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 (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.

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.

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.

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.