Category Archives: Transhuman

Detail from "Reading the Newspaper. War News" (1905) byNikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (WikArt.org)

The trans agenda Thetriumph of male swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly Will Thomas) is national news because it shows there are no limits to the charade of trans ideology. The Trans Lobby Doesnt Just Want To Erase Womens Sports. It Wants To Erase Women (The Federalist)

Putin and the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine By far the largest of the 23 Eastern churches in full communion with Rome, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has around 6 million members Does Greek Catholic Church help explain Putins obsession with Ukraine? (Crux)

No Open Society the composition of professoriate and students at elite universities skews massively to the political left. Against Academic Freedom (Post Liberal Order)

This is a punishment! so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. Apocalyptic Daze: Secular elites prophesy a doomsday without redemption.(City Journal)

Adolescent confusion As the number of transgender teenagers has exploded across the country, with it comes a wealth of readily available medical procedures unthinkable a decade ago. Top Pediatrician: Teenage transgender medicine a deadly path (Washington Examiner)

An end to globalization The values-based international order has long since ceased to exist, yet Western leaders remain reluctant to readjust. After the end of Globalization (Post Liberal Order)

Incompatible religions Transhumanism perceives immortality as something that can be achieved by men. Christianity identifies eternal salvation as the mercy of a loving God. The impossibility of Christian transhumanism (First Things)

Vigan s error Vigan is being swept away by trends in modern politics. His (legitimate!) anger at the West is blinding him to the evils of the Russian government. Is Archbishop Vigan Looking East? (Crisis Magazine)

Army fitness reduced standards The Army has scrapped plans to use the same physical fitness test for all soldiers, choosing instead to have some reduced standards to allow women and older soldiers to pass. Army approves reduced physical fitness standards for women and older soldiers (The Hill)

Gods mysterious providence When Pope Francis and the worlds bishops entrust entire countries to Marys intercession, the greatest fruits will be unseen by most people. Russian consecration will ice ecumenism (Pillar Catholic)

Episcopal confusion Bishops of the Episcopal Church on Friday adopted a pastoral statement critical of U.S. states that have enacted policies opposed by transgender activists. Episcopal Church Bishops Pledge Transgender and Non-Binary Support (Juicy Ecumenism)

Continental shifts While ordinations to the diocesan priesthood are on the rise in some parts of the world, theyre also falling fast in some traditionally Catholic countries. Is there a global vocations crisis? (Pillar Catholic)

Our Lady of Aparecida So Paulo States Court of Appeals has reversed a 2019 decision that stopped the building of a giant steel statue of the Virgin Mary in Aparecida, the city where Brazils major Catholic shrine is located. Court allows giant statue of Virgin Mary to be built in Brazil (Crux Now)

Disneys Queer Agenda Disney has been trying to queer children for a long time. A senior Disney executive brags about that to her colleagues! Disney Queers Children, Says Disney Exec (The American Conservative)

(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of said news item or essay.)

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Extra, extra! News and tidings, March 30, 2022 Catholic World Report - Catholic World Report

Anno: Mutationem is an overly ambitious love letter with one too many recipients. While the game has an interesting gumbo of ideas, its story buckles under the weight of living up to the very properties it attempts to pay tribute to. Ultimately, Mutationems ending fails to deliver a satisfying or cohesive pursuit of this monumental undertaking.

The game is a pixel art side-scrolling action game with RPG elements, developed by ThinkingStars. You play as Ann Flores, a highly skilled combat-trained lone wolf as she hunts down the cyberpunk gangs and corrupt mega-corporations that kidnapped her brother. Anno: Mutationem, not to be confused with the long-running Anno real-time strategy series, is ThinkingStars first video game. While Mutationem does a serviceable job of constructing an intriguing world, its preoccupation with paying homage to the media that inspired it distracts from the story its trying to tell.

Mutationem makes overt references to popular sci-fi anime and video games, including Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, NieR:Automata, a smidge of Drakengard 3, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. In the game, this feels more spread out over 18 hours, but in its two-hour demo, it felt like rapid-fire callbacks. While on paper, drawing from these iconic properties is a no-brainer for a developers first video game, Mutationem boldly goes beyond just mirroring aesthetics and injects their varying high-concept ideas on what it means to be human into its plot as well.

Id liken this phenomenon to using all your favorite seasonings into a dish youve never made for the first time. Although those spices pleased your palate in their own dishes, if combined haphazardly, theyll only clash and overwhelm. The same circumstance comes about when Mutationem transforms its aesthetic references into plot points.

Ghost in the Shell, NieR:Automata, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the other media Mutationem draws from have heavy, esoteric lore of their own. Mutationem ties itself down by ceaselessly drawing comparisons to these other media. Plot points like GitS introspective meditation on the human condition, Blade Runners commentary on transhumanism through cybernetics, and NGEseverything (most notably End of Evangelions third impact) take root within Mutationems story as well. While the argument that every piece of media is a remix of elements a creator liked isnt lost on me, Mutationem becomes a poorly adapted cover to its inspirations rather than rocking to the rhythm of its own story beats.

Youre telling me. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

This is a shame, because buried under all these references is Mutationems own unique premise. Interesting story elementslike the games poverty-stricken populace suffering from the Mechanika Virus, a disease that slowly turns people into robo-zombiesend up jettisoned to give the game more time to retread ideas from other media. Because Mutationem seems afraid to veer far from its inspirations, which are imperfect themselves, ThinkingStars fails at telling its own story.

Just when you expect the game to pay off your detective work and hard-fought battles against mecha and hordes of cybernetically enhanced militia with some attempt to connect its disparate ideas, it shortchanges you with a lackluster ending. Similarly to NGE, Mutationem builds up to armageddon, but its final boss comes out of left field. Basically, the government organization in Mutationem is SEELE from NGEwith all the convoluted reasoning and imagery that impliesand theyre using alternate-dimension tech to do something and must harness Anns power to pull it off. While the games been hyping you to fight Anns alt. dimension self, Amok, you merely fight a dragon. I felt robbed of an epic battle with the rival character I assumed the game was preparing me for, and insulted by the blatant sequel bait.

The gameplay ultimately disappoints, too. Being the unapologetic Devil May Cry devotee I am, games rewarding skill-based combat with gratifying feedback is a must. While Mutationems combat hints at being DMCs pixel-art equivalent, it proves to be a mixed bag of hype visuals and underwhelming grind. The games combat systems promise a depth that never plays out in gameplay. While Mutationem allows you to customize, deconstruct, and forge more powerful weapons with elemental mods and unlockable weapon skills, many of these cool bits only materialize near the games finale. While you can access some of these abilities earlier through side-quests, the game doesnt do a good job of letting you know, seemingly railroading you into its convoluted main plot.

Never go full-End of Evangelion. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

After a couple hours, fights dont really feel rewarding. Simply put, enemies are damage sponges. Once you finally break an enemys shield, which works as their second health bar, you have a matter of seconds to wail on them to do some actual damage before their shields recover. The rest is wash and repeat.

One simple answer to this conundrum would be to parry enemies more frequently, resulting in big damage boosts. But the rewards for doing so are negligible, and your foes have confusing hitboxes; if you miss a parry, thats a chunk of your health gone for the attempt. I had to go out of my way to parry bosses by lining up with their hits instead of letting them come organically. Instead of trusting the game to make my parries count, I developed the instinct to dodge roll constantly because it was the only safe and assured method for maintaining Anns health and dealing damage.

While early boss fights are unique, Mutationems latter half pulls a Halo 5 by throwing multiple versions of the same boss at you, sometimes fielding two more directly after you prime the first for a finishing blow. Boss fights increasingly felt like wars of attrition, rather than the fast-paced battles of skill the game advertises.

"Have neko car, will travel"

Side-Scrolling Action-RPG

PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Gorgeous pixel art, wacky NPCs, and the endearing dynamic between the games main character and sidekick

March 16, 2022

Convoluted story, underdeveloped villains, lore dumping and lackluster finale

18-ish hours, many of which were fighting frustrating boss battles

Outside of combat, Mutationem suffers from the same cognitive dissonance as the Yakuza series, with its side-quests and main missions feeling like two separate games. While Mutationems main quest comes off like an AI-generated anime sci-fi plot, its side-quests unabashedly tell wacky and heartfelt stories that characterize the people who inhabit its world. Much of my enjoyment with Mutationem came from straying from its main quest. Avoiding paths or hallways that looked like progress led me to discover bizarre NPCs who all had written dialogue and receive snippets of their experiences in Mutationems dystopian cyberpunk society.

My favorite interactions came from running into a sewer-dwelling man with a manhole cover for a face, discovering the secret identity of a virtual pop idol, and witnessing the final moments of a robot reaching enlightenment in the sewers. These brief encounters left long-lasting impressions, making its underutilization of these fresher concepts within its larger story all the more frustrating. Instead of reveling in rich storytelling, I was collecting a tally of how many plot elements from other media with which Mutationem garnished its story.

To make matters worse, the game introduces cookie-cutter villains who suffer from the annoying trope of being vague about their intentions. Instead of simply telling you just what the fuck is happening and what they want out of Ann, they simply say theyll see her again in the worst archetypical anime villain style. These guys even look identical aesthetically, sometimes even mirroring allies. While the games latter half attempts to curb this by introducing villains with bizarre new looks, these intricately designed double-crossers writing is just as flat as that of their predecessors. Aside from the two leads, the main cast is boring and unimaginative, leaving the incidental environmental NPCs to breathe life into Mutationems world.

Corn-Man rules. Screenshot: ThinkingStars / Kotaku

Storytelling and combat aside, two high points come in the games impressive art direction and the winning dynamic between its main characters. The stunning visuals of Mutationems setpieces almost supersede the imagery of the media its homaging. Ann and Ayane are also really cute. Their banter in between main quest and side-quest content was worth the many brutal deaths and consequent eruptions of Cmon man! I yelled when barely photo-finishing enemies.

As ThinkingStars first game, Anno: Mutationem boldly swings for the fences by throwing every cool concept it has at players. Mutationems unbalanced focus in its story is its critical failure. At one moment, its an anime-infused cyberpunk open-world RPG, in the next its a rigid story-driven metroidvania. But when it tries to meet in the middle, its pacing screeches to a halt, depriving its latter half of the charm of its wacky, worldbuilding NPCs and replacing it with long stretches of exposition conveyed through dry codexes and vague anime archetypes sporting unclear motivations.

With the games ending hinting at a possible sequel, Mutationem stands as a messy first draft. If a follow-up does come, I hope ThinkingStars will have the confidence to boldly stand and tell its own unique story rather than remain so shackled to its inspirations.

See more here:
Anno: Mutationem: The Kotaku Review - Kotaku

In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle jacket and wire-framed glasses and staring out with practiced intensity. Over Yarvins left shoulder floats a bust of the deceased rapper Lil Peep.

The moody digital aesthetic is called vaporwave. Ma, Pa, have you heard of vaporwave? It is a very of-the-moment style that uses retro computer graphics to evoke the feeling of haunting nostalgia for a vanishing human presence.

The metaphor was apt. In 2014, Yarvinwho had spent seven years blogging about politics and society under the name Mencius Moldbugwent silent, shifting his attention back to his grand project of building a functional software stack called Urbit that promised to revolutionize computing. But his political pronouncements soon caught up to him. In 2016, after the second planned talk at a computer programming conference was canceled on account of his political views, Yarvin found himself writing lines like: I am not an outspoken advocate for slavery, a racist, a sexist or a fascist. As anyone whos been on the internet lately can tell you, a person who must publicly deny that they are a fascist has already lost. When the invitations stopped coming, Yarvin didnt protest.

When I invited him to be a guest at that event, he was truly radioactive, the podcasts organizer, a young intellectual entrepreneur named Justin Murphy, told me recently. The scene brought out LA art hipsters, connoisseurs of civilizational decline, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The billionaire, who was one of the first investors in Facebook and has been a longtime patron of Yarvins, drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and ate pizza. Thiels car idled outside the club, engine on, driver behind the wheel, ready in case the need arose for a sudden exit. Rumor has it that Thiel takes this precaution wherever he goes, but it was not out of place that evening. Murphy, who spent several years in his 20s participating in militant black bloc anarchist protests, was worried antifa might show up to protest the event.

The night went off without a hitch. Yarvin had chosen an ideal venue to reemerge, with podcasts providing one of the only channels left to reach the public now that the glossy magazines, publishing houses, and other arteries for circulating new ideas had been choked off by the narrowing band of acceptable opinions.

Depending on what circles you run in, it can seem like everyone now has an opinion about Curtis Yarvin, including me. We were introduced in 2017 when I received a short, unsolicited email from him calling me a fake writer working in a fake century. The email arrived after Id published an essay that mentioned Yarvin a handful of times and referred to him as an architect of antidemocratic, Neoreactionary politics. The brashness, it turned out, was just Yarvins way of getting my attention. Thus began an occasional correspondence that has included a handful of interactions over the last five years. And so, without giving it a great deal of thought, I added myself to the extended network of people being courted, outraged, and shaped by the man and his work.

Like Niccol Machiavelli, to whom he is sometimes compared, Yarvin defines himself as an amoral realist who invented a new theory of government that upends established doctrines of political morality. Starting in the late 2000s, his namenot his real name, he was still known then by his blogging pseudonymbegan to be whispered among some of the most powerful people in the country, a secret society made up of disaffected members of the American elite.

Shortly after Donald Trump entered the White House, reports started to circulate that Yarvin was secretly advising Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His writing, according to one article, had established the theoretical groundwork for Trumpism.

Yarvin denied the rumors, sometimes playfully and at other times strenuously. But he was consistent in his criticisms of the Trumpian approach to politics. Mass populist rallies and red MAGA hats struck him as merely a weak imitation of democratic energies that had already died out. Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future, he wrote in 2016. The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.

What Yarvin is, if one wants to be accurate, is the founder of neoreaction, an ideological school that emerged on the internet in the late 2000s marrying the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society. Against democracy. Against equality. Against the liberal faith in an arc of history that bends toward justice.

Instead, neoreactionaries subscribe to the classical idea that history moves in cycles. In an era when the iconic Shepard Fairey portrait of Barack Obama captured the HOPE of the nation, Yarvin and his followers were busy explaining why liberal democracy was already doomed.

Unlike some of the other neoreactionary writers that emerged in the last 20 years, Yarvin possessed a style that, even when discoursing at great length on the gold standard or obscure historical matters, never suggested powdered wigs. He wrote like what he was: a hyperintellectual Ivy League autodidact and wiseass tech geek masking his childhood insecurities with an aura of infallibility, who shared the same set of subcultural and sitcom references found in anyone else his age. At its best, this approach made difficult ideas accessiblenot to mention viral. In one of his earliest blog posts, Yarvin birthed the now-ubiquitous meme of the red pill, a metaphor he borrowed from The Matrix movies and turned into a worldwide catchphrase describing the revelation of a suppressed truth that shatters progressive illusions and exposes a harsh underlying reality.

In Yarvins worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. The mystery of the Cathedral, Yarvin writes, is that all the modern worlds legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

Living Americans might be able to glean a sense of the phenomenon Yarvin describes in the current public discourse. It has often seemed in recent years that every few weeks has brought a new instance in which journalists and experts instantaneously, almost magically converged on shared talking points related to the hysteria du jourcycling through moral crusades to free children from cages at the U.S. border, save the post office from a fascist coup, label the filibuster a tool of white supremacy, and so on.The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think.

The night that Yarvin reemerged onto the sceneat the LA event, the story that moved him to tears concerned the life of the English writer Freda Utley, who became a communist in 1928an era, he observed archly, when anyone who was smart or cool was a communist. Utley moved to the Soviet Union and a few years later her husband was arrested and shipped to the gulag never to be seen again. She fled to the United States with her infant son and tried to warn her friends that their imagined utopia was really a police state. Of course, her friends are like, Do I know you? Who is this anti-Soviet person knocking at the door? Theyre like, Fuck you. Yarvin arrived at the moral of his story: You really shouldnt expect the material rewards of success to come along with the spiritual rewards of telling the truth. He swallowed a sob. You really shouldnt, he said, and wiped a tear from his eye.

In Yarvins parable, he is both the betrayed figure of Utley, martyred for telling the truth, and the above-it-all narrator explaining how the world really works. To his readers, his immense, fortresslike body of work offers one of the only redoubts where they can glimpse the realities of power behind the political circus. To his skeptics, he is a minor fraud whose claims to be a truth-telling iconoclast belie a fundamental affinity with the status quo. Yarvins calls to do away with democracy and turn, say, Elon Musk into Americas new CEO kingthats just the liberal technocratic system we already have on speed, an acceleration into the most dystopian aspects of the endless neoliberal present. To his critics, he is, as noted, a fascist. They point to a handful of his statements from a decade ago, including one in which he argued that certain races were better suited to slavery than others, and to the fact that the central pillar of his outlook is an avid opposition to the principles of democracy and equality. Yarvin, they say, is not a victim but the sender-off to the gulags; behind his tears, he plots to oppress minorities and tear down whatever remains of liberal democracy.

The essence of Yarvin as a historical figure begins not with his politics but his talents as a computer engineer, or programmer, the latter of which is his preferred label since he sees himself as a builder of things that work, not simply a manipulator of symbols. To separate his roots in technology from the politics he developed is to miss what is most powerful about himhis understanding of the hidden designs behind the systems of knowledge and power that keep both computers and societies running. The universal rule that he deduced is almost mystical in its simplicity: Order is good, not merely in an instrumental sense because it leads to virtuous outcomes; it is good in itself. Whatever leads to more of it is also good, while anything that produces disorder is bad.

While conservatives who have come to embrace Yarvin speak of restoring natural rights and using state power to direct the common good, for him, it is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene. Yarvin is not a nationalist or a populist, nor even a conservative. Rather, he is the signature example of a political theorist born after the death of 20th-century mass political movements, on the unsettled terrain of the internet. Whether you like it or not, Yarvin is the philosopher of, at the very least, our near future.

The father of neoreaction was raised in the bosom of the American state. His paternal grandparents were Jewish American communists. Yarvins father worked for the U.S. government as a foreign service officer, which took his family overseas to Portugal, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic. His mother was a Protestant from Westchester County who eventually also joined the civil service, as did Yarvins stepfather. The progeny of this Jewish-WASP-Stalinist, civil service, Cold War liberal American heritage was a child math prodigy and computer whiz who liked to write poetry. It didnt make social life easy, especially when his family returned to the United States just as he began high school.

I had already skipped one grade back in Fairfax County and they did an admission test, so I skipped two more and then Im 11 in ninth grade, he told me. Then we come back to the States and I go to an American public high school in Columbia, Maryland, and Im a 12-year-old sophomore, which is definitely wack.

At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go 90s dot-com era.

In late adolescence, Yarvin had a formative experience on an early internet message board called Usenet. It was a decentralized system, and more importantly it had this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it was an engineering student or worked at a tech company or something, Yarvin told me. He participated on forums like talk.bizarre, absorbing the inside jokes and new iterative patterns of thinking that were being developed on the outpost of a still-innovative and experimental digital culture. Occasionally he posted a poem or short piece of fiction to the board.

The end came in 1993 when America Online, the first mass internet provider, offered Usenet access to its subscribersresulting in a flood of uninitiated, unwashed provincials overrunning the community. You had this sort of de facto aristocracy that didnt know it was an aristocracy, and then it fell apart.

After the dot-com crash, I was left with a newly acquired girlfriend (who would become my wife), a few hundred thousand dollars, and a place in San Francisco, Yarvin told me of his early career. The buyout came from his job at a mobile software company that was founded in 1996 as Libris before changing its name to Unwired Planet, and then Phone.com. The settlement was considerably less than fuck you money, Yarvin said, but enough to finance an extended self-education in history and political theory that was attained by searching through Googles library of everything, ever, which was brand new at the time.

My ideas really came from reading the Austrian SchoolMises and Rothbardand then Hoppe. Hoppe opened a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world for me, Yarvin has said. A German-born political theorist and leading proponent of Austrian School economics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a title borrowed from his mentor Murray Rothbard. Hoppe theorized a distinction between monarchy, which he defined as privately owned government, and democracy, classified as publicly owned government. In the introduction to his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe called the transition from monarchy to democracy a source of civilizational decline.

From Hoppe, Yarvin took the idea that all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive.

If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the worlds great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. Yarvins answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.

Whether or not he can be compared to Machiavelli the man, it is correct to describe Yarvin as a Machiavellian, in the meaning given to that term by the American political writer James Burnham, a one-time follower of Leon Trotsky who later became a committed anti-communist. Like the historical figures chronicled in Burnhams book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Yarvin believes that one of the worst aspects of democracy is the fact that it rarely exists. Because democracy is the rule of the many, and the rule of the many is inherently unstable, democracies rarely last long.

Burnham argues that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites. To hide this fact and legitimize their rule in the eyes of the masses, oligarchies employ the powers of mystification and propaganda. Indeed, Yarvin believes that America stopped being a democracy sometime after the end of World War II and became instead a bureaucratic oligarchymeaning that political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of hereditary title or pure merit but through their entry into the bureaucratic organs of the state. What remains of American democracy is pageantry and symbolism, which has about as much connection to the real thing as the city of Orlando has to Disney World.

In place of a functional democratic system, Yarvin came to believe, there now exists an industrial-scale symbolic apparatus that generates the illusion of political agency necessary for societys real rulers to carry out their business undisturbed. American voters still go to the polls to pick their leader, but the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy.

The structure of democratic societies creates two tiers of power, observed the French sociologist and eminent defender of liberalism, Raymond Aron, in his appraisal of Burnhams book. While one tier of power is made up of industrialists, military generals, and other decision-makers operating in the shadows, in public their interests are represented by the second tier made up of those who know how to talk. The problem identified by the Machiavellians, says Aron, is that while the talkers are not necessarily competent leaders, they nevertheless gain power because debating regimes oil the wheels for those who know how to use words. There you have the two paths to power in a democracy: secrecy for the plutocratic persons of action, or, for those in the public political class, skill at deceit.

While Yarvins vision has as much or more in common with left critiques of the state dating back to the 1960s, his solutions are openly reactionarylooking back to the 17th century rather than forward to a promised socialist-utopian future.

In 2007, Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, started his blog Unqualified Reservations. His themes, now clearly established, were reflected in his earliest published work: Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction, Why, When, and How to Abolish the United States, and Against Political Freedom. At the time, Yarvins paid work was still with the San Francisco-based Urbit where, with funding from Thiel, he was immersed in a yearslong project to write a new programming language from scratch and decentralize the ownership of data. Even in the Olympian culture of Silicon Valley, where the microdosing transhumanists all had startups promising to engineer a brave new humanity, Urbits project was considered wildly ambitious, if not a bit mad.

The initial Moldbug audience was made up of fellow Silicon Valley misfits and disaffected amateur intellectuals with high-speed internet connections, the kind of people interested in his sardonic style and unconventional approach to history and political thought.

Everywhere one looked in the Moldbuggian scheme, things were not what they seemed. Beneath the surface of modern progressivism, for instance, Yarvin found that the sacraments and dogmas of Americas founding Protestant religion had been preserved. The now common criticism that the liberal activist culture of wokeness is a kind of secular religion picks up on arguments Yarvin was making in 2007 about mainstream liberal universalism, which he dubbed CryptoCalvinism.

This new techno-monarchist ideology of neoreaction developed in connection with other post-millennial intellectual movements in Silicon Valley like post-rationalism. By the late-2000s, while the U.S. culture and economy appeared stagnant, if not in outright decline, the technology sector was expanding its power and reach as apparently the only industry left in America still capable of innovation. The ideas coming out of the valley reflected that disparity and a growing feeling there that American liberal democracy was an obsolete operating system, impeding the tech sectors growth and with it the march of progress.

Other key figures to emerge in neoreaction included the writer Michael Anissimov, and the British philosopher Nick Land, a former Marxist and devotee of French critical theory who gave the title Dark Enlightenment to his extended study of Yarvins oeuvre. Adjacent to neoreaction was the digital fascism of the alternative right, which emerged a few years later. The alt-right, as it was also known, was another internet-based ideological movement but one that emphasized anarchic nihilism, rabid racism, and demonization of Jews. Neoreactionaries, by contrast, while comfortable expressing their own racial and ethnic bigotries, tended to downplay their political importance and eschewed the online Nazi role-playing of the alt-right as dim-witted and self-destructive. In a series of early essays, Why I am not a White Nationalist and Why I am not an Anti-Semite, Yarvin offered an analysis of those ideologies that was not entirely unsympathetic before ultimately rejecting them.

How could he be a fascist, Yarvin protested, when he so clearly detested the masses and the peopletwo of fascisms most celebrated subjects?

Perhaps the best known of the Silicon Valley democracy skeptics was Thiel. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, Thiel wrote in 2009. The great task for libertarians, he declared, is to find an escape from politics in all its formsfrom the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called social democracy.

Yet for Yarvin, even though libertarianism may be right about the best way to organize society, it fails because it is unserious about power. An all-powerful state is necessary, a sovereign Leviathan of the kind envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, to impose order by force on a level of such absolute authority that it can then disappear from day-to-day life.

Having concluded that democracy is a failed and dying form of governance, one that increasingly produces more disorder than order, Yarvin provided a vision for what could come next: an enlightened corporate monarchy that would only arrive after a hard reboot of the political system. It was a vision of total regime change, but one achieved without any violence or even activism since those efforts were doomed to fail and would therefore only strengthen the system they sought to overthrow. For those who believed in it, the next step was to generate the ideas that a future elite would use to run the country once it seized power.

And who should the rulers be, exactly? Rather than a hereditary dynasty, Yarvin proposed the Elizabethan structure of the joint-stock company used by the British East India Company as the best means for selecting and overseeing the monarch. The state, rather than tyrannizing its subjects or being controlled by citizens who endowed its authority, should be operated as a profitable corporation governed proportionally by its beneficiaries. Elsewhere, he puts it differently: I favor absolute monarchy in the abstract sense: unconditional personal authority, subject to some responsibility mechanism.

Some readers may dwell on how the weight that the rather vague some responsibility mechanism bears in this program for the enlightened monarchies of the future. For Yarvin, the answer is always more power.

While Peter Thiel has since disavowed his rejection of democracyin public at leastand is now financing the U.S. Senate campaigns of a new breed of MAGA 2.0 populists like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, Yarvin has not wavered.

Power, according to Yarvin, is like computer code, binary. It is either on or off; final and absolute, or merely a glorified form of servitude. Even the tech giants, which he considers the only efficient organizations left in the United States, are powerless. Facebook may be able to ban anyone it wants while controlling the flow of critical information to billions of people across the globe, but Mark Zuckerberg still has to answer to midlevel government functionariesa relationship demonstrated by the Facebook CEOs reluctant embrace of a Democratic Party approved fact-checking apparatus. Even if Zuckerberg wanted to raise an army to stage a coup, its not clear what target he could strike. [F]or all practical revolutionary purposes, Yarvin wrote in May of 2020. the deep state is as decentralized as Bitcoin, and as invulnerableto ballots and bullets alike.

Because the goal for Yarvin is to force power out of the bureaucratic shadows and make it visible, he sees the brute force approach of Chinas government as a positive example. After all, what is the opposite of the U.S. deep state with its esoteric CryptoCalvinist dogmas, if not the overtly state-worshiping ideology of the Chinese Communist Party where the governments capacity for violence is never far from the surface? Its an analysis that for Yarvin and others of his ilk approaches its own dogma. As recently as last December, Yarvin maintained that Chinas zero-COVID surveillance state approach to the pandemic, in which millions of people have been confined to their homes in citywide quarantines, entails fewer covid restrictions than citizens of the reddest American red state.

What is bizarre about the reaction to the neoreactionaries is not the perfectly understandable revulsion at this adoration of China, or at their racial and ethnic bigotries, but the outrage over their attack on democracy. Philosophers and politicians like Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, to name only three among countless figures, including many on the left, have been outspoken in their warnings about democracys perils. That is to say nothing of the current American ruling class, which treats ordinary people with aristocratic contempt, openly conspires to suppress reporting that might get the wrong candidate elected, and conspires to undermine popular electionsall in the name of democracy. If Yarvins political musings are a danger to the future of American democracy, as they may well be, one can only ask what that means for the actions and statements of the people who are currently in power.

The temptation to squeeze Yarvin into the premade villain costume of a contemporary morality play may be temporarily satisfying, but if its aim was to shut him down or curb his influence, it has failed. Hes back in the public sphere now with more time than ever after departing Urbit in 2019, and he has a busy schedule of podcast appearances. It seems likely, in fact, that ignoring Yarvins incisive diagnosis of the American political system, or reducing it to cartoonish villainy, will only benefit him and other opponents of democracy who are more than happy to see the American system continue its slow collapse.

It also misses the fatal weakness of Yarvins ideology: For all of its power as a systemic analysis, it contains no place for human beings. The classic question in philosophywhat is the good life?never intrudes on Yarvins pursuit of designing beautiful machines.

I once asked Yarvin whether he saw his computer programming and writing as drawing on different parts of his brain. My love of computer science has always been in systems because its essentially architecture, youre building something that has to have a very large component of aesthetics in it, he told me. Youre in a situation where maybe even more than in architecture, you know this works because its beautiful.

Later in the conversation, he expanded on this point. When youre building system software, youre in this position of this demiurge, he said using the term from gnostic theology for a minor, and typically false, god. The matter of the individual, not as a political subject but as a sentient, feeling agent possessing intrinsic needs and desires, seems not so much a matter Yarvin avoids as one that almost never occurs to him in his political writing. Even where his designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereftlike a beautiful but empty city.

Even where Yarvins designs are most immaculate, they are somehow bereftlike a beautiful but empty city.

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On Feb. 1, 2020, before any COVID cases were reported in the United States and a few weeks before his comeback podcast appearance, Yarvin published an essay warning that the novel coronavirus could become a devastating global pandemic. He also predicted that it wouldnt matter. He pronounced America a failed state, unable to envision, let alone muster the capacity to take the kind of decisive action that, according to Yarvin, was being modeled by Chinas zero-COVID approach to the virus. The hard truth, he wrote a few months later, is that the virus is not just a test of our government. It is a test of our form of government.

The following summer, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan while barely firing a shot. Americas trillion-dollar investment in the Afghan Security Forces was exposed as a Ponzi scheme and collapsed overnight. In the final chaotic days of the war, U.S. forces struck a deal with the Taliban, their sworn enemy of the past two decades, to provide security at the airfield where final evacuations were taking place. Shortly after that, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the airport killing 13 American service members and some 170 Afghan civilians.

No general or political leader was blamed for Americas longest war ending in humiliating defeat. No one was fired or resigned. Moreover, the total lack of accountability for a catastrophic systemwide failure is, according to Yarvin, not a problem that could be solved by electing better leaders or applying more political will, because it is an essential feature of the systems design. Why did this happen? Yarvin asked. Very simply: because no one is in charge of the government.

Not the wrong people; no one.

Is that possible? If things were really that bad, wouldnt we be able to tell?

Maybe not. Without losing your balance, try to work back through the many sharp reversals of public policy and elite opinion since the beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020, when Yarvin first issued his warning, it was considered a sign of right-wing racial paranoia to be worried at all about the virus in China. The actual danger of coronavirus: fear may fuel racism and xenophobia that threaten human rights, intoned The Washington Post. A few months later, the Great and Good changed their minds and declared the pandemic an unprecedented emergency demanding a nationwide shutdown. Schools and playgrounds were locked. Children were masked. The police were called out to break up weddings and prayer services held by religious communities that insisted on endangering the rest of the country by carrying on with their primitive rituals. Then the Black Lives Matter protests began that summer, and the switch was flipped again. Now, national leaders and public health officials donned the kente cloths of their own religious rituals and joined the throngs. A dazzling new form of Jesuitical argumentation was invented in which the crowding of tens of thousands of people together in the streets was not merely justified in spite of the risks, but redefined as a public health measure to combat the chronic threat of white supremacy and thus not in conflict with the science.

Witnessing this spectacle, I have found it easy to picture myself as the member of a captive audience watching a parade of soldiers march by in crisp uniforms, executing their synchronized movements to form images of hammers, surface-to-air missiles, and other icons of the glorious peoples republic. Only here it was not North Korean conscripts marching but the best fed and most thoroughly educated Americansuniversity professors, journalists, scientists, surgeons generalwho clicked their heels and pivoted in unison. How, one had to wonder in amazement, did they always stay on message even as the messaging changed so often and abruptly?

Yarvins answer, of course, is the Cathedralthe invisible structure of belief and messaging by which all the modern worlds legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure. At one and the same time, the Cathedral is simply a name for the uncanny degree of agreement between the media, universities, and other organs of elite culture, and a theory explaining how the aggregate effect of that agreement is a system of Orwellian mind-control projecting an illusion of freedom so powerful it blinds people to reality.

The question many people have, of course, is whether such a structure actually exists. After two years of COVID, following the disintegration of the liberal state, and the emergence of evermore eccentric ideological impositions, coordinated on what seems like an hourly basis by an invisible yet apparently all-powerful hand, which has no need to account for its nakedly visible contradictions and failures, the answer seems obvious: Either you see it, or you dont.

Originally posted here:
The Red-Pill Prince - Tablet Magazine

Tue Nov 10, 2020 - 7:07 pm ESTFri Jun 18, 2021 - 5:25 pm EDT

November 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) The COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by the worlds elites as part of a plan to globally advance transhumanism literally, the fusion of human beings with technology in an attempt to alter human nature itself and create a superhuman being and an earthly paradise, according to a Peruvian academic and expert in technology.

This dystopian nightmare scenario is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but an integral part of the proposed post-pandemic Great Reset, Dr. Miklos Lukacs de Pereny said at a recent summit on COVID-19.

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Indeed, to the extent that implementing the transhumanist agenda is possible, it requires the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a global elite and the dependence of people on the state, said Lukacs.

Thats precisely the aim of the Great Reset, promoted by German economist Klaus Schwab, CEO and founder of World Economic Forum, along with billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates and other owners, managers, and shareholders of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance who meet at the WEF retreats at Davos, Switzerland, contended Lukacs.

Transhumanism is far from a benign doctrine. Rather, it is at complete enmity with Christianity, Lukacs pointed out during the virtual in Truth Over Fear Summit organized by California-based Catholic writer and broadcaster Patrick Coffin.

Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of absolute relativism that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to relativize the human being and turn it into a putty that can be modified or molded to our taste and our desire and by rejecting those limits nature or God have placed on us.

Transhumanism therefore requires the destruction of the Judeo-Christian morality, which is based on absolute principles and values.

Those raising alarm about the Great Reset often overlook the crucial role of technology in the plans of the meta-capitalists, contended Lukacs, who has Ph.D. in management from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) from the University of Manchester.

The COVID-19 pandemic was just another social engineering project deliberately planned and implemented by predatory meta capitalism to achieve the ultimate end: redefining and reconfiguring the human nature and condition, he argued in a presentation in Spanish.

I have the firm conviction that this pandemic has been manufactured and its purpose is none other than to initiate, as they say, or implement the Great Reset, which will open the door to the advancement of the transhumanist agenda, he said.

Indeed, WEFs Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset as a way to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term he coined, which, he declared in January 2016, will affect the very essence of our human experience.

Schwab described the Fourth Industrial Revolution then as a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres, Lukacs said.

Those technologies include genetic engineering such as CRISPR genetic editing, artificial intelligence (A.I.), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and quantum computing.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is nothing other than the implementation of transhumanism on a global level, emphasized Lukacs.

Transhumanism as a political ideology and cultural movement was defined in 1998 by Swedish economist Nick Bostrom, then a professor at Oxford, and David Pearce, a British philosopher, who that year founded the World Transhumanist Association.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of Homo Deus, who is regarded as a great visionary, has been promoting transhumanism.

Transhumanists propose to use technology to alter human nature to produce human beings with super longevity, super intelligence, super well-being, Lukacs said.

They reject the Christian belief in absolute truth, and that God created human person in His image and likeness, and see absolute values as a brake for their pretensions of transhumanist and globalist progressivism.

Thats why the approval of abortion is key to understanding why we are entering fully into this transhumanist agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Lukacs said.

When abortion was approved, the political, economic order and moral values on which Western civilization is based collapsed.

Abortion means nothing other than the transition of the human being from a subject of rights to an object of commercialization, to an object of experimentation, he said.

Life ceases to have an inherent value, an inherent dignity. It becomes an object of consumption, an object of production, and this aligns perfectly with the goal of transhumanists to experiment with the human being.

Transhumanism is a struggle against those propositions of absolute values, said Lukacs, and what it embodies in progressivism is absolute relativism.

Evidence that absolute relativism has caught hold in the Western world is the rapid and widespread rise in trangenderism.

Lukacs also noted cases of transspecisim, transageism, transableism, and transracism.

Examples of these attempts to reshape ones reality at will include the American known as Lizard Man, the Canadian man living as a six-year-old, the British woman who blinded herself because she wanted to be disabled, and the German woman who injected herself with melatonin to darken her skin to identify as black.

These are previous states of transhumanism, a kind of accustoming, especially of the new generations, to accept this diversity, Lukacs said.

While many transhumanist proposals are rooted in science fiction, Lukacs pointed out they now have the technology to attempt to realize their mad aspirations.

Transhumanists propose to increase longevity by using CRISPR genetic editing, which has been used to triple the lifespan of mice. Thus, using this technique on human beings, it is conceivable that people could live to the age of 200 or 300 years old, he said.

They propose to increase human intelligence by planting chips in people that have greater processing capacity than the human brain.

An example is Elon Musks NeuraLink, which is an interface that is applied to the cerebral cortex and which Musk says will help people with Alzheimers or epilepsy, but which Lukacs speculates could open the door to neuro-hackers.

There is also the post-humanist school of transhumanism, of which economist Bostrom is a proponent.

Bostrom proposes that at some point it will not even be necessary to have a physical body, but we will be a set of information, that we will be able to upload our thoughts to the Cloud, that we will be able to form a great collective intelligence with other human beings, Lukac said.

As for the promise of super wellbeing, philosopher Pearce said it was the hedonist imperative to genetically modify us to aspire to super well-being.

What Pearce is saying is that through genetic modification, were going to be virtuous human beings, and that we have to forget about pain and suffering, we have to get rid of those genes that make us aggressive, violent, jealous, that force us to fight and kill each other, said Lukacs.

When you put all these things into the balance, what you are realizing is what you are looking at is literally the destruction of human beings, of Homo sapiens, and their conversion to Homo deus.

But as with the Great Reset, the elites twist the language and disguise their transhumanist agenda behind vaguely benign phrases, so Schwabs Fourth Industrial Revolution is sold to us as an idea thats not necessarily going to affect us, or that it is progress that will benefit humanity, he said.

However, just as ordinary people will suffer in the Great Reset under the architecture of oppression, as Edward Snowden phrased it, so they will bear the brunt of the experimentation by transhumanists.

Its very worrying because for achieving that kind of dream, many, many mistakes will happen for sure. The burden will be carried by the people that get affected by this in their health, in their lives, in their economic situation and in their psychological or mental state, said Lukacs.

Its a very, very costly experiment. And [the elites] are not going to bear any responsibility for this. Trust me, he told Coffin.

For them, its wonderful. For the rest, this is just dystopian.

Lukacs also contended that the global elites encountered an unexpected roadblock to their plans in U.S. president Donald Trump.

Actually, the structure of power is not that complicated, he told Coffin in an online Q&A session.

At the top are the meta-capitalists or capitalists that have so much financial muscle that they can play beyond the rules of capitalism; actually, they make the rules of capitalism or remake them, he said.

And you have those guys on Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Construction, everything big, the big corporate transnational world. Those are the billionaires who through their philanthropies, their billion-dollar pledges and all this kind of stuff, they funnel money downwards to all the politicians, who are basically rented politicians, they rent them, they run the world for them, he said.

Its really the privatization of power through philanthropy, added Lukacs.

And then, of course, you will have a layer of middle ground or middle level institutions, NGOs, universities, foundations, and then youll go down to grassroots local government. Its a pyramidal structure.

But Trump is one key public figure who could evidently not be rented.

It is so obvious that in the States right now for the past, what, four, five months, a state coup has been in the making. As simple as that. I have no problem in saying it openly, Lukacs told Coffin.

Thats the situation. They have tried to oust a president that was democratically elected because they are desperate. China is still progressing. And their partners in the West, theyre just not catching up. So, they are a little bit desperate. China is not going to wait.

For more information on Truth Over Fear Summit, go here. Premium passes are still available.

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Far-right polemicist ric Zemmour has vowed to reverse the immigration he blames for undermining Frances identity and core values if he wins the countrys upcoming presidential election. FRANCE 24 spoke to his supporters who gathered by the thousands in Paris on Sunday.

A writer and talk show pundit known for his polarising attacks on Muslims and immigrants, Zemmour emerged as the elections dark horse early on in the campaign, drawing from both the mainstream conservative camp and voters disappointed by the far rights traditional champion, Marine Le Pen. He has since slipped down the table in voter surveys, polling at around 10-11 percent, though his supporters still rank among the most raucous and motivated ahead of the first round of the election on April 10.

On Sunday, tens of thousands gathered at the Trocadro in Paris, facing the Eiffel Tower, hoping to inject new momentum into his campaign. They included veteran far-rightists, staunch Catholics, anti-LGBT activists and anti-vaxxers for whom Zemmour is the best candidate to halt immigration, restore order and uphold traditional French values.

Donning a Zemmour 2022 cap and a baptism medal wrapped around her neck, 18-year-old Eugnie is getting ready to cast her very first ballot on April 10 and she could hardly be more thrilled about her choice of candidate. I never thought Id support someone with such fervour, she says. Im lucky to be casting my first vote for a candidate I really like. The philosophy student was just 9 years oldwhen she first took part in a Paris rally, back in 2013, to oppose marriage for same-sex couples. Nine years on, shes back on the streets of the French capital to prove that Zemmour is not alone, contrary to what the media claim.

A practising Catholic, Eugnie stresses the former pundits love of France (...) and the fact that hes the only candidate to defend Christian values. Hes also the only one to challenge the transhumanist movement [advocates of human-enhancement technologies], she argues, praising Zemmours conservative stance on bioethical debates that undermine society. While she acknowledges that transhumanism is a niche concern, even for the far-right candidate, Eugnie wholeheartedly subscribes to his core policy: his pledge to halt, and indeed reverse, immigration.

Its good to be humane and welcoming towards foreigners, but when there is a refusal to assimilate we cannot surrender our culture, says the young Zemmouriste, whose champion has called for a ban on non-French first names. Eugnie is aware that Zemmour has slipped behind his rivals in the race for the all-important runoff. But she already has a Plan B in the other far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, who is polling in second place behind the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron.

I live nearby, its a nice day, Ive come to gauge the atmosphere, says 57-year-old Marc, observing the raucous crowd gathered on the Trocadro. An anti-vaxxer and opponent of the Covid-19 health pass, he describes himself as the familys ugly duckling. I didnt get the Covid jab, unlike my mother and brother who sold out to Macron, he says. Born to a French mother and Yugoslav father, Marc says he can identify with Zemmour, whose parents left their native Algeria when it was still a French territory. In fact, he claims lots of people of immigrant background can relate to Zemmour.

Like the far-right candidate, Marc says he is most concerned about the so-called great replacement, a conspiracy theory purporting that white Europeans are being replaced by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, with the complicity of political elites. Its not just a theory, its everywhere, says the self-employed part-time worker in the building industry, pointing to the growing number of women wearing (Muslim) veils in Paris and its suburbs. Aside from immigration, Marc also agrees with Zemmours stances on education and his opposition to woke ideas. Finally, we have a candidate who challenges all the anti-racist, feminist and LGBT talk we are constantly fed by the media, he says.

>> Read more:Pushing far-right agenda, French news networks shape election debate

Portuguese-born but very well assimilated, like Zemmour wants, 53-year-old Ana is perfectly at ease with Zemmours hardline stance on immigration. All of my children have French names, its important for them to integrate, says the mother of four, who travelled from Bellme in Normandy to attend the rally in Paris. A longtime Zemmour fan, Ana was first drawn to the far-right pundit by his televised appearances back in the 1990s and has read every one of his books. Shes a regular participant at his rallies, when she isnt busy running the kitchen of her restaurant.

A devout Catholic, Ana voted for conservative candidate Franois Fillon in 2017. Five years on, she sees Zemmour as the champion of Christian values. Hes the only one with a plan to save our civilisation from the great replacement. Our race is in decline and were heading for catastrophe, she says, describing Zemmour as an opportunity for France. Ana is convinced the former pundit would have averted the war in Ukraine had he been in power. He would have known how to negotiate with Putin because he is a man of peace, she says of Zemmour, who has frequently praised the Russian president, once saying he longed for a French Putin.

Another longtime supporter, Florent signed up for Zemmours fledgling party Reconqute ! at the first opportunity. I like his ideas, his personality and his background too. Hes the only one to cast a lucid eye on the situation, particularly when it comes to immigration, says the 40-year-old school supervisor from the leafy Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, for whom the great replacement is well underway.

When you see the number of veiled women increasing in a wealthy town like Saint-Cloud, where I live, it means immigration is everywhere, he claims. What will the country look like in 20 years? We must act now. Florent is also drawn to Zemmours education platform, with its focus on discipline. Every day I see kids falling by the wayside. We must restore order to the system, he says. However, Florent is increasingly pessimistic about his candidates chances of qualifying for the run-off. If he fails, he will vote for Le Pen, without a doubt as he has done in the past. Everything must be done to get rid of Macron, he adds.

A one-time Le Pen supporter, 42-year-old Sverine recently switched her allegiance to Zemmour, angered by Le Pens jabs at the former pundit. I didnt like it when Le Pen branded him far right, she says. And when she had a go at him for having Nazis in his party, it was really absurd, because she has the very same problem. An administrative workerin a suburb of Paris, Sverinesays she leans neither right nor left and is drawn to Zemmours earnest talk. Hes not a politician, hes a man of the people, like a family friend, she says of the hardline polemicist, who has two convictions for hate speech and is appealing a third.

While she does not live in the countryside, Sverine approves of Zemmours promise to hand struggling rural families a 10,000cheque. She also backs him to halt the decline in Frances education system. Holding up a banner that reads Women with Zemmour, she dismisses the accusations of misogyny levelled at the far-right candidate, who has repeatedly blasted feminist campaigns and attempts to introduce gender parity in government. Such accusations are totally unfounded, she claims. I even get the impression there are more women than men at his rallies.

This article was adapted from the original in French.

Link:
Spooked by immigration, Islam and woke ideas: Who are ric Zemmours supporters? - FRANCE 24 English

In his writings on Fatima and Russia, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen pointed out that the world has become so used to judging temporal events in terms of other events, that it has lost sight of that greater standard of judgment, namely, the Eternal. Michael Warren Davis, in an article forCrisis, has recently accused another archbishop, Carlo Maria Vigan, of having fallen into precisely this error, becoming so absorbed in worldly events, so swept away by trends in modern politics, that he has let the clamor of current events drown outthe voice of God, and blind him to the evils of the Russian government.

I strongly disagree. In fact, if we look at Vigans writings in the light of Sheens discussion of Fatima, we can see that just the opposite is true. Far from Vigan being the one drowning out the voice of God, it is actually the entire Western world that is guilty of drowning out not only the voice of God but even the very clear signs of His intervention in and movement through world events.

To understand this, we must step back and address what Mary meant when she spoke of Russias errors. The most common interpretation is that she was referring to the errors of communism. But there are several reasons to reject this interpretation. First, she spoke of these errors in her July appearance, months before the communists took over. The February Revolution had been a bourgeois democratic one that ended what had previously been seen as the divinely-appointed Tsarist monarchy. If Mary meant the errors of communism, why appear before the communists took over? Why appear when those at the time would have thought she was referring to the democratic revolution?

Further, communism was not newly spawned in Russia in 1917. By that time, it had been spreading its errors across Europe and the world for more than 70 years, and the Church had been sounding the alarm about it throughout those years. Neither it nor its spread were new to Russia. Third, if Mary meant communism, why not just say communism or communist errors? Why just errors?

Sheen points us in a different directionspecifically, to the year 1858. He asks us to look not only at the world events of that year but at the Eternal ones as well. Rejecting the commonly held view that the Modern Age started with the rise of science, something that is not at odds with Faith, he argues that it began instead with the writing of three seminal works: Darwins On the Origins of Species, Mills On Liberty, and Marxs A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In those three works, Man summarized the errors of the Modern Age and announced his independence from God: we were not divinely created but rather evolved from mere matter; there is no higher authority than man to which we must answer, freedom is license, the only laws are those we choose to make; and Man and history are driven by economics and politics not religion and certainly not anything spiritual.

These are not the errors of communism. They are the errors of modernism. They are errors that have to do with Modern Mans denial of God, of Creation, of Gods Authority over Man, of any obedience due to Him. Sheen points out that what was effectively said in those works, in that year of 1858, was that all men are immaculately conceived, all born without Original Sin. For if there was no Divine Creation, then there was no Fall. No Fall, no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin, then all men are born immaculate and free to be whatever they want to be, answerable to and in need of no higher authority.

Those were the key human events of 1858 to which Sheen directs us. He then shifts our attention to Gods response, His Eternal judgment, that occurred that very same year: the Apparitions at Lourdes. Mary appeared from Heaven and announced: I am the Immaculate Conception. Sheen points out that at the very moment the world was denying original sin, our Blessed Mother claimed the prerogative solely as her ownshe alone and uniquely was immaculately conceivedeveryone else was born in original sin.

In the Blessed Mothers appearance at Lourdes, Sheen notes, God answered Mans arrogant claim of independence and provided proof of his errors. Her very appearance said yes, there is more than matter; yes, there is a God; yes, there is a Heaven; yes, Man was born in Original Sin; and yes, Man owes obedience to God and reparations for the sins committed against Him. Every error contained in those three seminal works was contradicted in that one announcement: I am the Immaculate Conception.

Thus, Sheen says, began the Modern Agenot with science and reason, but with the denial of Original Sin and Gods response.

But Man did not take notice of, nor heed, that Eternal pronouncement, that Eternal judgment.

Instead, the modernist errors continued to be spread throughout Europe, along with all the other errors that went hand in hand with them: rationalism, socialism, communism, and all the others Pope Pius IX listed in Quanta Cura and its attached Syllabus of Errors. But that was in 1864. By 1917, those errors had existed and been spreading for another 50-plus years before the Russian Revolution and Marys appearance at Fatima. They were unique neither to Russia nor to communism. So, what was different about Russia that Mary would single it out?

The answer can be found in the pages of Pope Leo XIIIs Rerum Novarum. In it, he gives the Churchs answer to communism: inequality and class conflict are not aberrations to be fixed, but rather they are a part of the human condition. Mankind lives in a fallen world, a world felled by mans disobedience to God. Only through God and with God, through His Church, will peace and harmony be possible. All the sects, organizations, societies, fraternities, all the governmental solutions that communists and socialists think able to fix the world are futile and delusional. No organization or State, apart from God, will ever be able to bring peace to the world. Social problems cannot be solved apart from God and His Church.

If we look to all the writings of the Church throughout this time, what we see is increasing concern not just over the errors themselves but over the increasing belief that man could fix the human condition through the creation of a godless State, through the implementation of mere economic and political change. And that is what was new in Russia, in the February Revolution and to be completed in the Bolshevik one: the successful creation of a political body that incorporated all those errorsa secular State that, apart from any reference at all to God, claimed to be able to solve the problems inherent in the human condition; a State that said no to God, no to any authority higher than itself, no to natural law; and a State that would be powerful enough to spread those errors across the world. As Sheen put it, Russia gave political form and social substance to the de-spiritualization of the Western world.

The danger in believing Mary was pointing specifically to communism and to Russia lay in believing the problem is Russia and the error communism, when in fact the error is believing that man is nothing more than a rational animal who can fix all his social problems through the political and economic policies enacted by a secular State.

When Mary appeared at Fatima, her first announcement was this: I am from Heaven. As God responded to Mankinds announcement of its separation from Him in 1858, so He responded in 1917 to its erection of a godless State as the new path to human happiness and freedom: Mary stepped into time and announced that Heaven exists. And if Heaven exists, then there is a higher authority. Salvation and redemption will not come from a man-made State but from God and only from God. And to prove this, to drive the message home, Mary would appear six times. And on the last one, she would bring direct proof from Heaven, a miracle that would prove the lie that man is the highest authority on earth and fully capable of fixing that earth as he alone wills it to be fixed.

But even with a miracle witnessed by tens of thousands, Modern Man again said no and did not heed the message.

And the Soviet State grew and did indeed spread its errors across the world. Not the errors of communism, but rather the modernist errors that man is independent and can create his own path to utopia by means of the secular State. Throughout the West, in country after country, man began to turn to the government, the State, to solve more and more of his social problems. Care of the poor shifted to the State. Mediation of class conflict shifted to the State. Alleviation of discrimination, racial conflicts, income inequality: all shifted to the State. Individual charity was replaced by State-run charity.

Even the Church turned to the State to solve societys problems, mans human condition, and she shifted her focus to influencing public policy. Every social problem came to be seen as fixable through a new State policy, a new institutional or systemic change. It was only a matter of time until they were also seen as the result of poor government policy, not a wound in mans human nature. Everything was fixable through the State, not by healing hearts and souls through grace attained through the Church God created to heal mens souls.

Sheen drives home the point again and again that the errors were not specific to Russia or communism. They caught fire in capitalist countries as easily as they did in communist ones. He notes that there is a closer relation between communism and monopolistic capitalism than most minds suspect. They are agreed on the materialistic basis of civilization; they disagree only on who shall control that basis, capitalists or bureaucrats. And further, he says: Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God. Capitalism denies that economics is subject to a higher moral order. Communism says that economics is morality.

In fact, he highlights how the Church is as opposed to monopoly capitalism as it is to communism. The errors permeate both. Both reduce man to a mere economic animal. Both use the State to rule.

The issue isnt Vigan being blind to the evils of the Russian government. It is the West that is blind to the evils that have permeated its own existence to its very core. It is the modernist Church that is blind to the evils of thinking it right to replace sacraments with social action, taking government money to feed bellies at the expense of feeding souls.

Vigan looks at the WEF, the IMF, the UN, NATO, the EU, and all the other associations that have risen in the West and sees them not in terms of other worldly events but in terms of the Eternal. He sees them as Pope Leo XIII saw the secular associations of his day: efforts by man to fix the world apart from God and His Church.

He sees, too, that what they are trying to do is create a new, even more powerful State than the Russian one Mary warned us about, a Global State with the declared goal of creating a New World Order and a new transhuman creature. Modernism stripped man of his spiritual nature. Transhumanism seeks to strip him of his most basic human nature, reducing him to a mere machine, perfected by technology and microbiology.

Vigan has not become absorbed with politics. He has become absorbed with the Eternal, with seeing the Eternal in the affairs of the day, including both those things God seems to be moving as well as those things Satan seems to be moving. We dont know if the Consecration occurred as Mary asked, but Vigan asks us to look at world events not just in terms of other world events, but in terms of spiritual events. What we do know is that the Soviet State collapsed in 1989. And we know that since that time, Russia has been undergoing a Re-Christianization while the entire Western world has been experiencing its De-Christianization.

Vigan asks us to see that it isnt really Russia, or communism, or capitalism that we are battling but rather the Principalities, the Satanic forces that seek to enslave all men to a godless Global State. He asks us to consider that God is giving Russiare-Christianizing Russiathe chance to atone for its sins by being the very thing that prevents that Global State from being created.

And is that so hard to imagine? Is it not just like our God? To let Russia atone for its sins and be the means of saving many souls?

And is this not also just like Our God: To once again respond to mans rejection by guiding us to Him and Our Blessed Mother Mary? Is it not just like Him that, on the Marian feast day of the Annunciation of Gods Incarnation, the most modernist pope in the history of the Church got down on his knees and called the entire world, East and West, to likewise fall to its knees, every bishop, all people, on our knees, and not just recognize, finally, the Immaculate Conception, but moreto consecrate ourselves, and our entire world, to her Immaculate Heart, the Immaculate Heart of the Immaculate Conception, thereby saying, at last, after all these years, after all these appearances, finally: yes, there is a God; yes, there is a Heaven; yes, we are more than mere matter; yes, we are all sinners; and yes, we must obey God and make reparations for our sins.

In turning our eyes and our hearts to Mary, are we not finally conceding, agreeing with Pope Leo XIII, that apart from God, there will be no peace? Apart from God, no merely human institution, no godless Stateno matter how big, how globalis going to save us.

And is that not just like our God? The most modernist pope of all timeleading the world to renounce the most fundamental errors of modernism?

Is it not a fitting way for the Eternal to announce the end of the Modern Age?

At just that moment when man cant even define what a woman is, God reminds us that it is to a woman that He has given the power of overcoming evil, a woman who will crush the head of the Serpent. Modern Man lost Jesus. His Mother has returned to help us find Him. She has experience in that.

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Mary, the West, and Russia's Errors: A Defense of Archbishop Vigan - Crisis Magazine

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat in the sun, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

How People Think 17 of the most common and influential aspects of how people think Many behaviors are universal across generations and geographies. Circumstances change, but peoples reactions dont. Technologies evolve, but insecurities, blind spots, and gullibility rarely does. (Collaborative Fund)

The Latecomers Guide to Crypto As its gone mainstream, crypto has inspired an unusually polarized discourse. Its biggest fans think its saving the world, while its biggest skeptics are convinced its all a scam an environment-killing speculative bubble orchestrated by grifters and sold to greedy dupes, which will probably crash the economy when it bursts.(New York Times)

The Art of Money: Turning financial success into a creative pursuit What do you consider the act of making money? Is it an act of accounting and measuring? Or, is it an act of imagining and contemplating? Our finances involve numbers and data, but theyre intractably tied to our personal ideas, experiences, feelings and behaviors intangible things you cant formulate in a spreadsheet. Therefore, to manage the human side of money, its better to think more like an artist than a scientist. (The Root of All)

Why Cant the West Admit That Ukraine Is Winning? America has become too accustomed to thinking of its side as stymied, ineffective, or incompetent. (The Atlantic)

Silicon Valleys Favorite Weird Philosophy Is Fundamentally Wrong: Where transhumanists err is in the disproportionate role assigned to genes in creating their favored traits. In contrast to clear-cut physical features, such as eye color, the relationship of genetic information to characteristics such as intelligence and kindness is nuanced and indirect. Today, developmental systems theory supersedes the dominant, unidirectional causality previously lodged with genes. (Slate)

Why Do We Die Without Sleep? The reasons why sleep is so vital often hide in unexpected parts of the body, as host Steven Strogatz discovers in conversations with researchers Dragana Rogulja and Alex Keene. (Quanta Magazine)

Heres how an algorithm guides a medical decision Artificial intelligence tools are complicated computer programs that suck in vast amounts of data, search for patterns or trajectories, and make a prediction or recommendation to help guide a decision. Sometimes, the way algorithms process all of the information theyre taking in is a black box inscrutable even to the people who designed the program. But even if a program isnt a black box, the math can be so complex that its difficult for anyone who isnt a data scientist to understand exactly whats going on inside of it. (The Verge)

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things: The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels. (New Yorker)

Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album: Combing across 19th-century shores, seaweed collectors would wander for hours, tucking specimens into pouches and jars, before pasting their finds into artful albums. Sasha Archibald explores the eros contained in the pressed and illustrated pages of notable algologists, including the most ambitious album of all by Charles F. Durant (Public Domain Review)

Demand for This Toads Psychedelic Venom Is Booming. Some Warn Thats Bad for the Toad. In a sign of unintended consequences of the psychedelic resurgence, scientists say that the Sonoran desert toad is at risk of population collapse. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out ourMasters in Businessinterview this weekend with Samara Cohen, BlackRocks Chief Investment Officer for ETFs & Index Investments. BlackRock manages over $10 trillion in assets, and Cohens Index / ETF group is responsible for $6 trillion of it.

Geopolitical events. The playbook worked (nearly) perfectlySource: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day,please see this.

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10 Weekend Reads - The Big Picture - Barry Ritholtz

DNA Tracing

This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine issue 362 in October 2021, as part of our 'DNA Tracing' series, where every month we delve into the lineages behind iconic games and studios.

The life of a studio famed for big, difficult decisions began with a no-brainer. When John Romero approached Warren Spector with a blank cheque to make his dream game, Spector's team was unemployedshowing up to the defunct Looking Glass Austin office to pitch ideas unpaid. In their sketches and documents was a concept for a spy game called Shooter, in which an agent could hack devices and control nanotechnology. The year was 1997, and the air was thick with Hollywood actors in mirrored sunglasses tapping away at chunky keyboards.

Suddenly, with Romero's backing, anything Spector and his studio could imagine was fair game. The fundamentals were clear for a team that had coalesced around Thief: The Dark Projecta first-person world in which objects behaved as expected when subjected to gravity and the elements, and NPCs reacted with a nuance that enabled players to manipulate them.

Yet it wouldn't be true to say that Deus Ex was born from a unified creative vision. In fact, Spector encouraged discord by creating two design teams, each with a separate idea of what the game should be. One, headed up by future Arkane boss Harvey Smith, was determined to ground the adventure in a fashion that emphasised the 'near-' of near-future; the other had inherited the Ultima RPG sensibilities of Spector's alma mater, Origin Systems.

The results could have been disastrous, a game pulled apart by horses. Instead, Deus Ex was elevated by its whiplash variety. One level, which Smith fought to keep free of enemies, was a prototypical Gone Home in which you quietly explored the mansion of a dead Illuminati leader, listening to the wistful observations of the daughter she left behind. Another was a Matrix-esque hotel escape best handled with a flamethrower. A third, Hong Kong, was a massive city hub stuffed with engrossing dialoguea no-no in Looking Glass games, which had favoured abandoned or out-of-hours spaces in order to dodge uncanny NPCs. Forget Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex was the game in which everything was permitted, for player and developer both.

That exhilarating clash of contrasts was reflected in the story, too. Where later sequels homed in on transhumanism and the social issues it magnified, the original Deus Ex was an explosion of conflicting political ideas. Through likeable secondary characters, who condemned lethal methods in no uncertain terms, it endorsed a broadly liberal worldview. Yet its knotted storyline also warned against the potential of globalism to put power in the hands of a malevolent few, and hooked you up with a terrorist group dedicated to upholding the US right to bear arms. Thanks to the earnest socialist voice of lead writer Sheldon Pacotti, Deus Ex became a game in which a minor NPC in a bar could bend your ear with a radical interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Like the environment it was produced in, Deus Ex was a smorgasbord of ideologies.

By the time it came to make Deus Ex: Invisible War, Ion Storm Austin had resolved its internal differences. Perhaps that was part of the problem. With Harvey Smith newly installed as creative director, the team set about streamlining, determined to focus Deus Ex's feature set. Some of the more notorious controversies now seem overblownthe universal ammo system is defensible, for instance, since it regularly drains your guns, encouraging creative solutions with an environmental or social dimension instead. But Invisible War's amalgamated factions decoupled the series from real-world concerns. What's more, a singular vision reduced Invisible War's capacity for surprise, even as it routinely matched its predecessor for thoughtful, non-linear level design.

The biggest issue, however, was the Xbox. It's important to note that, in 2021, the tribal fear of 'dumbing down' is outdated hogwash; practically every AAA game is now multi-platform, a trend which has multiplied game budgets, benefitting PC gamers just like everyone else. Invisible War, however, fell on the edge of that change. The Xbox's 64mb of RAM forced a dramatic reduction in the scale of Deus Ex's levels.

While not necessarily a dealbreaker for designimmersive sims have always favoured density over sprawlit was a compromise that hurt Invisible War's fiction. Lower Seattle, supposedly a sprawling slum, comprised a couple of tight streets, three apartments, one coffee shop and a deathly quiet barfar from the "vast cityscape" described in early interviews.

Ion Storm pursued a similar policy of parallel development on PC and Xbox for its third and final project, Thief: Deadly Shadows. And some of the same problems manifestedespecially in the cramped open world that connected missions, damaging the carefully curated sense of a larger city looming in the background of Garrett's heists. Yet it clearly benefitted from being second in the queue, behind Invisible Warbearing less of the brunt of the console's technological lessons.

In fact, with Deadly Shadows, it finally seemed as if advancing tech was catching up with the Looking Glass dream of a simulation that mimicked the world's natural forces. The Havok physics was rubbery but robust, and Ion Storm made fine use of dynamic shadowsmaking your safe space mercurial for the first time as torch-wielding patrols moved back and forth behind lampposts.

Most of all, Deadly Shadows felt like the completion of a circle for the studio that had first coalesced around Thief. Spector let former Looking Glass staff lead the way, who treated Deadly Shadows as the last part in a trilogytying off Garrett's journey from cynic and misanthrope to caretaker of the world. Rarely has an inherited series been honoured so carefully.

Ironically enough, it's a reverence Ion Storm would never have afforded its own series, Deus Ex, which it considered a platform for risk-taking. That impetus might have disappointed players of Invisible War, who found their beloved RPG-shooter too much changed. But without that same quality, they would never have cared about the name Deus Ex in the first place.

More:
Ion Storm Austin's journey from Thief to Thief, by way of Deus Ex - PC Gamer

Transhumanist ideology is advancing among scholars who profess Christianity so the question must be asked, is the dream of a post-human (Human+) existence compatible with the Christian faith? More specifically, is transhumanism (H+) compatible with the doctrine of Adam and Eve as the first humans created in the image of God (imago Dei)?

The answer is no. The biblical doctrine that Gods image exists in every human person and also in humanity as a whole shuts the door to transhumanism. We can see this if we look at what the Bible teaches about anthropology, ethics, and salvation in Christ alone.

First, the transhumanist history of human origins and Human+ destiny denies that God made human persons with a fixed and final nature that glorifies our Creator. In practical terms, H+ is a gnostic endeavor that celebrates the immaterial and disparages the material embodiment of our souls. In contrast, the Bible teaches that, while the image of God was deformed by the fall (Genesis 3), the impact of sin did not destroy the sacred nature of human personhood. Nor did it undermine the intrinsic value of our soulish bodies.

The paradox of human sacredness and sinfulness is resolved in the Apostle Pauls affirmation of our identity in Christ (Galatians 2:1920). For Paul, the incarnation of Christ, and his subsequent death and resurrection, affirms the dignity of our bodies, and yet promises to transform every believer into a glorified state. In 1 Corinthians 15:49, he assures believers that, just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. The transformation offered through the cross of Jesus Christ does not imply that humans evolve into something beyond the human. Even in the final eschaton, when our salvation is made complete, Scripture does not teach that we somehow transcend humanity. The image of the heavenlies of which Paul speaks is a glorification of our humanity, both body and soul, and not the elimination of it. Therefore, the beauty of our humanness as it exists today seen through the lens of Christs redemption shuts the door on transhumanism which treats the human species as only one short stage along an infinite spectrum of evolved forms.

Second, H+ is the programmatic de-humanization of humanity. Just as Darwinists search for the missing link to our past, transhumanists seek to make each human a new link toward our unknown future. For transhumanists, the value of an individual person is tied to their perceived utility as an agent of technological evolution. Rights and dignity are tied primarily to the survival of the collective and only secondarily to the individual. Humans are no longer a uniform kind but a hierarchy of inferior vs. ever-evolving superior beings.

Consequently, the Christian duty to care for the sick and poor is altered into a duty to advance the species by giving economic privilege to the strong. Ultimately, this Nietzschean vision of the evolving bermensch does not eliminate suffering but justifies the use of techniques that cause individuals to suffer for the greater good of the species. And while the pursuit of technology to eradicate suffering, biological defects, and infirmities is compatible with biblical Christianity, the sacrifice of the imago Dei on the altar to the collective good shuts the door on transhumanism.

Finally, Christian transhumanists use ambiguous terminology to improperly connect technological transformation to the Bible. To achieve technological salvation, the human body is diminished and demeaned as a hindrance to Human+. Given transhumanist anthropology, it is no surprise that their theology emphasizes technology as the path toward post-human salvation. To make their case, transhumanists equivocate on the term change in the Darwinian sense of random mutation and equate it to change in the biblical sense of salvation through the cross of Christ. Despite this claim, there is no etymological, scientific, or hermeneutical connection between biological/technological change and biblical change except in the imagination of transhumanist theologians.

Finally, it is a category error to equate the universal salvation of the human species through technological advance to the particular salvation of the individual person through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Even more, what H+ soteriology offers is not the salvation of humanity per se but the elimination of humanity in favor of a transcendent Human+ race. The mission to self-evolve beyond humanity begs the question, how is humanity saved through technological advancement designed to eliminate humanity? In light of Scripture, transhumanist soteriology seems nothing more than a replay of Isaac Asimovs I, Robot, where the AI determines that the only way to save humanity is to exterminate humanity. In the final analysis, it seems self-evident that the biblical doctrine of imago Dei shuts the door on transhumanism.

Here are the first four short essays in this series by J. R. Miller:

With transhumanism, what happens to human rights? The transhumanist accepts suffering for the individual if suffering can advance the evolution of the species toward immortality and singularity. If humans can redefine what it means to be human, what prevents us from eliminating anyone opposed to this grand vision? (January 1, 2022)

Eugenics, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence If we were to succeed at creating an ethical decision-making AI, whose ethics would it abide by? The utilitarian goal of a sustainable future must be guided by a higher ethic in order to avoid grave mistakes of the past. (January 13, 2022)

The deadly dream of Human+ Look at the price tag Some are prepared to sacrifice actual humans now for the hope of future immortality. Without a fixed and final definition of human personhood, there is no foundation for a fixed and final ethic of human rights. (January 20, 2022)

and

Can Christian ethics save transhumanism? J. R. Miller looks at the idea that the mission to self-evolve through technology is the definitive Christian commitment. In Millers view, Christian transhumanists do not provide a stable and persistent definition of human personhood, thus cannot ground human rights. (February 27, 2022)

See the rest here:
Why the Imago Dei (Image of God) Shuts the Door on Transhumanism - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

On September 8th, 1966, the world was introduced to the greatest science fiction franchise in history. Star Trek: The Original Series hit the TV screens 56 years ago and has since amassed 13 movies, 8 television series, 3 animated shows, 2 magazines, a plethora of books and video games, plus innumerable fan fiction. Even fictitious languages such as Klingon have been offered as courses in several universities. Star Treks impact on the culture is beyond compare as it has pushed its audience to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Throughout its tenure, the franchise has always been largely progressive in its viewpoint. It never avoided taboo topics but instead encouraged the viewer to consider such issues through the looking glass of fiction, creating an intellectually open space for internal debate and discourse. However, the wokeification of its current series Discovery has altered Treks trajectory of thoughtful cultural commentary into a non-stop homily of political jockeying and woke promotion.

A sampling of Treks finest moments helps to shed light. These issues include race, gender roles, sexuality, xenophobia, transhumanism, globalism, war, and countless others.

Often credited as the first on-screen interracial kiss between a white man and a black woman, Star Treks William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols helped shatter a taboo when they locked lips in the 1968 episode Platos Stepchildren. As Smithsonian notes, The episode aired just one year after the U.S. Supreme Courts Loving v. Virginia decision struck down state laws against interracial marriage. At the time, Gallup polls showed thatfewer than 20 percent of Americans approved of such relationships. Back then, Star Trek pushed political boundaries without preaching. There was no diatribe or moralizing, just a nuanced normalizing of things now rightly considered trivial.

Later in the Star Trek universe, a subtle but bold change came to the introductory speech. Captain Kirk opened the 60s episodes with Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has before. In the subsequent 1987 series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard changed the phrase to where no one has gone before introducing gender neutrality in its framing and progressing the Trek franchise even further.

Throughout the series, not only were there more prominent female characters (four regulars in TNG as opposed to one in the original), but women were rarely portrayed as sexually as they were in the original series. Instead of the scantily dressed alien babes Captain Kirk often encountered, the women in TNG always dressed the same as men, rarely revealing their bodies and were given rich character development. This was done naturally, not as an editorial from the writers rooms.

Later still, in 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced the first Black captain, Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko, and the show often dealt with issues of race relations, prejudice and slavery. In the episode Far Beyond the Stars, Captain Sisko travels in a dream back to 1950s America where he is the science fiction writer Benny Russell experiencing racism and segregation, even being beaten by two police officers in a racially incited scene. The episode often finds itself in Top 10 lists of Star Trek episodes and the Movie Blogs summation is apt Far Beyond the Starsis a love letter to the transformative potential of science-fiction, an ode to the capacity to imagine a world that is better than this one.

Star Trek Voyager introduced the first female captain with Kate Mulgrews phenomenal portrayal of Captain Kathryn Janeway. Notably, the Trek timeline awarded her the ranking of Admiral before any other on-screen Captain who came before her.

Star Trek: TNG addressed issues of sexual orientation, transgenderism and reparative therapy in the 1992 episode The Outcast. At the time, the media still depicted gay lifestyles largely through the lens of the AIDS epidemic, but Star Trek took a much more nuanced approach. It dealt with an androgynous alien race that prohibited gender identification. It then portrayed how these aliens underwent reparative therapy in the event they deviated into identifying with a specific gender.

So Star Trek has always been progressive as it imagines and reimagines humanity moving toward a more perfect union. Unfortunately, the brilliance of a nuanced past has given way to a vapid and often insufferable present.

Star Trek Discovery, the newest series following a different crew seeks to increase its woke credentials in every episode, ad nauseum. Instead of creative episodic stories that challenge the mind and elevate the soul, every single episode turns into a lecture on all things race and LGBTQIA+.

Star Trek Discovery offers its first Black female Captain, Sonequa Martin-Green as Captain Michael Burnham. While Star Trek had already dealt with the gender and race of its captains in past series of DS9 and Voyager, the outright slobbering from media pundits about how brave the show is for introducing a Black female captain is ridiculous. There is nothing profound about this from a Trekkie perspective. It is in fact a normal progression of all things Trek. What is most unfortunate is that phenomenal acting capabilities of Martin-Green are traded for pedantic character development and shallow, predictable storylines. Its as if she serves more as a checkbox to Diversity and Equity than simply as a talented actress (which she more than proved in her Walking Dead days). Her trials and tribulations are subverted by always coming out on top and never having to endure true loss. The accolade Live long and prosper need not ever be said to Captain Burnham because the viewer already knows she will.

Now having recently wrapped its fourth season, the main crew is predominantly occupied by globalist gays, liberal lesbians, tyrannical transgenders, needless non-binaries and twisted transhumans. Instead of writing one or two poignant episodes regarding their identities and orientations, each episode serves to instruct viewers how they must think about these things, not simply challenge them to think more critically.

This season follows the character of Adira, a transhuman becoming a transgender human with the pronouns he/him. Its exhausting. Instead of watching a delightful sci-fi, the viewer is subjected to the woke tropes of a show seeking to break down barriers when all it accomplishes is the viewer needing to read a gay dictionary to understand its warped terminology. If that werent enough, this character develops a romantic relationship with his non-binary crewmate Gray, (the pronouns they/them serves as a heavy-handed lesson in every other episode). They also then become the surrogate children of the gay couple on board, which checks every box the people at the Human Rights Campaign demand.

Discovery deserves praise for only one of its LGBT characters, the lesbian engineer (obviously) Jett Reno portrayed by Tig Notaro. Her orientation just is what it is and no one really needs to think about it. She also provides humorous breaks from the endless sacrifices this show offers up to the rainbow gods. Slow clap.

To end the season, politics bluntly interrupts the storyline. Failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams enters stage-center as the President of United Earth. Never has Star Trek dared be so brazen with its political orientation. The heavy handed move robs the viewer of the experience, causing one to wonder if Stacey even won that election far off in the 29th century.

In the past Star Trek has served as a brilliant cultural commentary that encouraged the viewer to imagine mankinds progress, it now demands culture think a particular way in order to obtain progress. It no longer presents the audience with a debate to consider but rather insists on a politically correct way to think. It is as partisan as it is obvious.

In a time of American cultural upheaval, Star Trek should serve the functions it always has: a release valve for cultural disagreements and a platform that seeks to build ideological bridges. While The Next Generation signed off its series with the episode All Good Things Must Come to an End, Discovery is fast becoming the show that makes the Trekkie look forward to All Woke Things Must Come to an End.

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Woke: The Final Frontier - California Globe