#2

Iron Age, actually. And a fabulously wealthy kingdom at times.

Perhaps a reset to current intel rather than the old, tired, worn out 'New Atheist' propaganda that was frankly irritating even to atheists.

Or, if you only have a few seconds...

- Funny: 1

For when it's all ya gots.

Out of seconds, even?

We'll have to order you some!

Had Edgar Cayce or Nostradamus written these predictions, people would be going apesht over them:

#9

Well... some posters here DO seem like the result of trillions of years of a Mindless Process (see #4) but not everyone and everything. But glad to have your OPINION.

"Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots," Thiel said, "we should consider ... the secret coordination of the world's intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana."

This surveillance supersystem, Thiel wrote, could act as "a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks."

;;

"Sitting down the seminar table from Thiel, Palaver had no idea that Thiel had more than an academic interest in spycraft.

Just a year earlier, Thiel had quietly incorporated a new company called Palantir Technologies, where he would spend the next two decades developing some of the most sophisticated surveillance infrastructure in human history.

At the time of the conference, the firm was still in its infancy. But it would soon land its first major client: the CIA."

"It was a fairly shallow gloss on Girard's theory. But to many Girardians, it suggested Vance knew exactly what he was doing when"two months after Donald Trump selected him as a running mate"the nominee began tweeting that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets.

And when, on the campaign trail and in televised debates, he contorted himself to blame nearly every American crisis on immigrants."

;;

"For some Girardians, this was a breaking point. The mimetic theorist Bernard Perret lambasted Vance and his billionaire mentor in a French political journal, accusing them of "casting a shadow over Girard's legacy."

Within months, several more prominent Girardians followed suit.

"It's difficult to claim Girard, who fundamentally believes that violence is linked to exclusion, and at the same time to accuse Haitians of eating dogs," Girardian scholar Paul Dumouchel told a Canadian newspaper.

"Either you didn't understand Girard, or you're a liar."

"By February of 2025, Thiel's Armageddon tour had gotten to the point where he was handing out T-shirts that said
"Don't Immanentize the Katechon." (This was a nerdy Thielian play on the anti-utopian quote, "Don't immanentize the eschaton""meaning don't try to manifest heaven on Earth.)

In a recent interview, Thiel was asked whether or not Donald Trump might be the katechon, and he refused to answer.

His reticence to name a katechon is a lesson he seems to take directly from Palaver's account of Schmitt and Hitler.

"If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong," Thiel told Cowen. "There's always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist," he said, echoing Palaver's 1996 paper."

;;

"Throughout Thiel's strange circuit as an itinerant preacher, he and Palaver have been in frequent touch.

The first time I spoke with Palaver, he'd recently emailed Thiel to express his disgust over JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference, where the vice president called for greater inclusion of nationalist populist parties like Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany.

Thiel engaged with Palaver's criticism of Vance without really conceding it, Palaver says. Whether the message trickled down to the vice president is unclear."

"Less than a month before Douthat spoke with Thiel, I posed the exact same question to Palaver, and it elicited more of a response.

Why was Thiel, given his fixation on preventing a one-world state, building surveillance tools that a totalitarian dictator could use to seize power? Was he on the side of the katechon or the Antichrist?

"Palaver has decided that he has to pick his battles with Thiel. "We have different political views of the world. That's quite clear for him and for me," he says.

But matters of religion are different. "That's where I hopefully can have an influence on him," Palaver says. Ultimately, Thiel needs to choose who he is going to imitate.

"In the end, you have to decide: Are you really going to be a Christian in a proper sense? Or are you a Schmittian?"

Carl Schmitt Is Not Your Friend

Jordan Peterson & Peter Thiel