On Tue, 10 Dec 1996, Huge Cajones Remailer wrote:
One of the great ideas of the modern age is that people have the right to form organizations. It should probably be in the Bill of Rights. (We do have the right to "peaceably assemble", but that is not as general as the right to organize.)
You are completely correct that control of human organizational activity is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.
I would go further than this, though. I would say that that mode of thought which considers an organization to _be_ an individual, with rights and responsibilities of its own, is the hallmark of a state. (_all_ states are totalitarian to some degree, that is what makes them states). That is to say, when we say "General Electric owns so and so many dollars in assets" or "The government has a duty to protect its citizens", we are accepting the basic precept of statism, that these groups should be treated as something other than the sum of the individuals whom they are made up of.
Exactly. Like most, I have a strongly visceral negative reaction to bigotry. I wish there could be a system of law which contained it. There cannot, or at least not without doing even more harm.
But what is it that we want to make illegal? Bigotry is not a well
That's the point I was trying to make. We cannot outlaw `bigotry' because any such law would be a basic violation of the rights of thought, and expression. What we should do is combat the ignorance and factionalism which make it possible. As I said, the main obstacle to doing away with bigotry is the fact that modern statist societies rely on alienating the masses against themselves to keep prevent popular insurrection. -- Jim Wise System Administrator GSAPP, Columbia University jim@santafe.arch.columbia.edu http://www.arch.columbia.edu/~jim * Finger for PGP public key *