RSA Daily

For atheists, rationalists and secular humanists in Australia

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Good morning ,

If you look carefully, you can see that we (in our river boat) are cruising above the road below. In 1992, an incredible engineering feat was finally accomplished: connecting the Rhine-Main rivers on the north side of the Franconian Jura mountains with the Danube river on the south side. 170 kilometres, with 16 locks, some as high as 25 metres, making the canal the highest point on earth navigable by commercial boats from the sea. Clever humans.

Lead stories

"The ABC has catastrophically undermined its authority and independence by permitting journalists to post personal commentary on the corporation’s digital outlets, and to parade their egos on social media .. The ABC’s real problem is competence, or the lack of it, and a failure to recognise that staff cannot have a foot in both the fact and opinion camps." Could not agree more. The ABC has lost quality and gained only notoriety.

"There is a popular misconception that dementia is an illness where people become “pleasantly confused” .. in the later stages, people can have difficulty swallowing and food, saliva or liquid can get trapped in the lungs or airways .." Our opponents are of course "horrified" at the thought of allowing those facing the prospect of dementia the right to an Advance Care Directive that instructs VAD when the time comes. They ought to tell that to the relatives of watching a loved one going through the 'horror' of choking on their own food, saliva or vomit as their body breaks down.

If you've never listened to one of the RSA's podcasts yet, try this one. Hugh Piper is Program Lead at the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue. He proposes an idea to better reflect our increasingly diverse population and improve our standing with our non-Christian neighbours: "a very civic and secular answer to this question of how does the state give people the time and space to celebrate events and days that are important to them but do so in a way that is genuinely equal across all people?"

"Whether one is a socialist or a conservative or a centrist, or anything else, one should be committed to upholding the principles of the Enlightenment .. it is crucial to stand up for those values now. This is the age of Trump and Orbán and Putin, the age of left-wing identity politics, the age of Ayatollah Khamenei and Xi Jinping, the age of Islamism and jihadism—in short, an age where Enlightenment ideals are being challenged on all sides."

Other stories of interest

A Republic? - YES; a Christian Republic? - NO

Brian Morris writes, "We saw overt examples of predatory Christianity from MPs such as Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott and others .. but the problem of defending progressive social policy comes from covert parliamentarians of devout faith .. most avoid any display of openness and honesty about their religious leanings, so the public at large remains blind to religious influence .."

We need to stop treating AI like humans - Rationale Magazine

The first step is to stop calling it 'Artificial Intelligence' as if algorithms like ChatGPT are actually intelligent. Call them what they are: LLM ('large language models'). 

Experiment Reveals How The Mediterranean Diet Works at The Cellular Level

It's the good fats!

Got a comment on any of these stories? 

Write to me at president@rationalist.com.au

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