Sandy Sandfort wrote:
C'punks, On Mon, 23 Sep 1996, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
There is no such thing as an "ordinary citizen". When the U.S. commits war crimes in Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere, every American taxpayer is an accomplice and a fair game.
Illogical collectivist claptrap. When a taxpayer is targeted by terrorists, he has been victimized twice--first by the government that stole his money, second by the terrorist that punished him for the (alleged) acts others commited with that money. If a mugger buys a gun with the money he took from me, am I then responsible for the murder he commits with it? Clearly not. This line of "reasoning" is nothing more than a sad variant of the old, "blame the victim" game. For shame. Let's bring this back to crypto for a moment. Dimitri's "logic" must necessarily lead one to the conclusion that Cypherpunks (at least those in the US) are responsible for whatever draconian restrictions "our" government puts on free speech, crypto or whatever. John Gilmore, Philip Zimmermann, Whit Diffie and others will be chagrined to learn this, I'm sure. Dimitri needs to learn what it means to be an adult. Everyone is totally responsible for what they do, but ONLY for what THEY do. No one is responsible for the unassisted, willful acts of others.
You are committing a logical fallacy with the above. You're saying that the mugger who commits the crime with a stolen gun is equivalent to my own hired hitmen (the local and federal police I pay so dearly for). This is obviously not the case. I didn't hire the mugger, nor did I encourage the thief in an overt way. But I did consciously select and pay for the police and govt. assassins. And so did you. Unless you're saying that the govt. forcibly takes you down to the voting booth, etc.