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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Well, the thing about the Singularity boys is how much they have in common with South Seas Cargo Cults. If you build it, It will come, It being variously interpreted, although there seems to be a consensus that all the former things will pass away; whether or not this is a Good Thing being dependent on how you feel about the quality of your own life I suppose. Eschatology is like that: what you bring to the theatre is more important than what you find there.
But the core thing of it is pretty simply sympathetic magic: we may not understand this thing, but if we add a whole lot more of it, things will surely change. What ties it all together is how much we either exult in or dread change itself. Everybody dreads the thought that no, actually, things will, in most important areas, pretty much go on as before.
Because in the mean time, as we kick all this around, most of us will get on with the business of life: making babies, making and eating food, crying into our pillows, and so on; pretty much the same as it always was. Dreadful and unmagical quotidian reality, with paradigms unshifted.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
