[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> 
> *Blinks*
> 
> The Iraq war is only one symptom of the over-reaction to 911.  The  
> tremendous weakening of civil liberties in the US, the tremendous  
> strengthening of governments everywhere to pry into the affairs of  
> people and organization and to seize funds, goods and people on mere  
> suspicion, the general focus on danger and fear, these and other  
> things go far deeper than war in Iraq.  I do not thing that at least  
> four orders of magnitude worse reaction than the actual event is out  
> of line.

Maybe I'm too gloomy, Samantha, but the atmosphere of paranoia and the 
weakening of civil liberties seems to be simply a continuation of an 
existing trend that was only slightly accelerated.

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