Dale Carrico is no James Kunstler

by: John Howard

Fri Dec 18, 2009 at 18:14:57 PM EST

The Future's So Bright You Gotta Wear Shades

I truly worry that this was the last chance for democratic push-back, peer-to-peer, against a neo-feudal corporate-militarist America, and we may well be blowing it, right here, right now. Longer term education-agitation-organization may well be trending away from Movement Republicanism, not to mention ramifying pressures from post-US-hegemonic players, but it isn't at all clear that unraveling neoliberal ponzi-schemes, climate change, energy and resource descent, arms proliferation, global destabilization among other planetary problems are waiting around to give us time to become sane enough soon enough to be equal to them. The United States could very easily become in no time flat a hopelessly diseased distressed debt-ridden ignorant gun-saturated backwater neck deep in Greenhouse storms and riven with ethnic and ideological hatreds, while moneyed and incumbent interests retreat to walled enclaves with their loot to watch the show and pluck out the occasionally photogenic slave.

That's Dale echoing Kunstler, but with his peer-to-peer/education fixation replacing Kunster's clarion call for "re-scaling, re-localizing, and de-globalizing of our daily activities."

Below the flip, Dale eviscerates the Transhumanists for contributing to this epic collapse, but um, not really...

All that in mind, I must say that the always already somewhat surreal exchanges I have been having for years with chirpy futurologists handwaving about the technogizmolicious acceleration of acceleration toward gengineered and cyborgic hardbodies with three-foot chromium phalluses and nanobotic treasure caves and better-than-real virtual orgy-pits and escaping via uploading, rocketing, space elevatoring, geo-engineering, or otherwise technofixing our way out of climate catastrophe and all of this under the watchful eye of some sooper-kind sooper-genius sooper-Dad singularitarian robot god have become such obscene gargoyles of epic implausibility and irresponsibility (except as, you know, straight up escapist geek wankery without any pretensions to actual policymaking or sciencemaking) that it is almost impossible to believe that all these transhumanists and extropians and techno-immortalists I've been sparring with over their stealthily reactionary politics and conceptual confusions and theological vestiges are really for real at all. I mean, really? Really?

This sounds like what I've been saying to the sci-fi addled postgenderist libertarians who demand the right to attempt to procreate with anyone regardless of their sex.  So I was hoping that Dale was starting to see the big picture, and, in the spirit of both this blog and his post, that he would be ready to put aside his silly demand for equal procreation rights with his husband (Dale is a man also) and prioritize real problems.  But no, it turns out that he doesn't consider same-sex procreation to be a form of the extropian silliness that he ridicules, he doesn't think that the fight for equal rights for same-sex couples distracts us from real problems.  To Dale, same-sex procreation is a cool future technology that will enable him to transcend the limits of human ability.  Sorry Dale but same-sex conception is extropian, and you're an extropian for demanding a right to do it.

I asked him to look in the mirror in the comments, but he went back into his shell, refusing to see that his delusional demand for Postgenderism and transgendered/same-sex procreation technology is holding back progress and distracting us from real problems.  

He critiques the Transhumanist movement, but he IS a Transhumanist as far as believing that genetic engineering must be allowed, believing, like Transhumanists, that it's a reproductive liberty and people should have access to "lifeway diversity" and reproductive control over creating other people,  He just wants to make it milquetoast and unobjectionable by framing it as an educated, consensual freedom to create people however people chose to.  His objection to the Transhumanists is that he thinks they are putting a bad face on it, their "robot-god/immortality/space-elevator" crap is going to ruin it for the "postgender Transhumanists", who are trying to be slip genetic engineering in as stealthily and stately as possible.