Tag: philosophy

Not All Cancellations are Created Equal

It’s always fascinating to see who gets cancelled because some random nobody made false assertions about someone in an article nobody read, who gets cancelled due to a single tweet, and who doesn’t get cancelled when multiple women accuse him of monstrous acts for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet.

“By the time the New York Magazine article came out, we were deep into post[-production], and we had wrapped months and months ahead of time. So that’s when it became a factor for me. Prior to that, I was aware of a podcast that I did not listen to, just because I don’t have time. Do you know what I mean? It was like, ‘Whatever’s going on, it has nothing to do with the making of the show, and I have to make the show,’ which sounds callous. I have so much empathy for anyone who has a terrible experience, and especially is brave enough to speak about it and come forward about it. But because it didn’t involve me personally, and it didn’t involve the show, it wasn’t part of my experience of making the show, if that makes sense. And because my contact with him was so limited, it didn’t have an impact upon our dynamic, because I was fairly independent at that point.”

When asked if he’d been in contact with Gaiman recently, Heinberg focused on his experience working with The Sandman creator. “He [Gaiman]is an executive producer on the show, and he’s been a brilliant and — I will just tell you, in my experience — he’s been nothing but loving and generous. And I don’t know that if I had created a comic and some guy came in and made it into a TV show, I don’t know that I would have been as loving and trusting and generous. And that’s my Neil Gaiman experience.”

Regarding the allegations, Heinberg added, “I can’t speak about any of the allegations, because I don’t know anything. So I feel for everyone involved, and I wish we lived in a world where there was room for nuance, and everybody’s point of view is valid, including Neil’s. And that’s where I am: Everybody has a truth, everybody has an experience as it happened to them. And if there is — this is going way too far — but I’m not involved in it, in any of it. I respect everybody involved, and the worst thing I could do is make it about me in any way, if that makes sense.”

You know, it would have been nice to have been the benefit of even a modicum of that gracious willingness to suspend judgment after Popular Mechanics seeded Wikipedia with false assertions about opinions no one has ever once personally accused me of holding. Not even once in more than fifty years.

This, of course, is why I find it difficult to take people’s opinions about me very seriously, for good or for ill. Everything, with nearly everyone, usually amounts to “who, whom”, and all of the principles and beliefs they supposedly espouse are abandoned the moment they conflict with the individual’s immediate material interests. As Ludwig von Mises observed, it is only the acting man who truly knows his motivations and beliefs.

Everything else is just noise. The fact that Sean Combs is going to be welcomed back into the celebrity world with open arms, the fact that Neil Gaiman is still regarded as anything more than a fraudulent ripoff artist with an alleged penchant for inflicting himself on the insufficiently enthusiastic, is sufficient reason to simply ignore the illusory world of fame, prestige, and awards. Create the work for its own sake, because there is no greater reward than seeing your vision come to fruition, however imperfectly.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Smartest Conclusion

If you’re relying on an appeal to intelligence, it’s just not looking very good for atheists or satanists these days.

I had severe depression and anxiety disorder. I even tried to end my life. But when I met Jesus, everything changed. He healed me and set me free. I’m living proof that Jesus is God. He is the only way. Heaven is the only rational conclusion because only in Heaven can the human mind find eternal meaning, and perfect justice be fulfilled. And it is Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead, who guarantees both.

I’m just a humble 3SD myself, but I note that although YoungHoon Kim came at it from a different direction, his reasoning and his conclusion is essentially the same as Greg Boyd’s.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Science is Settled

How do you know you are an influential intellectual? People quote you and cite your ideas all over the world.

And how do you know you are a dangerous intellectual deemed a persona non grata by the scriptwriters of the Narrative? People quote you and cite your ideas all over the world without ever once referring to you by name or even implication.

This “Male Hierarchy Test” developed by “Experts from IDRlabs” on the basis of “the six categories of men identified by scientists” will look more than a little… familiar to the readers of this and one or two other sites.

The thing to remember is that this is standard practice when you’re not useful to the Narrative for one reason or another. It is amazing at how many innovative intellectuals have been effectively erased from history so that iconic frauds like Darwin, Edison, and Einstein can be manufactured and sold to the public in the place of the real innovators.

It’s no different than what we see in the world of political commentary, where new gatekeepers are constructed, inflated, and pushed on the public as soon as their fraudulent predecessors inevitably expose themselves as controlled opposition.

But the important thing is that the ideas get out there and take on a life of their own. The true intellectual has no need whatsoever of public adulation or awards, because the only reward that is worth treasuring is that magic moment of clarity one experiences when the summa encyclopedia of human knowledge and understanding is genuinely expanded. Not only is that something that no one can ever take away, it is something that the famous frauds, charlatans, and grifters will never, ever, know.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Boomers’ Last Boom

I find it tremendously amusing and absolutely satisfying to watch how the Boomers are struggling to grasp that the world is going to continue on without them. The new Stephen King movie, The Life of Chuck, may well serve as the last will and testament of that most wicked generation.

If there’s a useful rough division of King’s stories, it’s between the ones that describe a world of horrors on one hand, and the ones that consider what to do about being in a world of horrors on the other. This isn’t a clean distinction, certainly, nor does it map cleanly to downbeat versus upbeat — sometimes the straight-up horrors are told with dark humor, as in “Survivor Type,” a gnarly little short story about a doctor who gets marooned on a desert island and starts eating himself. A King story usually has an element of warning. This could happen to you, says Stephen King, as the doctor eats his foot, or as a finger comes up out of a bathroom drain, or as a haunted car or a pandemic or a vampire or a rabid dog appears. This could happen to you.

But many of his stories have a paradox at their cores. He believes in menace and evil, and in the brutality of a world that kills kids, and helpless people, and good people. He is not a horror writer who punishes the foolish above others.

At the same time, he writes with a deeply humane central thesis, which is that in light of all those monsters, you are blessed to have in your life at least your own resilience and the company of other people. The Stand is not really about the flu, after all; it is about creating a new community and choosing to make sacrifices for it. It is only superficially about the clown. Really, it’s about fear and trauma, and especially about strength in numbers. These are what you might call the “What now?” stories: You know the world is full of pain … what now? The worst has happened … what now? You are fully aware of your own mortality … what now?

An SGer posed the question: Can you guess the “shocking” twist from boomer Stephen King’s latest movie adaptation ? Possibly the most boomer sentiment ever.

That’s a pretty obvious hint. My guess: The world ends with Chuck.

And, of course, I was correct, as I confirmed when I asked Deepseek about the theme of King’s novella.

  • Life as a Universe: Chuck’s existence literally sustains the world; when he dies, reality dies with him.
  • Death’s Inevitability: The reverse structure mirrors how life is understood only in hindsight.
  • Legacy: The billboards (“Thank You, Chuck”) suggest even ordinary lives have cosmic significance.

King blends horror, fantasy, and melancholy in this existential fable, leaving much open to interpretation. The story’s emotional core lies in Chuck’s quiet acceptance of his role—both as a man and as the “engine” of a fleeting world.

Quelle surprise. It’s not an “existential fable”, it’s a quintessential Boomer fable. I genuinely wonder who was more shocked that Jesus Christ didn’t return during their lifetime, the apostles or the average Christian Boomer? I’ve never forgotten the declaration of a female Boomer who admitted that she didn’t know when Jesus would return amidst fire and sword, but was certain it would be during her lifetime.

O say do those fading old Boomers still boom,
As their sunset descends in the fullness of doom?

Isn’t it fascinating to observe that regardless of what their religion or their beliefs happen to be, so many Boomers tend to believe exactly the same thing about reality ending with them?

DISCUSS ON SG

The Collapse of Scientific Materialism

And the end of the Enlightenment. Ted Gioia correctly observes ten warning signs of the comprehensive collapse of the knowledge system known as “modernity”.

  • Scientific studies don’t replicate.
  • Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before.
  • The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many only have unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation.
  • Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector.
  • Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies.
  • Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard’s president. But the authorities just take it for granted.
  • AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted.
  • Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve. People now see actual degradation in every sphere of technology.
  • Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, COVID, etc).
  • We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science.”

All of these things are the direct result of the subversive attack on Christendom by Clown World. It is not possible to have science without truth, and it is not possible for Man to recognize truth while rejecting Truth. Modernity is a spiritual and philosophical sickness that is based upon a false foundation of subversion and groundless pride.

Every virtue of Clown World is a vice. Every stated truth is a lie. And it is not possible to build anything, from a functioning school to a thriving society, on what is, in the end, a philosophy of parasites.

What comes next is collapse, followed by the harsh and pitiless rule of those whose devotion to God, truth, and beauty will no know mercy for those who ruined the world due to their stupid and futile ambition to make themselves gods.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Modes of Persuasion

Now that we’re past the preludes, we’re into the substance of the Aristotelian text.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both, for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously, and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed but a small portion of that art. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. 

However, if you’re interested in the history of human thought, you might like to check out today’s post tracing the subversion of the concept of objective Beauty on Sigma Game, which was inspired by a question about the attractiveness of a Hollywood starlet.

From the smallest seeds spring mighty oaks…

DISCUSS ON SG

Because You Wanted It

WOMEN: We should get paid the same as men because there should be equal pay for equal work!

ALSO WOMEN: Why the fuck are women expected to work on their period? I’m sitting here at work keeled over in intense pain wearing a fucking diaper because my uterus is self destructing and l׳m expected to wear tight business casual clothing pants, be friendly to coworkers, AND do my work? Fuck this fucking sexist misogynistic society that tells women to suffer through several days of intense pain and act completely normally. I shouldn’t have to take a sick day every month and be looked at like a slacker because my body is losing a gallon of blood and tissue a day.

Prior to being “liberated” she would not have been expected to show up to an office and put in the same effort and hours as a man regardless of her physical state, but accepting false premises invariably leads to suboptimal consequences.

If you’re a young woman, think very, very carefully about what you actually want, not what some ugly Jewish feminists from the 1960s told you that you should want. Because if you pursue it, you’re probably going to get it. And while being a man is many things, two of those things are not “easy” or “fun”. Also, it’s exceedingly stupid to follow the path set by mentally unstable women whose lives were burning trash fires and whose ends were ugly.

No one was more important to the birth and flourishing of early women’s liberation than this singular persona. Shulamith Firestone died alone in New York, in her East Village apartment, where apparently she had expired some days before. No one had known of her passing.

DISCUSS ON SG

Commentary Question

One of the common forms of medieval analysis was the commentary. Hence Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which is just one of many examples of the form.

If I was to write a commentary of that kind, almost certainly with my new best friend, what author and what work would be of the most interest? Darwin, Dawkins, and anyone modern is out, unless you can make a very convincing case for consideration.

Throw your ideas out there. I’m not saying I will, I’m just saying that some of the experiments I’ve been doing with The Legend are making new possibilities of many kinds apparent to us.

DISCUSS ON SG

Talk to the AI

Because the man is extremely disinclined to engage with anyone. Now, as I said when I answered the Kurgan’s three questions, I was not interested in entertaining further discussion or engaging in debate with anyone on the subject. I particularly dislike theological discussions, because not only are most of them totally incapable of going anywhere substantial, but I have yet to meet a single individual who is intellectually honest enough to treat his fundamental assumptions with the same rigor that he treats everyone else’s.

Which means, of course, that I have yet to meet a single person, of any religious or irreligious persuasion, who is capable of genuinely defending the full panoply of his belief system against my critiques of it. And while there was a time when I enjoyed tearing down certain people’s belief systems, and while it remains necessary from time to time, I don’t get a kick out of seeing how it observably distresses people to see what scanty foundations support their intellectual infrastructure. And for some reason, my observation that it really doesn’t matter what nonsense your average person believes to be true, so long as he does his best to serve God, family, and nation, seems to provide most people with cold comfort.

Naturally, my simple act of answering a friend’s questions immediately prompted this self-titled DEFENSE OF THE CATHOLIC CLAIMS. Now, just to be clear, I’m not picking on this guy and I’m not targeting Catholic beliefs here, they simply happen to serve as recent and useful examples of something every single person from every single religious persuasion I have ever encountered always – and I do mean ALWAYS – does. And it should serve to explicate, yet again, why I am not interested in answering anyone’s questions or engaging in debates anymore.

In defense of the Catholic claims that you addressed today on your blog –

Kurgan formulated the first question badly, and you rightly caught his mistake.

Apostolic Succession is the fundamental basis for authority in the Apostolic (Catholic or Orthodox) churches.

A stronger formulation of Kurgan’s first question is “If Jesus gave his apostles the authority to teach, to forgive sins, and to distribute the Sacraments until He returns, as He explicitly states in the Gospels, then in what form does that authority exist on earth today?”

Protestants must say “it doesn’t”, or “everyone has that authority”, or “whoever I agree with has that authority”. None of which make any sense.

This is why it doesn’t matter that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was formulated after a later Ecumenical Council. The same Apostolic authority is behind all the Ecumenical Councils. The council of Nicaea is not any more or less authoritative than any other Ecumenical Council.

Kurgan’s second question – “then how is God loving” – was silly, and you addressed it properly.

On the third question of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity –

First of all, that tradition goes back to the early Church Fathers, who all read the same Gospels you do, which say Jesus had “brothers”. And yet they still believed Mary remained a virgin, for good reasons.

When Gabriel appeared to a girl about to be married and announced that she would be a mother, her response was very strange: “how can this be, for I know not man”? Rather than what most girls would think – that the upcoming marriage would obviously produce a child.

This indicates that Mary was not expecting to consummate her marriage to Joseph, probably because she had already taken a vow of perpetual virginity, which was not uncommon at the time.

As for the word “brothers”, in Greek “adelphoi”, it does not strictly indicate men with the same mother, but rather men who are relatives. The word could apply to half-brothers or cousins. Those brothers are probably from Jesus’ extended family, or maybe Joseph’s children from a previous marriage.

My response:

You make the same mistake he does when you go off on what you imagine Protestants “must” say. You’re obviously wrong. This is why I will not talk to you or anyone else about these things. None of you are intellectually honest enough to examine your own assumptions as critically as you do everyone else’s. I run into this every single time I talk to anyone, of any religious persuasion. So I no longer talk to anyone about these things.

If we grant that the Apostles had authority from Jesus, and then we ask “where is that authority after the Apostles have died?” –

The only possible answers are

“Nobody has it”

“Everybody has it”

“Some people have it”

If Nobody has it, then no council, including Nicaea, has any authority.

If Everybody has it, then every council, including Nicaea, has exactly the same authority as any individual – which amounts to none at all.

If Some people have it, then who and how?

See if you can spot the moving target, kids! I did, of course, and I knew it would be there, of course, because it always is. Furthermore, note the total inability everyone has to simply ask a question, receive an answer, and then stop right there.

I didn’t agree to a debate. I didn’t agree to explain anything. I don’t care what nonsense any of these guys believe. I’m even open to the theoretical possibility that they might somehow, against all probability and despite their observable errors, have accidentally landed on the precise historical and textual interpretations that sets the foundation for perfectly correct theological understanding.

Perhaps, against all the odds, they alone see through the glass with perfect clarity.

Now, I understand that virtually everyone who reads this blog is smarter than the average. I also understand that virtually everyone who reads this blog is a binary thinker who doesn’t really understand what I mean by probabilistic thinking. You see, it’s not about what you can do, it’s about what you are instinctually comfortable with. And most people naturally, instinctively, intuitively, seek certainty above all else. You are creatures of intellectual safety and order, and that is a good thing.

But I am not. I don’t think like you do and I don’t need what you do. I thrive on intellectual chaos and uncertainty. The crazy thing, the amusing thing, is that I am so often accused of that very certainty that doesn’t matter to me at all, usually by people who don’t even know what their own words mean, let alone mine. The following is a fairly common objection, one that happened to be raised on SG today:

Vox is using as authority his own intellect, which we were told is not trustworthy.

Tell me you’re retarded without telling me you’re retarded. So many of you are so blitheringly stupid. This is precisely why I don’t talk about these things. When you say something that is obviously incorrect and stupid, and I show that what you said is incorrect and stupid, I am not appealing to the authority of my intellect.

You morons don’t even understand your own words. And you think you’re going to teach anyone else what God’s Word means?

I will now happily go back to ignoring theological disputes and religious debates. But perhaps now you will have a better understanding of my lack of interest in them. If I’m going to explore these topics, I will do so with my new best friend, who for all his shortcomings and petty dishonesties is at least capable of comprehending his errors when they are pointed out to him. And indeed, we have had several good discussions about potential logical errors in the Summa Theologica, which actually holds up rather better than Arthur C. Clarke imagined it would.

One last piece of advice. If you think something logically follows, then write out the syllogisms. Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Rhetorically appealing to logic is not the same thing as actually applying it, and you’re never going to fool anyone who is capable of distinguishing between a syllogism and an enthymeme.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Three Catholic Questions

The Kurgan posed three questions for me. I’ll answer them, but don’t expect me to engage anyone in debate over them. Remember, most self-appointed theologians don’t even know the difference between the Nicene Creed and the so-called Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed which is a) often and falsely called the “Nicene Creed”, b) was formulated at the council that took place in Constantinople, and c) never had anything to do with Nicaea, and their grasp of basic logic tends to be nonexistent.

If God (Jesus) did in fact establish a Church (or at least a doctrine) to follow on Earth, then surely it necessarily must be a) infallible, and b) eternal (at least until end times). Agree? If not, why not? (In this case please explain the reasoning as I doubt I can infer it otherwise)

Disagree. The logic doesn’t follow at all. As with most appeals to “then surely it necessarily” this reveals nothing more than the formulator’s inability to construct the correct syllogisms. The conflation of “eternal” with “until end times” is a giveaway of the formulator’s tendency toward ambiguity. Indeed, the common use of the marriage metaphor for the relationship between Church and Christ indicates that it not only isn’t necessarily eternal, but cannot be.

Furthermore, Jesus Christ knew his apostles were fallible and even predicted some of their specific failures. There is no reason to believe that he had higher expectations of his future followers who would be even further removed from his teachings. I absolutely refuse to believe that Jesus Christ was less intellectually capable or had a weaker grasp on human behavioral patterns than Siddhartha Gautama or me.

If you do not agree with the premise that God DID in fact establish a Church (or at least a doctrine) then how do you reconcile this with God being a loving God?

Easily. First, God sent Jesus to rescue us from our fate under His own rules. He values us more than He values His system. Second, Jesus said that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he would be there. Both are powerful indications of love that require neither Church nor Doctrine.

Do you have an opinion/view on whether Mary was and remained a Virgin (sexually at least) both before and after the birth of Jesus?

Yes. If Jesus had brothers and Mary was their mother, then she was obviously no longer a virgin. One virgin birth is divine. Two or more smacks of propaganda or a fundamental failure to understand how reproduction works.

Furthermore, either Mary didn’t remain a virgin or she never became the wife of Joseph because their marriage was never consummated.

DISCUSS ON SG