#unless I can hunt down some Radical Prints

[monster-noises]

it's a very silly thing to turn your nose up at something just to be ~different~ but all the same I will continue to refuse to wear button up t-shirts.

[sjwmothman]

 tagged by @keybladedetweiler​ !! Thanks !! I’m doing it late bc I’m always on mobile................

1. Are you named after someone? 

I dk  ?? hrc was big in the year I was born and my conservative mom like............... zagged profoundly. 

2. When was the last time you cried? 

I almost cried a bunch today but I Have Not so like......... can’t rememb er.

3. Do you like your handwriting? My handwriting isn’t great but I think it’s mutant freak part cursive part printing charm is undeniable. 

4. What is your favorite lunch meat? 

Can I say pepperoni?

5. Do you have kids? 

No :v and I don’t plan on it either 

6. If you were another person, would you be friends with you? 

I think so but I’d probably secretly think I was Annoying.....................

7. Do you use sarcasm? 

not as much as I used to but I gotta clear this bile from my soul somehow 

8. Do you still have your tonsils? ye.

9. Would you bungee jump? 

i’m super not great at heights and once refused a four foot trust fall in the woods so .................... I guess not ?

10. What is your favorite kind of cereal? 

some kinda almond special k i had once.... cookie crisp............

11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? 

NEVER unless they are very tight goth shoes 

12. Do you think you’re a strong person? 

nah. 

13. What is your favorite ice cream? 

a local kind with candy corn in it called witches brew. or any kind of fudgy cookie dough sort of hunting quest of a pint.

14. What is the first thing you notice about people?  

honestly? if they laugh a lot or tell jokes.

15. What is the least favorite physical thing you like about yourself? 

if my teeth could just .................... stop. my face from most angles. one time I looked down at my own body and thought “kinda looks like the monsters from crow cillers” 

16. What color pants and shoes are you wearing now? 

black pinstripe pants and not wearing shoes now but I was wearing black boots earlier

17. What are you listening to right now? 

the silence by bastille 

just switched to hymn to breaking strain 

18. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? 

as a rule I don’t like this question but.......... blue or yellow I guess 

19. Favorite smell? 

The sort of fresh smell of a summer evening??? or like a woodstove smell on a cold fall or winter day ???/ lots of airy stuff I guess ............ also the yankee candle factory outlet on route...........................

20. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone? 

probably the person from the program who called to congratulate me! and see how I was doing. before that me mum and be fore that the DND CREW !!! 

21. Favorite sport to watch? 

fencing probably but I don’t really watch sports. as a rule my brain sort of glazes in response to action......

22. Hair color? brown yo.

23. Eye color? a blue so blue people mention it frequently ???????

24. Do you wear contacts? 

I would have no personality without my enormous glasses so. Never. 

25. Favorite food to eat? 

lemon pies and bars, tangerine chicken from this one place I used to go with my college friends (TT.TT i miss you guys........and the delicious chicken), candy corn, apple anything, muffins!

26. Scary movies or comedy? 

.why is this a question when edgar wright exists???? all scares either bores or freaks me out and The genre of funny movies that goes out of its way to be labelled comedy tends to be so misogynist or just embarrassing it hurts to watch....

27. Last movie you watched? 

I can’t remember?? oh go d. wait uh! probably treasure planet. .. 

28. What color of shirt are you wearing? 

just a black and grey striped sweater. 

@keybladedetweiler ur frodo shirt sounds rad.

29. Summer or winter? 

summer totally. but autumn is KING of this heart

30. Hugs or kisses? 

i’m so uh bad at physical contact. can I say like a radical high five ? I mean definitely hugs though. I could be hugged by like one of 6 diff people rn and I’d be really happy :v 

31. What book are you currently reading? devil in the white city, also crow cillers if comics count, and this rad as hell beatles fic called strings or the big pink job 

32. Who do you miss right now? 

hi it’s time to be candid and sappy.... I miss my friend group from school and scifi so much :( you guys are my best dudes ............ and i’m already getting sad thinking about how I’m gonna miss my best friend milk when I leave :( 

(hi so the one question about crying should be updated to now.... bc I’m crying right........... now................. ) 

33. What is on your mouse pad? 

I don’t have one :( I don’t think we’ve ever had one...

34. What is the last TV program you watched? 

I probably in passing sort of saw a few minutes of gf or star vs or something today bc my mom always has a disney channel going. 

35. What is the best sound? 

that weird watery sound in old kinda badly recorded acoustic music from like 60s/70s 

36. Rolling Stones or The Beatles? 

Beatles. but only bc I keep finding weird old fanfiction about them that’s a blast to read. 

37. What is the furthest you have ever traveled? 

Florida I guess... I’ll be going further for The Job though! 

38. Do you have a special talent? 

a lot of strangers have complimented my singing! I’ve never been vocally trained and sing possibly as a stim thing?? I’ve never researched it, I just know I feel a lot better singing! 

I’ve started having a lot of doubt in my writing, but I have been complimented on it possibly even more consistently than singing?? I’m so sad that I don’t write enough anymore and I know it’s easy to open a word doc and just Fucking try but it feels like I can’t do it anymore?? I’m worried that I’m letting myself be blocked by that dumb fear of not being good enough though I guess......... lmao cry #2 i’m the least tough person on this earth...............

39. Where were you born? 

In the sweet blessed autumny bosom of New England 

who needs to tag ppl lma ooooooooooooooooooooo

[beardcore-blog]

the day the horses drink from the trough

PRESS PLAY

lizzo SOULMATE

**********

one of the great myths in the NEO american empire of the misled is "the forever man".

this myth is literally crammed down the throats of the tiniest children in much the same way that people shove cornmeal down the throats of ducks and geese and cows to make them taste sweeter while killing them softly, lol.

the princess syndrome is so out of control now that any sense of an actual republic is long gone. but "the forever man" myth hasn’t changed.

young children are still taught that they must become parents, and i think we all know that parenting is one of the most BASIC TOOLS that the usurers can use to create loan debt. parenting is a very thankless job as well, so you get debt slavery and sht hours and there’s that baby that you can’t get rid of… or maybe you like your kid. lucky kid!!! but even though you like that kid, you will NOT be there in every moment and they will be neglected and abandoned to fate. so pray that your little one becomes a real princess or a true knight.

i’m not sure what the male dynamic is because little boys are so weaponized to create hostility that they always go for the swords and the guns to wreak havoc. nice work, parents!!!! way to create fake gender separation. pat yourself on the back for that one.

but we all got stuck with the breakage and wreckage of the "love that never dies" obligation to seek and find. i was oppressed by it as a child. it actually seemed like the coolest thing about the western dogma from religion — faith and love and unionizing.

of course, my strange and "briefly but permanently" mangled childhood proves how easy it is to destroy a child in really a mere matter of seconds. way to go, mom!!!

so naturally i have been weirdly taken with aldous huxley’s beautiful utopian dream that does not actually take place in his bitter and sad criticism of "the jews" (not to be confused with the jewish people in the same way that radical islamists are not a reflection of true path of the muslim journey — i note this because anti-semitism at that time in europe post wwi was at an all time high with printing criticism and outrage. anti-semitism was like a genre in a modern day bookstore it was so popular and had so many writings. picture that cowboy western section and the science fiction section and then the anti-semetic section.), fascist/idealistic germans and the north american noble savage.

all of that was a bitter pill for me. i literally was physically ill through sections of the book. it was a visceral experience that went beyond reading. it was an education.

but on the sidelines of the book was this curtain that had been pulled back on monumental ideas. it was like we were on the willy wonka factory tour and we’re in that massive cathedral of candy with an eternally churning chocolate fountain that sucks up agustus gloop and swooshes him away. and right at the moment every single person on the tour starts to formulate the actual "dangers" involved in this strange sugary fantasyscape.

but i was ready for the camera to ditch the sugarland phenomenon. i wanted to see where augustus gloop had gone and just how deep did this playland of machinery and artificial replication go. i was ready for a different kind of tour of the factory. talk about a psychotic dystopia…

plus, in huxley’s world, the glimpses that we get are very grown up and cool. they are not the childlike entrapping of a story for kids. it’s older, it’s stabilized. people of all people get along as one through class separatism. and a history of fulfillment through separation. we are told that each caste is trained to be content with their occupation in life and some are even dumbed down with alcohol in the birthing jars.

and this was an inceptive vision of the dawning corporate heirarchy/caste system of order/need. we are starting to experience its arrival. but in the novel, these were birth classes. everyone was born into their position.

further, these "corporatized classes" were arranged with the "controllers" and/or philosopher kings at the top and the class system below it with the alphas at the top of the class system. the alphas were all male and they were NOT clones. the betas are the female member of the caste which the alphas belong to in the novel and are NOT clones. but all the other caste systems were bred and manufactured to maintain different aspects of the system’s needs. they were all clones.

throughout the novel huxley continuously promotes the virtues of the THREE FOUNDATIONS for a great society:

identity, community, stability

and huxley presented ideas that blatantly/openly stated how evil it was to separate kids from self discovery and liberty and that by not allowing them to explore each others bodies and touch one another we were creating a repressed/suppressed curiosity that would grow like a monster inside the child — a childish expression that is encouraged through taboo.

and that’s pretty bold philosophy.

further, and logically, he presented a society that wasn’t afraid of children never having parents but rather, cherished the idea of each one growing up protected and looked over by people who loved their job of caring for little ones and they didn’t abuse them or prohibit the kids from discovery themselves.

and each one was genetically crafted and modified to fit perfectly into their role within the greater whole. this was the utopia. the novel, however, skitters all over the place like a drunken car crash. the passengers are not reflective of the society. instead they are are a TRINITY list of the "unusual suspects", the "anti-society types" through no real fault of their own, the anomalies, those who didn’t fit in — as explored through the sexual relationships of one woman. she bangs all of them.

which is weird because you never hear anyone talk about that. so my version™ would put her into the HERO BOX™ of the what used to be called a PROTAGONIST — see how lost we are?!??! a hero and a protagonist are not the same thing. and a soldier and a hero are not the same thing. unless you literally change the meaning of the word. a hero is someone who accomplishes a series of strange feats/tasks or labors. a soldier is someone who is willing to kill in exchange for commodities/livelihood.

take it up with the dictionary. i’m not making this up.

PRESS PLAY FOR MORE GOOD FUN from GALANTIS

anyway, the "star" of this series™ is not a hero because there is no such thing as heroes in BRAVE NEW WORLD. the mantra of IDENTITY, COMMUNITY, STABILITY is so deep that the society requires no heroes, no vigilantes, no protectorates, no nuclear arms.

and it would be the same story but it would be seen through her world and the experiences she was having simultaneously during the novel. like the film about jesus’ younger brother Agape who was away at college when jesus was a killed™ and the netflix film series™ would dive away from the very tiny blip of interest huxley’s novel provides.

not that it isn’t a great novel, it’s just that huxley was an intellectual surgeon and his storytelling feels very sterile, but the magnificent visions of the future that he is able to relay through description and attention to detail is brilliant even if it’s not the best writing.

and it is this world that is the skeleton of his novel. and the skeleton needs to be studied.

he’s given us the foundations and he’s created his own maps and he’s acutely aware of the beauty of the new mexican landscape and topography.

so instantly we know he’s got a crush on the noble savage whereas, personally, i’m more interested in hanging out with a beta and seeing what her best expectations are like in this fantastical land™. and the story was kind of about a beta in a very backward kind of way. and it was also about two types of failed alphas and then a hippie jesus guy from the "reservations".

but the novel does some time skipping and the tour doesn’t really take us much further than that disturbing garden that the the tour creeps up on.

aldous kind of magically skips from age four to the adults, so that’s a bit too fast on the timeline for me — where’s the COMMUNITY?!?!?! he picks up on this concept later in his book ISLAND — but i still kind of agree with him that really little kids should be allowed to discover each other physically and without the judgement parents impose and overimpose so fast. we are mistaken in sexualizing this curiosity. we make it rapey. we use our adult minds to be like "OH!!! RAPE, my baby’s a rapist", or "oh no, that little baby boy played with another little boy".

aldous suggested that this form of exploration was essential to humans understanding and experiencing themselves EARLY ON without the sexual element being present or worse, present and mature. further, that this exploration would lead toward a differnt developmental attitude which would in turn allow a society to bypass future rape and sexual misconduct breaches.

but his ideas were too radical for people in his time. they still are. considering what a powerful novel it is, when it was written and the brilliant ideas that are tossed around like a juggler who is bouncing balls and torches and chain saws of the walls of a racquetball court while teaching you squash at the same time, it doesn’t get much play.

he was, after all, such a BRIT who had been notoriously kicked out of his social life circle in england for writing hilarious tell-all novels about the people closest to him. so they’d given him the outcast card and he’d fled (as fast as a mostly blind man with a lesbian wife can flee) to new mexico in the post wwi era, near the future site of the u.s. secret city/laboratory, los alamos. and from there, hollywood by 1932, i think.

what a great story he lived as well, not just tripping out on acid as he died, but also his first wife hunting beautiful women for the two of them to share, and the screenplays, the vast library of single print editions by other famous poets and playwrights and novelists sent to him for his approval. and then his second wife, the beautiful violinist who escape that terrible canyon fire that obliterated all those never-to-be-written-again books, all those manuscripts, all those precious writings that vanished beneath the terrible heat. and she, taking only her Stradivarius, walking out knowing everything would burn. letting go. giving it up to the fire.

forever people.

we wish.

but there is no forever man. there is no living jesus. all things die.

and true love is more like paying attnention. like that nun says in "lady bird". true love isn’t sexual. true love may not even know itself. true love might just be paying attention and feeling joy? the joy of paying attention.

and i know how much we all long to feel joy when paying attention. and in an age of POST-DISTRACTION awakenings, isn’t it time you told your daughters that marriage is an OPTION. that having kids is an OPTION. that giving up your life to fulfill some fake darwinian NONSENSE is an OPTION.

but so is living your own life and having no one else that you’ve created. and so is fighting for new models of PROCREATION that don’t involve failing parents, parents that never wanted kids and people who can’t afford kids.

parents are most often the worst thing about kids. so don’t be afraid to tell your kids that you failed and how. maybe they even remember it and have blamed themselves.

and if all you can give your son is a gun or a truck or a logic game, you’re definitely part of the problem. it’s vastly unfair to use gender foolishness to masculinize a child. it distorts the idea of masculinity like a mental disorder in the same manner that physical sexual abuse destroys young children. they are both attacks against the child’s being.

we do our best to protect kids against the predators of the body, but we do very little protect our children from the predators of the mind and the consumer usurers who are taking the kids earlier and earlier.

who knows, maybe one day the movie of the book will be made. we live in a perfect time for it to just skip straight away from the book and into the BRAVE NEW WORLD right after the visitors on the tour see where the little kids are intermingling without any kind of ADULT IMPOSED intrusions.

the great thing about the BRAVE NEW WORLD was that the rapey issue had been addressed and fully considered. the society was developed around the understandings of sexual co-mingling without parentalizing adults.

since most of humanity ALLEGEDLY has a very low intellectual focus & MOST people don’t actively seek to better and improve their intelligence — this is not my fact, it’s how "they" talk about the 99%ers — it is easy to distract the general populace with "material gain" greed games and after life myths and unfulfillable promises like the forever man.

even now, fully ready to fall asleep again after being "awake" for so fking long, even now i still want the person i thought of to be my forever man.

i want him so bad. but he was never that man in real life. he was never the fake version of him that was presented. and that’s what kills me the most. i supported the lies without knowing it. i felt misled and bushwacked. not victimized, just super aware that i had participated in the set-up and had no grounds for complaint. i spent my liberty and freedom of time and it was gone. and he felt stronger and freer (which is good and i’m glad of that).

but in the process we burned through each other and the lies and the falsehoods and the deceptions and the weaknesses all became exposed and destroyed in the fire. he was never the forever man in the first place. and that’s the rub. the forever man isn’t a person. there is no forever man.

in that moment the forever man became a concept for me, a trap that so many others fall into as well. and then we fall out of it. a lot of people return to it, but that’s usually because they can’t see the permanent break.

so now, suddenly, there was this permanent break and it was known to both of us.

granted, at first i found this confusing. naively, i had always assumed the permanent break was already there. didn’t everyone know this intuitively? i hadn’t realize that this wasn’t a universal understanding. but, i only say this because i learned it from people who are born alone. they say it over and over again.

i was born a twin and i don’t think that the "born alone" perspective is "all there is" as much as it is "all that most people have access to, therefore"…

but i learned about the "permanent break" from people born alone. twins are generally super optimistic. and i’m guessing on this because i can imagine a family that takes joy in their twins and understands that they might be a little different. my parents made a permanent break with me. an unrecoverable intentional break.

and then, through a long process of hop-scotch education through the west coast public and private christian schools in north and south california, voila! aware of humans and how they formulate their kindnesses and their goodnesses.

so when i heard about the permanent break thing AT THIS STAGE IN THE GAME, i was a bit taken about. it was one of those horrible realizations where your mind goes all bird’s eye view and geomapping and speeds through all manner of timelines and conjugations and starts the "murder board" with the new thread.

you can visually see the wasted time as chunks of LIFE. tetris LIFE chunks filled with remembrances just "disappearing" the value of memories instantly. a radical cross-platform devaluation of emotional assets. worse than zero. worse than no memories at all.

and that’s when you realize that a rug has been pulled out from under you and your grand designs. it’s the dreadfulness of false manifestations, the celebrants of what you thought was genuine were really bound up in a bottomless sadness and a burning flame with their own downward spiral dance.

it’s that startling and irreversible moment when you realize that your eyes and your heart and the assurances of another had been used quite shamelessly to proliferate a bizarre and untrue fantasy.

and worse, it was TRULY the revelation that i had wanted but not with a ghost!!! not with a dancing apparition! not the hollow man!!! oh fk, not the hollow man!!

and so now i’m doomed to still want the forever man that i had created with my expectations and then with my desires and then was slowly filleted by…

or maybe it was more like the sides of my neck were slashed open to make gills. because i do feel lucky. the charade could have taken longer and bigger chunks of my life. and i had a great time in the delusion and i liked working for a relationship.

sometimes the process of aging is a vinting metaphor and sometimes it’s a venting metaphor. sometimes it’s all about the air and the breath.

either way, it wasn’t my first relationship and it gave me an opportunity to see whether or not relationshipping was even in accordance with my nature and liberty. could i be happy without unionizing?

and the answer is yes. or, at least, it’s a great position to be in.

there is a freedom to participate in life that comes from being a part of it without being forced to protect offspring and develop those kinds of natural enmities against your "greatest predator", men. that’s a lovely start to things. almost as fun as the fake "virigin" girl claiming it’s god’s baby. or worse, everyone forgetting that "god’s baby" meant bastard offspring.

PRESS PLAY for some louder harder better from galantis

whatever, it doesn’t matter, i feel lucky to have had a forever man and to be able to write a more complicated story of "royal romance" than the childish ones we tell other people’s children and even our own children.

the corporatized children’s engineering factories are already in their late pre-testing phases.

BUT, a bit of forewarning to those who would be wise when it matters, i was punished for my childish expectations. i lost everything i gave. and i lost the time it took to give it. there was no reward. no dividends. no happy ever after. it was just business in the end.

and the whole time i had believed my eyes and my ears and listened and had tried to hold up the "we". but it was hard. there was permanent breakage from the start, not the end. he was full of grief and loss. he was too needy. but i thought he was consciously aware of all these things.

so when we were dating, i thought he knew about the permanent break. he was so far away from everybody. he was deep in the valley of the permanent break trying to find his way to sea-level. like a crushed flashcard on the side of the road in death valley.

in that there was the permanent break. we were choosing to try to have a relationship despite the permanent break that existed between people. he had come to me and plied me with the tale of his sister’s suicide. he pulled me into his sorrow spiral because i had told him several months before she killed herself that he should come out to her. she was a lesbian and felt entirely alone in the world and i begged him to reach out to her and share with her that he was gay.

but he didn’t. he had this way of never doing anything i suggested and then blaming me later about "advice" that he would get when he had come back to ask for "advice" after not doing what i had suggested after being asked. it was all a bit dislocating for me

and i give him credit for being clear and levelheaded about it in the end, but he couldn’t undo the damage that i was doing to myself for being such a fking fool.

no version of "sorry, i used you" or "let’s be friends" would ever replace the amount of time he took from my life while the veneer of his "forever man" status diminished in front of me until finally it occurred to me to ask him on the phone one day, long after we’d broken up if his current boyfriend was okay with these calls. i asked because it had also dawned on me that he’d specifically asked me to give him a call and do check-ins every couple of weeks, "are you allowed to talk to me? is your man okay with that?"

and he admitted that they had agreed that he wouldn’t call me. at which point i was like, "oh, i see, so this is like cheating. great, gotta go, man. i just wish you’d be honest. and free. you know that’s what i always wanted for you. i told you that over and over."

and we’ve never connected since. such a drag. and this is the danger of relationships.

you can lose years of your life, but even more important, you can lose WINDOWS of your life.

the years are just time, but the windows are specific ages where wonderful and amazing things can happen that cannot happen during other windows of your life.

besides, relationships TAX you. they TRULY add surcharges and time-penalties to your existence. there will no end of speed bumps and dependency is anti-liberty at its core, so the struggle to be free cannot be achieved unless all parties of the relationship are unionized. and that’s business contracting, which is an artifice. grammatically speaking, relationships are duty bound and come with obligatory submissions of personal liberty.

who’d sign up for that?

as if that isn’t enough, relationships will steal your experiences and replace them SHARED memories. and on the surface this sounds great. but that depends on the how the shared memories end up affecting the relationship.

shared memories are indeed precious and the best ones are the ones that you cherish. but after a separation, the best memories are the ones that work as triggers for your sorrow or anger or grief or devastation. the best memories become the worst.

i knew a woman in grad school who had come out as a lesbian. her name was ceebs. and she was a quirky writer with an irish background and we we’re both from san diego where her dad had been police chief or something along those lines. and she’d grown up repressing a lot of stuff. i’d done the same thing until i decided that living a lie was so ordinary and that NO ONE in the whole history of western writing had ever said, "just be a liar. lie to everybody. tell them what they want to hear. then lie about that later."

she used to often say that the thing you really liked about a person and were drawn to about them would become the thing you ended up resenting them for and perhaps even disliking about them.

so it sucks if you hear a bunch of lies up front and then they unravel around you to become the thing you end up resenting. that’s a tough one. and the irony is that lying never ends. it just keeps reinventing itself.

on the other hand, in total fairness, ALL western literature has been littered with the ruins of people’s lies and the horrible effect that lying had on so many people’s lives. and not inadvertently, heaven becomes this place where the lies are all put back together in front of you.

contemporary christianity became so zealous it started to formulate this notion (an entirely post-television & televangelistic fantasy) about how you’d stand in judgement and your entire life would be played back to you. and you thought andy warhol’s film "SLEEP" was long and boring:

"John Giorno has said Warhol asked him to star in Sleep over Memorial Day Weekend in 1963, when the two retreated to the countryside and Warhol spent the night watching Giorno sleep. “I looked over and there was Andy in the bed next to me, his head propped up on his arm, wide-eyed from speed, looking at me,” Giorno later relayed. "

born a twin, i think my big one wish would be that i DO get to this illusory JUDGEMENT ZONE where god and his posse replay my life to see if i was good enough to get in the the party called heaven.

but, typical me, i could give a sht about the party called heaven. i want access to my unknown life. i want to watch my birth and everything after like a fking drone camera that i can move around and zoom in or rewind. i want to see what happened to me when i was left unattended. i want to see the things i already have been told happened and then re-lied to about it.

i have the cobwebs of all these weird myths that humans create in order to justify PARENTHOOD.

we don’t need parents. science and the bible have proven that parents are unnecessary and obsolete.

unfortunately pedophiles and religious structures/foundations/corporations and "neo colonist governments" will want to self-protect against this accord.

they want you debt-enslaved with college loans, home loans, bundled family plan phones and car loans.

but that won’t pay for the loans after the entire shipping and distributing INTERCONTINENTAL economy lays off all the drivers and starts running AUTOKAR in a color-coded lane that only AUTOKAR (pilotless vehicle) can use.

that’s a lot of truckers nationwide all hopped on speed and suddenly without jobs?? is this part of the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN strategy? shall we name that condition/state right now?

maybe we could call it THE AUTOKAR METH SHADOW.

so keep your eyes open. maybe it will never, ever, ever, ever happen.

or, give that "new utopia glimpse" a try. read huxley’s book BRAVE NEW WORLD. it’s a deeply fascinating look into miranda’s query: "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! (5.1.215-218) — the tempest

happy birthday. i hope you’re free and happy.

Posted by torbakhopper on 2007-04-03 17:03:24

Tagged: , like horses waiting for the gates to open , tulip , macro , flower , torbakhopper , scott , richard , photographer

The post the day the horses drink from the trough appeared first on Good Info.

[nebris]

The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism

Freedom from the government will allow radical science to go on undisturbed.

By Zoltan Istvan August 8, 2017

Transhumanists are curiosity addicts. If it’s new, different, untouched, or even despised, we’re probably interested in it. If it involves a revolution or a possible paradigm shift in human experience, you have our full attention. We are obsessed with the mysteries of existence, and we spend our time using the scientific method to explore anything we can find about the evolving universe and our tiny place in it.

Obsessive curiosity is a strange bedfellow. It stems from a profound sense of wanting something better in life—of not being satisfied. It makes one search, ponder, and strive for just about everything and anything that might improve existence. In the 21st century, that leads one right into transhumanism. That’s where I’ve landed right now: A journalist and activist in the transhumanist movement. I’m also currently a Libertarian candidate for California Governor. I advocate for science and tech-themed policies that give everyone the opportunity to live indefinitely in perfect health and freedom.

Politics aside, transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic world—a world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

Transhumanism was formally started in 1980’s by philosophers in California. For decades it remained low key, mostly discussed in science fiction novels and unknown academic conferences. Lately, however, transhumanism seems to be surging in popularity. What once was a smallish band of fringe people discussing how science and technology can solve all humanity’s problems has now become a burgeoning social mission of millions around the planet.

At the recent FreedomFest, the world’s largest festival on liberty, transhumanism was a theme explored in numerous panels, including some I had the privilege of being on. Libertarian transhumanism is one of the fastest growing segments of the libertarian movement. A top priority for transhumanists is to have freedom from the government so radical science experiments and research can go on undisturbed and unregulated.  

So why are so many people jumping on the transhumanist bandwagon? I think it has to do with the mishmash of tech inundating and dominating our daily lives. Everything from our smartphone addictions to flying at 30,000 feet in jet airplanes to Roombas freaking out our pets in our homes. Nothing is like it was for our forbearers. In fact, little is like it was even a generation ago. And the near future will be many times more dramatic: driverless cars, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Each of these technologies is already here, and in some cases being marketed to billions of people. The world is shifting under our feet—and libertarian transhumanism is a sure way to navigate the chaos to make sure we arrive at the best future possible.

My interest in transhumanism began over 20 years ago when I was a philosophy and religion student at Columbia University in New York City. We were assigned to read an article on life extension techniques and the strange field of cryonics, where human beings are frozen after they’ve died in hopes of reviving them with better medicine in the future. While I’d read about these ideas in science fiction before, I didn’t realize an entire cottage industry and movement existed in America that is dedicated to warding off death with radical science. It was an epiphany for me, and I knew after finishing that article I was passionately committed to transhumanism and wanted to help it.

However, it wasn’t until I was in the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam, on assignment for National Geographic Channel as a journalist, that I came to dedicate my life to transhumanism. Walking in the jungle, my guide tackled me and I fell to the ground with my camera. A moment later he pointed at the half-hidden landmine I almost stepped on. I’d been through dozens of dangerous experiences in the over 100 countries I visited during my twenties and early thirties—hunting down wildlife poachers with WildAid, volcano boarding in the South Pacific, and even facing a pirate attack off Yemen on my small sailboat where I hid my girlfriend in the bilge and begged masked men with AK47s not to shoot me. But this experience in Vietnam was the one that forced a U-turn in my life. Looking at the unexploded landmine, I felt like a philosophical explosive had gone off in my head. It was time to directly dedicate my skills and hours to overcoming biological human death.

I returned home to America immediately and plunged into the field of transhumanism, reading everything I could on the topic, talking with people about it, and preparing a plan to contribute to the movement. I also began by writing my libertarian-minded novel The Transhumanist Wager, which went on to become a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon and helped launched my career as a futurist. Of course, a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon doesn’t mean very many sales (there’s been about 50,000 downloads to date), but it did mean that transhumanism was starting to appear alongside the ideas of Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Sam Harris, and other philosophers that inspired people to look outside their scope of experience into the unknown.

And transhumanism is the unknown. Bionic arms, brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech. These technologies are no longer part of some Star Trek sequel, but are already here or being worked on. They will change the world and how we see ourselves as human beings. The conundrum facing society is whether we’re ready for this. Transhumanists say yes. But America may not welcome that.  

In fact, the civil rights battle of the century may be looming because of coming transhumanist tech. If conservatives think abortion rights are unethical, how will they feel about scientists who want to genetically combine the best aspects of species, including humans and animals together? And should people be able to marry their sexbots? Will transhumanist Christians try to convert artificial intelligence and lead us to something termed a Jesus Singularity? Should we allow scientists to reverse aging, something researchers have already had success with in mice? Finally, as we become more cyborg-like with artificial hips, cranial implants, and 3D-printed organs, should we rename the human species?

Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived. Not only has it become a leading buzzword for a new generation pondering the significance of merging with machines, but transhumanist-themed columns are appearing in major media. Celebrity conspiracy theorists like Mark Dice and Alex Jones bash it regularly, and even mainstream media heavyweights like John Stossel, Joe Rogan, and Glenn Beck discuss it publicly. Then there’s Google hiring famed inventor Ray Kurzweil as lead engineer to work on artificial intelligence, or J. Craig Venture’s new San Diego-based genome sequencing start-up (co-founded with Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation and stem cell pioneer Robert Hariri) which already has 70 million dollars in financing.

It’s not just companies either. Recently, the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with material from three different parents. Even President Obama, before he left office, jumped in the game by giving DARPA $70 million dollars to develop brain chip technology, part of America’s multi-billion dollar BRAIN Initiative. The future is coming fast, people around the world are realizing, and there’s no denying that the transhumanist age fascinates tens of millions of people as they wonder where the species might go and what health benefits it might mean for society.

At the end of the day, transhumanism is still really focused on one thing: satisfying that essential addiction to curiosity. With science, technology, and a liberty-minded outlook as our tools, the species can seek out and even challenge the very nature of its being and place in the universe. That might mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop. It will likely mean the transformation of the species from biological entities into something with much more tech built directly into it. Perhaps most important of all, it will mean we will have the chance to grow and evolve with our families, friends, and loved ones for as long as we like, regardless how weird or wild transhumanist existence becomes.  

Zoltan Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for Governor in California.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-growing-world-of-libertarian-transhumanism/

There are a lot of negative comments on this article, so I added my own: 

A few simple propositions for those hating upon TH: 

~It is fairly certain that unless humans become a space-faring species, we shall go extinct and very possibly in the not too distant future. See Stephen J. Hawking. Elon Musk, et al   

~Baseline Humans [that's me and thee, folks] do not do well in space. Not at all. Tends to break our bodies down quite rapidly.   

~Only deeply modified Humans, both Genetic and Cybernetic mods, have a real chance to survive and prosper in space.   

So, it is pretty much go Transhuman or go Extinct. I know which future has my support.