From: Douglas P. Wilson (dp-wilson@shaw.ca)
Date: Fri 15 Nov 2002 - 20:27:29 GMT
Quoting just a few short words from Grant Callaghan,
(and not the ones he'd probably expect):
> ... I don't think they have any specific goal ...
> ... the people I'm talking about are the Al Quaeda
> and their associates.
Thanks for the clarification, Grant, but could we perhaps
be more specific? Does anyone have a list of these
people? Other than their notorious leader, who else
is there? What are their national origins, genealogies,
and so on? How much education do they have,
and what kind?
> I can't believe that they think bombing a disco [in]
> Bali is going to drive America out of Saudi Arabia ...
Oh, for democracy, and the secret ballot! I wish we
could question these people by such means, and find
out what they really think, as individuals. We are all
too familiar with films of Stalinist public unanimity,
but what do these people actually think, I wonder.
Are they all religious fanatics, or mindless patriots?
How many of these individuals have actually been to
the US, and if so, did they hate it as much when
they were there? Nationalistic prejudice against the
US is not uncommon -- it thrives in Northern Alberta,
for example, probably the most American of Canadian
provinces, and parts of Toronto. But inhabitants
of those areas are frequent visitors to the warmer
cities of Florida and California, and secretly love it
there.
Though I have spent almost all of my life thousands
of miles to the west, I have spent quite a bit of time
in Washington DC, and a nice satellite photograph of
it hangs on my wall to remind me of those days. The
people I met there were nice ordinary human beings,
and I hope none of the friends who signed the margins
of that picture as a parting gift to me lives too close
to any of the more obvious targets visible there.
Note to terrorists: please show the kind of restraint
that the US Secretary of War had (in the days when
that country needed such a post), and spare the Mall,
as he did Kyoto. Almost every building on it is part
of the Smithsonian Institution, which (among other things)
houses many Mesopotamian artifacts of great
importance to YOUR culture -- which is the same as
ours, of course.
Note to American decision makers: if you must
antagonise a large percentage of the world's population,
please move the contents of the Smithsonian
and the Library of Congress to a safe underground
location -- the site you have chosen for disposal of
nuclear waste is the only one that I deem safe enough.
(Kindly remove any nuclear waste first). I will remain
completely unmoved by protestations that your
country is entirely in the right, (so to speak). Being in
a marked crosswalk with the lights in your favour may
make ensure your innocence, but will not make you
any less dead if neither you nor the driver of the car
that hits you bothers to look around before making your
move.
dpw http://www.SocialTechnology.Org/dpwilson.html
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri 15 Nov 2002 - 20:31:34 GMT