Cyberpunk is one of those genres that is clearly defined by it’s elements. It’s always got some form of post humanism, some form of technology corrupting society, some form of secret cabal that controls the rest of the world, some form of societal degradation, and always, always there has been a massive shift in the economy to either total collapse, or brink of collapse with everything controlled by the aforementioned secret cabal.

I know that most of these posts on cybperunk have been concentrating on technology that already exists, and me calling out the scoffers who claim bullshit on the tech. Well, what about the societal concepts as well? Having been paying attention to the crap that’s going down both here and abroad lately, it’s beginning to make me seriously think that perhaps Ben Elton, William Gibson and Masamune Shirow were onto something. (more…)

Wow, even Buddhists are fucked up!

Actually, in a way, I think that stands to reason. For a start, almost all of those statuettes that people think are meant to be Buddha… Here’s a fat happy guy with the huge droopy ears. Ok, I dig, he’s found inner happiness by giving up worldly desires. So how’d he get so rotund? Looks like someone still desires sugary treats, if you know what I’m saying.

But I digress… you just want your Sabbath morning cartoons, and I totally understand that. It’s just that this week’s is a Buddhist one… kinda. It’s called Birth, although in the early 90s was released by Harmony Gold as Planet Busters or World of the Talisman, depending which market you were in. It also had a dub that made it entirely suitable for kids, which was kind of not the point.

In the early 00s, ADV re-released it with a different dub, with some of the very fucked up original Japanese dialogue (including the rant by the now homosexual emo teen terracidal robot), but dropped a lot of the religious references… Go figure.

Either way, the clip you’re seeing here is the very last few moments, which are actually radically different from the rest of this pointless, yet entertaining romp, through many of the central tenants of Buddhism… with sexy arses an giant robots that shoot lasers from their face.

Hey, if you think this is disrespectful or something, you should see Legend of the Overfiend… also based on the central tenants of Buddhism… somehow…

I bet some of you thought I’d abanadoned this… and you were happy about it, too! Weren’t you!? Rejoicing in the streets like Fox News journalists when they heard that Muslims were probably behind the Twin Tower Airplane Takedown!

Well, I’ve abandoned nothing, except my sense of shame, and that was years ago! YEARS!

No, I simply had yet another one of my bouts of depression. Actual depression. Not the sad emo kind where I mope about and then feel better by shit talking other people, comparing medications and buying new clothes. The actual kind where you put on a saccharine smile, continue about your mundane life like some sort of automated robot-zombie, and other than forgetting to actually bathe every other day because it just seems like too much effort, no one twigs on to the fact that anything could actually be… y’know… wrong. Besides, if you’re into anime, people just take the non-bathing as par for the course.

And then I remembered to take my Fukitol, and it all went away.

Better lviing through chemistry. Remember it. Live it. Love it. Be sad that Repo The Genetic Opera has been made into a shitty action movie, with just enough changes so that the guy that created it gets nothing, and continue living because not doing so is just as pointless, but has fewer orgasms.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

« Older Posts — Newer Posts »