Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Republicans don't need NASA for a mission to Mars.

They'll just let pollution turn the Earth into Mars.

2 comments:

jimf said...

Hey, I have a solution for Republicans struggling to figure out
a way to dismantle the ACA (this will take care of Social Security
and Medicare too). It came to me in a dream last night!

Here's the thing. Instead of paying for doctors and hospitals
and retirement annuities, the government should just give money
to one of the cryonics companies to warehouse the superannuated.
But bag those tanks of liquid nitrogen. We need to develop the
hi-tek slice-'n-scan neuroimaging approach. Hey, dontcha think
Intel would be willing to devote a few more Bills to this,
given the right tax breaks?

So then, when folks get sick or just too old to work, they'll
just get uploaded into the Cloud to await the Singularity.
I think this would work for the prison population, too.
(I guess their data would need a bit of editing before they
got reactivated, though.)

But maybe the Cloud isn't the right storage medium.
No, let's take a hint from Scientology, and engrave the scan
data on stainless steel, or titanium, or something cool
like that, and bury it underground.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base ).

Isn't that a brilliant idea? Am I a genu-wine policy-wonk
genius, or wot?

Hey, are any o' them Trump cabinet posts left?

jimf said...

Speak of the devil:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/magazine/600-miles-in-a-coffin-shaped-bus-campaigning-against-death-itself.html
-------------
600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself

Zoltan Istvan ran for president with a
modest goal in mind: human immortality.

By MARK O’CONNELL
FEB. 9, 2017
====


The cover story in the same magazine is a bit more edifying, if
rather depressing.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/magazine/how-a-fractious-womens-movement-came-to-lead-the-left.html
-------------
How a Fractious Women’s Movement Came to Lead the Left

Feminism brought the opposition together. But how
long will that last, and how many converts can it win?

By AMANDA HESS
FEB. 7, 2017

. . .

[A] conflict that has dogged women’s organizing from the very beginning:
Of all the tensions that have coursed through the women’s movement,
none has ever been quite so pronounced as the one between white
and black women. Consider what happened when Sojourner Truth showed
up at a women’s rights convention in Ohio in 1851. . .
A “buzz of disapprobation” spread through the church. White women
in attendance complained that a black woman’s testimony would
distract from the convention’s focus. . .

[T]wo years later, Truth still drew jeers from white crowds
when she attended women’s meetings. A vision of whiteness was
ingrained in the leaders and the arguments of the mainstream movement.
Even the suffragists’ signature white clothes were deliberately
chosen to signal purity. This ideal of feminine virtue did not
extend to black women, or working-class ones. Some suffragists made
their racism and classism explicit. In 1894, a white woman at
a meeting of the Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association complained
that New York had become an “asylum for the trash of all nations,”
arguing that women’s suffrage ought to be restricted. “Think what
it means to give it to all women,” she said. “Our criminal
and pauper men have wives; there are thousands of female
operatives in tobacco factories and similar fields of labor;
there are probably two million Negro women in this country who
are but little uplifted above the plane of animals.” . . .

Over time, these racial contours would harden into lasting
institutions. When women’s social clubs spread across the
United States at the turn of the century, two models emerged.
Whites-only clubs leveraged middle-class women’s leisure time
to campaign for social reforms. Black women, who largely worked
outside the home, came together around urgent needs. . .
The main distinction between clubs, the black activist
Fannie Barrier Williams wrote, was that for black women,
“it is not a fad.” . . .

This dynamic is not only a thing of distant history: In the
thick of feminism’s second wave, women were often still divided
along lines of identity. In 1967, as the best-selling author
Betty Friedan called the first meeting of the New York chapter
of the National Organization for Women, she found herself at
odds with a black activist and lawyer named Flo Kennedy, who
pushed the women around her to make common cause with the
antiwar and Black Power movements. Friedan and the meeting’s host. . .
were not pleased. . . [T]hey “went bonkers.”

Friedan’s 1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique,” had been an
awakening for a class of white, married, middle-class women,
and she pictured herself as the leader of what she called
a “mainstream” feminist movement. When women at one
1970 march offered her a lavender armband to wear in
solidarity with a NOW member recently attacked for her
bisexuality, Friedan dropped it on the ground,
furious at the attempt to add gay rights to her program. . .
====


**Her** program. :-/