[ExI] U.S. Medical Care

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Thu Apr 9 06:09:56 UTC 2009


2009/4/5 Dagon Gmail <dagonweb at gmail.com>:
>> For someone who actually works as a psychiatric nurse (as Mirco does, I
>> gather) to say this is disturbing. Maybe he could change his name to Nurse
>> Ratched.#
>> Damien Broderick
>
> Well, for his sake, I hope someone doesn't collect his opinions, articles
> and views,
> prints them, binds them in a convenient folder, and sends copies of this
> folder to
> several such institutions in his region of italy, as well as to several
> newspapers,
> offices of Italian socialists and communists, and other media organizations,
> with
> his name, address and photograph. Such an act would likely could him his
> job, and
> worse.

That's clearly a threat, and really out of line in my opinion.

I don't agree with Mirco on pretty much anything he says (in fact I
have him kill-filed, sorry I know it's rude to admit it). But, what he
says, he says on the open internet, granting all and sundry the
ability to read it and form opinions on it as they may, including his
employers, and so on, as above. So the first thing to note is that he
is not trying to hide his opinion from "the light of truth" or
something like that.

Secondly, we are all in the same position. The views of the
transhumanist community are marginal in the context of society at
large, and many of our more banal ideas about, say, morphological
freedom, would horrify many members of our respective communities. By
publicly posting on the internet you give up any claim to privacy for
those posts, but on the other hand many of us likely depend, perhaps
without having thought about it too much, on the fact that while those
posts are public, they are also not being broadcast on the evening
news, and/or snail mailed to our employers, to "enemy" organisations,
etc.

It's a pseudo-anonymity, but it's a modern kind of decorum. It is
socially true that there is a difference between posting about unusual
and contentious ideas in a quiet internet forum down a sidestreet of
the internet, and taking those ideas and shoving them in the face of
every single person you know, regardless of the social niceties and
subtleties required of each such relationship.

Now if any of us tries to run for public office in the future, or has
an affair with Britney, then it's a different story, of course :-)

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site



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