On Fri, 1 Nov 2019 04:53:14 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:


zen >>   "Recreational Nukes for all, yay! - It's no different to the right of every American to buy a gun!"

 >   well, except, libertarianism/anarchy is PURELY a matter of rights. (side note : everybody is a 'potential' nuke owner?)

Well, a "government" is an organization that ostensibly works based on the authority of "the public".  The US Constitution, for example, is a document which states what authority "The US Federal Government" has.  That Constitution does not, nor should it, be interpreted so as to bind or limit the actions of non-government employees.  

The Second Amendment, I believe, amounts to a rule which prohibits ALL governments (including State Governments, where said states ratified the Bill of Rights, or 3/4s of other states did so too) from prohibiting ownership of "arms".  But that doesn't mean that individual citizens, acting as individual citizens, will be prohibited from acting to prohibit ANYONE (even "governments") from possessing nuclear weapons.   If, say, a private person anywhere on earth owned a nuke, I am very confident that there would be plenty of donations to force him to dismantle said nuke, and if he refuses, he will be dead very soon.

 >   anyway, what I think is not completely clear is who would be targeted in an AP system. 

Join the club!   From the moment I disclosed my AP idea, I expected and hoped for an extensive and serious discussion and debate as to the merits of AP.  Let me emphasize:   That "discussion and debate" HAS NEVER HAPPENED, at least to what I consider my standards are.  AP should have been debated by anyone who calls himself a "philosopher", a "sociologist", and just about anyone else who takes thought seriously.  Even people who claim they don't "like" AP (and really, especially those!) should want it to be picked apart by logical thought, and perhaps testing.  

That has NEVER happened.  Not even close.  I give the world an "F-minus" grade on this one.  

>And that's because it would depend on who the users of the AP system are. So you can describe how the protocol would work at some technical level, but you can't fully predict how people would use it. It may be clear how libertarians would use it. but what about other people? 

In a 'micro' sense, that is correct.  But in a 'macro' sense, AP would be inherently biased against all centralized heirarchies of power, such as what we now call "governments".   In the end, there might remain some sort of "night watchman" organization, perhaps let by bid, to maintain the infrastructure, at least infrastructure that could not be privately owned.  

 >then again, the general argument for anarchy is that people are mostly good, so no government is needed. And if people are not good, then government only makes things worse. The same premise, people being mostly good, could be invoked here to defend AP.

I agree that 'most people' are probably 'good'.  But some are occasionally not, so something akin to today's "law enforcement" would likely be necessary.  The details of something like this should probably have been heavily debated on the Cypherpunks list in 1995.  But it wasn't.  

                  Jim Bell