Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> On Thursday, March 23, 2000 9:44 PM Michael S. Lorrey retroman@turbont.net
> wrote:
> > Its funny that people like you are the ones who say that Mutual Assured
> > Destruction is insane, when its the same exact principle. MAD assumes
> > that
> > neither party can be trusted, and only the external threat of instant
> > annihilation is what keeps both parties in check. The MAD strategy
> > relied
> > completely on the idea that both sides had to keep as total a level of
> > surveillance on the others activities as possible.
>
> But did MAD work? Angelo Codevilla, in _Informing Statecraft_ (see
> http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/IP1_Know.html), tells of how a lot of
> evidence came up in the 1980s and early 1990s that the Soviets, in fact,
> were preparing for an all out nuclear war. Whether this was paranoia on
> their part or the planning stages of a first strike remains to be seen.
> That the Soviets also continued a military buildup -- in both conventional
> and nuclear forces -- seems to support the latter.
Whether it worked or not is irrelevant. The Soviets are the example of
the
individual without honor or integrity. My position is that it was and is
unreasonable and unconstitutional for our nation's leaders to place US
in the same position as a bunch of untrustworthy thugs and tyrants.
You do not structure your society expaecting everyone to behave as
poorly
as the worst member, because given such expectation, many surely will
behave in such a manner. Expecting people to behave honorably as a
default
raises the standard of performance, and you only treat those who do not
do so (criminals) by a different standard once they have done so.
You argument that this is insufficient in a world where an individual
will have the capability to destroy the earth does give one pause as to
whether this is still rational to expect, since it only would take one
bad apple. I would rather live in a world where the bad apples are
weeded out early, a la, David Brin's concept of declaring Propationary
Personalities (see his Uplift War trilogy), than to have a wholesale
abrogation of the rights of the individual, and I think that since we do
have a bit of a 'ramping up' period ahead of us, that this be tried
first.
>
> It's also notable that the Soviets mainly targeted, from what we know now,
> military and industrial centers -- not population centers. (Granted, they
> often overlap, but the fact that they targetted when they did overlap sort
> of means they might have been really planning for a first strike.)
>
> And MAD, as a US policy -- not a Soviet one, was only in place for about two
> decades. Not enough of a sample in my mind to say it work or not.
>
> I'm not about to join the John Birch Society hre, just pointing out some
> things I read.
>
> > An honorable person needs no external consequences. A society that
> > relies
> > only on external consequences has acknowledged that men are nothing but
> > savages and have no honor or rights.
>
> Honor does not pay the rent. Anyway, if one looks at honor as the desire to
> be moral, and if one doesn't accept the kind of Platonic morality Michael
> hints at, but the more worldly, Aristotelean or Objectivist one I tend
> toward, then the goal of morality is successful life -- not to be honorable
> in spite of what will be, but to be honorable in hopes of what will be.
Ah, but it does keep the landlord and tenant both on their best
behavior,
without the extortion of overwhelming force, or the might of public
humiliation.
Mike Lorrey
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