At 10:10 PM 9/23/96 -0400, hallam@vesuvius.ai.mit.edu wrote:
Jim,
I do support the presence of troops in Northern Ireland and do not consider that to contradict my belief that there should be a united, autonamous Ireland. I do not believe that the "loyalists" are in fact loyal to the British way of life, any more than the KKK are representative of the US south.
Troops are in Northern Ireland for a very simple and depressing reason. People like Jim want to impose their will on others by force.
Quite the contrary. I want to reduce, as much as possible, the ability of people to impose their will on others by force. Read my essay. Eventually you might figure it out. The difference is, I recognize that if you set up a government to try to minimize non-government violence and coercion, you'll get just that: A minimization of NON-GOVERNMENT violence and coercion, at the expense of vastly increasing the GOVERNMENT kind. And I don't consider that progress at all.
Despite prolonged attempts by each faction to assasinate the leaders of the other they have been unsuccessful.
I suppose it didn't occur to you that this is EXACTLY why this dispute has gone on so long? What if instead of being "unsuccessful," these attempts suddenly became 100% successful. Easy, even. Just push a button and the top guy on the other side dies. And you could do this as often as, say, once an hour, with all of his replacements. And the other side can do the same to your leadership. How long do you think it would be before people decide that maybe, they DON'T want to "step up to the plate" and get killed for the sake of their cause?
If terrorists trained by Lybia and Syria are unable to assasinate at will then we can be sure thaqt Jim's band of kooks is not going to get any further.
Which means that you clearly don't understand the motivating factor of a large, totally anonymous e-cash payment. And why should a handful of "terrorists" be successful? The "AP gang" will consist of 5 BILLION people who want to collect the reward, including anyone close to the target. It'll put an entirely new, ominous meaning into the phrase, "Friends and Family"! B^)
If the integration of both Irealand and the UK into the European Union has not ended the situation the complete lack of government will not either.
Hell, the whole reason for this dispute is heirarchical social systems, in this case governments and religions! And adding the European Union merely increases the problem by adding to the heirarchy. My solution eliminates the heirarchy, totally. Why, then, should EU's failure imply a failure by AP? It's the diametrically opposite tactic.
It is suprising that someone from the press has not seized upon Jims ideas as cause for another cyber-scare. I suspect this is because people like Markof are somewhat more responsible.
No, it's probably because they think, nervously, that I might just be right. Even that won't necessarily want to make them want to associate their names with my ideas. If they truly understand them, they'll recognize that it'll happen regardless of the amount of approval it gets from polite society.
This is not going to stop me from producing an op-ed piece linkiing the net libertarians to assasination politics unless I hear a few more repudiations of Bell's ideas.
A doubt whether most people feel themselves obligated to repudiate a proposal, particularly if they don't know that it won't constitute an improvement over the status quo. On the other hand, if the world engineers a good, permanent solution to the Northern Ireland problem in the next six months, as well as the Middle East problem, the India/Pakistan problem, the Chechnya problem, the North/South Korea problem and a few other heretofore intractable problems, you can start feeling confident that my "extreme" solution will be avoidable. Until then, don't get your hopes up.
If you don't very clearly reject his murderous ideas you are going to regret it just as the left regreted having the USSR or the RAF associated with them. Phill
Time will be the best judge of this, I think. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com