Idahobeef

Welcome to my new homepage. This site is a consolidation of all my work to date: short stories, biography, and the things I am interested in. It will be continually updated as time goes on. I am a science fiction author, artist, musician, a Devil Beater (Charismatic  Christian and Biological Fundamentalist),  Arm-Chair General and Gamer. I am also an information maniac, having read over 10,000 books (my own personal library has over 3,000 books). I am politically active as well and have strong Libertarian leanings (see my blog here). Check back from time to time for more updates. Damon

WHAT I BELIEVE IN

Infosocialism
This is a political philosophy developed (under the name "information socialism") by the American "Socrates III" in 2001. Originally from the left-anarchist tradition, Socrates felt that the vision of a pure anarchosocialist society was unrealistic (and in some cases criminal). Nevertheless, he observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of "intellectual property" often gave rise to significant injustice. He believes that the state should not criminalize owning life-saving information and popular digital information (like CD and DVD media) for the sake of the corporation. Distributing the benefits of such innovation fairly to society is the mainstream media's job, not the governments. Infosocialism thus begins with the premise that "information needs to be free," but redefined freedom as the nationalization of intellectual property and its free distribution by all citizens of the World Wide Web. Thus, the government does protect patents, but continues in its basic duties of protecting society and individuals. This is less absurd when one imagines a "university" rather than "corporate" model of research and development.

Infosocialist doctrine will surely fail to take hold in the hyper- developed nations like America and Japan and will instead take root in less-developed nations, many of whom feel that they were are being exploited by wealthier corporations' locks on major genetic patents, nanotechnology designs, and digital media, and information software.

Like many legal concepts, intellectual property is a fiction, viable only as long as everyone agrees to be bound by it. At the beginning of the 21st century, fierce controversies are beginning to break out over the ownership of computer software, digital recordings of music, genetically engineered seeds, and other forms of intellectual property. Whenever the public sees too great a discrepancy between the value of information and the price being charged for it, piracy becomes widespread. Entire nations like China and most of Africa, falling behind in the race for technical innovation, choose not to enforce the international agreements protecting intellectual property. The goal of Infosocialism is to make sure the artificial scarcity of information (and the high prices charged by people to make lots of profit) are negated as much as possible so that people can have the cures for diseases that can kill them, access to gene-modded crops to prevent widespread starvation in whole countries, and forcing the governments of the world to get back to the more important job of running their nations and their economies instead of punishing media pirates (usually kids) with criminal and financial penalties.

YOU might be an Infosocialist if you believe heavily fining kids for downloading MP3s is unfair. If you think that turning elementary or middle school kids into criminals for the sake of big music companies profits is unfair, you too may be an Infosocialist.

YOU might be an Infosocialist if you think that its not right for medical companies to charge billions of dollars for life-saving medicine, meds without which millions of people per year die.

Think about it.....

Biochauvinism
Also known as Biological Fundamentalism: A conservative religious movement that resists asexual reproduction, genetic engineering, altering the human anatomy, and overcoming death. A resistance movement born to counter the evolution from the human to the posthuman.

Biochauvanism is the belief that biosapient life (humans as well as clones) is inherently more valuable than animal or digital life ("AIs and infomorphs"). This meme has existed for centuries in various forms (humans are better than animals) however it is growing in public policy, especially in the Religious Right in the USA, now that the government is beginning to make life and death decisions for people due to its takeover of the health care system. Local beliefs vary a great deal: an artificial intelligence that is treated as fully "human" are being constructed as we speak. A major fear of biohumanists is the deep-seated belief that AIs and other commanding information systems could rule the planet ruthlessly and with only logic. Many people with religious or spiritual convictions worry that a global information network overseen by an AI would control everyone on the planet using the "Mark of the Beast". In fact, researchers in the USA have recently created an AI that can be "evil", shocking many people who question why creating an evil machine would even be necessary. In addition, biochauvanists see the global animal rights movement as dangerous to humanity overall, since many of the radical fringe groups of ecopagans would like to see most of humanity wiped out, to create a "sustainable level" of humans on the planet. Biochauvanism is especially strong in the Evangelical Christian communities due to its promotion of human rights over animal rights and they are generally called "Biological Fundamentalists".