Slaughterhouse 9

START TIME: 9:12 PM
END TIME: 10:49 PM
WORD COUNT - In the rebuttal, exactly 150

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION:

Dear Mr. Monkey,

My father used to tell the story of a guy changing his tire outside of a mental hospital. A patient stood silently watching. The guy accidentally kicked the hub cap holding the four lug nuts over and they fell down a storm sewer. He ranted and swore mighty oathes. The mental patient told him to take one nut off of each of the three remaining wheels and drive slowly to a gas station. The guy remarked that it was a great idea. The patient replied; "Hey I'm crazy, I'm not stupid."

Please see the attached and should I win, I'll expect your rebuttal to Mr. Kaczynski as my prize. To make it even more interesting, make your reply complete, convincing and under 150 words and I'll kick in $50.00 more.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/the_unabomber_w.php

Bwah ha ha.

Kurtz.

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OK, first of all, you should read the entire linked article; it's good. The premise I'm going to try to argue against is:

• Personal freedoms are constrained by society, as they must be.
• The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.
• Technology destroys nature, which strengthens technology further.
• This ratchet of technological self-amplification is stronger than politics.
• Any attempt to use technology or politics to tame the system only strengthens it.
• Therefore technological civilization must be destroyed, rather than reformed.
• Since it cannot be destroyed by tech or politics, humans must push industrial society towards its inevitable end of self-collapse.
• Then pounce on it when it is down and kill it before it rises again.

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THE REBUTTAL (149 words)

80 words go to Charles Darwin:

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly IN ANY MANNER profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”

In his “Manifesto” Kaczynski recognizes “technology” as being a first-world phenomena, when it could just as easily be a Coke bottle dropped over the Kalahari. He claims “modern society tends to guaranty the physical necessities to everyone” ignoring rising rates of communicable diseases via thickheaded parents bypassing vaccinations, provided by technology. If we destroy civilization, will there be Amish vaccines? Inmate 04475-046 remains silent.

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Here's where I'll point out that the ALL CAPS was not present in the introduction to Darwin's On The Origin of Species.

I could write a couple thousand more words about this and probably need at least an additional 500 to explain the shortcuts I had to take, the longer explanation I had to compress, the sick bait and switch I had to use to provide a real-world example, the multiple lines of argument you can have with the Unabomber Manifesto itself - but I'm going to let this stand in place until I get a verdict. I could flesh out the rest of this argument in less than 10 minutes...but I'd need another 100 words, at least. As much as I'd like to think I earned that nice picture of Grant I think the misdirection I employed is insufficient. Sorry, guys.