[ExI] Personal "backgrounds" and alleged relevance thereof

[giancarlos]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stefano Vaj" <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 5:53 PM
Subject: [ExI] Personal "backgrounds" and alleged relevance thereof

> 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,

Well, actually I think nobody accused your law firm to be the "business
cover for a band of lunatics of dubious political affiliations".

On the contrary, I perfectly understand that you want to hold carefully
separate Mr. Vaj's embarassing political leanings from Dr. S.'s professional
life.

In the same way - as I'm a lawyer too - I can understand that your partners
"are not really happy" and asked Fabio to remove the post from his blog in
order to preserve the law firm "good name".

That said, I cannot get out of noticing that:
1) your partners, besides asking Fabio to remove his post, should also ask
you to make your presence on the web more cautious and discreet, because -
as I already said in another post - if you perform a google search ("Stefano
Vaj") you will find plenty of questionable and embarassing query results,
which could undoubtedly represents a serious damage for your law firm (and
they're not written by Fabio!).
2) if even your law firm feels embarassed for its managing partner "parallel
identity", maybe one might at least ask if also the AIT (Italian
Transhumanist Association) - and consequently the WTA, and maybe the whole
transhumanism - could suffer a serious damage, isn't it? But think Giulio
should ask this question, considered that he's one of the AIT protectors.

Regarding your law firm SS logo (and the very nice - although a bit
pompous - german military march in the background), actually I consider it
just folklore, something you did on a whim, and at the most just one of the
pieces of the puzzle, which needs to be interpreted systematically, together
with the much more relevant elements I provided in my previous post (see
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-March/041398.html).

By the way, thank you to Lee Corbin who correctly pointed out that "an ad
hominem argument consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by
attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making
the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the
argument or producing evidence against the claim".

Well, in that post I think I provided a lot of "factual claims" regarding
your thoughts (with accurate references to books, texts and websites), while
I didn't attack you personally and never mentioned your real name or your SS
logo (which - as I said - I consider just a minor clue).

On the contrary, you replied just saying that I'm a "troll" (and now that
I'm a "psychopath"), as a means of avoiding discussion of the relevance or
truthfulness of my claims and statements.

That said, everybody can arise an opinion about who used "ad hominem
arguments".

Giancarlo
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stile