X-Message-Number: 33221
From: 
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:22:44 EST
Subject: Darwin document format, and motivation 

Content-Language: en

Thanks Charles for the formatting tips. As it is, I usually  post & delete 
2-3 times in the Cryonet Queue trying to get the formatting  'right.' As for 
the URL, the short URL did not work, and regardless of what URL  you post, 
the Cryonet software garbles it up. Having said that, I was able to  verify 
that the 'second URL,' apparently generated by Cryonet, worked for me.  I'm 
sorry it didn't work for some others.
 
The piece was also posted on The Immortality Institute Forum  under the 
cryonics subheading, however, I think that it has subsequently been  removed. 
When a durable URL is available, I will post that link here on  Cryonet.
 
Charles asks, quite reasonably: "Two years ago, when Cold  Filter was far 
more problematic, I recall you opining that resistance was  futile. You made 
a couple of long posts to Ms. Maxim, I think, and then  disappeared. Now, 
apparently, you have changed your mind. Some explanation for  this would be 
useful."
 
I still think, as I did then, that direct resistance in the  form of 
hand-to-hand combat on Cold Filter, or any other non-moderated, or  actively 

hostile to cryonics forum, would be useless. I give the reasons for  that in 
what 
I have written, but in a nutshell, it simply doesn't work because  liars 
can and will generate endless streams of lies with little effort that  will, 
if answered credibly by the victims of those lies, simply result in the  

exhaustion of those selfsame victims. It's a beautiful and time honored tactic
which is highly effective. Thus, any defense must be a 'metalevel' defense  
- at least an order of magnitude more sophisticated than the  attack. 
 
That kind of undertaking does not become possible until some  reasonable 
(even if quite small) cross section of the cryonics community becomes  aware 
of the actual cost, or the actual damage being done by these creeps. Even  
now, mostly what you will see is "let it run off you like water off a duck's  
back." Of course, that is easy for people who are only digital ghosts, to 
say.  Let THEM wake up in the morning and find that if their current or 
potential  employers Google them, they will find they are called 'fuck pipes,' 

sexual  deviants, or are labeled as professionally, personally, technically and
morally  bankrupt.
 
 
I did not write the  Cryonics Manifesto simply out of some 'abstract' 

concern for cryonics, nor  based upon extrapolations from Nazi Germany ;-). 
While 
both of these things are  valid, they were not the precipitating event. Nor 
was there any concern for  myself regarding these lies. Fact is, I have not 
read "Frozen,' never looked at  Cold Filter unless Finance Director (FD) 
prompted me to (which was very rarely),  and I found out about the Nightline 
program by sitting down and watching it -  something I do almost every night 
I'm home (and here in the US). In  fact, I've had an extraordinarily good 
last 4 years - better than most guys  my age, and I have to confess I've 
given almost no thought to the goings-on that  I just posted so passionately 
about.  
So, what was my  reason? Simple, I recently learned that some of the most 
important people in  cryonics were becoming so demoralized and beaten down by 
these broad-based  attacks on cryonics  that they were thinking of throwing 
in the towel. Perhaps this fact will put the attacks from Maxim, et al.,  
in a different light, because it should now be apparent that without any  
recourse to governments or courts, these creeps were (and arguably still are) 
on  the verge of depriving us of one of our most precious resources; our most 
 competent and fair minded people. And that is only the harm we see. I know 
they  are causing a great deal of additional harm because I am starting to 
get emails  from friends and colleagues in the critical care community 
asking me, "What's  going on?" and worse still, "Is any of this stuff true?" 
That means, inevitably,  that good people are being put off of cryonics, and 
that our credibility and  reputation are suffering. That will in turn 
translate into losses and damage in  every area cryonics.  
That this is  inevitable is not in doubt; Chatsworth had exactly this 

effect, and for the same  reasons in the late 1970s and early 1980s - indeed 
into 
the mid-1980s. Cryonics  is not a highly credible discipline with a lot of 
PR capital to burn - it  could not be, given the global culture. Any bad 
things said about cryonics will  attach to the already questionable and uneasy 
ideas and feelings  that the majority of the population holds in their heads 
about us. And the  truth is that the world should be uneasy about cryonics 
because the  values we hold are, in fact, antithetical to much of the 
existing order of  things. Abolishing death, or attempting to, is arguably the 
most subversive  thing on the planet. We should be proud of  that. 


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