[extropy-chat] ENOUGH already

[Matus]

> 
Charlie Stross said:

> I'd like to add to that: war seems to me to be about as anti-extropic
> as you can get. The triumph of brute force over enlightenment,
> destruction, death and despair on a massive scale. An excuse for the
> enemies of freedom on every side to chip away at civil rights. The
> ascendency of dehumanization is the *opposite* of transhumanism.

I would like to disagree with that.  War is neither intrinsically
extropic nor anti-extropic.  If one of the parties at war is less
extropic, and it wins, then war is anti-extropic.  If the other party is
more extropic, and it wins, the result is clearly extropic.  Would you
have been content trying to 'enlighten' Hitler or Hirohito or Stalin
about why war was wrong?  As I have pointed out many times on this list,
there has never been a society more anti-extropic than just about every
incarnation of communism on this planet.  More people have been killed
by communism than all war dead combined, add to that any other kind of
murderous totalitarian regime, and I am hard pressed to believe that
wars enacted to remove such murderous tyrants are *always*
anti-extropic.  I find you summation simplistic.  Take a look at the
rights enjoyed by people under the Khmere Rouge

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF6.TAB.6.3.GIF

And tell me if a war to free them from that particular oppressive
murderous regime would not have been extropic.  If any part of extropy
requires freedoms of any kind, than turning non-free nations free by
means of war is by definition extropic. 

Extropic progress requires freedom of information, ideas, thoughts,
technology, etc.  In most oppressive states, the internet and computers
are illegal, non-governmental publications and political disagreement,
also are, including property and technology in others.  Yet you assert
that *any* war, even ones that would bring freedom to these horrifically
oppressed peoples are by definition anti-extropic?  

You can debate about the specific ways a war might be carried out, and
can surely figure some to be anti-extropic, but to absolutely assert
that *any* war is automatically anti-extropic is egregious. 

> 
> About the only possible exception to this bleak picture is the way
that
> in the industrial age war permits the mobilization of vast
> technological and scientific resources and their direction towards
> achieving specific goals, in a manner that is difficult to coordinate
> in peacetime. But those goals are seldom positive, frequently
> destructive, and wouldn't it be better to achieve such mobilization
for
> creative and constructive ends instead?
> 

And if a society is ideologically opposed to creativity and construction
(as many communist regimes have pretty much been) then going to war with
them is still not extropic?  Do you consider WWII to have been extropic
or anti-extropic?

Michael