From: mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:40:53 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: A Libertine Question
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SV4.3.91.960730182712.10011A-100000@larry.infi.net>
Message-ID: <199607302350.QAA01377@netcom21.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Alan Horowitz writes:

> On Mon, 29 Jul 1996 jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:
> 
> > Think of how many of our laws are being enacted that tacitly make being
> > poor or indigent a crime.
> 
>    Horseshit. This is a poorly-disguised re-tread of one of the standard 
> lines of the Patrice Lumumba University brand of leftist agitprop.
> 
> Tell it to the starving Cubans who have to watch Fidel sitting in his 
> palaces.

Perhaps, but I can think of a lot of examples.  Laws that make it illegal
to ask for money.  Laws that say you can't sit on the sidewalk.  Laws
that make it illegal to feed soup to people without a stack of permits
six feet high.  Laws that make it illegal to perform an excretory function
outdoors in a city with almost zero public toilets.  (You should have
gone before you became homeless. :)

Certainly, it would be naive to think that such laws are passed without
being targeted at particular populations of individuals, especially 
during a period when "compassion fatigue" is on the rise.  

Here in Seattle, we have an city attorney who specializes in creating
ordinances to annoy and harrass the underclass, often paving new roads
over former civil liberties in the process.

I'm not sure starving Cubans have anything to do with it. 

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $