From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Wed Feb 19 2003 - 20:34:16 MST
Emlyn O'regan wrote:
> John Clark wrote:
>
>>As I said before I don't know if the coming war is a good
>>idea or not but I
>>have made 3 conclusions:
>>
>>1) It will be very difficult to take anything Tim May says
>>seriously in the
>>future, and that makes me a little sad because at one time he had some
>>pretty good ideas. The man has gone nuts.
>
>
> Some of the things he had to say in that piece were interesting, but by the
> end (particularly the Nuke DC bit), well, yes, it seems clear that he's
> insane.
I hear overheated rhetoric, and read it, all the time. Overwrought,
hyperbolic, impolitic. It's far from clear to me that he's insane.
But it's quite clear he's going to be taken for crazy by those who
say they will, and some other hard-to-determine fraction of the
people who encounter that utterance, especially at nth hand.
Let's go meta for a minute, and consider three other test cases.
1) "A" says that the recent loss of the shuttle is a good thing, and that
"The PRC needs to eat the West's lunch in space. When they set up a permanent
penal/army colony on the Moon, the US and the ESA will perhaps wake up.
It's more important that the human race get off the rock than that the
flags waved be American."
2) "B" discusses the notion of acceptable casualties in a protracted nuclear
exchange for many pages in a popular press book.
3) "C" says that public figure "C-prime" should be "shot wth a .44 Bulldog"
because C-prime is the titular head of a lawful organization which C disapproves of.
C has often indulged in classical revolutionary-violent rhetoric such as the phrase
"by any means necessary".
Whic, if any, of A, B, and C are clearly crazy? Why, or why not?
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