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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (131683)	5/6/2004 12:13:24 AM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oh good, we are friends. I hope Faultline will not deem our conversation overly off-topic, as I think it IS relevant to foreign affairs. Only a cum laude mind could contemplate the possibility: "Happy little moron, sitting in the sun. Doesn't know he's moron. My God, perhaps I'm one." Your graceful response tells me that you're not. Do you really have faith that we are getting closer to "live and let live?" I think you may be right, but I sure hope that the ever-increasing power of our weapons does not do us in. The late Carl Sagan (an American scientist of some note) said it was important to learn whether there were other intelligent civilizations in the cosmos who had defeated their propensity to kill each other in a holocaust. If such a civilization existed, it would prove that we could, and should, do likewise. I certainly hope it does not turn out to be a civilization like the one depicted in Herman Wouk's novel "The Lomokome Papers." In that story, the "superior" civilization conducted their wars in cyberspace and the loser (and winners) had to march the requisite number of citizens into the incinerator. This plot was later repeated on Star Trek. The premise was that this idea is abominable because it makes war too sanguine, too acceptable, too easy for politicians to fight. A Sylvester Stallone movie called "Demolition Man" depicted a society that was so utopian a computer would dock your credit card if you said a swear word on the street. There were no weapons (except in museums, a fact which was exploited by Stallone's character), no crime, and NO FREEDOM. Eventually the people who lived in sewers and ate rat burgers in preference to a life without freedom revolted, and the utopia crumbled. Of course, even a brilliant mind like Sagan's can be wrong. He once came to my fair city (which was Portland Oregon at the time) and declared that "cutting trees was just dumb." Oregon, you understand, has the finest tree growing land on earth. Trees do grow back, provided that is your objective. Which brings me full circle to New Zealand, where foresters managed to discover that a single genotype of a scrubby California pine (Pinus radiata) vastly outperformed the growth of all other species and genotypes. Every tree was fundamentally a clone of every other tree. The result was astounding productive growth so great that the whole industry was converted. Foresters of my camp believe that species and structural diversity, while not quite turbocharged like the growth of radiata pine in New Zealand, will ultimately win out. That single genotype might well fall prey to a mutated organism that would wipe it out overnight. Let me know what you think. I hope Faultline will see the relevance of these principles to foreign affairs and forgive me for straying so far afield.