From: Natasha Vita-More (natasha@natasha.cc)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 17:34:45 MST
At 11:47 PM 3/26/03 -0800, you wrote:
>Natasha writes
>
> > [Barbara wrote]
> > > You can listen to their unembedded reporters online:
> > > http://www.democracynow.org/about.htm
>
> > Excellent. Thanks.
>
>Hi Natasha. Do you happen to know whether that site is
>balanced or not? Have you listened to it?
Most political sites are not reasonably balanced.
> > I'm glad that Damien posted a news story that
> > reported Iraqi casualties. I do not want to
> > think that only American lives are important.
>
>Shudder. Yes. Absolutely all the truths must
>and should come out. Our tempest in a teapot
>was a rather arcane matter of subtle etiquette
>IMO. A completely separate post by him or anyone
>else wouldn't have caused the slightest objection
>from me, that's for sure!
>
>But it does bring up the question of the mindset of
>those---no one I know of, especially on Extropians
>---who would think human lives unimportant so long
>as they were "the enemy", or belonged to a "subhuman"
>or despised ethnic group.
>
>I suppose that it had evolutionary advantages at some
>point in the past to see others as not "the people".
>Hopefully, we are beyond that in most ways.
>
>The second point about this is why are the American
>soldier casualties and the Iraqi civilian and soldier
>casualties of more concern than, say, the approximately
>one-hundred fatalities on America's highways each day?
>I think that there *is* a good explanation for this,
>but it takes work, and I'll answer another time.
Probably because the threads have been about war and the consequences of
war rather than the unsafe machinery people use for transportation and
mobility. 50 years, if not sooner, people will look back on automobiles
and the deaths caused by them in horror that we were so vulnerable in these
motor transports and accepted it.
>For that matter, a third point is "why are the lives
>of non-combatants often assumed to be more valuable
>than the lives of young soldiers?". I'm afraid that
>anyone who thinks that the death of a soldier is okay,
>but that the death of a civilian is somehow worse is
>laboring under the delusion that war is some sort of
>game, and certain people have signed up to play.
I don't think civilians lives are more or less important. There seems to
be more compassion and sympathy for bystanders because they are not hired
military and therefore third party. Soldiers usually agree to
fight. Civilians usually do not.
best,
Natasha
Natasha Vita-More
http://www.natasha.cc
----------
President, Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org
Founder, Transhumanist Arts & Culture
http://www.transhuman.org
http://www.extropic-art.com
http://www.transhumanist.biz
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 27 2003 - 15:44:30 MST