From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 11:27:49 MST
--- Samantha Atkins <samantha@objectent.com> wrote:
> Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> > I'm not going to get into the Samantha/Mike/Emlyn war/no-war
> > rhetoric.
snip some extremely cogent points...
> > This problem isn't going to go away. I think if the non-U.S.
> > people on the list will review the history -- the U.S. did
> > by and large try to stay out of both WWI and WWII. That
> > approach did not work. Furthermore, I think if one examines
> > the death tolls in those wars (e.g. the trench warfare or
> > the holocaust) one will observe that "doing nothing" is
> > essentially writing a prescription for millions of deaths.
> >
> > So, to all "extropians", I ask this question --
> > "how do we prevent millions of deaths?"
>
> I hope a sufficient number of you boys come to your senses
> before we are embroiled in a very UN-Extropic global war.
Since when is war considered unextropic?
Is it because of the wholesale destruction war creates? That, by
itself, may seem extropic on the surface, but wholesale destruction can
have quite extropic results. For example, the Yucatan asteroid impact
killed most life on earth, yet it cleared the slate of an ecosystem
which had gotten in a rut of chosing unextropic organisms, allowing
mammals to come to the fore and allowed the eventual evolution of human
intelligence, which is highly extropic.
Was WWII unextropic? I don't think so. It eliminated several highly
unextropic regiemes and more importantly drummed into obsolescence
several rather unextropic ideologies.
Was the Cold War unextropic? I don't think so either. It eliminated one
of the last two remaining empires on the planet and illustrated the
moral bankruptcy of collectivist ideologies. It also helped finance the
development of many very extropic technologies.
>From a purely utilitarian perspective, one might say that building a
bunch of stuff and shipping it around the world only to blow it up,
sink it or burn it along with lots of other stuff is not very extropic,
an economic waste. Yet a better question to ask is why that stuff had
to be destroyed. It was destroyed in order to give a cognitive smack up
side the head to some culture which was behaving in very unextropic
ways that caused even more economic waste than was caused by the war.
In the case of the Gulf War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we
could say that these two events freed up so much human capital and raw
materials that the economic boom of the 90's was unavoidable. In
economic history, the 90's were only rivalled by the 1920's in the
amount of growth as well as 'irrational exhuberance'. Both periods
experienced the two largest liberations of formerly repressed peoples
from bondage and into freedom in history, who finally obtained the
chance to see what free men and women can do.
>From this, I will say that ANY war to liberate people from oppression
is extropic.
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
"Pacifists are Objectively Pro-Fascist." - George Orwell
"Treason doth never Prosper. What is the Reason?
For if it Prosper, none Dare call it Treason..." - Ovid
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