Oceans Yet to Burn

diarrheaworldstarhiphop:

argumate:

apricops:

apricops:

argumate:

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

I don’t know if I’d say I ‘dislike’ transhumanism so much as it’s important to keep the general arc of science and medicine in mind.

“Scientists installed robot wings in my back and now I can fly” is awesome. “Scientists installed first-generation robot wings in my back and then I was in unbearable pain because all of my spinal discs prolapsed” is not.

Which is related to my other thought, which is that we just aren’t very good at predicting what life would be like under very different circumstances. On a certain level transhumanism isn’t that different from people saying that we’d have flying cars and robot maids by the year 2000.

yes, although this seems like just avoiding over optimism, even if you think it’s the right direction overall.

Do not underestimate the cyborg equivalent of furries who WOULD endure the lmao prolapsed spine phase of transhumanism

These brave heroes will help bring mankind closer to perfection, and/or test the safety of the secondary backup heart implant before I get it.  Truly, our hats go off for these brave Cyberfurs™.

single_tear.png

argumate:

atrahasis:

argumate:

welldonna:

It bothers me when white ppl and other non-black ppl try to justify cultural appropriation with that “culture sharing” bull crap. Like black people are telling you to stop twerking and wearing our hair styles. So listen? This isn’t a fucking debate.

“I too believe in strict racial segregation”

So if one side says “don’t copy” because its cultural appropriation and the other side has (at least historically) said “don’t copy” because it’s degenerate art, does this mean that it’s win-win.

by not twerking you can please college students worried about oppression and the KKK, it’s a rare opportunity.

argumate:

bookchins-revenge:

argumate:

bookchins-revenge:

well I know you’re (possibly) a huge square and probably think tags ought to all be covered up with a nice solid layer of gray paint, but when you said you take exception to the idea covering up tags is uncool, do you mean you disagree it’s uncool for other artists to cover up people’s tags or you disagree it’s uncool for like, the authorities to cover up tags?

huge square checking in!

if a bunch of people are playing the same tagging game then yes I guess it’s tautologically uncool for one of them to break the rules of the game.

but since I’m not playing that game I’m free to say fuck your tag.

you’re dodging the question, square boy

not at all! I admitted that there is a subset of people for whom it is uncool to cover up tags: namely those people who participate in a subculture with mutually agreed upon codes of behaviour that describe covering up tags as being uncool.

I don’t know if Banksy is such a person, but if so then their action was uncool according to the conventions of this subculture they implicitly agreed to uphold.

However, anyone outside this subculture is free to disregard its conventions and cover up or otherwise obscure, modify, or erase tags with complete impunity, disclaiming any allegations of uncoolness as being mere status grab attempts.

Honestly, the whole tagging thing involves writing on other peoples’ walls without their permission, what right could they possibly have to object to other taggers tagging over their tags?  “Oh well it’s my tag” - well it’s not your wall it isn’t, you already broke the rules of ownership, you can’t claim to be covered under them again.

One could argue on a Consequential basis or an aesthetic basis, but the vast majority of graffiti has insufficient artistic value for that.  It’s mostly just people writing their names, over and over again, usually making walls and buildings look worse in expensive ways.

Every tagger caught by the state should be conscripted into removing all these worthless name tags as community service and be made to pay for the paint to do so themselves.

I bet a lot more people would be sympathetic if the act if illegally spraying paint on a building usually looked more like this:

Or even this:

mitigatedchaos:

collapsedsquid:

Need to get someone to promise to eat something ridiculous if Donald Trump get impeached.  A hunk of granite maybe?  Maybe some of the Swedish rotted fish thing? 

can i volunteer to eat abstract concepts

@collapsedsquid  Unless you can get on national television and make a good spectacle of it there somehow, no.

Call Xi Jinping.  I will eat the share of the national debt controlled by China by transmuting it into bearer bonds printed on tortillas.

ranma-official:

zoobus:

I think e3 is over and I hope that means I never hear about whatever that cyber punk drama was about again
I learned more about the origins of a genre I’ve never read than I ever cared to know

Thankfully, as we know, people really quickly drop culture war stuff as far as videogames go

“-and now, President Highever has ordered deployment of additional troops to fight GamerGate-sponsored insurgents as the Montana crisis continues.  The troops, who are expected to arrive on Wednes-”

argumate:

prudencepaccard:

Part of what makes Banksy’s work so popular is that it doesn’t operate much like street art at all. Think about Invader or Fairey, artists who appear in Exit Through the Gift Shop: Invader’s 8-bit career began with a single “Space Invaders” icon that the artist reiterated endlessly. Fairey’s work started with a stencil of Andre the Giant prefaced by the word “Obey,” again, repeated over and over. While they’re both more like media moguls than graffiti writers today, Fairey and Invader started with the same strategy: to project themselves into public spaces by broadcasting themselves all over it.

That ambition to control a public space through this sort of redundant branding, to make the street your own, is a masculine one—and it’s shared by the overwhelming majority of street artists. In the theater of the public square, graffiti is cousin to cat-calling—which Slate’s Dee Locket smartly explains as the constant effort by men to “create the illusion of dominance in shared public spaces,” specifically by claiming women’s private spaces as their own. 

pure ideology

Wanksy

So wait… is graffiti Woke, or Broke?  

argumate:

mitigatedchaos:

@rendakuenthusiast

I don’t think this actually true. Bill Gates, 1/8th of that number, is *already* doing massive-scale philanthropy, it hasn’t yet solved the problem of human poverty because human poverty is an even more massive scale problem, and it’s not obvious to me that any authority that could tell Gates to run his philanthropy differently/confiscate his money and do it instead of him would necessarily do a better job than him.

I’m in favor of governments taxing very wealthy people and using the money to pay for things that make the lives of poor people all over the world better, but I think this specific claim about the 8 richest people in the world makes solving poverty seem like a smaller problem than it actually is.

The thing about using mass immigration to try to solve global poverty is that it can’t keep up with birth rates.  Redistribution from the wealthy mostly can’t, either.

Only what is produced can be consumed.  The production capacities of these migrant-generating countries must be increased, and their birthrates must fall (increasing paternal investment per child, further increasing per-capita economic productivity in addition to not spreading limited base resources as thinly).

Probably the way forward isn’t quite giving or taking but something like partially self-funding institutions that “sell” infrastructure at a discount and promote development of local businesses and foster self-improving attitudes, promoting the formation of better institutions that will help the changes to stick.

One of the things Bill Gates is trying to do is cut birthrates in the developing world by promoting contraception, girls education, and vaccines (cut the death rate and the birth rate also drops).

Yes.  That’s part of the reason I don’t approve of seizing his fortune for the glory of the third world - the US government in the hands of the Republicans does the opposite with bans on funding to nations that practice abortion.

In their religious fervor, the Republicans are Natalists - a policy that might make sense for nations like Japan, but which does not make sense in countries that already cannot feed their populations.

@rendakuenthusiast

“. If you identify yourself “I am a PHP programmer“ or “I am a Windows user“, that sounds like you can’t change that! Criticism of your tool, or of the ecosystem around your tool, sounds like an attack on your personality. You are forever married, shackled even, to an editor, operating system, language, graphics editor.  “ <- I really dislike this attitude. I think that programmers should view all these things as tools that can be taken up and put back down again as needed rather than being a part of your identity.

That makes sense, after all a language is just a language, and while they sometimes have new concepts and idioms to learn, IME they aren’t that challenging to switch between.

My question is whether employers will treat it that way.  It’s obvious to me that a good C# programmer is only N months away from being a good Java programmer, but the job listings don’t seem to work that way.

rendakuenthusiast:

argumate:

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

If someone from another field successfully invades physics or math, we just call them a physicist or mathematician instead of whatever they were originally.

What about when a Poli Sci major ships software?

argumate:

davidsevera:

FIRST DATE IDEA: Go on about how women don’t have souls, but neglect to mention that you don’t believe in souls period.

Alternatively, women are the damned creations of a twisted heathen god.

As are men, and indeed all living things.

Born from the fire of the wicked lands, she is Woman, terrible and cruel, violent and tribal, a maelstrom of hatred and injustice.*

* Do you like Woman?  Please see our related companion product, Man, the Fire that Kills™

radioactivecallista:

argumate:

femmenietzsche:

The internet has truly led to a Golden Age of jokes that are just rewrites of actually funny jokes with three words changed so that now they’re about politics and suck ass

you know who else sucks ass? Mitch McConnell

you know how Trump gets ass? Mitch McConnell

you know who photographs Trump’s ass?  Mitch McConnell

wait guys we have to stop, I can suddenly hear Gaston music and it’s getting louder

argumate:

espikvlt:

in that same exact post i saw someone say that no one under communism will want to live in a secluded home with their one marriage partner

bitch, that is exactly what i fucking want, speak for your damn self

“after the revolution everyone will conform to my preferred aesthetic”

nuclearspaceheater:

prokopetz:

Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.

Also, for any issue that society gradually comes to a new position on, the popularity needed to stage mass activism is almost the level needed to simply institute the desired policy. So, for those issues determined more by material circumstances, it’s possible that the policy would have happened without any activism whatsoever, but you’ll still see the most activism just before it’s accepted, creating the illusion that it was accepted due to activism.

Interesting thought.

@discoursedrome: in the grim darkness of the far future, the furry vs. scaly war knows no end

That’s the spirit!

discoursedrome:

argumate:

honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why

The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.

I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary. It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.

I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se…  I mean, kind of.  It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.

What does race discourse look like when you can change your race?  Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?

What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?

What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?

Et cetera.

I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.

(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)

argumate:

obiternihili:

Had a thought about a future with men being forced to take some kind of drug when their partner’s found to be pregnant that stimulates bonding hormones, with a hell dump of it when the baby’s born, to mirror bonding hormones in the mother and dissuade abandonment

don’t men naturally already get something like that?

Yeah, isn’t this already the Bonding Hormones AU?