From: Randy Smith (randysmith101@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Sep 01 2001 - 13:49:12 MDT
>From: Tim Maroney <tim@maroney.org>
>Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>To: <extropians@extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: Herding Extropycats [was Shame on Australia]
>Date: Sat, 01 Sep 2001 11:33:57 -0700
>
> > What worries me, however, is that I've seen on this list an
>extraordinarily
> > high level of impatience with, and lack of imaginative identification
>with,
> > other people's current and historical sufferings. It's higher than I've
> > encountered in any other forum
>
>I guess you don't hang around in the science fiction community much. (I
>don't any more, but I used to.) What I'm seeing here politically is
>by-the-book fanboy libertarianism.
>
> > The tentative conclusion I coming to is that the problem is the other
>way
> > around: that (economic) libertarianism - which has *some* links with
> > extropianism, even if only of an historical nature - is attractive to,
>among
> > others, those who already have the emotional responses I've described.
>
>To be a technology junkie is to some extent to turn away from human life.
>To
>pins one's hopes on a radically transformed techno-future is to some extent
>to turn away from the issues of the present and the past. One hopes it is
>possible to reconcile these poles in oneself, but it should not be
>surprising that many do not, and that futurism continues to serve as a form
>of escape.
Well, let's face it, I have agree with many of the AI fanatics on this list
in their implied opinion that mankind's extended phenotype, mankind's tools,
technology, etc., will be, and perhaps in some ways already is, "better"
than mankind itself.
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