Re: Occidentalism

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 03:12:37 MST

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    On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 03:47:31AM -0500, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
    > A mighty intense article, that. There's a shifting essence of irrationality,
    > that extremists hope will see them through to total victory. To quote Bruce
    > Sterling, we must become "flexible and persistant" to beat such fanatics.

    A similar point was made by Lee Harris in
    http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-021103Ai
    which also fits in nicely with my short discussion of narratives
    in the media thread (although I have some reservations to his
    tone and generalisations).

    I found especially the following paragraph illuminating, and a
    bit an echo of Brin:

    "We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are
    professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with
    our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by
    any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure
    pragmatic success -- the most self-critical nation in human
    history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority
    over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some
    dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam
    Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military
    might. Can you really fear a society in which men like Chomsky
    and Gore Vidal are lionized, as opposed to being shot in the
    middle of the night in a remote forest? A society so absurdly
    tolerant has to be trusted; and it is precisely this trust that
    has kept other nations from arming themselves to the teeth
    against us. Talk is cheap -- and, with the USA as the dominant
    power, quite safe as well. "

    It is the strength of the open society it is all about, and this
    is also why it is so important to defend it even at home from
    itself.

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
    GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
    


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