[extropy-chat] (POLITICS) Utility of Protest was :Exhibitionism(no, not THAT kind)

[Al Brooks]

Your logic is absolutely impeccable, Bret. No more comedy posts. Just one more observation though: if this war goes on to a worst case conclusion, then we'll have no extropian future-- this is a platitude but it is a relevant platitude. Saying 'give it time' or 'it will work out' is no longer reassuring.
Optimism is only justified if it is not baseless optimism.

Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
Al, if your comedy peices involve doing parodies of people who you 
really think are acting like morons, I think that the risk you run in 
trying to carry that sort of humor off over an internet mailing list 
especially when your topic of choice seems to be politics should
be pretty obvious. 
 
There is very little upside to acting like a moron if people can't tell
that your acting.  I don't know you. I have seen you ask at least
some non moronic questions that seemed genuinely oriented towards
increasing your own and perhaps others understanding of opposing
views.  
 
That might, in my opinion, have been extropic from your standpoint,
but your questions *seem* to be coming off a pretty low base of 
understanding. 
 
Natasha asks how about taking this off list? I know of at least two 
intelligent people other than Natasha that would like to see many
topics taken off list not because they are averse to the topics but
because they are averse to the quality of the postings that those
topics usually of a loosely political nature tend to attract. 
 
The temptation to censor or to try to silence idiots must be almost
overwhelming. 
 
And yet there is a danger in doing so. 
 
The strongest challenges to transhuman worldviews is that they are
unrealistic, idealistic and show a want of understanding of how politics
actually works as a retardant on the possible rates of progress. There
is a price that has to be paid for having democratic institutions in
which the ignorant vote too. (For the most part that price is worth 
paying, for most people). 
 
The strongest challenge that could be made of transhumanists as
a class is that they are massively politically naive and this causes
them to see the world through rosy coloured glasses where what is
technologically possible (as they understand it to widely varying
degrees of sophistication) is expected to be politically realisable. 
 
More than the average, transhumans are aspirational about the future
and so more than most, the transhuman agenda, personally and 
collectively, is subject to political frustration, when others in the world
hold the power to shape the common future. 
 
Optimism combined with political naivette makes many transhumanists
look like right dills, not when they are considered one at a time, or one
conversation at a time, but when their aspirations over years and 
decades (and many transhumans have been in the field that long) don't
seem to get any closer to being realised or realisable. 
 
The re-election of the Bush administration after the Bush administration
pursued an illegal and unconstitutional policy of going into Iraq is a signal
event of the level of intellectual sophistication in the US.  That is the level
of intellectual sophistication, that is the level of human comprehension,
transhuman aspirations are up against. 
 
The Bush administration if frittering away the hard won gains of previous 
generations of American's and doing more harm to America and its
interests through incompetence than any existing enemy (of which their
are actually very few) could do it. 
 
I have two areas of interest. Improving human health and politics. Either
of these areas could take more of my time than I have to spend and both
could benefit for more intelligent input.  The health problems are tractable
but get slowed down by monkey politics at every turn. The political 
problems are tractable too but some more monkeys have to get smarter
first and the only way this is likely to happen that I can see is they need
to be let to learn the lessons of their mistakes before they will understand
and be receptive to solutions. 
 
The Bush administration is gone by Jan 2009. If they don't fuck things up
beyond all recognition by then then the next administration of either
flavour, republican or democrat will have the opportunity of learning from
the lexicon of mistakes the Bush administration is building up and 
ingraining in recent human history. 
 
I don't know if I should post this or not, but now that I've spent the time
to write it that could have been spent doing other things, I am going
to. 
 
Brett Paatsch
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Al Brooks 
To: ExI chat list 
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2005 7:17 AM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] (POLITICS) Utility of Protest was :Exhibitionism(no, not THAT kind)


okay. agreed. i started it, i apologize. but i'd like to do comedy pieces-- if, again, no one objects.

Natasha Vita-More <natasha at natasha.cc> wrote: How about taking this off list?  I'm scratching my head because I don't see a relationship to Extropy or transhumanism and don't see how this thread ties into any level of proactive discussion. 

Anyone agree?


            Natasha Vita-More 

   Cultural Strategist, Designer 
   Studies of the Future, University of Houston 
   President, Extropy Institute 
   Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture 


   Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.  Alvin Toffler 
   Random acts of kindness... Anne Herbet

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