From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 00:41:04 MDT
At 01:15 AM 5/29/02 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote: wrote:
>> I don't understand why the topics of infanticide, racism and violence
>> keep popping up. [...]
>> What is this all about? There seems to be some sort of meme-war going on
>> just underneath the surface. Someone seems to be trying to grab
>> mind-space within the Extropian domain for other ideas.
Nah, I don't think so, Harvey. I suspect a lot of it is akin to the Mensa
or obese-sf-fan dynamic: a lot of self-aggregating rather smart people many
of whom have not done nearly as well in life and love as they might have
expected given their opinion that their luminous minds are the most
wonderful thing about them, and who compensate for the dissing they get
from their perceived inferiors by developing lofty and prickly theories of
Us versus Them.
Since Them are the rest of the human race, and since this forum is avowedly
transhuman, it's easy to see how it would attract some people whose
principal orientation to the social world is *ressentiment* (in Nietzsche's
sense). This can take the discursive form of equally lofty and prickly
disdain for those who do okay in the world. I don't think too many of the
people on this list with lucrative jobs and kids of their own have been
engaged in this strange dog-eat-dog who-do-we-kill-first uber-kaffeeklatch.
Later, Eliezer quipped:
>It's a vast, anti-infant conspiracy.
Ho ho. Still, the recurrent tenor of such poisonous threads is a bit
worrying. I spent a fair part of my doctoral dissertation a decade and a
half ago arguing against the dominant and avowedly antihumanist cast of
most postmodern theory, while advancing what I see as a humanist-grounded
transhumanism. So it's always distressing to find what looks like
antihumanism flailing around here in the undergrowth (even if it's usually
nothing more malign than compensatory posturing).
Damien Broderick
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