Goddamit.

I am deeply annoyed - no, morally offended that Tired - Transhumanism, Wired - Clowns! is no longer online.

Dear Transhumanists and Scientific Materialists,

If you are reading this please tell everyone you know that we are no longer aligning ourselves with the transhumanist movement. We are looking to create something better. The reason is that transhumanism in its current form has become almost entirely coopted by an exclusive form of scientific materialism and reductionism. Although there are exceptions, and I counted myself among them, the overwhelming thrust is against all things not totally rooted in hard science (i.e discussions of soul, spirituality and mysticism will get you flamed beyond belief). Therefore, the label and movement called 'transhumanism' has become so dominated by those voices, that to further align with that philosophy as I've tried to do with this site, has done nothing but harm to the deeper message here. The overriding drumbeat of Transhumanism has becoming nothing more than tiresome and arrogant attempts to convert everything to materialist descriptions and computational metaphors.

So if you are one of them, please walk away, dismiss us as you would some rambling psychic reading tarot cards. If you are staying because you think you might convince one of us misguided hippies to your way of thinking, we've already walked your path. We've moved on. We're post-transhumanists now.


I had a thoroughly satisfying argument with a couple of psychedelic-futurist New Agers, including Paul Hughes himself (I was of course the Eveee-il Hardcore Scientific Materialist). Why they took it down or, alternatively, why it, of all pages, was the one to fall off the internet, we may never know.

Shoulda saved it to my hard drive when I had the chance.

yes, first thing i did was seek it out on the Wayback Machine. The link is there, but the full permalink isn't; that includes the comments. Dammit all to hell.

All-Female Peacekeeping Corp Sent to Liberia from India

The group of more than 100 police women from India will stay in Liberia for six months, helping to train the local police force.

They will also carry out security duties in forthcoming local elections.

The UN currently has 15,000 peacekeepers deployed in Liberia, which is struggling to recover after a 14-year civil war.

The unit is made up volunteers drawn from across India and are experienced in battling insurgencies in Kashmir and the north-east.

You know what we've got here right? Real live Fish-Speakers. No surprise India sent them; name another country containing a religion whose goddesses are as badass, hmm? Can't, can you.

(via Hannibal Tabu)

---------------------------------------

Peer Pressure - an article by John Scalzi about the foremost anti-pirate mercenary squad on the High Seas of teh Intarweb

It doesn't have to be music, actually. You could be trying to pocket Brokeback Mountain for your collection, or just a copy of Microsoft Office for your PC. MediaDefender will declare digital war on you if you are downloading a file that contains intellectual property the company has been paid by a media conglomerate to protect.

Of course, you can try. But while you're trying, those 2,000 computers will be doing their best to jam your efforts with a host of digital head fakes. They'll serve you bogus files with the same name as the song. They'll insert bad code into the file so that when you play it, you'll hear hissing and popping. They'll cause your download client to hang there, trying to access a file that doesn't exist. They'll gang up on you in the file-sharing queue so you're the 2,001st person in line to get the song.

If MD's 2,000 computers are doing their job, your response will be, 'Oh, screw this. I'll just buy it off iTunes.' And you'll pay your 99 cents. MediaDefender, 1; you, zip. MD is the entertainment industry's special forces in the war against file sharing - and here is the creed by which they live.


MediaDefender, huh? I will remember that name. For they are the Enemy.

The Sagan Diary - Fiction in the Sonic State!

As a promotional thing, John Scalzi's prequel to The Last Colony (and thus, by some strange coincidence, the sequel to The Ghost Brigades) has been put up for download on his site. The kicker is it's all in audio form, in approximately 10-14MB chunks and read by a Who's Who of scifi-writing ladies.



Enjoy.