IP: more on Bushido

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 09:05:12 -0800
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: IP: Bushido

At 8:46 -0800 4/3/02, Steward Brand wrote:
> Two things struck me about Tom Friedman's column in the Sunday NYT.
> One is, he said right out loud what no one else has acknowledged in
> print, that the Palistinians are now winning, thanks to the suicide
> attacks.  Two, he warned that if they succeed, suicide attacks will
> proliferate everywhere and darken the world.  That's a compelling and
> frightening piece of logic.
>
> In the US my wife Ryan and I have been watching with horror the
> growth over the last 15 years of what we call "the perfect crime."
> Man comes home, kills his wife, kills his children, kills himself.
> Man goes to work, kills some co-workers, kills himself.  Kid goes to
> school, kills some adults, kills some students, kills himself.  We
> seem to get a new one every week these days, and as with the
> Palestinians, women are starting to do it.  There is no defense, no
> retribution, no justice---it's the perfect crime, and copycats are
> proliferating.

    Sounds to me a lot like the world as outlined by John Brunner
in his 1969 Hugo winning classic SF novel, "Stand on Zanzibar".
"Muckers" - people driven into homicidal rages by intolerable living
conditions sound eerily familiar to what Steward is describing.
Check out the book at Amazon.com:

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1857988361/qid=1017852805/sr=12-1/10
3-4083406-5004619>

-- Dewayne


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