Dalle2 Fetus render
The Value of Life
I became pro-life while an atheist - or maybe agnostic. Which I was depended on my mood. In those years - somewhere between 2006 & 2009 - I still went to church because my parents wanted me to, and I still read the bible for its wisdom, but I was dead inside. So you may wonder why I would become pro-life? It stemmed from a simple principal: An embryo holds infinite potential. Each one could be a Hitler or a Buddha, each an inventor or destroyer. One could one day grow up to push the red button that ends the world or press two atoms together and invent fusion. It seemed as if people lost potential as they got older - as if aging was itself the measurement of that loss. It seemed to me, a young teenager, that I should push as hard as I could to expand the perimeter of my abilities before that fossilized into the essence of myself. I feared that fossilization, as I still do. Now, age 30, I find myself often pressing up against those ever-harder walls of my abilities and will power to develop myself. The fossilization process is completing, and I fear losing out. But for a fetus, infinity was still within reach. What a cruel thing to deny it the right to grasp.
I have never bought into the personhood arguments that were being pumped by whatever NGOs were active in those years, because babies are not born persons. This may shock you if you’re a conservative, but this fact ought not make a newborn any less valuable. Indeed, it ought to reveal why a fetus is more valuable. The revelation that a newborn baby and a fetus are hardly any different seems to reveal the sickness of a mind. The progressive then decides it’s OK to murder newborns, while the traditionalist acquires a reverence for the fetus. It is a fact that most children can’t passed a mirror test, or a DAP test, younger than two. These are the industry standards for measuring a sense of self, and therefore the presence of personhood. Ergo, as they cannot pass any of the peer-accepted metrics of personhood, they are not persons - neither the newborn nor the fetus.
I did not buy any arguments related to bodily autonomy. Humans are not plants - they cannot make their own food by just standing in the sun. They are dependent on each other for food and services. No one is truly autonomous. We also know none of us are autonomous while we sleep, nor when we are seriously injured. It’s a fool’s gamble to define worth off autonomy - especially considering so many fools in debt today. After all, inasmuch as an umbilical cord is needed to feed a fetus, a spoon is needed to feed a newborn. Leave either a fetus or a newborn on a table, both will die. Neither are bodily autonomous. Once again, the augment is complete nonsense - the product of a deranged mind.
I’ve heard other half-baked arguments about the fetus being a parasite (it’s not, because it’s the same species as the mother), and many endless diatribes of anti-natalist bunk. Over the years, a consistent pattern has started to emerge: when they run out of arguments, they admit they just want to kill. It’s not hard at all, they treat the murder of innocence as a sacrament - a rite of passage to their deranged beliefs. “Safe, rare, legal” is a red herring. It’s never safe, it’s never rare, it should be illegal, and they treat it like a holy sacrament that, when robbed, offends them as if they were robbed of the Eucharist - were they not demoniacs. No, I have no patience for pro-choice people. It’s run out. Furthermore, when abortion is gone from this land, I will never feel pity for women who risk their lives to get back-alley abortions. Such things are not to be pitied but laughed at for the sheer stupidity. And as many women who have gotten abortions and later regretted it have said, it just doesn’t make sense why they took it so seriously as if their lives were ending. If anything, I can understand the fear of fossilization - the fear of losing the infinite possibilities you could be if you didn’t have the baby. But they will always be tarnished by blood. It’s not worth it. And in pure number games, you are more likely to raise an unwanted baby better than you were compared to achieving anything meaningful in your life going to work and school. Part of growing up is accepting you won’t be great. You will be average, as will most people.
If this is cruel, it’s by design. In reality, I’m borderline socialist in wanting state resources to support pregnant women. But if you haven’t been pleb filtered by my inflammatory writing, read on.
Infinity in a Can
When I was in my Master’s program at Columbia U, a cherished professors of architectural history had a habit of using the phrase “in embryo” when discussing concepts before they formalized into movements. I had never heard the word used in that way, but I liked it - or rather, the vestigial parts of my secular pro-life views liked it. Any idea in embryo has the chance to change the world. Before it is tested, socially digested, and bested by other ideas, any idea has the chance to end or change the world. As an idea ages, however, its weak-spots are revealed and its capacity to do such things begins to falter. I will never understand the almost religious zeal surrounding economic theories, which thus far have all failed to out-perform the joys of medieval serfdom and guilds. None of this crap works, and I am unsure how many more decades of failure are still needed before that enters popular wisdom. Much like a severe autist, I have always been fascinated by concepts and machines that do actually work - even more so for when they do so in an elegant way. Embryos were certainly such things, but in light of my professor’s language, I started wondering what else?
A few years back Bioware released the game Andromeda. This was a Mass Effect spin off that was poorly received, due to most of the animations and voice acting being poorly produced - the rest of the game was decent. The story was simple: You wake up 600 years after the events of the original Mass Effect trilogy, in the Andromeda galaxy. You are on an ark - a cryoship whose passengers spent the journey to another galaxy asleep for those centuries. As for home, well… At the end of the original Mass Effect trilogy, it is strongly hinted that most intelligent life, if not all of it, has gone extinct. I’ll skip the details of the plot, but suffice to say that you the player are aware you might just be the only humans left in the universe, along with the other aliens you brought along. Ergo, each of these arks represents the continuum of civilization. There are several, if I hadn’t made that clear, with one for every species the human race was allied with at departure. There’s some mixing, of course, depending on skills. The Human Ark has a few alien specialists, and a few alien arks have their human specialists. But the loss of any one ark would more or less mean the extinction of that species in question, with the leftovers on other ships being doomed to watch the last echoes of their civilization slowly go extinct. These arks, as you may surmise, are embryonic civilizations - the infinite possibility of unknown eons and generations compressed into the frozen vaults in their hulls. A race in a can, or a civilization in embryo. The loss of one can alter the nature of an entire galaxy to come.
There is a scene where you rescue one of the arks from nasty aliens and the camera angles are designed to force your appreciation of this embryonic civilization. There is this sense as if you are watching a man with his balls exposed to blades all around. One wrong move, and it’s the end of his bloodline.
I can’t put to words what the sense is, but watching that Ark escape, and thereby securing the fate of an entire race to continue to exist, has something spiritually valuable to me. I often ponder about those various religious minorities that escaped European prosecution and settled in America - did they view their little escape ships the same way? Did they envision they were a civilization in a can? A future in embryo?
Dalle2 render of the Mayflower seeing what it will birth
Infinity Under the Sea
On July 8th, the United States Navy fired Cmdr. Seth Rumler from his post as captain of the USS Scranton. Mr Rumler is the most recent in an ongoing purge of naval command structure that the Biden administration has been undergoing this year. Some other names include:
Captain Amy Larson
LtCol Bret Swaim
Cmdr. Matthew McCormick
Cmdr. Devine Johnson
Command Master Chief Earl Sanders
Capt. Jeffrey Sandin
Cmdr. Peter Lesaca
Why exactly this is occurring has not been stated at all - albeit at least one was over a DWI arrest. Rumors abound about the “Naval Justice School’s climate”, which likely means these are political removals related to vaccines and or LGBTQ issues.
One of the main role’s of a Naval Commander is the faithful execution of American nuclear policy. In the event of a catastrophic disaster - ranging from biological, nuclear, to straight up existential - the Navy is very likely to be the last one left to turn off the lights of the American way of life. Many of our SSBs and SSBNs are purposefully isolated in deep sea missions lasting up to 6 months with zero comms. The idea being that if anything happens while they are in deep sea incommunicado, they can be the final decision arbiters when they come up for air.
Consider for a moment, a doomsday scenario. Perhaps America’s nuclear codes are hacked or stolen, or perhaps some new weapon ensures our ICBMs fail to launch. America is wiped out by Russia, or China, or aliens, or whatever. Everyone is celebrating for 6 months, and then up comes an Ohio class god of death to find rads coming from home port. They launch a salvo and become the great equalizers. Even one of these little Shivas houses 11,400 kT worth of nuclear heat. For comparison’s sake, that is 1,036 Hiroshima bombs, crammed into 170 meters of hull.
This is something akin to America’s dead-hand switch.
However, for some time now the United States has been aware that its navy serves an unusual secondary, or perhaps tertiary or lower role: Succession. Let us suppose for a moment an Ohio-class SSBN comes up after doomsday and discovers neither America, nor her enemies, are left. Most of the northern hemisphere of the planet is now smoldering ruins, and the southern hemisphere is desperately re-arranging itself around the lack of trading networks. In this scenario, why launch at all? You’d just be hitting ruins. What remains of the United States Navy would then constitute the most powerful military force on Earth. Not that it wasn’t already, but now it is without question. The captain of that SSBN can virtually hold any nation hostage with the threat of nuclear annihilation (Mind you, any surviving Russian or Chinese subs could also). For all intents and purposes, the fate of America’s refugees and the continuity of civilization after a nuclear war would rest on what those surviving ships decide to do. Where to rebuild and move surviving American citizens to. It will no doubt be a brutal struggle to establish order.
So you see, it is no surprise the regime ruling the United States today is so political in ousting captains not aligned to itself politically. They are aware each of these captains may one day find themselves as effectively the president of a government in exile. They understand each submarine is a New America, in embryo.
Nuclear Embryo, Dalle2
Fictional Birth
This plot is more or less Battlestar Galactica, but on the sea instead of space. Nonetheless, I am surprised no one has written a story around this concept as a formal novel. Though, if you know where to look, this plot was developed in a little-known internet war game conducted in the mid 2000s, called 1983:Doomsday. Who came up with the idea is lost to history, but a small community propped up around the original posts which were in the form of “WCRB Newshour”, or the World Census and Reclamation Bureau, a fictional post-war organization begun in Australia, trying to rebuild the world from the surviving southern hemisphere.
The plot of this little war game was simple: in 1983, Russian officer Stanislav Petrov saw his monitoring equipment detect a missile launch from the United States. Shortly after, he saw five more launches. It was his job to report first-sightings, and with his commander’s confirmation, launch retaliations. In real life, Petrov decided that if the United States was launching missiles, it wouldn’t be just five. It would be hundreds. He determined it was a false alarm, and did not report the launches - directly disobeying his orders. In 1983 Doomsday, Petrov was not on duty, and a less experienced officer reported the launches, resulting in an accidental nuclear exchange.
The war game concluded that after a nuclear war, much of the US Navy would likely be intact, and homeless. The only English-speaking areas that would survive would be Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Thus, the US navy became the Commonwealth Navy, and relocated millions of US survivors to Australia to help rebuild Anglo civilization in the still-habitable southern hemisphere.
I have enjoyed reading the WCRB posts for over a decade now, as the fantastical imaginations of a world of strange rebalances.
Some of the fictional successor states in 1983 Doomsday
Continuity
As the war in Ukraine heats up, it is worth asking who may inherit the Earth if we blow ourselves up. Where are the future civilizations in embryo? Have you considered they may not be on land at all? After America falls, whatever is left of its military and hardware will likely be the most powerful force on Earth. Where would they call their new home if they couldn’t go home? Would they continue on as a force for democracy, or something new?
After doomsday, when the subs come up to a world of ashes, would a captain actually launch? Or would they understand they now represent the strongest force on Earth compressed into a 170m can? What would a single officer with 11,400 kT of diplomatic insurance do? Or, let’s suppose, a captain is not under the sea on doomsday, and he receives launch orders in a first strike. Would he? Would that captain be aware of the game at play? Launch, and you are just another submarine in a war. Don’t launch, and you likely become the only nuclear power left on Earth.
11,400 kT to forge the world into your own image, or burn it into someone else’s.
It’s a heavy temptation.