For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.
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The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. Corporations | The Big Picture - 0 views
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The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and authority over the individual. These two “interest groups” – I can barely suppress snorting derisively over that phrase – have been on a headlong collision course for decades, which came to a head with the financial collapse and bailouts. Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power. The Individual has been supplanted in the political process nearly entirely by corporate money, legislative influence, campaign contributions, even free speech rights.
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It is now an Individual vs. Corporate debate – and the Humans are losing. Consider: • Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations; • The biggest influence on legislative votes is often Corporate Lobbying; • Corporate ability to extend copyright far beyond what original protections amounts to a taking of public works for private corporate usage; • PAC and campaign finance by Corporations has supplanted individual donations to elections; • The individuals’ right to seek redress in court has been under attack for decades, limiting their options. • DRM and content protection undercuts the individual’s ability to use purchased content as they see fit; • Patent protections are continually weakened. Deep pocketed corporations can usurp inventions almost at will; • The Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations have Free Speech rights equivalent to people; (So much for original intent!) None of these are Democrat/Republican conflicts, but rather, are corporate vs. individual issues.
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What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms? In many ways, American society is increasingly less married to this dynamic: Party Affiliation continues to fall, approval of Congress is at record lows, and voter participation hovers at very low rates.
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There is some pushback already taking place against the concentration of corporate power: Mainstream corporate media has been increasingly replaced with user created content – YouTube and Blogs are increasingly important to news consumers (especially younger users). Independent voters are an increasingly larger share of the US electorate. And I suspect that much of the pushback against the Elizabeth Warren’s concept of a Financial Consumer Protection Agency plays directly into this Corporate vs. Individual fight. But the battle lines between the two groups have barely been drawn. I expect this fight will define American politics over the next decade.
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Paul Crowley's Blog - A survey of anti-cryonics writing - 0 views
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cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic’s Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by “Invisible Flan”.
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And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best’s Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It’s almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot. Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. T
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Nano Nonsense and Cryonics goes for the nitty-gritty right away in the opening paragraph:To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.This sounds convincing, but doesn’t address what cryonicists actually claim. Ben Best, President and CEO of the Cryonics Institute, replies in the comments:Strawberries (and mammalian tissues) are not turned to mush by freezing because water expands and crystallizes inside the cells. Water crystallizes in the extracellular space because more nucleators are found extracellularly. As water crystallizes in the extracellular space, the extracellular salt concentration increases causing cells to lose water osmotically and shrink. Ultimately the cell membranes are broken by crushing from extracellular ice and/or high extracellular salt concentration. […] Cryonics organizations use vitrification perfusion before cooling to cryogenic temperatures. With good brain perfusion, vitrification can reduce ice formation to negligible amounts.
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The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry is no advance. Again, it refers erroneously to a “mushy brain”. It points out that the technology to reanimate those in storage does not already exist, but provides no help for us non-experts in assessing whether it is a plausible future technology, like super-fast computers or fusion power, or whether it is as crazy as the sand-powered tank; it simply asserts baldly and to me counterintuitively that it is the latter. Again, perhaps cryonic reanimation is a sand-powered tank, but I can explain to you why a sand-powered tank is implausible if you don’t already know, and if cryonics is in the same league I’d appreciate hearing the explanation.
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Another part of the article points out the well-known difficulties with whole-body freezing — because the focus is on achieving the best possible preservation of the brain, other parts suffer more. But the reason why the brain is the focus is that you can afford to be a lot bolder in repairing other parts of the body — unlike the brain, if my liver doesn’t survive the freezing, it can be replaced altogether.
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Further, the article ignores one of the most promising possibilities for reanimation, that of scanning and whole-brain emulation, a route that requires some big advances in computer and scanning technology as well as our understanding of the lowest levels of the brain’s function, but which completely sidesteps any problems with repairing either damage from the freezing process or whatever it was that led to legal death.
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Sixteen years later, it seems that hasn’t changed; in fact, as far as the issue of technical feasability goes it is starting to look as if on all the Earth, or at least all the Internet, there is not one person who has ever taken the time to read and understand cryonics claims in any detail, still considers it pseudoscience, and has written a paper, article or even a blog post to rebut anything that cryonics advocates actually say. In fact, the best of the comments on my first blog post on the subject are already a higher standard than anything my searches have turned up.
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I don’t have anything useful to add, I just wanted to say that I feel exactly as you do about cryonics and living forever. And I thought that this statement: I know that I don’t know enough to judge. shows extreme wisdom. If only people wishing to comment on global warming would apply the same test.
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WRT global warming, the mistake people make is trying to go direct to the first-order evidence, which is much too complicated and too easy to misrepresent to hope to directly interpret unless you make it your life’s work, and even then only in a particular area. The correct thing to do is to collect second-order evidence, such as that every major scientific academy has backed the IPCC.
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Geeks at the Beach: 10 Summer Reads About Technology and Your Life - Technology - The C... - 0 views
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we're so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we're neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it's not too late to make some "corrections" to our high-tech habits. It's time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.
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examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that "the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways."
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the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television.
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Mr. Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and frequent contributor to The Chronicle Review, reminds readers that they aren't consumers of Google's offerings. Rather, their use of Google's services is the product it sells to advertisers. Both books look at the continuing evolution of the Google Books settlement as a key test of how far the company's reach could extend and a sign of how the perception of Google has changed from that of scrappy upstart with a clever motto, "Don't be evil," to global behemoth accused by some of being just that.
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Is the Internet on its way to getting monopolized? That question underlies Tim Wu's The Master Switch. The eccentric Columbia Law School professor—he's known to dress up as a blue bear at the annual Burning Man festival—recounts how ruthless companies consolidated their power over earlier information industries like the telephone, radio, and film. So which tech giant seems likely to grab control of the net?
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it feels like we're perpetually on the verge of a tipping point, when e-books will overtake print books as a source of revenue for publishers. John B. Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, analyzes the inner workings of the contemporary trade-publishing industry. (He did the same for scholarly publishing in an earlier work, Books in the Digital Age.) Mr. Thompson examines the roles played by agents, editors, and authors as well as differences among small, medium, and large publishing operations, and he probes under the surface of the great digital shift. We're too hung up on the form of the book, he argues: "A revolution has taken place in publishing, but it is a revolution in the process rather than a revolution in the product."
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technology is actually doing far more to bolster authoritarian regimes than to overturn them, writes Evgeny Morozov in this sharp reality check on the media-fueled notion that information is making everybody free. Mr. Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, points out that the Iranian government posted "most wanted" pictures of protesters on the Web, leading to several arrests. The Muslim Brotherhood blogs actively in Egypt. And China pays people to make pro-authority statements on the Internet, paying a few cents for each endorsement. The Twitter revolution, in this book, is "overblown and completely unsubstantiated rhetoric."
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Internet is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think. And that has big consequences for teaching, he told The Chronicle last year: "The assumption that the more media, the more messaging, the more social networking you can bring in will lead to better educational outcomes is not only dubious but in many cases is probably just wrong."
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Designer babies - 2 views
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This website includes a video of an interview with a practical ethicist and Professor from Oxford University. I think his pro-designer babies view is relevant to what we discussed in class today. I feel strongly about giving the best possible things to my future child. As according to Professor Savulescu, if "Using IVF would give children the greatest choices and opportunities in life," would it be ethical to proceed with such technologies.. No?