From: matus@matus1976.com
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 23:41:34 MDT
Damien said:
> > I have never read a post of Damien's in which he refers to a Vietnamese
> >Communist "re-education camp omelette", a Castro or Mengistu's "famine
> >omelette", or even a Saddam Hussein's "oily omelette".
>
> The occasion hasn't arisen.
Oh Cmon, out of all the times we have discussed vietnam here, you have never
once felt compelled to say that the North Vietnamese government is actually
murderous and oppressive, has effectively enslaved the vietnamese population
for 3 decades, and is overtly anti-extropic? Afraid you might alienate
members of this board who helped to bring about that enslavement, or perhaps
the members who felt 'the good guys won'
>
> But the general point seems to me this: there is a moral asymmetry between
> one's standpoint on
>
> (a) issues where one's democratic representatives and their affiliates are
> making decisions on one's behalf,
>
> and (not-a) choices made by people outside one's sphere of influence.
>
> If your deputy is acting in a way you regard as deplorable, it's up to you
> to speak out. If someone over in the next town or nation is doing so, you
> might take a keen interest, but you generally have a lesser moral
> responsibility to speak out.
Absurd, this is the kind of twisted ethics prevalent on the extropy board
that alienates me. You are basically saying that the more an act directly
affects your life, the more you are morally required to speak out against
it. Bullshit. The more an act morally desecrates sentient life, freedom,
and progress the more your morally responsible to speak out against it. You
perpetuate this "As long as Im ok, who cares about anyone else" attitude
that is regressive and non-extropian, although you hide it under the guise
of a higher moral principle, the duty to criticize ones own state over the
rest of the world.
>
> If Australian, British or US decision makers act, allegedly in my behalf,
> it's far more urgent that I take stock of their actions and speak
> up for or
> against their choices. If someone in Vietnam, where I have no stake or
> control at all, acts abominably, I might speak up as a concerned, distant
> observer, but the moral situation is rather different, I think.
The *moral* situation is rather different?! Seems to me murder is just as
wrong whether perpetrated by a stranger in a distant land or by your mayor.
It is, in fact, the extent which these dealings affect your daily life that
dictates the level of moral outrage with which you regard such actions and
not the intrisnic horrors of the actions. I dont see how the flagrant
moral abandoment of murder and enslavement *matters* whether or not those
who make those flagrant moral aggreivances are a representative of you. Its
a convenient excuse to not care. We are all human beings, we must value all
life, not just our own, and not just those lucky enough to share our own
benign leaders.
> When I hear that Saddam and his sons and regime tortured and murdered
> people, I am horrified; when I hear that US jails contain a
> million or more
> prisoners many of them incarcerated for using marijuana and subjected in
> prison to rampant rape and brutality, I am horrified as well.
...but are you equally horrified? !!!!!!!!
Are you seriously suggesting it is equally deplorable that humans beings are
being raped, murdered, and tortured as you find human beings spending a few
months in climate controlled prison watching survivor, weight lifting and
reading Playboy in a post industrialized west nation living longer healther
better lives than perhaps 3/4's of the world? Yet again I find myself
feeling deep visceral disgust to an extropian's concept of ethics. You
should be speaking out against things in proportion to the horror of the
actions.
If you do not find it equally delporable, which do you find more deplorable,
and which do you speak out more vehemently against?
Regards,
Michael Dickey
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