I wrote a couple days ago about the popular contest between the guiding ideas of a championing of Good Government as against a vilification of Big Government, being staged in the present as a contest of affection for FDR as against Ronald Reagan as Presidential exemplars. One of the problems with this formulation is that the phrases on which it depends are not equally dependable themselves.
Of course, the idea of championing Good Government is not -- as some facile reactionaries would have it -- anything like a blanket celebration of all government as good, so much as the conviction that government can serve the people well whatever its vulnerabilities to do otherwise and that we must all be dedicated as citizens, then, to ensuring that it does do good.
Now, the idea of vilifying Big Government is a far more confused affair. Given the tendency of so many ideologues most loudly opposed to Big Government to enlarge governmental budgets, debts, employees, legislation, and authority the moment they are in a position to do so it is easy to wonder whether they mean or even remember or understand what they say when they repudiate Big Government. Of course, many claim to oppose the very idea of Government as such (which Reagan himself described as "the problem"), in which case what is Bad about Big Government is just that it is more of what is bad in any case, but this surely exacerbates the initial perplexity of those of us who wonder whether those who speak this way truly mean or understand what they say. It seems curious on the face of it that a person who denounces the criminality and corruption and incompetence of the very idea of public service would then strive so diligently to assume the position of such criminality, corruption, and incompetence (although I suppose it does help us make sense of the fact that so many who achieve public office through recourse to such rhetoric go on to be criminal, corrupt, and incompetent). And given that all public figures in the United States declare themselves dedicated to our democracy it seems especially curious that some would denounce government in a system of government of by and for the people, since this would seem to imply that they denounce not only all of their constituents but themselves as well as members of that people.
But it seems to me that the substantial reality underlying the rhetoric of the vilification of Big Government is really rather more straightforward than all this. Not to put too fine a point on it, Big Government tends to be code for "welfare" and for those who respond to this code it typically seems to mean even more specifically any empowerment of non-whites (which of course makes no sense at all since more white people are beneficiaries of welfare than not, but racism is irrational by nature and it is foolish to expect sense from it). That is to say, when you hear the vilification of Big Government it is crucial to understand just how often this vilification amounts to hostility to any Government so Big as to be Big Enough to be of benefit to anybody but well-off straight (or closeted) white guys. No, I do not think this is a facile or sanctimonious oversimplification. The Southern Strategy is real, and its mobilization by Reagan and others throughout the Movement Republican epoch consummated in Bush II is perfectly well understood.
Slavery was an incomparable crime in the foundation of this nation, a crime exacerbated by the native American genocide through which the United States constituted itself as a continental power through internal imperialism, a crime reproduced in the aftermath of the Civil War through racist Reconstruction and an Apartheid South, a crime consolidated by the exclusion of migrant farmers and domestic workers (many of whom were people of color) from the New Deal that created a white American middle class and then the subsequent failure of the New Deal to achieve a National healthcare system and hence a viable social democracy in the twentieth century because racists were appalled at the prospect of caring equitably for African American citizens, a crime re-invigorated right up to the present day in the racist war on drugs.
It is important to rehearse all this, because it is important that we recall forcefully to mind the ugly substance behind what might otherwise seem the merely stupid and self-defeating hostility to "Big Government" that presumably drives Movement Republicanism. It is important to grasp that their embrace of big authoritarian government in practice does not give the lie to their vilifications of Big Government so much as remind us that these vilifications are often profoundly misleading, functioning as cover for what is more substantially their racist hostility to the notion of equitable treatment for the diversity of their fellow citizens of color. And, finally, all this is important, because unless we attend to all this we are apt to forget or misunderstand the extraordinary force and promise (far from a guarantee, but promise indeed) of the historical moment when the Southern Strategy fails and Barack Obama assumes the Presidency of the United States.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Did the Cold War Happen?
It's interesting to re-read the Cold War as a planetary system rather than a planetary conflict, as a kind of meta-stable postcolonial hegemony that mistook itself as the stalemate between two diametrically opposed ideologies when in fact it constituted more a lumpy but continuous ideological system expressing the values of extractive- centralizing- authoritarian industrialism.
The "End of the Cold War," then, would represent less the victory of one antagonist ("capitalism," so-called) over the other ("communism," so-called), so much as the exhibition of systemic contradictions at both poles in an industrial planetary hegemony that eventually convulsed the whole, first at one pole and very soon after (what wishful thinking, "the end of history," indeed!) at the other.
Few readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that I regard the proper successor to the failed planetary system of extractive-industrialism as polyculture: sustainable planetary peer-to-peer consensual multiculture.
Darker possibilities are certainly also possible: warlordism in the midst of climate catastrophe and planetary pandemics, militarist extinction events, corporatist feudalism presiding over genocidal precarization of "surplus humanity" among others. But it does seem to me that history in this moment is rather up for grabs, and more promising than not, especially given the vitality of global resistance movements against neoliberalism (and its neoconservative underside), the corporate-militarist consummation of global extractive-industrialism, the emergence of environmental consciousness and the proliferation of disruptive peer-to-peer formations.
The "End of the Cold War," then, would represent less the victory of one antagonist ("capitalism," so-called) over the other ("communism," so-called), so much as the exhibition of systemic contradictions at both poles in an industrial planetary hegemony that eventually convulsed the whole, first at one pole and very soon after (what wishful thinking, "the end of history," indeed!) at the other.
Few readers of this blog will be surprised to hear that I regard the proper successor to the failed planetary system of extractive-industrialism as polyculture: sustainable planetary peer-to-peer consensual multiculture.
Darker possibilities are certainly also possible: warlordism in the midst of climate catastrophe and planetary pandemics, militarist extinction events, corporatist feudalism presiding over genocidal precarization of "surplus humanity" among others. But it does seem to me that history in this moment is rather up for grabs, and more promising than not, especially given the vitality of global resistance movements against neoliberalism (and its neoconservative underside), the corporate-militarist consummation of global extractive-industrialism, the emergence of environmental consciousness and the proliferation of disruptive peer-to-peer formations.
Friday, December 26, 2008
The Structural Asymmetry Faced By Good Government as Against Anti-Government Politics
One cannot stress this point Krugman made in his Christmas column often enough:
This isn't just a question of the hypocrisy and inertia of elite institutions favoring incumbent and moneyed interests above all. All that was depressingly in evidence often enough, but now that the tables have turned somewhat we are in a better position to understand the different stakes and conditions that structurally confront good government as against anti-government types more generally.
There is a special difficulty for good-government types (who closely but do not perfectly track Democratic as against Republican partisan politics, so one should be a little careful around this) in an era in which it is relatively easy opportunistically to deploy righteous dissatisfaction with organized corruption and incompetence into a popular anti-governmentality that actually benefits most who also benefit most from the corruption and incompetence itself.
(It has been largely the mass-broadcast media formations of the late modern era that facilitated this ease opportunistically taken up by the successive 20C waves of the Right, from the rise of fascism through to the bloody postcolonial global implementation of the corporate-militarist Washington Consensus comsummated in the killer clown college of the Bush II administration. Meanwhile, the ongoing -- but more vulnerable than you might think -- eclipse of mass-broadcast media by peer-to-peer formations has created the conditions, well, together with the emergence of post-nationalist environmental concerns, for a genuinely revolutionary recasting of the planetary political terrain to which radical democracy and social justice movements would do well to avail themselves while the getting's good. This is actually a topic for a separate post, but the politics that are roughly indicated through the shorthand of "good government types" are actually indispensable to this democratizing consensualizing planetary moment in my view -- without them, radical democracy is all too likely to be appropriated by the usual rhetoric of "spontaneism" and "negative liberty" that always eventually buttresses the politics of incumbency over the politics of resistence.)
It is crucial for "goo-goos" (advocates of good government) to resist their temperamental attraction to "moving on" in the name of problem solving here and now. They need to rethink their apparently endless capacity to "forgive and forget" those whose skills seem scarce and wasted should accountability for failure and corruption shunt them aside. And they must explicitly discredit all those who proffer blanket condemnations of government as such -- when good government is literally indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate, democratic, equitable, diverse, consensual social order. They must condemn those who would condemn public service in general as corrupt, incompetent, or ridiculous -- rather than excoriating corrupt and incompetent public servants in particular together with praise of the heroism, service, and sacrifice of public service in general. They must expose the self-serving pretense of those who like to insinuate that there something foolish or impractical or self-marginalizing in a dedication to integrity, fairness, long-term thinking, empathy, waiting for one's turn, achieving competence, right modesty, critical thinking, and taking responsibility for one's mistakes and even for the unintended harms one has had a hand in making -- when these are the public values that help make the world a place worth living in for all, peer to peer.
The anti-government types are all too eager to eat the world they did nothing to make and little to maintain, to howl that there "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" even as they feast themselves on a crumbling infrastructure (not only the physical infrastructure of roads and pipes and professionalisms and legal precedents, but a psychical infrastructure of goodwill and trust and decency and commonwealth eroded by self-promotion and looting and snide short-sighted opportunism) they refuse to pay for, eating it and thinking or pretending they can have it, too. Their carnival of looting and cruelty has been a vicious circle that swallowed a whole generation, their bad behavior feeding failure after failure and ensuring always only that those who were the most vulnerable or who actually sought to save the world from these predations would be the first to fail themselves, the first to burn out, the first to be squeezed, the first to be criticized for any misstep, the most vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if they succeeded in accomplishing anything at all, however momentary, under these impossible conditions, and so on.
Good government types must install virtuous circles to overcome these vicious ones always at the ready to undermine the harder work of common sense and common wealth. They must ensure that those who benefit from the equitable administration of society and law understand very well their absolute interdependence with their fellows for their continued security, prosperity, and expressivity and are devoted to maintaining the institutions and standards without which that security, prosperity, and expressivity are hopelessly fraught and fragile: imperiled by the short-sightedness, self-rationalization, and parochialism all human beings are susceptible to, but on which incumbent authority and privilege especially tend to depend for their long maintenance in a dynamic world.
Good government is fragile, and the task of good government types is far more difficult than that of anti-government types (except in rare moments of devastating reckoning like the one we are likely in for at present when the costs and stakes become flabbergastingly stark). Just as anti-governmentality succeeds with every failure, at least until these many failures accumulate into a failure too sweeping and too deep to hide or mistake or bear, good governmentality must ensure that its every success is indeed experienced as the success it is, as an accomplishment of common sense and common wealth for which we can all of us be proud and grateful and which should find us newly dedicated to the common work, peer to peer, without which every creative achievement, every collaboration, every reconciliation, every secure comfort would all too likely have been stillborn or stolen or smashed by the frailties we are all of us heir to otherwise.
[T]he Bushies didn’t have to worry about governing well and honestly. Even when they failed on the job (as they so often did), they could claim that very failure as vindication of their anti-government ideology, a demonstration that the public sector can’t do anything right.
This isn't just a question of the hypocrisy and inertia of elite institutions favoring incumbent and moneyed interests above all. All that was depressingly in evidence often enough, but now that the tables have turned somewhat we are in a better position to understand the different stakes and conditions that structurally confront good government as against anti-government types more generally.
There is a special difficulty for good-government types (who closely but do not perfectly track Democratic as against Republican partisan politics, so one should be a little careful around this) in an era in which it is relatively easy opportunistically to deploy righteous dissatisfaction with organized corruption and incompetence into a popular anti-governmentality that actually benefits most who also benefit most from the corruption and incompetence itself.
(It has been largely the mass-broadcast media formations of the late modern era that facilitated this ease opportunistically taken up by the successive 20C waves of the Right, from the rise of fascism through to the bloody postcolonial global implementation of the corporate-militarist Washington Consensus comsummated in the killer clown college of the Bush II administration. Meanwhile, the ongoing -- but more vulnerable than you might think -- eclipse of mass-broadcast media by peer-to-peer formations has created the conditions, well, together with the emergence of post-nationalist environmental concerns, for a genuinely revolutionary recasting of the planetary political terrain to which radical democracy and social justice movements would do well to avail themselves while the getting's good. This is actually a topic for a separate post, but the politics that are roughly indicated through the shorthand of "good government types" are actually indispensable to this democratizing consensualizing planetary moment in my view -- without them, radical democracy is all too likely to be appropriated by the usual rhetoric of "spontaneism" and "negative liberty" that always eventually buttresses the politics of incumbency over the politics of resistence.)
It is crucial for "goo-goos" (advocates of good government) to resist their temperamental attraction to "moving on" in the name of problem solving here and now. They need to rethink their apparently endless capacity to "forgive and forget" those whose skills seem scarce and wasted should accountability for failure and corruption shunt them aside. And they must explicitly discredit all those who proffer blanket condemnations of government as such -- when good government is literally indispensable to the maintenance of legitimate, democratic, equitable, diverse, consensual social order. They must condemn those who would condemn public service in general as corrupt, incompetent, or ridiculous -- rather than excoriating corrupt and incompetent public servants in particular together with praise of the heroism, service, and sacrifice of public service in general. They must expose the self-serving pretense of those who like to insinuate that there something foolish or impractical or self-marginalizing in a dedication to integrity, fairness, long-term thinking, empathy, waiting for one's turn, achieving competence, right modesty, critical thinking, and taking responsibility for one's mistakes and even for the unintended harms one has had a hand in making -- when these are the public values that help make the world a place worth living in for all, peer to peer.
The anti-government types are all too eager to eat the world they did nothing to make and little to maintain, to howl that there "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" even as they feast themselves on a crumbling infrastructure (not only the physical infrastructure of roads and pipes and professionalisms and legal precedents, but a psychical infrastructure of goodwill and trust and decency and commonwealth eroded by self-promotion and looting and snide short-sighted opportunism) they refuse to pay for, eating it and thinking or pretending they can have it, too. Their carnival of looting and cruelty has been a vicious circle that swallowed a whole generation, their bad behavior feeding failure after failure and ensuring always only that those who were the most vulnerable or who actually sought to save the world from these predations would be the first to fail themselves, the first to burn out, the first to be squeezed, the first to be criticized for any misstep, the most vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy if they succeeded in accomplishing anything at all, however momentary, under these impossible conditions, and so on.
Good government types must install virtuous circles to overcome these vicious ones always at the ready to undermine the harder work of common sense and common wealth. They must ensure that those who benefit from the equitable administration of society and law understand very well their absolute interdependence with their fellows for their continued security, prosperity, and expressivity and are devoted to maintaining the institutions and standards without which that security, prosperity, and expressivity are hopelessly fraught and fragile: imperiled by the short-sightedness, self-rationalization, and parochialism all human beings are susceptible to, but on which incumbent authority and privilege especially tend to depend for their long maintenance in a dynamic world.
Good government is fragile, and the task of good government types is far more difficult than that of anti-government types (except in rare moments of devastating reckoning like the one we are likely in for at present when the costs and stakes become flabbergastingly stark). Just as anti-governmentality succeeds with every failure, at least until these many failures accumulate into a failure too sweeping and too deep to hide or mistake or bear, good governmentality must ensure that its every success is indeed experienced as the success it is, as an accomplishment of common sense and common wealth for which we can all of us be proud and grateful and which should find us newly dedicated to the common work, peer to peer, without which every creative achievement, every collaboration, every reconciliation, every secure comfort would all too likely have been stillborn or stolen or smashed by the frailties we are all of us heir to otherwise.
Marriage? No, Thanks. The Right to Marry? You Better Believe I'll Fight for It!
I am not personally interested in assimilating into a heteronormative frame in which I become a "good gay," nicely bourgeois, logo-ized, lobotomized, married, buried, kids, all eagerness to kill my nation's "foes" of the moment on some foreign field as an openly gay patriot or what have you.
I am personally much more ferociously identified with promiscuous, punk, and pacifist variations of queerness, nicely crunchy, pinko, pervy, and effete-aesthete. I can't say as such that I am pleased particularly by the appalling but customary tradeoff that would now offer up legal standing and cultural legibility to queer people but at the price of the demand for our assimilation into the mainstreaming machineries of corporate-military monoculture.
I do agree, then, that a crucial dimension of queer critique and political struggle must be to resist this false tradeoff, to direct attention to the ways in which it marginalizes and denigrates intersex, bisex, trasnsex, asex, polyamorous, and otherwise deviant/defiant gender-atypical persons and lifeways.
But I have no trouble at all reconciling this queer agenda with my awareness that the refusal of equitable access to the institutions of marriage, adoption, public and military service for queers who aspire to them is conspicuously unjust and must be fought as such. Not only that, but it is plain to me that these exclusions function as a primary mechanism through which the ongoing stigmatization and abuse of less-assimilable queers takes place anyway:
If even boring white guys who want nothing more than to get married and shop for crap with their kids are rendered not-quite-human not-quite-citizens just because they couple homosexually, you can be sure that more radical modalities of queerness are earmarked for an even surer destruction in such a society.
And, anyway, if I want to celebrate the free expressivity of promiscuous punks and poets, this scarcely entitles me to denigrate all those whose queerness includes forms of long-term commitment, monogamy, child-rearing, public service, and so on that may be less pervy or poetical to my own parochial eyes. My imagination isn't so limited that I cannot conceive of worthy lives lived otherwise than mine nor are my values so insecure that I imagine them imperiled just because they jostle in the public square together with different ones.
So long as equity and diversity and consent are secure (or more to the point: only to the extent that they are so secured) I am usually happiest in the marginal minority, immersed in the bracing and provocative spectacle of difference. I think this is an attitude that is perfectly facilitative of the politics of queer lifeways, however assimilated or deviant they might be, as it happens.
None of this is to deny that assimilationist lgbtq politics cheerfully do produce exclusionary and abjective effects on lifeways I would celebrate as indispensable to lgbtq politics properly so-called, but, hey, nobody promised me civil rights struggle would be a rose garden -- one has, as it were, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And certainly we should be wary of simplistic either-or divide-and-conquer formulations that would support institutional homophobia under the guise of a celebration of homosex in only some one particular parochially preferred mode (even if the preference happens to be our own). The support and celebration of a more capacious atypical queerness is hardly helped along by the stigmatization and precarity of queers rendered second-class citizens in their own societies by law.
I am personally much more ferociously identified with promiscuous, punk, and pacifist variations of queerness, nicely crunchy, pinko, pervy, and effete-aesthete. I can't say as such that I am pleased particularly by the appalling but customary tradeoff that would now offer up legal standing and cultural legibility to queer people but at the price of the demand for our assimilation into the mainstreaming machineries of corporate-military monoculture.
I do agree, then, that a crucial dimension of queer critique and political struggle must be to resist this false tradeoff, to direct attention to the ways in which it marginalizes and denigrates intersex, bisex, trasnsex, asex, polyamorous, and otherwise deviant/defiant gender-atypical persons and lifeways.
But I have no trouble at all reconciling this queer agenda with my awareness that the refusal of equitable access to the institutions of marriage, adoption, public and military service for queers who aspire to them is conspicuously unjust and must be fought as such. Not only that, but it is plain to me that these exclusions function as a primary mechanism through which the ongoing stigmatization and abuse of less-assimilable queers takes place anyway:
If even boring white guys who want nothing more than to get married and shop for crap with their kids are rendered not-quite-human not-quite-citizens just because they couple homosexually, you can be sure that more radical modalities of queerness are earmarked for an even surer destruction in such a society.
And, anyway, if I want to celebrate the free expressivity of promiscuous punks and poets, this scarcely entitles me to denigrate all those whose queerness includes forms of long-term commitment, monogamy, child-rearing, public service, and so on that may be less pervy or poetical to my own parochial eyes. My imagination isn't so limited that I cannot conceive of worthy lives lived otherwise than mine nor are my values so insecure that I imagine them imperiled just because they jostle in the public square together with different ones.
So long as equity and diversity and consent are secure (or more to the point: only to the extent that they are so secured) I am usually happiest in the marginal minority, immersed in the bracing and provocative spectacle of difference. I think this is an attitude that is perfectly facilitative of the politics of queer lifeways, however assimilated or deviant they might be, as it happens.
None of this is to deny that assimilationist lgbtq politics cheerfully do produce exclusionary and abjective effects on lifeways I would celebrate as indispensable to lgbtq politics properly so-called, but, hey, nobody promised me civil rights struggle would be a rose garden -- one has, as it were, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And certainly we should be wary of simplistic either-or divide-and-conquer formulations that would support institutional homophobia under the guise of a celebration of homosex in only some one particular parochially preferred mode (even if the preference happens to be our own). The support and celebration of a more capacious atypical queerness is hardly helped along by the stigmatization and precarity of queers rendered second-class citizens in their own societies by law.
Transhumanism = Gay Marriage? Oh... Kay, Then
Just because I couldn't resist, Expanded and Updated from the Moot, here is bioconservative John Howard explaining why I am indeed a transhumanist (secretly!) despite my relentless critique of the transhumanists, all because of my stance on gay marriage of all things:
There is a clear logical line that all people are on one side or the other: should we ban genetic engineering of people? All Transhumanists are on your side, all Bioconservatives are on my side. And I don't see the point of saying that some people on your side are not Transhumanists, or some people on my side are not Bioconservatives.
Probably most transhumanist-identified people will agree with me that the earth isn't flat, but that hardly makes it irrelevant to point out that only a vanishingly small minority of the people who do agree with me on that score are transhumanist-identified and that it may be jumping the gun a bit to go from our shared denial of a flat-earth to corralling me together with transhumanists who actually are more noted for extreme techno-utopian and crypto-eugenicist views which I actually endlessly explicitly excoriate hereabouts.
The mere fact that some people are crazier than you are doesn't make you sane.
This is one of those man in the mirror moments for you, John, if you're up to it.
You still want to allow people to create people basically however they want,
Do you think people are creating golems from clay and magic spells? Do you think sentient suffering robot sex-slaves are appearing on assembly-lines somewhere? What the hell are you even talking about?
Are you proposing a blanket ban on actually-existing IVF techniques or all practices of surrogacy? As it happens I am enormously concerned about the abuses and problems that freight actually-existing ARTS -- the fraud of duressed and misinformed donors and surrogate mothers, the real health-risks and complications associated with the multiple births eventuating from many currently over-utilized fertility treatments, and so on.
But, you know, all of this is real world stuff, unconnected to and unclarified by sweeping declamations against "The Unnatural" or fearmongering fantasies (not to mention corporatist hype usually from the opposite direction) involving designer babies or clone armies or the like.
yet you refuse to stop them if their education doesn't result in the cautious prudence you were needing for your own PR purposes. Maybe that's when you'll decide we need some rules?
Again, I'm not quite sure what I'm presumably refusing to stop here -- golems? androids? cloned Hitlers? bioengineered centaurs? actually existing IVF kids menacing the natural order somehow while fingerpainting in their kindergarten classrooms? It would be absurd in the extreme for you to cast me in the role of some libertopian anything-goes corporatist just because I "merely" advocate strong regulation and public oversight of healthcare provision based on informed nonduressed consent and consensus-science based assessments of risk rather than blanket prohibitions of even not-yet existing or possibly never-to-exist techniques that might some day violate what you have personally come to fetishize here and now as "The Natural" state of affairs where human beings and their sexual and reproductive practices are concerned.
[I]f you can't see that banning genetic engineering means limiting conception to a man and a woman, and prohibiting people from attempting to conceive with someone of the same sex, then you just are willfully refusing to see, I think.
Well, sure, of course I see that this is the case. Unless Jeebus sees fit to bless buttfuckers like me with a miracle butt-baby (I'd abort it, by the way), it doesn't seem likely that homosex is going to yield much in the way of reprosex any time soon without the aid of some as yet only hypothetical medical technique.
But, then, I don't advocate "banning genetic engineering," I advocate actual harm reduction and health facilitation through equitable consensual healthcare provision (in case you want to know how this cashes out at political ground-level: I am an advocate for universal single payer healthcare and a scene of consent that is truly informed and nonduressed, which for me leads to an advocacy of a universal basic income guarantee and access-to-knowledge politics), whether this means banning some techniques you would call "genetic engineering" or making access universal and safe to other techniques you would call "genetic engineering."
If a technique emerges through which samesex couples can conceive a healthy wanted child with actually negligible risk to their health then you can be sure I will advocate that those who actually desire to make recourse to such a procedure can do so, even if this scares some conservatives who happen to believe for the moment that this would amount to "playing god" or "violating nature" -- as such people once said with the same idiotic fervor of anaesthesia and vaccination and so on as well.
You can be sure that it won't only be weird transhumanist-identified Robot Cultists who would be on my side in championing such access. Indeed, I wouldn't much welcome transhumanist allies in championing this access personally, since I daresay one can expect the transhumanists to remain in such a case very much as they are now, a vanishingly marginal minority of superlative technocentrics riding a more mainstream technoscientifically-literate progressive bandwagon but hyperbolized with a little worse-than-useless techno-transcendentalizing handwaving in the hopes of conning a few more impressionable naifs into ponying up membership dues for their membership organizations to munch on.
Any one that doesn't want a law to keep reproduction natural, between a man and a woman, is a Transhumanist
If you truly believe this, then I must question your sanity a bit.
It is a pretty neat strategy to pursue gay marriage and Transhumanism separately, as if they were unrelated, but it's pretty clear they are one and the same thing.
Well, there you have it.
There is a clear logical line that all people are on one side or the other: should we ban genetic engineering of people? All Transhumanists are on your side, all Bioconservatives are on my side. And I don't see the point of saying that some people on your side are not Transhumanists, or some people on my side are not Bioconservatives.
Probably most transhumanist-identified people will agree with me that the earth isn't flat, but that hardly makes it irrelevant to point out that only a vanishingly small minority of the people who do agree with me on that score are transhumanist-identified and that it may be jumping the gun a bit to go from our shared denial of a flat-earth to corralling me together with transhumanists who actually are more noted for extreme techno-utopian and crypto-eugenicist views which I actually endlessly explicitly excoriate hereabouts.
The mere fact that some people are crazier than you are doesn't make you sane.
This is one of those man in the mirror moments for you, John, if you're up to it.
You still want to allow people to create people basically however they want,
Do you think people are creating golems from clay and magic spells? Do you think sentient suffering robot sex-slaves are appearing on assembly-lines somewhere? What the hell are you even talking about?
Are you proposing a blanket ban on actually-existing IVF techniques or all practices of surrogacy? As it happens I am enormously concerned about the abuses and problems that freight actually-existing ARTS -- the fraud of duressed and misinformed donors and surrogate mothers, the real health-risks and complications associated with the multiple births eventuating from many currently over-utilized fertility treatments, and so on.
But, you know, all of this is real world stuff, unconnected to and unclarified by sweeping declamations against "The Unnatural" or fearmongering fantasies (not to mention corporatist hype usually from the opposite direction) involving designer babies or clone armies or the like.
yet you refuse to stop them if their education doesn't result in the cautious prudence you were needing for your own PR purposes. Maybe that's when you'll decide we need some rules?
Again, I'm not quite sure what I'm presumably refusing to stop here -- golems? androids? cloned Hitlers? bioengineered centaurs? actually existing IVF kids menacing the natural order somehow while fingerpainting in their kindergarten classrooms? It would be absurd in the extreme for you to cast me in the role of some libertopian anything-goes corporatist just because I "merely" advocate strong regulation and public oversight of healthcare provision based on informed nonduressed consent and consensus-science based assessments of risk rather than blanket prohibitions of even not-yet existing or possibly never-to-exist techniques that might some day violate what you have personally come to fetishize here and now as "The Natural" state of affairs where human beings and their sexual and reproductive practices are concerned.
[I]f you can't see that banning genetic engineering means limiting conception to a man and a woman, and prohibiting people from attempting to conceive with someone of the same sex, then you just are willfully refusing to see, I think.
Well, sure, of course I see that this is the case. Unless Jeebus sees fit to bless buttfuckers like me with a miracle butt-baby (I'd abort it, by the way), it doesn't seem likely that homosex is going to yield much in the way of reprosex any time soon without the aid of some as yet only hypothetical medical technique.
But, then, I don't advocate "banning genetic engineering," I advocate actual harm reduction and health facilitation through equitable consensual healthcare provision (in case you want to know how this cashes out at political ground-level: I am an advocate for universal single payer healthcare and a scene of consent that is truly informed and nonduressed, which for me leads to an advocacy of a universal basic income guarantee and access-to-knowledge politics), whether this means banning some techniques you would call "genetic engineering" or making access universal and safe to other techniques you would call "genetic engineering."
If a technique emerges through which samesex couples can conceive a healthy wanted child with actually negligible risk to their health then you can be sure I will advocate that those who actually desire to make recourse to such a procedure can do so, even if this scares some conservatives who happen to believe for the moment that this would amount to "playing god" or "violating nature" -- as such people once said with the same idiotic fervor of anaesthesia and vaccination and so on as well.
You can be sure that it won't only be weird transhumanist-identified Robot Cultists who would be on my side in championing such access. Indeed, I wouldn't much welcome transhumanist allies in championing this access personally, since I daresay one can expect the transhumanists to remain in such a case very much as they are now, a vanishingly marginal minority of superlative technocentrics riding a more mainstream technoscientifically-literate progressive bandwagon but hyperbolized with a little worse-than-useless techno-transcendentalizing handwaving in the hopes of conning a few more impressionable naifs into ponying up membership dues for their membership organizations to munch on.
Any one that doesn't want a law to keep reproduction natural, between a man and a woman, is a Transhumanist
If you truly believe this, then I must question your sanity a bit.
It is a pretty neat strategy to pursue gay marriage and Transhumanism separately, as if they were unrelated, but it's pretty clear they are one and the same thing.
Well, there you have it.
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