[__B_B__]

As long as we're talking about bodily autonomy, biometric surveillance and hypocrisy I'd like to quote Robert Scaer.

"Fetuses confronted with an amniocentesis needle invading the uterus exhibit defensive motor behavior. Intrauterine needling of the fetus causes full blown stress-related increase in plasma cortisol and B-endorphin levels, with modulation, of the stress response slower than the adult. Fetuses can also learn to adapt their behavior to control the environment. When presented with a sequence of different voices through headphones, an infant will learn to access his mother's voice through regulating the frequency of sucking on a nipple. The evidence for learning by the unborn fetus in utero, by the premature infant in the pediatric intensive care unit, and by the normal full-term newborn is overwhelming. They learn through implicit conditional memory.

The assumption that infants in all stages of development do not experience pain, do not register arousal with threat, and do not process a response to traumatic stress is clearly outdated and invalid."

Even a cursory familiarity with the positions of those in opposition to abortion would yield the delightful semantic response of "not your body" when presented with the equally semantic argument of "my body my choice".

[georgia_peach]

I don't doubt or disagree with anything you have written. I am simply speculating as to why such an old ruling would be so suddenly reversed. A mere coincidence of timing, arising from the number of justices Trump got to pick? Or something else?

[__B_B__]

I'm not really interested in isolated political incidents but rather how they fit into trends across long spans of time. This dichotomy of collective vs individual is also very interesting to me, and through that interest I've determined that some people seem to believe that this plane of existence is an engineering problem. That if you for instance, want to do away with scarcity or whatever, achieve anything at all, well then all that is required is a proper catalogue of inputs and corresponding outputs with as few and as limited variables as possible, and like I said, that to acquire such a catalogue is inherently good for it enables any beneficence.

So, regarding free will and self determinations about one's own body, that is to say, one's own inputs into this catalogue, right; if your question is why would some people be so obsessive about micromanaging those aspects of your life, well that's why. It's because they believe that to do so is to master the laws of nature, and therefore to be able to reformulate the world in such a way that they estimate mankind would be happier and better off. That's the closest I've come to understanding the why of this stuff anyway, and it doesn't sit right with me because the premise is nihilistic, and it seems to me to mirror parts of my own life in which others derived their own life satisfaction from making demands of me and making me do things I didn't want to do without my consent and in such a way that I was worse off for those things having happened to me.

[georgia_peach]

As an ordinary person, who thinks democracy is mostly a sham to pacify the people with an illusion of agency, I am very interested in the answer to "What will they do next?", because the answers hint at how I can protect the people I care about. That being said, I don't think they are lawless. I believe they are operating by a code, and that the Roe reversal strongly hints at it, at least in part.

With the "engineering problem," I'm dubious of the whole enterprise. The combinatorics are well beyond even the best minds at this point. It's just high iq verbal wranglers making terrible messes, then using a barrage of re-definitions, convenient omissions, misdirections, PR campaigns, and jargon to cover their tracks. And they refuse to even scratch the surface on things like consciousness or the soul. The operating theory seems to be: "Turn everyone into a "last man" who wants for nothing, and it will all work out!" They get very angry and insulting when you quibble with this.

I'm fairly confident that, at the higher levels (tha one puh-cent! [in reality, a portion many orders of magnitude smaller]), the micromanagement is in service of a goal far more ambitious than any utopianism. They would like to reach for His throne. Mankind must be re-configured if they are to have any chance at this: the race, assembled into a synthetic divine being; the man, reduced to a cell. Judging by the present trend, this will probably be an existence of pure suffering.

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

[__B_B__]

Sure. Reverse engineering the fall of man basically. But again to the question of why. Why be so nihilistic about life and the world that you want to do it over? Why believe that such a thing is achievable through some technological mechanism?

Well, maybe because you've seen some other technological mechanism facilitate something you thought was unachievable, like adherence to severe and rigid religious regimen facilitating group perpetuation in many disparate circumstances, and so you're just superimposing that experience onto a different circumstance and pursuing the belief of a similar outcome irrationally, which is where the shirking of feedback you mention comes in.

[georgia_peach]

> Why be so nihilistic about life and the world that you want to do it over?

The technical caste, for the most part, believes in emergence rather than creation. If this has all come about through pure chance, why wouldn't someone think that our own minds, limited as they are, can eventually do a better job?

As for the true rulers of this world--the bank accounts behind the paychecks, whose memos set a thousand wheels into motion--I suspect that they take the Old Testament very seriously--if only to play for the other team; to reform the creation of a deity they deem malevolent. They don't have to believe it's achievable. They already know. The highest authority said so. Think along the lines of the masonic temple legend, or of gnosticism--with all of its offshoots & predecessors...

> like adherence to severe and rigid religious regimen

This is an insightful connection, which is no doubt true in many cases. Some inherit religion in their tribal identity package--never delving too deeply into its substance, yet ready to kill and die for words carelessly read. Others come to it earnestly--being late to understand sin, and too filled with trembling over their own sins to punish others harshly. The same can be written for science/engineering, with its wide gate for careerists and its strait gate for Teslas & Newtons.

[__B_B__]

What's knowledge? "Justified, true belief"? Belief me and my friends really, really believe in, with some trial and error mixed in? How self serving and unsatisfying and prone to disaster, given critical mass.

I'm not really sure where to take this from here. What do you think the antidote to nihilism is?