Tag: philosophy

Happy Thanksgiving

SPACEKRAKEN

Among the many things for which I am thankful to God this Thanksgiving is this community. We may be a diverse and esoteric collection of souls, but we have continued to find common ground in devotion to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, particularly as personified in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

And all of us can also be thankful to be privileged to find ourselves living in such interesting and challenging times, where we have been given the opportunity to stand up and declare a side in the long-running war between the servants of God and the servants of Satan. As much as we might long for the peaceful salad days of yore, it is the conflict that tests and tempers us that makes us become more than we were before.

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Mailvox: On Suicide

A reader shares his thoughts:

Things aren’t going well. The hard is getting harder. And out of nowhere your post on “suicide.”

Thank you, Vox.

Not tonight.

Thank you.

Life is too interesting and full of possibilities to end it simply because one particular series of past choices culminated in a disappointing dead end.

Roll the dice. Shake things up. Enjoy the opportunity to make a completely new start. Explore one of the different paths you might have previously taken.

You have literally nothing to lose anymore. You’re entirely free!

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On Suicide

If your life sucks and you simply can’t see any way out, instead of ending it, why not make that radical change that has always fascinated you but struck you as completely impossible? Why not imagine that your present life is over, so now you’ve got the chance to live one of the other lives that you would have lived if you had nine of them?

It’s far better to leave everyone and everything behind than to seek oblivion while leaving your friends and family with psychological scars that will last a lifetime.

And if for some reason that’s not possible, if life genuinely isn’t worth living, then, at the very least, make your death count!

Samson said to the servant who held his hand, “Put me where I can feel the pillars that support the temple, so that I may lean against them.” Now the temple was crowded with men and women; all the rulers of the Philistines were there, and on the roof were about three thousand men and women watching Samson perform. Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other, Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.

Judges 16: 26-30

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The Importance of Maneuver

And perhaps even more significant, as demonstrated by this excellent piece on military history, is the importance of tactical flexibility:

Few ancient warriors have amassed such an enduring and widely known legacy as the Spartans. From the cinematic reimagining, to the science fiction super soldiers of the Halo series, to the use of the word Spartan itself as a synonym for arduous and ascetic ruggedness – Spartans are, for many, the archetypical warrior. Most with at least a cursory knowledge of ancient history know the Spartans by acclaim to be the best warriors of all the Greeks.

It is true that the Spartans fielded notably competent and powerful armies. This, of course, had less to do with some sort of genetic predisposition for combat, and more to do with the structure of Spartan society. In the classical era, most Greek city-states fielded citizen armies – quite literally the adult male population under arms, with farmers and craftsman mobilizing into a militia. In contrast, Spartan society was decidedly more martial, even in peacetime. Sparta had a large workforce of slaves (helots) who comprised the majority of the population – Herodotus claimed that there were something like seven helots for each Spartan. The presence of such a large, servile labor force enabled Spartan men to participate in rigorous military-social institutions, including regular training in arms and a military academy for young men. So while the average Athenian soldier was likely to be a farmer who grabbed the family shield, spear, and helmet when he was called up, a Spartan was more like a professional soldier who had helots to do the farming for him.

Sparta’s peculiar social structure and martial institutions bore their intended fruit. From roughly 431 to 404 BC, the Spartans fought a protracted conflict with Athens (the Peloponnesian War) which shattered Athenian preeminence in southern Greece and established Sparta as the dominant Greek power. This struggle witnessed many decisive Spartan victories, including the famous Battle of Syracuse, which saw an Athenian army entirely crushed by Sparta and her proxies.

The Battle of Leuctra brought a sudden, unexpected, and spectacular end to the era of Spartan hegemony.

Athens and Sparta are by far the two best known ancient Greek city states – Athens for its philosophers and Sparta for its warriors. Far less famous is Thebes – the third city of Greece. Yet it was this same uncelebrated Thebes that won a decisive victory against the Spartans, despite being heavily outnumbered, crushing the Spartan army and breaking its power….

At Leuctra, the Spartans arrayed in standard formation, with their battle lines formed up at 8 to 12 ranks deep. This was viewed as the correct formation to ensure both adequate depth and width. In short, the considered “best practice” was to maintain a properly balanced formation, with as little drift or dissipation as possible, to prevent the formation from breaking apart altogether. A broken formation was deadly. It is estimated that, in Greek hoplite battles, losing armies lost on average nearly three times as many men as winning armies. This was the price of a shattered phalanx.

At Leuctra, Epaminondas and the Thebans threw all the conventional wisdom out the window.

Instead of a balanced, rectangular formation, the Thebans assembled in a lopsided, weighted formation, with their left wing packed, both with far deeper ranks and their best troops. While the Spartans followed the conventional wisdom and lined up at a consistent depth all across the line, the Thebans assembled a massive package, fifty ranks deep, on the left (facing the Spartan right).

By forming up the vast bulk of their forces in the left wing (in a formation 4 to 5 times deeper than a traditional Hoplite mass), the Thebans had already deviated from one standard practice of the time. They abandoned a second standard operating procedure when they proceeded to advance that left wing far ahead of the remainder of their line. While the 50-deep left-hand mass smashed into the Spartan right, the Theban center and right lagged far behind. As a result, the mass of the overweight Theban left broke through the Spartan right wing and began to roll up the rear before the rest of the Spartan line even engaged in battle. Most of the Spartan army never got to join the battle before their formation was shattered from the rear. The Theban mass rolled into the rear, began concentric attacks on the Spartan army, and sparked a total rout in short order.

Leuctra was a titanic victory with massive geopolitical implications. The loss of an army to an outnumbered and underestimated foe rocked both Sparta’s material strength and its perception as the leading military power in Greece, and set in motion a strategic defeat that permanently relegated it to a second rate power within Greece.

The Battle of Leuctra also marked the beginning of the end of classical Greek hoplite warfare, with its focus on uniform, tactically simplified heavy infantry formations. To a modern reader, the strategy adopted by the Thebans at Leuctra, aimed at a decisive action to penetrate and exploit the enemy line, seems fairly obvious. Yet to accomplish this, the Thebans had to break a variety of “rules” for hoplite warfare, massing their forces into what the Spartans surely viewed as an unwieldy, imbalanced, and excessively deep left wing. Innovation rarely looks like innovation to those that have the benefit of hindsight, but the Thebans had, in a word, discovered the power of schwerpunkt. Thebes would itself soon be overwhelmed by another Greek power fielding similarly flexible, but even more powerful phalanx formations: Macedonia.

Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra marked one of the earliest documented examples of coordinated and planned battlefield maneuver.

The History of Battle: Maneuver, Part 1, 4 November 2022

Keep the Battle of Leuctra in mind whenever you’re tempted to “stick to the plan” in the face of a situation that has obviously departed from what was anticipated. If the Spartans had simply withdrawn in order to figure out the probable consequences of the anomaly they were witnessing at Leuctra, they might have been able to adapt to it and overcome it, thereby changing Greek history and preventing Sparta’s decline.

Mindless sticking to one’s pre-established position, either physically and conceptually, can be fatal.

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Never to Forgive, Never to Forget

There will be no “pandemic amnesty”. Those of us who weren’t stupid enough to fall for the obvious lies of the global depopulationists, the corrupt scientists, and the media are neither going to forgive nor forget the lies that were told, the incessant attacks on us, or the price that is still being paid by our friends and family members who refused to listen to us.

When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty….

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

There is no forgiveness without repentance. Not only is there no repentance from the pro-vaccine side, many of their lies are still being told! And the gaslighting and backpedaling by the politicians, the corporations, and the pharmaceutical companies – we never said the vaccines would prevent the transmission of COVID or forced anyone to get vaccinated – is absolutely unrepentant and unconscionable.

As Spacebunny aptly quoted Cerno, “there is no reconciliation without restitution.”

The only way to learn from mistakes is to admit them, and virtually no one who got vaccinated and/or pushed the vaccination on others is even willing to admit they were mistaken, much less repent of their foolish and hateful words. All of them will pay a price for their decisions, both physically and in terms of the way in which their decision-making capabilities will be regarded in the future. It is a price that is not only inescapable, but entirely merited.

The ongoing problems will not be solved by the people who created and exacerbated them, especially not when those people are desperate to deny their responsibility for the problems.

Never ascribe to uncertainty or error that which can be explained by malicious and satanic evil.

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More Adventures in Bafflegarble

Starring, as always, Jordan Peterson.

“Well, the question ‘Did that happen?’ begs the question ‘What do you mean by happen?’
“Because when you deal with fundamental reality and you pose a question, you have to understand that the reality of the concept of your question when you’re digging that deep are just as questionable about as what you’re questioning!
“Now so people say to me, ‘What do… do you believe in God?’
“And I say, ‘OK; there’s a couple of mysteries in that question.’
“What do you mean, ‘do?’
“What do you mean, ‘you?’
“What do you mean ‘believe?’
“And what do you mean, ‘God?’
“And you say as the questioner, ‘Well, we already know what all those things mean except belief in God.
“And I think, ‘No! If we’re going to get down to the fundamental brass tacks, we don’t know what ANY of those things mean.’”

This is what happens when you’re not very intelligent, you’ve never read any Greek, Roman, or Christian philosophy, you have a Christ complex, and you’ve sold your soul to the Prometheans. The addiction to Definitely Not Meth and what appears to be a multi-generational history of sexual abuse probably don’t help.

Every single one of you who ever thought that Jordan Peterson was anything more than a complete intellectual fraud should be ashamed of yourselves. Remember precisely what you did, and what you thought, the next time you’re tempted to tell me I’m wrong about someone.

My track record of predicting future events may be flawed – I am not a prophet and I make no pretense of being one – but my track record of calling out intellectual charlatans is flawless.

Speaking of charlatans, it will probably surprise no one that the multi-vaxxed Scott Adams is impressed by the Petersonian bafflegarble.

This is an interesting “one screen, two movies” situation. If you think he is talking about the dictionary definition of words, it sounds stupid. If you understand his point about how much of reality our brains can access, it makes perfect sense.

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Excellence + Time = Greatness

The NFL may, or may not, be irretrievably gay and converged, but the greatness of Bill Belichik cannot be denied:

The Patriots defeated the Browns 38-15 on Sunday, with New England having little trouble against the the team that Bill Belichick led as head coach from 1991-1995.

In many ways, that makes the milestone Belichick reached with the win that much more poetic. With his 324th victory — regular and postseason — Belichick tied George Halas at No. 2 for most wins all time by a head coach.

Belichick recorded 37 of his victories with Cleveland, the first of which coincidentally came over New England in 1991. The other 317 have come with New England since 2000.

Don Shula is No. 1 on the all-time list with 347.

I don’t think there is any question that he is the greatest football coach in history. And those seeking excellence in their own fields can learn a lot from the man and his singular focus on excelling in his chosen profession.

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Accepting Aggression

The Tree of Woe contemplates the Non-Aggression Principle:

The Non-Aggression Principal or NAP is considered to be a defining principle of libertarianism. It been presented in different ways, each with slightly different implications. Infogalactic lists seven formulations of the NAP by thinkers dating back to John Locke. Of the seven, it is the Mid-20th Century formulations by Murray Rothbard that have had the most influence, and upon which we’ll focus:

Murray Rothbard (1963): “No one may threaten or commit violence (‘aggress’) against another man’s person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.”

In addition to being a fundamental principle of libertarian thought, the NAP also appears as a second-order principle (derived from more fundamental rules) in many other ideologies. Many religions, typically those which do not espouse complete pacifism, espouse some variant of the NAP. Lockean liberalism espouses some variant of the NAP as well.

Because libertarians tend to be highly intelligent, highly disagreeable, and extremely online, virtually every aspect of the NAP has been extensively debated; the corpus of conversation about it almost approaches theological proportions. Since my readers here at Tree of Woe are also highly intelligent, highly dis—well, anyway, since you guys probably know most of that stuff, I’m not going to explore the NAP in breadth.

Instead, I’m going to drill down one particular aspect of the NAP which I have always found problematic: The issue of non-physical aggression. Thinking about non-physical aggression has persuaded me that the NAP is not correct, not for individuals, and not for nation-states.

Read the whole thing. I’ve never accepted the NAP; it has always struck me as an a priori non-starter. And frankly, the more I’ve read and understood of Murray Rothbard, the more I’ve concluded that libertarianism is just another alternative to Christian morality that proves to be an intellectual dead-end.

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A Gatekeeper Discovers IQ

Just as they’ve recently done with Christian Nationalism, the gatekeepers of the Right are beginning to discover that immigration affects IQ, and consequently, the shape of society.

The flow of people from the south into America is having a clear impact on IQ. The claim is that the people coming in will get smarter by standing on the better dirt in the United States, but it will take four or five generations for that to happen. That is roughly a century. While that is happening, the population of low IQ people rises. This is happening rather quickly due to the age distribution of the white population.

For example, using government data, whites have an average IQ of 100, blacks are at 85 and the new people are around 90. This is consistent with what Richwine found in his research and what subsequent research has shown. This is one of those times when the official government position mirrors reality. That means that the average IQ in the United States in 1950 was around 98. By 1980, with the uptick in immigration and decline in white fertility, the average was just over 97.

In other words, with very stable demographics and little immigration, the average IQ in the United States had not changed very much in thirty years. This would explain why the country was able to pull out of the cultural lunacy of the prior decades and turn things around so quickly. There were a lot of smart people. Societies with high average intelligence also have a much larger number of smart people. These are the people who solve the problems made by other smart people.

By 2000, the effects of immigration were showing up in the test scores. The average IQ of the country, based on the new demographic mix, was below 97. By 2020 the average had fallen to below 96. In another decade it will fall below 95 and when the white population is a minority, it will be around 93.

The Great Dimming, The Z Blog, 20 September 2022

Now, you might wonder about the strange reference to “the better dirt in the United States”. Or, perhaps, the way in which it appears to avoid the use of the more common term “the Magic Dirt” as well as any reference to the specific individual who has been pointing this out for some time. Consider the following passage from a book published seven years ago.

Without question the worst effect caused by 50 years of failure, and the one most likely to have the most severe long-term consequences, is the negative effect immigration has had on the collective national intelligence. Researchers around the world have observed that the nations of the West have been gradually becoming less intelligent; the Danish military measured a 1.5 point decline in the average IQ of its soldiers between 1998 and 2014, while the average British 14-year-old lost two IQ points from 1980 to 2008. The same is true for the USA, where a three-point average IQ gain that took place after the Melting Pot migration ended has been entirely reversed as a result of immigration from lower-IQ nations.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Whatever one thinks of these changes, this is one of the fastest demographic transformations of a nation in recorded human history, and it is the direct result of public policy.

CUCKSERVATIVE by Vox Day and John Red Eagle, 4 December 2015

What I find significant about the Z-man’s post is that even mediocrities who assiduously refuse to mention me except to attempt to minimize my hypothetical influence are now being forced by events to address the issues that I’ve been highlighting for more than 20 years, because the observable reality can no longer be ignored.

Now, I don’t take the Z-man seriously and neither should you. I stopped reading him regularly once it became clear that he is a confirmed liar who doesn’t hesitate to try to shape his readers’ opinions despite his complete ignorance of the facts. His gatekeeping role can be seen clearly in the way he follows the lead of the Daily Wire with regards to certain unmentionables who must not be mentioned for fear that his readers might become tempted to leave the intellectual corral he has constructed.

On that note, it’s rather amusing how, in a discussion of various concepts that will be familiar to you even without being named, most of those involved are less willing than Jordan Peterson to Name the Voldemort.

  • There is a certain blogger who has a very outsized opinion of his intelligence. I used to think he was exaggerating somewhat when he said that we could have diversity or we could have running water. No longer do I think he is exaggerating. Nothing explains the way our world runs and has developed the way IQ does. it is the one element of social science that has been battle-tested and still stands. The liberal intelligentsia spent decades trying to disprove it, innate intelligence, and genetically-derived abilities of a population. It sure seems like their final stab at it was Jared Diamond’s stupid book, but once that failed, they just banned it.
  • Said blogger does tend to be self aggrandizing, but that does not automatically make his conclusions wrong. He has been proven correct, in my opinion, in a number of areas.
  • His main point of hubris was that taxonomy of male archetypes. The taxonomy itself is self-evident even without the greek letters: you’ve got jocks, jocks-in-waiting, nerds, normies, and losers. Then our friend realized he was a nerd so he had to add an extra category of “cool nerd who everybody likes even though he’s a jerk” which only exists in TV shows written by narcissistic nerds like Rick and Morty or House MD.
  • The disdain people in the dissident right have of him is a reflection of some of the flaws of the DR. He is one of the few people making headway in the culture war. They sperg out about his quirks and his comics. Those comics are reaching a lot of people. Like it or not, comic books are a good way to reach young people.
  • That blogger has been pretty prescient lately and I’ve come around to agreeing with many of his conclusions about China.

It’s even more amusing to see how they cling to their assumptions even as they cite the evidence against them. But in fairness, once formed, assumptions are hard to recognize, let alone break. As for “the disdain people in the dissident right” harbor for me, well, the dissident right is welcome to join the very long line. Pretty much every group from CAIR and the ADL and SFWA and ComicsGate and Tor Books and Thomas Nelson and the Sad Puppies and the conservative media and the Red Cross and the Google executives and the Swiss media share that disdain. Boo-freaking-hoo.

None of them need me and I certainly don’t need them. All that matters is that everyone who attempts to shape, spin, and shade the truth will be exposed by the harsh light of reality in the end, myself included.

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that the Z-man has been pulling this gatekeeping stuff for a LONG time.

Steve Sailer has been having a lot of fun with the cooing over Raj Chetty’s big project, pointing out the many methodological flaws. In John Derbyshire’s latest transmission from the bunker, he introduces us to a new term that describes what Sailer has been discussing. It is called “Magic Dirt Theory.” The dirt in places like Utah where children do very well possess special qualities that are lacking in the dirt of places where children do poorly. Magic Dirt Theory is what’s behind the push to export troublesome populations out to the suburbs.

Practical Magic, The Z-Blog, 1 November 2015

NB: Observant minds will note my error in the last sentence of the quoted passage. I should not have used the term “nation”, but rather “polity” or “society”. It is the US polity that has been transformed while the American nation has been suppressed.

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Correction

Karl Denninger commented on my post yesterday:

Vox could have emailed me and asked about such a thing as he opined in relationship to what I believe, but he didn’t.

You see, it fits with a “gotta be this way” pronouncement to not do so.

It also allows one to hide behind “trust the plan” (of God, if you prefer) which, from my point of view, isn’t much different than those who buy into the “Q” crap.

‘Nuff said.

Fair enough, I stand corrected. I should not have assumed that Karl was not a religious man, simply because many, if not most, religious people nevertheless do not analyze current events through a religious or spiritual lens. It would have been more accurate to say something like this:

It is very difficult, if not impossible, for those analyzing events from a rational or a materialist perspective to connect the events of today with the pattern of historic manifestations of the same evil that is now ascendant, no matter how well they happen to analyze those events.

Karl’s particular beliefs are not relevant here, which is why I did not ask him about them and why I should not have even mentioned them. But I think my point generally stands, as evidenced by his subsequent comment about his perspective on current events.

I don’t dislike Vox and do read him from time to time.

My view of how spirituality has been twisted and abused through the ages both as a foil (“if you do that you’ll go to HELL!”) and a shield behind which one can evade doing what they know damn well is both right AND necessary (“God will judge; its not my place”) however, is well-documented and I’ve said so many times. The latter is especially invidious and, in my opinion, responsible for an unbelievable number of wrongs that various people get away with despite the fact that they did it being common knowledge and that the act deserves punishment also being not only common knowledge but in many cases near-universal consensus.

You need only look at the current VUMC controversy with them allegedly being involved in cutting off kids dicks and tits, perhaps with both drugs and knives. That predates Covid by quite a lot, yet in point of fact it is no different in fundamental character than their pronouncements vis-a-vis the virus and various public pronouncements surrounding it.

Risk assessment and personal autonomy be damned; there was money to be made and thus it was. At its core that’s the bottom line and it requires nothing further to see.

I do have a beef with those who claim that this is some spiritual war between good and evil (e.g. God and Satan, light and dark, pick ’em) and then, having identified the problem as such, refuse to join the battle when they claim to be on the good side.

Exactly how committed to that viewpoint is said person?

While I share Karl’s outrage and frustration about religious passivity and the refusal of Christians to reject obvious evil and to judge the wicked when it is both necessary and appropriate for them to do so, his response underlines the very point I was attempting to make. There is, absolutely and unquestionably, a monetary angle to the VUMC controversy. That’s valid and it is an important part of the equation. But there is also a very wicked spiritual angle as well; the obsession with homosexuality and transgenderism is ancient and unnatural, and it is an unmistakable sign of a satanic submission to Baphomet on the part of someone influential in that organization. One cannot fully understand the situation, or correctly anticipate the future consequences, unless one factors both the material and the spiritual elements into the analytical model.

It’s not an accident that the same ghastly evils, homosexuality, transgenderism, pedophilia, and child sacrifice, keep reappearing in the late stages of societies given completely over to more common evils such as lust, sloth, and greed. In the absence of a comprehensive theology of evil, we must make do with recognizing its historical patterns, and one observable pattern is that submission to Mammon in the form of usury and greed tends to precede submission to Asmodeus in the form of conventional lust, eventually followed by submission to Baphomet and Moloch, among others.

It even provides us with a predictive model; such societies are usually destroyed utterly by other, less corrupt societies that regard them, quite rightly, with horror and revulsion. And certainly that scenario is much easier to envision today than it was even three years ago.

As for the valid question of how committed one is if one does not join the battle, I would merely observe that we are reliably informed that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

When the time comes to take material action, you will know because your conscience will guide you. God will call some to be martyrs, some to be crusaders, and some to be inquisitors. The Pax Christiana of Jesus Christ is enforced with the sword he ordered his followers to buy. The evil will be confronted and the wicked will be defeated. But in the meantime, until the time comes, we must act as witnesses and as fearless speakers for the truth.

And of all the speakers for the truth today, Karl Denninger is one of the most intrepid. Which is why this is not a criticism of the man, it is merely an expression of my hope that he will see even more clearly, and analyze even more effectively, as the ancient elements of the ongoing conflict continue to come in focus over time.

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