Randy Smith wrote:
>
> >From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>
> >
> >Ahemmm! I think I will speak to this question.
> >
> >I believe that I am a 12th generation American citizen (those on
> >the list who can trump that (native Americans excepted) please
> >feel free to do so). Rafal, would I believe, be considered a
> >0th generation American. Yet I find myself siding more with
> >Rafal than with Randy.
> >
>
> This issue has NOTHING to do with genealogy! It has to do with long term future of this country, and the short term future of our wallets.
>
> As for myself, I have American ancestors going back to ~ 12000 BP.
> And, as someone else pointed out, West European genes have been found in very very old Americans, and they probably were here in America around 20000 BP.
Actually, someone said that there were caucasians here before the
present 'natives' arrived ~9000 years ago. Caucasians are not western
european in origin, they originate from the Altai/Caucasus/Baikal region
of central asia, and only migrated west (and east to NA, it seems) due
to pressure from a mongoloid expansion from China and SE asia. Said
North American caucasians had more in common with the aboriginal Ainu
people of the Japanese island of Hokkaido than with those that wound up
in Scandinavia
>
> >The "Extropian Game" is *NOT* "horde the wealth". The Extropian
> >Game is to spin the wheel and promote complexification.
>
> The Extropy game is *supposed* to be about keeping our precious brain matter from the ravages of Entropy....
"Live free or die, death is not the worst of evils"
While living forever is an extropic ethic, it is not only not the only
ethic, it is not necessarily the highest one. Individual liberty and
self determination / self improvement are the higher individual extropic
ethics. Living forever is merely one option an individual extropian may
choose.
>
> >Randy's
> >points are ill-suited for the Extropian list unless he makes a
> >clear and falsifiable arugment that the admission of "educated"
> >immigrants over "uneducated" immigrants will clearly promote
> >a greater rate of complexification.
>
> When you cross the street and see a bus bearing down on you, do you postpone running until an "clear and falsifiable argument" is presented that the bus will run you down unless you hustle your butt to the sidewalk?
Not quite the right analogy. More like: When you see a bus run down one
of your associates in the streets, and the driver says "You are next!",
do you postpone running/shooting out the wheels/EMPing the engine until
you have a clear, falsifiable, and independently verifiable argument
that the driver actually meant to do what he did and really means to do
the same to you?
The above analogy applies more to the present terrorist situation,
though. On immigration in general, it is more a matter of a ship at sea,
rescuing people who are abandoning sinking ships. You could rescue
everybody, but that would capsize your own ship and then nobody would
have anyplace to turn. Each individual floating in the sea obviously
thinks it is perfectly reasonable and fair that the ship can surely
accomodate just one more person (them, of course) and that they don't
mean any harm to anybody.
Now, while you are floating around rescuing people, you have the people
already on board furiously working to build the hull to have larger
displacement capacity, larger water processing capacity, and more food,
decking, cabin space, etc. You obviously want to keep the rate of new
construction ahead of the rate of rescuing, so you don't fall behind and
have to start functioning on a more scarce economy for each individual.
The problem is that some of the people you are rescuing are coming from
ships that sank because those people either neglected the maintenance of
their ship, were unable to do so, or had a hand in its destruction, and
when they arrive on board your ship, they either contribute nothing to
the expansion of your ship's capacity while soaking up resources, or
they contribute less than they consume, or they take an active role in
destroying the capacity of the ship.
How do you determine who is going to be a positive contributing member
of the crew and who is going to be a detriment? Do you just let
everybody on board and hope for the best, or do you impose filters that
try to determine how each individual is going to behave and check on the
actions of those new crewmembers until you are satisfied they are
positive contributors, while deporting those who don't fit your filters,
and those who turn out to have misrepresented themselves?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:14 MDT