X-Message-Number: 33224
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 06:07:59 -0800 (PST)
From: un person <>
Subject: digital ghosts, sexual braggadocio comeuppance, and willful i...

 wrote:
" 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.  "





Digital ghost? Li'l ol me? Damn straight. I aint giving any of the online freaks
anything on me.


 wrote:
"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."





Well, now, to be fair, back in "the day," you yourself did from time to time 
brag about your sexual exploits on cryonet. Amirite, amirite, or amirite?




 wrote:
" 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. "






"Some of the most important people" in cryonics? I'm guessing you are perhaps 
referring to Ben Best, who has come into the crosshairs of some of the online 
miscreants, and maybe Platt as well. I sure hope cryonics isn't riding on the 
shoulders of just 3 people, and after more than 40 years. The fact that this is 
even remotely plausible after 40 years, given the potential of the cryonics 
idea, shows how much of a failure the nerd-centric approach for selling cryonics
has been.


And "broad-based  attacks"? Please don't exaggerate. A couple of stupid websites
is not a broad-based  attack.

 wrote:
"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. "






Oh please. So all these tens of millions of potential cryonicists calmly and 
coolly evaluated cryonics and then rejected it because of the chatsworth thing? 
What a joke. Ya know, when I first came into cryonics, almost 20 years ago, I 
thought the things that you wrote were brilliant. You and the other leaders in 
cryonics. Your writings touched my soul and dared me to dream of immortality. 
Now I see massive gaps in your knowledge. Huge gaps. 


You have failed to grow intellectually. And you are not alone. I see an almost 
willful ignorance of large areas of human knowledge on the part of cryonicists. 
Which is really sort of ironic. Because to even have a chance of understanding 
the value of cryonics, one has to have a broad and general body of knowledge on 
a scale possessed by few.


But this is typical of modern american culture--people get sucked into a 
subculture, a quasi-tribe, and they then adhere to the mores, rules and 
expectations of that subculture. And in cryonics, we have this subculture that 
willfully ignores certain aspects of human behavior, e.g., pretending that 
humans in general evaluate cryonics rationally, objectively and consciously. But
of course they do not.

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