On 08/31/2016 10:43 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:
On 08/31/2016 11:47 PM, Александр wrote:
this has already been discussed dozens of times (on the thread about "offtopic" posts) -> Zen is NOT talking to himself. There are thousands of people here on the list. Only~15 of them participate most of the discussions. The rest - read and/or answer privately.
By the way, if you are so A-political dude, you could always filter these/all of Zen's letters.
Technologists are likely to assume that political problems are products of stupidity, and that putting their own kind of intelligence in the driver's seat would automatically create optimum solutions to all those problems. Maybe so, but only if that intelligence is given relevant and accurate data to work from: Context is everything, and in a world dominated by indoctrinated ideologies nothing is more subversive than the facts.
Something Paul Goodman, founder of Gestalt Therapy and Anarchist said to some technologists in 1967 comes to mind "...speaking by invitation to the National Security Industrial Association —a consortium of arms manufacturers at the October 1967 “Research and Development in the 1970s.” symposium, Washington DC: “You are the military industrial [complex] of the United States, the most dangerous body of men at present in the world, for you not only implement our disastrous policies but are an overwhelming lobby for them, and you expand and rigidify the wrong use of brains, resources, and labor so that change becomes difficult.” (He continued as the audience sat in stunned silence.) “The best service you people could perform is rather rapidly to phase yourselves out, passing on your relevant knowledge to people better qualified, or reorganizing yourselves with entirely different sponsors and commitments, so that you learn to think and feel in a different way. Since you are most of the R&D [research and development] that there is, we cannot do without you as people, but we cannot do with you as you are.” (laughter and booing along with scattered applause) “but we believe, however, that that way of life is unnecessary, ugly, and un-American.” (Shouts from the audience: “Who are ‘we’?”) “We are I and those people outside —we cannot condone your present operations; they should be wiped off the slate.” All the R&D and so-called intelligence applied to software and computer development is USELESS to anyone but the 'war machine' if it's all about ME, and not "those people outside". http://auntieimperial.tumblr.com/post/92438085944
The article cited in the original post is a commentary on this essay:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/04/17/toward-a-global-realignm ent/
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Wherein Brzezinski says:
"While no state is likely in the near future to match America’s economic-financial superiority, new weapons systems could suddenly endow some countries with the means to commit suicide in a joint tit-for-tat embrace with the United States, or even to prevail. Without going into speculative detail, the sudden acquisition by some state of the capacity to render America militarily inferior would spell the end of America’s global role. The result would most probably be global chaos. And that is why it behooves the United States to fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.
"Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which we have grown comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now. During the rest of this century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival as such on account of a confluence of environmental challenges. Those challenges can only be addressed responsibly and effectively in a setting of increased international accommodation. And that accommodation has to be based on a strategic vision that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical framework.
... and that's a paradigm shift, coming as it does from the man who created Al Qaida and laid the foundation for today's business as usual methods for regime change a.k.a. NeoColonial conquest.
We now return to our regularly scheduled Cypherpunks, a world of pure imagination where smart people like us would rise to the top of the social hierarchy on merit alone and fix the world, if only those damned [scapegoat name here] would get the hell out of our way.
:o)