X-Message-Number: 20520
From: 
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:46:24 EST
Subject: Yvan: meme war

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>You can launch a world wide directTV-satcom network 

  OK, Yvan, that much makes sense. You can fight memes with memes (fighting 
memes by blowing up the Vatican would just replace old slow meme programmers 
with new young ones; not very smart). But worldwide direct-broadcast 
satellites would have been launched by private industry to carry private 
programs and advertising in the 1960s. They were prevented largely by US FCC 
regulators, with help from the US proxy, the UN. The problem is not any lack 
of technology, but lack of freedom. I suspect this was done to shield the 
Communist regimes from the effects of outside TV (it wouldn't have done any 
good for the US to give the Soviet Empire hundreds of billions in "loans", 
and then have the whole thing fall over from meme attack; what would the US 
do for enemies then? Fight a "global Saracen conspiracy"? No one would 
believe anything that stupid...), but then it might just be side effects of 
faction-fighting between media groups in the US.
  Anyone who really believes their ideas are right just wants freedom of 
speech. The only people who need violence are those who know that their memes 
are wrong and therefore weak... and this includes atheists like Stalin just 
as much as religious people like Armaury or whatever his name was (the guy 
who said "kill them all, God will know his own" at the beginning of the 
Albigensian Crusade). Your main worry today should be the US and its Total 
Information Awareness pyramid-eye people; they're a lot more likely to impose 
their will on the planet than a few CIA-funded Saudi wastrels. Lose your 
trust in government memes, Yvan... they aren't really any different from 
religious memes. --Bill

PS I forgot again (damn my aging brain); how did your ancestors escape 
Operation Keelhaul? For that matter, how did the ancestors of both of us 
escape the Inquisition? How am I planning to survive Homeland Security? We're 
obviously too mouthy to survive such environments....


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