When all is said and done, environmentalists are guaranteed to be disappointed. Nature is fucked. Your recent ancestors who lived in the earlier half of the 20th century may have farmed land that nature has now reclaimed. What happened? Labour was cheap then. People were willing to work for whatever money they could get. Since […]
Category: Futurism
Optimised Humanity, Towards Corvus Axolotlus
The words “attractiveness” and “attraction” are routinely applied to an array of pleasurable stimuli with different properties, of which there are at least three obvious types: the erotic, the romantic, and the aesthetic. The erotic is the oldest of these, since erotic attraction facilitates gene replication in sexually reproducing species, reproduction being perhaps the only […]
Psychonautic Dreams
All experiences whether good or ill, in their essence, can be equated to the inter-relations between external stimuli and the internal states of consciousness created by our brains and, in an ultimate sense, by our genes. Most people will concede that no amount of overpowering stimuli, no amount of pretty sunsets, will bring a smile […]
Ethnocentrism, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Abandon Eternally Unreciprocated Altruism
Like many or perhaps most people with a verbally slanted intelligence profile, I used to invest a lot of energy into heady academic philosophy, especially ethics. The distant vision of a cognitively post-human species and a suffering-free world governed by utilitarian moral codes probably stimulated my endogenous opioid system. In retrospect, it seems to have […]
The Brick Wall of Washing Machines
People probably make too much fuss about defining biological sex in terms of its organic components. The term “chromosomes” gets thrown about, maybe because it is commonly used in basic biology education and is consequently a bit more accessible than “gametes,” although gametes are in fact the heart of the matter. Several different chromosomal combinations […]
A World of Trauma – Civilizational Psychosadomasochism and Emptiness
According to Google’s vast textual corpora, there was nary an instance of the term “trauma,” or its distinctly psychiatric derivative “traumatized,” in written English prior to the 1880s. The first usage of “trauma” is documented in the 1690s, at which point it referred to physical wounding only. Its “psychic wound” sense did not pick up […]
Quantum Boomer – A Look Back At Quantum Leap
I indulge in a brief retrospective of the classic early 90s tv show, Quantum Leap.
The Road To Neverland With Andrew Yang
Yangster’s Paradise
“That’s cool, but he has no chance,” was my initial reaction when a friend of mine sent me a link to a story about a candidate who was running for president on a platform of “universal basic income.” Admittedly, I had never heard of Andrew Yang until just a couple of weeks ago and had […]
Robert Stark talks to David Cole About LA Malls
Robert Stark and Matthew Pegas talk with David Cole about the history, culture, and aesthetics of LA ‘s Malls. David Cole writes for Takimag and is the author of Republican Party Animal. Show is available here Topics: David and Robert’s background growing up on the Westside of LA The Open Air Century City Shopping Center, […]