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