Every culture has had a teleological vision that gives purpose and meaning to our lives, but is the transhumanist vision the one we want?
21 September 2018
Crooked Media Wilderness: The Filter
How can Democrats break through in today’s media environment? A strategy for rethinking the way we communicate with the public.
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VICE: The Horrific Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is About to Get a Lot Worse
So what's different about this, than any of those I just mentioned, is that there was really no effort in any of those evolutions to do anything but prosecute predator priests. For example, law enforcement had Mahony in their sights—they could have indicted him. And Steve Cooley, who was the district attorney in Los Angeles County at the time, didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it because the Church—the hierarchy of the Church—still had a significant amount of influence. What's happened, as time has gone on, is the individuals who hold elected office have had less and less exposure to a Church that's had the sort of political power it did 30 years ago. The Church, now, simply has less political influence now, and can't stop it.
Frankly, if you're the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and you begin getting these calls, and you see the scope of this, why wouldn't you investigate it? It's criminality, really, on a scale that's unheard of. In California, the Church paid $1 billion to settle cases in the mid 2000s. A diocese went bankrupt. And it's not just the number of perpetrators. The real criminal conspiracy, and the real criminality, is the effort to cover it up, and conceal it as a matter of policy and practice. I think a lot of people still want to believe that something like what happened in Pennsylvania is an anomaly. It's not. It's the norm. Every diocese is the same—and the reason for that is the Church is a hierarchal organization, managed from the top-down. [...]
I think the next step—and I do think it's going to happen—is a federal investigation. Catholic institutions are not only religious, but they're massive receivers of federal, state, and local financial aid through charity and other organizations. And, more than anything else, they're a tax-exempt organization. If Scientology, which is tiny sect, [eventually loses] its tax-empt status because of criminality, then isn't a fair discussion to have that for the Catholic Church [too]? Can you imagine, say, if you found out that 300 United Airlines flight attendants were molesting children, what would happen to United Airlines? And we don't have 300—[we have even more] priests who have been removed for this behavior since the early 2000s. The only reason they haven't been held to the same standard that everyone else has been is the religious works in front of them. [...]
Me too. So the difference between Catholicism and basically any other Protestant sect is that the only way to salvation in the Church is through the sacramental life. And the only way to participate fully in the sacramental life is to go through all seven sacraments, one of them being to become a priest. And the victims that priests typically target are almost always the most devout kids who truly in their heart believe.
TED-Ed: Why incompetent people think they're amazing - David Dunning (Nov 9, 2017)
How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Guardian: Argentinians formally leave Catholic church over stance on abortion
In the month since the country's senate voted to maintain a ban on almost all abortions, more than 3,700 people have submitted apostasy applications to the Argentinian synod, according to César Rosenstein, a lawyer and founding member of the Argentinian Coalition for a Lay State. [...]
“Apostasy is an important symbolic and political act,” said Rosenstein, who said that visits to the group’s website had shot up since the vote from 100 daily unique users to around 40,000 a day. [...]
In Argentina, 92% of the population describe themselves as Catholic – even though barely 20% practice their religion on a regular basis – and many express pride in a pope who once served as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
A constitutional reform in 1994 removed the requirement for Argentina’s presidents to be Catholic, but close ties remain between church and state. The Catholic church is financed to a large extent by the government. Bishops’ wages are paid by the state and Catholic schools receive state support, in accordance with a concordat signed in 1966 between the Vatican and Argentina’s 1966-70 military dictatorship and a decree passed by the country’s later 1976-83 dictatorship. [...]
But the vote has also galvanised women’s rights campaigners, and provoked a new discussion around the Catholic church’s role in the country. Hundreds of people had signed apostasy forms at Cael’s street corner stalls around the country, Rosenstein said.
Deutsche Welle: Religiosity reigns in US, on the wane in western Europe
Sixty-eight percent of US Christians said religion was important in their lives, as compared with just 14 percent in Western Europe. But even among US adults who identified as religiously unaffiliated, 13 percent considered religion as a significant factor, against just 1 percent of Western Europeans.
In fact, the data shows that US "nones" — people who identify as atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular" — are in some cases as religious as or more religious than Christians in Western Europe. For example, 20 percent of US adults who are unaffiliated pray daily, while just 6 percent of Christians in the UK do so. And 27 percent of American "nones" believe in God "with absolute certainty," compared with 12 percent of Christians in Germany. [...]
The belief in God as described in the Bible is also much more prevalent in the US: Fifty-six percent of Americans have faith in the biblical depiction of God, almost twice as many as in Western Europe (27 percent).
The Guardian: 'What were her knickers like?': the truth about trying an open relationship
Polyamory has been getting a lot of press. It basically means having concurrent relationships with more than one person. You might have one primary, but everyone you choose to be with is more or less equal in your affections. My preferred configuration isn’t actually that radical: ethical non-monogamy is basically a good old-fashioned open relationship. There would only ever be two of us in it, but I’d like to trust that person so implicitly, and value them so wholeheartedly, that if they slept with someone else it wouldn’t damage us. I’d like for the other person to trust and value me just as much so that if I did the same, we’d be able to look at it for what it is: a banal act that is fun or weird or intimate or exciting, but ultimately not a threat to our harmony.
“A sort of flexitarian approach to relationships,” I said to Sam. “You have a primary partner, and they’re the important one… ” He rolled his eyes, and I told him he was being too middle class about it. “Me just wanting a normal relationship, where you don’t sleep with other people? I’m not sure that’s quite Volvo territory,” he replied. [...]
“It’s quite a scary concept,” Wilby said. “Because we don’t like the idea of our partner being with someone else. But generally, it’s because we’ve been taught to believe this means that our partner will leave us. Of course,” she continued, “the key point of non-monogamy is that even though your partner might be with another lover, they’re actually coming back to you. And that extra joy and love and happiness might even fuel and rekindle the relationship they have with you. We’ve been conditioned to believe other people are a threat to our relationships, but what if they aren’t?” [...]
Maybe it’s not committed relationships that non-monogamists are rejecting, but the idea that those relationships have to end when the romantic part does. And isn’t that desire – to keep those crucial people in your life – deeply romantic in its own way?
Deutsche Welle: Lessons from Chemnitz: Eastern Germany's right-wing protesters awash in anxiety
Hardliners within the AfD — to say nothing of the anti-Islam PEGIDA or "Pro Chemnitz" movement, which were also part of the anti-immigrant protest in Chemnitz — frequently accuse state authorities, politicians from the "old parties" and the police of conspiring against them. A few of the most extreme even assert that Chancellor Angela Merkel is secretly scheming to replace the German population with migrants and refugees. It's hard to get more alienated than that.
The vast majority of the people who marched on Saturday are neither bug-eyed conspiracy theorists nor extremists. But they are convinced, official crime statistics to the contrary, that their lives are rapidly becoming more endangered and that the authorities are doing nothing to help. These concerned citizens, too, use the vocabulary of the far right, saying they feel "swamped" by a "flood" of foreigners. And the killing of Daniel H. seems to be further evidence of their dramatic loss of control over their own society. [...]
Instead, one leitmotif of right-wing populism in Germany is envy. Leftist counterdemonstrators are given preferential treatment, the marchers fumed. Refugees are showered with money, designer clothes and state-of-the-art mobile phones while working Germans struggle to get by. And political and media elite line their pockets and have no contact any more with "common people." This is actually one similarity between Marxist and right-wing populist dogma: If you don't like what you read in the papers, it's because the journalists are all bought and paid for. These arguments are repeated over and over by today's German right. [...]
The extreme hostility towards the media is a conspicuous facet of right-wing populism in Germany right now. Whatever the flaws of today's media, without consensus forums in which debates can be held there will be no loosening the loggerheads in places like Chemnitz.
Quartzy: A German restaurant that banned kids after 5 pm says business is booming
A restaurant in Binz, on the island of Rügen on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, recently reignited this debate by barring children under the age of 14 from the restaurant after 5 pm. [...]
Markl has owned the restaurant for 11 years, and he says the behavior of children diners has been getting worse from one year to the next. He puts the blame on parents, saying they don’t care how their kids behave in the restaurant, and get upset when asked to control children who are creating a disturbance. The ban went into effect on August 13. [...]
It’s not the first time a restaurant or café has provoked a fiery debate in Germany by banning children. Back in 2012, a hip coffee roaster in Berlin’s “no children” policy caused mass consternation.
Child-free areas in public places are not as unusual as they once were. Restaurants in many countries are saying no to kids, sometimes citing legal or safety concerns. Resorts like Sandals have never allowed them, and many airlines create child-free zones or even ban babies from first class.
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