On Tue, May 13, 1997 at 08:21:13PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
At 6:34 PM -0800 5/13/97, Kent Crispin wrote:
First of all, it neglects to consider that governments may have prevented more murders than they caused. This is unknowable, since we don't have any worthwhile control cases. (I suppose we might examine a state of anarchic chaos (eg Rawanda) and compare the percentage of murders...but such cases are symptoms of other human ills, and cannot be used as a meaningful comparison, I believe.)
Rwanda (or Ruwanda, or...) is a _very_ poor example to pick, as this was not any kind of anarchy such as any of us have ever advocated. Rather, Rwanda was a near-textbook example of one tribal faction (Hutus or Tutsis) coming to power and inititiating a pogrom against the rival faction (Tutsis or Hutus).
Calling this an "anarchy" is comparable to calling the pogrom by the Third Reich against Jews, gypsies, cripples, and others an example of anarchy.
Nonsense. "anarchy n. the absence of government or control, resulting in lawlessness. 2. disorder, confusion" -- Oxford American Dictionary Which part of that would you say didn't apply to Rwanda? In fact, the correlation between anarchy and war is very strong, for obvious reasons. Perhaps that is why most intelligent people don't consider anarchy a desirable state of affairs. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html