Re: Genocide sucks

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 17:40:52 MDT

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    Lee Corbin wrote:
    > Avatar writes
    >
    >> From an historical and interpretative point of view, it is necessary
    >> to gather data on non-combatants killed violently including through
    >> deliberative deprivation of resources (e.g. the kulaks etc. starved
    >> in the Ukraine during the Soviet era) and ANY civilians killed in
    >> warfare including by the West (e.g. in firestorms or by napalm).
    >> There are websites such as
    >> http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocidetable.htm
    >
    > That's very good. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, especially those who
    > are at all ideological---whether of the left or the right---take a good
    > hard look at all these numbers, and understand well two things:
    >
    > ONE: Atrocities are not merely confined to one's political adversaries
    > or their allies
    >
    > TWO: It's still going on, and our voices must be added to those who are
    > in advance of us, and who are already demanding that it stop.
    >
    >> Places like Sudan and the DR of Congo have and are experiencing
    >> mixtures of war and genocide.
    >
    > Right. This is happening *now*.

    Wow. The entire 2001 genocides don't add up to one day's planetary
    casualties. By comparison with any of the past genocides listed, or,
    probably, *any* earlier period in *all* human history, this is downright
    amazing.

    When I went to that site, I was expecting much, much worse. It was as
    recently as 1994 that 800,000 Tutsi died in Rwanda. I don't remember
    hearing it on the news at the time, but I was young. Do you all, I
    wonder, recall any fuss about it? I can only imagine the outcry if that
    many deaths had occurred to people who were American, or British, or
    German, or, well, to be blunt about it, white.

    Now all we have to do is halt the fifty-five million annual non-genocide
    casualties, and we'll have made some real progress.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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