Month: July 2023

Categories
All in the Mind

Alternate Reality in the Post-Enlightenment Era

Is scientific censorship leading us back to the Dark Ages?

Flying over Antarctica's ice wilderness.

I’m all for challenging orthodoxy, especially when powerful forces seek to enforce their narrow interpretation of observable reality to protect their vested interests and drive hidden agendas. I’ve long argued that intellectual freedom is the best way to let good science, grounded in verifiable reality, win over bad ideological science. It’s the ultimate form of democratic peer-review. Yet at the dawn of the artificial intelligence revolution, many opinion leaders would have us believe only a select group of authorised experts may decide on the key scientific questions that affect our everyday lives as free-thinking autonomous human beings. Once we lose the right to challenge authority over matters such as healthcare, farming or town-planning, our technocratic masters hold the power of life or death over us. This foreboding sense of helplessness leads critical thinkers to distrust all official information.

I fear the more trend-setting influencers push alternate realities at variance with our first-hand experiences, the more a growing minority of confused malcontents will begin to question the very foundations of the scientific enlightenment that enabled modern civilisation to thrive. If new schoolbooks redefine basic human biology by teaching impressionable young children gender is merely assigned at birth rather than being an immutable trait embedded in every cell of our bodies, why should we believe mainstream cosmology? When science becomes dogma, enforced by an army of censors, fact checkers and skewed statistics, some will fall prey to deceptive but superficially appealing counternarratives that serve only to bewilder us.

It should hardly surprise us that just as gender theory goes mainstream with primary school children exposed to drag queen story time, flat-earthism and young-earth creationism have made big comebacks on social media, especially among devout Christians, and perhaps in an ironic twist of fate, among many strict Muslims too.

In a make-believe world where men can become pregnant, why should we not fantasise the boundless opportunities of a flat disc extending infinitely beyond an ice wall that globalist geographers have apparently mislabelled Antarctica? With the advent of AI-enhanced interactive virtual reality, almost anything is possible. Tartan army foot soldiers might want to relive the 1978 World Cup with Scotland beating Iran and Peru to qualify for the second round and then to go on to beat Argentina in the final. Such a fantasy might also feature the Winter Olympics in the majestic snow-capped Cairngorms with 4000-metre peaks and state-of-the-art cable cars outclassing the best the Swiss Alps may offer. Indeed, why bother spending a small fortune to experience the natural wonders of remote Pacific atolls, the Amazonian rainforests or idyllic Tibetan villages, when we could explore idealised three-dimensional simulations of these locales via VR-goggles and haptic suits. Modern technology can easily simulate weather and terrain too, but I anticipate brain implants may do away with the need for complex machinery altogether and send haptic feedback signals straight to our cerebrum as if we were walking, running, swimming, kissing or even making passionate love with an erotic deity. We could, with new superhuman powers, climb Mount Everest, dive deep into the Great Barrier Reef and enjoy an exquisite feast of freshly caught lobsters washed down with champagne aboard our private yacht from the safety of our bedroom, with our atrophied flesh-and-blood body reduced to a life-support system for our online activities. Future transhumans could re-enact almost any alternate reality with radical revisions of history and geophysics to suit our cultural predilections and belief systems.

You may wonder why I bother debating with pseudo-intellectual flat earth theorists. For all I know, they could be either AI bots or digital agent provocateurs sowing the seeds of confusion in an age of heightened media manipulation. A few may be genuine biblical literalists or victims of subterfuge. Yet I feel strongly anyone concerned with objective truth amid so much deceit should call out both official and unofficial pseudoscience.

In my brief online exchanges, random flat earthers have questioned why passenger aeroplanes do not fly over Antarctica. The real reason is the only viable commercial route to cross the Southern polar region, from Sydney in Australia to Santiago of Chile, follows a natural path that skirts around the unforgiving ice-clad continent with much higher survival rates at sea in the event of an emergency landing. However, for a mere $100,000 (USD) you can buy a chartered flight to the South Pole and stay at the Amundsen-Scott Station. If you stay long enough to the start of long polar night, you may observe in an extreme cold of -60ºC at 2835m above sea level the night sky with its aurora rotate at 24 hour intervals.

While observations of sunrises, sunsets and lunar phases at different latitudes and longitudes led ancient astronomers to adopt the Round Earth model long before the development of modern navigation instruments, flat earthers persisted with their literal interpretations of sacred manuscripts, with heaven above us and hell below us. It is simply a myth that medieval scholars believed sailors would fall off the edge of the Earth if they ventured into unchartered territory. Ancient maps often portrayed the known world as a disc or segment of a larger sphere. In the second century BC, Ptolemy argued that the Earth is a stationary ball surrounded by a larger celestial sphere revolving uniformly around it along with the stars, planets, Sun, and Moon, thus explaining their daily risings and settings. Indian and Chinese astronomers visualised a dome rotating above a flat earth floating in a larger ocean. The worldview of earlier civilisations centred on a small portion of a surface that seafarers would later chart onto a sphere with amazing precision by the late 16th century.

The modern technology we take for granted relies on detailed knowledge of our geophysical and biological environments that has taken us thousands of years to acquire. We may yearn to expand our horizons to new undiscovered continents lying beyond a mythical outer ice shelf, but we have to make do with the 149 million square kilometres of land and 361 million km² of sea we have within the Earth’s atmosphere. The oceans below a depth of a few hundred metres remain largely unexplored as does the earth’s outer mantle. While new discoveries have called into question previous orthodoxies, such as the Big Bang or mathematical abstractions behind the hyper-dimensions of string theory, we can be pretty certain our home planet has a spheroidal shape and orbits our nearest star, the Sun.

Categories
All in the Mind

Pronoun Creep

Sex is embedded in the DNA of every cell of our bodies

As a living language, English has no shortage of quirks and ambiguities but tends to adapt over time to fill the semantic gaps. However, there is a big difference between the natural evolution of language and compelled speech.

Unlike some other European languages, English lacks a generic gender-neutral pronoun such as the German “man” or French “on” for the third person singular, although the formal impersonal pronoun “one” may sometimes meet these needs. By and large, we find ourselves having to choose between he/him/his and she/her/hers when referring to an abstract third person.

Someone, anyone and everyone may take the third person singular verb, but have long, especially in everyday speech, been combined with they, theirs and them, e.g. “Someone has left their keys on the table” or “Everyone should take their belongings with them”. Older style guides recommended third person singular pronouns with “someone” or ”anyone” when they refer to one person only and until recently he/him/his was the default even if it could involve a woman. By contrast, "everyone" always refers to more than one person. Besides, the inclusion of “someone” or “anyone” in a sentence removes any potential ambiguity when combined with “they/them/their”, but this is not the case when a pronoun acts as a placeholder for a singular gendered woman or man.

Yet on the back of the gender-bending craze, third person plural pronouns are creeping into contexts where we’d expect singular forms unless many people are involved. I now get emails from LinkedIn with phraseology like “Angela Green has accepted your invitation. Message them now!”. As Angela is clearly a singular woman, will my private messages to her be sent to more than one person?

I’ve long observed that modern English has a stronger tendency to use people’s names in sentences where other languages would omit them, partly to avoid ambiguity in sentences like “Michael drove Bill to York in his car” where “his car” may be Michael’s or Bill’s. What happens if misplaced political correctness leads us not to assume Michael or Bill’s gender identities and instead opt for phraseology like “Michael drove Bill to York in their car”. Does this mean Bill and Michael share a car, but Michael drove on that occasion?

How could a language evolve without a means to identify a gendered person in a respectfully neutral way? The answer is simple. Human sexual dimorphism plays a central role in all traditional societies. Besides, gendered singular pronouns are deeply ingrained in everyday speech. Most suggested alternative gender-neutral pronouns either clash with common names or just sound hackneyed, especially as most people still like their natural gender identity.

The growing use of they/them/theirs for singular males or females dehumanises people. It promotes a rejection of our natural heritage as the offspring of a long line of women and men and blurs key distinctions between a group of people and a free-thinking autonomous individual rather than a mere subject of a genetic experiment.

Categories
Power Dynamics

Systemic Breakdown or Engineered Chaos?

Some foreign observers may gloat over the disturbing scenes of rioting, arson, looting and urban warfare in the banlieues of French cities over the last week with an arrogant sense of schadenfreude, blaming the EU leadership, the French governance team, complacent left-branded politicians and naïve French voters for failing to address the root causes of the societal breakdown we see unfold before our eyes on electronic devices in the safety of our suburban neighbourhoods. Allegedly the police shooting of a Maghrebi teenager, Nahel Merzouk, triggered the destruction of billions of Euros worth of public and private infrastructure with schools, libraries and apartment blocks razed to the ground. Some will recall the brutal stabbing of 4 toddlers in the picturesque Alpine town of Annecy by a mentally disturbed asylum seeker earlier in the month. The woke left admonished some commentators for highlighting the assailant’s origin. Yet while some nationalist politicians may have capitalised on the incident to call for stricter immigration controls, we did not see riots on the streets of provincial towns still populated by autochthonous Europeans. Neither did we see violent retaliations in the wake of the horrendous 2016 truck attack in Nice that killed 86 innocent people or the 2015 Bataclan Theatre massacre with 89 fatalities. Most French citizens did not blame all Muslims for the outrageous crimes of a minuscule, radicalised minority. Indeed, the crimes were so horrific, many suspected dark forces associated either with Western secret services or with foreign actors, could have trained a small army of gullible patsies to commit acts of terror that serve mainly to spread fear and thus to justify more surveillance and censorship.

Like elsewhere in Western Europe, the French government squandered hundreds of billions of Euros on heavy-handed covid containment. They deployed riot police to suppress overwhelmingly peaceful protests against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, losing the trust of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens. Although French pensions may seem generous by British standards, raising the retirement age amid a cost-of-living crisis with dwindling long-term career prospects for most over 40-year-olds proved to be the last straw for millions of French workers of all political persuasions. Macron could only win his second term as French President as the lesser of two evils, with the corporate media and trendy left opinion leaders smearing his opponent, Marine Le Pen, as a fascist. Ever since Manu, as many his subjects call him, has shown more interest posing on the world stages alongside WEF associates like Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, King Charles, Volodymyr Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen. As France burned, Macron partied with Elton John.

True to form, the gallic WEF puppet blamed the riots on social media, and wait for it, video games, both pastimes that his business buddies have been busy promoting for the last thirty years. Rather than focus on the underlying causes of social discontent, Macron opted to clamp down on free speech limiting access to the Internet in high-crime neighbourhoods and liaising with tech giants to suppress videos of mindless violence. Should we not ask instead: Who exactly benefits from the wanton destruction of shopping centres, libraries and schools? More important, who gave tens of thousands of looters carte blanche to steal luxury goods without fear of prosecution? How could acts of vandalism bring justice to the murdered teenager? I see close parallels with the choreographed overreaction to the police murder of George Floyd three years ago in American cities. One way or another French taxpayers will the price of their regime’s overspending on medical martial law, foreign wars and now mopping the mess of a civil war, either directly through tax or higher inflation.

Inevitably, as French security forces struggle to restore order, calls will grow for international peacekeepers on the streets of one of the wealthiest countries on Earth and tighter control over citizens movements. The stage seems set for the roll-out of 15-minute neighbourhoods with exit permits dependent on good behaviour. Nostalgic patriots may fantasise Macron’s resignation with early elections leading to Marine Le Pen’s victory. Socialists may dream of a general strike to bring down the government and, once in power, roll out their welfare panacea with a blend of 1960s social democracy and 21st century green technocracy. Yet the ongoing civil unrest can only benefit Macron’s international backers, eager to suppress the culture and independent spirit of the feisty French people to fast-track its transition to a billionaire’s playground with its lower-to-middle class residents confined to special reserves and suburban ghettos. The global elites may ditch Macron, but they will have another placeman or placewoman ready to fill his shoes with empty promises of reconciliation.

Despite all the bad press France has attracted of late, it remains one of Europe's more self-sufficient countries and is much less susceptible to higher global energy and food prices than its neighbours with a strong farming sector and major investments in nuclear power. At all costs, Manu's Mafia bosses must avoid a return to viable nation states.