Cosmic Inflation Hysteria, Bio Evolutionary Hysteria

What If Cosmic Inflation Is Wrong? Where It Is Shown That Scientists Are Prisoners Of What Looks Good:

How plausible is a piece of knowledge? How does one establish the plausibility of a piece of knowledge? This is the sort of meta theory of knowledge (meta-”epistemology”) which the progress of science unceasingly reveals.

Thus, establishing new science is not just a revelation of the world out there, but a revelation of how we think, and, even better, how we could think, if we wanted to be even more clever than we already are.

In particular mass sociological effects control the “data” all too easily, the more subtle the “data” is.

Here we consider evolution and especially the attitude relative to Lamarck, and then the so-called Big Bang, or as it is now fashionable to say among the cognoscenti, in a bout of poetic mystifying jargon, the ΛCDM model. (Much more sophisticated than Big Boom theory!)

In both cases, silly, and thus all the more enthusiastic, herd effects are involved.

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Nothing Real New In Darwinism, But Lots Of Insufferably Shattering New Ideas In Lamarck:

The debate about biological evolution was exemplary: Greece was making lot of money from having mastered selection of species, both natural and artificial, 25 centuries ago. Anaximander, earlier, informed us we all evolved from fishes. Then came the Christian Jihadists, burning books, libraries and infidels, cutting intellectuals alive with oysters shells until they succumbed. Fast forward 23 centuries, and research professor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, having ruined his eyes by spending thousands of hours studying mollusk, and other invertebrate fossils behind his microscope, came up with several new insights.

Lamarck thought that evolution was urged along by two other forces. Teaching evolution was outlawed in England, Lyell and Darwin went to learn it in Edinburgh, Scotland. Next Darwin rolled the basic Greek theory out, claiming to have observed it in Galapagos finches as Lamarck had observed it mollusks. Darwin’s basic theory, purged from its Lamarckian elements, became widely accepted.    

There was no proof that the further additions suggested by Lamarck were wrong, though. However, believing that there was anything in evolutionary theory beyond what the Greeks already knew 25 centuries ago, became “unscientific”. Since when is believing that something could be true which we have no proven is not true “unscientific”?

Since science is a church with great bishops?

Nothing was really completely new in Darwinism, but lots was really new, and religiously shocking, in Lamarck. After lots of ridicule, Lamarck took 2 centuries to be proven right.

We know now that Lamarck was right on one of his two suggested mechanism. And I am pretty sure he is true on the other. Underlying both is full bore Quantum Physics.

Thus spoke Zarathrustra.

***

Here comes the Bible, latest version! Perfectly correct, if one supposes their suppositions about their suppositions just as correct…

Inflationistas’ Hysteria:

I am for more mild inflation in matters economical, and also in matters cosmological, but not beyond that.

For decades, cosmologists have screamed from every rooftop that cosmic inflation was right. I was dubious, because they made an hypothesis which was astounding, to explain something rather mundane. (And extremely natural, if one entertains the fancy that the universe is hundreds of billion years old, not just 13.8 billion!)

The short of it is that the universe is huge, at least 45 billion light years across, but looks everywhere the same, as if it originated from just one place (or as if it were immensely old). To explain the discrepancy, some cosmologists, starting in the USSR, assumed the universe expanded at enormously faster than light speed. The speed of light along loops in space is locally limited. The speed of space, though is not limited (a curved manifold of dimension n embeds in one of dimension (2n +1) so that the curvature of the former is a trace of the flat one of the latter).

This was a huge hypothesis to explain a smaller problem. Basically, it looked as if cosmologists had got the temporal dimension of the universe wrong. Or maybe the Big Bang was wrong. Or maybe both, a bit.

Instead, cosmologists assumed a completely new force, Cosmic Inflation, and thus a completely new source of energy. They went for a phantasmagoric “explanation”, instead of modestly admitting that they did not really witness the proverbial “First Three Minutes”, from their position, on the right of God.

If CI existed, why should CI appear just once? Why not here, there, and everywhere, now, yesterday and tomorrow? Could one make universes out of nothing? Yes, yes and yes, screamed hysterical cosmologists from all rooftops.

A rule in thinking is that when one has a problem with a ready class of explanations one should not explain it with supernatural explanations from the get-go, before the more obvious explanations have been proven wrong.

Here conventional theories of the Hot Big Bang may not be not quite correct, so hysterical physicists decided that everything-we-know makes no sense, to start with. It turns out that their arguments amounted to hand waving (OK, a gas cools down when expanding; however a quantum fluctuation is not a gas!) fabulous mathematician cum physicist Roger Penrose claims that obtaining a flat universe classically without any recourse to inflation out of a quantum fluctuation is 10^100 more likely.

A casual look shows that conventional Big bang theory makes a lot of assumptions we have no proof of (for example in astrophysics). Absence of logical contradiction is no proof of experimental existence. Especially when, in the end, the theory one gets (the conventional Hot Big Bang) seems incorrect (because nothing can solve the flatness problem, short of immense age!)  

The philosophical problem became even more acute when an experimental cosmological inflation was discovered, Dark Energy. The conjunction of CI and DE made the universe expand tremendously, brake down, and then re-accelerate. Weird. Both inflations differ by a factor of 10^27 in their energy density.

So why not go with Dark Energy alone? Then the universe maybe hundreds of billions of years old.

Why not? Just to say that can’t possibly be true, because one has seen the universe expands very fast, in a tremendous cosmic inflation, amounts to starting with one’s conclusion.

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The Common Denial Mechanism About Evolutions Either Biological Or Cosmological; We Know, You Don’t, & What We Know Pleases Authority:

The Big Bang cosmology is in the exact mood of the Bible: nothing really new in that mood. They can say they have numbers, I can see there is a lot of completely circuitous logics, where the end proves the beginning. In any case, if it’s in the Bible, it’s right, and God cares about creating a little universe for us.

What hurt with Lamarck’s insights was the God of the Bible again (and the entire empires resting on it). Lamarck basically said intelligence, animal intelligence and an increasing mysterious complexity organizing force intrinsic to life, organized the universe. In any case, smarts, but not those of the God of the Bible. That was therefore censored from the Anglo-Saxon world, where God is a question of national security, or, at least, manifest destiny, grabbing entire continents… When the forces of obscurantism had to surrender, they embraced an obscure amateur gentleman researcher of good English stock. (Not to demean Darwin, but Lamarck, and even his enemy, competitor, contradictor and colleague Cuvier, did the heavy lift, 60 years prior…)

Insights about what truth could be never comes from herds, especially herds of mandarins, when they are genuinely new.  

Patrice Ayme’

Saint Patrick, the Trinity, and the Primacy of Secular Law, the Logos

Saint Patrick, A (Mental) Power Story

Mental power is the ultimate power, and the power of life, in the end, is all about intelligence. The argument has been made by many a top biologist (and not just Lamarck, but recent contemporary biologists, some Nobel laureates) that life is intelligent. That eukaryotic cells are intelligent.

Intelligence is much more Machiavellian than Machiavel. An example is Christianism, a triple headed system of thoughts and moods, which appears very different, depending the way one looks at it. Key to its success is that its secret God is the essence of humanity, the Logos. Saint Patrick’s day is a good day to remember this. Irish Catholicism, in its first phase, as taught by Patrice, and as mitigated by the people of Ireland, four centuries before the centuries of savage wars with the Vikings, was extremely open-minded.

Ireland was conquered by the Logos, not by the Sword. That is the difference with many other lands conquered by other religions (in particular the lands conquered by Islam which, in the first century at least, were all conquered by the sword, and a sword drenched in the blood of millions!)

***

Judges Can Be Of Some Use For The Progress of Civilization:

Today in New York the Alien Tort Act was activated by a Federal Judge. She ordered Germany to pay reparations for the attempted eradication of the Herero and Nama people, between 1904 and 1908. Half of the Nama were assassinated. This holocaust was warm-up for the German attack on the world in August 1914, another war crime, even greater. Neither the Namibian massacre nor the war crime of the German engineered world war of 1914 were excoriated, condemned, nor, a fortiori understood. Hence the repetition by the Nazis.

(A few years ago, Germany presented formal excuses to the state of Namibia, and “helps” Namibia; however that does not directly addresses the legitimate grievances of the Herero and Nama…) 

Teaching The Heathen, Or What Philosophers Have Always Done, And Will Always Do. Thanks to the Conversion of Ireland, Romanitas, the Greco-Roman Civilization Spread Where The Legions Didn’t Reach

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The Difference Between Sotus and Scottus:

Saint Patrick started as an English boy. During one of many raids of the savage Scotti on Roman Britannia, he was captured when he was 16. He was enslaved for 6 years.

The Romans called the Irish, “Scottus”, and so did the Europeans for centuries to come. Charles the Bald, king of Francia Occidentalis and Roman emperor as Charles II, was a promoter of fundamental research. He became an excellent friend of the philosopher Scotus Erigena (“Erigenus” means Iris-born). Charles had named Erigena head of the Palatine Academy of Laon, thus becoming a successor to Alcuin of York. (Alcuin was Prime Minster of Charles I, Charlemagne). Erigena spoke many languages, including Irish, Frankish, Latin and Greek.

Once the emperor and the philosopher were pleasantly drinking across a table. The emperor asked Erigena: “Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum? (What separates a sot  from an Irishman?”[“sot” means idiot, the word sot is still heavily used in French]).

Quick as lightning, Erigena retorted: “Tabula tantum” (Only a table). So Erigena called the emperor an idiot.

Of these little piques great civilizations are made.

Notice in passing the difference of smarts with Islam: even if nowadays one calls Muhammad a “sot” (a particularly uninteresting idiot), the righteous Muslim will want to kill you. Or, at the very least will have to kill you. If said Muslim considers that what is written black and white in the Qur’an is an order from “Allah”, as it is supposed to be.

And the same extends to all the Caliphs, and other Muslims in authority (Surah 4, verse 59). So no wonder Islam never acquired a sense of humor, let alone supreme intelligence. Remember the context above: Charles the Bald headed an empire mightier than the Islamist empire (as it had heavily defeated it in the Eight Century, and would push Islam out of Europe for centuries… before ending all the way to Jerusalem a bit more than 2 centuries later). But Charles II, like Charles I, had a sense of intellect, humor. Although “sacred” by the Popes, they didn’t take their own holiness too seriously (European emperors would quarrel with popes, on and off, for the next 11 centuries…)

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Saint Patrick Was a Franco-Gallic Product, to a great extent:

But let’s come back to Saint Patrick, four centuries earlier. He escaped slavery and Ireland, by hiding on a ship, and fled to what was becoming Francia (as the Franks, in military control conferred to them by the Roman Empire were slipping into governmental control).

The cleric Patrice was educated in Auxerre, Tours, and Cannes, Provence, more exactly at the monastery of the Lérins Abbey. He then returned to Ireland. (When Patrice came to Ireland, his name was mispronounced as “Patrick”.)

Hence Saint Patrick was pretty much a product of the Gallic-Catholic church (in contradistinction with “Roman-Catholic”). That Gallic-Catholic church would soon get in a conflict with the Pope in Rome, about secular teaching. The gallic-Catholic church thought that secular teaching was necessary. The Pope, as a good Jihadist keen to bring forth further apocalypse (the apocalypse in Christian and later Muslim texts, was a precondition for the Final Judgment, a desired act where the worthy are welcomed to paradise; hence its desirability). The conflict between Gallic bishops and Rome got so vicious, that Pope Gregory the Great threatened to have the bishop of Dignes burned alive, if he persisted with secular teaching (late Sixth Century). But the Gallic bishops had the army of the Franks, that is, the Roman army, to protect them (this fight between Gallo-Romans and the Popes was thus a continuation of the conflict of the Frank Arbogast, Magister Militum of the Occidental Empire with the Catholic fanatics of the Orient, in 394 CE).

Saint Patrick no doubt succeeded in Ireland, because he was taught tolerance in Gallic Francia.

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Christianism As The Triumph Of The Logos:

After making Christianism the official Roman religion, Rome used what Constantine called “Universalism” (= “Catholicism”) to spread Romanitas at a distance and through the limes (armed physical border of the Roman empire, the “Wall”). That worked extremely well. And, to be honest, so great was the appeal of Christianism to the uncouth that under Nestorian form (for example), it spread ahead… All the way to Mongolia (Genghis Khan was adopted as a refugee child by a Christian tribe).

Thus, when the Barbarians invaded, they were already Christian, so they looked up to Rome spiritually. But for two significant details:

1) the Franks spurned Christianity, as their association with Rome was older… and founded upon a sturdier, deeper basis, secular law.  

2) Eastern Europe, outside of the Roman Limes, had been converted to Christianism by Arianus and his disciple. Arianus, an Egyptian bishop, did not believe in the Trinity (this is also why the Muslims don’t believe in it, either). This would bring their disappearance: the dozens of millions of Roman citizens were Catholics. Craftily, when they “converted”, the Franks decided to become Catholics. That can be viewed as a testimony of their political acumen. 

But there is much more: converting to Catholicism was converting to the Logos, to debate, the intellect, thus, tolerance. Let me explain.

The Franks helped Constantine, who started by fighting them, conquer the entire Roman empire. They refused to convert for nearly two centuries, as they knew how the Christian sausage had been made and why. Then, under Consul-King Clovis (“Louis”), they got the better idea to do as Constantine had done, and rewrite Christianism, their way.

The subtlety of the Trinity escaped the Arians totally. The Trinity meant that the Logos, that is, LOGIC, was God. And even as a primacy to the rest. That helped convert to Christianism the millions of Neoplatonists who led the empire. It also meant that all those who thought that the (secular) law of man, the Logos, came before any superstition, could also be Catholic without contradiction.

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θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος: LOGIC IS GOD:  

This genuflection to logic is the master idea of Christianity, hidden in plain sight: the Evangel of John starts this way: ”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the original Greek, the last four words of John 1:1 are: “θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος”. Literally “God was the Logos”.

If Europe is the modern Rome, as it is, or used to be, what is the modern equivalent of Roman Christianity spreading ahead of Romanitas? The United Nations machinery, spreading around the planet the religion of democratic secularism, the only religion worth having. Because that’s the only religion corresponding to the deep nature of the humanoids.

Patrice Ayme’

Contemplating Philosophically Trappist Habitable Planets

From TRAPPIST Monachal Studies in the Middle Ages, To Seven Planets found around one star, the arc of intelligence pursues its ascent, using the same word (trappist)! Colonizing the giant Milky Way’s four armed barred spiral galaxy, just, for now, with our greedy electronic eyes to start with! Studies foster understanding, the better monks would have said, thus helping to repel enemies of Progress!

Surviving is what we do. Contemplating exoplanets, as our distant ancestors, launching the Homo understanding drive, as a gigantic experiment, did with the Savannah (before stepping onto it):

New potentially habitable planets have been found, a mere 39 light years away. They may harbor life. This has everything to do with philosophy. The fascist Catholic church tortured Giordano Bruno, a travelling astronomy professor, for seven years in the Vatican, then pierced his palate, and burned him alive, just for having entertained the possibility of other solar systems, complete with little green men and exobiology. Exobiology meant that the Vatican would not control the universe, as it was supposed to.

The despicable anti-intellectual madness of the Catholic theofascism is not quite dead: this is the present of Islam. And this is what the pseudo-left wants to impose on us (because that pseudo-left in truth works for plutocracy, the enemy of reason).

Another theme of the pseudo-left is that colonialism is bad (whereas most of the world, including Japan and South Africa, full of Bantus who did not use to be there a little while back, is the product of colonialism). The presence of habitable exoplanets reminds us that now colonialism, colonialism of other worlds, is a necessity. Yesterday toi fight cannibalism and slavery, amen, today to ensure the survival of intelligence.

Indeed, colonialism is a necessity for the same reason as it was for our distant ancestors and those of baboons, all of whom left the safety of the trees: colonizing the savannah was better than the alternative, which was death among the trees, in the Dark Forest (I just provided perniciously a link to an excellent Chinese Sci-Fi book; I advise NOT to read the Wikipedia article, which tells the whole tale, all too well, but go buy the book and read it first instead!).

Solar Systems Around Red Dwarves Were Found In Science Fiction So Far, Now They Are Science Fact. Impression of the view from a water-bearing Trappist 1 Planet. Spending a bit more money on telescopes would give us real pictures within a decade.

All of morality, and more generally, philosophy, flow from the opportunity of survival, granted by the understanding that a bit more imagination provides with.

The Politically Correct movement (which is anything but) has completely forgotten the deep nature of humanity, or, more generally, intelligence. There is no correctness in the city (polis) if there is no correctness in the physical sense. “PC” is a lie, a manipulation. What they call Political Correctness is the Perfect Con. The Perfect Conspiracy of vicious greed against intelligence.

Interestingly, the astronomers who invented the acronym “TRAPPIST” to designate this Solar System clearly had a feeling for the grander perspective of history I just alluded to.

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Why The Name Trappist For Planets?

The Franks brought monasteries under their mighty secular wings in the Fifth century. The Franks had set up their confederation two centuries earlier, under a law written in Latin (the Franks themselves talked a form of Dutch, but they eagerly learned from and then interfere with, Rome)).

During those two centuries the Franks helped Constantine acquire control of the empire, yet, while their comrade in arms Constantine was busy taking himself for the self-described “13th Apostle”, the Franks stayed anti-Christian, while their employer invented, and imposed what he christened “Orthodox Catholicism”.

Said Catholics collapsed the empire with their Political Correctness gone completely mad. Soon enough the Founders of the Church (bishop Ambrose of Milan and Al.) had to submit to their own contradictions. To their sorrow, they put the Franks, whom they had just fought to death, in charge of defense of the empire by 400 CE.

Verily, that was shortly after the Frank Arbogast took control of the Occidental empire in 392-394 CE. By the late fifth Century the Franks understood finally that the optimal course consisted in taking control of Catholicism (“Universalism”), by inventing their own version, just as Constantine had. But while avoiding the pitfall of superstition. (Consul Clovis famously quipped that Christ would never have been crucified if his Franks had been around: a deliberate mangling of Christian superstition!) 

Under the Franks, and opposed to the Pope’s fanaticism, in particular that of  Gregory the Great, monasteries became centers of knowledge. Saint Benedict of Nursia (in England) became the sort of Catholics the Franks tolerated and encouraged: those new style catholics only preached the kind side of Christianism, not its dark side, and were not just knowledge and progress friendly, but all about it.

Benedict’s mentality led later to the order of the Trappist monks, severely dedicated to study.

The Franks would save 94% of the Greco-Roman books which survived.

In any case, this is remembered by the European astronomers who discovered TRAPPIST 1. As Newton said, repeating 12th century’s  Bernard of Chartres, four centuries later: “We stand on the shoulders of giants”. More exactly, “nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”, we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. We discover truth by building on previous discoveries. The moods within Frankish monasteries, for more than a millennium, was all about studying and preserving past wisdom. Without them, all, but ten of Greco-Roman intellectual works would have been lost.

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The  TRAPPIST exoplanet survey is led from the University of Liege, Belgium. Using the 63 centimeters Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. A member on the team was the initial discoverer of the first exoplanet. (Chile is a honorably performing member of Greater Europe, and is full of expensive European, and US, telescopes enjoying the clarity of the high altitude Atacama desert.)

In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva,  used the radial velocity method with the ELODIE spectrograph on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence telescope in France to discover the first exoplanet around a main sequence star. Both received the Wolf Prize in physics (among other prizes). (My uncle Daniel Challonge founded that observatory. Continuity of civilization here too!)

Now we have discovered 3,500 exoplanets.

Interestingly, Winston Churchill wrote a fascinating, and very correct paper on exoplanets in 1939. Although the paper was unpublished, its content had got to have been known, as its author had close friends who were first class physicists. Basically Churchill wrote that there should be plenty of exoplanets. The theory of solar system formation at the time was that such a system would form only when another star passed close by, and tore material away. Churchill was not fooled and correctly guessed that the correct theory was the nebular theory (which predict plenty of planets). That was that the system gathered from a gas. The idea was discovered by Kant (in his astronomical phase) and Laplace.

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The TRAPPIST 1 system was so fascinating that NASA spent hundreds of hours of the Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler orbiting space telescopes to decipher its mysteries. (Follow-up studies will use NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018 on an Ariane rocket.)

There are seven Earth size TRAPPIST 1 planets, all rotating fast around a red dwarf. Such stars are the most frequent in the universe. They last a very long time, but they flicker, sometimes emitting enormous amounts of radiation. That means that they may sterilize water-bearing planets around them. There are three such planets around TRAPPIST 1. They may need very powerful magnetic fields to keep their atmospheres (solar storms is how Mars lost its atmosphere, recent studies showed). However that means the planets have to be endowed with even more powerful nuclear reactors than Earth (and that may well be a miracle!)

The entire TRAPPIST 1 system is tiny, in the sense that it fits within the orbit of Mercury. Thus the planets are very close to each other. Standing on one of the planet’s surface, one should see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear twice larger than the moon in Earth’s sky!

Even if suitably hydrated, the planets may have no indigenous life, because of the radiation storms, among other problems.

***

But those planets will certainly provide humanity with habitat, thus with hope to found a Galactic Empire.

That will sound ridiculous to the PC crowd. However, anybody else realizes that planet Earth has become too small for our increasingly divine technology.

So Trappist 1 should be viewed as a suitable target for colonization (that very non PC word again!) By the time we get there, may have so much technology that we could inhabit any system, and the space in between.

If the fuelless propulsion engine turns out to be real, we would have a means to go to distant stars at very high speeds.

Right now the fastest speeds we can achieve are of the order of 40 kilometers per second, 1/10^4 the speed of light. TRAPPIST 1 is 39 light years away. That means it would take 350,000 years to get there. From the chemical impulse propulsion we have now. However other modes of propulsion exist, or are now imaginable…

“Fuelless” propulsion has apparently been observed. If the effect is real (as it seems), its origin is deep in the foundations of Quantum Physics. (I proposed my own mechanism, Dark Matter Propulsion; researchers at NASA have proposed that the ever mysterious “vacuum energy” is tapped).

Fuelless propulsion achieves at least 100 times the energy efficiency of solar sails and laser push propulsion. The latter has been proposed to send a smartphone sized probe through the Trisolaris Centaurus system, which, it was suggested, it could reach in 20 years (a 100 meter telescope would be way cheaper and is certainly feasible).

So, weirdly enough, there is hope to conquer the entire galaxy pretty soon. The North Korean dictator’s vicious ways may help: Kim just poisoned to death his half-brother in the Kuala Lumpur airport, using VX nerve agent. Taking out Kim, a necessary task, while not allowing him to nuke Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing or LA, should bolster research in more advanced tech.

Spending more on powerful telescopes with existing technology should make us capable of seeing directly the surfaces of such planets (because the Red Dwarves don’t shine brightly, one can look at their planets directly; for stars like the sun, Sol, Alpha and Beta Centauri, one needs to put a screen in front, to mask the star’s blinding light, something which can be done in space, floating hundreds of kilometers away; the technology exists, it’s just a matter of spending half a billion dollars to launch the contraption…) The funding for a system of mighty telescopes is less than one would get by taxing just one of the world’s mightiest plutocrats. Yes, just one, fairly.

The ways of the Lord, namely within ourselves, the possibilities our deepest minds conceive, and bring forth, can only be mysterious. Imagination of the better parts of our best minds, is beyond the comprehension of the public discourse constituting the minds of most of us.

Yet we all have to progress in intelligence, emotional or rational, if we want to improve the probability of survival of terrestrial intelligence. Pretty pictures of imagined surfaces of exoplanets should help.

Patrice Ayme’    

RELIGIOUS IRRATIONALITY RATIONALE

Ruling Classes Subjugate Opposition With Irrationality, Not Just Human Sacrifices (And Their Variants: Killings, Jihad, Signature Strikes).

Say you are a tyrant, You want Your rule as absolute as possible. You may have ecological problems, and you may need to decimate your subjects, or make them work harder. What is the best way to do this? Controlling your subjects’ minds, and not just with fear. Notice the sheep: they follow the pastor who milks them, and occasionally, cut their throats. What is the difference between flock and pastor? The pastor is much more clever, much more rational. The pastor is endowed with reason. Actually more than one. The pastor is full of reasons. The sheep is deprived of reason. Irrational. So, as a tyrant, irrationality you shall preach.

So how are you going to turn simple folks into a flock deprived of reason? Well, human sacrifices are a way to do this. Notice the king in the drawing below, sitting under an umbrella, just like a US president under his White House. A study published in Nature, in April 2016, explains that “Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies”.

Sacrifice Of The Annual Customs At Dahomey. Drawing By Foulquier, 1776. Engraving In “Le Tour Du Monde, 1865.”

The “Annual Customs” in Dahomey were also tax day for the free citizens of Dahomey (only war captives and criminals were sacrificed). The massive (several thousands) sacrifices stopped when the slave trade became too irresistibly profitable (the empire of Dahomey provided roughly 20% of the transatlantic slaves).

Honored European guests were allowed to attend the Annual Customs, as Dahomey had guns made locally, a professional army, and was perfectly capable of defending itself against the white man (as the British army found out, in Ashanti next door, suffering a terrible defeat where all soldiers were killed, but two, and the Anglo-Saxon commander was eaten, cooked like Cook).

But the outrages of superstitious religion go well beyond just roasting people alive, and are otherwise subtle in their deepest forms. The Bible evokes the Golden Calf, and rejects its cult. But that may have been a red herring. What upper classes need to rule best is for the lower classes to:

ADORE IRRATIONALITY!

Adore irrationality, reject reason. Rejecting reason, makes one the master’s slave, because one becomes so stupid, one gets feeble-minded. Thus all enslaving religions trample reason, as reason is the weapon which could destroy them most. Reason, not love.

This is why all religions which help enforce plutocracy train their followers to obey senseless orders, such as not eating pig, crustacean, and only eating animals who were agitated by spasms, while experiencing anxiety and suffering as their throats were slit, etc.

Jared Diamond gives more examples in his book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”:

“Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.”

One should not forget a Prophet (Muhammad) who flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, before ascending to heavens, just like that other guy had done before. (Curious that Diamond forgot the founder of the second most major superstition.)

Superstitious religions sound very stupid, but the cult of unreason has its reasons that only the masters understand. Some of these orders are not just irrational, they are lethal: if they can claim you insult(ed) their little godly doggie god in the sky the excellent Judeo-Christiano-Muslim authorities could, or would outright order you killed.

Hence irrationality did not just rule, it killed, and demanded the utmost respect, doing so, lest it would have another irrational reason to kill you.

Let me insist: the very irrationality of religious commands enables the authorities to exert power whimsically. So it is the reign of Sharia, not Human Ethology (the later been approached by Roman law).

In the third century BCE, Chinese administrator Li Bing eliminated the sacrifice of young maidens to a river god during the conquest of Sichuan by the First Emperor. He called the bluff of a local racket in which families rid themselves of unwanted daughters while getting rich on the compensation they received. Thus “irrational” rituals bring all too rational, very prosaic gain.

Jared Diamond observes that embracing irrationality is the greatest divide between the fanatics and the rest (fanatics means: coming out of the FANUM, the temple):

“No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?”

As we just saw, “irrational” beliefs are something else reason to get ahead. Pure irrationality is rare. Searching the reasons behind apparent irrationality, what’s hiding in the Dark, oft reveals causality in full.

Jared Diamond rejects the explanation that believing in irrational things is just due to ignorance. Instead he views it as necessary for identifying in groups. There is no doubt that this is a factor. But one does not need sheer absurdities to identify in a group. Middle Age Muslims for example requested Jews and Christians to wear clothing which could identify them. So dressing in a special way can work.

In conclusion, Jared Diamond claims that “it’s irrational to be religious. Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they’re so emotionally satisfying.”

Well, sorry Jared, that’s mostly missing the point. There is a higher reason for imposing (the religion of) irrationality. The point is that irrationality makes people brainless, and thus easy to rule.

However, humans are naturally rational. So irrationality has to be taught, and preached. Some may sneer and ponder what’s in it for We The People. Why would We The People be so easily seduced by their own subjugation?

It is not as if the subjugation was a secret: Christianism brandishes “The Lord”, and compare people to “sheep” to be led (to slaughter?). Islam literally means: “submission”, from root of aslama “he resigned, he surrendered, he submitted.”

So what We The People get in exchange is… irrationality, a rest from the human condition. And just like the Lords themselves, brandishing irrationality to generate fear, cruelty, submission… We The People can do the same.

In almost all societies, killing “legally” within a tribe or clan is granted only to those with great authority. Thus ritual human sacrifice serves power structures—who sits at the top of the social hierarchy.

In a study published in Nature, Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and colleagues analysed 93 traditional cultures in Austronesia (the region that embraces dozens of thousands of islands in the Pacific and Indonesia). The key was to analyze them before they were influenced by colonization and major world religions (generally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Ethnographic records, show that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with increased social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those with a pronounced hierarchy.

Mapping the evolutionary relationships between cultures, the researchers found that human sacrifice and social hierarchy co-evolved. Social stratification can change over time. However,  societies that practised human sacrifice were less apt to revert to milder degrees of stratification.

In other words, human sacrifice seems to bolster stratification: it helped to stabilize hierarchy, and conceivably, therefore, had a common role in the development of highly stratified societies that generally persist even today.

I hold that extremely lethal Jihadism is a form of human sacrifice, so this analysis carries to Literal Shia or Salafist Wahhabist Islam directly, and explained why these Muslim societies were unable to progress.

Human sacrifice is the privilege of priests or those who claim religious authority. Watts and colleagues say that this discloses a “Dark Side” to the social role of religion. (They have previously shown that belief in supernatural punishing agencies in Austronesian cultures encouraged moral observance, and thereby promoted the emergence of stratified, complex social structures).

Watts’s team reveals that human sacrifice wasn’t conducted for ostensibly religious reasons alone. Taboo violations, demoralization the underclasses, imposing class boundaries and instil fear of social elites, all build and maintain social control. In India, Untouchable touching higher caste individuals could suffer what are nowadays unimaginable punishments such as amputation, sitting in a red hot metal seat, etc.

Here is the conclusion of Watts and colleagues:

“Religion has long been proposed to play a functional role in society and is commonly claimed to underpin morality. Recent evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the potential of pro-social and moral religious beliefs to increase cooperation. Our findings suggest that religious rituals also played a darker role in the evolution of modern complex societies. In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a

divinely sanctioned means of social control. The approach adopted in this paper demonstrates the way causal hypotheses about major transitions in human social organization can be tested by combining computational models and language phylogenies with a wealth of cultural and historical data. Unpalatable as it might be, our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today.”

Say You are a tyrant, You want all to understand that Your rule is absolute, global as the plutocracy you lead with relish. So You order “Signature Strikes”, thus telling the world that any wedding You can kill, if such is Your good pleasure, as long as it happens in a far away land.

Were the killing by drones in “signature strikes” personally ordered by president Obama for all to see a form of ritual killing, of human sacrifices for all to see? Certainly. The scariest part is that ordering kills for all to see is something that even Chancellor-President Hitler, a solid reference for human sacrifices, was careful not to be associated to! This means that the Obama administration developed momentum to change the public’s mind about human sacrifice.

Human sacrifices violate human ethology, the evolution-given morality humans come equipped with. In the small groups in which humanity evolved for millions of years, human life was most precious, because the life of others was necessary to pursue one’s life.

So this means that the rise of civilization and its accompanying religions comprised a violation of human ethology.

The main theme of this essay is even more general: it considers not just the violation of evolution given morality, by “stratified societies”, but the violation of reason itself. Violating reason itself compounds the preceding moral problem: human ethology does not come just from “instincts” (whatever that means), but also from the usage of rationality (within a culture, or the individual).

The superstitious religions associated to the rise of demonic upper classes, plutocracy, have attacked reason itself. They are as inhuman as one can get, and survive. They enabled war maximally, annihilating their competition fully (although secular Rome and Literal Islam have unfinished business). Superstitious religions come short, for the future. Their carefully engineered irrationality and willingness to kill at the drop of a hat, will decapitate us, if we do not decapitate them first.

Make no mistake: irrationality has its uses, it allows to jump out of mental boxes. However, irrationality in a religion is different; it creates a common box, and create common, shared respect for irrational elements. Adoration for the Golden Calf is itself a particular case of irrationality. Making irrationality itself an object of adoration is a generalization of the cult of the Golden Calf, to the point of adoring the whims of the satanic masters themselves.

Collective adoration of senseless ways is collective adoration for the mania of the crowd, intellectual fascism at its worst. It’s a moral duty, moral from the ways of Homo, moral to go back to the free ways of our genus, which have made us what we are, the crown of the creation of reason, by enforcing reason, and not its exact opposite.

Patrice Ayme’

Torture To Death: Christ’s Crux

Patrice Ayme’: The angry, cruel, somewhat demented, child murdering, jealous, holocaust-prone god of Judaism-Christianism-Islamism justifies bloody despots. (So does Literal Islam, and even much more so, but that’s besides the point here. What is interrogated here is the origin of Christianism’s, and thus Islamism’s, hyper-violence)

Chris Snuggs: “Christianism does not belong in the same basket as Islam. Disregard how men have perverted both; just compare what they ARE, what their fundamental message is.”

PA: Agreed… If one forget that they are not at the same stage of development, and if one uses a stochastic filter. Stochastic comes from the word for “aim” in Greek. It’s used to mean “probability theory”. So the idea is to look at the New Testament, and take, so to speak, the average statement, ignoring those where (the mythical) “Christ” speaks about swords and all that… Sword, as an instrument to foster faith. Force, the Sword, is what made Christianism seductive to Constantine. He was a forceful man. He steamed his wife, alive, killed his nephew, and had his meritorious, accomplished, most famous general and admiral of a son, executed.

Force & the Sword, Justified & Practiced by God, Is The Christian Mood Which Seduced Constantine, Because So Was His Calling

[Roman Emperor Constantine’s statue at York Minster, Britannia, his birth place.]

Here is a sample I have often used:

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Some will play it down: ‘Oh, it’s just one sentence!’ Others turn this around, and sneer, when one criticizes Islam’s violence:’Oh, there are also violent statements in Christianism!’. Both COUNTER-IDEAS miss the point: just as one horrible scream can create a terrible mood, so can a horrible statement. PPP Torture Is Intrinsic To Christ’s Business Model [Final Judgment.]

And, by the way, there are actually multiple statements of the greatest of horror, and an insistence that horror was prescribed, ordered, glorified, organized, instituted by god himself. It’s not by accident that the very symbol of Christianism is the worse torture known to man. Even Christ could not figure it out. Well, my child, lonely nailed on your cross, I did: “VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE’. And it was fun to figure it out.

Judaism, its child, Christianism, and its grandchild, Islamism were all war religions. Judaism appears shortly before King David, the enlightened founder of the Greater Israel. (At least so says the Bible written by captives in Babylon, more than half a millennium later.) Christianism, or more exactly what he called “Orthodox Catholicism” (= “Orthodox Universalism”) was imposed by Roman emperor Constantine, who was one of the greatest warriors in history, second to none. As a teenager, the special force like, privileged youth Constantine already terrified the imperial court. Emperor Galerius, the “animalistic, semi-barbarian” persecutor of Christians, tried to get rid of Constantine with a number of dangerous challenges, including suicidal cavalry charge, and fighting a lion in single combat.

Constantine became the single emperor of the entire empire, after many decades of multiple emperors governing in a more or less collegial manner (there were up to 6 emperors at a time, mostly because of the problem of distance in the far-flung empire!).

Christianism is a system of thoughts. But it’s also a system of moods. Systems of thought can be subtle: Islam, for example comes equipped with two meta-principles: Taquiyah (lying to unbelievers as religious principle) and the Abrogation Principle.

Christianism did not have Taquiyah: early Christians obstinately refused to lie, and diminish their god, or their faith, in any way, to the bafflement and anger of other Romans. But Christianism definitively has the Abrogation Principle; when god feels it is good medicine to torture to death his own son, who did nothing wrong, definitively the message that it is good to torture to death people who have done nothing much.

Systems of moods are even more subtle than systems of ideas, because they do not say things directly and explicitly. The mood in Christianism is, basically, that it’s OK to kill, horribly, for no good reason: after all, man is created in the image of god.

Now is there anything more significant to torture to death the innocent? Should we call torturing to death the innocent the most prominent, the most significant, the most particular, the most peculiar, and marking art of the Christian god?

As I insisted, most human beings have known and practiced love. Human beings don’t need lessons on love, as if it were an alien planet never seen before.

But human beings have not known, and, or, practiced, nor justified, excused and become familiar with, torture to death. Christianism not only justified torture to death of the innocent, but made it the crux of its entire system of mood. Torture to death is the clé de voûte, the keystone, the part without which the entire edifice of Christianism collapses.

Judgment And Torture Constitute Christ’s Business Model

And indeed, the last executions and torture to death of Christianism in Western Europe happened during the Nineteenth Century. In the preceding century, Voltaire had railed against the execution by “slow fire” of quite a few people, from a senile Jesuit to an eighteen year old a Jewish girl. The People was upset because of the Lisbon quake cum tsunami, which caused massive, irreparable damage. The girl was burned slowly just because she was Jewish.

Literal Christianism set up the mood which Literal Islamism inherited. Both originated with the guy who steamed his wife (and is a saint of the Orthodox branch of Christianism. Yes, this had deep consequences, including economic.

In the preceding, torture to death was vilified as Christianism’s ugliest mood. However, it does not stop there. The mythical Jesus, a rabbi, approved of the entire Old Testament. And that includes the mood of being willing to kill one’s own child to please one’s boss (“god”).

Yet, it does not stop there. Just as the cross is an add-on not found in old Judaism, Christianism is full of would-be cannibalism (“drink, because this is my blood”, “eat, because this is my flesh”). Would be cannibalism? Well, no wonder the Crusaders roasted children when they got hungry. History is not just an exacting teacher. Like the Christian god, history has no qualms, it just is.

And history is not just about facts and ideas. It is also about moods. Christianism went hand in hand with plutocracy, because it was all the excuse plutocracy needed to reign by the sword. And love was the screen behind which it hid its vicious rule.

How and why Christianism became supreme, as Constantine’s Catholicism, goes a long way to explain, and excuse, Literal Islam. This is the main reason to consider this agonizing corpse.

Patrice Ayme’

Shakespeare Versus Sade

Why were the English, or even the Spanish and the Portuguese so much more successful in establishing a world empire than the French? On the face of obvious facts, it’s curious that France did not do better. Nowadays Latin America speaks Spanish or Portuguese, entire continents are English-speaking. Only some of the wastes of Africa speak French. How come? Why did France not grab a continent for herself? Was France… too civilized? Is too much civilization an infection?

France was the most powerful, most populous, most innovative, most central, not to say most belligerent, of the European countries, for at least 13 centuries… Besides being the creator of Europe since 360 CE (election of Julian). France led a healthy reaction against Christian terrorism, and became the center of military and imperial power which made Western Europe one (rather united, “Christian”) civilization.

Too Much Civilization Goes To The Wolves

And, precisely, more civilization and more centralization may have been the problems, which made France come short. If one is too civilized, one may respect the Natives so much, that one may forget to take their place. This is clearly what happened to the French in Canada. The French civilized and settled the Hurons. Then the Iroquois Confederacy came down from the mountains, and exterminated the pacified Hurons. And so on. Turkeys cannot built a civilization under the watchful eyes of lions.

If one is more centralized, while civilized, one will be unable to exploit the Natives as required for a successful settlement, in a timely manner.

True, Louis XIV, the famous Sun-Tyrant, made “legalized” slavery in the French West Indies, with the “Code Noir”. However, there was no slavery in French Canada and Louisiana, while slavery was lawful in English colonies, starting with Massachusetts…to immense economic success: some English American states were mostly people by African slaves cultivating tobacco, under the white whip, terrorized by their white masters. Tobacco had made English America profitable.

So what the difference in the imperial patterns of various European powers? Moods. Basically, the French had too little too late, of the … Dark Side. I mean real Dark: the king of Portugal harassed the Pope to obtain a Papal authorization to enslave Africans (Frankish law forbid to enslave Europeans explicitly, and Charlemagne had created the Papal state). Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand harassed Borgia, a fellow Spaniard and Pope to authorize the Inquisition (then used to exterminate Judaism and Islam in the Iberian peninsula). Portugal and Spain were then ready to lash out. A planned crusade to exterminate Islam, was redirected more profitably towards the conquest of the Americas.

How come the greater friendliness of the English government to the Dark Side? Not coincidentally,  the rise of Shakespeare and of the West Country Men was simultaneous in England. And they were entangled: the (ex-Scottish) King James I, one of the West Country Men (basically) supported Shakespeare. (As Dominique Deux said) the success of Shakespeare comes from his parade of monsters.

Shakespeare, just as Allah in the Qur’an (following Yahweh in the Bible), made monstrosity honorable. Thus monstrosity became a strategy at the ready, something normal to do.

One may object that it’s not clear why monstrosity worked so well for the English and not so well for the Muslims.

Well, as a metaphysics of war, Islam was superb: the initial Muslim empire went from France, through Spain, North Africa, all the way to Central Asia and India, within 89 years of its launch in 732 CE. On the way it defeated the two most powerful empires outside of China, annihilating one, eating more than half of the other.

The feat was renewed later: in the Eleventh Century, the Turks, a decade or two after converting to Islam, defeated three large empires in West Central Asia, including a mauling of the Roman empire (which called the Franks to the rescue, launching the crusades).

So Islam’s monstrous side is excellent to motivate primitives for war.

This is proven as we speak: yesterday and today, January 7 2016, two Jihadist attacks in France (some terrorists tried a car attack against soldiers, no doubt inspired by happenings in Israel, and another attacked policemen with a meat cleaver, screaming “Allah Akbar”, and carrying a fake explosive belt, he was shot to death).

However, fanaticism does not rise to the motivation and power of free, knowledgeable men, as Islam’s crushing defeats at the hands of the Franks (starting in 721-732-748 CE), would prove in the next 13 centuries). Or the reconquest of Ramadi from the Islamist State by the Iraqi army and Sunni tribes.

So how come the English were so successful: it’s simple: in the case of the English, monstrosity was an adjuvant. I was listening to the Queen’s 2016 message the other day. She charmingly, succeeded to quietly claim that her family invented Christmas (a 4,000 year old tradition). She was completely unfazed by the monstrosity of her claims. (One could easily imagine her claiming Macbeth invented Christmas, just as unfazed.)

Monstrosity worked well as an adjuvant to other, more democratic structures in society, such as Common Law, Parliament, the Monarchy, with the oath to it that all males had to take at 14 of faithfulness to the King. In the case of the Qur’an, the Qur’an was all there was. Interpreted literally, the Qur’an is unbalanced monstrosity 100% of the time (with the major inconvenience that everybody can be suspected of apostasy, something punished by death).

Admiring Macbeth’s statement that life… is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, is a perfect slogan to go kill Irishmen (as the West Country Men did). And then American Natives (as the colonies founded by the West Country Men in America soon did).

Make no mistake: the Bible is full of genocides. Just as the Qur’an, which it inspired, it enables major monsters, bent on holocaust, to claim they are doing God’s will. Shakespeare is a secular version of the same mood with which to handle the world.

In the USA, many a school children spent an entire year studying Shakespeare shaking his spears all over human society (Shakespeare himself made jokes about the spear in his name, wanting it as his coat of arms).

Some could sneer that Sade wrote worse things. True. And actually I do think that writing terrible things is not just good, and instructive, but fights boredom, and feeds the mind. However, the obsessive exposition of Anglo-Saxon children to Shakespeare (or the Queen and her grotesque lies), while presenting that author as the epitome of classical humanism is deeply wrong.

Sade did not claim to extol classical humanism as he described horrors with relish. He was actually highly critical. Differently from Shakespeare the bard, about whom we know little, we know very well that Sade played a major role in the 1789 Revolution (including instigating the attack against the Bastille). Not just that, but he personally saved thousands (and got nearly executed for his troubles, escaping at the last moment thanks to the coup against Robespierre).

Sade’s main theme is that man is (potentially) immensely cruel, and politicians even more so, as they need cruelty, just to relax.

Power is cruelty, and absolute power is absolute cruelty.

A society where spears are shaken all the time, does not just shoots itself in the foot, or the head, very much. It also shoots everything that is in the way, all too readily. Shakespeare is viewed by the Anglo-Saxons as classical, while some of what is viewed as his most classical parts is just as bad, if not worse, than the worse in Sade (who, at least, was conscious of cruelty, while extolling it). The same objection can be made, and should be made, against the devout followers of the Bible, the Qur’an, and other various books of horrors. They say it’s classical, and should be respected.

No. Those books are classical, they should be known, but then they should be debated, fiercely, and dragged in the mud, as needed. Identify, condemn, and cut off the gangrene, the gangrene of the mind, as needed.

The West Country Men, powerful plutocrats as they were, sent soldiers and “endured servants” (white slaves) to America to make a profit. The French founded Canada for the “Mission Civilisatrice” (mostly). The West Country Men, operating in connivence with Justice, sent derelicts and miscreants to America. The French government carefully selected a moral elite to go to America, help the Natives.

However, in the real world, the sheep, however clever and cultivated, does not vanquish the lion. The former eats grass, the latter, sheep. It’s as simple as that. One lesson? Instead of just criminally prosecuting Africans, the International Court of Justice in La Hague should think about engaging a procedure against ex-president G. W. Bush, for instigating so many war crimes in iraq. Then, logically, the ICJ should move against the Saudis and all those businessmen doing business with them.

Indeed. Think about it. Culture without claws and fangs, and the will to use them, is only a betrayal of civilization.

In the Sixteenth Century, the Conquistadores enslaved the Indians, made them dig for oil, grow food for them. After they exterminated the Indians this way, they brought African slaves. When, finally the Frenchman Charles Quint, Spanish king and Roman emperor was forcefully appraised of the extent of the Holocaust by men of conscience (Bartolome Las Casas, etc.), the emperor autocratically ordered a halt to the Conquista (after a supreme tribunal got hung up). Otherwise all the Americas would be speaking Spanish.

Then Charles V retired. His son, Philip II, was less French. When Philip learned of French (Protestant) colonies along the “Carolina” coast, he sent an armada to exterminate them to the last French baby. A French relief fleet was dispersed by a hurricane (showing that god, were it to exist, is not friend of goodness). The French babies got killed, down to the last one (although some may have been rescued by Indians).

Not defending goodness with fang and claw surrenders it to the wolves. The good human is not an inert human. Goodness cannot just be lauded, it needs to be defended. Being inert, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme’

Beyond Cynicism, Reason

We have a lot to learn from the history of ideas and moods in Greco-Roman antiquity, and how it was entangled with the history of battles, empires, and the near destruction of civilization. We are clearly in a similar scheme. Except now it’s the biosphere itself, not just civilization, which is in peril. So let’s have no pity for our so-called “leaders”, and those who admire them.

In that light, Diogenes and the mental topology around him ought to be contemplated. The founding cynic Diogenes of Sinope, was of the opinion that people ought to behave more like dogs (or, even, mice). To this, I would add baboons. Understand what moves a baboon, shine a light on the human soul.

In particular, Diogenes’ followers would have sex in public. This was viewed as a much ridiculed oddity at the time. But Diogenes persisted loud and clear, even in the marketplace, responding: “he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 46).

Diogenes believed that each individual would either be guided by reason, or, like a domesticated animal, she would be led by a leash. Diogenes, did not despise knowledge per se, but spited pretensions to knowledge which serve only domestication. He had the intuition that the logic of behavior (human and animal) was the master wisdom. And more can be said. Why don’t human beings poop in public? (Aside from “Sun King” Louis XIV, but he was certainly not human.)

A dog has got to do what a dog has got to do. However, the point of human, is that human does not have to do what a dog has got to do. A human ought not to do what a human ought to do: this is the difference with dogs. We are free, free to go against the grain, and that’s all the freedom we have, as free human beings.

Diogenes was labeled mad for acting against convention to the extent he did (allegedly by Plato). To this, Diogenes retorted that conventions often lacked reason: “Most people, are so nearly mad that a finger makes all the difference. For if you go along with your middle finger stretched out, someone will think you mad, but, if it’s the little finger, he will not think so” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 35).

For Diogenes, reason clearly plays the central role. There is a report that Diogenes “would continually say that for the conduct of life we need the right reason or a halter”.  (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 24). A halter is something one puts around the head of a dog or horse to lead them around. So either the truth will make you free, or you are just cattle. Cattle ready to trample over civilization.

Diogenes’ influence was deep. He started a line of argument which denied motion (it evolved into Zeno’s paradoxes which have caught a second wind with Quantum Physics; Zeno founded the philosophical school known as Stoicism; probably being a stoic was best when subjugated by the “Hellenistic Kingdoms”, the dictatorship Antipater imposed by naval battle).

Diogenes was a harsh critic of Plato, disparaging Plato’s metaphysics and breaking away from theoretical ethics which only justified oligarchy.

“Plato had defined the human being as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s human being.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails’” (LOEP, chap 40).

Diogenes insisted that true human beings lived in accordance with nature. He lit a candle in broad daylight, and proclaimed he was searching for a human being, as so few lived in accordance with nature. Life in accordance with nature made human beings fully rational.

This was indeed true. Plato the chicken let to Aristotle, who was worse: that famed philosopher played a direct role in the destruction of civilization, and why there are still “royals” in England, leading, at least symbolically, the worldwide plutocratic charade.

That Diogenes had an anti-plutocratic bend is clear. He was captured at some  point by pirates (long story), and ended his life in Corinth. Alexander so-called the Great, was thrilled to meet the famous philosopher. The thinker was basking in the sun. ‘Could I do anything for you’, asked Alexander. Diogenes replied to the exterminator of cities and states alike: “You could stand out of my sun”.

Not easily defeated, Alexander tried the rejoinder: “Were I not Alexander, I wish I could be Diogenes”. In answer, Diogenes stared at a pile of bones: “I am looking for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”

You have to understand that this was the turning point of civilization in Greco-Roman antiquity: Greek philosophy, at its sharpest, was meeting the fascists, wealthy savage gangsters from the north, the Macedonians, rich from horses and gold mines. Macedonia was the world’s foremost sophisticated military.

Yet, the Greeks, led by Athens and Corinth, had the brains. Alexander, taught by Aristotle, was not too sure where he was standing. In the east was monstrous Persia, a hyperpower made of an archipelago of plutocracies (satrapies).

Alexander was hesitant about which course to follow, clearly. Alexander respected demographically vanishing Sparta, and fully resurgent Athens. Yet he annihilated Thebes (a move that would have helped Athens, actually, had a mild Alexander stuck around). Alexander went on to destroy Persia. He gave up on his attempt to reach the Pacific, after he discovered that India’s kingdoms could defend themselves.

Alexander then died, all too soon (a conquest of Arabia was being prepared). Alexander was perhaps assassinated by Antipater, Aristotle’s estate executor. Antipater, senior even to Alexander, certainly replaced Alexander and encouraged by Aristotle, destroyed Athenian democracy, replacing it by a plutocracy (only the rich could vote).

Antipater and the world Aristotle created, that of monarchies, thereafter ruled for around two millennia (although the Franks allowed small republics here and there, starting with Venice, then Firenze, Genoa, Switzerland, Escartons, Netherlands, etc., the first big break was the French Republic, a full acknowledgment that the Roman Republic was right all along).

Monarchies make no sense: if anything, being just the brain of one, they are dumb and weak against democracies (as the Swiss Canton demonstrated when they rebelled against the (Germanized)Roman empire ). So, for peoples to accept to be subjugated by individuals and their families, one has to make them stupid.

According to Diogenes, nature makes intelligent.

Thus, to reign monarchs (the Roman emperors in this case) had to fight nature and its gods. Switching to the fascist, cruel, demented and jealous Christian god was not enough. One had also to destroy the interface with nature, the body. Making it gross and smelly, reeked with lice and infections, was a good start.

In the fullness of time, the Catholics decided that anything having to do with the body was dirty. Some woman became a saint just because she never washed, and waited for her clothes to rot of as she piled more clothes on top. Her face was black with grime: she was lauded for that.

The Catholics were after the entire mood of the Greco-Roman civilization, and kept at it for more than eleven centuries: when they took the last Muslim kingdom in Grenada, their very fascist, cruel and demented majesties, Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, inventors of the Inquisition in Spain, closed all the 2,000 or so baths therein (disclaimer: an ancestor was ennobled by the Aragon king, 12 centuries ago).

So Diogenes was right: if one wants unreason, behaving unnaturally is a good start.

But now let’s go further than Diogenes: what is the interest of a sharp dichotomy between the public and private spheres? It enforces a morality, a sort of hygiene: just as it is good to wash one hands. Recent studies show that just washing hands would cut down child mortality by 40%, in the most destitute countries  (diarrhea kills more children than all other diseases combined). Symbolically, preserving a private sphere is a king of conceptual washing: it keeps some bodily functions and activities out of the public morality, thus segregates and hence weakens their influence, allowing for a more elevated society, let alone diarrhea free..

Any question?

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

Destroying Civilization, Stone By Stone

Civilization is under attack. By some measure, the holocaust of the biosphere, the greatest attack ever.

Putin has a solution: follow him, he is our new guide. Civilization is under attack. Actually, it is being invaded, and the plan (unsaid) is to occupy it. No, not “Occupy Wall Street”. Instead, it’s the obverse: “Wall Street Occupy Everything”. All successful invasions are heralded by a diversion. When Genghis Khan decided to utterly annihilate Khwarezmia, he made a diversionary attack, in the obvious place, while his main field army went all around through thousands of miles of desert. The invasion of France in May 1940 was also made possible by a diversionary attack on the Netherlands. Christianism itself can be viewed as a diversion organized by Rome’s greatest plutocrats, to anchor their rule in God (by the Fifth Century the wealthiest, that is, tax-free, families all had a bishop in their ranks). The Christian God’s Heavens was the ultimate fascist instate. And the emperor its servant on earth.

This 2,000 Year Old Temple Was Destroyed By Islamism.

Islamism was established by mimetism from Christianism (mimetism from Greek mimētēs, imitator). As Islamism was directed towards less civilized people, it was much more primitive than Christianism. Christianism had to bend over backwards to seduce the semi-intellectual class, and the New Testament started by pretending that the “logos” itself was “god”.

(Even then, the counter-attacks against superstitious Christianism by secular Parisian and Athenian philosophers nearly succeeded as soon as the Fourth Century; see the story of emperor Julian.)

Christianism destroyed the largest temples and public buildings of the Greco-Roman empire. It was important to claim there was nothing before Christ. Islamism has long done the same. The so-called “Islamist State” can only do the same.

There is no history, but the history of Islam, and Muhammad is its prophet!

ISIS representatives say they are combating “shirk”—the sin of idolatry or polytheism: in this case, reverence for something other than Allah. The Qur’an punishes idolatry with death.

The apologists of fanaticism claim Islamism says no such a thing. Fanatics are always saying that reality is different from what it, obviously, is. This is the definition of fanaticism (fanum being the temple, fanatics come out of the temple).

Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the tax, let them be.”

(This ayah is, chronologically, from the penultimate sura (At-Tawbah) in the Quran.)

This is clearly about planning future lethal attacks. Not self-defense. It’s about killing, ambushing,  recalcitrant pagans (‘idolaters’). But, if they’ve already truly converted (‘keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate [zakat]’), then leave them alone. (But let them beware: if they are thought not to be believers anymore, the Qur’an orders to kill them, for apostasy.) Assuming the Quran is the word of God, faithfully related, this murderous aya, known as the verse of the sword, is plenty enough proof that Allah commands conversion of Pagans by lethal force. (In context of sura 9 (Al-Tawbah), Meccans weren’t fighting Muhammad: they were merely resisting his authority. Yes that contradicts  the Quranic injunction against compulsion in religion. This is an example of Quranic abrogation: a later revelation contradicting earlier ones.  Allah is not always rational. He changes his omniscient mind, and becomes very angry if asked about his murky relations with Djinns and Satan (he actually threatens in the Qur’an those impertinent people who would ask such questions).

Allah is much more murderous than Muhammad. At some point He gets angry against the Messenger, who has been too lenient with the enemy:

Qur’an (8:67) – “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land.”

Qur’an (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Qur’an (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna and religion should be only for Allah”

‘Fitna’ is disbelief. Muhammad by that time is in power, and prior injunctions for self-defense and having no coercion in religion are not needed anymore.

Qur’an (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”.

A natural question arises:

Chris Snuggs: (September 21, 2015): “Has any member of the establishment facilitating the takeover of Europe by Islam actually READ the Koran?

Patrice Ayme: Non-Muslims who read the Qur’an, the establishment tells us, are full of prejudice. Why don’t you read the Bible or the Torah, the establishment points out: they have their Dark Side. As if we were presently still threatened by a take-over by the Catholics, Lutherans, and Orthodox Jews.

The establishment rules over us, having grabbed all the levers of power, while continually increasing said power by gathering ever more money through (legal) tax avoidance by all sorts of tricks (anonymous trusts, etc.). The establishment is afraid that we will find out, in a timely manner, that it has organized the greatest theft of all times (by capturing the money machine). The establishment is afraid we will realize it is the greatest Mafia ever: the Mafia of all Mafias. That we will realize this, before its take-over is irreversible.

Thus the establishment is afraid to be turned into the number one target of a revolution to save civilization. So the establishment needs a scapegoat, and one that will allow to foster the security state: Putin showed the way on how this is done: he wasted Chechnya, imposed his own men, and an increasing control on Russia, in complicity with his own selected plutocrats (“oligarchs”). Thus the establishment has no interest to read the Qur’an. Even better: he has every interest that we don’t read the Qur’an and thus we are told that reading the Qur’an in a critical fashion (like noticing the death threats against various categories of people) is RACIST.

Chris Snuggs:  (Sept. 27): “None of the religious lunatics you mention are like Islam, which is a totalitarian and murderous sect.”

Patrice Ayme’: Far from it. Christianism in its heydays killed tens of millions. Just one million killed during the Crusade against the Cathars/Albigeois. According to the English historian Gibbons (and I concur… with a twist) Christianism killed the Greco-Roman empire. See Theodosius’ murderous laws of 381 CE and his “war against the philosophers”.

Two centuries later, the intellectuals and their books had to flee the Greco-Roman empire. And so on. Fanatical Judaism caused the two terrible wars circa 70 CE and 139 CE, which brought the destruction of Judea, and its semantic and demographic replacement by what the Romans named “Palestina” (to forget about Judea). Later the Romans nearly annihilated  the last the “Samaritans” (2,000 survive today).

The religious wars which affected Europe (including England, Italy and Germany) between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Centuries killed well above ten million. In France alone, there were  seven religious wars in quick succession at the end of the 16C before Henri IV put an end to it. In France, there are precise statistics. In 1580 there were 20,000,000 inhabitants in France. In 1594, mostly due to religious wars, between Catholics and Hugenots, the population had dropped to 18,500,000. Nearly a century later, when the genocidal dictator Louis XIV tortured, killed and expelled the Hugenots, the population of France dropped by two million around the time of these “dragonnades“.

Saying that the religions Islam was educated by were terrible does not excuse Islamism. That does not mean that Wahhabist Islam is not murderous, totalitarian, intolerant, fanatical. Actually that’s so well known there is another 100 Islam sects (many under the qualifier “Sufi”). Many of these are extremely aware of what you say, Chris, so they changed the teaching of “Islam” completely. That’s why France has put Morocco in charge of teaching Muslim priests (they don’t like to be called priests, but that’s what they are going to become).

Since the USA’s government made a deal with the Devil, at Great Bitter Lake, in 1945, though, the Saudis and other Emirs, flushed with Petro-Dollars, have used Islamism (of the Wahhabist type) as a ferocious beast with which to terrorize and kill their opponents. Then it dawned on them that they could make it the new normal, so Wahhabism has been devouring Sufi Islam, all over the world.
The Islamist diversion is the best distraction world plutocracy could profit from, as it grows, undisturbed, basically tax-free. Better: it will allow to pretend that those who oppose it are Jihadists (this has already been tried!)

Patrice Ayme’

If Magnanimity Does Not Work, Extermination Will

Against Christianity, all too long, magnanimity was extended. All too long, Christianism was viewed as a force for good. After the disaster of the First Crusade, Saint Bernard, a still all too revered monster, tried his best to launch the Second Crusade. He was opposed fiercely by the university (“Cathedra”) professor, philosopher (and pop star!) Abelard and his many students, followers and appreciative colleagues… In the Church (many were bishops, cardinals).

The party of Abelard lost, short term. But just as the defeat of France and Britain in May 1940 led to the extermination of the Nazis five years later, Abelard’s defeat led to the demolition of Christianism seven centuries later.

“Charb”, Communist Editor In Chief Of Charlie Hebdo With Ms. Bougrab His Partner Of Muslim Culture

[Fascists, especially in the Anglo-American anti-French, anti-intellectual propaganda sphere, have disingenuously claimed that Charlie Hebdo was anti-Muslim racist. Here is another proof to the contrary. Let alone the fact two assassinated at Charlie Hebdo were Muslims. Charlie Hebdo, the martyr French satirical magazine made around 100 covers poking fun at the Catholic Church, but only 5 poking fun at Islam…]

The first Crusade had launched massacres of Jews in Alsace and further east, as the crazed Christian fanatics progressed, the way Christianism at its most excited, progresses. Roasting native children when hungry was part of the First Crusade. So was the siege and massacre of Jerusalem, with equal opportunity to go to heavens extended to Muslims, Jews and Middle Eastern and Coptic Christians.

According to the Gesta Francorum (of the Acts of the Franks), speaking only of the Temple Mount area, “…[our men] were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles…” According to Raymond of Aguilers, also writing solely of the Temple Mount area, “…in the Temple and porch of Solomon men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.” 10,000, including women and children, died there.

This sort of Christian behavior was discouraged later, thanks to no less than six centuries of religious wars wrecking Europe back and forth. The grand conclusion was that priests were required by the French Revolution to take an oath to the Republic. Those who did not were punished in various ways.

Fast forward to the Twentieth-First Century:

Murderous Child Killing Islamist Fanatic Condemned to Death:

Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber, 21 year old, was convicted of all 30 charges against him, 17 of which carry the death penalty. Unsurprisingly, he was unanimously condemned to death, by the seven women, five men jury (death requires unanimity). A crime that could, and did, bring the assassination of a child, falls under specially tough laws. calling for execution

Some philosophers were quick to call this “vengeance”. However, can a law designed to discourage the assassination of children be considered a “vengeance”?

Some Europeans are bound to come, and whine. However they do not understand that the law, in the USA, is a very strong glue. With the accent on “strong”. Differently from, say, the French, all the ancestors of Americans cannot be claimed to be Gauls. (Wait…)

***

Cool It; Not Drawing Muslims Is Not About You, It’s All About Killing Muslims:

There are 100 variants of Islam. Most of them compatible with secularism, and the Republic. However, Salafism, especially Wahhabism, propped by huge plutocratic money and the USA’s somber machinations, has come to dominate.

They are the one with the drawing-is-murder insanity.

When Salafists say we should not draw prophets, human beings, animals and other alleged creations of “God”, what they truly say, in practice, is that they want an excuse for killing 200 million Shias (Shias have very beautiful paintings of prophets for sale in the Bazaar; I was there).

So they want a pretext to kill 200 million Shias, to start with. Meanwhile reigning over Europe and America through unabashed terror will do. Next they will ask us to wear a yellow star as they did to Jews and Christians in the Muslim Middle-Ages.

***

Editor Of Charlie Was Muslim Lover:

Charlie Hebdo, the martyr French satirical magazine made around 100 covers poking fun at the Catholic Church, but only 5 poking fun at Islam. It turns out that the editor in chief, Charb, lived with Ms. Bougrab, a French “Muslim” of renown. So much for Charb’s alleged racism against Muslims.

Ms. Bougrab just published a book “Maudites” (“The Damned and Cursed”) exposing the mistreatment of women under Islam. Including a whole panoply of little girls being married to big, bad, old, nasty dirty old Muslim men. “Is it blasphemy to say we should move away from the archaic practices of seventh century Arabia?,” she asked, referring to the PBUH Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to [SIX YEARS OLD] Aisha, adding that she has no intention to stop fighting for secularism and women’s rights.

OK, sorry for my seemingly virulent anti-Muhammedism, apparently implicitly implying that Muhammed, the revered prophet and friend of Archangel Gabriel, had sex with Aisha at age six. This is simply not true, and I beg forgiveness to any Muslim I may have so offended.

Muhammed, Peace Be Upon Him, He Needs It, patiently waited, what a great man, to have sex with Aisha, until she was nine (9). Educating children, especially little girls, is very important in Islam, as Islam fanatics often point out, indeed. From these sort of little details, we can realize what a great man Muhammed was. PBUH.

On paper, Christianism is nowhere as bad as Islamism. It does not have as many strident, gross, repetitive calls to kill “unbelievers”, and “heretics”. Islam to boot targets explicitly “apostates”, “Jews” and whatnot.

However, Christianism killed millions before getting definitively defanged when the French republic, having freed Rome, stripped the Pope of most of his worldly possessions (1801). For the Franks, in the Seventh Century, Islamists were simply the latest Christian sect. They got ready for domesticating them as they had done with the Pope. As it turned out being ready was not enough, three whole extermination of three successive Muslim invasions in 30 years were necessary.

At this point, Islamists are in the suburbs of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important archeological sites. Palmyra was not just Greco-Roman, it was also its own civilization, and was led by a queen at the apex of its splendor. Destroying humanity’s inheritance is a casus belli, as far as I am concerned.

So what do we want exterminated? Palmyra? Or the Islamists? This is not a choice we chose. This is the choice we are presented with.

Patrice Ayme’

ENSLAVED, BUT SAVED?

Many who founded the English colony of America were forcefully brought there. It started with English adults or children given the status of “Indentured Servant“… they did not have much choice as at least a fifth of the English population lived in abject poverty and was homeless. Indentured servitude (of “whites”!) in Seventeenth Century America was probably worse than slavery (of “blacks”) in Nineteenth Century America. Indentured servitude in the Seventeenth Century was basically slavery for a number of years, accompanied with the threat of a robust execution for a number of (petty) crimes. 

A standard punishment of the indentured servants was quartering alive for fraternizing with the Native Americans (which was viewed as high treason with the gravest military consequences). Hanging by the neck until dead, for hunting pigs without authorization, was a relatively more benign punishment. Starting in 1615, convicts facing judicial punishment (in practice often death) were sent to the English colonies (officially more than 52,000 English convicts got to North America… while later, for comparison, only 388,000 African slaves got there). Many of these “criminals” were then enslaved… but saved (from the rope).

Naturally enough, within a decade, starting accidentally in 1619 CE, importing African slaves came up as a solution to the problem of work.  Notice what happened: slaves were purchased, in Africa, and then imported. Those people, those slaves, had been already enslaved, by Africans, before being purchased by European traders.

Indeed, at the time, the West Coast of Africa was mostly free of any European control, outside of a few trading counters: Africa was free and unconquered. Europe was strong enough to conquer the Americas, but not strong enough to conquer African steel. The African governments were independent of European control. African armies held the African continent.

Africans had steel arrows, plenty of them (bow, and arrow with a steel warhead is a frightening weapon: I saw a demonstration in Africa from native hunters, when I was a child: the penetrating power of an African arrow is huge).

Not just that, but Africa had conquered a substantial part of Europe. Twice. Five centuries before, the Almoravids, who ruled over much of Senegal and Mali, among other things, in other words Africans, had even conquered not just Morocco, but more than half of the Iberian peninsula (and even parts of France). 

The short of the thesis in this essay is this: Regions of Africa in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries produced more human beings than they could ecologically afford (something reminiscent of what is happening today, nearly everywhere…) There was a traditional solution: the engineering of deliberate mass death by the authorities in power. However, slave traders made selling slaves more profitable than killing those unfortunates who constituted an unsustainable humanity… Selling those one used to kill relieved African nations from ecological overload, just the same, but more profitably… (And it was morally nicer…)

Humanitarianism is not about imposing a goodness which cannot be. Humanitarianism is about optimizing the goodness which can be. In this perspective, slavery was a lesser evil than the status quo ante. Nothing too shocking, for those who can think, I reckon… but quite enough to melt millions of minds as fragile as snowflakes, who know nothing but hating superior considerations.

***

An ex-African child brings to you a NEW, SHATTERING PERSPECTIVE ON THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE: it saved lives! (A friend who is a lawyer raised in Los Angeles inside an Indian family told me to remove this essay, it would endanger my reputation permanently, she insisted… But really new truths often hurt, so not endangering my reputation would reduce me to no creativity, so here is the truth, and let the haters hate…)

No philosophy is new, if all it does, is to tenderly stroke the minds of the past, their pet theories, and the errors of their deepest, most obscurantist emotions. Really new wisdom breaks old minds, and it hurts, yes: in spiritual matters, no pain, no real gain.

It is a given, among the self-glorifying Politically Correct, and the fashionably liberal, that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was a gigantic black eye for Western Civilization, an irremediable error we should all attune for the rest of times, and all times to come, even when our ancestors had nothing to do with it, or even when some of our own ancestors were slaves, and other ancestors, masters. (For example is Michelle Obama, a descendant of both master and slave, stained with mastery, or slavery? I say, neither, and this essay explains why…)

Does that received truth, that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was abominable, hold under global, thorough, hyper-critical relativistic, fully informed scrutiny? No. It’s not that simple. Granted that slavery was an atrocity, the US leadership was one with it, and this is having a huge, nefarious influence on the USA, to this day. However, just transporting Africans out of Africa was another matter: it saved lives. A few remarks:

1) It’s a subset of plutocrats who organized the slave trade, not “Western Civilization”. The average European knew nothing about slavery, and didn’t profit from it (although some towns did, indirectly). Indeed, slavery had been unlawful in (what the Franks called) “Europe” for a millennium, thanks to Queen Bathilde around 655 CE. Plutocrats organize a lot of lucrative horrors nowadays, far from prying eyes.

Bottom Line: Notice that the slave traders are themselves Africans. Slavery Was Unlawful In Europe Since 660 CE. In Africa, as in all distant history, slavery flourished, and, much worse, so did mass human sacrifices. Yes, confronted to that choice, people would prefer slavery to summary execution.

2) It is better to (let) drown Africans by the thousands as they try to reach Europe, as is practiced nowadays? (Some days, hundreds drown in the Mediterranean, because conditions are so bad in Africa, and so good in Europe, they prefer to risk death than to continue with horror in today’s Africa…)

Is it worse to be put in chains, laying on one’s back like sardines, exercised one hour a day, as during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, rather than drowning in the Med, as endured by at least 50,000 in the last few years? And on this latter point, drowning in the Mediterranean because Africa has become such a terrible place, one can’t live there, we can’t say we never heard about it (whereas most of the European population had never heard of slavery during the colonization of the Americas, as slavery was unlawful in Europe: slaves were immediately liberated… except for those of (future) US president Jefferson (who, protected by diplomatic immunity, moreover lied to his slaves and French Ancient Regime authorities).

3) At least, indeed, differently from today across the Mediterranean, slave traders were keen not to drown their expensively purchased slaves (as they wanted to sell them, and in the best conditions).

4) Coach passengers in today’s airlines are in worse cardiovascular stress positions than slaves were (the latter could lay flat). Right, that should be unlawful (and many passengers die).

Let’s dig in the slave logic.

The claim is generally made that 11 million Africans were transported in slave ships, from Africa to the Americas. Once arrived there, they were used as living robots. They were moreover generally submitted to racism, the idea that they were not quite human. Accordingly they were treated inhumanly.

Between 650 CE and 1920 CE, 18 million Africans were transported to Muslim countries. Many were castrated, and suffered high death rates, so the slave population did not increase much. Islamist jurisprudence frowned upon enslaving born Muslims (and initially Jews and Christians, except if captured in war; however, that was rescinded soon).

The transatlantic slave trade was organized by pretty satanic individuals, right.

However, differently from slaves in Muslim countries, American slaves were not castrated, and however inhumanly treated, not only suffered much lower death rates than in Muslim countries, but grew and multiplied.

African slaves in the Americas were never treated so badly that they engaged in as a large scale rebellion such as the Zanj (= East African Great Lakes Bantus). 500,000 African slaves captured the large port of Basra in Iraq, and fought for 15 years. (The largest North American slave rebellion involved barely more than one plantation, and killed a few dozen people… Who all knew each other.)

The slave population in the Americas augmented rapidly… From doing what comes naturally, namely copulation, when conditions are not so bad.

But let’s reconsider the basic point. How did Euro-American plutocrats get their slaves? By buying them. (Europeans hunting Africans down was tried a bit by the Portuguese early on, but proved way too expensive and dangerous, past the first element of surprise.)

African states and empires were well armed (with native steel arrowheads). Starting in 1300 CE, in the empire of Senegambia and Mali, one third of the population was enslaved. Slavery does not have to do with riches: the emperor of Mali went to Mecca and blinded all the Arabs with his incredible wealth (Mali was full of gold and slaves to extract it). He was probably the Earth’s richest person.

In Madagascar, half of the population was enslaved. In Zanzibar, 90%. Slavery was all over Africa, and it had nothing to do with evil white men.

And the natural question is this: had these slaves not been sold, would they have lived?

Africa was crisscrossed by wars. Ever since the Carthaginians, white men had been unable to conquer it, because Africans were expert at war, and mastered steel technology. It’s only after 1850 CE that Europeans achieved military technology so advanced that they made local, African soldiers into conquering armies (or, at least, that’s the way the French did it; the British used their own soldiers and suffered two tremendous defeats, one in West Africa, the other at the hands of the Zulus).

So would have these prisoners of war and other criminals live, but for the slave trade?

The observation is the perennial one, the great enforcer of the Dark Side in the human species: the first thing humanity always had to kill, was overpopulation.

Bartolome’ de las Casas stopped all by himself the Conquista of the Americas by Spain (he did not like the genocide and persuaded Charles V). He also condemned the African slave trade, pointing out that it “incited Africans to sell their own children”.

A fine, very humanitarian, cute and cuddly argument, but is it really true? Could one cut and paste European ethical logic onto Black Africa?

In truth we know that mass human sacrifices as happened during the “Grand Customs” in Dahomey were stopped, because the captives got sold as slaves instead of being chopped into bits. Instead of killing up to 10,000 captives, it was found smarter to sell them to white slave traders (Dahomey provided up to 20% of the transatlantic slave trade). The fact is, there were too many Africans to go around, considering the state of farming then.

Hence the wars, slavery, mayhems, to control the population in many African countries (and not just African): One can’t have a population without an ecology, but one can’t have an ecology with too much of a population. That old quandary of the genus Homo evolved all of us into all too many bits and pieces of Doctor Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde.

Dahomey was not bad intrinsically: it was just organized, considering its capabilities. After the French (and Senegalese) conquered it, more advanced farming was introduced, while slavery and human sacrifices were outlawed.

It is no accident that, shortly before its civil war, Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa. 20% of the population was killed. In three months. (And the story is more complicated, and troubling, than usually told, as some observe that a majority of the people killed were Hutu, not Tutsi, as supported by the evidence that the “genocide” happened during the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi “Rwanda Patriotic Front”.)

Morocco closed its last slave market in 1920. It helped that Morocco was then under French supervision. Saudi Arabia made slavery unlawful in the 1960s. (Islam, by giving a precise legal framework to slavery, allowed it to fester forever.) Mauritania, a country of ineffable charm, which I have resided in, criminalized slavery in 2007. 600,000 people, 20% of the population, are currently enslaved there (the French had abolished slavery in Mauritania in 1920, but the country became independent in the 1960s, allowing to re-establish slavery).

A well-known reason brandished to justify the invasion and occupation of Africa by European powers was the presence of slavery in Africa (the source of the Transatlantic Slave Trade). That argument failed in Christian Ethiopia, which, although attacked by Italy, was never conquered… But also was never part of the slave trade.

Amusingly, as “passengers” are packed like cattle in planes nowadays, getting strokes by the thousands, as a result, nobody points out that slaves at least enjoyed flat beds. (I had still another friend who died, yesterday, from a stroke within days of flying; not a subject airlines and their sponsors are keen to examine.)

Once transported to the Americas, slaves were branded, and treated worse than 3,500 years prior in Mesopotamia. Well, that was a problem with the inhuman character of the laws in the Americas. And yes, it is unforgivable.

However, as far as the slaves were concerned, enslaving them may have saved their lives. I am not saying that this is sure, obvious, and proven.

Just, that it seems very likely. Reality is harder than fiction.

Think, but verify.

Nowadays, slaves can be discreetly purchased in several African countries for a few hundred dollars. Meanwhile, please consider the possibility that the situation with thousands drowning in the Mediterranean, as they try to flee to Europe, is actually worse than the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Many view colonialism as responsible for almost all of Africa’s current evils. In truth, with few exceptions (the Congo), the first thing colonial regimes did, was to outlaw slavery… and they used their outlawing of slavery to justify their existence ethically speaking.  In practice African societies were forced to instantaneously transform in non-slave societies, something that took centuries in Europe. Anybody who thinks an instant realizes that it is difficult to imagine any other way: after all Senegal was already trading with Carthage (dried fish, among other things). The East Coast of Africa had been in contact with (more civilized) Arabs for centuries (and Nubia with Romans). Why Africa was left behind has lots to do with physical and biological geography (long story). For centuries, European slave masters and African trade masters traded. They could have traded more than human chattel, for example scientific knowledge, and they did: some on the Gold Coast learned to make guns, and serve the British some of their own medicine.

For most people, in most circumstances, it is better to be chained than to be dead. The atrocious, uncivilized slavery organized in the Americas by European immigrants and their descendants may, paradoxically, have saved lives. And it surely enabled Africa to partly colonized the Americas in much greater numbers than it would have done otherwise, and thus contribute to civilization in more ways than simply music.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S 2021: I am fundamentally an African (and several other things besides as a full Earth citizen). My first memories and most of my childhood, are from Africa. We Africans know more in an important way, 3,000 years of civilizations before our eyes: Africa is where many civilizations collided. Thus we Africans think very differently, especially about race and skin color… Including very differently from African-Americans, who are, like European-American or Asian-Americans, Americans first, having all gone to American school while swimming in an ocean of Americana. Adding an ocean of Post Modernism/French Theory/Critical Race Theory has made the situation even more… American. Africa is of course in a sense responsible of the Slave Trade… Most Africans, like most Europeans, had nothing to do with it… Being rather on the receiving side of violence. As usual what is culprit and needs to be changed is the institutional side, especially some cultural institutions: the exploitative chief system in Africa, a plutocratic institution, which was symbiotic with slavery, is what one needs to graduate from. All the more as that system, also present in Europe in the last few millennia, did not arise by surprise or accident, but rather necessity…