Category Archives: Transhumanist

By Kaity Kempf | LTVN Reporter/Anchor

Reality is starting to look more and more like an episode of Black Mirror every day. But is it something that we should be scared of? Not necessarily.

Recently, many companies are investing in neurotechnological research, with many of them developing implantable brain machine interfaces (BMIs). You probably know about Elon Musk billionaire, CEO of Tesla Motors, CEO of SpaceX, and thats just the beginning of his many achievements. More recently, he is the co-founder of Neuralink.

Even though the company is just now gaining popularity, it was launched back in 2016. Neuralinks initial goal was to create devices to treat serious life-threatening diseases in the short term. However, the company has evolved to much more than that, and it aims to eventually reach human enhancement or transhumanism. Since its start, the company has hired several famous neuroscientists to conduct research for Neuralink, and Musk expressed that 2022 will be the year the company starts its human trials.

So, what should one expect when thinking about undergoing the procedure to receive the implant? As I stated earlier, the chips goals are to enhance humans as a whole, whether that be physically or intellectually. In April 2021, Neuralink exhibited a monkey playing the game Pong with the Neuralink chip installed. Musk has also said that receiving the chip would not be a big surgical procedure but rather would be inserted through a vein or artery.

Unfortunately, the company, and many others similar to it, remains very secretive about its work, so it is hard to fully weigh out the pros and cons of receiving the implant. Still, it leaves us to wonder what each of us would do if presented with a choice to get the brain chip.

Under the right conditions, I would not mind getting the Neuralink chip installed. With that being said, the right conditions would be that the technology has undergone the right trials and been out for a few years and whether I am a healthy individual at that time may sway my opinion even more. If one day I have a life-threatening disease or illness, and the Neuralink chip is the only way to seek any sort of cure, I will be sure to take my chances. At this time, though, with the technology not even out yet and with my health in good standing, I more than likely wouldnt get it installed.

How about yourself? Are you excited about the new prospects of the metaverse, or would you rather play it safe in reality?

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Are chips in brains the next phase of advancement? - The Baylor Lariat

Debate

10:08

by Daniel French

Credit: Getty

The leaking in The Times of a confidential in-house paper on radical restructuring of the Church of England is yet more worrying news. It contains all the management-speak that we have become accustomed to under Justin Welby, but also new details about a diocese merger and specialist episcopal non-geographical appointments, including a Brexit Bishop and a Covid Bishop. How this is supposed to help vicars on the ground is hard to see.

As a vicar of twenty-five years, I despair at the creeping corporatisation of the national Church. Since the mid-1970s, there has been a persistent push from the centre to reject our Anglican sensibilities of subsidiarity and parochialism, resulting in an increasingly politicised Church. A command and control governance overseen by a myriad of Anglican policy czars (usually to the Left) is only going to alienate the laity further and fail to energise the base.

There is an unhealthy paternalism here that seeks to present the clergy as the fonts of all knowledge. It smacks of clericalism. Our job is to get our own house in order first, say our prayers, and achieve theological consensus before we attempt to tell the rest of the country what to think. We utterly failed to achieve this during the pandemic, instead morphing from priests into public health officials at a time when our congregants wanted God. We became, as historian Tom Holland warned, a second rate version of the Liberal Democrats.

No doubt official voices will clamber to the airways to say this is all being done to release the laity. But if we continue to tread down this path of bureaucratisation and politicisation, we will only end up with a depleted and demoralised flock. The bemusement from the public and the pews is matched by the behind the scenes frustration of burnt out bishops and archdeacons too drained by the paperwork to pastor their own clergy. The bloated centre ends up devoured in its own feedback loop.

UnHerd contributor Douglas Murray predicted that the West was overdue for a new religion, arguing that the old supernatural religion of Christianity will emerge with a non-woke face. I would add that for this version of Christianity to work, it must integrate a deep intellectual patrimony as an alternative to the trans-humanist digital technocracy that the Church is drifting towards. This is a very real fear for civil and religious society, but I worry that the CofE is too busy reorganising itself with nonsensical roles and titles to take note.

Daniel French is the vicar of Salcombe, Malborough with South Huish, cohosts the Irreverend podcast and occasionally writes for various publications on faith. He tweets as @holydisruptor

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A Covid Bishop is the last thing my Church needs - UnHerd

Sherri TenpennyPhoto: via Wikipedia

One of the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement claimed on TV that the goal of the governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to make people either chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs.

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny of Ohio is an influential source of COVID-19 misinformation, and she has also got a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, especially about transgender people. She has been using the prestige of her medical degree to push wacky COVID theories like that the vaccines make people magnetic and sell detox products to her gullible followers for years.

Related: One of Americas biggest televangelists died of COVID-19 after his alternative treatments failed

She is especially influential on the religious right. She appeared on The Stew Peters Show, a show that calls people who get vaccinated shot goblins and claims that the vaccines will result in American killing fields.

The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things, Tenpenny said on the program.

She did not explain what exactly a transhumanist cyborg is, but she has attacked transgender people in the past, including making jokes at the expense of transgender peoples identities and implying Pope Francis works for an LGBTQ cabal.

Tenpenny got national attention last year for her claim in front of the Ohio House that the COVID vaccines make people magnetic, but she told Stew Peters that she was somehow proved right.

I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House committee in Columbus, she said. Well, guess what? Its all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and how what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the Internet of Things, the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after youre injected, she continued. You get hooked up to what theyre trying to develop, its called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except its an electronic replica, its not our God-given body that we were born with.

And all of that will be running through the metaverse that theyre talking about. All of these things are real, Stew. All of them. And its happening right now. Its not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; its happening right now in real time.

Tenpenny ranone of the 12 Twitter accounts where 65% of COVID-19 misinformation originated, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, before she got banned from the platform last year for spreading COVID misinformation.

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Prominent Christian doctor claims COVID vaccines will turn people into transhumanist cyborgs - LGBTQ Nation

I first met Sohrab Ahmari, one of the most influential and controversial writers on the American right, a little over a decade ago, during the secular neoconservative phase of his dizzying ideological pilgrimage from Marxist atheism to Catholic post-liberal neo-traditionalism. An intellectually restless law student, Ahmari aspired to a career in journalism, and a mutual frienda human rights activist, as it happenedintroduced us.

Like many immigrants to this country, Ahmari, who was born in Iran, had a way of making you feel obscenely lucky to be born an American, and that you should never take it for granted. The first things that struck me about him were his infectious optimism and seemingly old-world civility. This was about a year after the birth of the Green Movement, when millions of Iranians, mostly our age at the time, poured into the streets to protest the regimes fraudulent presidential election. Ahmari was an eloquent advocate for their democratic aspirations. Though we came from very different backgroundshe, the product of a broken home and a refugee from an Islamic theocracy; I, the son of upper-middle-class Jewish professionals in the most hospitable country Jews have ever knownwe shared a love for the written word and the freedom that America represented.

I connected Ahmari to a few editors, but cant take any credit for his subsequent rise, which has been dramatic. Not long after we met, he co-edited a collection of essays by dissidents from across the Middle East, Arab Spring Dreams: The Next Generation Speaks Out for Freedom and Justice from North Africa to Iran, which included a piece by a gay Moroccan man compelled to mourn his lovers suicide in secret, and for which Ahmari managed to snag a foreword from Gloria Steinem. Around this time, Ahmari joined The Wall Street Journal editorial page, based first in New York and then in London, a perch he used to skewer authoritarians and bolster embattled democrats around the world. While in Britain, Ahmari converted to Catholicism, which he announced publicly in the summer of 2016 after the gruesome murder of a French priest by Islamists in Normandy. Id recently started to notice a more pious bent in Ahmaris writings, and given what I knew of his universalist commitments, this development (which he later recounted in a thoughtful memoir) did not come as a particular surprise. The following year, I attended the baptism of his first child.

When Donald Trump descended onto the political scene in a fit of nativist and isolationist bluster, Ahmari was exactly where I expected him to be. In the summer of 2016, he published a cover story for Commentary, Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis, which diagnosed a transnational, cross-ideological tendency distinguished by, among other things, an impatience with norms and procedural niceties; a tendency toward populist leader-worship; and skepticism toward international treaties and institutions, such as NATO, that provide the scaffolding for the U.S.-led postwar order. Ahmari included Trump alongside other practitioners of such politics like Russian President Vladimir Putin, the xenophobic French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn. The following year, after Trumps shock election victory, and by then a Commentary senior writer, Ahmari published another cover story titled, The Terrible American Turn Toward Illiberalism, in which he presciently decried the perils of conspiracism and romantic politics on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, but especially among his fellow conservatives. Beginning when Trump clinched the GOP nomination last year, he lamented, a great deal of conservative thinking has amounted to:You did X to us, now enjoy it as we dish it back to you and then some.

Like other right-of-center Trump critics, Ahmari hoped to join a broad, bipartisan coalition committed to defending basic liberal values at home and abroad from the whims of a president who threatened to undermine both. But as what should have been a loyal opposition hardened into an often unethical and perpetually panic-stricken resistance, it became harder for self-respecting, intellectually consistent, anti-Trump conservatives to be the team players that their left-of-center peers demanded. In particular, the unscrupulous behavior of Senate Democrats and the media during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle, and the cynical promotion of the Russia collusion narrative, put Ahmari in the position of defending Trump from the hysterical excesses of his adversaries, a cause he would take up with gusto after leaving Commentary in 2018 to become editor of the New York Post op-ed page.

Now at a more populist, pugilistic media outlet than the Journal or Commentary (and one that had endorsed Trump in 2016), Ahmaris targets shifted. Rather than fight an increasingly lonely battle against the enemies of liberal values on both right and left, Ahmari quite rapidly transmogrified into a partisan supporter of the president, in turn appearing to renounce the ideals that had, until quite recently, been his lodestar. He has since become representative of a new intellectual and political redoubt on the American right, one that is fundamentally pessimistic about the country, its people, its values, and its role in the world, imbuing his dizzying personal odyssey of the last 10 years with a broader cultural salience.

In March 2019, the conservative Catholic journal First Things published an open letter that Ahmari helped draft. Titled Against the Dead Consensus, it looked favorably on Trumps takeover of the Republican Party, lambasted consensus conservatives for fetishizing individual autonomy, and condemned other aspects of tyrannical liberalism such as the transhumanist project of radical self-identification. Two months later, Ahmari went further. In Against David French-ism, also published in First Things, he singled out the even-keeled, evangelical political commentator as just the sort of spineless conservative unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. (As the titles of his First Things manifestos suggest, Ahmari had become motivated more by his animosities than his passions.)

As Ahmari defined it, David French-ism is a posture of political engagement too polite, guileless, and respectful of a nonexistent neutral public square for our current predicament, which demands nothing less than an acceptance of politics as war and enmity. Engaged in existential struggle with autonomy-maximizing liberalism, American conservatism could no longer afford to be Burkean, soberly defending the accomplishments of civilization from revolutionary progressivism. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and conservatives must answer the call by becoming revolutionists themselves, harnessing the power of the state to fight mercilessly for a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

What incited Ahmaris broadside against French, and what led him to embrace the very impatience with norms and procedural niceties he had warned against just three years earlier, was not the sort of event that future historians are likely to identify as having clearly distinguished an old political era from a new one, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the murder of George Floyd. Ahmari was perusing Facebook one day when he came upon an ad for a drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento. Organized by private organizations across the country, drag queen reading hours are what they sound like: drag queens reading childrens books aloud to children. More than just exposing youth to different forms of beauty, performance, and experience, it dispels the stigma and stereotypes of predation and lechery that are so often and unfortunately projected onto LGBTQ youth workers, is how one participant described the program. And it does so in such an innocent, playful, and positive way. Its a beautiful thing.

Ahmari expressed his disgust on his popular Twitter feed: If you cant see why children belong nowhere near drag, with its currents of transvestic fetishism, we have nothing to say to each other, he tweeted. We are irreconcilably opposed. Theres no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war. The only way is through. Ahmari singled out French for abuse because French, who, before becoming a journalist had litigated cases for an ecumenical roster of clients on behalf of a conservative religious liberty group, is a prominent advocate of viewpoint-neutral access to public facilities when those facilities are opened up for public use. This is the legal principle that allows, for example, both a private organization to host a drag queen reading hour at a public library in California and a Christian church to host weekend prayer services in public buildings in New York.

No family has ever been forced to send their child to a drag queen reading hour; it was the mere existence of this voluntary event, some 3,000 miles away in Sacramento, that whipped Ahmari into a frenzy.

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Besides the constitutional argument, the French position also represents the broader ethic of pluralism: Just as Ahmari would find it unconscionable for parents in San Francisco to dictate the terms of his childrens education, so they expect noninterference from him. No family has ever been forced to send their child to a drag queen reading hour; it was the mere existence of this voluntary event, some 3,000 miles away in Sacramento, that whipped Ahmari into a frenzy. Never mind that putting a stop to it would require state intervention, thereby junking the First Amendment and its guarantee of free association, which also protects him and his fellow religious conservatives from overweening secularists. This is demonic, Ahmari declared. To hell with liberal order.

Observing Ahmaris breakdown from afar, I felt a pang of guilt. Several years earlier, before his conversion to Catholicism, Id brought him and two other straight friends to a Sunday drag brunch at a restaurant near my home in Washington, D.C. Popular with tourists, the drag brunch is a weekly gay ritual where guests, fueled by bottomless mimosas and Bloody Marys, consume generous helpings of comfort food as drag performers sing and strut around the room. The person at our table who relished the raucous affair most was, by far, Ahmari. Had I mistaken his apparent enjoyment that day for an inner turmoil? Had I helped seed it?

Even understanding that his Catholic conversion would almost certainly lead to a more socially conservative belief system, the nature of Ahmaris attack on French stunned me. It wasnt only that the person Id known to be so unfailingly polite was now embracing public incivility as a positive good. I was also confused by how a drag queen reading Red: A Crayons Story to other peoples children could lead to a wholesale personal and intellectual break.

But homosexuality and nontraditional gender expression are high on the list of fears shared by Ahmari and his fellow travelers on the post-liberal new right. Last year, in his inaugural column for The American Conservative (where he is now a contributing editor), Ahmari explained his trajectory from grateful immigrant convert to the creed of American exceptionalism to a chastened American citizen who now enjoins the leaders of his country to Stop lecturing the world, and for Gods sake, stop trying to remake other societies in your own image. Looking back on his earlier neoconservative political orientation in disbelief, he wondered who could possibly believe such things, but a young opinion journalist with a mind self-marinated in the goopy abstractions of interventionism, nurtured by men like Bret Stephens, who on the day he hired me at the Journaltold me that his ideal vision of freedom was the 82nd Airborne escorting a Pride parade through the streets of Tehran?

Ahmaris self-examination was less notable for the intellectual evolution it tried to convey than for its inadvertent admission that, in the process, hed evidently lost his sense of humor. Ive never worked for Stephens, but I know him well enough to be certain that his comment was a joke. But Ahmariwhom I suspect took it as a joke at the timemust now, from the distance of a decade, take such things literally (if not seriously). Elsewhere in the column, Ahmari derided American leaders for being too busy with LGBTQ rights in Uzbekistan to notice the house is on fire at home.

Ahmari may have a point about the navet of the American foreign policy establishment, but he gives the impression of being preoccupied less with U.S. economic or political failures than with nightmare visions of men in thongs and dykes on bikesthat he is haunted by a fear, as H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism, that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

In his 1981 book Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba 19281979, the Hungarian-born political scientist Paul Hollander observed that communism enjoyed its greatest popularity among Western intellectuals during the Great Depression, not when its performance was the most impressive or its policies most humane, but at a time when a severe economic crisis buffeted the Western world. Record-high unemployment and poverty at home helped create a perception of the Soviet Union as an island of stability, order, economic rationality, and social justice. Likewise, during the wave of Western intellectual admiration for China and Cuba in the 1960s, the United States was undergoing major social upheaval over civil rights, the sexual revolution, and the Vietnam War. According to Hollander, the intellectual admirers of communism sought a social order in which the individual was free from aimlessness, confusion, and uncertainty such as the intellectuals experienced in their own societies and which are endemic to contemporary, secular, pluralistic societies.

Hollanders subjects were men and women of the left whose disgust at the inequality produced by Western capitalism inspired a search for alternative models in countries where inequality had supposedly been eliminated. They shared an amalgam of alienation and utopia-seeking. But the yearning for a society devoid of aimlessness, confusion, and uncertaintya society, as Ahmari might say, reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Goodis not specific to the left. Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a similar yearning is conspicuous among the post-liberal right, whose veneration of authoritarian regimes islike Hollanders Cold War intellectualsmoving from live-action role-playing to programmatic political ambition.

When I recently asked Ahmari to explain the new rights take on foreign policy, he said it is a belief that America needs retrenchment. There is nothing bad with a power saying we need domestic consolidation for a while. Behind this belief is the sense that America is internally incoherent, internally decaying, and that hawkishness of the kind that certainly I used to subscribe to and I got my entre into the journalistic world through, a kind of secular neoconservatism, that kind of hawkishness not only doesnt address these internal crises but distracts us from our ability to address them. Ahmari pointed to the vast number of underemployed men, fentanyl addiction, and visible social decay as signs that America has become a machine that runs itself without any sense of telos.

Pretty standard fare, except that the alternative model most favored by Ahmari and the new right is, of all places, Hungaryand not the Hungarian system or economy or society per se, but the goulash authoritarianism of its current prime minister, Viktor Orbn. Last summer, Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent a week broadcasting his show from Hungary, which he lauded as a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of usso many, apparently, that he returned recently for another week of Budapest-based broadcasts. Carlson was followed by former Vice President Mike Pence, who praised the Orbn governments curbs on abortion access at the Budapest Demographic Summit. This spring, the city will play host to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Orbn was the first and one of the very few world leaders to endorse Trump in 2016, and Trump recently returned the favor, expressing his support for Orbn in Hungarys upcoming parliamentary elections.

New right thinkers frequently cite Orbns ban on university gender studies programs as an example of the kind of thing they would like to do in America, and while some of them expressed perfunctory disapproval of Orbns expulsion of Central European University, they barely hid their delight that the George Soros-funded campus was forced to relocate to Vienna. The biggest difference between our conservative politicians and Viktor Orbn is this: Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is, but Prime Minister Orbn actually does something about it, enthused Rod Dreher, Ahmaris colleague at the American Conservative, last fall at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando. Another source of admiration is the law, modeled on a 2013 Russian measure, prohibiting the popularizing of homosexuality to children. (The legislation was adopted in response to a series of sex scandals involving Hungarian officials, including one member of Orbns political party who was arrested while fleeing an all-male orgy held in defiance of COVID regulations.)

Like the Western intellectuals who thrilled to communist dictatorships during the Cold War, the American new right seems enchanted more by grand and highly symbolic gestures performed by the state (children, who still have access to the internet, will no longer be taught homosexuality!) than by, for example, per capita wealth, which is now lower in Hungary than in Romania, or with cultural and intellectual achievement, which has mostly deserted Hungary in the Orbn era.

As recently as 2016, Ahmari was castigating Orbn, who, he wrote, hollowed out the countrys democratic institutions politicized the judiciary, nationalized pensions by decree, proscribed unbalanced media coverage, and removed a slew of other checks and balances on his own power. Three years later, he was conducting a softball interview with Orbns foreign minister, Pter Szijjrt, and indignantly arguing that Western elites should stop lecturing Hungary. More recently, he appeared to endorse the Hungarian governments imposition of price controls on groceries.

Ahmaris new admiration for eastern alternatives to Western decadence does not stop at the Danube. Im at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century, he announced last year in a (since deleted) tweet. Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue. He has repeatedly praised Wang Huning, first secretary of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party and a leading party intellectual, whose 1989 book, America Against America, assailed what one writer described as the radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism. When the Chinese government recently decided to ban depictions of sissy men in popular entertainment, Ahmari favorably contrasted the move with the United States, which got rid of its restrictions against degeneracy in a flash of postwar liberation, and it has definitely backfired. Chinas war on metrosexuals, Ahmari continued, wouldve been commonplace in, e.g., an older Hollywood that wasnt at war with nature and the family.

This perception of Western society as enervated and effete and dictatorships as vigorous and manly was shared by the political pilgrims of old. Hollander quotes the Polish American Sovietologist Adam Ulam, who observed in 1966 that an intellectual often finds a certain morbid fascination in the puritanic and repressive aspects of the Soviet regime and also in its enormous outward self-assurance, which contrasts so saliently with the apologetic, hesitant self-image of the democratic world.

Then there is Ahmaris native Iran. The lesson of the Islamic revolution is that rapid secularization of the kind that the Shah pursued was bound to create a backlash, he told me in a recent conversation. It was startling to hear, especially considering his passionate, almost vocational support of the Green Movement when I met him a dozen years ago. As recently as 2018, he described the Pahlavi dynasty as overseeing a benign autocracy, but now he castigates the shah for having owned half the casinos in Tehran and instituted a social welfare program for prostitutes. While noting that the Iranian Revolution was a tragedy for my family, Ahmari cryptically warns that it offers an interesting lesson for American liberals today and what kind of backlashes they may be fomenting.

Ahmari is at pains to distinguish the new rights approach to foreign policy from the isolationist right and the anti-imperialist left. The former, driven by nativism, fears and distrusts the world outside Americas borders, and believes that too much American engagement abroad can only corrupt it at home. The latter, driven by self-hatred, romanticizes the foreign, and believes that American racism, capitalism, and oppression of marginalized peoples corrupt the world. By way of distinguishing the new right, Ahmari pointed me to a moronic and sinister argument from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank funded by both Charles Koch and George Soros, which depicts the Chinese government as the primary victim of violent attacks on Asian Americans, and advocates for toning down criticism of the CCP:

The specific substance of Quincys strange take may be at odds with what Ahmari and the new right believe, but youd be forgiven for noticing that they advocate a lot of the same things. The isolationist right, the woke left, and the new right are all pretty repulsed by their country (albeit for different reasons), and believe its unique repulsiveness disqualifies it from having an active role in the world.

Wary of the Globalist American Empire, Ahmari now argues for understanding small, vulnerable, but independent democracies as belonging instead to the historic civilizational spheres of revanchist great powers like Russia and China. With 130,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraines borders, Ahmari has recently been frothing at Liberals and NATO jingoists. Last August, during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he ghoulishly exulted in the humiliating defeat dealt to a decadent West: Motherfucker, you couldnt handle Afghan goatherders, he taunted from his keyboard as U.S. Marines and Afghan civilians were being targeted by the Taliban. By contrast, that same week, he tweeted admiringly of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, who Isnt ashamed of his national heritage and Couldnt give a shit about your pronouns. Ahmari insists on calling the Biden administration the regime, lamenting the bizarre fact of a regime that enacts laws referring to mothers as birthing people. (His Twitter account has lately become a daily encyclical of Francoist pronunciamentos, juvenile invective, and praise for political extremists.)

Beyond the moral weirdness, Ahmaris new creed is also notable for its incoherence. At the same that that he would like the U.S. government to adopt what he believes is the Russian model of state interference in the public square, he worries that, The repressive mechanisms used in America are a lot more sophisticated than in Russia. It would seem, therefore, that the United States already uses state power to shape society along certain moral dimensionsjust not the ones Ahmari likes. So is the point to have a repressive state apparatus that privileges his side in all places at all times, regardless of elections? If so, why on earth is such a transition from democracy to autocracy incumbent upon Americans in particular? Which America is that supposed to revive or save?

When I asked Ahmari why his writing and tweeting include not just criticisms of American liberals but praise of foreign autocrats, he responded that, There are moments in which an adversary tells you a truth about yourself and its worthwhile to listen and look in the mirror and see if it matches reality.

It wasnt an answer to the question I asked, but on its own terms, I understood what he meant. Although Im much more relaxed about issues of human sexuality than Ahmari, there are aspects of the new gender ideology, particularly its harmful effects on women and children, that I too find deeply troubling. But it remains a question how Ahmari gets from A to B: from defending Trump against fanatical anti-Trump ideologues to ditching liberalism and democracy altogether; from rolling his eyes at the use of silly new gender pronouns to admiring the perceived virility of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. When Putin delivers a speech bemoaning American cancel culture and praising Martin Luther King Jr., why do Ahmaris bullshit detectors suddenly fail and leave him as credulous as Anna Louise Strong reporting on Stalin?

Maybe, as a secular Jewish homosexual, Ill never be able to understand Ahmaris transition. And maybe Im the fool for not being sufficiently chastened by the failure of America to promote democracy abroad and crush wokeness at home. But if the rah-rah neoconservatism of our misspent youth was nave, Ahmaris new preference for playing authoritarian, ethnically homogenous, Eastern European dress-up in a diverse, continental democracy of 330 million is no less romantic, and even less practical. Ahmari still acknowledges that the United States is the only country in the world where someone like me could come from Iran and within that span become a leading intellectual on the right. But he seems to be left with nothing but contempt for the system, principles, and people that made his American dream possible.

In each of his books, Ahmari has generously acknowledged three men to whom I owe my career in journalism and whom I have resolved to thank in every book I publish till I pass from this earthly valehis former bosses Bret Stephens and John Podhoretz, and me. I used to feel a measure of slightly bemused pride at this tribute. But now the first thing that comes to mind is a question posed by a pair of my fellow degenerates: What have I done to deserve this?

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When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That's Ahmari - Tablet Magazine

The laws of physics makes it impossible for the vaccines to eliminate or affect the Higgs Boson particle, known in media as the God Particle

A Facebook post published on January 11 by Facebook page Filipino Future falsely claims that COVID-19 vaccines remove the God Particle in the body.

The posts caption has a line that reads: More variants, more shots. Para ano? Para makumpleto ang pag eliminate ng God Particle sa katawan mo, at trabahuin ng mRNA ang pag create ng new strains of tissues na magpapangyari upang ihanda ka sa transhumanism goal ng mga Elitista.

(More variant, more shots. For what? To complete the elimination of the God Particle in your body and to allow mRNA to create new strains of tissues that will prepare you for the transhumanism goal of the elitists.)

The post also defined the God Particle in the line that reads: What is the God Particle? Ito yong mark of God sa DNA ng tao, yong conscience mo, yong naka tanim sa bawat hibla ng tissues ng katawan mo. (What is the God Particle? Its the mark of God in the DNA of humans, your conscience, its in every fiber of the tissues of your body.)

The post has over 300 reactions, 150 comments, and 250 shares on Facebook, as of writing.

This claim is false.

COVID-19 vaccines cannot do anything to eliminate or even affect particles like the Higgs Boson, known in media as the God Particle, due to the limitations of the laws of physics.

The term God Particle was coined by Nobel Laureate for Physics Leon M. Lederman in his book The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? originally published in 1993.

The term is used to refer to the sub-atomic particle that gives all particles their mass, which is technically called the Higgs Boson, named after theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs. The Higgs Boson was first observed on July 4, 2012.

The European Center for Nuclear Research says that sub-atomic particles are so small that they are governed by either the strong or the weak nuclear force and are described by the quantum theory. Meanwhile, any matter that is larger than atoms is governed by gravity and is described by the general theory of relativity.

These differences do not allow sub-atomic particles to interact with the macro world, and physicists have not yet fit the two into a single framework. The difference in models also explains why sub-atomic particles cannot interact with normal matter.

Dr. Don Lincoln, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, told Rappler that there is no credible link between the sub-atomic world and vaccines.

Lincoln explained that removing the Higgs Field from an object or a body would instantly make its atoms infinitely large because it is responsible for the mass of every matter in the universe. The Higgs Field is the associated field of the Higgs Boson particle.

No Higgs field means that atoms become infinitely large.If the Higgs field disappeared in the body, youd evaporate or explode, depending on how fast the Higgs field disappeared. Given that there are no reports of post-vaccine explosions or disappearances, I think we can dispel this claim, Lincoln said.

According to the World Health Organization, vaccines work by triggering an immune response in the body to fight a specific virus.

Rappler has fact-checked posts from Filipino Future multiple times in the past. Here are more fact-checks on Filipino Future:

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FALSE: COVID-19 vaccines eliminate 'God Particle' in the body - Rappler

Photo credit: superanton, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We have enough problems with attaining universal human rights, but activists want animals and nature to have human-type rights. Transhumanists and futurists also worry about guaranteeing rights for AI technologies when they attain consciousness.

The latest example comes inThe Conversationfrom a professor of game designing who knew that was an academic discipline? named Richard A. Bartle, at the University of Essex. He believes that we may one day create virtual worlds with creatures as intelligent as ourselves. From, How to Be a God:

I believe wewillhave virtual worlds containing characters as smart as we are if not smarter and in full possession of free will. What will our responsibilities towards these beings be? We will after all be the literal gods of the realities in which they dwell, controlling the physics of their worlds. We can do anything we like to them.

Actually, that would not be a problem because they would be neither alive nor real. No matter how sophisticated these avatars or cyber creatures, it would all be mere programming, in a fictional universe of our own conjuring. That would not make us gods, but gamers.

But Bartle believes we would have a concrete moral obligation to these non-existent beings:

If we create our characters tobefree-thinking beings, then we must treat them as if theyaresuch regardless of how they might appear to an external observer.

That being the case, then, can we switch our virtual worlds off? Doing so could be condemning billions of intelligent creatures to non-existence. Would it nevertheless be OK if we saved a copy of their world at the moment we ended it? Does the theoretical possibility that we may switch their world back on exactly as it was mean were notactuallymurdering them? What if wedont have the original game software?

Sorry, but this isnt worth the loss of any sleep. To begin, only human beings can be murdered. Moreover, something that isnt alive cant be killed. The worst thing that would be happening is that non-existent beings would remain non-existent.

And heres a non-problem:

Accepting that our characters of the future are free-thinking beings, where would they fit in a hierarchy of importance? In general, given a straight choice between saving a sapient being (such as a toddler) or a merely sentient one (such as a dog), people would choose the former over the latter. Given a similar choice between saving a real dog or a virtual saint, which would prevail?

The dog. It is alive.Lifeshould be the first prerequisite of inherent moral value. To which, I add, a dog can experience pain, love, joy, hunger, and contentment. In direct contrast, a virtual saint isnt really a saint. Its merely a computer program.

Bartle asks whether we should create such creatures at all. I dont think we can or ever will, but if we are worried about such non-existent moral dilemmas, just dont play.

Finally, Bartle seems to be saying out ofThe Matrix that we live in such a manufactured universe:

Humanity doesnt yet have an ethical framework for the creation of realities of which we are gods. No system of meta-ethics yet exists to help us. We need to work this outbeforewe build worlds populated by beings with free will, whether 50, 500, 5,000,000 years from now or tomorrow. These are questions foryouto answer.

Be careful how you do so, though. You may set a precedent.

We ourselves are the non-player characters of Reality.

No, we are not characters. We are real people, living in an actual universe whether created, intelligently designed, or evolved in which the actions we take are consequential and truly do matter morally.

If we want to make a better world in the here and now, perhaps we should focus more on the rights and duties that arise out of human exceptionalism and not concern ourselves with the fate of fictional non-beings that not who will never really exist.

Cross-posted at The Corner.

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Professor Explains How to Be a God - Discovery Institute

Ashley Carter (Editor) -Paulie & Henry: The End of a Goodfellas Era(Release date TBC)

I strongly suspect Im not the only one refreshing my local cinemas booking page on an hourly basis to check when tickets for this highly-anticipated gem finally go on sale. Yes, thats right, Goodfellas 2 has finally been confirmed. Well, kind of. Theres no Scorsese, De Niro, Pesci, Liotta, or anyone else involved in the original film. But someone has cobbled together some (probably shit) documentary footage of former friends and mafia associates Paul Mazzei and Henry Hill to make Paulie & Henry: The End of a Goodfellas Era. Mercenary cash-grab using a popular films clout, or potential Best Documentary Academy Award nominee? Only time will tell. But one things for sure, its definitely the first one.

Multiverses seem to be all the rage right now. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Loki. Spider-Man: No Way Home. Yet Everything Everywhere All at Once appears to take the already mind-blowing concept to even weirder places. Starring Michelle Yeoh as an unlikely hero dragged into a bizarre quest to save the world, the films trailer gained a lot of attention when it dropped online and, despite having almost three minutes of footage to dive into, no one could quite figure out what the hell is going on. But Ill be damned if I aint excited.

Directed by the brains behind the one-of-a-kind Swiss Army Man,this is going to be a hell of a ride. I dont care about being everywhere all at once I just want to be watching this film as soon as it comes to cinemas.

How do you follow up the greatest animated film of the past several years? Well, making a two-part, universe-hopping sequel starring a time-travelling Spidey from the future voiced by Oscar Isaac, no less is certainly one way to do it. While the first film saw amateur webslinger Miles Morales being visited by fellow Spider-folk from other worlds, this time Miles is the one taking part in inter-dimensional travel, with the two-minute teaser depicting him quite literally being flung from one stylised cityscape to the next.

Surpassing 2018s Into the Spider-Verse will be no easy task, but with Joaquim Dos Santos (director of the memorable final episodes of both Justice League Unlimited and Avatar: The Last Airbender) and Kemp Powers (co-director of Pixars Soul) on board, this film could well push the limits of animation even further.

I have always been a fan of a period drama, so when the series of Downton Abbey came out all those years ago and took the world by storm, I was straight on to it. And while some shows that spawn cinematic spin-offs do not do so well, Downton nailed it with its first big screen release back in 2019.

What is most exciting about A New Era, though, is the returning cast. A stand-out is, without a doubt, Dame Maggie Smith as Lady Crawley, but seeing others such as Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot is something I definitely wont be missing. The dresses, the dinners and, of course, Carsons bossiness despite being retired - I am here for all of it!

With the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel has fully realised the concept of the multiverse that the prior Spider-Man film and Loki only hinted at. Marvels next film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, will fully explore exactly what it means. Directed by none other than the legendary Sam Rami - enough reason alone to anticipate the film, I might add - this is bound to be another mind-warping experience, featuring more kaleidoscopic visuals.

The trailer shows a range of elements, but the most exciting of these is the inclusion of another Doctor Strange. Reminiscent of the variant in What If (expertly tying the property even closer to the films), this idea flips the friendly, alternate version of the hero seen in NWH to explore what would happen if Strange were evil, which is bound to create great action and drive great conflict.

The sequel to one of the MCUs best efforts, Black Panther,is slated for release this year, and no-one really knows anything about it. Since the passing of lead star Chadwick Boseman, there has been a lot of speculation around the potential recasting of the titular role. Yet earlier in 2021 it was announced that the role would not be recast, and another character would be stepping up to the mantle.

Whether or not this will be Letitia Wrights Shuri, Lupita Nyongos Nakia or another character remains to be seen. What's not in doubt, however, are the credentials of the films cast and its director. Ryan Cooglers first Black Panther was culturally significant, and a superb film in its own right, and if the follow up handles its former stars passing sensitively which Im certain it will and emulates the success of its soundtrack, then there is no reason to doubt its potential.

David Cronenberg is finally back after eight years since his last release, 2014s Maps to the Stars. It is said this film will be a return to his classical body horror style something which he moved away from in the 2000s. With a star studded cast of Kristen Stewart, Vigo Mortsessen, Lea Seydoux and more, plus a veteran director at the helm, this film is bound to be, at the very least, exhilarating and fascinating.

Although this shares the name of Cronenbergs 1972 feature film, it is not a remake or a reimagining. The plot has not been fully revealed yet but it is rumoured to feature biological augmentation, transhumanism and a so-called world without pain themes that are all frequent in his films. While most releases today feel safer and we see fewer and fewer made for adult audiences, Crimes of the Future looks to truly disturb.

Killers of the Flower Moon sees the 79-year-old maestro Martin Scorsese tackle his most expensive production yet (estimated at around $200 million), with a cast that includes his two favourites, Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert De Niro. Obviously the prospect of this trifecta of talent working together for the first time as a collective is enough to make any cinephile's mouth water. But its the story, centring on the infamous serial killings of various members of the Osage Tribe a group of extremely wealthy Native Americans that really grabs our attention.

Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it will see Scorcese have a crack at making a film in the spirit of a genre that has influenced him so much: the Western. We can expect a bloody affair that will probably come in at a cool 180 minutes and not a minute less!

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8 of the Best Films Coming Out in 2022 - LeftLion

A recent survey of over two thousand adults in the UKrevealed plenty of mistrust, anxiety, fear, and skepticism about artificial intelligence (AI). The survey attempted to understand whether AI was a blessing or a curse.A recently-released collection of short sci-fi stories by Andre K. George entitledI, AI, attempts to answer the same question. It is comprised of eleven short Sci-Fi stories that will keep readers on the edge of their seats. But at the same time, each story offers a different lesson and perspective.

Few recent sci-fi books stand out with the same level of original stories, fascinating characters, and powerful themes asI, AI. It is a truly gripping read, exploring a future where humans and artificial intelligence (AI) are forced to interact across all areas of life. They help each other like friends, conduct high-stakes investigations like partners, and fight for power like enemies.

With a five-star rating on Amazon, this book has received acclaim from reviewers for its engaging, thought-provoking and surprising content. As one critic points out, this book had [readers] racing to the end of each chapter to start a new one. The second story in the collection, The Ultimate Test, is the recipient of the Honorable Mention award from the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest.

Andre K. George has spent two decades specializing in computer technology and artificial intelligence. The author has a wide breadth of knowledge in the subject and delivers a fictional future rooted in the realities of science and technological progress. A future that, as the author points out, is as inevitable, unavoidable, and unstoppable as time itself.I, AIoffers an introduction to what the world can expect from artificial creations after the technological revolution takes place.

I, AIwill appeal to a wide range of science fiction readers, including fans of Michael Crichton, Isaac Asimov, Daniel H. WilsonsRobopocalypse, and Martha WellsThe Murderbot Diaries.

More information aboutI, AI,and the authors other books can be found onAmazonas well as the authorsofficial website.

Media ContactContact Person: Andre K. GeorgeEmail: Send EmailCountry: United StatesWebsite: https://andrekgeorge.com

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Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Transhumanism - Digital Journal

The tech startups are grabbing the eyeballs with new advancement every single day. Its amazing to see how quickly the paradigm is changing and the impact is nothing short of impressive.

The world has seen an overwhelming rise in the popularity of vertical short video apps in the last 5 years. Tiktok became so popular that every other social media app copied its format.

But since the Indian Government banned TikTok and other Chinese apps due to security reasons, it has opened a vast market for Indian as well International app developers to capture.

Founded in May 2019 by Lakshminath Dondeti and Vidya N, Rizzle has emerged as the fastest-growing vertical short video app in India. Rizzle gives a new approach to the format which is still open to experiments and innovations.

This is yet another out-of-the-box idea of the tech genius Elon Musk. It focuses on developing devices that understand the language of the brain! It is a great initiative for people with disabilities of hearing and speech.

The ultimate goal of Neuralink is to support human limitations by incorporating technology into the human brain and body which is also known as transhumanism.

The startup was founded by Musk and other people in 2016 and has received a funding of 158 million since then, out of which 100 million were given by Musk.

Who knows if this becomes the laying of the founding stone for future cyborgs!

With each passing year, a tech user is getting rid of as many cables and hardware as possible. From chargers to earphones, everything has become wireless.

Even the storage devices are being ditched by a majority of the users who are going for cloud storage instead.

Wasabi is one such cloud storage platform that has gained popularity recently. It was founded in June 2017. What makes it so popular is that it is almost 80 per cent less costly than other leading cloud storage applications available.

Tech geeks are looking forward to more useful applications that Wasabi has to offer.

The year 2020 saw everything go virtual. From schools and colleges having their classes and exams online to dance instructors teaching Zumba via zoom calls.

Even music events, concerts and award shows were attended by people via their smartphone screens.

Lumaki is an innovative startup that focuses on helping students to have virtual internship programs.

It provides a 2-in-1 virtual onboarding and recruitment platform. The year 2022 can see more platforms like these to cater to the needs of the lockdown.

A start-up for the star-tups! This one deserves attention in 2022. The major problem for any start-up around the globe is to get funds. Genius minds can work on great ideas but they need help from the big players in the industry.

Equivisto helps the startups to connect with the people who may be interested in their projects and fund them. One can expect Equivesto to get a lot of attention from the people planning to launch their start-ups in 2022.

Nimble robotics founded by Simon Kalouche manufactures robots specially designed to cater to the needs of the E-Commerce industry.

The E-commerce industry has been at its best pace for the last 8-10 years, but the pandemic gave the already fast-growing industry a nitro boost. People filled up their free time during the lockdowns.

The startup produces robots for picking, packing, and handling products which is a big help for e-Commerce companies.

Udaan has gained funding of 1.2 billion in the last 5 years. This Bangalore startup was founded in 2016 by Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta and focuses on providing a one roof service solution to the wholesalers and goods manufacturers.

Udaan will be one of the most interesting startups to look forward to in 2020, as it made an investment in a restaurant startup PetPooja last year.

Also Read : Goodness score, an algorithm by Goodspace proving to improve hiring efficacy

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Transhumanism, virtual internships and other cool stuff that top 7 tech startups have to offer in 2022 - News Hour Press India

Is Joe Rogan close to becoming a Bitcoiner? The biggest podcaster in the world received podcasting pioneer Adam Curry and at one point, the conversation turned to Bitcoin and crypto. In retrospect, it was inevitable. Even though Joe Rogan had Andreas Antonopoulos as a guest a couple of times back in the day, he seems clueless about it all.

Related Reading | How Chinas Tech Firms Are Racing For Metaverse Trademarks

Thats perfectly fine, though. As one of the Internets main success stories, Rogan doesnt need Bitcoin. His audience, on the other hand Luckily, Adam Curry was there to help. The new project from the man many call the Podfather is promoting the Value 4 Value model and what hes deemed Podcasting 2.0. The idea is that a new generation of podcast will be set up to receive Bitcoin payments in real-time over the Lightning network using compatible Podcasting 2.0 apps.

Recently our sister site NewsBTC, as part of their Lightning Speed series, discussed the Podcasting 2.0 phenomenon:

You already know this, the Lightning Network allows for micropayments that are almost free. Anyone can use it, and its approaching mass adoption by the minute. Not only can creators now plug into an open monetization platform with hundreds of millions of users, they can even access a new type of monetization that was never before possible. Those new types are, real-time payment streaming, micro-tipping, and other monetization strategies that simply arent possible on fiat payment rails.

In any case, what did Joe Rogan and Adam Curry discuss in their recent conversation?

Adam Curry introduces his Podcasting 2.0 idea by saying that a lot of young people are opting out of the current system and building parallel networks. Thats what the Value 4 Value model permits, a direct-to-consumer approach that doesnt need an intermediary and bypasses the advertising and sponsorships model thats prevalent today. This is all thanks to the Lightning Network.

It makes sense for Adam Curry to be a Bitcoin maximalist. Im just on the Bitcoin train because I believe that my money is safer there, he says as a way to assure that hes not against the US dollar. What is he against, then? The money system is broken, Curry believes. Its expensive and inefficient; it finances wars and needs armies to protect it. And then, on top of it, theres the banking system. Another artifact of old thats doing more harm than good.

Then, its Joe Rogans turn. He has a lot of hope for cryptocurrencies. He thinks that theyll be the future of the world or theyre going to go to zero, those are the two options. Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be the ones who people who are in the know talk about the most, Joe Rogan says.

Adam Curry interrupts and lets him know. The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that in Bitcoin, there will only be 21 million. It cant be changed. It cant be inflated. You cant say the same about Ethereum.

Oh, Joe Rogan says.

The Metaverse portion of the conversation starts with a revelation. Brian Cox from Succession will commercialize an NFT. Adam Curry cant give more details, but wow. Joe Rogan shows him a Beeple piece he owns and defends NFTs from Currys jokes. Adam thinks Non-Fungible Tokens materialize Klaus Schwabs dream of You will own nothing and youll be happy.

Curry doesnt seem to like NFTs, but he gives them this. In the dream of the metaverse, the Silicon Valley controlled metaverse, NFTs are going to be very-very important. Then, he gives Ethereum some flowers. The Ethereum crowd is building a more decentralized metaverse.

Related Reading | Twitter CEO to Joe Rogan: I Think Currency of The Internet Will Be Bitcoin

After that, Joe Rogan fantasizes about big companies creating private coins that act as stock of sorts. Curry stops him and tells him Facebook tried that and the governments wouldnt allow it. Thats not the plan. The plan is the Central Bank Digital Currency. You will have crypto. You will have a digital wallet. It will be directly from the Federal Reserve to you, Adam Curry says. Then, theyll have total control. However, Bitcoin fixes this.

The clip ends by describing the metaverse depicted in Neal Stephensons Snowcrash, the transhumanist dream, and Elons supposed brain chip. It was a much longer conversation, what else did they talk about? Thats out of our wheelhouse. Go to Spotify and find out, if you feel so inclined.

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Podcasting Legends Joe Rogan And Adam Curry Discuss Crypto And The Metaverse | Bitcoinist.com - bitcoinist.com