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