From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Fri Apr 05 2002 - 16:55:14 MST
"Dear Sir: You may be right. Yours sincerely, Samuel Clemens"
William wrote:
> > - --bomb "them" (fifty thousand? twenty million? one billion? two?) flat
> > send their kids to all be raised by Clifford Huxtable
...snip...
> This is absolutely the logical extrapolation of our (USA's) current
> trajectory.
Logical as in one-ply? Linear? I think we agree.
> and I do not see any other BETTER way to go about it.
Yes, I hear you. Are you familiar with the "Polesotechnic League" future
history by the writer Poul Anderson? A big part of it concerns the gradual
disillusionment of a career military type who gradually figures out that his
very own galactic empire is doomed to downfall due to overexpansion,
corruption and decadence, but if he does his utmost he might be able to stave
off the fall for a few decades, and extend the quality of a few (billion?)
lives.
Do you appreciate the tragedy?
Item: Willingness to die (and the pumped up '"Go-to-Hell" fighting style') has
been a critical component of Western Civilization since at least the
Athenians. Following your alpha male's lead unquestioningly goes back a lot
further than that.
Item: The ability to blow people up efficiently is a development of Western
Civilization. Alfred Nobel and all that.
Item: The Western World, because it is composed of people, includes a lot of
one-ply-thinking people--_vide_ those French trappers I mentioned. Do you
think they realized they were inventing a fad that would sweep the continent
and contribute, in large measure, to the extermination of the "savage
redskin", as taking scalps became the very acme of _native_ savagery in the
minds of the whites?
Hell no. They were just inventing a convenient token for body counts.
Item: ...Oh heck, forget it. For values of N greater than 3, there may be no
solution. The margin is too small to contain the rest of my proof.
John Walker (the retired Scrooge McDuck free-entrepreneur, not the
impressionable "American Taliban") designed a bumper sticker after the fall of
the FSU. It has a CCCP and a US flag on it; the red flag has a big X through
it and the catch phrase in the middle is "EVIL EMPIRES: ONE DOWN, ONE TO GO."
Hold tight while you digest that bitter joke. Take the point that a brilliant,
truly civilized capitalist could find it in his heart to make it.
You know those random-dot stereograms, the "there's a sailboat in there"
mosaic pictures that used to be all the rage in malls? The brain's capacity to
find the pattern in those is part of what perceptual researchers call
"camouflage breaking".
We're in for a rough ride. My recent post was to explore that, and the
question of how to keep enough mental parallax to accurately break some of
Western Civilization's camouflage, in order to distinguish between what is
expedient for sharks, parasites and people with mental... ...not myopia,
exactly, more like amblyopia ("Lazy eye")
--versus what I deeply love about my civilization.
> I find the talk of "clash of civilizations" annoying because I see it as
> a clash between civilization (i.e. the
> Western World) and barbarism/terrorism/evil/subhumanism/devolution/etc.
The gnat you are straining at isn't me. I did not use the plural.
MMB
--
butler a t comp - lib . o r g
I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization.
Sometimes I forget.
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