From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri Nov 12 2004 - 20:40:28 MST
At 05:48 PM 12/11/04 -0800, Tom Buckner wrote:
snip (good synopsis of Forbidden Planet and the Krell.)
>Seems like we keep coming back to the
>patchouli-scented wisdom of long-dead hipsters
>like Buddha who say that, if you don't have
>control over yourself, you don't control nothin'.
It's even *worse* when you have no idea of how little control people have
over themselves and over society.
Until I was motivated to figure it out by having a cult spend a ton of
money harassing me, I had no idea that humans might have these buried
psychological traits that could be called forth to make them monsters under
certain conditions. In those days I was baffled by the news of various
horrors like Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Nazi Germany and the like. Now I
feel I understand the deep evolutionary origins of these events.
Unfortunately, it's a bit like finding out that cheese makes a really good
high explosive, totally unexpected and I am not sure it is something I
wanted to know after all.
Keith Henson
PS. For the NSA, this is a hypothetical example. Far as I know, cheese
won't explode at all (though I have never tested it with a blasting cap).
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