From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 22:10:48 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: SAY WHAT? [Assassination NOISE]
Message-ID: <199609250730.AAA25890@dfw-ix12.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


An earlier generation of Assassination Politics set the public's
stereotype view of "anarchists" for the next hundred years.
Do we really want to do it again?  Perhaps the public will
realize that we're not lefty-anarchists, we're the
Totally Unified Cypherpunk Anarcho-Capitalist Movement...

Someone, probably Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu> said:
>= .Assasination politics is  impossible to defend from a classical 
>= .Liberal/Libertarian position.  Bell advocates arbitrary applications
>= .of violence and coercion without restriction.  There is no way to
>= .justify the initiation of force without abandoning any pretence of
>= .being a Libertarian (which, to be fair, Bell doesn't claim to be).

Bell, like X, is proposing mechanism without built-in policy, 
as well as suggesting some potential policy implementations.  If you use 
the mechanism to sponsor assassination of people who have initiated force
against you, you're only using retaliatory force, not initiating it.

On the other hand, the mechanism also can be used against people who
haven't initiated force against the sponsor - even against politicians
who have refused to get the country into misguided but popular wars
or judges who have refused to convict innocent but wrong-colored defendants.
Like democracy, it's a really terrible system, and like democracy,
there are some alternatives that aren't worse :-)  Maybe even democracy.
It's at least as appalling an idea as government.

If it does catch on, and I suspect that the technology will certainly
make it possible, I hope that most of the public will have enough sense 
and decency not to pay for murdering people who don't deserve it,
so assassins will find more of a market for killing people who do,
and that the lower-paid assassins who kill undeserving people will
be less competent and get caught like most stupid bank robbers do.

But there are enough Drug-War-Loving Americans that I doubt it.
And there's enough intersection between the morality-challenged
and the financially-challenged fellow Americans down on their luck
that some of them will take a break from robbing liquor stores for
drug money to make bigger bucks serving the desires of the public
that the high-tech lynch mobs will have people they can hire.
Not everybody needs Mario Greymist to get some basic "work" done.
Glory of the market, matching up supply and demand.

And attila replied
>        all very true.  but I will defend Jim Bell's rights to propose
>    them, even if Bell is more than a few cards short of a full deck.

Sure, he's got the right to, and if I run a remailer again he's welcome
to use it to discuss AP (though not to propose assassinations....)
Doesn't mean I want to encourage this sort of thing, though.
Remailers can damn well afford to be choosy, and I'll bet
5 zorkmids that the first person to use my remailer for assassination
doesn't last a month. (Oh, wait...)


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto