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>Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 23:12:22 -0700
>From: Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>
>To: extropians@extropy.org
>Subject: Re: GUNS: Re: Those Damm democrats
>Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>
>Joe Dees wrote:
>
>> There is a cluster of values common to most (not all) members of the religious right wing in this country. They are predominately antiabortion, pro-death penalty, pro-gun, anti-womens' and minority parity and pro-judeo-christian-influenced government (against church/state separation). There are exceptions, but their very status as exceptions highlights the fact that this cluster of values is more often than not found together.
>>
>
>To add to the list: anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-evolution,
>anti-les-bi-gay-trans, anti-fiddling with "God's Law" generally and
>doing whatever makes them the least queasy specifically. Some of the
>scarier ones think a more or less theocracy is a fine idea.
>
>You know, I temper my love of tech with a deep love of humanity and
>desire to see the race advance and to include everyone in the benefits
>that are so obvious. But I don't know how to include or reach some of
>the people out there. How do you reach someone who doesn't want to be
>reached and is bent on your destruction (to the extent they know about
>you and can get away with it). How do you reach the 60+% in the US
>whose primary core beliefs revolve around utter fairy tales? I run into
>statistics such as that nearly 50% of college grads in the US never read
>a single book after graduation. Totally incomprehensible to me. Nearly
>a different species. Or claims that a huge portion of the population
>never achieves the state of mental development known as formal
>operations. How can such people be reached with the truth of what is
>now much less what is coming? How can these people be trusted to vote
>on technologies they cannot begin to comprehend or even conceive of?
>How can we reach them and gather their vote instead of leaving it to the
>Creation Coalition or worse?
>
>And, if they can't be reached, how do we proceed in such a way that they
>don't stop us and most likely doom the species in the process?
>
An excellent and superb question, and one that can be not only abstractly and theoretically, but also concretely and empirically, addressed. How indeed do we keep the neanderthal troglodyte juggernaut of saurian conservative reactionism from derailing our progressive evolution to a more enlightened emerging future?
>
>- samantha
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