At 04:33 PM 9/16/96 -0400, hallam@ai.mit.edu wrote:
Yet another obligatory AP (Assassination Politics) reference: If a person is really interested in helping out "starving children" he may be able to do far more good by purchasing the death of the local tyrant(s), rather than (just) buying more food.
The problem is that assasination rarely leads to the installation of a government that is any better. In most cases it gets worse.
There is an enormous difference in significance between the following two scenarios: 1. Tyrant A, speaking outside, gets struck by a meteorite and is instantly killed. He is immediately replaced by his second-in-command. 2. Tyrant B is told that he has been threatened with a meteorite strike by an opponent in an hour if he goes on with his speech, he ignores the "unbelievable" warning, and dies on schedule, just as he was warned, struck by a meteorite. What should his vice-thug do in THIS case?!? Physically, the same thing happened: Big boom. But the implications are vastly different. Incident 1 looks like a freak of nature that's unlikely to be repeated. It leads to very few policy changes or changes in precautions. It was a fluke. Incident 2 looks like somebody has developed a new weapon of practically supernatural capabilities. This difference is why I scoff at your attempts to equate political assassination in the past with what will be accomplished in the future. (other people have made this mistake as well; it's a common misunderstanding.) In the past, assassinations have often led to worse replacements, but that is because there is no likely prospect that the assassination will be repeated, as many times as needed, until the job is done. Partly that's because assassinations were often seen to be the work of "lone nuts" (who don't come around all that often), or because they were done by the very people who take over. In either case, the prospects of a repeat are rather low. As anyone who really understands my AP theory recognizes, getting rid of an unwanted leader will become so easy and cheap (on a per-citizen basis) that nobody would dare take the job who angered more than a tiny fraction of the population. A "worse" government would simply never be formed, unless they were suicidal.
In the past the US excuse for supporting bloodthirsty murderers like Pinochet, Saddam, Marcos and Noriega was that the alternative was worse.
The _truth_, however, is that the alternative was worse...for the US government. It's really very simple: Let me draw an analogy. Modern organophosphate pesticides were initially developed by German chemists in the 1930's. These materials are closely related to Sarin, the well-known nerve agent that killed people in the Tokyo subway attack over a year ago. It turns out that Sarin is a rather simple molecule. Why not use it to kill bugs? Well, it kills bugs just fine. The problem, of course, is that it kills farmers just as well. Since you presumably don't want to do that, you have to go to all the trouble to find compounds that kill bugs, but are as non-toxic as possible to farmers. And if you look at the description of the contents of modern organophosphate pesticides on the bottles, you see names that only a chemist could possibly pronounce, names so long (because their molecules were so complex) that you often have to take a breath in the middle to recite. These compounds were found by individually synthesizing thousands, or even tens of thousands of compounds, and testing each one. Individually. Eventually, they found compounds which were as toxic to bugs as Sarin is to humans, but were far less toxic to humans. They found the needle in the haystack. Likewise, as I've discovered through AP, it will be easy to get rid of tyrants. The exquisitely difficult task is to get rid of ONLY SOME of the tyrants, for example Saddam Hussein, Moammar Khadafi, etc, and leaving most of the rest behind. _THAT'S_ the tricky part. I have the easy task: describing a system to get rid of them all, with no exceptions. But that's the system that nobody in the leadership of any current country wants to see. That is why you won't see Clinton announcing that he's going to use my idea to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and instead will waste hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in a failed bid to eject the thug. Doesn't that make you feel a lot safer? Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com