So there's this videogame company called Shrapnel games from whom I've just ordered Space Empires IV Gold and that is sweet. I can't wait to build my space empire!!! Of course my anticipation conjures memories of the recent Bush announcement. His most recent message, like many of his other messages, has me all angry. Why? Because I think we should already be on the moon.
What's with this colonize-the-moon-procrastination anyway? Why is it so difficult for us to get off of our little rock here and start living what has always been the human dream. That dream is, in a word, growth.
A lot of people scoff at the idea of expansionism, especially when considering all of the rotten precedent we have for it. Like anything else, however, expansionism is not in itself a bad thing. Expansionism coupled with excessive ethnocentrism, resentment, nationalism, or insensitivity is dangerous. It's sorta like the Joker poison in the first new Bat Man Movie with Nicholson and Keton.
Others might say that there are plenty of societies that didnt believe in expansion and that the very idea that the desire for human communities to grow is itself ethnocentric. I disagree. I take a sort of Darwinian-Marxist stance to this whole thing. My idea is that only social structures that place importance on expansion could collect the resources necessary to secure their continued existence several generations into the future. If this were true, we should see expansionist tendencies in all social organizations of living things, which, I believe, we do. Obvious examples are the behaviors of bees and other communal insects. Not so obvious examples lay hidden in traditions that we really dont consider expansionistic like nomadic life styles or even the processes of debate in human communication.
Some might say that expansionism encompasses all of the ideas I have said are dangerous partners to it, but that's like saying water is an element, or an electron or proton is a base particle. Things only seem like the end of the line to those who haven't thought about the problem enough to see the conceptual fractures in whatever paradigm.
In short, I dont think we should go to the moon, I think we need to go to the moon. So lets list to some more Sinatra and get crackin.
What's with this colonize-the-moon-procrastination anyway? Why is it so difficult for us to get off of our little rock here and start living what has always been the human dream. That dream is, in a word, growth.
A lot of people scoff at the idea of expansionism, especially when considering all of the rotten precedent we have for it. Like anything else, however, expansionism is not in itself a bad thing. Expansionism coupled with excessive ethnocentrism, resentment, nationalism, or insensitivity is dangerous. It's sorta like the Joker poison in the first new Bat Man Movie with Nicholson and Keton.
Others might say that there are plenty of societies that didnt believe in expansion and that the very idea that the desire for human communities to grow is itself ethnocentric. I disagree. I take a sort of Darwinian-Marxist stance to this whole thing. My idea is that only social structures that place importance on expansion could collect the resources necessary to secure their continued existence several generations into the future. If this were true, we should see expansionist tendencies in all social organizations of living things, which, I believe, we do. Obvious examples are the behaviors of bees and other communal insects. Not so obvious examples lay hidden in traditions that we really dont consider expansionistic like nomadic life styles or even the processes of debate in human communication.
Some might say that expansionism encompasses all of the ideas I have said are dangerous partners to it, but that's like saying water is an element, or an electron or proton is a base particle. Things only seem like the end of the line to those who haven't thought about the problem enough to see the conceptual fractures in whatever paradigm.
In short, I dont think we should go to the moon, I think we need to go to the moon. So lets list to some more Sinatra and get crackin.
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
evanx:
You live with Oninotaki???? What interesting dinner conversations you must have!
bathory:
HEY! thanks so much for the CD.....