Why should the public listen to individuals who represent themselves as
extropians, supposedly holding to principles of protecting and enhancing
intelligent life, when they condone cannibalism, when they condone the
murder and arbitrary use of developing selves until those selves are
capable of standing up and shouting "I claim rights for myself"? If
children, born or unborn, have no rights until they can claim them, adults
can use them as resources for *anything* a twisted mind can conceive. The
general public is not brain dead yet, extropian credibility just took a
turn for the worse.
I read recently where China has 53 million missing females, they are
statistically expected from normal demographic trends but simply not there.
Guess why they're not there. They were not referred to as missing "fetal
tissue" or missing "viable tissue mass" or missing "clumps of tissue" or
missing "small lumps of biological matter." They are missing women. I
can't think of anything being more "anti-woman" than this capital fact.
This is the result of the vision of world unity that the self-anointed
world demographic managers hold - the High Priests and Priestesses of the
Cult of Unfertility - and I can't believe that self-proclaimed extropians
are in league with them, passively by sharing their definition of human, or
actively. Real extropians view developing selves as more gray cells. The
self-anointed depopulation experts view them as more alimentary canals.
The difference is stark and uncompromising. Think of what 53 million
Chinese women might have thought of to improve and enhance life; the
abortion fanatics just think of 53 million stomachs to fill and 53 million
bowels to empty. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I am with the late
Julian Simon in believing that intelligence trumps resource limitations,
and the more gray cells the better. The Malthusian vision is false, the
race between humans and resources is not a fair race because resources are
stupid and individuals are not.
As to what Roe v. Wade legalized, I'll stand by my original post, this is
the law of the land. "In America, abortion is legal on demand right
through nine months, in fact, right up to having the baby 2/3 out of the
birth canal on its due date." A Gallop poll conducted in the spring of
1990 found that 80 percent of Americans disagreed that abortion was legal
on demand through nine months and 65 percent disagreed strongly. It is a
common case of legal illiteracy. A majority of five justices is all it
takes to continue the holocaust. The Webster and Casey cases did allow
some states to place some conditions on abortion, but the fact remains that
if you live in America, you can legally find a place that will abort your
child on its due date with the child 2/3 out of the birth canal for *any
reason whatsoever*. Even the doctor who recently testified before Congress
that partial birth abortions were rare and primarily done to protect the
life of the mother, later recanted his testimony out of shame, and admitted
that they were far more prevalent than the orthodox press dared report and
that 90% were elective, i.e., on demand.
Outright infanticide, as some so-called extropians have inferred should be
allowed, will have to wait a bit for the Supreme Court to follow its own
logic out to its deathly end. If all lines drawn as to when a developing
self is entitled to rights are arbitrary - that is, all lines drawn after
conception - then the line can be moved anywhere at all on an emotional
whim, from 2 weeks to 40 years. There is *no* rationality involved in
arbitrarily picking a line, only different levels of emotional
squeamishness. If we desensitize our population through education and
popular culture, we can do anything we want. If we can eliminate enough
squeamishness, we can deal with the minority who remain squeamish. For
example, there'll be no more messy frog dissections in high school biology.
Rather, the dissections will be done on computer simulations of humans,
encouraging the entropic view of them as "meat machines." Our
squeamishness is sanitized as our students are brutalized. The technique
worked well in the SS boot camps.
The arguments for rape, incest, life-of-the-mother and fatal defects are
rational, even if they prescribe tragic consequences. These can be worked
out, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But in America, they amount to roughly
3% of all abortions. It is not rational to open the sluiceway to the
culture of death to deal with small numbers of exceptional cases.
Arjen Kamphuis wrote 3/4/98:
RJ: <As we slip closer and closer to a world government of some sort or
another, there will be no place on earth left to move to in order to escape
the culture of death.>
AK: <As I said before: You can always move to the Vatican>
As to moving to the Vatican, I don't think we can squeeze 5 billion people
into a postage-stamp size country. Will the world death-worshipping elites
allow them any other jurisdiction "with liberty and justice for all"? Your
solution in mediaeval times was known as ghettoization. I predict that
those who oppose the oncoming world government's forcing abortion,
euthanasia and assisted suicide "rights" on everyone, will in fact, be
ghettoized, at least until the elites develop a final solution to them. I
see this tangibly, as if I were reading today's headlines. The logic in
entropic worldviews is inexorable.
When I drive by the local abortion "clinic" every day, I am acutely aware
that I am driving by a Nazi or Stalinist death camp. There are death camps
spread "liberally" throughout the world, in neighborhoods. Those who would
condemn the German or Russian citizen for living next to their death camps
without speaking up or questioning have absolutely no grounds to do so
unless they recognize the holocaust going on in their own backyard. Every
time some tinpot dictator, some politician or over-active bureaucrat
proposes a new restrictive law or regulation "for the safety and sake of
the children," I always substitute "for the survivors" in my head. The
moral logic of doing anything for children within the culture of death is
twisted beyond recognition.
Arjen Kamphuis wrote 3/4/98:
AK: <I don't claim to know what the definition of a human is but I'm pretty
sure you and I are human.>
RJ: <I do know.>
AK: <Then why haven't you won a couple of Nobel prizes or something? Do
you even grasp the enormous arrogance of those three words?>
Non sequitor. What do the globally balanced, politically correct Nobel
prizes have to do with the definition of human? Is the ever-so politically
circumspect Nobel prize committee who we go to in order to be granted
rights? Do you grasp that you and your fellow travelers are arrogantly
forcing your definition on everyone else, with the exception of the one
ghetto you'll allow us, the Vatican?
Jay (Entropyfoe) wrote 3/4/98: <If any religion can be said to be
Extropian, Buddhism is the greatest in extent.>
I don't think I can answer this bit of nonsense better than Friedrich
Nietzsche did in "Will to Power" so I will quote him: "Every purely moral
value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this to be
expected in Europe.... [T]he weary nihilism that no longer attacks; its
most famous form, Buddhism; a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness.
Nihilism does not only contemplate the 'in vain!' nor is it merely the
belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy. This
is, if you will, illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one
needs to be logical. The reduction to nothing by judgment is seconded by
the reduction to nothing by hand.... [T]he most extreme form of nihilism:
the nothing (the 'meaningless'), eternally! The European form of Buddhism:
the energy of knowledge and strength compels this belief. It is the most
*scientific* of all possible hypotheses. We deny end goals: if existence
had one it would have to have been reached.... Nihilism as a symptom that
the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be
destroyed.... [T]he overall aim is, in... Buddhist... terms: 'better
*not* to be than to be.' I see all philosophers, I see science kneeling
before a reality that is the reverse of the struggle for existence as
taught by Darwin's school - that is to say, I see on top and surviving
everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life." Tell it,
preacher man! Extropians, listen to the authority here. "Those who
compromise life and the value of life" are nihilists, not extropians.
Michael Lorrey wrote 3/4/98: <Outlawing abortion is just one more example
of illegal extraterritorial exercise of power that we all should fight
against.>
Welcome to the One World Government, the *only* avenue for enforcing
abortion everywhere on earth. And woe to those who oppose it; the iron
logic of tyranny.
It is very intersting to see which of my points and questions go
unanswered. The silence is deafening. I don't count ethical emotivism as
containing any answers, only personal expressions of feelings, and
individuals who use feelings as a moral guide are little better than slaves
responding to their masters' instruction of what *to* feel.
This goes unanswered:
RJ: <Are you saying that the possession of intelligence is the source of
rights?>
AK: <The ability to have Intelligence & consiousness.>
RJ: <And who determines whether ability is there or not, at what threshold
of ability? Which individuals grant us our rights? Can I talk to them?>
This goes unanswered:
AK: <All consious beings should be treated with respect whether they are
humans, dolphins or computers.>
RJ: <Why should I? Who says so?>
This goes unanswered:
RJ: <The key is in the concept of development. Development of the self,
self-ownership, means others should stay hands off. But development of
other selves, that is, non-consensual development, is ownership of other
selves. Other selves have every right to question this activity and to
bring the activity into the political sphere. The concepts of guardianship
and power of attorney evolved in society to champion the rights of
developing selves that are incapable of acting as their own champions....
Developed is a static concept that I have never observed in living
entities. Life is always "developing," from conception to death. Even
with indefinite longevity, no one will ever be "developed," they will
indefinitely be "developing.">
This goes unanswered:
RJ: <When you speak of the "source of the rule" all I see is the very
oldest rule of all, "might makes right." Nature is red in tooth and claw.
If it is legitimate for the strong to prey upon the weak, sooner or later,
we will end up, not as a society, but as isolated systems of perfected
self-defense staring at each other across no-man's land.>
This goes unanswered:
RJ: <What's wrong with commercializing all life, at all stages of
development, including humans, intelligent or otherwise, conscious or
otherwise? Just make all life into products in the marketplace, all custom
designed for any use whatsoever? "If destroying it is acceptable," why
would any use not be, living or dead?>
P.S. Thanks to Gene Leitl for pointing out the obvious re: future master
races giving short shrift to lowly humans. I would add that we should
expect them to be giving especially short shrift to humans who have
exhibited a pronounced death fetish regarding the weak. Not a good example
to our masterful progeny who may very well view *us* as embryonic.
Also, thanks to others for the private support.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology:
Reilly@compuserve.com | The rational, moral and political relations
| between 'How we create' and 'Why we create'