We’ve introduced a new forum today, ‘Futurist Textbook’, as well as made a few layout changes to the boards. Let me elaborate:
Futurist Textbook is a forum for you futurists. It’s dedicated to prediction and problem solving for our rapidly changing world. Read the introduction by Tentative, who will be heading up the new forum. Then get started, because there’s a whole lot of future to cover.
The other changes to the boards are more mundane, and were made to make the board structure more logical and more descriptive. Everything functions just the same, but it looks nicer, which fits with the new recognition of The Arts.
I look forward to many debates and criticisms of the subject known as futurism considering that I believe such thoughts to be either absurd or fleeting.
You can count on me being the anti-thesis of futurism.
We’d better write quickly, the future is closing in fast.
Glad there is a new forum. I don’t know about writing a textbook, I’ll be happy if we can simply find some convincing reason to hope. God knows I’ve tried, but saving a miracle, I feel the future will be ironically Hobbesian - Nasty, brutish and short.
“Two things have always been true throughout history, at least in large chunks of it. One, things are always getting better. Two, people always think they’re getting worse”
–Penn Jillette
The better or worse part is subject to opinion and that alone should provide plenty of grist for the mill, but it is obvious that our global environment is changing, changing rapidly, and we are way behind the curve.
Hopefully, the forum will be more about finding pragmatic solutions to pressing problems and not so much about the philosophical considerations. In honor of an old gentleman, the question is, will it help fix the sink? The sink is leaking. Why and where? How can we fix it? Can we fix it in such a way that it doesn’t screw up something else?
We’ve talked about humanist progress before Rainey, and a generalized ‘getting better’. I remained unconvinced. I think you ended up that way too.
Nice quote from the illusionist too. These days though, we don’t have to wait until we’re dead for the delugé - it has the impatience to arrive prior.
I think the real question is “Will we have the guts to fix it…?” The choice will be either to wait meekly for the reaper, or to don the cloak and take up the scythe ourselves.
It’s just that…well, everything is fine. Everything has always been fine. It’s called life. Problems come up. They get solved. More problems come up. They, too, get solved. Things ebb and flow. Somehow we just keep rolling along, humankind. What a ride. What a view.
That’s like saying, after we just got into the car and drove a hundred miles with a few near-misses, and nearly running out of petrol once - but with twenty-thousand miles to go, that “Gee, fatal crashes never happen maaaan… Everything will be just groovey…”
Tell that to the trilobites. Sometimes the ride ends abruptly, or ends with someone having to gnaw off their own arm to escape, or someone elses.
This is the common mistake to make. Oh dear, life will not be roses, therefore we may as well call it a day. Black white. Passive active.
I would happily gnaw off my arm, and yours, to live, and I wouldn’t whine about it afterwards. But I also wouldn’t go around ignoring my stump and telling everyone it didn’t hurt and life had been somehow ‘enriched’ by the experience.
The world is not an interpretive test Rainey, wether the cup is half-full or half-spilt is no longer the point; not once you have been foolish enough to have children anyway.
It may just be perspective, but as valuable as introspection may be, pragmatic considerations often trump our wondering wandering. You know this is true when the damned alarm goes off. And in that sense, that is what this is hopefully about. The alarm is ringing and we need to begin our preparations for the day… Pee, shower, brush our teeth, look at our schedule and get into the groove. I mean, if the rope is too short, do you know how to splice in another?
When did this happen? 
I think the real question is “Will we have the guts to fix it…?” The choice will be either to wait meekly for the reaper, or to don the cloak and take up the scythe ourselves.