Re: Fears of nanotech

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Thu, 09 Sep 1999 08:40:37 -0500

mark@unicorn.com wrote:
>
> You think many Chinese will care about US troops getting killed? Russians?
> Indians? Arabs? That's more than half the world's population already. I
> think you severely underestimate how many of the people of the world hate
> and despise America, largely because of its military ambitions.

No, actually I think we're despised for three reasons:

  1. We're richer than anyone else; furthermore we're arrogant about it. Whether this is actually true doesn't matter, because that's the perception.
  2. America uses its power to ride roughshod over the interests of other nations, except when we get to play hero, at which time we care more about image and token victories than actually getting the job done. I think this one *is* true.
  3. America's foreign-policy agenda of freedom and liberty makes us a huge annoyance to petty and not-so-petty dictators, so reporters in the controlled press that write pro-American stories are shot. -- sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way