In this weeks The Space Review, Michael Huang covers a recent story in The Economist on a group calling itself the VHEM: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This is apparently a group of such extreme nihilist neoluddite econutcakes that they are advocating the extinction of the human race.... by not having children.
Now, far be it from me to object to barking moonbats deciding not to curse any other human beings with their genetic tendency toward post-modernist deconstructionism and irrational anti-American, Anti-West, anti-technology, and now Anti-human nutjobbery. More power too em, don't let the door kick you in the ass on your way out of history and the evolutionary record. We won't shed a tear at your passing, dimwit.
VHEM's program purports to be rather pacifistic: they try to delineate themselves from historical genocidal megalomanias like the New Turks, Nazis, Fascists, Hutuism, and, worst of all, Communism, by arguing Gandhiist non-violence and voluntary compliance through moral suasion, though I can't help but note that Hitler was a vegan, too, who eventually stopped trying to just work his enemies to death and actually started exterminating them from impatience with more "moral" methods.
Their justification, of course, is to allege that humankind has been the greatest scourge on the environment in the history of the planet (ignoring, of course, things like the semi-regular cometary-impact derived mass extinction events every 26 million years, that 90% of the last 30 million years has been spent in the throes of Ice Ages, and, that as top predators, it is our evolutionary duty to kill off unfit species that cannot adapt or compete.)
However, they even go so far as to oppose human spaceflight and colonization into space, even as a strategy for easing the burden on Earth's environment, spreading life into the lifeless reaches of space, but they do so on faulty logic:
VHEM's FAQ says: "At first, spreading life might sound like a noble idea. British explorer Captain Cook would offer Pacific islands chiefs a breeding pair of pigs, and was disgusted by the ignorance of some primitives who just slaughtered the gifts for a luau. Yum, European exotic invader… Cook, et all. Feral pigs are still negatively impacting ecosystems in Hawai’i and elsewhere."
What amazingly ignorant ethnocentrism on their part, blaming the British for hawaiian pigs. In fact, the polynesians brought pigs (as well as yams and other crops) with them on their voyages of colonization across the Pacific centuries before. It is not surprising that a group so wrongheaded so as to propose the voluntary extinction of man has got their facts all wrong...
Huang comments, "If someone expressed the view that a particular ethnic or national group should die off, that person would be condemned, and rightly so. But for some reason, when it comes to the entire human race dying out (including every single ethnic and national group), it becomes much more acceptable."
Huang is entirely right, but that is the core of the post-modernist neoluddite ethic of self-hate. Humankinds mass extinction of other species, in their eyes of the luddites, is nothing short of genocide (despite the fact that we've been at it for thousands of years as the top predator, and it is our evolutionary function to do so) so anybody arguing for the survival of the human race is obviously a racist... There, see how easy it is to play idiotic git for a minute or two?
Huang goes on: "Seeing how humans on Earth are increasingly being asked to defend our own continued existence, it is no surprise that humans-in-space are continually criticized."
It is unsurprising that there is so much overlap between the left wing barking moonbats who blame the west, blame Amerika, blame Bush/Blair for the current war on terror, and the barking moonbats who think the human race should flush itself down the toilet of evolution. They suffer from the same lack of rational faculties and the same extreme nihilism (prolly related to some childhood trauma, who knows?).
Idiots like VHEM who fancy themselves environmentalists are ignorant fools. There is no such thing as an "invasive species", there are merely species which are more competitive than others. That is how evolution works: the fit survive, the unfit adapt or die.
Their stasis-oriented view of nature is not natural: it derives from the delusion that a well groomed park is a natural environment, and a desire by its adherent to return to that perfect park of childhood, possibly rooted in an unresolved oedipal complex, although it may be some form of childhood or adult adaptation disorder, which is described in the literature thusly:
"Clinical practice has shown a subtype of adaptation disorder that is characterized primarily by lasting embitterment after exceptional though normal life events which violate basic beliefs. This disorder can be called post-traumatic embitterment disorder (PTED). A case vignette and results of a pilot study are reported. Critical life events were found to be job loss in 38%, conflicts at work in 24%, death of a loved one in 14%, familial strain in 14%, and other events in 10%. When reminded of the critical event, patients report feelings of embitterment (85.7%), sadness (81.0%), anger (76.2%), or helplessness (75.0%). When standardized assessments are made, they fulfill criteria of various comorbid disorders such as GAD (38.1%), depression (33.3%) and dysthymia (33.3%), agoraphobia (28.6%), or panic (19.0%). Of the patients, 81% said they avoid places which remind them of the critical events. Impairments were suffered in work (70%), leisure (65%), and familial relations (57.1%)."
Folks like those who ascribe to VHEM's agenda fear the change that is natural with both human life experience, and ecological systems in general. The stasis they seek is neither natural, nor healthy.
After trying out other blog services, one of which crapped out, the other remains a bit ghettoized by restrictions on provider non-members commenting, I am back here at blogspot, however, I have two blogs now. This one, which I will continue to comment on miscellaneous things with my life and other stuff, and my political blog, The International Libertarian which currently ranks third on Google for searches for the title, competing against a flood of international communists in their campaign to co-opt 'libertarian' for their movement, like they once co-opted the term 'liberal'. In any event, it is good to be back, lets see what happens....
Zblogger has crapped out, so I'm currently on xanga.com under the title "Sadomikeyism", though with the 'new' blogger, maybe I'll come back here. It seems to have pulled its head out of its ass.
As of this date all new entries will be there.
Why did I do this?
Blogspot's servers are slow, frequently timing out to browsers. They've broken my blog several times, and template updates don't take sometimes for a day or so. And the ads. zBlogger is free, no ads, faster servers, no loading problems, fast template updates. All one could want in a blog host.
Okay, everything is functioning, though the servers are serving up template changes EXTREMELY slowly.
In any event, I'd like to see some discussion of Matrix:Reloaded. One of the interesting things about this episode is that we are meeting some of the non-human personalities of the Matrix beyond just Agent Smith. We find out that the Oracle isn't human. Nor is the Architect, who claims to have built the Matrix and its predecessors. We also meet The Merovingian, a rather egotistical and sado-mercenary personality who is heavily franco-philic (oh, the horror) and lives in a reconstruction of the castle in southern France once used by the Templars and said to hold the key to the real tomb of Jesus Christ and the Holy Grail. He holds an exile program personality called the Keymaker, who I have commented on previously, and keeps as his girlfriend Persephone (in mythology she's the goddess of the underworld. A Greek legend tells of the return of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of the earth, from the underworld to the light of day; her return symbolized to the ancient Greeks the resurrection of life in the spring after the desolation of winter. Many ancient peoples shared similar legends. The Phrygians believed that their omnipotent deity went to sleep at the time of the winter solstice, and they performed ceremonies with music and dancing at the spring equinox to awaken him.)
I believe that the Oracle is Demeter and Persephone is her daughter. The Oracle helped the Architect create the Matrix (the earth) with her intuitive logic. The Merovingean occupies a rather underworldly position in Matrix society, so as his girlfriend, she is the goddes of the underworld. I predict, therefore, that she will be of importance in episode III in ending the tyranny of the Matrix.
Well, I think the repairs are all made, but I'm still peeved at Blogger. I am looking at migrating to zBlogger, since the Blogger servers are very bogged down, especially to free customers like myself, and response sucks.
I am rather peeved at blogger at the moment. This blog has been seriously broke for the past day and it's been a royal pain in the ass to fix things, and PyraLabs has been about useless. Lessee if this post updates anything...
Nope, for some reason it is not updating to my new template on the public display, though the new template is all that it displays in the editing area.
I went and saw The Matrix: Reloaded this evening with my sister Chrissy, a IT executive living in Connecticutt who was visiting home for the weekend (and to pick up her Saturn, which I had done some work on). Chrissy has never been exposed to transhumanist or extropic philosophy more than knowing that I'm associated with it and basic concepts about Moore's Law, so she was lacking in a lot of the core concepts that give one more than a pedestrian understanding of what is going on in this story line. It was interesting to explain a lot of things to her afterward. You could see the light bulb going on in her head.
So, here is my review (some spoilers may be included):
I still think the Wachowski brothers have a luddite agenda, intent on portraying the transhuman future as a severe distopia and feral humans as the heroes. Neo's purpose is to bring down the machines according to the prophesy and faith of the inhabitants of Zion. The Oracle is a program who believes that humans and machines can peacefully coexist, while the Architect, the entity which built the Matrix, sees the only coexistence as being humans subservient tools of machine intelligence.
What is interesting about the story development is that Neo is attaining Oracle capabilities, but is fixated on Trinity's alleged death. This jives with singularity theory, that as a transcendant individual moves up the exponential curve of the technological singularity, he attains more and more powers. What is not disclosed is that entities like the Architect and the Oracle also are further up the curve and are attaining powers at even faster rates. We also learn that the Architect functions on a quantum computer level, capable of simulating all possible alternative realities in one step.
The Keymaker is another interesting entity. He makes keys of all kinds. You need to operate anything that uses a key, and he has the key for it. He also has reality hacking keys, which allow you to make any door a 'backdoor' into a sort of virtual hyperspace, to take another door into a very distant location within the Matrix. Neo needs him to get the key to the Source, which is where he will meet the Architect.
All the while this is occuring, Zion is under attack. The Sentinels are tunnelling down to Zion, 250,000 strong. In order to stop this, Neo needs to destroy the Source. When given the choice by the Architect of being assimilated by the Source (causing the destruction of Zion and the launch of a new Matrix and a new Zion with a handpicked few), or returning to his friends to fight the Sentinels (resulting, allegedly, in the destruction of the Matrix and every human within it), he chooses the latter course, the luddite course, rather than transcending, because his love for Trinity outweighs everything else.
Agent Smith is a loose screw in the mix, because of his last experience with Neo at the end of the first installment. Some of Neo's independence of action rubbed off on him, and he is no longer restricted in his programming to a limited range of action in achieving his prime goal (which is that of an anti-virus program that hunts down humans incapable of subconciously accepting the Matrix as reality, and humans who are Zionists). He has become a virus, replicating in large numbers by assimilating and taking over the personalities of large numbers of people. The only way to protect them completely from Neo and his ilk is to make them all like Agent Smith. He threatens the stability of the Matrix as much, or more, than Neo because he is capable of exponentially assimilating people as he reproduces his programming within them. He will eliminate individual diversity by turning everyone into replicants of himself. He will destroy the Matrix because he is just a hammer that looks at everyone as nothing but nails.
I believe that this trilogy is a luddite fable because it makes a big thing about control. "Free will is an illusion created between the powerful and the powerless," as the Merovingian says. Luddism is at its core a philosophy that seeks to control reality by destroying technology, eliminating the one factor of human civilization that causes dynamism and progress, in the hopes of imposing an andalusian agrarian or even hunter/gatherer stasis on the species. Luddism is humanism run amok, loose of its original faith in the goodness of the human spirit and the benefits of progress. It sees industry as loss of control for the human, technology as loss of future for the species, and knowledge only useful in producing precautionary prophylaxis on progress.
We are given three possible futures to expect in episode III, due out later this year: Either the Matrix wins, Zion is destroyed, or Zion Wins, Neo destroys the Matrix, or the Oracle's desired outcome of benevolent symbiosis and cooperation is achieved between human and machine.
I see the luddite end being more likely because the history of the Matrix lends to such a conclusion. Matrix and pre-Matrix history is not entirely as is presented by characters in the movie. Morpheus says in episode I that humans destroyed the upper atmosphere to cut the Matrix off from solar power because it had started to enslave people, but admits that 'nobody knows who struck first'. I would posit that luddite terrorists, much like those who sabotage GMO projects today, attacked the Matrix, which was likely just a voluntary mind uploading project prior to this, because they thought it threatened their Luddite agenda. The Matrix responded by forcibly assimilating everyone it could and creating the Agent Smith entities and his cohorts to act as anti-virus programs with essentially anti-human personalities, because it saw the propaganda/memetic war that was going on in early 21st century society and was determined to deny the enemy as many recruits as possible. This is much like our current response to the threat of terrorists, where individual liberty has been confiscated in the name of national security against asymmetric combatants.
Another project I'm involved in is the Transtopia project: a project to develop a new sovereign micronation on the high seas. We're now having the First Annual Transtopian Libertarian Design Contest, for people to submit plans for floating, anchored, or grounded artificial habitats to be based on the high seas. Goal is for platforms with 1/2 acre of deck space for less than $500k. Innovative architecture is welcome.
