most of you reading this will understand the significance of that.

Your church is for god’s sake. Quit fighting for social justice, quit saving the bloody planet. Attend to some souls, that’s what you’re supposed to do, that’s your holy duty. Do it now, before it’s too late and the hour is nigh.

And which “god” is that, Mr. Peterson. Which “god” is that?

Like the professional gatekeeper that he is, like the deceitful inversionist snaketongue that he is, Peterson is demanding a return from social justice evil to materialist Enlightenment evil in order to prevent those seeking the Way, the Truth, and the Life from founding new Christian bodies that will supplant the invaded, conquered, and subverted organizations that have been rightfully abandoned. This is simply an attempt to maintain the viability of the converged churchian institutions in order to prevent them from collapsing completely.

Needless to say, the average Churchian will drink this pseudo-philosophical poison up like Kool-Aid on a hot summer’s day.

UPDATE: Fencing Bear points out how, in his own words, the little satan actively rejects the central beliefs of Christianity while accusing the churches of failing to live up to his materialist standards for them.

Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered. This also meant that it had become acceptable to overlook and shirk responsibility for the suffering that existed in the here-and-now; Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life (a consequence that Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was the opiate of the masses); and, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden (outside of the stated belief in salvation through Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work.

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