The one consistent place in Star Trek where tech and advancement are approved of is the realm of the Star Trek Engineer. But they don't create so much as tinker with existing systems, and often in ways that would definitely void the manufacturer's warranty--and, if you pay close attention, they're usually the ones arguing for limits. Also, their purpose in the plot is rarely that of scientists. Instead, they are closer to the archetype of the Smith, the craftsman who makes specialized tools for the heroes, and usually as a one-off thing. They're just cranky men and women in unitards as opposed to cranky dwarves or crotchety wizards, but the end result is the same--they're miracle workers, not doers of science (miracles being one-off, non-repeatable phenomena). Also, they're the humanistic face of science; the lone expert, the "Wizard" archetype who knows deep secrets beyond the means of ordinary men, capable of understanding how best to achieve practical results instead of ivory tower, "useless" research (notice, in all of the series, how often we have mad scientists, research run amok, and other perversions of science, and that it is the engineer who fixes it?). They're the veneer of technoprogressivism that I mentioned, and they're only acceptable to the plot because what they do isn't reproducible and would hence have larger implications. My favorite example, both because it's funny and because it is such an extreme example, is the U.S.S. Lovell, from the Star Trek Corps Of Engineers novels. It is a century-plus old, obsolete piece of tech that was decommissioned from active service half a century earlier. The Corps of Engineers takes it, and turns a decrepit ship with mismatched hull plates, welds and patches all over, and a rattle that sounds like the whole ship is about to explode every time they take it to warp, and... upgrade it. It is, afterall, crewed pretty much exclusively by Star Fleet Engineers. So it still looks crappy... and, by the time they're done tinkering, it's the fastest ship in the fleet.

Well, for its day, it was very forward looking. But there is a very strong streak of what we would term bioconservatism running through the entire setting as a non-stated but pronounced theme. Now, part of that is because of the source--television producers are notoriously conservative and meddling, and too many transhuman elements will make your average TV viewer alienated, as they lack the ability to relate to the characters. But it is still a very consistent and repeated aspect of the show--Science needs to be tempered with Wisdom. Technology requires the social maturity in order to use properly. There are Things out there beyond our Understanding, and they are Dangerous. Nature and the Natural Course Of Events are Sacrosanct and should not be Meddled With (see the Prime Directive, for example, and the ban on human genetic engineering for another, while, at the same time, gaining improved abilities via the "natural" pathway of interbreeding with aliens is acceptable). At the same time, it isn't all bad. There is also a strong theme of community, respect, acceptance and decency towards your fellow sapients recurrent throughout the series, regardless of form, as well as the ideal of self-determination (the moral basis of the Prime Directive).

Well, Star Trek comes from a time, where transhumanism wasn't as accepted as it is "now". I think it still aged well, everything considered and the themes and problems are pretty good presented. I greatly enjoyed Measure of a Man, for example.

GreyBrother wrote:

Well, Star Trek comes from a time, where transhumanism wasn't as accepted as it is "now". I think it still aged well, everything considered and the themes and problems are pretty good presented. I greatly enjoyed Measure of a Man, for example.

It's not unique to transhumanism or even Star Trek; sci fi in general (especially the sci fi that leans towards horror) has the implicit or explicit ideal of there being "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" or "Lines Man Was Not Meant To Cross". Look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where the idea is that only God should have the ability to create life, not Man. This idea comes out in every Terminator movie (whoops, turns out robotics/AI research was a bad idea!), every renegade mutant movie (whoops, turns out nuclear power/genetic engineering was a bad idea!). Even the movie Pi could be about how too much MATH is a bad idea. Hell, Lovecraft built an entire genre around it being a bad idea to read the wrong book - if that book just happens to be the Necronomicon. Arguably, it's a theme going back to Icarus, or perhaps the Tower of Babel or even the Garden of Eden - we currently live in a safe little bubble of knowledge and by pushing out the boundaries of that bubble we risk burning ourselves. In and of itself, this isn't necessarily a bad idea. It teaches us that new possibilities aren't all good - new possibilities for good things also provide new possibilities for bad things. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons come in the same breath; the vast data possibilities of the internet come with the risk of devalued privacy, cyber-attacks and so on. Is this regressive or anti-progressive? I wouldn't say so. Certainly it can be used in that fashion - I know several critics who point out poorly written science fiction uses fiction to bash science. But then, I've also read tons of badly written sci fi that just goes "blah blah blah theoretical physics". It's a good thing to be aware of potential risks so we can be prepared. If we're right about possible problems, we can be ready. If not, we're fine.

Star Trek has a very strong left wing political bent, and the left are typically been against growth, technological progress, and science. The whole show is a tribute to some UN/Greenpeace/socialist hybrid ideology. I liked TNG but certainly not for the agenda it tried to push.

I love Star Trek for exactly this reason, cast as an RPG. Play an engineer type. Get your friend to play as the science type. Repurpose existing technology in ways that void the manufacturer's warranty as thoroughly as if Jebediah Kerman himself were doing it. For instance... Replicators. Install at least one in every conceivable space, and install more if need be to ensure that no significant space doesn't have line-of-sight to a replicator. In addition to ensuring that should he ever come aboard, Jean-Luc Picard is never more than fifteen seconds away from a piping-hot cup of Earl Grey, you can program them to materialize a weapons turret any time the ship has been boarded and begin suppressing the enemy. Normally, this will take the form of stun blasts, but in the face of a Borg invasion, you can crank the phaser up to kill and rotating-frequency. They adjusted to the phasers? No problem, dematerialize the phaser turret and replicate a Klingon-based Disruptor. They adapted to that? Romulan disruptor, kthx. Adapted? Cardassian phaser. Etcetera, etcetera. They'll run out of drones and/or patience before you run out of weapon systems to deploy. And the transporter. Here's a simple trick: have the computer update its scan of living/moving people/people-like things every half second or so. Did it suddenly detect someone who wasn't there a half second ago and they didn't just appear in the transporter room? They're getting a one-way trip to the [i]brig.[/i] Unless they're Borg, in which case they're just getting dematerialized and scattered into atoms. Come up against somebody who likes to spam missiles at you? Do a little research into old-timey missile defenses and repurpose the outer 10% of the phaser strips for automatic-fire missile defense. Next! It's so much fun. Especially since between the replicator and holodeck you can rapid prototype basically anything you can think of. Want AR? You can probably have a working AR headband with as much if not more functionality than a PADD in a lunch break.

Steel Accord wrote:

The left, on the other hand, (hehe) doesn't want research at all.

what is this i don't even Once again, bibs speaks the truth of it.

Steel Accord wrote:

A) I don't think the Borg have patience to run out of. Not to say your tactic sounds a hell of a lot more promising than anything they actually tried.

I dunno. The Borg can be pretty tempermental at times, what with that queen bitch of theirs. That said, you can simulate running out of patience by updating your cost-benefit analysis and determining that this is not working, or is not working efficiently enough to justify the end result.

Quote:

B) Wouldn't Star Fleet crack down on whatever starship you are on for experimenting in such technologies. "Non-interference" my foot!

The Prime Directive is applicable only to foreign cultures and especially primitive ones. It is only applicable to Federation member worlds inasmuch as they go completely bonkers and start behaving in a manner not in keeping with the UFP charter (such as if they say decided to institute the death penalty by wild dogs for every crime,) or whatever. It is in no way, shape, or form, applicable to Starfleet vessels, being that said vessels are, in fact, part of the [i]de facto[/i] naval hierarchy of said Federation. That said, Starfleet knows damn well that a lot of the best principles that go into making new starship classes were engineered as retrofits, bodges, or outright field improvisation, by the crews of ships in space. So they're not likely to complain unless you're like, implementing banned technologies or something. (Also, with the collapse of the Romulan Star Empire as of the "not-quite-a-reboot" movies and STO, the Treaty of Algernon that prohibited the Federation from developing cloaking technology is null and void.)

bibliophile20 wrote:

So, Star Trek. Star Trek has an interesting relationship with transhuman themes. On the one hand, we have the repeated message that "Science=Bad". This has been a repeated theme through all of TV series, as witnessed by a repeated appeal to Luddism and how many of the AIs in the setting (with the notable exception of Data, but balanced by his brother) act.

Not all of them are treated as such, mind you. Remember Wesley's self-aware nanoswarm and those bots they engineered to be repair drones? As soon as it was realized they were self-aware entities, they were accorded all the respects thereof, including being allowed to determine their own fates and, most emphatically, ceasing to issue them orders. (Which one of those drones promptly repaid by proving that it understood both the values of individual sapient life, and the value of self-sacrifice in order to allow others to survive.) It's just that many of the AIs the Federation runs into are [i]utter jackasses[/i] and have evidently decided that the galaxy isn't big enough for both meat and mechanical intelligences.

Quote:

Technology that is developed off-screen is good. Technology that is developed on-screen... well, not so much. So that might just be an element of the dramatic nature of a television production. Successful tests do not make for drama.

Don't forget all of the things they've come up with on-screen. The Enterprise is probably considered a flying mad science lab/insane engineering depot, and you bet your ass that the reports of all of those things they've pulled out of their asses to get out of the scrape of the day are being funneled right back to Starfleet to be picked apart for usable applications. (And don't forget Montgomery Scott. He basically engineered the best way to survive on a ship with failing life support.It never came up again in the shows or the movies, but it did rear its head again in the Elite Force 2 video game.)

Quote:

Messing with biology, however, is never treated positively. Implants have a cost, ranging from as minor as Geordie's headaches to as severe as utter loss of individuality, in the case of the Borg. The doctors are the most conservative individuals on the show, with only Phlox arguably breaking the trend. Biology is seen as something you have to accept about yourself, and not something at all mutable or alterable, and any alterations need to be reverted ASAP.

Geordi's VISOR implant was early and primitive. Largely because it was conceived of in 1989. You know what else we got out of 1989? Shadowrun 1st Edition. Fast forward to today, we have SR4 (I refuse to acknowledge the abomination that increments that number,) and Eclipse Phase. We also have the Star Trek movies, where Geordi has replaced the old VISOR with a set of cybernetic eyes (or eye [i]implants[/i], at least,) which not only provide massively more functionality to him (to the point he likely has superior vision to Data, let alone the spectrums Data hasn't got,) but no headaches. Ultimately though, you can safely chalk it down to the main themes explored by the Star Trek TV shows not being transhuman - or, well, transsapient, anyway, 'cause there's nothing saying a Bajoran couldn't go for augs if she wanted. That's because their primary themes are on other dramas. That's also why hacking and electronic warfare shows up very little, if at all; it's not that kind of show.

Smokeskin wrote:

The left fears growth, resource depletion, pollution, and interfering with the natural order. They also fear anything that they perceive as increasing inequality, like intelligence enhancement available to the rich.

And those are mostly things which [b]should[/b] be feared, because resource depletion and pollution [i]will[/i] wreck the fucking world. And the last thing we need is the rich gaining the means to become even fucking richer and further distance themselves from the rest of us.

Quote:

The right has a series of religiously inspired biases against science, plus the yuck factor (they call it wisdom of repugnance), plus an idea of protecting human dignity (like Ritalin devalues hard work and self discipline, so better leave those ADHD children untreated).

Human dignity is one thing, withholding medication from those who need it is quite another.

Smokeskin wrote:

Resource depletion has been talked about since forever. Malthus warned about it. Never happened. Limits to Growth made a compelling case in the 70s - it didn't happen. As resources are depleted, human ingenuity and markets figure out a way around it.

You know, other folks on this forum are polite. I am no longer in the mood to be polite. I swear to god, if I heard someone wank the free market IRL as much as you do in here, I would fucking punch them right in the gob and tell the judge "Yeah, I did it, and I ain't sorry." It's. Getting. [b]Old.[/b] Change the fucking record already! The free market has never failed to do two things [i]exceptionally[/i] well: funnel resources, wealth, and all around quality-of-life into the rich, and screw everybody else.

Smokeskin wrote:

I'm sure you have predominantly leftwing opposition to say GMOs, shale gas and the very idea of continued growth in the US.

I don't know how much opposition there is to GMOs [i]politically[/i] anymore; I know a lot of extreme hippie types are opposed to them, but I personally couldn't give a shit. I've looked into them, and since they apparently aren't going to cause me to grow any extra appendages or anything, I'm not opposed to them personally. Fracking is an entirely different issue, and the main concern is the environmental impact (as it should be). Say what you will about our species turning the entire planet to computronium (I wonder...), but I question how likely we are to get to that point if we continually contaminate important water basins with the toxic chemicals needed for the fracking process. That said, again, the political opposition more cautious than opposed, though there's always the extremist elements. As for "continued growth", I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the US that would outright state to be opposed to something as generalized as that. This is all with a grain of salt, of course. I'm not nearly as well-read as most on here, so don't jump all over me if I'm mistaken.

Lilith wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

I'm sure you have predominantly leftwing opposition to say GMOs, shale gas and the very idea of continued growth in the US.

I don't know how much opposition there is to GMOs [i]politically[/i] anymore; I know a lot of extreme hippie types are opposed to them, but I personally couldn't give a shit. I've looked into them, and since they apparently aren't going to cause me to grow any extra appendages or anything, I'm not opposed to them personally. Fracking is an entirely different issue, and the main concern is the environmental impact (as it should be). Say what you will about our species turning the entire planet to computronium (I wonder...), but I question how likely we are to get to that point if we continually contaminate important water basins with the toxic chemicals needed for the fracking process. That said, again, the political opposition more cautious than opposed, though there's always the extremist elements. As for "continued growth", I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the US that would outright state to be opposed to something as generalized as that. This is all with a grain of salt, of course. I'm not nearly as well-read as most on here, so don't jump all over me if I'm mistaken.

We more or less agree on these things. But you find different positions on the far left. Sometimes even in the mainstream, here in Europe there are only 2 strains of GMO that are not banned for example. Greenpeace actively oppose Golden Rice. Here in Denmark, you hear many politicians talk about how we should drop the idea of continued economic growth. Some environmentalists even talk about how we need to reduce economic activity drastically, and the scariest say we need to get down to a sustainable population of only half a billion humans (how are they going to do that?!?).

Smokeskin wrote:

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

I swear to god, if I heard someone wank the free market IRL as much as you do in here, I would fucking punch them right in the gob and tell the judge "Yeah, I did it, and I ain't sorry."

I hope you're kidding. Political violence is highly morally objectionable, the legal repercussions could damage your quality of life substantially, and it is dangerous to assault people, you never know who you're dealing with. I don't know what your martial prowess is, but I've been doing MMA for 3 years and earlier in my life a bit of krav maga and muai thai.

[color=orange]Oy. Okay. You two need to stop threatening each other. ShadowDragon, you already got one strike from implying that you'd physically attack Smokeskin. Smokeskin, please don't return the favor. You're implying every bit as much as he is that you'd harm him. [/color] [color=orange]Strike One, and, as soon as I figure out how, I'm doing a temporary lock on this thread for the next 24 hours. I think heads need to cool all around. [/color]

I think Fukuyama is a douche bag too if there was any doubt about that. I'm more upset that you implied that I was threatening anyone. Self defense is a completely different thing.

I still don't get it. He says he'd punch someone like me in the face. I tell him that's a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Even if you read my post as directed at him physically and in person from an internet forum, I'm still only saying I can defend myself. I get that you issued a warning and that should have settled it, and it did. My preferred reaction to someone who says they'd commit political violence and proudly admit it to the judge is a lot harsher than giving advice on why violence is a bad idea. Try replacing "someone who wanks the free market so much" with something else and see how it reads: I swear to god, if I met someone as overtly gay as you, I would fucking punch them right in the gob and tell the judge "Yeah, I did it, and I ain't sorry." It's a scary thing to say and a scary meme to spread. Getting thrown in the same boat doesn't sit right with me. But whatever, we're probably not going to agree on this.

bibliophile20 wrote:

And, as our technology has improved, our ability to deplete resources has accelerated past the point where we can find new resources to exploit. Limits To Grow didn't see the Green Revolution coming. But now we're up against the limits imposed by that, and we haven't yet found any ways around that one--and the side effects of the Green Revolution are having their own problems. I do fear that we either already have, or are about to exceed carrying capacity, and I do not look forward to the population crash. Water is the biggest issue at the moment, and, yes, we have the technology to deal with it--desalination plants--but we do not have the political will or the financial will to invest in that coming crisis, and it will be ugly if that does not change. Also, those plants have very large ecological footprints that cascade onto other aspects of the environment that we need to live (sea life is very sensitive to salinity changes, and most of our oxygen is produced by phytoplankton in the seas).

It looks like Dean Kamen and Coca Cola will get their SlingShots widely distributed and solve the water problem. That thing is cheap, cheap to run and turns anything into pure water.

Quote:

Quote:

Pollution, there's no threat to the world in sight. Besides, we're going to level the place and turn it all into computronium anyway, so as long as we don't poison people or ruin their stuff along the way, it's not a big deal.

That's a very.... optimistic viewpoint. Rather callous, in it's own way and one that I fundamentally disagree with. We have several outstanding threats to the world--or at least or civilization's presence on it--at the moment. Climate change. Lack of fresh water. Food production shortfalls due to climate change. Ecological collapse due to climate change, resource extraction, and habitat destruction.

I don't know. I'm taking the IPCC side on this, and they say there isn't a major threat coming from climate change. It's pretty far down the list of the serious problems we have. Aside from the remote risk of a clathrate gun, it is nothing unmanageable. I know that a lot of people are very concerned about it, but the science doesn't predict anything catastrophic. And besides, there are several feasible geoengineering fixes to climate change, like slat water spraying ships or sulfur seeding.

Quote:

But, at the same time, don't make a slippery slope argument. Nature has its own value that often gets ignored in the process of these discussions.

Nature has value to the extent that sentient beings place value on it. You can place value on it, and buy it and protect it, but on its own, I don't see it any different than any other property. How do you justify all the shit we do to nature? Keep millions of animals in farms to be raised and butchered? In the west we've destroyed most of the original nature and replaced it with cities and farm land. Was that wrong? Should we shut down industry?

Quote:

Setting aside the aesthetic, subjectively moral, and custodial values, the "natural order" does need to be preserved for our own survival at this stage. There seems to be this persistent train of thought that human ingenuity can overcome any adversity. I happen to agree with that, with the caveat of "adversity that we have time to study and put into context, otherwise, we're going to lose alot of people along the way." We're still discovering how interconnected the biosphere is, and how damage and change in one place propagates elsewhere, and we haven't found all of the cascading functions yet.

Cascading functions like what? Did we ever trigger one? Would it destroy our agriculture?

Quote:

However, at the same time, we should not go around and actively destroy the planet's ability to support life. And, with the population growth figures at the moment, I'm honestly worried. There's a quote from one of my textbooks, "The Time Before History", which covers the tens of thousands of years of unrecorded history between the development of behaviorally modern humans and the beginning of writing and records. And this quote has stuck with me. "Multiple times in human history, mankind has had to make the choice between being celibate and being clever. We have always chosen to be clever". Nearly every time our population has exceeded carrying capacity, we've found ways around it--but only nearly.

Honestly, it seems our history is full of lots of people being frightened about the future and then the future turns out to be better instead. Everyone should check out Hans Rosling and his Gapminder (don't worry, he's not a libertarian, he's a widely respected Swede). Even more so now that we have markets that self regulate and adapt to changes, instead of us having to rely on the sometimes strange and counterproductive ideas of the rulers.

Whew. Busy, busy, busy couple of days. On the good news front: Tutoring jobs have picked up massively! On the bad news front: My free time has shown an inverse curve! :) So, mostly been watching and keeping an eye, but I didn't have time for big posts.

Smokeskin wrote:

It looks like Dean Kamen and Coca Cola will get their SlingShots widely distributed and solve the water problem. That thing is cheap, cheap to run and turns anything into pure water.

Doing some research, the system certainly has possibilities--massive possibilities, at that--but it is not a "magic bullet" that will solve all the entire problem. Specifically, it has three major problems that are immediately obvious to me: 1) it requires a source of combustible fuel. Yes, it can use just about anything combustible as a fuel source, but those are typically already in use for other purposes, or have existing drawbacks. I'm thinking of kerosene heaters and stoves in India, wood-burning stoves in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Africa, and coal-burning stoves in China, all of which are facing severe shortages problems in their fuel source and/or are being phased out as polluting and contributing to air quality issues which negatively impact the health of the user and the community. If the Slingshot requires a fuel source along those lines, then that's a problem. 2) It is not a strict condenser, collecting the atmospheric water vapor and condensing it. It is a small scale evaporator and condenser, and requires a source of water to begin with. Now, this is not a problem if you're living on the seashore (although I don't see a mention of how one deals with the large volumes of precipitates that this device would produce), but it is hardly economical when you don't have a ready source of water. Yes, you can use urine for this kind of device, but, in climates where you're going to be using that as your primary source of recoverable evaporatives, you're going to be losing more water through sweating, which is not recoverable using this device. So you still need a source of water, which certain regions lack. And 3) Being an evaporator, it cannot be used to filter water of any chemicals with equal or lower evaporative energies than H2O, which includes many volatile and toxic chemicals used in industrial processes and end up in runoff. That being said, a very interesting idea, and one which I hope paves the way for larger-scale evaporative plants, once people get used to the idea.

Quote:

I don't know. I'm taking the IPCC side on this, and they say there isn't a major threat coming from climate change. It's pretty far down the list of the serious problems we have. Aside from the remote risk of a clathrate gun, it is nothing unmanageable. I know that a lot of people are very concerned about it, but the science doesn't predict anything catastrophic.

Actually, that is factually incorrect. [url=http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf]The IPCC has determined that the climate is indeed warming, that and, with 95% certainty, that humanity is responsible, and that the results will range somewhere from “nasty” to “catastrophic”[/url]. For the [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/27/2691471/ipcc-report-warming-... alone, they’re predicting a 9 degree (Fahrenheit; 5 Celsius) temperature increase over the next 85 years[/url] if we take no action in curbing our carbon emissions--i.e. continuing the same direction that we have been for the last three decades. And, due to how the entire climate engine is extremely sensitive to heat, [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/17/3076101/global-warming-water... can expect wet areas to experience regular flooding, while dry areas will become more so[/url], meaning that [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/03/3238781/deforestation-water-... regions will become even more lacking in drinkable liquids[/url]. So the science does predict something catastrophic. And that’s without a biosphere killer like a clathrate gun feedback loop.

Quote:

And besides, there are several feasible geoengineering fixes to climate change, like slat water spraying ships or sulfur seeding.

I’ve looked at the studies on those geoengineering fixes, and they are not at all feasible, either on costs, scale, or potential propagating cascading failures. Some of them are potentially feasible, given a great deal more study, but the ironic thing is that those methods are typically the ones that are the most expensive or directly under attack by corporate interests. Ironically, if we could plant a forest with the area of Texas and then sequester all of the carbon in the wood away from the atmosphere (meaning not burning it or decomposing it, but using it for paper or building materials), that would make tremendous strides towards fixing some of the damage that has been done. The problem is, simply, where do you put a forest of that size, when we’re already in the process of cutting down forests as fast as possible to make room for people and agriculture?

Quote:

Nature has value to the extent that sentient beings place value on it. You can place value on it, and buy it and protect it, but on its own, I don't see it any different than any other property. How do you justify all the shit we do to nature? Keep millions of animals in farms to be raised and butchered? In the west we've destroyed most of the original nature and replaced it with cities and farm land. Was that wrong? Should we shut down industry?

Alright, I’ll give you a response, because you asked... “All true wealth is biological” --Vorkosigan Saga. How do I value nature? I value nature for the aesthetic, for what I can learn from it, for the value that it has been here longer than I have and will be here far after I am gone, and I respect that. Beyond that, I value nature as the life support system for myself. I value the bees as the pollinators for the food I eat, the plants as the basis of the food web that supports me, the oxygen that I breathe. I value them as being part of a dynamic equilibrium that has managed to adapt even after tremendous damage done to it, even as the rate of that damage accelerates. I value nature as the basis of my context in it, as a consumer and producer, as the mechanism that produces the materials necessary to keep a jumped up monkey with delusions of importance and aspirations of immortality alive, me and seven billion other monkeys. I value it as much as I value my own life, which is limitless, and multiply that by seven billion. I don’t justify what we do to nature. I don’t deny it, either. We keep millions of animals alive in farms as a symbiotic relationship between our species and theirs. They never need to fear extinction, unlike so many other species. Does that mean that I fail to think that the process is perfect, that it humane and decent? No. I will only eat kosher meat, not out of religious conviction, but because the process is designed so that the animal feels no pain. In the west, we have indeed damaged nature and replaced it, and we are poorer for it. But there are areas that have been preserved. And I protest against the casual destruction of life--any life, because, so far as we know, this is the only place in the universe where life can be found, and I must fight against the dimming of that candle in the endless dark. And, in the end, value is what we say it is. You say that these chits and coins and pieces of paper have value. But, in the end, what are they good for? I cannot cure diseases with them. I cannot eat them, or feed them to people. I cannot plant them and make them grow. I cannot inhale their subtle perfumes and wonder at the millions of years of evolution that has brought them and me to this instant. I cannot experience shared joy or sorrow with them. I cannot pair bond with them, or experience the satisfaction of a life well lived with them. They are merely a useful substance, that, so long as others share the delusion with me that these chits and mediums have value, I can exchange for things of use to me. But they are not what I truly value. On a desert island, the medium of exchange is a coconut. In a famine, it is a loaf of bread. And all of these support the true value: life, itself.

Quote:

Quote:

Setting aside the aesthetic, subjectively moral, and custodial values, the "natural order" does need to be preserved for our own survival at this stage. There seems to be this persistent train of thought that human ingenuity can overcome any adversity. I happen to agree with that, with the caveat of "adversity that we have time to study and put into context, otherwise, we're going to lose alot of people along the way." We're still discovering how interconnected the biosphere is, and how damage and change in one place propagates elsewhere, and we haven't found all of the cascading functions yet.

Cascading functions like what? Did we ever trigger one? Would it destroy our agriculture?

Cascading functions like climate change. Like ocean acidification and its effect on phytoplankton populations and therefore on fish stocks. The effect on overfishing of fish stocks removing key portions of the oceanic food web, thereby removing protein and carbohydrate transfers through the ocean food web. Like how increasing temperatures defrosts permafrosts and releases frozen CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, resulting in temperature increase feedback. We’ve triggered all of these, and we’re still tracking the wakes of damage, destruction, death and denial as their effects propagate. “And would it destroy our agriculture?” Try “[url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/31/3223791/climate-change-calif... [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/10/3270481/california-drought-g... destroying[/url] [url=http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/]our[/url] [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/04/2882901/leaked-ipcc-report/]...” (and other things too).

Quote:

Honestly, it seems our history is full of lots of people being frightened about the future and then the future turns out to be better instead. Everyone should check out Hans Rosling and his Gapminder (don't worry, he's not a libertarian, he's a widely respected Swede).

And there have been [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_failure]many times[/url] [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island]where the future[/url] turns out to be worse and results in [url=http://www.english.iup.edu/lmasiell/courses%20spring%2008/499/disappeara... death and collapse[/url]. Just because we’ve continued to be clever does not mean that we will continue to be clever each time. We just need to screw up big once. Brushing the risks we run off as “nothing bad has happened yet, so nothing bad will happen!” is much like a turkey or goose being fattened up for slaughter, convinced that today will be like yesterday, which was like the day before, when, in fact, it is quite wrong.

Quote:

Even more so now that we have markets that self regulate and adapt to changes, instead of us having to rely on the sometimes strange and counterproductive ideas of the rulers.

*[url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/31/3233481/nestle-climate-denie... [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/09/3196981/chemical-spill-timel... Right, [url=http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/10/28/2847631/deregulating-wall-st... corporations[/url] will [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/10/3273201/freedom-chemical/]to... self-regulate[/url] and [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/24/3204641/petcoke-emergency-il... from poisoning people[/url], even if [url=http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/02/10/3271221/walmart-downgraded-u... hurts their bottom line[/url], and are [url=http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/14/2942781/massive-pipeline-exp... about[/url] [url=http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/31/3234131/wall-street-raises-d... [url=http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/08/word-day-desheeting-toilet... best product[/url], [url=http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/10/aluminum-warehousing-racke... about providing the best way[/url] to [url=http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/08/how-make-risk-free-fortune... all of the water from the stone.[/url] [/sarcasm]

Steel Accord wrote:

I'm of the opinion that sarcasm is one of the most hurtful forms of communication.

Really?

Steel Accord wrote:

I'm of the opinion that sarcasm is one of the most hurtful forms of communication.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that bullets are the most hurtful form of communication. Also being set on fire, impaled, lynched or otherwise being murdered as a means to send a message. I consider hate speech to be a close runner up to those forms of communication, as one often follows the other. So, when someone communicates their disgust at "the Jew", the "liberal", the "atheist", the "heretic" or any of the other loathed categories that I fit into, I feel pain (and fear). And, being Caucasian in appearance and cisgendered, I can only imagine how it is like for people of color and the LGBT community, who find themselves as second or third class citizens (if they're even citizens at all in their present locality), but it must be much worse than what I personally experience. In the face of that, sarcasm doesn't even climb onto the Hurtful Communication leaderboard. Now, that being said, sarcasm is a communication tool and can be used for hate speech. But it can also be used to inform, to entertain, to enlighten and to explain. It is a linguistic tool, and, like all tools, is fundamentally neutral, and is defined by the application to which it is put. In this context, I tried to use it to inform and enlighten. And I apparently failed utterly, which saddens me.

Kremlin K.O.A. wrote:

Said it better than I could... Although I would disagree about bullets... They kill pretty quick.

Depends on where you hit. CNS hits above the 5th vertebrae is insta kill. Heart and lungs, 10-12 seconds. Liver, about 1 minute. Anywhere else, unless you hit a major artery, you could live for hours or days.