In case you were wondering about the Republican vision for higher ed…

Just look to Kansas.

A plan to restructure the school and allow the firing of faculty members with only a 30-day notice is expected to be approved this week by the Kansas Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s higher education. If adopted, the “workforce management plan” would effectively suspend tenure for the fall 2022 semester.

A semester doesn’t seem like much, but it’s enough time to wreck careers and burn down programs that have taken decades to build. It’s enough time to change an institution that has contributed to the common good in Kansas for more than 150 years to one that is dedicated to … well, we just don’t know yet.

Yikes. We’re hired on a legal contract…but they can just tear it up and throw it away like that? How can they do that? Simple answer: Republicans.

There’s little doubt that the university’s move to end tenure is in response to pressure from the deeply conservative Kansas Legislature, and I’ve heard the former university provost Gary Wyatt say as much. Once, in a department meeting, he told us that legislators viewed tenured professors as “the enemy.” Then again, at a faculty address this fall, he said the campus would have to come to grips with the reality that we live in a state that is mostly Republican, with a legislature that is GOP dominated. How much clearer could he make it? To his credit, Wyatt is one of the few administrators willing to speak the truth on the issue.

They don’t care. They’re willing to wreck the state for their failed ideology. And the hired gun they employ to do the dirty work is the new president of the university, Ken Hush. How he was hired was appalling.

The same week KBOR extended the “workforce management” policy, it also hired a new president for Emporia State: Ken Hush. An ESU alum and former college tennis star, Hush had served as interim president since November 2021. Hush is a former CEO of Koch Carbon and, according to the Federal Election Commission database, a contributor of tens of thousands of dollars to KochPAC, which predominately funds conservative candidates for Congress.

Hush’s appointment as president came as a surprise to campus because many assumed a presidential search would select someone from the outside with an advanced degree. Hush holds a dual major bachelor’s, in business and marketing, making him the least academically credentialed of the leaders of the six universities in Kansas.

The presidential search process, unlike all previous searches at ESU, was a closed one, veiled in secrecy. There was no announcement of finalists or opportunities for faculty, students and staff to evaluate them, whoever they were. The chairman of the search committee was another former ESU tennis athlete, Greg Kossover — and a major donor to the new tennis complex on campus.

The selection of Hush at first seemed an odd fit.

Although he had served on the Wichita State University board of trustees, he didn’t have a deep background in public service in a classroom setting. He had run a Koch company that specialized in bulk commodities of coal and petroleum coke, and contributed heavily to a PAC that funded candidates who were often climate change deniers.

The libertarian Koch brothers, of course, kicked off the current culture war during the Obama years with their support of the Tea Party. The university and KBOR both refused to release a resume or curriculum vitae for Hush, something that most schools share with pride.

We’ve gone through several chancellors at my university during my tenure here, and every time, hiring a new one was a major effort involving a national search, multiple candidates, multiple interviews, faculty consultation, a thorough review of their qualifications, and draining amounts of work by a committee. This guy was just hired because the Koch’s said so?

Note to self: we currently have an acting chancellor, and I presume will eventually hire a different person. Thumbs down on any applicants from Kansas, unless they’re refugees with solid qualifications fleeing the imperial regime of Kochistan.

The objective morality hamster wheel

I’d almost managed to forget that Michael Egnor exists, but there he is, yelling stupid arguments at me. He dropped a pingback on my recent post about objective morality, but then he weirdly quotes something I wrote in 2012.

There is a common line of attack Christians use in debates with atheists, and I genuinely detest it. It’s to ask the question, “where do your morals come from?” I detest it because it is not a sincere question at all — they don’t care about your answer, they’re just trying to get you to say that you do not accept the authority of a deity, so that they can then declare that you are an evil person because you do not derive your morals from the same source they do, and therefore you are amoral. It is, of course, false to declare that someone with a different morality than yours is amoral, but that doesn’t stop those sleazebags.

Yay! I’m consistent!

Egnor objects, however.

Actually, Christians don’t ask “Where do your morals come from?” in order to call atheists evil. We do it to point out that objective morality is powerful evidence for God’s existence.

They can do both, you know, and they do. On multiple occasions, I’ve had Christians announce that I’m an atheist to discredit me and my arguments, so yes, they certainly do use it to call me evil. I will concede that they may think they’re making a “powerful” argument for god, but they’re not. It’s a stupid argument. I guess I was unconsciously giving them more credit than they deserve to think they can’t possibly believe it’s good evidence.

Egnor then defines the difference between subjective and objective morality to explain how the argument defends the existence of a god.

How so? From our human perspective, moral law can have two origins — subjective and objective.

Subjective moral law is based on human opinion. It may just be one man’s opinion, or it may be the collective opinion of a group of people. If our standards are wholly subjective, dislike of strawberry ice cream and dislike of genocide are not qualitatively different. The dislike is just human opinion.

Objective moral law, by contrast, is outside of human opinion. It is something that we humans discover. We do not create it. Thus, objective moral law exists beyond mere human opinion.

Oh, OK. Then I do possess an objective morality, by Egnor’s own definition. It’s not merely my opinion that we shouldn’t murder other people, it’s a conclusion based on empirical observation of the consequences of murder on individuals and society. Human cultures discovered this by seeing the harm done to a society if death runs rampant. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was also a genetic component, that we have an in-built revulsion from death, especially violent death.

Also, I like strawberry ice cream. What kind of monster dislikes strawberry ice cream? Except…OK, if you are lactose intolerant, you’ve got a legitimate objective reason to dislike it.

So far, I’m fine with Egnor’s claim. Yeah, moral judgments (but not all moral judgments!) can be based on something objective, greater than opinions about ice cream. Fine. Done and done. So we agree that atheists can have an objective morality? Not so fast, because next, without evidence or reason, he leaps to another claim, one that is not related to his earlier definition.

Of course, if a value judgement prevails over other human value judgements, there must be Someone whose opinion is Objective Moral Law. There must be a Law-Giver. That is the one whom all men call God.

No, this is false. I just gave sources of objective morality that are not dependent on authoritarian pronouncements from an imaginary deity. There doesn’t have to be an anthropomorphic invisible law-giver anywhere in the process.

This is just the standard creationist shimmy. The universe had a beginning, therefore there must have been a superpowerful cosmic man-shaped being who started it…but no, that’s not true, there could be some other material cause, or some meta-cause outside our universe that triggered it. A burp in hyperspace, a glitch in the matrix, or why not an entity that cares nothing about us, but spasmed a bunch of stars into existence for its own purposes? There is no logic to his conclusion there.

Myers, as you might expect, is a moral scold, which is odd, coming from an atheist who by definition denies any Source for objective moral standards. Without Objective Moral Law, debates about morality are merely assertions of power — I just try to force you to believe and act as I do because I assert the power to do so. And you do likewise to me.

Every time Myers scolds humanity on morality and immorality, he implicitly acknowledges God’s existence. Myers detests the question “where do your morals come from” because he can’t answer the question without acknowledging the existence of a non-human Moral Law-Giver. For an atheist, denying God’s existence appears to be more important than consistency, logic and evidence.

Notice that he smuggled in a capital-S Source as a prerequisite to objective morality, and that he hasn’t provided any evidence or even any reason why it must exist. That’s his premise. So his argument distills down to:

  1. Objective morality exists because God is the Source
  2. God exists because objective morality exists
  3. Goto 1

It’s as circular as a hamster wheel, and Egnor is frantically running in it.

How did we end up with a conservative Catholic Supreme Court?

It’s peculiar. We’re supposed to have a separation of church and state, but somehow we’ve ended up with not just a religious court, but a sectarian religious court. The answer, obviously, is money. Someone or someones has been skewing the court rightwards by sinking lots of money into it — buying the law, basically. But who?

Here’s a candidate:

Meet Neil and Ann Corkery, a pair of veteran Republican operatives who have cultivated a robust network of conservative and Catholic-affiliated nonprofits, charities and funds notable for their near-total opacity. For more than a decade, the Corkerys have leveraged this network to prop up conservative judicial nominees, most of whom have been devout Catholics. Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Salon that “while most Americans wouldn’t recognize their names,” the Corkerys “have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into federal judicial races.”

“They have the discipline to not talk,” Maguire explained, acknowledging the dearth of reporting on the duo. “They don’t have social media accounts. They don’t give public speeches. They’ve done a really good job of limiting the amount of public information on them.”

We do, however, know bits and pieces. It’s likely that the Corkery empire started around 2008, when Ann Corkery, a partner at the Washington law firm Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner, established the now defunct Wellspring Committee, a 501(c)(4) organization that took in tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds, of millions, from undisclosed donors for upwards of a decade. Wellspring was founded with the help of Charles and David Koch, and raised its first $10 million seedling donation from attendees at a Koch donor seminar.

The scary thing about the Corkerys is that they were smart enough to keep quiet about what they were doing, while cunningly recruiting millionaire donors to fund a campaign to make sure Catholics are packing the judiciary. They’re organizing horrid little pissant billionaires like the Kochs, and focusing interest in a particular direction. The worst thing to have is a clever enemy.

The Corkerys’ political influence, as Maguire pointed out, has a highly specific orientation rooted in religious faith. “When you look at the way money has flowed through the groups [Wellspring] is affiliated with,” he explained, “you see a long history of supporting groups that fought against marriage equality and anti-abortion.”

In 1990, the Corkerys gave an interview to the South Florida Sun Sentinel describing themselves as members of Opus Dei, an enigmatic and highly secretive society within the Catholic Church. According to a 2013 investigative report from the liberal group Catholics for Choice, members of Opus Dei “vehemently oppose legislation that allows divorce or civil marriages, as well as homosexuality and contraception.” Critics have also alleged that the group has internally supported various authoritarian world leaders.

If you’ve ever wondered how unqualified incompetents like Kavanaugh and Barrett ended up on the highest court in the land, just look at the Corkerys and their influence.

Hooray for Democracy, where it’s not people who shape the leadership, but the dollars that vote.

Bad coach

On the one hand, kids shouldn’t have to be snitches, and I don’t like the idea of junior secret agents monitoring adults around them.

On the other hand, some adults need to be monitored, since grown-up institutions seem to look the other way when their members are continuously awful.

That was the case in a Rhode Island school, where students took it upon themselves to document the unpleasant behavior of one of their teachers.

As sixth graders, the students thought their teacher at Davisville Middle School was a creep.

They saw him leering at some girls, singling them out with pet nicknames, encouraging them to dance for him. They saw him treating boys with contempt, and sometimes cruelty.

The teacher, who was also a coach and involved with extra-curricular activities, told the students that he’d weathered parents’ complaints for nearly 30 years, and there was nothing anyone could do to him.

By seventh grade, some of the boys had started taking notes, documenting what the teacher was saying and doing, particularly to the girls, at the school.

In an exclusive interview with The Boston Globe, one of the boys described how in January 2021, he and his friends decided to start their “Pedo Database,” to track the teacher’s words and actions.

They had tried talking to adults about what they heard and saw. None of the adults listened or took them seriously, the student told the Globe. It made the boys uncomfortable to see the girls in their class struggling to deal with their teacher flirting with them.

Again, on the one hand…I had a math teacher in junior high who was exuberant, loud, overweight, and sweaty, who loved show tunes and would sometimes start belting out Ethel Merman songs in class. He was regarded with suspicion by some in the administration, and some of the students — not the ones who were any good at math, or even took his class — started an ugly whisper campaign. He treated students with respect and had high expectations for them. I thought he was just a terrific teacher, memorably enthusiastic. He got me doing geometry for fun.

Again, on the other hand…there were two coaches in high school who were abominable creeps, urging the boys to tell stories about the girls who would ‘put out’, leering at girls outside of the gym, making revolting jokes about them. They were pure misogynistic bullies. No one complained about them, most of the guys were terrified by them (or worshipped them).

I worry about a culture that targets misfits — it could go very wrong very fast. But the RI situation is different. The teacher was a creep, and the kids were later found to have been right about him.

And then, in late April 2022, the teacher was escorted out of the middle school.

Interim Superintendent Michael Waterman announced that he had placed a teacher on leave and was launching an investigation into allegations that the teacher had stalked a pre-teen girl at the middle school while he was her coach, and had been inappropriate with other girls.

The accusations were made by lawyer Timothy J. Conlon, who is representing the girl’s family and is also representing former athletes at North Kingstown High School who have accused former coach Aaron Thomas of conducting naked “fat tests” on teenage athletes.

Of course he was a coach. There are no staff more privileged at a typical American school than the coaches. It sounds like they got good evidence of directly harmful behavior by the coach, which is how this ought to work — a Discord list maintained by a bunch of students shouldn’t be definitive, except as supporting evidence that he was an obnoxious jerk.

Man, I wish my high school coaches had gotten what they deserved. But instead, my excellent math teacher was the one who lost his job — no, he didn’t do anything wrong, other than to annoy small town bigots.

It’s so generous of Oz to provide grist for the mill

He has been despised by skeptics for a good long while, so I have to thank Fetterman for highlighting the quack nostrums Oz has been selling for so long. Boy, there’s a lot of ’em.

What’s really sad, though, is that Oz has made a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars peddling random herbs while claiming they can cure cancer and make you a decade younger (they can’t). Meanwhile, pointing out that he’s lying will earn you diddly-squat.

I’ve experienced brain fog, and no thank you very much

A few weeks ago, I had what is called a transient ischemic attack — don’t worry, it was brief, hasn’t returned, and the doctors examined me inside & out with embarrassing thoroughness, and have given me a clean bill of health — but it was terrifying. For a whole ten minutes, I couldn’t focus on a simple and familiar task on the computer. I knew what I had to do, if I was thinking normally, and I couldn’t figure out how to find basic, abstract functions on the screen in front of me. When it passed, then click-click-click it was a second’s work, and I couldn’t understand what had happened.

Today I read Ed Yong’s latest, and dear god, it is chilling.

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.

Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.

AAAAAAAAAAAAIIEEE! That’s what I experienced…for ten minutes. But that’s one of the possible symptoms of long-COVID, and people go through it for months? I can’t imagine it. I wouldn’t want to go through that.

For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.

That’s exactly what I was trying to do! I was trying to put a presentation I had to give on my calendar/email, and somehow I couldn’t figure out where anything was or what steps I had to take. Even my brief experience with that was intolerably frustrating. It was so awful that immediately after I recovered my ability to act again, I checked into a hospital, despite feeling totally fine once it passed.

Thanks, Ed Yong. Now in addition to worrying about respiratory failure and death, I can dread losing my brain. I’ve managed to avoid getting COVID at all so far, and now I’m motivated to be even more scrupulous in my preventive efforts. It’s too bad my employers, a fucking university, has so little concern about the minds of their faculty and students.

Gotta admit, Al Franken is one hard-hitting advocate

More like this, please. Al Franken interrupted a Republican apologist when she started to lie, and reduced her to stammering incoherence by simply demanding that she back up her claims of historical legitimacy for packing the court with incompetents by citing examples and evidence. This is how we have to deal with Republican dishonesty, by hitting back hard.

“I disagree with what the chief justice said. The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn’t take up Merrick Garland. And you’ll remember that [then Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell said it was because it was during an election year. And you remember Lindsey Graham pledging that if a vacancy came open during an election year in 2020, that he wouldn’t vote for — they wouldn’t take up a nominee,” Franken said.

“They’ve stolen two seats: The one that Merrick Garland wasn’t given a hearing for and the one that [Amy Coney Barrett] was, where she was seated a week before the election. That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.”

Acosta tossed it to CNN political commentator Alice Stewart — who worked on Mike Huckabee’s campaign when he ran for president in 2015 and was also a campaign communication director for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann at various times — saying that the Court has become “titled to the far right.”

“To throw some accuracy in what Al said there, Merrick Garland was held up because we had divided government, a Democrat in the White House, and Republicans in control–,” she started, only to be interrupted and corrected by Franken.

“That’s not what McConnell said,” Franken argued. And the back-and-forth arguing began.

“But that’s the way historically this has been. When you’re in close to an election year and you have divided government–,” Stewart said, only to be interrupted by Franken’s, “No, that’s not the way it’s been historically done. Tell me when this happened before. Tell me when it happened before.”

“Well,” she started, “Merrick Garland is certainly one. When there’s a–”

Again, Franken, popped in. “No, before Merrick Garland. Tell me when it happened before. You said this is what happened historically. Tell me when it happened before.”

“I can’t give you an exact example when this happened in the past,” she answered.

“You know why you can’t? Because it hasn’t happened before,” Franken shot back.

She attempted to divert the subject, but he wouldn’t let her.

“This is total hypocrisy,” a fired-up Franken said. “And actually, I’m surprised that you’re claiming this, and you can’t come up with an example because there is none.”

She tried to respond and get back to what she called “the point of the conversation,” but Franken stepped on that with a boisterous “This is the point!”

This is a general problem with conventional rules for debate. There’s a habit of insisting that both sides must get equal, uninterrupted time, even when they start spinning out absurd lies — don’t let them do that. If they make a claim, insist that they must back it up. Don’t give them 5 minutes to compound their lies into a tangle that will take hours to un-knot, which is what they want.

Yeah, he was rude. Ruder still is the privilege that gives liars unquestioned opportunities to make stuff up.

Rebranding the Necron Empire as the good guys

The latest from Émile Torres focuses on how longtermists have effectively focused on PR and advertising. They have a truly odious philosophy, so they emphasize whatever element will get them the most money. The core of longtermism is the idea that in the far future there could hypothetically be many, many trillions of hypothetical “people” (who would mainly be artificial intelligences of some sort), and that therefore we should make any contemporary sacrifice we can to maximize the population of machines in the unimaginably distant future. There’s a lot of weebly-wobbly rationalizations to be made since nobody has any idea what strategies now will lead to conquest of the galaxy for human-made computers in some imaginary fantasy future, but somehow the current popular ones all involve sucking up to disgustingly rich people.

Ironically, it grew out of the goal of ending world poverty.

Longtermism emerged from a movement called “Effective Altruism” (EA), a male-dominated community of “super-hardcore do-gooders” (as they once called themselves tongue-in-cheek) based mostly in Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Their initial focus was on alleviating global poverty, but over time a growing number of the movement’s members have shifted their research and activism toward ensuring that humanity, or our posthuman descendants, survive for millions, billions and even trillions of years into the future.

If you asked me, I would have thought that building a stable, equitable base would have been a sound way to project human destiny into an unknowable future, but hey, what do I know? The longtermists gazed into their crystal ball and decided that the best, and probably most lucrative, way to defend the future was to pander to the elites.

Although the longtermists do not, so far as I know, describe what they’re doing this way, we might identify two phases of spreading their ideology: Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk — and this has been wildly successful. Musk himself has described longtermism as “a close match for my philosophy.” Sam Bankman-Fried has made billions from cryptocurrencies to fund longtermist efforts. And longtermism is, according to a UN Dispatch article, “increasingly gaining traction around the United Nations and in foreign policy circles.”

After all, haven’t billionaires already proven that they will do their all to spread their wealth? OK, maybe the past is a poor guide, but once they’ve perfected brain uploading and have a colony of serfs on Mars, then they’ll decide to let the rest of us have a few crumbs.

The article is largely about one guy, MacAskill, who is the current Face of the movement. His entire career is one of lying to make his philosophy palatable to the masses, but especially delicious to wealthy donors. From day one he was shaping the movement as manufactured public relations.

But buyer beware: The EA community, including its longtermist offshoot, places a huge emphasis on marketing, public relations and “brand-management,” and hence one should be very cautious about how MacAskill and his longtermist colleagues present their views to the public.

As MacAskill notes in an article posted on the EA Forum, it was around 2011 that early members of the community began “to realize the importance of good marketing, and therefore [were] willing to put more time into things like choice of name.” The name they chose was of course “Effective Altruism,” which they picked by vote over alternatives like “Effective Utilitarian Community” and “Big Visions Network.” Without a catchy name, “the brand of effective altruism,” as MacAskill puts it, could struggle to attract customers and funding.

It’s a war of words, not meaning. The meaning is icky, so let’s plaster it over with some cosmetic language.

The point is that since longtermism is based on ideas that many people would no doubt find objectionable, the marketing question arises: how should the word “longtermism” be defined to maximize the ideology’s impact? In a 2019 post on the EA Forum, MacAskill wrote that “longtermism” could be defined “imprecisely” in several ways. On the one hand, it could mean “an ethical view that is particularly concerned with ensuring long-run outcomes go well.” On the other, it could mean “the view that long-run outcomes are the thing we should be most concerned about” (emphasis added).

The first definition is much weaker than the second, so while MacAskill initially proposed adopting the second definition (which he says he’s most “sympathetic” with and believes is “probably right”), he ended up favoring the first. The reason is that, in his words, “the first concept is intuitively attractive to a significant proportion of the wider public (including key decision-makers like policymakers and business leaders),” and “it seems that we’d achieve most of what we want to achieve if the wider public came to believe that ensuring the long-run future goes well is one important priority for the world, and took action on that basis.”

Yikes. I’m suddenly remembering all the atheist community’s struggling over the meaning of atheist: does it mean a lack of belief in gods, or does it mean they deny the existence of gods? So much hot air over that, and it was all meaningless splitting of hairs. I don’t give a fuck about what definition you use, and apparently that means I’m a terrible PR person, and that’s why New Atheism failed. I accept the blame. It failed because we didn’t attract enough billionaire donors, darn it.

At least we didn’t believe in a lot of evilly absurd bullshit behind closed doors that we had to hide from the public.

The importance of not putting people off the longtermist or EA brand is much-discussed among EAs — for example, on the EA Forum, which is not meant to be a public-facing platform, but rather a space where EAs can talk to each other. As mentioned above, EAs have endorsed a number of controversial ideas, such as working on Wall Street or even for petrochemical companies in order to earn more money and then give it away. Longtermism, too, is built around a controversial vision of the future in which humanity could radically enhance itself, colonize the universe and simulate unfathomable numbers of digital people in vast simulations running on planet-sized computers powered by Dyson swarms that harness most of the energy output of stars.

For most people, this vision is likely to come across as fantastical and bizarre, not to mention off-putting. In a world beset by wars, extreme weather events, mass migrations, collapsing ecosystems, species extinctions and so on, who cares how many digital people might exist a billion years from now? Longtermists have, therefore, been very careful about how much of this deep-future vision the general public sees.

The worst part of longtermist thinking is that what they’re imagining, in the long term, is a swarm of digital people — none of whom exist now, and which we don’t know how to create — is the population that our current efforts should be aimed at serving. Serving. That’s a word they avoid using, because it implies that right now, right here, we are the lesser people. Digital people is where it’s at.

According to MacAskill and his colleague, Hilary Greaves, there could be some 1045 digital people — conscious beings like you and I living in high-resolution virtual worlds — in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The more people who could exist in the future, the stronger the case for longtermism becomes, which is why longtermists are so obsessed with calculating how many people there could be within our future light cone.

They’ve already surpassed the Christians, some of whom argue that there are more than 100 million (100,000,000) angels. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, remember, so sacrifice now to make your more numerous betters.

You will also not be surprised to learn that the current goal is to simply grab lots and lots of money by converting rich people to longtermism — this is also how Christianity succeeded, by getting a grip on the powerful and wealthy. Underdogs don’t win, except by becoming the big dogs.

So the grift here, at least in part, is to use cold-blooded strategizing, marketing ploys and manipulation to build the movement by persuading high-profile figures to sign on, controlling how EAs interact with the media, conforming to social norms so as not to draw unwanted attention, concealing potentially off-putting aspects of their worldview and ultimately “maximizing the fraction of the world’s wealth controlled by longtermists.” This last aim is especially important since money — right now EA has a staggering $46.1 billion in committed funding — is what makes everything else possible. Indeed, EAs and longtermists often conclude their pitches for why their movement is exceedingly important with exhortations for people to donate to their own organizations.

One thing not discussed in this particular article is another skeevy element of this futurist nonsense. You aren’t donating your money to a faceless mob of digital people — it’s going to benefit you directly. There are many people who promote the idea that all you have to do is make to 2050, and science and technology will enable an entire generation to live forever. You can first build and then join the choir of digital people! Eternal life is yours if you join the right club! Which, by the way, is also part of the Christian advertising campaign. They’ve learned from the best grifters of all time.

Optimism must be tempered with realism…and dread

Portrait of Victory!

Tragedy and waste, that’s all anyone will get out of the war in Ukraine. It seems to have entered a phase where exhausted, demoralized Russians get to run away.

In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, many after their units abandoned them, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.

“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.

Russia has announced that they are regrouping in the face of the Ukrainian surge.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the north-east of the country has inflicted an extraordinary defeat on Moscow, prompting the Russian army to pull back thousands of troops after suffering a series of battlefield defeats.
Ukraine appears to have regained control of the two key cities of Kupiansk and Izium after a major counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in recent days, after wrongfooting Russian forces with a much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region.
Photos published by the Ukrainian security forces showed troops raising the national flag in Kupiansk, an important logistical hub for Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, where rail lines linking Russia to eastern Ukraine converge and which, in the last months, has supplied Russian forces in north-eastern Ukraine.

Nobody has won. Russia is spasming and continues to rain missiles on civilian targets. Ukraine has retaken narrow strips of land that were theirs to begin with. Putin must react savagely to this embarrassment; there are whisperings of discontent among the militaristic factions in his country, and he will be deposed if he loses his strongman reputation. I want Ukraine to win, to be honest, but let’s be willing to face the facts and see every bloody step forward as an action that will demand more blood.

That other Pennsylvania candidate

No Dr Oz today. There’s an even worse guy running for office in Pennsylvania: Doug Mastriano wants to be governor, and he’s a certifiable nutcase.

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania has done any number of things that would doom to Hades the political prospects of any mortal politician: wearing a Confederate uniform, doing business with a white nationalist website, calling Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust, associating with militia figures from groups such as the Oath Keepers, appearing at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and sharing QAnon conspiracy ideas, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Muslim hatred.

But though he walks through the shadow of the valley of defeat, he fears no evil — because he has his very own campaign prophet! Her name is Julie Green, and she personally receives messages directly from God, “sometimes … twice a day,” she says, when He instructs her to turn on certain recordings and then speaks to her through the music’s “frequencies.”

Yes. English grammar.

This is not that unusual in America since every conservative president seems to adopt a personal god-walloper. For many years — most of my life, it seems — it was Billy Graham. Julie Green, though, is particularly weird.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano has promoted and campaigned with Julie Green, a “prophet” who has claimed that God will execute political figures “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” The Mastriano ally and fringe religious commentator has also alleged a variety of conspiracy theories, including that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood”; the government is conducting “human sacrifices” to stay in power; and President Joe Biden is secretly dead and an “actor” is playing him.

…

Green’s prophecies are badly performed pro-Trump fantasies in which God has “chosen” Trump to be his “Moses” to “deliver the people out of the hands of these nowaday pharaohs.” In this telling, the “majority” of states will decertify their 2020 election results, Trump will “take back his rightful place of power,” and God will send his “Angel of Death” to take the lives of people who stole the 2020 election, among other alleged misdeeds.

Green’s prophecies justify the coming deaths of elected officials by alleging vast conspiracy theories. For instance, she claimed Rep. Ilhan Omar is “a spy sent from your land to get everything you could to give it back to the nation that you serve”; she said that Sen. Mitt Romney’s “fingerprints will be found all over the fraud of the 2020 election”; and alleged that Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Brian Kemp were also involved in stealing the 2020 election.

Her prophecies have a special place for Mastriano and Pennsylvania. On February 28, she prophesied: “Doug Mastriano, I have you here for such a time as this, saith the Lord. I know it seemed like I had forsaken you, all your hard work, and all the time you put forth to get to the truth in election integrity. You know the truth, and you have seen so much evidence of what really happened. It is now time to move forward with the plans you have been given. Yes, Doug, I am here with you. I will not forsake you. The time has come for their great fall and for the great steal to be overturned.”

I had to look to see what this Julie Green is all about…and I’m sorry, she is the most uncharismatic evangelical preacher I’ve ever seen. She has this rather flat delivery of nonsense, and her videos…well, I include one here just so you can see what I’m talking about. It’s strange. It’s random animal videos with Green in a corner, talking, but her voice is completely out of sync with her mouth. Don’t watch the whole thing, it’s boring and poorly done, and if you watch a few minutes (or seconds) of it you’ll have captured the flavor of her entire video catalog.

What’s also strange is that while she has 10 times the number of channel subscribers that I do, hardly any of them watch her video — the number of views is typically in the hundreds. It’s like how an American majority may claim to be church members, only a small minority actually attend church on Sunday. I think there are a lot of fanatical far-right old people who see a sermon by her on Facebook, click on subscribe, and then don’t bother to look up her work at all regularly.

To put it in perspective, my maggot video has had more viewers than most of Julie Green’s boring prophecies. I don’t know why no governors have attached me to their election campaigns. Hey, Tim Walz, for a small fee, I could feed you a steady supply of cool spider videos! Call me.

Oh wait — an explanation. Julie Green Ministries has said they have no videos on YouTube (for good reason, they’re banned), and the videos I saw were all made by some rabid fan who steals the official videos on Rumble and Telegram and Truth Social and hacks them up and splices audio recordings of her sermons with what seems to be an arbitrary recording of her face. If you check out those sites, there are no cute animal videos, her voice is in sync, and the number of views is much more representative of her popularity among the Q wackos. The content is still flat and boring, though.