(resend) At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
At 09:19 AM 12/12/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: ...
You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang worries about. McVeighs and Rudolphs. They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.
One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't actually make peace.
Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone warriors. Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we finally agree to ban abortion. You're a fanatically committed
Good points, but not entirely true. For instance, we could stop the Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid, following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements." If you take yourself out of the game, you are not seen by a player which can be influenced. Or which influencing would do any good to a given cause. A government can take itself (and thus the proles that fed the NYC rodentia the second week of Sept 01) out of the game, while individuals (corporations) continue to trade freely, and at their own consensual risk. The point is that while the soldiers are independent, their motivations are not. So you can reduce the cost of the lone warriors to you by not annoying them any more. pro-choice
activist. What's your next move?
Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the clinics. Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to sway a govt. If the US went neutral, whether Halliburton was in Arabia would be entirely an economic question, involving the cost of paying off widows or hiring Islamic workers, or buying the goods through a third party. Instead its a policy question, the only way to influence it is to bring it home ---"the only language the American people understand is dead Americans." -EC --- "Can you hear me now?" -UBL, 11.9.01