What am I interested in doing here? I'm fascinated with the world of tradition, sacred symbolism, and religion and initiation as all these things relate to the martial arts as a spiritual path. I'm hoping to find other people who are a bit too interested in knights.

“For philosophy was to the Greek world what the Law was to the Hebrews, a tutor escorting them to Christ.  Philosophy is a preparatory process; it opens the road to the person who Christ brings to his final goal.” - St. Clement of Alexandria

Holy God Holy mighty Holy Immortal Have mercy on us

Just a modest little castle. Don’t need a big one. Small castle will do.

Righteous anger is part of being well-tempered. We don't lose our temper, but having that anger is, so to speak, like having a balanced blade.

I’m Aboriginal and I support One Nation. The race industry has made a fortune while our remote communities stay broken. Billions spent every year… and the gap barely moves. Enough special rules based on ancestry. Help people who actually need it, not because of their bloodline. Pauline Hanson just wants one set of rules for every Australian. So do I. No more division.

“Wherever we’re gonna land, they’re going to be Christians after this!”

STOP saying “sensitive young man.” The native English word is “feelknight.”

It’s not Istanbul it’s Constantinople

Château Gaillard in the 12th century. Designed by Richard the Lionheart himself.

The case against Fascism is a rather easy one to make, but notice how you aren’t making it? You’re instead just doing a bunch of Leftist moralizing because you fundamentally agree with their conception of good and evil. Good = anything that liberates the individual from unchosen obligations Bad = anything that imposes demands on the sovereign will Fascism failed because it’s a Left-wing application of a Right-wing way of life, not because it offends the sensibilities of Woke idiots who hate you no matter how much you want to virtue signal to them about how you’re “one of the good ones” for condemning Fascism. It was too obsessed with nationalism and the state while retaining modernity’s rejection of the more transcendent and spiritual side of society that existed before the French Revolution. It relied too much on mass movements and propaganda designed to indoctrinate the masses, as if a mob is capable of granting legitimacy or value to anything. It believed corporatism was as an answer to modern class conflict, despite the fact that modernity’s tendency to reduce human beings to homoeconomicus was itself the root of the problem. Fascism was a rebellion against modernity that failed because it was itself a creation of the modern world.

In his Summa Theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas laid out one of the most charitable yet practical arguments concerning immigration that effectively shaped the West for almost 1,000 years. 1. Immigration must always be proportionate so that foreigners can properly assimilate into the culture and mode of worship of the state. 2. Citizenship – and associated rights – should only ever be granted after the third generation to preserve the culture, mode of worship, and constitution of the state. 3. The common good of the citizens must remain the highest priority of the state, meaning, the state's obligation to provide aid to its neighbours can never be at the expense of the citizens. However, Aquinas ends with the sobering reminder that some peoples and states are incompatible with one another, and these must be held as "foes in perpetuity".

Russia fought twelve wars against the Ottoman Empire over 241 years. Turkey has been our longest and most persistent historical enemy.

This reminds me of this quote from Otto von Bismarck: "Gentlemen, if you contest the right of conquest, you cannot have read the history of your own country." Modern people are uncomfortable with the concept of Right of Conquest because it became essentially prohibited after 1945 to invoke it in any conflict, since the UN and the international order don't allow wars of conquests in terms of one country annexing territories of another country by force anymore. However even the creators of these modern post-1945 ideas never intended to question age old borders which were a result of some conquest centuries ago, when the Right of Conquest was effectively the norm, as Bismarck points out in this quote. Let me explain what the historical principle in international law and political practice known as Right of Conquest actually was. It did not mean recognizing that some country has the right to go on any war of conquest they want, but that a conquest could be seen as legitimate if the victorious party was able to establish effective control over the territory and the defeated were no longer able to resist or reclaim the territory. Historically, this would be seen as establishing a new legal reality, leading to formal treaties that confirmed the transfer. Such treaties were seen as valid and countries could claim legal right to territories by the virtue of having conquered them in the past. So even if these conquests resulted out of wars of aggression which would be seen as illegal, the result of the conquest could still be legally affirmed out of pragmatism and "might makes right" (Macht geht vor Recht) principle, a catchphrase specifically describing Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and a reality for most of history. In this context the Right of Conquest would be invoked. This was simply a pragmatic reality in the age where global empires and emerging nation states were regularly going at war with each other and territories switched hands all the time. In this context, the Right of Conquest was actually the only way to ensure peace, because if losing states would not want to accept defeat and transfer of their territories to the winner, peace treaties would be impossible to sign, and therefore leading to perpetual wars all over the world. However the Right of Conquest became essentially banned in 1945 by UN charters. Modern international relations and conflicts were to be guided by the concept of ex iniuria ius non oritur ("a right does not arise from a wrong"), which asserts that if a war was waged illegally, anything that was gained through such war could not be legally recognized as legitimate anymore. And since all wars of aggression are effectively seen as illegal today, countries could no longer invoke Right of Conquest in international law for any new transfers of land. The reason why a "ban" of such historically accepted concept like Right of Conquest was made possible is because of the establishment of international order that was actually able to enforce it. All the major post-1945 powers like USA and Soviet Union essentially agreed to it. For example when these countries waged wars and invaded other lands, they did not attempt to annex those lands and claim their territories but instead installed a favorable regime. The post-1945 order turned wars of conquest into regime change wars. The 1945 borders were practically meant to be frozen, to preserve world peace and provide stability, since such order at least in theory discourages countries to invade another, knowing that their territorial gains would never be legally recognized. So even though the modern 1945 international order banned the Right of Conquest to be invoked in future conflicts, it was never meant to question historic conquests that happened before that. Quite the opposite, because the 1945 borders were meant to be frozen. The modern international order is literally based on the idea that you affirm all the historic conquests that happened before it came into being as legitimate. But now you often see people who want to project the modern international legal order and morality into earlier times in history, and treat historic conquests as illegitimate, as if the post-1945 international laws existed in 15th century. This is just a result of complete ignorance of these people and/or their inability or dishonesty to form a coherent worldview. It's always completely selective too. For example if you think that Ceuta isn't Spanish because it was gained through some military conquest centuries ago, Morocco literally shouldn't exist as a country by the same logic. Or, to quote Bismarck again, "you cannot have read the history of your own country."

The Klondike Gold Rush of 1896 is one of the purest natural experiments in spontaneous order you will ever study. George Carmack and his companions struck gold at Bonanza Creek on August 16, 1896, and within two years over 100,000 people had attempted the brutal journey to Dawson City in Canada's Yukon Territory. No government planned this. No bureaucrat allocated the labor. The price signal embedded in gold did what prices always do: it coordinated the decisions of tens of thousands of strangers without a single committee meeting. What actually made the rush function was a system of private property rights that miners invented and enforced themselves before Canadian authorities had any meaningful presence in the region. Miners formed local committees, established claim registration systems, and created enforceable rules about staking dimensions (typically 500 feet along a creek). Disputes got settled through peer arbitration. Men who cheated found themselves expelled from the community and effectively blacklisted. Order emerged from the bottom up, forged by people who had skin in the game and zero patience for freeloaders. The Canadian government eventually showed up, of course. The North-West Mounted Police imposed royalty schemes (initially 10% of gross output, later modified under pressure), created licensing requirements, and generally inserted themselves into an already-functioning productive order. Costs rose. Smaller operators got squeezed out. The big corporate dredging operations that dominated the Klondike after 1900 were partly a product of regulatory overhead that only large capital could absorb. Regulation priced out the little guy instead of protecting him. The deeper lesson here is about scarcity and title. The frozen ground had zero economic value until individual human action transformed it. A man who spent months hacking permafrost to extract gold had a legitimate property claim not because a government granted him a certificate, but because he mixed his labor and his life with that resource. Property rights precede the state. They don't flow from it. Dawson City proved it empirically in one of the harshest environments on earth. People like to treat property rights as a polite legal convention, something courts invented to keep things tidy. Try to tell that to a man who spent the winter of 1897 in a canvas tent at forty below, defending his claim with a rifle and a handshake agreement.

Sweordplega

I beg philosophers to please stop describing theories of universals as 'Platonism'. To describe Plato's ideas as 'universals' already concedes to Aristotle the mistaken impression that his ideas are universal and not particular, real and not ideal, or one and not many. As Lloyd Gerson shows us, Plato had never used the word 'universal' (καθόλου), but had instead spoken of the 'ideas' (εἴδη), which derives from the Proto-Indo-European root 'weid-', 'to see', from which we also derive the English words 'video' and 'wisdom'. As Paul Natorp reminded us in his famous 1903 book 'Platos Ideenlehre', these ideas are, for Plato, less the subsistent universal forms of paradigmatic self-predication, but rather posited as the hypothetical starting points for dialectical circles, in which argument opens way of seeing and knowing. The common mistake of all theories of universals from Porphyry to Ockham results from an abstract elevation of universality, reality, unity, etc. above its subaltern opposite, such that, as in Aristotle's 'Third Man Argument', the 'third' universal stands unrelated to the multiple particular instances for which it has been posited as a unitary subsisting reality to explain. Source: Gerson, L. P. (2004). Platonism and the invention of the problem of universals. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 86(3), 233–256.