In message <199408182252.SAA26632@pipe3.pipeline.com> John Young writes:

...

Personally, I find these statements very disturbing, because they are so empty.

Might be applied to your own later comments:

...

You won't tear down the government without replacing it. And I would argue that the more violent the means used to tear down the government, the more repressive its successor. Governments exist in part because we are such dangerous animals.

I do not think that these statements are empty. Do I really need to prove that people are dangerous? One of the main functions of government is to stop us from harming one another. If you replace government with something else which has the same function (and works), you may call it something else, but it is acting in the same role as a government. Cases of violent replaces of governments from within: the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the victory of the Chinese communists, Pol Pot -- in all of the cases that I can think of, the violence of the revolution was a good predictor of the repressiveness of the government that followed. The revolutions in Eastern Europe over the last few years have almost gone unnoticed, because they have been so peaceful. But they are genuine revolutions. I have seen no one claim that the new governments are repressive, except possibly for Rumania, where the revolution was violent.

This rhetorical ploy comes across as an apology for the status quo and seems to offer counter-revolutionary cant instead of your best arguments for making rational, evolutional improvements to our inheritance.

I am not justifying some status quo. My observation is pretty much equivalent to saying that accidents at high speeds tend to be fatal. If you drive a little more slowly and look where you are going, you are more likely to get to your destination in one piece. -- Jim Dixon