From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Fri Sep 05 1997 - 20:28:25 MDT
arkuat@pobox.com (Eric Watt Forste) writes:
>Oh, yeah, and the principle of comparative advantage. I'm
>starting to feel that "the principle of comparative advantage"
>is my personal "Carthago delenda est" in all these discussions
>of future fearsome military competitions between human beings
>and their technological offspring. The only threat I see here
>is stupidity. Anyone with half a brain and the patience to
>spend a few months of eir life studying modern economics can
>see that initiating warfare is almost always idiocy. That
If you are able to imagine value systems sufficiently different from
our capitalist values, you will probably be able to find explanations
with more predictive power than "stupidity" for starting wars.
Try desires for power, fame, pleasing Allah combined with indifference
towards a long life expectancy (for example, some Olympic athletes
reportedly say they would take a drug that promised them victory even
if they expected it to kill them soon after).
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