Excerpts from Consciencism

by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah

The eighteenth-century African philosopher from Ghana, Anthony William Amo, who taught in the German Universities of Halle, and Wittenberg, pointed out in his De Humanae Mentis Apatheia that idealism was enmeshed in contradictions. The mind, he said, was conceived by idealism as a pure, active, unextended substance. Ideas, the alleged constituents of physical objects, were held to be only in the mind, and to be incapable of existence outside it. Amo's question here was how the ideas, largely those of physical objects, many of which were ideas of extension, could subsist in the mind; since physical objects were actually extended, if they were really ideas, some ideas must be actually extended. And if all ideas must be in the mind, it became hard to resist the conclusion that the mind itself was extended, in order to be a spatial receptacle for its extended ideas. The contradiction is in the denial of the spatial nature of mind and the compulsion to harbor spatial objects in it. For in idealism it is not only our bodies which are in our minds, instead of our minds being in our bodies; the whole universe, to the extent that we can perceive or be aware of it, is neatly tucked away in our minds.

Kwame Nkrumah - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah

• Overview
• Overthrow
• Early life and education
• Return to the Gold Coast
• Ghanaian independence
• Ghana's leader (1957–1966)
• Exile, death, tributes and legacy
• Personal life

In February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to North Vietnam and China, his government was overthrown in a violent coup d'état led by the national military and police forces, with backing from the civil service. The conspirators, led by Joseph Arthur Ankrah, named themselves the National Liberation Council and ruled as a military government for three years. Nkrumah did not learn of the coup until he arrived in China. After the coup, Nkrumah stayed in Beijing for four days and Premier Zhou Enlaitreated him with c…

Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license

The Biography Of Dr Kwame Nkrumah: The Father Of African ...

https://ikonversace.com/the-biography-of-dr-kwame-nkrumah-the-father...

2021-07-21 · Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960 and President of the Republic of Ghana from 1960 to 1966. He was the leader of the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain its independence from Britain. He went on to become a leading figure in the campaign for a United States of Africa.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$T

Irish-born entrepreneur Mike Lynch facing extradition to US after ruling

Judge in London rules the software tycoon should be extradited to face fraud charges


Mike Lynch is facing US extradition to face fraud charges related to a 2011 HP deal. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Software tycoon Mike Lynch should be extradited to the US to face fraud charges stemming from the $11 billion sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard, a London judge ruled.

The US Department of Justice has pursued Mr Lynch over allegations that he dressed Autonomy up for a sale to HP by inflating sales. The Silicon Valley hardware giant acquired the software company in 2011 only to write down the value by $8.8 billion a year later.

Mr Lynch, who personally made more than $800 million from the HP deal, was “the leader of a corporate conspiracy,” the US said. He was arrested in February last year and has been on bail ever since.

The high-profile case has attracted significant political attention with lawmakers highlighting perceived imbalances in the US-UK. extradition treaty. Mr Lynch argues that a “very substantial measure” of the supposed wrongdoing took place in Britain.

The high-profile extradition will now be sent to the home secretary Priti Patel for her final decision on the matter. A Home Office press officer couldn’t immediately comment.

Representatives at Hewlett-Packard and Mr Lynch’s lawyers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lynch is also waiting for the verdict in a $5 billion London civil trial brought by HP. Judge Michael Snow said he would deliver his ruling without the civil verdict, calling it “of limited significance in the case.”

Judge Snow, the extradition judge, said he “quickly regretted” his initial decision to wait for the civil judgment.

“This is not nine weeks, this is months,” he said. “We will sink into the New Year and it will be two years since the arrest that judgment will be handed down.”

Mr Lynch was released on bail.

- Bloomberg

Malcolm X Series in the Works From Activist Icon’s Daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, Sony’s TriStar (EXCLUSIVE)

Joe Otterson 

© Courtesy of AP; Ilyasah Shabazz

A television series based on the life of Malcolm X is in the works at Sony Pictures Television’s TriStar, Variety has learned exclusively.

The series will be based on the novels “X: A Novel” and “The Awakening of Malcolm X,” both of which were co-written by Malcolm’s daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz. “X: A Novel” was also co-written by Kekla Magoon while “The Awakening of Malcolm X” was also co-written by Tiffany D. Jackson.

“X: A Novel” follows Malcolm’s life from his childhood — including his father being lynched and his mother being institutionalized against her will — up to his imprisonment at age twenty. “The Awakening of Malcolm X” picks up during his time in prison when he decided to join the Nation of Islam, ultimately emerging from incarceration as Malcolm X.

Shabazz will executive produce the series along with State Street Pictures’ Bob Tietel and George Tillman as well as 3 Arts Entertainment’s Jermaine Johnson and Molly Madden. will also produce. Jay Marcus with State Street Pictures will serve as co-executive producer with Ron Baldwin producing. State Street currently has a first-look deal with Sony.

Should the project move forward, it would not be the first time Malcolm X has been portrayed onscreen. Most famously, Denzel Washington played him in the 1992 Spike Lee film “Malcolm X,” for which Washington received an Oscar nomination for best actor. Most recently, Kingsley Ben-Adir played him in the Oscar nominated film “One Night in Miami.”

In addition to writing the two books that will serve as the basis for the series, Shabazz has also written the books “Growing Up X,” the children’s book “Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X,” and “Betty Before X.” She is a noted educator, activist, and motivational speaker. She is the co-chair of The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center located at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York, which was the site of her father’s assassination in 1965.

She is repped by Solis Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment, and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein + Selz.

This Syrian refugee wants justice after his brother was tortured and killed by Russian mercenaries.

By Sebastian Shukla and Jomana Karadsheh, CNN 

 2 days ago

In the central Syrian desert, an oil field has become a makeshift torture chamber. An unarmed man writhes in the dust, howling in pain. Four men in military fatigues pin him down and smash his hands and feet with a sledgehammer

.

© Brice Laine/CNN Abdullah's brother Mohamad was tortured and killed in Syria in 2017. Abdullah only found out what had happened to him months later, after videos surfaced online

.

© Brice Laine/CNN Abdullah spoke to CNN from an undisclosed location in order to keep his family, who still live in Syria, safe.

As he cries out for help, they taunt him in Russian, drowning out his agonized screams with laughter. In the background of the video, which was uploaded online, a nationalist Russian military song, "I am Russian special forces," plays.

The victim in this harrowing amateur video is Mohamad, a 31-year-old Syrian construction worker and father of four young children, who disappeared on his way home from a job in neighboring Lebanon in March 2017.

Mohamad's final words were those of the Shahada, a declaration of his Muslim faith.

The men who killed and decapitated Mohamad scrawled graffiti in Cyrillic on his lifeless chest. It said "for VDV and reconnaissance," a reference to the Russian airborne forces.

At least one of the men in the video has been identified by the independent investigative Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta as a mercenary from the shadowy Wagner group -- a private military outfit that has links to the Kremlin-connected oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as "Putin's chef" for his ties to the Russian President.

The Kremlin denies any connections to Wagner and insists that private military companies are illegal in Russia. Prigozhin has previously denied being connected to Wagner. Neither he nor anyone from his companies would talk to CNN in recent years despite multiple attempts seeking comment, including for this report

.

© Myrotvorets As Mohamad writhed in pain, his captors laughed as they tortured him.

"These people risk their lives and by and large this is also a contribution in fighting terrorism ... but this is not the Russian state, not the Russian army," said President Vladimir Putin in 2019.

CNN special report: Putin's private army

Russian forces have been operating in Syria since 2015, and there is substantial evidence to show that Wagner's presence in the country is connected to the Russian military deployment.

Analysts say it's inconceivable that Wagner would exist without Putin's approval. Indeed, its training camp in southern Russia is attached to a Russian special forces base.

Four years after Mohamad's murder, three NGOs from Syria, France and Russia filed a landmark legal case against Wagner for the role it allegedly played in the atrocity, as well as the perpetration of possible war crimes by the men seen in the video.

The lawsuit was filed in March on behalf of Mohamad's brother, Abdullah. It is the first time anyone has tried to hold a member of Wagner accountable for what rights groups say is a growing list of atrocities committed by the mercenaries, whose expanding global footprint has allowed Moscow to advance an off-the-books foreign policy in places like Syria, Ukraine, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique

Abdullah, a refugee who fled Syria in 2017, has never spoken publicly about his brother's killing before. He broke his silence in an exclusive interview with CNN, he says, to draw international attention to the tragedy that devastated his family.

To protect family members still living in regime-controlled areas of Syria, Abdullah requested that CNN conceal his full identity and the location of the interview.

"My brother is gone, he will never come back," Abdullah said. "I want the world to hear about my brother's case, so these criminals are held accountable."

Final phone calls to family

In one of Mohamad's last phone calls, in April 2017, he told Abdullah he had been detained by the regime as he crossed back into Syria, after working in Lebanon for about eight months. He said he had been taken to Damascus and forced to join the military, but that he planned to desert.

Ten days later, Mohamad called to say he was being sent to Homs the next day and that he would escape at night.

It was his last call to his family.

"He said, 'Give my best to my father and my mother, ask them to forgive me, I am going to do something, I am going to leave, I don't know if I will be able to get back to you or not,'" Abdullah recalled.

He said his brother had asked him to "take care of my wife," adding: "I am entrusting you with my family."

"It was that kind of talk, it was as if he knew something was going to happen to him," Abdullah explained.

Mohamad never met his youngest daughter.

Video: This Syrian man was tortured and murdered. His brother wants justice (CNN)

With the Syrian civil war raging, and poor internet and phone connections in their remote village, it was hard for Mohamad's family to find out what had happened to him.

It wasn't until a video showing his torture emerged online months later that his loved ones discovered the true horror that had befallen him.

"One day a guy from our town sent me a video clip, he said: 'Watch the video, it could be your brother.' Of course, I recognized my brother -- from his clothes, his voice, his appearance," Abdullah said, his voice pained. "He was being tortured by soldiers, they were not Syrian, we did not understand what they were saying."

Abdullah told other family members about what he had seen in the video, but did not share it with them, fearing what it would do to their elderly parents.

"When I saw that first video, I still had hope he was still alive," he said. "He was being tortured, but he was alive, he was moving. We were hoping he was still alive and in a hospital."

Their father traveled to Damascus, searching for his son at hospitals and jails in the Syrian capital.

"About two months later, the second video emerged, that is when we believed our brother died," the softly spoken 27-year-old, now visibly distraught, told CNN.

"When I watched the second video [which showed Mohamad being beheaded], I stayed in a room ... I did not leave the room for three days. He was not only my older brother. He was my friend. We were always together," Abdullah said.

"My (other) brother developed kind of a psychological illness from the videos."

Landmark legal case

Wagner's forces have been used as the tip of the spear in Syria, but their shadowy presence affords Moscow a degree of deniability.

In February 2018, a US airstrike killed dozens and injured hundreds of Wagner fighters as they were advancing towards an oilfield outside the border town of Deir Ezzor.

Moscow did everything it could to distance itself from the incident, but when bodies of Russian mercenaries started to return home, it became clear it was a Wagner operation.

CNN spoke to a source connected to Wagner who had been to visit the injured fighters as they returned to Moscow. Moreover, in the days following the attack, one independent Russian media outlet went to visit the mother of a fighter who died in Syria, she confirmed that her son was not a Russian regular soldier.

Russia's foreign ministry would only say that these contractors were working independently and went to Syria on their own.

In Syria, the use of mercenaries is based around a company called Evro Polis, which was sanctioned by the US Treasury for being connected to Prigozhin. In February 2018, CNN obtained a copy of a contract between Evro Polis and the Syrian government. The agreement stated that Evro Polis gets to keep 25% of the revenue from the oil fields if they are recaptured from rebel territory. In other words, Wagner does the fighting, Evro Polis keeps the spoils.

Since Wagner's footprint has grown across the Middle East and Africa, a key launchpad has become the Russian military base at Latakia on Syria's Mediterranean coast. CNN and other researchers have monitored the frequency of flights originating from Latakia to other theaters across the region. One document obtained by CNN, details the agreement made between Yevgeny Prigozhin and a Russian airforce 223rd flight detachment to use their planes.

There is growing evidence to suggest that Mohamad's case may be just the tip of the iceberg.

A CNN investigation in June uncovered evidence that Russian mercenaries were committing war crimes and human rights abuses in the Central African Republic (CAR), according to several witnesses and community leaders.

The Russian government denied the allegations and insisted the contractors in CAR are "unarmed and do not take part in hostilities." The CAR government also denied the allegations but said an inquiry would establish the facts.

News of the legal action launched in March -- by the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Memorial Human Rights Center in Russia -- coincided with the 10th anniversary of the Syrian uprising.

"The complaint ... is an unprecedented attempt to fill the impunity gap and bring Russian suspects to account," the advocacy groups said in a statement.

"Syrian activists and victims of the atrocities perpetrated by all parties to the conflict in Syria have been working tirelessly since 2011 to obtain accountability," they said, adding that: "There are limited avenues for victims and their families to obtain justice and redress."

The International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction in Syria, since the country is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, leaving countless victims of the conflict with few options to seek accountability.

In their pursuit of justice, Syrians are increasingly turning to European courts -- especially those in Germany and France -- under the concept of "universal jurisdiction."

It gives a national court jurisdiction over grave crimes against international law, even when they were not committed on the country's territory.

Earlier this year, a German court convicted a former Syrian officer for crimes against humanity, in the first-ever trial of people linked to the regime in Damascus. Another remains on trial.

Clémence Bectarte, a lawyer at FIDH, said they chose to file this case in Russia due to "the unique opportunity because of the strong legal basis to claim jurisdiction in Russia ... this is the natural court for this case."

"We are talking about Russian perpetrators, people who could potentially be arrested in Russia if there was a political and judicial willingness to push the case forward. Universal jurisdiction always has to be considered as a last resort," Bectarte added.

So far there has been no movement on the lawsuit filed by Abdullah in Moscow.

A similar request in 2019 by Novaya Gazeta to Russia's main investigative body -- the Investigative Committee -- to open a probe into its findings in Mohamad's case was dismissed.

Abdullah has never heard of Wagner. He says he just wants to see his brother's executioners held accountable.

"If someone hadn't given them the green light, they wouldn't have done something like that," he said. "We will not be like them and demand [that] what happened to my brother [also] happen to them, [but] the least they deserve is jail."

Abdullah says his brother's death has left him facing a series of challenges, from caring for Mohamad's wife and children to dealing with the trauma of the horrors he saw in those videos.

It has also led him on a long and potentially dangerous quest for justice against a shadowy, faceless enemy. But he believes it is worth the risk.

"I am not worried about myself," he said. "I just want them to be held accountable, even if this costs me my life."

"The Hermeneutical Invasion of Philosophy and Economics"

Review of Austrian Economics, 1989, (3), pp. 45-60. See also "The Logic of Action Two" pp.275-293.

Murray N. Rothbard

Here we must note two variants of the common hermeneutical theme. On the one hand are the candid relativists and nihilists, who assert, with an inconsistently absolutist fervor, that there is no truth. These hold with the notorious dictum of the epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend that "anything goes." Anything, be it astronomy or astrology, is of equal validity or, rather, equal invalidity. The one possible virtue of the "anything goes" doctrine is that at least everyone can abandon the scientific or philosophic enterprise and go fishing or get drunk. This virtue, however, is rejected by the mainstream hermeneuticians, because it would put an end to their beloved and interminable "conversation."

In short, the mainstream hermeneuticians do not like the "anything goes" dictum because, instead of being epistemological anarchists, they are epistemological pests. They insist that even though it is impossible to arrive at objective truth or indeed even to understand other theorists or scientists, that we all still have a deep moral obligation to engage in an endless dialogue or, as they call it, "conversation" to try to arrive at some sort of fleeting quasi-truth. To the hermeneutician, truth is the shifting sands of subjective relativism, based on an ephemeral "consensus" of the subjective minds engaging in the endless conversation. But the worst thing is that the hermeneuticians assert that there is no objective way, whether by empirical observation or logical reasoning, to provide any criteria for such a consensus.

Since there are no rational criteria for agreement, any consensus is necessarily arbitrary, based on God-knows-what personal whim, charisma of one or more of the conversationalists, or perhaps sheer power and intimidation. Since there is no criterion, the consensus is subject to instant and rapid change, depending on the arbitrary mind-set of the participants or, of course, a change in the people constituting the eternal conversation.

Exclusive-India watchdog accuses Amazon of concealing facts in deal for Future Group unit

By Aditya Kalra 

© Reuters/FRANCIS MASCARENHAS FILE PHOTO: A man walks past an Amazon logo outside the company's collection point in Mumbai

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -India's antitrust regulator has accused Amazon.com Inc of concealing facts and making false submissions when it sought approval for a 2019 investment in a Future Group unit, a letter to the U.S. e-commerce giant seen by Reuters showed.

The letter complicates Amazon's bitter legal battle with Future Group over the Indian's firm's decision to sell its retail assets to Reliance Industries - a matter that is now before India's Supreme Court.

Amazon has argued that terms agreed upon in its 2019 deal to pay $192 million for a 49% stake in Future's gift voucher unit prevent its parent, Future Group, from selling its Future Retail Ltd business to Reliance.

In the letter dated June 4, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Amazon hid factual aspects of the transaction by not revealing its strategic interest in Future Retail when it sought approval for the 2019 deal.

"The representations and conduct of Amazon before the Commission amounts to misrepresentation, making false statement and suppression or/and concealment of material facts," the letter said. It also noted that its review of the submissions made had been prompted by a complaint from Future Group.

In the four-page letter, a so-called 'show cause notice', the CCI asked Amazon why it should not take action and penalise the company for providing false information.

Amazon has yet to respond, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified as the letter has not been made public.

Amazon said in a statement to Reuters it had received a letter, was committed to complying with India's laws and would extend its full cooperation to the CCI.

"We are confident that we will be able to address the CCI’s concerns," it said.

Representatives for Future and the CCI did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Vaibhav Choukse, a competition law specialist and partner at J. Sagar Associates, said it was rare for the CCI to issue such a notice and that if the CCI was not satisfied by Amazon's response, it could lead to a fine and even a review of the deal.

"The CCI has wide powers which includes directions to re-file the approval application and even revoke the approval under exceptional circumstances," Choukse said.

The CCI's 2019 approval order states its decision "shall stand revoked if, at any time, the information provided" is found to be incorrect.

Shares in Future Retail jumped after Reuters published details of the letter, extending gains to be up nearly 5% in Thursday afternoon trade.

SUBMISSIONS COMPARED

The dispute over Future Retail, which has more than 1,500 supermarket and other outlets, is the most hostile flashpoint between Jeff Bezos' Amazon and Reliance, run by India's richest man Mukesh Ambani, as they try to gain the upper hand in winning over the country's consumers.

Amazon also has a host of other challenges in India, a key growth market where it has committed $6.5 billion in investments, including a separate CCI probe into alleged practices that small businesses say have hurt them.

In addition, it faces the prospect of more regulations that would restrict the sale of private labels and would prohibit the U.S. firm from allowing its affiliates to list products on its website.

The CCI letter compared three sets of submissions Amazon made to it in 2019 with submissions made later to other legal forums, saying they were "contradictory."

In particular, it said Amazon had explained its interest in investing in Future's coupon unit as one that would address gaps in India's payments industry. But the letter stated Amazon had disclosed in other legal forums that the foundation of its relationship with Future Coupon was certain special rights it obtained over Future Retail.

"Amazon has concealed its strategic interest" in Future Retail, the letter said, adding: "Such interest and the purpose of the combination ... was not disclosed to the Commission despite specific requirements."

The CCI also objected to one section of a submission where Amazon had told the regulator it had nothing to do with one particular legal agreement that two Future entities had signed between themselves days ahead of its 2019 deal. But Amazon later claimed before an arbitrator that the agreement was an "integrated part" of the transaction, the letter said.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra in New Delhi; Additional reporting by Abhirup Roy; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

CRIMINAL COVID CAPITALI$M

Australia's Lorna Jane activewear fined

 $4m for misleading Covid-19 claims

23 July 2021 - BY REUTERS

“This was dreadful conduct as it involved making serious claims regarding public health when there was no basis for them,” said ACCC Chair Rod Sims in a statement.
Image: 123RF / leungchopan/ File photo


Athleisure clothing chain Lorna Jane Pty Ltd was fined A$5 million ($3.7 million) by an Australian court on Friday after claiming its garments could prevent Covid-19, which a judge labelled as “exploitive, predatory and potentially dangerous”.

The company with 134 stores across Australia, New Zealand, the US and Singapore was sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) last year after saying its LJ Shield Activewear range “eliminated”, “stopped the spread” and “protected wearers” against the coronavirus.

The misleading claims, which centred on the “groundbreaking technology” of the company's garments, were made on in-store signs, on its website, on social media website Instagram, in emails to customers and in media releases, the consumer watchdog said.

In a judgment published on Friday, Federal Court judge Darryl Rangiah said the Brisbane-headquartered company had “represented to consumers that it had a reasonable scientific or technological basis” when it had none, and ordered the company to publish corrective notices on top of the fine.

“This was dreadful conduct as it involved making serious claims regarding public health when there was no basis for them,” said ACCC Chair Rod Sims in a statement.

The judge, the ACCC said, had called the conduct “exploitive, predatory and potentially dangerous”.

Lorna Jane said it accepted the court's ruling and acknowledged that it had unintentionally misled customers as a result of being itself misled by a supplier.

“A trusted supplier sold us a product that did not perform as promised,” said CEO Bill Clarkson in a statement.

“They led us to believe the technology behind LJ Shield was being sold elsewhere in Australia, the USA, China, and Taiwan and that it was both antibacterial and antiviral. We believed we were passing on a benefit to our customers.”

In addition to the fine, Lorna Jane was told to publish corrective notices. The company was earlier fined A$40,000 by Australian drug regulator the Therapeutic Goods Administration for the same claims.

MORTALITY AMONG PALEOLITHIC HUMANS

Violence is as important a cause of death as disease for young Hiwi adults, and for infants as well. On page 451, the paper points out that violence and accident cause as many deaths in the Hiwi young adults as occur in most other hunter-gatherers from all causes combined. Hill and colleagues discuss this issue in relation to the possible life history pressures on Paleolithic hunter-gatherers:

If high mortality, warfare, homicide, and accidental trauma are typical of our Paleolithic ancestors, the Hiwi mortality patterns may be more representative of the past than those derived from other modern hunter-gatherers. If so, several observations about the Hiwi are important. First, conspecific violence was a prominent part of the demographic profile, accounting for many deaths in all age and sex categories. Most of the adult killings were due to either competition over women, reprisals by jealous husbands (on both their wives and their wives' lovers), or reprisals for past killings. The criollo-caused killings were motivated by territorial conquest. Moreover, infanticide (especially on females) constituted the highest mortality rate component of all Hiwi conspecific violence. Second, no predation deaths were reported despite attacks by anacondas, Orinoco caimans, and piranhas, and the presence of jaguars in the area. Accidents associated with the active-forager lifestyle were common, but disease was a more important killer, accounting for nearly half of all deaths. This suggests an adaptive landscape in which success in social relations, competitive violence, and disease resistance are paramount. This may partially explain why many of the genes that appear to have been under strong selection in the past 50,000 years affect either disease resistance or cognitive function (Wang et al., 2006), presumably related to success in an atmosphere of frequent violent social competition (Hill et al. 2007:451).

The paper also includes a substantial discussion of the implications of high young adult mortality for intergenerational investments, such as grandmothering. This is an important issue, and Hill and colleagues end their discussion with a suggestion that neither the "grandmothering" nor the "embodied capital" models for the evolution of long life spans is sufficient to explain the human pattern. In their view, the key difference between humans and other primates (notably, chimpanzees) is not life span itself, but the markedly lower mortality rate among young adults. This low mortality rate directly causes the long life span (if you don't die young, you'll live long!). Hill and colleagues favor extrinsic factors such as greater protection of children, nursing the sick, and food sharing as possible causes of reduced mortality rates in humans.

The Game Developers Who Are Also Witches

Chris Priestman
Published 1 week ago:July 13, 2021 
Filed to:AEVEE BEE

Illustration: Angelica Alzona


Kitty Horrorshow was the first game maker to tell me she was a witch, and it wasn’t a joke. On the contrary, Horrorshow was revealing the spirituality that allowed her horror games, ANATOMY and CHYRZA, to have a sense of mystique and danger.

Horrorshow is one of a growing number of young people who practice witchcraft or identify themselves as a witch. As both VICE and The Guardian outline, witches have especially seen a resurgence among women, trans and queer-identifying people recently. Some of them dress up, some cast spells and do tarot, others create webcomics and video games.

Some see witches as icons of feminist power, or women who challenge the rules and boundaries of society. Cultural historian Rictor Norton writes that witches have always been associated with heresy, and were thought to practise unorthodox activities, such as homosexuality, which “was often an important feature of the witches’ real or alleged initiation rituals”.

Accordingly, game maker Solomon Fletcher finds that “even though the term ‘witch’ is usually tied to womanhood, it’s always felt genderless to [them]”. Witches naturally invite genderqueer discourse, and that’s part of the appeal of adopting the philosophy.
An alternative spirituality

One way to approach witchcraft is to adopt it as a spirituality called Wicca, a Pagan religion derived from pre-Christian beliefs. Wicca’s followers believe in both male and female deities, who teach that natural objects contain magical powers that can be channelled by performing rituals.

Horrorshow developed her interest in witchcraft as a way to escape the “super intolerant” upper-middle-class suburb she grew up in. She claims the people there were apprehensive toward anything that didn’t fall into their purview. That led to Horrorshow repressing her trans identity and feeling bad for even having thoughts of living in a different body. But when Horrorshow started reading books about the supernatural effects of burning different colour candles, she found a spirituality that spoke to her in ways her physical environment discouraged.

For Horrorshow, rituals are the gateway to a realm between the conscious and unconscious, where she pulls on invisible energies to create her art. “Sometimes it involves lighting candles and laying out paper and brushing ink across it into patterns that don’t make sense until later,” Horrorshow says. “Sometimes it involves waking myself up prematurely and pouring half-formed words out into a spiral notebook without being able to see what I’m writing.”



At other times, her witchcraft involves writing poems, songs, or making video games. Whatever the medium, Horrorshow’s creations are coloured by her personal experience as a practising witch. Ritual, for example, is a semi-autobiographical game that follows an individual who despises their body so much that they perform a magical ritual to change it. At first, the body becomes powerful, resembling the “goddess of witches”, but then violently disintegrates into nothing. It’s a game that reflects the agony of living in a body that society shuns and the impossible wish for something magical to change that.

Another obvious analogue is Rain, House, Eternity, which has you make a big, personal, choice at an altar. Its narrative speaks to the unfair pressures society puts on our bodies, gendered or otherwise. The choice at the altar is to give up and commit suicide or to become powerful through transition — to change the body through witchcraft. Sigils are also featured throughout the game, which Horrorshow says “comes from a place of personal practice”.


Witchcraft in this context is a “counter spirituality to the religious conservatism that defined many [queer people’s] childhoods,” as game developer Aevee Bee puts it. The visual novel Bee co-created, We Know The Devil, explores what it means to embrace witchcraft through three queer teens who attend a Christian summer camp, where they spend a night in the woods awaiting the devil. “What [the protagonists] encounter in the woods they understand and perceive as the devil because that is what they have been taught to understand their desires, identity, and love as,” Bee says. By embracing the devil, the protagonists find liberation from their religious upbringings, just as someone might by realising it’s acceptable to be queer.

The rise of witchcraft as a spirituality these past few years serves the same function Marilyn Manson did in the ’90s. It’s a way for young people who fall out of mainstream society to find something that speaks to them and accepts them. Specifically, as both Marilyn Manson and witchcraft involve satanic ritual, those drawn to them are likely rebels against religious upbringings. Witchcraft lets them hold on to the comforts of having a spirituality but in a way that serves them rather than shuns them.

Sisters doing it for themselves

Given that witches have been an icon of sisterhood for many years, their most obvious draw is in empowering and bringing women together. From the 15th century to the 18th century, across Europe and America, the witch craze saw women who were disliked or misunderstood by society hunted down and killed by the thousands.

For Arielle Grimes, there are parallels between those persecuted witches and the lives of queer women today. In 2013, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Program found 72 per cent of hate violence homicides in New York were against transgender women, and that number has since increased. Grimes made a game called 2sWitches, which follows two witches who use the power of sex to open a portal to a safer world. “2sWitches is about rebuilding oneself through shared intimacy with others,” Grimes says. “I found that this resonated strongly with many of my friends and the greater community of queer women processing their identity post-trauma.”

Included in that community are women like Jillian Wakarchuk, the co-creator of the game Crystal Witch Cyber Jamz. For her, witches symbolise fear, and the ugliness of that fear can be reclaimed by exiled women and marginalised people. “There is a lot of power in being feared, in having knowledge, and in having control,” Wakarchuk says. “When women and queer folks have this power, it goes against the patriarchal system of power, which can be a satisfying and cathartic new dynamic.”Witches symbolise fear, and the ugliness of that fear can be reclaimed by exiled women and marginalised people.

This is played out in Crystal Witch Cyber Jamz, in which you are a magical musician trying to reclaim items that have been stolen by a male-dominated technopagan cult. It was made to “explore the power in screaming and being ugly to tear a structure down,” Wakarchuk says. The game is informed by and subverts classic images of crones and the medical history of “female hysteria” diagnoses. For centuries, both of these allowed men to destroy the lives of women: The former forced women to conform to beauty standards, while the latter punished women who simply expressed emotion.

But not all modern witches find power in the monstrous femme. Jennifer Raye, the co-creator of Witchrider Nova, finds her power in colourful cartoon witches. Raye grew up with masculine pressures that denied enjoyment of magical girls; the frilly-dressed heroines of manga and anime who deal with everyday life while possessing supernatural powers. But as Raye began to question her identity as she grew up, she found solace in anime like Sailor Moon and games like Touhou and Cotton. “They represent something I was once afraid to enjoy, and discouraged from, but now I’m free as an adult to do so,” Raye says. She describes Witchrider Nova as “a game for 14-year-old Jenn… something unabashedly feminine, without being exclusive.”

In both cases, whether the witches are ugly or cute, women are reclaiming images that have been used to scorn them in the past. It’s a way of taking power from oppressors and turning it back on them.

Witches as healers



While many witches were believed to kill livestock and poison village waters, another type of witch was essentially a female healer. Proof of this is seen in the witch trial of Jacoba Felicie in 1322, whose accusation read, “she would cure her patient of internal illness… visit the sick assiduously and continue to examine… in the manner of physicians.” As practising medicine was considered a male profession at the time, when a woman healed people, it was a crime punishable by death.

Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda is a developer who is inspired by her Paraguayan heritage, allowing her to make games with brujas (the Spanish for witch). Brujas are a type of witch-healer that emerged from Hispanic and Native American cultures, and they are seen as people who have been assigned black magic by the gods. Also associated with witches in these regions are the curanderos, who are medicine men that use herbalism and folk remedies to heal people.


While brujas and brujeria have been feared by some, in some cultures they command respect. This is why Aveiro-Ojeda depicts them as healers and protectors who use witchcraft against oppression and to maintain cultural identity.

“Growing up Paraguayan and later as part of the latinx diaspora, brujeria is part of my life,” Aveiro-Ojeda says. “In Paraguay we have some ritualistic practices that are the result of our mestizo culture, such as beliefs about divining the future or protecting one’s home, so to me it’s very important to have depictions of this brujeria that center latinx women (in particular indigenous and afro-latinas) as a way to dispel superstitions around witchcraft and use it for healing and resistance.”

AP Thomson is another game developer who uses witchcraft as a medium for healing, specifically as a coping mechanism for mental health and gender identity. “At one point, I decided to try doing some tarot readings,” Thomson says. “I found it was actually a pretty good way to center my thoughts, re-contextualize what I was struggling with, and give my anxieties a broader perspective.”

Thomson got the idea for their new game, Fortune-500, from a funny website used to interpret tarot readings. The website reads the cards and presents the outcomes as potential futures for the participant, some of which are “performance reviews”, “home improvement”, and “career advancement”. Thomson came up with a term for this bizarre mix of the corporate world and witch culture: “White collar witchcraft”, and that aesthetic is prominent in Fortune-500.

Fortune-500 has you play as a fortune-telling witch who works for the “Magical Resources” department in a large corporation. The witch has anxiety, and believes that people secretly hate them, or that their work is worthless despite evidence to the contrary. “She’s close to being fired because her co-workers don’t understand what she actually does when compared with the much more obvious elemental magic of her wizard co-workers,” says Thomson. Fortune-500 takes anxieties and lays them out in a format that people can interact with, and hopefully make sense of them.By appropriating images and terms used to scorn and kill women, they can find power, community and inspiration for marginalised people.

Thomson’s aim, along with those of other witch game developers, is reclamation. By appropriating images and terms used to scorn and kill women, they can find power, community and inspiration for marginalised people. The importance of doing this in today’s climate is something Thomson understands well: “Wizards in popular media are often portrayed as wise advisors and mentors who are instrumental in the rise of powerful men (think Merlin and Gandalf). Meanwhile, witches in popular media are often portrayed as being instrumental in the downfall of powerful men (think Macbeth and The Little Mermaid). Given recent events in the world, it’s hopefully more and more obvious why the downfall of powerful men is often necessary and just. Basically, the world needs witches.”

Friday essay: Satan is back (again) — 

the Devil in 5 dark details

July 15, 2021 

His title is the Devil, but he goes by a number of names — Satan, Lucifer, Beliar, Beelzebul or Beelzebub.

He was big in 1970s pop culture (The Exorcist, The Devils) and continues to feature on screen today. A sixth season of the TV show Lucifer is in production and new film The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It is showing in cinemas.

Conservative Christianity has a long commitment to the idea of a personal devil. Our Pentecostal Prime Minister Scott Morrison believes the misuse of social media is the work of the Devil. Pope Francis, meanwhile, maintains Satan still exists.

The Devil’s modern resurgence might explain a reported increase in apparent demonic possessions in both conservative Catholic and Protestant churches. The rise has fuelled the growth of church ministries that claim to drive out demons. And the conspiracy theorists of QAnon have notoriously created baseless moral panic about the imagined sexual abuse of children in Satanic cults.

Given the amount of publicity the Devil is currently attracting, it’s worth reviewing his history. Here are five things worth knowing.

1. His story is paradoxical

After the Divine Trinity itself (the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — three identities in one God), the Devil plays the most important role in the Christian story.

He is there before the beginning of the world and he survives its end. He is first and chief among the angels. He is the first to disobey God and, along with his fellow fallen angels, to be expelled from Heaven.

From this moment on, religious history records the conflict between God and his angelic forces and the Devil and his demonic army.

Within the Christian tradition, it was the Devil — in the form of a serpent after his own fall from heaven — who brought about the Fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden. Christ’s death and resurrection signalled the victory over Satan and death.

Christ refused a banquet offered by Satan. William Blake (circa 1816–1820). Wikiart

Yet this story is deeply paradoxical. For in spite of Christ’s apparent win, the Devil remains for Christians a real and present source of cosmic evil and human suffering. “We should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea,” declared Pope Francis in 2018, lest we “let our guard down”.

On the one hand, the Devil is God’s most implacable enemy, granted the freedom to rebel against him. Thus, Saint Paul advised the Ephesians “to put on the whole armour of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil” (Ephesians 6.11).

But on the other hand, the Devil is also God’s faithful servant who acts only at God’s command, or at least with his endorsement. So God sends Satan to kill Job’s animals, servants and children and to afflict Job with “loathsome sores” in order to test his faith in God (Job 1-2).

‘The court accepts the existence of God every time a witness swears to tell the truth […] It’s about time they accept the existence of the Devil.’

Read more: Thoughts and prayers: miracles, Christianity and praying for rain

2. He is a master magician

Within the Christian tradition, Satan was a master of illusion. Unlike God, he could not perform miracles because he was bound by natural laws.

Satan was seen as a master of magic. In early Christianity, magic was reprehensible because demons were at the heart of it. For Saint Augustine (354-430), the demonic was present within all magic and superstitious practices in other religions.

For Isidore, bishop of Seville (c.569–636), “the foolery of the magic arts held sway over the entire world for many centuries through the instructions of evil angels […] all of these things are to be avoided by a Christian and entirely repudiated and condemned”.

Thus, witches, magicians, and sorcerers (whether acting benevolently or malevolently) were seen as in league with the Devil.

Thus “demonology”, which developed from the middle of the 13th century, was the “science” of determining the powers of the Devil within nature. From the middle of the 15th century, their research was written up in text books for demon hunters — Demonologies.

Modern conservative Christianity still views magical practices along with a range of popular occult practices — tea leaf reading, horoscopes, seances, tarot cards, and ouija boards — as dangerous dabbling with the Devil.
‘Conjecture is useless. We need a professional witch hunter.’

Read more: Is God good? In the shadow of mass disaster, great minds have argued the toss

3. He can be sexy

The Devil has been imagined (and pictured) in many forms. In the television series Lucifer he is a handsome, well-built man.

This tradition goes back to John Milton’s depiction of him as a handsome man in the poem Paradise Lost: “From his lips/Not words alone pleased her”. Poet and painter William Blake depicted the devil as a chiselled Greek god.

In the medieval period, however, because he dwelt on the boundaries between the human and the bestial, he was often depicted in animal form. In Dante’s Inferno (1265-1321) he was imagined like a dragon with “two mighty wings, such as befitting were so great a bird, sails of the sea I never saw so large. No feathers had they, but as of a bat”.

He was often imagined as goat-like and depicted with animal features: cloven hooves, talons, horns, tail, webbed hands.

Satan with creature features. Detail from Jacob de Backer’s The Last Judgement (circa 1580s). Wikiart

In demonological literature he was portrayed as a spiritual being without any bodily form. A master of illusion, he was a shape shifter. It was believed he could change gender and assume a male (incubus) or a female body (succubus).

As a spiritual being, the Devil was unable to create children. But he could assume a female form, steal semen from a man and then, in a male form, deposit it in a woman.

According to that most famous of all the Demonologies, Malleus Maleficarum (1486), the pleasure to be gained by a woman from sex with the Devil was equivalent or better to that with a man.

But the Devil and his angels gained no such pleasure. For them, it was just part of the job of inciting people to evil. Demons transformed themselves, Malleus authors declared, “not for the sake of pleasure, since a spirit does not have flesh or bones,” but “that humans will become more inclined to all faults”.
‘Lucifer’s come a long way. He does his best when you put a little faith in him.’

4. He gets around

As a spiritual being, it was believed the Devil could enter into human beings and possess them. Demonologist Henri Boguet (circa 1550–1619) told of a nun who, in eating a lettuce, swallowed the Devil hidden within it.

Indeed, the Devil most often entered through the mouth. But he could apparently also gain access through other bodily openings or wounds.

Satan smiting Job with boils. William Blake (1826). Wikiart

Demonologist Francesco Guazzo listed 47 signs of possession in his Compendium Maleficarum (1608). There were natural signs, like crying, gnashing the teeth, foaming at the mouth, extraordinary strength, and violence to the self and others.

There were also supernatural signs — clairvoyance, knowledge of strange languages, levitation, vomiting of strange objects, speaking without moving the mouth in different tones from the normal and the inability to feel pain when pricked.

In the “golden age” of demonic possession, from 1500–1700, experts arose within Catholicism and Protestantism who could cast out demons.

By the year 1600, do-it-yourself exorcism manuals were available. The most successful collection of these, the Thesaurus Exorcismorum (1608) promises “evil spirits, demons and all evil spells are driven from obsessed human bodies as if expelled by whips and clubs”.
5. He can be defeated (sort of)

According to the Christian understanding of history, the Devil, his son the Antichrist and his army of demons will be finally defeated on Judgement Day and sent to hell.

But within the confines of hell, the Demonic paradox continues.

The Devil and his evil angels will be tormented eternally for their rebellion against God. But they still remain God’s enforcers. There is no Biblical source for the idea of Satan and his demons torturing the damned in hell. But from the fourth century, Satan was believed to be the ruler of the underworld, as told in stories of Christ’s descent into Hell before his resurrection.

Detail from Luca Signorelli’s The Damned (circa 1500). Wikimedia Commons

Read more: Five things to know about the Antichrist

The role of Satan and his demons punishing the damned in hell was to become a common image in medieval art.

English philosopher Henry More (1614-87) wrote of gratuitous torture, with demons looking to “satiate their lascivient cruelty with all manner of abuses and torments they can imagine”.

Jack Nicholson plays a charming devil in The Witches of Eastwick. IMDB

But by the end of the 19th century, this demonic story had lost its central role in Western intellectual life. The Devil had largely become a figure of myth.

Ironically, the marginalisation of the Christian story of the Devil in the modern West and in liberal Christianity allowed for a proliferation of devils and demons in popular culture — from The Devil’s Advocate to Rosemary’s Baby to The Witches of Eastwick.

The Devil is metaphorically, if not literally, the “evil” within all of us. As a result, the Devil has new domains, new territories, and new borders in which he “walks about, as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5.8).

Author

Philip C. Almond
Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland