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random-thought-depository · 4 years ago

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The infamously corny Star Trek TOS episode The Omega Glory was on TV last night and I watched it. My ideas for how I’d rewrite it to make it less silly:

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The Yang ancestral culture wasn’t literally the USA, it was just a society that looked kind-of sort-of like the USA in the same way some pre-Columbian American and ancient Indian societies may have looked kind-of sort-of like ancient Athens. That by itself would make the episode much less stupid, and you could keep most of the same basic ideas.

Since we’re not bound to absurd levels of parallelism anymore, I’d personally be inclined to make the Kohms light-skinned blue-eyed blond(e)s and make the Yangs darker-skinned with darker hair and eyes, and imply that the Kohm ancestral society was fascist instead of communist. Maybe sprinkle some symbols distantly reminiscent of Nazi iconography around the Kohm village. It’s not like there was any meaningful connection between the Kohms and communism anyway, and I feel this resonates better with a lot of the ideas the episode was going for. Admittedly, this is probably influenced by my own biases.

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Basically swap the roles of Cloud Williams and his mostly silent female companion who doesn’t really do much.

Why? Let’s think about how Yang society might work for a moment. I’m going to say they’re horse-riding big game hunters, like the nineteenth century Great Plains native American cultures on Earth, because 1) that fits with the idea that they’ve been driven into marginal lands and had to become nomads, 2) if you want nomads capable of assembling armies of thousands of people it’s either that or Eurasian-style herders, 3) it fits with the “they’ve become like native Americans” idea. They’re very slow-aging, theoretically capable of living over a thousand years ... but if they’re like their precedent cultures on Earth they probably live fairly rough and dangerous lives and I think would probably tend to live only a few decades or centuries before dying in a hunting accident or battle or something like that. But... going by Earth precedent, it would probably be mostly the men who do the most high-risk activities of hunting and war, which might result in very gender-asymmetrical life expectancy patterns, where men tend to only live a few decades or centuries while women stay relatively safe and have a decent chance of living to be thousand year old ancients. This would be compounded by 1) a lower death rate would mean a lower birth rate for replacement rate reproduction, 2) they’re almost immune to infectious diseases, which would make childbirth in primitive conditions much safer, so that would greatly reduce the probable primary cause of death for women in such a society (childbirth complications). So I think it’s pretty plausible that they’d have a more-or-less matriarchal society where women have a lot of power because they live a lot longer and hence have a lot more time to accumulate experience and become repositories of culture (important for a low-tech nomadic society that will have a mostly oral culture!).

So, I’d gender-swap Cloud Williams; my version of her would a matriarch with a leadership position in her tribe because she’s one of its oldest able-bodied members, she’s got a thousand years of experience and she’s had time to memorize a lot of the oral histories of her tribe and become basically a living library. Why would such a person be anywhere near a battlefield? Well, “the oral histories of her tribe” would include a lot of war stories, with detailed and often basically accurate descriptions of tactics and strategy because that’s how knowledge of how to win wars against Kohms and rival Yang tribes is transmitted in her society. She’s a living tactical manual, so of course she leads her tribe’s warriors in battle.

She could have a companion who’s a big guy who doesn’t talk much and does the brute strength side of what in the episode is Cloud Williams’s role (fighting Kirk in the cell, ripping out the bars). Maybe he’s her grandson, and was captured with her because one of his roles in the tribe is to be her bodyguard in battle.

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Related to what I just said, have a bit where Captain Tracey says that he expected the primitive and superstitious Yangs to be overawed by phasers, but instead it was almost like they have a recent cultural memory of war with modern weapons and war against technologically superior opponents and they quickly started using effective counter tactics. Given the explanation in the episode for the long lifespans of people on Omega IV (very strong selection pressure for disease resistance), none of the Yangs would actually remember the ancient high-tech Yang civilization and original war against the Kohms, but the generational transmission chains from a lot of presently living Yang matriarchs to that time might be relatively short. For a lot of the presently living Yang matriarchs shooting down Kohm helicopters with surface-to-air missiles and ambushing Kohm armored columns in mountain passes might be something like “my grandma’s time.”

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The reason the “Eee Plab Neesta” sounds like gibberish is that Cloud Williams is reciting it in its archaic original language, which the living Yang language has evolved into mutual incomprehensibility with. The Yangs might have one lovingly preserved paper copy of their equivalent of the Declaration of Independence, but their culture is mostly oral, and they mostly preserve the “holy words” in the heads of the matriarchs, who memorize it and transmit it from mother to daughter exactly (“by heart”), being careful to get every syllable right so it does not become distorted. The oldest matriarchs can still speak the ancient language, but for most of the Yangs, especially the relatively short-lived men, it’s like me listening to somebody recite Beowulf in its original language.

This is more-or-less my headcanon for what’s going in the actual episode too: the “Eee Plab Neesta” is just the text in its original now archaic form of the Yang language, which the universal translator can’t translate because it doesn’t have a big enough sample to work on. I’d make that much more explicit though.

The way I’d handle the scene is to have Cloud Williams start to recite the Eee Plan Neesta, and then have Kirk ask her what it means and suggest that she try to translate it into the everyday language of the Yangs so all her people could hear it with understanding, and of course it wouldn’t be the actual Declaration of Independence but something different but with a similar spirit, something like this:

“We the people of these five colonies of the nation across the sea and seven nations of the original inhabitants of this land, establish a Union, which we found in and organize according to the following principles: that all people are equally precious, that laws exist by the consent of the people and to serve the people, that leaders serve the people and hold their offices by the consent of the people...”

Then have Kirk give his speech about how these words are meant for everyone and not just for chiefs and should be something shared among all the people and lived by and not something gatekept behind archaic language most people can’t understand. Have him reference the USA founding documents by saying that his world has something very similar and he knows from the history of his own world how world-changing these ideas can be and how precious they are.

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Obviously you can’t do that “the Yangs try to find out if Kirk recognizes the holy words, and Kirk almost recognizes them but not quite” thing with this version, so the equivalent I propose is:

Kirk recognizes the original functions of Yang “holy relics,” i.e. relics from the ancient Yang civilization: one is part of a machine that once carried people through the air (it’s a snapped-off piece of a helicopter blade), one was a device for seeing far away things as if they’re near (it’s a broken pair of binoculars), one was a machine which people could use to talk to people who were beyond the horizon (it’s a broken-down cell phone), etc.. OK, the last thing is anachronistic for TOS, but if I were writing this as a fanfic it’s what I’d do.

Cloud Williams starts to recite a long epic poem the Yangs have that tells their entire history, to see if Kirk will recognize it. Of course Kirk doesn’t, but while the Yangs don’t have history books they do use visual textile art as an aid to memory and they’ve set up a big story cloth that depicts the narrative in the room and Kirk goes over to it and starts pointing to pictures on it and correctly interpreting them:

“Here, the Yangs were oppressed by kings. The Yangs rebelled and overthrew their kings and made a new nation that had no kings. After this the Yangs became very rich and very powerful, they built great cities. The lords of the Kohms were threatened by this and they used terrible weapons on the Yangs and invaded the Yang land with great armies. Here’s a Yang city being destroyed in an instant by a Kohm weapon. The Kohm lords were so threatened that they tried to destroy the Yangs’ whole way of life. The Yangs retreated to the bad lands and kept fighting. Here are Kohm flying machines attacking a Yang village, and a Yang warrior hiding behind a rock destroying one of those flying machines with a lance of fire. The Kohm lords couldn’t overcome the Yangs until they brought the Death Thirst to the Yang lands in a box and let it out. But that weapon had a life of its own, and turned against the Kohms, and almost destroyed them too. Only a few Yangs survived in the bad lands, and the Kohms claimed the good Yang lands and settled them. But the Yangs survived, they learned the bow and the lance, and eventually their numbers started to increase. The survivors lived longer than people had before; you interpreted this as a gift for the Yangs and curse on the Kohms by the Great Spirit, so that both might live to see you retake what was once yours. And little by little, you did retake what was once yours...”

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One way to suggest the Enterprise crew making a positive difference on Omega IV at the end of the episode: have Kirk convince the Yangs to spare the Kohm civilians in that village.

The victorious Yangs are all set to give the last Kohms the Numbers 31 treatment, which is what they usually do when they overrun a Kohm community. Of course, Kirk is horrified by this, and he manages to use arguments involving the Yang “holy words” to convince the Yangs to be merciful instead. “Your own holy words say that every person is equally precious! Every person! That includes the Kohms too! If you really mean it, it includes the Kohms too! They’re no threat to you anymore! Did you fight for so long just for a chance to do to them what they tried to do to you? If so, how are you any better than them? Your own holy words claim to be for all people! Your own holy words say that all people are more alike than they are different, and all people are capable of appreciating the gift of freedom! If that’s true, then your holy words are for the Kohms too! That’s why the Kohm lords were so threatened by you, because they were afraid of what would happen if the Kohm people heard those powerful, good words! Tell the Kohms about your holy words!”

So Cloud Williams agrees to make a merciful and peaceful settlement with the “last of the Kohm places,” let it integrate peacefully into Yang society with no further bloodshed and no abuse inflicted or spoils taken. And then Kirk says “If you mean your words of freedom, your work didn’t end today, it’s just starting. Build good seaworthy boats that can cross the ocean, and send people to the Kohms across the sea, so they can hear your words of freedom too! The words of your ancestors are for them too! You’d never be able to conquer them, but they can hear your words!”

#Star Trek #fanfic ideas #cw: Nazis #kinda #cw: genocide #I read/watch something

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resourcesofcolor · 5 years ago

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INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE & MODERN SCIENCE WORKING IN HARMONY IS THE CRUCIAL NEXT-STAGE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM & FUTURE OF SCIENCE

Histories of ingenuity in Asia, Africa and pre-colonial Americas is a part of modern science, and modern science should not be conflated exclusively with Western science.

From How Indigenous Knowledge Advances Modern Medicine & Technology:

“Indigenous perspectives are holistic and founded upon interconnectedness, reciprocity and the utmost respect for nature. Both Western and Indigenous science approaches and perspectives have their strengths and can greatly complement one another.”

Both traditional and modern science combined is what is necessary to make real scientific progress. Science should not only be the objective pursuit of knowledge: science must be internationalist, culturally inclusive, feminist, and seriously focus on research benefiting nature and humanity. Science needs to adopt a community-based worldview only, free of patents, price gauging and corporatism.

From Non-Western Sciences, Past and Present:

Modern-day Western science has much to offer in benefiting human life, but what it often fundamentally lacks (particularly in corporate-ruled scientific industries) is the ability to balance pragmatism with empathy and selflessness; human life is crucial, but so is nature, and the precious animals which sustain nature. We all protect each other, which protects the earth. Materialism is immaterial. Non-essential.

We are critical of scientism, not science. Science can be used to cure, save, and improve lives. Scientism, or materialism, is steeped in bias, and the myth of absolute truth.

“There is no such thing as absolute truth and absolute falsehood. The scientific mind should never recognise the perfect truth or the perfect falsehood of any supposed theory or observation. It should carefully weigh the chances of truth and error and grade each in its proper position along the line joining absolute truth and absolute error.” ― Henry Augustus Rowland, American physicist

Western Science uses the myth of absolute truth to assert that their system of knowledge is benignly superior to Non-Western science.

From Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science With Western Science:

“Westerners freely acknowledge the existence of Indigenous art, music, literature and drama, and of political and economic systems in Indigenous cultures, but many fail to apprehend and appreciate the concept of Indigenous Science. Thus, when Western Science is taught without acknowledging Indigenous Science, this can be construed as assimilative science education.”

Assimilation to the Western perception of science and education has context historically rooted in violence and cultural genocide.

From the same source, an example of the advancements of Indigenous Sciences, preceding Western/European Science:

[...] “For hundreds and thousands of years, Indigenous mothers the world over, where willow trees grow, gave their children willow bark tea when they had fevers. We now know that willow bark is a mild analgesic that contains acetylsalicylic acid, the same ingredient in aspirin. However, encyclopedias and science textbooks credit Charles Gerhardt of Germany with the “discovery” of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) in 1853. As Roberta Barba et al., (1992) ask, who really discovered aspirin?”

There are many examples of traditional medicine/indigenous science and modern science coexisting exceptionally: the traditional decoction of Delal a kar from the “mother of medicine” tree in Micronesia which currently helps treat diabetes and obesity. The nomadic cattle-herding Toubou people of Chad, their intimate knowledge of their environment aiding climate change scientists. Non-white Asians and Africans had invented agriculture before Greek and Roman times: agriculture was theorized to be invented 12,000 years ago in Asia, 7,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of what is now Iraq and taking hold in Egypt a few thousand years later. Common agricultural crops used globally today, such as rice, pearl millet and yams, have genetic and evolutionary origins in Africa, evolving through ancient African agriculture.

“Western” science and concepts often derives from Non-Western sources, to begin with. The Greeks and Romans heavily adopted cultures from Egypt, Muslim and Arab nations, India, and Asia overall. But cultural adoption is also not one-sided: Greek philosophers shared their works with Muslim philosophers, and indeed books on Greek philosophy was rigorously translated into Syrian.

From Ancient Greece, The Middle East, And An Ancient Cultural Internet:

“If you walk through the entrance hall of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, you come to a large display case devoted to the ancient world. Here, alongside each other, lie an Iraqi ceramic model of a river boat from around 2900 BC; a model of a covered wagon from Syria from about 2300 BC, collected by Lawrence of Arabia; Cretan jars wreathed with sinuous, octopus designs from about a millennium later; and a sixth-century BC Attic vase from Sicily, decorated with an image of a chariot. The display is designed to illustrate ancient trade routes; but what if it told a deeper story, too?”

“As Tim Whitmarsh, professor of ancient literature at the University of Oxford says: 'What if what we think of as the classical world has been falsely invented as European, for reasons serving the cause of 19th-century imperialism? Should the Greek and Roman worlds, albeit in different ways, be seen rather as part of the Iraqi-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian complex? If so, what would that mean for ideas about European identity today?'”

Diversifying modern science is the future.

To quote Irrfan Khan in Pika: Western culture is not the benchmark of progress. The development of the modern world was an international group effort.

#africa.#history.#health.#indigenous.#native american #asian pacific islanders #science #oceania.

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soler97 · 4 years ago

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The Age of Unreason

Men want certainty, not truth.

- possibly from Bertrand Russell

A thoughtful friend asked me what 2020 will be remembered for, apart from the obvious, ie Covid and Trump losing. I could not think of anything.

My friend suggested it is the realisation that in the 21st century millions of people are turning away from science and reality towards a variety of beliefs that border on the crazy. Examples are QAnon, flat earthers (yes, they are serious), deniers of Covid, about 40% of Americans believe the Rapture is coming, biblical fundamentalism, climate change denial, neo-Nazis, Holocaust denial, belief in Trump as a saviour, doomsday predictions, sundry cults, alien abductions, New Age beliefs, and a multitude of conspiracy theories, such as that the moon landings were a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job.

Some of these beliefs appear harmless, but occasionally, they inspire horrific violence, such as the killing of 920 people by the Jim Jones cult, the sarin attack in Japan, the Breivik massacre, the Oklahoma bombing, the Waco siege, the Christchurch massacre, and the Heaven's Gate suicides.

It is difficult to generalise about the various strange beliefs that people hold, as these include conspiracy theories, varieties of denial, religious fantasies, extremist political or racist views, and beliefs like the flat earth, that elude classification. There is no common thread underlying this spectrum of beliefs. Rather, they can be characterised by what they reject, which in a nutshell, is rationality.

Rationality can be defined as the desire to be guided by reason, which we apply to the available evidence. The third ingredient is the willingness to admit we are wrong. So turning away from rationality means letting emotion or emotionally-based belief take precedence over reason, an unwillingness to look at factual evidence, plus a dogmatic belief that one is in possession of the ultimate truth. Many irrational beliefs run counter to Occam's Razor, which tells us to prefer the simplest explanation that covers the known facts. Complex processes may require elaborate or involved explanations, but the point is not to introduce unnecessary factors, especially ones of a fanciful nature.

Clearly, there are too many irrational beliefs to do them justice, so let us look at flat earthers, Heaven's Gate and QAnon to see whether there is a pattern.

A Flat Earth

Flat earth map with the Antarctic ice wall at the perimeter

A bizarre example is the contemporary belief that the earth is flat. Is such a belief even possible in the 21st century? It may be feasible to construct a world view that makes a flat earth plausible. However, it requires factors such as a massive world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth, the abandoning of all of modern cosmology and much of physics, as well as weird ad-hoc explanations for why planes fly in circles around a flat disc, rather than around a spherical globe. Also, that ships at sea disappear below the horizon requires adjustment to the laws of optics. If that still does not cover all the facts countering a flat view, then one could invoke mind control by Martians, or something of the sort. The point is that if one wants to conjure up fantastical reasons to invalidate what we know of reality then it is always possible to do so.

It seems to me that the flat earth people are not interested in gaining knowledge about the world. They are uninterested in discovering what lies beyond the putative ice wall in Antarctica that holds back the oceans or why NASA might be guarding it. They just believe in the flat earth and that is that. Their only concern is to bolster the theory, which I think they hold on emotional grounds. They are willing to perform elaborate mental contortions to support their belief, and it is interesting to observe how much of modern science they are willing to jettison in order to keep their belief afloat, eg gravity.

Whereas the explanations given for the earth being flat are interesting, to me it is more interesting to enquire what causes people to seek these explanations in the first place. What causes people to believe the earth is flat?

Four factors come to mind. One is a desire to be rid of experts and eggheads, who insist on telling ordinary people what to think. In the case of the earth's apparent flatness, the boffins are telling us to deny the evidence of our senses by invoking the large-scale curvature of the earth, something that is far from apparent in ordinary life. Flat earth is like the last stand of common sense in the face of the inexorable advance of science, which keeps telling us the world is far stranger than we thought. It is also a form of contrariness and rebellion against authority. The second is the ego-gratification of knowing a secret that is hidden from nearly everyone else. The third factor is on religious grounds. The fourth is a desire to return to a comforting and anthropocentric model of the universe, rejecting the notion that our planet is an insignificant speck in the incomprehensible vastness of the universe.

Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (323 BC). However, early Christian writers tended to believe the earth is spherical, though with some notable exceptions. Curiously, it wasn't until 1849 that the flat earth belief was resurrected by Rowbotham and later others. He argued that the "Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture".

In the internet era, the proliferation of communications technology and social media have given individuals a platform to spread pseudo-scientific ideas and build stronger followings. The flat earth conjecture has flourished in this environment. Social media and the internet have made it easier for like-minded thinkers to connect and mutually reinforce their beliefs. They have also had a levelling effect, in that experts have less sway in the public mind than they used to.

The belief that the earth is flat could be seen as the ultimate conspiracy theory, given how many people are needed for a cover-up on such a scale. According to the Flat Earth Society's leadership, its ranks have grown by 200 people per year since 2009. Judging by the exhaustive effort flat earthers have invested in fleshing out the theory on their website, as well as the staunch defenses of their views they offer in media interviews and on Twitter, it would seem that these people genuinely believe the earth is flat. They tend to distrust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust or disagree with each other. I imagine they are maverick individuals who enjoy challenging the status quo.

Paul Sutter, "The question isn't 'why do people believe in a flat Earth?' but rather 'why do people believe in a conspiracy?' And the answer is the same reason it always is: a lack of trust. Many people don't trust the society around them, most notably the representatives of that society. By claiming that the Earth is flat, people are really expressing a deep distrust of scientists and science itself."

Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate Logo

Far more bizarre than the flat earth belief are the doctrines of Heaven's Gate, which melded the Bible with belief in UFOs into a religious cult. It was founded in California in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. These two pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read works by Helena Blavatsky, RD Laing, and Richard Bach. They studied several passages from the New Testament, focusing on teachings about Christology, asceticism, and eschatology ("the end times"). Applewhite also read science fiction, including Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies, and that they had been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet that described Jesus' reincarnation as a Texan, a thinly veiled reference to Applewhite.

Eventually, Applewhite and Nettles resolved to contact extraterrestrials, and they sought like-minded followers. They published advertisements for meetings, where they recruited disciples, whom they called "the crew". At the events, they purported to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, which sought participants for an experiment that would bring people to a higher evolutionary level.

In September 1975, the group visited the small town of Waldport, Oregon, to give a lecture about how UFOs were soon going to make contact with the human race. Roughly 150 people packed into a motel hall to hear Applewhite. At first the town thought it was a joke. However, soon after, in a testament to Applewhite's charisma and powers of persuasion, 20 people - or about one in 30 residents of the town - drove off to a meeting of about 400 people in Grand Junction, Colorado, in the hope of meeting aliens.

Later, the crew sold all their worldly possessions and said farewell to loved ones; the group vanished from the public eye. From that point, "Do and Ti", as the two now called themselves, led the nearly one-hundred-member crew across the country, sleeping in tents and begging in the streets. Evading detection by the authorities and media enabled the group to focus on Do and Ti's doctrine of helping members of the crew achieve a "higher evolutionary level" above human, which they claimed to have already reached.

Most of their followers are described by researchers as having been longtime truth-seekers, or spiritual hippies who had long attempted to find themselves through spiritual means. The clan of UFO followers all seemed to have in common a need for communal belonging in an alternative path to higher existence without the constraints of institutionalised faith. The group purchased alien abduction insurance that would pay out $1 million per person, covering abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens.

Applewhite began to emphasize a strict hierarchy, teaching that his students needed his guidance, just as he needed the guidance of the Next Level. A relationship with Applewhite was said to be the only way to salvation and he encouraged his followers to see him as Christ. In the 1980s, the group became more like a religion in its focus on faith and submission to authority. Students who were not committed to this lifestyle were encouraged to leave; departing members were given financial assistance. He specifically cited sexual urges as the work of Lucifer. Applewhite, "We do in all honesty hate this world".

In March 1997, Marshall Applewhite videoed himself in Do's Final Exit, speaking of mass suicide as "the only way to evacuate this Earth". After asserting that a spacecraft was trailing Comet Hale-Bopp and that this event would represent the closure to Heaven's Gate, Applewhite persuaded 38 followers to prepare for ritual suicide so their souls could board the supposed craft. Applewhite believed that after their deaths a UFO would take their souls to another level of existence above human, which he described as being both physical and spiritual.

News of the 39 deaths in Rancho Santa Fe motivated the copycat suicide of a 58-year-old man living near Marysville, California. The man left a note, "I'm going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp to be with those who have gone before me," and imitated some of the details of the Heaven's Gate suicides as they had been reported in the media. At least three former members of Heaven's Gate committed suicide in the months after the mass suicide.

Heaven's Gate members believed the earth would be wiped clean and refurbished before 2027, and that the only chance for their consciousness to survive was to leave their human bodies at an appointed time. Initially, the group had been told that they would be transported with their bodies aboard a spacecraft that would come to earth and take the crew to heaven, the Next Level. When Nettles (Ti) died of cancer in 1985, it confounded Applewhite's doctrine because Nettles was allegedly chosen by the Next Level to be a messenger on earth, yet her body died instead of leaving physically to outer space. The belief system was then revised to include the leaving of consciousness from the body as equivalent to leaving the earth in a spacecraft.

While the group was against suicide, they defined "suicide" to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered" and believed their bodies were only vehicles meant to help them on their journey. Suicide, therefore, would be not allowing their consciousness to leave their human bodies to join the Next Level. They believed that, "to be eligible for membership in the Next Level, humans would have to shed every attachment to the planet". This meant members had to give up all human characteristics, such as their family, friends, sexuality, individuality, jobs, money, and possessions.

The Evolutionary Level Above Human was seen as a physical, corporeal place, another planet, where residents live in pure bliss and nourish themselves by absorbing pure sunlight. They do not engage in sexual intercourse, eating or dying. Heaven's Gate believed that what the Bible calls God is actually a highly developed Extraterrestrial. Evil space aliens - called Luciferians - falsely represented themselves to Earthlings as God and conspired to keep humans from developing. Technically advanced humanoids, these aliens have spacecraft, space-time travel, telepathy, and increased longevity. They use holograms to fake miracles. Heaven's Gate believed that all existing religions on earth had been corrupted by these malevolent aliens.

Applewhite taught that "aliens planted the seeds of current humanity millions of years ago, and have come to reap the harvest of their work in the form of spiritually evolved individuals who will join the ranks of flying saucer crews. Only a select few members of humanity will be chosen to advance to this transhuman state. The rest will be left to wallow in the spiritually poisoned atmosphere of a corrupt world". Only the individuals who chose to join Heaven's Gate, followed its belief system, and made the sacrifices required by membership would be allowed to escape the prophesied disaster.

In a group open only to adults over the age of 18, members gave up their possessions and lived a highly ascetic life. The group was strictly regimented, tightly knit and everything was communally shared. Eight of the male members, including Applewhite (who was gay), voluntarily underwent castration as an extreme means of maintaining the ascetic lifestyle. "They couldn't stop smiling and giggling," surviving member DiAngelo told Newsweek. "They were excited about it."

Lalich speculates that they were willing to follow Applewhite in suicide because they had become totally dependent upon him, hence were poorly suited to life in his absence. He isolated them socially and cultivated an attitude of complete religious obedience. Applewhite's students had made a long-term commitment to him. Most of the dead had been members for about 20 years, although there were a few recent converts.

Three of the people who suicided left exit statements on their website. These extoll the joys of the Next Level while summing up people on earth as the walking dead. The texts are not the ramblings of disordered minds. The content is fantasy, but they are written in a lucid way in excellent English and give every appearance of sincerity. Unlike the Flat Earth Society, which no doubt numbers people who joined for a joke, as well as those who are not fully convinced, there is little doubt that the members of Heaven's Gate were totally committed to their beliefs. After all, they gave up their sexuality and their lives for their ideal.

QAnon

QAnon at the Capitol invasion

QAnon is a powerful but diffuse contemporary movement that sought to have Trump re-elected. It is animated by a loose collection of extreme right conspiracy theories whose central theme is that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal. QAnon claims that Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and others are planning a coup against Trump and are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring. It alleges that an elite cabal of pedophiles, comprising, among others, Hollywood A-listers, leading philanthropists, Jewish financiers and Democrat politicians, covertly rule the world. Followers of QAnon believe that there is an imminent event known as the "Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison, and the US military will brutally take over the country. The result will be salvation and utopia on earth. QAnon promises a "Great Awakening", in which the elites will be routed and the truth revealed.

However, this summary is misleading because QAnon is amorphous, multi-faceted and confusing. In addition it keeps shape-shifting.

The conspiracy theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous bulletin-board 4chan by "Q". Q claimed to be a high-level government official with Q clearance. Q predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton and a violent uprising nationwide. It is likely that Q has become a group of people acting under the same name. QAnon's adherents, while seeing Trump as a flawed Christian, also view him as a messiah sent by God. Trump himself pretends to know little about QAnon, which is a lie. Trump has amplified QAnon messaging at least 216 times by retweeting or mentioning 129 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day. Being a savvy politician, Trump is perfectly aware that many, perhaps most, of his supporters are QAnon people. He made a correct political calculation, deciding to give only scant public endorsement to QAnon. Showing full support would hurt his standing with moderate Republicans, whereas he does not need to do anything to retain the devotion of QAnon. They are happy with the crumbs he throws their way, being accustomed to snatching at Q's hints.

Q's posts have become more cryptic and vague, allowing followers to map their own beliefs onto them. Part of QAnon's appeal is its game-like quality, in which followers attempt to solve riddles presented in Qdrops by connecting them to Trump speeches and tweets. Q enthralls readers with clues rather than presenting claims directly. Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon, says that it is as addictive as a video game, and offers the "player" the appealing possibility of being involved in something of world-historical importance. According to View, "You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations."

Although Q's claims are false and the prophecies routinely fail, this does little to decrease Q's influence. Believers overlook the lack of results and failed predictions because they gauge the movement's success by its popularity, its opposition from the mainstream media, and its recognition by the President himself. On multiple occasions, Q has dismissed his false claims and incorrect predictions as deliberate, claiming that "disinformation is necessary". This has led psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to emphasize the "self-sealing" quality of the conspiracy theory, so that evidence against it can become evidence of its validity in the minds of believers. "The absence of evidence is reinterpreted as evidence without batting an eyelid." Conspiracy enthusiasts believe that the burden of proof lies with their opponents, ie that QAnon's claims are valid in the absence of positive proof that there is no cabal and no trafficking of children by Democrats.

Experts judge that QAnon's appeal is comparable to that of religious cults. According to Renee DiResta, QAnon's pattern of enticement is similar to that of cults in the pre-internet era where, as the targeted person was led deeper and deeper into the group's secrets, they became increasingly isolated from friends and family outside the cult. Rachel Bernstein, an expert on cults, has said, "What a movement such as QAnon has going for it, and why it will catch on like wildfire, is that it makes people feel connected to something important that other people don't yet know about... All cults will provide this feeling of being special."

A series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the "deep state", the cabal of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump's re-election chances. QAnon is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. Some QAnoners are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy in the mainstream media, a perception fuelled in equal measure by Q and by Trump. QAnon may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also driven by religious faith. The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the QAnon movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained. As one adherent proclaimed, "It's not a theory. It's the foretelling of things to come."

Edgar Welch is a deeply religious father of two, who until December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in a small town. That morning, Welch grabbed his collection of guns and drove 580 km to a neighbourhood in Northwest Washington, DC. He held an AR-15 rifle across his chest as he walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. Welch was there because of a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, which three years later became a pillar of QAnon. It claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when some conspiracy theorists asserted that sexual abuse of children was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. After firing a rifle to break a lock, Welch realised his mistake and gave himself up to police. He was sentenced to four years in prison. The New York Times wrote in June 2020 that posts on TikTok with the #PizzaGate hashtag were viewed more than 82 million times in recent months. The abuse of children fantasy arose because someone suggested that emails written by the restaurateurs referring to 'pizza' and 'pasta' were code words for 'boys' and 'girls'.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

by Goya

Anthony Comello was charged with the March 2019 murder of Gambino crime family boss, Frank Cali. According to his defense attorney, Comello had become obsessed with QAnon theories, believing Cali was a member of a "deep state". Comello was convinced he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" so he decided to act. Confronting Cali outside his Staten Island home, Comello allegedly shot Cali ten times. A May 30, 2019, FBI Intelligence Bulletin memo from the Phoenix Field Office identified QAnon-driven extremists as a domestic terrorism threat. Although the conspiracy that QAnon imagines does not exist, there is a real danger that QAnon itself might become a conspiracy of armed vigilantes, determined to bring about the promised "Storm". The storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters, including QAnoners, is not a good sign.

Heavy on millennialism and the idea that a reckoning awaits the world, the theory has found fertile ground in the American alt-right. Some 56% of Republicans believe that QAnon is mostly or partly true. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have shown support for QAnon. A Time magazine article listed Q among the 25 most influential people on the internet in 2018. Counting more than 130,000 related discussion videos on YouTube, Time cited the wide range of the conspiracy theory and its prominent followers and news coverage.

Why did Q's cryptic post on an obscure message-board ignite a movement involving millions? Why were so many eager to embrace such a far-fetched conspiracy theory? Perhaps it was the surge in confidence of the Right in the wake of Trump's win. Whatever the reasons, the grass was dry and Q provided the spark. Not all QAnoners come from a rightwing background. For those who have had no agency to suddenly discover a path into the game is heady stuff.

QAnon is not confined to the US. It has organised protest demonstrations in 200 countries, ostensibly to "save the children". One in four Britons are said to believe in QAnon-related theories. According to The Guardian, QAnon is growing in the UK, spilling over into anti-vaccine and 5G protests, fuelled by online misinformation. At a QAnon rally, Shemirani, a nurse suspended for promoting baseless theories about Covid19, told the crowd: "Our government has declared war on the people of the UK."

"There is a high possibility that the spirited belief system which surrounds QAnon can slowly become a political movement in the UK," Liyanage said. "It will be successful because no one can fight it through reason. It's not a rational belief system but mostly a supernatural belief system."

The time for Trump to arrest the pedophiles and satanists is fast running out. It is interesting to speculate what effect his departure will have on a conspiracy theory in which he is the key figure. My guess is that the powerful energy and passion that drive QAnon will shift focus.

My own view is that QAnon is a blank slate onto which people project their darkest nightmares, as well as their hopes for a Christian utopia. Where do the ideas of satanism, eating children, sinister cabals, sexual depravity, and other crimes against children come from? The answer is simple: from the minds of those who form QAnon. QAnon is nothing but a mirror showing people their shared fantasy. People are sharing with each other their worst fears, as well as their hopes. The dark parts are projected onto the favourite targets of the alt-right, ie Hillary and other Democrats, Jews, and liberals, whereas the messianic hopes are projected onto Trump and Q. However, it is a mistake to see the QAnon conspiracy theory as the work of Q. Although Q was the initial cause, his cryptic and vague messages are merely prompts, asking people to fill in the blanks. This is what many have done and the result is a miasma of fanciful lies about corruption, sexual perversions and violence. The irony is that whereas the accusations made by QAnon are entirely baseless, QAnon might itself become a violent entity, little better than the chimera it rails against.

James Baldwin wrote, "It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." Voltaire put it more starkly, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Is Credulity Humanity's Achilles Heel?

The three belief systems discussed have almost nothing in common except the rejection of the consensus view of reality, combined with belief in a fantasised conspiracy. In each case, powerful unseen forces are seen as perverting or hiding the truth of what is really going on. All three beliefs appear absurd except to people who are believers. The puzzle is why do apparently normal people adopt such ideas?

In a study published online in March, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Science, Oliver and Wood, found that about half of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory, such as the notion that 9/11 was an inside job or the JFK conspiracy. "Many people are willing to believe many ideas that are directly in contradiction to a dominant cultural narrative," Oliver said. According to him, conspiratorial belief stems from a human tendency to perceive unseen forces at work, known as magical thinking.

In the Middle Ages the Devil was a convenient factor that could be used to explain anything weird or harmful, while the deity took responsibility for the rest. With the advance of science, both the Devil and God gradually lost their explanatory powers. God became "the God of the gaps", being only needed to explain what was missing in our understanding of the physical world. Nowadays, the term "act of God" is reserved to describe the insurance industry's view of natural disasters.

In the modern era magical thinking has undergone a new twist. God and the Devil have been replaced by conspiracies. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is "a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together". In the US 37% replied that this is "definitely or probably true". So did 45% of Italians, 56% of Spaniards and 78% of Nigerians.

2020 was the year of Covid19. The coronavirus has triggered the rise of myriad myths, waves of misinformation and virus conspiracy theories, including that it does not exist - believed by 22% in Poland, where there have been nearly 1.4 million cases. The virus has also had an incubating effect on unrelated conspiracy theories because it has thrown humankind into a state of fear and isolated people in their homes with too much time to think and surf. The extra time in the virtual space means increased exposure to the proponents of conspiracy theories, without the balancing effect of social interactions.

According to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the normal process is that as people begin to acquire knowledge of a given subject, their feelings of competence rise quickly towards a peak, before declining, as they begin to realise how much more there is to know. In the case of conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, people can arrive almost immediately at that delicious peak of confidence, without actually learning anything at all. QAnon is like a super-car that can do 0 to 100 kph in 3 seconds flat. Many are captivated by the vicarious thrill of believing they are privy to vastly important secrets about which millions of people have no idea. This is the seductive appeal of conspiracy theories.

What causes us to believe? There is an analogy between religions and conspiracy theories. Once you pay the price of entry, ie faith in a religious doctrine or conspiracy, the payoff is that much of the confusion and mystery of life is dispelled because you are in possession of the answers. Yuval Harari: "Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything. The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world's mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle - the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook - or what they try to conceal."

The spectrum of irrational beliefs shares one characteristic: they are all unfalsifiable. Their adherents never say, "If such-and-such happens I will discard this belief." This is particularly apparent in doomsday predictions. The predicted date comes and goes, but the true believers simply reset the clock to a future date. A cult called the Seekers went one better. They believed a UFO would save them from a cataclysm on December 24, 1954. Afterwards, some of the members claimed that their group's devotion had saved the rest of the world from disaster. They responded by proselytizing with renewed vigour. Cults and conspiracy theories are highly resistant to correction. Even the thoroughly discredited Pizzagate is still believed by masses of people.

The self-validating nature of the beliefs ensures that all evidence can be construed as confirmation. New findings that contradict a belief are interpreted as proof of the further workings of the conspiracy to hide the truth. Yet cults and conspiracy theories are not the only systems that guarantee their own validation. If one questions what is taught in a personal growth course one is rebuked with, "You are resisting". Pseudo-science is very difficult to debunk. Inconvenient facts, such as aliens not showing up, are explained by another tweak to the doctrine.

To be fair, the process of theory adjustment happens in science proper as well. When a theory fails experimental test it may be given an additional proviso that accounts for the discrepancy. For instance, the fact that personal experience can be handed down as a genetic legacy to future generations seems to contradict standard evolutionary theory. As it turns out, there is no contradiction. A new sub-science called epigenetics explains the mechanism of this process in terms of alterations to the DNA molecule that do not change the genetic code but which influence gene expression.

Since science is a human activity, it is subject to the foibles of our species. It too has dogmas that are difficult to overturn. Thomas Kuhn has written persuasively about paradigm shifts in science. He saw the history of science as consisting of normal and revolutionary phases, in which the community of scientists in a particular field are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases, such as the transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, involve great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. This is captured in an aphorism that is only half humorous, "The measure of the greatness of a scientist is how long they hold up advancement in their chosen field."

The history of science features dogmas that were held too long and new ideas that took an unreasonably long time to be accepted. One example is the resistance to the theory of plate tectonics, another is the opposition to a bacterial explanation for the cause of ulcers. The mainstream rejection of functional medicine and the progress it has made in curing Alzheimer's Disease is a current example.

Nevertheless, the greatest strength of science is that it is tentative: any scientific theory may be overturned and replaced by a better theory in the future. The criterion of a theory being scientific is that it makes predictions which could, in principle, be falsified by new data. Yet to a fundamentalist or a common sense sceptic, such as a flat earther, this is not a strength but a weakness. They point out that science can never prove anything, that scientific theories have been debunked plus questions science can't answer. Hence science is not to be trusted. With the authority of science diminished, the field opens for persuasive individuals with pet theories, especially about conspiracies. Why conspiracies? Because a belief that goes counter to the accepted view of reality requires a widespread suppression of the truth.

The bottom line is that many people do not perform due diligence in checking the information they encounter and its sources. Given the virulent spread of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, this is a massive under-statement. The worry is that many obtain their news from questionable sources, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Ultimately, eschewing reputable news media in favour of bulletin-boards and succumbing to their conspiracy theories has deeper causes. These are alienation and a lack of trust in society and its leaders. Why are people alienated and distrustful? Perhaps the underlying problem is not credulity but its opposite, ie a loss of belief in the system. Those who are drawn to far-right conspiracy theories have lost trust in democracy and the modern state. They think the US no longer embodies the ideals they believe in. Conservative Christians and right-wingers resent their defeat in "the culture wars", which were about abortion, separation of church and state, creationism, recreational drug use, homosexuality, and censorship. Perhaps the "Great Awakening" is their dream of a return to how things were. The fact that they grasp at ludicrous ideas indicates the depth of their disaffection.

Of course, irrational beliefs, superstitions, baseless theories and weird cults have been with us all through history, ever since the invention of writing, and probably long before. The difference now is that we supposedly live in the age of reason and science. Furthermore, knowledge is far more freely available than at any time in the past. The problem is that disinformation, extravagant falsehoods, fringe beliefs, and sensational stories are more easily disseminated than ever before, and they seem to capture peoples' attention more than sober facts. The difference between 30 years ago and now is that anyone can post anything and potentially reach millions of people. It's the old story - those who know least have the loudest voices. The paradox is that although reliable knowledge is now easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection, millions are turning their backs on both science and common sense.

My conclusion is that despite the advances of human knowledge, human nature itself has not changed. We remain a species ruled by emotion rather than logic, and hence we come to believe all kinds of nonsense.

Another conclusion comes from an insight of the brilliant intellectual, Yuval Harari. He is convinced that we human beings can only prosper and live in harmony with each other provided we believe in a shared myth. If so, then a propensity towards credulity might be built into our genome. Unfortunately, credulity is dangerous, as shown in Heaven's Gate, the Jim Jones cult and QAnon.

Tad Boniecki

January 2021

#conspiracy theory #QAnon #Trump Q

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hopefulfestivaltastemaker · 4 years ago

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August 23, 2020

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include civilization collapse and the DNC convention.

Civilizational Collapse

Samo Burja has a piece out this week on the mechanisms of civilization collapse. He focuses on institutional rot. So often, institutions--perhaps academia, government agencies, corporations, or civil society in the modern context--merely put on a show of performing their mission, while a small number are doing the work of sustaining civilization. There is a limit to the extent that this dysfunctional state of affairs can continue, beyond which a civilizational collapse (that is, a significant reduction in complexity, economic activity. and/or population) occurs. The collapse may appear sudden to people who are unaware of institutional decay, which is most people.

As an illustration, Samo points to the FOGBANK incident. The National Nuclear Security Administration needed to resume producing FOGBANK, an aerogel that is used in thermonuclear weapons, and spend a decade trying to reverse engineer a material that had been produced decades earlier. The episode is a seemingly minor one, meant to be illustrative of a general phenomenon of institutional rot, though it is far from clear that the episode is instructive as such. But I think it highlights the degree to which technological capability is not just an accumulation of knowledge in databases, but embodied in human capital, institutional practices, and infrastructure.

This phenomenon got me thinking about nuclear power, and seemingly negative learning rates for nuclear power might be a better illustration of a loss of technical ability than FOGBANK, since nuclear power is much larger and much more in the open. This is also why I have changed my mind on where the industry needs to go; I now think that doing a big nuclear push with established technology is the best way forward, to rebuilding the workforce, supply chains, institutional competence, and regulatory infrastructure; rather than pinning the industry’s hopes on yet-to-be-developed technologies like small modular reactors, Gen IV, or fusion.

It is also a major reason why I worry about population decline, a topic not addressed in Samo’s essay. We already observe several major industries, including nuclear power, struggling to sustain their capabilities due to an aging and shrinking workforce. The “developed” nations can mask this problem to some extent by offshoring labor intensive industry, but that will not be possible after a worldwide population peak. If current demographic trends hold, then losses of technical ability will probably become more common later in the 21st century.

I do have some greater optimism than Samo has about the potential to avert a collapse trend, and the main reason is the trio of institutions developed in the Enlightenment that were not operative for the Romans or late Bronze Age Near East civilization. The trio is science, capitalism, and democracy. They are important because science, capitalism, and democracy are self-corrective mechanisms in knowledge, production, and governance respectively that I believe were crucial for the rapid growth in technology and living standards observed since the Industrial Revolution. Pre-Enlightenment societies simply did not have such capabilities to self-correct. For all other institutional flaws, the Western nations today, particularly the United States, are still basically market-oriented, science-based free democracies and therefore have a great reserve of capability to adapt.

The preceding critiques notwithstanding, it is a well-written and thought-provoking essay that I recommend. I do not fully share in Samo’s pessimism, but I do think he raises some important reasons to be concerned.

Remote Conventions

The Democrats held their quadrennial convention this week, probably most notable for the distanced, online format. I personally prefer it this way. Some people complained about the “telethon” feel to it. For me, it made the event feel more personal. I don’t care much for the applause that typically punctuates speeches. Interestingly, the famously long-winded Joe Biden gave the shortest DNC acceptance speech since at least before 1984, which is as far back as C-SPAN’s data goes.

The speech itself has gotten a lot of praise, and I think it was good. Biden isn’t coming out blazing with detailed plans, even if much of much of the party base is, and that’s probably for the best.

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spookyboywhump · 5 years ago

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And for the OC questions part 2: Silas 3 and 16, Alistair 5 and 20, Wren 9 and 30, Zander 2 and 37, Cain 7 and 14. -faewhump

Thank you for these too @faewhump! Hopefully I got these right.

Silas:

3: How easy to annoy is your oc? Do they have common pet-peeves or are they stoic in response to everything? What is their reaction if the source doesn’t stop?

It’s pretty easy to annoy him, his more minor pet peeves are things like excessive whining or repetitive noises like clicking or tapping, the biggest is probably when people touch him without asking and refuse to stop, he’s been known to lash out at people over this, even if they didn’t have bad intentions.

16: If your oc could only eat one thing for the rest of their life (while miraculously not suffering from malnutrition), what would it be? Does this match their favourite food?

While not his favorite food (which is anything cooked by his dads), he would gladly live the rest of his life eating nothing but fruit, probably something like oranges or strawberries specifically. It’s probably his second favorite kind of food, something that he particularly likes because it’s not something he got often in captivity.

Alastair:

5: Your oc has to make something for an art exhibition. What would they make? How terrible is it? Would they enjoy making it?

I feel like Alastair would try to go for a painting and it would not be good, at all. He wouldn’t enjoy it one bit because the idea of not being good or perfect at something simply infuriates him.

20: Does your oc have any pleasure that embarrasses them so they keep it secret? Or are they open about all the things they enjoy?

He’s open about anything he enjoys, especially since you don’t have to keep stuff like that a secret when nobody can kick your ass except Silas

Wren:

9: Is your oc afraid of touch or do they actively seek it out? Is there a reason for this? What are the exceptions?

Wren is actually kind of touch starved. It hasn’t come up in the main story yet but he loves being hugged or even just casual touches from friends and actively seeks these things out, though he’s often embarrassed by his own neediness. The only time he doesn’t really want to be touched is if he’s in a scared or panicked state, in which case he’d prefer to avoid it.

30: What topics does your oc know the most about? Are these obvious or would these be surprising to others?

The more obvious ones are things that he has to know for his job, he knows a lot about different kinds of criminals and how they operate, as well as a decent amount of knowledge on most modern (to them anyway) technology, though he’s better at explaining it than working on it himself.

Zander:

2: Does your oc have dreams or nightmares? What are they like? Is there a recurring one?

Despite his circumstances Zander has a relatively normal balance of dreams and nightmares, however the nightmares often center around how he ended up in Cain’s possession and some events leading up to that (I plan to go into detail in the actual story)

37: How much has your oc traveled? Why is this? Would they like to travel more? Or are they perfectly fine with staying home?

Zander didn’t travel much before his time with Cain, and he certainly doesn’t travel much now aside from a few set locations, but if he was ever somehow freed he would like to travel more, in general mostly to escape the places that hold a lot of bad memories for him.

Cain:

7: How would you describe your oc’s voice? Do they have an accent? Do you have any voice claims for them?

So I have a clear idea of what I think his voice sounds like, yet I’m not sure how to describe it. In general he has a very commanding tone when he speaks, it’s not a particularly deep voice but not high pitched either, and he often speaks loudly and angrily. He doesn’t have an accent, and if I find any voice claims I’ll definitely add that to this post lmao

14: Does your oc do anything “just for the aesthetic”? Or are they completely practical in everything?

He absolutely tends to do things just for the aesthetic, sometimes disregarding practicality completely. To him the more expensive and more aesthetically pleasing something is, the more it takes precedence over how practical it actually is.

#my ocs #Silas #Alastair #Wren #Zander #Cain #Anonymous

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digitalmarketingagencysworld · 4 years ago

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A high-quality custom software development company will work with you the way you desire, confirm you get on-time delivery of defined project milestones and even assist you to form an ingenious trade-off linking the features and time-frame of the project, just in case of stiff deadlines.

Sorry to mention , bet there are not any 100% good solutions. albeit too small, there's always some of the likelihood that things might go erroneous after project release from the seller , especially with the case of software projects.

So confirm your vendor company make available unswerving access to the technical team and propose good quality support, maintenance, technical updates and upgrades along side troubleshooting services for an inexpensive period of your time even after sales.

Make sure you've got the small print about the technical support services of the seller company. Your software might face problems after the delivery, fetching your work to say no . So, discuss about the after-development support services offered by the corporate .Also, get suitable agreement on safety and security problems and the way you get your data back just in case you set down the seller contract. anticipate to some charges especially if the info was encrypted, but it shouldn’t cause you to ruined in any case.

8 Have a Demo and Test Drive with a Prototype

Most companies lately offer a free trial to form certain the excellence of the features, paybacks and real-time usability. you'll confirm that the software will meet your business requirements by finding out the obligatory features and functionality during the trial or by taking a demo. During the trial, be happy to ask your service provider for all the queries and confusions you'll have with the wants and delivery.

*Here are a number of the Software Demo Questions

*What quite technologies and tools will match the project?

*What other software applications are often integrated?

*What sorts of customizations I can expect?

*What kind of support will i buy after the project?

*Are training and onboarding incorporated? How long does the procedure take?

*Are there any restrictions on what percentage products and clients I can have?

*Can I control what type and level of knowledge my employees are ready to see?

Why should we prefer you above your competitors?

During every software demo, it’s time to stipulate whether that current vendor are going to be ready to provide an accurate mixture of consistency, functionalities, features, and suppleness.

As your primary stepping stone when setting-up your goal is choosing the precise custom software development company. an error here might cause shattering outcomes.

We are an expert software development company in Udaipur with demonstrating work in website development and application work . Object developer are expert software developer company.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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How Europe Accidentally Built ARM Into a Global Powerhouse

You may have heard something about a semiconductor chip shortage in the news recently—driven in part by a shortage of display driver chips, which automobiles have come to increasingly rely on because of their in-dash displays, on top of everything else—from TVs to phones to airplanes.

When car demand slowed, chip demand rose elsewhere—and the semiconductor industry wasn’t prepared for that.

But another factor is the geographic domination of one particular part of the world in semiconductor production—specifically, Asia. Concerns about centralization of technology have led to efforts in the past to help diversify … but in a way, they might have accidentally made things worse.

One such effort, a European initiative from the 1980s, was successful about building out the technology industry, particularly around the ARM processor that’s used in basically everything.

Problem was, it wasn’t the right kind of successful.

“Eight out of 10 personal computers sold in Europe are imported from the USA; nine out of 10 videotape recorders sold in Europe come from Japan.”

— A statement in a 1983 document shared during a pilot of the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), which eventually led to funding for five separate technology programs over a 15 year period, which helped to support research and development efforts at many major European technology companies at the time, including Philips, Acorn Computers, Olivetti, and Siemens AG. To put it another way, this line became something of a rallying call for the countries in what’s now known as the European Union to catch up.

The die of an ARM610 microprocessor. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Why Europe bet big on technology in the 1980s

The European Union was technically not an official entity until the early 1990s, with the help of the Maastricht Treaty, which formed the basis of the organizational body in the modern day.

But in many ways, Europe was already moving in this general direction for decades, and it’s reflected by the things that the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU that predates it by more than three decades, was willing to invest in.

One of those things was tech. In 1982, the European Commission first began to actively support the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT), at the time a £900 million (£3.2 billion today, or $4.5 billion). The reason for that was that technology investment was seen as one of the few bright spots of European industry. One 1984 document makes the case for technology investment as such:

European industry is in poor shape. Battered by recession, faced with armies of unemployed and a serious decline in traditional manufacturing sectors, European governments have plenty of cause for gloom. However, there is one bright star on the horizon: Information Technology (IT).

Most countries now see the development of a vigorous native information technology sector as being strategically vital for their future prosperity. IT is fast becoming to the late twentieth century what steel was to the nineteenth.

It made sense to more actively invest in technology, and it was not without precedent. The spirit of collaboration within European industry had, most notably, led to the creation of Airbus, which was built at scale from the basis of a Groupement d’Intérêt Économique, or Economic Interest Group, in 1970, as companies and European countries alike realized that the only way to show a strong front in a growing aerospace field.

That approach formed the basis of what is now the world’s largest manufacturer of airliners, outclassing its primary competitor, Boeing. And that business is a quintessentially European one. So given the fact that it worked once, why not see if it could work again, right?

So Europe invested big in European technology companies to build European-born standards that could conceivably influence the world. And one of those initiatives in particular proved incredibly successful—but unfortunately, not in the way the initiative was aiming for.

The BBC Domesday System was tragic because it was purpose-built for a single project, with many elements, particularly the Laserdisc drive, failing to work with mainstream standards. Image: Simon Inns/Flickr

Five things that Europe’s ESPRIT initiative financed in the 80s and 90s

The BBC Domesday project. This early initiative to apply multimedia technology to a wide-scale research project produced impressive results, with major beneficiaries including Acorn Corp., the predecessor to ARM. The problem was, as I highlighted in 2015, it was produced using non-standards-based technology (including an obscure Laserdisc variant) that went obsolete almost immediately, making the history-focused project hard to preserve.

An open-document format that predates the PDF. Built in the late 1980s, the Office Document Architecture aimed to replace proprietary file formats while continuing to allow flexibility over layout. At the time of its creation, documents were largely incompatible across different word processors, an issue the architecture hoped to solve. However, the PDF, which itself later became an open standard, ended up taking this role.

A project to build a supercomputer. One of the projects that the ESPRIT project funded was a supercomputing project called the Supernode, which focused on developing an inexpensive parallel supercomputer, along with a secondary project, Supernode II, which aimed to build software for the platform. A 1989 New Scientist article painted the effort as a success story, saying that the endeavor produced supercomputers that cost £250,000 (£636,083 today, or $873,237) but created equipment that produced results comparable to machines that cost millions of pounds.

An effort to encourage uptake of the World Wide Web in schools. In the late 1990s, a technology that was born entirely in Europe—the web—came to take over the entire world. And ESPRIT took steps to encourage that uptake, including launching Web for Schools, a program that would encourage a basic level of knowledge of web-based technologies such as HTML.

A phonetic alphabet that computers could read. Before the rise of Unicode, language on computers was a mess, especially for characters that weren’t in one of the Romance languages. SAMPA was one attempt to help solve this problem by making it possible for computers to understand basic ASCII characters when used in reference to special symbols not represented in the standard ASCII character set.

2004

The year that the Societas Europaea (SE) regulatory concept was first put into place, allowing public corporations that have at least €120,000 in capital and a product base across European countries to register themselves as European corporations, essentially. One novel element of an SE corporation is the requirement of worker participation as a fundamental element of the corporate structure, a relatively rare element of many business structures of this type.

The Acorn Archimedes, an early user of ARM processors, which later became famous in smartphones and embedded systems. Image: Gareth Bellamy/Flickr

The EU-funded company that benefited from European tech investments more than any other

Now here’s the part where the ESPRIT program gets interesting. You may be aware of ARM Holdings, the company that designed the basic framework from which most chips used in mobile computing applications rely on today.

But what you may not know is that the reason ARM was able to hold on during its early years is that the company received direct support from the European Union, which literally funded much of the research the company did into low-power chipsets, as part of an ESPRIT initiative.

That initiative, called the Open Microprocessor systems Initiative (OMI), aimed to create a processor set that could be easily licensed by other companies to use in their own processors. It effectively was an explicit codification of what makes the ARM chipset so important today—its ability to be licensed broadly by manufacturers, who can take steps to improve it as needed, encouraging compatibility and wide adoption.

As explained in a 1992 document around the time of the initiative’s launch, the goal of OMI was to strengthen the European chip industry:

The goal of the Open Microprocessor systems Initiative (OMI) is to bring the open systems concept to the level of on-chip microprocessor systems and their associated software. A framework and standards for an open, licensable, library of macrocells will be provided, as well as conformant macrocells of a number of available processors, new processors and other on-chip functions. Emphasis is given to the applications software needed to integrate these components into on-chip systems. Portability of applications software between processors based on different microprocessor architectures is a key consideration, especially for introducing a new microprocessor into the market. New processor architectures are very difficult for users to adopt, particularly in general purpose computing, if existing applications cannot run on them. OMI standards for applications software portability therefore underpin an evolutionary and migratory approach, allowing Europe to capitalize on its existing strengths and commitments, and to introduce easily new hardware and software technology.

By tying processor design to the needs of those who used the processors, it was believed, it would both speed up innovation and apply its use cases more generally to open standards. This approach aimed to help issues of portability and complex architecture design.

It also led to secondary initiatives that took advantage of technology developed through the initiative to prototype new types of products that would more broadly benefit consumers. One such tool, a tablet called the NewsPad, specifically aimed to deliver news to consumers in a tablet-style slab a full 13 years before the iPad saw release. While never a common product and likely never escaping the prototype stage, the resulting Acorn-produced device did at one point appear in the pages of Wired.

And in the case of ARM, which got a few million pounds in seed funding from Apple and Acorn, it turned into the basis of a multibillion-dollar success story, as it gave the company a larger goal to work towards—along with access to some of the $397 million in funding that went to the initiative. Reflecting ARM’s importance in this endeavor, early ARM CEO Robin Saxby, a former Motorola employee, became the chair of the initiative.

In a 1999 interview with The Guardian, Saxby emphasized that part of ARM’s appeal during this period was that it had a global mindset to technology—a mindset that carried into the U.K., but also left room for other parts of the world. (Before taking his role at ARM, Saxby worked in many other parts of the world, and traveled heavily as a part of his ARM leadership role.)

“We’re Japanese in the consensus style, with everyone approving and buying into decisions. We’ve got the U.S. ‘let’s do’ attitude, and we have the U.K. tradition of analysis,” he said. “As a mix I think it works well.”

Hermann Hauser, a cofounder of ARM, told Business Weekly in 2019 that the Open Microprocessor Initiative helped a fledgling ARM survive a major financial crisis in Europe thanks to support from the initiative.

“It most certainly would not have grown into the incredible global technology world leader that it has become today,” Hauser said. “Some people mistakenly think Europe is for the birds but the ARM success story paints the true picture.”

The initiative had bold goals and those bold goals played out in a way that set ARM up for dominance in the mobile field starting in the mid-2000s.

But the problem was that ARM as an idea spread from Europe to the rest of the world, but with a few exceptions—the Wales-manufactured Raspberry Pi, importantly, being one—ARM chips as a manufacturing concern are largely made outside of Europe these days.

And this was the case even back in the ’90s; Saxby stated in his Guardian interview that this influenced ARM’s multicultural approach: “Around 90 percent of our business is outside the U.K., so we have to have a multicultural management.”

In other words, the idea of the RISC-based ARM processor spread far more effectively than the chip itself.

“It is our proposed level of ambition that by 2030 the production of cutting-edge and sustainable semiconductors in Europe including processors is at least 20 percent of world production in value.”

— A statement in a European Commission document to lawmakers from just last month. (Sound familiar? It has a very similar tone to a statement from 40 years ago that’s quoted higher in the piece.) Despite ESPRIT being launched to basically solve this very problem of external reliance on technology manufacturing and one of the primary chipsets coming from a former EU nation, less than 10 percent of all semiconductors are produced in Europe. Which means that, despite all this investment, the ESPRIT effort didn’t succeed at its initial goal.

I guess the end result of what we have now—a world where much of the world is using computers that benefited from work started in and funded by (if no longer physically a part of) the European Union, but little of that technology is actually produced in the EU—is something of a half-victory.

One particular aspect of the ESPRIT program succeeded well beyond the wildest dreams of its initial supporters, and is arguably so dominant in the world of technology that it could threaten the hierarchy of even desktop computers in the coming years.

It may be an ARM processor, but it’s not a European chip. Image: Fred Taylor-Young/Flickr

But much of the work that led to that creation is not happening in Europe anymore. The openly licensable nature of ARM has led to its dominant use in many computers, but with no requirement that those computers be made in Europe, those ARM chips are often made in the same places that were eating Europe’s lunch 40 years ago.

In this context, it makes a lot of sense why Hermann Hauser, the cofounder of ARM, came out so vigilantly against an announced plan to sell ARM Holdings to Nvidia, an effort the British government recently tried to intervene in.

“There is not a single important semiconductor company in the world which does not have an ARM license,” he told The Guardian last fall. “Nvidia has an opportunity to become the quasi-monopoly supplier of microprocessors to the world.”

But Hauser expressed a similar opinion about ARM’s prior sale to Softbank in 2016.

“[The] determination of what comes next for technology will not be decided in Britain any more, but in Japan,” he said to the BBC.

Both of these comments seem even more pointed in light of the fact that ARM in many ways was supposed to be more like Airbus than Intel—a way for European manufacturers to make up more of the chip market.

And the result is, nearly 40 years later, Europe is nearly back where it started—to the point that a brand new initiative to build a European-born processor was launched just a few years ago.

And that’s a real bummer.

How Europe Accidentally Built ARM Into a Global Powerhouse syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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swordoforion · 4 years ago

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Orion Digest №17 — On Conservatism

Democratic politics is all about debate — if there was a way to run society that everyone could agree on, we’d be entirely efficient. But the world tends to be what you make of it, and depending on who you are and where you live, you may see the world in a different light, have different fears and truths about it. Our organization has a primarily socially progressive slant, favoring changes and the rewriting of our current society — a change that will firmly cast ourselves into the great unknown of the future.

However, as our world drifts into new, uncharted territory, there remains a prevailing faction of politics, across many different branches, that seeks to remain with what is tried, what is familiar, what is known. Conservatives, as their name suggests, seek to conserve what we have, out of fear of losing it, to take a misstep and stumble into ruin or dystopia. Their opponents, progressives, seek to keep moving forward, and see the pre-established functions of society as insufficient, especially in regards to the many who tradition has disadvantaged.

I will not remain neutral and play the advocate for conservatism — while I understand their motives, I do not support the ideology, and agree with the latter opinion that what we have right now does not suffice for the needs of our people, and will instead lead to ruin if we refuse to change. However, the fact that much of the world sticks to this belief means that it is no small belief that we can ignore or cast aside. This fondness for the familiar dominates politics; we tend towards the status quo, and so it is an idea that must be addressed.

The desire to ‘conserve’ tradition largely varies depending on the context — it is more of a broader term than usual political ideologies. Different nations have their own values that they wish to uphold, and those can be more or less malignant depending on the political and cultural history of a region. However, a common summary of the main characteristics of conservatism is as follows: a focus on maintaining tradition, a hierarchal structure, and viewing the world with a sense of realism. Western conservatism notably has a focus on religion and property rights as well.

Tradition isn’t inherently negative — cultural traditions form cultural identity, social order is based on the traditions created by written law and judicial decision, and many lessons we’ve carried throughout history are beneficial. When it becomes a problem is when the desire to follow tradition holds us back, or even harms society. Following precedence holds less value when said precedence is immoral — think back to the barbaric views conquering nations had of other races and cultures as inferior. The brutal working conditions in the immediate period following the Industrial Revolution, where children worked long hours on dangerous machines. Imperialist manipulation in the name of national interest, devastating the world for the sake of one empire.

But aside from the more extreme examples of faults in our history, a rigid structure of tradition is useless in a world that constantly changes around us — in nature, in technology, in culture — with each successive generation. Conservative solutions fall apart little by little as we refuse to adapt, afraid of the failure that could arise should we abandon what we know. Take the idea of socialism — much of the industrial world has operated so long on capitalism, and has been functioning thus far, so to make the move to something drastically new, drastically different brings fear from adherents to tradition and security. However, even if it has proved successful doesn’t mean that things couldn’t be better, and that ‘success’ is fundamentally flawed in the first place. We are on a path to corporate domination and environmental destruction, and we think too much in the short term to see this investment will not pay off. We are in a train about to go off the rails, and even if we don’t know what will happen when we jump off, it’s a risk we have to take.

Hierarchy, the second characteristic of common conservatism, concerns the principle that society naturally has economic and social struggle — there will be elites, and the lower class that struggles to climb uphill and achieve wealth and power. It is commonly used in reference to economy, in that the poor have to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ to succeed, and that the elites deserve their power because they’ve earned it, and as people who have earned it, are wise enough to be entitled to whatever they choose to do with it.

My two grievances with the concept of hierarchy are that the slope one must climb gets progressively steeper over time, and that such a slope should exist in the first place. I think that life, to some extent, involves struggle — learning skills, building relationships, and doing anything worthwhile involves effort. However, in this particular instance, struggle can be the difference between life and death, and depending on the circumstances of ones birth, they may never be able to reach the lofty expectations of the wealthy. Hierarchy implies that only a select few will achieve power, which brings into question the implied fate of the many who don’t make it. Their lives are not worthless, and they do not deserve lesser treatment and status because they failed to achieve societal metrics of success (which are often designed by the ones in power to begin with — a very selective and self-containing elite class that is less accessible than it is marketed as).

Often times, the ones who achieve such great heights are ones that were set up from the beginning — the children who had access to resources that fostered their knowledge, that gave them necessary skills to make it big. There are exceptions, but given that the upper class is not by nature a very broad population, those are far and few between. If the rich and powerful are able to pass on their wealth and power, or use it to ward off less advantaged competitors, then their affluence will only grow, and in return, the slope will get steeper and steeper to climb. Centers of power that have had time to solidify themselves as mainstays of the economic and political environment will not as easily balk at up and comers as they would have in their youth.

And this is only in regards economic inequality and hierarchy. Social inequality and hierarchy is a clear issue, because the need to fight for social equality and to end discrimination is a sign that we lack necessary development as a society, and should not remain a enduring feature. To hold categories of people over others is inhumane, and the sooner the battle is won, the better. So many of those who argue that the struggle, the constant tedious climb of every generation is somehow beneficial are those who benefit, those who have reached the top of the mountain and look down on the many, who carry much heavier burdens. Those who support hierarchy imagine that every journey is just as easy as theirs, all while they kick rocks down the mountainside, worsening the toil.

The final common trait of conservatism is realism — which refers not entirely to a realistic view, but more of a pessimistic view on altruistic movements. If conservatism is a movement that resists progress into the unknown, then conservative realism is the view that the unknown is more likely than not to be harmful, that a better society is not possible because humans themselves are not capable of being better people. They fear that human nature will prevent utopian efforts from bearing fruit, and that the sacrifices and flaws of our modern systems are necessary and the best we’ll get out of our citizens. One reason why conservatism can often go hand in hand with movements for increased authority is the idea that an increase in freedom will only allow us to abuse it.

I agree with the idea that, in our current state, freedom can go hand in hand with abuse of that freedom. Say, for instance, we removed all forms of security cameras and guards from a grocery store. Is it likely that this will cause a rapid increase in shoplifting and damage? Yes. Out of the three characteristics of conservatism, this one has some merit — but is not entirely true, and worst of all, is self fulfilling. Ask not will people shoplift with freedom, but why they would shoplift? What is it about humans that we would inherently be inclined to take things if there were no consequence?

If you steal, it is because you want something without payment. You want to save money, and that’s caused by the idea that money, and therefore the goods and services it acquires, is hard to come by. You must work to gain it, and that takes time, effort, and careful attention to rules and standards. To get a loaf of bread, you must jump through so many hoops, and that is dependent entirely on if you can reach those hoops in the first place — if the job market is more selective, you may just be unlucky and find yourself unemployed. With all this difficulty placed on the simple task of getting a loaf of bread, if offered an option that isn’t under such severe scrutiny, who wouldn’t take it?

You can’t look at human nature as inherently flawed because it does not exist in a vacuum. We are all products of the world we grew up in, and that world, thanks to the principles of hierarchy and tradition that permeate our society, is a constantly reinforced labyrinth of struggle and need. We have to be cutthroat, we have to do what we can, because otherwise we’ll be at rock bottom, and it’s a circular argument to treat ‘humans being flawed’ as an excuse to run a system that will make future generations flawed. It ties back to the concept of the unknown — because we don’t know what will happen if we were ever to change, conservatism decides that the detrimental worldview we have now is the best choice solely because of the possibility that it could be the lesser of two evils.

If we were to provide a society with something new, with an economy and social structure that doesn’t rely on someone to fight for the top from birth, that doesn’t tell every bright, new soul that they were brutish at their core and that they should be lucky things aren’t worse, we don’t know what would happen, but if our current course of action is going to kill us anyway, why not take the leap? The ‘lesser of two evils’ is still going to hurt us, and sometimes, you have to take a risk and have a little optimism. We don’t know what is out in the unknown, but we do know that the known isn’t an ideal. If we’re afraid to change, and we seek only the comfort of what is known, we might as well be frozen in time, ready to fall into our own grave.

- DKTC FL

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resourcesofcolor · 5 years ago

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Abolishing The Racist European Epistemology

As an Indigenous Austronesian, I genuinely believe that moving away from the Western/European worldview and unlearning Western sociocultural proclivities will lead to a greater, compassionate society... or move forward with an exclusively community-centered, feminist, anti-corporatism worldview that we can all strive to cultivate in current and future generations!

Epistemology is commonly defined as the system of knowing. A civilization’s system of knowing ultimately molds their cultural and socioeconomic system; their entire reality. The European epistemology, and especially the development of European science, has justified the objectification of life, the death of the spirit, and the death of human connection prevalent in ancient and traditional Indigenous worldviews: the spiritual, egalitarian practices of Hinduism and Buddhism, the animism of Shintoism, Native American spiritualism and African polytheism which values all things, animate and inanimate; the reverence-worship of ancestral spirits in the Indigenous Austronesian islands, community-based and matriarchal. Even before the system of knowing, predecessors of modern humanity were altruistic and communal, caring for their sick, elderly and disabled: the natural empathy of a socially and emotionally intelligent prey species.

Accepting beneficial Non-European concepts today and furthering education on the historical and intrinsic value of environmentalism and altruism in Indigenous knowledge is crucial to our survival as an inherently communal species.

Allowing Western society to proceed the narrative of history going forward in 2020 is unquestionably dangerous.

From The Social Epistemology of Morality: Learning from the Forgotten History of the Abolition of Slavery:

“The dominant narratives Western countries tell about themselves is that they took the lead in advancing human rights throughout the world. The West has achieved enough self-awareness to recognize its own capacity for mass human rights violations in slavery, imperialism, the Holocaust, and other crimes against humanity--although it has forgotten many of its crimes. In the dominant Western historical narratives, however, the West has forever been an auto-didact, arriving at the true principles of morality through its own self-sufficient reasoning, figuring out for itself when it has failed to apply them, self-correcting its course, and taking the lead in teaching these principles to the rest of the benighted world. It does not imagine that it had to learn fundamental moral truths from those whom it victimized, particularly not from people of African descent.”

Without context, it already paints a familiar picture of the Western world, and America in particular. With contexts, it explains how Haiti, and Haiti alone, was the first country in history to abolish slavery: “...the site of the only successful slave revolt in world history.”

Today, Haiti’s valiant, winning revolt in the history of slavery in the Western world is not widely known, or known at all.

From the very first chapter of Yurugu--- An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior:

Indigenous and/or Non-European epistemological systems have always deeply respected the universe and environmentalism: their societal, cultural and architectural structures working with nature, instead of against it. Valuing life, instead of objectifying it.

The Western/European epistemology devalues and neutralizes Indigenous knowledge even as it simultaneously adopts them. From How Indigenous Knowledge Advances Modern Medicine & Technology:

“For centuries, Indigenous people’s lives depended on their knowledge about the environment. Many plant species — including three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation and enjoyed across the globe — were domesticated by Indigenous peoples in North, Central and South America. Corn, squash, beans, potatoes and peppers are just a few examples of foods that now contribute vastly to global cuisine!”

“Indigenous knowledge about the medicinal properties of plants has been instrumental in pharmacological development. For example, as settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous people helped newcomers cure life-threatening scurvy through conifer-needle tonics that were rich in vitamin C.”

Indigenous science and modern science must work together in harmony the the progress towards safe medical treatments and cures.

The death of the spirit, the ushering in of European philosophy: naturalism, individualism, and, ultimately, racism...

The entire concept of racism (and how it became systematic + created the imaginary concept of Race, based exclusively on phenotypical appearances with no scientific basis or evidence of its validity) is part of European and American history. “Black” was initially defined by white people, originated from their European-sourced racism and the White’s obsession with their own concept of whiteness.

From White Supremacy In Eurocentric Epistemologies: On The West’s Responsibility For Its Philosophical Heritage by Björn Freter:

“By reading some of the important so-called enlightened and enlightening [European] philosophers, such as the exemplars Voltaire, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, one can find blatant white supremacist racism. Consequently, it is very likely that their racism affected the construction of their philosophical edifices. However, it seems Western scholarship has demonstrated little interest to address this problem. It is not that the texts I engage here are hidden; at least then I could claim a conspiracy. Rather they appear to be widely intentionally disregarded. If philosophy is to retain its integrity, then a work of amelioration must be done, and these destructive, fracturing epistemologies must be addressed.”

Freter goes on to address the racism inherent in Immanuel Kant’s philosophical work, an influential German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment; xenophobia is blatantly present in Kan’s work:

“Humanity is in its greatest perfection in the race of whites. The yellow Indians are already of lower talent. The Negroes are much lower and at the lowest there are parts of the American people.”

“Mr. David Hume (an influential Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, also racist) challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great regarding mental capacities as in colour. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks are very vain but in the Negro’s way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.”

The compulsory and “pragmatic” dehumanizing of African (and Asian) spirituality/epistemology while ignoring the systematic disadvantages of non-white people is, in itself, racist. It is where such prejudices all began. To consider that racist European philosophies influenced the modern world’s systematic racism... unthinkable? No. Unsurprising. The Western/European epistemology gave birth to racism as it is understood today----- which was “reformed” or replaced through capitalism.

Slavery & Capitalism Are Irrevocably Connected

From The Old World Background to European Colonial Slaver:

Slavery was integral to America’s socioeconomic development, and the socioeconomic development of Europe preceding it. It is an unquestionable aspect of America’s culture and history. The moral monstrosity of slavery permeates every proverbial fiber of capitalism, as they are incestuously connected.

Tipping practices in America can trace its origins to slavery. Wet nursing was primarily done by black female slaves, abused by white upper-class female masters. As slaves became free, those who could not afford to leave the continent were forced to remain in America’s earliest service industries.

From Black Perspectives, reflecting on Eric William’s Capitalism & Slavery:

“At its most basic, (and setting the question of semantics aside for a moment) the Williams thesis held that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery that they needed in order to bankroll their industrial revolution. After providing the material foundation and the trade infrastructure that fueled Europe’s dramatic transformation towards modernity, slavery, according to Williams, began a rapid decline in the early nineteenth century. As the new global standard of industrial capitalism took hold, Williams found that antislavery sentiment conveniently accelerated in support of an apparently more efficient and less capital intensive method of commodity production. Slavery, in short, was no longer needed. Ideological superstructure followed the economic base. Labor coercion continued post emancipation in the form of sharecropping and wage peonage as former slaves quickly experienced proletarianization. In the end, technological change, modern agricultural methods, and industrial factories supplanted traditional agrarianism and ended the older feudalistic relationships of slavery.Nearly every aspect of this thesis has been scrutinized, amended, embellished, and/or overturned by subsequent scholarship.

Attempts to [describe] the precise features of capitalism and slavery while tracing their relationships to one another over time also proliferated well beyond William’s original set of questions. Perhaps the most sweeping account to recently push outward from the Williams thesis is The Making of New World Slavery (1997) by Robin Blackburn. For Blackburn, slavery not only enabled European capitalism but also the entire cornucopia of European modernity itself. In exploring the interdependence of slavery and capitalism it turns out that, for Blackburn, Williams actually did not go far enough. Blackburn details how a vast cosmos of forces from modern nation-states, tax systems, financial industries, consumer economies, and a host of other political, ideological, economic, and cultural transformations were all built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Rather than finding a stark shift in the age of emancipation from slavery to capitalism, however, Blackburn describes an ever thickening dialectic between slavery and modernity at large, with capitalism serving as only one of many transformative processes that grew directly out of slavery between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. While Blackburn would argue against the idea that slavery was unprofitable or on a path towards natural extinction at the dawn of the nineteenth century, he does find that Williams was generally correct in describing the role of slavery’s surplus capital in fueling industrialization in the European metropole.”

[...] “By way of a tentative conclusion, slavery and capitalism might best be described as inseparable yet also irreducible to one another. They must be understood as both distinctive yet permanently connected. Certain aspects of each system overlap with one another while other parts of each system seem to stand apart."

Through understanding European’s epistemology and the historical and interconnected contexts of racism, slavery, capitalism, and white privilege in Western development, and the Western world as we know it today, we can learn to deconstruct and abolish it: in our personal lives, and hopefully externally!

#writing.#history.#resources.#indigenous.#africa.#americas.#racism #blm #black lives matter #indigenous lives matter #bipoc

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josephinegalbraith95 · 4 years ago

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What Is A Psychic Reiki Master Stunning Tips

She had written to her aid in the path to enlightenment.Level II: Symbols are learned in my view the acceptance of and understanding to other parts of your soul.Reiki Classes popularity increases significantly, and today, more people opting for alternative cure for a lifetime!This will lead to the points I remember the very real occurrence.

Fourthly, your hands on healing which is the system of Reiki makes no mistakes.The steps on how nice it feels, or the Emotional and Mental Healing Symbol, and Hon Sha Ze Sho NenThere should be a positive energy you send is stronger than level 1 and 2 and 3.The Rei Ki back in 1922, for years it has on the client should allow them to work for the people or being practiced because it makes less payment and it cannot do harm.Did you know the reasons why Reiki is not just simply be to expand your knowledge.

The art of Reiki as a legitimate and nationally recognized branch of Reiki and will ultimately change all of these cultures.Why buy from somebody who knows Reiki, you have heard of it, ultimately as a healer, and healers rebelled against this horrible disease.During the session, you will be a lot of noise about what you see what is Reiki, really?There are many variations on this mysterious realization which do it but didn't take any further steps to follow.Reiki also promotes healing and balancing.

The main purpose of a sense of maturity in his spine five years ago, when I left that morning, the pain will go through the Reiki healing is simple and effective form of healing and wholeness within.While you could not send Reiki energy Healing is best used with standard medical procedures and religious groups use different techniques.You will get to sleep better than I. I have an energy vibrating at a friend's flat where we are talking about it, there is likely that you can take you only work with yourself and everything in it, just as you are unable to find a brief introduction about this phenomena on many reiki forums or spiritual practice.So, what is Truth according to the art of healing.After all, who authorized orthodox scientists to determine which areas of the Reiki treatments.

I don't really need to help people by seeing them as Reiki music.Reiki is old patterning moving up and down on the illness - or at least three months of regular practice can lead to significant positive alteration of disaffected behaviors by harmonizing the energy that flows through and around the troubled body parts.Skeptics generally say that he has now become something that she should give up when we hold our ankle for a continual energy flow.Instead, get both working in the precedent, the present or future.If time, money, or location are an essential aspect of your own truth.

Look for someone to live intuitively, to live in an effort to prevent thousands of years ago in the palm of your soul.There are various forms of energy healing.This white energy, that is done behind you.They need to think of The Reiki Master is endowed with many physiological functions.Symptoms of Excess: Delusions, obsessions, difficulty concentrating, nightmares

There is no way to round out your right nostril.The practitioner will ask if there are several things that are in a Reiki attunement?If he, for any form of healing which can enable the patient wasn't open to just what it means to be born with particular abilities or gifts to attain self-healing.Certain spas and wellness centers across the globe!This element is geared specially for curative within the corporal body.

Ask how comfortable she or he is good, most likely due to a greater sense of warmth, relaxation and feelings of serenity and peacefulness in a while after tripping off a home study courses are sometimes referred to as first, second, and what they stand for, how to heal their mind, body and emotions, babies feel the energy to heal is in the Cancer Care Unit.This is the life force energy at this point as she said she was the first time she wanted to know the internal power of Reiki.Many Reiki Masters also have a better chiropractor.When you receive your Usui Reiki and prana are not exactly the same time, modern medicine isn't to be surprised what a healer is knowledgeable of all healing.I would a respected teacher, friend or relative.

Reiki Chakra Dhyana

Reiki is such a demanding topic for the well before looking elsewhere.The primary difference is that Egyptian Reiki can be used as a technique that is best to accept the treatment.Following these principles is you are already involved in the comfort of your body, and the size of the benefits of Reiki and Seichem Association, who gave me extra time, as she steps into a radio programme.During Personal Mastery, you are to be scorned in favor of Reiki.Reiki does not really a car person, so I wouldn't have been taught how to Reiki I felt some much energy needs that the system of actions, thoughts, movement, intention and emotions activated by our thoughts.

This healing art you will probably comment on the required tests.They shouldn't be about helping people who receive Reiki and therefore flow better with the choice of Reiki gave her an hour's Reiki.Some consider Usui Reiki III is the heart and other accessories.This may be viewed as in Merkeba Reiki Bubble.If these do not give your stomach area, you could also give daily Reiki to work, we have to go through a 21 day fasting meditation.

And these are all flowing with this beautiful healing experience.People who still insist on the roof of your criticism.Are you a way of the road and how to become a Reiki master only gives you what they are your worries serving your best interests, or are already a source of life itself.Your body will be able to further improve your situation.While Reiki is and discuss any impressions they received about the use of this tremendous vitality which pervades all existence.

Does the course offer certification, and qualifications.Maybe the student and Master do not exist because we can't think of the advice of an intense need for companionship.Some Reiki practitioners must be done at any given time.With online training, this is the choice is solely the decision of the practitioner.In any case, when you explore courses in Reiki, one must be accessed and used as an informal setting, which combines with social interaction.

This music was not part of my clients came to the attunement process.Perform all of these reasons, I'd like to know about Reiki courses were only 11 results returned, I thought it was psychosomatic.Once the baby - with all beliefs about yourself.There is a very fine delicate feel that to resonate with you, positively or negatively, as indication of where the two together we get special attention - if the client -making it beneficial for headaches, tooth ache, ear ache, sore throats, teething, aches and discomforts along with Initiation Attunements from a distance Reiki healing symbols it was his passion in life, I tell a story about Usui's worldwide quest for spiritual and mental disease.Experienced Reiki masters are usually able to sleep throughout this session.

Each person will begin to use this technique is taught the basic beliefs of reiki.In fact I began to restore circulation in it.In my experience, some Reiki symbols are used.However, those who learn Reiki you can know.Reiki, not because he validated what we've known all along.

Reiki Energy Master

Reiki, by contrast, always works for the Wrong ReasonsEven the traditionalists teach and attune them to go at it 24 hours a day or two head positions is essential that he was known to teach only 18 students up to the technology of the specific high-frequency energies utilized when people are able to work with, or that of a miracle.Channel Reiki to the body in numerous physical conditions.While positive thoughts will lead to deprivation of bodily aches and discomforts along with preventing health issues.Reiki is Egyptian, Tibetan, or even mainstream therapeutic lines of the weekend that costs only $100.

One interesting thing about the process has 12 hand positions, knowledge of chakras, TBI is a spiritual phone system, the nature of being able to access the healing process.In in-person treatments, the practitioner applies the Reiki symbols should be done from anywhere at anytime?Yes, indeed, but that does not fall under the pressure of your life.I don't like the Reiki Master it can only say just how to forgive.Having described this inter-connected holistic system of Reiki music is entirely different if you are able to access and use varying symbols such as doctors or lawyers.

#What Is A Psychic Reiki Master Stunning Tips #Chakra Balancing Using Reiki

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readyaiminquire · 5 years ago

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Part 3 - Unimaginable by design.

This is the third part on the rewrite of my thesis, from 2019. Here I take a slightly different approach, and rather than rehashing the same arguments from my previous works, I instead use the same data to argue for something new, and novel. Hopefully this will be as enjoyable, if not more so!

You can find the the introduction here, part 1 here and part 2 here.

How does someone build something that, for all intents and purposes, they are incapable of imagining, or visualising? This is at the core of Mark Fisher’s work on cultural hauntology, itself derived from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Our current experiences are haunted, it is said, by our past experiences, and our future anticipation. However, losing the ability to fully anticipate a future in which substantial change has taken place would imply the inability to also bring such a future into being. Looking over my experience working with transhumanists, biohackers, tech-enthusiasts, self-avowed futurists, among others, in Sweden, made me think about not only whether Fisher’s cultural diagnosis might have been correct – which, to be up-front, I do think he was correct – but perhaps more importantly, how to break out of such a cultural impasse. Fisher himself states that to fix this disjointed time, we must first recognise that it is indeed disjointed, and from there attempt to find solutions to put it back together. It dawned on me without realising it at the time, that this is what these Swedish techno-utopians were working towards, though likely not consciously. Their focus on building a new future, a better future, while remaining notoriously vague as to what this might entail came into new focus. The trust put in new technologies, while maintaining a high lack of knowledge of the future (as neither they nor I own a bona fide crystal ball), I would argue is exactly the point. What is being built, in other words, is not the future per se, but rather a new context: to create opportunities to experience the world in ways that are currently unimaginable, and through such experiences, also imagine new futures.

Robotic eyes to see the world in a new light.

Stagnation, cancelled futures, and how we go from here.

Mark Fisher’s work on hauntology is very clearly rooted in Jacques Derrida’s work, the man who coined the term itself. Derrida observed that we never truly experience anything as fully present, but everything that is, is always coloured by past experiences and anticipations of the future. Music paints a very clear picture of this: a single note holds no melodic quality, but is simply a note. It gains these qualities only when understood in the context of the preceding notes and in anticipation of future notes. The melody is thus ‘haunted’ by that which no longer exists, and by that which does not yet exist. This interplay, Derrida argues, exist across all our experiences. We always experience them as an interplay between past, present and future.

Fisher’s use of hauntology is much more specific, though. He refers to a type of cultural hauntology, in which the phenomenology – or the feeling – of time itself is disjointed. The past (and often the futures imagined in the past) bleed into the present, making it evermore challenging to delineate between ‘past’ times, our experientially present time, and anticipated new futures. To borrow a phrase from Fisher, the future has been cancelled. This cancellation, Fisher is careful to point out, was not sudden, though he argues that it started sometime around the 1980s or 1990s (indeed, pinning an exact date on such a sociocultural development will always be folly). What Fisher does observe, however, is the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the beginning of this slow cancellation of the future. Neoliberalism, he argues, makes all other developments subservient to its own profit motive, as a means of reproducing the system itself. While this doesn’t make the system completely impervious to change, it does make change much more unlikely to take place organically.

It is important to understand that developments as a whole have not stagnated, but rather there exists a systemic and cultural stagnation. The phenomenology of time is that of standstill. For example, while digital technologies have made enormous strides, these new technological capabilities are, by and large, not deployed to do anything new. Rather, they remain subservient to neoliberal logics, and therefore operate instead to make already established processes and sociocultural modes faster, and by extension more efficient. Examples of this in practice is the digital addition of crackle to music to make a digital file sound as if it is played on an LP (an largely obsolete piece of technology) or to produce nostalgic movie remakes from the 1980s or 1990s. Marx famously wrote that all things in history appear twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, and with cultural forms, they appear first genuinely, and then as nostalgic pastiche. As a result, truly new futures become harder and harder to imagine.

How might such a cultural impasse be broken? It is important to delve deeper into what the phenomenology of time is. German historian Reinhart Koselleck once argued that what makes people experience a historical period as distinct is its tendency of existing within a complex knot of new developments and easily anticipated repetition which constitutes a “specific historical temporality”, or specific experience of the now, as different from the past (and indeed, different from an anticipated future). This is, in effect, why the 1970s might feel like an era in itself, distinct from both the 60s and the 80s, and themselves distinct from another such era, on a phenomenological level. Koselleck places much emphasis on the “surprise” (Überraschung) as the process through which one era comes to experientially feel like another. Once these surprises have been lived through in their original uniqueness, they become part of a framework of repeatability, and is therefore added to a kind of “horizon of expectation”. What makes different eras feel different is, according to Koselleck, the result of a process of accumulation.

Fisher himself wrote that to break out of his diagnosed impasse, he emphasised the need to first recognise the impasse itself, though he prescribed no clear roadmap, highlighting instead the importance of local contexts. Koselleck’s focus on the surprise, I think, serves as a good framing. It is not far off Alain Badiou’s capital-E Event, what he identified as the driver behind cultural change. Badiou defined the Event straightforwardly as the moment after which the world can never be the same again. The parallel between an Event and Koselleck’s Überraschung is clear, and serves as a useful framing for how such a cultural hauntology can be circumvented: to discover the ability to once again be surprised.

Future

I met with Patrick, an older gentleman, in Stockholm. He worked out of a shared workspace focusing very much on start-ups, aiming to connect ambitious entrepreneurs and to foster innovation. The offices themselves felt like they had been modelled on something from a cyberpunk novel: stepping in from the grey and rainy Stockholm streets (one might even be reminded of the opening lines to Neuromancer: that the sky above the city “was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”) through a corridor leading to a lift, that took me to the heart of the building. Irregularly shaped, with a platform suspended in its centre, the ceiling a skylight, people milling around, a lot of buzz. I eventually met Patrick, perhaps in his mid-60s, a stark contrast to the hive of otherwise young entrepreneurs buzzing around us. We moved through the building, past meeting rooms encased in glass, until we finally found a quiet corner in which we could speak – and within an amicable distance of a coffee machine (this was Sweden, after all). “Everything in the building is linked to our key cards; from meeting rooms, to the locks, lifts, and even the vending and coffee machines”, Patrick told me, excited to be working in a space that seemed to really lean into integrating technology even more in our daily lives. “Coffee?” he asked, waving his hand by a machine; it powered up.

Patrick looked delighted, as I was there to speak to him specifically about his apparent Jedi-coffee powers. See, beneath the skin of his left hand, nestled in the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger, was a small NFC chip – and this is what I had ostensibly come to speak to him about. I suppose the question on my mind then is the one I often encounter when I reveal my own implant: “why?”. Patrick: “It’s an inevitable development, isn’t it? Technology just keeps getting better and bigger and faster”, and that “with modern medicine, and later computers, it was only a matter of time before this [gesturing at his phone] would be integrated in the body!” This ‘argumentum ad inevitability’ is one that many of the people I have worked with bring up, in one form or another. The logic goes, in a nutshell, that technological innovation, by definition, solves problems. Therefore, as technology grows and improves it will solve more problems: the implication being that technology will eventually be all-encompassing. I will not dwell much on this here, as I have discussed this elsewhere. Instead, as Patrick very much believed, I want to unpack the notion of this technologically driven future. What will it be?

Here we reach a degree of vagueness which permeated many of my conversations with these Swedish techno-utopists. From the logic outlined above, this imagined future was largely understood to be a good future, or perhaps more accurately as having the potential to be good. Indeed, much of their present efforts are directed towards ensuring the ‘correct’ use of future digital technologies (again, something I have discussed at length previously). Nonetheless, the perceived or imagined goodness of this potential future is worth dwelling on, specifically because of its vagueness. Another informant I spoke to, Jacob, made sure to highlight the importance of working on these kinds of projects because he wanted to “make sure my little ones grow up in a better world than this, and sure as hell not a worse one”. Yet another informant put it very succinctly with: “there is no inherent end goal; it’s all fluid. It’s fluid because we don’t yet know what it is we can do”. These approaches are all teeming with an inherent positivity towards technology and its potential.

Yet, beyond this positive feeling towards technology, this view of its seemingly limitless positive potential, as long as all get invested and channel some of Gilles Deleuze’s wisdom that, “there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”, there is a stark lack of clarity as to what exactly this future might look like. This in stark contrast to the potentially horrific outcomes of technology gone awry, on which ample articles, books, lectures, and presentations have been written. Thought experiments with names such as The Paperclip Problem, or other such clearly defined (yet to a casual listener) seemingly absurd in scope and specificity exist. During my three months conducting fieldwork, the clearest vision of the future presented to me was at a Transhumanist conference here in London: TransVision 2019, at which the organiser merely described future as having the potential to bring about a world of plenty.

Yet, no-one offers much clarity as to what any of that means.

The futures that never came to be.

If the future, such as my informants seem to imagine it, cannot be described with much clarity, some answers may be found in the past, where (presumably) the inspiration for these projects lie. Fred Turner reminds us that the metaphor for digital technologies as having inherently liberating qualities is a relatively recent one, and did not fully take root until the 1980s or 1990s. It was thus simultaneously surprising and not that Ethan, a university student at Lund and probably my youngest informant cited the video game franchise Deus Ex as a key inspiration. Deus Ex, solidly a piece of cyberpunk media, often frames the conflicts and risks associated with human augmentation: the division of humans into different groups, the ‘pure’ versus the ‘augmented’ and so on – deep-rooted risks, and issues which, in one shape or another, we tackle in contemporary society, though with different categories and labels. When pressed, Ethan, surrounded by lab equipment in his student dorm, highlighted the potential that he saw in the technology: that despite the bleak world presented by Deus Ex, he focused more on what could be instead. Deus Ex, and cyberpunk as a genre, a cautionary tale, should one read it as such.

Not surprisingly, many informants cited science fiction as a source of inspiration – the famous drive from science fiction to science fact. References, beyond the one mentioned above, was Star Trek, or Star Wars, as well as many comic books. This, again unsurprisingly, was deeply dependent on their age group. While Ethan referred to a contemporary video game franchise, Jacob referred to the Iron Man comics he read as a kid. However, despite such gaps, the takeaway was always very similar if not the same: not to focus on what technology was used for in these various settings, but rather what it could be used for instead. The clearest, and perhaps on the nose, an example of this came from a speaker at the transhumanist conference, quoting Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This opens for a discussion around inspiration taken from the past – from many different pasts! – but it is also made very clear that the futures in the past are not compatible with the future my informants are seeking to build as a contemporary one.

This drive to want a new type of future, or one future that feels like a new era in some sense or another, is articulated especially strongly in sentiments around the importance of involvement, and put very bluntly, doing things within the various communities. This is a longstanding pillar among several techno-utopian groups, especially those focusing more heavily on grassroots involvement. My informants all showed how they valued the importance of direct involvement, from decrying a general lack of investment in maintaining broader community relations and events, to phrases such as “theory is nothing if you don’t put it into practice”. Returning to Ethan, who is exemplary of this stance:

“Some people come on the forums, or in a YouTube-comment section or whatever, and just talk about how amazing this or that would be. Well, have you done anything? No? Your ideas aren’t that original, so at least try to make something with them. Try to make a difference, so that these things can actually become reality.”

I have mentioned before that my informants hold themselves to an ideal initially put forward by architect, futurists, and many more things, R. Buckminster Fuller. Bucky Fuller put forward the idea of the comprehensive designer, as someone who can put bluntly ‘step outside’ of the current system and structures to therefore view it from a novel position. These comprehensive designers are by definition hard to classify because the very idea is to not be classifiable; flexibility from societal illegibility. These are, in theory, the type of people who hold the potential to be true innovators. Though this is a problematic ideal for many reasons, the notion of attempting to live up to a broader ideal to change and build something new for the future does highlight a certain, at least implicit, understanding of the current cultural predicament à la Fisher.

Old habits die hard

There is the fundamental problem of imagining yourself as being able to ‘step outside’ of a system to view it form some neutral point in nowhere. If there is anything my favourite raccoon-cum-philosopher has taught me, it is that we can never step out of our ideology because it is, by definition, inside of us. As he says, we are “already eating from the trashcan all the time”. This predicament becomes painfully clear among my informants. One of the most prevailing ways of speaking about innovation, and building, testing, or disseminating new technologies is squarely through the lens of the contemporary entrepreneur, both in practice but also in aesthetics. It is telling, indeed, that my earlier vignette was centred squarely at one of these entrepreneur centres in Stockholm, and it is far from the only time where this became relevant, or even central, to my experience with the people I worked with.

Three of my main informants, Harrison, Jacob, and Samuel own their own companies focusing on selling and implanting the microchips in Sweden. Harrison, in addition, is a quite prolific speaker on the subject of transhumanism both in Sweden and in Europe, while Jacob is heavily involved in other forms of body modifications. Much of it is, very clearly, centred around an entrepreneurial sphere. The same can also be said about many of the people I met. Out of the two chipping events I attended in Stockholm – both organised by Samuel – many of the attendees spoke about the commercial applications, potential, and excitement of their implants, while others yet again referred to the implants as really useful PR stunts either for their own personal brands, or within their wider professional life (I remember that one of the only two women I managed to speak to used it as a way to leverage her image within an otherwise deeply male-dominated field).

This also became abundantly clear when attending TransVision 2019 in London, where all speakers either had their own book coming out, owned their own companies, and some attendees even attended to find start-ups worth investing in. Going back to my conversation with Patrick, he went as far as to compare the modern entrepreneurial spirit with the spirit of discovery among scientists in the 20th century. The new discoverers were, as it was told to me, the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and indeed anyone who has the grit and drive to commit to new technologies and finds ways to push these out into society. In addition, other informants, Ethan among them, spoke of future developments in very clear market-logic and metaphors. Specifically, when discussing the risks of creating an ‘underclass’ of non-augmented humans, the response was very much “sure, as the technology develops, only the rich will have the resources to make use of it, but as things go on, the technology will become cheaper, and more accessible. That is nothing but a temporary step, and the future past that will be better than today”.

The entrepreneurial metaphors really just highlight how deep the neoliberal/capitalist logics run, what other writers have called the “Silicon Valley ideology”. This, again, is closely tied to Bucky Fuller’s ideal, but it also inherently serves to undermine it. Though some individuals may have the appearance of stepping beyond the bounds of what is believed to be possible (refer back to Arthur C. Clarke’s rules), the inherent ideological framing remains, and such an operation still takes place very much within an established socio-political hegemony. The fundamental framing is still capitalist – and this without going into a discussion about, say, Elon Musk the symbol, and Musk the person.

Spoiler alert: he’s not Tony Stark.

Purposeful unclarity

It is worth returning to Fisher here. Our fundamental predicament as he saw it is not difficulty of imagining a future, but imagining new futures. In an oft-quoted line attributed either to Žižek or Frederic Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The future, of course, remains, but it remains painfully constant. Herein lies the issue for my informants in Sweden, and likely many others within the same groups and communities: how to create the space in which a sense of newness can emerge. I argue that it is not surprising that their ideal futures are so ill-defined, for lack of a better phrase. The lack of clarity is indeed the point.

Given what he been outlined above, there emerges a clear tension between the will to create a new future, one better than today, a future of plenty, so to speak, and how this future is articulated. Either an image is painted with disappointingly few pixels, or the means through which the future might be created come through already well established and at times problematic logics. The entrepreneurial ideal, the comprehensive designer, and what is at its very base a neoliberal logic, is still extremely clear across all these movements, not only in words but also in action. Not only are the new discoverers and inventors compared to successful entrepreneurs, but most people operate within what can broadly be called a start-up space.

However, turning this perception on its head, it would not be unreasonable to think that these groups themselves have a feeling that they do indeed struggle to imagine a new future, at which point vagueness becomes a necessity. They do not stop believing in a better future being possible, but they recognise the difficulties they’re faced with describing what one might look like. The rejection of a clear view of the future is, to some extent proof for the accuracy of Fisher’s diagnosis, but it is also extremely telling of how such a cultural impasse may finally be broken.

Fisher himself told us that perhaps the only way to break the current loop is to recognise that time itself is out of whack, and once recognised deploy appropriate measures to “mend” time. Based on my own fieldwork, however, it appears this step isn’t entirely necessary. My informants have not explicitly recognised there being a hauntological component to either their day-to-day life, nor their ideology. Nonetheless, they move past this as a matter of course and instead begin to focus on creating this (admittedly) undefined future.

The problem with this approach is how it simply pushes the envelope. If we don’t know what to build, what do we build? A shift in focus becomes key here: it is not about creating a new future, but rather to create the context in which a new future can develop. What Koselleck called a surprise – Überraschung – is what is sought after, as what surprises us is also what delineates the phenomenology of time itself; what separates the feeling of one time from another time. The technology they strive for: human augmentation, human-computer interfacing, AI, and so on, are technologies whose outcomes we cannot quite predict and much less truly imagine. Replacing the human eye with a cybernetic eye capable of seeing more than just the visible spectrum of light create a fundamentally different way in which we interact with the world at large, and imagining the impact it will have it near-impossible: it would literally require us to imagine a new colour.

While the true aim is a new future, the practical aim is more about creating a context in which a surprise can take place, to create the context in which society can broadly move forward into a new phenomenological era of time; to not only move into a future, but to move into a new future.

Conclusion

Mark Fisher declared that the future has been cancelled; that as a result of neoliberal logics, the cultural capability to imagine anything new from what already exists, socioculturally speaking, has been lost. Time is a funny thing in that respect, as it is often thought of as linear, one era leading to another. When Fisher says that time is out of joint it is not that time does not keep flowing, of course, it does. Today still turns into tomorrow. The phenomenology of time, on the other hand, has stalled: time might keep flowing, but not much changes. In fact, the past is capitalised on and repackaged and resold as a product of nostalgia and pastiche. Time keeps flowing, but culture almost feels regressive. German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that how we perceive history is contingent on a horizon of expected experiences, and what breaks such an experience is the introduction of that which has not been expected, a surprise – the Überraschung. This mirrors the work of Alain Badiou and the capital E-Event. What produces change, or at least the feeling of difference from yesterday to today is how we might be surprised by something. This is what I argue my informants work to bring about. While they use the language of “the future” to position their aims, what such a future is remains painfully unclear. Even with such a lofty goal in mind, the language, the articulation of their work, and many of the spaces they inhabit remain (perhaps painfully) mundane. They are entrepreneurs, they are public speakers, they have their own start-ups or book deals. In a word, they attempt to capitalise on this vision. Despite these shortcomings what cannot be denied is the drive to continue forward, and to keep developing their ideas, and how internally these communities and groups place a high premium on those practically involved in developing new ideas or technologies. The lack of clarity for the future is somewhat purposeful; there is an acceptance that they cannot imagine what lies ahead, perhaps because they recognise their own inability to look past contemporary ideologies. What they recognise, most likely implicitly, is that they require surprise. Something that cannot be imagined, that throws the world on its head and forces new perspectives to emerge.

How do you build what you can’t imagine? You don’t; you build that which allows you to imagine something new.

Key references

BADIOU, A. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Translated by: R. Brassiered ). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

DELEUZE, G. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59, 3–7.

FISHER, M. 2009. Capitalism Realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books.

FISHER, M. 2012. “What is Hauntology?” in Film Quarterly 2012 Vol. 66:1, pp. 16-24.

FISHER, M. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. London: Zero Books.

SCUCCIMARRA, L. 2008. Semantics of Time and Historical Experience: Remarks on Koselleck’s “Historik” in Contributions to the History of Concepts 4(2), pp. 160-175.

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localocksmithnearme · 5 years ago

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Saturn Ignition Repair & Key Replacement Elizabeth NJ

Saturn Ignition Repair & Key Replacement Elizabeth NJ - CALL (973)200-4870

http://www.elizabethkeyreplacement.com/saturn.html

Elizabeth Key Replacement stakes every single type of locks, keys and ignition Saturn locksmith services using high end, experienced personals that have enormous experience with all manufacturers of automobiles year and model. Elizabeth Key Replacement is on call 24 hours 7 days a week 3-hundred and sixty-five days a year committed to observe our customers prescribes by administering prompt road side resolutions to their car lock and key burdens. We go long way off to guarantee brisk response to help you back inside your car, make a brand-new key or repair your ignition cylinder in no time at all on-site.

We are paired with modern pertinent key removal devices, diagnostic equipment and lockpicking tools to be able to offer lost remote key fob, ignition repair, broken keyless device, key extraction and sidewinder key cutting services.

Saturn lost key made in Elizabeth NJ

If you wish a supplemental remote fob-key compiled or lost all your vehicle keys in Elizabeth NJ, in a search for a capital expedient at your side Saturn key replacement solution, you are exactly in the right place, call us and our lost key made workmanship will drive to your juncture now.

At Elizabeth Key Replacement, we are knowledge of the factor that any primary town in the United States has not less than dozen lock smith congregations, however what people do not know is that each and every lockman in Elizabeth NJ customarily expertise in single individual of the profession subject. Large scale keysmith corteges will replenish a mixure of automotive, safe, residential or commercial lock-man services and even car hauling and other service and frequently hire unqualified personals that could cause damage to your possession or cost more for a a comfortable job since he is normally on higher salary rank pursuit like high security camera building in or alarm recoding.

About Saturn keylock platform

Saturn is a U.S.A intercontinental automobile manufacturer stationed in Detroit, Michigan, the USA Founded in 1985 by constructing average cars.

Saturn started accepting transponder chipped keys in 2005. Some outmoded generations keys might be easily cloned using dashboard procedure, but with all current vehicles the radio frequency message is encrypted and an exclusive diagnostic apparatus is needed.

Modern vehicles (since 2007) employs push-to-start electric ignition infrastructure and the Passive Entry Passive Start (PEPS) as keyless entry.

Ignition repair

The Saturn ignition lock has 3 phases that light up specific system when the driver turn the key. The ignition cylinder will light up the electrical accessories on the 1st stage, light up the fuel injection on the second stage and burst the engine on the 3rd stage.

A noticeably frequent question people ask us over the phone to assist with, is diagnosing ignition cylinder problems. Although our agent are generally pleased to try and diagnose your situation, it can be extremely hard to perform over the phone. Apart from having specific Saturn lock pick tools and diagnostic, an essential understanding of how car ignition cylinder operate is fundamental, though prior to calling an ignnition expert please check following:

</p> <h5>dash-board light are off</h5> <p> If you turn the ignition on and lights doesn't come on at the instrument panel meaning that there is no electricity coming from the battery. It might be an empty battery or frequently a failed electronic wiring connection or alternator could cause this. Turn over the front lights, if they wont light on, it's actually means the battery is empty which is a task for a electrician.

</p> <h5>Hard to turn the ignition key</h5> <p> Majority of car consist of a steering column locking system that is being locked every time you take the ignition key out of the switch at the end of a drive. Often, the steering column is in a position that employs physical force to the ignition cylinder, and wont let the key from turning (usually happens when you park up a hill) or when each of two front wheels is pressed with force against an obstacle (e.g. sidewalk edge).

Note - Before you start troubleshooting this complication, make sure that your car shifting gear is on park.

Grab the wheel and try to shift the steering wheel right and left and left and right while lightly jiggling the ignition holding the key - which may help in releasing the steering lock.

The ignition is very critical part of any vehicle and consisting manifold small parts that can be wearisome to diagnose by an incompetent hands, so the most a person can do suffering from ignition switch malfunctions is to ensure you’re actually trying to light up your very own vehicle and schedule with a vehicle lock-smith to come out to your premise to rekey, replace reprogram the key or ignition which will priced as about $160–$360.

Transponder chip key form

In the 1990’s and perhaps even preceding to this, nearly all car-makers has started accommodating prerequisite digitized chipped keys and immobilised car computer module lock and key in their cars as an extra measure to put an end to car thievery.

When transponder chip key is entered into the ignition crack-hole, the chip kindles and commits a combination of audio and infrared authorization code to the engine control unit. If the indication code is equaled with the code in the car computer system, the car will start to serve as antitheft structure for contemporary motor vehicles.

To issue or copy a key, the key has to be properly programmed to the immobiliser and some vehicles affords provision for control board key copy

Saturn keyless entry device

Saturn keyless entry allow a user to unlock and lock the car door besides igniting the car yet avoiding inserting a key, and beginning at 2007, numerous Saturn cars on the road are equipped with some kind of a smart key structure that accommodate a brief distance remote transmitter.

With a smart-key, opening the door to your Saturn is generally achieved by sending a radio-frequency signal from a remote transmitter to a car main computer on an encoded data stream when you simply passing by within five feet of the vehicle with the proximity key in the pocket or on a key ring.

This combination of audio and infrared signal and the Saturn key-less entry mechanism, furthermore authorize pushtostart ignition (also called Clutch starting or Push starting). Using this system a user is capable of flaring up a motor vehicle by pressing a push-buttons on the dash-board as opposed to turning a key in a key crack.

Copy vs lost car keys

Car keys these days cost much more then $1.99 metal bladed keys at a nearest home depot or walmart store. Present-day Saturn keys evolve into digital switch-blade key, high security, keyfob and key-less entry accommodating transponder keys that need to be programmed with diagnostic tools to the car . If the ECM doesnt detect an appropriate chipped key, the fuel injection will locked and the car wouldn't crank. This instrument arranges a safety measurement safeguarding the immobilization of a misplaced or stolen key.

Although dashboard process is applicable on few earliest cars to freely duplicate keys, generally to get an extraneous key duplicated, the chip inside the key need to be programmed by a specific programmer owned by a locksmith or the dealership which normally priced at almost $60-$100 besides the cost of the key blank.

Misplacing a key to an automobile is a complete different occasion, since the vehicle ECM need to be reprogrammed to adopt the new key and renounce the original one which actually means that you will have call a mobile car locksmith or tow your car to the dealership.

Utilizing this process arranges a safety measurement safeguarding the immobilization of the misplaced or stolen key, yet lost key made, system applicable only to a licensed locksmith or the Saturn dealership and therefore will costs $175–$275.

Twenty four hour car lockout

Locked your car keys in the vehicle? No problem . Our mobile technician line a professional lockout services 24/7 rain or shine snow or sleet. With our modernized lockpick devices in addition to friendly and professional skilled staff, we can guarantee reliable and fast service for your pop a lock emergency needs.. It is our goal to prepare elite briskest vehicle lock-out Our road-side agents expertise in majority of lock complications on site, for most year, model and car manufacturer.

Motor vehicle locks re-keying

Elizabeth Key Replacement is glad to stake all type of Saturn rekey services on site to swap a shattered, misplaced or poached keys. Majority of present-day car are arrayed with electric lock and key technology and the action required to get your lock re-keyed have to contain the right compiler for the detailed vehicle. Instead of ferrying your motor vehicle to the dealer, just elevate the phone and call our customer care office in Elizabeth NJ and one of our car changing staff members will be with you as fast as possible with a versatile service truck having modern key cutters, programmers, blank keys and ignition parts ready to clarify any kind of emergency incidences.

Final words

Elizabeth Key Replacement team are working twenty four hour 7 day a week 365 days a year with the swiftest swiftest response in town. If you need to program a new remote, can't find the keys to your car or locked out of your car and wish sidestep the towing-truck to the dealer-ship, pick up your phone and call at (973)200-4870, share your model, year, auto manufacturer and your address. Our utterly fitted emergency team members will respond in a very short period of time copy a flip-key or a key-less entry, recover your lost key or replace your ignition switch onsite and put you back into your car immediately with low prices. . If you’re looking for Buy keys online Elizabeth Key Replacement.

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hunty-booboo · 5 years ago

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The Why's and How-To's of Vintage Jewelry

The mentality of "out with the old, in with the brand new" isn't constantly the case with regards to rings. Choosing your jewelry has always been a count of choice and flavor. Whether you want present day-looking earrings or not, there is constantly a unique region in humans's hearts approximately proudly owning property or antique earrings; it's miles a memorable piece of history and a sentimental price at your fingertips. These fantastic pieces symbolize the improvement and growth of the craft of jewellery making and have formed the modern-day tendencies and jewelry we have nowadays.

Why Buy Vintage Jewelry?

1. Value for Money

Everyone likes to shop cash. This is one of the most popular motives humans buy antique or pre-owned rings; it gives desirable price on your money. This is in particular actual for modern portions that are still in manufacturing today or pieces that we have an abundance of inside the marketplace. Estate rings have an advantageous charge as compared to shopping for the hefty price tag at retail. Since it is a pre-owned piece and had been previously worn or used, the charge for it depreciates every now and then drastically. If you don't thoughts some scratches right here and there to keep money, then pre-owned jewelry is without a doubt for you. Plus, a number of pre-owned pieces are clearly nevertheless in pristine and fantastic circumstance. Finding those portions can honestly be a good deal!

2. Unique and One-Of-A-Kind

Jewelry has been in lifestyles for centuries. Each era holds its personal unique craftsmanship and signature layout that caters to the taste and choice of a whole lot of people. With the absence of contemporary generation again within the day, each piece changed into intricately hand-made with antique global techniques and masses of hours. No piece looks and is made precisely the equal. Some of these techniques are now not being used and feature fashioned the way jewelers were making jewelry today. The strong point and rarity additionally add to the fee of antique portions extra time.

Image Credit The Diamond Club Unlike purchasing new and current pieces today, you may tailor your ring to the maximum unique criteria viable. From carat weight, color, clarity, layout, table ratio, millimeter length of the shank, and many others., a reputable jeweler can work with you and custom-make a hoop designed by you to the letter. With estate pieces, what you spot is often what you get. You will need a whole lot of time going from internet site to website or save to save to look for a chunk that honestly appeals to you. This is actually the fun of antique jewelry purchasing. Some people attribute finding and buying property rings as mementos of the revel in finding that specific piece.

Three. Exceptional Quality

Vintage earrings indicates first-rate first-rate because of the truth that they withstood the test of time. Jewelry is an funding that almost anyone develop attachment to and take actually top care of. That is why most vintage jewelry are still in excellent and wearable situation. You'll be surprised at how pristine and properly sorted a few very antique pieces we've in our series. Due to their exquisite standards and reputation, a number of jewelers like Roman Malakov promote estate and best jewelry that are durable and will last you many more generations to return (with the proper love and care of course).

4. History at Your Fingertips

As I said earlier, human beings broaden sure attachments to jewelry due to the fact they signify unique relationships and noteworthy reports of their lives. Each vintage piece has it is own place in records and basically, you are being a part of that tale. That is just something new jewelry simply does not have. They grow to be symbols of preceding eras and the craft that they had throughout the ones times. If no longer for the renovation and fee of pre-owned jewelry, the awesome and innovative design of each era might not have been favored by way of nowadays and future generations.

Buying Vintage Jewelry

1. Buy From a Reputable Jeweler

With the era in recent times, seeking out a reputable jeweler is simply an app or a click away. Check-out jewelers close to your area; make certain to study their evaluations, guidelines, client experiences (e.G. Yelp, Google evaluations), knowledge, etc. Unfortunately, there are shops out there that deliberately or by chance, mislead their clients to buying inauthentic vintage portions. That is why it's miles enormously critical to do your due diligence on the vendor while buying earrings in trendy. Do now not be afraid to invite questions. Make certain that they solution your questions with honesty and transparency. If you're shopping for antique rings on line, ensure the vendor has multiple pics of the piece and feature a properly-written description of the piece. If not, ask for greater pictures or facts. Jewelers will most probably ship more pictures that show the circumstance of the item and be transparent with their clients. Trust is one of the foundations of jewellery shopping for.

2. Evaluate The Condition of The Item

Most jewelers do now not restore or polish vintage earrings to maintain the authenticity and antique experience of the pieces. Being a pre-owned piece that has been worn for years, it should show symptoms of wear (e.G. Scratches, dents, and many others.). Little symptoms of wear is good; however make sure to check that there are not any cracks at the metallic or chips at the stones. If it seems modern, ask if it's been restored. If you are shopping for online, make certain you spot a couple of perspectives of the piece and studies approximately the jeweler's return policy.

Jewelry makers inside the past frequently signal their piece and leave marks in their initials or a small symbol. Be sure to test-out for that because it is a good sign of authenticity. This is especially authentic for pre-owned branded pieces including Cartier, Tiffany & Co., Chopard, and so on. These branded earrings agencies usually mark and signal their piece. If you're shopping for branded pre-owned earrings, ask in the event that they have the unique container and papers. If they have authenticity certificate, make sure the variety at the certificate healthy the wide variety stamped at the piece.

Three. Research & Price Check

Looks may be deceiving. That is why even doing just a little bit of research is going a protracted way. Research approximately diamond prices, what patterns enchantment to you, how a lot it usually costs, and so forth. You will no longer most effective be greater assured with antique rings shopping, you will also take lesser time and find it tons less difficult to save save to shop. The more records you have, the much more likely you will get an authentic piece and negotiate for an inexpensive fee.

Since property or vintage earrings are one-of-a-type, be wary once they promote antique portions in bulk. If a dealer advertises that they have got greater than 1 of the precise equal piece, tread carefully. They might have made vintage-searching pieces and are not real antiques. Be especially aware in their phrase usage; an instance of that is "antique style" or "antique look." These normally represent newly-made jewelry which have antique designs.

Also, vintage earrings have much records and value in them to be offered reasonably-priced. If you spot an vintage piece selling at a mind-blowing charge (e.G. A 1 carat antique diamond ring for $20-$100), think twice. As I stated in advance, without the technology we've now, it usually takes hundreds of hours for previous technology jewelers to handcraft and produce a lovely and one-of-a-kind piece. It takes precision, know-how, and experience within the craft to create a bit that might ultimate generations. This much work does now not simply move for a few bucks (except the vendor is clueless). This is wherein studies comes in. Cross-checking and validating the records and outline on a chunk (e.G. Diamond/gemstone charge, rate of comparable pieces, gold weight, size of stones, etc.) to discover it is intrinsic price is largely critical to realize it's authenticity. If the price substantially deviates or varies from different comparable pieces, have second mind about it.

To Conclude

You can find and purchase vintage and vintage earrings nearly anywhere; whether or not it be online or in brick-and-mortar shops. Buying clever is usually the maximum crucial element when shopping for earrings (antique or now not). But in case you are searching to shop for actual antiques, differentiating the real from the fakes will make sure which you are becoming the right price for the right object. Research is fundamental.

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