[ExI] Israel and Transhumanism article in H+

David Lubkin lubkin at unreasonable.com
Wed May 19 03:24:07 UTC 2010


Spike wrote:

>History judges a people by how it uses technology.  I don't care about what
>any particular society names its deity, or how it prays.  I do care about
>how a society scores in building an orderly society, in how its people
>prosper, in fairness and equality in that society, in the level of
>individual freedom in that society, and EXPECIALLY, the level of individual
>freedom in that society, followed closely by the level of individual freedom
>in that society.
>
>Israel scores high in the areas I care about.

This is only very recently, and still not entirely. Until the Likud came
to power (thanks, in small measure, to my father), the country had
been run by the Labour Party for 40+ years, and was socialist in
many exasperating ways.

>In retrospect, it is too bad Israel was set up in the middle east.  After
>the war we should have given them Wyoming or Alaska or something.  We have
>never used Wyoming for anything useful, and the land is no worse than
>Israel.  We could have bought out the approximately four families that live
>there, then made that Israel.  The Israelis could have come in there and
>made something of the place.

If we were to give them a state, surely there are better choices than
two of the three most libertarian in the US. Although, the land (and
underlying mineral wealth) is *far* better than the malarial swamp
that was much of Ottoman Palestine.

I'm not sure which "after the war" you had in mind. WW II, I suppose.
Too late by then. The time to offer would have been right after WW I
or earlier. (There was actually serious consideration of other spots,
notably Uganda.)

All in all, though, if they can steer clear of nuclear exchanges, I think
Israel in the Middle East will prove (from the vantage of future centuries)
to have been critical to the transformation of the Muslim and Arab
worlds. Some of the clues are in the relative success and freedom
of the parts that get along with Israel, e.g., (usually) Jordan and Turkey.


-- David.




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