[extropy-chat] Re: riots in France

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:21 AM 11/10/2005 +0800, Jack Parkinson wrote:

>Spoilt rich kids always praise their own benevolence when they hand out 
>their loose change. The hot news is: No one is ever delighted at earning 7 
>cents an hour. They want a house with a manicured lawn, a membership of 
>the golf club and an SUV. When they see someone like you buying and 
>enjoying these little luxuries with the money they have earned you - they 
>start thinking about torching cars and burning shops...

Jack, the odd thing is that probably every Aussie on this list shares your 
basic perspective, while it remains bizarre and wrong-headed to most of the 
US extropes. Hard to say why that is; we are not *utterly* slaves of our 
nations' economics dogmas.

On the other hand, you're overstating your case just a tad. Rioters in 
France aren't living on 7 cents an hour, and I doubt many of them are 
earning the bourgeoisie their SUVs--it's exactly because there's no obvious 
route to decent work that they go crazy with rage. Their parents, 
generally, were imported as a dirt cheap labor pool--as many Europeans were 
to Oz in the 50s--and technological/ educational shifts, plus pervasive and 
fearful disdain from the haves, leave their kids with few prospects, even 
as they watch endless TV shows, movies and games that goad them with 
visions of wealth, ease, fun, and mayhem. My wife Barbara tells me DeSoto 
and Thomas Sowell have much to say on the cultural backgrounds to these 
topics, but the problems seem to me almost intractable by now. Maybe 
dead-cheap molecular manufacture will end such strife, but I stand by my 
gloomy prediction in THE SPIKE a decade or so back that what we'll see is a 
planet of Color Gang Wars and the like among those for whom life retains no 
discipline or meaning outside of arbitrary local status and violence.

Damien Broderick