From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 06:46:10 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Assassination Politics(tm) was V-chips, CC, and Motorcycle  Helmets
Message-ID: <m0tvWTF-000905C@pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 01:45 PM 3/9/96 -0500, Jean-Francois Avon (JFA Technologies, QC, Canada)
wrote:

>>At 10:42 PM 3/8/96 -0800, Bill Frantz wrote:
>>>(1) Assassination Politics (AP) will be most useful to a fired-up group of
>>>people who want to silence a single person.  Madeline Murray O'Hare comes
>>>to mind.  (She was a Texas atheist who challenged school prayer and won.)
>
>I quote this text as an example of an ongoing thought process in
>the analysis of the AP scheme.  A little statistical mechanics
>would not hurt here.  The above example shows *one* possible
>interaction between two entities, each having their own charac-
>teristics leading to a given inter- action.  But in all theses 
>examples, the specific variables that is forgotten is the time
>variable.
>
>What will be the *dynamic* characteristics of such a system.
> - the above paragraph describe an interaction in a given 
>   direction.
> - what are the others interactions that could *speed up* the 
>   above process
> - what are the others interactions that could *slow down* the
>   above process
>Any analysis of the problem that blanks out the 
>probability of occurence (which happens in the time domain) of
>each partial reaction cannot describe the outcome of the scheme.

Ever since I started publicizing my "Assassination Politics" idea, I've 
noticed that self-selected opponents of this idea frequently invent these 
hypothetical scenarios to try to criticize it.  Now, I can't deny that any 
given scenario can happen, but I respond that I don't believe that it 
would occur very frequently, and I usually give reasons why.  I don't 
normally get any kind of challenge to this:  They've shot their wad, so to 
speak.


>Proponents of such a scheme should stick a bit more to crypto...

Well, I agree, but keep in mind that the text you quoted above was 
apparently written by a critic, not a proponent.  

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com

Klaatu Burada Nikto
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