At 02:21 PM 5/20/96 +0000, Jean-Francois Avon wrote:
On 20 May 96 at 10:28, Jim Ray wrote:
And you'll also note that the anonymity issue generate more interest from more CPunks because it (hopefully) will acheive the same goal without any killing.
our anonymity-baby threatens to have govt. kill it in the crib,
It is not yours, it only *is*.
with the support of the people.
Here, again, Jim Bell would probably say that this sentence proves him right...
Absolutely! Even these days, what passes for "the support of the people" is simply the generally-agreed-upon position of the news media, which the public is supposed to accept as their opinion. Before alternative sources of information such as the Internet appeared, TV stations and print media could just about mold public opinion any way they wanted, within limits.
I have not respected a US president in my lifetime, yet I get _pissed_ when they get shot/shot at.
I somehow agree with you here.
I could say, "I don't want to see any president get shot," but that's simply because I want them to resign instead. And it really isn't the president, per se, who is the problem: It's the entire political system which chooses the candidates, from which the public is only given a one-of-two choice in the matter. If the system were cleaned up, and massively reduced in power, we could have a figurehead president that nobody would even dream of harming, because he exercises no abusive power. And in any case, since I think it is legitimate for "us" (everyone else in the world) to pay for the death of (say) Saddam Hussein or Moammar Khadafi, it would be selfish of me to suppose that any system which could easily achieve that could somehow be tuned to ensure that "our" presidents are somehow immune. I would much rather see _all_ the leadership under the risk of the gun than none of it.
Killing seems to be a first resort for some, and IMO ends do not justify means.
Well, here, you are threading on a very difficult path. Of course, the ends does never justifies the means in an *uncoerced* context. But what JB says, is that AP would be a justified "self defense" against coercion.
That's right. However, I've noticed that the people who object to AP rarely want to talk about the self-defense aspect of the situation; they want to assume that nobody has done anything wrong enough to justify AP from being used against them. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com