Jillian Becker was interviewed by Sergio Politics. Certain questions were put to her, but only her answers were posted. (See here).

We reproduce the interview with both questions and answers so that our readers can give their own answers if they wish to:

Sergio: What are your thoughts about Mitt Romney as a GOP candidate?

JB: I think Romney should be supported as the GOP candidate. He should have been the candidate in the last presidential election rather than McCain. He’s an experienced businessman, and economic know-how is more desperately needed in government than ever. He doesn’t make heavy weather of his religion. Only thing that bothers me is that – like McCain – he won’t use his opportunities to tell the voters what the media hide about Obama, all the disreputable facts. I have no doubt that if they were repeatedly stressed Obama would be not just discredited but disgraced. If Romney cares more for his gentlemanly image than for getting into the White House, he will be helping Obama to victory.

Sergio: What do you think about Obama and his chances for re-election?

JB: It would be terrible for America and the world if Obama is given a second term. He has done enough harm in his first term. Four more years of his redistributionist, pro-world government, pro “green” energy, pro-Islam policies would be disastrous. I think he will be defeated, but perhaps less because of what the polls indicate (though at present they are encouraging) than because I so strongly wish it.

Sergio: What do you think will be the main issue in November election?

JB: I think the economy will be the main issue in the presidential election. It should be.

Sergio: How do you think Social Media will play a role in this campaign? And can you compare it to Obama’s campaign of 2008?

JB: It’s good that millions of people now get information and opinion from sources other than the mainstream media, which are blatantly left-slanted and Democrat-supporting. Obama was hugely helped by the MSM in 2008. They will support him again this year of course, but they have a lot more competition.

Sergio: What is your opinion of Super PACs and its influence in this race?

JB: If Obama is exposed and hammered by Super PAC ads, they could make up for Romney’s restraint. Let them bring on Jeremiah Wright ranting at his worst, and all the others – communists, terrorists and America-haters – who constitute Obama’s circle of friends and supporters.

Sergio: If you have some other thought you would like to share please feel free.

JB: The electorate made a terrible mistake raising this incompetent, ignorant, weak, vain man, stuffed with leftist ideology and lacking any understanding or experience of leadership, to the most powerful position in the world – and in a time of conflict, threat, and economic distress, when a strong and prosperous America is so desperately needed. The mistake must not be repeated.

(Video from PowerLine)

At our readers’ behest, we are proud to unveil the first official Atheist Conservative t-shirt! Pick it up on the Republican gear superstore Pax Republicana. Show you have the courage of your convictions. Wear this shirt.

If you think it, flaunt it!

The human species is wrong for this world. Those of us – we special few who bear the heavy knowledge of human inadequacy and who know what is good for the world – might have to come to the conclusion that humankind must be eliminated altogether. But before we take drastic final action to rid the planet of the human plague, we will try our utmost to improve the species: adapt it, trim it, re-shape it physically and mentally; change its habits, its desires, its appetites and ambitions, its needs, its abilities; transform it, using the very minimum of the material it’s made of as a base on which to build what we judge an earth-suitable ratiocinating species should be.

Three members of our panel, Matthew Liao of the University of New York, professor of Philosophy and the young hybrid ecumenical discipline Bioethics [Ecumenical: from Greek oikoumene = the inhabited earth], and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford,  have published a paper on how human beings may be experimentally re-engineered in a last-ditch effort to solve the paramount problem of CLIMATE CHANGE.  

Liao gave an interview to the Atlantic – with the consent of the rest of us, we hasten to confirm. The full report of it may be read here.

Greatly excited that we can at last hint at what we, the “Doom Panel” as we  jokingly call ourselves, are contemplating in our closed meetings, we select a few highlights to whet your curiosity.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating.

Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Here is why we think “human engineering could be the most ethical and effective solution to global climate change”.

Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people – for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on. And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.

There are “various ways humans could be engineered to be smaller”, Liao explains:

You might try to do it through a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which is already used in IVF settings in fertility clinics today. In this scenario you’d be looking to select which embryos to implant based on height.

Another way to affect height is to use a hormone treatment to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate earlier than normal …  In fact hormone treatments are already used for height reduction in overly tall children.

A final way you could do this is by way of gene imprinting, by influencing the competition between maternal and paternal genes, where there is a height disparity between the mother and father. You could have drugs that reduce or increase the expression of paternal or maternal genes in order to affect birth height. …

The paper “also [discusses] the pharmacological enhancement of empathy and altruism, because empathy and altruism tend to be highly correlated with positive attitudes toward the environment”.

(What is most wanted is empathy with and altruism towards the earth, don’t forget. Always remember it is the earth that matters, not the people on it.)

What we have in mind has more to do with weakness of will. For example, I might know that I ought to send a check to Oxfam, but because of a weakness of will I might never write that check. But if we increase my empathetic capacities with drugs, then maybe I might overcome my weakness of will and write that check.

In giving this example, Liao is putting himself hypothetically on your level. Writing checks for Oxfam is the sort of thing your will should be used for. Leave the greater vision to us.

Some of you are probably mumbling about liberty. We know that you continue to be concerned about that grand old chimera, and we have not ignored your attachment to the idea.

The authors of the paper “suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing”:

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions – what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

You could order Child by the pound, you see.

Don’t think of it as an entirely new definition of freedom – notice that you will still have choice: two medium sized children, OR three small sized children, OR one hulking great basketball player.

Embarras de richesses!  

And that’s not the only way the new techniques will be “liberty enhancing”:

Liao: I would return to the weakness of will consideration. If you crave steak, and that craving prevents you from making a decision you otherwise want to make, in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have that steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing. …

In any case, liberty is not a major issue. Speaking for the whole panel, Liao stresses –

We believe that mitigating climate change can help a great many people, [so] we see human engineering in this context as an ethical endeavor. 

He also touches on another point, a particularly sensitive one perhaps, that has to be made: the human species is guilty of harming the planet, and must be made to pay for what it has done:

We [humanity as a whole] caused anthropogenic climate change, and so perhaps we ought to bear some of the costs required to address it.

But having said that, we also want to make this attractive to people—we don’t want this to be a zero sum game where it’s just a cost that we have to bear. Many of the solutions we propose might actually be quite desirable to people, PARTICULARLY THE MEAT PATCH. 

Ah, yes. We knew that would entice you. Only have patience, and it will come to you just as soon as we can get it out in sufficient quantities for world-wide distribution. And that depends only on when the US government can raise the necessary taxes.

And maybe – just maybe – if you all give up eating meat, have very few very small children (if you must have any at all), become truly empathetic to the earth, and show willing to sacrifice yourselves for it’s welfare to the extent we tell you is needed, we may allow some of you to continue existing. For a while at least. No guarantees.

Where are you going, humankind?

The future now being shaped by new technologies seems to scare some of the very people who know most about them.

These extracts are from an article by N.M.Guariglia which we find somewhat incoherent, in that it dodges about from subject to subject, and needs more explanation than is given; but it predicts amazing technological developments and it is grandly eschatological:

The reaction to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was heartening. In just a few days, the American people were able to compel Congress to shut down SOPA, a terrible piece of legislation. My congressmen wrote me saying he was sorry, didn’t know what he was thinking. Of course, on the discouraging side, in order for the people to care or even know what was going on, it took huge Internet companies like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Google to publically protest the would-be law. SOPA and its Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), were at their core Internet censorship bills. Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — now run by former Senator Chris Dodd of Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac fame — embarrassed themselves and wasted millions in lobbying for the legislation. In response, we had the largest online protest in history. And it was successful. …

We too are glad of that.

The intent of SOPA/PIPA was to centralize cyber-security under the auspices of the federal government in order to crack down on “piracy” and copyright infringement. In doing so, the American people’s liberty would have been undermined, freedom of information would have been threatened, and existing and adequate copyright laws would have been circumvented and ignored. It would have been a litigator’s dream. Worse, the legitimate issue of cyber-security — more so: the nature of the future itself — would have been entirely overlooked, as it is currently misunderstood.

The nature of the future? Currently misunderstood? He goes on to talk about it in a way that is fascinating but obscure to technological laymen like us:

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting one of the heads of security for Raytheon — very interesting guy. “When ones and zeroes are involved, offense will find a way to win,” he said. Encryption defenses may work for a time; they may even get better. But that will require decentralization. Impenetrable information security will be sustained in a space off the grid. “When we go from mega-, giga-, and terabytes to peta-, exa-, and zetta-, we’ll be entering a brave new world of the infinitesimally small. And then there’s the quantum world.”

Yes, the quantum world. When one considers the future of this century, there are at least three existential threats.

The first is traditional in scope: the possibility of great-power warfare (with China, perhaps). This is least likely, I believe, due to old-established Cold War principles amongst rational actors: deterrence and mutually assured destruction.

More likely, at least in the nearer future, with Iran. The mullahs and many devout Muslims do not, it is said, fear destruction because Islam “loves death”.

The second threat: the probability of a terrorist organization smuggling and detonating a nuclear device in an American city (and the incomprehensible aftermath).

A suitcase nuclear bomb? Yes, such a thing has been spoken of for decades.

And then the third: “GNR.” Genetics (biotechnology), Nanotechnology (quantum science), and Robotics (Artificial Intelligence; A.I). GNR is riding the wave of information technology and its exponential growth. You take 30 steps linearly, you’re at 30. You take 30 steps exponentially, you’re at a billion. This is what’s come to be called the Singularity: the scientifically foreseeable point in the near-to-medium-future in which human beings have created technological intelligences so intelligent — billions of times more intelligent than today’s strongest computers — and so subatomic — as small to an apple as an apple is to Earth — that we will have created nothing less than nano-gods.

Nano-gods?  Because they’ll be so “intelligent”?

These gods will then enter our minds. Probably by way of eye drops.

Gods will enter our brains through our eyes?

Do not misunderstand. There is much promise in this — clearly. But there is also great peril. It is a deeply philosophical discussion. A man either comprehends this trajectory, and prepares for it, or puts it out of his mind. The implications are enormous. Will this transcendence expedite our evolution, or will it destroy our individuality, our liberty, our humanness?

With gods in our belfries we wouldn’t be human in quite the same way as we’ve known human to be, would we? And if all the gods entering all our brains through all our eyes are the same, our individuality would be considerably diluted. As for our liberty – that would depend on the values of our immanent gods.

And how should we prepare for “this trajectory”?

Could either the users or preventers turn tyrannical? Who will guard the guardians? Will attempts to control and regulate these technologies succeed in accomplishing precisely the dystopia we may fear the technologies themselves will create? Will we merge with these intelligences or will they be distinct entities? Does the future need us at all? …

Well, at the very least, the way he’s projecting it, the future will need our eyeballs. And our brains to start with, though after that they’d never be the same again.

But whether we keep such intelligence as we have now, or exchange it for the intelligence of nano-gods, it seems we are doomed because intelligence per se is a killer.

Life is rare; intelligent life, infinitely rarer. The silence of the universe conveys “the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves… intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.”

Even for gods? Perhaps we shouldn’t bother with the eye drops then.

There seems to be a sense amongst humanity that something big is right around the corner, something unequivocal.

“Unequivocal” meaning final?

Collectively, we’ve taken to apocalyptic and supernatural assumptions.

Was it not always thus with many human beings?

Nearly half of Americans think the Rapture will happen by mid-century.

Nothing new there.

Hollywood, ironically, has stoked along these ideas. It won’t be found in the Mayan Calendar, but rather in [Carl] Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. It won’t be coming out of the clouds, but rather into our brains. This is it. This is where we are and this is where we’re going.

Where exactly?

Disappointingly, he does not say. He jumps back to the Sopa and Pipa threats.

Information is power. It is …  an infinite resource on a finite planet. As free people, we should encourage the dissemination of information technologies under one condition: our security and liberty are not endangered. In the future, the government may assume undue authority and force information companies into subservience for authoritarian reasons, or these companies, in trying to avoid total subservience, and in trying to destroy their competition without competing, may preemptively give the government what it wants. This is not free-market capitalism, nor is it humanism. This is a form of fascism. …  SOPA and PIPA were just two more examples of this troubling trend.

This will be the most consequential century in the history of life on Earth. Technology is man’s greatest invention. It is a fine servant, but a most dangerous master. We should neither concede its control to a central authority nor prove to become dependent on it, for we will have sullied both human integrity and individual liberty. The next president, to his surprise, will likely have to address the potentialities of transhumanism, both good and bad, and so he will not have time for the little things our cheap culture will seek to put him through.

“Transhumanism”? Our transitioning into gods? What little things will he not have time for – reducing the national debt? Stopping Iran mounting a nuclear attack?

And how is our culture “cheap”? As compared with what other culture? Or does he mean we would be cheap if we demanded that he address the problem of the national debt rather than oversee our transition into gods?

While we think a little more human intelligence, of the ordering and explaining kind, could have been applied to the composition of the article, we are grateful to the author for the fun it has given us.

It may not inspire us to engage in a deeply philosophical discussion. We confess we do not comprehend “this trajectory”, have no idea how to prepare for it, and will soon put it out of mind. But we’ve enjoyed it while it lasted.

A case for debate

Milton Friedman – why drugs should be legalized

In the light of certain altercations that have taken place recently on our comment pages – less arguments than cursing and mud-slinging – we offer the balm of some words by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, one of the (few) great moral thinkers of our time. The quotation comes from his recent book of collected essays, Anything Goes. We more than recommend it, we urge our readers, commenters, visitors and critics to read it. You’re unlikely to agree with every word, but every word is worth reading.

The essay we are borrowing from is titled Freedom And Its Discontents.

There are few of us who have never felt the temptation to silence those fools and scoundrels who have views different from our own. They must, after all, be either stupid or malevolent (or, of course, both). If the means to silence them were at hand, we’d be sorely tempted to use them.

Which of us listens without impatience and even anger to the arguments of our opponents? …

Love of free speech in most men is only fear of being shut up. If they were a bit stronger than they are, they would just have monologues, the most pleasurable of all speech forms. …

The threat to free speech does not inhere, therefore, solely in governments, but in our hearts.

We welcome debate.  Please put your arguments, the more persuasively the better. Agree, disagree, criticize, give your reasons. The slinging of invective is not argument and never persuades anyone to anything. Mere abuse is not productive, and not interesting to read.

One more thing. Listening (and its equivalent, reading attentively) is an art worth practicing. Ideally, we need first to comprehend, then to test with internal argument, and only then to express ourselves freely.

As an answer and antidote to St. Paul who spoke on our front page yesterday, here’s Ayn Rand speaking against self-sacrifice, and against loving everybody:

Wouldn’t it be a grand thing now if the Western world were suddenly swept by an enthusiasm for capitalism? And for earned self-esteem – earned because every Self achieved what it wanted for itself and didn’t think of looking to government to give it anything?

And wouldn’t it be splendid if every Turk, Arab, Pakistani, Albanian, Bosnian, Iranian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Bangladeshi, Somalian, Iranian, Afghan …… dropped the superstition called Islam and discovered the infinite joys of reason?

Better still if all believers in the supernatural were to make that Best of All Possible Discoveries?

This was written by the great Persian poet and atheist, Omar Khayyam (translated by Edward FitzGerald):

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

We recall those lines in connection with a controversy that has been raging – not too strong a word ! – on our pages.

A number of commenters have complained, some very aggressively, that the caption to the picture in our posts Acts of religion, and Acts of religion (repeat) is inaccurate; that the burnt bodies are those of people killed by a truck accident in the Congo, not – as the caption says – Christians burnt by Muslims. They want the picture and caption removed.

We did not know that it was a picture of a truck accident at the time we first posted it nearly a year ago on November 6, 2010, nor when we repeated it on August 7, 2011. The information we received was that the dead were the victims of an attack by Muslims. We did not intend to mislead.

A mistake can be a useful thing. This one has brought thousands of people, as nothing else seems to have done, to think about how Christians are treated in the Muslim world.

And it is true that Muslims burnt Christians in Nigeria. See our post Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October 16, 2011. We urge all those who have complained to take note of that fact.

The picture of the many burnt bodies was posted, the caption was written, the mistake was pointed out, we responded. All that has happened and cannot be erased or cancelled.

Those who are furiously exercised about it should put their passion and energy to work against the cruelties perpetrated daily in the name of Islam.