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 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). 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