From: VirgilT7@aol.com
Date: Thu Jul 02 1998 - 19:17:08 MDT
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:16 MST