From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2002 - 07:16:01 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> "What sort of luddites would be moral to kill?" Are you kidding? We
> can't just kill people because they believe differently than us.
I suppose that its perfectly acceptable to some to let future genocidal
fascists continue on until they kill half of the human race or more.
It's not to me, and it shouldn't be to anyone who actually does give a
damn about the future and human life.
My question, though, was to provoke thought. How much do you think an
extropic future is important, is absolutely necessary to the human
race's survival? Is passivity and pacifism an acceptable principle when
it's consequences are counted in billions of lives? Sins of omission of
such a scale are of far greater weight than sins of commission at an
individual level.
If you knew in 1936 what you know now, would killing a few specific
individuals be morally repugnant or not?
At Extro last summer, when Robert Bradbury said about the luddites, "The
blood of billions is on their hands", he was not making a rhetorical
statement. What do YOU intend to do about it? To what ends are you
willing to go to save billions of lives? What means are you willing to
accept to achieve those ends?
Furthermore, your statements are hopelessly hyperbolic, automatically
labelling everything I spoke of as 'proposing terrorism'. I did not and
I demand an apology about that.
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