Embracing Extinction in a Posthuman Era
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
There is no good and evil. There is only power... and those too weak to seek it. ~ Voldemort, Harry Potter series
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You can listen to me read this essay here:
What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have rights as a human being? We still haven’t figured that out and we are now expected to enter the age of the posthuman. Of one thing we can be sure, if those in power are to succeed in creating a post human era, do you think that humans will still be considered to have the ultimate in rights? Absolutely not. The rights of humans will be less than the rights of posthumans.
But before we get into posthumanism, let’s take a quick look at humanism.
Humanism really took off in the 18th century. In Rosi Braidotti’s fascinating 2019 lecture, “Posthuman Knowledge” she describes that history like this:
We had an International Declaration of Human Rights with the French Revolution, 1792. Almost immediately a woman by the name of Olympe de Gouges notices that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights only applies to free men and writes the alternative, a Universal Declaration of Women’s Rights. Does anybody know what happens to Olympe de Gouges? She’s sent to the guillotine immediately, because life is short, and we’ve got a revolution to run. Thank you, brothers.
1792, Toussaint Louverture, in the middle of the French Revolution, he says, well, does this apply to the slaves? Aren’t they humans, too? In 1794, Louverture triggers the Haitian Revolution, liberates all the slaves, establishes a free democratic republic on the basis of the principles of the French Revolution. But what happens to Louverture? The French Imperial Army goes in, squashes the whole thing, and he dies in captivity. Thank you, brothers.
You can listen to her talk here:
When I listened to this, I immediately thought of how it relates to what is happening now. It was only last summer that Christians and Muslims stood side by side, protesting together against the woke agenda invading their schools.
In fact, a Newsweek Opinion piece observed how all minorities were uniting in this common goal. And they were uniting, horror of all horrors, with White conservative Christians. That could not be allowed to happen. Imagine the strength of those numbers.
This might be the most important revolt yet against the politicization of education, against the upper-middle-classes' use of the classroom as a soapbox for social engineering, where the aim is less to enlighten the young than to inculcate them with all the "correct" thoughts on sex, gender, and race. The eccentric ideologies of the largely white graduate elites are crashing against the pro-family, small-c conservatism of immigrant-descended communities.
Another Newsweek article observed how in 2021, after parents objecting at school board meetings were labeled as domestic terrorists to be investigated by the U.S. government “Many on the Right felt for the first time what Muslim Americans have lived with since the September 11 attacks: the innate suspicion of the U.S. government due to your religion”.
For anyone who cannot see the similarities between the protests/riots against Israel worldwide and the BLM protests/riots of two years ago, then they simply don’t want to see it.
Remember this when BLM protestors surrounded a woman sitting at a restaurant?
Or remember after the start of the Ukraine war when all things Russian were banned. The owner of a Russian restaurant i the video below had to completely makeover his restaurant. He never imagined people would stop going to his popular diner just because it was Russian.
And now the harassment of Jewish restaurant owners easily follows.
The only difference is that the US government condemns the protests against Jews—at least on the face of it. No matter that it is right for the government to stand up for Jews who are being persecuted, people who have been conditioned to disbelieve everything the Biden administration might say or do, have automatically become antisemitic rather than agree on something Biden would say. They think they weren’t duped by Covid; they weren’t duped by BLM or the Ukraine war, they certainly aren’t going to be duped by this new Israeli/Gaza war.
People don’t realize that in dehumanizing others at the drop of a hat, essentially, they are paving the way for all humans to be treated as less than—and that includes themselves.
I hear over and over from friends and colleagues “I hate people.” I try to remind them, “But you are a person. So, that means you hate yourself?”
They pause for a second, but only a second. Humans are losing their ability to empathize with others; to put themselves in the same pot as those they so nebulously “hate”. If they think a little deeper about what they are saying, they will have to define which humans they hate. They will have to categorize them. Because certainly, they will not include themselves and their own friends or family members or those who agree with them ideologically or ethnically or religiously, in that foul pot.
We find ourselves at a crossroads where humanity must sacrifice itself for the “greater good”, which is the transition to the posthuman era.
Humanism grew out of anthropocentrism, the idea that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe.
Eating Animals, a novel by Jonathan Foer, describes anthropocentrism as "The conviction that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the appropriate yardstick by which to measure the lives of other animals, and the rightful owners of everything that lives."
As Braidotti says, “Species Anthropos has granted themselves the right to access every body, every organism that lives. Regardless of all other sociological variables—class, ethnicity, race, religion or the mantra of the variables—anthropocentrism.”
It’s true that this concept of having dominion over the earth was introduced in the Old Testament. But it has been perverted and humans have used it to justify raping the earth and subjecting animals to horrific torture. The Bible says we are to be good stewards and care for the earth. It warns that “to whom much is given, much is required”. If you are given the care of a house, for example, and by the mere fact that you can “do what you want in the house” you set about destroying it, then you must be prepared to suffer the consequences when the master returns.
Humans have taken this concept of Anthropos to the extreme. It isn’t enough that humans should reign above the animals, especially when they have done such a bad job of it. Rather than admitting their fault, they now move on to “post-humanism”, believing this will save the few enlightened ones from all those mere humans beneath them who they can then blame for all the problems as they leave a trail of destruction behind them in their desire to realize post humanism.
As Braidotti describes, humanity has reached a sort of plateau, a convergence of many “zigzagging phenomenon, carried by the two fundamental events that structure historicity—the fourth industrial revolution, the knowledge economy, also known as cognitive capitalism, and on the other hand, the sixth extinction, and the dying of the species, the dying of this planet.”
According to Robert Cowie, professor at the UH Manoa Pacific Biosciences Research Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), "Humans are the only species capable of manipulating the biosphere on a large scale."
Just listen to Bill Gates and his rants on dimming the sun, manipulating the weather, genetically altering everyone and everything, all for the sole benefit of humanity. But what benefit exactly? And defined by whom?
We are in a world of extremes. It is a world propelled by panic, hysteria, where the feeling is that everything is out of our control. And yet, no one wants to stop it. On the one hand, we are being told we are destroying the planet. If we don’t do something fast, we will all burn up from climate change. We will also no doubt die from the next plague if we don’t do something about it now. Oh, and then there is AI that is set to kill us off or at the very least enslave us.
On the other hand, we are being told we are on the verge of a new era ushered in by AI. No one will ever have to work again, we will all live happy lives, served by our AI assistants who will never let us forget anything, never let us drive down the wrong road or take the wrong pill. We are being told that science holds all the answers and if we just stop holding back and allow scientists to do whatever they want to us, we will reach heaven on earth.
Braidotti says this contrariness is “causing a great deal of panic on the one hand and incredible excitement on the other. These are really the best of times and the worst of times. Transversality is really the key term here. You need to draw lines across events that are not similar or parallel even. Trans. The future is in the transversality of almost everything.
This, then, is why it’s so important that people to accept mediocre males calling themselves “trans women” and competing in women’s sports, erasing what it means to be a woman. Look at this picture, where two transgender women, also known as biological men, have won gold and silver in a cyclocross race in Illinois:
If this doesn’t represent the extinction of humanity, then I don’t know what does. And the poor girl—yes, the one who is actually a female—is smiling her bravest and her brightest, believing she is doing the right thing by sacrificing her innate rights for the sake of “trans rights.”
When Braidotti speaks about “trans”, she speaks with the clueless enthusiasm of the disassociated academic, one who is so removed from ordinary human beings that they no longer relate to the real world in all its mundanity but delight in theorizing in the clouds about the most horrific things that somehow, they cannot ever conceive of affecting them. Yet, in every revolution, it is the academics who are debased and sent off for reeducation or killed first. The ones who often welcome the new order with open arms.
I use more down-to-earth language than Braidotti. I say that all of this is making everyone crazy—and I use the term “crazy” in the literal sense, not figuratively. People are being fractured by this thinking that does not allow them to reach conclusions, only hurdle from one disaster to the next. The further we go along this road the greater is our sense of doom and the more debilitating is our fear that something really bad is coming and we are powerless to stop it.
Contradictions abound. Just as we are being told we are on the cusp of a new dawn; we are being pulled back into the dark ages. Take a stroll through the nightmare that is now X, if you dare. Every day it becomes more of violence, hate-filled cesspool. As if everyone demands the return to the Inquisition because everyone is sure it will be on their side and it will punish their enemies. Sharia Law is the new Inquisition.
Yes, democracy is flawed but at least we have the freedom to protest it. That glaring fact, right there, should tell every protestor what they need to know because what they are protesting to replace democracy with would kill them in two seconds for daring to protest in the first place. Yet, they don’t see it. In their rush to self-destruct, they don’t want to see it. Especially educated young people. They have been so successfully indoctrinated; they don’t see how a society that subjects its girls to female genital mutilation is a society they shouldn’t support. Of course, they don’t see it. Not when they support the drugging and mutilation of children—themselves—for the sake of posthumanism.
Where does this come from? The push for humans to despise themselves, to turn on their own kind. To accept becoming “less” for the sake of “progress”.
And yes, okay, the privileged have always done this. But why do we continue to accept it? It is precisely because we embraced this path for so long that we are here now. So, if we shrug our shoulders and say, well, it’s always been that way, at least our lives are more convenient now as a result, then of course, nothing will ever change, and we have only ourselves to blame when the prison doors lock us in.
Here’s a perfect example of this madness, from @GadSaad:
“Twenty-two years after 9/11, a new generation of Americans are romanticizing the "liberatory freedom fighter" Osama bin Laden via @tiktok_us. A society that is so willfully committed to its self-destruction cannot survive. This reminds me of the Norwegian man who was raped by a Somali Noble Immigrant in Norway. The Norwegian man felt guilty that the Undocumented Love Maker might be deported back to Somalia wherein he might have a harsh life. Hence, the raped man was predominantly concerned with the sodomizer's future prospects. Human nature is predicated on the notion that humans & societies have a self-preservation instinct. Well, the West does not. Your grandchildren will pay a very dear price. The policies that need to be implemented to correct course are simply outside the purview of the Western mindset.”
In Malcolm Muggeridge’s Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society, written way back in 1985, mind you, he nails this phenomenon:
“So, the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus, did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
That is exactly what is happening right now.
A transgender refugee who carried a placard that said “Israel burn in hell” at a pro-Palestine rally claimed it had been “picked up from a bench” and she did not understand it because it was written in English.
Laura Davis, 22, pleaded guilty through an Arabic interpreter to a charge of having caused racially, religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress by words or writing when she appeared at Westminster magistrates court in London on Friday.
First of all, Laura Davis is not a ‘she’. But as far as I’m concerned, he has every right to say he is and to wear what he wants, but how insane that whole side of things has become is a whole other topic. So, for the sake of this article, I will call him a ‘her’.
Of course, any rational person knows how insane it is that the LGBTQ+ (whatever) community calls Israel an ‘apartheid’ state while raving on about ‘freeing’ Palestine. Has anyone asked the question of what Palestine will look like when it is ‘free’? Or how Israel will look when the blood of 7 million Zionists has been spilled (factual definition of Zionist being Jews who believe they have a right to a homeland).
Will Laura Davis rush to move there? Will a single trans person be crazy enough to move there? If they do, they will be as foolish as the student revolutionaries who studied in America and went back to Iran and were murdered by Khomeini that I wrote about it The Reluctant Revolutionary!
There is no rational reason why Americans would so hysterically protest against apartheid in Israel where 2.1 million Arab-Israelis live, representing 21% of the population, when Blacks represent a mere 14% of the population in the United States. By their own definition, apartheid exists in their own country to a greater extent.
Why aren’t they protesting the way Blacks in America have been herded into inner city communities (ghettos) and kept there? Why aren’t they protesting the fact that Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of Whites, with the disparity being even greater in some states? Why don’t they call this a genocide? What happened to all the BLM protests? They vanished in a puff of smoke once Biden was elected.
It’s true that in Israel, Arabs are convicted at a higher rate. But not as high as Blacks in America! In Israel Arabs are convicted at 3.7 times the rate of their Jewish neighbors while in the US it’s 5 times.
That’s not all. Young, educated Americans in particular are angry that Israel incarcerates children, mostly teenagers who have been tried and convicted of acts of terrorism. In July, Israeli Ministers advanced a bill on imprisoning children under 14 for terror-related manslaughter). Okay, be angry about that if you want. But they should be even angrier that their own country incarcerates more youth than any other country in the world—and for much less offenses. Just take a look at the disparity between races of incarcerated children in America:
Youth Placement Rates by Race and Ethnicity, 2019 Rate per 100,000 Youth
According to the ACLU
Each year, an estimated 250,000 children—some not yet in their teens—are prosecuted in adult criminal courts and subjected to the consequences of adult criminal convictions. In addition, 36 states continue to incarcerate youth under 18 in adult jails and prisons, where young people are at greater risk of suicide and physical and sexual assault.
So, let’s get back to Laura Davis’s insane mentality.
Davis fled Saudi Arabia in December 2021. Her lawyer explained that “She is a member of the transgender community and due to the views in Saudi Arabia, she had no choice but to flee. She has been abandoned by her family because of the way she lives.”
It would be just as dangerous, if not more so, for Davis to live in Gaza. In contrast, transgenders are fully accepted in Israel. They are fully accepted in Britain, where Davis now resides and is part of a supportive trans community and receives benefits from the government, free courses and help to find employment.
Yet, there was Davis, protesting against the country that embraces transgenders in favor of a country that kills them.
Davis was not flogged or beheaded or hung or thrown off a building for the crime of carrying an antisemitic sign. No, she was fined a mere £225, which will be deducted from her benefits.
Millions of people around the world want to see the extermination of Jews and the end of any form of democracy in the Middle East. In exchange for what? Fundamentalist Islam, a religion that openly vows to either kill or convert every single person on the planet who does not bow to Islamic rule. Would any of these virtuous protestors actually want to live under Sharia rule? No, they would not. But there is no rational thought when you are bent of self-destruction.
If you want to look further into how the west is self-destructing from the inside out, you only have to watch this trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6:
Grand Theft Auto is the game every western boy loves to play. Millions of boys who are now men, and millions more boys who are replacing them in an endless stream of players, were and are being raised on this game. It reinforces the idea of us vs them. Because I am special and my team is cool, we have the right to kill, torture and enslave everyone else.
At any given month Grand Theft Auto 5 alone garners 2.1 million active users, the vast majority being 18- to 34-year-old males living in the Western world. Interestingly, Great Britain has the most players.
You can live in the world of Grand Theft Auto (try walking the streets of San Francisco some time), or you can live in the world of Islamic fundamentalism. Which world would you choose? To Elon Musk’s credit (and my readers know I’ve not held back on criticizing the world’s richest man) his response to those who ask what he thinks of GTA6 is that he won’t play it. Why? Because the game requires him to engage in criminal activity.
Musk was immediately made fun of for being “soft”. Apparently, he is often compared to Drake for this reason:
There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of the connection between boys playing hours upon hours of a video game that glorifies violence, rape, drugs, and crime and a society that is now unable to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil.
There’s more insanity, unfortunately. On top of everything else, there is something that can only be described as the “Death Cult of Climate Change”. (Notice how they don’t call it “Global Warming” anymore.)
As ZeroHedge reports: All Four "Pillars Of Civilization" Are Under Attack By An "Anti-Human Death-Cult".
As Michael Shellenberger recently wrote on his Public substack, flying on private jets to a climate conference to announce plans to make energy even more expensive for working people is bread-and-circuses, except there’s no bread, and the circus consists of rich people celebrating their wealth, morality, and superiority.
Tucker Carlson interviews Shellenberger, asking him just how long this “posturing” of environmentalism can go on:
"We're watching people push an Orthodoxy at increasing volume with increasing hysteria and with increasingly severe penalties for disagreeing...what is that?"
Shellenberger replies:
"Global Elites used to pretend to care about people but they're not even pretending anymore..."
Why would the elites continue on this path towards annihilation? Because nobody wants to risk another elite devouring their wealth and power and pushing them out of the game. They all think they can be the one who will win the race, unlock the secret to posthumanism just in time and become the heroes.
Don’t slow down. Don’t regulate. There isn’t time. It’s all going to work out. You know why? Because the X account @BasedBeffJezos claims to have founded the “effective accelerationism,” or e/acc, movement, which argues that technology companies should innovate faster, with less opposition from AI safety advocates and regulators. And that message has captivated many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful. Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon, who founded AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022, and we have revealed his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’ influence grows.
BeffJezos—Jeff Bezos is Jesus? Are we living in a looney bin? Apparently so. The absurdity continues at a record pace.
After her introduction to “transversality” Braidotti makes the argument of how we can create something “productive, affirmative and propositional”. But before we do that, she advocates first being grounded somewhere, because “‘we’ is not one, ‘we’ is not unitary”. One must define who ‘we’ is.
This is what she wants us grounded in:
Feminism, politics of location, anti-racism, anti-fascism. Be accountable for a “specific location, indigenous epistemology”. All of this allows us to do a “critique of universalism without allowing ourselves to fall into relativism”.
Don’t you just love the language of the academic? Let’s pause for a moment and define:
Universalism: the belief that all humankind will eventually be saved:
"Christian universalism would insist that Christ's atonement did atone for everyone's sins"
loyalty to and concern for others without regard to national or other allegiances:
"a tendency towards universalism and inclusion"
loyalty to and concern for others without regard to national or other allegiances:
"a tendency towards universalism and inclusion"
Relativism: the doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.
Braidotti argues that the opposite of universalism is not relativism, but it is perspectivism, “multiple grounded perspectives”.
‘We’ are not one and the same, but ‘we’ are in the post-human convergence together."
Braidotti completely ignores “moral absolutism”, the concept that most of the rest of us ordinary humans know very well, having grown up in various forms of religious families. And even though most people might not be familiar with the term, they instinctively understand its definition, that:
Some moral principles are universally valid.
In refusing to acknowledge this basic truth, Braidotti falls into the same madness as everyone else. It is the arrogance of believing that if humanity just progresses far enough, we can figure everything out, moving beyond the mere human and becoming our own god.
Brushing all of this aside, Braidotti goes on to talk about the “lovely robots” who will care for us, who will “look as clean and caring as possible”.
Only to then remind us of the dark side which is the “digital garbage” our lovely creations leave behind. She talks about the toxicity of the lithium batteries exposed in piles of waste, and so on.
The contrast between the good and the bad of our creations dig chasms between us. Either you go into a state of euphoria, like the Silicon people do, or you sink into melancholy, like many of the rest of us—all while addictively attached to technology, using it 24/7, while at the same rationalizing away the guilt that we feel.
After all, we in the western world cannot help the poor children mining for rare earth elements that supply our smart phones. But we can complain about the children in Gaza—using our smart phones to do so—and somehow that makes amends.
Yes, the end of humanity promises to usher in the age of post humanism and we are assured there is nothing we can do to stop its advancement. It’s good. It’s bad. But more than good or bad, it’s progress so let’s keep on moving forward, shall we?
Here is a short video of Elon Musk’s answer to the worries he himself has raised multiple times about AI:
“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Through Neuralink, we will become symbiotic with AI.”
It isn’t surprising that, like his peers, Musk shows a complete disconnect between right and wrong, good and evil in the real world, while displaying prudish principles when it comes to committing crime in a video game. In the Game of Life, rules are meant to be broken in the quest to be number one in the post humanism race.
The evil of those in power knows no end.
It is probably true that traders informed of Hamas attack profited millions by short-selling Israeli stocks. Why not? In the game of life, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
In the real world of the evilest bad guys on the planet, they don’t run around the streets shooting at cops like they do in Grand Theft Auto. That’s for the small fry who the powerful condition to mindlessly kill each other. When the real killing starts, the monsters who engineered it are way ahead of the game. They’ve already made their bets and are sitting back in their mansions raking in the dough while the world burns a safe distance away.
Yes, yes, I know this is depressing. But it’s necessary to talk about. It is also necessary to remember that it isn’t all of the story. It never is. A light always shines through the darkness. Incredibly, despite the forces that are hell bent on destroying it, the human spirit survives. The human spirit that we are imbued with by our Creator. Instead of growing weaker, that human spirit grows stronger through trials and tribulations. The strength and courage of the human spirit will always put these “gamers” to shame.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hamas hostage victim Hersh, calls it “balancing on the head of a pin”. How do you stay there without falling into the abyss all around you?
In the video below, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose arm was partially blown off by a grenade, speak with Anderson Cooper about what it is like knowing their son is either dead or still a hostage of Hamas.
They describe their son’s friend, Honor, who, when the two young men and a group of others were hiding from Hamas, kept on catching the grenades that were thrown into the room and tossing them out again. There were eleven grenades in all, and Honor managed to toss out nine of them. When Honor’s body was found, he was still holding one of the grenades tightly in his hand.
However cute or helpful a robot can be, it will never have the spirit of a human being. No Grand Theft Auto game will ever prepare a young person to commit such courageous acts as Honor did.
Hersh’s parents go back and forth between hope that he is still alive and despair that he is dead. Maybe he bled out in the truck that they saw in the video of their son being taken away. Maybe he died yesterday. Maybe he died five minutes ago. These parents cannot understand their thoughts. They don’t know how they live day to day with their thoughts. Yet they do.
Rachel, Hersh’s mother, describes going out onto the porch that faces south and raising her hands and screaming a blessing to her son, “a traditional Jewish blessing because on Friday nights we go out and bless our children. I usually put my hands on his head when he is home”.
What is the blessing, Cooper asks. This is how Jews pray for their children on Friday nights:
May God bless you and keep you. May God’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May God’s countenance be lifted up toward you and give you peace.
We should all pray for our children. They need our prayers like never before. I am sure there are many Palestinian parents praying in anguish, too, and how could anyone dare to judge who suffers more. What truly loving parent isn’t willing to run to the ends of the earth to save their child as Rachel describes she would do for her son.
It is easy for the academic to reduce it all down to “transversality” and “universalism” versus “relativism” that is really “perspectivism” and the argument that we simply must deal with it all for the sake of “progress” because that’s just the way it is. But when you live a life in harmony with the earth and the sky and those around you, when you have respect for a power greater than yourself—God, in fact—all of this insanity falls by the wayside.
On December 30, 2022, Rahi Santhanam posted a video of a bead of bright lights strung across the night sky, with the comment, “Saw this in the night sky over Yelahanka just now. Any idea what this could be? My imagination is running wild!!!”
Some people responded with magical interpretations such as “To me it seemed like the galaxy of stars are touching the ground in a line!” “Beautiful!”
The bitter truth came out in Harmoney Marya’s comment:
“unfortunately that is elon musk's 5g satellites. it's pissing off astronomers and astrologers as it is creating traffic and pollution in the sky”.
Yes, it looked beautiful, it gave all those who observed it a sense of “connectivity”, but it had a darker side.
Just recently, SpaceX announced it had launched Starlink satellites on a record-breaking 62nd mission of the year.
We are all under surveillance from Elon Musk in space. That’s because the guy who doesn’t want to commit a crime in a video game wants to be number one in the real world, at any cost. It doesn’t matter that in the name of progress, all the wonder and magic of gazing up at the night sky, of counting the stars, of searching for the Milky Way or the 12 Zodiac Constellations, will be forgotten. Anyway, you will be able to experience those things in an alternative universe, provided by Starlink, so who cares.
It doesn’t matter that something sinister happened in July when the sky was described as bleeding. The launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in California punched a hole in Earth's ionosphere, which resulted in a blood-red glow across the sky visible for hundreds of miles.
It happens all the time, we are told. No cause for concern.
In August 2017, a Falcon 9 rocket created a hole four times bigger than the state of California, the largest ever recorded. And in June 2022, another Falcon 9 punched a hole over the U.S. East Coast, sparking a display of red lights from New York to the Carolinas that many observers mistook for the northern lights, Spaceweather.com reported at the time.
Imagine what it will be like when thousands upon thousands of satellites are orbiting our earth. Do we really think this will have no impact on our perfectly balanced biosphere? Or on our own mental state? All the marvelous stories that have been inspired by the night sky will be lost to us.
Over 1 million satellites could be headed to Earth orbit. Check out the space garbage already caused by satellites in 2019:
"If even a portion of these million satellites are actually launched, national and international rules will be needed to address the associated sustainability challenges, like collision risks, light pollution, and reentry risks," warns Andrew Falle, a researcher at the University of British Columbia's Outer Space Institute.
But since when has anyone worried too much about rules when the race is on to be top dog? We see it with technology like “swarms of killer robots that hunt down targets on their own and are capable of flying in for the kill without any human signing off”. We see it with “Designer Babies” who could change the DNA of the human race forever, chimeras, and the list goes on and on. Even as they wring their hands in mock despair, saying, oh, we must make some rules, nobody is doing it, they are too busy rushing headlong towards self-destruction.
I enjoyed listening to Braidotti’s talk very much. I agreed with some of it. The problem is that she, like most of her peers, leaves out God. The more I delve into the topics I write about, the more I return to C. S. Lewis. He spoke so clearly of simple truths—and yet, he, too, was an academic, an intellectual. But a rare one; one who did not lose sight of his “connectivity”—no, wait, forget those newfangled words, I will stick with his connection to the rest of us. Without that connection, he could never have written some of my favorite books, starting with the Narnia Chronicles, then The Space Trilogy and The Great Divorce.
In The Abolition of Man, he wrote:
“The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.”
There are certain fundamental truths that unite us all. If we lose them, we are lost, truly lost.
Here is a photo that Rahi Santhanam posted:
…along with this beautiful comment:
“This visual has the essence of eternity. The transmission of knowledge through the ages. That magnificent tree being a sakshi, witness, to the ever-changing times. And, yet, exuding a timelessness in its very existence.”
Rahi and I don’t know one another. We come from different worlds. She lives in India (a place I’ve never visited but would love to) and I live in America. We follow different faiths. But in our hearts, we share the same truths.
I do not believe that these post humanists will succeed. I do not believe there is anything more powerful than these simple truths.
Please, do not let the night sky be taken from you with all its mystery. Do not embrace extinction in a postmodern era, just for the sake of convenience.
Thank you, Karen.
The video game, Grand Theft Auto, is so realistic and validates the likelihood (based on Moore's Law) that we are currently living in a simulation. Those of us who read/listen to Karen's Substack are aware of the extent to which the Military Industrial Pharma Technocratic AI Complex experiments on humans, animals and the environment. We mistakenly perceive the matrix as authentic.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=75PEZ9-aR0s&pp=ygUTVGhlIEFydCBvZiBNZXRhIFdhcg%3D%3D