From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 05:38:29 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: The Inducement of Rapid Oxidation of Certain Materials in or Near Government Buildings
Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19970512171524.028df2c8@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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The Inducement of Rapid Oxidation of Certain Materials in or Near Government
Buildings

At 04:07 AM 5/11/97 +0200, M. Froomkin wrote:
>[... ugly stuff about "soft targets"]
>
>It ill behooves participants in a democracy to either advocate or even
>tolerate or even cluck sympathetically at mass murder for political ends. 
>This way lies Bosnia.

Tim is neither a democrat nor a participant in a democracy.  Note that all
the parties involved in the current Balkans war are governments (or claim to
be). 

Most of the violence in interactions between people and governments is on the
government side.  The U.S. government and others have been committing mass
murder for years.  Supporters of those governments thus support mass murder
for "political ends."

Governments have murdered 170 million people since 1900.  My
back-of-the-envelope estimate is that the civilians of the world have only
murdered about 20 million people in the same period of time.  Quite a
disparity.

The U.S. government and its subsidiaries (for example) annually kill hundreds
of people in carrying out the "war" on the unlicensed retailing of
pharmaceuticals.  The U.S. was convicted of war crimes in the International
Court of Justice in the Hague in the late 80's for dropping air-sown mines in
one of Nicaragua's harbors.  The U.S. practices the mass bombing of civilian
populations in wartime which causes a very great loss of innocent life.  Many
of the other governments of the world are worse.

The principle of estoppel would seem to logically preclude the world's
governments from arguing that their mass murders are OK but those committed
by amateurs (which kill many fewer people) aren't.

Again, and in general, some of the readers of this and other recent threads
on cypherpunks need some reading lessons (present company excepted).  Tim May
has not advocated blowing things up (though such advocacy remains legal).  He
has not advocated that cypherpunks blow things up.  He has not advocated that
Timothy McVeigh blow things up.  He has not even said that blowing things up
is a hip and happening way to raise the average IQ and moral level of the
surviving population.  

He has merely said that if OTHER PEOPLE blow certain things up he understands
their actions and that in the case of certain targets he would not shed a
tear.  He also predicted that people will be blowing things up in the future
(with which prediction, even the U.S. government agrees).

In any case, cypherpunks' orientation is towards the mathematics of
cryptography rather than towards chemical engineering.

DCF

"If the Red Queen blows things up it's a virtue.  If you blow thgings up it's
a vice." -- The Mad Hatter.


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