I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it’s not about you. It’s what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. ‘Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs’ -– oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.Speaking of How Californian, specifically in the California Ideology sense of Californian, remember that techno-transcendentalists of the techno-immortalizing sort pining after sooper-human post-human robot bodies and nanobotically-bolstered bodies and uploaded digi-angelicized cyber-bodies in Holodeck Heaven are very much of a piece with the pathologizing religiosities Banks is properly pooh-poohing here, with the difference that many of these latter are among his most ardent, if misguided, fans.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Iain Banks on Immortality: "How Californian"
Via Pharyngula, h/t -- JimF, some especially apt words on people who pine after perpetual life from the last interview of the mainly marvelous, much mourned, only a moment ago mortified Iain Banks:
The "Mixed Economy" Isn't A Mix, It Is "Ideal" Capitalism and Socialism That Are Mixed Up
The metaphor of the "mixed economy" is absolutely mystifying.
The idea of sustainable, consensual equity-in-diversity, of democratic commonwealth, is not a "mix" but a coherent political vantage, a political being democratic processes experimentally implement and a political becoming at which democratic struggles aim.
What tend to be called "capitalism" and "socialism" are, it seems to me, very much to the contrary, historically unrealized and logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity. That is to say, it is the prior conceptions of "capitalism" and "socialism" that seem to me to be mixed, if anything, historical and practical misapprehensions and dodgy implementations of consensual multiculture, democratized association, sustainable commonwealth.
And hence, the contractual arrangements to which moral cases for capitalism are devoted will always depend for their actual legibility as consent on a substantial provision of general welfare and socialization of common and public goods typically denominated socialism from those argumentative vantages, just as anti-authoritarian cases for (eg, democratic) socialism will inevitably allow for differences of preference and outcome typically denominated capitalism from those argumentative vantages. This is not because modern societies have been mixes of socialism and capitalism historically, I think, but because the democratizing struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity is the political substance from which capitalist and socialist abstractions are strained and deranged in the first place.
Again, I think it is what passes for capitalism and socialism in thought that is mixed up, the "mixed economy" in practice is not a mixture of these two derangements from good sense.
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them -- and that includes having a say in matters such as who are these people? what constitutes a proper say? of what does the public actually consist? and just who is affected by what that demands an accounting? There is no single regulative or ideal democratic form, but only endless efforts at implementing and struggling over the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. And the politics that matter most are the politics of anti-democratization against the politics of democratization, where anti-democratization seeks to restrict the people who have a say and the force of what they say to the benefit of incumbent-elites and where democratization is simply the struggle to enable ever more people to have ever more of a say in what affects them.
It has now become a commonplace for apologists for incumbent interests to respond to questions of public policy -- such as whether this dangerous practice should be regulated or whether that publicly useful infrastructure project should be funded -- by replying that we "should let the market decide" the matter. Such responses are predicated on ignorance -- more actively, on ignoring -- the fact that there is no such thing as "the market," really, that what passes for "the market" from epoch to epoch is an ever changing constellation of laws, norms, contingencies of geography and history, infrastructural affordances, and systems of signification. To an important extent "the market" derives from decisions we make, and to endow this result of our decisions with the power to make decisions for us, tends to amount to a relinquishment of decision to those who are already beneficiaries of the status quo naturalized as what passes for the moment as the dictates of "the market."
All of this is just to point out, that quite a lot of what we take for granted, treat as tidal forces supply and demand outside ourselves with which we struggle to cope and accommodate and exploit, are in fact public decisions that affect us about which democratic politics may demand we should have a say. When basic definitions of capitalism we find in elementary textbooks and basic dictionaries declare capitalism a system in which the means of production are privately owned and investments result from private decisions, the collective normative infrastructure on which such claims of ownership and the selective public allocation on which the legibility of such decisional authorities depend are disavowed.
Democratizing politics seek to secure equitable lawful recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what properly constitutes violence and equity and democracy); work to facilitate nonviolent transitions in authority through periodic elections, universal enfranchisement and office-holding and freedom of assembly and expression; have long struggled to provide a scene of informed, non-duressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of generous welfare (universal basic income -- possibly via piecemeal provision of social security, long-term unemployment insurance, a living wage, public grants for IP commons, compensation for public exposure to environmental/medical risks -- healthcare -- possibly via piecemeal provision of veterans healthcare benefits, medicare, subsidized insurance, medicaid expansion, medicare for all -- education, civil rights) all paid for by progressive income, property, and transaction taxes, counter-cyclical deficit spending, and bond issues; and would eliminate the violation of common and public goods through their accountable administration in the service of commonwealth. The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly renegotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. (For more on why taxes are not theft see this; for more on basic income see this; for another formulation of left versus right basics see this.)
All of these ideas have been implemented in comparatively democratic welfare states -- many of them have been implemented less well lately due to the influence of facile, falsifying capitalist and socialist ideologies, and most of them could be implemented incomparably better simply if the process and spirit of stakeholder compromise were to prevail (which you might say is another "mix" that isn't actually a mixture at all, but the substantial if interminable accomplishment of reconciliation of which the political actually, essentially, consists).
But while I have focused most of my disdain here on political systems that call themselves "capitalist" -- though there have been and are many quite importantly different capitalisms historically and presently, colonial, industrial, financial, and so on -- this is mostly just because my own country thinks of itself as such a system, and the crimes of perils of that system appall and implicate me in ways that demand response. But, once again, I do not think there is a pure "socialism" with which capitalism is being mixed and ameliorated in the better welfare states. The socialization of public and common goods facilitates their accountable administration and provides for a legible scene of consent to the terms of everyday commerce. The democratization of economic and ecologic life better describes what remains alive in the fraught history of socialist struggle and aspiration to me. Socialization is not an end in itself but a means to the end of Democratization. That socialism worth fighting for is democratic socialism, and it is its democracy that makes it so.
The idea of sustainable, consensual equity-in-diversity, of democratic commonwealth, is not a "mix" but a coherent political vantage, a political being democratic processes experimentally implement and a political becoming at which democratic struggles aim.
What tend to be called "capitalism" and "socialism" are, it seems to me, very much to the contrary, historically unrealized and logically unrealizable derangements of either the diversity dimension or of the equity dimension of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity. That is to say, it is the prior conceptions of "capitalism" and "socialism" that seem to me to be mixed, if anything, historical and practical misapprehensions and dodgy implementations of consensual multiculture, democratized association, sustainable commonwealth.
And hence, the contractual arrangements to which moral cases for capitalism are devoted will always depend for their actual legibility as consent on a substantial provision of general welfare and socialization of common and public goods typically denominated socialism from those argumentative vantages, just as anti-authoritarian cases for (eg, democratic) socialism will inevitably allow for differences of preference and outcome typically denominated capitalism from those argumentative vantages. This is not because modern societies have been mixes of socialism and capitalism historically, I think, but because the democratizing struggle for sustainable equity-in-diversity is the political substance from which capitalist and socialist abstractions are strained and deranged in the first place.
Again, I think it is what passes for capitalism and socialism in thought that is mixed up, the "mixed economy" in practice is not a mixture of these two derangements from good sense.
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them -- and that includes having a say in matters such as who are these people? what constitutes a proper say? of what does the public actually consist? and just who is affected by what that demands an accounting? There is no single regulative or ideal democratic form, but only endless efforts at implementing and struggling over the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. And the politics that matter most are the politics of anti-democratization against the politics of democratization, where anti-democratization seeks to restrict the people who have a say and the force of what they say to the benefit of incumbent-elites and where democratization is simply the struggle to enable ever more people to have ever more of a say in what affects them.
It has now become a commonplace for apologists for incumbent interests to respond to questions of public policy -- such as whether this dangerous practice should be regulated or whether that publicly useful infrastructure project should be funded -- by replying that we "should let the market decide" the matter. Such responses are predicated on ignorance -- more actively, on ignoring -- the fact that there is no such thing as "the market," really, that what passes for "the market" from epoch to epoch is an ever changing constellation of laws, norms, contingencies of geography and history, infrastructural affordances, and systems of signification. To an important extent "the market" derives from decisions we make, and to endow this result of our decisions with the power to make decisions for us, tends to amount to a relinquishment of decision to those who are already beneficiaries of the status quo naturalized as what passes for the moment as the dictates of "the market."
All of this is just to point out, that quite a lot of what we take for granted, treat as tidal forces supply and demand outside ourselves with which we struggle to cope and accommodate and exploit, are in fact public decisions that affect us about which democratic politics may demand we should have a say. When basic definitions of capitalism we find in elementary textbooks and basic dictionaries declare capitalism a system in which the means of production are privately owned and investments result from private decisions, the collective normative infrastructure on which such claims of ownership and the selective public allocation on which the legibility of such decisional authorities depend are disavowed.
Democratizing politics seek to secure equitable lawful recourse for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what properly constitutes violence and equity and democracy); work to facilitate nonviolent transitions in authority through periodic elections, universal enfranchisement and office-holding and freedom of assembly and expression; have long struggled to provide a scene of informed, non-duressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce through the provision of generous welfare (universal basic income -- possibly via piecemeal provision of social security, long-term unemployment insurance, a living wage, public grants for IP commons, compensation for public exposure to environmental/medical risks -- healthcare -- possibly via piecemeal provision of veterans healthcare benefits, medicare, subsidized insurance, medicaid expansion, medicare for all -- education, civil rights) all paid for by progressive income, property, and transaction taxes, counter-cyclical deficit spending, and bond issues; and would eliminate the violation of common and public goods through their accountable administration in the service of commonwealth. The ongoing generational churn of the plurality of stakeholders who make up the present world ensures that the ongoing accomplishment of equity-in-diversity is endlessly renegotiated, re-enacted, re-figured. (For more on why taxes are not theft see this; for more on basic income see this; for another formulation of left versus right basics see this.)
All of these ideas have been implemented in comparatively democratic welfare states -- many of them have been implemented less well lately due to the influence of facile, falsifying capitalist and socialist ideologies, and most of them could be implemented incomparably better simply if the process and spirit of stakeholder compromise were to prevail (which you might say is another "mix" that isn't actually a mixture at all, but the substantial if interminable accomplishment of reconciliation of which the political actually, essentially, consists).
But while I have focused most of my disdain here on political systems that call themselves "capitalist" -- though there have been and are many quite importantly different capitalisms historically and presently, colonial, industrial, financial, and so on -- this is mostly just because my own country thinks of itself as such a system, and the crimes of perils of that system appall and implicate me in ways that demand response. But, once again, I do not think there is a pure "socialism" with which capitalism is being mixed and ameliorated in the better welfare states. The socialization of public and common goods facilitates their accountable administration and provides for a legible scene of consent to the terms of everyday commerce. The democratization of economic and ecologic life better describes what remains alive in the fraught history of socialist struggle and aspiration to me. Socialization is not an end in itself but a means to the end of Democratization. That socialism worth fighting for is democratic socialism, and it is its democracy that makes it so.
Plutocrats Always Fancy Themselves Meritocrats (Also, a Brief Digression on IQ As Rationalization for Plutocracy)
Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, from an ongoing exchange with a self-declared champion of aristocracy:
It is true that important knowledge can be counterintuitive -- the sun doesn't travel around the earth (even though it really does look that way), governments should borrow more to stimulate the economy in recessions especially when interest rates are at the zero lower-bound (even though proper intuitions from household economics suggest the reverse), micro human actions can catastrophically impact macro global climate systems (it hardly seems possible, people being so small, the world being so big, and yet it is true), one can lower aggregate healthcare costs by providing them universally (everybody benefits from distributing social costs across a whole population across generations, not just THEM), social policy works much better when it focuses on harm-reduction rather than on punishment (even tho' it sure feels nice to punish with the law, it can't be wrong when it feels so right, eh?), and so on. Education is necessary for an informed citizenry as well as for competent administration of public affairs, these things are not automatic.
To declare as you do that people should be assigned to government at random -- apart from freeing you from having any skin in the game when it comes to making actually existing governance actually better since such thought-experiments without any constituencies will never even remotely happen to produce results to hold you accountable -- also demonstrates a mistaken disdain for the work of administration and legislation fairly typical of right-wing ideology. The same goes for your reduction of governance to "services" paid for by fees, as if commonwealth is a commodity which it very much is not. My point is not to deny that there are some things that are commodities, nor to denigrate ownership of or trade in them or fairly widespread microeconomic models for talking about such trade. But there really is a difference that makes a difference between private goods (and also that obscure uncle, the "club good") as against public and common goods. Reductions of the second pair to the first -- or the other way around I just as cheerfully concede -- yield injurious confusions and catastrophic policies.
The availability of non-violent arenas for the adjudication of disputes -- including over the determination of what counts as violence -- is not a commodity, equity in access to law and in the accountability of law-making to all is not a commodity, the maintenance of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday concerns is not a commodity, a community of healthy, well-educated, non-precarious potential collaborators confident in the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances of their society is not a commodity, a sustainable planetary ecosystem of the sort humans evolved to flourish in is not a commodity -- these are all goods, but not private goods, they are public and common goods. You declare me "illogical" in making such distinctions and proceeding in my arguments and formulations in ways that take these distinctions into account. There is no nice way to point out that you are saying this because you simply have a profoundly mistaken and impoverished understanding of politics.
I do not doubt you are educable, but as of now you certainly don't strike me as particularly superior in the way of intellect -- quite apart from the question of your morals, which look to be conspicuously inferior, given the ugly inequities and violent evils you seem willing to countenance in support of your errors. You speak endlessly of the "better" people, the "smarter" people who should run things, and the "dumb" people and "inept" people who muck everything up. All this idiotic business of yours over IQ tests is the worst in this line of BS that has you ensorcelled, it's truly embarrassing, I'm not even going to dignify that stuff with comment, but it is really just the awful extreme edge of your general self-congratulatory elitism. You know, privileged people always think they have it better because they are better -- this doesn't mean they are all bad but they are usually mostly wrong. The conception of intelligence in plutocratic bioreductionist IQ discussions is always radically impoverished, usually implicitly self-congratulatory, often demonstrably racist. You don't have to take my word for it, and this is the sort of thing I won't spend too much of my time arguing about because it is even more unutterably depressing than the other topics I take up here. Look, there's good and bad in everyone. In general, people seem to me to be capable of good and bad things.
It is true that important knowledge can be counterintuitive -- the sun doesn't travel around the earth (even though it really does look that way), governments should borrow more to stimulate the economy in recessions especially when interest rates are at the zero lower-bound (even though proper intuitions from household economics suggest the reverse), micro human actions can catastrophically impact macro global climate systems (it hardly seems possible, people being so small, the world being so big, and yet it is true), one can lower aggregate healthcare costs by providing them universally (everybody benefits from distributing social costs across a whole population across generations, not just THEM), social policy works much better when it focuses on harm-reduction rather than on punishment (even tho' it sure feels nice to punish with the law, it can't be wrong when it feels so right, eh?), and so on. Education is necessary for an informed citizenry as well as for competent administration of public affairs, these things are not automatic.
To declare as you do that people should be assigned to government at random -- apart from freeing you from having any skin in the game when it comes to making actually existing governance actually better since such thought-experiments without any constituencies will never even remotely happen to produce results to hold you accountable -- also demonstrates a mistaken disdain for the work of administration and legislation fairly typical of right-wing ideology. The same goes for your reduction of governance to "services" paid for by fees, as if commonwealth is a commodity which it very much is not. My point is not to deny that there are some things that are commodities, nor to denigrate ownership of or trade in them or fairly widespread microeconomic models for talking about such trade. But there really is a difference that makes a difference between private goods (and also that obscure uncle, the "club good") as against public and common goods. Reductions of the second pair to the first -- or the other way around I just as cheerfully concede -- yield injurious confusions and catastrophic policies.
The availability of non-violent arenas for the adjudication of disputes -- including over the determination of what counts as violence -- is not a commodity, equity in access to law and in the accountability of law-making to all is not a commodity, the maintenance of a scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday concerns is not a commodity, a community of healthy, well-educated, non-precarious potential collaborators confident in the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances of their society is not a commodity, a sustainable planetary ecosystem of the sort humans evolved to flourish in is not a commodity -- these are all goods, but not private goods, they are public and common goods. You declare me "illogical" in making such distinctions and proceeding in my arguments and formulations in ways that take these distinctions into account. There is no nice way to point out that you are saying this because you simply have a profoundly mistaken and impoverished understanding of politics.
I do not doubt you are educable, but as of now you certainly don't strike me as particularly superior in the way of intellect -- quite apart from the question of your morals, which look to be conspicuously inferior, given the ugly inequities and violent evils you seem willing to countenance in support of your errors. You speak endlessly of the "better" people, the "smarter" people who should run things, and the "dumb" people and "inept" people who muck everything up. All this idiotic business of yours over IQ tests is the worst in this line of BS that has you ensorcelled, it's truly embarrassing, I'm not even going to dignify that stuff with comment, but it is really just the awful extreme edge of your general self-congratulatory elitism. You know, privileged people always think they have it better because they are better -- this doesn't mean they are all bad but they are usually mostly wrong. The conception of intelligence in plutocratic bioreductionist IQ discussions is always radically impoverished, usually implicitly self-congratulatory, often demonstrably racist. You don't have to take my word for it, and this is the sort of thing I won't spend too much of my time arguing about because it is even more unutterably depressing than the other topics I take up here. Look, there's good and bad in everyone. In general, people seem to me to be capable of good and bad things.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
A Corpsicle's A Corpse, Of Course, Of Course
It will come as no surprise to Amorous Mudyites that a high-profile (in a big fish, small pond kinda sorta way) transhumanoid trio is casting their Pascalian wager on faithly techno-immortality rather than in the more conventionally faithly forms of judeochrislamic resurrection. The Daily Mail's snark on the subject is nonetheless a welcome note in the news today, oh boy.
To those who would wag their finger at such hate speech directed to a religious minority in a land that guarantees freedom of belief, you may be sure that I do not begrudge these futurologists the human, all too human, consolations of their faithly dreams -- after all, they are not so very different from the private perfections and crutches I cherish myself as an atheistical aesthete when all is said and done. But you will forgive me when I insist on the difference between articles of faith and scientifically warranted beliefs, a difference the maintenance of which is indispensable to the flourishing of both faith and science, as any theologian worth his salt will be the first to tell you. Fandoms are fine, I'm a queergeek myself, but consumer marketing isn't political activism, wish-fulfillment fantasizing is not science, pseudo-science is not a sign of seriousness, and con-artists are not humanitarians even when they are high on their own supply.
They were a shattered world’s last hope -- three great minds from the past who might be able to avert a catastrophe that threatened to extinguish mankind... It’s difficult to say whether this sort of Hollywood sci-fi scenario ever occurred to three Oxford University dons when they signed up to be frozen after death. [Believe me, it did -- d] It was revealed yesterday that the trio -- Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and his fellow lead researchers, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong -- have agreed to pay a U.S. company anything up to £50,000 to have their remains frozen at death. The hope is a future society will have the technology to restore them to life. Armstrong has arranged for his entire body to be frozen by the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute. His wife is expecting their first baby and he is so enthused by the idea that he wants to sign the child up, too. His two colleagues have opted for the less glamorous but cheaper and supposedly more reliable option of having just their heads frozen when they are declared dead, by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation outside Phoenix, Arizona. Their heads will be perfused with a cocktail of antifreeze chemicals and preserved in liquid nitrogen at -196c... Previous acolytes of cryonics have often been dismissed as head-in-the-clouds cranks, sci-fi buffs who have watched too much TV or victims of vanity. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have both waxed lyrical about being frozen. Simon Cowell is believed to be among several dozen Britons who have joined a cryonics programme, although several hundred have reportedly shown interest... But Prof Bostrom and his colleagues are young, highly educated specialists who have devoted their careers to humanity. If they are signing up for cryonics, one might think, perhaps we should all pay attention.Uh, no. If the article seems to suggest that this brave new generation of deluded cryonauts are distinguishable from sci-fi buffs of the past they need only make momentary recourse to the Google to be disabused of this fancy -- not to mention the fact that at least some members of this transhumanoid brigade have been cryonically enthused for at least a quarter century by now: The new generation is the old generation, which is par for the futurological course. Further, the suggestion that these futurologists are not vain because they have "devoted their careers to humanity" (what, more than Britney Spears has done?) is likewise hard to square with their efforts to divert public attention and effort away from global financial and environmental and arms regulation into concerns over sooper-intelligent robot apocalypses, nano-magickal insta-Edens, the need to consume and "geo-engineer" our way past climate change, and how all the mean liberals keep getting in the way of the nice eugenicists. You know, for kids!
To those who would wag their finger at such hate speech directed to a religious minority in a land that guarantees freedom of belief, you may be sure that I do not begrudge these futurologists the human, all too human, consolations of their faithly dreams -- after all, they are not so very different from the private perfections and crutches I cherish myself as an atheistical aesthete when all is said and done. But you will forgive me when I insist on the difference between articles of faith and scientifically warranted beliefs, a difference the maintenance of which is indispensable to the flourishing of both faith and science, as any theologian worth his salt will be the first to tell you. Fandoms are fine, I'm a queergeek myself, but consumer marketing isn't political activism, wish-fulfillment fantasizing is not science, pseudo-science is not a sign of seriousness, and con-artists are not humanitarians even when they are high on their own supply.
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