"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?"
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.
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
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.
>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.
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago