Category Archives: politics

Off-Guardian article about Naked Singularity and Euthanasia

The Ethics of Euthanasia Are Complicated: I Speak from Experience

Over twenty years ago, my own father—who had exhausted every treatment for throat cancer—alone with no family to comfort him, took a toxic cocktail he mixed up on his own. He lived in the Bible Belt, where euthanasia is not only illegal, but inconceivable. Although the drugs severely disabled him, he took over a week to finally succumb, during which time he and the family suffered great pain.

At the time, I wished that there had been someone or some agency to help.

In such a situation, where euthanasia is illegal, the family is vulnerable to predators. I wrote a novel Naked Singularity in which I explore this eventuality: a male night nurse sees an opportunity to take advantage of a daughter who is desperate to end her father’s suffering. As when abortion is illegal, DIY strategies don’t often work out so well.

Read more.

Great 2015 Interview with Kevin Barrett about Locus Amoenus

With the recent release, finally, of the Locus Amoenus audiobook on all listening platforms, it’s time to reacquaint my readers with that 9/11 novel. Among the many interviews I gave in 2015, this remains my favorite. Barrett, a 9/11 truth activist, is also a very well-read academic, whose appreciation for literary works is notable.

“Until now, the only 9/11 themed novel of high literary quality was Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Locus Amoenus is the best fictional treatment of 9/11 yet. It’s hilarious, darkly ironic, playful, deeply moving.”  –Kevin Barrett

The audiobook is available on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.

New 9/11 Article on Free The People

Having gone through the Co\/iD-I984 debacle, many people have lost trust in the media and government. And they are wondering if the news wasn’t trustworthy about past emergencies, such as the attack on 9/11.

In the article linked below, which appears on Free the People, a new media organization, I discuss my decision to write Locus Amoenus, a dark satire about 9/11, which was published in 2015.

This week, the audiobook has finally been released on all listening platforms, including Spotify, Nook, Kobo, Libro, StoryTel, Hoopla, and Google Play.  (Not yet on Audible. Soon.)

2023 Was the Year of the ChatGPT-4 Scare. What’s Next?

2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)  Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth. Continue reading →

My Off-Guardian article about Locus Amoenus & Co\/id-1984, The Musical goes viral

Just before the anniversary of 9/11 this year, I wrote and article for the Off-Guardian about how literary works can be useful for neutralizing the brainwashing effects of propaganda. Please click over to Off-Guardian to read it and come back when you’re done.

As most of my readers know, my 2015 novel, Locus Amoenus, which was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (by the publisher, don’t get too excited), retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  It’s a high comedy, written to lure in the Atlantic Monthly subscriber, to trap the Vanity Fair reader with my erudite and clever prose. Once inside the story, I have them.  They cannot unsee the scenes I paint. Continue reading →

Free Range Humans

In my latest paper, “Free-Range Humans: Permaculture Farming as a Biosemiosic Model for Political Organization,” I apply the lessons of my field to governance and economics.  The title is a mouthful, I know, but it’s actually a pretty accessible read. I offer this as an alternative to the Great Reset, which proposes to centralize all assets under the control of a Corporate State and, essentially, make us into livestock. 

Abstract: Modern agricultural approaches attempt to substitute biological self-reinforcing networks, which naturally sustain healthy food economies, with technology that seeks to control nature — not work with it. Artificial solutions (caging, pesticides, genetic engineering) tend to address symptoms of problems that the artificial approach has itself created. The great error of modern agriculture is the assumption that Nature is not intelligent. In fact, we can learn much from natural smart technologies that far out-perform recently invented artificial “smart” technologies. These lessons can also be applied to other political and economic systems, allowing self-organization to foster creativity and intelligence in the populace at large.

Download PDF.

 

 

Strange Recital podcast features Chapter One of Locus Amoenus

This month the Strange Recital features Ben Jorgensen reading Chapter One of Locus Amoenus. Following the reading, the show hosts, Tom and Brent, interview Victoria Alexander about writing that novel and working on the sequel.

“As you drive northeast through Dutchess County in upstate New York, farm scenes strike calendar poses: leaning barns, well-tended white Victorians, winding roads tunneling through overhanging maples.”

A pastoral paradise… but is there something dark under the surface? Troubles in America manifest in the personal. Let Hamlet tell you about it.

Should we let Artificial Intelligence decide for us?

“AI, Stereotyping on Steroids and Alan Turing’s Biological Turn,” by V. N. Alexander, in The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence

The fact that AI has not yet passed a Turing Test has not prevented it from being sold to the public as a superior kind of intelligence capable of handling vast amounts of data and therefore capable of making “evidence-based” decisions about human behavior. There is no basis for this claim. AI uses advanced statistics to fine-tune generalizations; it is a glorified actuary table, not an intelligent agent. At the time of his death in 1952, Alan Turing was exploring the differences between biological intelligence and his initial conception of AI. This paper focuses on those differences and sets limits on the uses to which current AI can legitimately be put.