From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Oct 15 2002 - 17:31:02 MDT
> (Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com>):
> FutureQ wrote:
>
> I think I owe you an apology. I just finished reading the
> entirety of the Bloom article. I need to let it digest a bit
> and check some parts. But he makes a very good case that Islam
> *is* itself a very real and serious problem.
I don't Bloom deserves to be taken too seriously. I read all of
"Lucifer Principle", and it's largely a propoganda piece for one
simple idea--the idea that memetic "superorganisms" as he calls
them can have major influence on history. But his scholarship is
shoddy, and his rhetoric is precise and careful and calculated in
exactly the way one would expect of someone who is more interested
in pushing a point of view than in finding the truth. Perhaps he
is so afraid if these memetic organisms because he himself so
easily falls prey to them.
What pretty much clinched it for me was that he actually argues
that conventional medicine out-competed homeopathy on memetic
grounds. The fact that homeopathy is complete fraud and that
conventional medicine actually works was apparently irrelevant to
him, since he only saw the memetic competition, and completely
ignored the more rational basis for idea's success. I don't see
any reason to think his opinions on religion are any better.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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