Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 1429 Editor's Choice: 20
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Rosy future?
[Read the article: Our rosy future, according to Freeman Dyson]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mister Dyson paints a picture of the future where our problems will be solved and our lives enriched by advances in science. And it's baloney.
Let me tell you why.
The assumption is that the great problems posed to humanity are scientific ones. They are not. Our problems are political. And those problems are not rooted in science, but in economics and in culture, particularly perversions of culture and economics. Science cannot solve the problems Christian and Muslim religious extremism, or prevent war, or feed the hungry, or prevent ecological disaster. If it could, it would have.
Ten million people die in Asia and Africa every year from disease and starvation. And yet, we already have the means to feed these people and prevent the diseases that kill them. The science and technology are available to do so. We just don't want to.
Technology, which is based on science, is a tool, and provides means to ends. It does not tell us what our ends should be. Science can be used to kill more easily than it can be used to cure. Science and technology could be used to elevate the poor, but it is mostly used to pursue wealth and power and to exploit the poor. Science can be helpful, but it can also be abused, and it is abused to multiply our problems at least as much as it is used to solve them.
Science and technology is a two-edged sword.
Advances in food production, sanitation, and medical science can prevent premature death globally. The result is overpopulation and global resource depletion.
Advances in information technology can keep us all informed. But it can also be used to keep us disinformed and misinformed, and enables the detailed mass surveillance and mass propaganda that serves police states, and that is growing faster than the internet. You are being watched. In the future, you will be controlled, unless you take steps to prevent it.
Advances in engineering can give us more efficient transportation and home appliances, but they also give us more efficient machineries of war. Science and technology make no distinction between the two, so we have to.
Dyson's views of global warming are particularly wrongheaded. Human-induced climate change may not be bad if it's limited, but it's not. Right now there are hardly any limitations at all. And we're not talking about a little climate change, or a small amount of species extinction, or minor resource depletion. By itself, improved and expanded scientific technique isn't going to change that. It is more easily used to make it worse than to make it better.
Technology serves rapacity extremely well.
If history is any guide, the scientific and technological advances dreamed up by Dyson are likely to help a few people at the top of the economic and political chain to enrich themselves, as such advances have always done. But they will increasingly do so at the expense of everybody else on the planet, and at the expense of the planet's ability to support civilization.
A "rosy future", you say? Well, blood is red, isn't it?
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JackHughes
[Read the article: "Nazis" and "Hitler" -- the Right's casual, trivializing political insults]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For Right-Wing Authoritarians, "Nazi" has apparently come to mean any political speech or activity they disagree with.
There's more to it than that.
It's perfectly characteristic of the Radical Right to project their failures and criminality on their political adversaries. It's one of Rove's best smear tactics:
- Remember the claim that 9/11 was somehow Clinton's fault. In fact, for years all of Bush's failures were somehow Clinton's fault.
- That Democrats - not deficit-spending Republicans - are somehow the ones who are fiscally irresponsible.
- That Democrats forced Bush to invade Iraq. I kid you not.
- That libruls are the purveyors of immorality - not Republicans, the Party of Pedophiles.
- That Democrats are the cowardly ones, when the pubs are mostly chickenhawks.
In short, the idea is to persuade people that everything right-wingers and Republicans can rightly be accused of were actually done by Democrats and libruls, and not by right-wingers and Republicans at all.
They do this a lot. They invent arguments to blame their political enemies for their own perpetrations. Which makes it perfectly natural for right-wingers to blame right-wing authoritarianism on their librul political enemies.
Right-wingers have other favorite smear tactics also:
"A good leader must have the steadiness to accuse any critic of undermining the Leader's efforts and aiding and abetting the enemy...
"Criticism of the Leader must be equated with treason...
"...if the situation is there, the Leader must eliminate the critics..."
Adolph Hitler