Fundies should be thankful, for we are Merciful.

[elfs]

I have this dream, you know. I understand that one of the premises of Ayn Rand's famous book, Atlas Shrugged, is that the "productive" people of the world all take themselves away to some desert colony and let the rest of the world, bereft of leadership and vision, waste away.

I dream of a Darwin Shrugged. That someday, all of the gifts of evolutionary biology be withheld from those who claim not to believe in its efficacy. That we deny them all access to antiobiotics, vaccines, cancer angiogenetic antagonist drugs, anti-obesity medicines, modafinil. That we withdraw from their markets (and their markets only) inexpensive fibers and bright colorful dyes.

That we make food as dear to them as it ever was in the depth of a Lamarkian winter.

I think I subject myself too much to the utter stupidity of the anti- evolutionists. The "We're fighting Darwinism" has now fallen over into smug "We've beaten Darwinism" in the fundie churches, who congregants still vaccinate their kids and use antibiotics, all produced by scientists who scratch their heads and say, "Uh, what... ?"

Sigh I guess I'm just too bloody minded today. Damn allergies kept me up all night, I got maybe four hours of sleep. My car's gonna cost me a kilobuck, probably, to keep running for another two or three years, and all that stressy crud.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading Richard K. Morgan's excellent _Altered Carbon_, a futuristic noir novel. In it, people are stored in "stacks" installed in their spinal columns and can be "re-sleeved" - inserted into a new body - if their body is killed, or even restored from backup if their stack is destroyed. Most penalties for crimes are essentially temporal displacement - you get stored for a while, then re-sleeved.

In this world, the Catholics, refusing to believe that the stack could be the repository of the soul, refuse to be resleeved. This also prevents them from being needlecast (think ansible) out to the colonies, leaving them stuck on Earth, and generally leaving them behind as the rest of society lives longer and they don't.

[rapier.livejournal.com]

I really liked this book. I require more Richard K Morgan.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

He has published several other books, two in the same world. I intend to pick them up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Morgan_%28author%29