[ExI] A Transhumanist Terrorist Manifesto

[Lee Corbin]

Natasha writes

> At first I thought [the "Transhumanist Terrorist Manifesto"] a bad
> joke, and then I thought it just plain bad taste.  Now I think it is ignorant.

Exactly!

Consider the most recent rejoinder from that quarter:

> > Which fucking world do some of you airheads live in? Are you all on
> > valium of something?
> >
> > 506 murders per day
> > 833 rapes per day
(etc.)

> > Thats -your- fucking world you pricks. You stand by and blather and
> > posture while the world burns.

While the world "burns"??   What planet has the writer been living on?
How could anyone be so incredibly ignorant?  Does he ever employ
percentages, one wonders? It's as though to this person everyone is still
living in a string of very small villages somewhere, and that those numbers
do not need to be considered relative to 6,000,000,000 people---the vast,
vast majority of them who are almost unbelievably better off than centuries ago.

If I thought that the writer---who unfortunately, I must say, seems to have
lost his mind---were able to absorb new information that conflicted with
his over-wrought beliefs, I would urge him to read Bernstein's "The
Birth of Plenty".   You can actually find the whole first chapter on-line at

http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/404/CH1.HTM

(Warning to the deranged writer: this has graphs, charts, and presents
lots of hard data.)

Excerpt:
"Beyond the city walls, lawlessness reigned absolute. Highwaymen plied their trade, sometimes in roving gangs and sometimes alone, 
with near impunity. Soldiers, when not engaged in Crusades, dynastic feuds, or papal ambitions, periodically swelled the ranks of 
highwaymen. Only walls provided a town with effective protection against its lawless environs. Since walls were expensive, town life 
crammed itself into as little space as possible. The streets, nothing more than narrow, open sewers, teemed with townspeople and 
disease; the first demographers documented death rates from infectious diseases that were twice as high inside the walls as they 
were outside.

"Most people lived in tiny villages and worked small adjacent fields. Not until 1500 did farmers clear the wolf-infested forests. 
Everyone, from toddlers to the aged, performed backbreaking field work, usually unaided by the plow. Until A.D. 900, it was the rare 
peasant who could afford to harness horses and oxen with collars for fieldwork.

"The squalor of medieval dwellings was unimaginable. According to the greatest of all Renaissance humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam,

Almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for 
twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer . . . remnants of fishes, and other filth 
unnameable. Hence, with the change of weather, a vapor exhales which in my judgement is far from wholesome.25

"Families slept together on one foul bed, and chimneys were almost unknown. Soot covered the walls of all but the newest huts. Lack 
of proper exhaust resulted in house fires that brought roaring death to large numbers of villagers, particularly women, who, clad in 
highly flammable dresses, tended wood-fired pits and stoves.

"The past few paragraphs describe the circumstances of peasants who were relatively well-off. The less fortunate had little or no 
shelter at all. In the subsistence-level premodern society, famine and pestilence knocked constantly at the door. During times of 
extreme famine, cannibalism was not unknown; travelers were occasionally killed for their flesh, and there were even reports of 
gallows being attacked for sustenance."

Lee