Re: Zombie Patriots and other musings
(resend) At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
At 09:19 AM 12/12/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: ...
You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang worries about. McVeighs and Rudolphs. They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.
One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't actually make peace.
Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone warriors. Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we finally agree to ban abortion. You're a fanatically committed
Good points, but not entirely true. For instance, we could stop the Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid, following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements." If you take yourself out of the game, you are not seen by a player which can be influenced. Or which influencing would do any good to a given cause. A government can take itself (and thus the proles that fed the NYC rodentia the second week of Sept 01) out of the game, while individuals (corporations) continue to trade freely, and at their own consensual risk. The point is that while the soldiers are independent, their motivations are not. So you can reduce the cost of the lone warriors to you by not annoying them any more. pro-choice
activist. What's your next move?
Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the clinics. Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to sway a govt. If the US went neutral, whether Halliburton was in Arabia would be entirely an economic question, involving the cost of paying off widows or hiring Islamic workers, or buying the goods through a third party. Instead its a policy question, the only way to influence it is to bring it home ---"the only language the American people understand is dead Americans." -EC --- "Can you hear me now?" -UBL, 11.9.01
At 12:34 PM 12/14/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
...
One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't actually make peace.
Good points, but not entirely true. For instance, we could stop the Jihad (tm) (including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid, following the good general's advice, "Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign entanglements."
So, I think that's pretty sound advice, but I don't think any of the top ten reasons for supporting it involve whether Al Qaida will stop attacking us. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small part of that calculation. For example, we could presumably beat China in a war, but such a war would be enormously more expensive and dangerous than fighting Al Qaida. If continuing to play world's policeman improves our chances of avoiding war with China, at the cost of bringing about some attacks from Al Qaida, that's a win for us. Now, I suspect that playing world's policeman does *not* make us less likely to get into really dangerous and expensive war, and often gets us caught up in little wars that could expand into bigger ones. (The Korean war apparently came relatively close to getting us into a war with China, for example.) But there's at least some argument to be made about that--for example, by ensuring the security of Japan and Germany, we have avoided having two potentially very well-armed and dangerous opponents wandering around, possibly going on an empire-building spree that would have forced us into a nuclear war with them sooner or later. ...
Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the lone warriors. Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that we finally agree to ban abortion. You're a fanatically committed pro-choice activist. What's your next move?
Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the clinics. Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to sway a govt.
Isn't he alleged to have also done the Olympic Park bombing? (Who knows whether he really did, or whether the FBI just assumed he had so they'd only have one domestic terrorist at large.) Anyway, my point is that it's never going to be acceptable for the US government to pull out of making decisions about policy within the US. A campaign of terrorism against abortion clinics, or against liquor stores, or against bookstores, can't be responded to by changes in policy to appease the terrorists without giving up on any kind of a free society. --John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259
On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 06:59:59PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
us. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small part of that calculation. For example, we could presumably beat China in a
Oh, but our foreign policy is based on "our long term best interest", or so our minders tell us: "Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources." - Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General http://www.thesunmagazine.org/bully.html Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
At 02:49 PM 12/17/2003 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 06:59:59PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
us. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but our foreign policy ought to be made based on what is in our long-term best interest ("our" meaning American citizens); realistically, terrorist attacks are a fairly small part of that calculation. For example, we could presumably beat China in a
Oh, but our foreign policy is based on "our long term best interest", or so our minders tell us:
"Our overriding purpose, from the beginning through to the present day, has been world domination - that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of US foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources." - Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General
I'm mostly trying to stay out of this rather than going off on rants, but there's an issue of fact to be dealt with here... Ramsey Clark is _not_ one of "our minders", stating official policy to the sheeple, which is what you're implying here. He was at one time, but that was long, long ago, in a job title far, far away. For the last umpteen years, he's been a major anti-establishment figure, beating up on the US government when they do things that are wrong or illegal. I'm not sure when it was that he rehabilitated himself, probably during the Nixon administration, and I don't know if he beat up on Jimmy Carter or only on all the Republicans (+Clinton) since Jimmy. In any case, what he's saying here is his analysis of US policy, spoken years after he was out of office, not that it's any the less correct for that.
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Harmon Seaver -
John Kelsey -
Major Variola (ret)