From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2001 - 03:12:13 MDT
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Spike Jones wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, 1 Oct 2001 CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
> > >
> > > > It would if they had actually been cowardly. But they obviously weren't,
> > > > and saying they were just makes us look like kooks...
> >
> > While arguing over whether terrorists are cowardly, we must
> > keep in mind that the "coward" meme is one that evolved in order
> > to encourage people to behave in a certain way. {Look at the
> > word I just used, "encourage" meaning exhort or motivate.}
>
> So what are we supposed to do? Engage in blatant defiance of reality for
> propaganda purposes? Try that often enough and people just stop paying
> attention to you. Even failing to acknowledge that, yes, it takes courage
> ("suicidal courage") to kamikaze a plane seems to me too much like
> distorting reality. We've heard enough about the attacks not destroying
> America's liberties. Should we let it destroy our rationality and
> intellectual honesty as well?
>
Well, at least our judgementalness is intact. :-)
Seriously, we our freedom, wealth, time and even lives on the
line does it really matter all that much whether we consider a
kamikaze terrorist to be cowardly or not? I certainly don't see
any point
in wasting one more line of text on the subject. As alwasy, my
humble opinion.
- samantha
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:11:06 MST