From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 03:19:31 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Kiddie porn on the Internet
Message-ID: <199609211655.JAA21404@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 04:33 PM 9/16/96 -0400, hallam@ai.mit.edu wrote:
>
>>Yet another obligatory AP (Assassination Politics) reference:  If a person 
>>is really interested in helping out "starving children" he may be able to do 
>>far more good by purchasing the death of the local tyrant(s), rather than 
>>(just) buying more food.
>
>
>The problem is that assasination rarely leads to the installation of
>a government that is any better. In most cases it gets worse.


There is an enormous difference in significance between the following two 
scenarios:

1.  Tyrant A, speaking outside, gets struck by a meteorite and is instantly 
killed.  He is immediately replaced by his second-in-command.

2.  Tyrant B is told that he has been threatened with a meteorite strike by 
an opponent in an hour if he goes on with his speech, he ignores the 
"unbelievable" warning, and dies on schedule, just as he was warned, struck 
by a meteorite.  What should his vice-thug do in THIS case?!?

 Physically, the same thing happened:  Big boom.  But the implications are 
vastly different.   Incident 1 looks like a freak of nature that's unlikely 
to be repeated. It leads to very few policy changes or changes in 
precautions. It was a fluke.   Incident 2 looks like somebody has developed 
a new weapon of practically supernatural capabilities. 

This difference is why I scoff at your attempts to equate political 
assassination in the past with what will be accomplished in the future.  
(other people have made this mistake as well; it's a common 
misunderstanding.)   In the past, assassinations have often led to worse 
replacements, but that is because there is no likely prospect that the 
assassination will be repeated, as many times as needed, until the job is 
done.  Partly that's because assassinations were often seen to be the work 
of "lone nuts" (who don't come around all that often), or because they were 
done by the very people who take over.  In either case, the prospects of a 
repeat are rather low.

As anyone who really understands my AP theory recognizes, getting rid of an 
unwanted leader will become so easy and cheap (on a per-citizen basis) that 
nobody would dare take the job who angered more than a tiny fraction of the 
population.  A "worse" government would simply never be formed, unless they 
were suicidal.


>In the past the US excuse for supporting bloodthirsty murderers like
>Pinochet, Saddam, Marcos and Noriega was that the alternative was
>worse.


The _truth_, however, is that the alternative was worse...for the US 
government.  It's really very simple: Let me draw an analogy.  Modern 
organophosphate pesticides were initially developed by German chemists in 
the 1930's.  These materials are closely related to Sarin, the well-known 
nerve agent that killed people in the Tokyo subway attack over a year ago. 
It turns out that Sarin is a rather simple molecule.  Why not use it to kill 
bugs?  Well, it kills bugs just fine.  The problem, of course, is that it 
kills farmers just as well.
  
Since you presumably don't want to do that, you have to go to all the 
trouble to find compounds that kill bugs, but are as non-toxic as possible 
to farmers.  And if you look at the description of the contents of modern 
organophosphate pesticides on the bottles, you see names that only a chemist 
could possibly pronounce, names so long (because their molecules were so 
complex) that you often have to take a breath in the middle to recite.  
These compounds were found by individually synthesizing thousands, or even 
tens of thousands of compounds, and testing each one.  Individually.  
Eventually, they found compounds which were as toxic to bugs as Sarin is to 
humans, but were far less toxic to humans.  They found the needle in the 
haystack.

Likewise, as I've discovered through AP, it will be easy to get rid of 
tyrants.  The exquisitely difficult task is to get rid of ONLY SOME of the 
tyrants, for example Saddam Hussein, Moammar Khadafi, etc, and leaving most 
of the rest behind.  _THAT'S_ the tricky part.   I have the easy task:  
describing a system to get rid of them all, with no exceptions.  But that's 
the system that nobody in the leadership of any current country wants to see. 

That is why you won't see Clinton announcing that he's going to use my idea 
to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and instead will waste hundreds of millions or 
even billions of dollars in a failed bid to eject the thug.

Doesn't that make you feel a lot safer?





Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com