[extropy-chat] 9/11 Commission Report

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Kevin Freels <megaquark at hotmail.com> wrote:
> What if we create and release a virus into the
> middle east that causes men
> to lose all their body hair? We can do this in
> concert with a holographic
> imageof Allah projected into the sky telling them
> that they must love and
> embrace all humans, and will be punished for their
> wicked ways.
> 
> They are fighting a different kind of war than we
> are. Let's pull out the
> military entriely and mess with their heads. :-)

This is the kind of thinking that's needed, although
that specific idea has problems.  For one, the virus
would spread beyond the Middle East, probably through
most of the world - and much of the world would
rightly view the "punishment" as America's fault (even
if it only targetted people of Middle Eastern descent
- there are American citizens of said ethnicity who
wouldn't mind seeing Jerusalem destroyed, for
example).  For another, those ME-ers with any
education would quickly point out to the rest that
it's not Allah but America who did this, which many of
them would want to believe even if it wasn't true.

Now, the hologram and voice by itself, if those who
produced the recording took great care to get the
details right (as opposed to, say, spy agencies who
can't be bothered to recruit even the most sympathetic
locals in regions of high national interest) might
have a good effect, even without any direct material
corrolary.  It is already the case that Iraqi
moderates are pointing out how fundamentalists are,
through their attacks on other Iraqis and their
infrastructure, doing more harm to Iraq than to the
Westerners they claim to target.  It's a simple step
to claim this is one mechanism of Allah's punishment,
and that simply stopping the "holy" war would quickly
end it.

(Indeed, some - including me - say that this kind of
thing was originally blamed on God for the benefit of
those deemed, rightly or wrongly, unable to conceive
of their own responsibility for the harm they
inflicted, and that this was one of the reasons for
religion in the first place.  Whether or not most
people these days have enough sense that they no
longer need religion to figure out that things like
unlimited revenge cycles, atrocities in the name of
noble causes, and so forth almost always wind up doing
more harm than good, is another question.)