Re: META: Why I'm boycotting Extropy(TM).

From: Alex Future Bokov (alexboko@umich.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 06 2000 - 16:49:39 MDT


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Paul, I'm sorry that you felt alienated by some of the responses. I hope
you reconsider your decision, and I am saddened that the thread I
started as an attempt to address some of the very same concerns you
voiced seems to have had the opposite effect in your opinion.

We all get upset and have periods where we just want to walk away. So I
don't think that anybody will hold it against you if you don't follow
through on this one... except maybe one or two individuals who may have
it in for you personally, and what do you care what they think of you
anyway, eh?

We need you and more like you here to balance our liberthink. If
everyone who isn't a libertarian abdicates from participating in the
Extropy Institute, it will become less objective and less broad-based,
and that isn't in anybody's advantage. To paraphrase Randy Smith's
post, the bottom line is survival and advancement, not a particular
economic ideology.

The real divergence appears to be not between statists and
libertarians, but between those who think strict lassiez faire is
already perfect, and those who see problems that will need to be
solved, hopefully before they are upon us. Of course, anything that is
examined closely enough turns out to be imperfect, so the barrier to
this list seeing 'debugging markets' as a worthwhile problem to
investigate might be abandoning prejudices (from both sides of the
quaint little duality we grandiosely call the political spectrum) and
tackling it rationally and conscientiously.

While I'm at it, I'd like to thank the authors of the dozens upon
dozens of replies to this thread. While it focused on bread-and-gold
type economics more than on the general class of arbitration/allocation
systems I was hoping for, it still was very instructive. I expect to
spend a long time digesting the thread and extracting the lessons
therein. Heck, this list has essentially just written a short book on
the issue.

- --

SOF drug CIA
Why are the above words in my signature? Check out:
http://www.echelon.wiretapped.net

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