In a message dated 7/2/98 6:13:53 AM Eastern Daylight Time, mark@unicorn.com writes:
<< You may think that, but it's not true. Again, any immortalist who trusts governments to look after them is deluded.>>
Unless you plan on somehow completely and irrevocably isolating yourself from all of humanity, you better believe that someone intent on living forever should be concerned about the stability of governments. Or he better have some drastic way to alter what evolution has so firmly ingrained within us.
>Second, what makes you think that
>everyone, or even most, will be able to move away from those who will likely
>be targeted?
What, you mean people will cut their legs off? Tie them to the ground and refuse to let them go? Nonsense. Most people won't move away, because they don't think more than five seconds ahead. But there's no reason why they're unable to do so; they merely choose not to. And many of them will die as a result. >>
Many people will not leave because many people will lacks the means to leave. But what's further, I don't think that anyone should HAVE to leave. The idea of some psychotic idiot who happens to have a weapon of mass destruction forcing people out of the most important areas of their civilization strikes me as repugnant; and the idea of running from the problem and allowing it to exist strikes me as a surrender of some of our core values.
<< > Third, I'm afraid I don't understand how your response to the
>idea of weapons of mass destruction proliferating amongst irrational
>psychotics can be "so what?". Surely the possibility of so much death and
>suffering that could be caused requires more than a "so what?" response.
Sure, it's bad, but so what? Crazies will use mass destruction weapons against the unsuspecting here and there, and there's nothing we can really do but accept the risk and try to reduce the motivation for crazies to do such things. The problem with all the police state schemes suggested as a way to prevent it is that they will encourage *more* people to attack. You don't solve a problem by making it worse.>>
No. There will ALWAYS be crazies with motivations, and there will always be foreign governments with "rational" motivations to engage in terrorist activities. To concentrate on reducing the motivational force for terrorism is simply a bad course of action. That should be secondary to reducing the ability of terrrorists to act. How can we do so? I don't think that we need to destroy privacy. We can design and build more effective devices to detect nuclear/biological/chemical weapons, as well as conventional explosives.
And it's frankly silly to throw up one's hands so quickly in defeat when contemplating a threat to the lives of God knows how many human beings. I thought that optimism was an integral part of the Extropian Ethic. Am I wrong?
Andrew