Voice of the Resistance

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• Commented on A reminder
  If defeating fascism depends on a celebrity CEO grifter like Musk - who doesn't pay his engineers so they go and sue him - to redesign the world economy, WWIII is already a historical occurrence and we're just waiting for...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  I'm German and call me old-fasioned, but I believe it's my duty to do everything in my power to fight fascism. What OGH speculates has me deeply worried. What can I concretely do to help? We all had a big...
• Commented on The Day After
  "There are a lot of racists in the US. They're decent people" It happened! Now I finally understand how Trump could happen. While I wasn't looking, somebody transported me to Bizarroworld. Racism, sexism, xenophobia are forms of decency here, and...
• Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
  Meh... The VR preachers were saying the same thing about VR back in '96. Nobody wanted to wear a bucket on their heads to play a game then, and you will be hard-pressed to convince me that stuff will fly...
• Commented on The unavoidable discussion
  Well, and guess what Apartheid, Stalinism and the National Reorganization Process were? Orders uphold by the po-po....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Rhesus Chart
  groan Everytime you use the S-word and other examples of their Newspeak, or even invite some of those cranks to shill on your blog you directly support this IT Scientology movement. It signals to the transhumanut and singuhilarity crackpots validation....
• Commented on Thoughtcrime
  Except that the Verfassungsschutz and co. were explicitly formed to stop rightwing-extremist, white-supremacist groups like the Nazis from taking over Germany ever again. These special institutions are the direct result of a unique history. Pray tell, what is the WWII-,...
• Commented on Thoughtcrime
  Wait a minute, did Call-Me-Dave just say that in order to uphold freedom of speech you have to abolish freedom of speech? Mind. Boggling....
• Commented on The Ultimate Tech Frontier: Your Brain
  This is not yet the iPhone era of brain implants. We're in the DOS era, if not even further back. And what in the blue hell makes you think implantology maps at all to the development history of consumer electronics...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  That comment chain hadn't anything to do with gene manipulation, but I'll humor you. CRISPR is fundamentally a repair technique, as it's designed solely for monogenic traits. You can wait a long time for GM unicorns, horns and related add-ons...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  No, Dirk, the full transhumanist response would be: "Not yet, but if you make a generous donation to my for-profit organization/start-up, you will be the first to have one in just twenty years!" Followed by the exact same line if...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  What, only to find myself trapped in a cult that repackages rehashed Christianist dogma into a nerd-friendly form? http://religiondispatches.org/the-promise-of-immortality-in-a-tech-enhanced-heaven/ "The transhuman future does indeed seem to make many of the same promises as most religions" Gee, wonder why that is,...
• Commented on Who Got Fantasy in My Science Fiction?
  Treating technoscientific development as magic is tantamount to being so open-minded that your brain falls out. You leave vulnerabilities unclosed and eventually the woo starts to creep in, rotting away reason and common sense. And if you think the sooper-scientific...
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  David Brin Uh, I may be a bit hazy about his stance on certain other issues, but what I do know about his views on privacy and gender relations casts that picture into doubt. Or did I not get the...
• Commented on The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots
  As the kids say these days, THIS. "SJW" is a particularly ludicrous slur meant to silence any opposition to the foaming-mouthed far-right populist hordes a lá Gamergaters and MRAs. I don't think I'm willing to "take it back" and start...
• Commented on Default Option
  Preach it, bro, preach it! TANSTAAFL! Meanwhile, moguls come out pro-feudalism: "You can get unemployed people that cost nothing" http://www.ibtimes.com/blackstone-groups-stephen-schwarzman-says-more-money-wont-improve-public-education-1792794 Turns out: "Ostensibly libertarian tech world is actually partly underwritten by the state" http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-new-book-claims-the-internet-has-bred-a-different-type-of-capitalism Silicon Valley shill asks how SillyCon...
• Commented on Default Option
  Insanity? Greg, let me show you what true insanity is: "I was recently wondering who was responsible for the psuedoscience which is integral to many of the manifesto promises in UKIP. Unsurprisingly I'd already heard of the man, but was...
• Commented on Default Option
  As long as the European Left hears the rallying cry and doesn't let the momentum bleed away to outorganize Golden Dawn, UKIP, AfD and all the other Nazis, I'm more than okay with that....
• Commented on Cloud cuckoo politics
  It's one thing to satirize extremists of $RELIGION, but it's a whole other story if you attack the religion as a whole with lowbrow bullshit like "Haw haw, look at them silly towelheads and their Abba god! Or was it...
• Commented on Cloud cuckoo politics
  Yeah, of course this SNAFU is the direct and immediate result of boo, hiss! LIBERAL ARTS!!1 Everybody, cut the nerd superiority, alright? This has nothing to do with the important and legitimate fields he studied. It's either pure vote catching,...
• Commented on Cloud cuckoo politics
  Periodic reminder what the Luddites actually were and why nobody who was ever called that by nerds was one. http://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/index.htm...
• Commented on Cloud cuckoo politics
  War har har, "Ali Baba, Peas be upon him". I'm rolling on the floor here. This is totally not bigoted and racist. You know, like Charlie Hebdo!...
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  "Proposing" is too strong of a word... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tTqdR7qtQ "Fantasizing", "babbling" or "wanking about" is more apt. He let his lackeys draw a cartoon about a sooper-train so he could bask in the celebration of gullible, ignorant nerds the world over....
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  It's almost like they were selling vaporware! Hmmmmm......
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  You assume the, cough, "security" authorities operate under pure rationality and not under several layers of systemic paranoia. As long as there's the slightest chance of Big Terrorist Plot, they will obstruct the shit out of it....
• Commented on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
  "At first glance, this isn't an obviously stupid assertion" Is it? Branson (and people like Musk) can't simply buy off former NASA personnel who either know exactly how to build this stuff or actually did build working prototypes, after all....
• Commented on CMAP: Short stories, what are they good for?
  Ellis, Morrison and Gaiman proved as much. It's just that the cinematic lags behind the graphic and literary side in the creativity department....
• Commented on CMAP: Short stories, what are they good for?
  My pet theory of why GotG was the smash hit it was is that general audiences are in the first stages of fatigue. They noticed, whether sub- or consciously, that superhero flicks are all the same damn movie (see 4chan's...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  I've... problems with Hamilton. For instance, in the Night's Dawn series there's the "ethnic streamlining" practice for colonizing new planets, i.e. taking members of one nation (as all nations are made up of just one ethnicity, don'tcha know?) to populate...
• Commented on On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
  Other way round, Wuxia movies are a Hollywoodification of wuxia. They're basically Westerns sans revolvers. Hero rides into oppressed town, beats up baddies and saves the day. Martial arts and Asian environments are but windowdressing....