Remedial history for people who take moldbug seriously

At Nick Land's, self-described "actual Calvinist" ashv explains that he's fully on board with moldbuggism, as long as the scapegoating of Calvinists is restricted to New England Puritans:

Regarding the the Moldbuggian ultracalvinism thesis — it’s entirely correct, but its wider reception has ignored several details. It wasn’t the Calvinism per se that launched progressivism, it was Calvinism plus emphasis on emotional conversion experience plus Puritan character. English Puritanism was Calvinist, but so were Scottish Presbyterians and French Huguenots, neither of which contributed significantly to the development of progressivism (the former gave us Carlyle, of course). In America, the Half-way Covenant created Unitarians, the source of Abolition, Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, and so forth. (The Unitarian Universalist history on this is largely accurate: http://uudb.org/articles/unitariancontroversy.html )

America has had its share of rightist/reactionary Calvinists too, as seen in the Southern Presbyterians such as Dabney and Thornwell.

I point out, among other things:

• Unitarianism "began almost simultaneously in Poland-Lithuania and Transylvania in the mid-16th century. Among the adherents were a significant number of Italians."
• "In England, the first Unitarian Church was established in 1774 on Essex Street, London", a decade before the first congregation in New England accepted Unitarianism.
• Abolitionism did not originate with and was never the exclusive province of Unitarians or others of New England Puritan stock.
• The same for "Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, and so forth".

Ashv:

Yeah, this is all irrelevant to the cladistic issue being discussed. There aren’t any original ideas in the world. Do you really want to argue that Carry Nation and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were inspired by the Xia Dynasty?

Nick Land to ashv:

Thanks.

Me to ashv:

ashv,

"Yeah, this is all irrelevant to the cladistic issue being discussed."

Are you fucking retarded? It's irrelevant to your assertion that Unitarianism arose in New England that Unitarian congregations formed in England a decade before the first was founded in New England? It's irrelevant that Unitarianism arose two centuries before this in central Europe?

It's irrelevant to your assertion that "the Moldbuggian ultracalvinism thesis [is] entirely correct" and "It wasn’t the Calvinism per se that launched progressivism, it was Calvinism plus emphasis on emotional conversion experience plus Puritan character." (that New England Puritans, via Unitarians, were "the source of Abolition, Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage") that Royalists, non-dissenting members of the Church of England, Quakers, etc., were involved in abolitionism well before it became popular in New England? It's irrelevant to the assertion that there's something uniquely Protestant about anti-slavery sentiments that anti-slavery sentiment existed in 16th-century Catholic Spain?

No, it's not irrelevant. You're grossly ignorant of basic history, like one has to be to take moldbug seriously.

"There aren’t any original ideas in the world."

If people are able to have ideas without first hearing them from someone else, and if more than one person can have the same idea, this might be a tiny hint that the entire "cladistic" conceptualization of leftism that forms an article of faith for your nerd cult is unfounded.

"Carry Nation"

Carrie Nation was born Carrie Amelia Moore[4] in Garrard County, Kentucky, to George and Mary Campbell Moore. [. . .] In 1874, Carrie married David A. Nation, an attorney, minister, newspaper journalist, and father, 19 years her senior.[1][8] The family purchased a 1,700 acre (690 ha) cotton plantation on the San Bernard River in Brazoria County, Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_Nation

If someone like this strikes you as a Yankee, again, you have a very poor grasp of history.

In fact her ancestry was Irish, Scottish, and Southern. In religion, she was apparently a Methodist.

Now that I've pointed this out, I anticipate you'll attempt to move the goalposts, of course. You don't care about facts. You care about belonging to a clique of nerd pseudo-scholars/pseudo-philosophers who spend more time honing their imitations of moldbug's writing style and reading each other's blog posts than they ever have reading a work of standard history or even the "old books" moldbug told them to read.

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton"

While her ancestry was half-Yankee, it was also half-Dutch/Scottish/Irish. She was raised a Presbyterian (and didn't we just hear from you Presbyterians are not the bad Calvinists):

Her religious skepticism began early in her life. As a young girl she chafed against the Presbyterianism of her family, but the critical turning point came in 1831, when she was a student at Troy Female Seminary http://www.albany.edu/history/digital/stanton/religion.html

Less-orthodox moldbuggist OLF:

And prohibition in China is connected to prohibition in the USA how? Same question with abolition, and everything else you like to cook up.

It’s clear that in case of the USA low-church WASPs were entirely to blame for Progressivism, elsewhere… not so much. Still, compare low-church Lutherans of Finland and Sweden with high-church Lutherans of Germany, for example. It’s clear that low-church Lutherans were lefter than high-church Lutherans despite both being Lutherans, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire as the saying goes.

Me:

OLF,

"It’s clear that in case of the USA low-church WASPs were entirely to blame for Progressivism, elsewhere… not so much."

First, this is moving the goalposts. The line pushed by moldbug, taken up by Nick Land, and taken seriously by people with axes to grind or simply a poor understanding of history and a need to belong to to a quasi-intellectual movement, is specifically that New England Puritans are to blame for "progressivism" everywhere. This is the line that was being pushed by ashv and which I responded to.

Second, no, it's not at all clear "low-church WASPs" were entirely to blame for "progressivism" in the US. If many of the people involved in advancing progressivism in America were Protestant Americans when America was still overwhelmingly peopled by Protestant Americans, this would hardly be surprising. It's obviously not the case that "progressivism" in America has ever been the exclusive domain of "low-church WASPs". Not in the 19th century, and certainly not in the 20th or 21st century.

http://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/09/yankees-and-womens-suffrage.html
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/04/ethnic-origins-of-nations-fifty-most.html
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-25-most-influential-liberals-in-us.html
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-port-huron-statement-not-product-of.html

Nor was America ever cut off intellectually from Europe.