Browsed by
Tag: courage

Is Reality Winner “One of Us”? – Article by William Sims Bainbridge

Is Reality Winner “One of Us”? – Article by William Sims Bainbridge

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
William Sims Bainbridge
July 26, 2017
******************************

This article originally appeared on the website of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and is republished here with Dr. Bainbridge’s permission. 

Amidst the raging chaos in modern advanced nations, aggravated or rendered more visible by emerging technologies, an occasional individual person stands out, now notably Reality Winner.  Her Wikipedia page begins: “Reality Leigh Winner (born December 1991) is an American intelligence specialist employed by Pluribus International Corporation. Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, on suspicion of leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections to the news website The Intercept. The report suggested that Russian hackers attacked a U.S. voting software supplier.”  Despite considerable journalistic attention, we cannot be sure we know exactly what Reality did, what its legal implications really are, and how her fate may be decided.  Yet today is not too early to consider the possible meaning of her remarkable story.

As soon as I learned about her arrest, I explored her Facebook page, and saw much that resonated with the humanistic values of future-oriented scholars and techno-visionaries, but soon that page vanished from public view.  Intense exploration of a host of online commentaries and information sources raised a profound general question illuminated by her specific case: Can futurists gently guide existing social institutions toward progress, within the context of conventional norms, or have we reached a grim point in history at which we must risk building a replacement for the civilization that is collapsing around us?

Reality Winner’s Facebook page was not awash in political radicalism, but presented a thoughtful person who was intensely dedicated to perfection of herself.  The five public Facebook groups to which she belonged were all real-world organizations promoting personal improvement in physical fitness.  CrossFitters of Augusta and CF 10-10 Members Group were local chapters of CrossFit, a network of organizations promoting a physical exercise philosophy advocating high-intensity training.  Another group was more specialized, GB Handstand Challenge, in which GB stands for Gymnastic Bodies.  The fourth of her public groups was vegetarian:  Vegan Recipes for Everyone.   During the brief time it was still visible, I checked Reality Winner’s Facebook page for “vegan” and saw that she used “#veganlifters” as a hashtag for an Instagram message she had posted at 6:10 AM on May 22, 2017: “Those days when you remind yourself the sacrifices you made to be here, now, every day.”  It struck me that her values seemed very similar to those of Transhumanism, seeking to attain human perfection, but through investment of personal effort and commitment to achieving difficult goals, rather than passively adopting some new technology.  Indeed, these four groups were technological, but advocating techniques that required well-disciplined human action, rather than taking some hypothetical nanotechnology vitamin pill.

The fifth group was a martial arts movement, Krav Maga Maryland, dedicated to “a military self-defense system developed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli security forces (Shin Bet and Mossad).”  Wikipedia summarized the public information currently available about Reality Winner’s military career: “Winner served in the United States Air Force from 2010 to 2016, achieving the rank of senior airman with the 94th Intelligence Squadron.  She worked as a cryptologic linguist, and is fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto.  Winner was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal.”  Farsi is the Persian language of Iran; Dari is a dialect of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan, and Pashto is the language of a major Afghan ethnicity.  Of course, we are not able to administer college advanced placement tests to Reality Winner, given her current incarceration, but she seems to invest the same energy and dedication into intellectual development, with respect to other cultures, as she does in physical fitness.

What about her humanity?  Many news websites copied the picture Reality Winner had posted on her Facebook on May 29, showing her overlooking Mayan ruins.  The day before, she had sent via Instagram another picture from the same archaeological site, with this comment: “Carved head at Lamanai, Belize, 100bc. This has been such a spiritual journey for me.”  We may all find spiritual significance in ancient ruins, but news reports mentioned that her father had died just a few months earlier, and she posted this touching paragraph on her Facebook page:  “There is nothing that can fix the hole in my heart that you left behind. I still don’t know who I am without you here or how to keep moving forward without the one person who believed unconditionally in everything I want to do in life. Old habits die hard, I still find myself making time to call you in the evenings or jotting down notes or stories to tell you next time we speak. Somehow, though, I feel like you are a little closer, here, among the pyramids you used to endlessly tell us about, and always hoped to see. It’s like I have a little piece of you here with me. I miss you, Dad. You would have loved to be here, though I’m sure you would have been bitching about the hot weather every minute.”

There is ample room to debate what punishment, if any, Reality Winner deserves for releasing classified US government information.  Many other people are currently leaking secret government information, and we may note that prominent people like former CIA director David Petraeus do not seem to suffer much when they commit similar acts.  There is some concern that Reality Winner will be given a harsh prison sentence, not because she deserves it, but to deter others from releasing damaging information, and to express the anger of the US President.  Her family seeks help in defending her through a Facebook group, named Friends of Reality Winner, and an online fundraiser at www.gofundme.com/2d9rnm64 that has not yet reached its modest goal to hire a good lawyer.

A number of political action groups briefly used her case in their campaign against the US President, and the document she made public is directly relevant to concerns about the election outcome.  However, it may be a mistake to blame one gang of politicians for our problems, investing false hopes in a competing gang who are not any better but employ different rhetoric and tactics.  Politicizing Reality Winner’s situation may only increase the harm she may suffer.  Following her family’s request to send her good wishes and contribute to her defense would seem to be the most immediately beneficial course, yet not satisfying our long-term ethical obligation.

Can current laws be changed to provide better protection for “whistleblowers” and others who provide information to journalists, scientists, and the general public that is needed for careful decision making?  Perhaps the secrecy laws should be changed so that they are strict only during the period of a formally declared war, which has not been the case for the US since 1945.  Whether from incompetence or corruption, both major US political parties fed false information to the public in escalation of the Vietnam War and the Second Iraq War.  It is hard to know the extent to which current public debates are poisoned by the desperation felt within the dying old-fashioned news media, as the information technology revolution erodes their influence and profits.  Yet there seems good reason to believe that the general public really should not trust the government that currently holds Reality Winner captive.  We are all journalists now, in the era of Facebook, Instagram, and the IEET website, so Freedom of the Press should be defined much more broadly, now that printing presses are obsolete.

This brings us to the most difficult pair of questions: How can we design a better civilization?  How could we bring that dream to reality?  Perhaps the answers cannot be based upon a hope that somehow progress in science and technology will automatically achieve such goals.  We may need to work exceedingly hard, as Reality Winner did in her self-improvement campaigns, transcending our human limitations through directed personal effort as much as through collective technical innovation.  We will need to reinvent modem culture, which requires honestly experimenting with many alternatives, not merely marching in lockstep to a single drummer.

Information technologies are having uncertain impacts on human societies, and the case of Reality Winner raises a host of related ethical issues, while calling into question our ability to extrapolate from the past, and asking for new policies.  Oh, those are the four principal questions raised by IEET!

Yes, Reality Winner is One of Us.

William Sims Bainbridge, Ph.D. is an IEET Senior fellow, and a prolific and influential sociologist of religion, science and popular culture. Dr. Bainbridge serves as co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the NSF.

Disagreement Is a Bad Reason to Unfriend – Article by Sarah Skwire

Disagreement Is a Bad Reason to Unfriend – Article by Sarah Skwire

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance HatSarah Skwire
******************************

I have an interesting meeting next week. A young woman in my community is working very hard on a set of policy suggestions for environmental measures, and she wants a libertarian perspective on the ideas she has drawn up. So we’re going to get together over coffee and talk about her plan and about what I think libertarians might think of it.

But I don’t want to write about her plan today.

I want to write about her invitation to talk about it.

I want to write about it because I think it’s an enormously important counterpoint to something that I see more of every day on my Facebook feed, in the media, and in the small daily interactions of people around me.

That’s the obstinate insistence that people who disagree cannot be friends or colleagues—that they cannot even be reasonably expected to communicate with one another.

Some disagreements, we are told, are just so profound, so deeply seated, so indicative of the other person’s moral turpitude that no reaching over the division is possible.

Shunning? Really?

That may be true, in some cases. Cultures all over the world have long had methods for shunning those whose behavior was so counter to cultural norms that they were viewed as potentially destructive threats to the culture’s continuation. I’m not saying that such threats don’t ever exist.

But in the last little while, I’ve seen claims that anyone who voted for Trump should be “cut off” from communication with “civilized society.” I’ve heard people argue that voting against the continuation of the ACA reveals people to be morally bereft and outside the bonds of normal human interaction. I’ve heard college students and faculty argue not that they should not have to attend or listen to speakers with whom they disagree, but that no one else should be allowed to do so.

That’s a lot of people to vote off the island.

Excluding Others Isn’t Brave

Worse than the sheer numbers involved, though, and even worse than the ever-expanding list of offenses that are considered dire enough to excise whole swathes of people from civil discourse, is the insistence that all of this exclusion is being done because the excluders are brave.

The rhetoric is familiar. “Stand up” against this offense. “Speak out” against that one. “Refuse to tolerate” X. “Give no quarter and make no compromises” with Y. “Shut down” the language of the other side. “Refuse to even entertain” opposing views. “Give no platform” to this person.

I think there’s bravery in resistance to wrongs. I don’t think there’s anything brave about shutting down speech and debate and refusing to interact with people with opposing views.

I think it’s much braver, and much harder, to look for ways to cross those barriers, to find the humanity in the people with whom you disagree most strongly, and to work to solve the problems that plague us rather than retreating to separate camps.

I think it is a brave thing to contact someone with whom you disagree politically and say “Let’s have coffee and talk about stuff. I want to understand how you see this problem.”

And I think we all ought to do it more often.

Sarah Skwire is the poetry editor of the Freeman and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Those Critical of Indefinite Life Extension Fear Life – Article by Eric Schulke and Wioletta Karkucińska

Those Critical of Indefinite Life Extension Fear Life – Article by Eric Schulke and Wioletta Karkucińska

Comments 2 comments
The New Renaissance Hat
Eric Schulke and Wioletta Karkucińska
March 23, 2014
******************************

What a repugnant, disdainful, knee-jerk flippancy to flop out of one’s mouth to mock anybody for being afraid of death.

If death doesn’t arouse fear, then what is fear?

We know what fear is. It’s having the sense to understand the level of loss that something imposes upon a person. It’s a no-brainer to understand that life provides value that would diminish to an extensive level if it were to be lost.

Let’s make this even clearer by spelling out what the dictionary tells us about fear.

fear

verb \ˈfir\

: to be afraid of (something or someone)

: to expect or worry about (something bad or unpleasant)

: to be afraid and worried

…

a :  an unpleasant often strong thought caused by anticipation or awareness of danger

b (1) :  an instance of this (2) :  a state marked by this

:  anxious concern :  solicitude

:  reason for alarm :  danger

I don’t have the courage to be robbed or run over; nor should I, or anyone. I have the emotional maturity to understand what my fear is telling me and to equip myself with the courage to join in on the assault on the terrible beast of aging. Watching incredible things unfold in the universe and world, seeing that it is all just the tip of an inconceivably large iceberg, and then seeing that it will be arbitrarily terminated in another of endless, terrible, horrific events for all involved, is alarming. It should concern you that you are standing on the deck of this great star-ship called Earth, and that you might fall off. You should be able to be aware of, and anticipate danger that is ahead. Your stake in the universe is at stake. Your DNA crawled out of your mother’s womb, drove a spike into the universe, asserting a claim in this realm, and death comes along like a miscreant walking up to a land-claim stake, and rips it out and throws it in the river.

“What are you, afraid of death?” They say.

“Don’t be a coward.”

“Because you’re too cowardly to accept death, the rest of us have to help you with your stupid little excursions?”

It’s as though they are saying, “What are you, afraid of cancer? You sissy, your mother and brother have cancer? So what? Don’t act like a wimp. Cancer is what happens. People live, people get cancer. Don’t accept the ice cream and the music if you’re going to whine about the cancer, it’s part of the package. If I could lift a finger to stop people from dying, then I wouldn’t do it.”

Or, it’s like that jerk that you know urging people to walk into woods where there are predators with humans as prey.

“Come on man, walk forty miles through the jungle there. Don’t worry about the lions, mosquitoes, and rhinos. You’ll get through fine, just goooo.” What terrible advice, and what a terrible kind of advice to condone and not discourage!

They are like the trash-talkers on the rodeo machine, where a round of people sit at a teeter-tottering table in the middle of a bull pen while they play cards and talk smack to each other for not continuing to sit in the bull’s eye of imminent death.

Pretending to be fearless in the face of death isn’t some form of heroism. It isn’t reasonable or courageous. It is quite the opposite. It is taking the easy way out.

What’s more is, that although being afraid is a sensible, logical part of it, the overriding part of it is that most of the people that I talk to that want to live long into the future, do it first and foremost because of their love for life. Most of the people that I know have been thwamped over the head with passion bugs of various kinds by flipping over galactic rocks like philosophy stones, quantum particles, history books and science boulders.

Fighting death has been for ages treated as a battle destined to be lost. How many times, when faced with a loss of a loved one, have we heard “Well, that’s the way of life”? How can one NOT notice the bitter irony and hypocrisy of that statement? How can death EVER be called an element of life, something to accept? It’s the very OPPOSITE of life, NOT part of it, and it is high time we should start seeing it as such. Let the blinders fall from our eyes, once and for all.

We appreciate our opportunity. We appreciate the rarity of humanity and the mind-blowing mysteries we have the privilege to continue to be submersed in. We understand that culture and tradition do not govern the big picture of what it means to exist here.

What it means to exist here is that we are the rare opportunities to know existence. What kind of extremely rare miracle would spring out of the mud after eons of nothingness and then declare that fleeting, flippant, empty cultural traditions of intellectually straitjacketed ancestors of itself are the best dictates for how it should face the big picture of the rapidly unfolding, multifaceted, and to-be-unfettered dreams-come-true (multi?)universe? Would you say that your grandmother’s old typewriter manual is the best guide for figuring out how to fix and program your computer?

What kind of jaw-dropping, paradigm-quaking miracle would spring out of the mud, find science and technology, industry and physics, communications superhighways and knowledge warehouses at the ends of high-speed trails, and all the rest – in many cases at its disposal or within reach of it – and then decide that the best thing for this miracle of the universe to do would be to return to the mud? I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to realize that many of our fellow human beings still think that. It’s also hard to understand exactly how they could think that in a world that emphasizes the value in good, positive critical thinking. They know better than that.

Accepting death is in fact choosing it. In the face of recent discoveries and progress in science, medicine, technology – it is a matter of choice.

Some people will smugly respond with the assertion that quality is obviously better than quantity. They say that acquiring more happiness now in exchange for taking away their chance to live for continued decades and centuries, is not irresponsible and wrong.

To them we say, our ancestors toiled and struggled through untold and long-lasting hardships to deliver their progeny, you, here to where you are so you can have the opportunities and the ever-brighter futures the generations of your ancestors hoped for, worked for, and achieved. You and your opportunities are their achievement, and I urge you to keep in mind thoughts of not wanting to let them down. You don’t live it up now and then throw away the chance your ancestors gave you. Your job is to survive first, and build empires later. You accept the tough times so that you may continue to earn opportunities to work to build more and more goodness into your life – be that through the completion of more dreams, the building up of more enterprises, the satiation of more curiosity, the fulfillment of more adventure, etc. The tough times help you to savor the good times more. When the ship is on choppy seas and might go down, you hold on tight and work twice as hard. Our ancestors didn’t raise us to throw in the towel. As far as I have ever seen, modern-day Homo sapiens did not evolve with a gene for quitting.

You are set for all the challenges that fighting for life brings. Let’s repeat it – death really is the easy way out. You fall asleep; you get a bullet; cancer kills you; some choose suicide; some accept aging and its effects as an inexorable given. The hard truth here that we should be prepared to acknowledge is: accepting death is the true cowardice, no matter the circumstances. Fighting it and choosing life is the true courage.

Critics of indefinite life extension, don’t put on a snide, condescending face and tell me that you aren’t afraid of death, because you are, too.

By your own knee-jerk flippancy, reactionary admission, you are also afraid of life. You’re afraid of death, and you’re afraid of life. You say, right to us, all the time, that you don’t want to bear to deal with the drastic changes, you don’t want to live without all your friends and family around, you don’t want to live with war still being a reality anywhere. You can’t stand all the jerks and the dangerous people, and rich people, or tyrants, controlling you for one decade longer than a traditional lifespan. The thought of it makes you want to jump into your grave right now to get away from this big, bad, scary life.

You, my friend, are afraid of life. Living scares you. You think of life and you cower. You see the challenges of life and you’re too scared to face them. You wouldn’t dare form and join teams and initiatives to meet those challenges on the intellectual combat fields of dialectics and action. You don’t have what it takes. Life isn’t for you. It’s not your thing. So love your death, fear your life. Do that if that’s what you want.

I am afraid of death. It scares me to think of losing my life. I value my life. I have no shame in that. That is the reasonable thing to do. What I have shame for is that anybody would think that being afraid of death might possibly be something to mock.

You mock us for being afraid of death. We are afraid of death; it’s a logical and positive thing to be afraid in the face of it. It reminds a person to take action against danger. It’s your being afraid of life that is to be mocked. So stand up and tell us how afraid you are of living. We promise not to look upon you with too much shame, and we promise to lend you a hand if you need help crossing over to the land of reason.

We once thought the Earth was flat or that all planets revolved around Earth. Many people who have threatened to disrupt tradition and the ways things have been at given times in the world’s history, have faced persecution and shunning for their discoveries. The life of helping move the world forward was hard because the work didn’t often ride forward in a parade of activism and public cheer and action. It would ride forward one hard-fought campaign at a time, one shovel-full at a time, at the hands of small groups of dedicated people working hard to ring the bell of freedom at each new level as humanity continued to expand out into the big picture of the universe and existence. They kept their minds fine-tuned and well-oiled with awareness and focus on what it means to be alive, gathered information, moved humanity forward in various ways, and proved the huge number of skeptics wrong. Life must have felt like hell for them, but they held on and won.

They chose to be courageous in their LIVES. Are you ready to open your mind and face some difficulties in the struggle for life? Would you rather fall asleep and miss out on miracles or stay wide awake and live them?

Eric Schulke was a director at LongeCity during 2009-2013. He has also been an activist with the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension and other causes for over 13 years.

Wioletta Karkucińska is an author and longevity activist in Warsaw, Poland.