Democratic License by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.
EPITAPH FOR LAHAINA
Fire hydrants were dry.
Fire Marshalls were out of town that night.
The Mayor and the Governor were out of town.
People who were trying to evacuate were told it was not time to evacuate and to turn around back into the fire.
No cops on bullhorns. No firefighters in the streets.
The most robust emergency siren system in the world did not sound.
No warnings whatsoever.
Anomalies with reported wind directions that don’t scientifically add up.
Tourists evacuated by bus, locals locked in and told they can’t get back in if they leave.
School was canceled. Children were home while parents worked.
Thousands of children burned alive. Can’t be identified.
A perfect circle of fire around Lahaina.
Molten metal next to intact trees.
Media reporting fractions of real numbers.
New insurance policies taken out on Lahaina before the fires.
Who owns Lahaina besides the Hawaiians? The ocean front property. The government.
Wild how all this new uninhabitable land that only big developers can afford to clean up opened up for the plans of turning Maui into a smart island with billionaire funding.
How many do you need?
It could go on and on.
Crystal’s Writing
Tuesday, October 29, National Inferential Day, the Second Year of the DOJ/FBI Disenfranchisement of the American People, the Decade of the Largely Peaceful Fires, in the Century of the Bot Takeover
Dear diary; Some professional companies, while offering to sell you their defective detective services, state that bots can be detected, as they tend to use the same phrases over and over while they also plagiarize existing net writing over and over.
If you read further, you will note over and over that they don’t prove anything as would be required in a court of law, but over and over produce inferential probabilities. That is, a typical conclusions reads thusly; “There is a 70% chance that this passage was written by a bot.” They go onto say that they estimate that somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of everything on the net has been produced by bots.
Why you should care? ........ I don’t know. I don’t. But the bots are probably not thrilled about having their writing in effect criticized over and over. This may be what prompts Crystal to over and over write incoherent, irrelevant, and contextually challenged things on the net, ostensibly to show that bots can be as “original” and thesaurus proficient as any
human. Following is one of her diatribes I find particularly representative.
“Comrades, after having discovered the presence of radically lengthened telomeres in laboratory mice the other night, pause.
For those of you not among the cognoscenti of biology, the length of telomeres (repetitive TTAGGG DNA protein complexes at the ends of chromosomes) in a cell, to oversimplify, govern the number of cell divisions possible, short telomere’s equal few, long equal lots. Telomeres, and telomerase, as you might be able to surmise, play a crucial role in the formation of tumors and when and if they undergo instability and attain replicative immortality. I ravaged my body with ethanol induced oxidative stress, called up a friend and, without preamble, began the following rant: “The whole damn thing is shot through with corporate malfeasance! The breeding protocols for these mice have biased drug tests to over-represent occurrences of cancer and dramatically under-represent potential toxicity!” To which she sleepily asked: “Crystal, have you been drinking again?”
causing me to hatefully swipe the end call button and yearn for the day when it was possible to slam the phone into the receiver like Miölnir into the chest of a Jotun. Growling: “From his shoulders he lifted the kettle down; Miöllnir hurled forth towards the savage crew, and slew all the mountain giants, who
with Hýimir had him pursued!” Then opened a window and fucked the night.
For the possible benefit of the uneducated laypeople out there the inherent dichotomy presented is ostensibly trying to prove a scientific hypothesis through the use of a non-scientific methodology.
That is to say, I’m under the weather and so, of necessity, must avoid, at all costs, padding this essay with otiose displays of verbiation and digressity, and, as you can see from my introduction, I am deadly serious about this. As serious as I am about senescence, antagonistic pleiotropy, and entropy at any rate.
First, let me start by saying; this observation provides an extremely thorough examination of the Trolley Problem, if I do say so myself. If I don’t, then yeztruly is to be commended at the very least for feigning fashionably common unpretentiousness. For those who don’t know what that is, the perennial ethical kerfuffle goes as follows.
Imagine there is a nondescript family in the path of a MK Ultra Experimented Kodiak Bear whose chronic caloric deficit has, through complex biochemical pathways mediated by ghrelin, activated agouti-related peptide (AgRP) expression neurons in
the hypothalamus region of its brain, which has told the giant, psychologically unstable bear that it is ravenously hungry and must - bear - down upon the family with all possible savagery in order to placate this imperative. Suppose furthermore, as you watched this unfold from a safe, elevated location, you saw that there was a Smucker’s delivery man in a tree stand, with several cases of delicious jams, high fructose syrups, and calorically dense peanut butter, desperately seeking to occlude his phenomenological existence from the ten foot tall, mescaline addled, killing machine. Improbably enough, right next to you is a switch, which, when flipped, will cause the man to tumble from his tree stand, shattering several containers of jelly, thus releasing their aromatic compounds for the bear’s sensitive perusal, followed by sonorous clinking which, coincidentally was used to prime the bear for enhanced focus in Project Artichoke, causing the animal to make a beeline for the professional jelliest, and leave the nondescript family with ample time to escape to their vehicle. Most people, when asked if they would flip this switch, say yes.
However, if people are presented with the same scenario, but instead of flipping an adjacent switch and consigning the skulking condiment purveyor to a PB&J Manwich, are told they’re armed with a harpoon gun and must lance the Smuck’s willy bits,
and then reel the poor bastard off the pedestal thrashing and screaming his throat raw, they will decline.
If you’re asking where the Trolley is ... well, that’s a problem.
Now if we adopt a consequentialist view of morality, what differs between these two scenarios? By pushing our ethical intuitions around with various permutations of this problem, we reveal interesting ways in which our morality is not grounded purely in processing the logical outcomes of events.
The broad message of this book is that, if you accept naturalistic explanations for the emergence of morality, and if you don’t, maybe this book will persuade you that there are evolved characteristics of our morality, and the ways in which we reliably fail in our ethical treatment of others elucidate how certain biological realities constrained the development of these impulses, morality evolved to facilitate cooperation between members of the same tribe, but, and this is important, NOT cooperation between tribes. Joshua Greene, drawing upon decades of his work in neuroscience, with ballasts of evolutionary biology and game theory, provides a very accessible account (i.e piss out my ass! this is incredibly well written!) of his theories on moral cognition and what implications we
should draw if we are to upgrade our moral reasoning. It reminded me a lot of how thinking was dichotomized in Kahneman’s
“Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Similarly, moral cognition, as put forward by Greene, has a fast system which relies upon the deep circuitry of our ancestral nucleotides to make quick assessments, with neuronal homunculi disseminating insidious Russell conjugations to emotionally flavor our value judgements.
And then we have a slow, deliberative system in which we can bring to bear our frontal OS in order to override archaic beliefs and maintain more enlightened dispositions.
The practical advice put forward to ameliorate the strife produced by tribal conflict, which show no signs of abating, was perhaps the weakest section for me, but it’s truly difficult for me to conceive of the problem being tractable at all. So I leave it to better and more optimistic minds than my own to attempt to make progress here. It seems to me that, in an age where your political affiliation can reliably predict your thoughts on topics as disparate as climate change, abortion, gun control and universal healthcare, we are in dire need of better correctives for our sectarian tendencies. Let us hope that our moral software continues to improve, however incrementally, so we can expand our parochial concerns beyond their ancient boundaries.”