FYI this has been going on— (cw for screenshots from a racist rightwing blog)

[image IDs: several screenshots from a blog post by Noah Carl, a rightwing “researcher” of racial pseudoscience, regarding “Nick Bostrom’s pre-emptive apology”

2nd screenshot of Carl’s statement shown above:

Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford who works on topics like existential risk and human enhancement. I haven’t read much of his work, but people I respect rate it very highly. Anatoly Karlin (whom I had on the podcast recently) considers him “the greatest living philosopher”.

A few days ago, Bostrom posted a document titled ‘Apology for An Old Email’ on his website. The document was subsequently shared on Twitter by his colleague Anders Sandberg, apparently at Bostrom’s request. It begins:

> I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people … I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.

The email in question, which was sent “in the mid 90s” as part of a discussion about “offensive communication styles”, is as follows:

> I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct. Take for example the following sentence:

> Blacks are more stupid than whites.

[I cut off the rest of Carl’s screenshot of Bostrom’s email, as it contained more unpleasant antiblack commentary]

3rd screenshot:

You don’t have to apologise for saying offensive things in a setting that people have selected into for the specific purposes of discussing offensive things. Stand-up comedians don’t need to apologise for telling jokes at their shows that it would inappropriate for them to tell in church. Moreover, Bostrom made the comments more than twenty years ago, and he “immediately apologised” at the time! End of story.

Yet as you well know, academia is crawling with offence archaeologists – low-lifes who spend their time combing through other people’s writing with the hope of finding something they can use to ruin their careers. They are not virtuous, and they do not care about the downtrodden. Their aim is simply to “take down” someone whose views they disapprove of – usually someone who contributes far more to society than they do.

In light of this, you can understand why Bostrom wanted to “get ahead” of the controversy by saying his piece pre-emptively. Unfortunately, what he said may have made things worse – not only for himself but for others who might find themselves in similar situations in the future.

4th:

Rather than making the points I made above (and perhaps apologising for needing to bring the admittedly provocative email to people’s attention), he issued an embarrassingly grovelling apology:

> I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago … The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time … and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

As for his “actual views”, Bostrom thinks “it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity”. And he wants you to know that he has given to charities “fighting exactly this problem”, including “the Black Health Alliance”.

The one saving grace of his apology – from the perspective of grown-up intellectual discourse – was that he didn’t denounce the hypothesis that genes contribute to group differences in cognitive ability. “It is not my area of expertise”, he wrote, “and I don’t have any particular interest in the question.” Note: the latter claim is likely to be false; how could you not be interested in it?

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https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1615072322058076166

[image ID:

tweet by xriskology:

The real victimhood culture is on the political right:

[a screenshot from the same Noah Carl blog post shown above]

thread QRTing their tweet:

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

My line is that your career can be destroyed by exposing the truth (that you’re still soft on vapid racial pseudoscience 25 years after endorsing it), then it deserves to be.

I find it deeply disgusting and infuriating the way that so many “rationalists” are framing everything in terms of “he said a bad word and immediately apologized 25 years ago” when that’s not even fucking remotely the issue and would amount to almost no blowback on its own.

I think almost no one gives a shit about Bostrom using the n-word 25 years ago, his apology for that isn’t the issue. The issue is that his recent apology is stunning in what it studiously doesn’t renounce and the way it leaves claims about genetic racial intelligence open.

I’m well aware that Bostrom makes the perfectly fine transhumanist move that “even if racial intelligence disparities were a thing, they’re irrelevant because everyone can individually tinker with themselves in whatever direction” but it’s not enough to merely bracket the claims.

Bostrom’s “apology” sounds perfectly fine to him and his circles because “I am not an expert on racial science” sounds like a renunciation of his claim “blacks are stupider than whites” to them. But it’s anything but! It doesn’t address at all what he still believes.

The fact is that the specific measures the rationalist community chooses to valorize, certain limited performances of rationality, do not exclude shitbags willing to make some contortions so those shitbags flock into their circles, expelling others, and shaping background norms.

I’d be willing to bet at sharp odds that >50% of the self-identified rationalist community believes “there are significant genetic racial disparities in intelligence between the races and unfairly we can’t talk about this.”

That is the problem Bostrom’s non-apology exemplifies

Now there are myriad good mechanisms and reasons to dismiss the object-level claim, but sure, ghosts could exist and it could be true, the biggest problem is the way this “likelihood” has been drastically inflated within the rationalist community by their social dynamics.

The rationalist community is running the proverbial bar where they let nazis in. And if you fail to draw the line with one nazi, you very rapidly just have a nazi bar. Because nazis are large in number, have few other options, and are willing to go through a lot of contortions.

Nazis will absolutely shit themselves silly writing endless papers throwing chaff everywhere like the “200 proofs the earth is not flat” and credulous “rationalist” bros whose whole self-image prioritizes feeling smarter than everyone and holders of esoteric truths love that.

And so we see vast asymmetries and distortions in the epistemic frames of most “rationalists” as a consequence of their sociological dynamics. They proactively read anti-woke folks on the right and then pretty much never delve deep into radical leftist arguments.

They’ll delve into the most esoteric neoreactionary screeds with giant bibliographies of catholic and postmodern writers to find the secret actual argument for an inane conservative position, but then assume every leftist argument is the first related tumblr post they found.

Scott Alexander Siskind BRAGGED that his readership was fair and balanced because he had some socialists and only like 22% identified openly as alt-right or neoreactionary. That is not balance. That is a nazi bar. And that social fabric warps one’s epistemology.

Bostrom honestly thought he was addressing the problem with his racist email in the 90s. And Sandberg (god damnit dude) read it and was like “this is a knockout response I want to be associated with” and hordes of fuckers saw the same.

reply to the thread by zorangecats:

One observation I’ve made is I’ve never seen the rationalist “steelman” for the feminist worldview. An interesting omission.

/end image ID]

https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1614428504581607424

[image ID:

tweet by Aella_Girl:

Lost some respect for EA due to the response to the Bostrom thing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? CEA has always leaned a bit too far towards PR at the expense of integrity. I guess I’d hoped to see some more bravery. Feel like the correct response would have had more nuance.

thread QRTing her tweet:

The lost “integrity” she’s bemoaning is that the Centre for Effective Altruism released a very thin anodyne statement condemning Bostrom’s “words” (presumably just his original email and no detail on whether the racial pseudoscience in particular sucks)

Imagine being so fucking twisted that you see condemning racist shit to any minor degree as a lack of integrity.

These people’s entire morality is about fiercely condemning and ostracizing anyone who ever dabbles in condemning or ostracizing people over shit like racism, rape, and transphobia.

It’s pure Coalition Of The Bad shit.

/end image ID]

@nostalgebraist

I consider myself a rationalist, but virtually none of what I read from you regarding “the rationalist community” bears any semblance to what I consider rationalism to be. All I see is a zealous and if I may be blunt seriously oblivious community devoted single-mindedly to machinelike logical efficiency in contemplating the expenditure of poorly-defined resources, with obvious warning signs of cultism and a distinct tinge of misanthropy.

Rationalism, to me, is a process, not a culture. Yet on the Internet the label apparently specifically refers to a community—a lifestyle, one whose practice outside the realm of writing on the Internet about itself and its central apprehensions is, I suspect, dubiously inconsistent, and whose connections to actual rationalism I find thin.

I feel like a homespun bard who visits a city one day and encounters a classical music appreciation society whose adherents are adamant that This is exactly what music is and it can be nothing else. And I say to myself, I don’t think that’s how music is defined. I don’t think external natural truths can be arbitrarily declared by self-concerned enthusiasts or devotees.

It almost rises to the level of a caricature. And I find it a bit sad. A healthy subculture will, in addition to pursuing its own enthusiasms, serve as an expedient for the general public’s knowledge of and exposure to the relevant subject matter, much as how the speedrunning community is a great resource for people who like watching speedruns or want to learn to do it themselves. In unhealthy subcultures, this ceases, and the public is better off getting to the subject matter by circumventing its self-proclaimed authorities. There’s a cliché among rock groups: “It used to be about the music.” In other words, in healthy subcultures the focus remains on the subject matter, whereas in unhealthy ones it becomes about reinforcing and perpetuating the community’s sacred norms and hierarchies—much as has happened with, say, the Star Wars fandom. The rationalist community, as I see it, has vastly narrowed its radius of awareness of rationalism as it pertains to the wider world.

Now, I’m very much an outsider to all this, and am going off of a small amount of total information. My question to you is: Am I missing something? Am I not being gracious enough in my reading here? Am I simply wrong outright? Are there mitigating factors: Are, perhaps, the insights you share from the rationalist community disproportionately representative of its problems rather than its whole?

T*H*E I*M*A*G*I*N*A*L R*A*V*E

This is not so much about what raves are or aren't, than about what they MIGHT be.

So don't bother looking here for a rehash of the obvious: that raves are the latest thing in underground dance parties/about having fun/feeling good/Peace/Energy/Unity ... all of which IS true, needless to say, but there remains so much more to be said, so much more to BE!

CUT through the clouds of trendism and commercialization that attach themselves to any major new mutation in culture. What wants to be invoked (what I want to invoke--what I hope YOU want to invoke) is that imaginal, incandescent core out of which all the smoke & noise is generated; what a rave truly can be, for some people in some situations--what it could BECOME; and then, peeling away at the sides, ... falling off one by one, duller, flatter, greyer ... and ever so much more TAME ... all those would-be and almost-raves, unavoidable byproducts of anything too real.

An old Sufi saying has it that: "where there's counterfeit, there's true gold."

So next time you go to something that calls itself a rave but isn't, don't just write it all off; the real ones do exist, and why SHOULD they be so easy to find? And, after all, it's up to YOU to make them real.

Allright, we already know that raves are THE space-age tribal youth ritual, the return of the dionysian energy that first emerged in 50's rock 'n' roll and erupted in full force in the late 60's with the intertwining of music and psychedelic drugs. But the rave-current is itself only the more visible crest of something broader and deeper.It's no coincidence that it hits the States at the same time as a major resurgence of psychedelic usage.

You can take the toying with neo'60's motifs--day-glo, flowers, smiley faces, flares--as mere fashion recycling by a generation born largely post-Summer of Love. Or you can see these themes as the instinctual recovery of a project left hanging, next breath after a two decade-long lull. Or you can go ever furthur--and why not!?--and see "the 60's" as only one recent intrusion within the Flatland of (take a deep breath now) Gravity-Bound-Domesticated-HumanoidIndustrial Civilization (got that?) of a future that is already happening, a future that beckons us towards itself and sends its echoes spiralling back through the dark and narrow tunnels of terrestrial time to make itself come true...

But only with your help, of course!

Picture a wave forming on the horizon, a big one (talking late 50's, early 60's): the psychick surfers coasting out there, beatniks, nonconformists, oddball academics bored with the small town life at the shore and all its dismal soap-opera games, looking for something to carry them away into a wilder, richer world; the first swells of energy carry with them a tide of psycho-active algaes...

HOFFMAN/HUXLEY/BURROUGHS/GINSBURG/WATTS/LEARY/ALPERT/KE SEY & CO., issue their first reports and manifestoes; munching on the junk food of the gods, our proto-mutants are initiated into the mysteries of the Vortex; they come back to the cardboard facades of Main Street with their evocations of kaleidoscopic infinity, eyes lit with the light of alien suns. Their news answers a gnawing hunger among so many trapped within the greypastelboxroutines of the industrial-consumer-democratic hive; More, they activate dormant circuits of the hive's nervous system, and spawn a burst of deviance: forms of rebellion less interested in disputing what varieties of greypastelboxroutines are preferable and what's right and wrong for everybody, than in setting up scouting parties for heading out to sea...

Underline the word parties.

Dosed to the gills, beatniks in existential black mutate into rainbow-hued hippiedom. Up with the Flower Children, hedonistic and 'escapist'--so called because they withdrew from the arena of domesticated primate aggro-sports known as 'politics' in favor of actually learning about the infinite kingdoms within their own body and nervous system. Drop into the Haight, turn off powertrips, tune out conformism and competition.

Meltdown ensues. All the accelerated bondings through Be-Ins, LoveIns, communes. Awash in the incense of oriental exoticism and occultist bric-a-brac, a renaissance of the spirit decks itself out in raiments of psychic kitsch. And how much can we fault them, really, if their Love&Peace trip undercut itself by becoming a denial of the Darkness; after all, they are there for us to learn from.

But just as everyone is tumbling about in the cosmic froth, anticipating revolution or millenium tomorrow afternoon at the latest, the Wave suddenly evaporates beneath them. No, the Earth Egg didn't quite hatch yet, ...just some initial stirrings. And so the children of the Vortex find themselves hurtling through the air like Wil E. Coyote, wrapped up in all their newfound lifestyles, but the vital juice is gone, and it all becomes so tame and lame so quickly, and in any case, a lot of people couldn't handle the intensity so it comes time to settle back into a safe routine, in some cases lay the ground for those who come after; & all around are the Mr. Jones' of many guises, panicked at the imminent collapse of Normalville; some however take their chance to cash in on what they can of it, a lot of others are wholly freaked, and thus begins a Counter-Reformation. One the one hand, a retreat from direct encounter with the Abyss crystallizes into the New Age, and on the other, it's back to the Bible, dumb drugs, white-bread, and Family Values. And all the hipsters left posing without a clue, all the burnouts/fuckups/addicts & victims of some invisible multidimensional boogeying elephant; over there in the ivy towers, the blind men scribble their learned tomes, dissecting some stray paisley footprints; but something far stranger has happened, and its awfully hard to make out just what till the next, bigger cousin of that wave starts to surface offshore.

Meanwhile even many devotees of the Vortex ascribe it to the decline in quality of their psychoactive goodies, mistaking the portal for the vista beyond (but how do you enter the vista without the portal? hmmm...BE THY VISION! a distant curl of the Vortex whispers back).

Credit it all to upsurges of the Gaian mind, long-schemed scams of the giggling DNA-consciousness, or the flotsam & jetsam cast down by That Transcendental Novelty Item at the End of Time; choose your metapors--the more the merrier; but there's a mystery-in-process that all the nice rationalistic analyses will never get at: here I'll echo a point once made by Mr. Leary: the most subtle form of conservatism is that which views the present only through the prism of the past!

And yes, (to those for whom it's not patently obvious), IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN.

***

At the heart of the rave is a modern, technologically clad form of non-verbal, ecstatic communion. The ethos of openness, sharing, intimacy, touch and empathy--not to mention the pure intensities of trance itself--facilitated by the use of LSD & MDMA (hey, the fact that you have to take these things to loosen up is a sign of just how far down & lost we all are!!), in tandem with the all-night long pulsation of bodies to the same sound source, can and does create a context where layers of armoring and conditioning are shed, where those willing can find the joyful and mysterious realm of their bodies free of oh-so many enculturated ego-trips and bullshit, ... while also opening the "post-terrestrial" circuits of their psyches. (Whew! Pause, return to beginning of paragraph, read again slowly.)

In other words, a safe space where we can be as weird as we want to be.

A collective molting ritual for the new species.

***

Or take it from another angle: compare the rave-thing to a chemical reaction: a half-dozen ingredients (make your own list), inert & ordinary in the normal course of things; but combine them in right proportions, at the right time and place, apply the CATALYST (& what what THAT be?) and BOOM!, you've set off an explosion, a chain reaction producing ENERGY, LOTS OF IT, and in that process a dynamic that continues to transform many of the starting ingredients into new & unknown qualities. No question, of course, that bystanders can look in from the skeptically, and reduce it all back to something familiar: escapism, consumerism, fashion parade, whatever. But we'll leave them to their nervous calculations...

***

OK, so you want a schoolbook definition of TECHNO-SHAMANISM, that catchphrase everybody likes to invoke but no one seems to be able to actually explain? Prepare to jump levels: As the individual shaman/ess evicts demons and excises magical darts from the sick person through a mixture of magickal sound & motion, so on the level of the diseased and crisisridden 'global village' raves aim to heal the collective body by shaking it loose of its neurotic fixations and death-fetishes.

EXORCISM THROUGH DANCE.

Unhooking the talons and shadowy webs of control. A physical unlearning of a few thousand years worth of BAD HABITS.

Learning to be at once a little more human and a little more alien.

Healer, leader, visionary, outcast: the shaman/ess' role is multifaceted, both at the center but also relegated to the margins of the community; the use of sound and/or psychoactive compounds are central to shamanism. The shaman/ess chants, hums, drums and dances as a way of programming hir voyage into the "spirit realms" (aka hyperspace), as well as of healing the mind and body of others, ... all on a more face-to-face, way lo-tech scale, of course.

So there, chew on that for a while.

***

It's a pretty sad but predictable fact that self-professed "radicals" have been oblivious to this phenomenon, just because it seems to emanate out of NITEKLUBLAND; too bad--when will they figure out that all social alienation is ultimately grounded in an alienation from the body--that realm of nature closest to us but oh-so far away. Their heroine Emma Goldman once proclaimed to the grim socialist militants of her day: "If I can't dance in your revolution I want no part of it."

And what if dance could be a modality of social change?

A heretical thought, no doubt. "Free your ass and your mind will follow," so said George Clinton. But hey, he was just another crass capitalistic rock star, right?

Not to rescusitate, however, that burdensome word, Revolution. Scratch the R, hilite the E. Quote an obscure graffito from a wall in Paris, May 1968: "This is not a Revolution but a Mutation." And say rather, TAZ. Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Like the TAZ, the rave is wild, nomadic, outside the maps of Power. At its best, the rave opens onto a realm of free-form behavior and perception, one in which there is no hierarchy, no leaders or followers, at most the dj and the light-show artists. (Hopefully benign--be careful who you leave your sensorium with!)

...Not unlike the Situationist International's notion of the "situation" (sorry, I just had to drag them in here!), a space of liberated interactions... but where the participants are the art and the show, the synergy between them all the event (or event horizon?). If the insurrection was supposed to realize itself in a festival, we might ask, why shouldn't the festival turn into an insurrection--an insurrection of Love?

Anyone who has been part of a REAL rave, if only once, briefly, knows that its insane, insanely beautiful ferocity is something that exceeds all the contrived parlour-games that pass for alternatives, social or political. The mere fact of this ferocious hedonism is, without words or slogans, A REFUTATION OF DOMESTICATED EXISTENCE.

So FUCK IT if most of this California rave-scene is still ensnared in niteklubbism. Invade the pseudo-raves, instigate roving micro-raves. Doesn't take more than a ghetto blaster and a handful of courageous revellers to start a rave on any streetcorner or park, see how long it takes to catch..., or to be shut down...

THIS is OUR form of protest--our style of dance is angry and combative as well as loving and celebratory; to free our bodies first from the rotting carcass of history,,,

...and from there, ... who knows where we'll go?

***

Prediction: a few years down the road, the rave-scene will be looked back on as the primary networking mechanism for the tribes of starfarers.

But if ravers can't clean up after themselves, how are they going to clean up the planet?

***

DANCE

If you had to have JUST ONE metaphor for it all to live by and through, wouldn't that just be it. The spiral dance of life...so it sounds cliched, but cliched only in words, in words...

DANCE

but (& rave-friends can detour here for a sec, these are words for those who've never raved and long stopped going out to

DANCE

DANCE, --this kind of dance--is FREEING MOTION. Not just moving to the beat but letting the beat help you throw off all the constricted robotic movements that have been imprinted into your heart, your eyes, your ears, your arms, your ass, your dreams, by all the tricks, traumas & seductions of society; and find the REAL YOU; dancing with the world, but dancing off the consensus-trance, that narrow greyout rightangle robotic updown freezeframe pseudoreality.

Raves signal the return to Western culture of sacred dance. A dance that balances discipline with excess, ecstasy with focus. Look at the three great Monotheisms that have pretty much defined our psychosomatic matrix: Judaism, Christianity, Islam: none of them possess any tradition of Sacred movement; they have all been scared shitless of the Body, and have instituted its repression in a thousand and one subtle ways. How appropriate that the advent of a spiritualized form of movement to the center of Civilization should present itself in a totally decadent, seemingly profane form. And people wonder why raves are actively suppressed back in the UK? Raves represent the primal life-force suppressed so long ago it remains only a dim but real memory.

And let's get this out of the way too: dancing on a decent dose of a psychedelic is something else again: communing with the animal spirits encoded into the depths of your skin, letting them out of their millenial cages. Learning how you can be each of them when you need to be; and its also about learning how to fly, how to turn yourself inside out into a spinning glowing disc, though that's a little harder ... and then, once we've got that under our belts, we can do it TOGETHER.

It's been said before, but not clearly enough: UFOS R US.

***

So what if all this prepacked ravitis costs too much. Don't leave it to them and whine about how commercialized it all is: THROW YOUR OWN! AND MUTATE IT WHILE YOU'RE AT IT!

So some of the dinosaurs may not be happy seeing their way of life superseded and want to stamp out those noisy critters scampering between their feet; more intelligence and greater manoueverability will be our response. Haven't we gotten sick enough of the EnemyProduction Line?

Social transmutation can be fun too, right? There's fun, safe vapid alcoholic-nicoteine hedonism, letting off steam so you can return to Monday; and then there's fun that aims high, fun allied with Will. The path of disciplined excess (??).

But watch this--all those scouting parties of the future will be known by their capacity to throw great parties--and pioneer partying as a way of throwing off the legacy of the miserable Dominator culture we've all had to grow up in.

***

RAVERS, look a little ways forward: have you wondered yet what happens once you're burnt out after a year or two of intensive raving, once you've lost half your hearing, the beats become stale, and the Energy has leaked away. Where, what then?

Define the rave for me.

What does the verb TO RAVE really mean to you?

But first let's list all the stuff that seems to go with it: Acid/techno/deep house music; dancing from dusk to dawn; hi-tech light shows; lollipops, floppyhats, dayglo pendants, smart drinks; $15-20 tickets; zillion gigagawatts sound-systems; X,a cid, nitrous and 2CB; goofy outfits, sexy bodies; so many inane and beatific smiles...

SHALL we ask together: just what is the essence of a rave?

Suppose, just for a second that we subtract one by one each of the above accessories. Stretch your imagination to the limit, and take away even, yes, even THE MUSIC; till all we have left are the people, all those people who have found each other in this beat, in these hidden gatherings, but without the beat, just heartbeat, pulserate, breath, ... AND THE EXCHANGE OF LOVE-ENERGIES (isn't that what sex is, ultimately?) and each other's presence ... Radiant and revelling in our unearthly beauty ... so here we are: much as we adore it, do we really need the dance music to affirm our commonality, the patent fact that we are siblings of the the same spiritual family who through the raves have managed to find one another and in that finding remember who each of us truly is, orphan child of eternity. Do we need to confuse the rave with the quality of our common presence, our moving-loving together; can't we take the essence of the rave, freed of all the externals we associate with it, transfer and apply that energy elsehwere, to just about anything...?

It comes down to a challenge, a challenge posed in that leap from normal space to hyperspace that kicks in when the 'rave' really starts to rave: those altered moments when each of us in being truest to our uniqueness enters into a harmonious whole; elusive as this may be, it calls out, and asks to be realized in every moment of our lives; it asks for creation, CREATION OF LIFE, for the nurturing of real communities that last deeper & longer than a few hours on the dancefloor.

That creative energy, apply it not just to your style of dress but to your style of BEING. Free eros & intimacy from the shackles socially-inherited sexualities (gay vs, straight, male vs. female), from monogamy and the neurotic fixation on genital sexuality:

YES, CELEBRATE your arrival here at last after a long trek, but don't forget, this is only the point of departure. These parties are our loading docks and shipyards. (And there is Work to be done: enough healing & cleaning for us all.) Here is where we will build not just a House, but a ship of dreams, a starship. Woven out of LOVE. CHAOS. LAUGHTER.IMAGINATION. WILL.

And embark; post-nuclear families setting sail out along the unwinding multi-dimensional origami strands of alternity...

Our motto:

UTOPIA OR BUST.

This is shocking where we says that we are in 21st century but people are so much of superstitious. The purpose behind this video is to make social awareness against superstitions in India. Actually since more than 10 years I am fighting against superstition through various NGOs and we have caught hundreds of Baba's, Tantrik, Etc. Its very sad to say that still in 2017 superstition is exists in various forms not only in rural areas but in urban areas too. At the beginning of the 21st century and the new millennium, everyone is aware of the need to be able to think with an open mind and to lead a rational life. India has a long legacy of rationalist social reformers who always took an objective and informed stand against superstition. The constitution of India has stipulated adoption of scientific outlook as one of the responsibilities of every Indian and has included it as a value to be inculcated through education. Scientific Outlook - In simple words Scientific Outlook means believing anything to the extent of the evidence available for it. Observation, reason, inference, verification and experiment are constituents of Scientific Outlook. Scientific Outlook is not a mere mathematical process. Its core contains values. Those values are modesty, independence, exactitude and fearlessness. We have resolved to further this rational legacy through purposeful activities and programs. The eradication of blind faith can be achieved by these four main Aims and Objectives:- 1. To oppose and agitate against harmful superstitions and rituals which misguide and exploit. 2. To inculcate and propagate scientific outlook, skepticism, humanism and critical thinking. 3. To encourage constructive and critical analysis of religion, traditions and customs. 4. To associate and work with progressive social reform organizations. While fighting against superstitions prevailing in the society, our activists come across and confront gurus of mystical cults, shamans, practitioners of ancient systems of medicine and faith healers. All of them claim that they possess some special power through which they can prescribe miraculous cure for the physical or mental pains. To convince about their superiority and miraculous power various types of unscrupulous methods are used to mystify the illiterates. Particularly the communities who stay in remotest village sans basic amenities are pray to these Babas who exploit them unashamedly. The people who have to do hard labour are in a closed shell who neither can think of cause and effect relations nor reason and fight against high handedness of self proclaimed Babas. There are two ways of fighting against superstitions 1st is to attack on any Baba who exploits the people and help the police to get him caught and 2nd way is to make the people aware about the superstitions. There are some Baba's who performs some magical tricks and claims that they have some divine power so this YouTube platform I am using to reveal the science behind those magical tricks of the Babas. Apart from this I am targeting to explode right facts towards the audience not the rumors and superstitions. I know what I am doing is against the flow and risky and only with the help of you people I will be able to manage its. You people are my strengths. Disclaimer- Some contents are used for educational purpose under fair use. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Thanks Jaggu RDX Blog - http://ift.tt/2A3gvmf Facebook Page - http://ift.tt/2xHOQpv Twitter Page - https://twitter.com/JagguRdx

The most influential witch in history

There aren’t many words as loaded as ‘witch’ in the English language. Centuries of mythology, persecution, and perhaps the greatest patriarchal massacre of women, elderly people, and disabled people (and generally speaking, anyone who dared question or contradict holy logic) have resulted in a cultural trope that is far too often seen in contemporary imagery. Doreen Valiente (née Edith Dominy) changed all that, sparking the conversation about the Pagan traditions of witchcraft at a time when it had only just been made legal in 1951.

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (4 January 1922–1 September 1999) remains, simply, the most influential woman in the world of modern Witchcraft. Her fame and achievements are only surpassed by her popularity and respect among the world’s Pagan community.

Doreen Edith Dominy was born in Mitcham, South London on January 4th, 1922 to parents Harry and Edith.

Harry was a draughtsman described by Doreen in later life as a “failed architect” the family moved to the South of England somewhat during her childhood living at various times in Surrey, Exeter, and Southampton which is how she was to acquire her characteristic soft west country accent. She had her first magical experiences at the age of 7 and she recalls playing at riding a broomstick up and down the street, behavior that led to her parents fears that she would be attracted to the occult in later life, how little they could have known.

On a balmy summer evening in the 1920s, she crept into her south London garden at twilight and was consumed by the feeling that her surroundings were fabricated to hide something else: something “very potent.”

Valiente began practicing magic as a teenager, walking out of her local convent school at the age of 15. Her passions remained unwavering through WWII, during which she worked as a translator at Bletchley Park, up until she was initiated into a coven during the summer solstice.

When she was thirty, Doreen was introduced to Gerald Gardner. By this time, she had been married twice – her first husband died at sea, her second was Casimiro Valiente – and in 1953, she was initiated into the New Forest coven of witches. Over the next several years, Doreen worked with Gardner in expanding and developing his Book of Shadows, which he claimed was based on ancient documents passed down through the ages. Unfortunately, much of what Gardner had at the time was fragmented and disorganized.

With a gift for poetry and an indomitable objectivity and research-led mind, Valiente quickly rose to become High Priestess of the coven and rewrote much of Gardner’s seminal Book of Shadows and Charge of the Goddess, two texts that continue to act as the lynchpins of Wiccan practice due to her resilience.

Although Valiente’s career may seem strange to our modern condition of cynicism and Google-powered rationality, it’s important to consider the context in which she emerged. Besides the broomsticks and cauldrons, she advocated the protection of nature and animals, as well as the advancement of women’s rights, long before such movements had truly gotten off the ground. As Ralph Harvey, a Wiccan High Priest, remarked in her eulogy, “Wiccans were the original green party.”

Rarely seen without her hypnotic spectacles and dramatic necklaces, Valiente was not one to be missed. Her collection of folk and Wicca paraphernalia, from broomsticks to five-point stars, as well as cauldrons and capes and candles, has come to inform the imagery surrounding witchcraft across various cultural outlets. Considering that in the 1950s, Wicca was an underground cult which subsequently became the world’s fastest growing religion in a matter of decades, Valiente is one of the 20th century’s most significant figures of influence. She lent a traditional folkloric, Pagan aesthetic to her movement and embraced it during her Wiccan festivals and rituals. In her last address to over a thousand people at the National Conference of the Pagan Federation in 1997, Valiente noted: “We have literally spread worldwide. We are a creative and fertile movement. We have inspired art, literature, television, music and historical research. We have lived down the calumny and abuse. We have survived treachery. So it seems to me that the ‘Powers That Be’ must have a purpose for us in the Aquarian Age that is coming into being.”

As a self-proclaimed witch, she naturally found herself being attacked from two sides: by Christians who believed that witchcraft was Devil worship, and by rationalists who refused to acknowledge it. Her answer to them was that the theology of witchcraft was purely Pagan and therefore refused to acknowledge the Devil, a Christian invention and that the Wiccan rituals undoubtedly released a power from within.

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Near the end of her life, Doreen was concerned about the many misconceptions about modern witchcraft, as well as the wide distortions of original teachings. She became a patron of the Centre for Pagan Studies, described as “offering a facility for learned research and a noncommercial environment.” She passed away in 1999.

Much of Valiente’s work is still in print and can be found both new and in used versions. Many of these titles have been updated since their original publication, and even after Valiente’s death, but are still worth seeking out.

from The most influential witch in history

The rationalist’s guide to left-wing politics (LONG POST IS LONG)

So firstly, if you were linked here and want some propaganda literature, the Communist Manifesto and Debt: the First 5000 Years make very good sequels to Yvain's "Meditations on Moloch".

Going from there...

The very short summary is: capitalism is the private, profit-seeking ownership of the means of production, and their operation via wage-labor. Socialists are against this! The reason for italicizing that definition is because it's important: almost all economic systems have included elements of communal cooperation, loose social cooperation (as between ordinary friends rather than tribe-mates or family members), trade and exchange, and hierarchical domination (this is parroting Graeber). Capitalism, as such, is a historically recent (1800s, more-or-less) and particularly pernicious arrangement of these elements. In fact, even capitalism has taken varied forms in different places and times, some more vicious and others even somewhat benign. Moreover, all of them were instituted by the deliberate imposition, through violence (usually state violence), of new ways of living and new ownership arrangements on existing populations.

The important thing is, we are not talking about a "naturally-occurring" economy. There is no such thing. All social systems are invented by people, imposed by people, and made to compete for efficiency by people. In fact, the best argument usually made for capitalism is not that capitalism is the most natural economy (or worse, the only possible economy), but that earlier, more natural occurring economies are really fucking poor.

All capitalism's variations, by definition, are characterized by private, profit-seeking ownership of the means of production, and the operation of those means (such as machines and land and such) by wage-labor. The standard anticapitalist criticism is that capitalism contains "internal contradictions", or in other words, it can neither keep its own promises nor preserve itself from economic crisis. This is part of the core Marxian thesis from Das Kapital: capitalism just is defecting in the Prisoner's Dilemma, eating your own seed corn, sacrificing a few more values to Moloch, populating past carrying capacity.

In fact, that's a fairly good way to describe what a crisis of capitalism (depression or secular stagnation) actually is: it is just what happens when the owning class attempts to harvest more wealth from wage-labor than is actually available. Marx's Labor Theory of Value really ought to be called a Labor Theory of Profit. We all know there's always a gap between the cost of raw materials plus the cost of labor, and the final price of goods. That gap is, of course, profits, supposedly allocated to capitalists for their role in risk-management and planning.

However, the goods are almost entirely paid for by other companies' workers: capitalists can't consume everything at a profit themselves. Thus, ultimately, one capitalist's profits must come out of other capitalist's labor-costs. Since each capitalist wants to maximize their profits by minimizing wages, maximizing prices, and maximizing consumer appeal, profit becomes a non-renewable resource.

Worse, as the easy profits get eaten up with low risk by capitalists, and thus accumulate as capital to be reinvested, capitalists are forced to seek increasingly risky investments: investments where the prospect of profit is imprecise (difficult to plan for) or just plain small. Low-risk = low-profit is not a conventional investing principle for nothing: it's a fundamental result of needing to bet (take risks) on ways to obtain a non-renewable resource (profit).

Worse, as even very risky profits from the actual sale of goods become scarce, investors need to turn to even simpler ways of making money: just take money from people. Basically, start loan-sharking, squatting on natural resources, consolidating market shares, or even outright stealing from people. This is called rentiering, and was the major subject of Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

If profit is a non-renewable resource, what stops capitalists from over-consuming it and leaving no new profits available to be made? Well, history tells us: nothing at all. They proceed to do exactly that, again and again and again. This is what an economic depression is: an over-harvesting of the non-renewable resource that is profit, resulting in a mass failure of investors' plans and massive budget gaps for everyday stuff that needs to keep operating.

Now, there is one bright spot, as any conventional economist will point out. "Counter-forces" (to use Marxist terminology) do exist to this tendency towards economic disaster: productivity increases, population increases, and wealth redistribution. Productivity increases allow more or better goods to be made with the same amortized cost for raw materials and labor, and then sold for the same prices. Productivity growth is thus the one true and healthy source of economic growth. Population increases add to the supply of labor -- but they only add to consumer demand when productivity growth or redistribution is high enough. Wealth redistribution recycles profits: it takes them from the rich and gives them to the working classes, who proceed to go ahead and spend them, turning them back into profits.

Sufficient wealth redistribution to sustain capitalism has been done in the real world. It was called various things: left-liberalism, Keynesianism, or (most of the time) social democracy. It's actually a very good system for its available level of technology, but also contains its own internal contradiction. Generous redistribution to consumers, workers, and retirees requires consistently high productivity growth and consistently low rentiering. Without both those factors (the latter of which requires vigorous state action to break up monopolies and oligopolies), all that redistribution cuts into investors' rate of profit as taxes, and investors "go on strike". This was what happened in the 1970s stagflation: the oil cartel spiked rentiering rates up, the productivity growth from rolling out industrial implementations of WW2-era inventions tapered off, and working-class militancy (an attempt to bargain a larger share of revenue for wages) was high. Thus, investors took their money to other countries and sponsored "neoliberal" political forces who would do what needed doing: Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher.

(We can now conjecture: what is a secular stagnation today? When productivity growth is low, population growth is low, risks are accurately assessed, and the primary investment incomes come from rentiering.)

In overall summary, capitalism promises cheap consumer goods, but then creates glut/depression/debt-crisis conditions in which the overwhelming majority of the population can't afford those consumer goods. So you end up with "poverty in the midst of plenty". This is the natural attractor state of the system!

So what about socialist movements, the responses by the working class to capitalism? Well, at first, different terms were used for the same things, and then divisions developed. Broadly, socialist and social-democratic movements aim to reduce or eliminate those internal contradictions by changing to a substantially different economic system, one we aim to make more sustainable, rational, and humane than capitalism.

Historically, "social democracy" overlapped with both socialism, communism, and labor liberalism (the kind of "liberalism" you're familiar with from FDR-LBJ). Parties called themselves "social democratic" just to indicate they were more-or-less left-wing and stood for labor concerns. So for instance, the Leninists/Bolsheviks originally formed as a faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The place where social democracy has been most fully implemented is in the famous "Nordic model", though nowadays it's subject to the same headwinds as everyone else.

Historically, "socialism" referred to almost any form of society or economy premised on common ownership of stuff. Back in the day, everything from 19th-century "utopian" socialism (ie: 19th-century communes) to Marxism (which Marx himself called "scientific socialism") to anarchism to syndicalism was called "socialism". This usage persisted into through the present day: the nonviolent Socialist Party of Eugene Debs were democratic socialists (today's Democratic Socialists of America descend directly from them), the Israeli kibbutz system was socialist, today's Mondragon cooperatives were socialist, nationalization of major firms in otherwise capitalist countries was considered socialist, etc. In general, self-proclaimed socialists consider the word to mean "radical democracy" or "economic democracy": the extension of democratic participation into not only governmental institutions, but all institutional components of daily life, especially the workplace.

"Communism" meant one thing when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, and then came to mean another thing in the 20th century. When Marx wrote about "communism" in 1848, it referred to destroying the major empires and early nation-states that existed at the time, in favor of networks of worker-controlled municipalities. In fact, Marx's core idea was precisely that After the Revolution (capitals because the phrase is a traditional refrain!), the socialist state would wither away and control over life would be decentralized to precisely those worker-controlled localities. This would be "full communism": a stateless, classless, money-less society in which labor is planned out to create appropriate levels of abundance and leisure for everyone.

However, once the Russian Bolsheviks got their movement really underway, they adopted the name "Communist" for themselves, founding the Russian Communist Party. For the rest of the 20th century, "communism" referred specifically to the Bolshevik movement, and all other left-wing groups had to take stances on whether they were communist (Soviet-controlled), pro-communist (pro-Soviet but not themselves Soviet-controlled), anti-communist (actually opposed to the Soviet Union), or non-communist (neither particularly for nor against the Soviet Union). The derisive name for these Communists on the Left ended up being "tankies", after the Soviet Union deployed tanks to crush a left-wing uprising in Communist Hungary.

The other major question created by the Russian Revolution was: to what degree could Soviet Russia be considered "actually existing socialism", a form of socialism that had really been achieved and from whose example we can learn? To the Russians themselves, the phrase "actually existing socialism" became a bitter joke: their lives were miserable, and the phrase was constantly used as an excuse for why the widespread prosperity and personal freedom of "full communism" (see above) never actually arrived.

Anarchism was a major distinct current in socialism, often acting in contradistinction to revolutionary socialists. They share the goal of a stateless, classless society, but differ on how to get there: anarchists believe that "workers' states" cannot be trusted to "wither away". They therefore believe in trying to dismantle the state apparatus as the first step towards democratic, participatory human freedom.

Further, as the 20th century went on, the distinction between democratic socialists, social democrats, and revolutionary socialists (with communists as a strict subset of the latter) grew harder. Social democrats were those who worked to get elected to government in liberal-democratic countries so as to reform or tame capitalism to make people's lives better. Democratic socialists were those who also worked to get peacefully elected in liberal-democratic countries, so as to replace capitalism with socialism via legislation rather than violence. Revolutionary socialists were those who believed formal politics under a capitalist system was useless, because the government would always be corrupted by money, and thus that they needed to overthrow the capitalist state by force.

That brings us to neoliberalism, a particular form of capitalism which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and really came into full swing in the 1980s. We've been living under neoliberal capitalism since then, and still are. A simple way to think of neoliberalism is as a chiefly political program: to dismantle social democracy and render it impossible, leaving no alternative to a (relatively) pure, unreformed form of capitalism.

That basically gets us up to today, and everything else would involve going into minutia. Now that I've got the terminology, I can at least say, "This is what I ACTUALLY BELIEVE", South Park-style.

I believe the best actually-existing societies/economies have been, variously, social-democratic and democratic socialist. I believe that these societies worked particularly well because they maintained the negative freedoms of liberalism, the positive freedoms of socialism, the capacity for experimentation inherent in autonomous firms, and the diverse mingling of interests and values characteristic of democracy. I believe the sociological research I've seen showing that peaceful changes of government, be they formally labeled elections or revolutions, lead to stabler societies in the long run, and in complex modern societies, are actually more likely to work. Finally, I believe with perfect faith (let me know if you get that joke) in the coming of Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism ;-), as described by the prophets Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson.

I profoundly hate neoliberalism, and fear that its effect is precisely, "[to] make peaceful revolution impossible ... [and] violent revolution inevitable." Both social democracy and democratic socialism have existed in the real world and worked well, but neoliberalism reconfigures things precisely so as to make those actually-existing good systems impossible figments of the past. I worry that we are now living through a crisis in which neoliberalism has, to a great degree, run itself into the ground and started "eating its seed-corn", trying to profit by simply discarding human beings instead of finding profitable work to do. I also worry that we may well be living through a "revolutionary moment" in which the broad population will grow so discontented that violence can break out and completely overthrow the existing society, with... high-variance results. We seem to be past the time when one could safely contemplate politics from afar. I therefore sometimes, but not always, support revolutionary socialists and anarchists.