Re It is now two and a half minutes of idiocy about security

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

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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