From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> Sent: Oct 22, 2004 12:21 PM To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Airport insanity
All of the terrorists came from countries that were beneficiaries of an immense amount of US help. Saudi Arabia was certainly not under attack. If they were Palestinians, and they hit the Pentagon but not the two towers, then they would be defending themselves.
I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing. McVeigh (not a branch davidian) wanted to strike back at the BATF for the Waco massacre, so he killed a whole bunch of people, a few of whom were BATF employees, but not, as far as I know, anyone directly involved in the decisions that led to all the deaths in Waco. The 9/11 hijackers wanted to strike at the US for a variety of reasons, probably mostly that we're a big, visible target, but presumably also that we're propping up states like Saudi Arabia. So they killed a whole bunch of people, most of whom had nothing to do with what they opposed, but surely including people who were doing business with Saudi Arabia and Israel. If McVeigh had used a sniper rifle to kill the specific BATF agent who called for the raid/media event on the Branch Davidians' compound, I'd still think he deserved to either die or spend his life in prison, but at least I could somehow fathom the moral decision to do what he'd done--like the pro-life terrorists (ah, the irony) who assassinate abortionists. They need to be locked up, but you can at least see what they were thinking. Blowing up a building full of random people because a few of them are associated with some action you really disagree with is just outside the realm of the sort of moral decision I can figure out. Just like flying planes into buildings full of people with almost nothing to do with what you're really getting at.
James A. Donald
--John Kelsey
-- "James A. Donald"
All of the terrorists came from countries that were beneficiaries of an immense amount of US help. Saudi Arabia was certainly not under attack. If they were Palestinians, and they hit the Pentagon but not the two towers, then they would be defending themselves.
John Kelsey
I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing.
The pentagon did not have a branch office in the two towers. BATF had an office in the Murrah building.
So they killed a whole bunch of people, most of whom had nothing to do with what they opposed, but surely including people who were doing business with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Was McViegh targeting people who do business with BATF? Besides which the terrorists did not target them for doing business with Israel, but for "World Trade" - globalization and all that. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG F1A5ubUDIrbSNLUuleFdhNEKrRgGGTlY3WAjUS9V 4IOaq8sP0KR47YXUJterj5PKXQM9mYdBplIzlApRI
There were several USG offices in the Twin Towers, some of them intelligence. In addition, CIA was located in 7 WTC, along with Secret Service and military offices. The military offices were used as cover for the others. There was far more USG in WTC than in Murrah, and the lesson learned in OKC was no doubt useful to the attackers: collateral hurt to innocents is magnitudes more powerful than hitting military targets -- that is what strategic bombing was invented to demonstrate, not to say threatening with WMDs, a practice invented by the US and which remains its primary defense strategy. The cause and effect between USG WMD threats and terrorist attacks is yet to be fully admitted outside military circles: the military accepts that innocents will be slaughtered, and the winner must slaughter the most. Terrorism to the military is a nuisance even when a few of its troops are picked off. The losses in Iraq do not even make a blip on expected casualties of a major war. More military have died in conventional accidents, murders and suicides around the world than have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those in the Middle East have greater utility for the military to boost its suck for more funds and more "our boys and girls" sacrifice and more bawling in congress and the presidential campaign about protecting the nation, defense cut-back not even a dream since ever so convienent 9/11. Murrah bombing helped the battle against homeland militants, and WTC got the ball rolling for battle overseas. Who planned them is yet to be revealed, but the usual suspects don't mean shit.
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, James A. Donald wrote:
"James A. Donald"
All of the terrorists came from countries that were beneficiaries of an immense amount of US help. Saudi Arabia was certainly not under attack. If they were Palestinians, and they hit the Pentagon but not the two towers, then they would be defending themselves.
John Kelsey
I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing.
The pentagon did not have a branch office in the two towers. BATF had an office in the Murrah building.
Bzzzt! Try again. There were a number of federales in the towers, INCLUDING atf, all the various branches of the armed services, and a large number of spook proxy points.
So they killed a whole bunch of people, most of whom had nothing to do with what they opposed, but surely including people who were doing business with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Was McViegh targeting people who do business with BATF?
Besides which the terrorists did not target them for doing business with Israel, but for "World Trade" - globalization and all that.
Personal knowledge? -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org 0xBD4A95BF "An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core" S. Plath, Temper of Time
-- John Kelsey
I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing.
James A. Donald:
The pentagon did not have a branch office in the two towers. BATF had an office in the Murrah building.
"J.A. Terranson"
Bzzzt! Try again.
There were a number of federales in the towers, INCLUDING atf, all the various branches of the armed services, and a large number of spook proxy points.
You guys just keep making up facts. There were no branches of the armed services in the towers. You are just spouting bullshit, like the story that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that Saddam was installed in a CIA coup, and all those similar lies made up to rationalize terror. Just a few posts ago someone posted that old one that the US started the Korean war by attacking North Korea, in order to make the US rich by imposing poverty on Koreans, despite the fact that we now have the records of Stalin ordering the attack, and despite the obvious and dramatic difference in wealth everywhere between the two sides of the line where the iron curtain used to be - and still is in Korea. The same people spout the new lies in the same breath as they spout the old lies. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG dvBfWIZqEu161Mjru/y6SQOfX5yCTWwAzV2e8e/N 40oki+XXmhK7vuYZqXY+Sr2pWASXQo+gx9TqdXW7/
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, James A. Donald wrote:
You guys just keep making up facts.
There were no branches of the armed services in the towers. You are just spouting bullshit, like the story that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that Saddam was installed in a CIA coup, and all those similar lies made up to rationalize terror.
OK - I'm out of this "discussion". This is either just the worlds most elaborate troll, or Donald's brain is dense enough to used when we finally run out of depleted uranium. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org 0xBD4A95BF "An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core" S. Plath, Temper of Time
-- James A. Donald wrote:
You guys just keep making up facts.
There were no branches of the armed services in the towers. You are just spouting bullshit, like the story that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that Saddam was installed in a CIA coup, and all those similar lies made up to rationalize terror.
"J.A. Terranson" <measl@mfn.org>
OK - I'm out of this "discussion". This is either just the worlds most elaborate troll, or Donald's brain is dense enough to used when we finally run out of depleted uranium.
In other words you are not willing to either disown or defend any of the claims listed above. Like Chomsky, you want to imply they are obviously true, without quite committing yourself to say in so many words that they are true. Nail your colors to the mast. Pick one of the above and defend it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Z+DB496uVoR/FHJetoWJv6cYEL8yFUDYet7Av/Hs 4SdfwHFAFX9A0KROEm1bmE/hxcqwo480srRy24zrC
Can you guys please take it outside? The majority of us just isn't interested. On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 12:49:52PM -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
Nail your colors to the mast. Pick one of the above and defend it.
-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:56 PM +0200 10/24/04, Eugen Leitl wrote:
Can you guys please take it outside? The majority of us just isn't interested.
Oh, please. <Tanto>Who's this "us", white man?</Tanto> Personally, I'm having a lot of fun watching this. What amazes me the most is that no matter how finely James cuts his logic, I'm still following him through the changes -- and I end up agreeing with him to boot. Tim McVeigh made a direct attack on his own nation-state because he thought it impeded progress and freedom. Islamist barbarians, and other luddite neo-feudal terrorists, attack the public in order to weaken their resolve to support their nation-state so they can impose, well, luddite neo-feudal barbarism. Fuck that. The libertarian argument against war is the most ethical one that exists, as far as ethics goes, but physics causes philosophy, not the other way around. From where I sit it looks to me that, whether he's trying to or not, James has been making about the best case for classic liberalism -- as opposed to recent cryptocommunist "liberalism" that can't even use that heisted label anymore -- I've seen in a very long time, and certainly around here. Look, guys, the internal and external use of force is just about the only legitimate act of a state there is anymore, and ethics has almost nothing to do with it. Force monopolies are an *economic* fact of life, no matter how much anarcho-capitalists -- like myself -- wish it weren't so. Call it Coase's revenge, or whatever you want, but transaction costs are sufficiently high in markets for force that they create local monopolies. These monopolies tend to gigantism because high-speed -- but still human-mediated -- communication in those markets causes large information hierarchies and concomitant economies of scale. Modern geodesic communications have started to reverse that, the Afghan war is a case in point, heck, the collapse of the Soviet Union into multiple states, possibly recursively from now on, is a canonical example. China's current cohesivity is a perfect exception to the rule, more a testament to their common 5000-year cultural heritage and their rapid adoption of market economics than anything else, the same as America's, for the time being, though for a much shorter period of time and for entirely different cultural reasons, freedom vs. feudalism, and all that. Nonetheless, humanity is probably a long way from completely *private* markets for force with a collapse to the bottom of recursively smaller nation-state "firms" in the meantime. My point is, you dance with the girl that brung ya. If the only way to kill barbarians is to kill barbarians in their bed before they kill you in yours, to pave over nation-states that support them, starting with the easiest first, it can't happen fast enough, as far as I'm concerned, and I'll gladly "vote" my expropriated tax-dollars for the purpose of draining the swamp that is the Middle East. Hell, the fact that every middle-class born-again islamofundamentalist jihadi "freedom-fighter" in the world is making a beeline for Fallujah, makes me *happy*. They're doing our work for us. Concentrate their forces, go in in force, shoot whoever shoots at you, and let Allah sort 'em out; wait for newbies to fill the bowl again and flush, um, liberally, until they stop clogging the porcelain like so much human excrement. Finally, the more that those expenditures on external force bankrupt the "welfare" system, and all the other anticoagulant bribes that "democratic" force-monopolies use to keep the tax-catheter from clotting up, the happier I'll be anyway. That's what Reagan did, deficits and all, and if it puts second-tier genocides out of business the way that he did to the first-tier ones, then "America, Fuck Yeah". Finally, apropos of every political development on this list since November 2000, and especially 9/11, doesn't everyone find it positively apocryphal that all the former Republican "libertarians", "anarcho-capitalists", "crypto-anarchists", whatever, reverted instantlyl to Republicans, and the former Democrats doing the same? Even the "lifelong Libertarians" are positively transparent in their underlying politics at times like these. Binary choices are such a bitch, ?Si? Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQXxftcPxH8jf3ohaEQKPDwCeM5A0xUmU7gsMuhLiGJIHR5xifQQAoJP3 HKxNhnNE0d5OTsCLG59yQ3JH =9NeO -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
participants (6)
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Eugen Leitl -
J.A. Terranson -
James A. Donald -
John Kelsey -
John Young -
R.A. Hettinga