On the Origins of America's "Culture Wars"

Dylan went Electric... and the Red Diaper (Pete Segar [folk music] / Communist) Babies donned the Pink [Pop/ Rock music] ones of the New Left... and Cultural Capitalism was born (ala- Mods vs. Rockers)!

Fundamentalist Perverts

Slavoj Žižek, "How to defeat the perverts now ruling in the Kremlin?"

Like Islamic extremists, Russian President Vladimir Putin wraps himself in the garb of religious orthodoxy in order to present himself as an authentic exponent of traditional values. Yet one need only consider the lives of genuine spiritual fundamentalists to see this ruse for what it really is.

The standard interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine war is that it is a “clash of cultures” pitting Western liberalism against traditional Russian authoritarianism. But this is deeply misleading. Far from being a traditionalist, Vladimir Putin is merely the latest in a series of murderous modernizers stretching from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to Catherine the Great and Stalin. 

When Stalin was asked to define Bolshevism in the late 1920s, he described it as a combination of Russian dedication to a Cause and American pragmatism. Once in power, he sought to imitate the American industrialist Henry Ford’s achievements throughout the Soviet Union, brutally erasing all traces of Russian tradition through, most prominently, the violent collectivization of agriculture.

Stalin was also a great admirer of Peter the Great, who built a new capital for Russia on the Baltic Sea (St. Petersburg) to establish a direct link with Western Europe. Peter’s reforms faced resistance from so-called Old Believers, Eastern Orthodox Christians whose liturgical and ritual practices predated the reforms carried out by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 1652-66. Many Old Believers ultimately chose death over compromising their faith. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, thousands died by self-immolation.

Things only really changed in Russia with the October Revolution; and even then, the first Soviet government included several prominent figures with Old Believer backgrounds. The Bolsheviks correctly saw such sectarians as representatives of a long-running social protest against the czarist regime. The Old Believers had always distrusted the unity of church and state (which really meant the former’s subordination to the latter), insisting that the religious community remain a self-organization of common people.

Not surprisingly, state persecution of religious believers intensified under Stalin, and the Orthodox Church’s subordination to the state continues to this day. Putin, indeed, has mobilized the Church for his own political ends.

According to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Russians need not fear nuclear war, because Christians should welcome the end of the world. “We await the Lord Jesus Christ who will come in great glory, destroy Evil, and judge all nations,” he said late last year. Thus, what appears as a reactionary move – a return to the old orthodoxy – may in fact be a perverted expression of the rejection of the domination and exploitation that passes under the guise of “modernization” in the temporal world.

A very different, but illustrative, example of such resistance is Canudos, the nineteenth-century outlaw community deep in the Brazilian backlands of Bahia, which became a home to prostitutes, beggars, bandits, outcasts, and the poor under the leadership of the apocalyptic prophet Antônio Conselheiro. According to Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy of the Workers’ Party of Brazil:

“This community developed a ‘mutual, cooperative and solidary concept of work’ … a kind of socio-mystical, religious, assisting, community power inspired by the ‘equalitarian fraternity of the primitive Christian communism,’ in which there was no hunger. ‘They all worked together. Nobody had anything. Everybody worked the soil, everybody labored. Harvested… Here’s yours… Here’s yours. Nobody got more nor less.’ Conselheiro had read Thomas More, and his experiences were similar to those of utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Canudos was razed by the Brazilian army, and Conselheiro was beheaded in 1897.” (He had already died of illness.)

This refuge from money, property, taxes, and marriage did not disintegrate because of its internal tensions; it was destroyed by the armed forces of Brazil’s “progressive” and secular government. Canudos was a place where the victims of historical progress had acquired a space of their own. Utopia actually existed for a brief moment, and that was too much for the modernizers. How else can one account for the slaughter of all inhabitants of Canudos, including women and children? The very memory of freedom had to be erased.

The obvious counterargument to the defense of Canudos is that religious fundamentalist projects like the Islamic State are no different. But a clear line separates the two. While Canudos openly welcomed the Other, the Islamic State – like all religious fundamentalists – does not.

If today’s “fundamentalists” sincerely believe that they have found their way to Truth, why do they feel so threatened by non-believers? After all, when a Buddhist encounters Western hedonists, he does not get worked up or feel the need to condemn them; he just shakes his head at their self-defeating search for happiness.

But pseudo-fundamentalists are obsessed with non-believers’ sinful lives because the sins reflect their own temptations. Unlike the truly faithful, they envy, rather than pity, those who satisfy their appetites.

Whereas Tibetan monks regard Tibet as “the center of the world, the heart of civilization,” European civilization is decidedly ex-centered. Our central longing is to recover some ultimate pillar of Wisdom, secret agalma, or spiritual treasure that we lost long ago. Colonization was never only about imposing Western values on others; it was also a quest for lost spiritual purity. This story is as old as Western civilization itself: For the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the mythical storehouse of ancient wisdom.

In our own societies, the difference between authentic fundamentalists and perverted fundamentalists is that the first (like the American Amish) get along with their neighbors, because they are concerned with their own world, not with what others are doing. Perverted fundamentalists, by contrast, are haunted by ambivalence, motivated by a simultaneous horror and envy of sinners – an unholy brew that pushes them toward acts of violence, be it terrorist bombings or brutal invasions.

Putin’s regime has nothing in common with an authentic Russian spirituality that rejects European modernization. His fantasized “Eurasia” is merely a term to legitimize his own misbegotten modernization project. That is why we must not dismiss Russia as a deeply conservative and traditionalist country that is forever lost to modernity. After all, the Russian spirituality embodied by the Old Believers rejects authoritarian state power. To defeat the perverts now ruling in the Kremlin, it will have to be reawakened.

On Dostoevsky's "Demons"

Bible (NIV),  Luke 8:26-39:

Jesus Restores a Demon-Possessed Man

26 They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes,[a] which is across the lake from Galilee. 27 When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don’t torture me!” 29 For Jesus had commanded the impure spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.

30 Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

“Legion,” he replied, because many demons had gone into him. 31 And they begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.

32 A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. 33 When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

34 When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, 35 and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. 37 Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.

38 The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.

Afflicted with German Guilt-Pride, Many Establishment Parties Now Deny History of Nazi-Islamic Cooperation

...and accuse the AfD of "fabricating" the connection for the purpose of extending anti-Semitism from Jews to Arabs (all Semites).

"Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples."

—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941

More on German Guilt-Pride

For propaganda purposes, the producers of the above video attempt to portray the conflict in Germany between Establishment Political Parties and the AfD as an attempt to shift Nazi Guilt onto Arabs and Islam.  That guilt has historically always been there.  One need only read the Quran to find it.  They also paint the AfD as a resurgent fascism unrelated to German Anti-Globalism and restoration of any form of healthy economic Nationalism.  All Nationalism is a form of fascism, by definition (notice the fasces):  

The producers thereby seek to sew division between the German establishment parties and AfD, and portray Islamic immigrants to Germany not as "cheap labour for economic globalism", but as a wholly "innocent" community of victims of Nazi responsibility transference within Germany requiring special protections and rights.  They also attempt to extend the concept and guilt for racism to all Western colonialism under the special-pleading rubric of post-colonial theories and ignore their own long and storied history of non-Western racism, colonialism, and religious conquest.

Evolutionary Endosymbiosis Experiment: Hacking "Life"

Bacterial/ Viral  Applications of Assembly Theory?

Endosymbiosis is a biological process where one organism lives inside another organism, and the two organisms are typically in a mutualistic relationship: 

The word "endosymbiont" comes from the Greek words endo, meaning within, and symbios, meaning living together. 

Endosymbiosis has been a major driver of evolutionary innovation. For example, the evolution of mitochondria and plastids in eukaryotic cells is a result of endosymbiosis. 

Here are some examples of endosymbiosis:

Mitochondria: Mitochondria were once cells of their own, but are now obligate symbionts that live inside us and produce energy for our cells. 
Chloroplasts: Chloroplasts in plants have the same origins as mitochondria. 
Insects and microbes: Insects have diverse associations with microbes, including bacteria that live exclusively within host cells. 

Endosymbiosis continues to shape the ecology of many species.

Leo Strauss: Against the Open Society

Esotericism in Philosophy and Life

Naaaah!  Gain of Function Research, like Critical Nuclear Weaspon Design Information (CNWDI) should be shared EVERYWHERE and with EVERYONE!  </ sarc>

Zizek on Ukraine

Slavoj Žižek, "The magic tricks behind Russia’s propaganda machine"

Russia’s propaganda mimics magic tricks, using deception and misdirection to justify its war as self-defense.

I must admit that I occasionally enjoy podcasts explaining the secrets behind well-known magic tricks (the three-shell game, mentalism, levitation, etc.). After reading recent news from Russia, I’ve come to the conclusion that these tricks offer a clue to how Russian propaganda has achieved what seems impossible to common sense: claiming that the Russian attack on Ukraine is an act of self-defense. The standard explanation for magic tricks is that they usually rely on at least two different strategies, combining them to produce the desired effects — and Russia is doing exactly the same.

The Russian government approved a list of 48 foreign states and territories accused of implementing policies that promote destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes, which contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. This list was approved under a decree signed by Putin on Aug. 19, aimed at providing humanitarian support to those "sharing traditional Russian spiritual and moral values."

States on this list are now officially designated as “enemy states” simply because they don’t share these values — there’s no mention of a multi-polar world; you are an enemy of Russia just for not sharing its values. Oddly, North Korea and Afghanistan are included on this list, but Russia isn’t being deceptive: its respect for “traditional values” aligns with North Korean and Taliban ideology in rejecting the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil in history.

The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level: beneath all the talk of a new multi-polar world lies the vision of a total war to the extinction of two opposites. When religion directly enters politics, the threat of deadly violence is never far behind.

Putin recently declared a new nuclear doctrine, announcing that “a number of clarifications ... defining the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons” were being made to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. He added that proposed amendments would expand “the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out.”

In a pointed warning to the West, Putin announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state, supported by a nuclear-armed nation, would be considered a “joint attack.” He also stated that Moscow reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in case of an attack on Belarus, as it is part of the “Union State” with Russia, a special partnership between the two nations. This includes cases when the enemy, using conventional weapons, “creates critical danger to our sovereignty,” Putin said.

Such statements make us nostalgic for the Cold War era, when both sides wisely avoided direct nuclear threats and announced they would use nuclear arms only in response to a nuclear strike. The threat of a direct nuclear strike was unmentionable back then. Russia has now asserted the right to a first strike and even expanded the conditions for its use. Of course, an actual Russian first strike remains unlikely, but words in the military domain are never just words — they often lead to action.

After thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, Iran’s UN delegate said Israel had “crossed a red line” again. But today, crossing red lines happens regularly, making the situation even more dangerous because each side thinks it can do so without consequence. The catch is that you can’t do this indefinitely: there is a real red line, though it may not be publicly acknowledged, and the only way to learn where it is is to cross it. Our response to Russia should be that Russia itself has crossed the red line by issuing nuclear threats.

Those who see the Russia-Ukraine war as a proxy war between NATO and Russia would claim that Russia is under attack by NATO. In some sense, this is true, but in what sense? In the same sense that Israel claims to act in self-defense in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The catch lies in how we define the "self" in self-defense. If I occupy land that isn’t mine and declare it mine (like the West Bank or parts of Ukraine), and if the land or people there resist, I can claim that my actions to crush them are in self-defense.

The two basic strategies Russian state propaganda relies on are these: accuse the opponent of doing what you are doing yourself, in a much more open and brutal way. This distracts the public’s attention and makes them accept your basic claim that what you took from the opponent was originally yours. Russia is just defending itself — if we accept that Crimea and Donetsk (and perhaps other regions, from the Baltic to Moldova) belong to it, and that Ukraine as a nation doesn’t truly exist, but emerged from the minds of Lenin and the Nazis.

"The two basic strategies Russian state propaganda relies on are these: accuse the opponent of doing what you are doing yourself, in a much more open and brutal way. "

The second strategy is to accuse the opponent of dangerously approaching a red line after you’ve blatantly crossed the only true red line — the use of nuclear weapons. This combination of strategies makes rational peace negotiations nearly impossible, because the very terms of negotiation are falsified from the outset. As Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič rightly wrote: “Peace is all too precious to be left to peaceniks.”

Add to this the third strategy of deception: presenting a brutal war of conquest as a defense of spiritual values. This combination is nearly unbeatable. All our hope lies in the “nearly.”

Refresher Chemistry...

.... here moley, moley, moley!

Immortal Mortals...

Struldbruggs