At 07:37 PM 9/26/96 -0500, snow wrote:

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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. But AP is great - adding more violence to Ireland is just the thing they need........

It wouldn't ADD more violence.

I had intended to respond to Bill Stewart's comment before this. I was surprised that he would suggest that AP would (necessarily?) cause "more violence." To me, it's obvious that it will cause _different_ violence, and I strongly suspect it'll actually reduce the total violence level, and certainly will do so in the long term. But far more than reducing violence, it'll reduce coercion that doesn't rise to the level of violence as well. When people AREN'T put in jail or prison for a victimless crime, I consider that a drastic reduction in coercion, and that's progress. Put fewer people in jail, and you anger fewer people, and you rob fewer people by taxation to pay for that jail, etc.

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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.

Putting AP into place doesn't make murder legal. You could still be arrested, tried (depending on the jurisdiction) and punished for it.

Not only that, you could use AP to kill somebody who killed SOMEBODY ELSE with AP! (which is, to me, a rather obvious fact, but one that escapes an unusually large number of people. 'course, you'd have to figure out who did it... a non-trivial task under the circumstances.) Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com