[ExI] difficult (?) puzzle

[William Flynn Wallace]

Fanatics are responsible for all of it:  tearing down statues, taking names
off of buildings and so on.  It is black and white thinking.  If Jefferson
kept a slave then he is a bad person who has utterly no qualities we want
to emulate.  I predict that cooler heads will prevail after some token
things, like moving statues to cemeteries and the like.  For example,
Robert E. Lee was a very fine person who let his emotion of loyalty
overcome his rational side (a danger for all conservatives, I should add).
bill w


On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 8:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 7, 2020 11:33 PM
> *To:* ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> *Cc:* Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] difficult (?) puzzle
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 7:46 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
>
> >…"Man" is often gender-neutral in old sayings.  These days, with more
> sensitivity to gender meanings (not to mention a greater understanding that
> female people can have just as much agency as male people), we might say
> "person", but in those olden times when they said "man", women were
> included in what they meant…
>
>
>
> One wonders how far we can take this notion.  We wish to be inclusive,
> certainly a virtue with which none will argue,  but we are up against
> language constraints.  Sometimes we choose the pedantic “he or she” and
> “his or her” rather than do violence to the language by using the terms
> “they” and “their” for the gender non-specific singular.  However, there
> are more than two genders, and we wish to be inclusive.
>
>
>
> >…Indeed, within the past month, I have seen someone opinining that when
> the law says "him or her", the law does not apply to anyone who responds to
> some other pronoun instead.
>
>
>
> >…This is incorrect.  Where words have been redefined in this manner, the
> law uses the meaning of the word used by the author, and the author clearly
> meant to mean everyone,  It is entirely possible - likely, in many cases -
> that the author had never heard of non-binary people, or of any third party
> personal pronoun other than "him" or "her", as of the date of that
> particular law's authorship.
>
>
>
>
>
> Adrian, this is the kind of thing that has me thinking about how we will
> be judged in the future.  It has come in vogue to judge people from the
> past by today’s ethical standards rather than the standards of their
> times.  No doubt we will be judged in a similar manner, for that system is
> easier than actually learning about culture from past times.
>
>
>
> Today we are furiously tearing down past culture, treating it as morally
> toxic (or much worse.)  In this way, we establish ourselves as the moral
> superiors of our forefath… forepar…  hmmm, forehumans while having the same
> evolution-implanted psychological characteristics they had for all the same
> reasons.
>
>
>
> We are not ethically or morally superior to our forelifeforms.  We haven’t
> figured out how to evolve past the factors that made them and made us this
> way.
>
>
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200708/66263418/attachment.htm>