Er, what?

 

With apologies to No Context Memes on X.  

The new censorship

 

Sabine Hossenfelder calls out a new attempt to counter "misinformation" on YouTube. In reality, to censor it. This time around, it´s climate change denial that should be stopped, and it seems the definition of what constitutes such a denial has broadened considerably. "The new climate denial" include people who are skeptical of the officially approved solutions to climate change. By that "logic", I could be censored for pointing out that Elon Musk´s EVs don´t work in the dead of winter! 

I assume the "NGO" behind the proposal is connected to the fake "Green transition" wing of the political establishment, and that their staff consist of former climate activists who turned 22 this winter?

If you want to know what the powers-that-be (or one of their wings) are afraid of, look no further than to who they want to censor! But yeah, I have a long list of people *I* would like to kick off social media platforms. So there´s that, I suppose.  

The end of drone power?

 

- Look´s like another war is coming up.
- Yepp. 

Is the end of drone power in sight, asks controversial blogger Vox Day. The second link mentions the laser weapon that can shoot down drones. The third may or may not tell us something about Britain´s "industrial power"...  

The end of drone power

UK dawns aerial drone with new laser

UK "Green Steel"

Lies midwits tell themselves

 

I don´t usually link to this dark side Alt Right personality, but for some reason I just can´t help sharing this material. Besides, Vox Day has a certain point here. That is, he is skeptical of the "modest midwit" who wrote the description of a high IQ person. Presumably, he was referring to a VHIQ person, which apparently means Very High IQ (UHIQ means Ultra High IQ).

Now, I´m fairly certain that I don´t have VHIQ (let alone UHIQ), and yet...I recognize myself in the four points mentioned. Not always. But tolerably often. So no, that´s not how you know a person is VHIQ. 

Vox Day´s own proposal about the eyes seems more relevant. The only person I´ve ever met who may have been a Sigma (or at least "Sigmoid") had more or less those kinds of eyes...   

How to recognize VHIQ

Puttes ikoner

 

Falsk rysk ikon c/o Bing AI

Lite högerextrem propaganda från de falska karolinerna på Fria Tider, men artikeln innehåller en del intressanta sakupplysningar. Så innan Tobias Hübinette lyfter frågan, får vi nöja oss med detta!

Putin vill ha tillbaka ryska imperiets föremål

Another Russian veto

 

Is NATO turning into some kind of sick joke, or what? 

Turkey and their Hungarian vilayet are blocking Sweden´s NATO membership bid, and now Slovakia say they will veto any future attempts by Ukraine to join NATO.

Having three Putinist Trojan Horses in NATO seem to come with consequences...   

Slovak PM says Ukraine isn´t a sovereign nation

Ex-Hindu tells it all

Doreen Virtue strikes again…

Here, she interviews an ex-Hindu named Sandeep who converted to (evangelical?) Christianity about five years ago. While the interview is interesting, I nevertheless gasped at somewhat irregular intervals. As when Sandeep attacks Hindu worship for its blood sacrifice to Kali and some other deities. Sandeep has converted to a religion which is *literally* based on a human sacrifice to a wrathful god! Christianity, remember? And in the Jewish Temple, they sacrificed animals to God. Jesus and the apostles worshipped in the Temple, indeed, the apostles “praised God” in the Temple even after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus!

And speaking of the Temple…

Virtue mentions that the Old Testament prohibits idol worship, God declaring that He is the only object of worship. She forgets to mention that the Israelites themselves broke these commandments by having two graven images in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple! And while the Bible never says so, there are suspicions that the two cherubim are really Yahweh and his heavenly consort Asera – how is this relevantly different from a Hindu god and his shakti, or even Krishna and Radha and in their eternal love play?  

Going back to Sandeep, he attacks the Hindu gods and the Buddha for having a bad family life, but what about Jesus condemning his family, or indeed everyone´s family? Sure, the Hindu or Buddhist scriptures are frequently peculiar or even somewhat bizarre, but what about all the strange stuff in the Old Testament, or even in the New Testament? (Fill in your favorite examples here.) Sandeep also attacks Hindu polytheism, but if he had wanted a consistently monotheist religion, he should have become a Jew, Muslim or Sikh! How is the Trinity and worship of Jesus (a kind of Christian “avatara”) really different from polytheism, indeed from a polytheism claiming that all gods are really one and the same?

It´s not entirely clear to me what attracted Sandeep to Christianity, but he does mention a couple of points on which he believes (perhaps rightly) that the teachings associated with Jesus were unique. For instance, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies. He contrasts this with Krishna´s admonition to Arjuna to fight at the battle of Kurukshetra. Leaving aside for the moment that the NT never prohibits Christians from fighting in wars (but sure, those are secular duties in the NT, not religious ones like in the Bhagavad Gita), how is the advice to love your enemy and don´t resist evil practical at all? 

I also get the impression that Sandeep didn´t see any escape from samsara and its never-ending cycles when he was a Hindu, and that he found Hindu ritualism absurd. Salvation by faith and grace is presumably “easier”, but how is the idea of everlasting hell for the unrepentant “better” than never-ending cycles for everyone? Sandeep also believes that there is historical evidence for Jesus, but hardly any for Krishna and absolute zero for other Hindu deities. But even if we accept this (some don´t), what is the historical evidence for Abraham, Moses, Joshua or even king David?

Once again, Sandeep´s conversation with Doreen Virtue (who is a former New Age believer) is interesting (I had no idea that certain yoga postures were associated with the Hindu deities), but I can´t help feeling that both of them have a blind spot for the problems of their own chosen religion… 

Test the demons

 

Anonymous Australian occultist on the YouTube channel "Lifting the Lamp" responds to some bad reactions to another video upload of his, in which he discussed demons. You would think the critical viewers considered Mr Lamp to be too positive towards demons. You would be wrong.

They actually accused him of being too negative?! Which just confirms what other Neo-Pagans and occultists have said on other fora: demonolatry seem to be in fashion these days. That being said, Mr Lamp isn´t entirely dismissive of his demon-friendly critics. There is *some* truth even in demonolatry, the demons of “his” magical system not always being 100% evil evilly beings á la Satan. However, even the “best” demons – which can help you with material gain – are negative in the end, since they keep you chained to the material world with all its desires, desires which ultimately cannot be fulfilled (Mr Lamp admits that some people might find his argument “Buddhist” or “Gnostic” here). Many other demons are simply deceitful or indeed evil, and if you don´t trust people, why would you trust a demon?

Some of Lamp´s critics regard demons as simply the old pagan gods, who have been literally demonized by the Christian Church. Some also accuse him of being brainwashed by Christianity (Lamp is a former Catholic). His answer to the former is that many pagan gods weren´t particularly nice or ethical, so why have dealings with them? Humanity should outgrow them. As for being programmed by Christianity, Lamp points out that he was a member of the Crowleyan OTO for over a decade. Judging by his other videos, he then took up “Enochian Magic” and Golden Dawn ditto, which indeed have Christian undertones, but he doesn´t seem to regard this as negative. Christ is a real being coming through when you do white magic.

Yet other critics charged Lamp with being too “dualist”. In a sense, he admits that he is indeed such. There are negative forces and beings who wish you harm in the cosmos, while others want to elevate you to higher states. If that´s dualist, so be it. Mr Lamp doesn´t rule out that angels or “devas” might develop material attachments and fall, nor that demons might sometimes ascend (he mentions a mage who could release such beings of their suffering). However, this doesn´t really disprove dualism, since the entities involved chose between Light and Darkness.

The content-creator also reveals that he carried out a demonic ritual himself in order to face down the demons, called “the four princes of evil”, and says that he “may or may not” do a video about it. Who knows, maybe that will make his critics go away…

The transition that wasn´t

 

A very modern ape?

Just for the hell of it, I´ve been trying to read and comprehend two scientific papers lately: “The Changing Face of Genus Homo” by Bernard Wood and Mark Collard (published in 1999) and “From Australopithecus to Homo: The transition that wasn´t” by William H Kimbel and Brian Villmoare (published in 2016). I found them hard to understand and even harder to explain to the readers of this blog, who are of course eager to learn all the cladistic aspects of the australopith-to-Homo transition (when not busy trying to comprehend the present economic crisis or cold spell). Or am I just being vaguely ironic here? But sure, I might have gotten *some* kind of existential insights even from these papers.

I long wondered why the genus Homo (“humans”) is so broad. As a layperson, I always suspected that a number of taxa in said genus aren´t really “human” at all, but rather australopithecines. More specifically: Homo habilis, rudolfensis, floresiensis, luzonensis and naledi. The first actual human would then be Homo erectus (or Homo ergaster). I always got the impression that there was some kind of non-trivial “jump” from earlier forms to Homo erectus. And indeed, both H. habilis and H. rudolfensis have been classified as Australopithecus by some scientists. (In colloquial terms, the australopithecines would be “ape-men” rather than real men!) In their 1999 paper, apparently still something of a classic, Wood and Collard argues for precisely this kind of position: Homo habilis and his close cousin Homo rudolfensis really were relevantly different from Homo erectus and should therefore be excluded from the genus Homo. They tentatively reassign these two forms to Australopithecus, but don´t rule out that they should perhaps be classified in a genus all their own.

The 2016 paper, by contrast, takes the exact opposite position: there simply isn´t any dramatic shift from a generalized form of Australopithecus to an advanced and specialized Homo with large brain, tool-use, obligate bipedalism, or whatever it is that supposedly makes us human (all too human). Nor is there a smooth gradual transition from one to the other either. No, evolution is like a bush with many branches, the traits we consider extremely important showing up helter skelter (from our perspective) in quite different lineages. Of course, this has been the official view of human evolution for a long time (“three decades” according to the authors), so who needed to hear it in 2016? Or today? Wood and Collard, perhaps?

Kimbel and Villmoare point out that Homo erectus and its supposed ancestor Homo habilis actually show up at approximately the same time in the fossil record. I admit I had no idea! It also turns out that in terms of brain size, Homo erectus, H. habilis and Australopithecus (“sensu lato”) partially overlap. The smallest brain size of Homo erectus overlaps with the largest brain size of Australopithecus (!), while the smallest brain size of Homo habilis overlaps with the middle range of Australopithecus (I´m almost tempted to say “the midwit range”). This obviously means that the lower range of Homo erectus also overlaps with that of Homo habilis. The authors believe that the earliest fossil remains clearly diagnosable as Homo are closer to Homo erectus (!!) than to Homo habilis, but also that other almost equally old fossils are more habiline in nature, suggesting that there was a “bushy” diversity in the human family tree already from the start.

Why haven´t we been told this before? In popularized docus, I mean.

There are other relevant overlaps too, such as the “robust” australopithecine Australopithecus boisei having the same body mass as Early Pleistocene Homo. One thing that was news to me is that nobody really knows who/what developed the Oldowan industry. I assumed that it was well-established that these ancient stone tools were manufactured by Australopithecus, but they might as well have been made by Homo. Who knows, maybe they were made by both?

In the background lurks the conflicts over cladistics, which co-exists in an uneasy relationship with the old more Linnean (or perhaps quasi-Linnean) system of taxonomy. Back in 1999, Wood and Collard believed that cladistic analyses couldn´t distinguish between ancestors and sister groups, making it impossible to define a genus in a “monophyletic” way (only including species descended from a common ancestor, plus that ancestor). Instead, a genus has to be defined as an “adaptive grade”, which I presume means on the basis of morphology and/or behavior, species having the same “ecological” strategy being grouped together, the assumption presumably being that this does express common evolutionary ancestry. Indeed, Wood and Collard believed that a close analysis of hominin fossils shows that Homo habilis and H. rudolfensis had an adaptive strategy relevantly different from those of, say, Homo erectus. This would have aligned them more closely with Australopithecus.

Kimbel and Villmoare by contrast believe that such a dramatic rift doesn´t exist. *If* there is a transition between different adaptive strategies, it´s visible in the oldest known remains that could be Homo, remains far older than Homo habilis. Of course, the 2016 authors believe that cladistics work. The Linnean categories, by contrast, are meaningless and arbitrary. There really is no such thing as a “genus”, and the same is true of “family”, “order”, etc. Asking how to define their limits is like saying “how far up is up” (ironically, Wood and Collard have almost exactly the same criticism of cladistically-based genera!). What´s important is the concrete evolutionary lineage, something the 2016 paper believes can be demonstrated by cladistic analysis. Thus, scientists can objectively construct monophyletic groups (clades). I´m not sure how they do this with fossils, however, since no DNA can be extracted from them? Some kind of advanced computer modelling?

There are of course “ideological” implications of all this, or at least of Kimbel´s and Villmoare´s paper, something the two authors also emphasize. If human evolution was neither a dramatic shift from Southern Ape to Man, nor a smooth, unilinear and progressive transition between them, Homo sapiens isn´t unique. We like to imagine our species as towering on the endpoint of evolution, with our suit of characteristics defining whatever “transition” we think lead to us. In other words, a kind of hidden teleology. Instead, the transition was complex, with each of our “important” and “defining” characteristics presumably appearing at different times, perhaps originally in different groups of hominins. We are simply the lucky recombination of all these characteristics (that´s my interpretation) imagining ourselves to be the unique goal of the process. The 2016 paper in effect calls us to go back to Darwin and more radically accept the implications of his theory.

So perhaps the “genus Homo” really is broad enough to include even Homo habilis & Co. 

The Changing Face of Genus Homo

From Australopithecus to Homo: The transition that wasn´t

An Anthropocene we can believe in

 

"I´m beginning to suspect that the Cornucopia thing was just a load of hype!"