Re: [wta-talk] CEP?

On Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 11:47 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> Christopher Whipple wrote:
>
>> As I promised Rafal earlier in the day off-list, here's what I could
>> find in a brief parsing of the book. The last quote best describes
>> what makes the CEP attractive to me. The quotes assembled here were
>> found and typed out manually from May 2000 Bantam paperback reissue.
>
> ### Thanks for the summary. It looks like quite a coherent
> libertarian-federalist type of arrangement. I feel that Stephenson
> must have
> loved Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom".
>

Ah, I went to put this book on my Amazon wish-list and found that it
was already there!

> Friedman was unable to come with a plausible way of providing strictly
> private protection against armed invasion by other states. Stephenson
> sidesteps the issue by providing a technical reason why the existence
> of a
> state capable of aggression would be impossible in the Diamond Age.
>

I think I was first introduced to the concept of private protection
against armed invasion by a paper-and-pencil role-playing game called
"Underground". The game took a particularly dystopian view of the
future. The first chapter being a timeline of events in a downward
spiral towards "militant corporations" that governments would need to
lease the service of, as increased use of technology meant wars were
too costly to fight on their own.

A more serious introduction to private protective associations was
given by the book Anarchy, State, Utopia.

> Still, it's a treat. Does widen ones horizons, even if one might not be
> quite willing to go all the way there.
>
> Especially the guys with nukes wired to their EEG's in Snow Crash make
> me
> think twice about willingly saying good bye to the idea of good old
> Patria.
>

Indeed, if I ever see someone with POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed across
their forehead, I'm outta here. :)

-crw.
Received on Sun Oct 20 10:31:13 2002