On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 12:25:43PM -0500, jburnes wrote:

On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 11:03 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:

...

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 11:21:05AM -0400, Sunder wrote:

...

What part of "Don't impose your ideals on others" do you not understand?

What part of "Don't impose your drug addiction on others" do you not understand? Tobacco junkies are worse than crackheads, especially concerning their irrational behavior.

Actually it may be quite rational.

"Irrational" is what I call junkies so desperate for a fix that they don't care how it affects anyone else.

A certain percentage of the population may be self-medicating for type 2 ADD (nicotine fills in for acetylcholine that they lack). Some others use tobacco to focus and tune out the really high levels of environmental noise and distraction that are part and parcel of modern society.

Some others may do it just because they like it.

That's their perogative, they just can't force others to indulge along with them.

Man, cypherpunks has really gone down quite a ways when members are advocating who should be allowed to consume what and when. Next it will be laws to stop people from blowing their noses in restaurants. I say let people go to hell in their own way. Cigarettes or Jack Black or cocaine.

Oh, another one who either can't read or is just too clueless to get it. Nobody, but nobody, here has suggested outlawing tobacco (although, actually, now that I think of it, maybe it should be until such time all other drugs are freed -- boy, would that be fun to watch all those nic junkies murdering one another to get a fix). If you'd read the thread, what part of "forcing others to smoke" don't you understand? -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com

On Sat, May 03, 2003 at 06:03:46PM +0100, Dave Howe wrote:

<snip "I should be free to smoke"> Actually I agree - you should be free to smoke all you want to; however, given that a) the rest of us don't want to share your smoke b) you don't want to share the smoke you are paying for *with* us the real problem is the inefficiencies of your drug equipment - you really should have some system so you get 100% of the smoke you paid for (rather than less than 30% as now)

Yes, like a vaporizer people use for smoking pot. Almost zero secondhand smoke, only what is breathed out. And, if operated properly, doesn't really create smoke in the first place. Much more efficient, much healthier as well, you don't get all the tars and crap. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com

-- On 3 May 2003 at 20:16, J.A. Terranson wrote:

That my generation, once noted for their significant progress towards human freedoms, has turned into the single largest source of repressive laws and McCarthyesque attitude, is something I have sorrowfully noted for many years. That it keeps getting worse and worse is the only thing that continually fucks with my mind :-/

How did we go from libertarians to fascists?

That is of course a rhetorical question, but it has a straightforward answer I was in the movement during the late sixties and early seventies and watched the authoritarianism become visible the seventies, and eventually realized it had always been present, but hidden by the war against conscription. Initially, the movement started off against racist Jim Crow laws, issues where leftism and libertarianism, and Marxism were all on the same side. So naturally the Marxists called themselves lovers of liberty, and no doubt believed themselves. With Jim Crow laws out of the way, but the draft not yet the big issue, Marxism took the reins, and it has held those reigns ever since, though since the fall of the Soviet Union nazism has started to share authority. When the draft ended, the movement took up issues such as enslaving the third world and political correctness. It became visible as the enemy of freedom and human life the seventies, when so many third worlders were enslaved or murdered, but not many cared, because the goal were far away. Since then, issues like the anti sex laws in the workplace, expanding the war on some drugs to include tobacco, and support for the 9//11 terrorists and Saddam has caused increasing numbers of ordinary people to care about these evil people. When the Jim Crow laws were out of the way, but the war in Vietnam had not yet begun to bite, caring and activist youths cast about for new issues, and adopted "social justice", Of course "social justice", being a form of cosmic justice, implies a vast authoritarian state to do good to people with baton and gun whether the beneficiaries like it or not, so to counterbalance that they adopted a criticism of existing state institutions as unresponsive to the will of the people, and a program of "participatory democracy" to make those institutions responsive to the will of the people. Of course the program of "social justice", and helping the poor and oppressed brought out the Marxist in all of us. Subconsciously we visualized ourselves holding the whips and guns and beating in the faces of those bloody ungrateful poor and oppressed until they showed us the gratitude we deserved. I observed this in myself and others in the late sixties, and reading of earlier movement activities, I can see it the writers, though they could not see this in the themselves. As Pinochet is alleged to have said, but did not, everyone is a Marxist, but only some know it. The actual poor and oppressed in the west sensed the condescension, hatred, and intended violence, and rejected the do gooders of the movement as long haired creeps, recognizing them as the class enemies that they were. Embittered by this rejection, the movement turned its benevolence on those too tightly controlled to fight back, the third worlders, and came to identify emotionally with governments such as Castro's which swiftly tortured anyone who was insufficiently grateful for all the good that had been done to him with electric shocks. So emotionally the activists were already no longer the anti authoritarians they thought they were, but there was as yet no contradiction between the movement's belief in itself as anti authoritarian, and what it was actually doing. The movement set about implementing participatory democracy within itself. Participatory democracy in actual practice has a striking resemblance to Lenin's democratic centralism. To the extent that it actually is participatory, he with the strongest bladder wins, but what usually happens is not "participation" (rule by those with iron bladders and incredible tolerance for boredom), but instead Leninist democratic centralism, rule by a secretive and conspiratorial organized minority. We called ourselves "the caucus", but the caucus was, in practice, "the party". The movement rapidly came to be controlled by people who thought of the themselves as secret communists or open communists, a small conspiracy, hostile to the existing order, aimed at taking power, acting under a mask in a hostile world, which we expected to become violently repressive as it entered the throws of the expected world revolution.. Among us were many people who thought of themselves as secret agents for an outside power, some of whom may perhaps have accepted some small change from those who actually were agents of that power, many of whom accepted substantial non money benefits from China, Russia, or one of Russia's puppet regimes. At that point, the point where I became part of the movement, and part of the caucus, the movement was fundamentally authoritarian, but we believed ourselves to be libertarian, and what we were doing did not obviously contradict that belief. With the end of conscription however, the authoritarian mindset of the movement became increasingly visible. This was most spectacularly revealed with the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia, when the movement came out in defence of tyranny, slavery, and mass murder, glibly forgetting the liquidation of those such as the NLF that they had claimed to identify with. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG fj+tCcy65aP3mGsmaTn0aQ67N3yJfffYK4Xa2D1v 4iwyi++c8DsRZqC4ThvnGSIU90wpqTA4DXf8TrmjV

On Sunday 04 May 2003 12:05, Tim May wrote: (To summarize: the youth culture of 1966-1980 was statist rather than libertarian.)

"Eat the rich!" came out of that era.

One of my catch-phrases is "eat the poor". This is a combination of letting the poor pay back the productive part of society for the welfare they'd sponged, and a response to the "eating animals is cruel" crowd. Similarly, I proposed to stop benefits to the elderly after they'd taken out all the Social Security they'd put in (plus interest). That was met with howls of protest, so I proposed a no-bag-limit open season on geezers. "Eat the old!" (Believe it or not, I'm viewed as unelectable... But that's ok, I don't want elected office, I just want to shake up the comfortable one-party no-debate shoo-ins that have been the norm in every city in which I've ever lived.) I'm a bit younger than the youth Tim mentioned above, and while my proposals above were not entirely serious, I think the yells of the students a few decades ago were serious. I surely have no patience with the statist mind-set of the boomers. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns. -- Ron Kuby