The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, not aliens or any other mysterious forces

The pyramids of Giza have exercised the imagination of Anglophone nations, and their Western counterparts, for decades. The so-called mysteries of the pyramids have permeated popular fiction for a long time. When I tell people that my background is Egyptian (Armenians from Egypt to be exact), I know what is next; the inevitable and wide-eyed questions from my interlocutor about pyramids.

You see, when my late father migrated to Australia from Egypt, the first thing he did was build a house in the shape of pyramids……and if you believe that, I suggest you seek psychiatric help.

Discovering lost civilisations

The appeal of finding lost civilisations is durable and longstanding. We like to uncover lost worlds, and certainly archaeology is the study of the human past. There are long extinct worlds just waiting to be uncovered. Pseudoscience manipulates this healthy curiosity by taking it into dead ends, such as the mythical Atlantis.

The claim – or rather hallucination – that aliens built the pyramids, along with other ancient structures, is nothing new or original. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and practising egomaniac, made the ‘aliens built the pyramids’ claim in 2020. The Egyptian archaeological community, in so many words, told Musk to go take a running jump. The new boss of X/Twitter did his part in amplifying misinformation.

Zahi Hawass, veteran Egyptian archaeologist, commented that the pyramid builders were not slaves, as popular imagination would have it, but a dedicated workforce. The notion of slaves building the Egyptian pyramids stems from the fictional Hebrews-enslaved-in-Egypt portrayal in the Old Testament.

Steven Novella, neuroscientist and science blogger, writes that the aliens built things claim does contain an element of racism. Nonwhite civilisations are not given the credit for possessing the scientific and technological know how for building complex and impressive structures. The aliens built it trope is easy to deploy and requires no further scrutiny.

Notice how we in the West never ask how the ancient Greeks built the Parthenon in Athens, or the Acropolis of Rhodes, were built – no alien explanations required here. The Colosseum of Rome – was that built by aliens?

Those questions never arise because we in the Anglophone nations view ourselves as cultural descendants of a continuum starting in Greco-Roman times. They were smart enough to build their own structures. Funnily enough, the aliens only constructed complex structures in Egypt, or Mesoamerica, or sub-Saharan Africa.

How were the pyramids built?

That is a longstanding question, and numerous commentators, from Herodotus onwards, have been perplexed by this question and the enigmatic pyramids. The Egyptians certainly had all the requisite engineering technology to build the pyramids; using levers, wheels, pulleys and so on. How did they haul and lift such enormous blocks of stone over miles and secure them in place? A news item elaborating some recent archaeological research may have the answer.

A long-dried up branch of the Nile, a waterway, was the superhighway used by the Egyptians for constructing the pyramids at Giza. Researchers from North Carolina university, led by Professor Eman Ghoneim, have found a 64-km branch of the Nile, covered over for centuries by farmland and desert. The pyramids at Giza, 31 in all, are clustered in an area west of the Nile.

This new information regarding the river landscape helps scientists answer how the pyramids were built – water power was the main method of transportation.

An ancient water superhighway

This recently discovered branch of the Nile, called Ahramat, is in line with the ever-changing landscape. Yes, I know, we think of deserts as timeless and unchanging. Yet, mapping the environment of alluvial plains, obscured by centuries of cultivation and urban expansion, can reveal surprising results. The Ahramat flowed into the western desert floodplains of the Nile, close to the pyramids.

The pyramids were built over a thousand year period, commissioned by different pharaohs. They were the tombs of royalty, designed to enforce the legitimacy of dynastic authority. The pyramids of Giza, concentrated near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, are located at an accessible location given the course of the Ahramat – a mega water highway and power source.

A word about Pythagoras

Every school student is familiar with the theorem that bears the name Pythagoras. The latter, a Greek mathematician from the Hellenic island colony of Samos, has been cursed by generations of students. The famous theorem, memorised by all of us going through high school, was known to the ancient Egyptians (and Babylonians for that matter). Samos, the island from which Pythagoras hailed, had extensive commercial exchanges with Egypt.

Various accounts of Pythagoras’ life explain that he traveled to Egypt. To be sure, the ancient Greeks were familiar with geometry and engineering – Euclid and Archimedes stand out. Pythagoras’ innovation was to take the practical mathematics of Egypt, which the latter developed in abundance, and place it on a metaphysical plane of abstract reasoning.

Numbers became an underlying framework for interpreting the cosmos, and mathematical mysteries were integrated into a semi-mystical religion. No Jehovah of the monotheistic cousins was required, just an overwhelming fascination with the infinite mystery of numbers which allegedly produced the apparent order of natural world.

The cult of Pythagoreanism has died out, but its remnants continue to mutate in the form of numerology. As for the pyramids – the Egyptians built them, based on the mathematical knowledge and engineering resources they had.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, W B Yeats, and writers who take on political subjects

Creative writing is a huge umbrella term for all sorts of writing – including novels and poetry. Fiction writing is not necessarily political, and creative writers can choose their subject matter from the wide gamut of human lived experiences. However, there are novelists and poets who cross the boundary into the political, and their aesthetic sense influences, and is in turn influenced by, politics.

There is no shortage of materials covering the endlessly fascinating topic of writers, novelists and poets who have gone political.

We all know that Ezra Pound, arguably the most famous poet to emerge from the United States, was an out-and-out fascist. But how many of us know about the flamboyant, extravagant and determined proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio? The latter, known as the Bard (Il Vate) in Italy, D’Annunzio achieved fame as a poet, writer, soldier and a practitioner of aesthetic showmanship in politics.

Born to a wealthy family in 1863, D’Annunzio displayed a flair for poetry at an early age. He also developed an overinflated ego, with a penchant for theatrics. He lived, according to the motto of one of his characters in The Child of Pleasure, life as a work of art. Combining poetry with a decadent lifestyle – he was a lecherous, womanising profligate – he developed a national following in his home country prior to WW1.

He built and cemented his reputation as a novelist with his pre-WW1 literary output. From 1889 to 1910, D’Annunzio produced a succession of novels, elaborating his interpretation of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the superman. Let’s clarify one misconception here; the Nietzsche’s concept of the superman has been misappropriated by far right and ultranationalist political forces, mainly the Nazi party, to buttress their malignant view of a white Aryan superior race. That is bunk, along with the far right, drunk on bad misunderstandings of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s concept of the superman was not racial, but aesthetic and moral. Repudiating Christian morality as that of the slave, he was searching for a process of ethical self-discovery. The Ubermensch was not part of a collective; Nietzsche despised socialism and all notions of equality. He equally despised nationalism and antisemitism. D’Annunzio, a political figure, adopted the concept of a superman to mean a political strongman, directing the strength of the mass of people.

D’Annunzio was a proponent of Italian irredentism; the reclamation of lost Italian lands to create one unified Italy. The Austro-Hungarian empire, a protagonist in WW1, controlled territories in the northern Balkans populated by Italians. D’Annunzio, a combat veteran of WW1, got his chance to put his philosophy into action.

In the aftermath of WW1 and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, its territories were up for grabs. Believing that they had been cheated out of their ‘rightful’ claims for territory, D’Annunzio and his arditi – war veterans – marched in their thousands to the coastal town of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) and declared a republic. It was to last 15 months.

This experiment of D’Annunzio’s prefigured Mussolini’s Italy in many ways. Setting up a corporatist, anarcho-syndicalist type structure, Fiume’s working class residents were organised into nine vertical ‘syndicates’, or corporations at the service of the state. Giving speeches from the balcony of his palatial residence, D’Annunzio incorporated the Roman salute – the outstretched right arm – in his theatrical displays.

The Fiume republic soon fell into decrepitude; attracting occultists, futurists, drug traffickers (cocaine became a major commodity) and practitioners of non-traditional sexual enthusiasm. Drug addiction was a major problem, superseded only by the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases. D’Annunzio was the supreme commander in chief of this mutilated schmozzle.

The sizeable Croatian population of Fiume was encouraged to leave – sometimes forcibly. The Italian government in Rome, finally running out of patience with D’Annunzio’s extravagance, the Italian army marched into Fiume and shut down the entire social experiment in 1920.

All the daily poetry readings encouraged by D’Annunzio, the mandated Italianised cheers copying the war cry from Homer’s Illiad, made for a remarkable spectacle, but was no substitute for practical administration.

D’Annunzio died in 1938, but the ideas he germinated, particularly the corporatist model, lived on in Mussolini’s Italy.

To be sure, D’Annunzio was not the only European bard attracted to the ideas of fascism. Ireland’s most famous poet, William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was writing his poems while the Fiume experiment was still in full swing. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, has been quoted as nauseam by centrist political commentators as an expression of exasperation with the terrible after effects of revolution and civil war.

With its melancholic observations of how ‘things fall apart’ and the ‘centre cannot hold’, Yeats’ The Second Coming has acquired new resonance in the aftermath of Brexit and MAGA politics in America. But this deployment of his poetry overlooks an important component of Yeats’ outlook; he was a fascist sympathiser.

His conservative perspective led him, in the interwar years, to uphold the Irish Blueshirts as a political alternative to what he perceived was the chaos and crass consumerism of liberal capitalism. The Blueshirts, modeled on their German Brownshirt counterparts, were fanatically anticommunist, clashed with the IRA and the political Left, and advocated a corporatist style state along the lines of Mussolini’s Italy.

Yeats, in the 1920 and 30s, sympathised with the ostensible order and stability that the Blueshirts represented in contrast to the decadent liberal capitalist orthodoxy. Rather than a champion of democratic liberalism, Yeats supported the vision of the Irish Blueshirts. Although later distancing himself from the authoritarian tendencies of fascism, Yeats became, like his idol the Anglo-Irish Edmund Burke, a champion of conservative traditional hierarchies and order.

I am definitely not suggesting that writers be canceled or their works destroyed because of their political beliefs. I am suggesting that we need to be mindful of the political context from which writers and novelists emerge, if only to better understand the messages they are trying to convey.

Military acronyms, cynical hubris, and the propaganda of imperial wars

Every conflict produces its own set of acronyms; usually regarding weapons systems developed by the military. For instance, the US produced Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), provided to the Ukrainian government, were used in strikes on Russian targets.

The THAAD system – Terminal High Area Altitude Defence – is a type of missile defence system provided to South Korea by the US. There have been important and sustained protests by Koreans against the deployment of THAAD.

South Korean politicians and protesters are demonstrating their fundamental commitment to anti-imperialism, knowing full well that the stationing of THAAD on their territory is not a defensive posture, as Washington would have us believe, but an aggressive act in a widening imperialist adventure.

Each deployment of NATO weapons, American or otherwise, is accompanied by a fanfare of simplistic rationales about tipping the war. The sending of HIMARS – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – was supposed to have turned the tide, enabling the Ukrainians to drive Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine.

The exact opposite has happened, with Russia constructing a steel wall in Ukrainian territory. Indeed, Ukrainian forces have been retreating, even though they possess the latest and greatest NATO weaponry.

Currently, the much hyped capabilities of ATACMS are in the news, in the latest cycle of ‘they are going to turn the tide’ shenanigans.

Such language is eerily reminiscent of the media releases and carefully orchestrated political stunts of the former US client state of South Vietnam. Headquartered in Saigon, the major corporate media parroted the lines – tipping the balance, turning the corner, on the edge of victory – but all these phrases turned out to be deceptive illusions. The parallels between Kyiv and Saigon are deepening with every passing day.

In fact, the battlefields in Ukraine have become the graveyard of US and NATO weapons systems about which American and European politicians have bragged. That is the assessment of a North Korean government official, and Pyongyang has been keeping a close eye on the purported effectiveness of American weaponry in Ukraine – know thine enemy.

Hubris is a condition characterised by excessive pride, an arrogant belief in one’s own invincibility or invulnerability. The Roman Empire suffered this kind of malaise; and now the collective imperialist West is exhibiting this mass delusion. What am I referring to?

Sending much vaunted NATO weapons to Kyiv, plus slapping the Russian economy with sanctions, was supposed to have brought about the rapid economic, political and military collapse of the Russian state. Numerous and repetitively boring headlines, screaming about the impending defeat of Russia and its economic implosion, dominated the corporate media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2022.

That kind of systematic gloating has evaporated as the reality of Kyiv’s failures, and Moscow’s resilience, sets in. Not only did Moscow learn from and adapt it military tactics since its defeats in the initial aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, but has reorganised its military Keynesian economy to produce weapons at a faster rate, and technologically more advanced, than anything Kyiv and its NATO backers could offer.

Kyiv’s much heralded counteroffensive spluttered and stalled in the first months of 2024. The NATO sponsors of the Kyiv regime have failed to maintain an adequate pipeline of armaments because of their own industrial manufacturing deficiencies. The Russian economy, saddled with the burden of increased military spending, grew by only 1.7 percent. Meagre growth to be sure; but the EU economies, unencumbered by sanctions, grew by barely 0.3 of a percent.

European Commission president and expert PR practitioner Ursula von der Leyen is now demanding state subsidies for armaments production. Fair enough, but that violates a central precept of neoliberal capitalism, that private companies are routinely more efficient that state industries.

The partisans of free market capitalism are stating the quiet part out loud; giving money and weapons to Ukraine is a cheaper way to weaken Russia as a competitor, while the human toll is borne by Ukrainians, not westerners.

The collective hubris of the imperialist west today is in many respects a repeat performance of the hubris which characterised the ruling circles in 1930s Berlin in the lead up to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. Let’s examine the words of Seymour Hersh, veteran journalist and commentator, on the conduct of Washington in our times:

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

What the American government is telling its people, about imminent victory, and the reality on the battlefield, demonstrates the rank hypocrisy of those in power. This dissimulation is highly reminiscent, as Conor Gallagher writes, of the disconnect between the Nazi party’s expectations of a quick victory over the USSR in 1941, and the stubborn resilience of the latter’s population.

Expecting the military campaign and occupation of the Soviet Union to be a cakewalk, Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and the Nazi party hierarchy were stunned by the fierce resistance of the Soviet people.

Not only did they fight back, but these subhuman Asiatic hordes, (as Nazi ideology portrayed them), these people enslaved by Jewish-Slavic Bolshevism, organised their economy effectively, producing weapons of high quality in a short space of time, and inflicted serious defeats upon the mighty Nazi war machine.

The hubris of the West today mirrors that of the German government in the 1930s. Am I suggesting that Russian DNA is superior to that of other ethnicities? No, I am not. Am I suggesting that we all genuflect in front of a gigantic portrait of Vladimir Putin? No, I am not. If we want to understand Putin’s way of thinking, we can start by analysing one of his favourite philosophers, Ivan Ilyin (1883 – 1954). A Russian nationalist, anticommunist and conservative monarchist, Ilyin was expelled from Russia by the Bolshevik authorities in 1922.

It is very sad to see thousands of Ukrainians suffering trauma because of this war. At least 20 000 Ukrainians are amputees, a figure comparable to rates of injury during the intractable trench warfare of WW1. It is perverse of the Anglophone-EU axis to claim respect for Ukrainian lives, only to provide money and weapons for a NATO proxy war guaranteed to increase Ukrainian casualties.

Elon Musk, Tesla corporation’s dysfunction, and ego-nomics

Billionaire and practicing narcissist Elon Musk, along with his flagship corporation Tesla, are getting consistently bad press coverage. The failings of Tesla company’s electric vehicles (EV)s, involving recalls of millions of Tesla cars and cyber trucks and malfunctioning autopilot software, are splashed across the pages of the media.

The problems with these electric vehicles, and the dysfunction of Tesla corporation are indicative of a problem which can rightly be called ego-nomics.

Elon Musk is a long time promoter of himself. An ultra libertarian offering hallucinations in the purported ideology of futurism, Musk is trading on Silicon Valley-driven big tech dreams. Paris Marx, writing in Time magazine, described the promotion of Musk as this visionary entrepreneur developing the IT future of humanity.

The electric vehicle, among other Musk company assets, was seen as an example of technology and the capitalist market combining to solve a host of problems. The ecological breakdown could be reversed, according to Musk and the fans of billionaire entrepreneurs, by relying on innovative technologies being taken up by the market. Musk is there at the forefront of this frontier – a kind of real life non-military Tony Stark.

However, Tesla’s fortunes are declining precipitously, and its vaunted EV is plagued by numerous problems. This observation is not just a product of a fertile imagination. Writing in The Verge magazine, Andrew J Hawkins reports that Tesla’s profits and sales are down, the company laid off 14 000 workers earlier this month, and its much-hyped new EV, the supposedly affordable ‘Model 2’, has been cancelled.

In December last year, Tesla recalled 2 million of its self-driving cars because of problems with its Autopilot software. Numerous crashes and fatalities were found to have been caused by autopilot failures and driver distraction. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is opening a new investigation to determine if the December recall actually did enough to address the safety hazards of the autopilot software system.

Even the name ‘autopilot’ is a bit misleading, says the traffic regulator, because it implies capabilities the software system does not have. Fatalities arising out of drivers putting too much faith in autopilot are nothing new. In 2019, George McGee was driving in Florida in a Model S on autopilot. Distracted by a phone call, he dropped his mobile and went to retrieve it.

The autopilot did not detect the road ending, and the car proceeded to crash into a stationary vehicle, killing the occupant of the second car. McGee survived to tell his story.

Driver error is always a factor in traffic accidents. However, human error does not absolve Tesla’s autopilot product of culpability. Transferring guilt to human error as a result of corporate production is a tactic used by big companies to avoid legal liability.

As the gun lobby always claims, ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. This casuistry deftly sidesteps any legal consequences for the use of a corporate product.

Autopilot-caused deaths have been under the spotlight for some time, so Tesla corporation was fully aware of these problems.

When considering debates around AI, which occur when discussing and developing self-driving cars, we can find help from an unexpected and distant source. Ibn Sina, (980 – 1037 CE) the Persian Muslim philosopher (Latinised as Avicenna) wrote voluminously on the issue of personhood.

What constitutes a human, as opposed to say an animal? Personhood involves having an ethical responsibility. Consciousness of intentional action is a component part of being human.

Such considerations about ethical responsibility, and culpability, are being discussed by AI software developers and engineers. If a car is being guided by its autopilot software while it has an accident, can the driver evade responsibility for any resultant damage or deaths?

Corporations have and should be held responsible for any fatalities or damage caused by their products. The billionaire class, exemplified by Elon Musk, play up the image of an everyday ‘self-made man’ to promote public sympathy for himself, and his corporate activities. Public relations and marketing are powerful tools in winning over hearts and minds – it’s called propaganda in other nations.

There is one country that has shifted the majority of its vehicle-owning population, and car production, away from the internal combustion engine and over to EVs – China. Tesla faces strong competition from Chinese EVs, because the state has strongly subsidised the production and sale of said vehicles.

The shock-inducing headlines regarding Chinese EV production are in abundance in the corporate media. China comes to ‘dominate the world’ in electric vehicles, screams one particular headline in a technology magazine. Strangely enough, when it comes to lithium battery production, the profit-making media discover and circulate news regarding the environmental problems associated with that particular resource extraction.

Funny to observe the barons of the fossil fuel industry, one of the most ecologically destructive industries in the world, don a green veneer when speaking about lithium batteries.

Instead of building upon the cult of the private entrepreneur as a device to achieve community improvements and public outcomes, let’s look beyond narrow ego-nomics. The latter is a term created by David Korten, a former professor from that bastion of Kremlin Communist propaganda – Harvard Business School. He writes that we have adopted an economic model which elevates personal profit as the ultimate goal of socioeconomic activity.

In contrast to ego-nomics, how about we prioritise the well-being of the very environment that makes economic activity possible? An ecological perspective in economics is desperately needed to avert climate catastrophe. Elon Musk’s ultimate purpose – similarly to the other billionaires – is to exploit resources for private profit. Holding them to account for the damage they have caused would be a positive start.

Daniel Dennett, empirical proof, the workings of the mind, and ultra-Darwinism

Daniel Dennett (1942 – 2024), American philosopher, popular science writer, and one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the New Atheist movement, has died. Let us respect his remarkable talent and breadth of knowledge, and his courageous insights into human consciousness, but also maintain our disagreements with his advocacy of social Darwinism.

He wrote a number of important books on the topics of evolution, human consciousness and free will. He was also a leading critic of organised religion, particularly in the United States and its evangelical form. Dennett, author of Brainstorms (1978), Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), established a solid reputation as a scholar who could convey complex scientific ideas for the general public.

He was a philosopher of mind, and starting from a materialist platform, he wanted to explain the workings of the mind in material terms. Removing any reference to an immaterial soul or mysterious mind-force, he advocated a reductionist approach – the mind is what the brain does. Thoughts are the result of synapses – electrochemical activity in the brain.

However, there is a problem. In covering the problem of consciousness, he employed an ultra-Darwinian mechanistic approach. Dennett was an old-fashioned 19th century materialist.

Panglossian adaptationism

Everything, according to ultra-Darwinians, is the product of natural selection operating on the organism, its DNA being the ultimate arbiter of its destiny. Adaption is the supreme and only goal of each feature of an organism – noses evolved on which to rest spectacles. Why do we rest spectacles on our noses? Because noses were adapted for that purpose.

Circular reasoning, like that of the hamster stuck in the spinning wheel, makes us active to be sure. However, we are expending all that energy, we are getting nowhere.

The current use of a trait is one thing; the reason it evolved and provided adaptation for an organism is quite another. To use a modern analogy; the internet was created to decentralise computer communications and facilitate exchanges in the case of a nuclear attack; only later was it used for social media purposes.

Gould and his colleague, the late geneticist Richard Lewontin (1929 – 2021), made a famous criticism of just-so adaptationism stories. While accepting the power of natural selection and selective pressures on organisms as a factor in driving evolution, they cautioned against a Panglossian view of nature. What does that mean?

Pangloss was a character from the novella Candide, by Voltaire. Foolishly naive, Pangloss reasoned that everything is as it should be – why do we have legs? We wear breeches, so that is what they are for. Gould and Lewontin use this analogy to describe Dennett’s Panglossian adaptationism when exploring evolution.

The other major analogy Gould and Lewontin used was spandrels – the triangular spaces, usually found in pairs, between the top of the arch and the rectangular frame. These are byproducts of adaptation, serving no particular purpose. We could reverse engineer an adaptive explanation, but would that be the reason the mosaic spandrels formed?

Biologists were more careful to evaluate their findings of organismal adaptations found in nature. Spandrels are the result of architectural constraints, not some teleological purpose. They can later be adapted to satisfy some utility, to be sure. Indeed, Dennett’s adaptationism has replaced the traditional teleological argument that everything was created by god for specific purposes.

Dennett was a proponent of the selfish gene – an organism was simply the product of DNA’s unstoppable quest to replicate itself and reproduce. The phenotype was the inevitable product of the organism’s genotype – in short, biology is destiny.

Darwin, while a strong advocate for the role of natural selection in evolution, also recognised its limitations. He and his colleague, Alfred Russell Wallace, admitted that natural selection could not account for that most uniquely human feature, the one characteristic that sets Homo Sapiens apart from the animal kingdom – language. The latter was not a singular, explosive event, but rather had its origins in earlier nonverbal stages. Intentionality and intersubjectivity arose prior to the formation of a fully functional language.

Dennett and the late Stephen Jay Gould, the palaeontologist and popular science writer, had an ongoing feud regarding what Gould called Darwinian adaptationism. The ultra-Darwinians, of which Dennett was a proponent, ascribed monumental powers to natural selection. Human characteristics, an organism’s physiology, the Earth, the universe – all can be explained by recourse to natural selection.

Darwin himself, in his later writings, lamented that numerous people focused solely on natural selection as the exclusive mechanism of evolution.

New Atheism

No, I am not suggesting that Dennett’s books are worthless – far from it. He was an innovative, brilliant philosopher who adhered to a materialist position. This should not blind us to his limitations, and we must not be shy about expressing our differences with the rightward deterioration of the New Atheist movement.

Emerging from the twin dangers of 9/11, and the fundamentalist George W Bush presidency, Dennett became an outspoken critic of supernatural and religious perspectives, and strongly stood up for empiricism. Joining Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, the new atheism provided a rationalist counterpoint to the rising tide of superstition-driven ideology. Proof and experience through the senses were taken as the starting points of truth.

The reassertion of rational thinking and scientific proof as the ultimate source of knowledge, as opposed to divine revelation, New Atheism, and Dennett with it, provided an alternative platform for freethinkers. As the years went by, Dennett, succumbing to the pervasive and poisonous logic of the ‘war on terror’, went along with New Atheism’s deterioration into an adjunct of US imperial warmaking.

Convinced that Western civilisation, with its purported European scientific superiority, provided intellectual clothing for US imperial wars overseas. While Dennett denounced all religions, somehow it was Islam that got him worked up and exercised his energies the most.

Dennett was undoubtedly a talented, versatile and energetic philosopher with a powerful intellect. Always challenging and engaging, his books contributed to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Advocating an empirical outlook in an America sliding into religiously based fundamentalism took exceptional courage.

Tackling the big issues in philosophy and science, his example is inspirational. We may not always agree with the answers he provided, but he had the tenacity to explore terrain that most of us fear to tread.

RFK Jr, anti-vaxxers, and the descent into fascist contrarianism

What would you say if the surgeon general of a state – the chief public health officer – advocated using leeches in medical treatment, denied the effectiveness of vaccines, and ignored a measles outbreak? You would expect that official to be dismissed and prosecuted for medical negligence.

Yet in the state of Florida, US, the surgeon general Joseph Lapado, has done the above. Measles has spread throughout the community, and he has advised schoolchildren with measles to still attend school. Quackery is steadily replacing evidence-based medicine, and the public provision of health is being eroded. Lapado’s pseudoscientific approach has resulted in an entirely preventable tragedy.

Lapado is a political protege of the ultrarightist Florida governor and pseudoscience peddler, Ron DeSantis. The latter has a long track record of attacking publicly provisioned health care and education services. He has agitated for book bans, particularly on those books which explore the history of racism and inequality in the United States. After denying the reality of Covid-19, he has peddled Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theories regarding its origins.

When public officials are abdicating their responsibility to uphold and enforce public health measures, then those officials should be held to account. In Australia, I can rely on the tap water for drinking and washing – there is no danger that I will be infected by cholera. The latter is a waterborne disease, and there is strict water filtration and testing systems in place for the water supply in Sydney. Cholera has been basically wiped out.

On that basis, can health officials declare that the battle against cholera is over, and abolish the water filtration procedures needed to maintain the drinking water’s hygienic condition? Can we now stop funding the medical research, stop teaching and research into virology and pathology needed to contain and eliminate cholera? Should we now declare the time has come to ‘stop living in fear’ of cholera, and just get back to normal?

The example above is meant to convey a basic point; water quality is one of the outcomes provided by public and community governance. A healthier population means increased participation in the economic system, less disease means a better quality of life and improved community welfare.

Defunding and abolishing the publicly funded provision of health care – and its eventual privatisation – is a long term goal of the conservative Right. Its political allies in this regard are the libertarian ultrarightist forces.

What has all this got to do with the Left? Numerous left wing writers and activists – the term left wing being a broad brushstroke – have moved into the rabbit hole of COVID denial MAGA ultrarightism. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, among many others, have descended into a contrarian position from the libertarian ultraright. It is no exaggeration to call it a fascist contrarianism.

Robert F Kennedy Jr. a long term environmental lawyer and activist, has metamorphosed into a MAGA supporting far right political figure. Starting with the respectable-sounding position of vaccine hesitancy, RFK has moved decisively to the far right.

His journey is indicative of a widespread phenomenon – leftists who move right wards on an anti scientific trajectory. They remain contrarians – fascist contrarians, ultra libertarian opponents of publicly funded services, such as health care and education.

Starting with anti vaccine tropes, RFK Jr has gradually moved into far right and fascistic circles, expanding the swamp of anti-lockdown zealotry. It is not wrong to ask questions about vaccines. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, anyone studying the workings of the human immune system – all these people ask about vaccines.

Am I suggesting that we shout at people who are vaccine hesitant, pounding the table with our fists? No, of course not. When vaccination programmes, as RFK Jr has done, are smeared as methods of social control, or falsely accused of causing autism, then that is the first step down into the dead end of ultrarightist contrarianism.

RFK Jr, upheld as a rival Democrat candidate to US President Joe Biden, is rallying disaffected Democrat voters. From anti-vaxxer positions, RFK has gone on to recycle fictitious and slanderously false allegations that the Covid virus is an ethnically targeted bioweapon. Avoiding Chinese and Jewish communities, the Covid virus satisfies the political agenda of Jewish elites by reducing the numbers of Anglo Americans, RFK Jr asserted.

While subsequently backtracking from this antisemitic and preposition claim, he has done his level best to assist the MAGA Republican side. RFK Jr has enthusiastically embraced the so-called free market as a solution to ecological and health issues in the community. His seemingly progressive stance masks a deeply conservative agenda. Promoting market solutions and attacking government expenditure on health care and the environment is music to the ears of the billionaires.

Speaking of billionaires, RFK Jr recently appointed Silicon Valley lawyer, the ultrawealthy Nicole Shanahan, as his running mate. A devotee of libertarian fantasies in the free market, Shanahan is a believer in the necrotic futurist vision of tech industry entrepreneurs.

Jeet Heer states that RFK Jr made a direct comparison between Shanahan’s business acumen and that of his entrepreneurial grandfather Joseph P Kennedy. The latter’s corrupt business dealings, ties to gangsterism, antisemitism and fascist sympathies were ignored.

RFK Jr’s opposition to the misnamed ‘big pharma’ – which should accurately be called corporate pharma – does not stem from his motivation to make medicine cheaper for working people, but from his recycling of antivaccine misinformation. A politician who is putatively anti war, he has never actually opposed any of the imperialist wars waged by the United States.

His candidacy is a serious misdirection of outrage, and is more in line with the ouroboros – the serpent that eats its own tail.

Havana syndrome, solar eclipse, conspiracy thinking and the public understanding of science

Do you wake up in the middle of the night? Do you have a sore throat, coughing? Does your dog wake up howling? Do you experience fatigue, depression, migraines or joint pain? Then the answer is simple. Since at least 2016, the corporate media has told us there is one inescapable condition – drumroll, please – Havana Syndrome.

First detected by the intrepid staff at the US (and Canadian) embassies in Havana, Cuba, this mass psychosis and clustering of anomalous health events has its origins in that all-purpose villainous stereotype – the Russians. Malevolent agents of Moscow have deployed secretive yet powerful sonic devices – ultrasound, or microwave, take your pick – to cause mass psychogenic illnesses targeting American and Canadian personnel.

This is a very appealing conspiracy theory; a hostile foreign government, utilising a mysterious and purportedly powerful technology, inflicts a mass malady on the ‘good guys’. Sonic weapons blasting out microwaves to distort our brains is the stuff of entertaining Hollywood movies. There is just one problem with all this – the CIA admitted it was completely false.

Whatever medical conditions arose among the American or Canadian personnel, alternative and plausible explanations are available. There are no foreign powers behind the psychogenic conditions. No, brain injuries, no physiological abnormalities – nothing, However, conspiracy theories take on a life of their own, so that it seems like we are forever playing a game of whack-a-mole.

Sonic attacks and solar eclipse of the heart

The sonic boom scenario propounded by advocates of Havana Syndrome are serving a direct political purpose – to increase domestic opposition to the Cuban government, and its supporters in Moscow. Claiming a foreign directed conspiracy against American and Canadian citizens relies on, and inflames, fears of foreigners with high-power technology, whether microwaves, sonic sounds, or some other sinister sounding terminology.

When you promote conspiratorial thinking in one area, you can rest assured that this pattern will carry over to other topics. That was the case with the April 8 solar eclipse, an astronomical event guaranteed to fascinate millions of people. Rather than be awed by the science of this celestial event, millions of Americans turned to conspiracy theories about the alleged political and sociological ramifications of the eclipse.

To be sure, solar eclipses have long fascinated humankind for centuries. Numerous non-Western civilisations have recorded observed solar eclipses. Multiple gods and supernatural characters have been created, prompted by the celestial event. The ancient Irish carved images of a solar eclipse into stone at the Loughcrew Megalithic cemetery at Meath, Ireland, in 3340 BCE.

The ancient Chinese, Babylonians, the Maya – observed and kept meticulous records of solar eclipses. Carved in stone, Maya hieroglyphs depicted astronomical events, and they tried to make sense of mathematical patterns. Solar eclipses were interpreted as omens for sovereigns and rulers; the Chinese who observed the eclipse described the sun being ‘eaten up.’

The Chinese recorded observations of the eclipse on tortoise shells and oxen shoulder blades. It is no secret that eclipses have been noted as a sign of end times. The beginnings of an apocalyptic rapture, the solar eclipse is referenced obliquely in the biblical account the book of Joel; the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood as the lord himself returns. Assyrian and Babylonian priest-mathematicians went to great lengths to predict the next solar eclipse from records on clay tablets.

The most famous eclipse is that of 1919; British astronomers, observing the solar eclipse from Principe off the coast of Africa, confirmed Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Gathering confirmatory evidence of the gravitational warping of light, that eclipse made Einstein a world famous scientist. He would go on to travel the world, giving lectures and media interviews. Einstein theorised that a large enough body, such as the Sun, has enough mass to cause light to bend.

However, the latest solar eclipse did not prompt a flurry of scientific enquiry. The floodgates opened for a veritable tsunami of conspiracy theories, particularly from the ultrarightist MAGA cesspit. From theorising about an apocalyptic end times, to concerns about Biden declaring martial law, the internet was ablaze with the hobby horses of the extreme right.

In the age of retweeting and Instagram social media influencers, thousands of years of accumulated scientific knowledge – in this case of solar eclipses – is summarily thrown out. Alex Jones, far right commentator and narcissistic fantasist, pumped out numerous conspiracies, alleging that the Biden administration was shutting down the mobile phone network as a prelude to a coup. MAGA delusional trolls shouted about how your kids would turn transgender, that the end of the world was upon us.

When millions of people are getting their advice from Instagram and TikTok, repudiating scientific knowledge becomes a serious societal problem. Yes, we can all see that there are extensive educational resources on the internet. The Smithsonian publishes its own magazine. The articles, videos and podcasts of Scientific American are readily available.

In this age of Covid denial and conspiracism, scientific evidence is being overwhelmed by social media obstinacy. We need to return to institutional analysis and the preponderance of evidence. Secret weapons deployed by foreigners is a recycled trope, leading us to speculate all sorts of social implications. Let’s listen to the scientists, not the Instagram-celebrities.

The Spanish civil war, and Britain’s cynical veneer of nonintervention

April 1 this year marked the eighty-fifth anniversary of General Francisco Franco’s declaration of victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). There is an abundance of educational materials covering the basics of the political-military conflict, the causes of the war, and its role in presaging the major eruption of conflict in World War 2.

I will focus on an underreported aspect of the civil war – the policy of nonintervention adopted by Britain, during the conflict between the Spanish Republican government and the nationalist military rebels. Why is this important?

Britain, we are taught in the Anglo majority nations, is an exemplar of a democratic system. The result of centuries of careful, gradual reforms, the British version of democratic governance – the Westminster system, a model for others to follow. Its institutions, undergirded by the highest and purest principles of democratic accountability, such as the venerated Magna Carta, and the primacy of parliament – promotes its values as a robust alternative to the nightmare of authoritarianism.

In 1936, Spanish democracy was under threat. The Republican government faced an attempted coup d’état by rebellious ultranationalist officers, betraying the constitution they swore to uphold. The country split into warring regions between those loyal to the democratically elected government, and those rallying to the fascist military rebels.

The British government had a unique opportunity to rally to the defence of the beleaguered Republican authorities. The Spanish ultranationalist officers were fully supported by the fascist powers of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Military supplies flowed uninterruptedly into the arms of the Spanish military rebels. Hitler and Mussolini witnessed an opportunity to topple a democratic government in Europe and gain a supportive fascist ally.

While the latest military technology and elite German troops flowed to the Francoist rebels, the British government adopted the farcical and cynical posture of nonintervention. Under the veneer of respectable neutrality, the Tory government denied effective military and political support to the Republican side.

Class perspectives certainly played a role in the English government’s decision to avoid sending help to the besieged Republicans. British officials staying in Republican controlled areas spoke of a French Revolution style ‘reign of terror’, as the largely centre-left authorities sought to redistribute land to the poor peasantry and confront the power of the landed Catholic Church. The latter was a particularly reactionary bulwark of the ruling class, with priests acting as spies in parishes, informing on labour organisers and political activists.

The Catholic Church gave its blessing to Franco’s ultranationalist rebellion, and approved of its actions. This included the 1937 blockade of Bilbao, a Republican stronghold in the north. The population faced mass starvation, a deliberate policy inflicted by Franco’s nationalist military.

While British seafarers bravely broke the fascist blockade, risking life and limb to convey badly needed supplies to the residents of Bilbao, the British government stated that the Royal Navy could not guarantee the safety of merchant shipping in Bilbao.

British merchant ships were indeed attacked and sunk by Franco’s forces. Merchant personnel and British sailors were killed – and still the Tory government did nothing to change its cynical policy of nonintervention – an arms embargo against the Spanish Republican forces. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, but there was to be no change to London’s policy.

It is not within the scope of this article to go into to the labyrinthine political differences in the Republican side, particularly between the Moscow-loyalist Communist Party, and the Trotskyist aligned Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM in Spanish). The latter was made famous by George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, based on his experiences as a fighter for the Spanish Republicans.

Orwell was a talented writer, but his political perspective was deeply problematic. In a letter written after the civil war ended, he admitted that he regarded the POUM with too much sympathy. Be that as it may, the Republican cause was hobbled from the start by the British arms embargo. No matter the ideological leanings of the various parties on the Republican side, being hogtied by your putative allies is a serious obstacle when facing a militarily disciplined enemy,

In 1939, the war was over, Franco declared victory, and unleashed a statewide campaign of terror against his Republican opponents. Thousands were killed, imprisoned in concentration camps – thousands more were driven into exile. Franco presided over one of the most corrupt, nepotistic regimes in the world, with the military officer caste lining its pockets.

London’s policy of nonintervention was a major factor in ensuring the victory of the ultranationalist side in Spain. None of this is intended to dismiss the contribution of the courageous international brigades – including British – for the Republican side.

They gave their lives in defence of the democracy that London abandoned. We must always remember and honour the heroism of the international brigades in the fight not only against fascism, but also against the indifference of our own governments.

Ancient DNA, fossils of extinct hominins, and the mosaic pathway of human evolution

Since I was a teenager I have been interested in the topic of origins; the origin of humankind, life on Earth, the planets, the solar system and the cosmos. No, I am definitely not suggesting that I possess all the answers to these questions. No single individual can make such a claim. My late father had books on these topics, in particular human evolution, on the bookshelves. I read as many of them as I could.

Times have changed since I was in school, pouring over biology and geology texts, examining pictures of Richard Leakey holding hominin fossil skulls in his hands. Fossils are crucial, to be sure, but they are not the only way to uncover previously unknown hominin species.

When it comes to the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens, no other subject – with the possible exception of cosmology – has changed so much in the last fifty years.

Discoveries of extinct hominin fossils have changed our simplistic picture of human evolution. The linear model of from ape to human is not only wrong, but outdated. We are all familiar with the wonderful discovery of Lucy in 1974. But that is only one part of an increasingly complex, multifaceted picture.

Ancient DNA and modern humans

The impact of genetics – specifically ancient DNA – on the field of human origins cannot be overestimated. The dizzying array of discoveries of ancient hominins have revealed a complex picture; not only did Homo sapiens coexist with other, now-extinct hominins, they interbred with them.

Jordana Cepelewicz, writing in Quanta magazine in 2019, makes an astute observation. With the advent of ancient DNA, and the analysis of their contents, reveals that Homo sapiens are a mosaic combination. Rather think of the human genome as a blueprint, think of it as a tapestry, combining fragments of DNA from our now-extinct hominin brethren. Yes, humans migrated out of Africa; but we also coexisted with ancient lineages of hominins.

Ancient DNA analysis is not just the basis for Jurassic Park out-of-control threats to human existence Hollywood scenarios. Long before ancient DNA became the basis of fictional blockbusters, biologist and anthropologist Svante Pääbo was developing the techniques of ancient DNA analysis which would open up the burgeoning field of paleogenetics.

Denisovans

Extracting, sequencing and cataloging ancient DNA would lead to the discovery that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals. Not only that, but a completely new ancient hominin species was discovered, the Denisovans. Initially, the identification of Denisovans occurred based on the mitochondrial DNA extracted from a finger bone fossil, excavated from Denisova Cave, Siberia in 2010.

Since then, Pääbo and other researchers have done more work uncovering the mysterious Denisovans. Not only did they coexist with us, they also interbred with Neanderthals. The fossils of Denisovans are rare, and work on them has been painstaking. Nevertheless, scientists are starting to paint a fuller picture of the Denisovans, our evolutionary cousins.

Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times on the Denisovan origins, states that while fossils for the extinct lineage may be hard to come by, they make up for it with DNA. Indeed, Denisovan teeth and bones have been located in Laos and Tibet, indicating that they could survive in variegated climates and altitudes. It was not until 2019 that researchers found that Denisovans lived outside their ancestral home in Siberia.

In fact, Denisovan DNA fragments are extant in the genomes of indigenous people of Papua New Guinea. Researchers, in 2019, identified Denisovan DNA in modern day Papuan genomes, specifically how Denisovan contributions towards the immune system of Papuans. Not only did the Denisovans travel far and wide, they adapted to the various diseases they encountered along the way.

Darwin, fossils and the human genome project

It was the publication, in 1871, of Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, that really got tongues wagging about human evolution in the English-speaking world. Darwin barely mentioned human origins in his most famous work, On The Origin of Species. He covered all sorts of non-human species in his Origin book; barnacles, ants, aardvarks, lizards – you name it. He tiptoed around the topic of human origins, leaving that for a later date.

He tackled human evolution head on, in his Descent volume. The fossil record at the time was exceedingly thin, and he made a number of observations that have stood the test of time. Basing his case on comparative anatomy, embryology and behaviour, he hypothesised an African origin for Homo Sapiens.

So while he refrained from posing the definitive answer, he laid the foundations for others to follow. Darwin of course, never knew about DNA; that finding would not reveal itself until years into the future.

If there is one discovery that can truly be called epoch-making, it is the complete mapping of the human genome in 2001. While it is impossible to summarise the entirety of the genome project in one blog article, we can make a number of pertinent observations.

The unraveling the human genome was accomplished by much hyperbole about unmasking our true selves. The genome was compared to a blueprint, a CD-ROM of instructions if you will, and humans were supposed to be totally summarised by this finding.

Let’s not delude ourselves that we are reducible to genes. Language and culture, based on our labour power, is what makes us truly human. It is impossible to understand the emergence of humanity without understanding the decisive role of labour – bipedal locomotion freed up the hands from arboreal living.

To be sure, Neanderthals, Denisovans, even Homo Floresiensis – annoyingly nicknamed ‘hobbits’ because of their small stature – all demonstrated a level of toolmaking, symbolic production and the beginnings of stories and songs. As we uncover their genes, we need to make a careful analysis of their cultural environments, and the methods they used to shape it.

Copywriting, entrepreneurship, public service internet and the humanities

Why is everybody on LinkedIn claiming to be an entrepreneur, or intending to be one? Why cannot we take pride in the simple fact of being a worker? If entrepreneurship is not my passion, does that make me deficient in some way?

Copywriting involves, among other things, increasing brand awareness. Every corporation, big or small, wants to increase market share. Good copywriting is persuasive, whether it is business to customer or business-to-business. This kind of writing is great, and pays the bills. If this kind of entrepreneurship is your passion, then congratulations and best of luck to you.

I am a copywriter, but it is not my passion. No, I do not want to be an entrepreneur. Why not? Entrepreneurship consists of activity that is ultimately unfulfilling and emotionally draining – no offence to entrepreneurs and copywriters out there.

Entrepreneurship is all well and good, and if that is your passion, go for it. I do not find a sense of fulfilment in entrepreneurship, but in writing with meaning.

Persuasive writing for business

Please do not misunderstand – good copywriting is a necessary component of any business. What is an example of persuasive writing? Omsom. The latter is an Asian food restaurant business, and their web page contains great copywriting.

Leveraging their refugee background, the two sisters who run the business explain their commitment to cooking, which they learned growing up in their mother’s kitchen. Fleeing their native Vietnam, the Pham sisters have made a new ‘Phamily’ in the US. They have updated the traditional refugees-rags-to-riches story.

The people responsible for Omsom’s web page copy have done a fantastic job. It is a twist on the old story of penniless refugees becoming prosperous in their adopted homeland. Good copywriting will ensure repeat customers. I enjoy copywriting, but it is a job, not a method of achieving social connections.

I still describe myself as a writer. Using that word to describe my occupation feels archaic, a remnant from a bygone era. I should be using the term ‘content creator’. Writers belong to the early twentieth century and use a quill pen; today, content creators are the rage.

What is a content creator?

Since the rise of the internet, digital material is created for the intent of circulation. The instructional guides for using a software platform, the novels of George Orwell, and the videos of monkeys smelling their own fingers are all available for circulation. Clicks and likes have become ends in themselves. Clickbait has replaced cultural capital in big tech’s drive to turn the virtual crowd into individual consumers.

Public service internet

As a blog writer, I try to think of important topics, subjects which I feel are underreported. Yes, I use the internet to find topics. No, the problem is not using algorithms to search for news and long form content. The problem is that we have allowed big tech companies – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple – to monopolise the internet space and define it as a purely profit-driven mechanism.

I take notes (not on LinkedIn) about the subjects I read. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his appropriation by the far right; Max Stirner and his ideology of egoism and self-empowerment; the aristocratic rebellion that underpins the viewpoint of Plato’s Republic.

No employer or corporation has ever asked me to write about these topics. These subjects belong to the humanities, and cannot be monetised, even though the modern university is being steadily corporatised. The growth of social media is a mixed blessing; of course you can find the works of the great philosophers and writers, but you can also find the conspiracy theories, the misinformation and harmful content, amplified by the megaphone of the virtual crowd.

The deleterious impacts of social media are only just beginning to be understood. The increase in depression, anxiety, isolation in the age of social media connection may seem counterintuitive. Surely we are all better interconnected because of TikTok, Snapchat and the like? Actually, we are all consumers, and digital advertising focuses on the click, the brand name, the shallow engagement.

The above-mentioned philosophers are from the past, to be sure. Are they obsolete? By no means. Understanding the heavyweights of the past is essential if we are to comprehend our current predicament. I enjoy copywriting, but it is the humanities (or social sciences) that make me feel connected.

Not just consumers in a marketplace

There is no shortage of practical proposals to open up the internet as a public service broadcaster. The digital commons is far from just a utopian fantasy; treating the digital space as public infrastructure reduces the harms visited upon the public by the commercialised monopoly that we now confront. Indeed, back in 1922, when a little broadcaster called the BBC was founded, it was envisioned as a public pulpit, dedicated to education, information, cultural diversity as well as entertainment.

The new media of that time – radio and television – opened up new audiences, new collectives of people ready to receive messages and content. Many of the debates that were had then are being revisited today with the rise of social media. Let’s be realistic; the birth of the internet was not motivated by the public good, but by the ultra libertarian philosophy of the companies which evolved into the Silicon Valley behemoths we witness today.

Ironically, the Silicon Valley titans, upheld as exemplars of private industry initiatives, were actually seeded by government money and military-industrial startups. Using public money, the tech giants promote individualistic consumerism as an end in itself. Parasitising public infrastructure and turning it into a profit-maximisation business model seems to be a widespread practice, even at universities.

Please enjoy the clicking and browsing hobbyhorse that is the internet. Once in a while, get to a page, and then – stop, log off social media, and read a book.