Beyon Miloyan

The Luddite rebellion facilitated industrialization by prompting the State to quickly adopt extreme legal & military measures.

Yesterday, I quoted this and pointed out that St. John of Damascus wrote αὐτεξούσιον, not freedom of will. Today, I logged in to find my post is gone, as though I never said it... You can't gaslight an autexousious man, twitter. Bringing it back.

I have a >90-y-o бабушка-подружка who oft reminds me: դուն զքեզ կառավարէ.

LARP. Part of the neo-pagan fetish that goes back to the Renaissance. If you valued Greco-Roman civilization so much, then you wouldn't continuously gloss over 1,000 years of Greco-Roman history trying to reincarnate pagan idols. If you were taking up the Greco-Roman mantle, you'd continue from Christian Rome.

Few realize that Chop Suey is a mockery of the Passion, sung to a catchy tune. Here's one of the producers of the song describing how he "magically" prompted Serj to pick just the right verse for the high point. youtube.com/watch?v=1P__qjVB…

> Willpower is a myth. It seems to me that the modern emphasis on willpower is downstream from the shift in emphasis from αὐτεξούσιον (անձնիշխանութիւն) to free will. Indeed, the Patristic understanding of self-governance has come to be almost completely replaced by the scholastic notion of free will, as though they were 1:1 equivalents, to the point that one even finds the above terms being construed as "free will" in modern translations of Patristic texts.

What’s surprising to me is that the recent successes of LLMs have only added to the misanthropy of their designers, who ought to know better. In the first instance, LLMs compute on inference engines built & maintained by humans, which plug into ML frameworks built & maintained by humans, which run on silicon hardware built & maintained by humans, which are networked across servers built & maintained by humans. These, in turn, are powered & cooled by energy infrastructure build & maintained by humans, housed in real estate built & maintained by humans (and every one of these humans lives in a society with other humans, relies on other humans for food, water, power, clothing, sanitation, &c.) Yet even all this "complex and amazing" technology of theirs would amount to absolutely nothing without the enormous aggregate of human outputs on which they have trained their machines; I mean, the accumulation of knowledge by humans, for the sake of other humans, which they now feed their machines with total disregard for attribution (which might be OK if they were not already so obsessed with the intellectual property of their machines’ outputs & the "souls" of their machines). And! And! even all this would not be enough to make LLMs very useful, lest we think that some critical theorist at Bighead University was going to succeed in prompting some LLM into potentially solving the Navier-Strokes problem. Indeed, even LLMs would not very useful if they were not prompted by knowledgeable human beings (and their outputs shaped & guided by people who know what they're doing), thanks to whom they accrue the benefits of best-of-N-sampling to help solve problems they would not have even realized existed. In short, LLMs are completely STUPID by themselves & will probably even turn out to be destructive without real intellect & adult supervision, you idiotic misanthropes.

In Western Europe, nationalism was a leech on Christendom (the modern nation-states of Western Europe having emerged from the fabric of Europe's Christianization). The ideology of nationalism was from the very outset bound up with revolution & liberalism, and therefore part and parcel of the very "blind refusal" Darylymple laments. In the Near East, nationalism amounted to a rejection of Christianity and a hearkening back to a pre-Christian pagan mythos (as many of these nationalities indeed predate Christianity). Though the reception of the good tidings meant that the ethnos once came to be viewed as something unconsummated relative to the ecclesia, the actual effect of Orthodoxy on nationality was to uplift it, to give it a real history and tradition, while preventing the nation (as geographic body) from falling back into barbarism. And so, all the more in this case, it was the turn from Orthodoxy back to nationalism that amounted to this "blind refusal of one's own culture, traditions and history."

Good thing @Apple removed a ~14KB keyboard layout I've been using for 10 years and gave me 14GB of AI instead.

Faith can be placed in false things and religion can be faked, so may it not be merely a return to faith and religion, but to true faith and devotion. Once man concedes his trust to the falsehood of "the self-grounding system" -- i.e., those things he seeks in vain to legitimate by reference to their own necessary impulses -- he abandons the way of true faith and devotion. The problem of the self-grounding system is by now evident in politics, where every Party seeks to legitimize itself, even by the most belligerent means. We see that every political ideologue also expresses the same impulse, attempting to generate a totalizing cosmic order from but a single category -- class, race, market, nation-state, etc. -- which is, in turn, treated as proof of its own validity. The Ideologue is thereby bound to his Idea, as the Partisan to his Party (it is the same old tribalism so denounced at every turn by our contemporaries, who attempted to replace the old concrete ties with new abstractions and called it Civility). Even before the political ideologues, we find the same self-legitimating impulse among the philosophers and social theorists: for Locke, Rights; for Spinoza, Nature; for Darwin, Natural Selection; for Adam Smith, the Market; for Rouseeau, the General Will; for Hegel, the Absolute; for Comte, Progress; for Burke, Prescription, &c. What these men had in common was the treatment of each one's domain as a whole that generates its own order from within, without reference to any external standard (the market coordinates without a coordinator; history moves by its own contradictions; the nation gives itself its own law; the mind founds knowledge by turning on itself, &c.) Many will readily admit that this the case in the "social sciences" or in the "humanities" (which adherents of the "hard sciences" have long held in some contempt), but the exact same logic governs the hard sciences also: mathematics with its formal axioms; probability with measure-theoretic probability space; computer science with its models of computation, etc. Perhaps this impulse had not yet crystallized in the mind of Descartes (who expressed it as "cogito") but even he was taking up an older mantle: for Cusanus, mind was the measure of all things; for Montaigne, it was the drive to construct his own first principles; and before them all, for Barlaam and the Renaissance humanists, it was the self-grounding of episteme and virtue. Thus we arrived at the false faith of modern man, for whom God is reduced either to a stupid giver of what is believed to be a necessary, totalizing order (or, in computational terms, the "initial state" from which everything unfolds automatically) or itself some totalizing order. Now if true faith and devotion were abandoned by this deathly impulse, then they will not be held fast again until man transcends this deathly impulse with the help of the Triune God, to Whom be glory unto the ages and ages.