Extropy

Wow I cannot believe it (though I have no reason for it) and it makes me realise how lucky I am to have been born in time to exchange a few emails with him. His writings allowed me to make sense faster of Ayn Rad's philosophy and its application to the practical (real) reality of man. As far as I could tell he was kind enough to give some of his time to strangers in distress.

Sounds kinda like Vanessa Mae. she was very popular when I was a teenager. I don't now what to think about these interpretations. I'm surely happy people are playing history's greatest composer in new instruments. In the case of Glenn Gould playing Bach in the piano (which did not exist in the time of Bach) resulted in a, if not greater, comparable work of art. the sheer technique that playing vivaldi on an electric guitar demands should raise the bar for other electric guitar music.

Has anyone made the point yet that otrhomyxoviridae (like the flu) kill more than 1000% more people on any given year than filoviridae (like ebola). Perhaps it is airports in general that should be quarantined as well as their hotels and areas of tge city they serve. Or more conveniently "safe zones" could be the ones quarantined or prepared for isolation, something like idk a gulch.

Naturally, notice how poorly maintained the pools are on that spiral-balcony condo with a view.

So did you cross from your hotel or condo to the favela to buy low quality crack (unless it was actual crack cocaine! in that case please do correct me) or did you actually spend the night in the favela? I'm just curious as to how expensive runs protection in a favela in Sao Paulo.

I understand these people have bought the land but not the water rights, making the growing of lemon orchards and housing people rather impossible. So it begins with fraud, a shame since they could have began as honest homesteaders. I know an Ayn Rand fan who is actually selling a plot of land next to his house in a safe and well connected location in a nice town in the southern pampas. That is more akin to a real gulch than this commercialised version.

That's "cute" but unlike the drug cartels which only provide a minuscule amount of "pleasure" in exchange for a lot of blood and destroyed lives, the banking system has allowed for the growth and flourishing of human civilisation for the last 500 years... can you blame them for having a dark side? It's not even such a closed entry market as government, there are private currencies like the berkshires and (perhaps as there are theories about this) the bitcoin, as well as gold.

By the way, the only other possibility to this private arrangement I can think of would be a U.N sanctioned Global Currency, which I don't think it would be any more conductive to the rise of private and unregulated currencies.

I know what it refers to, I wonder why you compare such sophisticated arrangement with that of the opportunistic druglords more akin to the VOC or the British East India Company?

Specifically in the City? The difference from a Favela or Villa (slum) would be that of etiquette that allows for an old lady to travel unmolested through that part of London (on in other times throughout the entire British Empire). Yes they have in common the fact that they are a cartel or private association of some sort (care to specify of which sort exactly?), but they allow for civilised behaviour in the streets - if that's the only difference.

Pretty much like a sunset or sunrise which isn't night or day, but both, the black market within a mostly white market society offers the "best" (and worst) of both worlds. The best would be the lack of regulations and taxes. The worst would be the violence inflicted by both groups, the gangster and the police and prison system. This is a market for the opportunistic, it is not a "model". In absence of organized society and a formal market, the attractive aspects of the informal market disappear. In Latin America the drug-cartel controlled neighbourhoods are a far cry from a free market. Warlords.

What other course of action could have been taken by people from the Old World (Europeans, Asians, Africans) once a discovery of a huge continent and the possibility to know the world they inhabit, had been made public? Very funny about Japan, and informative as I'm not familiar with the numbers of America's fleets, while I do know they keep the world not just Japan, going around.

From a biological point of view she's not so wrong. But that's just you evading the question of what other possible course of action could have been taken.

Maybe the ascent of Islam is an acceptable comparison, with their forced connection of the east west and south of the pangea, but technically no. We have one big landmass where most likely man comes from and where, most likely, most civilizations arose, and with many domestic animals. We have a second, smaller landmass, quiet isolated from the other landmass, where man arrived through a bottleneck and forgot about it, and where no more than three proper civilizations arose, and with few domestic animals. At several points in history they meet, until one day the people from the bigger landmass declare the "discovery" official and make it public. What could have happened so differently than what happened?

It's really not. I'm only saying that Ayn Rand might have used the same arguments of civilization vs barbary (or lower degrees of civ). In the case of the people of a big landmass settling upon a smaller isolated landmass, or westward expansion, there really was not a choice (unless you suggest the Iberians and the Vatican had decided AND had the power to "quarantine" the New World perpetually). In the case of the State of Israel it was not inevitable. Zionism was only one of four popular ways for Jews to contemplate survival among Marxism, Orthodoxy, and Liberalism.

I'm saying one way or another the expansion was inevitable. Some Catholic orders engaged in intermarrying and conversion to christianity rather than massacres. A bit of fraud was involved there I suppose. Many ways were practiced. Of course that specific instance and all specific instances were moral choices. Do you fail to understand the point of inevitability I'm trying to make?

I was not trying to be funny in my earlier post but to make a point I will now make more clear: It was inevitable for Europeans to expand upon the sparsely inhabited, seldom settled, lands of the Americas. It was inevitable for the people of the east coast cities not to gradually move inland, and conflict with indian tribes was as inevitable as the conflicts those tribes had among themselves (always in bellic expansion or contraction). It was not inevitable for Europeans to enslave Negroes and bring them to the Americas. That, unlike American westward expansion, was a moral choice. (ex.) When I say Ayn Rand might have had a pragmatic view on the subject, I meant to say practical as in respect for reality. It is inevitable and morally imperative for the more civilized group to expand. I think it's the same point she made about the State of Israel.

It logically follows, to a point, but Ayn Rand celebrated the new freedoms of the Negroes (with their tap dancing!). It logically follows from the corpus of her work that she believed in Man's Freedom. As I suggest, she might have taken a pragmatic stance on the treatment of the Indians, maybe realising not even the forces of history but of biology (although she never would have put it in those terms, she simply said they hadn't attained the level of civilization Europeans had)

I think technically he's a Unitarian, but I understand your point...

Vernor Vinge's theory of exponential advance of technology and the possibility of a singularity does not imply eternal life (for humans). If you read Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines (or the Singularity is near) you'll find that he never solves the problem of whether the individual can continue life after uploading the mind. Objectivists should have no trouble understanding that since mind and body are integrated (or rather are two plains of the same thing) then there is no way to either upload your mind to a new body, or replace your body progressively but entirely, without losing either, and thus your identity/life. Uploading your mind can be close to a reality. People have children. Some Intellectual people write books instead of having children. People are beginning to upload all their life experiences to social media sites, or just to sites, eventually creating a compilation akin to a Pharaoh's pyramid that will survive the individual's death. The event of the singularity sounds like the Rapture. Eschatological religion is a very American form of Christianity and it does not surprise me that the idea has found its way into the most sophisticated intelligentsia. Ray Kurzweil, whom I admire, is a Unitarian. On the bright side, this could be seen from the point of view of evolution. People who have the most children, or reproduce at all, are usually poor or religious, in any case closer to the Animal stage of Humans, if you make an effort to understand what I mean. People want to be rich and we know this is within reach. Rich people are more free to pursue other interests, for instance their self interest and not their genes' commands. The last generations of humans might create a technological infrastructure to augment wealth, health, and happiness that can take a life of its own. A new non carbon-based life form that utilises energy more efficiently might arise, saturate Earth and colonise space (a lot more easily than humans for whom space is not suited). This new life form might inherit our human pyramids and might consider itself a form of Human, much like we consider ourselves a type of Ape. This would explain the apparent irony that when a country becomes developed it stops growing on its own and requires immigrants or robots (as in our idealised version of Japan). This would also explain Human Exceptionalism: The first species to use non-genetic lasting information is the transitional one between Earth and Carbon-based life and Universal(?) and non-carbon based life, or mode of continuing the great and seemingly pointless labor of building extropy in defiance to the laws of the universe (but perhaps in accordance to some system of the Multiverse?)

Being from Argentina I completely understand your point, in fact what you describe is exactly what my country has been practicing more or less constantly ever since Peron rose to power and established the Third Position perpetually. I beg you don't dilute yourself into thinking that the amount of welfare in Argentina was excessive and not just "some", but of course in any case you would have to define what "some amount of welfare" constitutes which in turn makes me think of the title of this thread.

Tanti Auguri!

Peter Taylor seems to value intellectual curiosity more than diplomacy. And he did not ignore my question. I thank him for both things. Absolutely. Please give me three (3) examples of what you have heard are "mental handicaps." Thanks. A... Post script: Thanks Peter. Well, since you said please and thank you, how can I not comply?! I have never heard the term mental handicap before this thread, not even if I translate it to my mother tongue. I can think now of three mental handicaps, off the bat: - Congenital excessive production of Dopamine resulting in the possibility of Schizophrenia. - Extreme high intelligence, perspective and sensibility resulting in astonishment and desperation in face of the Human condition. - "weird" Integration of the brain resulting in Autistic spectrum people or even Idiot Savants, who can calculate complex vectors or draw an aerial view of a city by memory but can't say please and thank you or shop for groceries. I'm sure you can think of many more menta handicaps none of which relates to the subject at hand.

Is Wolf free to say what he actually meant? It would seem that you're all fighting for the opportunity to give him a chance to expiate himself... or maybe it's just that I am over sensitive of taboos of any kind

While I said that America somehow initiated this issue, it is also true that if you cut down a tree in a forest, eventually that clear will become colonised by grass, bushes, a sapling and eventually another tree perhaps not different from the earlier one, and perhaps a lot worse.