Re: The Net and Terrorism

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 8:35 PM 7/3/96, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
>TCM breaks a longstanding personal policy of never replying
>to my posts directly. (well, thanks.)  realize that my
>speculation on his position is largely associated with the
>vacuum of his continually refusing to discuss key points of his
>essays.

Check your mail logs, Larry, as I've replied to a couple of your posts in
the last several months. True, I delete most of your posts after glancing
at them briefly, but I do this with a lot of posts and posters.

>imagine that all the palestinians had good paying jobs, for example.
>how many of them would be into rock-throwing and terrorism?  of course their
>own attitudes make such a thing very difficult. they may not have any
>skills or reject a job even if offered one. I'm not saying such a thing
>is easy. the fact that it is so elusive is proof of how difficult such
>a thing is.

Your point being? After all, nothing we can do will give the Palestinians
such jobs...visit the Middle East and see the quagmire. Too many points to
make here, and I don't plan to debate utopian ideologies about making the
world a land of milk and honey. (I will tell you that there are relatively
few "good paying jobs" anywhere in the Arab world--look at the poverty of
Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Morocco, and so on. Note that these countries are not
directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and yet not a single
one of these countries has so much as a primitive electronics production
facility, let alone true high tech facilities such as Israel has. You may
want to wave a magic wand and say "Yeah, but what if they did have such
jobs?," but this is pure fantasy, and not something I plan to waste time
debunking.)


>I do NOT believe that living in the world is a zero-sum game as you
>seem to suggest. your use of the term is very compelling. do you
>believe human life is always at the expense of other human life?

I made no such claims about the world being a zero-sum game.

(I made references to game theory, and used the term "game-theoretic," but
this is not at all the same thing as asserting anything about zero sum
games! I never mentioned zero sum games, positive sum games, or anything at
all about sums. You are carelessly setting up straw men and then knocking
them down.)

No real point in wading through the rest of your ramblings.

--Tim May

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