I recently subscribed to the Culture List hoping to find some liberated
souls who share some of our extropian values. I was wrong. The list is
dominated by statists of all kinds, who IMHO, have a an amazing 'trust'
in authority to lead them. I found this disheartening as I think 'The
Culture' is an amazing vision of the future. Does anybody think that
'The Culture' and extropiansm are compatible or incompatible, and why?
Some snips from the Culture List:
I said:
Then and only then will the 'Culture' become attainable - not through
some state ordained process, but by the individual enlightenment of all
its members.
Response:
Give me _one_ example of this happening? Unfortunately all evidence
tells me that the state is the lesser evil. If the all its members
(or most of them) are indeed enlightened and participates in
controlling and defining what the state is, then I believe this
to be a good and workable system. Even in the most enlightened and
free countries in the world this is not the case now, but I believe
the alternatives are _much_ worse.
It always suprises me that americans are so frightend of the state.
In the US the state is much less prominent than in most european
countries, but still they go on and on about 'big goverment' and
what have you. I think it was Wired Magazine that ran an article
about what control the big credit companies have over you. They
amass lots of information about you and is under virtually no control.
If it had not been for the state you would probably had no rigths
to know what that information is or get them to remove false
information about you. To be honest I'm much more worried about
what VISA knows about me than what the state knows. At least the
state doesn't sell the information to whoever wants to buy it, like
these companies does.
Haakon
ROU Join the militias if you want to, but leave me out of it
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Most on the list concurred with Haakon.
Paul Hughes
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