From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Sep 11 2001 - 23:09:21 MDT
Daniel Ust, recently made several statements to the general
effect that "the U.S. goverment should stop acting in international
arenas".
One of which was:
> They were, of course, drafted and their leaders trying to play at world
> politics. I wouldn't mind if Bush really was an isolationist in the sense
> of withdrawing militarily from the world -- limiting the US military to
> defending only US soil -- and stop the flow of aid (tax dollars) to
> everywhere else -- as well as returning such money to its rightful owners.
Now, Daniel is someone whom I have an immense amount of respect for
because he has a much better education in areas in which I wish that
my education were as deep as his.
However, *purely* from an Extropic perspective, I am going to
take my glove and slap him across the face, and say "I challenge
you -- for YOU are not an Extropian". The essence of an extropian
perspective is the desire to combat entropy -- the diminishment
of information. What we witnessed recently was a classic example
of the destruction of information, both in the minds of individuals
now dead and in the knowledge bases of commercial enterprises that
are unlikely to survive this incident. This is an extropic loss on a
scale that has probably not been witnessed in the last 45+ years.
What we have witnessed over the last decade or so in the Balkans
and in Kuwait were similar massive extropic losses (more difficult
to quantify because of the difficulties of equating loss-of-life
with loss-of-economic-activity). Furthermore, had we not acted
in those situations they ran the risk of those conflicts expanding
into situations that could have significantly impacted the economic
health of the USA (resulting in decreased economic growth and a
diminishment in the production of information and/or complexity).
As I've stated before, and I'll state again -- the greatest stain
on past/current governments in terms of "extropic sin" was/is the lack
of intervention in the previous and continuing Central African genocides.
Now, if I look back over the last 10-15 years of my life, and
how I've allocated my resources, I can make a reasonable case
that the U.S. Government has done a better job of allocating
my tax dollars for extropic purposes than I have done with
my non-tax dollars. So when I recently discovered that I may
have significantly overpaid my income taxes and may not be able
to recover those funds, I could rationalize it without too much
difficulty. For Daniel to be able to support his position, I believe
he has to make a *strong* case, not only *he*, but a significant
majority of Americans must be better at allocating their resources
for extropic purposes than the American government is. I challenge
him to make that case!
Not that I think the American government is *trying* to allocate
its resources extropically. I just think for some reason it
seems to naturally be able to do so. It may be some emergent
property of democratic governments. This may be related to the
fact that individuals can experience "self-gratification" while
governments cannot. Governments can only experience self-preservation.
So perhaps self-preservational behaviors have a much greater multiplier
effect for extropic production than self-gratification behaviors.
So, I challenge Daniel and other extropians to set aside their
personal beliefs (or agendas?) and ask themselves what will maximize
the production of extropic bits? If you want to stick with your
personal agendas, you are going to have to "prove" their worth
extropically to me.
Robert
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