Truth with love.
Last night Noosa city council lit up the "christmas tree", which in Queensland is not a pine but a jacaranda with lights through it. We did not know this was happening. We were having dinner. There was a speech from the mayor, and kids yelling for Santa to arrive. There were creepy angels on stilts.
It was fun for the kids, but not for us. Santa has bad memories: the Auckland Santa was creepy.
Though the main narrative during this period is that you should spend. Lots. For the kids, and so that you display your wealth. I'd rather have more days where I can live in jandals and shorts, but needs must, and we will return to a cold and wet South Island over the weekend.
Where the world is less competative, and there is less stress. Australia celebrates its winners and boasts of them, but the society leaves the losers in the poor suburbs and towns, far away from conference centres, surf beaches, and Santa Parades.
The trouble is that we live in a swamp of narrative: lies, boasts, claims, poor statistics, false statements and the truth is seen as hurtful. There are ways to say the truth, softly, gently. But it means you have to listen. The world would drown out all conversation in noise, which happened at the conference dinner (the panorama above was taken on a ferry to the dinner. We should have got the first ferry back).
Tell the truth in kindness. It is too hard and too exhausting to spend all your mental energies trying to keep track of an ever-growing multitude of exaggerations, false narratives, self-serving spins, and outright lies. Just tell the truth, as you best understand it, without taking pride in it or using it to hurt others.
-- Vox Day, Vox Popoli
The woke will weaponize. They will put down. They will snark. We should not do those things. We should weigh our words, though this is for us all a challenge: in our wrath we would use words as whips.
Christ emptied himself. So should we.
2 So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The counterexample is the officil ideology that worsips intersectionality and wokeness, saying to all that you can only accept the approved texts for your caste. Evolutionist X shows this in the current week as a ban on young men reading the Stoics. The Stoics wrote for young men.
The quote refers to Ovid, who Augustus banned, because his seduction manula (Ars Amorata) worked.
So Donna Zuckerberg, a white woman with enough wealth and leisure to study the classics for a living and sister of one of the richest, most powerful men in the world (who also loves the classics so much that he has named his daughters “Maxima,” Latin for “greatest,” and “August,” after Emperor Augustus,) is complaining that Losers on the Internet are sullying the Classics by quoting Ovid.
This is a problem because White Men on the Internet are Privileged (even when they are poor whites who struggle to get a job or even friends,) while rich white women like Donna are the Oppressed.
Realistically, these men aren’t a threat to Mrs. Zuckerberg; the aren’t going to rise up and force her back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. They are, however, icky, and Donna obviously doesn’t like them impinging on her turf: “By appropriating the Classics, these men lend a veneer of intellectual authority and ancient wisdom to their project of patriarchal white supremacy.”
Appropriating from whom? What culture owns Ovid and Homer? These books are considered the foundation of all of Western Civilization. Is Heartiste not a part of Western Civilization? I suppose you could argue that Roosh is Iranian/Armenian by blood, (despite being born in the US,) but arguing that Roosh can’t enjoy Ovid because he’s Iranian is, well, stupid.
I understand that Mrs. Zuckerberg doesn’t like pickup blogs, but you can’t appropriate the intellectual and literary foundations of your own culture. This is like accusing a Hindu of appropriating the Bhagavad Gita just because he’s a jerk.
--Evolutionist X
I don't like pickup blogs either. The reason that people like Roosh are discovering the Stoics is because the pursuit of pleasure alone -- hedonism -- does not allow for a full life. The ancients knew this, and we know better than they.
For we have Christ, and Christ is the truth. Christ speaks quietly in the noisy marketplace. Shut off you social media and turn down your television. Seek the true word of God. Listen.
And he will keep his promise: he will find those who seek him, not half heartedly, by wholly.