From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Thu 01 May 2003 - 06:50:46 GMT
Joe Dees wrote
>Hokay. I would just like to point out that the US had to play dirty pool
>with friendly dictators in order to effectively contend with the Soviet bloc
>in the world arena, where they were doing the same thing in spades.
To point this discussion back to memes, particularly *religious memes* what
went on between the Soviet bloc and the rest of the world was really a
religious war--against communism. I think it will eventually be recognized
that communism was in competition for the religious meme receptor site in
human mental "space" and that the wars were a continuation of a very long
series of religious wars.
Of course, the root cause for such wars is economic, falling wealth per
capita. It is interesting that for all the build up, the US and the
Soviets never directly fought a war. The Chechen war since the soviet bloc
broke up is likely due to relatively high birth rates there which
translates into falling wealth per capita, but I have not researched the
numbers yet, and am not sure where to start.
>Once their totalitarian hegemony crumbled, that unfortunate necessity
>was removed, and our post-Soviet interventions have been mainly
>about toppling despots and providing needed humanitarian aid.
>Virtuous interventions (or attempts at them in the third case, or urging
>and support for them in the last one) since then: Bosnia, Kosovo,
>Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, East Timor. Also notice that
>the majority of these were in assistance to, and not in oppression of,
>Muslims.
I think we would have let Afghanistan starve (which they were on the verge
of doing) if they had not been the base for the 9/11 attack.
In the "good old days" attacking a stronger tribe was better than starving
because some of your tribe's women (carrying the tribe's genes) would
usually be incorporated into the stronger tribe if they killed all the
males. I suspect (on evolutionary psychology grounds) that decisions made
by modern "tribal leaders" like Ben Ladin are biased by accent
psychological traits that lead them to attack the very powerful, something
close to assisted suicide.
It actually works out for the average person in a "tribe" like Afghanistan
to attack the US and get fed.
Keith Henson
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