It is also pretty usefull to understand that the same species of meme can
be travelling under diffrent names. # You die for the benefit of the memes
propagated by your elders. # Thats the functional content, and it holds
equally well for religous fanatics, religous soldiers and plain soldiers.
>If I may abuse D.Leeper's Cohesive Math: The intended logic [not that
>boot camp always succeeds....] seems to be [I'm basing this on personal
>acquaintance with those subject to this]:
Been there too. We had a soldiers manual that stated that "War is
dangerous, some of your friends may get hurt." And I was trained to defend
a piece of coastline with 50 men and helped by what digging machinery we
could rustle up from the local farmers. Our objective was to hold the
positions for 48 hours after the first fire. Estimated death rate was 50%
after 12 hours, does anybody see where that graph is heading? So, speaking
of self-preservation, that was not the place to be. While the brass did
not want us to work on our tan during combat, they did most definitely not
want us to burrow deeper and never come out again.
>[Note that "cowardice" is the memetic analog of a biological mimic: it
>tries to camouflage itself as useful for "self-preservation", but really
>attacks it.]
Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, and sometimes somebody else
will try to tell you what you have to do. Big diffrence. Sometimes they
dont care if you get killed as long as you do what they think you have to
do.
>When training your core forces, the "self-preservation" meme is rather
>key. You are depending on typical shortsighted reasoning bias, of course.
You dont waste highly trained soldiers for nothing, well you try not to
anyway, but their survival is rather less important than winning the war.
>Religions with high perceived death rates have few spineless believers.
>Possibly the church leaders had to change their talk to increase their
>congregation size. [OOPS, another thread!]
On that note, yesterday I heard on the news that the pope has told his
Vatican 'scientists' that maybe they should take another look on darwinism,
he thought that maybe there could be something there after all.
And that leads me to this joke:
Do you know why the Vatican has scientists?
Because they are trying to perfect their research on Artifical Stupidity.
<<<<<<<<<<< Peter =D6kner >>>>>>>>>>
<<<<< okner@arch.kth.se >>>>>
"Our common sense tells us that
the things of this earth barely exist,
that actual reality is only in our dreams."
Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels.