09-18-2018, 01:45 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-18-2018, 01:50 PM by Bill the Piper.)
(09-18-2018, 12:41 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: While there was some tribal warfare, war as we know it was invented by the original Sargon of Akkad (I've never heard of the new one).
A relevant image from an anthropology book, War before civilization:
![[Image: wardeaths.jpg]](https://www.nextnature.net/app/uploads/2009/10/wardeaths.jpg)
Primitive war certainly was not organized well, and the warriors did not have high-tech weapons. But there was more violent deaths among hunter-gatherers than in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Quote:But we had no business deposing Saddam, as evil as he was. He was on the road to reform.
Show me your sources!
Quote:We had no business "spreading democracy around the world" through war to create a "new American century." Neo-con imperialism caused untold needless deaths and debilitating injuries in Iraq and the USA. ISIS was the direct result of US intervention in Iraq, not of our pullout. We don't need neo-cons at all. We do need a well-conceived foreign policy that is not isolationist, because American power can be a useful check on rogue nations and tyranny, and defending our own freedom from attack is needed. An alliance system is needed, with multi-lateralism and the UN. But rampant preventive intervention and imperialism causes many more problems than it solves. We need the 2T ideal of a world without war; I stand by it.
A world without war is world without tyranny. Democracies almost never go to war with each other.
The UN is a fine thing in theory, but it lost all moral authority by treating dictators and democratic leaders in the same way. Also, it did not prevent Saddam from gassing the Kurds. It didn't prevent Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons. It didn't do anything to make North Korea close its gulags.
What the current 4T could accomplish is to reform the UN to make it more moral, like its Missionary founders wanted.
Quote:To me, worship of tech is a 1T throwback.
We are heading towards another 1T and this part is needed too. I don't like it when core millennials live their lives on Inslagram and Faceborg (my nicknames for social media, you may be familiar with what "slag" means in British slang)
Quote:I am not familiar with Stapledon or Max Moore. It sounds fine, but I am very skeptical of humans becoming machines. I want instead an extension of the organic. Tech solutions should be subordinate to our original gifts of spirit and body.
You'd like Stapledon
In Last and First Men he described how future humans built gargantuan brains, which turned out to be disasters because they lacked bodies and hearts. They had only intellects and could not experience love, which gives life meaning. Not necessarily sexual love, but also love of all that is beautiful in the universe. The Earth's final civilization in Stapledon's fiction was normal human beings, only with bigger brains, longer lifespans and "Martian units" in brain cells which gave them telepathic abilities. Those units were probably something we'd now call nanobots. Imagine that, a Missionary person foresaw nanobots!Max Moore is a boomer so I guess he shares Stapledon's life-affirming sentiments. But many millennial extropians probably do want humans to become machines.
If you're curious about extropianism, you can read the manifesto:
http://vency.com/EXtropian3.htm
Political extropianism could be the big thing for the new idealist generation! The cows of liberalism, conservatism and leftism have been already milked.