How I Mine for Fish?

chronic phone poster, forgive my typos

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

In the late 2000s, the New Atheist movement was at its height. Smart young people clustered around memetic weapons deployed by "The Four Horsemen" of the movement. They quoted The God Delusion and wrote passionately about the brave new world lying just beyond the the horizon, once we had finally swept away the last remnants of organized religion. That religion, you see, was the source of man's primitive and atavistic conditions. In the new age of reason and tolerance, we would all be heckin good people.

Now, had any of these clever youngsters (myself among them) bothered to dig into the arguments, they might have noticed some concerning faults. When faced with a legitimate theologian, the Horsemen had much less exciting debates. These were intellectual bloodsports, after all, and the people demanded a show. What use was a meandering talk about the Cosmological, Ontological, or Teleological Arguments? When these were presented, Hitchens would sidestep, guffaw, and point out that religion was very, very stupid. And the crowds would roar.

Removed from the certainty of being Young, Hip, and Aware of the New Thing, it might quite obvious that the Intellectual Rigor of the Horsemen was not, in fact, very rigorous. When confronted with the robust (boring) arguments for religion, they would answer with such daring ripostes as "we've never found heaven in the Hubble Space Telescope", "can God make a burrito so hot He cannot eat it?", or "imagine believing in a flying spaghetti monster."

Hardly arguments, at all. What they were, however, were social proof. You, the good and smart person, was laughing at the dumb and bad person, and all of your good and smart friends were laughing along.

The Four Horsemen did not kill God. They came upon a dead god, lying facedown in a ditch, and they pronounced themselves His vanquishers.

And what god did they find there?

That corpse was the husk of Western Inertial Christianity. It was the remains of dead words, quoted by fools and fraudsters.

Authentic Christianity was driven out of the West long before the New Atheists took over early YouTube with cartoon skits of "Bible Man." When had it been replaced by Inertial Christianity? I cannot say for certain, but at least as far as the Boomers.

I do not speak of doctrine. There are many forms of Christianity with all manner of doctrine, about which far smarter men than I can endlessly argue. We have all those doctrines, still written on their pages. What I am speaking of is animating spirit, of living faith, scaled to the level of state. There are many churches in our lands. I assume that there are many of those churches, in roadside cathedrals or common-room chapels, where the Word still beats. But I am speaking of societies. Where could we last call our civilization "Christian", in such a way that it would recoil at sin, weep for faith, and transmit itself forward not as secular morals but as the Only Way and Truth. What was the last Christianity that would compel princes and nations not just to "be good people", but to organize themselves beyond the letter of secular law.

What was the last form of Christianity that would kill and die for belief at the scale of governance?

History is replete with examples. If you roll back to Westphalia, you see the need to bind just these forces. The wars of religion were no dead letters.

But that's quite some time, and Westphalia solved that problem quite elegantly. So we can look, instead, to the reasons states organize for mortal endeavors.

Even into the Twentieth Century, the language of state spoke in Christian terms: who was in, who was out, why we suffered, why we labored. Not just endurance, either. Not just absorbing the ills, but turning upon them with artifice and force.

Looking at the documents of those eras, we can say that they at least believed themselves to be Christians, in the real sense of the word.

Certainly, modernity's acid must be the inciting incident in decay. The growth of materialist ideology, the flattening of the sacred, and the removal of the transcendent are a drip-drip-drip of erosion upon the faith, far more powerful than any Nietzschean refutation. But where was the flip? When was the last document written, invoking God, where more people rolled their eyes than looked down in reverence?

Growing up in Millennial and Gen X spaces, we were thoroughly dead letters. The religious Boomers above us roughly fell into two camps: crazy textual thumpers yelling about heavy metal and Satan, or cultured, erudite, functionally atheistic "believers" who understood that these parables and lessons were but a cast necessary to set a moral bone, not a Truth within themselves.

The former were mockable. They quoted words they didn't understand. They lacked temperance and prudence. They often lashed out from fear of their own iniquities, pressed into zealotry, and when pressed in an argument, they'd brandish the Bible and say "it says right here".

They would often misquote.

Those of my generation who followed this literal crowd rejected the secular world. They learned and adhered doctrinally to the Precise Text. These were the kids who could recite chapter and verse. But their faith was often brittle. When a precisely-memorized contradiction was forced to the surface by a more agile thinker, they would shut down. Faced with the inability to understand the verse they recited, they would collapse into a parody of religiosity (dumb, low status, hateful, etc) or their glass cathedral would shatter, and they'd plunge into hedonic liberation (self-annihilation).

The second set were barely Christian at all. The Boomers who believed such may have dressed as Christians. They may have believed themselves to be Christians. They may have even been clergy! (More than once was I informed, with sly and knowing wisdom, that nearly "all" high-functioning theologians were effectively just noble atheists, setting a moral narrative for the less developed.)

But remove this by one more generation, and the Inertial trappings of the religion made less sense. If the point of Christianity was "be tolerant" and you had to constantly explain those intolerant passages, wouldn't it make more sense to simply cut away the cast? The bone of secular humanism had set! It was time to be honest and cease the noble lie.

Those of my generation who followed this path didn't so much leave the Church as simply Stop Pretending to Be Part of It. One day, each of us simply didn't go to services. What was the point? We had learned the lesson, and the church (lowercase-c) itself was just a gathering place for the elderly, those in need, and the lunatics mentioned above. Good for them, and glad it existed, but not something I needed, certainly!

So when the Four Horsemen rode into town, what did they find? A new generation of "thinkers" who had been led out from the Church by the last generation of Shepherds, and a mass of lunatics and yokels just waiting to be defeated in glorious, live-streamed takedowns. If you lived on Midwit Mountain (and most of us always do), this was the show of the age!

If the Horsemen had been smarter, had their audience been more discerning, they might have put some thought into what god's corpse they were triumphantly dancing atop. The gods of Inertial and Pop Christianity were scarecrows, but with a little wisdom, more might have realized that the corpse of the god of Secular Humanism (Christian Atheism) was a mere ten yards further down that trench.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@GreeneMan6 It becomes a period piece by its nature.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@seanspicer This is "making the most" of it - shoving a thumb in their voters' eye.

[Scott Mechkowski @ScottMechkowski]

🚨 THE FARM BILL ISN'T JUST FARMS. READ THE FINE PRINT.

H.R. 9535 rewrites what counts as "agricultural labor" for the H-2A visa. Here's what's on the new list:

The slaughter of animals and breakdown of carcasses at meat and poultry plants.
Logging.
Seafood processing.
Packing houses.
Trucking farm goods from the field.

Americans work those jobs right now. And H-2A has no annual cap.

Then it redefines "temporary." Any contract under 350 days counts, "without regard to the approved employer's underlying need or nature of the job." A year-round job, filled with a temporary visa.

Then it caps the H-2A wage floor. It can't rise "more than 3.25 percent" in a year, and it can drop 1.5 percent.

And for group filers there's "no weekly minimum or maximum hours." One hour every 30 days keeps a worker on the books.

So the industry gets a cheaper, uncapped, year-round workforce, with raises held down for anyone competing with it. That's not a farm bill. It's a labor deal for the meatpackers, paid for by American workers.

@HouseAgGOP @CongressmanGT @JudiciaryGOP @Jim_Jordan @StephenM @SecMullinDHS @Phase2Deport @NICEnforcement @itsyourgov

[Scott Mechkowski @ScottMechkowski]

🚨 THE FARM BILL FORGIVES FRAUD. EVEN FAKE CITIZENSHIP CLAIMS.

Yesterday I showed you that H.R. 9535 hands illegal farmworkers a visa. Now look at what it forgives to get them there.

The bill says these violations "shall be waived." Not may. Shall.

Illegal entry. Waived.
Unlawful presence, including the 3- and 10-year bars. Waived.
No valid papers. Waived.
Fraud and misrepresentation. Waived. In immigration law, that section includes falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen.

The waiver covers conduct "in relation to obtaining employment performing agricultural labor." The one carve-out is fraud to get public benefits. In other words, if you used fake papers or lied about being a citizen to get a farm job, it's wiped clean.

And how do you prove you qualify? 180 days of farm work over two years, backed by "a written record of employment" from the employer. That's the same honor-system paperwork that made the 1986 farmworker program a fraud factory.

My career taught me that when the paperwork is the only proof, the paperwork is what gets faked.

You don't fix a farm labor shortage by forgiving identity fraud.

@HouseAgGOP @CongressmanGT @JudiciaryGOP @Jim_Jordan @StephenM @RealTomHoman @SecMullinDHS @Phase2Deport @NICEnforcement @itsyourgov

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@realJeremyCarl If you're correct, this one got me.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@SenateGOP Man, crazy that you had 2 years to do this but held Paw Parades instead.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the last two years is that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still in this country despite the fact that everyone knows he’s an illegal.

The Trump administration has attempted to deport him at least three times and yet every time some treasonous judge rules against them, delays the case, or drags the proceedings on.

Now apply this same sort of immigration sabotage to tens if not hundreds of thousands of other cases and you can see how difficult it is to deport anyone at all.

The GOP Congress could have easily passed a bill stripping Federal courts of jurisdiction on these sort of immigration-related cases, but they didn’t.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@Osint613 That's honorable behavior!

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@SaysSimulation Ask back in March.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@DataRepublican @mattvanswol Anthropic + DNC push is for centralized compute. Jensen was pushing for broad and distributed compute.

This was definitely a hit.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@ggreenwald More than likely, this is being pushed by Anthropic et al on their quest to centralize all compute within managed AI models. Jensen selling chips to anyone harms their attempt to control all compute.

[Cimmerian Pervert @cimmerian_v]

“We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They turn our states blue and we move away. They destroy entire cities and we fall back to the suburbs. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!”

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@higureshuuen Any culture that thinks that stealing, scamming, and lying is "smart" needs to be treated like a disease. It is deadly to good, high trust societies.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@KaiserLoengramm Isaac wrote a quality book. Highly recommend.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@_Apollosol SLOP SIREN!

BOOM!

BREAKING!

John Thune COULD do something! (He won't.)

Democrats in SHAMBLES!

Patriots in control! (But not of the Senate)

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

Every girl crazy about a sharp dressed man.

[Shibetoshi Nakamoto @BillyM2k]

ladies, how could you possibly resist this dance

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@RepStutzman Deport the all.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@chriswithans The America that could take that contract was demographically replaced.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

@EricLDaugh @daveyjohnny987 The Senate? LMAO.

Add it to the pile of 700 bills Thune never passed.

[How I Mine for Fish? @HowIMineFish]

I'm telling you, it's the egregore age. Everyone lives in a hyperreality increasingly mediated by distributed agentic systems.

Even if you don't, the people you listen to do.