>
> Meanwhile back to that other fantasy land of the transhuman, USA,
> yesterday evening.
>
> My first thought when I listened to his worship's stem cell research
> directives was the permitted 60 lines were merely those that had
> established US patents, were currently on the market, and were part
of
> some larger bio-tech-med edu-corp business sector. So banning them
> would hurt business and kill off some significant piece of
for-profit
> healthcare as we know it. The determinant was probably some economic
> bottom line and had nothing to do with anything else.
>
> Which reminds me of course that the real problem with all this
> bio-tech-med shit isn't the moral, ethical, all too frail and human
> aspects at all, or the Schismatrix----but the CPH (capitalist pig
> hegemony). Which in turn leads to Michael Pugliese's post (SDUSA on
> Empire):
>
> ``The thesis of "Empire" is that globalization and technology are
> dividing the world between "the multitude" and "the Empire," the
> system that organizes production. But because economic production is
> now based in knowledge and social interaction, the disenfranchised
> multitude will in due course rebel and do away with the chains of
> Empire. Sound familiar?
>
> Many on the moderate left have argued that globalization needs to be
> shaped by a new social contract, a global New Deal, that would
temper
> raw capitalism with some regard for social consequences. "Empire"
> looks on such half- measures with disdain, and presses on toward The
> Final Conflict.''
>
> So Ian, did you want to flesh out what Kenney has to do with all
this?
>
> I looked briefly at: http://hcd.ucdavis.edu/faculty/kenney/ and
> couldn't see the immediate relevance. That reference seem to be some
> Silcon Valley business-first puke and so I moved on to chase down
> Schismatrix.
>
> Chuck Grimes
==========
I posted Kenney because he wrote a great book on Biotech from a neo-Marxian perspective back in 1986. I didn't realize he caught the Technophilia bug Silicon Valley style, alot can change in 15 years, eh?
Phenotypic plasticity and genotypic plasticity under conditions of commodity production hold out the serious potential for the mutability of subpopulations of our species. The conservatives clearly recognize the very slippery fractal we're slowly zooming into on this one. Intellectual property issues aside, I think they're very worried about fetus farms and neural networks detached from the human form that do strange things that elected officials and the majority of us will never understand and that may tell us things many would rather not know regarding that ancient saying: "if god does not exist, everything is permitted" when it comes to our co-evolution with life in space-time [note, permitted is not the same as possible].
Stanislaw Lem has perhaps pursued the theme of just where we would be able to halt technology and the futility of the attempt to moralize it's evolution. With the way Bush was talking, this goes further than the simple observation of hypocrisy that a man who has citizens executed for transgressions of social norms while at the same time telling us life is sacred; it's even beyond using schizophrenia as a stand in for the sheer inconsistencies of his and our belief sets. What that is we don't know. I'm not an avid sci-fi reader by any means, but I think those who write in that genre may have more to tell us about the present-future of our motivations than some of the bioethics "experts" who'll have a real hard time with ethical absolutes in a Heraclitean/Darwinian world of what one philosopher has called "constructival plasticity.". We've learned very little on the ethics of science and technology since the bomb and the giddiness of those who want to clone a human shows an almost adolescent rebelliousness as much as anything else; the paradoxes of anti-authoritarianism.
Ian