From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 16:13:28 +0800
To: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: McVeigh
In-Reply-To: <33959B0B.167E@ai.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970604230312.624C-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




> > > Hallam-Baker, realizing he is a soft target, wrote:
> 
> > I would say that the visible and government-vilified militia groups have
> > been damaged by this, because of the killing of innocents. Where is the
> > second AP bot, I know about the one at sympatico.......
> 
> I find it very hard to credit people as being opposed to
> censorship when they make thinly veiled threats of murder
> when people post things they don't like.

What? - I don`t seem to recall making any threat, if you are referring to 
the AP quote above, see the post it was in reply to which mention 2 AP 
bots, I asked where the second was, this was not even intended as a 
humorous mock-threat, I did not even notice it looked threatening in 
context. 

If you are referring to the "soft target" quote, that came from a post I 
replied to and was not mine. Look elsewhere.

Also, you are clearly under some misconception if you feel censored or 
threatened by my speech, as anyone who reads my posts often will know, I 
would take no initial agressive act against anyone.

> This is the type of censorship that the IRA uses in NI,
> Catholics who join organisations opposed to the IRA get
> death threats and threats of punishment beatings. When 
> the parents of the five year old murdered by an IRA bomb
> placed in a rubish bin outside a McDonalds announced
> a US speaking tour the IRA threatened to murder them.

The IRA are a bunch of thugs, who happen to serve a useful purpose, 
personally however, I would say than on balance their attacks on 
civilians and private property harm the cause of freedom by showing 
that some of the "terrorists" around really are nasty scary control-freaks.

> Murdering your opponents for what they say is censorship. 

Quite so, you seem to be answering a point I never made, please elaborate 
on this deep issue you appear to have just discovered.

> Bell's Murder Politics scheme was a censorship scheme.

Wrong, Bells AP was intended by Bell as a defensive system to be used 
against agressors, saying AP is a censorship scheme is like saying a gun 
is a tool of censorship because you can kill someone with it. So is a 
knife, so is a big stick.

> The fact that Miltia sympathisers condone censorship 
> through murder while fulminating at censorship by
> governement does not surprise me in the least. i can
> guess that someone will try to redefine censorship to
> exclude death threats.

All speech is non-criminal and non agressive, I could make a direct death 
threat with specific details and would not consider my actions criminal, 
I am no militia sympathiser, if McVeigh did kill those children he should 
die for it. I agree that militia groups along the lines of those McVeigh 
was supposedly acting for are merely factions which wish to take over the 
state, not destroy it.

> It is precisely beause of this type of behaviour that
> people consider the militias and their sympathisers to
> be fascist in nature and a threat to the values they
> claim to defend.

Quite so, but "defending" society from a few fascists does not remove the 
responsibility of a government to govern properly in a minarchist 
fashion, nor indeed does it change the fact that government "evolves" to 
become invasive and unnaturally large. 

McVeigh was a highly deranged individial if he did bomb the building, 
when caught he was wearing a T-Shirt with the Jefferson quotation on it 
"The tree of liberty from time to time must be replenished with the blood 
of patriots and tyrants", McVeigh did not believe in personal liberty, 
supposedly (although this is media reported so I cannot fully believe it) 
McVeigh was just another loon who wanted to take over the government to 
turn it in his own preferred direction.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
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     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"