New blog post up (Sept 1)

[Jeff]

We are the monsters we've been waiting for

They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse the management of an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but for no other reason than a cold heart doesn't dwell upon the cruelty of its bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club. They're the Killer Elite, but don't call them elite. No. Apparently, and with ironic perversity, that's me and my numerous tribe; over-educated beyond utility at the end of the Age of Useless Things.

And I mean that: the end of things. Capital has exhausted its first fuels, and now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round. And naturally, when it's down to your own body, setting it alight before it's taken from you to stoke the engines of the Great Machine becomes the final impudence. Depending upon whether your nation is an appetizer or an entree on the globalists' menu, and how well the kitchen prepares its living parts, such an act may lead to revolution or a passing LULZ.It can go either way.

Over-educated, I mean that too. But it's not a sour boast after half a life being schooled for self-aware obsolescence. If you feel dumber for having watched Jersey Shore, then you too already know more than is good for you. America's public schools are made to fail on a budget comparable with the cost of air conditioning its imperial guard in Central Asia, with assets peeled off to private charters, and teachers discarded upon their broken unions. University, North America's new high school, is corporate funded and corporate branded and humanities' starved, with a deliberately crushing debt load upon students that corrals the choices of the less privileged towards machinery-sustaining, practical careers. The study of subjects that have not been sufficiently monetized and the accrual of empathetic knowledge are sniffed at as elitist pursuits, even as the student is financially wrecked by their mastery.

Terrible lizards. I don't really mean that. Not literally. Not yet. They might, after all, not be alien lizards in masquerade, but their ecocidal reptilian brains just happen to be terraforming a post-mammalian world best suited for the cold-blooded, and engineering a society denuded of human warmth, compassion and mindfulness. Lizards aren't what they were; lizards are what they're to be. This could be the prophetic consummation of transhumanism: the metaphor become flesh.

...

And so on, blah blah blah, for 11,000 words.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I like your focus (so far) on Fascism: social control, class warfare, choking education, repression, dehumanization, moral disingagement, etc.

You really can use excellent metaphors that are richly evocative without reinforcing W.O.O. which is itself a social control tool.
Because W.O.O. is superstition, ignorance, misdirection...generated and amplified by the military social control class tasked with Stability Operations through counterpropaganda. Uh, you know.

"Overeducated?" Sure, you're not getting paid for what you know.
But it takes all the education you can get to grok Scientific Fascism.

[justdrew]

[semper occultus]

thanks Jeff

always painful to hear a cry of distress & feel helpless, that was difficult to read, surely more so to have written, a truly terrible gaze into Galadriel's mirror...

[Wombaticus Rex]

one catch (unless this was poetry)

And don't think the Sadean few for whom the system works aren't loving the masochistic spectacle of good Democratic foot soldiers debasing themselves as New Deal Sonderkommando, immolating their Social Security on finance capitalism's pyre of a trillion dead presidents before freshening up with a whore's bath of Enjoy President Bachmann ooga booga. (Somehow, moving the goal posts never interfere with their end zone dance.) Maybe, when you're given the choice of Satan, or Satan's Little Helper, it's past time to crash the parties. Because their moving goal posts sure don't interfere with their end zone dances.

[jam.fuse]

Pardon my ignorance, but what does W.O.O. stand for?

Been wondering for some time now. Net search engines yield no answer.

[Wombaticus Rex]

He's usually formulated it as "wonder occluding objectivity" -- in practice, it's a blanket slur for any data point outside of Hugh's sandbox.

[tazmic]

He's usually formulated it as "wonder occluding objectivity"

The antidote to which, typically, becoming a poison in sufficient quantities. Appropriately, this is also called 'wonder-occluding objectivity'.

[Stephen Morgan]

Always learning something. Who knew entrees and appetisers were different things?

The downloading of brains into machines reminds me of an old radio version of Blake's 7. Some mad scientist was doing that, did it to a whole planet, did it to Vila. They were trying to figure out how to put him back in his meat so they could fly off. In the end they just woke him up, Avon being clever enough to figure out that the "transfer" of minds was just copying, and that the empty bodies the mad scientist had done away with were actually still the real people. "What have I done" and fade to black. Radio black. Who wants in? If I were a global evil hegemon I would be interested in keeping my meat. And, not being one, I would feel guilty about polluting superintelligent computers with the most retrograde of human minds.

America does make a lot of corn syrup.

Reptiles may be better suited to a super-globally-warmed world. As in They Live the evil aliens and the human power elite were trying to engineer a world for their alien masters. Kurzweil doesn't believe in aliens, you seem to say. Are there meant to be no hidden technologies, Tesla anti-gravity airships and so on? I have become convinced of panspermia, given mysteries about our own planet's past, there may even be humans out there, not just the interplanetary exchange of simple genetic material. What we need is more people.

You're wrong about the Bonobo, though. The now discredited idea of the bonobo as cuddly pacific lesbians is just politics, like the idea that the Native Americans are unusually in tune with nature, or that proto-Aryans were five eyed electromagnetic supermen.

Morgan's Aquatic Ape is an interesting idea, I even read the eponymous book, but she doesn't reassure me by getting some basic things wrong. Assigning importance to women having long hair which floats on water, for example, when the lack of long hair on the heads of men is due to a conspiracy by hair-clipper manufactories, rather than evolution. Whole religions - Nazaritism, Sikhism - have long-haired men as a central pillar of their theology. The idea that vaginal protection is more needful amongst people who sit on beeches than branches, although monkeys rarely sit on anything prefering to crouch. The idea in one of your quotes that people may have been driven to "littoral living" by drought - driven to undrinkable salt water by a lack of drinkable water, no less. More likely would be that the coast is full of easily obtained foodstuffs - everything from cockles and mussels alive alive-oh to sea-buckthorn. The idea that ancient men lived in caves, which is at best debatable. Caves were more likely used for religious rites and burials. The idea that women "consistently outperform" men in long distance swimming. The idea that people would "flee predation" by heading to African seas with sharks and sea snakes and sea snails and the occasional leopard seal rather than just escaping lions up a tree.

And you don't like civilisation! Civilisation is the only stumbling block to tyranny, survival of the fittest and the anarchy of the strong.

And obviously I don't believe in an eternal metaphysical conflict between the mindless collective of the hive and the soulless process of individuation.

William Morris was one. "The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless," he wrote, "because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side." If Morris was on to something then, I'd say he's right on top of it now. The vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation has become the doom of the world, and it's not going to check itself. Who can stop it?

It is demonstrable that palliatives have, in fact, done good. Since his day we have established a wider franchise, the legalisation of trade unions, universal health care, a paid pension for the elderly, and various other productive palliatives only some of which have been eroded by the villains.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Wonder Occluding Objectivity jam.fuse.

Jeff has been playing Deus Ex HR or something.



Really tho that was heavy and awesome.

[Stephen Morgan]

wonderment occluding objectivity.

[IanEye]

*


"Once we have machines doing our high-level thinking, there's so little need for ourselves and you can't ever undo it - you can never turn them off." - Steve Wozniak

*


on that train all graphite and glitter


undersea by rail


a just machine to make big decisions
programmed by fellows with compassion and vision



we'll be clean when their work is done


we'll be eternally free
yes & eternally young

*

[Joe Hillshoist]

Whatever mister Bonobos are all bloodthirsty genocidal maniacs. (THats Steve)

[Jeff]

one catch (unless this was poetry)

Hardly. And thanks; fixed.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Very auspicious with Ganesh Chaturthi starting off today.