A nation, for the good of its people, must secure itself both in space and in time. One of the most important ways a nation secures its existence in time is by securing the coherence of its families. The family, being the fruitful union of man and wife, is the fundamental political unit of civil society. It is the most efficient cause of the resources, actions, values, and loves belonging to a nation; the way in which a nation is most closely linked with what it has, and what it is. Ultimately, families are one of the principal material causes of a nation.
There is much to be gained by singing and praying the Psalms. Aldo Leon has compelling sermons on the benefits of doing so here and here. In short, the Psalms teach us how to pray, and how to sing. They are divinely inspired songs and hymns and prayers, serving as precise regulation of God on how his people are to sing and pray to Him.
In a day of happy slappy Christianity and worship songs from Big Eva Christian Music Inc. (which are theologically and spiritually shallower than a plate of cereal), the Psalms provide guidance for how we are to approach God in the sundry circumstances of everyday life. Are you grieving? Sing Psalm 6. Are you victorious? Sing Psalm 21. Are you praising God? Sing Psalm 150. Are you vexed over the wicked? Sing Psalm 37. Are you in sin? Sing Psalm 51.
No More
September 26, 2024
There no more useful innovation to be done in the field of computing. If there is, almost nobody is working on it.
Computers are useful for processing data and communicating with others. Anything beyond that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. Our current computer infrastructure already solves the basic problems we want it to. We already have programs and protocols like email, and HTTP, and SMS, etc. which allow us to communicate with each others just fine. We already have programs that allow us to share documents and photos and videos and other files. We already have programs that allow us to do financial accounting, and banking, and currency transaction. We have programs to keep things cryptographically secure. Name any human function that we need computers for, and I claim it is already built. Useful computing needs only to be maintained at this point.
Acknowledging that modernity has many blessings is not an endorsement of everything that modernity does. That’s just like…basic logic, and it is my position. Neo-luddism as I have presented it is not an outright rejection of modernity or an arbitrary truncation of technological usage; it is a critical posture towards modernity in light of basic eternal truths of human nature.
Thus, even though modernity is full of blessings, it is not full of only blessings. We can logically throw out destructive and consumptive aspects of modernity that are not blessings, and still embrace the blessings. Modernity is not a monolith; modern technological advancements of the modern age are not all logically entailed in each other. Questioning whether we should really be carrying around these addictive mobile phones with us is not the same thing as questioning the use of penecillin in lieu of bloodletting.
The top three killers of the American people are heart disease, cancer, and medical error. That means the top three killers of Americans are largely preventable illnesses and conditions.
Our food is one problem. The staples of the American diet are seed-oil filled, ultra-processed, ultra-pasteurized, double-hybridized, geneticially modified, nutritionally depleted post-war consumer slop, with added sugar. These foods are addictive and unable to be processed by our bodies. Our fathers drank raw milk and ate homegrown meat and vegetables. Big Food and Big Pharma are to blame here, along with the government organizations who enable and tolerate them. But that’s a topic for another time.