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Wavebreakmedia/DreamstimeAs part of its special issue on the so-called alt-right, New York Magazine has published an especially dim-witted article attacking transhumanism entitled, "Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia." The author Mark O'Connell begins by going after Silicon Valley venture capitalist and wrong-headed Trump-supporter Peter Thiel who also happens to have some interest in how the technological Singularity may unfold. Thiel has made no secret about the fact that he has long had "this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing." Thus he finances researchers who hope to develop anti-aging technologies and think tanks that try to foresee the consequences of succeeding at that goal. Fine.

To illustrate Thiel's evil intentions, O'Connell points to his 2009 assertion, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." As further evidence of political depravity, he cites Thiel's 2011 observation, "Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead." Based on these statements, O'Connell accuses Thiel of "ethical simple-mindedness." Really? Is it not more ethically simple-minded to believe that democratic authoritarianism cannot run roughshod over minority rights or that ensuring that everybody is equally diseased, disabled, and dead is somehow the height of moral probity.

O'Connell then notes that other Silicon Valley "libertarians" share Thiel's interest in human enhancement (and not only those who reside in purlieus of Palo Alto do too). Apparently, for O'Connell, the desire for ageless bodies and enhanced minds necessarily amounts to a rightwing conspiracy. As evidence for his claim that transhumanism is a manifestation of the alt-right, O'Connell digs up a couple of oddballs who've hung around the fringes of transhumanism who now call themselves neo-reactionaries. Of course, anybody can apply the labels libertarian and transhumanist to themselves with malice aforethought. Remember how progressives stole the term "liberal" back in the day. Once O'Connell has made the old guilt-by-association rhetorical move, he does admit that one of his two exemplars of supposedly alt-right transhumanism is "these days something of a pariah from the transhumanist movement." Indeed.

Transhumanism is a big tent. For example, my sometime intellectual sparring partner James Hughes, who is former executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, is a fierce social democrat and author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2005). In his Transhumanist Values manifesto, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues for wide access to enhancement technologies:

The full realization of the core transhumanist value requires that, ideally, everybody should have the opportunity to become posthuman. It would be sub-optimal if the opportunity to become posthuman were restricted to a tiny elite.

There are many reasons for supporting wide access: to reduce inequality; because it would be a fairer arrangement; to express solidarity and respect for fellow humans; to help gain support for the transhumanist project; to increase the chances that you will get the opportunity to become posthuman; to increase the chances that those you care about can become posthuman; because it might increase the range of the posthuman realm that gets explored; and to alleviate human suffering on as wide a scale as possible.

The wide access requirement underlies the moral urgency of the transhumanist vision. Wide access does not argue for holding back. On the contrary, other things being equal, it is an argument for moving forward as quickly as possible. 150,000 human beings on our planet die every day, without having had any access to the anticipated enhancement technologies that will make it possible to become posthuman. The sooner this technology develops, the fewer people will have died without access.

Is transhumanism some kind of ultimate threat to humanity? Not all. Last year I explained in the Washington Post:

One crowning achievement of Enlightenment humanism is the principle of tolerance, of putting up with people who look different, talk differently, worship differently and live differently than we do. In the future, our descendants may not all be unenhanced Homo sapiens, but they will still be moral beings who can be held accountable for their actions. There is no a priori reason to think that the same liberal political and moral principles that apply to diverse human beings today would not apply to relations among future humans and transhumans.

The highest expression of human nature and dignity is to strive to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution and our environment. Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and be astonished that some well-meaning and intelligent people actually wanted to stop bio-nano-infotech research and deployment just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature. If transhumanism is allowed to progress, I predict that our descendants will look back and thank us for making their world of longer, healthier and abler lives possible.

Does that sound like anyone is praying for a dystopia?

Original post:
Transhumanism Is Not an Alt-Right Conspiracy! - Reason (blog)

Kyle Chapman, known to his fans on the alt-right as Based Stickman for beating aleftistprotester with a wooden stick at an early March pro-Trump protest in Berkeley, California, wants people to think hes tough. In late April Chapman announcedon Facebook hiscreation of a new group of right-wing street fighters, called theFraternal Order of Alt-Knights (or FOAK), dedicated to defense and confrontation in the streets. You could almost hear thechest-thumping right through the computer screen.

This organization is for those that possess the Warrior Spirit, Chapman wrote. The weak or timid need not apply.

A few days after that, the Proud Boys network, a group that Vice co-founder and former Fox News contributor Gavin McInnes calls a pro-West fraternal organization, posted a notice about the formationof the alt-knights orderand a call for strong minded men who are comfortable in fisticuffs to join. I reached out toChapman in hopes of seeing his warrior spiritfor myself. Alas, I ended up disappointed.

Initially, Chapman seemed interested in talking and gave me his phone number. But when I called him, he refused to speak to me, insisting that I email my questions instead. Since then nearly a week has gone by, and Chapman has not answered my emailed questions or any of my follow-up nudges on Facebook. (He has read them, though.)The warrior spirit is apparently not enough to help him tough out a conversation with a journalist about why he believes the world needs the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights.

The public claim is that this organization is needed for self-defense.

The Proud Boys are already known to escort woman and targeted speakers to events for protection against violent anti-speech protesters, a blogger named PawL BaZile wrote on the Proud Boys website. FOAK will now take the next logical step in organizing the Proud Boy watchdogs into a force to protect and serve when the police are told to stand down.

Investigative journalist and Southern Poverty Law Center contributor David Neiwert, who has won a National Press Club award for his investigations ofhate groups, is skeptical about these claims.

These guys are there looking for a fight, Neiwert said in a phone conversation. These guys are clearly quasi-fascist, classic protofascists, and theyre on the track to full-fledged fascism. All we need to do is look at history and see how it happened.

Neiwert said he consultshistorian Robert Paxtons theory, published in 1998 in the Journal of Modern History, that delineates the five stages of fascism. Right now, Neiwert argued, far-right elements are seekingto consolidate power and that requires recruiting mainstream conservatives totheir side. By going out into the street and picking fights with leftists, under the guise of free speech and self-defense, groupslike the Proud Boys and the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights can play themartyr and give ordinary conservatives an excuse to rally around them.

My Salon colleague Matthew Sheffield offered a similar analysis last week in a Salon article, arguingthat those on the alt-rightare now angling for more mainstream support, and the quickest way to do that is by portraying themselves as frontline defense against a supposedly violent leftist uprising.As evidence, Sheffield pointed out that propaganda portraying these far-right racist and neo-Nazi groups as free-speech martyrs has quickly migrated to more mainstream conservative sites that also cater to alt-right audiences.

The claim of Chapman and his fellows to be gentle lambs merely provoked by violent leftistsis hard to swallow on its surface, because they just so happen to hold their rallies in places they know have a large presence of antifa activists. Antifa is the label adopted by advocates fora subculture promoting a set of tactics and practices that have developed since the early 20th century (and the rise of fascism in Italy) as a confrontational response to fascist groups, rooted in militant left-wing and anarchist politics,according to Natasha Lennard of The Nation.

But thats not the only reasonits hard to buy the claim that Chapmans hard-right acolytes aregoing into this fight reluctantly.

We dont fear the fight. We are the fight, BaZile crowed in his post announcing the formation of the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights..

Especiallyilluminating was the response that Chapman received when he put out a call on Facebook, under his own profile and the Based Stickman fan page, for a symbol/crest to represent the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. The self-seriousness of those who responded was matched only by the near-pornographic enthusiasm forviolence.

Heres a sampling of some of the popular submissions:

The above graphic is apparently a reference to former Chilean dictators purported habit of disappearing leftists by throwing them out of helicopters.

Soon there will be a court test for the theory that these far-right forces are deliberately starting fights so they can play the victim afterward.

Last week prosecutors in Seattle filed charges against the married couple Elizabeth and Marc Hokoanainconnection withthe shooting of a man who attended an Inauguration Day protestof a speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington.

The Hokoanas have tried to depict the shooting as an act of self-defense, but a prosecutor argued that the couple created a situation designed to allow Elizabeth Hokoana to shoot the victim in the middle of an extremely crowded event under the guise of defending herself or her husband.

Prosecutors have gathered evidence of premeditation, including Marc Hokoanas statementthat he wanted to crack skulls and coaching his wife, who was carrying the gun, by saying, They have to start this. They have to start it, during the fight.

Neiwert, who was at the event and captured video of the events preceding the shooting, told me on the phone that the victim,Joshua Dukes, had beentrying to break up fights. The Seattle prosecutors agree, arguing that Dukes was shot when he confronted Marc Hokoana for pepper-spraying the crowd.

But Neiwert doesnt want to let leftist protesters off the hook entirely, however.

For the most part, the antifa people are peaceful, Neiwert said, but he also reportedhaving seen antifa protesters throwing rocks and punches. He wasbangedaround a few times at the Seattle protests by antifa radicals trying to knock the camera out of his hands.

Right now the left is being outsmarted by these guys, Neiwert said. Antifa protesters are playing into the hands of the protofascists by giving them the fight they want, he argued.

Even though the Southern Poverty Law Center officially discourages efforts to confront right-wing protesters, Neiwert thinks theres value infirm opposition, [being] out there saying no, you dont speak for us; you dont speak for America.

But you cant do it, Neiwert said, by fighting them physically, adding, All you do is prove their point or seemingly prove their point. Certainly you give the media the opportunity to say, See, both sides are equally bad.

Instead, Neiwert argued that the left should confront protofascists with mockery.He sent me a post he wrote in February forhis personal blogrecountingwhat transpired ata 2005 neo-Nazi rally in Olympia, Washington,when progressive protesters showed up in clown costumes and performed dances to mock goose-stepping.This whimsical display reduced the neo-Nazis to sputtering but impotent rage, he wrote.

In 1993, Molly Ivins reported on a similarcounterdemonstration in Austin, Texas, where 5,000 anti-racist protesters met a Ku Klux Klan rally andmoonedg Klansmen.

Citizens dropped trou both singly and in groups, occasionally producing a splendid wave effect, Ivins said. It was a swell do.

Considering the utter self-seriousness of the protofascists, this could well be an effective response. Its certainly better than giving them a fight, which allows the far-right forces toportray themselves as martyrs and victims and mighteven aid them in rallying more mainstream conservatives to their side.

Meet their macho bravado with clown noses and fart noises. Its tough to play brave soldiers facing down violent leftistsin the face of that.

See more here:
Alt-right hopes to organize street-fighting goon squad: Is it more than macho posturing? - Salon

TAI staff writer Jason Willick is inNew York magazines newserieson theright-wingfringe in American politics thatlatched itself on to Donald Trumps presidential candidacy. With Park MacDougald of Foreign Affairs, he profilesSteve Sailer, the reclusive California-based blogger whohas been run out of mainstream discourse for his racial demagoguery, but who has also quietly built up a large but overlookedinfluence onthe American right, prefiguring many of the ideas that Trumpism would bring to the fore.

After Mitt Romneys 2012 loss to Barack Obama, the Republican establishment undertook a rigorous postmortem and, looking at demographic trends in the United States, determined that appealing to Hispanics was now a nuclear-level priority. And yet their successful candidate in the next election won by doing precisely the opposite. The Trump strategy looked an awful lot like the Sailer Strategy: the divisive but influential idea that the GOP could run up the electoral score by winning over working-class whites on issues like immigration, first proposed by the conservative writer Steve Sailer in 2000, and summarily rejected by establishment Republicans at the time. Now, 17 years and four presidential cycles later, Sailer, once made a pariah by mainstream conservatives, has quietly become one of the most influential thinkers on the American right. []

Sailers body of work points to a politics very much like the Trumpism of the campaign trail nationalistic, contemptuous of limitations on acceptable discourse, and laden with occasionally sinister racial undertones without directly challenging the principle of equality under the law. Sailer sees himself as having presented an intellectual justification for commonsense politics, which Donald Trump, by being ignorant of the (as Sailer put it in an email to us) Davos Man conventional wisdom, arrived at out of instinct.

As Andrew Sullivan arguesin hisleadpiece for the series,The Reactionary Temptation, far-right politicsis a major force in our political moment, and its better for all of usto understand its often-frightening appeal than to dismiss it out of hand or ritualistically bury it in epithets. So read the whole thing.

The rest is here:
An Overlooked Maven of the Alt-Right - The American Interest

Speaking out against the far right and threats to free speech at UC Berkeley

AN ONGOING controversy at the University of California-Berkeley over whether right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter would speak on campus following the cancellation of her event by the university administration came to a head on April 27 when "alt-right" groups targeted Berkeley for the third time in recent months and confronted left-wing, anti-fascist protesters while claiming to defend free speech.

Coulter, who was originally invited to speak on April 27, but whose speech was cancelled and then rescheduled due to security concerns, waffled about whether she would appear on campus anyway. Her supporters rallied, using the cancellation to their advantage to claim that the right's free speech rights were under attack.

Meanwhile, the media speculated that there would be another round of violent clashes.

Anticipating this, Berkeley city officials and UC Berkeley administrators mobilized hundreds of officers from every police department in the area, both on and off campus, which had a chilling effect on protest. There were at least five arrests on Thursday, including one incident of racial profiling in which police detained a Latino member of the Underground Scholars Initiative, a group of formerly incarcerated students at UC Berkeley.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TWO SEPARATE rallies were planned for Thursday, regardless of whether Coulter showed up or not.

Alt-right and anti-fascist protesters faced off at Martin Luther King Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley. Dozens of right-wingers turned out, clearly emboldened by their rampage in April, when they mobilized at least several hundred from up and down the West Coast, ready to inflict violence on the outnumbered counterdemonstrators.

This time, the police operation kept the two sides apart, and the right didn't get to attack those who stood and chanted against them in the park.

There was another gathering on Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, where the International Socialist Organization (ISO) announced its "Alt Right Delete" initiative in opposition to the right-wingers and in defense of free speech.

Alt Right Delete is an effort to build a larger mobilization capable of confronting the racists and reactionary in Berkeley. It also aims to reclaim the ideals of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s from the right-wing's distortions and reinvigorate its radical, socialist and anti-racist roots.

As Mukund Rathi, a law student at UC Berkeley and member of the ISO, explained at the demonstration:

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose out of the struggles of civil rights activists and socialists against segregation and anti-Black racism in California. These activists, many of them students, were engaging in militant demonstrations and sit-ins to win equal rights for Black people...

It is absurd for the far-right provocateurs, white supremacists and the College Republicans to claim this legacy...

The greatest threat to free speech, on college campuses and elsewhere, comes from these right-wing forces. They will use violence against those who wish to speak and assemble freely. And this should not surprise us--we can't possibly believe that white supremacists and neo Nazis have anything but violent hostility towards their opponents.

Due to the massive police presence and the threat of far-right violence, many people were discouraged from turning out to the rally on campus. Among the 30 to 40 who did, some held signs reading "Fascist-Free Campus" and "Immigrants Are Welcome Here," and chants rang out in defense of immigrant students, refugees and workers.

Coulter's racist and xenophobic views are abhorrent, but it does not benefit the left if the university denies her a venue, giving her and the bigots who celebrate her a chance to play the victim.

We believe it is important to distinguish between the right of students to protest Coulter's speech and the university canceling a forum where she was to appear. A defense of free speech from the left needs to oppose the state and other authorities exercising their power to censor speakers, because this will inevitably be used against left-wing speakers and activists. Our power lies in mobilizing the largest number of people possible to confront the right.

UC Berkeley, along with many other universities, has a record of shutting down speakers in solidarity with Palestine, repressing student workers and silencing sexual assault survivors. Protecting the right of the oppressed to fight back against these attacks means defending free speech rights.

Effective opposition to Coulter and alt-right speakers can take shape without relying on the university officials to intervene, which will ultimately jeopardize the left. The goal of Alt Right Delete is to build a movement that protests right-wingers like Coulter effectively, through a mass mobilization of students and members of the Berkeley community, without curtailing our right to speak freely.

Read more here:
Organizing for an alt-right delete at Berkeley - Socialist Worker Online

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Here's What Happened When The Trump White House Gave An Alt ... - Media Matters for America (blog)