Robots In Disguise
I’ve long thought that The Fragile, the brilliant and still-astounding 1999 double album by Nine Inch Nails, would make a perfect soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film. The newest Terminator: Salvation trailer, I think, proves this objectively true:
Musically, I prefer Year Zero, which has the added bonus of actually being a dystopian scifi story. This trailer does make a powerful case for The Fragile, though.
— JS Bangs · Apr 7, 09:16 PM · #
Oh man, that definitely sent a thrill going up my leg.
— JA · Apr 7, 10:10 PM · #
Oh, Year Zero, and the stone brilliant ARG (alternative reality game) that advertised it.
And how genius is Trent anyways?#
Reznor is a true subversive.
Fragile was distributed for free over the ‘net, and people paid whatever they felt like.
Reznor always loathed Bush though.
Both “Capital G” and “With Teeth” were written about GW.
Prescient as it turns out.
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 03:12 AM · #
I wonder….don’t conservatives ever get tired of reaching out to the cultural elite and being given a righteous smackdown?
Perhaps lack of coolth is a bigger problem than you admit, Suderman.
In particular I recall your culture11 piece where you attempted to libel Dr. Pinker as a “fiction-hater” for dissing the bioluddite council’s awful work product.
Have you ever considered…..perhaps almost all the cultural, intellectual, and academic elites are on the other side because…….you are wrong?
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 12:06 PM · #
Chan — Have you noticed that I’ve argued that conservatives shouldn’t oppose stem cell research? That I’m giddily in favor of people uploading their selves to computers? Have you considered that I might agree with Pinker about Kass despite also taking issue with the way Pinker seems fearful of — or at least uncertain how to deal with — anything that lies even a hair’s breadth outside the realm of the measurable and scientific? Did you even read the post in question? Far from siding with Kass on bioethics issues, it argued that, like Dawkins, Pinker seems to made anxious by the idea that we might be able to explain anything about the world by resorting to fiction. That point might be debatable (though I’d stand by it), but I’m not sure what it has to do with my agreement or disagreement with Kass’s bioethics pronouncements.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 8, 04:42 PM · #
I read the post.
Did you read the Stupidity of Dignity?
Pinker’s point was that neither bible cites or cites from other works of fiction had any place in a work product on bioethics.
Agree or disagree?
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 05:34 PM · #
And have you ever considered that given your incessant claim to have the forces of Science and Reason on your side, it’s a bit strange that you continually argue by way of baldly fallacious appeals to authority?
That Pinker essay, by the way, got a fair amount of discussion on this blog last year, and the specific point you cite was disputed at some length by our resident authority on the relevance of fiction.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 8, 06:08 PM · #
Pfft.
I just don’t think it very conservative to pay taxpayer money to fake-scientists to write essays on bioethics that include hysterical doomsday quotes from orwell and support text and validation from the bible.
sheesh
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 09:57 PM · #
lol, and yes!
but MY appeal to authority is to “vulgar” evo pysch, evo theory of culture, cognitive anthropology and evolutionary biology while YOUR appeal to authority is to a possibly mythical supernatural being and an antique book of non-verifiable faerytales…..ie, fiction .
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 10:25 PM · #
Chan, I don’t side with Kass on the vast majority of the issues he writes about, and I generally find his writing pretty tedious. I wrote a long and almost entirely negative response to his co-authored TNR piece on steroids in baseball. That said, if someone is seeking to illustrate, explain, provide history or add context to moral and ethical ideas about how society functions, or might function, or could or should function, I think it’s entirely reasonable to reference Biblical stories, which have, after all, served as one of the principle ethical guides for Western society for roughly two thousand years. Relying solely or primarily on its authority to make an ethical case to a secular audience is, I think, a bad idea, and not terribly productive in a semi-post-religious, secularly-governed society like ours.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 8, 10:44 PM · #
I think it’s entirely reasonable to reference Biblical stories
Are you insane Suderman? A two thousand year old book is going to give us applicable information for the ethics of genetic anti-senescence therapy?
I studied the Bible in Great Books 101, along with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upanishads and Vedas.
It is a mashup of conflicting socio-political writers that were wholly embedded in their antique slice of spacetime.
Oooo! Oooo! I know! Let’s use il Comedia Divina to inform policy on legal rights of citizen cyborgs.
No and no and no.
btw, what has happened to the bioluddite council?
disbanded? tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail?
What a colossal waste of taxpayer monies.
Small government my ass.
— matoko_chan · Apr 9, 09:25 PM · #