From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 20:00:12 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harvey Newstrom
> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:48 AM
>
> http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php>
?s=2a921b763522f9b85bec6
> > b824451531a&
> > threadid=34658
> >
> > It seems that some from the Stormfront White Nationalist Community
> > are reading the extropians list and passing that information around.
>
> I have complained about this before. Extropianism and Transhumanism
> have long been connected to the racist movement in the minds
> of many.
> That is why it is so scary to me to see racial profiling, group
> judgments, eugenics, selective child killing, and The Bell Curve
> discussed on this list as if they are reasonable positions within our
> philosophy.
>
> (And no, this is not an invitation for all the racists to come out of
> the woodwork and demand that I offer real scientific proof that these
> viewpoints are wrong. I'm not playing that game.)
I went to this horrible website and did a search on the term "extropy"
-- fortunately there were no hits. "Transhumanism" turned up 11 hits
and I forced myself to skim through all of the threads, overcoming the
natural nausea I felt at doing so. While the association of
transhumanism with this horrific nonsense is certainly Not a Good Thing,
there is some little comfort to be taken that almost all of the effort
to connect transhumanism to the racialist drivel one finds there seems
to be the work of one unsophisticated poster (from the tenor of his
writing, I would imagine he's a lonely, classically socially maladapted
misanthrope, i.e. a "loser").
I have agreed all along that Extropy Institute needs to be very clear
that we have no association with this kind of thing and that it is
utterly inconsistent with the Extropian Principles. There is some small
risk that some few people might somehow come to believe that
transhumanism in general and extropianism in particular somehow have a
connection to the kind of terrible nonsense one finds in places like
"stormfront.org", but such a belief could only be formed by not really
reading the Extropian Principles or having a strong antipathy to
transhumanism or extropianism to begin with. Note there is a risk that
too strong a public reaction to the smarmy rantings of one or two
misguided losers might be mistaken for more of a concern about the
substance of their ideas being similar to our own than is warranted.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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