The Goth Club

No, I’m not talking about the amazingly good movie, even if Jude Law was extremely sexy stuck in a wheelchair.

Jude Law and his impossibly sexily superior DNA

Nor the first 7 chemical elements that certainly define us as actual human beings either.

Today’s post is about the society presented by the film The terrible terrible society (with impeccably good taste in reviving art-deco styles) portrayed in the film is on the cusp of becoming a reality.

A quick synopsis for those of you out there that are such philistines (or if you’re Jewish, filasteins): in a very near future, society has become obsessed with whether or not you are genetically valid thanks to a very liberal program of eugenics. It all starts with insurance companies getting people to take genetic tests and then basically not insuring for certain things, or entirely, because it was an unacceptable financial risk for them (basically the ultimate in insurance companies being able to fuck over their customers… We can’t cover you for this medical condition because you’re likely to have it). In the storyline of the film, since this discrimination set a precedent, it opened up into other walks of life. Schools no longer had to take students because they didn’t have the genetic aptitude to excel (although we can already determine that with league tables, IQ tests and NAPLAN!). Employers could now refuse to employ people on the grounds that they were genetically predisposed to anti-social behaviours, or not excelling in their fields. Dating basically becomes obsolete because you just need to spit in someone’s general direction and they can find out if your suitable for what they want out of a child, with minimal genetic tampering required… and allthose that don’t fit these wonderful biological stereotypes, regardless of what they actually manage to achieve are called “invalids”.

It’s kind of a more up to date, smarter version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the best people were actually just average, and everyone else was made inferior by pouring booze into their gestation tanks.

You want some of that hot DNA for your child. In your child. Jude Law just totally in your child...

And right now it is starting with insurance companies that want to screen people so they don’t have to insure them! From there, it’s a slippery slope not to let it go further. And in some parts of the world, such as the United States, it already has. Many high tier firms are requesting genetic samples from their employees, often under the guise (and here’s the sick part) of screening them for what the company’s insurance is actually going to cover.

The idea of breeding out unwanted traits, and then actively working in a way that enriches society seems good, especially if you are like myself, genetically superior to a large proportion of the population. Intellect, decent health, not predisposed to anything major… Why wouldn’t I want to discriminate against those that are not amazingly great, or better?

Yes, there it is. His genetic material delivery device... and soup drinker... Mmmm, Jude Law DNA....

The truth is, I don’t, and a lot of people are probably right now thinking I’m some kind of Nazi loving monster. Yes, thank you Nazis, you’ve ruined yet another area of research for everyone.

I actually do believe in liberal eugenics like this, but the operative word here is “like”. Let’s face it, as much as we all would love to believe the pap that everyone is born equal, there are those that are simply more equal than others andsomehow manage to get a few extra digits tucked in on the right hand side of their equation. I don’t think people should be negatively discriminated against because of random acts of how they were born. It’s my belief that a society like this can only be fair and functional if everyone, not just the rich, has access to technology allowing them to tamper with their potential children’s make up, adding some non-present genetic code to improve them, and removing code that is faulty. To that end, we can use genetic manipulation technology for a very positive form of eugenics.

And this is what you get if you drink from the soup of Jude Law

After two or three of generations of succesful breeding in such a manner, it would then be possible to institute discrimination like this without it being inherently unfair. Admittedly you will get morons who insist on not improving their genetic stock, or think it’s all some gub’mint program to plant tracking devices in their genes so the aliens can monitor them because the president’s really a lizard from Neptune … however, they’re likely to not only pass on inferior genetic material to their progeny, but also a lack of education which they fully make up for with various prejudices. And societies as a whole are generally better off without those sorts of people.

Oh shit yeah, we were talking about DNA and bioethics... Ummm, here's a picture of a helix!

Of course, the flip side of all this is what I like to call the Mike Judge theory of current human evolution, but everyone else calles Idiocracy. The sad fact of the matter is that certain people are breeding a hell of a lot faster, and these are usually people that are in the lower echelons of the social heirarchy. And let’s call a spade a spade here, it’s often due to some genetic inferiority *coughinbreedingcoughlikeinSouthAustraliacoughagainwiththeGermanscough* So is it really so terrible if we decide that it’s time to start handing out the good stuff to everyone? It would certainly be a more cost effective and substantially less traumatic way of improving the human species compared with other options, such as cybernetic adaption. As much as I techno-fetishize, I’d actually much rather have been born a hell of a lot better than I currently am, rather than have to have my eyes replaced to deal with my myopia, and better muscle tone instead of stealing some poor monkey’s 3rd arm.

So this brings us back to the old time of me posting these rants where I’d actually ask some rhetorical questions for you to ponder over for the week:

• We’re already tampering with animals and foodstuffs to ensure superior product, and not just for food. Is it really so different to tamper with people if they’re not actually people yet?
• If you had to submit to a genetic test in order to get insurance, would you actually go out and buy someone else’s genetic material to do it, like someone that buys urine to pass a drug test?
  • Would you be desperate enough to close your eyes and suck it through a “hose” if it was the only way to get quality black market material?
• Assuming you could tamper with phenotypes and appearances of your children, would you give them that Eurasian look and a fine arse, knowing that those are things in life that would actually get them further with minimal real effort?
• As genetic defects due to inbreeding are now gone, what happens to the whole incest taboo?
  • Was it ever really a taboo with identical twins? Cause, really, let’s be honest, that shit is kinda hot… Not so much a question, just something I had to get out there.
• Would such a society simply become more an more pretentious about the “quality” of someone’s genes, like in the anime series Geneshaft?

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Let's face it. Love sucks, and nothing sucks more than Kirby

A happy, love filled, wonderful Valentine’s to you all, what with your nice delightful sexy partners that you can just snuggle up to, whisper a sweet nothings to¹, and instantly get gratuitous down and dirty kinky sex.

Failing that, you could just go out to a club on Saturday night (of which there are several if you look up the Events section here), get insanely drunk on these, and have someone take you home with them, whereupon if you’re only missing your wallet and boots, it was a good night. Read the rest of this entry »

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Eh, it's still more fun than going to RnB nights

Not to be read from the German translation of “The Caramel Chap, The!”

As many of you are now aware, Miss Twist has left us here in Victoria and gone to Perth… I’m sure she’ll have fun at the goth club there, which I’m told is  park bench with a strobing sodium arc light above it, and some dude in a trenchcoat with an iPod dock.

I kid, I kid! There’s a post about club Sin somewhere in the events section. I’m expecting a report anytime soon now.

So what’s this got to do with getting you drunk this weekend?

Well, we went on a long country drive through Victoria’s south coastal wine regions… Read the rest of this entry »

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Well… maybe if programmers lived in my neighbourhood when I was growing up, this’d be a Saturday morning cartoon.

It would seem that I have exhausted the supply of legitimate, ye oldè religious cartoons that have very fucked up teachings (I still insist they a lot of them simply have not made their way to YouTube / Vimeo), so we’re going to have to go with a new tack to keep you folks entertained on a Saturday morning.

Last week I showed you all how I think The Wizard of Oz should have ended.

This week is scene you’d only normally find on the special edition, re-re-release of Avatar: Director’s Cut.

The real irony is that there actually was a sex scene in the script where they have intimate hair tendril sex… but it was cut because it might have been a bit too full on for the young children going to see it. Ummm, are these the same tendrils that their sticking in animals? Considering parasites and disease exist on every world, what kind of freaky STDs would they have picked up? Psychic worms? Bioluminescent herpes?

Being a little more serious, this scene does raise some interesting questions. Whilst one might think that these questions were actually answered by Kirk in the first series of Star Trek, and then again in numerous fantasy canon with all the half-fantasy race creatures out there (half-giant? Really now? How does that even work logistically? You either get torn in half by a giant’s cock that’s nearly the same size as you, or you drown in vaginal lubrication and it’s doubtful your sperm will get further than two feet… I suppose maybe some giants having alfresco out in the forest and accidentally missing and hitting the local village? But then there’s still the issue of women basically exploding to give birth. It’s all very anime!), but it hasn’t been!

That's right, James Cameron has made furrys of us all...

Precisely how do two vastly genetically different creatures actually mate? Interspecies erotica!! Kelly can be a guys name!!! The whole sex scene is in avatar was predicated on the basis that the N’avi anatomy was somewhat like the picture here, or was at least left for the viewers to believe it was such.

Even considering the fact that Jake is technically in a N’avi body, and one assumes is somewhat cognisant of the biology behind it simply from using it, there’s still the issues surrounding the psychological and social implications of sex not only with an entirely different species, but also simply not knowing what those issues are between species.

Ahhh, Photoshop. Hours of fun! Click for full size

Considering the primitive nature of the society in which the N’avi live, and the hostility of the world that they supposedly live so harmoniously with, it’s hard to imagine that there is actually expectation of monogamy, which is predominantly a social construct, and rarely exhibited in hostile environment species as they are attempting to spread as much of their genetic material as possible.

This still doesn’t take into account the social impacts. In Avatar, Jake’s actually responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people (which does get mentioned in the How Avatar Should Have Ended cartoon) because he should have actually been attempting to setup a trade deal of some kind. Let’s face it, humans wanted the metal under the tree… Surely, with technology advanced enough to go interstellar distances and be profitable, it would be more than possible to set up an ecologically friendly (as possible) mining operation if it were fully explained to the N’avi (let’s face it, if it’s worth $20m/kg, it’ll still be profitable to setup an expensive mining operation)… But no, let’s get some native bush in the bush with my hairy tendrils, thinks Jake Sully.

So what does Avatar teach us? Actually, it’s almost along the lines of religious teachings really (oh yeah, sneak the religion in for the getting-back-on-topic segue…).

We learn that we should:

• Be good to the environment;
• Respect one another;
• Not betray our own people, whomever they may be;
• and don’t fuck aliens (read: people that aren’t your skin colour) or you’ll be responsible for the apocalypse!

Personally, I give this extra scene four and a half spinning blue cocks.

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