From: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 10:49:42 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: The Inducement of Rapid Oxidation of Certain Materials in or Near Government Buildings
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970512171524.028df2c8@panix.com>
Message-ID: <19970513193420.35018@bywater.songbird.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Mon, May 12, 1997 at 05:15:24PM -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:
>
>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.

Your estimate seems high to me.  But it is meaningless, in any case.

First of all, it neglects to consider that governments may have 
prevented more murders than they caused.  This is unknowable, since 
we don't have any worthwhile control cases.  (I suppose we
might examine a state of anarchic chaos (eg Rawanda) and compare the 
percentage of murders...but such cases are symptoms of other human 
ills, and cannot be used as a meaningful comparison, I believe.)

Second, such cases of civil breakdown aside, all humans, for now and
for the conceivable future, live within the context of some kind of
government.  The option of non-government simply doesn't exist.  The 
issue is how can governments be improved.

Third, murders caused by governments can't really be separated from
murders caused by individuals.  That is, in many cases deciding
whether a murder is a personal action or a government action is
impossible. 


Fourth, it's fashionable in these circles to paint all governments
with the same brush, but in fact, some are much better than others.  
But it only takes one bad one to start a war.  Furthermore, human 
motivations are complex and irrational, so wars are started for 
essentially insane reasons.  This is a human problem, not a problem 
of government.

>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.

That inconsistency doesn't bother Tim.  To quote him:

"Some innocents died, but, hey, war is hell. Broken eggs and all that."

>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).

He said:

"Every day that passes, I'm more convinced that McVeigh did the right 
thing." 

This is a lot stronger than saying that he "understands" McVeigh.

[Parenthetically, it is absolutely amazing to me that he and
practically everyone on this list just seems to assume McVeigh is
guilty...do they know something I don't?]

And Tim did *explictly advocate* the assasination of government
officials:

"Chiles and his co-conspirators should be shot for high crimes against
the Constitution.  After Clinton, Freeh, Kerrey, and the other
traitors."

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html