Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> I still have not gotten any explanation about why we are discussing this at
> all. Suppose we all concede that blacks commit more crimes, for the sake of
> argument. So what? Why is it so important to argue this? What would we do
> differently if blacks commit a higher percentage of crimes than whites?
> What would we do differently if blacks and whites committed the same exact
> percentage of crimes? More and more of the list's bandwidth is being taken
> over to discuss these issues, but I still don't know why. What is the
> relevance to Extropians?
As I've said before, the impact of transhumanism and its attendant
technologies on the human race is that there is going to be MORE
diversity genetically among people, not less, which illustrates how
content-less the anti-cloning and anti-genetics accusations of
'eugenics' are. As the race gets more diverse, you will have more people
looking at a larger part of the human race as 'inhuman' (as I described
in my original posts on the Vinge singularity discussion several years
ago that is now on the Extropy website) if they are less experienced
with those variants. Since knowledge breeds empathy and diffuses racism,
xenophobia, and discrimination, we need to be aware of what the reality
is today, and what the misconceptions are, in these subjects if we are
to be effective in the future in preparing the human race to deal with
transhumanity without annihilating itself in conflict between races,
technologies, etc...
We need to be able to objectively and dispassionately say, "okay, this
is what real race differences are and are not, and this is how we can,
as ethical and rational transhumans, deal with these real facts as well
as peoples misperceptions to make this a better world."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:08 MDT