AutistoMephisto

As Mark Twain once remarked, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."

And is also a sociopath, incapable of feeling or giving love.

grant all 50 states independence, and let the states come back together into whatever new nation or collection of nations they wish to form.

Kind of reminds me of this map from the Unofficial Fallout TTRPG:

Here the 48 contiguous States are divvied up between 13 Commonwealths with Alaska being part of the Northwest and Hawaii being in the Southwest.

One of the things I wish we'd stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They're more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they've convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that's what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it's only gotten much, much worse.

So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they've been marinating in some kind of "WH40K-esque" tech religion, it's because they are, and they have.

You know, you do raise a valid point, here. Note-taking has become something of a lost art/skill in the smartphone age. Not many people write shit down in notebooks and journals outside of what they are required to do in school, college, university in the US, anyway. I'm personally working on getting my groove back when it comes to taking notes on things, because as much as I love to create content I find it hard not to go into a rambling diatribe without notes. Honestly the dumbing down of America has led to a lot of people not writing shit down and that's going to be a huge problem down the line.

This. We have a culture that doesn't allow for much in the way of personal time.

They did. They also basically came in around the early 90's in San Francisco and all the tech hippies were like, "Yeah, we're gonna give people all these wonderful tools to create new realities and it's gonna be like a Star Trek utopia!" Then the VC investors and money men showed up and said "No, we're gonna use these tools on people to make them more predictable." So now instead of giving people tools, tech uses tools on people.

What this guy said. Or, even better, why doesn't Captain Aggravated just go make their own movie? It's not super complicated to do, but it does require getting others involved, since nobody can do everything.

I don't want them to "cure autism" by erasing it, either. I'd rather they try to "cure autism" by improving on what it can help a human be capable of doing. That way, if we have a real-life "Butlerian Jihad" like from the lore of Dune, we have Mentats (human computers) to replace "thinking machines"(AI and computers).

As I recall, the reason the Federation outlawed genetic manipulation is due to what happened with the Eugenics Wars, the details of which are murky due to temporal interference, but one of the root causes was clear. While the end results of genetic engineering (Khan Noonien-Singh and his Augments) were undoubtedly superior to normal humans in every way, they also incredibly aggressive and arrogant, a flaw their creators could not correct, as the science was still in its infancy. One of the scientists remarked that "Superior ability breeds superior ambition".

And in the US, religious assholes want to ban IVF for exactly this reason, because it's "playing God".

Evil sustains. Not sure why and science has yet to yield answers. One of the Rothschilds would get continued organ transplants to sustain his life, often from organ donors who did not know they were organ donors, usually from third-world countries.