From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 12:50:19 MDT
On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 12:21:42PM -0700, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> Anders wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> ### This is interesting - what did they propose?
More of the Swedish model, the right wing side was in favor of allowing
more private treatments, the left was more in favor of doing more
through tax-funded health insurance. Essentially the "Marxist" and the
"Liberal" (in the european sense) were social democrats.
> It appears to me that the terms "left" and "right" mainly describe
> minor differences in the flavors of statists of all sorts, since as
> you say both want to solve all problems using coercive methods. In
> that sense it is a meaningless distinction.
Exactly. Non-statists and non-stasists are a relatively small part of
the political debate in the West.
> The insidious questions from the transhumanist posse
> > bounced away from them - morphological freedom was simply not a
> > thinkable issue.
>
> ### Yes, freedom, and the use of non-violent methods is not a thinkable
> issue, once you become bound to the left or to the right.
No, the real problem is the assumption that the current system is given.
Both of the speakers wanted freedom (but they meant different things),
none were in favor of violence (both thought rational people would want
to pay the taxes voluntarily) but they could not imagine a situation
where the current system is challenged by alternative institutions, new
lifestyles, new people or running a deliberate political program to
change the system (and the leftist speaker was supposed to be a
*leninist*!). So the big issue was the size of the taxes, how much to
redistribute to which poor and what treatments to subsidize.
Transhumanism falls outside the conceivable spectrum because it
leads to radical changes of society. Had it only been about increasing
lifespan 4 years or producing cheaper goods, then it would have been
completely acceptable.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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