From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2000 - 08:03:05 MST
On Wednesday, March 29, 2000 12:47 AM Dan Fabulich daniel.fabulich@yale.edu
wrote:
> > Again, not really. Microsoft would be a likely candidate for your big
scary
> > corporation scenario. But what can Microsoft do to abridge my human
rights?
> > It cannot legally amass an army. The worst it could do is obtain an
> > insurmountable monopoly in the marketplace such that my choice as a
consumer
> > would be restrained. And as we see in the news everyday, even that
ability
> > is significanly curtailed by antitrust legislation.
>
> You seem to have missed the antecedent "if national sovreignity ends or
> wanes..." Nobody would claim that this is the case today. National
> sovreignity is alive and well, for better or worse.
All too true - -and it might not be a completely bad thing, especially
considering the _official_ alternative is world government.
> > >Gun control like you advocate has always led to total confiscation,
> > >sooner or later, in every country, state, and city in which it has been
> > >allowed to become law.
> >
> > Examples, please. Even if that is the case, that is not what *I*
advocate
> > (at least not yet).
>
> This is a problem of entailment of consequences. You find it in policy
> debate more than anywhere else, IMO.
>
> Alice: We should not abide by your proposal that X, because Y will follow
> from it. (where Y is something nasty)
> Bob: But I'm not proposing that Y. I'm proposing that X.
>
> Clearly, Bob's making a kind of mistake here. Assuming that X does
> *indeed* lead to Y, you CAN'T just propose X without proposing that X & Y.
A very clear way of putting it. Few people advocate Y, they usually
advocate X. Just as in when people advocate economic equality. They do not
typically advocate that we all be poor and live under all manner of
controls, yet this generally follows from economic equality.
[super big snip of lots of great material]
> So ubiquitous surveilance promotes despotism; since despotism is nasty, to
> the extent that we can prevent ubiquitous surveilance, we should.
I agree. This has historically been the case too. Look at any dictatorship
that has survived longer than a few weeks, and one typically sees huge
secret police organizations and neighbors turning in neighbors a la Orwell's
_Nineteen Eighty-Four_. Granted, this is not ubiquitous surveillance, but,
it appears, the close one gets to it, the worse life looks.
And it might be my knee jerk reaction, BUT pulling my hand away from flames
has often been a good thing.:)
Vivamus!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
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