It’s Better To Have…

 

Marriage failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a young man in the relationship scene.

Never having had a chance to live your life with the woman you love is far worse.

Even if it were to fail, you would have gained so much from that marriage. Even some kids, probably. And a lot of other good things if you approached it well.

Too many young men today, because of bad, mad, social media advice fear the wrong thing. They fear that their relationship might fail, rather than fearing that they never took the chance to succeed.

They fear more that they might lose half their assets, rather than consider that they built something with another person. Which is one of life’s greatest privileges.

Now, of course a marriage break up is not fun. This is true no matter which side initiates it. I have seen enough divorced people in my life, through my ministry, to see that many of them have the same look of woundedness, the same shattering of confidence, the same presence that speaks to a great personal failure. Some display this less than others, some more, but I have observed it in all of them at some point. So, I would never say that a marriage failure is not awful.

But the person who has never pursued a relationship with a woman they are interested in has to live with a deeper wound: they lived the life of a coward, and that is worse, much worse, than even a marriage failure. Don’t let it happen to you.

 

Degrading Art Degrades A Society

 

I am looking forward to seeing how all the usual big-eva crowd pump out article, after article, and social media post after social media post, about how Translan is actually a good thing, it is only a small part of the movie, and then promoting some feminist spin on the story. Which is exactly what they did with similar issues in the recent travesty that is called Nolan's The Odyssey.

Of course, they will only do this if the movie turns out to be successful, because then they can ride the wave of popularity. There are so many leaders in the church who are so desperate to seek the approval and aplomb of the left-leaning culture. Or, others will promote it because some of them are paid to shill for it, because this does happen as well.

This is the level of disrespect our society gives to Christian things, when Christians take disrespect and tell everyone else to lap it up.

The way they got behind the subversion of the Odyssey will encourage more travesties like that.

To those who say, "It is just a movie." Do you still not understand how important art is to the soul of the culture? The greatest work of art in history, bar none, is the Bible. It has spawned countless lesser works of art, all to some degree reflecting its glory. These works of art speak to grander truths that shape how a people thinks about itself. It is a well known historical field of study that art reflects the state of a society, and our society is clearly not in good shape.

There are few more successful ways to demoralize a culture than humiliate it through art. This was practiced by the Soviets who founded a massive movie industry in Communist Russia, but this has been known since ancient days. The Assyrians used art to crush the fighting spirit of their enemies. Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, all used it to inspire their societies to greatness. There is a reason conquering armies always smashed the artworks of conquered peoples, it is a way of tearing out their hearts.

In fact, one of the worst things about evangelical culture is how bad it is at producing art. It was not always this way, once we had great artists, Lewis was one of them. But somehow the spirit of artistry has vacated the Protestant churches. The result has been an inability to capture the heart of society.

And now they are in the process off degrading the legacy of our greatest Christian artists.

 

Feminists Were Always Crazy

 

Because we live in a day and age where bad hair dye jobs have caught up with feminist sensibilities, we tend to think that earlier waves of feminists were more reasonable, and more sensible.

But no, the first wave feminists were not the saner feminists. As Helen Kendrick Johnson writes in the 1890’s:

“I copy from the "Salt Lake Herald" a few sentences taken from an interview with Mrs. Cannon, State Senator elect. When asked if she was a strong believer in woman suffrage, she answered: "Of course I am. It will help women, and it will purify politics. Women are better than men. Slaves are always better than their masters." "Do you refer to polygamy?" was asked. "Indeed I do not," she answered. "I believe in polygamy. My father and mother were Mormons, and I am a Mormon…. A plural wife isn't half as much of a slave as a single wife. If her husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every single month…. Of course it is all at an end now, but I think the women of Utah think, with me, that we were better off in polygamy…. Sixty per cent. of the voters of this State are women. We control the State…. What am I going to do with my children while I am making the laws for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have been practicing medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal…. Some day there will be a law compelling people to have no more than a certain amount of children, and the mothers of the land can live as they ought to live." This is the character and opinion presented by the highest State official that woman suffrage has as yet given to the United States. Comment upon it seems unnecessary, so far as it would be needed to express the disgust of the majority of American women at such sentiments and such a situation.”

From Woman and the Republic, Helen Kendrick Johnson.

Insanity was always a mark of feminism.

There are many things that I could draw out from this short passage quoted here, but this stands out the most for me, “What am I going to do with my children while I am making the laws for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have been practicing medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal….” Why do you think Paul said that older women need to teach younger women “to love their husbands, to love their children” (Titus 2:4)? Because, if they are not taught this women will quickly abandon their children to follow their careers and desires. Paul saw this in his day, we see it in our day, this woman brags about doing this.

Feminism was always an attack on the family. It is dyscivilisational. It is to individualism what petrol is to a grass fire on a hot day, an extremely dangerous accelerant. People were already selfish, sinful, and given to going their own way, this is a part of the sinful human nature, the flesh corrupts our approach to life. But feminism took that and supercharged it, for women and men. Now, we live in a hyper-individualistic culture that sees any containment by gender roles and duty as oppression. But the individual is not the basic unity of society, the family is. Feminism was always, from the very start, simply a means for bad women to seek to sunder themselves from their God-given roles and responsibilities and also be given the chance to bring many other women along with them.

Now, we live in a day where so many men and women live adrift in a broken culture, and this ideology is one of the core reasons for that.

 

 

Hardship is Coming

 

The first round of record oil prices earlier this year burnt through oil reserves of many countries and also through the financial buffers of many people and companies.

This round?

It will break people.

In the 1970's the world oil markets were sent into major shock, because the US chose to support Israel over all the Arab oil producing countries, after they demanded Israel surrender land it took in a war. So, those countries strangled the world of oil. This started the fuel efficiency and green energy target movements. Rather than stay out of Middle Eastern affairs, the US decided to back its greatest ally and try to invent new technology instead of humbly accepting it did not rule the world. The whole world suffered as a result. There was mass inflation in the West, mass starvations across the third world, and industry after industry died and was offshored because energy became too expensive for things to be made in the West. Because the US used its power the way it did.

Now it is doing something very similar.

Fuel prices were dropping just a couple of months back. But then the war was re-escalated. Now we are all paying the economic price for the hubris of one country believing it has the right to determine what should happen far away from its borders.

I have been encouraging people to prepare cheaper transport, and pay down debt, as this war was always destined to escalate. This stupid, unnecessary, and completely avoidable war, is going to strangle many places of the basic resources they need to function.

Hence, much of how we lived will now be stripped away, by pure cost. Are you prepared to cut back? Have you been preparing? Are you ready to help others?

We can't change what foolish leaders in charge of foreign governments do. We can't get through the thick skulls of the religiously retarded ON BOTH SIDES that support this war because of bad theology and bad religion. We can't even look forward to good, responsible government from our own national leaders, as they have been working hard to make us exposed to this exact sort of problem, and have ignored every warning that this kind of energy crisis was inevitable.

But we can cut back and prepare to help people around us. Both these approaches will be increasingly important in coming months.

Are you prepared for coming economic hardship, because I believe we are about to see economic problems really escalate.

There is No Perfect Time

 

Vox Day notes on his Sigma Game Substack about the passivity of Delta males,

“But the passivity and reactive behavior of the Delta is absolutely within their control. If there is one thing I have observed that seems to hold Deltas back more than anything else, it is their narcissistic desire to have the universe time everything according to their preferences. They simply don’t seem to understand the concept of a window of opportunity.

Sure, it’s important to finish a task already underway. But does the task absolutely need to be finished now? The task will still be there tomorrow, the three women at the bar will not.

There is a reason why carpe diem has remained valid and relevant for more than 20 centuries. It is because most people simply don’t, even when they have the ability to do so.

So remember, the right moment is always now.”[1]

This is so true.

I have seen this sort of thing so many times.

Don’t wait for opportunities, make them. Take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. Never wait for the perfect moment, life is not a movie.

This is how so many young men today remain single well into their 30’s wondering why they still are. It is simple, in a lot of cases, you were so single-mindedly focused on some particular task, that you were likely doing very well, that you did not realize that the pretty woman who kept asking your help or your opinion needed neither of those things, but kept coming back anyway…she was seeking to get your attention, and you completely looked past it.

Or, you might have noticed it, but you were waiting for the right moment to ask her out, and never did, and finally someone else took their chance and you are left out in the cold.

I have seen a woman pine after a man and then marry his friend, because the friend actually asked her out, and that won her over. She did not jilt the other man, because he never said a word to her, because the time was not yet right.

I have seen a beautiful woman working alongside single men, a woman who is still single long after it makes any reasonable sense why, because these men never felt the time was right to ask her out. Thank God for this too, in one situation, because my wife was one such woman, and I saw her and took my opportunity straight away.

This principle is really true in many aspects of life, not just relationships. But this is the area where many men just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

There is no perfect time, at least not in most people’s situations. There is just windows of opportunity, and closed doors. Take your opportunities, what have you got to lose?

List of References

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[1] https://substack.com/home/post/p-215643412

Free The British Isles

 

I once would have been horrified at the idea of the UK breaking up. But today I look forward to it, because I know it will be better for all the nations involved. I am the Son of an Englishman, I want to see the Englishman live free again, but as long as he seeks to dominate other nations, the law of imperial decline with rot England to the core.

Here is a comment I wrote about a similar issue which serves to explain why I celebrate this. Ireland should be ruled by and for the Irish. Scotland by and for the Scots. Wales by and for the Welsh, and England by and for the English. Empire which is what Colonialism is, always ends with the core nation suffering the loss of its identity. I was asked if I made any distinction between the Colonialism of the English compared to the more violent conquests of the ancient Greeks, Mongols and other societies. Here is my response, which is relevant to this discussion:

I would say the difference is more one of degree. Colonialism is not new. The Greeks had both connected and independent colonies that went up into what is today modern Russia in the B.C. era. In fact, it is incredible how far the Greeks spread out. It was not always through violent conquest, like with Alexander, but sometimes they set up trade cities and the like along ancient trade or sea routes. Their most successful trade city, Byzantium, became Constantinople a city as famous and powerful as Rome, in its own way.

So, I would say some empires and some colonial efforts are more violent than others. The ancient Persians were less vicious than the Assyrians and Babylonians, especially the Assyrians who were famous for their cruelty even in the ancient world where cruelty was more common. The Mongol invasions were more vicious than most. If you had to choose between English conquest and Mongol conquest, I would choose the English variety.

Settling barely populated or unpopulated islands in the pacific is obviously very different to defeating and taking control of another settled society. Completely unpopulated islands are up for grabs really, though you will find yourself in territorial disputes with other nations over time. But the impacts of empire/colonialism always create the same results.

The cycle goes like this: A nation becomes prosperous and militarily adventurous. It then seeks to take over trade routes, and in turn it then seeks to dominate countries along those trade routes. Settlers follow the military and they take varying degrees of control over other nations, and this sends wealth back to the core nation. This leads to success and this success attracts people from across the empire back to the core. As a result, the core nation loses its national identity increasingly over time. Over time more and more foreigners rise to power and direct the resources of the core to their preferred interests, and the natives of the core nation are increasingly sidelined. The core degrades as resources are directed elsewhere and it loses its importance, as this happens the empire degrades, and another rises to take its place. This is a consistent cycle.

This is so consistent we could call it, if such a thing exists, a law of history. Because of how God refers to it in the Bible, I see this as a spiritual punishment for a nation arrogating itself over other nations. Every nation that so arrogates itself does so primarily for their own interests, which leads to varying degrees of oppression over other peoples.

Of course, this does not mean everything these empires do is bad. Rome bought roads and civil law and structure over most of Europe. Greece bought advanced philosophy and a common tongue. Britain brought English understandings of natural rights and justice to many peoples, and broke with world convention by seeking to end things like the slave trade, a truly marvellous act. But the end results always finish up in a bad place for the host nation.

Hence, a massively declining empire like Britian should learn from this and give up what it does not need and focus on the core people's their state exists to serve. There is nothing wrong with letting a former colony stand on its own two feet. This is how many nations have been born.

In fact, homogenous nations usually lead to some form of success over time, then become heterogenous empires and then those empires break down into new and constituted homogenous nations. It is a cycle of history. It is better to relinquish power than be forced into submission, which has happened to many empires.

Of course, in the past there has been great efforts to keep the United Kingdom together. I hope that whichever way this goes, that these nations would rise again to greatness under the banner of the Lord Jesus Christ.  

Update: they have met and have demanded independence referendums. 

Is That You Antichrist?

 

One of the most frustrating things that evangelicals, especially those influenced by modern American and end times evangelicalism (which is many modern Baptists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, independent churches, etc, etc) do is whenever there is a new technology revealed, they instantly start arguing that this is the beast’s tool to build the beasts system and the beast will use this technology to control us all.

I have been around long enough to see this thinking applied to everything from things like barcodes, to credit-cards, to mobile phones, to bitcoin and more. The big one that this thinking is now being applied to is AI.

But now that it is becoming increasingly clear that AI is going to turn out to fall far short of the Big Tech Bro predictions, as it always was, again the evangelical church is going to have egg on its face. The tech bros were always simply trying to upsell their product, which is why they sold it to people in the apocalyptic world changing terms they did. Many of the predictions, made by evangelicals, about AI being the final key to the antichrist system will again make the evangelical church look ridiculous. We have to be better guys, much better.

AI is becoming slightly more useful with every update. But every big tech company is also haemorrhaging money quickly, because achieving that rise of utility is being outweighed by the cost of the infrastructure needed to get those gains, and not enough revenue to offset those costs. In other words, the AI tech companies are increasing their debt, to outcompete each other, but they are not able to bring in enough money to cover those debts. On top of this the tech base they are relying on to produce the computing power is quickly perishing. Graphics cards in data centres don't last as long as people think, only a few years. You might still be able to use your 1080 TI to run Steam games on medium settings in a rig you bought 10 years ago, but AI data centres run 24/7 at a high output, that chews through the technology they rely on. Hence, the costs of improving AI are increasing and the returns are not increasing fast enough. AI investment is heading for a big downturn.

This does not mean AI won’t have its uses. Look at how Castalia House is using it to produce new translations of books on a daily basis. There are other ways it can be used as a research assistant, to speed up code writing, to increase the writing output for talented writers, and in many other ways. But it also gets things wrong often, and needs a lot of oversight, correction and direction.  

In other words, AI will just turn out to be a very useful personal assistance tool, that people will only trust with certain tasks, because we have all seen how unreliable it can be in a host of circumstances. Even the ways it is being used in law enforcement are coming under scrutiny and causing legal cases because AI is shown often to be unreliable, resulting in many fines being overturned in reviews.

Already we see a lot of people mock AI content as inferior. Who here even bothers to read a post on social media, or in a blog, once you work out that the person wrote it with AI? You skip it, don’t you. I do. Most people who use AI also won't pay for it, and so the companies are building liabilities they cannot cover, on a technology that many people are having bad experiences with. It will improve over time, but it is not going to be the omniscient danger many have predicted it to be.  

Don't get me wrong, I agree with people who are concerned with how modern governments are using technology to strip away our rights, freedoms and privacy. Be ever vigilant and vocal about that.

But the key to the antichrist system is not a technology, it is a spirit which, 1) seeks to take the place of the Lord Jesus, 2) seeks to deny the true Lord Jesus, 3) convinces people to worship it and offer their lives to it. Tech is not required for that. Versions of this antichrist spirit and system existed in the 1st century, and have in every century since.

Christians have to stop automatically assuming every new technology is the beast’s technology. Technology is basically morally neutral. It is the heart of man that can direct it towards evil or towards good. You can use AI to create an incredible worship song for the Lord or you can use it for nefarious purposes. It is the heart of mankind that is the real issue, along with the spiritual realm of darkness.

There are antichrists everywhere. By that I mean that there are people everywhere who deny Christ and proclaim false religions in the place of his true religion. Be more on guard for that. In fact, that is our bigger concern, and that kind of evil has always been pervasive in our world.

Interestingly, the tech moguls kind of are treated by many people like modern deities, or at least demi-gods, who will lead us into the promise land of the future tech utopia. Many of them have obviously believed their own hype, and so the massive fall of much of their industry is exactly what we should expect. And that tech depression is coming. In fact, it is likely already here. Pride comes before a massive fall. They thought the key to creating intelligence was ram and ever increasing CPU power. But that is just the key to burning through electricity fast and churning out slop videos and photos. Intelligence is created by a Higher Intelligence, and he looks at the pride of man and laughs (cf. Psalm 2).

This does not mean that AI won't be of use. It will be very useful for some applications. It does not mean it won't take away some jobs, it will, as all disruptive technologies do. But like all other tech it will not achieve all of what was promised, it will fall short of its makers claims, and it will turn out to be a pretty mundane thing in a few years, that many people have incorporated into their everyday life.

Beware the constant “is this the antichrist tech” thinking. Be more concerned about how sinful politicians and sinful tech barons can use any technology to push autocratic ends. That is something to be vigilant of. But then that issue has existed long before silicone was transformed in such a way that helped the rocks cry out.