test results (I've done it myself), and so on. If I were
in your country, no doubt by the end of a busy day I'd have clocked up a
couple of references in corporate databases, detailing my credit ratings,
physical characteristics, preferred brand of coffee...
Imagine some Haight-Ashbury hippy getting up on a foggy sixties morning,
and declaiming to his fellows that the Man was watching them in the 7-11.
They'd probably have asked him where he got such good dope.
>Myself? Well, I've been a sf fan long enough to know even the brightest
>and most imaginative and knowledgeable people don't have a clue, much less
>myself.
Note: Tail-landing. reusable rockets, as described by Heinlein et al., are
being touted as the best payload delivery system for orbit.
Life imitates fiction?
>Consider it a disease of that Great Redundancy: Western
>Civilization...not the rune-casting, but the utter, positivistic,
>empirical, faith that you can predict the future.
I'm not inclined to agree with utter etc., but I do know that it is
possible to make predictions about the possible future states of
even large-scale systems, once the underlying forces are determined.
For instance, I don't know when next it will rain, but I realise the
significance of the Coriolis effect in weather systems.
>But I am not an "optimist" about the future. The future is a construct,
>an imaginary object, a toy...
In other words, you "let it take care of itself", an inherently optimistic
viewpoint.
>>But it was all in a fun way! If you couldn't convince the veggy market to
>>let you have the bruised potatoes for your commune, you could always
>>draw the dole!
>There's no point. I've learned the uselessness of actual knowledge, that
>it is powerless against commodified images. I do not discuss this anymore
>on usenet.
Alright, I admit that was low. I take it back. But from what I've seen of
the remains of that world and the one I live in, I do believe that the pace
of such life has become more frenetic, and that it has become harder.
>Well, Escape From New York, right? I don't know what to say. You are
>taken up in Vision, like an apocalyptic preacher, and prophesy.
Hardly, f that is an apocalyptic prophecy, I'm very much surprised. I thought
it was on a par with "people will start to carpool to work".
>I simply can't be that enthusiastic.
Again, excellent reversal. But yawning "I can't be arsed" when you come
up against conviction, even the small degree of it I hold is really an
annoying and cu-de-sac tactic.
>I was thinking of an sf story, which imagined the rite of passage was
>originally the process of selection of human qualities over animal ones,
>and was therefore the first expression of culture taking over from biology
>in evolution
If it does, it's no longer evolution.
>...those who reacted like animals to the ordeal being clubbed
>to death by the shamans.
Indeed, a very human reaction.
>The dystopic and the utopic share the same field and play the same game.
>Both appear to be incorrigable. The dystopiacs here react petulantly to
>my pairing of the two because it let's fall too much light on their bleak
>pleasures...not the light of optimism, but the light of perspective and
>the juxtaposition of difference.
>Living in the effulgence of that light, I, of course, am seen as the most
>horrible of creatures by both utopiacs and dystopiacs -- someone who is
>unimpressed by their Vision...who does not stand there like a fawn caught
>in the headlights of a Mack truck..."Gorsh, Mickey..."
Treading that fine (dashed white)line between similar metaphors, Sourcerer
avoids the multi-laned utopic and dystopic hells on both sides.
This is all starting to sound very self-congratulatory. I don't know,
you might be far better off compromising your anti-ideological purity
for long enought to see if anything useful resides in either camp.
Ideologies in and of themselves aren't bad, so long as they're not
rules, but guidelines, and Visions can actually serve as useful
approximations, if one takes their more far-out notions as unsound,
and in general unsupported.
>I hope you feel like developing that. The valuation of one's life in the
>risking of it, the uses of the mechanism of fear, and exploration
>generally are worthy topics for discussion.
Yes, but then we're into issues of courage, and then, once again, we come around
to self-congratulation, which I have no reason for and even if I did, no time
for. Some things are often best left undefined, if one is looking for general
cases. Isomorphism going only so far, after all.
K.
-
--
"Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and
myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you
will become one of the prophets of your age." - Bertrand Russell
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