Entries by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities

AI is an Existential Threat – Just Not the Way You Think

The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe. Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research […]

Recent left-wing attempts to subvert maths curricula hold some awkward historical parallels

If you were an author of school textbooks and wanted to teach a small child that 2+2=4, how would you choose to do so? Perhaps you might draw a picture of two easily-understandable items like apples, next to another two apples, followed by a final illustration of four apples, these simple and innocent images linked […]

VIDEO: How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life

How the trans movement became the centre of American political life and a touchstone for political and moral integrity is something of a mystery. But it’s a fact. In this fast-paced video, “The Transgender Empire”, Christopher F. Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute, offers his own explanation. In 12 minutes, it’s hard to gather together all the […]

Artificial Intelligence Going Rogue: Oppenheimer Returns

Even restrained advocates of tech caution that equating WMD with rogue AI is alarmist; the former is exclusively destructive and deployed only by nation-states, the latter can be widely constructive and deployed even by individuals. But this distinction is, dangerously, sweeping. In the 20th century, when J. Robert Oppenheimer led work on the first WMD, no […]

If Pedophiles Ruled The World

With the sobering and inspiring film, Sound of Freedom hitting theaters this week, we are faced with the reality that there is a huge appetite for child sex throughout the world. While Operation Underground Railroad is fighting the child sex movement, there is an international effort pushing it forward in the name of “children’s rights.” Here is a crucial […]

Iran’s government is repressive at home and aggressive abroad

Tehran exports its repressive system beyond its borders, backing Shia militia in other countries and hunting down critics of the regime. The Iranian regime is one of the most repressive in the world, ranking 162 out of 165 on the Human Freedom Index. Additionally, on the Human Rights and Rule of Law Index the Islamic Republic of Iran […]

Rebranding flags as rainbows dissolves the ties that bind our countries together

When national flags are inverted into mere utopian abstractions, they become little more than concrete symbols of coercive oppression. The advent of June means annual Gay Pride Season is here, that one month of the year (apart from the other eleven) when homosexuality is officially promoted by the State all across the Western world. You […]

‘The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America’

An unspoken social contract used to link community to the existence of strong authority. As a long-time former editor of Governing magazine, Alan Ehrenhalt is an expert on local political and governance issues in America. More than a quarter of a century ago, he wrote a little-known classic which is essential reading for all those interested in […]

Lab-grown ‘meat’ worse for environment than retail beef: Study

The lab-grown meat industry is propped up more by hopeful modelling than favourable data. The high-tech utopia we keep hearing about will have to wait, if a recent pre-print study on laboratory-cultured meat products is to be believed. According to researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Holtville, “sustainable” meat alternatives have […]

‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is not religious bumph. It’s how civilizations survive!

While population collapse is an environmentalist’s dream, it is an unfolding nightmare for the rest of humanity. Demography nerds assiduously follow the data popping up about fast-ageing societies, their loss of dynamism and prospects of population collapse. With each successive generation significantly smaller than the last, we know where we’re headed. While population collapse is […]

Does ‘Net Zero’ make sense?

Do the maths. The figures don’t add up. A lot of people are worried about climate change and global warming. Who can blame them? We are constantly told that global climate catastrophe is only a few years away or that “time has quite literally run out” as then Prince Charles did at COP26 in 2021. “Our world […]

Yes, climate change is making people depressed and angry – but not for the reasons you might think

Scaring readers out of their wits is not part of the job description of the American Geophysical Union. The American Geophysical Union (AGU), founded in 1919, is possibly the world’s premier association of earth scientists, and numbers among its members many leading climate experts. I had the privilege of attending its annual Fall Meeting last […]

The U.S. Military Depends on Virtues that are Fading

Contrasting recruitment videos for the Marines and the Army are clues to difficulties in meeting quotas. The US military is facing a recruitment crisis. It is so severe that in September, Senator Thom Thillis referred to an “inflection point” for the voluntary-force model, threatening over a half century of precedent. In 2022, the Army failed to meet […]

LA Dodgers choose anti-Catholic drag queens over sanity

What do Major League Baseball and drag queens who dress as nuns have in common? It is a question that is yet to be answered. Even so, the two have been on a collision course this week as the Los Angeles Dodgers first invited, then disinvited, then re-invited the ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ — a […]

Class Warfare: Training The Next Generation of Childhood Red Gender-Guards

One of the most depressing stories of 2023 features a British teacher who claims to have been removed from her job in a prestigious, fee-paying English high school for the heinous crime of referring to her pupils as being female. This is despite the school in question being a girls’-only institution. Giving testimony to an independent enquiry into childhood gender dysphoria, […]