From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 18:23:40 MST
Eliezer wrote:
> Iraq will get a new dictator. A few years later we'll
> probably have the
> same problem all over again. That seems to be the most
> common result of
> modern wars. Plenty of rubble, but no liberal democracies
> rising out of
> the ashes. Is that worth a war? It's hard to see why.
It's good to see someone look at this from an historical perspective, which
tells us (well me, anyway) after all that war is generally crap for
everyone, excepting perhaps the leadership on the winning side, (assuming
the result is callable).
>
> If there's a liberal democracy in Afghanistan in ten years,
> maybe I'll say
> that something worthwhile took place there. But I'd bet on
> theocracy or
> kleptocracy.
>
> The only good argument I can think of in favor of invading
> Iraq, North
> Korea, and whoever's next, is that in five years we may be
> playing this
> little scenario over again with rogue development of
> nanotechnology. So
> someone inside the White House decided to just say the hell with
> international law and get rid of all the perennial menaces
> that were never
> quite annoying enough to squash before.
I don't think that you are seriously suggesting this as the reasoning behind
the current behaviour of the US administration. It seems spectacularly
unlikely that the US govt would be marching into what is coincidentally an
unfriendly oil producer because of future concerns about nanotech.
> But if that were the
> case, I'd
> expect Bush to be as polite and conciliatory as possible
> internationally
> to minimize that fallout. This feels... I don't know.
> Either the US is
> being really, really stupid, or someone is playing this game
> with really
> evil goals, or I've totally failed to comprehend what's going
> on.
I think it's that second thing, probably combined with a good bit of the
third. The first option, well, that seems unlikely.
> I wish
> I had a few years experience in international diplomacy; I
> might be able
> to figure out what's going on then.
>
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
You'd probably do better with the same time invested in the relationships
between big corporations and the US government; there is no indication that
anything approximating diplomacy is involved.
OTOH, that'd be a big waste of time. It seems to be that even a fairly
mediocre set of bullshit detectors will inform you that the current rhetoric
about war, and the proposed actions, match like stripes and plaid. The
really stunning thing to my mind, is that Bush Inc. is spouting such a
spectacularly flimsy line to support its actions. Probably scary is a better
word than stunning. Scary, because they don't seem to give a shit what
anyone else thinks about the things they propose to do, given that no-one
can do anything about it.
Just think about the phrase "War on Terror" for a moment. It's catchy, but
meaningless. Terror is an emotion, or maybe a procedure used in warfare at
best. How do you declare war on that? How do you even declare war on
terrorists, in general? Isn't it a bit pervasive and vague?
The answer to this seems to be (and has from the ominous beginning) that you
execute a war on terror by choosing who best represents terror, and beating
the living crap out of them. As it's a vague notion, you need only give
vague justification. As it's pervasive, you can do pervasive things to fight
it (like setting up ubiquitous networks of informants amongst your people,
like imprisoning people on suspicion of things, like changing the rules on
freedom of speech).
It's just scary. As to the idea that the US govt might need to do the same
thing in the future to control rogue states with nanotech, well, how
comfortable will anyone here feel when Bush Inc. controls nanotech,
planetwide? If we got to plan the development of nanotech, would we include
"total control and policing by the US govt" as one of our dot-points?
Emlyn
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