censorship – The Burning Platform

Amid the Absurdity of Clownworld: How Should We Then Live?

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

I believe people are as they think. The choice we make in the next decade will mold irrevocably the direction of our culture… and the lives of our children.

– Author and theologian Francis A. Schaeffer in 1976

The picture at the top of this article shows one of America’s founding fathers according to Google’s Gemini image generation tool. Pursuant to complaints about the blatant inaccuracy and the ensuing maelstrom of negative press coverage, Google claimed it was “actively working on a fix”. Nonetheless, there remain claims that Google is “not telling the truth” and the company will never give up on its “desire to reshape the world in a specific way”.

Indeed. It appears artificial intelligence, woke relativism, and Orwell’s “two plus two equaling five” are here to stay. And the “memory hole” first conjured by Orwell has increasingly manifested in The Borg’s nearly completed Simulacrum – as misinformation, false flags, and propaganda daily populate our collective screens.

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With that in mind, amid the absurdity of Western culture in the twenty-first century, I will often seek credible information and insights where they are more surely found: in the printed past, and by the words of authors and researchers mostly forgotten.

Having written previously on the prescient prognostications of twentieth-century thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Augusto Del Noce, another book was recommended by a commenter in the thread of my last article. The book was said to have predicted the decline of empirical science, the rise of technological science, and a frightening future.

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Embracing Realism with an Attitude of Pessimism and a Foreboding Sense of Fatalism

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted – but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.

– Straus and Howe (1997): “The Fourth Turning”, FIRST EDITION page 2

The books “Generations” (1992) and “The Fourth Turning“ (1997) by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe identified and categorized recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras. Both books analyzed the timelines of historical events and correlated them to specific life cycles identified as generational “types”. Strauss and Howe addressed the concept of time in the context of both circular and linear perspectives. In so doing, they described the “saeculum” as a “long human life” measuring approximately 80 to 90 years and comprised of four turnings, each lasting around 20 to 22 years.

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Gladness and Silence amid Chaos and Violence

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery, and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries.

… The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes, and of the abominations of the earth.

– Revelation 17:1-5

I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped rightly upon her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.

― MacDonald, John D. (1966). “Darker Than Amber”, Travis McGee series, Random House LLC, 2013, pgs 56-57

We live in an age of wizards and whores where souls are sold in the pursuit of material pleasures. Time-honored principles have been traded for profit and power as lawlessness intensifies.

The word “mystery” is defined as “something not understood or beyond understanding” or, in a religious sense: “truth that one can know only by revelation and cannot fully understand”. This would imply more than simply not knowing. A mystery can be that which exceeds human understanding.

There is a saying I’ve heard over and over in my life that has… for the most part… been stated by older men with whom I’ve been related and/or acquainted: “The older I get, the less I know”.

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Tradition Is Not the Worship of Ashes

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

– Ephesians 6:12

As World War III recently expanded into the Middle East, I was reminded of an article I posted last summer where I mentioned my lack of interest in the news. Honestly, in these times, I have become more interested in things I can control.

Nevertheless, in the thread of that article, a commenter claimed that “news fatigue” was by design and “the less interested people are in what’s going on in the world, the more [The Powers That Be] can get away with. “

That is an interesting notion, indeed.

That same commenter also included a YouTube link to a 2016 documentary entitled Hypernormalisation. In viewing that three-hour video, I found it to be mostly correct and on the right track, so to speak. However, because that particular BBC-funded production emphasized the wrong historical “tracks”, it missed the correct destination by its conclusion; and being mostly right is not all right.

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A World Without Truth is a Game Without Rules

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

While recovering from an injury years ago I had some time on my hands. Between various books and chapters, I watched several episodes of the HBO television series “Game of Thrones” (GoT). The show ran eight seasons from 2011 to 2019 and I found the series to be very well-produced with an impressive cast of actors and intriguing plotlines.

There are elements of fantasy in GoT as in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” paired with echoes of epic storytelling from medieval legends like Robin Hood or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But what appealed to me the most in the early seasons of GoT were the gritty politics and the realistic human consequences of actions, alliances, and betrayals.

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