[ExI] Personal "backgrounds" and alleged relevance thereof

[Stefano Vaj]

Longish message, only for real lovers of flame wars and human psychopathology...

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:12 AM, estropico <estropico at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I am not surprised, though. I originally included the above
>  information in an article on my website regarding the neofascist (?)
>  transhumanists, but I was forced to remove it following legal threats
>  from Stefano "Vaj"'s lawyers. Would he have won in court? I doubt it,
>  but he's the managing partner of a big law firm and I'm not... That's
>  way I'm going to be careful about what I say on a public forum such as
>  this.

Uff... (what is the emoticon for boredom?).

Just for the record, and then I will not play any further in the hands
of the couple of a few full-time disgruntled would-be presidents of
the AIT - significantly 100% absent from any kind of thread in this
list that does not concern my humble self - by deigning them with an
answer (an entirely different iissue being that of good-faith third
parties who may be interested in knowing better my ideas or writings,
as a couple of people have privately made me the honour of being):

- I have never instructed any lawyer to represent me with regard to
the more or less libelous statements of the author of the message
above, firstly because I am probably not exasperated enough yet,
secondly because, as the "true totalitarist" I am accused to be, I
prefer to err on the side of... freedom of speech.

- Yes, I happen to have two names, for family reasons that are
nobody's business, and more or less casually I started much time ago
of making alternative, rather than joint, use of them, depending on
the circumstances. No big conspiracy or secrecy here, as I am widely
known with both, and by spending a little time on Google one may even
find instances of joint usage. Now, the firm which I am a partner of -
and which was founded *27 years* before I joined it as a paralegal,
then climbing the career's ladder - happens to bear the same name,
which - sinister circumstance indeed - starts with an "S". So that,
hear hear, my forename being Stefano my initials are SS and so are
embroidered on my shirts and boxers, the fact being allegedly a
telltale sign of my ideological preferences, as would be the fact that
my firm's trademark, adopted *7 years before my birth* (!), employs
angular fonts, which never disturbed the clients making use of our
services in five different European jurisdictions, including notorious
neo-nazi organisations such as Ford or IBM, the governments of Romania
or that of Lombardy, not mention innumerable Jewish and Israeli
clients. If anything, the fact that I am using the name Vaj when I am
not writing on legal theory or international business law, may
"protect" my firm from association with what I do in a purely private
capacity, be it my membership in the Rotary International or in the
World Transhumanist Association. Certainly not the other way around,
as the "discovery" of my firm's name would seem intended to
demonstrate, namely that I would be here in some sort of "disguise"
(!) of my true self.

- Do such petty and childish "investigations" and aspersion casting
exercises, emphatically reported on the Web, sound as an odious
invasion of my privacy? Sure, but life is still too short to pay
attention to every such annoyance. On the other hands my partners,
namely those in charge with the firm's own legal representationare not
really happy, irrespective of what they may think of my
extra-curricular activities, that somebody may think it funny, for the
sake of my moral assassination, to have the firm described on the Web
as a business cover for a band of lunatics of dubious political
affiliations, and I am informed that they actually send a letter "to
cease and desist" to the webmaster of www.estropico.com, threatening
recourse to the appropriate civil and criminal remedies, a threat that
I have no doubts was not idle in the least.

- As for the "unelected national secretary of the Associazione
Italiana Transumanisti etc. etc.": the legitimate owner of the name
AIT, Riccardo Campa, decided at a point in time with a few fellow
transhumanists of very diverse professional, political and
philosophical background to incorporate the loose group at that time
going under that name as an Italian non-profit legal entity. In fact,
I gladly accepted the invitation to be amongst the founders of such
entity, who obviously decided by unanimous agreement its inner
organisational working and the names and capacity of the initial
officers. I am now even more glad that the webmaster of
www.estropico.com, who was invited. in a spirit of perhaps excessive
ecumenism, in view of the interesting stuff he translated in Italian
in his web site, eventually declined to participate - even though he
became a member at a later stage, probably with the exclusive purpose
of pretending an interest in the sort of the organisation and of
justifying his reiterated "denounciations" of its "dangerous drift".

As for the ideas and programmes of the AIT, one can directly check
from its Web site at http://www.transumanisti.it and hopefully have
access soon to an English version of the Manifesto that we have
recently, and again unanimously, approved. Now, I understand that some
people may take its content as a "dangerous drift" away from sectarian
and "debatable" positions they promote, but I fear that they will have
to live with that in the foreseeable future, since it is now amongst
the official charts of the AIT.

Stefano Vaj