At 5:12 PM -0800 11/7/96, jim bell wrote:
accessible to the common man? Suppose, say, the approval of one million citizens was the only thing necessary to have an assassination legally accomplished? Or, more likely in practice, the vote of a million citizens was interpreted as a kind of terminal veto over that particular politician or government employee, who would have to resign or face the (lethal) consquences! In that case, assassinations wouldn't be seen as bad, they'd be the natural consequence of a politician who overstays his welcome and ignores numerous warnings.
Nothing in any version of AP I have seen makes any stipulation that the payment is "one person, one vote." Thus, if saw a politician killed (and if I believed it to be an AP-related kiling), I might think: "Well, one hundred thousand people just voted with their one dollar each to have him killed." But I might just as easily think: "Or one special interest group just paid one hundred thousand dollars to have him killed." That is, "assassination politics" boils down to be being a minor variant on a well-established topic: the use of untraceable payments for contract killings. Whether there was some fiction of a betting market or just a direct payment is immaterial. --Tim May "The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology." [NYT, 1996-10-02] We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."