From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 14:06:54 MDT
On Friday 16 August 2002 23:56, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> ...
>
> This is the stupidest thing I have seen in a long time. You guys
> posting this crap about nuking the planet are going to end up killing us
> all. Not directly by anyone implementing your insane plans. No one in
> their right mind would believe your lunatic ramblings.
>
> No, what you are doing is destroying the transhumanist movement from the
> inside. Just as a few violent muslim articles get quoted as being
> representative of the entire muslim world, your rantings will be quoted
> as representatitive of the transhumanist movement. The are all in the
> archive. They get served up by Google. They don't contain any smileys
> or hint that they aren't serious proposals. People read this stuff and
> think that we are pushing this agenda to destroy the plan to bring out
> some post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future a la Mad Max.
>
> Is this what you want? Is this another "thought experiment", to see if
> you can destroy our movement from the inside? I don't appreciate you
> filling our archives with this violent destroy-the-world garbage. This
> is about as far from the Extropian Principles as you can get.
>
> Face it, folks. We have nothing to fear from terrorists or Luddites.
> The worst damage done to our movement come from this kind of internal
> sabotage.
The problem is that one lunatic with a lot of power can do uncounted damage.
This doesn't justify the rants, but remember that they don't and can't
actually do what they are proposing. But the problem is real, and I know of
no decent solution. The berserker strategy, which is what is being proposed,
"sort of" works. But no civilization that encourages berserk behavior has
persisted. Game theory sort of indicates that the proper answer is to be
capable of extreme berserk behavior, and then if the event happens, roll dice
to decide whether or not to go berserk. Pascifist action might work, but it
would require more continued determination than the berserker strategy, and
the determination would need to be directed along more subtle strategies.
(Undermining the value of the oil is a good example of a valid strategy, but
quite difficult to execute from a pascifist position.) And as a boycott is
already in progress against Iraq, that limits the most visible of the
pascifist tactics. How long would people stand for the government
appearantly doing nothing?
Well, I'm not a pascifist, but I also don't like the use of nuclear weapons,
and I consider that it's usually a bad idea to send in an army when you are
searching for just a few men. Perhaps establishing a bounty on the (named &
identified) perpetrators would be the best approach. How much does a B-1
cost? Perhaps half that much for each of the leaders who are declared
guilty. On delivery of their head. (The "Ballad of Boh da Thoe" (sp?) by
Kipling recalls itself to me. A time limit might be necessary.) Now I'm not
much more thrilled by the idea of "declaring someone guilty" than most people
are, but at least this appears to be better than a war. Besides, isn't
Afganistan is where the "Old Man of the Mountain" founded the order of
assassins (the Hashashim). So it seems appropriate, and culturally approved.
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