Egregoros

@georgia There's no one point at which a culture becomes itself. If you're looking at Anglos it's not even linear. We have a local identity loosely tied to a language family, then we're Roman, then we stop being Roman, but we're still vaguely part of Celtic spheres of influence, then Germans immigrate, then different Germans conquer, now we're half Celtic half German. We lean into the German half, but we're not all that like continental Germans after a while because the two ethno-cultures fuse. Are we English or British at that point? Well we won't really be united that way for a few hundred years, but maybe. Oh wait, the Reformation just happened and the king is saying he's sitting on the throne of Israel now. Are we jewish? Some of us moved to America and decided to re-emphasize the Greeco-Latin classics. We build a form of government based on insights from the Roman Republic, monarchy and empire both become cultural taboos. Are we Athenians now? pre-Caesar Romans? Or are we still Germans? Britons maybe? Or perhaps we're the true jews, we circumcize these days, after all.

@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @silverpill @light @Mammal I never took any of this stuff seriously 6 years ago. A lot of us were younger and thought this was all dumb drama about shitposting and blowing off steam when these people were trying to genuinely trying to subvert American culture.

But these days Torba seems to be exclusively running in these weird astroturfed "trad" circles whose only consistent position is shilling for random 3rd world countries. "Save the White race by siding against White countries no matter what the issue. In fact, don't even look into the issue. Being a misinformed vibes based gonzo idiot is BASED!"

It makes me wonder if all the deplatforming from those days that everyone said was "leftist" was actually targeted at people receiving foreign money.

You look at these types of people from back then and where they are now and they're all shilling for Orban when that election was totally irrelevant to everyone except Hungarians and Russians, they all have Russian wives for some reason, or they're promoting pro China, pro Iran, pro pan-Arab propaganda.

Basically anyone that has influence that isn't in the core American geopolitical coalition, the old Far Right influencers are carrying water for those people. I'm thinking more of these Torba types than we thought are just paid agitators of foreign governments. Even back then a lot of them were being promoted by RT.

@georgia I tend to favor medieval Europe and modern European derivatives of the IE tradition that are critical of axial age revolutions, but yes. He was most likely mirroring the common sentiment of those European thinkers: That India preserves an Aryan lineage but it's degenerated.

It's not an uncommon perspective but to say Indians "departed from God" is an unnecessarily provocative and anachronistic way of putting it. The most complete Western analogue we have are the Greeks and they hardly stayed true to some "original" Aryan praxis either. That's not how anything works.

@georgia There are serious questions about the historic Muhammad too. Sometimes "reliable" Hadiths agree with Jewish consensus over the Quran. Older substrates of surviving sources refer to Jews as part of the Ummah. The Quran seems to think Christianity and Judaism are both true and legitimate paths sometimes, but other times it calls for their annihilation, and this change sometimes happens within the same surah. Its not clear if the change is chronological in history either.

Also most of the semitic customs are testified to in Arabs at an earlier date than Muhammad's life.

I think for any religion with a single founder from the start of the axial age all the way to the advent of cheap printing, it's going to be ambiguous whether that founder was more a part of the new tradition or the old one. The answer is usually probably both.

@georgia I think the Hindus who say Shakyamuni Buddha is misunderstood by Buddhists are probably right. I think he probably just meant that the accidents you identify with are not what you really are.

No historical evidence for this it just seems unlikely that the proposition of radical nominalism metaphysically has anything to do with detaching from your personal cravings and expectations as a meditative discipline and the Buddhists wind up having to rely on ambiguity to justify the exact same beliefs that the Vedic tradition believes and has no issue accounting for.