I was reading Planet Gore over at National Review’s website and an item by Chris Horner caught my attention. A global warming hysteric named George Dvorsky has decided we need to do away with national sovereignty and democracy in the name of fighting the coming meltdown. From Dvorsky’s January 2010 bemoaning the failure of Copenhagen at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology:
I’d like to see the United Nations assemble an international and permanent emergency session that is parliamentary in nature (i.e. representative and accountable) and dedicated to debating and acting on the problem of anthropogenic climate change (a sub-parliament, if you will). The decisions of this governing board would be binding and impact on all the nations of the world. The chances of outright failure (like the one in Copenhagen) would be significantly lessened. Instead of ad hoc conferences, the emergency sub-parliament would conduct a series of ongoing debates over proposed legislation that would ultimately result in internationally binding agreements.
That should read, “imposed agreements.” Once again, we are told that the crisis requires destroying democracy and imposing global governance.
Nothing new here. We’ve seen such sentiments often expressed. But the name rang a bell. “George Dvorsky,” I thought. “Where have I run across him before?”
Ah! I heard him speak at at a transhumanist conference in 2006, arguing for “uplifting” animal consciousnesses into sapience and thence into computers to eliminate suffering. I wrote about it for the Weekly Standard in “The Catman Cometh” (no link). Here’s what Dvorsky said:
“As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance non-human animals and bring them along with us into advanced postbiological existence. There will be no middle road that we can take; humanity will either have to leave animals in their current state of nature or bring as many sentient creatures along into a posthuman future. A strong case can be made that life and civilizations on Earth have already been following this general tendency and that animal uplift will be a logical and reasonable developmental stage along this continuum of progress.”
We will never upload our own consciousnesses into computers, much less those of animals. But Dvorsky, like all transhumanist true believers, takes these fantasies very seriously.
As he does global warming hysteria: We have discussed here how certain political predilections tend to accurately predict where one will stand on the issue. Radicals overwhelmingly embrace it and the most Draconian “solutions.” Why might that be? I think at least in part, because they so loathe the status quo. Hence, radical transhumanist (now there’s an oxymoron) Dvorsky’s freak out over the collapse of Copenhagen and his undemocratic and globalist proposal.
