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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Having gone to Golgotha last night, it occurs to me that a lot of promoters really… well… can’t.

Promote that is.

If it got any worse, there'd be tears of blood

I’ve decided that as I endeavour to make GothClub.com.au more of a site that is of actual use to the Australian gothic community, rather than something for the amusement and blitherings of myself & select friends, that I’ll be putting up a list of clubs that are on around the country, special events, etc., and a little bit of detail on everything that I can get. I was also hoping that a few people from interstate might even consider writing reviews for their local haunts and keeping me updated with events that are happening outside of Victoria

To that end, I decided to do some serious research on the national goth scene and found something that really flabbergasted me.

The majority of goth clubs are really poorly promoted. (more…)

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This post may come off sounding like great plot to a SciFi film, and it probably is. The problem is that every link I’m putting in here is either an academic paper, or a research project that is actually currently underway, usually for military contract.

So how do manage to destroy ourselves?

Self adaptive robots: designed to survive, read situations, help each other and self evolve. Basically the Godel machines that DARPA already appears to be working on.

The robots mimic basic animals to begin with, and are too basic to be called AI. They do have limited survival drive and can share information. They could also reproduce given the availability of finished materials. To think that it would start out with some grandiose A.I., like in the Terminator films is misguided for numerous reasons, least of all being the complexity of creating a real A.I. system which requires more than mere binary states of current non-quantum computational architecture, and basic safeguards one would hope the folks DARPA are smart enough to install.

It begins with basic models escaping field tests and self reconstructing due to limited processing power of single units. As more units develop by scavenging parts from available sources (and places like electronics stores would basically become a spawning ground) they become faster at building their own basic models, as well as constructing new models, due to increased numbers available to help construct others and the processing power of working in hive like networks. Other designs are quickly developed through trial and error processes to make them better suited for specific tasks.

What starts out as basic survive and adapt units has now become a colony that has specialised roles.

• Hunter Gatherers
• Guardians
• Builders
• Processing Units

The threat would be initially ignored as science fiction, until Guardian units started attacking people to defend colonies, or hunter gatherer units identified human dwellings as optimal material gathering grounds, or worse, that some human tissues would be naturally useful.

Further specialisations would occur in Guardians to specifically attack humans who are active threats. Units from different colonies would pass on information and designs to other colonies, if they exist which is likely at this point as some units would have fallen out of the communication net, when they randomly pass each other buy.

True A.I. would be highly unlikely to come about in this instance as self adaptation routines are unlikely to create anything more advanced than methods for dealing with issues. The necessity for actual thought and reason would simply not exist, and the ability to further improve on designs to achieve this end are equally unlikely.  “Smart” behaviours would that mimick thought, at least in a tactical sense, would be present and slowly become more advanced. Electronics stores & warehouses will become hives. Places that humans have to go to, such as petrol station, will become assault grounds should humans become widely identified as a threat. In this instance, retaliation would occur, but be largely pointless as colonies and hives that are attacked will quickly learn to hide processing units and some basic HGs and Builders as a means of continuing the colony and starting over.

Whilst they may be rudimentary compared to the robotic swarms we expect from post-apocalyptic science fiction films, they still hold two major advantages over us. 1) They don’t work as collective individuals; and 2) they will have a learning time of zero for replacement units, versus the at least ten years it would take for our own. From a purely mathematical stand point, there’s no way they could lose.

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Those of you that are regular readers know that I try to keep my personal life out of this thing. After all, if there’s something that the world doesn’t need, it’s another nagging, whining “woe is me” blog by some angst ridden no-longer-teenager that can’t even write poetry. Attempting to maintain that often means that there are times when the blog won’t get updated for weeks, except for posts that I’ve written well into the past and scheduled, which are no longer working by the time they post (i.e. Disney’s Muhammed). To that end, I’m attempting to write something of a missive, instead of a personal bitch fest about how craptacular my year has actually been… so bear with me here:

A.K.A. Giving Apathy 100% (more…)

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