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Troops are in Northern Ireland for a very simple and depressing reason. People like Jim want to impose their will on others by force.

People have been imposing their will on others in Ireland for 800 years, and killing off the more prominent members of the opposition has been a long-term policy of the thugs who've been doing it. Today there are at least three competing gangs of thugs trying to impose their will on others by force. The Protestants are afraid that the Catholic majority on the island will enforce their rule on them, and the Catholics in the north are afraid that the Protestants will enforce their rule on them, both with good reason as near as I can tell. At least a few years ago, the IRA were spouting Marxist rhetoric and wanted to impose their Marxist thuggery on the whole island. The Queen's Empire's army understands AP better than the IRA does - they know the IRA's happy to kill Imperial soldiers who wander around unprotected. On the other hand, the IRA are a bunch of murdering thugs who blow up pubs and non-combatants as well as targeting soldiers. Some of the pro-Saxon Orangeheads do the same, of course, though most of them mainly like to have parades in Catholic neighborhoods to say "Nyahh, nyahh, we still rule you peons." The atrocities that the IRA and Brits commit against each other are both unsupportable, and lead to more conflict rather than peace, but neither side has the high moral ground to complain about it. But AP is great - adding more violence to Ireland is just the thing they need........ One of the strong negatives of AP is that it leads to reverse AP - if you don't know _which_ Hatfield killed the latest McCoy, you might as well just shoot one or two Hatfield Boys at random. If you kill off GrandDaddy Hatfield, there's nobody to say "OK, let's stop shooting each other"; instead there's a bunch of angry grandkids, and uncles, _all_ of whom have the authority to say "Let's go kill the McCoy bastards who did this!" The protocols may work when there's one hierarchical target - they don't work with two. Hammurabi's law about "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" was a _limitation_ on the amount of vengeance you were allowed to take, not a minimum required vengeance. jonathon <grafolog@netcom.com> wrote:

Do that op-ed piece --- but remember that AP is not a libertarian position. Libertarian's think that government is a good thing. AP thinks that government is a bad thing, and their philosophical differences get wider, from there.

Libertarians have varying opinions about government; some of us are anarchists, while some are minarchists. Most of us figure that once we've gotten rid of the first 90% of government, we can haggle about the rest of it then, in a much freer society, where people will have different perspectives on what stupid and obnoxious things they want the government to stop doing next. And if the well-intentioned-but-misguided minarchists prevail, it'll still be far better than today :-) Assassins, on the other hand, are generally on power trips - I don't see that replacing power-tripping wholesale murderers with lots of power-tripping retail murderers is really a good thing. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> # You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto