Science!
Eight sentences, eight of them totally wrong. (The X chromosome is 3 times larger than Y, and has 16 times as many genes, so even where they were going in the right direction they got all the details wrong.) That sounds like the Ray Comfort school of sexual education.
It’s December First, time to resume the battle. Except, uh-oh, there are some uncomfortable associations with my side in the battle. You know, we atheists aren’t trying to get rid of Christmas — we like parties — we’re just trying to escape the religious implications of the season.
Who else tried to remove the Christian element from the holiday? Hitler, that’s who.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis did their best to transform Germany’s beloved Christmas traditions into Nazi ones. Though Hitler’s attempts to create a national church failed, his party’s attempt to redefine religious celebrations was more successful. To do this, they used ideology and propaganda to put the holiday in line with the national socialists’ anti-Semitic values.
The Nazis’ problem with Christmas was baked into Christmas itself. After all, Jesus was a Jew—and both anti-Semitism and the goal of eradicating Jews and Jewishness were at the very core of Nazi ideology.
OK, it’s true we’d like to subvert the religious associations, but it’s not for the purpose of anti-semitism (a significant difference, I think), it’s to make the holiday more inclusive. You want to celebrate a traditional, conservative Christian Christmas? Fine, go ahead, I’m happy for you. You want to strip naked and dance in the moonlight on the solstice? Also good, you do you. But nobody should try to swap the participants in those two rituals. And it’s possible to go too far in distancing yourself from basic civil behavior during the season. Like Nazis.
Among the most important was the celebration of the winter solstice. The Nazis attempted to move the date of Christmas to the solstice instead and mounted large performances and community bonfires that supposedly drew on pre-Christian rituals. They also tried to redefine St. Nicholas as Wotan, the ancient Germanic deity.
As the years went on, Nazi attempts to take over Christmas intensified. The Nazis rewrote the lyrics of “Silent Night” to remove all attempts to religion or Christ. They distributed Advent calendars for kids filled with propaganda and militaristic imagery. They even tried to rewrite Handel’s Messiah. Mothers were encouraged to bake swastika-shaped cookies. Even the familiar star that topped millions of Christmas trees was replaced by a sunburst that looked less like the Star of David.
Replacing Santa with Wotan? OK, but you’re going to make the kids cry harder.
Rewriting “Silent Night”? I also approve. Nice slow melody, but man, those lyrics are thoroughly soaked in god-shit. You can sing it however you want, but I personally can’t stand the words to the song.
Swastika-shaped Christmas cookies, there I draw the line.
Also, it’s more Nazi-like to tell me I can’t say “Happy Holidays” and force me to abide by every sacred nuance of your peculiar religious tradition.
Is it the French? See that image on the right? That’s a Phrygian cap, and it was the inspiration for the mascot for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It’s the symbol of liberty, and it’s also a very strong message linked to the revolution that we want for those games. We want those games (to be) a big success,” says three-time Olympic champion canoeist Tony Estanguet, who is the Paris 2024 president.
Silly, but cute. But wait. There’s a different interpretation.
Fair enough, Mr Estanguet, but on closer inspection, it’s also a very strong message linked to the female anatomy. Because the mascots – quite aside from looking like lunatic Smurf hats – unmistakably resemble gurning plush clitorises with the cold dead eyes of a killer, who could be right at home in a particularly traumatic Cronenbergian fever dream.
Huh? What? That’s a stretch. It only fits if you have an image of a vivisected, chopped out deep chunk of a woman’s genitalia in your head. I don’t. That’s not at all what I picture if I try to visualize a clitoris. Somebody has the gross mind of a serial killer.
But I was wrong. It’s not the French. The people responsible for bringing up this stupid comparison are the English at the Vagina Museum, a London-based exhibition. The English are trying to corrupt the innocent French!
Given his recent demonstrations of incompetence, would you allow Elon Musk to perform brain surgery on you? Not that he, personally, would wield the knife (probably…although he also has had a machine built to do the surgery, and he might want to push buttons), but one of the companies he owns and mismanages would be in charge. That’s what he wants to do with Neuralink.
It’s been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It’s been three years since the company first demonstrated its “sewing machine-like” implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs — and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third “show and tell” event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, “we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human.”
Let’s also mention the self-driving software for his cars, which is going to be killing people soon. Would you want Musk software in your head? Or consider the Boring Company fiasco, which has failed to produce any useful transportation solutions.
And, don’t forget, it’s been about a year since he successfully impregnated a Neuralink executive. That’s the one thing I’d trust Elon Musk to do — fucking someone up.
I skimmed through his 2 3/4 hour tech demo. I was unimpressed. He showed off the pong-playing monkey again, with Elon providing narration to reassure us that all of his monkeys are happy. He had a dummy on an operating table, its head encased in a machine. They had the machine poking needles into an imitation brain. They did nothing to reassure us that long-term implantation was safe. They had no new, concrete, specific results.
One thing I noticed is that all of the engineers who were trotted out were well-spoken and well-rehearsed, kind of the minimum I’d expect…which made Musk’s off-the-cuff, clumsy speaking style more prominent. It was a lot of halting “uhh”s and “umm”s. He’s terrible. A charisma-vacuum. Fortunately for him, he had a paid claque on hand to whoop and holler at his every pronouncement, which just made the whole presentation even more annoying.
That also exposed how bad the content of what he was saying. Here’s a medical device that he claims will help the blind see and the paralyzed walk again (not that that was demonstrated), and what does he think is important? Defeating the long-term risk of AI.
Musk, however, also tends to emphasize non-medical uses, such as using brain implants to even the playing field, if digital artificial intelligence becomes smarter than any human.
“How do we mitigate that risk? At a species level?” Musk asked Wednesday. “Even in a benign scenario, where the AI is very, very benevolent — then how do we go along for the ride?”
This is not a real thing. We are not threatened by AI, and the kinds of clumsy tech Musk is playing with won’t mitigate his imagined existential future danger. He has no grasp of what his hired engineers are doing — he lives in a sci-fi fantasy world in his head.
The worst, though, is his stated purpose for the demo.
Musk noted during the “show and tell” event that the primary goal of the evening was to recruit talent to Neuralink.
“A lot of the time people think that they couldn’t really work at Neuralink because they don’t know anything about biology or how the brain works,” Musk said. “The thing we really want to emphasize here is that you don’t need to because when you break down the skills that are needed to make Neuralink work, it’s actually many of the same skills that are required to make a smartwatch or modern phone work.”
NO. NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOO. That is all wrong. It’s what a stupid pseudo-engineer would say. The first priority has to be safety, and long-term stability, and building a functional interface with an immensely complex biological organ. These are all medical and biological problems. The engineering…jesus, his major accomplishment has been training a monkey to play Pong. Pong is not difficult. It is not an engineering triumph. The tricky part is the biology. Any ethical review board ought to read that quote and immediately reject his proposal for human trials in 6 months.
He thinks it’s a gadget problem rather than a medical problem.
“In many ways it’s like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires,” Musk said of Neuralink’s device during the 2021 livestream event.
The Fitbit part is relatively trivial, the tiny wires are easy, it’s using them to muck around in a person’s brain that is hard. I don’t think Musk appreciates the difficulty at all.
There are people who are desperate for something to treat the catastrophic medical problems of ALS or spinal cord energy, and that’s Musk’s market. He’s going to gouge them for everything they’re worth and provide dangerous and minimal solutions, all while he’s dreaming of someday uploading his brain to a computer. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let a bumbling narcissistic billionaire get in your skull, especially since his efforts so far have a 65% mortality rate.
