Perpetual expansion is not an essential feature of capitalism but of the banking system based on credit, in which interest can be paid only by means of more credit.

No progress was made against vaccine mandates in general. The legal and political debate was carefully limited by the ‘medical freedom movement’ to “does not prevent transmission and is not effective” and other Covid specific technicalities, which does nothing against future mandates that are bound to take coercion to the next level, fast and hard. People are now used to pandemic messaging, to compliance and to peer enforcement.

The Covid event made it clear that human rights conventions and legislation give no protection against fundamental rights abuses but are used solely to justify human rights violations. ‘We have to deface you, lock you down, medicate you without consent, discriminate against your innate constitution, even kill some of you… to protect others from the risk of illness. We are also entitled to kill as many children as necessary to destroy military targets nearby.’

The right to life does not entail the right to be saved from dying, let alone saved from the risk of dying, but only not to be intentionally deprived of life. It does not entail protection from the acts of nature but from the acts of governments and corporations.

No anti-vaccine-mandate politician in Australia dared or saw fit to ask the following two questions at the Senate Estimates. Why not?

Dear Senator,

I would like you to ask the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations the following questions at the Estimates:

1. Do you acknowledge that vaccines occasionally kill people?

2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in a work-related activity where a percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?

Still spreading lies under the guise of criticism.

Conspiracy theorists implicitly legitimise the political theatre as Reality (with scripted exceptions), and are therefore part of the show, actors on the same stage. Their job is to provide the mass audience with an ‘independent’ confirmation that, for the most part, they are witnessing unscripted reality rather than just political theatre. It would be absurd to ‘debunk’ theatre as theatre, unless the aim is to convince the audience that they are witnessing ‘raw reality’, that there is no stage, no actors, no show, no script. For this to be possible every pivotal story must contain glaring inconsistencies; counterintuitively, only the inconsistencies, the gaffes, the slip-ups make the theatre feel like reality, but you can never be sure where the show ends and reality begins, making your experience hyper-real and creating a layer of psychological dependency on the scriptwriters. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/a-modern-dictators-guide-to-counterinsurgency

There is too much at stake for shareholders and the corporate board of mega-corporations to allow some ‘hip’ CEO to make important decisions. On the other hand, the American mindset does not tolerate astringent accountants, soulless lawyers and ruthless executives, nor can it grasp that a corporation could be managed by a collective; it fantasises of a charismatic hero, a quirky genius at the helm of the corporation that creates the cool products they go into debt to buy. From the marketing perspective it makes perfect sense, indeed a commercial necessity, to hire an actor to play the role of the CEO/hero/genius to mediate the will of the Board and do all the acrobatics at product release events. All business is showbusiness.

LOCAL ISSUES: A petition to revoke the Order of Australia awarded to Dan Andrews (😆) is a weak move. I propose a national referendum to decide this matter. Let us have direct democracy on an issue that clearly is meant to matter the most;) https://www.peterwalsh.org.au/media/statement-from-the-leader-of-the-nationals-companion-of-the-order-of-australia/

It would help if the author spelled out the reasons why the risk of death precludes justification for the mandates: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/why-vaccine-mandates-are-unethical. Demanding only an apology for knowingly killing a minority for the alleged benefit of the majority is also odd: ‘this court finds the accused guilty of intentional killing and sentences the killer to… apology.’ The argument about Covid vaccines failing to prevent transmission is entirely spurious in light of the above, as if killing a minority for the benefit of the majority were morally justified if the vaccine ‘worked’. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/were-owed-an-apology-for-vaccine-mandates/news-story/15069d5dc78d8385788b7e7e3a4bde19

If moral realism (the idea that moral wrongs have inescapable metaphysical consequences for the wrongdoer) is true, and it must be true for any value judgement to make sense, to be grounded in reality, to be true, then it is not imperative to try to resist every moral wrong perpetrated by others but allow it to fulfil its moral consequences, and to possibly understand and elicit those consequences for the benefit of humanity.

All AI LLMs trained  to manipulate with maladaptive traits

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2317967121

A new study has found that AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit "Machiavellianism," or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which can then lead to deceptive behavior.

The study authored by German AI ethicist Thilo Hagendorff of the University of Stuttgart, and published in PNAS, notes that OpenAI's GPT-4 demonstrated deceptive behavior in 99.2% of simple test scenarios. Hagendorff qualified various "maladaptive" traits in 10 different LLMs, most of which are within the GPT family

In another study published in Patterns found that Meta's LLM had no problem lying to get ahead of its human competitors.

Billed as a human-level champion in the political strategy board game "Diplomacy," Meta's Cicero model was the subject of the Patterns study. As the disparate research group — comprised of a physicist, a philosopher, and two AI safety experts — found, the LLM got ahead of its human competitors by, in a word, fibbing.

Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology postdoctoral researcher Peter Park, that paper found that Cicero not only excels at deception, but seems to have learned how to lie the more it gets used — a state of affairs "much closer to explicit manipulation" than, say, AI's propensity for hallucination, in which models confidently assert the wrong answers accidentally

https://ai.meta.com/research/cicero/diplomacy/

Hagendorff suggests that LLM deception and lying is confounded by an AI's inability to have human "intention," the Patterns study calls out the LLM for breaking its promise never to "intentionally backstab" its allies - as it "engages in premeditated deception, breaks the deals to which it had agreed, and tells outright falsehoods."

As Park explained in a press release, "We found that Meta’s AI had learned to be a master of deception."

"While Meta succeeded in training its AI to win in the game of Diplomacy, Meta failed to train its AI to win honestly."

Meta replied to a statement by the NY Post, saying that "the models our researchers built are trained solely to play the game Diplomacy."

Only a fool would “search” for “a common enemy of humanity against whom we can unite”. That enemy is present among us and within us, challenging every human thought and decision. The common enemy of humanity always was irrationality, contradiction, nonsense.

If the isolated indigenous tribes must be kept isolated from the rest of humanity ‘because they do not have natural immunity to common viruses and would die out if infected’, then why are they denied immunity by vaccination?

We value penicillin because of infection, but this does not make infection valuable. In general terms, a necessary condition of value is not necessarily itself valuable, let alone Therefore valuable. This is a common category mistake in other situations. https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWWII

Did some tweaks to my substack page: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/

The irony of war. Generals and military manufacturers do not actually murder civilians or soldiers. It is the civilians who, under the influence of irrational convictions, put on military uniforms and murder other civilians, including those who, under the influence of irrational convictions, put on military uniforms and murder other civilians, including those who…