Re: Herding Extropycats [was Shame on Australia]

From: Tim Maroney (tim@maroney.org)
Date: Sat Sep 01 2001 - 12:33:57 MDT


> 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.

-- 
Tim Maroney    tim@maroney.org



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