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: Tech
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 […]
Neurotic to the Bone
Ed Hagen recently wrote a paper outlining his objections to the classification of major depression as a “brain disorder,” on the grounds that, in sum: the diagnosis is made to distinguish it from other conditions and not from “normal” persons, symptoms of what is called depression tend to remit within weeks or months, and occur at points […]
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 […]
On Agency and Accountability
Is it morally permissible for a 14-year-old to be enlisted in the military under any circumstance? The impulse this question elicits is one of disgust, founded on a historically and geographically local set of assumptions about moral agency and its relationship to age. The “true” existence of agency itself is contestable if taken to mean […]
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 […]
The Road To Neverland With Andrew Yang
The Nail In the Coffin
When I saw that JF Gariepy was releasing a book related to genetics, I assumed it would be another boring race/IQ/HBD volume that I would have little interest in (given the redundancy of the topic.) However, it would turn out that JF instead devotes his book, The Revolutionary Phenotype to the subject of gene editing. […]