At 8:35 PM 7/3/96, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
TCM breaks a longstanding personal policy of never replying to my posts directly. (well, thanks.) realize that my speculation on his position is largely associated with the vacuum of his continually refusing to discuss key points of his essays.
Check your mail logs, Larry, as I've replied to a couple of your posts in the last several months. True, I delete most of your posts after glancing at them briefly, but I do this with a lot of posts and posters.
imagine that all the palestinians had good paying jobs, for example. how many of them would be into rock-throwing and terrorism? of course their own attitudes make such a thing very difficult. they may not have any skills or reject a job even if offered one. I'm not saying such a thing is easy. the fact that it is so elusive is proof of how difficult such a thing is.
Your point being? After all, nothing we can do will give the Palestinians such jobs...visit the Middle East and see the quagmire. Too many points to make here, and I don't plan to debate utopian ideologies about making the world a land of milk and honey. (I will tell you that there are relatively few "good paying jobs" anywhere in the Arab world--look at the poverty of Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Morocco, and so on. Note that these countries are not directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and yet not a single one of these countries has so much as a primitive electronics production facility, let alone true high tech facilities such as Israel has. You may want to wave a magic wand and say "Yeah, but what if they did have such jobs?," but this is pure fantasy, and not something I plan to waste time debunking.)
I do NOT believe that living in the world is a zero-sum game as you seem to suggest. your use of the term is very compelling. do you believe human life is always at the expense of other human life?
I made no such claims about the world being a zero-sum game. (I made references to game theory, and used the term "game-theoretic," but this is not at all the same thing as asserting anything about zero sum games! I never mentioned zero sum games, positive sum games, or anything at all about sums. You are carelessly setting up straw men and then knocking them down.) No real point in wading through the rest of your ramblings. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."