From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 08 2002 - 21:54:18 MDT
Actually, I left some things out (and they're still
running loose):
http://www.smartvoter.org/2001/04/10/ca/la/vote/daley_t/bio.html
Tad Daley ran an interesting one-man panel that I
hadn't noticed until it was already going, dealing
with 9/11. His take on it seemed congruent with mine
at the beginning (that the obsolete fiction of the
nation-state created this bizarre dilemna in which
people who were neither criminals nor prisoners of war
were imprisoned indefinitely without recourse to law
of any kind), but rapidly diverged as it became
apparent that he had caught one of the more virulent
forms of the "progressive" meme and was advocating a
World Federation to eliminate all those pesky wars.
Daley had allegedly been directly and substantially
instrumental in the creation of that entity known as
the World Court, formed outside the U.N. by treaty in
order to prosecute crimes against humanity. Of
course, the U.S. has NOT signed on to this treaty. I
opined that it might have something to do with all the
millions of people who have died in the past century
and a half due to U.S. crimes against humanity, but
no, Daley pointed out that prior crimes were
specifically exempt.
Aha! But then it must be because they intend to
continue such crimes - as in shooting down peaceful
planes in Columbia, or sponsoring terrorists worldwide
in the name of the War on Drugs. Again, we had an
agreement for a moment.
Then Tad unleased the full affect of his politician
stage presence and briefly, I believe, swayed probably
90% of the audience over to his side, talking about
Star Trek and the Galactic Federation, and how silly
it would be to imagine Captain Kirk as a U.S. vs.
U.S.S.R. confronting the Klingons, etc. Perhaps, he
suggested, the real reason for the Fermi Paradox
(altho he didn't use the term, and I doubt he ever
heard of it), was that the Galactic civilizations were
waiting for us to grow up and speak with one united
peaceful voice. Such a grand dream!
Then I recalled the 3rd Internationale, where the
anarchists split from the socialists. The former went
on to found the Seaman's Union, among other similar
achievements, and to forge mutually beneficial
contractual relationships between ship owners and
sailors. The other side went on to found the most
murderous states on the planet - Bolshevik, NAZI,
Chinese Commie. I pointed this out.
Tad was - to his credit - in that mode that welcomes
disagreement, something that a lot of other people
could learn from, as it gave him enormous credibility.
Can you trust anyone who can't afford to let the
opposition speak?
So he asked me, after some considerable discussion of
our differences, ~"well then, what you want, I
surmise, is 6 billion soveriegn individuals? Right."
I affirmed that, and he then went to his primary
objection, "And if one of them decides to buy a
nuclear weapon and store it in his garage, then he's
free to do so, right?"
"Sure," I came right back - like I haven't heard this
100 time before, " after he pays sufficient insurance
premiums to cover the risks he creates for his
neighbors."
Tad actually had no answer for that one, and by then
my reminding the audience of just how well his kind of
solution actually worked in practice historically had
clearly taken its toll. A lady who had been nodding
her head enthusiastically to his utopian socialist
proposals remembered how it was her New Jersey company
and its telephone exchange that had moved in and
restored and maintained the phones within bare hours
after 9/11. Another recalled how the New York Stock
exchange had relocated transactions to Boulder almost
instantly, from where they are still run today. On
and on, people remembered just how quickly individual
private businesses had moved in and restored services,
while the Feds fumbled the ball. By then, it was
clear that Tad had lost the day, but he was still
gracious, ever the politician - or maybe he really is
a nice guy who has simply never heard the other side
clearly enunciated?
Later I found him at the Con Suite and gave him a
little intro to anarchist theory, from Jarret
Wollstein's seminal speech at the 1st Southern
Libertarian Conference circu 1971. When, I asked, do
the police get a bigger budget, more powers, more
publicity? Is it when they succeed at their job of
curtailling or at least reducing crime? No, it's when
they fail, right? And this is true of every
government program. So, systemically inherent in the
nature of the state is this built-in evolutionary
impetus to failure. True, strong-willed people can
force the state into a particular path for a while,
but it always tends the other way, and what will the
next generation do?
Tad admitted he had never heard this argument. He
also was completely unaware of the plurality of
anarchists - syndicalists, anarcho-individualists,
anarcho-capitalists, etc. I think I really shook him
up. Strange that someone could be a world leader and
a Rand Corp. consultant and know so little outside a
set of narrow memes. It will be a real feat now if he
finds it in himself to actually challenge his lifelong
political beliefs...
>From there, I went to hear Harlan Ellison deliver a
eulogy for author George Effinger, of whom I had never
heard, but that didn't matter, as I went to hear
Harlan. If you've ever heard Harlan speak, then you
know why. Harlan could describe opening a can of tuna
and make it the most interesting, funny, pathetic
thing you had ever heard. And it was totally worth
the effort.
Harlan described how he had been invited to speak at
the Tennessee Williams Society in New Orleans, which
had absolutely refused to recognize the existence of
George Effinger, who, admittedly, from Harlan's
description, was truly, truly weird and a shyster and
con man to boot. But George begged Harlan to let him
introduce him at the talk, and Harlan loathed the
la-de-da New Orleans high society with their huge hats
and fans and mint julipes, and what the f...! did
Tennessee Williams ever write that was worth one
paragraph of George's work anyway, so Harlan
introduced George, ~"And now I'd like my friend, this
native son, this flower of Orleans, this unremarked
genius of the written word, to grace you with his
insight..." or something like that only ten times
better. And then George spent the next hour and a
half in completely incomprehensible ranting, at the
end of which Harlan arose and opined, " and what could
I possibly add to that?" And left.
I found myself thinking, however, who will one day
deliver Harlan's eulogy? I can't think of anyone but
Harlan himself who could possibly begin to do justice.
And I didn't stay to hear the finale, as I suddenly
realize that I couldn't recall where I had last seen
my motorcycle helmet.
After an hour of fruitlessly searching and relying
upon the professional help of the Radison staff, it
suddenly occured to me that assuming the Radison staff
could do ANYTHING right was risky at best. So I went
back to the bar area where I and other authors had
spent a jovial time making jokes at David Brin's
expense and looked down the shelves of liquors behind
the bar, and, sure enuf. Saved!
Later, when I had finally managed to get to the 12th
floor in spite of the LL-PH elevators and the locked
firedoors, I ran into one of extropy's own, a
professional programmer lady who used to frequently
contribute to the list but finally decided that the
uploader faction had not really thought through their
position and were just being silly
pseudo-intellectuals.
We settled into a long discussion of various computing
problems and infanticide and why people reacted so
emotionally to certain subjects and ended up blearily
collapsed on the hallway floor, making little sense,
I'm sure, but enjoying ourselves nonetheless. Her
take was that humans naturally are attracted to little
kids, because it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Just keep killing the ugly ones, and eventually you'll
have the most adorable babies. And, she pointed out,
that's also why men are so attracted to women. Their
faces look babyish.
I had heard all this before, of course. The
interesting thing is that that subject was all over
the con. I kept hearing people discussing it. Even
David Brin brought it up at our panel. ... Why?
... Has the Extropian community become some kind of
memetic fountainhead? Or was the recent heated
discussion just another symptom of something generated
independently?
That was about the limit of my tolerance of fatigue,
however, and so I headed back to Santa Ana, knowing
that I would be up against it on Saturday...
Picking up that thread again, David (Brin, for those
who missed episode one) after shaking his finger at
the audience, ~"you fools! Do you really think that
anyone will believe anything you tell them, when you
make no bones about having absolute contempt for them,
you blithering apes?"
He followed up this interesting oxymoronic performance
however with a discussion about why people liked
babies, going into the chemical pathways - oxytoxin,
etc. - and how people self-addicted to putting other
people down, altho it accomplished nothing except to
feed the addiction, and how he had learned to use the
self-addiction to feed the things in himself he wanted
to nurture.
Several of us had responded earlier to his attacks on
Rand, in which he characterized her as an arrogant
elitist who created a religion out of logic (or so was
the gist I recall, altho I believe he expressed it
somewhat differently). I had been thinking for days
prior to the con about the many ways I could preempt a
typical Brin attack. (I am not without certain
resources in that arena.) In fact, I had a whole list
of calculated jibes and insults just thronging behind
the mental gate, eager to break out and wreak bloody
havok.
But, something David said informed me that he had
somehow acquired a taste of inner knowledge as to how
he was perceived - and I had the feeling that someone
had clued him that he might be walking into a trap -
and so, without planning it in the least, I found
myself in my alter-ego as Mr. Rationality.
In reply to his attack on Rand, I pointed out that the
primary reason for the great successes of Western
civilization - democracy (such as it is), jury trials,
the scientific method - were that we had totally
internalized the idea that things are what they are.
Wishes don't change them. But, we have the capability
of identifying what things are and finding the rules
of the universe that give us the power to mold it to
our desires. We assume that this is true in every
realm of our experience, and it works!
Someone objected that this was ethnocentric and I
pointed out that the Japanese did not have a word for
a scientific dispute - for any dispute that was not a
fight, a power contest. They had to invent one
borrowed from the West. The concept was totally alien
to them, and they were perhaps the closest to the West
in philosophy.
And that was the primary position that Rand had
finally explicated. Forget her personal failings and
occasional objectionable behavior. We were all sorry
about that. But she had given voice to the thing that
made us what we were. I noticed the rocket plane
people watching me closely at that point, as well as
my extropian friend, and later they approached me with
an invite to a launch, assuring me that they were fans
of Rand bigtime!
Anyway, David's next thrust was his line about
endorphins and self-addiction behavior. He spoke this
new gospel at some length, and made good sense. I
managed to get the floor a few minutes later and
pointed out that the underlying systemics had been
identified much earlier. Nathaniel Branden, in his
truly seminal "The Psychology of Self-Esteem," right
at the end, had discused the "Muttnik principle."
Why is it, he asked himself, that I like playing with
my dog, faking attacks back and forth, growling and
wagging the tail at the same time? Why does this give
me such amazing pleasure? Because the dog and he both
knew that it was a game. They perceived through the
mock attacks their mutual benevolence.
>From the touching of finger to thumb in the womb to
the creation of a skyscraper or a space ship or a
computer program, we build our consciousness by
creating feedback loops, by taking what is inside and
reaffirming it by our successful actions. And, that,
not some set of hard-wired instincts, is our and every
higher animal's prime motivation, to recreate the
universe in our image, to become the eyes and hands of
the universe. And, it's nice that now we're getting a
handle, as David has described, on the precise
mechanisms by which this happens, because now maybe we
can improve on them and fix the problems.
Such a day. And I still had the female Kzin to
face...
NOW do you see why people go to SF cons?
more later.....
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