
Peter Watts: The Scorched Earth Society [pdf] - pkinsky
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/TheScorchedEarthSociety-transcript.pdf
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fiatmoney
"What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went
out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return
alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass
arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the
entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with
terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the
staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set
up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers,
polkers, or whatever else was at hand?"

\- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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barry-cotter
All in favour of removing the scribd autolinks as scribd are a cancer on the
internet please upvote. Karma sink for downvoting will go below. If it hasn't
appeared yet feel free to go to my history.

~~~
Nexxxeh
I had to use the search to find out why people view scribd as evil.

[http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/quora-scribd-
conside...](http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/quora-scribd-considered-
harmful.html)

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pronoiac
Oh! It's the author of Blindsight! That spaceship facing aliens with a vampire
novel. It's memorable - it was a Hugo nominee, and I highly recommend it:
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

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tygorius
I was nodding in agreement right up until the point he showed charts of 17
"first-world" nations and started torturing data:

 _In terms of pretty much any metric you 'd care to name — I'm showing you
homicide and infant mortality rates, but the same pattern holds for
incarceration rates, life expectancy, STDs, teen pregnancy — a whole slew of
variables I don't have time to show you — the US is consistently the worst of
the lot._

First, 17 countries? WTF? Why is he deliberately limiting the sample to
predominantly caucasian countries? The US certainly has its faults, but it
comes in at #3 on the UN's Human Development Index. Why not show data from the
top 20 nations on that list? Is there really a problem with finding
"religiosity" data for Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore?
(Ireland comes in at #7 in the latest ranking while the UK is #27, behind
Slovenia, Spain, and Italy.) It appears he's citing a 2009 Gregory Paul paper
that argues the US is a more secular nation than a 2008 Baylor study
indicated, which has me scratching my head.

His text refers to infant mortality while showing a chart of child mortality.
Not a mistake I'd expect from a biologist, but even Homer nods on occasion.
Alas, immediately after stating the US is the worst of the lot in measurements
including life expectancy in some manner because of its popular religiosity,
he makes the case that religiosity is a social survival trait and shows a
chart indicating that religious communes last longer than secular ones. At
which point I found myself wondering exactly what point he was trying to make.
Atheism is the way forward even though religious nations are more likely to
survive? Which is a pity, because I quite agree with his larger points on
government intrusions on our privacy.

(Edited for clarity.)

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pkinsky
>First, 17 countries? WTF? Why is he deliberately limiting the sample to
predominantly caucasian countries? The US certainly has its faults, but it
comes in at #3 on the UN's Human Development Index. Why not show data from the
top 20 nations on that list? Is there really a problem with finding
"religiosity" data for Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore?
(Ireland comes in at #7 in the latest ranking while the UK is #27, behind
Slovenia, Spain, and Italy.) It appears he's citing a 2009 Gregory Paul paper
that argues the US is a more secular nation than a 2008 Baylor study
indicated, which has me scratching my head.

The first world is an outdated term, originally used to describe the countries
aligned with the US during the Cold War. I agree that it would have been
better to use the top 20 nations on the UN's HDI, but given the term the
choice of countries was correct.

>Alas, immediately after stating the US is the worst of the lot in
measurements including life expectancy in some manner because of its popular
religiosity, he makes the case that religiosity is a social survival trait and
shows a chart indicating that religious communes last longer than secular
ones. At which point I found myself wondering exactly what point he was trying
to make. Atheism is the way forward even though religious nations are more
likely to survive? Which is a pity, because I quite agree with his larger
points on government intrusions on our privacy.

A trait that causes cells to die at some predetermined time can benefit the
organism as a whole, for example by preventing cancer. Similarly, Peter Watts
seems to be arguing that although religiosity causes life expectancy and a
whole slew of other important metrics to plummet, it strengthens the
collective whole by building group cohesiveness. Put crudely, fanatics make
useful cannon fodder.

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digitalengineer
>Offer data destruction

Isn't this exactly what the right VPN companies do? "We absolutely do not log
any traffic nor session data of any kind, period." Source:
[https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-take-your-
anonym...](https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-services-take-your-anonymity-
seriously-2014-edition-140315/)

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lwhalen
Nothing short of inspiring. Thank you for sharing this!

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osmala
The Mother of All Games.

