[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[David Lubkin]

Eliezer wrote:

>The last thought was understated by, oh, three orders of magnitude or
>so.  I would estimate that the overreaction to 9/11 was around five
>orders of magnitude worse than 9/11.

The problem with 9/11 wasn't overreaction but misreaction. I believe 
I've vented on this before; stop me if you've heard this.

There was a golden moment when Bush could have gotten anything he'd 
asked for from Congress, the American people, and much of the world.

Part of the right answer is making the system more distributed and 
fault-tolerant.

The Powers-That-Be have this inane presumption that something bad 
will happen in one place, maybe two, and we can galvanize the 
country's resources around it/them. Plenty of plausible attack, 
disease, or disaster scenarios would affect much, most, or all of the 
country, or necessitate isolating a section (as in disease quarantine).

Every region, state, city, town, business, hospital, family, and 
individual should be prepared with skills and materiel suitable for a 
wide range of possibilities. Has your mayor identified every building 
that can be used as an emergency shelter? Did your employer inventory 
employee first-aid skills? Do you have agreed-upon signals to 
indicate to a loved-one that they should come home NOW? Is there a 
blanket in your car and a Swiss Army knife in your pocket?

America's traditional focus on self-reliance and on community 
self-help has dissipated, but Bush could have revived and marshalled 
it. Given his ostensible political and personal philosophies and the 
practical political benefits, I'm not sure why he didn't. Peggy 
Noonan could have written a great Thousand Points of Light speech, 
and the American people would have rolled up their sleeves and pitched in.

(I gather that many of the domestic measures taken during WW II, at 
least in the US, were undertaken not for any direct war benefit but 
for the psychological effect of girding and wedding the populace to 
the struggle.)


-- David.