Sunday, July 02, 2006

Doom?

Instapundit.com: "Still, I'm apparently a Pollyannaish techno-utopian because I hold a Faulknerian belief that mankind will not only survive, but prevail. Whatever. In truth, actual Polyannaish techno-utopians are pretty hard to find -- Ray Kurzweil is often charged with Polyannaism, but his book The Singularity is Near is devoted as much to grim warnings as to rosy scenarios -- but the luddite crowd seems to want them so much that where they do not exist, they are invented. Of course, the pop culture is sufficiently loaded in favor of techno-doom, from Paul Ehrlich to Jeremy Rifkin to Al Gore, that anyone who doesn't run in circles screaming that we're all going to die looks Polyannaish by comparison."

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