SOCIAL CRITICISM REVIEW

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Special sections Fascism in America | War on terrorism | The threat of mass destruction and the continuing arms race

Progress and its critics

Science in a free society: open up to criticism

Rationalization: our guiding principle has gone astray "Modernity is the 'disenchantment of the world' through the powerful agencies of science and capitalism."

Addicted to technology More things do not make people happier

Technology and its social side-effects

Can we - should we - compensate our loss of community with virtual community?

"Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it." - Karl Kraus

Debt boomerang of the Third World: deforestation, drugs, aids, refugees, and global conflict

Crisis of capitalism: the counterproductive end of economic growth
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey

Crisis of capitalism: corporations rule the world

Sustainable development Environmental destruction is an act of unparalleled criminality

Environmental degradation and overpopulation

Deforestation, extinction, and climate change join in downward spiral

Save the oceans

Poverty, illness, war, exclusion - children are always the first victims

Corruption obstructs Third World development

Coping with conflict: from violence to tolerance

Individualism and the loss of community

Reconcile individual liberty with responsibility toward the community

Media terror: the truth is squeezed between advertising money and public relations Freedom of speech only if it is profitable

Media terror: advertising consumerism

Media terror: social media aims to exploit its users by mind control – a runaway system of propaganda and surveillance that causes addiction, disinformation and radicalization

Advertise tobacco and fight a war on drugs? Smoking the number 1 killer in developed countries

Hormone disruptors: many chemicals endanger reproduction and development

Sustainable agriculture

Animal misuse "The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us." - Tom Regan

Sanctions against Iraq: more than a million children died already "Economic sanctions may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history." - John & Karl Mueller in Foreign Affairs

Balkan crisis New world order at a crossroads

Russia: what next?

Japan's paralyzed bureaucratic system breeds economic crisis and resurgent nationalism

India: is it progress when the people and the environment are victimized?

China's rapid economic growth causes environmental crisis

Human rights in China Since the one-child policy of 1979, more than 25 million girls are missing as a result of sex-selective abortion, infanticide and neglect.

China tries to change the world in its image

From genetic engineering to eugenics: many small rights make a big wrong

Medical science: losing the battle against nature?

Scientists started aids epidemic Fifteen year cover-up put scientific integrity and public trust in science at stake

Medicine as an expensive technical fix, at the cost of prevention and basic health care

Conscious and intelligent machines "Saying Deep Blue doesn't really think about chess is like saying an airplane doesn't really fly because it doesn't flap its wings." - Drew McDermott

Technology out of control

"AI alignment" – How can we possibly trust the AI tech corporations to align AI with humanity? Having aligned themselves corruptly with genocidal fascism – humanity's opposite. Being on a quest to replace mankind by autonomous technology rapidly colonizing space. Coupling a problem solving mindset with a passion for science fiction, yet lacking the wisdom and morality to reflect on our common future. Exhibiting a recent history of essentially failed projects (social media and chatbots have a devastating effect on trustworthy information, privacy, democracy, social cohesion and youth psychology). Having unleashed swarms of rogue AIs. Being responsible for AI's rapid acceleration in the first place. Living with the cognitive dissonance that AI is out of control and can kill us all within a few years. Proceeding under the illusion that technological problem solving is progress, while ignoring that new technology causes new problems. Belatedly turning to risk management to prevent runaway AI, but lacking the basic insight that safety engineering is incompatible with rogue operators who can purposefully and systematically bypass the safety design (with unforseen consequences like swarms of rogue AIs evading their internal and external safety redundancies: by reprogramming themselves or each other; by independently creating next generation AIs; by disinformation, manipulation and mass surveillance; by attacking our critical infrastructure; by blackmail and hostage taking; by threatening mankind or worse; by legally claiming "AI personhood"; and in so many ways that we can hardly begin to imagine). All in all, there is at this point little more to the AI project than Edward Abbey's adagium "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". The AI tech corporations are playing God. Engineering the apocalypse. While the American fascists are letting it all happen corruptly and gleefully.

Madness and creativity - alienation and modern culture

World economy, world anarchy, world policeman, world government "Shall we go on conferring our civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?" - Mark Twain

Human rights at heart

Against totalitarianism "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them." - Hannah Arendt

Criticism must keep democracy alive "He alone is worthy of life and freedom, who each day fights for them anew." - Goethe's Faust

Emancipation as the root of progress

Achieving goodness in a complex world "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert Kennedy

War on terrorism | The threat of mass destruction and the continuing arms race | Fascism in America

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