From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 08:23:51 MDT
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 09:04:45AM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> It used to be a standard Extropian belief that the left-right spectrum was
> totally inadequate to properly describe modern or transhuman politics. I
> find it regressive that we are falling more and more into these old-style
> political divisions on this list. We used to be in more agreement on some
> issues and have more diversity in others. Nowadays, it seems like were are
> stereotyping into two opposing camps and straying further and further from
> the topics of the future.
This is a *very* good point.
Last evening I attended a meeting about the future of healthcare, with a
speaker from a the far left and another from the mainstream right. Both
were essentially in agreement about how Swedish healthcare should look,
just some minor discrepancies in how high the taxes should be and what
treatments should be included in social security. The insidious
questions from the transhumanist posse bounced away from them -
morphological freedom was simply not a thinkable issue.
Personally I find Virginia Postrel's analysis in terms of dynamists and
stasists more useful for our discussion. There are of course differences
within these camps, such as between technocratic and reactionary
stasists and left- and right- dynamists of different kinds.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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