Not to defend Brennan, who was largely considered incompetent, but the US didn't disband the Iraqi Army, it disbanded itself. He stopped cutting them checks after they refused to muster or provide any basic defense function. What he probably needed was some sort of carrot and stick for the enlisted men and a reform strategy that would get me back in the organization.

Initial plans for Iraq had a big role for the military in keeping order. The problem is that soldiers went home and didn't want to come back out when it was unclear how things would progress vis-a-vis ethnic divisions of power.

In a larger way, histories of the Iraq war tend to be plagued by lack of nuance and detail. Trainor and Gordon's Cobra II and Endgame are one of the only "complete" narratives I've seen.

Yes, he's referring to mass mobilizations. It doesn't necessarily have to be a war on a country's own land. WWII greatly reduced inequality and allowed workers to gain concessions in the US.

Wars also force elites to accept a more centralized states. This is pretty obvious in the massive growth of the US security apparatus after WWII. Theoriticians like Fukayama and historians like William Durrant both tie the growth of competent states to the need to field larger and more complex armies. This is a trend that starts with the European Wars of Religion and then truly gets under way with the Napoleonic era and the levee en mass.

An important point to be sure. It explains why some elites prefer extractive systems. More open markets and political systems tend to produce wealthier economies. You can grow the pie, rather than taking a bigger piece. However, those at the top benefit from systems that allow them to take a larger piece, even if they stunt their nations' economies.

Take for example Gaddafi. When he died, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were the "richest men on Earth," with around $40B. Gaddafi's personal wealth was estimated at over $200B. It pays to loot a nation. Bill Gates can't have people who displease him imprisoned or killed. He can't notice a cute girl on the street and send her an invitation she can't refuse to join him on a date. So, there is an incentive for leadership to undermine systems that promote fairness and more wealth overall.

What Thomas Piketty and others have shown, is that this move towards consolidation of privileges happens pretty inexorably in modern societies unless violence forces concessions.

Billionaires can't have you killed in the US, but there are myriad examples of them financially ruining people with law suits.

Child sex crimes are considered pretty much the most heinous thing you can do in our culture and Jeffery Epstein was allowed to make a plea covering many cases and be sent to "prison," where he was allowed to leave every day, only had to sleep there, and had his own meals sent to him. Of that's not an indictment, IDK what is.

Even better, the academics who justify the system are caught in an even more hyper competitive loop than the general populace. Publish or perish. I had dinner with a professor who specialized in terrorism research, mostly game theory modeling, and he explained to me how the pay and prestige for academics most closely reflects street gangs. Lots of adjuncts living near the poverty line, a very few people at the top getting prestige and huge economic benefits.

I had the occasion to test this theory asking an adjunct while working at Duke, which is one of the 10 most selective schools in the US. The salary for a full teaching load worked out to $18 an hour. You basically gambled on the name getting you future work.

I loved teaching college courses, but the grind is why a PhD never interested me.

I figure depending on whether or not I stay in my field, I could still teach in retirement. Practical experience is counting more for instructors. One of the best professors I ever had only had a BA, but had been a city manager for larger cities for decades and had a wealth of knowledge.

Immortal Technique defined them in lyrical form.

"I got a job and house and a bank account
When I'm out, I doubt that's something you could say
And if not then I fake death like Kenneth Lay
Make money every day the world burns on its axis
While y'all struggling to pay taxes
I'm getting my money the fastest
Memos and faxes shredded-up documents
Slush funds through the corrupt continents

But they don't want me indicted
'Cause they don't want my dirty laundry aired when I fight it
Don't get my lawyers excited
'Cause what good is a law if you can't rewrite it

I got CIA traders, dictators
So fuck y'all whistle blowers and haters

I'll invest money from Al Qaeda
In the bank 911 widows go to later
Capitalism's who I pray to
Fuck the state of the world
Money talks so what the fuck I need to say to ya girl."

https://youtu.be/Pc985fd3uLE

Just 27 Republicans in Congress will acknowledge that he won. Only 30 will say in writing that he will be President-elect after the Electoral College votes, so cowed are they Trump.

It's great the courts aren't giving Trump what he wants, or that enough of the state legislatures have decided not to vote to overturn the election. It is, however, quite worrying that there are plenty of Republicans is state legislatures who are arguing that the state should overturn the election results.

Caesar Augusts didn't create the Principate (role of emperor) himself. His way was paved by Julius Caesar, Marius, and Sulla, and with the murder of the Gracchi Brothers. The norm breaking had to start a generation earlier. And indeed, people may prefer a competent Caesar to what we have now, an inept gerontocracy. Rule by fabulously rich octogenarians.

In his "Origins of Political Order," Fukayama attributes the rise of strong, centralized states to the demands of the emerging bourgeois and the peasantry to have the kings empowered to protect them from the rapacious nobility. I think a similar dynamic is at work here. Rule of law doesn't seem to apply to the elites. The people increasingly prefer a tyrant to rule by oligarchs.

The other driving factor behind strong centralized states for Fukayama is the need to wage wars. Thomas Piketty demonstrates how war, and the need to mobilize the populace, had also acted powerfully to redistribute wealth and political power. Absent war, the returns on capital slowly allow a small elite to pull away and dominate the economy and politics.

The US and by extension Europe's sickness is perhaps an ironic lack of wars. To be sure, there are large military expenditures, and foreign adventurism, but these are not existential wars that require major mobilization. The US military is now a small professional corps. Increasingly it is a multigenerational, hereditary profession, particularly in the officer corps and particularly at colonel and above.

As Gibbon said of the Roman Army after the final Punic War, the professionalization of the legions "elevated war into an art, and degraded it into a trade." Our combat effectiveness has never been higher, neither has our separation from a citizen army in the model of old Greek city states or the Roman Republic.

The US is like Rome after defeating Carthage. The USSR/Carthage is gone, and now the wealth to loot inside the empire is worth more than what is outside of it. There is no external threat, and so the race to loot begins. China is akin to Parthia. A threat to the periphery, but far enough away (for now) to have its own sphere of influence.

Although, not to contradict myself, but in a larger analogy, I would say:

USA = Carthage. A trading state using a mercenary army ruled by degenerate elites without civic virtue.

Western Europe = Greece. A once great power still know for intellectual exports, but held in loose thrall by the ascendant cultural power of Rome/America. It helps that Rome/America copied Greece/Europe so that they can still feel culturally in charge, even as.the flood of Hollywood sweeps inland.

Russia = Persia. A once great power that is currently much reduced, hoping to move back to ascendancy but crippled by infighting and corruption.

China = Rome. A stoic and ascendant power that is remarkably self confident even as it rises to challenge established powers.

The analogy doesn't totally work because Greece is aligned with Carthage not Rome, but whatever.



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Https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/survey-who-won-election-republicans-congress/2020/12/04/1a1011f6-3650-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html

Take a moment to consider what, to us, is grotesque?

Umberto Eco has a great art book on this called "On Ugliness." It's a discussion on the aesthetics of ugliness that is set up semi-chronilogically, and topically. You have monsters in antiquity, passions and torture, the uncanny, Satan and the Satan adjacent.

Aside from the actual narrative it has tons of quality reproductions of art from across the ages of all things evil and ugly, and a ton of excerpts from "horror" work across the ages. Functional tests like witch hunters guides to modern horror to Shakespeare. It's a favorite coffee table book of mine.

I guess the take away would be that, while the philosophy of aesthetics has generally focused on what is beautiful, and defined ugliness and evil in relation to that, art also serves a purpose is defining and exploring evil.

Trend wise, Greek sculpture and Medieval art has lots of dark undertones and horror that aren't always placed in the context of a "good." Subject matter in general seems to get a LOT cheerier after the Baroque period. The impressionists for instance, tend to have bright scenes, while romantic art has these gorgeous land scapes. I might be generalizing, but a trip through art museums chronologicaly always seems to get gradually happier for me.

This changes when you hit contemporary art. A lot of photography I've seen lately has very dark subject matter. War, racial injustice, poverty. A return to ugliness.


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Unrelated, I think stylistically art is going to become more interactive and exploritory. With Sleep No More and Then She Fell in NYC, you have the transformation of a typical play into a haunted house type scenerio where each audience member sees different scenes as events play out across a large building simultaneously. The audience also gets brought into the performance. VR art (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art has some up right now) is a promising direction, allowing exploration into a scene.

Biden will be 83 in 2024 and already shows signs of cognitive decline, so I'd say a one term Presidency seems likely. Although given that the average age of Democratic leadership is already over 80, I would not be surprised if they all refuse to let go of power and tank the party.

That the wealthy don't universally, or even predominantly have the positive traits you ascribed to them.

Certainly, they might embody those traits more on average, but it's probably not a huge difference between the upper middle class and the top 1%.

Aside from a necessary level of intelligence and emotional intelligence, I would say ambition is more a determing factor than conscientiousness.

If we're talking Big Five personality traits, you need a base line conscientiousness for work ethic, but too much is probably bad. Risk tolerance from low neuroticism and lower agreeability is probably more important.

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/neighborhoods/

This has a county by county level map that shows the percentage chance that a child born in the lowest 20% of income will make it to the top 20%. Even poorly preforming counties still have 1/25 poor children making it to the top, so there is mobility, although perfect mobility would be 1/5.

Of course this is longitudinal data, so it's looking at older Millennials. In fact, social mobility has been trending downward due to a number of factors. The simplest being that exploding inequality means the difference between the top and bottom are further to travel.

Things are worse now than this map lets on.

Notably, the deeply Republican South has the absolute worst mobility. This does not change controlling for race. Whites are less socially mobile in the South.

Neither is the highly liberal coastal regions the most mobile. That tends to be the Mountain states. This is probably a mix of faster growth there, lower rents (historically, CO blew up later), a more libertarian brand of Republican rule, and less inequality overall. Ogden, Utah as a city had the lowest inequality and best mobility last time I checked, and Provo was second. It helps that Utah also leads in donations to non-profits by a huge margin, so there is more voluntary social support.

I'll be honest, the Tao seemed underwhelming when I read it because so much of it had filtered into anime and manga, so I had already absorbed some of the cultural motifs.

Grade A level pseud coming through!

Personal experience would show you. I can assure you, there are people who were born very rich, who have received rubber stamp degrees from prestigious universities, who hold high income positions, but whom I wouldn't trust to stack rocks correctly.

What's the source for most millionaires being self made? I know Forbes tried this once with billionaires, claiming most were self made, but the methodology was terrible. Donald Trump was labeled self made because he claimed he only received a single $1 million loan from his father. As it turns out, his father passed him the better part of a billion dollars, continuing to pump money into his failing businesses into Trump's 50s.

Another guy came from the bottom because "he worked at a gas station as a teen." In reality, a solid percentage were born rich and almost all were at least upper middle class.

I went to extremely selective schools so I met a lot of people from that class. Two physician families, etc. People vary the way they always do. I think the main difference is generally more educated and nuanced views, coupled with some insularity.

That is on average. I definitely taught young adults of the 1% and worked with plenty who were pretty dumb and unmotivated. Their success seemed totally due to peer effects, wealth, and networking. Couldn't write a coherent memo but got into one of the most selective schools in the world... hmmm.

"Competition," denotes intent. Can we ascribe intent to evolution? It seems more stochastic to me. Can we even describe intent to human action? Experiments show "intentional action" begins before the mind experiences making the decision to move. Occipital lobe blindness shows that our ability to navigate a room by site, or catch a ball, exists disconnected from any experience of sight. At best, intent is something that affects long term planning, which sidelines competition from a number of essential moments in the competition for survival.



Religiously, many other reasons for existence exist. To shape the soul and prepare it for knowledge of God. To seek redemption through Christ. You also have your Buddhists and Gnostics who reject the material world as accidental to meaning for the individual, which is to attain enlightenment.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the developing world, at one point for about half a year living out of a tent in a climate where it is rarely much above freezing and pisses down cold rain every day. I was still happy plenty of the time.

People I kept in touch with from my work in Egypt seem pretty happy. Their young. They have friends, girlfriends, despite being quite poor. My grandmother lives in the first world and talks about wanting to die all the time, and I don't blame here. Location ain't everything.

Evidence suggests that individuals' base line happiness changes very little over time or with additional wealth. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Being in the first world doesn't = rich. For one, low status matters more than raw material benefit to happiness. Secondly, American cities, Baltimore for example, have levels of violent crime on par with some of the worst Central American nations (i.e. the highest in the world), and people there can grow up in absolute squalor. Some neighborhoods I've lived near look like photos of Germany after WWII, but never get cleaner up.

Just joking around. People act like it's the end of the world, but at least we aren't burning people for being demon spawn (yet).

31% of US Coronavirus deaths are from people over 85, 58% over 75, 80% over 65. Just 6,900 under 45.

Whatever effects the virus will have, it won't directly affect demographics, except for indirectly due to the lockdowns and economic distress.

This is why I think comparisons to wars are spurious. A large proportion of the deaths are in people who weren't expected to live another 5 years, and many who were past their "health span." Obviously though there is a big difference between people getting sick at 65, getting ready to enjoy their retirement, versus relatives I have who are 90+ who express a desire to pass on, and are now living their last months locked in their room.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

Does their expansion into Central Asia count? Tajiks, Chechens, and Uzbeks were their own peoples, so I would argue that those are obvious examples of colonization. What about the, admittedly sparsley populated areas of Siberia?

Here I find myself thinking that Russian colonization was different from other nations, but why? Reflecting on it, the only real difference I can see is that the US and Russia were contiguous with the large areas they colonized, and eventually demographically replaced and assimilated the people on the land they claimed.

However, historically it's hard to draw a distinction from England in South Africa, or Belgium in the Congo, with the actions of these two "in the moment," aside from having those cases not be colonization because: "well it was contiguous land and they kept the land."

Same goes for the Ottomans and Seljuks. They invaded and colonized most Arab lands, but we generally don't call them colonizers, not do we speak of the Arabs as colonizers in North Africa. Maybe colonization has an element of faliure to keep the land to it? You have to not replace the native culture?

It also seems like a loaded term politically. Only European nations "colonize," an aggressive, morally condemable act. China in Tibet, the Ottomans, those seem less morally loaded, despite happening in the same time period.

Anyhow, the US did rule over semi-soverign nations within its borders, over the course of their long push West. If the British, French, and Spanish were imperialists in colonizing the coasts of North America, than the US was in its push westward.

Another interesting question, is Western Europe becoming a colony for peoples from Asia and Africa? Obviously Europeans aren't subject to imperialism, but colonization isn't necessarily imperial, it's settlement. France, the UK, and Germany will have populations that are a majority non-European in descent by around 2080, so a major wave of settlement. Or is the movement of peoples post globalization a different concept?

Based on your pro-Nazi screed earlier, I assume you'd do better at /pol/ or 8kun, lovely places I got to observe at my old job, no beta cuck simps at all!

Why is that? It certainly took over a lot of area from sovereign peoples, extracted resources, and peopled them with its own demographic.

If the US wasn't imperial as it annexed land across North America, was Russia not an imperial power either?

That's how people here in Kentucky see it for sure.

In reality, dense coastal states pay significantly more in federal taxes than they get in back in aid. Rural states tend to be the most dependant on aid. Add on that rural counties have very high median ages (58 here) and you have economies fully dependant on transfer payments. Where I am, the economy would absolutely collapse if Social Security and disability payments stopped. Many of the "good jobs" are in the medical field, but demand (as in money chasing services) is heavily propped up by Medicare.

Now you can say people worked for those services, but it isn't really true. The Baby Boomers voted continually for lower taxes, higher expenditures, and an exploding deficit during their time in the driver seat. Trump for instance, lost voters under 55 by 7 points, a landslide electorally, and proceeded to run a trillion dollar deficit, borrowing $0.25 of every $1.00 spent, during an expansion.



The US should do more of that. Immigrants should be encouraged to move into placed like Buffalo and Detroit. Instead we have them crowding into the most expensive and desirable places to live in the country, also places with dwindling water supplies, and then demanding rent support. You can blame zoning laws, which are an issue, but the fact is that a median single family costs $260k to construct even with free land. Due to mass migration, wages for low skill workers is simply never going to by high enough to support constructing that much new housing.

Meanwhile there are houses for $100k in the Rust Belt, and an actual labor shortage.

American imperialism in its Manifest Destiny form in North America wasn't particularly more benign than any European project.

Arguably the only difference is that disease and then demographic replacement washed away the cultural memory of that era.

The "largest witch hunt in history," by Presidential declaration actually. It's interesting to compare to the old record holder: the Würzburg witch trials, held in Germany during the 30 Years War.

Like today, there were also over zealous politically motivated inquisitors attacking heros of the people. Among prince-bishops, Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg was particularly active: in his reign of eight years (1623–31) he burnt 900 persons, including his own nephew, nineteen Catholic priests, and children of seven who were said to have had intercourse with demons.

I'm sure he would have been a Democrat btw.

Although I grow tired of the Donald Trump show in its final act. If I wanted this, I'd just watch Downfall with the orange tint turned all the way up.

I wonder if I can get out of having to pick out Christmas gifts with this thread? "I got you nothing? Just read this; nothing is quite impossible!"

I too recall the part in the Holocaust where the reasonable Nazis said "enough is enough." If only BLM was as reasonable. Alas, the battle is lost for us friend. Best to flee to your bunker now before Biden invokes socialist Sharia law.

Interesting thread. I had sort of a "symbol" kick over the summer, starting with Jung and other Jungians, which led me to Guenon on the one hand and papers/lectures on information science on the other. I was looking into semiotics and then got derailed by Psychology and Alchemy, which got me reading on the Gnostics and Kabbalah, topics I was already familiar with but was revisiting.

Now that is a rabbit hole, but certainly the Sepirot and the Ogdoad are early examples of an systems that see reality as a series of interactions.

Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? My cousin's wife recommended it to me. I absolutely love the guy's fiction.

No, not an ascended being such as myself. But let me tell you, I once worked with people who would eat co-workers' lunches straight out of the fridge. There is no accounting for the rabble.

Although, come to think of it, while I was in high school a hotel left its bar unlocked and we stole all the liquor we could carry out of there...

The idea that one requires statism and laws to prevent him from doing harm to others is infantile.

Someone has never had to commute in Jersey.

Ha, funny considering humans show a remarkable amount of neoteny compared to other great apes. We basically look like adolescent versions of past hominids, particularly women since neotenic phenotypes seem to add reproductive advantage there, not so much for males.

So a time traveling primordial human would find themselves surrounded by seemingly magically intelligent teenagers.

I was thinking "wealthy in comparison to the people they colonized." The English were vastly more advanced technologically, economically, and organizationally than the Powhatan for example, who had been ravaged by European diseases and we're isolated from the trade in technology and ideas in Asia.

By the time the English colonized India, they were vastly more organized and wealthy on a per capita basis, which led to a qualitatively better military.

When Europeans first got to Asia they had limited inroads off the coast because they're technology and doctrine wasn't exceptional compared to Asian cultures, only their shipbuilding. Centuries later, you had the US easily forcing Japan to open up with a skeleton force because the gap had grown.

Full authoritarian totalitarianism, clearly. We do want the people to be free after all.

Cheaper to prosecute at least. The American prison system is horrendously expensive and also ineffective on terms of recidivism, undercutting more global arguments for "efficiency."

I think it's dangerous to fall into the trap of "differences between group outcomes = discrimination."

For example:



This comes from a good place, but it is quite literally instructions to take correlation as causation. Group outcomes will vary when groups are different. "Diversity is our strength," would be meaningless if all people were the same.

Although people generally won't say it, when they are presented with evidence of an unfair society in terms of ratios, they will internally fall back on the conventionally unspeakable explanations of "superior" culture and genetics. Causal mechanisms take more time to explain, but will work better at changing minds. African Americans performing worse economically being the result of "cultural deficits," is an essential Republican talking point now, and "biological explanations," have been allowed to make a comeback, I'd argue, because discussing what we actually know about them has become fraught even in the academy.

The frustrating thing for me is that:
A. The new brand of "race realists" don't know what they're talking about but aren't properly rebutted.
B. Classical liberalism already had fine arguments for not treating people based on what you think you know about the mean attributes of whatever groups they fall into.

I suppose the other problem is that "Wokeness" as an ideology has a bad habit of taking what it wants from positivist social sciences, and then flipping to critical theory whenever it suits an argument. The issue being is that people are going to get turned off from the arguments because it's essentially psuedoscience. As with psychoanalysis, any objections to its claims can be explained within the theory (e.g. White Fragility, Internalized Oppression). Failure to accept dogma is a sign of a problem internal to the individual. Claims are essentially unfalsifiable. This isn't a blanket condemnation, just a popular thread in a broader social movement for reforms that I think hamstring the larger movement.

For example, police use of deadly force in the infamous Harvard study isn't actually unbiased, as the study suggests, because the control variables vary systematically with demographics. You have to remove controls. But then the death penalty is racist, despite being massively disproportionate in killing White people over the past 50 years, because if controls are introduced it shows bias. Either way is fine to look at an issue, but the goal of regression analysis is to hone in on causal methods, and hopefully test them experimentally, not to pile up a scientific gloss on a theory that also rejects positivism whenever necessary. Not to mention, rather than tie yourself into knots rebutting a single study, you could just remind people of the replication crisis...

At least that's where I think people get turned around. Stories and causal explanations are harder to deflect.

Neuropath, a short thriller by R. Scott Bakker. It's about a neurologist serial killer and incorporates a lot of interesting neuroscience findings into a story about free will and meaning. Fast paced, but on a dense topic, a rare combo.

Writing is decent, nothing great. A shame because his The Darkness That Comes Before has really good writing. I like this though because it's so accessible; good book to get people thinking who normally wouldn't read anything on mind-body philosophy.

How is On Tyranny? I read Snyder's Blood Lands and I thought it was excellently presented and researched, although I didn't finish it (I had just finished Evans' Third Reich trilogy, and didn't have the stamina for more.) I'd seen articles by him on contemporary issues and wondered what a book would be like.

For me, I'd say in terms of "explaining it all," vis-a-vis political order, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate and Francis Fukayama's Origins of Political Order are both masterpieces.

The first looks at neuroscience and evolutionary psychology through the lens of Locke and Rousseau as the inspiration for contemporary liberal and conservative traditions. The second is an excellent primer on theories of "why states succeed." Fukayama gives you a good overview of the field. Blows similar works such as Why Nations Fail (IMO, "selecting on the dependant variable, the book"), and Guns, Germs, and Steel out of the water.

Final nomination is William Durrant's Story of Civilization as an excellent overview of Western history from almost every angle. Cheating a bit because it's several volumes. Great prose and political philosophy musings. I might skip the first volume early and go back to it. Unfortunately he dies at Napoleon, but fortunately Richard Evans' The Pursuit of Power is a worthy successor that brings you up to 1914.

The 92% conviction rate is because only 2% of cases go to trial. Additionally, if a person faces multiple charges, but are found innocent of all but one, it counts as a conviction.

Check page 12 of Wikipedia's source. 26% of jury trials and 36% of all trials (judge + jury) result in no conviction.

High conviction rates are secured by forcing pleas in the overwhelming majority of cases. This makes the system work much more efficiently and cheaply, but it also has created a system where heavy potential punishment is used to force pleas from innocent people.

This isn't "some prosecutors do it," the plea system is an integral part of how the US justice system works at a basic level.

I think the third season of the podcast Serial, even just the first episode is a pretty good close up of how the system works in benign cases.

Speaking of affidavits, there are three sworn ones by women who were allegedly trafficked by Jeffery Epstein who said they were abused by Donald Trump. Would those be legitimate sources for substantiating a claim or would some vetting be required?

Keep in mind that the idea of the "Bible" as a codex containing all canonical books of the Bible, and nothing else is a post-Reformation invention. Monks used to only copy some books, while also including non-cannonical epistles and the writings of early church father's in "Bibles."

Much of the myth surrounding Satan comes from the Books of Enoch, which weren't deemed canonical, but we're nonetheless considered "useful for instruction," and studied. The Books of Enoch are considered canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Jews.

Those contain a much more detailed story of the Flood, and of the Nephlim, fallen angels.

You can find it here: http://www.hiddenbible.com/enoch/online.html

Then, during the Reformation, many Protestant sects threw out books of the Bible. These are known as the Apocrypha, and many Protestant Bibles separate them out or exclude them entirely. They will be in any Catholic or Orthodox Bible though.

Finally, you have the "Gnostic" texts, which refers to apocalypses and gospels from a diverse group of Christian and Jewish Gnostics. Most interesting is the Gospel of Thomas, which is not explicitly Gnostic (no Demiurge). Thomas is older than John and based on historical analysis seems to date to around the Synoptic Gospels. It is less a story and more a collection of Jesus's sayings, some of which appear in other Gospels, some which don't. It's only Gnostic in that it was kept out of the Canon and because it seems to describe salvation as coming through enlightenment or knowledge (Greek: Gnosis, the root for the so-called Gnostics).

The Gnostic Texts can be found at gnosis.org.

I'm not aware of any others that were removed. There are stories in the Talmud that date to, or before the period of the Canon that are interesting too, although reading the Talmud straight on is difficult.

Last, there are the Books of Mormon, discovered or written, as you like, in the US in the 19th century.

Maybe the problem is one of relation: some people (BigBrains like me) are Spirit filled pneumonics and have qualia. Some folks are automata-like hylics; B. F. Skinner could figure them out in a long weekend.

In the middle are the psychics, imbued with Soul but not Spirit. They are condemned to navel gazing- questioning if they experience qualia or not. Alas, for all that navel gazing, they will never join us in our navel gassing, so bloated with enlightenment and filled with pneuma are we.

To build off this, not only did colonies have an ambiguous relationship to the long term economic success of host nations, but many of the most prodigious colonizers fell far behind nations with little to no colonial experience.

Spain and Portugal fell significantly behind the rest of Western Europe despite early colonial expansion, only making up ground with "catch up growth," later. France hit the peak of its cultural, economic, and military dominance vis-a-vis the rest of Europe prior to it's major colonization efforts. The wealthiest, highest functioning European states, the Nordics, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, etc. had fairly limited or no colonial aspirations. Meanwhile, Russia exerted and still exerts control across a huge amount of natural resources in Central Asia, and later held sway over Eastern Europe, and remains a low functioning and poor state.

The classic image of South America, Asia, and Africa dug up, and North America and Europe covered in plunder seems to ignore that economic growth in Europe much more the cause of colonization than vice versa.

Meanwhile, it's arguable that decolonization after WWII was done in part due to moral concerns. Of course said moral concerns blended with security concerns, since there was a strategic element to seeming morally superior to the Soviet Bloc.