He was convicted of robbing, kidnapping, sodomizing and sexually abusing a woman he didn’t know btw, and her excuse for halving the sentence was “he fell through the cracks [as a black man] in this society.”
“Off the record, the defendant was speaking to Ms. Zgonjanin [the victim] and stated, ‘I will see you in 20 years, b****,’” Judge Davis read aloud. “On the record, in front of the entire court, he stated, ‘D**** s*****, f**** y’all kids, and f**** y’all’s dead loved ones.’ In addition to that, speaking directly to the court, he said, ‘Eat my d****, b****. I’m going to pop your *** and s*** my d***, b****.’”
Additionally, below is the exchange that preceded Judge Davis’s decision to forgo the jury’s recommended sentence in favor of a lighter sentence (mind you he was telling the court this while she was actively handing out the sentence):
Thompson: “I don’t have sympathy for nobody.”
Judge Davis: “If you come in here and you show the court –"
Thompson: “I don’t have sympathy for you, the victim, the victim’s family.”
Judge Davis: “We don’t need your sympathy.”
Thompson: “I don’t care.”
Judge Davis: “That’s fine.”
Jul 22, 2025 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I’m deeply suspicious of Thomas Massie because of his funding sources and you should probably be too.
China is retaliating against by exposing the 100%-1000% markups by US brands on items manufactured in China for pennies on the dollar.
1/x
Lululemon:
Birkenstocks
2/x
Apr 4, 2025 • 6 tweets • 6 min read
In 2011, my papa was laid off from a Whirlpool manufacturing plant, the kind that had for so long made America great. In the wake of the financial crisis, the C-suite had decided to offshore operations to Mexico.
The plant they shuttered was a 1.2 million sq ft manufacturing plant, and overnight, 1,000 people lost their jobs. Many of whom had been working there for decades.
My papa was 57 years old when he got laid off. He had worked at that very same plant for over 30 years, and snap just like that, it was all gone.
1/6
When I was a little girl, from as far back as I could remember, my papa woke up at 3:30 am and drove the 40 minutes to the plant from the rural 1,200-person town every single day. And for 30 years, he worked what were often 10-12 hour shifts with no complaints.
I grew up a Navy brat, so I didn’t get to see my grandparents except for a few months during the summer, but I remember my papa exerting the last drop of his energy so he could spend time with us going to the creek, building us a tree house, riding horses, and playing cowboys and Indians.
Every evening, starting from when I was in grade school, my papa and I would sit in the living room and watch the History Channel, Animal Planet, and Bill O’Reilly and hee-haw together about what the Democrats were doing, as much as an eight-year-old can.
My papa and my nana had been together since they graduated high school; they got married at barely 18 and had my mom less than a year later and my aunt soon after that.
They had a small homestead, owned most of what they had outright, and they were poor, but poor doesn’t have to mean that much when you can work the land.
My nana worked as the local school’s secretary, and my papa had good benefits with his manufacturing job. They only ever went out to eat on special occasions. McDonald’s was a birthday-only type of affair. They had a one-acre garden, a few head of cattle, would can fruits and vegetables at the end of every summer, and freeze chopped okra, blueberries, meat from wild hogs and venison in an old chest freezer in the workshop.
2/6
Jan 31, 2025 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Trump had just signed the EO banning Trans people from the military two days prior.
The trans identified male was allegedly the command of the flight.
I could always be wrong, but this entire thing is starting to seem a bit like reactionary trans terrorism event.
The H-1B work visa is fundamentally about cheap, de facto indentured labor. Tech industry lobbyists pitch it as a fix for labor shortages and a way to hire the world’s “best and brightest."
In practice, these claims are invalid. Most H-1Bs, even those hired from U.S. universities, are ordinary workers doing ordinary jobs, and their overall quality is often lower than that of Americans.
This program isn’t used because there are no qualified Americans. It’s about cheap, immobile labor:
Type I Wage Savings:
- Paying H-1Bs less than comparable Americans (in fully legal ways, thanks to loopholes).
- Most H-1Bs are under 30, and younger workers cost less in wages and healthcare, so employers use H-1B to avoid hiring older Americans, where “old” means 35. The key is the four-tier prevailing wage system, which effectively sets wage floors by level of “experience”—in reality, by age.
Type II Wage Savings:
- Hiring younger, cheaper workers to avoid employing Americans over 35, who command higher salaries.
- The primary appeal of H-1Bs, especially in Silicon Valley, is their “handcuffed” status. Sponsored workers cannot easily leave, particularly if a green card application is underway, making them extremely attractive to employers. Even supporters of H-1B, like Vivek Wadhwa, have admitted underpaying H-1Bs. Multiple studies show that H-1Bs are often paid less than similarly-qualified Americans. This is partly because H-1Bs, lacking mobility, cannot negotiate better pay.
Abuse of H-1B runs throughout the tech industry, including large U.S. firms and top immigration law firms, not just Indian “body shops.”
It also occurs in hiring foreign students at U.S. campuses.
Underpayment of H-1Bs is a documented fact, supported by congressional reports and multiple academic studies. Even staunch defenders of foreign worker programs have admitted it:
“I know from my experience as a tech CEO that H-1Bs are cheaper than domestic hires…[the] mechanism is riddled with loopholes.” — Vivek Wadhwa, former tech CEO and vocal advocate of expansion
Representative Zoe Lofgren, historically the H-1B program’s strongest ally in Congress, has also acknowledged that undercutting American wages is built into the system:
“…the average wage for computer systems analysts in [Silicon Valley] is $92,000, but the prevailing wage rate for H-1Bs in the same job is $52,000.” — Rep. Zoe Lofgren
Though Lofgren proposed a 2011 reform bill, it would not have closed major loopholes and would have added a “automatic green card” track. It also scapegoated Indian IT services, which is inaccurate and overlooks that the entire industry uses H-1B for cheap labor.
Underpayment is usually legal due to loopholes in H-1B law, not due to lax enforcement.
For instance:
The “prevailing wage” excludes market premiums for “hot” skills, so the legally required wage is lower than the true market rate.
The “actual wage” (paid to workers in the same job) can be dodged if the employer redefines jobs or if most workers in that role are also H-1Bs.
PERM data show employers routinely pay H-1Bs only at or near the prevailing wage. This underpayment pervades not just Indian “bodyshops” but also big mainstream U.S. tech firms.
Though visa sponsorship costs a few thousand dollars, employers easily recoup that by saving tens of thousands annually per underpaid foreign worker.
No credible (non-industry-sponsored) study shows a tech labor shortage.
Wages for both entry-level and experienced professionals remain largely flat. Unemployment figures don’t capture underemployment or forced career changes.
Undergraduate STEM programs produce more than enough bachelor’s graduates. The supposed shortage at the PhD level stems from the influx of foreign grad students, which depresses wages and discourages Americans from pursuing doctoral degrees—exactly as predicted by an NSF internal report in 1989. Even the NIH found that a glut of foreign lab scientists drives talented Americans away from the field.
In reality, employers hire only a fraction of domestic applicants, often discarding those deemed “too expensive” (i.e., over 35). Companies also exploit H-1Bs for offshoring facilitation, contradicting claims that visas prevent shipping jobs overseas.
Industry advocates say H-1B is needed to keep “the best and brightest” in the U.S., but most H-1Bs are not in that elite category, and Americans with experience or advanced degrees often match or exceed their innovation potential. Research shows no patenting advantage for H-1Bs, and some evidence suggests the opposite.
Green card fast-tracks won’t fix age discrimination; foreign workers would still be young and cheap relative to older Americans. Calls to keep foreign students in the U.S. so they don’t help competitors are disingenuous; many do transnational work anyway.
Except in very narrow cases, employers are not required to recruit Americans first. Inflated claims that each H-1B job “creates” additional jobs have been discredited. Meanwhile, most foreign students who want to stay, do stay.
At a minimum, the definition of prevailing wage needs to be changed in the legislation to reflect genuine market pay.
IMPORTANTLY, provisions targeting fraud/enforcement are less crucial because the main problem is legal loopholes, not illegal conduct.
THE ISSUE IS NOT FRAUD
They are trying to hide the ball by saying there needs to be reform to prevent fraud.
The LOOPHOLES are the issue, and this is something that they conveniently obfuscate and detract from.
Comprehensive study done on abuses of the program from 2003—abuses that have never actually been reformed:
While it is accurate that some individuals develop an unhealthy fixation on the pursuit of sexual or emotional validation from women, many fail to disentangle the object of that fixation from the underlying pathology driving it.
The conceptual error often made is treating “women” as if they were an inherently causative agent, when in reality women, like any external stimulus, are not the prime movers of the compulsion. Rather, the root problem is in the internal psychological and behavioral patterns of the individual who becomes addicted to the pursuit itself, similarly to someone who becomes addicted to a substance vis a vis their own psychological vulnerabilities and neurochemical reward circuits that reinforce the behavior, a dispositional proclivity that exists independent of the properties of the drug itself.
In this regard, women function as the stimulus that triggers, or at least reinforces, a preexisting proclivity toward dependence and fixation. The underlying issue is the internal relationship the individual has cultivated with that stimulus.
For example, an individual might develop a reinforcement loop wherein the attention and sexual validation they receive from women creates a reward-driven loop that manifests as a pathological fixation. This would produce symptoms analogous to substance addiction, i.e., obsessive thinking, tolerance (needing more attention or more intense encounters to feel the same “high”), and withdrawal-like distress when the desired stimulus is unavailable. The individual might similarly do whatever it takes, to their own humiliation, detriment, social standing, dignity, what have you, to get "a fix."
Many fail to recognize that the “pathogen” is not women, per se, but the addictive behavior patterns and the distorted cognitive motivation that leads to the preoccupation that produces "simping." The solution is therefore remediating the underlying maladaptive emotional and psychological schemas, but many actually fail to address this, and instead solve their preoccupation by developing a deep seated hatred and resentment of women, which is just as pathological a response.
It seems a lot of individuals swing to the opposite extreme through developing a seething hatred of women as though they constitute the root cause of the internally occurring pathological dynamic. This externalizes the problem and obscures the root cause of the internal dysfunction.
It seems many have developed this response and have adopted an entrenched form of resentment/fear, that almost manifests as a phobic aversion, a deep seated “fear of ass.” This is further catalyzed when you factor in the fear of rejection that many men have and how many externalize their fear of rejection, and it transmutates into a fear of women.
The above dynamic is why so many men now manifest with what has been described as being "spiritually gay."
The Fragility of Liberal Universalism: Epistemic Contingency and the Collapse of the Noble Lie
🧵Essay thread on some of the conclusions I’ve come to over the last couple years—after a lot of reading, writing, and thinking. 🧵
1/x
Classical liberalism’s foundational reliance on “natural law” unveils an intrinsic epistemic contradiction—a dialectical dissonance deliberately obscured by a constructed noble lie.
This noble lie, contingent on an amorphous framework of “God-given” or “natural” rights, is purposefully vague, a calculated ecumenical abstraction meant to accommodate diverse and often incompatible theological and epistemological foundations. Natural law’s character as a noble lie becomes painfully evident when those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, gnostics, and pantheists apply painfully contrived polemics extolling the principle of a set of “God-given” or “transcendentally endowed” rights or privileges—thus, the contradiction becomes evident as foundational to its very structure.
The liberal invocation of a universal, indeterminate “transcendent essence” serves as a pseudo-metaphysical pivot, providing a shared yet unexamined substrate upon which disparate ideologies coalesce. Such an arrangement allowed classical liberalism to project a veneer of universalism without necessitating ontological consensus on the source or substance of rights. Initially pragmatic, this abstraction unified factions across the Protestant fragmentation by appealing to a minimalistic, malleable principle rather than demanding a rigorous metaphysical commitment. However, the viability of this construct is inherently contingent upon the willingness of all constituent groups to tacitly uphold some transcendent referent.
The rise of postmodern and deconstructionist cosmologies—worldviews fundamentally averse to transcendental principles and favoring instead immanent, relativistic frameworks—effectively destabilizes this liberal noble lie, exposing the conceptual edifice of natural law as contingent and context-bound rather than universally axiomatic. Herein lies liberalism’s epistemic fragility: it asserts universality while tacitly relying on a metaphysical scaffold that is neither universally acknowledged nor objective. The maintenance of democratic pluralism is thus, tenuously supported by some vague acknowledgment or deferral to “consensus,” or in other words, “common sense,” while simultaneously extolling that the “common” is made empirically self-evident by “the divine.”
The resulting self-referentiality permeates multiple socio-political domains, revealing liberalism’s supposed universality as selective, culturally particular, and deeply embedded in Western, Protestant-influenced ontologies. When transplanted onto international frameworks, liberalism’s universalist pretensions encounter insurmountable dissonance, as societies rooted in fundamentally distinct metaphysical traditions find liberal constructs culturally myopic and epistemically incongruent. Thus, what is projected as universal becomes, on closer inspection, a parochial value system, one implicitly reliant on Western hegemony for its preservation and extension.
2/x
On the national front, the liberal framework promises a “marketplace of ideas” ostensibly open to pluralism; however, the operative tolerance in this model is intrinsically conditional, limited by liberalism’s own epistemological strictures. While classical liberals extol open discourse, this tolerance is selectively extended only to perspectives that uphold or minimally disrupt the liberal order. When dissident ideologies emerge that threaten to destabilize the natural law construct or illuminate the relativistic nature of liberal epistemology, liberalism’s commitment to pluralism dissipates. In practice, this marketplace of ideas becomes a meticulously curated sphere, where destabilizing critiques are systematically neutralized, not through dialectical engagement but through ideological gatekeeping—often through straw man fallacies, ad hominem dismissals, or outright exclusion. Liberalism’s purported anti-authoritarianism is thus conditional and self-canceling; it is contingent on the preservation of ideological coherence, resulting in a latent authoritarianism that suppresses divergence under the guise of safeguarding pluralism.
In social and cultural spheres, the contradictions in liberalism’s pluralism become more explicit. Liberal tolerance is predicated on an assumption that identity-based affiliations will conform to liberal individualism, maintaining social cohesion without challenging the primacy of individual autonomy. As long as intergroup relations do not expose structural deficiencies in the liberal framework, diversity is nominally celebrated. However, when identity-based collectives underscore the limitations of liberal egalitarianism—by emphasizing hierarchies or communitarian structures irreducible to individual merit—liberal tolerance wanes. Rather than re-examining the structural rigidity of its own ideological framework, liberalism opts to delegitimize such critiques, framing them as threats to social cohesion or as obstacles to “progress.” Here, liberalism reveals its own limitations: it endorses diversity only so far as it aligns with individualistic ethos, refusing to entertain forms of plurality that expose liberalism’s inherent incapacity to reconcile group identities within a strictly individualistic model.
Religiously, the liberal reliance on natural law as a cohesive foundation emerged as a pragmatic response to Protestant fragmentation, enabling a minimalistic unification of divergent denominations through the ambiguous invocation of “God-given rights.” This framework operated effectively within a theistic paradigm, where a shared belief in a transcendent order lent credence to the liberal construct. However, as secularization progresses and materialist cosmologies proliferate, this shared fiction begins to disintegrate. Secular, immanent frameworks increasingly challenge the liberal appeal to transcendent rights, viewing them as socially constructed rather than metaphysically grounded. The dissolution of a shared metaphysical foundation thus reveals liberalism’s reliance on natural law as an instrumental strategy rather than a genuinely ontological commitment. Once reinterpreted as a social construct, natural law’s unifying potency fades, destabilizing the liberal model’s claim to universality and coherence.
Sep 14, 2024 • 19 tweets • 7 min read
Unraveling the Cultural DNA of the West: Self-Referential Paradoxes and the Crisis of Identity
A thread 🧵
1/18
The Unraveling
Imagine Western culture as a DNA strand—the fundamental code that transmits our collective identity across generations. Now envision this DNA being bombarded with radiation, causing it to unravel and mutate uncontrollably. The irradiation symbolizes the destabilization of foundational value systems. As the DNA unravels, the genetic information—our shared values, beliefs, and traditions—becomes corrupted and fragmented. This disintegration mirrors how the erosion of cultural transmission leads to individuals disconnected from their heritage, floating aimlessly in existential ambiguity. The unraveling irradiated DNA strand serves as an analogy for the self-referential paradoxes and intractable transmissibility issues plaguing modern Western culture, leading to hyper-individualization, social fragmentation, and a descent into nihilism.
2/18
A Fascinating Yet Horrifying Transformation
The current trajectory of the progressive transmutation of, broadly construed, Western culture is fascinating in a horrifyingly morbid, slow-moving train wreck sort of way. The relationship between the process of self-individuation and its necessary, formational dependence on generational transmission of social and cultural value systems is being actively sublated from its requisite contingent. Any absence or warbling of the foundational reliance on this predicate first-order principle generates an intractable transmissibility issue.
Aug 25, 2024 • 20 tweets • 12 min read
Just gonna leave this here
Aug 21, 2024 • 50 tweets • 24 min read
🧵A Thread on Joe Biden's Horrific Federal Judicial Appointments🧵:
1/x
President Joe Biden's judicial appointments are reshaping the federal judiciary, prioritizing diversity over the traditional focus on professional experience. 2/x
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court has been criticized not only for her lack of extensive judicial experience—having spent just a short time on the D.C. Circuit before being elevated—but also for her record on several controversial issues. She has a history of lenient sentencing in cases involving child pornography, which many see as troubling, especially in comparison to Trump appointees who often emphasized strict adherence to sentencing guidelines.
Moreover, Jackson has advocated for more lenient treatment of illegal immigrants and has been supportive of progressive stances on transgender rights, which critics argue reflects an ideological agenda rather than a balanced judicial approach.
Aug 6, 2024 • 17 tweets • 18 min read
Tim Walz Signed a Bill Redefining the Term "Sexual Orientation" to INCLUDE PEDOPHILES.
🧵A Thread 🧵
1/x
On 02/13/2023, Leigh Finke, a trans identified male, Introduced H. F. No. 1655, which redefined "Sexual Orientation."
Link to the amendment:
In this amendment, Finke CROSSED OUT the section that expressly precluded pedophiles from falling under the definition of "Sexual orientation."
In the old bill, the definition "Sexual orientation" delineated which people were were protected under the Minnesota Human Rights Statute, making it a violation to discriminate against those falling under that definition. This old definition EXPLICITLY EXCLUDED pedophiles through the addition of this phrase to the definition: "Sexual orientation" does not include a physical 1.20 or sexual attachment to children by an adult.
The bill then passed the committee was adopted.
Link to Minutes:
Link to the video stream of the hearing:
The amendment to 2022 c 52 art 19 s 44, (yes, this includes the section crossing out the pedophile exclusion), is characterized by Finke in the committee hearing as "modernizing" the terminology to reflect more contemporary understandings of sexual orientation and gender.
The most disturbing part of this bill, is that it went through MULTIPLE revisions, and in EVERY. SINGLE. REVISION., they kept the pedophile exclusion crossed out.
This trans-identified male is running for his local school board while scrambling to erase disturbing videos that expose his dom/sub sex work. These videos graphically depict his sadomasochistic role-play scenarios where he is sex-trafficked.
Spread the word.
A thread
1/x
I just realized the videos in this thread never uploaded as apparently there was a glitch so I am reposting.
2/x
Aug 5, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you weren't already convinced that mass immigration is being used as a "biological weapon" against the host populations for the purpose of weakening worker protections and devaluing labor through a surplus of low quality cheap labor, here it is.
This is not, and never was, about some mission to absolve or remediate global poverty. It is profoundly selfish and is at the behest of a few influential figures who pull the strings of world leaders vis a vis a global megacorp, with the supra-national bodes of global governance acting as the puppet as it pulls the strings.
The aim is global technocratic rule. The pernicious part is the fact they hide behind empathy and humanitarianism to bring about profound suffering and destabilization.
Do not be a fool.
Jul 31, 2024 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
The pathology that manifests on the right is the idolization of the normative, while the pathology of the left is the normalization of the deviant.
When the “norm” becomes the aspirational point of reference, it is placed on a pedestal. Consequently, “normal” people are expected to aspire to this idealized norm. However, a fundamental issue arises: if those who are already considered normal possess the traits deemed aspirational, there is nothing external to oneself to strive for. As a result, the idolatry of the normative necessitates its transformation into something that appears normative but has not yet been achieved by those embodying societal norms.
1/9
This new normative ideal must be continually modified. Over time, it transmutes into a caricature that is not even recognizable as the old ideal. It becomes a simulacrum of the normative. This process does not sustain the original character; rather, through flaws and pathological means, it attempts to tweak the norm to align with contemporary conditions, under the mistaken belief that this will recreate a social character similar to an arbitrary normative ideal from the past. Normativity is thus continually recalibrated toward what it believes will reproduce this ideal character, but through a distorted logic that cannot truly recreate the past.
Ultimately, the pathology on the right culminates in the idolization of what once would have been unequivocally considered deviant.
2/9
Jul 29, 2024 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Meta is now censoring the assassination attempt and labelling photos "altered."
The DOJ made a call to Zuck. Just like with google, bing, and duck duck go. When the FBI says dance, they all start dancing.
Biden laptop 2.0.
🧵Thread of companies that are doing this:
1/x 2/x
Jul 26, 2024 • 126 tweets • 76 min read
Some of Chris Tyson's old deleted posts across a variety of social media platforms have been dug up, including from his old reddit account u/tysonboy34, and they are incredibly disturbing.
A thread:
I will add to this thread as I find more
1/x
2/x
May 4, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
There's something in the air
These have between 150k -1 million likes on TikTok
A thread 1/x
Mar 28, 2024 • 11 tweets • 23 min read
Hegel's Mystical Materialism and The Lurianic Modernity
A thread
🧵 1/10
Table of Contents
1/10. Introduction
2/10. Lurianic Kabbalah
3/10. The Mystical Idea in German Idealism
4/10. Hegel's Mystical Materialism
5/10. Karl Marx's Dialectical Materialism and its Mystical Structure
6/10. Walter Benjamin and Messianic Marxism
7/10. Erich Fromm and Radical Tradition
8/10. Deconstruction and Kabbalistic Hermeneutics
9/10. Gnostic, Lurianic, and Hegelian Concept Map
10/10. Cosmological Overlap Between Gnosticism, Hegelianism, and Lurianic Kabbalah:
X/10. Works Cited
Introduction
The recognition of this esoteric undercurrent in modern thought has significant implications for our understanding of the intellectual history of modernity. It challenges the conventional narrative of a purely rational, secular modernity, revealing instead a complex dialectic between reason and mysticism, enlightenment, and esotericism. The persistence of Gnostic and Kabbalistic themes in the works of thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida suggests that these esoteric traditions have played a vital role in shaping the very categories and concerns of modern thought, from the nature of subjectivity and language to the philosophy of history and the critique of ideology.
Moreover, the Kabbalistic and Gnostic elements in modern philosophy point to a deeper continuity between ancient and modern forms of thought, one that transcends the conventional boundaries of religion, philosophy, and politics. The recurrence of motifs such as the self-alienation of the divine, the exile and redemption of the soul, and the utopian hope for cosmic repair suggests a persistent human need to grapple with the fundamental questions of existence, a need that finds expression in both religious and secular forms of discourse.
Ultimately, I am arguing that recognizing the Kabbalistic and Gnostic underpinnings of modern thought allows us to fully evaluate the influences contributing to philosophical modernity and allows us to obtain a better understanding of the challenges posed by the crises of meaning and purpose in our late modern age.
2/10
Lurianic Kabbalah
Lurianic Kabbalah had a major impact on Christian thinkers like Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), whose mystical writings were a key source for the German Idealist tradition. F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854), in his "Philosophy of Revelation," explicitly drew on Böhme and Kabbalah in his conception of the divine life and the process of creation.
Lurianic Kabbalah's influence on German Idealism is particularly noteworthy, as its key concepts and cosmological structure find striking parallels in the works of thinkers such as F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. As noted by Gershom Scholem in his essay "Schelling and Kabbalah" (1962), Schelling's engagement with Kabbalistic ideas, particularly those of the Lurianic tradition, played a significant role in shaping his philosophical vision.
Schelling's concept of the "Absolute" as a dynamic, self-differentiating unity bears a remarkable resemblance to the Lurianic idea of Ein Sof, the infinite divine source that undergoes a process of contraction (Tzimtzum) and emanation (Sefirot) in order to create the world. For Schelling, as for the Lurianic Kabbalists, the finite world of nature and history is a necessary moment in the self-revelation of the divine, a process marked by rupture, alienation, and reconciliation (Vater, "Schelling and the Kabbalah: Myth, Revelation, Pantheism", 1996). This Kabbalistic underpinning of Schelling's thought is further evident in his conception of evil as a necessary stage in the unfolding of the Absolute.
In his "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom" (1809), Schelling draws upon the Lurianic idea of the "shattering of the vessels" (Shevirat HaKelim) to articulate a metaphysical account of the origin and significance of evil. Just as in Lurianic Kabbalah, where the broken shards of the divine vessels give rise to the realm of the Kelipot (shells of evil), Schelling views evil as a byproduct of the Absolute's self-differentiation, a dark residue that must be confronted and integrated into the divine life (O'Regan, "The Heterodox Hegel", 1994).
Hegel's philosophical system, in turn, can be seen as a further development and transformation of these Schellingian and Lurianic themes. As Glenn Alexander Magee argues in his book "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" (2001), Hegel's dialectical conception of reality as a process of alienation and reconciliation is deeply indebted to Kabbalistic and Gnostic ideas. The Hegelian notion of "absolute negativity," the driving force behind the dialectic, bears a striking similarity to the Lurianic concept of Tzimtzum, the divine contraction that creates the space for otherness and difference.
Moreover, Hegel's understanding of history as a progressive unfolding of the Absolute Spirit (Geist) towards self-consciousness and freedom can be seen as a philosophical transposition of the Lurianic idea of Tikkun, the cosmic process of repair and restoration. Just as in Lurianic Kabbalah, where the divine sparks (Nitzotzot) scattered throughout creation must be gathered and reunited with their source, Hegel envisions history as a gradual process of overcoming alienation and fragmentation, culminating in the realization of "absolute knowledge" (Wolfson, "Hegel and the Kabbalah of the Absolute", 2011).
The Kabbalistic resonances in Hegel's thought are further amplified by his appropriation of the Christian Kabbalistic tradition, particularly the works of Jakob Böhme. As Cyril O'Regan demonstrates in his book "The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar's Response to Philosophical Modernity. Volume 1: Hegel" (2014), Hegel's engagement with Böhme's theosophical speculations played a crucial role in shaping his dialectical vision of reality. Böhme's Kabbalistic understanding of God as a dynamic, self-differentiating unity, as well as his conception of evil as a necessary moment in the divine life, find clear echoes in Hegel's thought.
This genealogy of Kabbalistic influence, extending from Luria to Schelling, Böhme, and Hegel, highlights the profound impact of Jewish mystical ideas on the development of German Idealism. As Warren Montag argues in his essay "Hegel and the Kabbalists: Death, Desire, and Detachment" (2018), the Kabbalistic substratum of German Idealist thought represents a crucial but often overlooked dimension of modernity's philosophical and theological composition.
Feb 10, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It’s been a death cult for a long, long time, and we are very behind.
These opinions are from the late 1890s— written by members and other individuals connected to the Fabian Society.
Funny how these opinions sound like they could have been written today.
2/x
2/x 
2/x 
