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Re It is now two and a half minutes of idiocy about security
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 09:44:57 -0500
Begin forwarded message:
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com> Date: March 6, 2017 at 9:08:14 PM EST To: dave () farber net Cc: "ip" <ip () listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] It is now two and a half minutes of idiocy about security "In addition to the existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and climate change, new global realities emerged, as trusted sources of information came under attack, fake news was on the rise, and words were used in cavalier and often reckless ways." http://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/Final%202017%20Clock%20Statement.pdf With these self-describing words, these classic scaremongers just claimed that the entire earth is now 150 seconds from destruction. This was fake news, using words in cavalier and often reckless ways. While claiming to see tiny motes in others' eyes, the self-promoting authors can't see the huge tree trunk in their own eye. Or at least they expect that their readers can't see it. But maybe Farber's readers have more intelligence. It took me more than 2 and a half minutes to compose this email message, so-called Atomic Scientists. How come I'm not already dead yet, along with the entire population of the earth? Perhaps you are lying to us? I wrote about this more than a decade ago: Deflating Idiocy About Security http://www.toad.com/gnu/index.html The US government says we are always at an "Elevated" threat level. They have no plans to ever reduce this reported threat level down to "Low", no matter how many years of untroubled life we go through. It's like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "doomsday clock" which in over fifty years has never been shown with less than 17 minutes remaining before Armageddon. Well, 17 minutes have ticked past more than a million and a half times since 1947, and the bombs haven't blown us up. These are both scare tactics, not real reflections of reality. In reality, the likelihood of you being directly affected by a terrorist attack has not gone up or down since 9/11; the likelihood has always been extremely low. You and your friends are far more likely to die in bed, in a car wreck, of heart disease, or by falling down the stairs, than from a terrorist attack. Similarly, the risk of you or your friends being directly affected by an atomic explosion is also low -- perhaps at 10AM rather than at 7-minutes-to-midnight. If their "doomsday clock" is of zero use in actually predicting the timing of doomsday, why should we believe ANYTHING the authors tell us? Crying "wolf" more than a million times isn't enough to teach us to ignore them? Average human lifespan is INCREASING, not shrinking; quality of life is also increasing, and those things are true for more and more billions of people than were here in 1947. Why does anyone give ANY credence to these egregiously false predictions of bad news? (I also note that an alleged organization of atomic scientists, suffering from terrible mission creep, is now also predicting doomsday from the world's climate, AI, biology, cyber weaponry, and many other things far beyond their actual competence. The common thread is to be scary, be very scary. Scared people are more pliable; it's easier to convince scared people to do stupid things. The Atomic Scientists keep telling us what "wise" leaders and citizens should be doing; but what wise person does what an obvious incompetent tells them to do?) John
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- Re It is now two and a half minutes of idiocy about security Dave Farber (Mar 07)