Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, September 08, 2012

"Dale Carrico is a memetic terrorist."

That statement actually happened. Regrettably, its author isn't accomplished enough to merit my "Acclaim" sidebar.

26 comments:

jimf said...

Hm. The link is down, but I found the page in Google's cache.
"postbiota.org" is Eugen Leitl's mailing-list archive site,
and the comment was made on the "New Cryonet" list.

-----------------
Dale Carrico notices Kim Suozzi campaign

Ted Smith... on Wed Sep 5

On Wed, 2012-09-05..., Eugen Leitl wrote:
>
> If he didn't exist, we should pay somebody to play his role. He writes
> obsessively about our ideas all the time, and some of his readers will
> take the time to check us out and like what they find. He is evidently
> educated and smart, and an excellent writer with a sense of humor.
> What more could we ask for.

And more of his readers will agree passionately with what he writes,
become convinced over time that he isn't going far enough down his happy
death spiral, and bomb a cryonics facility.

Dale Carrico is a memetic terrorist.
-----------------

Well, here we have Leitl calling you "evidently educated
and smart, and an excellent writer with a sense of humor".
That's better than being compared to a pig, I suppose.

"Ted Smith", on the other hand, is an overheated idiot.

You know, in today's culture, using the word "terrorist" to
describe somebody, or saying that somebody's blog contains
"hate speech" (as Giulio Prisco alleged a while back)
is tantamount to an invitation for the authorities --
police and courts -- to intervene and remove the offending
texts from public view (and possibly to remove the author
from public view as well).

There's a curious imbalance in this country (probably even
more so in the U.K., where libel laws can be used very
effectively to silence critics) in that **positive** speech
(even if it's arrant nonsense -- claims about anything from UFOs
to getting messages from angels, to the efficacy of
supposedly therapeutic personal philosophies, to alleged
cancer cures) seems to entail a presumption that it should be
**left alone**, not criticized too harshly.

Whereas **negative** speech -- which is just as useful in
public debate -- runs the risk, not only of being dismissed
as "rude", but of actually being suppressed, either
via intimidating threats, or by actual legal action.

That's why the Scientologists were able to keep anybody
from saying too much about them, for decades. It's why
"respectable" media don't really have too much to say
about Mitt Romney's Mormonism. It's why the "New Atheists" --
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens --
got a negative backlash even from **other atheists**
(including such people as Chris Mooney).

Well, speaking of Christopher Hitchens -- I was browsing
in a copy of _Arguably_ the other day, and reading the
chapter on Jessica Mitford. I think the cryonicists could
use a Jessica Mitford (author of _The American Way of Death_)
right about now. Then they'd count themselves lucky that
they "only" have to deal with Dale Carrico. ;->

jimf said...

> And more of his readers will agree passionately with
> what he writes. . . and bomb a cryonics facility.

You know, this isn't what the "sensible" cryonicists are afraid
of. What they **are** afraid of, more than anything else, is
that there will be legislation passed in the U.S. (either federal
or, more likely, state) to make cryonics **illegal**. Just as it
is currently illegal in France and in the Canadian province of
British Columbia (something I didn't know until I happened to
read it on Chronosphere ;-> ).

I do not happen to think that cryonics should be **illegal**.
I think people should be free to spend their money, and dispose
of their corpses, as they see fit (in the latter case, as long
as it doesn't create a public health hazard, of course).

Dale Carrico said...

Of course, I didn't dwell on the comment too much in the post, thinking the link would take the curious to see the whole absurd thing (funny it's down now, funny ha ha), but I will admit that beyond the immediately surreal terrorist charge I found the whole comment amusing at several points. I can't help but wonder if my "happy death spiral" can really possibly refer to the personal mortality I already freely acknowledge and which they are the ones to deny? Or is it just a hyperbolic way a death-obsessed person would describe his imagining of what it must be like for me for my argument to fail to convince them? The crazy conjuration of the imaginary scene of cryonics clinics (as if they are real clinics in the first place, as if they dot the modern landscape like eyeglass stores) being bombed is especially bizarre. Who on earth would bomb a cryonics storage lot? Why, it would be like bombing a mausoleum! Do people do that? I can't claim to know how terrorists choose their bomb sites, but the whole scenario seems so wonderfully preposterous. I mean, dude, everybody's already dead! My argument implies among other things that a cryonics facility is just a weirdly elaborate corpse disposal location. I think it is infinitely more likely that such a strange attractor for scam artists and saucer-eyed True Believers is going to get cleaned out by some splashy fraud or incompetent than some skeery "deathist" conspiracy terrorist attack or whatever other non-existing existential threat these dunderheads are conjuring up as a distraction from real problems in the real world.

jimf said...

You know, there's a long-time >Hist and cryonicist named
Keith Henson

http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.h.keith.henson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson

who got into legal trouble with the Scientologists
after becoming an outspoken critic of them in the 90's.

"As a result of this conflict, Henson was charged with three misdemeanors
under California Law: making criminal threats (California Penal Code section 422),
attempting to make criminal threats (California Penal Code section 422,
charged pursuant to Penal Code 664, the "general attempt" statute), and
threatening to interfere with freedom to enjoy a constitutional privilege. . .

The jury verdict of the trial resulted in Henson being convicted of
one of the three charges: "interfering with a religion." This misdemeanor
charge carried a prison term of six months. . .

Henson stated his belief that if he went to prison, his life would be
placed in jeopardy. Rather than serve his sentence, Henson chose to
enter Canada and apply for political asylum. Henson lived quietly in
Brantford for three years while he awaited the decision. His request
was ultimately denied and, in 2005, he was ordered to present himself
for deportation and transfer to US authorities. Instead, Henson
fled to the United States and later presented himself to the Canadian
consulate in Detroit. He then settled in Prescott, Arizona where
he remained for two years until his arrest in 2007 by Arizona
authorities. . .

In 2007, Henson was jailed in Riverside, California for "using threats
of force to interfere with another's exercise of civil rights".
He was released in early September 2007."


Isn't it ironic?

Dale Carrico said...

I do not happen to think that cryonics should be **illegal**.
I think people should be free to spend their money, and dispose
of their corpses, as they see fit (in the latter case, as long
as it doesn't create a public health hazard, of course).


Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too. Certainly the official verbiage of the organizations shouldn't be allowed to create the impression that the current state of scientific knowledge provides any grounds for actual confidence that severed hamburgerized heads will be nanobotically or digirifically resurrected or whatever -- but it seems to me that contra the handwaving of True Believers in faithly settings the organizational discourse covers its ass more or less. Beyond that, so long as you say as there is no hazard to public health, it doesn't seem to me on the face of it that cryonics should be more illegal than embalming, cremation, or shooting corpses into the Sun or what have you.

Myself, I always rather liked the fictional depiction of the Bene Gesserits on Chapterhouse dropping bodies in orchards with a freshly planted tree on top of each departed member of the community. I rather like the idea of a white-pedaled dogwood flowering on a hillock where I used to be. I remember driving past woods in Indiana as a kid when dogwoods were blooming among the trees thinking the forest, like the monolith in 2001, was full of stars.

Dale Carrico said...

Isn't it ironic?

My word, it hasn't come to that. I will say that there are worse things than exile in Canada -- among them, if Democrats don't soon prevail over Movement Republicans and more, and better, Democrats don't prevail over the corporatist Democrats (which does seem to be happening, if frustratingly slowly and convulsively), possibly remaining in the USA qua Republic of Gilead/ Potterville.

jimf said...

> I will say that there are worse things than exile in Canada --
> among them, if Democrats don't soon prevail over Movement Republicans. . .,
> remaining in the USA qua Republic of Gilead/ Potterville.

From your pal, Mark Plus (ne Potts) -- the guy who is
soliciting legal advice as to whether you've crossed the
line into libel vis a vis his tribe, in case anybody
hasn't noticed. ;->

http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/2012/09/at-least-norrises-think-long-term_5.html
-------------------
"I have trouble getting cryonicists to think about a mere
decade ahead, yet Chuck Norris and his deferential trophy
wife (who has had too much cosmetic surgery, judging from
her eyes) worry that if America's christians don't come
out in droves to vote for Mitt Romney, by default we'll
bring about Ronald Reagan's prophecy of entering
'1,000 years of darkness.' Either that, or else the
Norrises have Obama confused with Sauron.

jimf said...

> Myself, I always rather liked the fictional depiction of
> the Bene Gesserits on Chapterhouse dropping bodies in
> orchards with a freshly planted tree on top of each departed
> member of the community. I rather like the idea of a
> white-pedaled dogwood flowering on a hillock where I
> used to be. . .

Well, then, there's the thing for you (and for me, too,
though regrettably it's not yet available in the US).

It even involves liquid nitrogen, though not for **quite**
the same purpose the cryonicists use it for. ;->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promession

Dale Carrico said...

Promession seems interesting, I wasn't aware of it. The environmental impacts of conventional corpse disposal methods are an under-addressed problem (not surprising given how squeamish people seem to be about the topic). I wonder about the costs of the procedure though. I read a book on cremation as a procedure but also a kind of "movement" by Stephen Prothero (who was on the committee for my MA thesis in Georgia "Technology and Proliferating Queer Bodies" back in 1994).

From the first chapter:

"On December 6, 1876, in the small town of Washington, Pennsylvania, the corpse of Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm went up in flames in an event billed as the first cremation in modern America. Supporters hailed the event, the first cremation in modern America, as a harbinger of a new age of scientific progress and ritual simplicity. Opponents denounced it as Satan's errand. Reporters too were divided. Some wrote up the story as a tragedy, others as a comedy. Either way, the event was a grand triumph for the U.S. cremation movement."

It is interesting to think of the discursive and cultural freighting of cryonics -- or, possibly, eventually, promession, the very term of which is redolent, coming from the Italian word for Promise! -- in a comparable way. Definitely cryonics is a site where late modern societies are negotiating the technoscientific subsumption of transcendental aspirations.

Eudoxia said...

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promession

This (Well, a slight variation) was actually considered as a cheap alternative to cryonics by leader of the non-existent cult of Transtopia, Dalibor den Otter aka neosapient:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090302090837/http://www.transtopia.org/plastination.html#freezedry

Dale Carrico said...

Following that link is a real eye-opener -- click on "principles" and you find yet another "science champion" leaping gleefully into techno-transcendence as rational religion, click on "pc-free zone" and discover full-throated defenses of eugenics, anti-racism as racist anti-science propaganda, clash of civilization neo-imperialism, the whole nine yards. One more data point in a long chain of hideous reactionary religiosity never more than a hop skip and jump away from the Robot Cult.

jimf said...

> . . .Dalibor den Otter aka neosapient. . .

I remember "den Otter" as a name from the Extropians' mailing
list when I was reading and posting there at the turn of the century.

> Following that link is a real eye-opener -- . . .
> [You'll] discover full-throated defenses of eugenics, anti-racism
> as racist anti-science propaganda, clash of civilization
> neo-imperialism, the whole nine yards. One more data point
> in a long chain of hideous reactionary religiosity never
> more than a hop skip and jump away from the Robot Cult.

Another name familiar from the Extropians' list during that
same timeframe has been described thus:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=480
-------------------
If one follows the website far enough down its meandering byways
of numbered and unnumbered pages, one discovers that Mr. [Lyle] Burkhead
is apparently a Holocaust denier (well a gas-chamber denier,
anyway, as he would evidently correct me with a considerable grievance)
and a self-described admirer of Nazi Germany as a model for
"transhumanism", as well as a white-power racist.
-------------------

Though a transhumanist, Mr. Burkhead is also, it seems,
a Nanotechnology skeptic on his "geniebusters" Web site.

Here's another, um, interesting case:

http://thelifeofmanquamanonearth.blogspot.com/2012/09/rick-potvin-illustrates-one-of-my.html
-------------------
Of course, Rick [Potvin] has sabotaged his own life by wasting inordinate
amounts of time on posting word-salads on the internet about Jews,
the evils of circumcision, Neanderthals, an imminent ice age,
conspiracy theories, Lyndon LaRouche's insights into world affairs,
and denialism of real events like the moon landings and the
9/11 terrorist attacks.

In fact, Rick could serve as a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger
effect.
-------------------

I can think of other candidates among the >Hists to serve as
exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Speaking of deniers, however, here's a doozie of a proposal:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/singularity-denial-should-be-a-criminal-offence-worse-than-holocaust-denial
-------------------
Singularity Denial should be a criminal offence: worse than Holocaust denial.
by Singularity Utopia

I am in the process of writing a short essay regarding Singularity Deniers.

The basic premise is that Deniers are potentially causing enormous
loss of life because their denial could easily delay the Singularity.

Approximately 150,000 people die each day therefore when we reach
the Singularity (immortality) almost all these deaths will be prevented.

Singularity deniers are therefore potentially complicit in the deaths
of thousands or millions of people.

Guilt will be determined retrospectively via supremely intelligent AIs.
I would like a international law to be created to criminalize Singularity-Denial.

The definition of Singularity Denial is where a person or persons
deny the Singularity will occur by year 2045 (at the latest) and
they deny the Singularity will create utopia.
-------------------

jimf said...

> . . .leader of the non-existent cult of Transtopia. . .

You know, that name reminds me of another "non-existent cult", whose
leader is also a self-declared "futurist", who provided a fair amount
of entertainment for readers of Usenet back in the early-to-mid 90s.

That "movement" never quite bridged the gap with the transhumanists,
Extropians, and Singularitarians. Its "leader",
Elizabeth ("Libby") Hubbard (the self-titled "Doctress Neutopia"),
is a woman, for one thing, and her ideas are in part predicated
on her own brands of "feminism" and "environmentalism" (involving,
among other things, the coming of a Gaia Messiah -- who would also
serve a role as her own mate, if I recall correctly), which likely
made her anathema to the boys'-club constitution of "mainstream"
transhumanism (not that there aren't likely examples among "the boys"
who might seem to disinterested observers to be just as outrageous
(notice I avoided using the potentially-libellous word "crazy" ;->)
as the good Doctress.

There was a Usenet group devoted to following the adventures
of the Doctress Neutopia, called alt.society.neutopia . Here is
its "FAQ-Like Substance":

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/alt.society.neutopia/jDzEAs_fVlA

joe said...

What and absolutely moronic statment to make.
I personally just like the balloon puncturing you give "the movemenst" more trippy member but I have no interest in going to a cryonics facility and blowing up a bunch of frozen chickens.

Frankly there are some people involved in the various sub sets of all this (TH, H+ types, wannabe AI makers and shakers etc) who scare the shit out of me.

How much further swimming in the deep end would be enough to turn one of those fringe types (who already dismiss us as "deathists" and "Mehums") from having a good try at thinning the population out?

If you can already see a person as less worthy "H+" "mehum" what have you?.

Dale Carrico said...

Criminals are always a minority and I daresay if any of the transhumanoids actually took up some of the darker entailments they like to contemplate with their inside voices these efforts would leave discernible traces for the authorities to follow.

The Robot Cult is a religious enterprise pretending to be a serious scientific policy-making or philosophical one -- which offends me as somebody who thinks even provisional standards need to be maintained if civilization is to have a chance --

The Robot Cult threatens reasonable public deliberation on technodevelopmental questions, some of them urgent -- which worries me and leads me to critique it the better to marginalize that threat --

The Robot Cult preys on the credulous and the foolish -- which pricks my conscience and makes me want to do something to help at least some of these foolish people avoid wasting their time when they could be doing more useful and fulfilling sorts of things instead --

The Robot Cult is very foolish -- which leads me to ridicule it for fun -- but it is also a kind of reductio ad absurdum of much of what is foolish about our unsustainable consumption driven, gizmo-fetishizing, media-bamboozled, techno-triumphalist, limit-denialist society in general -- which leads me to ridicule it as a clarifying extremity of this more prevailing but still ridiculous state of affairs we seem all to pleased to take for granted.

But taking these numbskulls too seriously as a criminal conspiracy or sooper-science movement risks re-enacting the sort of hyperbolic discourse they are already indulging in.

One must be vigilant about such things, of course -- which is why I occasionally force people to connect the dots among figures and organizations and so on and why I remind people of the example of a comparably marginal group of foolish white guys completely sure of their genius, the Neocons, who managed despite being perfectly ridiculous to do a whole of damage in the world. But it hasn't come to that. And to worry about transhumanoids coding an eeeeeevil AI or bioengineering a special deathist plague or some such nonsense is to believe in the Devil which seems to me only slightly less silly than believing in God, Robot or otherwise.

Eudoxia said...

>Singularity Denial should be a criminal offence: worse than Holocaust denial.
>The definition of Singularity Denial is where a person or persons
deny the Singularity will occur by year 2045 (at the latest) and
they deny the Singularity will create utopia.

Hahahahah, SU never fails to entertain. That dude should just pop a Zyprexa and rest for a few days.

>"Doctress Neutopia"

Internet schizophrenics are always sad to watch.

jimf said...

> How much further swimming in the deep end would be enough
> to turn one of those fringe types (who already dismiss us
> as "deathists" and "Mehums") from having a good try at
> thinning the population out?
>
> If you can already see a person as less worthy "H+"
> "mehum" what have you?.

I don't think it takes much to nudge some fringe futurists
in that direction of speculation. I suspect, though, that most would be
content to fantasize about letting a future "Homo superior"
race, or a future superintelligent AI, "have a good try at
thinning the population out", rather than imagining doing it
themselves. The theme is certainly a staple of science fiction,
though.

Here's a quote from Arthur C. Clarke, taken from an essay called
"The Mind of the Machine", which I first saw in the Dec. 1968
issue of _Playboy_ (reprinted in _Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!_,
1999):

"The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that is was pointless
for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in
a single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that
would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred
thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage,
special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement
for what has been called the global village of the future to hold
more than a million people scattered over the face of the planet.

And if such a figure appears unrealistic -- since we are already
past the 3 billion mark and heading for at least twice as many by
the end of the century -- it should be pointed out that once the
universally agreed upon goal of population control is attained,
any desired target can be reached in a remarkably short time.
If we really tried (with a little help from the biology labs),
we could reach a trillion within a century -- four generations.
It might be more difficult to go in the other direction for
fundamental psychological reasons, but it could be done. If the
ultraintelligent machines of the future decide that more than
a million human beings constitute an epidemic, they might order
euthanasia for anyone with an IQ of less than 150, but I hope
that such drastic measure will not be necessary."

Exactly what Mr. Clarke "hoped" might not, I fear, bear close
examination. As for the decisions of the "ultraintelligent
machines" -- projection, much? :-/

joe said...

"And to worry about transhumanoids coding an eeeeeevil AI or bioengineering a special deathist plague or some such nonsense is to believe in the Devil which seems to me only slightly less silly than believing in God, Robot or otherwise."

Now you've hurt my feelings Dale :(

jimf said...

> There's a curious imbalance in this country (probably even
> more so in the U.K., where libel laws can be used very
> effectively to silence critics) in that **positive** speech
> (even if it's arrant nonsense -- claims about anything from UFOs
> to getting messages from angels, to the efficacy of
> supposedly therapeutic personal philosophies, to alleged
> cancer cures) seems to entail a presumption that it should be
> **left alone**, not criticized too harshly.
>
> Whereas **negative** speech -- which is just as useful in
> public debate -- runs the risk, not only of being dismissed
> as "rude", but of actually being suppressed, either
> via intimidating threats, or by [outright] legal action.

I know Dale is not willing to forgive this guy his support of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but for what it's worth:

Christopher Hitchens on free speech, pt 1 of 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOck_bDb0JA

Christopher Hitchens on free speech, pt 2 of 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHzjNhH7jXg

Christopher Hitchens on free speech, pt 3 of 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3OTS5gSO0E

Dale Carrico said...

Now you've hurt my feelings Dale :(

Aww, don't be that way, I ain't mad atcha.

Dale Carrico said...

I wonder if Hitchens a decade before his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would forgive Hitchens his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As for me, there's a lot I can forgive an acerbic wordsmith.

Summerspeaker said...

Criminals are always a minority? Maybe the those of us who get caught. Historically, working-class folks have always been criminalized and subject to punishment at the whim of the bosses.

Dale Carrico said...

I agree that patriarchy, white racism, corporatism, and militarism are each also "a crime" after a fashion, certainly they are institutionalized systems of abjection and injustice, but that is different from assigning the label "criminal" -- which seems to me properly to mean prosecutable -- to those who are caught up in these systems, even the ones who are their relative beneficiaries. I really do think only a minority of people are really actively criminal -- a different assignment than the one of "people who happen to be in the wrong" -- a minority incomparably smaller, for example, than presently reside in the US prison complex.

Athena Andreadis said...

Hitchens was a rabid misogynist, and much of his wordsmithing was a smoke screen to cover the fact that he wasn't ignorant about much of the stuff he discussed.

Athena Andreadis said...

I noticed my comment contains a typo! It should read "...he was ignorant about much of the stuff he discussed."

Dale Carrico said...

Typo or not, the point was well taken.