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…and The Model is Not the Action (Sex is not Gender)

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The field of General Semantics introduces patterns of thought required for success in computer programming and related subjects, and I’ve been struck by how much its basic ideas of cleaning up human thought by insisting on principles like “the map is not the territory” correspond to real life and all language.

In the 1930s, when Korzybski began to popularize this thought, relatively few people were interested in this subject that had largely been the domain of professional philosophers. Today, this sentiment is so commonplace in many technological areas it is hardly worthy of note, yet the less informed non-technical community will fall into this way of thinking, and propagandists often use it to distort the behavior of their ignorant fellows.

Systems engineering, broadly defined as the application of systems science to the real world, is an approach to solving large problems by assembling smaller components to achieve a goal that is “more than the sum of its parts.” It is an informal way of analyzing situations and synthesizing solutions that emerged in the 1940s from work done on developing a nationwide telecommunications system. Systems engineering knows no recognized debt to General Semantics, although the name/thing dichotomy is fundamental to its epistemology. From the application of systems engineering principles, the use of the scientific method in the evaluation of complex systems, technologists are gaining more advanced understanding of the problems of accurately representing real world experience.

One of the major areas of computer usage today is simulation of complex systems to predict peformance and operating characteristics. A simulation describes a virtual activity as if it were occurring in reality. Thus, a simulation of a nuclear power plant is a bunch of data that describe, in physical terms, the state of every component of the plant. The simulation also determines how the physical state of each component will evolve in time. Thus, core temperature is a state of the core, a data item that represents the expected or known value of a real world quantity. Simulations estimate the state of the system at the next instance of time from all the data and relationships it possesses about the system—the change in core temperature is estimated from current data using credible rules of change. This collection of data and the rules for proceeding from one time step to the next is called a model of the system.

LEGO Model of Ancient Calculator

There are many kinds of models, such as a LEGO block model of a pyramid or an ancient astronomical calculator, that are easy to grasp as different from the function of the thing modeled. In each case materials and processes that may or may not relate to a real world product are used to convey a critical idea of the product, without representing (and thus becoming) the product itself. Put very directly, a model of a nuclear power plant will not light a lightbulb, although the thing that is being modeled can power a large city. The model will simply report that, under certain assumptions, the plant will provide an estimated amount of power. The real power plant is a complex assemblage of material that actually exists. The model power plant is a coarse approximation to some of the behavior of the real plant. It helps create understanding by eliminating excessive detail, but what if the information thought to be mere “detail” is, in reality, what makes the thing work the way it does?

If the model is correct for a wide range of conditions, we have a useful model, which yields a plausible estimate of results in “normal” situations, even though it may incorporate no understanding of the activity it purports to describe. And here lies the danger of loose thinking. Seeing the predictive power of the model, people easily come to believe it represents either the way the world actually works or, worse yet, how it should work. And for many areas of experience, like the matured elements of 20th century engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, nautical, automotive, etc.) this is entirely satisfactory for routine projects as long as no situation unanticipated in the model can arise to invalidate the model’s assumptions (like an undersea earthquake and the resulting tsunami).

But consider what emerges when the model is computational and it models another, more complex computation. In this case, since everything, real and virtual, is the product of an abstract computation, it is easy to confuse the model with reality. While no one believes that a LEGO model of a locomotive will inform the design of a device for rail transportation, almost everyone believes that a dichotomous model of sex and gender phenomena determines how human relationships are constructed in reality, although the most casual observation shows that real human relationships do not agree with this dichotomous model in any way, since they emerge from sex distinctions only through a very long and complex sequential development process. This elevation of an egotistical construction of the human mind, based on incompetent observation of reality, to the level that almost everyone in our society is forced to order their lives in accordance with this delusion, represents a temporary triumph of mass insanity over the truth and reality of all our personal experiences and observations.

Existing models of social categories fail the test of rationality for two reasons. First, they provide a small or dichotomous choice of labeled properties of the world as data. Second, they fail to recognize the fundamental multidimensionality of all living experience. Nowhere in all human thought and philosophy is this conceptual failure to understand the nature and role of models in science and technology more profound and more injurious to individuals and society than in the complete misapprehension of the nature of sex and gender that oppresses all human activities on this planet.

First consider the insane idea of the dichotomy of human biological sex. It has been noted that over 99% of all humans have either XX or XY sex chromosomes (but not both) in their somatic cells. This is a biological fact. If one then creates a model that says “all humans have either XX or XY sex chromosomes (but not both) in their somatic cells” that model is not correct. If one goes further to say “all persons with XY sex chromosomes have penises” and “all persons with XX sex chromosomes have clitorides” the model becomes much worse in its ignorance of a growing mass of variant sex presentations. When the ignorant and bigoted satraps of human society go even further to assert “all persons with XY sex chromosomes are men” and “all persons with XX sex chromosomes are women” the foolishness reaches a climax of stupidity. At this point it is correct to quote  the late Richard Feynman who would tell his students that their model, their idea, is “not even wrong,” that is, it incorporates so many incorrect assumptions as to have little relationship to the thing it purports to describe. But the foolish, irrelevant oversimplification has hardly begun and grows rapidly to serve the forces of oppression.

The failure of all human philosophy about sex and gender on the biological level is made worse by the failure to recognize the rich multidimensionalty of reality, compressing the common conceptual model even further to dichotomous models such as “men work best with men, women with women” or “men do not dress like women, nor women like men” or “men only share erotic play with women, and women with men.” Not only is the basic biology reduced to a false model, lacking a continuum of intermediate values, but also independent levels of genetic sex, sex expression, sexual orientation, social affinity, gender identity, and gender orientation are assumed to be all one thing, determined by genetic sex. An XY body has a penis and fucks XX bodies that don’t. The XY is socially attracted to other XYs and all of them think they are people who wear pants and fuck people who wear dresses, having no idea of the reality of gender.

And such people have largely succeeded in convincing everyone in the world that their blighted understanding, obviously silly at every turn, is the way the world should work and that anything that does not fit this asinine model should be suppressed.

The growth in application of rational methods of analysis and synthesis to understanding inadequately explored aspects of everyday life, driven by the great growth in general understanding of information and systems technology, at least among us geeks, is bringing for a new generation of thinkers, whose superior vision of the true realities of sex and gender freedom will displace permanently the foolish ideas of their pastfathers. Today’s state of social and economic injustice calls for more than mental exercise, it requires bold action to reverse these false hypotheses that create bad thinking and discriminatory laws.

A more complete discussion of the levels and dimensions of sex and gender expression is provided in my paper, I Am an Intersex Bisexual Transgender and So Are You.

—Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 18 Jul 2011 0 comments

The Name is not the Thing and…

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This is the story of the great change in the accepted understanding of human language that occurred in the last century and how it is forcing extensive public reevaluation of large bodies of “received wisdom.”

In less than one century a logical/linguistic misconception has become a hallmark of ignorance and illiteracy. It has so dominated popular thought as to give rise to so-called “Christian Fundamentalism” and numerous other literalist philosophies that greatly inhibit social progress. The second part of this story will explain another logical/linguistic misconception that continues to distort human understanding of the foundation of society, specifically the free expression of sex and gender.

Ignorant literalism led to the conflation of terminology with reality in public understanding of sex and gender throughout the last century, a problem that is now being corrected through death and technology. A complex literalism that insists human theories are more correct than observable facts, suppresses counter-evidence, and ignores the rich complexity of life in favor of simple categories and labels, continues to plague our society. However, the application of elements of the “scientific method” to address a wide range of non-technical issues is beginning the liberation of human thought from the simple man’s effort of trying to force the world to be something other than it actually is, again with specific reference to issues of sex and gender freedom and expression.

My first exposure to this dichotomy, the real world as opposed to the real world as described by random men, was when a classmate shared with me The World of Null-A by A. E. Van Vogt. At 13 or 14 years of age, I couldn’t quite understand the plot at the time, maybe because I could only sneak a chapter or two every afternoon during dramatics club rehearsals. Later I was to learn that most people had to stretch their imaginations a lot to make sense of a Van Vogt plot. At the top of every chapter, in italics, was a brief saying, such as “the map is not the territory” or “the word is not the thing defined” and it would be signed with an enigmatic “A.K.” Another classmate (we were all hooked) whispered “General Semantics” to me and I thought that sounded like something really neat, especially since this guy in the story, this Gilbert Gosseyn (that’s “go-sane”) has two brains and all kind of superpowers, especially including the ability to see and understand and react appropriately to whatever is going on. And, an S. I. Hayakawa essay was being taught in class at the same time, and he was a General Semanticist, whatever I thought that was.

Later, The Players of Null-A was published, giving me an even greater thrill of the rational mental powers unleashed by “non-Aristotelian” logical thinking. And, although it was clear that the novels were mid-century futurist fantasy stories, there was something that stirred my imagination and belief that the ideas were not just fantasy and might have some grounding in reality. Twenty years later, I decided to try to learn more about this and many other subjects in connection with my professional career developing computer architectures. I knew that “A.K.” was Alfred Korzybski, who had set forth a philosophy of rationality that he called General Semantics in his 1933 book Science and Sanity. Van Vogt was a believer in General Semantics and incorporated many of Korzybski’s ideas into the Null-A novels. But by that time (1970’s) something much more powerful was in motion.

One of the curious things about the rise of computer technology is that every fundamental and important thing for starting the revolution and interpreting its capabilities and limitations was already in place by the 1940s. In many ways, the developments since that time (before computers) have been in engineering technology to create increasingly better realizations of ideas that were well developed by metamathematicians like Alonzo Church and Alan Turing in the 1930s. Of course, each major generation in technology has brought greater capability, and increasingly powerful applications have abstracted and incorporated these capabilities to create increasingly useful tools for information manipulation; however, the fundamental process of computing conforms to the limits first understood by Turing and Church.

But beyond mere computing machinery and fundamental mathematical limits, we found the job of representing a task to a computer (programming) to require a kind of orderly thinking that leaked over and influenced the way we software designers think ourselves. We early learned to use “variables” or “handles” to allow us to identify and manipulate the data objects on which we wished the machine to operate. We understood that a name of a quantity can be assigned a meaning that has no relationship to the actual quantity or the literal letters of the name. We can use a name like “fuel” to allow us to designate a numeric quantity of liters. And we well know that the letter string “f-u-e-l” is not itself something you can run your car on. Although f-u-e-l identifies and allows us to manipulate such a number. The name is not the thing. Us geeks were first to use these concepts routinely in our work.

When I investigated General Semantics, I found amazing how many their basic ideas of cleaning up human thought by insisting on principles like “the map is not the territory” corresponded to patterns of thought required for success in computer programming and related subjects. In the 1930s, when Korsybski began to popularize this thought, relatively few people, except some professional philosophers, were interested in this subject, Today, this sentiment is so commonplace in many technological areas as to hardly be worthy of note, yet the less informed non-technical community, as well as insincerely motivated propagandists, will fall into this way of thinking or even use it to distort the behavior of their ignorant fellows.

Van Vogt captured from General Semantics and popularized the “cortico-thalamic pause.” Basically, this is the systematic consideration of every conscious reaction in the context of a stimulus. A very simple example suffices. If someone slaps your cheek, what do you do? Although you may instinctively react in some way, the goal of the c-t pause is to give you time to construct a superior, even optimal response. In short, life is not all about quick action/reaction, like a game of speed or agility. Rather, every reaction, no matter how quickly chosen, should be based on sound thinking about what has just happened. Van Vogt’s hero is always reacting in unexpected and superior ways to the actions of others, and, since this is science fiction and he has an extra brain, the mere act of c-t breaking always gives him enough shift of perspective to master the situation instantaneously (even when he has to teleport across the room or wake up in a different body—wow). Although we don’t have two brains, I have always found the c-t break to be rather wise advice and try to employ it when I can muster the patience and good sense to do so. In computer programming and debugging it can be very helpful in clearing the mind of incorrect binding of names as things. In managing one’s life it can be a life-saver.

Next we will examine how overly simplistic thinking and incorrect reasoning lead directly to sex and gender oppression.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 17 Jul 2011 0 comments

Why sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms

(También en Español)
Our sexual pleasure response is completely individual. When we feel it, those precious moments, we experience unbridled exhilaration that is at the same time indescribable by mere words, even in great art or poetry.

There is only one way to replicate this experience of unrestrained freedom and that is to recreate — re-create increasing favorable circumstances to plug in at a healthy pace. Although sexual pleasure exists by definition in a time and space all one’s own an imperative to share it and enhance it with others is built in. Studies have demonstrated over and over again the irrefutable benefits to mental health, prosperity, and longevity of a life regularly punctuated with the desired number and rate of pleasurable encounters. This inviting pressure brings people into relationship, the midwife of personal growth.

These cumulative states of sexual pleasure, those knowings of  at-one-ment in the universe, can be mutually acknowledged as both a singular experience and the bodily guarantee of true pluralism. It is the one authentic human experience that virtually all other humans agree exists, and no other experience comes close to this criteria. Pluralism leads inevitably to democracy and the extension to more and more people their birthright to pursue sexual freedom and all other freedoms that emanate from this mutual acknowledgement of each other’s immutable bodily freedom in the form of sexual pleasure.

Our own sovereign portal to experience physical pleasure and love in infinitely inexhaustible manifestations makes possible a mutuality of individual autonomy that is expressed as true pluralism and the quest for universal equal rights for each person without qualification. Everyone shares that inner experience of freedom to the same extent everyone else does and is why civilizations progress in making all freedoms universally felt in society.

This inner experience of sexual pleasure is what joins together each and every person on earth, an organic unity all of us can recognize and agree is important, even a type of magic, that makes our world better day by day.

Party on.

Creative Commons images by: rileyroxx, DavidSpinks, and Lori_NY

in Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Grassroots / Library / Op-Ed  by 17 Jul 2011 2 comments

The Newseum—Vainglorious Journalism Leads to Triumphalist History

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The Newseum sits on Pennsylvania Ave. in the District of Columbia next door to the Canadian embassy about halfway from the White House to the Capitol. A magnificent architectural accomplishment in glass and some white metal (aluminum?), it contains a vast 7-story atrium. Everything that can be transparent is transparent. The parable for the news media seems rather obvious. And you can enjoy this Disneyesque production for a mere $21.95, for two days’ admission. If this seems a bad value, it’s probably because all the Smithsonian museums are free and have nicer gift shops.

Inside, arranged like the Stations of the Cross, are the tiers of exhibits, interactive playgrounds, working studios, more exhibits, a gift shop, and a food court. Unlike Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré or Guadalupe, the faithful are taken to the top of the mountain by an all-glass joy of an elevator. And then descend by ramps and steps to worship at each Station of the Press. Make no mistake. This is not a rational or logical endeavor. This is a monument to one of the religious cults of our nation–the so-called “Free Press.” As such, its pretentions are not limited by either fact or truth, but go to serve the great myth that is American “constitutional” government by the People. A basically good idea executed rather haphazardly, compared to what it promised.

A casual viewer may think that every major event in the last 200 years was initiated and orchestrated by the press. Further reflection shows that, even when events occurred unexpectedly, the initial and follow-up press coverage defined the public memory and archival record of the events, including multi-generational effects (e.g., future history). As an example:

We are shown how the rogue bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover, could infiltrate the highest levels of our government through corruption, criminal conspiracy, and blackmail, even as a feckless press elevated him as a national icon of progressive law enforcement and public safety. Nowhere in this paean to Hoover and the press of the day, heavily sponsored it appears by the FBI, did I note reflection or self-criticism or even comprehension of the possibility that the press had been gullible co-conspirators in Hoover’s aggrandizement, which so distorted the realization of our national values throughout most of the 20th century and linger with us today.

There are many exhibits presenting a collective, synthetic record of events assembled from selected press reports. Where a death blow was dealt to all human freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution in the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, the Newseum is silent. On as issue of grave importance and representing serious injury to the press, the press is silent, not only in reaction, but in acknowledgment of the destructive reality. They might as well be dead.

And so the press, with its collective ignorance and cultural biases, records the events of time. The stories and, finally, myths that arise from this shallow sloppiness become fixed in the minds of people and define what is considered to have been true, even it, as often happens, the press record bears no meaningful or logical relationship to the reality of the event.

The serious question raised by this subtle distortion of reality in the mainstream media is how it affects the development and interpretation of history, our national myth. For historians will draw on recorded data, and the mainstream media produce more data and content than any other private agency. So it is easy to see that the slant of the historical record is shaped by prevailing media assumptions of the period being analyzed. While a historian may find arguments and events advantaging one side or another in some dispute, his analysis may not penetrate to the underlying errors of thinking that distort the positions on both sides of a dispute. So when the media focus on a particular event uncritically, this naive approach tends to define the simplistic story of a complex issue. History is largely written by the winners of any dispute. Triumphalism is a great failing of the human spirit. And from this emerges bulshyte, not history.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

When we examine the so-called historical narratives of our own or other cultures, we quickly find much that is commonly believed that has no basis in reality at all. One need only consider the legends of the founding of our nation and the roles of George Washington to know that this is not the Native American view, not the French-Canadian view, and certainly not the Primitive Mormon view of what the United States is and what it stands for in terms of “freedom.” Our own national myth, enshrined in endless hours of fantasy contemplating and analyzing such delusions as “manifest destiny” and “states’ rights,” begins to resemble Horatio Greenough’s half-naked statue of George, a fitting symbol for the founder of a nation that glories in empire rather than service to humanity, no matter how little it relates to the man himself.

 

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 13 Jul 2011 0 comments

Transreligion—An Inspirational Framework for Transgender Transhumans

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Religious myth has only degraded and inhibited human progress. Essentially all contemporary religions are myth based. Christianity fails the test of worth when it relies on Hebrew racial myth (the old testament) and Greek philosophical myth (the concept of the Christos and related ideas) as absolute truths. We know that nothing that draws on such ancient Sci-Fi can be either true, good, or beautiful, except by accident, and thus stands forever opposed to the power of love in the world.

Paul Henri Thiry (click)

There are, fortunately, many people (now and in the past 2000 years) who love others, serve others, do good to others, and make our world more beautiful by their efforts. Some of these people call themselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Atheists or something else, which is their choice, but their lives have taken inspiration from the universal powers of love and truth in the human mind, not from religious myth or dogma.

Transhumanists continue to debate the appropriateness of any kind of religious faith or behavior as a component of Transhuman life. My own post-transition perspective illuminates many ethical and moral concerns of the Transhumanists. Foremost, if we are to foster the emergence of a genuine Transhuman philosophy of life, we need to create an inspirational framework that justifies and motivates rational behavior. We should evaluate candidate inspirational frameworks according to their individual ability to satisfy essential requirements that must be met by any proposed framework.

In my view, a satisfactory transhuman rationally religious world view ought to address five basic requirements that bridge the gaps of sex and gender and merge the physical, psychic, and inspirational elements of joy into a total personal and socially transforming experience of reality. At the same time, we recognize that a genuinely operational inspirational framework, a true transreligion, can only emerge from the collective unification of individual joyful experience. This list is just a starting point for further thought and discussion.

1) Assure complete freedom from reliance on any myth or backstory. Our beliefs are based on plain observational knowledge and insights of personal wisdom.

2) Demonstrate open and informed attitudes, viewpoints, and experiential training for all of the many dimensions of sex and gender.

3) Practice group communion for collective psychic inspiration and empowerment, through the exploration and experience of sex and gender as acts of communion.

4) Fellowship every transhuman living on this planet. Empower them to know the joy of living, showing how love finds expression in true service to others by doing good and making beauty.

5) Be open to alliance with any cosmic government that may make its presence or influence felt in human affairs, with a willingness to facilitate transhuman emergence. In the meantime dedicate your life to the highest principles of love, truth, goodness, and beauty.

To summarize, we help one another by starting with baldfaced mythless truth and showing each other the joy that is really important and gives meaning to life. A universal acknowledgment of the possibility that some external force will intervene keeps us mutually focused on progression towards our ideals of truth and love, regardless of what the future brings. And our intent to combine free and open acceptance of all forms of sex and gender expression with equally free and open communion, joy, and fellowship guarantees our ability to lead the destined evolution of human affairs.

Transhumans may find something like this just fine as the basis for a way of life and be finally able to leave the god talk to the past. But a religion, the social expression of a community of individuals who share common ideals, is not designed, so much as grown through the social customs of the community. Setting aside old, incorrect beliefs, the inherent truth of principles like these will emerge and cause focused will actions. Through trial and error, the community will gradually discover convenient and innovative ways of serving these principles to more and more people. And that will be the emergence of true Transreligion.

Now is the time for a new inspirational framework to replace the outdated and overly interpreted ideas of our pastfathers. I do not know what will emerge, but I trust that it will necessarily be true to ideals and principles such as those stated here.

—Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom / Transunity & Transleadership  by 09 Jul 2011 2 comments

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 2 of 2)

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On January 21, 2010, the 235-year lifetime of the first North American federal republic, which once called itself the United States of America, came to an abrupt end. On this date the Supreme Court of the nation issued an irrational and false ruling, in the so-called “Citizens United” case, born of a lack of any valid national visionary focus that effectively recognized and bestowed on every organized collective entity the full rights and privileges of a singular citizen. Our national constitution was designed to provide a process for managing collectives and overarching rights to limit their operation against the individual and personal choice. By according individual citizen rights to collectives, the court destroyed this balance. The result was the creation of an irremediable failure within the foundation of balanced decision making in the Constitution, resulting in the final destruction of any voice from the people at the ballot box.

Kenneth Arrow

Collectives are not and can never be functionally equivalent to individuals. The critical difference is in the quality of decision making. Individuals make choices based on their own sense of truth and their will to act upon it (or not). Collectives aggregate the opinions, true and untrue, fantastic and incomplete, of their members by various means, but never as an individual. The essential unfairness of this was conclusively demonstrated in the 40’s by Kenneth Arrow, in a PhD thesis that foreshadowed a lifetime of work for which he later received the Nobel Prize in Economics. In brief, Arrow showed that, given a group of three or more people, all expressing preferences according to their own desires, there was no possible way to combine their individual judgments to achieve a collective decision that would be non-dictatorial, representative, decisive, and fair, among necessary qualities. The main difference is that the individual decides, but the group decision making process, even conducted with perfect transparency, necessarily diffuses the inevitably illogical and irrational way the conclusion was reached, protecting the guilty within the group by spreading moral responsibility across the whole body of participants, both innocent and guilty. Of course, Arrow’s Paradox may also be taken as a proof of the inevitable inadequacy of any collective form of government to achieve all the ideals one might reasonably expect of it.

Today we already see our dead nation rotting away as a direct result of the single decision in Citizens United; however, a great many of the foundations of our nationhood had already been undermined or had never been implemented at all, as I noted yesterday in comparing the colonial treatment of the black man, who could be enslaved, to the treatment of the red man, who lost both life and society to avoid enslavement. Equality of opportunity and social redress for the injustices of slavery seem to have slowly, painfully advanced. The survivors of the great North American Genocide for the most part languish in poverty without social services or infrastructure, though some have won the proverbial jackpot by having control of petroleum sources or legalized gambling. The privilege gap between the Mashantucket Peqod, a tiny tribe that operates the vast Foxwoods Casino complex in Connecticut, and the Hopi inhabitants of Third Mesa in dry, red rocky, desolate, Arizona is now as vast as the income inequality of our nation as a whole, if not more so.

The Constitution elaborates a mechanical government and gives it force, while the Bill of Rights offers a set of vague and unenforceable promises to protect the individual from the depredations of government and the mob or horde. What can we possibly do to rescue our communities from the global plan of legalized slavery that is now sliding into place with the surety born of an alien invasion of overwhelming might? Old-style humans increasingly organize to own and control all property and, since property is essential to life, all living things as well. They have conspired to take control of all aspects of government, including the ability to define what government is and is to be. They have announced loudly their intention to make our presently oppressive government a refined instrument of total social and economic control, to accelerate the attrition of the weak by deliberately increasing the death rate through destruction of social and medical services and infrastructure, and to trap a planet in their incredible solipsistic delusions of personal grandeur. Such is the legacy of our pastfathers.

For over two centuries the worst of such bullies progressively gained greater control over the Federal government, the US military, and the know-nothing cults displaying their self-generated delusions and ignorance under false-flag Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which, as “religions of the book,” are peculiarly susceptible to such spiritual derailment when subjected to ignorant literal reading of their largely irrelevant and obsolete texts.

And what has all this social terrorism of the meek and powerless achieved for our nation? I refer you to the table “American Shame” from the New York Times, where you will find the US has the poorest performance among all “advanced economies” in income inequality, food insecurity, prison population, and mathematics education. At the same time, US life expectancy at birth is significantly worse than all advanced nations except Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Our unemployment rate is higher than every country but Slovenia, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.

Monday, July 4, we celebrate our nation’s birthday and honor the vision of what our nation might have been had we been a truer and wiser people, less inclined to reliance on imagined history and other myths of the past, and more willing to replace fear with love. Now that we have witnessed the cycle of our old nation, like Greece, Rome, and other false social constructs, cycling to an ignominious end in a convulsion of greed, bullying, and imperialism, we know better for the future. It is now our task to build new ways of living on the remaining working parts and reusable structures of that which we now transcend.

Our own transhuman destiny calls those of us who understand and have experienced the full dimensions of complete freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity to accept our role as teachers and leaders in the founding of a new social order. From this day we shall move forward in time with the future, at last to build that great and fabulous society of which we have always dreamed.

Our own celebration this year might be viewed as a “Launch Party” for the “New Age,” which we eagerly look forward to helping to create. There’s mighty work afoot. Let us begin to prepare for the second great North American federal republic—the nation that is to be, that will realize the ambitions of humanity to be safe and at peace, where all can grow into the fullness of their abilities.

Hail, Columbia!

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 06 Jul 2011 0 comments

Why the United States Government is Damaged Goods (Part 1 of 2)

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When I was growing up in Chattanooga in the 50s, I somehow acquired the belief that the United States of America was the best country in which to be born and live. I gave thanks to my god of the day I had been born an American, and wondered at the miracle of such privilege in a world torn by war, famine, disease, and poverty, in which it seemed no group of national cults could exist in peace.

Before Kent State was the Boston Massacre

When I went to college in the Boston area at the start of the 60s I was abruptly exposed to a very different view, no less idolatrous, but couched in historical ideals and events that supported two related viewpoints on which our republic was founded—a desire for intense socialization of agrarian freedoms on the one hand, simultaneously opposed and supported by mercantilist and capitalist interests where commercial advantage could be found. In Boston, we thought all the unrighteous capitalists were slave owners in the slave states.

In the 90s I moved with my family to the National Capital Region of Virginia and, in the 00s to the District of Columbia. Virginia (and Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania) really evoke the terrible realities in the birth of a new cult of nationhood. It is impossible to visit Manassas, Antietam, or Gettysburg without recalling the thousands of lives sacrificed to fear, disunity, and greed, where the soil is soaked with yet more thousands of liters of blood. And, having grown up in Chattanooga, I already knew the horrors of Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and Chickamauga. I remembered the words of that hideously false, yet weirdly inspiring line from The Battle Hymn of the Republic which says “…as he died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free.” Can mass emotional insanity built on ignorance reliably serve the cause of love and truth? We now know it cannot, does not, and never has. Today we are heir to the results of living with such foolish ideas.

Once we moved to the District, I saw how Jefferson’s forced decision to have the national capital at its present location initially captured, within one city-to-be, the national vision of union based on unity without uniformity, avoiding New York in favor of a fresh start where Georgetown and Alexandria competed for economic favor, based on different social models. I contemplated the Rosicrucian geomancy that L’Enfant drew on in planning the city, as well as the artistic ideals inspired by Paris and other great cities of Europe in that day. I understood how the desires for balanced and fair peace had inspired this most occult design, as if the greatness to be of the city and the republic for which it stands could be invoked and established within an urban architecture designed to be a subliminal parable of truth.

The National Mall, designed by the McMillan Commission at the start of the 20th century, ripped the ramshackle and decrepit commercial heart out of the original, unplanned collection of businesses, services, and residences that occupied the swampy flats west of Capitol Hill, moved the city plan closer to its Masonic origins, yet made me feel I had entered a Federal Disneyland recreation of the Roman Forum on a much grander scale, where everything was brand new classical revival and beaux-arts architecture, a gleaming alabaster city “undimmed by human tears.” Unfortunately, to me the brilliance of this parklike setting for our Federal buildings and monuments was drenched in the human blood spilled to achieve the triumphalist vision of a newborn world empire. This especially came home to me when the World War II memorial was completed. Emperor Trajan, the prolific builder of second-century Rome, would have been proud.

Those who walk the streets of this city patrol the paths of destiny. When we marched for equality in October 2009, the light of truth on which this city was founded and designed broke through the ocean of clotted blood and stinking death wrought by foolish greed, showing us the glorious rainbow of a better age, unconquerable and soon to be all there is.

Can the future learn from the past? Or must the future be imprisoned by the limited wisdom of the past? How can our nation escape the prison of literalistic and untruthful government and triumphalist imperial ambitions in which it seems trapped? Today, Lincoln’s words continue to apply, “…a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation…can long endure…” Now as we realize and expose how cruelly our nation continues to fail to build on the ideals for which so much life was sacrificed to the worship of greed, from the Revolution through the Civil War, we more clearly see the roots of oppression that prevent human freedom and social progress. In answer to the implied question, we now know this new nation has not endured, and has finally been destroyed by a bunch of ignorant humans flying a false flag of Supreme authority. Will yet another war be needed to achieve liberty, freedom, justice, and equality for all?

See how far we have lost our way as a national cult of freedom. Colonial sentiment was strongly anti-slavery, but the political power of slaveholders could not be denied, even as the extraction and financial industries cannot be denied today. Jefferson wrote of the King, in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to drestrain this execrable commerce.”

General Jeffrey Amherst

Does our nation live up to this standard today? Or have we actually become suborners of true freedom to serve delusions of historical and religious mythology? Or were we ever willing to put the interests of the powerless who depend on us for survival behind our personal greed and national desire for empire. For example, our national myth ignores the intentional genocide against the American aboriginal peoples (the “indians” that fought the “cowboys”), which began with the policies of British Commander Jeffrey Amherst, who conducted biological warfare against the Indian population of Ohio, among other things, directing his troops to deliberately infect gift blankets with smallpox. It is likely these actions by British troops caused a major smallpox epidemic among the native population.

Such mass social cruelty to an entire people has continued unabated to this day. After personally starting the French and Indian War (out of abyssal ignorance) George Washington led forces that ferociously destroyed the villages and societies of the Iroquois Confederation across New York state. He was known to the Indians as Caunotaucarius, which means “devourer of villages.” Many years later, when Washington was President and the settled Seneca were suffering under the continual abuse and cruelty practiced on them by American frontier rogues, they sent a delegation, headed by Cornplanter, their great spiritual leader of the time, who had encouraged them to adopt agrarian ways compatible with European frontier development. This delegation was to beg the great white man for mercy from his government and to require the frontier citizens to obey treaties and the law. After Cornplanter made his appeal, the delegation was given gifts and promises and sent home. On the way back they were robbed several times and, of course, nothing changed on the frontier. In retrospect it is easy to see that, in those days, the President and Federal government were powerless to control the frontier. It seems there has been no time when our nation was willing to live up to its grand promises for its aboriginal peoples.

This discussion continues tomorrow.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 05 Jul 2011 0 comments

Where Did All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From?

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También en español It is undeniable that there is often a lot of pain and suffering in a human lifetime. While individual experiences vary widely, over the course of a lifetime most people will experience instances when they are confronted with the reality of an apparently genuine evil. And this inevitably starts the discussion, “Why me? What did I do to deserve this? If God loves me, why is he doing this to me? How can we love a God that would let something like this happen to anybody (not just me)? I refuse to accept the religious proposition that there is a God because I see only evidence of universal randomness, filled with constant strife between good and evil partisans! And even if there were one single personal God of the universe, he’d be way too busy to pay attention to the crap going on down here.”

But there are fundamental assumptions in this line of questioning that often go unappreciated. First and foremost are the implied assumptions about the nature of God. If one assumes that the God referenced is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent throughout time and space, then why isn’t the universe perfect? Surely a universe under the total control of a God of Love would never tolerate the amount of human misery and grief that surrounds us on all sides. Therefore, since the observed world does not match my prediction of what the world would be like if there were an omni-cube God, either such a God does not exist or my predictive method about what the world should be like is wrong. Sounds bad for my predictive methods—what man dare attempt to compass the purpose of God? Well, men have minds that, if you are God-oriented, are surely gifts of God. And my mind tells me that simplistic faith contrary to reason is most definitely NOT what any God I could personally respect would ever require of me. Therefore, if I believe the workings in my mind are True, I must perforce reject the concept of the omni-cube God. There simply is no such deity active anywhere I’ve been in the universe because his existence is refuted by the reality of my own experience.

And from this line of reasoning flows the faith of many devout atheists. It’s not so much that they reject the general idea of some sort of Supreme Being, but they can’t figure out what it would be good for because it doesn’t seem to even try to put things right in the world around us. If it’s out there, we obviously mean nothing more to it than an ant does to the automobile that ran over it in the road. Let’s try looking at this situation from a very different and more hopeful viewpoint.

Suppose that the universe is destined to be a perfect place of light and life—a universe of continuous unbridled joy in loving service, living truth, doing good, and making beauty. By our actions, our relationships, we are building small parts of this great universe of constructed perfection. But the perfect universe is not here today. Only portions are in evidence—the areas where love predominates over the primal emptiness of original space-time—where evil is merely the region into which love has yet to penetrate. Evil is not itself a reality. Rather, it is the absence of meaningful reality.

So evil is not something inflicted on us by an angry God, who abandons us to the vacuum of space-time devoid of Love. Rather, evil is the state of being where there is a weakened or nonexistent presence of Love. Since we are the creatures in the universe who are equipped with the ability to sense the presence or absence of Love, and with the tools of Truth guided reason that enable our will to effectively direct our loving actions, it is necessarily our responsibility to fill the gaps in finite reality where Love does not adequately penetrate.

The response of the finite universe to the force of destiny, the necessity of evolution towards a perfect state of light and life, requires the participation of many beings working together and dedicated to the ideals of Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

If you see evil in the world and have sufficient resources of Love, you can make the repair yourself. Our planet seems to have been shortchanged on loving service in the past, so we have a lot of gaps in our Love coverage. Many of these will require the cooperation of many people of goodwill, even entire communities and nations, to bridge vast gaps of lost communication and long misunderstanding.

So let’s get with it. Is there evil in the world? Then let’s work together in Unity to Love it out of existence. It’s our job to do this and this is how destiny is realized. Fear not to act. With Love and Truth you can only do Good and make Beauty.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 28 Jun 2011 3 comments

The Philosophy of Burning Books—Calling It Like It Is

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Last week a truly amazing story of academic support for persecution of LGBT youth by “professional mental health researchers” came to light through the diligent work of Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin and Anderson Cooper of CNN. Briefly, both deal with investigations into the academic and professional life of George Rekers, an ordained minister of the Southern Baptist Convention, arguably the most homophobic of all Protestant cults, as well as the largest. Rekers was a graduate student in clinical psychology at UCLA under Richard Green and Ivar Lovaas, who were responsible for the review and acceptance of his research papers, when the story begins of the tragedy they created to satisfy their lust for academic and financial advancement.

Rekers, with the support of Lovaas and Green, published knowingly false research reports on the case of a child, “Kraig,” who was placed in their care by two very gullible parents. Their own neurotic reactions to their effeminate son resonated with a chord of sociopathy present in UCLA clinical psychology at the time, which was following a path of child development through bullying and deprivation of empathy that had been pioneered by the famous poseur B. F. Skinner, of Harvard. For decades the lies these men wrote, swore to, and promulgated dominated major branches of American psychology and psychiatry.

Over a year ago, thanks to Truth Wins Out and the Florida LGBT press, the fact came out that, in spite of his very public homophobic image, Rekers was actually a closeted homosexual. This was big news in the LGBT press and led to his resignation from the boards of homophobic charities and organizations he had helped lead for so long. This also drew attention to his lifelong history of academic and religious publishing, which has now been proven to be based on deliberate falsification of research results, apparently with the support of his supervisor (Lovaas) and department head (Green) since both were deeply involved themselves in the pseudo-scientific study of effeminate behavior in young boys.

Sorry. Don’t know artist or source.

The work of this blind and bigoted trio has influenced generations of students of childhood development of sexual orientation and gender identity. The published work of these men, and other fraudulent scientists like them, is the foundation of a public relations industry devoted to the marketing for profit of homophobia and transphobia. These institutions are NOT public charities and DO NOT deserve registration as 501(c)3 tax-exempt charities, since they only exist to enrich their organizers and spokespeople by marketing their hateful fantasies as real. I just paid $10 to see the new Spielberg flick. When you leave the theater you know it was all more-or-less meant to be nonsense. At least Hollywood pays taxes on the money it gets from peddling nonsense. The Southern Baptist Convention and its constituent persons and organizations do not. Perhaps Hollywood should claim to be a religion. I know a lot of LGBT folk who would agree.

How can the damage done by Rekers and his like be countered in the intellectual life of humanity? Obviously, the exposure by Burroway and Cooper identifies the problem, but this again will become a one to two week PR event unless the,LBGT community and allies take away a sense of purposive action to stop the further spread of this evil that permeates so much of the generally accepted ignorance of the people. As a minimum, we should identify and disqualify the researchers and the publications that have come about as a result of Rekers’ crimes against academia, science, and humanity.

When one tries to assess the importance of some piece of scientific research, it is useful to know how often and in what capacity the work has been cited by other researchers in their publications. Although the bibliography in a paper tells you where the author used other’s work and ideas, there is nothing to tell you who went on to make use of this particular work of this particular writer. It would, for example, be very convenient to be able to trace out every academic publication that referenced the work of Rekers, Green, or Lovaas, but would require you to examine every bibliography in every later publication that could have possible referenced their work.

Actually the problem was solved definitively 50 years ago by the creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI), which is essentially a reverse bibliography that identifies every subsequent publication that cites the target article. Through SCI one can find not only everything written by Rekers, Green, or Lovaas, and published in a significant peer-reviewed journal, but also everything that cites any of their work. Thus one quickly identifies both publications that should be recalled (since they are contaminated by authorship by Rekers or the others) and other publications that should be recalled (since they are contaminated by citation of Rekers or the others).

This process is then iterated, seeding the new selection cycle with the name of all authors of citation contaminated publications, identifying their other writings and the writers who cited them and their writings. In fact, it is likely one could turn this into a real witch-hunt through the assholes of academia.

Once the offensive material has all been identified, there is an immediate technique for ending further research or credibility for this entire intellectually and morally bankrupt community. Each journal that has published a suspect article simply publishes a formal retraction, even going back 50 years, if necessary. These retractions are indexed by SCI and become a part of the formal record there of the final disposition by rational humanity of a body of published research. Though the discredited documents presenting lies as true will remain in a few archives, every bit of future meaning is gone in the sense that no sane person would waste time by basing further work on it. The injury to academic and science is corrected.

This of course leaves open the place where real injury to real people has been done by these men and their disciples. And this continues through their writing and publication in the very large non-academic press that has no standards of peer review and, in many cases, no concept of truth in reportage. For example, there are 16 titles by Rekers on Amazon. Do any of these books deserve dissemination? Or distribution? Or memorialization in libraries?

Here we face directly the struggle for the hearts and minds of the sane. There is no social purpose in the publication and dissemination of these books. On the other hand, their just and forcible suppression could leave some unconvinced of the evil they represent. Scientists and authors of good will are needed to tell the true stories of human sexual and gender development, uncontaminated by the theological and moral mythology of cult leaders. Such truth will gradually eclipse the lies of the cults, since sane human minds recognize truth and resonate with it when it is heard.

No, I don’t advocate book burning, but I see no reason the false intellectual legacy of men like Rekers, where it can be so clearly identified in the stream of formally reviewed publication, should not be erased permanently from academic history, taking with it the life work of many bigots and homophobes who have hidden (and continue to hide) their neuroses and psychoses behind the false privilege conferred by an academic degree and often tenure.

—Dan Massey

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 11 Jun 2011 0 comments

Can I Transition to be a Transhuman?

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También en español Of course you can. On a normal world, with decent human lifetimes, it would happen naturally as your personality developed; however, the social structures of present-day human society are intentionally organized and maintained to inhibit such personal growth, assuring a docile attitude to the social bullies who manipulate unearned privilege to enslave the masses through religion, government, and business. But these are easy to override if you are serious about realizing your destiny.

But would you really want to be a Transhuman? Becoming Transhuman carries with it the personal assumption of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It implies that you love and serve every person as you are loved and served by others. It implies that you are committed to the realization of a supremely perfected society throughout the universe by vigorous development and ethical exploitation of human technical and artifactual ingenuity on all levels of literal reality—physical, mental, and motivational.

Transhumans serve humanity in this way because their reasons for being and acting are completely removed from typical human concerns. The characteristic difference between a human and a Transhuman viewpoint is that, in contrast to the human, whose behavior is based on mythic memes imparted by family and society, the Transhuman sets aside all such myth in favor of direct engagement with reality guided by personal dedication to the realization of love.

It is hard for a human to understand how Transhuman behavior is controlled and directed. Without hard and fast rules of response to each social situation, how can anyone expect to have a coherent social experience, without the markers of privilege and dominance so beloved by the apes? The answer is quite simple. The Transhuman abandons all mythic systems in favor of a solid belief in and behavior towards a transcendent ethical system constructed from Transhuman actions in support of the finalization of destiny.

The guide to such living action, as well as the test of the validity of experience, is summarized in each Transhuman’s personal attitude towards the four supreme realities of existence in service to destiny. Love is the desire to do good to others. We Transhumans express the supreme values of reality when we demonstrate Love by living Truth, doing Good, and making Beauty. We reject all acts that do not contribute positively to the expression of one or more of these supreme values.

Humans transitioning to become Transhumans often experience conflict between the fixed attitudes of their old beast and their cosmic vision of personal destiny. For example, they may easily abandon religious myth, while adhering strongly to equally silly beliefs in philosophy or science. The challenge before humanity today is not to meet endlessly around a table to hammer out some foolish patch on a failed social model, but to abandon the cause of the confusion—the myths of our pastfathers, which never really had any value for us, no matter how we tried to breathe energy into their dead patterns. We may take inspiration from the motivation they displayed in their service to Love without being bound by the limitations of their acts and vision.

Humans who increasingly dedicate themselves to the honest demonstration of loyalty to supreme values in their lives are transitioning to a Transhuman state, and this is the fundamental connection that allows the human mind to interface with the cosmos and become part of the emerging collective consciousness of a joyful universe.

–Dan Massey

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 10 Jun 2011 0 comments