From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 13:24:06 MDT
I ran across this URL:
http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/afgh-01.htm
Obviously a somewhat inflamatory document, but discusses
the fact that our "war on terrorism" may be 3+ years old
and the fact that annual terrorist activities have been
impacting people in numbers that are of the same order of
magnitude of those who may have died this week (i.e. this
is nothing new).
Why does it take a "dramatic" act to call our attention to
and galvanize a response to such atrocities?
I am reminded of a perspective developed by the Hunger Project
almost 20 years ago -- it pointed out that the number of people
who die from starvation around the world annually is equivalent
to a 747 full of people crashing into a mountain *every* hour.
I think Brian may have pointed out to me recemtly, my Sysopish
perspective that one needs to prevent the unnecessary loss of
life. It is an extraordinarly difficult perspective -- to allow
the exercise of individual freedom and at the same time preserve
to the greatest extent the information content of the civilizations
that currently exist that troubles me.
Another way to look at this is that "blind belief" is unextropic.
So extropians should celebrate the extinction of blind believers.
This would seem to indicate that in the long term, any actions
that promote the development of constructed, integrated, information
producing perspectives is good, while their destruction is bad.
However, one has to be careful in determining whether "blind belief"
can be transformed into productive belief that can be useful
from an extropic perspective.
Robert
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