Metahistory
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The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right
..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.” Matthew
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Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis
I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:Till we have built Jerusalem,In Englands green & pleasant Land. –"Jerusalem" by William Blake I want to bring into focus certain key themes that emerge in the early common era that became central for shaping the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary of Latin
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Progressive Fever Dreams
Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How? What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside
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Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture
[For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian
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Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries
At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a
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Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus
Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical–or Wisdom–dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West–Christian Neoplatonism–worked for so
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Young Socialist Intellectuals
Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo– What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard
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The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III
In Part I, I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party
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What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong
[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable
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Is Magic a Thing?
I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted