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Book critics Fiona Capp and Cameron Woodhead cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction titles. Here are their reviews.

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Neil Balme: A Tale of Two MenAnson Cameron, Viking, $34.99

When former Richmond strongman Neil Balme contacted novelist (and Age columnist) Anson Cameron in 2020 and asked if he would be interested in writing his story, Balme chose well.

The result is not just the tale of a footballers life, but a thoughtful character study of an intriguing figure: a man of paradoxes and contradictions, a thug on the field with a history of violent episodes, but to those who know him a thinker, mild mannered, someone who goes his own way, but also a players player keenly aware of the collective of football itself.

Cameron covers his playing life, his coaching and key administrative roles at various clubs, plus the impact of football on his private life with sympathy, wit (he has a great turn of phrase) and the kind of intellectual inquiry his complex subject requires. A genuine cut above usual sports writing.

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RiggedCameron K. Murray & Paul Frijters, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

For all our nonsense talk of being an egalitarian country, Australia according to World Bank data is one of the most unequal in the developed world. Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters boil this down to something they call the game of mates, the title of their 2017 study, Rigged being an updated version.

In the nature of a parable, they invent a devious, corrupt villain called James, and an ordinary sucker, Sam, who indirectly foots the bill. But its a real-life tale of networks within networks. James works for a government department in land development, gets to know certain developers, jumps the fence and joins them armed with all his inside knowledge and contacts, resulting in massive government contracts.

Transport, mining, banking, COVID schemes that lined companies profits, you name it. The same principle applies.

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The WitnessTom Gilling, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

Much has been written about the infamous Sandakan death marches in Borneo during World War II, this latest study focusing on one controversial figure: Australian Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich. Of the 2400 Australian and British POWs sent to Sandakan, only six escapees survived. Sticpewich was one of them.

Drawing on records and other texts (especially Tim Bowdens interviews with survivors), Tom Gilling creates a vivid picture of the brutality of camp life and sadism of the commander Captain Hoshijima. Sticpewichs evidence during war crimes trials was so compelling it sent Hoshijimi and others to the gallows.

But was he a heroic survivor or a collaborative opportunist out for himself at the expense of everyone else? The truth is possibly somewhere in between. Whatever, its a dramatic tale of war and survival.

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My Father and Other AnimalsSam Vincent, Black Inc., $32.99When Sam Vincent, a would-be writer in his 20s, offered to help out on the family farm just outside Canberra after his fathers hand was damaged in an accident, he could not have seen how events would unfold.

At first, he worked alongside his father, a sort of unpaid apprentice learning the trade, at the same time getting to know his father, warts and all. Then his mother suggested he needed a project of his own, which led to him becoming an orchardist, specialising in the Smyrna fig, which in turn led to grazier school and learning about holistic farming. Then, seven years later, his parents moved off the property, and he was suddenly in charge: a farmer, albeit a kind of accidental one.

True to his title, Vincent recounts it all in a droll, amused and bemused Durrell-esque style. Its also a window onto the new rural Australia.

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Every Version of YouGrace Chan, Affirm, $32.99

Set in a 2080s Melbourne ravaged by climate change, Every Version of You envisages a world where those who can afford it gel up and plug in to spend time on an unspoilt virtual planet known as Gaia. When the tech to allow a full upload into Gaia emerges, people choose to leave their physical bodies behind.

For Tao-Yi, her boyfriend Navin and their friends, the decision tempts and torments: Navin, plagued by ill-health, hopes to find release from suffering; Tao-Yi is left to wonder why shes so reluctant to surrender, as her friends upload themselves one by one.

With an intriguing blend of cli-fi, philosophy of mind and transhumanist themes, Grace Chans novel delivers striking science fiction steeped in absurdity and dystopian menace.

Grace Chan is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

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Cult ClassicSloane Crosley, Bloomsbury, $29.99

Sloane Crosley, author of the sharp-witted essay collection I Was Told Thered Be Cake, takes on the New York dating scene with a twist in her second novel, Cult Classic.

We follow the disgruntled editor of a psychology magazine, Lola, who is newly engaged to a devoted fiance, Boots, but might be developing an acute case of cold feet. Awkwardly, Lola keeps running in to her exes. With the first, outside a Chinese restaurant, she relights an old flame, but when she continues to run intoher exes again and again, something more bizarre than a coincidence is afoot.

Cult Classic is Twilight Zone-style speculative fiction that fuses acerbic dating memoir and digital media satire into a romantic parable with a neat twist.

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Isaac and the EggBobby Palmer, Headline Review, $32.99

This sensitive and assured debut novel from Bobby Palmer deep-dives into the perils of extreme grief. After the sudden death of his wife, Isaac Addy is in such anguish he finds himself on a bridge about to jump off. A nearby cry of suffering stays Isaacs hand; he heads into the woods and discovers Egg, a mysterious creature who starts as an inarticulate companion then evolves, ushering in an emotional transformation.

Isaac and the Egg could easily have been twee, but this unstinting study of grief is delivered with the seriousness of a fairytale. And while he uses a whimsical premise, Palmer is at pains to avoid sentiment and always has a well-judged flash of gallows humour at hand to leaven the novels bleaker intensities.

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HydraAdrienne Howell, Transit Lounge, $29.99

A young antiquarian, Anja, snaps at work and gets fired. She has a lot going on already: her mother has died recently and her husband left her after a hellish trip to Greece.

When Anja hits rock-bottom, shes drawn to an eerie sea change, using her inheritance to lease an isolated cottage by the sea. But it isnt long before she becomes convinced that shes not alone in the bush, that her every move is being watched, and tension builds as Anja begins to seek an unseen presence and confront the cause of her unease.

Adrienne Howell has written a paranoia-inducing modern gothic. It does suffer from the letdown of an uninspired reveal, but not before showing off the authors distinctly gothic vision and talent for creating suspenseful atmospherics.

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History of a hard man: Neil Balme memoir stands out from the pack - Sydney Morning Herald

Demythicizing EconomismCommon Good Part ThreeSilver Dollar

Just as the Philistine Giant Goliath bellowed threats to the cowering Hebrew army (1 Samuel1 17), economism has buffaloed and bullied our nation and our planet into surrendering to its myth. Might God raise up a humble warrior such as young David to engage the giant in combat?

Here, we will emulate Davids courage. Although the battle appears hopeless, we will carefully place two stones in our sling shot to attack the giant. We will select demythicization plus the common good. Will these hit their mark?

Continuing what we began in the previous posts, we will engage in demythicizing economism. More commonly, we plan on myth-busting economism.

By the Goliath economismwe refer to a set of beliefs that functions mythically in our worldview. Our economic beliefs provide a conceptual set of presuppositions we assume to be true without critical reflection. Like lenses over our eyes, they determine our very perception of reality. These presupposed beliefs define our epoch as the econocene. It [economism] functions as an unspoken worldview, says law professor and founder of Baseline Scenario, James Kwak. Economism provides a framework that people use for interpreting social reality, a style of thinking that shapes, consciously or unconsciously, their values and preferences(Kwak, 2017, 10).

Following economist Richard B. Norgaard and theologian John B. Cobb, Jr., we dub economisms beliefs to constitute a religious dimension within our culture. Whether or not we consciously realize it, we hold membership in the church of economism.

Recall our distinction between demythologizing and demythicizing. I do not engage only in demythologizing, which is a form of interpreting a myth while living within the myths world of meaning. Rather, by demythicizing economism, I intend to liberate us from the grip of thinking only in economic terms when confronting economic injustice combined with threats to planetary wellbeing. We need language and symbols and values that orient us toward a planetary common good. We need a supra-economic vision of a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society to guide the ethics of our institutions.

This is the third in our series on the common good. In the first I alerted readers to grass roots support for common good governing. In the second, I announced our agenda: myth-busting economism. Here in the third post, I will uncover and disclose what lies hidden before our very eyes, namely, the myth of economism.

Is Economism a Religion? a Myth? or Both?

Why are you wearing black? I asked my teaching teammate in the Energy and Resources Program at the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, Professor Richard Norgaard. He was wearing a black shirt, black pants, and black shoes. I bet his socks were black too, but I didnt check. We were co-teaching a course dealing with religious and ethical perspectives on environmental science. It had just dawned on me that this was the wardrobe he routinely wore to every class. I suddenly realized that I can be slow to observe the obvious.

Im in mourning for our planet, he answered.

In mourning? Are you without hope?

Since the year 2000, I wake up each morning and ask myself what I should wear. When the thought enters my mind that today, just as yesterday, our nation is still in the grip of economism with its unrestrained greed and disregard for the future of our planet, I decide once again to wear black. I mourn.

Economism is the term Richard Norgaard elects to describe economic theory as a religion in disguise. Worse. It is a destructive religion at that. Homo sapiens on Planet Earth have entered the Econocene era, he observes. We are at the stage in human evolution where human minds, beliefs, daily aspirations, institutions, and measurements of history are filtered and framed through a single dominating lens, namely, the economic narrative regarding what constitutes reality.

Economism provides the twenty-first century with its conceptual set, its worldview, its myth through which we understand ourselves and interpret the course of both personal and political events. Because of the totalization of the economic metanarrative, economism functions nearly invisibly as the religion which unites America if not the world across ethnic boundaries.

Economist Norgaard is not alone. With equal vehemence, process theologian John Cobb views economism as an idolatrous religion. Economism functions today as our shared religion.From a Christian point of view, it is the idolatrous worship of mammon (Cobb, The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank 1999, 1). Might Norgaard and Cobb agree on a theological analysis of the economy? Yes.

Economist Norgaard has reluctantly found himself in the business of religion. Hed like to convert from economism to something better. Whereas the church of economism estranges the human race from Earth, Norgaard prophesies a vision of an as-yet-unnamed global moral renewal that readies us for reformation, or better, for supersession. Might public theologians and ethicists aid in this vision construction?

I offer one modest amendment to Norgaards description of economism as a religion. Although describing economism as a religion helps illuminate some aspects of our present situation, one point I wish to make is the following: if we employ the term, myth, as an analytical tool, we will gain more direct access to the near invisible manner in which economism governs todays culture. I recommend we think of economism as a myth. By myth I mean a cultural mind-set, a frame of interpretation which heavily influences our view of reality.[1] My employment of myth overlaps largely though not exhaustively with Norgaards term, religion, and I hope it adds illumination.

Once designated a myth, economism becomes subject to de-mythologizing, to an interpretation that exposes its existential and moral underframe. The myth metaphor will prompt us then to de-mythologizeperhaps better, de-mythicizeeconomism, breaking its grip on the modern mind.

In place of this myth I offer a biblical vision of Gods promised future, a transformed future prefigured in Isaiahs vision of the Peaceable Kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb (Isaiah 11). This prophetic vision opens the human imagination to ask two key ethical questions: (1) should the rich help the poor? and (2) does a vision of the common good bridge Gods eschatological promise with todays economic possibilities? I will answer both of the questions in the affirmative.

These questions are important because postcolonial critics of the global economy liken the market to an enslavement from which we need to be liberated. According to R.S. Sugirtharaja, the postcolonial task today is not territorial emancipation but freedom from the control of the market(Sugirtharajah 2012, 134). The role that economism understood as religion or myth plays is akin to an opiate, as Marx and Lenin might aver, to inoculate us against the pain of environmental degradation.

The economic-environmental crisis drove John Cobb along with Nobel Prize winning economist Herman Daly to produce a most prescient book in 1989, For the Common Good. The delusion of Homo economicus as an individual with no regard for the welfare of the larger biosphere needs to be corrected with a new global economic system, they contend. We call for rethinking economics on the basis of a new concept of Homo economicus as person-in-community(Daly 1989, 164). Each of us is a person-in-community, in community with the entire web of life that makes our planet green with fertility.

Religion is inherently at play in public morality, writes eco-justice ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda. The question is not whether but how (Moe-Lobeda 2013, 9). Uncovering just how our economic belief system functions mythically requires fanning away the dust cloud that hides it.

Why might one even suggest that economics could create its own religion? After all, economics deals with the material world whereas religion deals with what is spiritual, right? In addition, economics does not enlist church memberships or belief systems or moral codes, right? Economics is based on science, whereas religious people live out of faith, right? Economics can be sharply distinguished from politics and culture, right? No, none of this is right. In fact, all these assumptions kick up a cloud of dust which hides the invisible religious character of economism. Here is how Norgaard describes economism.

Our concern here is with economism as a widely held system of faith. This modern religion is essential for the maintenance of the global market economy, for justifying personal decisions, and for explaining and rationalizing the cosmos we have created. This uncritical economic creed has colonized other disciplines, including ecology, as ecologists increasingly rely on economistic logic to rationalize the protection of ecosystems. More broadly, economism often works syncretically with the worlds religions even though it violates so many of their basic tenets. A Great Transition is needed to replace economism with an equally powerful and pervasive belief system that embraces the values of solidarity, sustainability, and well-being for all (Norgaard 2015).

Even though ecnomismthe greed creedis most dominant in the United States, Norgaard observes that economism has reshaped diverse cultures to become for the planet its modern secular religion(Norgaard 2015).[2]John Cobb, Claremont School of Theology

Theologian Cobb provides a parallel definition: economism is the belief that the economy is the most important dimension of human life, that the whole of society should be organized around it (Cobb, Spiritual Bankruptcy: A Call to Prophetic Action 2010, Chap 7). Once we get the economist and the theologian to agree on nomenclature, we are ready for creative mutual interaction.[3] We are ready for discourse clarificationwe are ready for demythicizing economism, one of the two main tasks of the public theologian.

Within the frame of public theology, my own method for dealing with economism as a secular religion includes a hermeneutic of secular experience. This is a method I have employed elsewhere to analyze the structure of myths that model reality for modern and emerging postmodern culture. The hermeneutic of secular experiencea form of demythologizing, actuallyidentifies hidden or disguised dimensions of ultimacy which lurk below the surface of secular practices or ideologies, dimensions of ultimacy which interpret reality in such a way that they enlist faithful adherence.[4] Subsequent to this demythologizing of secular experience, I then try to de-mythicize the myth that governs so much of our social and cultural thinking.[5] First, demythologize economism. Then, demythicize economism.

Of the four main social driverseconomics, politics, culture, and communicationthe churches and other religious institutions may lack economic or political power but they have access to culture. The path to public policy for the church is through culture, and demythicising economism is the first step to influencing public reaction to, if not resistance to, the economy.

With this method in hand, we turn now to economism in more detail to uncover the mythical framework through which existential and moral questions get posed. That we are dealing with the dimension of ultimacy is clear when we recall the rise of the discipline of economics over the last century. One of the founders of the market-oriented Chicago school of economics, Frank Knight, already in 1932 declared that economics would have to become the equivalent of a religion with basic tenets hidden from public view. There must be ultimates, and they must be religious contended Knight. He went on to propose that if someone were to question the purported objectivity of economic tenets the questioner should be treated as if in violation of what is sacred. To inquire into the ultimates behind accepted group values is obscene and sacrilegious, he added(F. Knight 1932). We today can see how nearly a century ago the discipline of economics was deliberately taking on dogmatic status with an authority that relegates criticism to heterodoxy(F. a. Knight 2015). Move over religion! Economics wants to take your place!

When in religion a dogma is proclaimed, then it becomes easy to draw a line between orthodox and heterodox alternatives. This does not exactly apply to economism, however. What turns economic theory into the religion of economism is not outright dogma. Rather, it is the power of its submerged myth to screen the questions society asks. Its presupposed conceptual set functions to filter language and ideas in such a way that our mental assessments and values become pre-structured, so to speak. Relentless economic discourse fogs our minds with interpretations of reality offered hourly in radio, television, and internet communications. The televised Sunday morning worship services of the 1950s have been gradually replaced with stock market reports, economic projections, and investor hand ringing. Hunting bear has been replaced by bear markets, and milking cows with bull markets.

Through discourse clarification, we can sift through what is said to the unsaid. We can search the presuppositions to find the dogmas. Here is what we find: the tenets of belief in the creed of economism.[6] On the one hand, these beliefs are promulgated as dogmas by the high priests of neo-liberalism. On the other hand, we the hoi polloi simply accept them as dogma, usually without question. This widespread acceptance makes them virtually invisible as creedal commitments. Here is a list of seven tenets I plan to lift from obscurity into visibility through discourse clarification.

The problem posed by economism is threefold: (1) economic injustice; (2) ecological deterioration; and (3) degradation of the human soul.

Degradation of the human soul is almost forgotten by todays progressive theologians. But, the souls health was paramount at the birth of liberal Protestant theology more than a century ago. Writing in 1895, Dutch public theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) drilled down to the coveting of money in the human heart measured against the teachings of Jesus. Everything stalks money. Everything thirsts for money. Virtually all senses and thoughts are set on acquiring money. To gain control over money people will use cunning and guile; they will cheat and deceive each other; they will risk the goods of their wives and children, and sometimes even the goods of strangers that have been entrusted to them. Everything is measured by money. Whoever is rich is a celebrated and honored man. This is just what Jesus does not want (Kuyper 2022, 78-79). What does a healthy soul look like? The souls longing and the hearts desire must be focused on something entirely differenton spiritual goods, on heavenly goods, on the treasures that neither moth nor rust corrupt and where no thief can break through and steal (Kuyper 2022, 79).

If we turn our soul toward spiritual flourishing, what do we get? We get ecodomy. Theologians Barbara Rossing and Johan Buitendag employecodomy within ecotheology to stress the kairotic dimension of the present moment in the face of Gods eschatological promises. By approaching the ecological crisis from an eschatological or even apocalyptic perspective, the concept of ecodomy will help us envision future hope for a new creation and life on earth. If ecodomy is eschatology put into practice, it can help us address the climate crisis. We can name our moment as akairos moment, a moment of hope and urgency. And we can draw on the apocalyptic witness of Scripture to address this crisis, not with despair but with hope hope for what the Gospel of John calls abundant life, hope for a renewal of the whole community of earth, the ecodomy, hope for life in all its fullness.

This has been Part Three on demythicizing economism on behalf of the common good. In Part Four of our Common Good series, we will explicate and analyze each of these seven tenets.

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

This fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot.

Chung, Paul. 2016. Postcolonial Public Theology: Faith, Scientific Rationality, and Prophetic Dialogue. Eugene OR: Cascade Books.

Clague, Julie. 2011. Political Theologies Ten Years after 9/11. Political Theology 12:5 645-659.

Cobb, John. 1982. Process Theology as Political Theology. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox.

. 2010. Spiritual Bankruptcy: A Call to Prophetic Action. Nashville TN: Abingdon.

. 1999. The Earthist Challenge to Economism: A Theological Critique of the World Bank. New York: St. Martins Press.

Daly, Herman E. and John Cobb, Jr. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gilkey, Langdon. 1976. Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History. New York: Seabury Crossroad.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2013. The Sociotheological Turn. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81:4 939-948.

Knight, Frank. 1932. The Newer Economics and the Control of Economic Activity. Journal of Political Economy 40:4 448-476.

Knight, Frank, and Thornton Merriam. 2015. The Economic Order and Religion. Manfield CT: Martino Publishing.

Kuyper, Abraham, 2022.On Charity and Justice: Collected Works in Public Theology. Bellingham WA: Lexham.

Kwak, James, 2017.Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality. New York: Pantheon.

Lee, Hak Joon. 2015. Public Theology. In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology, by eds Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips, 44-65. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper.

Metz, Johannes. 1969. Theology of the World. New York: Herder and Herder.

Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia. 2013.Resisting Structural Evil.Minneapolis MN: Fortress.

Norgaard, Richard. 2015. The Church of Economism and Its Discontents. Online Post, ), http://www.greattransition.org/publication/the-church-of-economism-and-itsdiscontents .

Peters, Ted. 2017. God in Cosmic History: Where Science and Big History Meet Religion. Winona MN: Anselm Academic ISBN 978-1-59982-813-8.

. 2nd Ed, 2003. Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom. London and New York: Routledge ISBN0-415-94248-0-415-94249-7.

Peters, Ted. 2018. Public Theology: Its Pastoral, Apologetic, Scientific, Politial, and Prophetic Tasks. International Journal of Public Theology 12:2 153-177; https://brill.com/abstract/journals/ijpt/12/1/ijpt.12.issue-1.xml.

Peters, Ted. 2018. Toward a Galactic Common Good. In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, by ed David Boonin, 827-843. New York: Macmillan Palgrave.

Reich, Robert. 2018. The Common Good. New York: Vintage.

Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slessarev-Jamir, Helene. 2011. Prophetic Activism: Progressive Religious Justice Movements in Contemporary America. New York: New York University Press.

Sugirtharajah, RS. 2012. Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Tracy, David. 1981. The Analogical Imagination. New York: Crossroad.

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Economism vs Common Good Part Three | Demythicizing Economism - Patheos

Morals are on our side, science is on our side, the law is on our side, and the Nuremberg Code is on our side.

Thousands of people from many different countries gathered on Aug. 20, 2022 in Nuremberg, Germany to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Nuremberg Code. Many activists, physicians, musicians, and others came to speak or perform during the afternoon at an event set up by the World Council for Health in front of the attendees, and a multilingual livestream was set up so that viewers from across the world were able to join in.

The Nuremberg Code is a 10-point document highlighting a set of ethical research principles in experiments involving humans. Initially disregarded when the code was created in 1947, it has come into conversation in light of recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Vera Sharav, a medical doctor, Holocaust survivor, activist, and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, was one of the speakers at the open-air event. She spoke about how human experimentation and eugenics never ended with Nazi Germany; how after World War II, thousands of Nazi scientists who operated closely with Hitler, were smuggled into the United States to continue their work.

These were brutal scientists, engineers, and technicians who actively participated in the human eugenics program during the Nazi era, she said, and they dont see people as humans. They legally infiltrated the United States and educated the next generation of scientists and taught them to be indifferent to humans, and ruthless. Sharav says that the reason President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex during his farewell speech was precisely because many people in the military and weapons sector were no longer interested in the basic rights of humanity.

She refocused the speech on modern times and said that this mode of thinking had never gone away; it has been passed down until today and applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were many inhuman aspects to the development of the vaccines, she said, and many of them violated the Nuremberg Code established decades ago, such as waves of mass testing, vaccination, and medical passport efforts.

Sharav drew parallels between the Nazi eugenics movement and the transhumanist theories being promoted today, especially by globalists. The opinion that humans are perfectible through electronic components and biotechnology is known as transhumanism, and many pandemic response measures were in line with this vision.

Another speaker was Dr. Rolf Kron, who came under heavy scrutiny in Germany because he was one of the first doctors to question the COVID-19 narrative. After speaking out against the official policies, he was woken up one day by the police who came and searched his house. This act, however, did not intimidate Kron, and for the past 15 months he has continued to speak out against the vaccine mandates among other things.

Kron said he knew many doctors who were fired because they had written medical certificates for patients exempting them from wearing a mask in public. Doctors in Germany, he said, were under strict scrutiny of the government and had no choice to obey the government because they would otherwise face unemployment, social scrutiny, and other forms of pressure. Doctors are now being looked at like criminals [if they put the wrong foot forward].

He called for an end to the medical tyranny as it seemed like a repetition of the medical offenses that led to the Nuremberg Code in the first place. He strongly reemphasized the codes as the baseline of scientific experimentation and that which should never be violated.

Although the Nuremberg Code is not officially a part of any law in the world, it is still enforced internationally, much like laws against slavery and piracy, said Mary Holland, the president and general counsel of the non-profit organization Childrens Health Defense. It is an international standard established by lawyers and doctors, and the importance thereof cannot be reemphasized enough, especially given the current situation, she said.

Dr. Holland says that although the current situation seems unappealing, it is still not too late. We have been winning for the last two years! The narrative that these injections work is over, [along with testing asymptomatic people and similar former regulations]. Dr. Holland highlighted how crucial the Codes are today, and how vital it is for us to fight back.

Morals are on our side, science is on our side, the law is on our side, and the Nuremberg Code is on our side.

Overall, the energetic event went on for the entire afternoon and hosted many more speakers from a multitude of nations as well as contributing professional musicians.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.

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The Importance of Medical Ethics Highlighted During the 75Th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Code - The Epoch Times

Since Fringe (one of the best TV shows / series ever) ended in 2013, TV has never been the same, missing an integral and interesting sci-fi link.

Science-fiction has always had a special place on TV, captivating audiences all over the world for decades. Shows like Doctor Who and The Twilight Zone have been fan favourites since the late 1950s, the former even having started in black and white and only in later seasons moving to colour.

Although no longer a popular choice for many studios producing series, network TV was responsible for many of the most influential sci-fi storylines in pop culture today. For example, J.J. Abrams Lost gripped audiences all around the world for over six seasons airing on ABC. Many others followed in its wake, possibly even inspired by the influential Lost, such as Alcatraz, Revolution and Flashforward.

One of the more recent and biggest series that was genre-defining for sci-fi, is another TV show that was spearheaded by Abrams (along with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci): Fringe.

Fringe aired on Fox in 2008 and followed Olivia Dunham, portrayed by Anna Torv, who joined the FBIs Fringe Division after investigating a plane that lands full of dead passengers whose skin has completely crystallized.

She and her team (which included Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop, John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop, Jasika Nicole as Astrid Farnsworth, Lance Reddick as Phillip Broyles) look into bizarre cases involving transhumanist experiments that have gone wrong, doomsday cults, giant parasitic worms being smuggled inside illegal immigrants and much more.

The impressive cast also included Blair Brown as Nina Sharp, Michael Cerveris as The Observer, Kirk Acevedo as Charlie Francis, Jared Harris as David Robert Jones and Leonard Nimoy as Dr. William Bell.

Its practically impossible to mention sci-fi series and not think of Chris Carters The X-Files as that was a TV-redefining procedural drama that set one of the highest bars when it comes to mystery and intrigue. Fringe follows in its footsteps with an undeniably similar premise which the TV show is not afraid to flaunt. Its almost surprising how much Fox let them get away with.

The X-Files sees Fox Mulder, portrayed by David Duchovny, and Dana Scully, portrayed by Gillian Anderson, investigating aliens, mad scientists, and the supernatural, yet while following a similar format to the iconic series, Fringe knows its limits and has never tried to outdo its predecessor, never trying to go too big and sticks to experimental science. They have never had to do any more than keep their focus there as they dive into many fascinating directions within those limits, each episode could seemingly sustain a full season-long story all on its own.

Rewatching the sci-fi series today makes it clear that this dose of mystery and weirdness is exactly whats been missing from TV since Fringe ended in 2013.

Many fans hope for a reboot or continuation, however, many more feel that the show had a wonderful conclusion and are quite happy to rewatch the series, dreading that new episodes would break the wonder and mystery of the original. Dont fix what isnt broken, right?

Read the original here:
Fringe: TV Has Never Been The Same Without This Sci-Fi Show - Fortress of Solitude

Definitions of life are notoriously hard to pin down. Is a fire alive? It has a kind of metabolism, and in a sense it reproduces by spreading. Is a crystal alive? It certainly grows. What about a virus, which can reproduce and mutate, but only if it can find a living cell to use as a host?

Scientific definitions of life tend to focus on things like reproduction, metabolism, heredity, and evolution. But there is another, more basic property of life that has profound consequences for its study, and which I want to explore today: the capacity to die. While this may seem obvious, reframing life in terms of death reveals some of the biggest philosophical and scientific problems with the way we think about living systems.

Focusing on the biomolecular mechanisms of life has yielded remarkable insights into what happens inside cells. However, this emphasis over the last 70 years on molecules such as deoxyribonucleic acid has produced a kind of myopia that can lead researchers to blind themselves to a critical insight. Life is not just molecules. It cannot be reduced to the interactions of a set of molecular actors. Instead, life is really about organization. This is why, alongside the emphasis on biochemistry, there has always been a focus on life as an organism. An organism is a whole that is also wholly invested in its interactions with the environment. Biomolecules would never take on the activities they play in the cell were it not for the higher levels of organization the cell makes possible.

And this is where death comes in.

Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed the concept of autopoiesis in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the essential character of life as an organism. Autopoiesis means self-producing. The term, which Maturana and Varela coined, refers to a kind of strange loop that occurs in living systems whereby the processes and products needed for an organism to survive must be created by the processes and products needed for the organism to survive. The classic example is the cell membrane, whose presence is required to create the very compounds that maintain it.

Over the next year I will be writing more about autopoiesis, as it forms part of a new research program on life and information funded by the Templeton Institute. The key point for today is to understand that one thing Maturana and Varela wanted to focus on with autopoiesis was its intrinsic capacity to end. To be an autopoietic system is to constantly face death.

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To be alive is always to live in a precarious condition, as Varela called it. You, me, a butterfly, a single-celled organism all life must constantly be at work to produce and maintain itself. Life can never take a rest from the internal activities it must carry out to do that. And this self-production and self-maintenance must work on a remarkable array of scales. At the molecular level, the ribosomes that drive lifes nano-machinery must never halt. At the cellular level, the membrane can never stop its work of monitoring and adjusting the flux of compounds into the cell. At the system level in more complex life, the various components of a plant or animal must always be synchronized and synchronizing.

Or else, what?

We know the answer to that question, for it drives so much of our higher animal psychology: or else, we die. The organism is always and forever bound to its state of precariousness, and eventually that precariousness must win. It always wins. To be alive is to be able to die.

This emphasis on death as the definition of life serves many roles and will be useful for many purposes. On a purely scientific level, it can help us understand which features of organisms and their organization to focus on. This is important for the Templeton project I am beginning, because it sharpens our focus on how information can serve to keep an organism viable, i.e. self-maintaining.

On a philosophical level, the focus on death reveals a key problem with reductionist descriptions of life that rely on what is called the machine metaphor. For reductionists, life is nothing but a set of molecular mechanisms. We are therefore nothing but biochemical machines. This is a fundamental mistake, because while a machine can be switched off, there can be no off button for life. Even seeds that remain dormant for years are not off like my blender is off when I am not using it. Life is not a machine.

Finally, understanding life as what can die has a personal or even spiritual valence. It gives the lie to the strange transhumanist, techno-religious fantasy about conquering death. While I am all for extending my life if I can, I would never think to avoid its end. Instead, what I long for is the fullest experience I can muster out of this strange trip. Then when death does come, I will greet it like the old friend it has always been.

Read more here:
Why death matters - Big Think

Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish, darkly humorous, and yet endearingly sincere. For a small group of fervent futurists, it is their lottery ticket to immortality. What are the chances that these bodies will be reanimated? Will baseball legend Ted Williams frozen head be awakened to coach fighter pilots or fused to a robot body to hit .400 again?

Cryonics attempting to cryopreserve the human body is widely considered a pseudoscience. Cryopreservation is a legitimate scientific endeavor in which cells, organs, or in rare cases entire organisms may be cooled to extremely low temperatures and revived somewhat intact. It occurs in nature, but only in limited cases.

Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads. Deprived of oxygen at room temperature, the brain dies within minutes. While the body may be reanimated, the person who lives is often in a permanent vegetative state. Cooling the body may give the brain a bit more time. During brain or heart surgery, circulation may be stopped for up to an hour with the body cooled to 20 C (68 F). A procedure to cool the body to 10 C (50 F) without oxygen for additional hours is still at the experimental research stage.

After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable.

This vessel lies within a second outer vessel, separated by a vacuum to avoid heat transfer from the outer room-temperature vessel wall to the cold inner vessel wall. Heat gradually transfers across anyway and boils away the LN, which must be periodically refilled. Bodies were originally, and may still be in some cases, cooled and frozen in whatever condition they were in at death, with better or worse preservation, as we shall see.

The early years of cryonics were grisly. All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.

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Small freezing operations began in the late 1960s. While the practice of storing bodies has become more sophisticated over the past 50 years, in the early days, technicians cooled and prepared corpses with haste on dry ice before eventually cramming them into Dewar capsules. By in large, these preservations did not achieve preservation. They were nightmarish, gruesome failures. Their stories were researched and documented by people within the field, who published thorough and frank records.

The largest operation was run out of a cemetery in Chatsworth, California by a man named Robert Nelson. Four of his first clients were not initially frozen in LN but placed on a bed of dry ice in a mortuary. One of these bodies was a woman whose son decided to take her body back. He hauled (his dead mother) around in a truck on dry ice for some time before burying her.

The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post.

Eventually, the mortician was not pleased with the other bodies sitting around on beds of ice, so a LN Dewar capsule was secured for the remaining three. Another man was already frozen and sealed inside the capsule, so it was opened, and he was removed. Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people who may or may not have suffered thaw damage into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a puzzle. After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

Another group of three, including an eight-year-old girl, was packed into a second capsule in the Chatsworth vault. The LN system of this capsule subsequently failed without Nelson noticing. Upon checking one day, he saw that everyone inside had long thawed out. The fate of these ruined bodies is unclear, but they might have been refrozen for several more years.

Nelson froze a six-year-old boy in 1974. The capsule itself was well maintained by the boys father, but when it was opened, the boys body was found to be cracked. The cracking could have occurred if the body was frozen too quickly by the LN. The boy was then thawed, embalmed, and buried. Now that there was a vacancy, a different man was placed into the leftover capsule, but ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape no pun intended from the get-go and was eventually thawed.

Every cryonic client put into the vault at Chatsworth and looked after by Nelson eventually failed. The bodies inside the Dewar capsules were simply left to rot. Reporters visited the crypt where these failed operations had taken place and reported a horrifying stench. The proprietor admitted to failure, bad decisions, and going broke. He further pointed out, Who can guarantee that youre going to be suspended for 10 or 15 years?

The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again stuck to the capsule like a childs tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into a plug of fluids in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.

Out of all those frozen prior to 1973, one body remains preserved. Robert Bedford was sealed into a Dewar in 1967. Instead of leaving the body to meet a horrific fate under Nelsons care, Bedfords family took custody of the capsule, meticulously caring for it at their own expense. The body was handed off between professional cryonics operations, occupying multiple frozen tanks and facilities for 15 years or so. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the founders of Alcor a modern cryonics outfit one of whom wrote a heartfelt, slightly creepy piece about the body.

Credit: Jeff Topping / Getty Images

Alcor is the leading example of the current state of cryonics. While the ugly events above suggest that your remains might well end up as tissue sludge scraped out of a can, the professionalism of companies like Alcor may offer an increased chance for long-term preservation. This 501(c)(3) organization hosts researchers who work on methods to improve the freezing process, possibly increasing whatever slight odds exist that human popsicles will ever be brought back to life. At a more fundamental level, it appears to be stable and to have deep pockets, so there is a better chance that your corpse will be around long enough for some distant future doctor to recoil in horror at it.

The U.S. industry has consolidated around two main organizations. If not Alcor, your other choice is the Cryonics Institute, which has more than 200 bodies stored in giant tanks and accepts dozens more each year. Apparently, ten years ago, head storage alone at Alcor cost $80,000, while full body storage at the Cryonics Institute was only $30,000. There are international options as well. A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.

Modern cryonic preparations at Alcor employ a multistep process to prepare the body for storage. First, they begin to cool the body while anti-clotting agents and organ preservation solutions are injected into the bloodstream and circulated under CPR. The body is then transported to the companys main facility, where the original fluid is replaced with chemicals that vitrify turn to glass the bodys organs. This offers some hope for cutting down on structural damage during the subsequent cooling and storage. Then the body is entombed in its Dewar capsule.

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, its not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? Thats probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking.

Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think

While cryonic preparation is now more advanced, the laws of physics demand that the structure of the body will break down rapidly after death, catastrophically upon freezing, and gradually over time, even while frozen. Think of how badly frozen food ages in your freezer. If the medical technology of the future becomes advanced enough, perhaps these corpses can be revived. But thats a big if. Lets say your body remains frozen until the 25th century. Then, lets say that future doctors are interested in reviving you. How much work will they have to do to fix you once youre thawed? The answer lies in the condition of the bodies once theyre thawed. Strangely enough, we know something about this.

In 1983, Alcor needed to lighten three cryonauts, reducing them from bodies to simply heads. (In one transhumanist conception of the future, medical science will be able to revive the brain and then simply make a new body or robot to which to attach it. Neuropreservation is cheaper and easier too.) The three corpses were removed from their Dewar capsules so that the heads could be cut off still frozen, so requiring a chainsaw and stored separately. Once the heads were sawed off and put away, Alcor employees got to work medically examining the state of the bodies. They wrote up their findings in great detail.

At first, things looked reasonably good. While the bodies were still frozen, their skin was only moderately cracked in a few places. But once the bodies thawed, things started to go downhill.

The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured.

Cracks appeared in the warming bodies, cutting through the skin and subcutaneous fat, all the way down to the body wall or muscle surface beneath. One patient displayed red traces across the skin following the paths of blood vessels that ruptured. Two of the patients had massive cutaneous ruptures over the pubis. The soft skin in these areas was apparently quite susceptible to cracking.

While the external damage was extensive, the internal damage was worse. Nearly every organ system inside the bodies was fractured. In one patient, every major blood vessel had broken near the heart, the lungs and spleen were almost bisected, and the intestines fractured extensively. Only the liver and kidneys werent completely destroyed.

The third body, which had been thawed very slowly, was in better condition externally, with only a few skin fractures and no obvious exploded blood vessels. However, the inside was even more annihilated than the others. The organs were badly cracked or severed. The spinal cord was snapped into three pieces and the heart was fractured. The examiners injected dye into an artery in the arm. Rather than flow through blood vessels and into muscles, most of it pooled under the surface in pockets and leaked out of skin fractures.

The medical examiners extensively detailed the content of the blood, the texture of the muscles, and the extent of the damage. They included pictures. And they earnestly stated their conclusion up front: The tremendous tissue deterioration will require incredibly advanced medical technology to fix. Worse, the probable destruction at the cellular level may require rebuilding the body at the molecular level. Perhaps future medicine might be able to inject swarms of nanobots into your body to repair every bit of tissue, but dont bet on it happening any time soon.

Modern cryonics practices may ward off the horrific failures of the past. And we cant entirely rule out future medicine somehow finding fixes for the terrific damage incurred by the body in freezing, sitting, and thawing. But theres one more hurdle for the future revivification of your frozen form, the last great danger to your immortality: your crazy relatives. Several cases demonstrate the problem.

The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. Two further men were stored by their sons, one of whom had his father thawed, removed, and buried. The other son eventually buried his dads capsule in its entirety with the remains still inside.

Relatives can also go to court and battle over what happens to your corpse. Richard Orvilles family buried him against his wishes and was eventually forced by an Iowa court to dig up his body for preservation. A Colorado womans family went to court to fight Alcor for their mothers head. Alcor eventually got the head, to preserve as best they could. Conversely, another womans will stated that she did not want to be frozen. Her husband froze her anyway, and after a four-year court battle, the State of California ordered that she be thawed and buried.

One particularly well-known family affair is the story of a frozen Norwegian man who was initially stored at a California facility that worked with Alcor. He was removed by his daughter, who stored him in an ice shed behind her house in Colorado. The body was discovered when she was evicted from the property. The small town of Nederland, Colorado now has a Frozen Dead Guy Days celebration every year.

While the chances of immortality may be slim, dozens of people still commit their bodies or brains to cryonics each year. If their remains arent mismanaged or allowed to disintegrate, and if their relatives dont go to court over the body, there is now a good chance that they will remain frozen for decades. Unfortunately, they will come out of the process cracked into a million pieces, and the prospect of putting them back together again is purely science fiction for the foreseeable future. Its a grim practice with ghoulish results; at least it makes for some fascinating stories and a bit of dark humor.

Continued here:
Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of frozen bodies - Big Think

Earlier this week the philosopher Kathleen Stock waded into the national press to talk about Tories and our troubled relationship with transgender issues, using Penny Mordaunts tilt for the top job as commentary fuel.

For Stock, the Tories flapping around on gender issues demonstrates a special kind of indifference to half the population, which she ascribes to a hidden ideological commitment to individualism. She also suggests that the many Tory MPs who do oppose self-ID are motivated by opportunism and cultural warmongering, rather than concern about women.

As with everything Stock writes, the article is good, and I urge you to read it, as I urged people to read her book Material Girls when I reviewed it. However, in crucial respects, Stock doesnt understand her opponents. Thats not a knock on her. Id probably make a terrible mess of writing about Labours internal workings. After all, Im a member of the Tory Party.

The most important thing to remember is that the Conservative Party is (famously) a broad church. Whether were broader than Labours similarly broad church, I do not know.

In any case, it is unquestionably true there has long been a spergy transhumanist element in big-C conservatism. People who are keen on open borders, eating bugs, free trade, GMOs, nuclear power, lab-grown meat, pro-fertiliser, effective altruism and so on. Call it the Tom Harwood faction of Toryism, if you like.

Im old enough to remember when The Economist used to run articles calling for the legalisation of drugs in sport. The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) is full of this sort of thing.

Not everything these people say is nonsense. If it were, I would not have consented to one of my novels being launched at the ASI. Theyre often acute on economic matters, sounding early alarms on how quantitative easing would eventually lead to runaway inflation, for example. Theyre also almost certainly right about addressing climate change by dint of nuclear energy, while their pro-fertiliser criticisms of organic agriculture have been emphatically vindicated by recent events in Sri Lanka.

Some of Penny Mordaunts views are of a piece with this tradition. She also shows how one can combine elements of it including things considered woke with patriotism. (Mordaunts patriotism is genuine, by the way. Its not possible to feign that sort of thing and sign up for the Navy reserves.)

My problem with Mordaunts candidacy was her reverse-ferreting on gender issues (which Stock documents superbly), coupled with wider support for pseudoscience: shes a fan of homeopathy on the NHS, for instance. Had she come out and admitted shed changed her views, Id have been much more sympathetic. After all, in 2012, I wrote the following (for my then professional association, the Law Society of Scotland) on aspects of transgenderism. Note: I dont expect an apology from Mordaunt, just as I dont apologise for present Helen disagreeing with past Helen.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?

The broader issue is why most of the parliamentary party, the membership, and rusted on Tory voters are opposed to self-ID while simultaneously disclaiming feminism.

In part, its because the ASI types are a minority of both MPs and the membership, and close to non-existent among ordinary voters. Genuine wokies in the electorate will almost always opt for Labour: why go for Woke Lite when you can have the real thing?

Contrary to Stocks argument, it is emphatically not because Tories are indifferent to women or planned to use trans as an issue with which we can wedge Labour (although well take the latter as a present). It is because most Tories think both gender self-identification and feminism are nonsense.

Whod be a feminist?

This isnt just a Tory preoccupation. When the Fawcett Society got a famously honest and scrupulous polling outfit (Survation) to make inquiries of a decent and representative sample, only 7% of Britons self-identified as feminist. Huge, thumping majorities believed in male and female equality, of course, which is often taken to be the definition of feminism. Clearly, however, the public does not see it that way. Perhaps significantly, of those people who called themselves feminist, 68% were more likely to think gender can be a range of identities.

Survation did not disaggregate based on political affiliation, which in itself is revealing. If even 7% of Tories self-identify as feminist, I will eat my Akubra.

One of the great ironies of our time is that feminism has adopted the Victorian Cult of Womanhood: men are uncivilised brutes who women must morally tame. It is an unspoken assumption that the movement of women into, well, everything, is an unalloyed good.

Women are female homo sapiens. The notion that women have no statistically significant, systemic character flaws is nonsense.

Two of the biggest problems when it comes to forming decent, functional, social orders are male violence and male sexual incontinence. The victims, and even more the perpetrators of violence, are overwhelmingly male. A Swedish study found that 1% of adults generated 63% of all violent offences. But that 1% was itself almost 90% male. Males also overwhelmingly dominate sexual offenders, with a similar skewed pattern. Violent crime is a sex-based power-law on steroids.

Thanks to the movement of women into the professions, into creation of culture (women have always been important in its transmission), into management, politics, and media, we are now confronted with a new problem for sustaining functional social orders. Female emotional incontinence, what one old Tory friend calls the blubbering woman problem.

Women are systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than are men. As institutions, including universities, have become more feminised, they have become more hostile to freedom of expression and thought.

Many older Tory men are also angry that they were forced to give up male-only venues historically (they dont use the word spaces) to admit women, and think feminists are hypocrites on this point. Some of these men are not simple-minded golf club bores, either. They see trans as an opportunity to break feminism into what they consider richly deserved pieces.

One reason gender-critical feminists have struggled to win what should be an easy argument is because they havent been able to mount a freedom of association case. And the reason they havent been able to mount a freedom of association claim (which would resonate with older Tories) is because feminism did more to wreck freedom of association in Britain than any other ideology.

Homo sapiens are much more cognitively dimorphic than many people realise. 70% of men have a pattern of personality traits that no woman has; 70% of women have a pattern of personality traits that no man has.

For obvious evolutionary reasons (the elevated risks of pregnancy and childcare and the need to invest in emotionally intense relationships to sustain child-rearing) women are systematically more neurotic, more agreeable and more concerned with propriety (moralised status) than men are. Women are inclined to form cliques (emotionally-intense connections), to engage in relational aggression (attack reputations), and to hide from themselves and others that they are engaging in aggression by claiming it is moral concern.

No, this is not as serious or nasty as sexual assault or violent assault more widely. That reality is something men must simply own. It is why the male prison estate is nine times the size of the female prison estate.

That clear difference in personality traits is also why sex non-conforming behaviour in children is so easy to spot. My father knew I was homosexual when I was five, long before I knew. I never played with the dolls mum and dad bought for me (I have never seen such indifference) and constantly nicked my brothers toys. By the time teenager me was building a scale model of the Colosseum with Meccano, the jury was well and truly in.

Of course, these days, a kid like me would be at risk of transing the gay away.

Feminism has spent decades pretending men and women are interchangeable widgets, and that evolution only had an influence on human development from the neck down. When it has veered away from this claim, its indulged in biological essentialism (viz, women are always kinder) almost as pseudoscientific as Mordaunts apparent enthusiasm for homeopathy. Weirdly, this essentialism doesnt draw on actual evidence of sex-based cognitive dimorphism. Then there are homosexuals. There may not be many of us, but on this sort of thing, we stand out like sore thumbs.

This not individualism or the search for a wedge issue is why the Tory Partys relationship with both trans and feminism is like a Facebook status: its complicated.

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Helen Dale read Law at Oxford and won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, 'The Hand that Signed the Paper'. Her latest novel is 'Kingdom of the Wicked'; it was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.

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Continued here:
What Kathleen Stock gets wrong about the Tories, trans and feminism - CapX

The Psychology of Totalitarianismby mattias desmettranslated into english by els vanbrabantchelsea green publishing, 256 pages, $53.25

In 2018, a Polish academic study calledTotalitarianism in the Postmodern Age anticipated a shift in attitudes toward freedom among young Europeans. The research canvassed young people from seven E.U. countries: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Almost half of those surveyed did not preclude the right of governments to suspend key democratic political freedoms, while one-third were sanguine about governments engaging in political manipulation, or even lying. A similar proportion could identify values for which they would readily forgo both freedom and democracy. Slightly more than half indicated their support for democracy, while one-third said they had no clearly formulated views. Just half of those surveyed indicated that they might resist incursions upon their freedom, while one in five appeared to regard freedom as inessential.

Two years later, Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, began to ponder developments in a similar light as he observed the COVID lockdowns rolling out all across the world. His reading of the writings of Gustave Le Bon on the psychology of crowds, and those of Hannah Arendt on twentieth-century totalitarianism, as well as his expertise in statistics, led him to take a deeper interest in what was emerging, and rapidly he came to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of the world had fallen under a kind of spell.In late 2019, visited by some premonition of impending menace, he went to his bank and paid back his mortgagebecause he felt that society was moving towards a tipping point.

In his new book,The Psychology of Totalitarianism, he elaborates on these instincts in light of what he witnessed during COVID, including the strange phenomenon of peoples apparent indifference to their own deprivations, hurts, and incurred damage from the lockdowns: loss of freedoms, work, income, education, human contact, leisure,etc. The discourse surrounding the coronavirus crisis shows characteristics that are typical of the type of discourse that led to the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, he writes. The excessive use of numbers and statistics that show a radical contempt for the facts, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries.

His book offers a description of modern society in the drifts of a mechanistic culture. Totalitarianism is the ineluctable destination. Gummed up in a congealing ideology, man is reduced to a biological organism and subjected to the positivist logic whereby every aspect of thought must be eminently demonstrable. The human person becomes an atomized subject whose entire existence is as though reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics. This provides the building block of the modern totalitarian statea world, as Osip Mandelstam once observed, rendered fromman, notfor.

In such a culture, the goal is for society to be led by expert technocrats who make decisions based on objective, numerical data. With the coronavirus crisis, Desmet write, this utopian goal seemed very close at hand. For this reason, the coronavirus crisis is a case study par excellence in subjecting the trust in measurements and numbers to critical analysis. Before, societies were governed on the basis of stories; now, we have tyranny by numbers.

He cites Hannah Arendts assertion that totalitarianism is ultimately the belief in an artificially created paradise: Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man. The destination of this process is transhumanist manthe merging of the human being with the machine, and the supplanting of the human soul with micro-chips in which all communication will be positivistically constructed.

The key instrument in the creation of a totalitarian state is mass formationin effect, mass hypnosisimposed by propaganda and intimidation. On the one hand, the population is systematically exposed to the relentless voice of the totalitarian leaders; on the other, every alternative voice is systematically eliminated. Fear is the grease of this process. When fearful, the population wants a more controlled society.

The essence of mass formation involves proposing a tangible basis for otherwise unexplainablefree-floatinganxieties, frustrations, and aggression.The appropriate conditions, he says, existed in Western societies long before the COVID crisis.There was an epidemic of burnoutsomething between 40 and 70 percent of people in modern societies experience their jobs as senseless. He points also to the escalating use of psycho-pharmaceutical medicines to treat anxiety and depression.By offering a strategy to deal with the specific anxieties imposed by the coronavirus crisis, the would-be controllers were able to create a bogus solidarity in a society that has destroyed true solidarity. Under these conditions A society saturated with individualism and rationalism suddenly tilts towards the radically opposite condition, towards radically irrational collectivism.

When, writes Desmet, a suggestive story is spread through the mass media that indicates an object of anxietyfor example, the aristocracy under Stalinism, the Jews under Nazism, the virus, and, later the anti-vaxxers, during the coronavirus crisisand at the same time offers a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, there is a real chance that all the free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object and there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.

The hypnotized members of a mass formation close out everything but that which the hypnotist tells them is important. They become not just indifferent to the losses of others, but insensitive to losses of their ownwilling, in fact, to sacrifice everything.

Desmet is at pains to underline that, in a mass formation, the leaders and the led operate in symbiotic manner:The process is as much a pandering to the mob as a manipulation of it, and the hypnotist/leader can himself fall under the spell of his own trance.

In situations of mass formation, saysDesmet, three distinct groups manifest themselves. Only 30 percent, he says, are hypnotized beyond reach. Another 40 percent will from the outset go along with that 30 percent of total believers. Another cohort of about 30 percent, who are not hypnotized, will try to speak out and resist. This group, he says, is extremely heterogeneous and disunited. If they could unite, he says, they could bring the whole thing quickly to an end, but this seldom proves possible.

The slightly better news is that mass formation totalitarianism inevitably self-destructs in time, though by then the cost may be enormous. This is because the leaders need continuously to invent new sources of anxiety and introduce new measures to attack these. At the moment of total control, the leaders mania enters its most fanatical stage, pursuing enemies perceived and imaginedas with Stalins purges of the 1930s. This can only lead to absolute destruction, and yet in the short run is essential to the maintenance of the fear that sustains the mass formation.

Professor Desmet writes that a mass formation can only be combatted by an insistence by those who are immune to it upon telling the truth at all costs. The continued presence of alternative voices serves to curb the viciousness of the rulers and constrains the mob in its excesses. In spite of the growing menace of the times, we have to continue to share rational counter-arguments, in the hope of breaking the link of free-floating anxiety.

He stresses also the importance of the maintenance of ethical principles as an antidote to totalitarianism. The books proffered solution is preventative as opposed to curative. Desmet pursues a fascinating refection on a waterwheel designed by MIT professor Willem Malkus in 1972 to illustrate the work of Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist and one of the founders of chaos theory.The device consists of a rotating wheel to which small buckets with a bottom hole are attached. At the top, there is a tap releasing water into the top bucket. At a very low influx, the wheel does not move, because the water flows out of the hole in the bottom of the bucket faster than it flows in. At a slightly higher influx, the bucket fills up and the wheel starts to move, sometimes in one direction, sometimes the other. Once the wheel has chosen a certain direction, its behavior becomes regular and predictable: The greater the influx, the faster it turns.

We cannot predict the specific behaviors of the waterwheel (at least not in its chaotic phase), Desmet outlines, but we can learn the principles by which it behaves. . . . Hence, there is no rational predictability, but there is a certain degree of intuitive predictability. Therefore, Desmet writes, the antidote to totalitarianism lies in an attitude to life that is not blinded by a rational understanding of superficial manifestations of life and that seeks to be connected with the principles and figures that are hidden beneath those manifestations.

And as Desmet rightly points out, this also applies at the societal level: A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. These quantities are not expendable adornments, nor cosseting luxuries, nor optional extras. If it loses its intuition of the absolute necessity for these principled fundamentals, a society will lose the sense and memory of how its own equilibrium has been arrived at, and thereafter descend into chaos.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

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Tyranny by Numbers | John Waters - First Things

This is an opinion editorial by Roy Sheinfeld, cofounder and CEO of Breez.

Although Breez often ranks highly on lists of the best Lightning wallets, attentive readers will have noticed that we never refer to Breez as a wallet. Were not trying to confuse anyone. On the contrary, its the language of wallets in the context of Bitcoin and Lightning thats confusing.

Wouldnt it be odd to hear someone refer to a fiat payment app, like CashApp, PayPal, or Venmo as a wallet? Nobody, not even the companies themselves, describes them as wallets. And though many Bitcoin and Lightning companies and apps are both more versatile and further removed from what we normally think of as wallets, thats still what we call them.

This is a very common misconstrual, as Gigi has also noted and (independently) debunked. So lets think about what a wallet really is, what a Bitcoin wallet really is, what a Lightning wallet really is, and what we should call these things instead of wallets. We will spare no effort in pursuit of truth and liberating ourselves from scare quotes.

A wallet is a flat case or pouch often used to carry small personal items such as paper currency, credit cards; identification documents such as driver's license, identification card, club card; photographs, transit pass, business cards and other paper or laminated cards. As Giacomo Zucco put it in a recent chat we had, wallets contain little documents and pieces of information we use to interact with others.

What we call wallets first showed up around the 17th century, concurrent with the rise of paper money. And since there are only so many ways to make a small folding case to carry money, wallets havent changed much over the centuries. Compare these two specimens:

On the left is a leather wallet that archaeologists found in the wreckage of a 160-year-old submarine, and on the right is a typical wallet anyone might have in their pocket today.

The big difference isnt in the wallets, but in their contents. The modern wallet contains credit cards, which arose in the middle of the last century. Its no coincidence that credit cards entered the market around the same time as machine-readable standards enabled a transformation from physical to electronic money.

The more we rely on electronic money of whatever kind, the less we rely on wallets. The quantity of electronic money out there now outstrips physical money by a ratio of about 20:1 and each card in the modern wallet can contain balances dozens of times greater than the antique wallet could hold.

Now consider: if you took the modern wallet back 160 years to the time of the antique wallet, people back then could almost certainly tell you what it is and what its used for. Explaining credit and debit cards would be challenging, but they are still physical objects to represent electronic money. The next step would be to explain fiat payment apps, like PayPal. Your great-great-great-grandparents would positively no longer see a wallet there. By the time you try to explain your favorite Bitcoin/Lightning wallet, theyd not even be sure youre speaking the same language.

We in the 21st century might want to expand the definition. Language evolves. Like Giacomo said, wallets contain documents and little pieces of information that let us interact with others. Phones can now contain digital driving licenses (for as long as driving licenses are still a thing), credit card information, photos of loved ones, passwords, contact info and membership info phones can contain the digital versions of everything we carry in leather wallets.

As a matter of fact, the term wallet might cover more of the functions these devices perform than phone. (While were on the topic of proper labeling, phone is such an outdated term! Here in Israel, nobody younger than Methuselah refers to their mobile device as a phone. Get with it anglophones.) So the 21st century correlate of the leather wallet is the phone, right?

But then does it still make sense to call a specific, single-purpose app a wallet? Many apps store information that is readily available to us. If we dont refer to a contacts app on the device as a wallet, even though it replaces traditional business cards, why use that term for a Bitcoin app like BlueWallet or Wallet of Satoshi? Its the phone itself that is the wallet, not the apps. Apps are more like the compartments in the wallet. If were going to adapt the term wallet to our transhumanist age, lets do it right.

Wallets havent changed, but money has, how we store information has, and the term wallet no longer fits.

Bitcoin wallets and physical wallets are both storage media. Physical wallets store bills and cards that are marked with patterns of information. The right tokens with the right patterns denote value, and wallets move those tokens around in meatspace.

Bitcoin wallets also store patterns of information, but they dont directly store value. Bitcoins value is stored only as records on the public blockchain. Bitcoin wallets store private keys that allow users to authorize changes to the blockchain on their behalf. Anything that can store a long string of numbers (i.e., private keys) a piece of paper, neurons, or a fancy, password-protected flash drive would count as a bitcoin wallet. In Bitcoin, the right private keys with the right patterns indirectly denote value, because these keys allow you to move value around in cyberspace.

When friends split a tab with cash, and bills move from one wallet to another, the value is transported. When friends split a tab with bitcoin, the sender encrypts a transaction with the recipients public key and then their numbers shift around on the blockchain, where the value was and remains.

Lets compare again these two kinds of transactions visually:

Again, its easy to see where a wallet fits into the transaction on the left: cash exits wallet A, changes hands, enters wallet B. But when it comes to Bitcoin, what we call wallets are those colored boxes at the bottom containing the private keys. Does does anyone else find that metaphor silly? Like, if a piece of paper, neurons and a flash drive can all be called wallets, even though none of them contain any physical tokens of value or even any bitcoin (whatever that would mean), then isnt that metaphor misleading and unhelpful?

As Kiara Bickers puts it in her great book, Bitcoin Clarity,

With a physical wallet, you are directly holding cash that has value, but with a digital wallet you never hold the value directly, you only ever hold access to it on the blockchain. If you cross a national border from one country into another, did your bitcoin move with you? Well, no. The private keys stored in your bitcoin wallet represent only the ability to move funds, not the funds themselves. (p. 18)

If you want a better term that is less misleading and more accurately descriptive, how about signers? Same denotation plus vastly improved connotations equals Pareto-efficient semantics.

(Hat Tip to NVK and Conor Okus for helping me to think through this question and terminology.)

The term wallet is applied to all manner of Lightning apps. While that term misses the mark in every case, it errs in different directions depending on the type of app in question. Interestingly, reflecting on how Lightning apps are not like wallets does help to identify what they are like, so lets do that.

Custodial wallets dont transport tokens of value, but they do have an analog in the fiat world: bank accounts. Remember how custodial accounts actually work:

In effect, whoevers operating the custodial wallet is an establishment for the custody [and] exchange of money and for facilitating the transmission of funds. In other words, theyre a bank, and thats not my judgment, its the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Thats just what the word means. And the wallet they provide is an arrangement in which a bank keeps your money but makes it available to you when you want it i.e., a bank account (Cambridge American Dictionary).

Custodial wallets are merely user interfaces for these accounts. They just provide a way for users to pass instructions to and receive messages from the custodial intermediary. Not really wallets, are they?

What a custodial wallet would look like in real life. Doesnt look anything like a wallet, does it? (Image: Adam Norman)

So an actual wallet contains tokens of value to carry them around physical space. A bitcoin wallet (or a signer, remember?), holds your keys, signs transactions and broadcasts them to the network. Custodial Lightning wallets are really like bank accounts, where the value is entrusted to a third-party who transacts on the users behalf.

So what about noncustodial Lightning wallets? (Ugh. It feels awkward just typing that.)

The Lightning Network consists of nodes connected by payment channels. Signing plays a role here too, because every Lightning transaction is a Bitcoin transaction. However, Lightning transactions require routing bitcoin from one Lightning node to another and another and another, along their payment channels, until the payment reaches its destination.

The point is that Lightning payment apps arent just flashy user interfaces to manage wallets or account balances they have to route payments through a fluctuating network graph. And ensuring a decent routing-success rate entails a number of subsidiary tasks. These include, for example, channel management opening and closing channels with other nodes in the network and liquidity management ensuring enough outbound and inbound liquidity.

Some users prefer managing their liquidity and available routes manually on self-hosted nodes. Most users, though, delegate these technical tasks to Lightning service providers, like Breez and Phoenix.

Reading this, did anyone think Well, thats simple! Theyre just describing a wallet!? Thats the point. There is no such thing as a Lightning wallet.

Give this network graph to a toddler with a box of crayons and try to find your way from minute to minute. Thats routing on the Lightning network. (Image: Annie Mole)

Metaphors are great when they help people to communicate a complex reality vividly and succinctly. When E.M. Forster writes that Life is a public performance on the violin in which you must learn the instrument as you go along, it hits. It doesnt require explanation; its already an explanation of something much bigger. Lightning wallet is not like that. As a metaphor, it confuses, misleads and obfuscates.

A better approach would probably be to use terms that describe functions (think: bolt cutter). If an app sends and receives payments, let's call it a payment app. If it's used to play podcasts and stream sats to podcasters, call it a podcast app. If it's used to manage finances, call it a finance app. This applies equally to bitcoin and fiat (remember PayPal, Venmo, CashApp etc.). The apps name should derive from its function, not how it implements that function. And if we must use metaphors, those metaphors should at least reflect the current state of our technological reality.

Were sure that many people will continue to refer to Lightning payment apps and custodial accounts as wallets, and that legislating language never works (or we would be writing these posts in Esperanto, rajto?). Im all for free speech, but simply using a term does not make it accurate or valid. Its still important to think about the relation between how we talk about Lightning and how we think about Lightning, and how the former might influence the latter for better or worse.

Our world is made of concepts (ask Immanuel Kant), and concepts are made of language (ask Ludwig Wittgenstein). Therefore, getting the language right should help us understand and shape the world. How do you expect to launch the Lightning revolution with a mere wallet?

This is a guest post by Roy Sheinfeld. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Read the original:
There Is No Such Thing As A Lightning Wallet - Bitcoin Magazine

As ever, Paul Kingsnorths Substack is one of the most important Substacks in the world, and its not even close. In his latest essay, Kingsnorth talks about how the public controversy over transgenderism is not really about male and female. Its about human nature itself. The beginning of the essay is a reminder about how insane honestly, insane the public dialogue is around trans today, and how fast it got there. Five years ago, if you had said that a Berkeley law professor would have testified contentiously before Congress that women arent the only people who give birth, people would have thought you were bonkers. But it happened this week. Excerpts from Kingsnorths latest:

Back in America now ground-zero for the abolition of biology thousands of girls are undergoing double mastectomies, and teenage boys are being given puberty-blocking drugs designed tochemically castrate rapists.Eleven year old girls aretaughtthat if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender which may explain why, in some classrooms,a quarter of the childrenidentify as precisely that. The concept oftrans kids a notion that would have been inconceivably baffling to most people even a few years back, and for many still is is now beingpushedso hard that it starts to look less like the liberation of an oppressed minority than an agenda to reprogramme society with an entirely new conception of the human body and thus of nature itself.

Kingsnorth gets into The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Truemans invaluable book (now out in an abridged, reader-friendly version) about the roots of the Wests falling apart, which, as PK points out, began with Trueman trying to answer the question of how it is the phrase I am a woman trapped in a mans body came to be meaningful. Kingsnorth:

Meanwhile Nietzsche and Darwin both helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to undermine the foundational assumptions of Western Christianity, thus unmooring the culture from its spiritual roots. Finally, figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich provided the justification for the removal of sexual taboos which exploded in the sixties counterculture and brought us into the pornified present.

It is this latter development, suggests Trueman, that may prove to be most significant. Identity in the contemporary West is now cored around sex and sexuality a situation which he believes is arguably unprecedented in history. Trueman identifies Wilhelm Reich and his countercultural successors as prime movers in this culture shift. Sexual liberation, to Reich, represented the latest stage of the ongoing liberation of the individual from both nature and culture.

In his 1936 bookThe Sexual Revolution, Reich argued that sexual repression had been imposed and weaponised by governments and churches for centuries as a means of controlling the masses. Liberation of the individual was thus intimately tied up with liberated sexuality:

The existence of strict moral principles has invariably signified that the biological, and specifically the sexual, needs of man were not being satisfied. Every moral regulation is in itself sex-negating, and all compulsory morality is life-negating. The social revolution has no more important task than finally to enable human beings to realise their full potentialities and find gratification in life.

Sexual freedom is human freedom.

It doesnt take much to move from that point to accepting that ones true self is not a self that is given, or a self that is shaped by limits, but a self that is fully chosen, against the bounds presented by nature or society. Transgenderism is just the next phase in humankinds revolt against nature, says Kingsnorth. More:

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What does a transhumanist billionaire [Martine Rothblatt RD] who wants to make God have to do with a teenage boy who feels uncomfortable in his body? The answer is that Rothblatt isfar from the only personwho believes that the path to a disembodied, posthuman and post-natural future leads directly through the shattered gender binary. Looked at this way, the question of what pronouns to use, or who should be allowed into which bathroom, suddenly starts to look a lot more momentous than the newspapers are telling us. The unifying driver is the desire fortrans-cendence: the latest stage in what another transhumanist,Kevin Kelly, calls our ongoing liberation from matter.

I dont mean to suggest that the activists currently beavering away to queer the gender binary all have this end in mind, let alone that everyyone who considers themselves to be transgender buys into this worldview, or has even heard about it. But this is the direction of travel. People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue.

The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, cyberconsciousness software and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

I strongly urge you to read the whole thing and to subscribe. Unless we rise against these elite controllers, the day is coming when these writings will be outlawed.

This is all profoundly Luciferian. You know that, right? You should. Does anybody at your church ever talk about this stuff? If not, why not? If your church isnt talking about this stuff, it is not preparing you for the present thats here and the future thats coming.

Here is the original post:
What Is A Human? - The American Conservative