[ExI] Legendary Battleship was diamandis commentary

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Legendary Battleship was diamandis commentary

 

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026, 11:00 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

I can assure you, congress is not going to fund weapon systems which are ineffective or obsolete.

>…Given how often they have before, even without the influence of Trump (looking at the span of time between when Congress had its first session and when Trump first took office), what do you base that assurance on?

 

 

 

 

Adrian consider what the US Navy has accomplished in the short span of the conflict with Iran.  From what I can tell, the score so far is 60-0.  Iran is claiming to have damaged or destroyed many US ships.  They threaten to kill any Iranian citizen who claims otherwise.  We have a free press, but they don’t.  None of our ships are missing or damaged.  Our navy is claiming to have destroyed about 60 Iranian navy ships.  We welcome our press to refute the claim.  None have.  

 

OK then.

 

This one-sided result apparently deterred China from invading Taiwan.  But I had another idea on that failure of China to invade, based on evolutionary psychology, which I invite comment in this forum.

 

Darwinian evolution has a difficult time explaining altruism, but Dawkins’ theory explains that genes shape our attitudes and actions (of course they do.)  If sacrificing oneself for two siblings or four first cousins or eight second cousins (etc.) makes sense from the POV of the gene.  Consider China, which strongly encouraged a one-child policy in the 1960s.  A generation grew up with no siblings, then a generation with no first cousins, followed by a generation with no second cousins.  This makes the young Chinese soldier most reluctant to sacrifice himself.

 

A Chinese government, recognizing this problem, refrains from war.  Being overly aggressive might cause Dear Leader to lose his Dear Head.

 

spike

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260605/b159ce54/attachment-0002.htm>