We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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He’s no fun, he fell right over It seems a Japanese company has invented a human steering device. It is external, harmless and affects the sense of balance.
The article suggests uses in gaming where tweaking the balance system helps make immersive gaming more realistic. One must wonder: how much time will pass before the porn industry picks up on this?
There are darker uses I am sure you can easily imagine. A company is already studying the use of the ideas for crowd control by affecting their sense of balance. One can imagine implants to control gulag prisoners of future Stalin’s.
My dark crystal gets darker still from there.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Omigod, everyone … read the link! A Japanese reporter agreed to have this used on him and it sounds absolutely nightmarish!
In Soviet Russia, the robots remote control you!
I can see party whips using this during divisions!
The brewers have been using a similar system for years!…
Ugh…most of the time I’m so excited to see the technological advances we are making and devices like this jolt me back to reality. Don’t really want to think about it. How long before that make an end of days movie about this…?
Calm down, everybody. It might also be one of the technological miracles that saves millions of elderly people from not being able to get around, because of fear-of-falling-induced muscle rigidity. (Talk to some bodyworkers or anybody who deals with the elderly, this is a serious issue, and maybe the A-#1 issue keeping otherwise-healthy older folks from being able to get around.) If you can mess up the sense of balance, you can also learn how to reinforce it…
Hi Dale
If this ever is used as a non leathal weapon I’m sure that someone will develop a counter measure to it. Maybe a jammer.
The US has got the active denial system ready to go. It uses mircowaves to produce pain in the nerves on near the outer layer of skin , it pretty painful They tried it out on me at an Air Force event a couple of years ago.
It has not been deployed, partly because the lawyers have issues with it – less than lethal versus non lethal etc. , but also I suspect because they don’t want to make it easy for the bad guys to develop counter measures.
Or, just imagine how cool riding a motorbike or flying a plane in GTA will be now!! I want one!
More seriously, think of the ramifications for fly-by-wire and remote flight. And remember, it isn’t crowd control: they are putting something on your head first!
Something on your head now… something IN your head eventually.
THAT’S what scares me.
Monique – Yeah. IN your head eventually. Probably at birth. We are now in Aldous Huxley territory.
Ah hell, I just give the poster kudos for working in a FireSign Theater reference..
Larry
You got it 🙂 I spent my college years amongst those strange sorts of theatre people who’d sit around a table in an evening abusing substances and carrying on conversations filled with lines from Firesign… or sometimes doing whole sections of the records!
Do you have the key? No, I split half with the sound man.
It is the potential abuse of developments such as this, which, as one post pointed out also has positive therapeutic uses, makes the uncompromising defense of individual rights and liberty so important.
In a society which respects human rights, because its citizens demand it and will brook no infringements except those absolutely necessary, the positives can be explored while the negatives are avoided.
In a society in which rights are merely legal or social constructs granted by the society, as a recent post asserted, and can be abridged at the whim of some nebulous public purpose for the allegedly “common good”, any positives are quickly overwhelmed by the allure of power over one’s fellows.
The demand of free people to be free and left alone by the “powers that be” is not legitimate because of some possible good outcome, or because they can then steal property and make money, as one particularly repulsive analysis recently asserted, or because the state has agreed to allow them certain freedoms that can just as quickly be withdrawn, or for any other reason external to the individual free entity involved.
Inalienable rights are such because they are intrinsic to the existence and fulfillment of the human person.
It is only in a society which views individuals as means to an end, instead of ends in and of themselves, that the stuff of nightmares—the boots eternally grinding down faces—can arise.
In a society of free individuals, the one who attempts to don that boot will wear it to the grave, with a neat round hole right between the eyes.
Sic semper tyrannis.
Amen.
Remember: “If you push something hard enough, It WILL fall over.”
Fudd’s Law
(Don’t Step On That Dwarf, Hand ME The Pliers)
Or, just imagine how cool riding a motorbike or flying a plane in GTA will be now!! I want one!
Hm… these gizmos have definite potential. Consider a driving game, where you actually feel your center-of-gravity shift in the curves… this has the potential to be very cool.
More seriously, think of the ramifications for fly-by-wire and remote flight. And remember, it isn’t crowd control: they are putting something on your head first!
Yup. If you’re not wearing the gizmo…
Actually, given what passes for protestors these days, I’d be less than surprised if they were wearing these gizmos to protests! But their subsequent death from walking off a cliff would come under natural selection, for me.
This is what rights are.
Rights are not natural rights, because they do not flow from the mere fact of humanity and they are not necessary for humanity to exist. Possibly suboptimally, but humanity still exists.
Rights are not inalienable, because they have been alienated and people continue to exist and society continues to function. Whether it is an optimal society is another matter, but is not the point.
Rights are not self-evident, because philosophers and moralists have been arguing about what they are for centuries and are still doing it.
Rights ARE pragmatic constructs of society. That this is so is clearly seen from the facts that rights are heavily dependent on the nature of a given society, vary from society to society, and vary over time within a given society.
EG
“[Don’t Crush] That Dwarf, Hand Me…” etc.
“Rights ARE pragmatic constructs of society.”
So are scientific (falsifiable) theories. Yet they ‘aim’ at the truth do they not?
Is there not some sense in which natural rights theories also ‘aim’ at the truth, although different methods of rejecting propositions are used?
Indeed they do. However, given that it is hard to explain where natural rights supposedly come from and by what mechanism, whereas it is easy to see how they are social constructs, how they develop, why the exist, why they change, etc., it would appear obvious what the truth is more likely to be. Occam’s razor, and so forth.
Of course, just as there is a sense in which religion aims at the truth. Aiming doesn’t mean hitting, though.
And what is the method of falsifying the idea of natural rights? It’s a quasi-religious position in its nature (no pun intended), and so it’s not obvious how it is supposed to be falsified other than pointing to the alternative view which has evidence in its favour, is a reaonable interpretation of reality and which matches with the experience of history.
EG
Belief does matter. If people believe in their RIghts as Natural, then they will be as willing to fight and die to keep them. As much as we may wish to impose a theory of rationality in all things upon humanity, it won’t work. People are rational when it suits them. If we wish to live in liberty then people must devoutly believe in it. Otherwise they are likely to believe in something that enslaves them and makes them suffer… all for that wonderful afterlife of course!
Theory matter to scientists and it does help set the ethos of a society. But unfortuneately, theory will neither make nor keep you free.
“And left!
Think of Left!
And think about BEFT.
Why is it that beft
always go to the left?
And why is it
so many things
go to the Right?
You can think about THAT
until Saturday night.” – Dr. Seuss, “The Thinks You Can Think”
People must devoutly believe in God, otherwise they are likely to believe in the Devil, which will enslave them and make them suffer. Compare and contrast.
Sorry, but I neither like nor accept the Calvinist approach to doctrinal purity in politics. People do not need to be told what to believe in, nor do they need to be bent to a particular view however subtly, nor indoctrinated, nor propagandised . Provided there is a mechanism for them to freely express their political views, and provided the political system more or less implements the general will of the people, that’s enough.
EG
There’s a nice, funny little movie on DVD now called “Second Hand Lions”. It stars Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, two of my favorites, and the “I see dead people” kid, now about 14. It’s a coming of age story, among other things, and my almost 14 yr old loves it.
Anyway, towards the end, Duvall’s character gives the kid a portion of his “what every man should know” speech. Part of the speech is, “A man should believe in some things because they are the things worth believing in.” He then gives some examples,”Honor and virtue mean everything. Money and power, power and money mean nothing. Good will always triumph over evil. And true love never dies.”
I would add that a free man knows who, and why, he is what he is, and that it is worth defending.
The servile man, however, knows what he is all too well, and spends his time trying to convince everyone it is the natural state of things that all should eventually accept, as he has.
And that is all the time and energy I’m going to waste on that. I never bother to argue with statists. If they were rational, they wouldn’t be what they are, and they wouldn’t spend their energies enabling oppression and sneering at the concept of liberty.
I think it’s quite reasonable that anyone should believe in decency, virtue, honour and many similar things.
I just don’t think anyone needs to be told what to believe in, nor do I think there is a “correct” set of beliefs.
EG
Not a correct set per se. But in a land where the people no longer believe in Liberty, slavery and oppression are not far away.
I know you would like to imagine people as utterly rational. We are not. We are mammals with an attitude and we do not live up to the standards of our forebrain as often as we would like to imagine.
Quite the opposite, as I have frequently opined.
EG
In the 60’s some SF novels by people like John Brunner and Michael Moorcock suggested devices that would cause epileptic seizures being used as riot control devices. Combinations of flashing strobes and electromagnetic emanations would be beamed at the rioters to leave them twitching on the ground. Is SF again proving not wrong but too early?