From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Oct 28 2000 - 23:29:01 MDT
Dave Sill wrote:
>
> The military is nothing without the population to keep it running. And they
> can't even take over a third world backwater like Viet Nam or Iraq. Putting
> the U.S. under martial law would be a thousand times harder.
Oh, really? Think you're going to find a lot of US citizens willing to strap
bombs to themselves and walk into government offices? Well, I don't know,
maybe you would. Especially among the WWII generation. But the number has
never been very large, and it's getting smaller. The converse of being so
civilized that the military would refuse to participate in a coup is being so
civilized that you couldn't do anything about it if they did.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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