News

Target partners with Satan supporter on new transgender clothing line

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Do you shop at Target? I stopped shopping there in 2004, when they banned the Salvation Army from their stores during the Christmas holiday season. At the time, I thought to myself “I wonder if this is being caused by an anti-Christian bias”. And then more stories came out showing that they really might be. Let’s take a look at some of Target’s actions, and decide whether we should shop there.

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

Since 2012, Target has happily stocked the front of its stores with pro-LGBT T-shirts, accessories, pet items, party supplies, and decor. In recent years, Target expanded the reach of messages like “trans people will always exist,” “queer,” and “live laugh lesbian” to the children’s section.

[…]Target furthered its commitment to advancing radical gender ideology this month when it partnered with a Satan supporter who called for the eradication of anyone who disagrees with the mutilation of children to supply transgender-themed merchandise to Target’s “pride” collection.

Target is collaborating with “the U.K.-based brand Abprallen and its designer “Erik,” a self-proclaimed “gay trans man”.

But is Erik really a Satanist?

One quick glance at the designer’s website and Instagram shows dozens of designs featuring satanic and sacrilegious symbols such as pentagrams, “Satan respects pronouns” T-shirts, “gay as hell” stickers, and stained glass windows covered up by “trans bodies are holy.”

“So for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences. They reject binary stereotypes and expectations. Perfect,” Erik wrote.

[…]One particularly graphic image on the designer’s Instagram shows a naked demonic creature with a horned skull and mutilated breasts.

In addition to promoting explicit evil, Erik often uses violent language and imagery, with products such as a “burn down the cis-tem” lighter, a “we bash back” mace, and “time’s up for transphobes” skull pins to call for action against people who take issue with radical gender ideology and the dangerous mutilation and castration it prescribes. Erik also sells merchandise promoting the murder of babies in the womb.

One can only infer from this that Target supports all this as well. And if you shop there, then so do you. I disagree with all of that, because I’m a Bible-believing Christian and a Constitutional conservative. So I don’t shop at Target.

This isn’t the first time that Target has gotten into trouble with Christians and social conservatives.

You can see it in their bathroom policies.

Breitbart reports:

The Target department store chain drew the ire of millions of Americans after it announced it was opening its bathrooms to transgender shoppers and employees and allowing them to choose whatever bathroom they feel like using at any given time.

And Christian Post notes:

With that in mind, FRC compiled a list of 21 cases reported in the U.S. stretching back to 1999, but most within the last 10 years, where men violated the privacy of women in bathrooms, locker rooms, and other private spaces.

The most recent case was reported on Jan. 17 by WPRI, concerning a man who mounted a camera inside the family bathroom at a Target store in Lincoln, Rhode Island.

Umit Cakmak, 41, of Providence, was arrested by Lincoln police and charged with video voyeurism, with reports noting that the man already had an active warrant for the same crime.

In a similar case from July 2016 in Idaho Falls, a man who identifies as transgender was arrested on one count of felony voyeurism for taking photos of another woman changing clothes at a Target store in Ammon.

And then of course there was the banning of the Salvation Army from the sidewalks outside of Target stores during the Christmas holidays.

Christian Post reports:

Target shoppers won’t be hearing the sound of bells ringing or a polite “Thank You” when they contribute to Salvation Army Kettle Drive this holiday season. The Salvation Army expects the enforcement of Target Corp’s non-solicitation policy to hurt projected donations and cutback the ministry’s services to the community.

[…]The decision will force many Salvation Army locations to reduce services to make ends meet. The Salvation Army in Metro Detroit has already suffered $1 million in income cutbacks this year and will lose the $220,671 in potential donations it collected last year at Target, which can fund 6,000 meals.

“We’re going to lose 112 days of food service for the hungry because of (Target’s) decision,” Russ Russell, Salvation Army executive director of development, told The Detroit News.

I’ll bet their Satanist friend really approved of that. Do you? Is it time to stop shopping at Target?

Polemics

Will computers and robots ever become self-aware?

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There is a very famous thought experiment from UC Berkeley philosopher John Searle that all Christian apologists should know about. And now everyone who reads the Wall Street Journal knows about it, because of this article. (Full text available at archive.md)

In that article, Searle is writing about the IBM computer that was programmed to play Jeopardy. Can a robot who wins on Jeopardy be “human”? Searle says no. And his famous Chinese room example (discussed in the article) explains why.

Excerpt:

Imagine that a person—me, for example—knows no Chinese and is locked in a room with boxes full of Chinese symbols and an instruction book written in English for manipulating the symbols. Unknown to me, the boxes are called “the database” and the instruction book is called “the program.” I am called “the computer.”

People outside the room pass in bunches of Chinese symbols that, unknown to me, are questions. I look up in the instruction book what I am supposed to do and I give back answers in Chinese symbols.

Suppose I get so good at shuffling the symbols and passing out the answers that my answers are indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker’s. I give every indication of understanding the language despite the fact that I actually don’t understand a word of Chinese.

And if I do not, neither does any digital computer, because no computer, qua computer, has anything I do not have. It has stocks of symbols, rules for manipulating symbols, a system that allows it to rapidly transition from zeros to ones, and the ability to process inputs and outputs. That is it. There is nothing else.

Here is a link to the full article by John Searle on the Chinese room illustration.

By the way, Searle is a naturalist – not a theist, not a Christian. Now, let’s hear from a Christian scholar who can make more sense of this for us.

Here’s a related article on “strong AI” by Christian philosopher Jay Richards.

Excerpt:

Popular discussions of AI often suggest that if you keep increasing weak AI, at some point, you’ll get strong AI. That is, if you get enough computation, you’ll eventually get consciousness.

The reasoning goes something like this: There will be a moment at which a computer will be indistinguishable from a human intelligent agent in a blind test. At that point, we will have intelligent, conscious machines.

This does not follow. A computer may pass the Turing test, but that doesn’t mean that it will actually be a self-conscious, free agent.

The point seems obvious, but we can easily be beguiled by the way we speak of computers: We talk about computers learning, making mistakes, becoming more intelligent, and so forth. We need to remember that we are speaking metaphorically.

We can also be led astray by unexamined metaphysical assumptions. If we’re just computers made of meat, and we happened to become conscious at some point, what’s to stop computers from doing the same? That makes sense if you accept the premise—as many AI researchers do. If you don’t accept the premise, though, you don’t have to accept the conclusion.

In fact, there’s no good reason to assume that consciousness and agency emerge by accident at some threshold of speed and computational power in computers. We know by introspection that we are conscious, free beings—though we really don’t know how this works. So we naturally attribute consciousness to other humans. We also know generally what’s going on inside a computer, since we build them, and it has nothing to do with consciousness. It’s quite likely that consciousness is qualitatively different from the type of computation that we have developed in computers (as the “Chinese Room” argument, by philosopher John Searle, seems to show). Remember that, and you’ll suffer less anxiety as computers become more powerful.

Even if computer technology provides accelerating returns for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t follow that we’ll be replacing ourselves anytime soon. AI enthusiasts often make highly simplistic assumptions about human nature and biology. Rather than marveling at the ways in which computation illuminates our understanding of the microscopic biological world, many treat biological systems as nothing but clunky, soon-to-be-obsolete conglomerations of hardware and software. Fanciful speculations about uploading ourselves onto the Internet and transcending our biology rest on these simplistic assumptions. This is a common philosophical blind spot in the AI community, but it’s not a danger of AI research itself, which primarily involves programming and computers.

AI researchers often mix topics from different disciplines—biology, physics, computer science, robotics—and this causes critics to do the same. For instance, many critics worry that AI research leads inevitably to tampering with human nature. But different types of research raise different concerns. There are serious ethical questions when we’re dealing with human cloning and research that destroys human embryos. But AI research in itself does not raise these concerns. It normally involves computers, machines, and programming. While all technology raises ethical issues, we should be less worried about AI research—which has many benign applications—than research that treats human life as a means rather than an end.

When I am playing a game on the computer, I know exactly why what I am doing is fun – I am conscious of it. But the computer has no idea what I am doing. It is just matter in motion. The computer’s behavior is just the determined result of its programming and the inputs I supply to it. And that’s all computers will ever do. Trust me, this is my field. I have the BS and MS in computer science, and I have studied this area. AI has applications for machine learning and search problems, but consciousness is not on the radar. You can’t get there from here.

News

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is stacking up achievements ahead of 2024 announcement

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I’ve been blogging about DeSantis’ achievements for some time, but a whole bunch of new ones just happened. I want to make sure that people have a good grasp on everything that he’s is accomplishing. How else would you choose a candidate for president, except by looking at what battles he’s fought and won? DeSantis has just visited Iowa and New Hampshire, and I’ll cover that too.

So, here come the stories.

High tourism and low unemployment:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office celebrated that Florida witnessed a record 37.9 million visitors in the first quarter of 2023, the highest ever recorded in a quarter.

That tally includes 34.6 million domestic visitors and 1.8 million international.

[…]Florida’s unemployment rate also held at a low 2.6% for April, which the governor’s office bragged is the lowest “among the top 10 largest states.”

Florida’s new six-week abortion ban:

In a recent interview, Trump said that the six-week abortion ban recently signed into law by DeSantis may be “too harsh” in the eyes of “many people within the pro-life movement.”

[…]“What are your thoughts on that?” DeSantis was asked.

[…]“As a Florida resident, you know, he didn’t give an answer about, ‘would you have signed the heartbeat bill that Florida did?’” he continued. “That had all the exceptions that people talk about the legislature put it in.”

[…]“I signed the bill. I was proud to do it. He won’t answer whether he would sign it or not.”

No sex-reassignment surgeries on kids:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill to ban sex reassignment surgeries and medications for minors Wednesday.

[…]State funds are prohibited from being used for these treatments. This includes state counties, municipalities, districts and commissions.

Physicians are required to receive written informed consent from adults receiving the surgeries or prescriptions.

The governor said it also gives the Florida courts temporary jurisdiction to intervene and halt procedures for out-of-state children.

“You have actually some states in this country that want to be a haven for these types of procedures, and even welcome minors without their parents consent,” DeSantis said. “We’re obviously doing the opposite here.”

No pronouns required in Florida schools:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law Wednesday that will prohibit a school from requiring students and teachers to use preferred pronouns and adds guidelines for books that citizens wish to challenge in schools.

“We’re not doing the pronoun olympics in Florida. It’s not happening here,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis said the law, HB 1069, makes sure that Florida students and teachers will “never be forced to declare pronouns in school, or be forced to use pronouns not based on biological sex.”

“There’s a lot of nonsense that gets floated around and what we’ve said in Florida is, we are going to remain a refuge of sanity, and a citadel of normalcy, and kids should have an upbringing that reflects that,” DeSantis said.

No kids at drag queen shows:

 Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law to penalize businesses and people who admit children into “adult live performances.”

[…]The law authorizes Florida to fine, suspend, or revoke the license of any public establishment that admits a child to “adult live performances” that depict or simulate nudity, sexual conduct, or lewd exposure.

Pre-game prayer is allowed:

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to protect youth sports in Florida on Wednesday, which will also allow high school teams to pray before games.

[…]“You have a right to free expression of religion. If government is denying your right to say a prayer before the game, they are infringing your speech, you’re not violating anything, but by doing that, and so for them to do it is discriminatory,” DeSantis said.

Add these actions to the list of previous DeSantis actions:

Finally, let’s see where DeSantis has been traveling to ahead of the 2024 GOP primaries.

Iowa:

“Governing is not about entertaining. Governing is not about building a brand or talking on social media and virtue signaling,’” said DeSantis at a fundraising event in Sioux Center. “It’s ultimately about winning and producing results.”

The Florida governor has emerged as the most formidable threat to Donald Trump’s securing the GOP nomination.

He’s presented himself to voters as a staunch conservative without Trump’s distinctive abrasiveness.

Trump was scheduled to host his own Iowa event Saturday in Des Moines, but canceled the event due to a tornado warning.

While Trump and his campaign have raged against DeSantis, the governor has been hesitant to criticize the ex-president who endorsed his gubernatorial campaign in 2018.

DeSantis told voters that in order for conservatives to secure victories in the upcoming elections, they need to remain focused on the issues and “reject the culture of losing,” appearing to reference Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.

“We must reject the culture of losing that has impacted our party in recent years. The time for excuses is over,” DeSantis told prospective voters.

“If we get distracted, if we focus the election on the past or on other side issues, then I think the Democrats are going to beat us again.”

And New Hampshire:

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis traveled to New Hampshire late this week where he met with voters, state lawmakers, and the state’s governor just days ahead of his anticipated announcement that he will be running for president in 2024.

DeSantis met with voters at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester where he was very well received by many who thanked him for what he has accomplished in Florida.

DeSantis, 44, focused on talking to voters in the Granite State about economic and family issues like school choice, tax cuts, crime, and inflation, The New York Times reported.

[…]DeSantis has been busy racking up large lists of endorsements in recent days, including 37 state lawmakers in Iowa, approximately 50 state lawmakers in New Hampshire, and 99 out of 113 Republicans in the Florida state legislature.

[…]“These fights are not easy,” DeSantis said. “I think when you look, there’s a reason why things have gotten crazy in this country, because there’s a lot of powerful people that want it to be, a lot of institutions push that direction. When you kind of step out and you speak truth, you get a lot of blowback for that, but I think what I found in Florida is no governor ever received more incoming, I would say in modern history, than me, during my first term, particularly with COVID, but it really went on after that, a lot of narratives generated.”

Interesting that he mentioned COVID, as Donald Trump recently criticized DeSantis for opening up his state, comparing him unfavorably to NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO. Yes, really. And you might remember that Trump issued commendations to “Operation Warp Speed” members, including Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci. Something to think about.