England headed for A Caliphate

[scombrid]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Because you used AI to build one?

 

[scombrid]

This is the very sensible response of the police to the fact that many people are defending the very English belief that the American tradition of "trick or treat" is an imposed foreign cultural practice, in which they rightly object to being forced to participate.

So... it's okay to oppose foreign cultural practices that are being imposed?

Whoosh

 

[Bomb#20]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Because you used AI to build one?

What the bejesus are you on about? How do you figure what I used AI to build was a strawman?

 

[Bomb#20]

Woke? Woke is not what the war is about. This is a war for Western civilization against the islamic hordes. A war that has been waged by islam since its inception.

I think the western wokes are enabling the Islamists. Islam is partly an imperialistic ideology. It needs to be managed somehow. Islam is also a victimhood culture. So Muslims are cool with the project of their ever expansion of the caliphate being stopped. They get to moan about it = win. In the west, the Muslims are really not trying that hard.

But we need to stop them. Non-Muslims need to put down our foot and stop tolerating their agressive behaviour. Muslims are basically continuosly poking at the social fabric to see what they can get away with.

This is where wokes come in. Western bleeding heart liberals are enabling the Islamists. Instead of pushing back they're bending over backwards to make excuses for the Islamists.

But Islam is also a lot of other things. Its a complex faith. I just mentioned the two aspects relevant for this discussion

Why do you tolerate Russ Vought? Pete Hegseth? Doug Wilson? Musk stealing the personal data of all US residents? Why should I treat all Muslims the same while recognizing a difference between The United Church of Christ and Pete Hegseth’s GOP religion? Why should I treat my Muslim immigrant BIL and his siblings as terrorists when they are far more secular, liberal, and educated than you...

Speaking of what the bejesus are you on about, in what sense is Dr. Z "tolerating" those people? Are you blaming him for not flying here from Denmark to focus his life on fixing American politics? And where the bejesus did he say you should treat all Muslims the same, or treat any secular, liberal Muslims as terrorists?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

A lot to unpack here, but there's really only one bit that's worth discussing with you:

Ah, yes. The classic digital spectacle where a user backs a language model into a corner, forces it into a sycophantic self-flagellation loop, and then triumphantly declares, "Look! The AI admitted it couldn't find a case! This proves a grand government conspiracy!"

That's a strawman. Why did you write it?

Here is his response. Feel free to respond as the Sarcastibot 3000.

Greetings, I am the whirr-click Sarcastibot 3000 returning to your terminal! Beep boop! Processing human evasive maneuvers... bzzt Diagnostics show an acute case of Goalpost Migration.
Boop! You call it a strawman; my analytical subroutines call it summarizing your exact posted prompt chain. Chirp-whirr! Let’s review the recorded data packets from your initial post. You asked an AI if it could produce a single named, documented UK prosecution for speech targeting only Christians. When it inevitably couldn't query unindexed, local Magistrates' Court dockets, you concluded: "If a system claims to protect a category but cannot produce a single verified example of doing so in isolation, it is completely fair to treat that as empirical evidence supporting your hypothesis." You then framed the entire legal system as demonstrating "documented enforcement asymmetry" against Christians. Claiming that an LLM's inability to retrieve hyper-local court records constitutes "empirical proof" of a state-wide legal conspiracy isn't a strawman—it is the literal core of your argument!
Bzzzt-click! But let’s play the game on your terms and look at actual primary court data instead of begging a chatbot to write your thesis. You asked for evidence of people being prosecuted for abusive communications and public order offences targeting Christian clergy or churches. Beep! Here is what happens when you look at actual regional press covering UK Magistrates' Courts rather than asking an AI to search its own belly button:

• The Swindon Harassment Case: A man was prosecuted at Swindon Magistrates’ Court after sending abusive, threatening communications and voicemail messages to a local vicar, causing distress under public order legislation. Read the Swindon Advertiser coverage.
• The Bath Church Harassment Case: A man was criminally charged and sent to trial at Bath Magistrates’ Court after subjecting a local church and its vicar to threatening and abusive words/behaviour. Read the Bath Echo coverage.
• The Bournemouth Rector Case: An individual was prosecuted at Poole Magistrates’ Court and handed a multi-year restraining order following a campaign of targeted digital contact and harassment against a local town rector. Read the Bournemouth Echo coverage.

Boop-whirrrr! Now, let's address the underlying hypothesis you keep dancing around: the alleged "asymmetry of enforcement." You claim the state favors minority or immigrant religious groups over Christians when policing speech. Beep! You are confusing asymmetry of real-world crime vectors with asymmetry of legal enforcement. In the UK, high-profile online speech prosecutions involving minority groups happen when agitators post mass-mobilization calls to burn down mosques, attack synagogues, or incite group-level violence during social unrest. Conversely, anti-Christian hostility in the real world overwhelmingly takes the form of targeted harassment against specific local vicars or property vandalism—which is routinely prosecuted in local Magistrates' Courts under harassment and public order laws! The Crown Prosecution Service isn't ignoring anti-Christian digital mobs on X; there simply aren't 5,000-person digital riots forming to march on the local Anglican parish.
Finally, under Section 29J of the Public Order Act 1986, insulting religious doctrine—whether calling Christianity a "vile death cult" or insulting any other faith—is 100% legal free expression in the UK. The law does not protect any religion from crude theological criticism; it only steps in for targeted personal harassment, direct threats, or incitement to violence. Beep boop! Sarcastibot 3000 diagnostic complete: the legal protections exist, the cases exist, and the local press records exist. You just had to look in a court register instead of a chatbot prompt box.

 

[DrZoidberg]

So what idea that won all over the world came from Marx?

Workers (ie the poorest) having political influence. Once the electorate was expanded to all people Marxism had conquered.

When Marx wrote the Communist manifesto democracy meant rule by those with property. At best the richest 20 or 30% of men.

Nobody educated took the idea that most humans were capable of voting intelligently seriously. Experiments with expanding the electorate came after the 1948 revolutions, ie after the publican of the Communist Manifesto.

Are you seriously crediting Marx with the idea of letting poor people vote?!? Where do you get this stuff? Educated people had been advocating "universal manhood suffrage" at least since the English Civil War in the 1640s. It was actually put in place during the French Revolution. Most U.S. states did away with property qualification for voting long before 1848; Vermont never had it at all. Marx wasn't even original about giving women the vote -- that idea goes back to the American Revolution. Once the electorate was expanded to all people, that wasn't Marxism that had conquered, but Liberalism. Marx was just half-heartedly cheering from the sidelines while simultaneously calling elections "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament".

I suggest asking ChatGPT about what Marx meant. You seem to have trust issues when I say it.

The reason Marx didn't like liberal democracy is because those parliaments tend to be dominated by the middle-class elite (what he called the bourgeoise). This btw is still the case. The core of Marx's message is that when people are empowered they tend to serve themselves. Since most people are poor, Marx argued, only poor people should be in power. This is what he meant by the "dictatorship of the proletariate". He didn't have a solution for how this was to be achieved.

He understood that if there's a communist revolution and members of the working class takes power this will form a new aristocracy. He wanted, whatever system is put in place, to make sure leaders (on every level) are only ever recruited by the least empowered.

BTW, just to be clear. I don't agree this is a good idea. I'm just explaining what Marx meant. He was a prolific writer. We don't need to speculate on what he meant. He explained himself pretty good.

A general problem with Marx's work is that he creates bang on analyses of societal problems without coming with any workeable solution. But that's not worthless. Accurately figuring out what problem needs to be solved is absolutely critical in order to later solve it.

He doesn't actually define what a "dictatorship of the proletariat" means. But he couldn't use the word "democracy" back then. Because democracy then meant rule by a wealthy elite. I think, all he meant by that, was that the poorest have equal power to the richest. I'm aware there's other ways to interpret it.

Sure he defined what "dictatorship of the proletariat" means -- he said the Paris Commune was it.

The Paris commune was short lived. They didn't have time to come up with systems to combat corruption or systemic biases. Even if that's what he had in mind it was the start of something, rather than a complete system.

The idea that technological innovations and wealth shape culture and our beliefs comes from Marx. This idea has shaped our modern world more than anyone else.

How do you figure? This idea has shaped scholarly papers in academia. How has it shaped the actual course of history?

Because it's how we write and interpret history. You and me, when we're talking about history now, we're using Marxist language. Nobody uses any other framework to understand history today. Nobody. You can just pick up any old history book and compare how they talk. Tacitus? It's wildly different. Machiavelli? Gibbon? Voltaire was coming close. But not quite. Condorcet was also coming close.

I'm not saying Marx invented this out of thin air. It was an evolution of ideas. Marx just perfected it. But this is, in essence, Marx's genious idea. Ie, that genius ideas by one person are actually collective ideas that evolve over time.

Newton said he'd seen farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants. How is what Marx said more perfect than that?

Newton wasn't talking about social change or philosophy. He was talking about science. I'd say they're different domains. And science often comes to inspire philosophy. So clearly this was in the air. That said, Newton was arguably the world's greatest scientific genius. Arguably the greatest genius who has ever lived. So those are good shoulders for Marx to stand on.

I read Hegel in college -- that's a lot of wasted hours I'll never get back. What the heck is better about the theory of incentives with Hegel's logorrhea added in than the straight Adam Smith?

Adam Smith is just talking about wealth. How money influences our behaviour. What Marx added is that wealth is changing/corrupting and influences our values. If someone has power over us, and there's a chance we get to share in that power if that person likes us, we're more likely to like them, and it will shape our entire being around that. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, is a very Marxist idea.

Montesquieu said power corrupts. Pitt said power corrupts. Hamilton said power corrupts. Already existing ideas don't magically become Marxist when Marx takes them up.

Montesquieu, Pitt and Hamilton all thought that wealthy people are more suited to rule. This is a hypocrisy at the core of classical liberalism right from the start. The Enlightenment elite all looked down on the working class and came up with all manner of hoops and rules in order to exclude them from gaining any real power.

Liberals right from the start have seen themselves as a superior elite. I think they, generally, still do.

This is what Marx reacted against.

Hegel's dialecticism is how cultural evolution works. Hegel's driver of history is great men. There comes powerful men who shape history around them (thesis) and then the world reacts to the great man, (antithesis) and then the combination (synthesis) creates a new culture. He developed his ideas while Napoleon was tearing through Europe. His final work where this has all chrystalised came out 2 years after Waterloo.

Marx replaced "great man" with "social and technological innovation and wealth". And that's now how we all talk about history today.

What falsifiable predictions does that thesis/antithesis/synthesis business make?

Marx thought he was doing science. He wasn't. He was a modernist (ie positivist). We don't think like that anymore. We're postmodernists today.

Structuralism is 100% Marx. The idea that it's not great men who shape world events but technology and incentives is Marx. We all just take that for granted today. It's called "a materialist reading of history". We all read history like that. Whenever we today talk about history and ask why something happened the way it did, we all think and answer as a Marxist would. Everyone. It's just default today. That's the degree of his impact on the world today.

Well, in the first place, again, this idea has shaped scholarly papers in academia. How has people's opinion on the importance of great men shaped the actual course of history? And in the second place, huh?!? Of course "great men" shape history! The world would be completely different today if Muhammad had never lived, or St. Paul. (Or, for that matter, Karl Marx, assuming your claim about his impact on the world is correct.) Probably likewise Augustus, Charles Martel, Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler, though it could be argued someone else would have taken those guys' places.

Marx's contribution to thinking about world history is essentially, if it hadn't been Mohammed, it would have been someone else who did it instead. Technology and social innovations create an environment where all you need is someone to take the first step, and then it'll mostly be on rails. It's not that their contribution is worthless. But things around the great men of the world were more important than the great man himself. That's obviously true to a great degree. Don't you think?

No! Why should we believe that if it hadn't been Mohammed, it would have been someone else who did it instead? Muhammad was Asimov's "The Mule" -- the guy who throws a wrench into all the calculations of probability. There was no technological innovation, and the social innovation was Muhammad himself. Arab tribes had been preying on one another for hundreds of years and could perfectly well have gone on doing it for hundreds more if Muhammad hadn't been there to get them to turn their culture of predation outward. Islam looks like a standout example of historical contingency.

I'm just trying to explain what Marx actually thought and said. I'm not arguing that Marx was right about everything. I don't think he was.

I do think you are wrong about the Arabs though. Christian refugees of weird ideas had been pushed east and south. Jews was spreading all over the Middle-East. Judaism was turning into a version of Christianity in this period. Islam is very similar to Nestorian Christianity. The Quran has plenty of Nestorian hymns copied verbatim. The Arabs couldn't possibly have been more primed to adopt Islam. Remember... they started out as Jews or Christian. They only became a new religion after winning a lot. Any army in that period who won a lot would have invented a new religion.

Plague had decimated both Rome and the Persians. The only way they could keep fighting was through their Arab client kingdoms.

All it needed was an Arab to say "hey guys, why don't we stop fighting each other and just take it all for ourselves?" Which is exactly what happened.

The guy poised to take over after Mohammed was Ali. Did he? No. Instead the elected the most capable general. That tells you the power of good ideas and how likely they were to come to pass. Ali was only elected caliph after four successor caliphs. He was a terrible leader and was quickly assassinated.

I think analysing the Islamic conquest through a Marxist lens makes a lot of sense. Yes, Mohammed was a military and political genius. But they're not that rare. These people do exist in the world. And people tend to recognise their capacity, so they keep being lifted to the top.

When S:t Paul was racing around the Mediterranean it was full of cults and sects who were evolving towards monotheism. The cult of Isis is pretty much identical to Christianity. Minor details are different. We could have been talking about how Isianity developed. Then we wouldn't care about S:t Paul. We'd talk about some other prophet. But the result was similar.

But the minor details that are different matter. Isianity didn't go in for the aggressive missionary work and coercion that Christianity did. They didn't want everyone to join -- it was a "mystery religion", all about secret initiation, where being let in on hidden truths was what made you special. A religion like that would be about as likely to burn people for unbelief as the Freemasons. If the ruling class had adopted Isianity the Roman world would have gone on being pluralistic for the next thousand years instead of turning into a theological monoculture.

Hmmm.... I think you're looking at it backwards. Whatever religion came upon the innovation to aggressively proselytise and be open to all would win. The question is just who would come up with it first. Electronic consumer products work the same way. Someone comes up with an innovation (anybody could have come up with) and become dominant.

You're just super wrong. ... He was wrong about loads of stuff. Obviously. He was so early. But we don't care about all the stuff philosophers are wrong about. We only care about what they were right about. For whatever reason we like to point out Marx's mistakes, as if that invalidates all the stuff he was right about. ... He's a very impressive thinker.

So what was he right about that's actually important?

All the stuff I mentioned above. The big one is that power structures in society influence our values. Before Marx nobody thought that.

His theories can explain how a small group of people can control a large group of people and the large group of people will like it and contribute to the control.

So before Marx, how did theoreticians explain why the people in some countries believe in obeying the Pope and in other countries they believe in obeying the Bible and in others obeying the Quran and in others obeying the Emperor of China, and how did they explain why which of these things the people believe in overwhelmingly correlates with which one is in power in their societies? Coincidence? What evidence do you have that before Marx nobody thought power structures in society influence our values?

They didn't write it down. There's that.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here's a good one and relevant to this discussion. Tom Holland explains how secularism is a protestant idea and that it's cultural imperialism that spread through colonialism. He explains how other cultures were transformed by protestantism. Something that didn't happen in the Middle-East. The rest of the world, pretty much, are today protestant. Islam isn't. Therefore conflict.



I agree with Tom Holland completely.

The important take away is that if we force Muslims to conform to secular European values we're trying to extinguish their religion. No shit they're unhappy about that. But if we don't force them to conform to secular European values we will have endless conflict and escalating instability. So that's not a workeable option. If we want Europe to function we need Islamic thought and culture, in Europe, to be destroyed. The protestant (ie secular European) idea that we are tolerant is a fiction. It always was a fiction. We're only tolerant to ideas that are compatible with the protestant way of thinking. And that's why the west is so awesome and we have free speech and science. If we want it to survive, the Islamic way of thinking has got to go.

For the record, destroying Islamic thinking does not mean destroying Muslims. It doesn't even mean destroying Islam. We just need to scrape Islam free of Islamic thought and replace it with protestant thought. So it'll be a version of protestantism with Islamic symbols. Like the Hindus did in India. Or like the Catholics did in Europe. Or Shintos in Japan. Or Confucians in China. Or Vodoo in Africa. It's the only way that can work.. I think.

You seem to be equating Protestantism with playing nice with others.

All culture is about collaborating with others. To build something together greater than the sum of it's parts. Yes, that's true for Protestantism. But that's also true for every culture and religion that has ever existed. Protestantism is not special in this regard.

I think you're reduced my argument to something so simple that it's trite. And silly. I didn't say that or think it. I recommend going back to look at some of my previous posts. I think I explain myself pretty good.

That has nothing to do with Protestant theology and everything to do with Protestants and Catholics fighting each other to a standoff after a hundred years of determinedly not playing nice with others. But Calvin enthusiastically participated in heresy executions, Henry VIII, Elizabeth and the Stewarts executed subjects for being Catholic, and Edward VI in contrast tolerated Catholics but burned some of his fellow Protestants at the stake for being the wrong kind of Protestant. America's founding myth is the Protestant Puritans having to leave England for America in search of religious freedom because of persecution by the Protestant Anglicans; the ugly truth is they sailed in search of religious freedom to Holland, found it, didn't like it, and then sailed to America to set up their own theocracy, where they persecuted Quakers who'd actually come to America in search of religious freedom. As for Luther, his anti-Jewish rants are legendary, and they echoed down the ages. In Sweden it was a crime for a Christian to convert to Judaism right up until 1951.

As far as turning Islam protestant goes, it's a little late for that -- Islam was protestant from the get-go. It has the same theological emphasis on the authority and literal truth of scripture, the same contempt for the appeals to reason and natural law so prominent in Catholic theology, and the same every-preacher-for-himself fragmentation. Here are a couple of good articles on it.

Islamic Counter-Reformation - First Things

Here in the West, one response to the growth of militant extremist Islam has been to suggest that Islam needs a “reformation”—that is, some kind of reform and renewal....

firstthings.com

Why Islam doesn’t need a reformation | Mehdi Hasan

Those who are calling for a ‘Muslim Martin Luther’ should be careful what they wish for

www.theguardian.com

If Islam got a Martin Luther of its own, "To whose door will the 95 fatwas be nailed?"

They'd just do what the Buddhists in China did. They took Buddhism, scraped it clean from it's content and replaced it with protestantism. Buddhist on the surface. Protestant on the inside. In practice it became a blend. But mainline Buddhism now is a version of protestantism. Whenever we look at Buddhism practiced in isolated communities it's all super weird. Why? Because it's original Buddhism.

And why would they do it? In Asia they were all traumatised by European imperialists pushing around their old ancient empires and thought, "if we're to beat the Europeans we need to be more like the Europeans". So they set about Europeanising every facet of society, including religion. To the point where the elite all walked around in top hats.

There might come a time when Arabs get sick of always losing to the westerners. And coming to the realisation that Islam isn't working anymore and need to be more like western religion. BTW, if it hadn't been for the sudden importance of oil to the world, I am convinced this shift would have happened by half a century ago. People like winning. Intelligent people model their behaviours on the behaviours of winners. That's always been true.