At 09:26 PM 5/9/97 -0800, Tim May wrote:
Every day that passes, I'm more convinced that McVeigh did the right thing. Some innocents died, but, hey, war is hell. Broken eggs and all that. ......................................................
Timothy must be drunk; I can't believe he said this. Because he wouldn't spend so much time writing sensible things of Truth & Light, if he thought the better thing to do for achieving libertarian values was to kill so indiscriminately with a bomb. After all, he subscribes to utmost discrimination. So I think right now he's less in the engagement of Reason and more under the influence of maybe some Bud Light.
I have to say I agree, I believe that violence is probably the only way to proceed in order to defend ourselves against the criminals within modern societies, however, I seperate this entirely from the action of killing indiscriminately. I have to say also that I believe that if one were to drop a fairly large bomb on a major US city, say LA or NYC, the probable outcome would be that 99% of the people killed would be corrupt scum anyway, in DC I would imagine the figure would be approching 100%, however, this does not absolve one from blame if, through some freak outcome, a small bomb of, say, the Timothy McVeigh style happens to kill an innocent person, one is still guilty of murder. Part of the reason I despise government so greatly is because the poloticians justify their actions by reference to "the greater good", ie. "If a few thousand innocent conscripted members of the army get killed defending our society so be it." In the end, it also comes down to what action you believe is justifiable in the name of freedom, ie. When I say I believe 99% of people in sat NYC are corrupt scum this is true, but to varying degrees, I would personally say, as an estimate, only 3 to 5% of these people should be executed for their crimes, the others are either corrupt morally on a small level, or are just naive, eg. I believe people who vote in democratic elections commit a crime against me by being part of the process which brings about authoritarian government, even if they vote for a party that proposed to rule according to libertarian values they still perpetuate a system where the majority control the actions of the minority, however, I would not kill these people, I believe they are simply ill educated and unable to comprehend the wrong they do me. The bottom line is, I disagree with what Tim said but I do sympathise with the reasons why he said it. Datacomms Technologies data security Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/ Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85 "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"