[ExI] [wta-talk] Anti-transhumanist crap on Kuro5hin

[Hughes, James J.]

> "nearly all 
> Transhumanists are either Neocons and Neocon influenced" is 
> BS, and "Since 99.5% of Transhumanists are white males, they 
> don't care about any of these issues" is BS. 

For those who want to respond to this nonsense with facts you can review
the actual demography and political diversity of the WTA in this survey
of our membership:

http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/wtasurvey2005/

PDF:
http://transhumanism.org/resources/survey2005.pdf

We're working on a new survey of the membership. If you have things
you'd like us to ask let me know.

As to gender-bias, we were 90% male in 2003 and 2005. Hopefully that is
slowly changing. But I think its important to note that many progressive
social movements that our critics presumably endorse have been or are
also male-dominated. As our movement matures and becomes more associated
with (female-ish) advocacy for health and well-being for all, as opposed
to (male-ish) technophilia, this should change. 

We are also very white, and that is slowly changing. We don't ask about
race (and I don't think we should) but given that our membership
correlates with Net access, and Net access is highest in Europe and
North America, our ethnic representativeness will improves along with
growing Net access in the developing world. 

The puzzling thing has been why we have attracted so few members in S.
Korea and Japan, where attitudes are in many ways tilted in our favor,
and they have high Net access. Here there is some good news, the rapid
growth of Chinese membership. Between 1998 the end of 2006 only twenty
Chinese signed up with the WTA. Since last Spring 71 Chinese have signed
up. That's still not many (0.07/million compared to Finland's 42 members
per million) but its progress. You can also point out that we have had
chapters in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda.

As to our politics, only 3-4% self-identify as "conservative" (including
"Christian Dem" and "far right"), 22% identify as some variety of
libertarian, and fully 39% identify with some label on the Left. Of
course conservatism is in the eye of the beholder, and if one is
sufficiently postmodern facts like these don't really matter.

However it would be interesting to meet an intelligent "neo-con" H+. I
wonder what positions they would endorse? Sending US Marines to create
regime change in the Vatican? Cynically collaborating with social
conservatives that they despise in order to defend Big Pharma from the
Luddites? Oops, there is Glenn Harlan Reynolds - please note to people
that he never joined.

J. Hughes