[FRIAM] What should we do?

[David Eric Smith]

Marcus writes: 

> I think #18 and #19 are pretty dark for most folks to consider so far, but I’m glad there are professors that aren’t sugar-coating it.

I certainly agree with the last clause (as with all you wrote before it).  The thing is that, short of death, the legal and criminal apparatus of the US provides almost unlimited means of harassment that may be worse than death, in that they can consume all resources of time and effort by an individual to fight them.

The early stages of this make me think of cancers.  The reason they are so difficult to deal with is that, for the most part, the cell populations are not completely disintegrated and non-functional.  Most of their systems still function very robustly, which seems to be the cause of different cancers' seemingly producing quite robust phenotypes, even after the putative triggering problem has been knocked out.  Those systems have just been re-directed by control signals of the wrong kind. 

A state in which the mechanics of the institutions is still quite functional, but its command and control has been hijacked, seems to be the problem we are likely to have to deal with in the next stages.  Snyder's question can start with which people have the courage to stand in the line of fire if it costs them everything they had tried to build to live, and leaves them still alive.  

I wish there were still many Indians alive who had experienced living through the (Mohandas) Gandhi years.  What was it like to coordinate hundreds of millions of people so that, when the institutions were getting unwanted control signals, they could, in a widely distributed fashion, function much worse or not at all.

Eric

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