Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

Said it before: The beginning of the 21st century is looking eerily like the beginning of the 20th century.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

(a) Allocation of materials, services, and facilities

The President is hereby authorized

(1) to require that performance under contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) which he deems necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense shall take priority over performance under any other contract or order, and, for the purpose of assuring such priority, to require acceptance and performance of such contracts or orders in preference to other contracts or orders by any person he finds to be capable of their performance, and

(2) to allocate materials, services, and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.

(b) Critical and strategic materials

The powers granted in this section shall not be used to control the general distribution of any material in the civilian market unless the President finds

(1) that such material is a scarce and critical material essential to the national defense, and

(2) that the requirements of the national defense for such material cannot otherwise be met without creating a significant dislocation of the normal distribution of such material in the civilian market to such a degree as to create appreciable hardship.

Ok that does sound pretty fucked up, haha. I might look into that a bit more.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I'm wondering what the executive order was actually for (apparently it revised something in the original law?). Either way, the order seems pretty trivial compared to the fact that the US Code it references is a US Code, passed by Congress.

And that law was passed in 2010? Why is it becoming news only now?

 

[viewerfromnihil]

"Greek Borat" on the EU bailout of Greece:

 

[Dak]

Good video. I could label it "Why the West is dumb", or "The Prussian School System".

 

[viewerfromnihil]

I went to about 8 or so different elementary schools, so from my experience this is an isolated case, but I remember being taught in second school that I went to in second grade that the United States was the only free country in the world and all others were ruled by despots. My teacher put emphasis on being sure that we understood how lucky we were to have been born in the greatest country in the world. Obviously, this is a problem with the individual teacher, but I figured it shared enough relation to the video to mention.

 

[Einherjar86]

Once again, R. Scott Bakker makes my day:

Aphorism of the Day: The singularity is a dirty, naked old man whipping wide his raincoat and revealing the absence of genitals.

.

This post got me thinking about my technological pessimism once again, and why I think ‘posthumanity’ simply has to be a disaster from our own ‘good ol’fashioned homegrown human’ standpoint. In fact, I had something of a small clarificatory revelation.

Brain science. The reason why I fear that ‘cognitive augmentation’ will be catastrophic turns on the way I see psychology and neuroscience slowing confirming what I think should be humanity’s greatest scientific fear: the possibility that meaning and morality are simply figments of our neural parochialism. If this is the case, it means the very frame of reference that Marone uses to value ‘biohacking’ will in fact be one of the first casualties of biohacking.

How does one value the death of value? How can any given frame of inferential reference argue for its own destruction without lapsing into abject contradiction?

This is a tricky, prickly, paradoxical question. To be clear, if meaning and morality are parochial artifacts of human conscious awareness, then ‘expanding’ that awareness does not, as seems to be the assumption, mean expanding meaning or morality. Quite the contrary, it means leaving them behind. In other words, given ‘semantic parochialism,’ transcending the human means transcending meaning and morality. Or put differently, embracing nihilism.

The posthuman is the postsemantic.

The possibilities extolled by Marone, in other words, are nothing more than optimistic guesses, a hope grounded on the unwarranted assumption that meaning and morality transcend the human, and so will faithfully await us as we use technology to disrobe our souls. As optimistic guesses, they should be treated as such, pending the results of that great slayer of human conceit, science.

Of course, an inverted version of the same paradox afflicts this argument as well: If science reveals there’s no such thing as meaning and morality, why should anybody give a fuck one way or another?

Welcome to the Whatever Future.

What this underscores, I think, is the way the problem of the posthuman just is the problem of nihilism considered in concretion. People keep crying, ‘More! More!’ not realizing that it could be a certain kind of less, a certain kind of confusion or even outright delusion that makes ‘more’ more valuable in the first place.

http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/the-posthuman-paradox/

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I would say the human drive to discover technology comes from our basic animal instinct for survival (which is the source of all value for us), and I don't anticipate that instinct disappearing (since most of us would probably never want it to) unless some sort of freak accident happened to wipe it out for everybody.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

I went to about 8 or so different elementary schools, so from my experience this is an isolated case, but I remember being taught in second school that I went to in second grade that the United States was the only free country in the world and all others were ruled by despots. My teacher put emphasis on being sure that we understood how lucky we were to have been born in the greatest country in the world. Obviously, this is a problem with the individual teacher, but I figured it shared enough relation to the video to mention.

Nope, that's pretty standard public school indoctrination. I didn't figure out the truth until high school when I got the internet (back in the mid 90's!, dial up FTW). Then I brought it up to our history/social studies teacher who said something like "Well, Canada is almost as free as America and Europe is mostly free, but America is the only country that has true freedom."
I'm not sure if any country is even close to being free these days, except for maybe the 3rd world, who while they may have oppressive laws, are unenforced due to lack of funding for an expansive police state.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Just started reading up on Monsanto to satisfy a little curiosity. The info on their lobbying efforts surrounding rGBH kinda blew me away, haha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#rBGH_.28recombinant_Bovine_Growth_Hormone.29

 

[Einherjar86]

I realize a lot of us have come to use this thread as a kind of de facto philosophy thread; but I figure that's as good a use as any.

Anyway, I wanted to share a quote by Michel Foucault that I came across the other day. Foucault is interesting for being a Marxist early in his career, and abandoning his communist ideals by the end of his life. This quote is from late in his career:

"On the other hand, I do not think that there is anything that is functionally - by its very nature - absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around - not because they are ambiguous, but simply because 'liberty' is what must be exercised."

 

[Dak]

At a cursory glance, I'd say that is pretty spot on.

 

[SentinelSlain]

Would America accept a request by the U.K. to cede into the federal republic as a state?

 

[Dak]

Replacement for SOPA:

CISPA:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/watch-out-washington-cispa-replaces-sopa-as-internets-enemy-no-1/

 

[V.V.V.V.V.]

I've read a few articles on it so far. It doesn't actually seem to say anything.

 

[Dak]

The more ambiguous, the worse it is.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

So do you think our laws are becoming Kafka-esque?

 

[Einherjar86]

I'd say America's laws have always tended towards ambiguity. There's a reason our constitution has, historically, been open to multiple and often contradictory interpretations.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/influence-of-us-constitution-declining-globally-69709/

"The average lifespan of a constitution is 19 years. Jefferson said, as a coincidence, that constitutions should be revisited every 19 years. Yet, here we are, failing to revise it, except very periodically, over two centuries."

There are two primary obstacles to amending the Constitution, according to Law. First, the U.S. Constitution is one of the most difficult to amend. An amendment requires a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states.

The second reason has to do with resistance in the public to thinking about the Constitution as a working document that can, and should, be revised.

"We put the U.S. Constitution on a pedestal," Law said. "We don't have an official religion in the U.S., thanks to the Constitution. Instead, we pledge allegiance to the Constitution. The Constitution has become for us, a symbol of nationhood.

 

[Dak]

I think most laws tend towards ambiguity. It's in the interest of the lawyers for them to be so.

 

[Einherjar86]

That's true, although comparatively there are degrees of separation between charters. There's an article in the NY Times that does a better job of going into the problems with the U.S. Constitution in today's global society.

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

And...

The Canadian Charter is both more expansive and less absolute. It guarantees equal rights for women and disabled people, allows affirmative action and requires that those arrested be informed of their rights. On the other hand, it balances those rights against “such reasonable limits” as “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The article also states that the USSR had a much more comprehensive constitution than our own, including "freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests." Lot of good that did them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/us/we-the-people-loses-appeal-with-people-around-the-world.html