Silicon Soapware #230
Sep. 11th, 2013 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bubbleblowerSilicon Soapware #230 is out. Look in
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0230.txt
or check out my main page at
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0230.txt
or check out my main page at
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/
SILICON SOAPWARE
wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
from Bubbles = Tom Digby
= bubbles@well.com
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/
Issue #230
New Moon of September 5, 2013
Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details.
Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.
Details of how to sign up are at the end.
*********************
What some refer to as the "Psychedelic Sixties" was a period of great
social and cultural changes. Now we're starting to see the fiftieth
anniversary of events that defined those times, such as Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech. I could try to list those
events here, but Wikipedia has done a much better job of it in their
article on "Counterculture of the 1960s".
You might want check that article every few weeks or months over the next
few years as anniversaries of various events are mentioned in the media.
While various experts analyze the Sixties in terms of their effect on
society in general, I've been thinking of how they affected me.
Fifty years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I started by first
"real" job away from home and school.
I had been studying Electrical Engineering in college (University of
Florida) and was about to get my degree. As was common at the time and
may still be, there were recruiters from major companies there looking
for promising new talent. I ended up being hired by a defense contractor
in the Los Angeles area.
The work was rather unglamorous and in retrospect feels a little bit
politically dubious (checking design calculations for a missile) but it
paid well and at the time I didn't think about the ethics of working on
something designed to kill people. It also got me far away from the part
of the country I grew up in. Although I didn't realize it at the time,
that turned out to be important.
I'll probably be writing more on this in future issues.
*********************
"Why are those soldiers marching around barefoot?"
"They're toughening up for their next assignment."
"Huh?"
"It's in case they need to go to Syria, where the President has said
there won't be any American boots on the ground."
"Can't they go with sandals or moccasins or something else that isn't
boots?"
"Yes, but they figure they need to be prepared for the worst case."
*********************
One problem with our foreign policy is that in many of the places we try
to "spread democracy" the people aren't used to the concept and may not
really want it. They're for the most part happy to be ruled by their
local chiefs or mullahs or whatever, and don't want to change their
traditional ways, repressive as they may seem to us. Or if they do want
to change, we may not like what they want to change to.
The problem with just leaving them alone is that those places always have
at least a few people who don't fit in with the local culture. Some of
these get our sympathy and show up as horror stories in American (and
other Western-culture) media. If you took away those relatively few hard
cases the rest of the people would be reasonably happy.
So what I'm proposing is that instead of "democracy" we should be
spreading the concept of being able to opt out of a society. Let the
rulers make whatever rules they want, so long as anyone who doesn't want
to live under those rules is free to go somewhere else and is aware that
that option exists.
The only limitation I would place on it is that in order for someone to
go somewhere there would have to be a place willing to take them.
In order for this to work we (and other countries) will need to allow
something closer to unlimited immigration. That may be a sacrifice on
our part due to the economic effects of the additional immigrants, but
then the savings from no longer feeling a need to "spread democracy" may
well be worth it.
You may ask if this would apply to criminals? It would have to, since
"criminal" is a label that can be defined pretty much at the whim of
whatever rulers someone may be trying to get away from.
Under this system it seems only reasonable that if someone in jail for
displeasing the local dictator wants out, then as long as some other
country is willing to take them they should be free to go there. But
since it's hard to draw a clear line between displeasing the regime and
"real" crime it would have to apply to all "criminals".
Would this apply to serial killers and such? Technically it would, but
as a practical matter few other countries would be willing to take them
without severe conditions and limitations, so the problem would be
self-limiting. If someone is on Death Row and some place with no death
penalty is willing to take them on condition they stay in one of the
receiving country's jails for the rest of their life, then let them go
there.
There will be times when this system will result in some outcome we
Americans won't like, but overall I think it would be better than the
present situation.
Think of it in terms of that line in the Declaration of Independence
about governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed. By allowing those who don't consent to opt out, the situation
for those who remain becomes more legitimate, even if it isn't one we
would have chosen.
The proposal as stated above is a first draft, and will be full of
problems and unanswered questions. If the general idea seems to have
merit, think of the problems as engineering challenges rather than flat
out show-stoppers. Maybe we can make this work.
*********************
On one of the streets a couple of blocks away they've posted temporary No
Parking signs and painted marks on the pavement about stuff they don't
want to dig up by mistake. It looks like another construction project is
about to begin.
Then as I was looking at those marks showing where things like
underground power cables and gas mains and such were, I got to thinking
about what if magical and psychic hazards such as dormant monsters and
old Indian burial grounds were to be similarly marked.
The first question might be who would be in charge of marking them?
Would there be some central agency through which people whose job it is
to know where such things are could be reached with queries? In a world
where magic is strong and magic-users are able to do their thing more or
less openly, there probably would be such an agency. In fact, it might
be part of the same one people call for advice about locations of pipes
and wires and such.
On the other extreme in a world where magic is weak or non-existent,
there would be no need for such. The physical hazards would be the only
things anyone would need to worry about.
The tricky part would come in a world in which magic is moderately
strong, but not consciously noticed or believed in by most of the
inhabitants. Some hazards would be real, but people would scoff at
advice on how to deal with them. And then even when someone does the
magical equivalent of digging into a buried water main, they may not
recognize the problem for what it is. They'd just chalk it up to
happenstance or bad luck, at least at first. Only when things got too
big and bizarre to ignore would they start to consider that it might have
a non-physical cause. And by then dealing with it would be a major
hassle.
*********************
In a system of many worlds with differing amounts of magic in them, what
category would our world be in? Initially many would say it's a world of
weak magic, if there's any here at all. But what if it isn't? What if
magic ebbs and flows in cycles of a few centuries, and is now becoming
stronger after having almost completely faded out a few hundred years
ago, perhaps around the time of the Salem witch trials and similar events
elsewhere?
Perhaps those few centuries of magic fading away forced people to look
for purely physical solutions to their problems, and also took away much
of the "noise" of magical stuff influencing physical experiments so that
physical science and technology could be developed.
If magic is indeed coming back into the world it may cause some problems
with some physical technologies, but hopefully the effects will manifest
gradually enough that engineers will figure out ways of coping with them
and will be able to make the best use of both.
*********************
Now I'm reminded of this:
Opening Other Eyes
Children, we must leave you,
No more to be with you
As you dance the Moon
And the harvest and the Sun.
Children, we must leave you,
No more to remind you
As you dance through life
That the world and you are one.
It is time we left you
To other gods
For a while.
Yes,
Children, we must leave you
To gaze into darkness
Till you truly see
How the waking world is run.
Children, we must leave you
Adrift in the darkness
Till you've touched the Moon
And have sailed beyond the Sun
With the gods of numbers
And here-and-now
For a while.
But
Children, we'll be with you
To help you remember
And to wisely use
The power you'll have won.
Children, we'll be with you,
Rejoining, rejoicing,
When those other gods
And you and we are one,
And it's then you'll see
Why we had to leave
For a while.
Thomas G. Digby
written 0000 hr 4/27/82
typed 0220 hr 5/11/82
entered 2035 hr 3/29/92
format 13:30 12/22/2001
*********************
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