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Here is what it boils down to: I won’t endorse, as Maggie succinctly put it, carrying out violent acts against non-combatants in an effort to scare a broad category of people or political entities into doing what you want. If that came across as trolling, then perhaps we got off track.

I’m quite happy, thank you, and glad you are too. I consider it a matter of good netiquette not to start a discussion then fail to reply. If I had no respect for you, I would have ignored you’re initial comment.

I don’t take kindly to apologizing for terroristic acts, whether privately executed or state sponsored. If that wasn’t what you were doing, then you’re correct, I misunderstood your position.

If you see this, good; if not, have a nice life anyway.

It is a question with two “obvious” answers people tend to give/first arrive at that are actually the same:
- Ostracize views and bar them from debate which renders debate impossible. (Targets POV).
- Use violence because debate is considered impossible. (Attackers POV).

Those two are for all purposes the same choice with the same result.

It can’t be rhetorical because I don’t have an easy answer. Even the third option; inclusive debate, is no panacea unless one lives in a private world of unicorns and rainbows.

But maybe it would help if more people were aware that there aren’t any good or simple and straightforward answers to the question?

I can’t help it if you or anyone else find my opinion insulting (an opinion that has nothing to do with you or anyone else in particular, I don’t know you or anyone else among the commentators and I was responding to the article).

I realize you didn’t recognize the lyrics that start with “fools to the left of me, jokers to the right”, it continues with “stuck in the middle with you” but instead I commented on how I need to care less about things because life is brief –guess I should have stuck with the original considering how i seem to be stuck in the middle with you :D

And please note: when I use a smiley it is to indicate different varieties of levity, small smiles and big smiles. It implies happiness and cheerfulness, a twinkle in the eye or humerus self-deprecation and if you read it to mean anything else then you’re reading me wrong.

See you around, I’m not going to check back on this page (because life is short and one should enjoy it) but if you’re not just trolling me (if so you got me) and if you’re actually as miserable in your life as you seem to be to me from the few words I’ve read from you, well then I hope maybe you’ve discovered a small part of why and how that is the case and that letting go of some of your assumptions would do you good.

Smiles are not insults.

While, as I said before, the ALF claims not to support these acts, the membership of the ALF consists of many of the same people as the ARM. These are not well-defined organisations, they are terrorist groups (I do not use the term lightly) whose names are used when convenient by extremist members of the animal rights movement.

Note that I have not claimed that all animal rights supporters are fire-bombing, hate-mail-writing nutjobs. I’ve been involved in many debates/discussions with animal rights activists across the spectrum and the majority of them are fairly reasonable (if misguided) individuals. It’s undeniable, however, that there’s a small group of them who are dedicated to causing criminal damage, threatening people, and even directly causing harm to people, in the name of their cause.

Transhumanism – or for those who find that term unsatisfactory or sanctimonious, bright humanism – is a philosophy for empowering human beings to use science and technology to have a quality and style of life of their choosing. If someone feels excluded because their neighbors choose to live in a way they find intolerable, I will be happy to discuss why diversity benefits everyone. But the gay and lesbian marriage debate has taught me that the intolerant are infrequently (though, thankfully, not never) open to listening to what their opponents have to say.

You see, where I´m coming from, human beings have always been developing the tools to alter their brains, bodies and available ways of interacting with their environment and each other. There is absolutely nothing “trans-” or “-ism” about it. On the contrary, I’d say it’s a integral part of the “human condition”.

I essentially agree. And the terminology is largely irrelevant, IMHO.

George Washington had prosthetic teeth. My great-grandfather had a pacemaker. Neither called it an ” -ism” or developed some silly holier-than-thou attitude because of it. So to get all excited because this year’s microchips are speedier than last year’s and use that to proclaim a new glorious era of “transcendens” or whatnot is really just creating a false dichotomy. And that dichotomy, albeit false, will provoke the stupid people who believe in it and feel excluded. And then they will do stupid shit to their fellow man who they now perceive as their enemy.

There have always been members of society who try to control how others choose to live. In the middle ages, medicine was widely considered sin and vilified as witchcraft. People don’t resort to coercion because they feel excluded; they do so because they fear the unknown and believe that they are justified in using violence to terrorize their fellow humans into not exploring it. They use force to control through fear. They are bullies.

Again, transhumanism is just a word, albeit a word different from transcendence. Singulatarians have made a cottage industry out of predicting, as you say, a new glorious era of transcendence. Not all transhumanists by a long shot share that outlook and, if you want them to heed you, it is unconstructive to dismiss them out of hand on the basis of an outlook to which they do not subscribe. I think the singulatarians are almost certainly wrong, but time alone will tell decisively.

We have, as you noted, been reinventing the human condition since at least the invention of language. You speak of transhumanists having a holier-than-thou attitude, but from where I’m sitting it’s the people who oppose science and technology and, in particular, who regard the natural state of my and your bodies as sacrosanct and use that as a moral argument for taking ownership of it from us, who have a holier-than-thou attitude.

Generally, in my experience, it’s a way for people who are hostile to animal protection issues to point at those they disagree with and yell “FREAKS!”

In that way, I don’t see how it can possibly be part of a productive discussion.

Calling an animal an animal model is a bit like calling Mengele’s victims human “models,” isn’t it? (And no, before someone else exaggerates what I have actually said, I am not equating animals and humans – we’re still discussing terminology here. Inthis thread, anyway.)

You see, where I´m coming from, human beings have always been developing the tools to alter their brains, bodies and available ways of interacting with their environment and each other. There is absolutely nothing “trans-” or “-ism” about it. On the contrary, I’d say it’s a integral part of the “human condition”. 
George Washington had prosthetic teeth. My great-grandfather had a pacemaker. Neither called it an ” -ism” or developed some silly holier-than-thou attitude because of it.
So to get all excited because this year’s microchips are speedier than last year’s and use that to proclaim a new glorious era of “transcendens” or whatnot is really just creating a false dichotomy. And that dichotomy, albeit false, will provoke the stupid people who believe in it and feel excluded. And then they will do stupid shit to their fellow man who they now perceive as their enemy.

So we shouldn’t laugh at and ridicule people like the Unabomber and now the “Nanobombers”; their worries are reasonable no matter what one thinks of their methods (what choice are they have when the “debate” consists of their ridicule by people who seldom even understand how they arrived at their conclusion?).

Ted Kaczynski’s “manifesto” is very well written, very carefully thought through. Until you get to the part where he justifies his triple murder by saying what amounts to: it’ll make me famous so people read this manifesto and smash our technological civilization. Now, I think he’s wrong on several points, but I definitely support his, and even these fuckwits’, right to voice their concerns. I absolutely, unequivocally do not support their “marketing” campaigns, even if they stood a snowball’s chance in hell of working, which they don’t.

When you insult the intelligence of people merely for disagreeing with these anti-technology extremists (or their peaceful counterparts), you yourself contribute to the breakdown in communication you claim to value. Calling all your opponents fools and jokers helps absolutely no one, even when you append the insult with a :)

Meh. “Transhumanists” are to hard science what furries are to zoology.

Trans-humanism: literally the philosophical belief that it is not inherently immoral or sacrilegious to transcend the natural human condition. Perhaps you are conflating the general philosophy of transhumanism with a small subset thereof: singulatarians and/or extropians. Always fun to dismiss a whole philosophy by arguing against its most extreme examples. If, on the other hand, you are arguing that human beings are not developing the tools to alter their brains, bodies and available ways of interacting with their environment and each other, you should follow tech news more.

That being said, the deluded weirdos who committed this heinous act DID
evidently subscribe to the notion that there exists a real conflict, and
sides to be chosen. So you do have that in common.

Yes, there are. Some people will and do try to use violence and other coercive means to limit what others may do to their bodies and what types of human modification others may study. Those that wish to openly pursue such research and self-experimentation, or defend the right of others to do so, can either fight back or surrender. When someone points a gun (or bomb) at your head, you either do as they say or you resist. I intend to resist because my body belongs to me, your ridicule not withstanding. The deluded weirdos created the conflict when they choose violence. Others are likely to follow because when humans don’t get their way with other humans, many resort to terrorism and other means of coercion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNJj-PA8lKU

Caution is great. This thread is about assholes blowing people up because they’re pissed about science fiction.

Computers were used for nuclear tests, now we have Anonymous.

Only DARPA could shoot itself in the collective foot from thirty years in the past.

They’re one and the same. It’s just a rebranding.

The use of animal models allows researchers to investigate disease
states in ways which would be inaccessible in a human patient,
performing procedures on the non-human animal that imply a level of harm
that would not be considered ethical to inflict on a human.

It boils down to the Cautionary Principle at simultaneously extremely small and extremely big scales and is __not__ “science fiction” or “impossible” considering all existing biological systems have (and always have had) working mechanisms at this nano scale.

Nor is this very existence in biology any legit cop-out: those systems evolved and fought since the very first spark of life on this planet millions of years ago (or possibly billions including panspermia), together they’ve reached the dynamic equilibrium that is our biosphere Earth, the changes were relatively gradual in kind due to how mutations work (and usually they don’t work to any advantage and thus die); they all filled whatever niche they could in the existing environment.

None of them were to anyones actual knowledge anything like human ideas of problem-solving, task-specific, machines (even if generalized) built to precise preconceived specifications that might actually be flawed with serious unintended consequences in construction or instruction.

The notion of “grey goo” came about as an warning example of the ultimately worst possible unintended consequence or human natural error and if memory serves it was Eric Drexler himself (/the/ nanoengineer) who phrased it __and__ the need for hitherto unrealized levels of ___foresight___ to avoid such outcomes in nanotechnology/nanoengineering.

So we shouldn’t laugh at and ridicule people like the Unabomber and now the “Nanobombers”; their worries are reasonable no matter what one thinks of their methods (what choice are they have when the “debate” consists of their ridicule by people who seldom even understand how they arrived at their conclusion?).

Nobody knows whether they or those they attack are wrong or right as far as arguments go; nobody knows the future but damn few humans want to admit to that fact :| (and that goes for just about all topics).

P.S. People don’t get grants for being flawlessly ethical and risk-averse.
P.P.S. In case people don’t know or realize it: fully realized nanoengineering is the manipulation at will of any/all individual atoms* and is in its potential consequences a far more powerful technology/science than smashing atoms together/apart.

* with habitual efficiency on a grand scale rather than the cute (and at the time impressive) arrangements of Xeon atoms into company logos as happened in the 1980ies…

Fools to the left of me, jokers to the right: I must learn to care less because tomorrow I might not be here :)

I worked for a breeder of actual animals to be used for experiments and it was very common to find animals drowned or starved to death in their cages.

Using “animal models” instead of actual animals will prevent a lot of suffering.

Meh. “Transhumanists” are to hard science what furries are to zoology.

That being said, the deluded weirdos who committed this heinous act DID evidently subscribe to the notion that there exists a real conflict, and sides to be chosen. So you do have that in common.

Degrading sentient beings into mere objects, by calling them animal models, is bad enough. Describing the hurting + killing of them as a near-wellness-experience is a wee bit perverse, a kind of scientific vomit. If they could, they would run _ run away from scientists.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_model

“An animal model is a living, non-human animal used during the research and investigation of human disease, for the purpose of better understanding the disease without the added risk of causing harm to an actual human being during the process. The animal chosen will usually meet a determined taxonomic equivalency to humans, so as to react to disease or its treatment in a way that resembles human physiology as needed. Many drugs, treatments and cures for human diseases have been developed with the use of animal models.”

Who do we ask about the fantastic progress in new techniques? See for example Science, July 22 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041.toc What are the right questions? Do you have access to the articles in Science? Is there someone you trust who can give a solid answer in language you understand?

More people should be learning and writing about related topics. There should be someone to ask. It is worthwhile reducing fear.