[ExI] Meanwhile in China

[Stefano Vaj]

On 10 August 2010 22:18, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:42 AM,  John Grigg
> <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It frightens me to think that a nation with little or no respect for
>> civil liberties (even of their own people), is going to probably be
>> the greatest economic and military power on the planet within several
>> decades!

Mmhhh. I have US, not Chinese military forces based in my country's
territory, and while Chinese may pose more of a threat to its ethnical
identity in terms of immigration, US cultural colonisation is
certainly much more invasive (see under "Hollywood" or "pop music")
than anything likely to come from China anytime soon. In fact, it
seems that it was quite difficult in Milan to recruit just 15
professors able to teach Mandarin in high schools as opposed to the
pervasive presence of English in the Italian educational system...

> Be that as it may, I think Extropians and related groups will abandon
> country centric, perhaps even culture centric, attitudes.

Personally, I would love a more "pluralist" approach, where
relativism, diversity and self-determination, including at a
collective level, would make for a healthy and hopefully peaceful
competition where Darwinian mechanisms would take care of neoluddite
and anyway less efficient societies by themselves...

-- 
Stefano Vaj