PurpleMassGroup - Front Page

Alternet article on "Bizarre Libertarian Plan"

John Howard — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:57:51 GMT

Hey, the meme is spreading, people are beginning to notice the Libertarian Transhumanists and their outsized influence on the politics of today. Alternet has a great article by Brad Reed entitled "The Ultimate Escape: The Bizarre Libertarian Plan of Uploading Brains into Robots to Escape Society" and Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society picks up on it and connects it to the New Yorker's revelation of Billionaire Libertarian David Koch's covert steering of the Tea Party activism into a Libertarian movement, which means a Transhumanist movement also. The Tea Party's opposition to "death panels" is a seed planted to grow into but a demand for funding life-extension and transhumanism research, who cares about plain old medicine for everybody?

Update: Just discovered another Darnovsky must-read: Libertarians Diss Democracy

How to help transgendered people right now

John Howard — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:20:30 GMT

So it looks like the Transgender Bill is stalled in the State House and causing lots of headaches and wasting time for the Representatives who are looking for a way to resolve this, not to mention the activists working for and against this important bill.

Well, there is a way to resolve this, by specifying in the bill that nothing in the bill implies a right to conceive children as the other gender, and affirming that people only have the right to conceive children as the sex which they would be most likely able to conceive children as, using their natural unmodified genes.

This would achieve all the stated aims of the trans activists, while eliminating fears about being forced to pay for transgender reproduction and surgery.

It is worth a try, is it not?

There is no place for Transhumanism in Conservativism

John Howard — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:39:02 GMT

It should be obvious from the words themselves that Transhumanism and Conservatism are essentially completely opposite and mutually exclusive enemies of each other:

Conservatism (Latin: conservare, "to preserve") is a political attitude that advocates institutions and traditional practices that have developed organically, thus emphasizing stability and continuity.

Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes.

Indeed, the opposite movement to Transhumanism is called "Bioconservatism":

Bioconservatism (a portmanteau word combining "biology" and "conservatism") is a stance of hesitancy about technological development especially if it is perceived to threaten a given social order. Strong bioconservative positions include opposition to genetic modification of food crops, the cloning and genetic engineering of livestock and pets, and, most prominently, rejection of the genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human beings to overcome what are broadly perceived as current human biological and cultural limitations.
Bioconservatives range in political perspective from right-leaning religious and cultural conservatives to left-leaning environmentalists and technology critics. What unifies bioconservatives is skepticism about medical and other biotechnological transformations of the living world. Typically less sweeping as a critique of technological society than bioluddism, the bioconservative perspective is characterized by its defense of the natural, deployed as a moral category

In spite of how obvious it is that there is absollutely nothing conservative about transhumanism, many Transhumanists call themselves conservatives, often prefacing the term as "libertarian" conservative, and are trying to achieve their anti-conservative goals by picking out a few aspects of conservativism that they need to advance their agenda. In particular, they appeal to conservative principles such as laissez-faire policies for businesses and state's rights and opposition to federal laws and regulations, as well as policies that increase private wealth to enable them to maximize their investment in biotech research and give them as much free reign and money as possible. It is a very self-interested harnessing of conservatism to fulfill short-term goals, because most Transhumanists recognize that not only will government wind up regulating the safety and use of genetic engineering technologies, the government will also have to subsidize the technologies to make them available to everyone else. Transhumanism, specifically genetic engineering of human beings to improve their health and intelligence and talents, will lead to big government and big regulation and big intrusion into everyone's freedom to procreate with their own unmodified genes. Conservatives should not be tricked into letting Transhumanism into the tent, it is the polar opposite and enemy of conservatism and needs to be rejected.

Celebrate the WTF New Year

John Howard — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:36:48 GMT

Get up early at 7AM in the morning on Thursday to celebrate the Alphabetic New Year! That's right, here in the Eastern Time Zone, 7AM on February 4th is the time when the World Time Format (WTF?) Alphabetic Date will roll over from FJRZZ to FJSAA, marking the start of Alphabetic year S. We're going to have a celebration at the Diesel Cafe in Somerville where the Alphabet Clock and WTF were born, if we can actually get up that early in the morning (if only we lived in England, it would happen at Noon).

An Alphabetic Year consists of 26 Alphabetic Months, which are each 26 Days, so a new Alphabetic Year happens every 676 days. After this one Thursday, February 4th, the next one will be Monday, Dec 12 2011. (We decided to skip Alphabetic "Weeks", since 26 days is close to a lunar month. Alpha Centuries last approximately 48 years (that is, 48 orbits around the Sun), and Alpha Millenia last about 1251 years. The next Alphabetic New Century (FKAAA:) is on Mon Nov 25 2024, so make your New Alphabetic Century breakfast reservations now.
The WTF Alphabetic Days correspond to the astronomical Julian Day, which is used in many computer databases to store date and time information. The first Julian Day (the year AAAAA:) was some day in 4713 BC, which apparenently is the first day in recorded history, or perhaps the earliest recorded astronomical event. There have been more than 2.4 million days since then. Every new day begins at Noon on the Greenwich Meridian, so it is twelve hours off from the legal calendar day and Universal Time or GMT, but, like UTC, the WTF time is the same all over the world (hence, "World Time Format"). The time is represented by a decimal fraction, the portion of the day elapsed. This way, every event in history can be represented by the number of days since that first day. Today's Julian Day is 2455227, and it is now a little less than half way through the day (in the Greenwich time zone), so it is now (well, just was) exactly 2455227.3934798613. Expressed in Alphabetic Time, which is simply Base 26 rather than Base 10, it is now FJRZV:KVEXW. Halfway through the day is Midnight in Greenwich and 7PM here, and is :NAA (or just :N), since N is the thirteenth letter of the 26 Alphabetic hours in a day.

So join us at the Diesel at FJSZZ:ZW (Thu Feb 04 2010 06:51:28 GMT-0500 (EST)), to count down the last few Alphabetic minutes of the Alphabetic Year R and usher in the new Alphabetic Year S! Remember to designate a driver as there probably will be roadblocks set up for the morning commute.

Use Stimulus To Increase Local Farming Capacity

John Howard — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:05:49 GMT

Our nation's factory farmed food supply is a public health hazard, responsible for many deaths from bacterial infections, rampant diabetes and poor nutrition, new influenzas, contaminated ground water, etc. There is a growing understanding among the public, thanks to books like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Eating Animals, and movies like Food Inc and King Corn, that factory farming has got to go, and be replaced by local sustainable agriculture.
Factory farming is more than merely cruel to the animals and abusive to and exploitive of the workers, it is reckless and dangerous to our health and costs human lives and hard-earned money. It is unsustainable, and has to be systematically dismantled before it collapses catastrophically, leaving us with not enough food in the food supply to feed the population, and the violence and unrest that always follows behind hunger.

Massachusetts needs to immediately ramp up local food production in order to ensure that we can survive a disruption in the food supply, and so we can we can begin to systematically dismantle factory farm system without causing hunger, before it causes more deaths and diseases.

Let's use the stimulus money that is still unspent to create farms and farming jobs in order to be able to grow enough healthy food for all of us, and to avert the public health disaster that is bound to occur if we don't shut down factory farms. Yes, we'll still need to truck (or train) in most of our food, but the more we can grow ourselves, the more of us survive.

Yawn ..

nomad943 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:25:35 GMT

Typing makes me sleepy. Time for another cup of coffee.

The Purple Marriage Compromise

John Howard — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:23:16 GMT

One example of the kind of bipartisan cooperation toward needed results that I am hoping this blog will foster on all sorts of issues, is of course the compromise to resolve the marriage debate that I've been pushing for all over the internet and at my own blog EggAndSperm since 2004.

In The Egg and Sperm Civil Union Compromise, the extreme libertarians that have been protracting the debate are rejected, while the responsible moderates in each party agree to what they both agree about already: preserving marriage as a man and a woman while giving the same benefits and protections to same-sex couples in the form of Civil Unions. ?

Been there, tried that, you say? ?True, and there are many reasons why we haven't been able to settle on Civil Unions already, and courts in California and Massachusetts have ruled they are an unconstitutional solution. ?The key to the Egg and Sperm Civil Union Compromise that makes it different from a "marriage-in-all-but-name" Civil Union compromise is (of course) the "Egg and Sperm" part that would prohibit attempting to procreate with someone of the same sex using modified genes, and then explicitly defining the Civil Unions as not having a right to procreate together, using the couple's own genes. ?Also, for good measure, the Compromise would affirm in federal law that all marriages must protect the right of the couple to procreate together, using the couple's own genes. ?This preserves marriage's essential meaning as well as reserves it for a man and a woman, while federally recognizing uniform state civil unions that provide all the other rights and benefits.
This is a "purple" marriage compromise because it rejects the libertarian positions that government should not prohibit same-sex procreation or genetic engineering. This position is called "libertarian Transhumanism", and is a view shared by libertarian ideologues in both parties:

Libertarian transhumanism is a political ideology synthesizing libertarianism and transhumanism.
Self-identified libertarian transhumanists, such as Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, are advocates of the asserted "right to human enhancement" who argue that the free market is the best guarantor of this right since it produces greater prosperity and personal freedom than other economic systems.

There are some Transhumanists who are not libertarians, who argue that the public will only accept genetic engineering if it is well-regulated and safe, and that a strict libertarian position of no laws and regulations is likely to result in a backlash and a ban. (For example, James Hughes's book "Citizen Cyborg", and his article The Politics of Transhumanism). That may seem more reasonable than a wild-west of unregulated Dr Frankensteins making human beings however they want, but it is still unethical and unsustainable Transhumanism, only with huge intrusive state government agencies and regulations on reproduction and taxpayer-funded entitlements to allow everyone access to possibly mandatory genetic engineering and same-sex conception. The Libertarian Transhumanists can't stand Hughes because he affirms the argument against Transhumanism that it will result in Big Government and cost taxpayers. They like to pretend that all the research into "human enhancement" and other wankery will be their own dime. It's hard to say which is worse, him or the libertarians, but it is clear that they are both terrible, whether it is government regulated or not.

A small percentage of Transhumanists are not Libertarians, but all Libertarians are Transhumanists, or at least side with the Transhumanists against a ban on genetic engineering and same-sex conception. To support a ban, or even some government regulation of genetic engineering of human beings, you have to ditch libertarian ideology.

This is how by rejecting irresponsible Libertarians, we can forge a "Purple" compromise, a lasting, responsible compromise.

Dale Carrico is no James Kunstler

John Howard — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:14:57 GMT

The ever-confusing Transhumanist critic Dale Carrico offers up another great rant against Transhumanists over at his amor mundi blog, melding Jim Kunstler's poetic commentary on the epic disaster about to happen with Dale's unique understanding of the addled sci-fi delusions plaguing the thinking of Transhumanists.

The Future's So Bright You Gotta Wear Shades
I truly worry that this was the last chance for democratic push-back, peer-to-peer, against a neo-feudal corporate-militarist America, and we may well be blowing it, right here, right now. Longer term education-agitation-organization may well be trending away from Movement Republicanism, not to mention ramifying pressures from post-US-hegemonic players, but it isn't at all clear that unraveling neoliberal ponzi-schemes, climate change, energy and resource descent, arms proliferation, global destabilization among other planetary problems are waiting around to give us time to become sane enough soon enough to be equal to them. The United States could very easily become in no time flat a hopelessly diseased distressed debt-ridden ignorant gun-saturated backwater neck deep in Greenhouse storms and riven with ethnic and ideological hatreds, while moneyed and incumbent interests retreat to walled enclaves with their loot to watch the show and pluck out the occasionally photogenic slave.

That's Dale echoing Kunstler, but with his peer-to-peer/education fixation replacing Kunster's clarion call for "re-scaling, re-localizing, and de-globalizing of our daily activities."

Below the flip, Dale eviscerates the Transhumanists for contributing to this epic collapse, but um, not really...

All that in mind, I must say that the always already somewhat surreal exchanges I have been having for years with chirpy futurologists handwaving about the technogizmolicious acceleration of acceleration toward gengineered and cyborgic hardbodies with three-foot chromium phalluses and nanobotic treasure caves and better-than-real virtual orgy-pits and escaping via uploading, rocketing, space elevatoring, geo-engineering, or otherwise technofixing our way out of climate catastrophe and all of this under the watchful eye of some sooper-kind sooper-genius sooper-Dad singularitarian robot god have become such obscene gargoyles of epic implausibility and irresponsibility (except as, you know, straight up escapist geek wankery without any pretensions to actual policymaking or sciencemaking) that it is almost impossible to believe that all these transhumanists and extropians and techno-immortalists I've been sparring with over their stealthily reactionary politics and conceptual confusions and theological vestiges are really for real at all. I mean, really? Really?

This sounds like what I've been saying to the sci-fi addled postgenderist libertarians who demand the right to attempt to procreate with anyone regardless of their sex. So I was hoping that Dale was starting to see the big picture, and, in the spirit of both this blog and his post, that he would be ready to put aside his silly demand for equal procreation rights with his husband (Dale is a man also) and prioritize real problems. But no, it turns out that he doesn't consider same-sex procreation to be a form of the extropian silliness that he ridicules, he doesn't think that the fight for equal rights for same-sex couples distracts us from real problems. To Dale, same-sex procreation is a cool future technology that will enable him to transcend the limits of human ability. Sorry Dale but same-sex conception is extropian, and you're an extropian for demanding a right to do it.

I asked him to look in the mirror in the comments, but he went back into his shell, refusing to see that his delusional demand for Postgenderism and transgendered/same-sex procreation technology is holding back progress and distracting us from real problems.

He critiques the Transhumanist movement, but he IS a Transhumanist as far as believing that genetic engineering must be allowed, believing, like Transhumanists, that it's a reproductive liberty and people should have access to "lifeway diversity" and reproductive control over creating other people, He just wants to make it milquetoast and unobjectionable by framing it as an educated, consensual freedom to create people however people chose to. His objection to the Transhumanists is that he thinks they are putting a bad face on it, their "robot-god/immortality/space-elevator" crap is going to ruin it for the "postgender Transhumanists", who are trying to be slip genetic engineering in as stealthily and stately as possible.

Why is it green?

John Howard — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:34:59 GMT

You may have noticed that PurpleMassGroup is not purple, it is green! That's because the responsible democrats and republicans who this blog is intended to serve desire "green" public policies and lifestyles, and the green color scheme helps remind us of our goals and our responsibilities. Besides, purple would have been really really ugly, and it's a sort of frivolous color. So we're green, literally.

Update: On the advice of Brock at RMG, I'm trying out this deep Tyrian purple. He says PurpleMassGroup should be purple, and if this color was good enough for Roman Emperors and early Christian art, it should fit a blog dedicated to respect for government authority and morality. I'm still not sure its a good idea, but at least on a blog it's just a number (Hex: #66023C), it's not derived from snails like the real Tyrian Purple dye was.

Update: Patrick had a good idea to try blue on the left, red on the right, and maybe purple in the middle, to convey the bi-partisan mission. I like this, it looks like the French flag and also like a pair of pants I had in 1976. Update to this update: Patrick actually suggested red on the left and blue on the right, I think to signify the meeting in the middle between conservative Democrats in the right of their party and responsible Republicans in the left of their party. So now it's not like the French flag anymore, as far as I can tell, Red White Blue vertical stripes aren't any country's flag, they're just "red, white, and blue."

Welcome to Purple Mass Group

John Howard — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:07:42 GMT

Welcome to PurpleMassGroup! As the name suggests, this site is intended to provide a forum for both Republicans and Democrats who are seeking a return to responsible effective government, who reject the libertarian influence that has been pushing both parties toward the extreme left and right. Libertarians now have their own blog at GoldMassGroup.com and their own candidate in the Senate race, so this blog completes the new alignment that will help the two main parties reclaim their true identities, unburdened by the selfish influence of libertarianism.

Socially conservative Democrats and socially responsible Republicans are encouraged to join PurpleMassGroup and forge a new coalition to bring Americans together to address the urgent issues that we face as a nation. Of course, PurpleMassGroup will be focused on Massachusetts, but not selfishly focused on it. Massachusetts has neighbors and exists in a larger community, just like people do.

So if you are an anti-government, anti-healthcare, anti-regulation, free market, globalist Republican, or an anti-government, laws-off-my-body, reproductive freedom, anti-regulation, globalist Democrat, there is a party, a candidate, and a blog, just for you (you'll have plenty of inherent contradictions to argue about, so get started right away). But if you believe in social responsibility and individual responsibility, respect government and religion and traditional morality, and are sick of extremists paralyzing the parties with outrageous and embarrassing positions and want the parties to come together to get things done, then this blog is for you.

About

John Howard — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:25:17 GMT

And just as GoldMassGroup has their candidate in the Senate race, so too does PurpleMassGroup. It was easy to decide who to endorse, as I am not only the only editor and owner but also running in the race myself, for the same reason I am starting this blog: in order to get the country to address the same issues that I hope this blog and community will help bring attention to. I started blogging about one of those issues five years ago at my blog EggAndSperm, to enact a federal law to stop human cloning, same-sex procreation, and genetic engineering of people, and raised awareness of the issue all over the internet. Now I'm trying to raise the issue in the Senate race, and running a write-in campaign to go to Washington myself and introduce the bill to resolve the marriage debate and get to work on huge issues that we face as a nation.

But this blog isn't a campaign blog or intended to be about me, it is not mere self-promotion. This blog is intended to and will hopefully grow with more editors and contributors who want to meet in the responsible middle ground and form a community dedicated to bringing the two parties together by rejecting libertarian extremism. As the editor, I will try to promote posts to the front page that come from that responsible perspective and seek to form that middle ground. Libertarians are welcome to join in the discussion, but probably won't be promoted to the front page very often, unless it shows they're trying.