[extropy-chat] POLITICS: terrorism and strategies

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Gregory Propf commenting on my comments wrote:

> >Now I know some of you are going to dislike the following
> >(probably intensely)
>
> Well you got that bit right.

I bask in the radiance of my own intense insights... :-;

> One currently sees a few people getting kidnapped and beheaded, yes.

"Few" is a relative term particularly if one confines oneself to
a perspective that "Western" individuals are worth more than
non-Western individuals (I'm not suggesting you are saying this --
I'm simply considering that this may be a bias by much of the media
Western individuals are exposed to that may need to be normalized
by an extropic framework.)  For example it looks like over 100 Iraqis
were killed today by their fellow "citizens".

> And this would justify murdering millions with nuclear weapons how?  By
> all means let us show the terrorist idiots that we can do terrorism much
> better than they can.

As pointed out in other messages the death toll would not be millions.
What remains unaddressed (in the messages I've seen thus far) is not
that this would be an *undesirable* strategy but that this would be
an *ineffective* strategy.

People have not been paying attention to the ramp-up to 911, Friedman's
essays in the NY Times, the Palestinian and Iraqi and Pakistan suicide
bombings, books like Imperial Hubris, etc.  These people are out to destroy
the West (no matter what it costs themselves) and that means they will take
down nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, lifespan extension, the
singularity, transhumanity and extropianism (just for starters).

Now you can argue that they will not be effective (we have the throw
weight), or you can argue that they cannot destroy societies of
robust democratic states (even though they outnumber us...) or
any of a bunch of other reasons.  But I challenge you to present
a case where the path(s) we are currently on will *not* require
the ultimate use of nuclear weapons.

Robert