CDR: Re: Jim Bell arrested, documents online

[Ray Dillinger]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Jim Choate wrote:

>
>On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> There has never been a human society that did not kill people.
>
>People kill people you idiot. Don't confuse WHAT and HOW something is done
>with the WHY.

My point is that people HAVE TO kill people.  The presence or absence 
of a government has no bearing on that fact, only on how it is done,  
by whom, and how often.  There are certain people who, if not removed 
from society, will terrorize populations and cause huge amounts of 
economic and other damage.  In places where there are laws, they are 
called "criminals".  In populations that can afford to build prisons, 
and which work together (whether working together is accomplished by 
government coercion or voluntary cooperation) enough to build prisons 
and courts, we don't have to kill them as often because there is 
another method for removing them from society available.


>> Even countries that don't execute criminals still 
>> slaughter enemy soldiers and civilians when they go to war. 
>
>So? Self-defence isn't the same as murder.

And war killing isn't the same as self-defence, either.  In the 
absence of laws, killing is just killing.  It is law that 
designates some killings as murders, others as executions, others 
as self-defense, others as duty.  But I really don't care what 
anybody calls it.  I'm just pointing out that some killing is 
evidently (judging by history) necessary in every culture.

>> You can regard killing, of certain types of people anyway, as a 
>> service industry.
>
>I believe this is called bigotry.

Believe whatever you want.  A sorry waste of living tissue made 
headlines here the other day by being found with a woman's breast 
in his pocket.  On searching, the police officers discovered 
several corpses in various states of hacked-to-bits-ness, all showing 
evidence of having been raped violently and tortured before being 
killed.  All of the victims were people whose history did not 
connect to the killer in any way -- he didn't even know them, 
and he did this.

If I didn't have police, courts, and prisons available, and such 
an individual came to my attention, I would regard it as my civic 
duty to personally remove such an individual from the gene pool, 
and I would not hesitate to chamber the round and pull the trigger.
Moreover, I would regard anyone who didn't feel the same way as 
a coward to be shunned.  So, I'm bigoted for feeling this way?  
Fine.  You use your words, I'll use mine.  It is an act of 
cowardice, and destructive to society at large, to permit such 
individuals to live.

Right now, we use governments to regulate that kind of force -- 
it's a protocol, to see that it is applied consistently and with 
due process, rather than at whim and as a result of poor judgement. 
And, despite a few spectacular failures, it works most of the time.
I participate in the Government protocol because I like for there 
to be some accountability regarding killings and other uses of 
force.  But in the absence of the opportunity to use government 
in this way, I would have to carry out killings and other uses of 
force myself.  And so would a lot of other people, including some 
whose judgement does not agree with mine or yours nor with what we 
now get through government.  

>AP, and anarchy in general, is the scream of the failed. Those who have
>given up and agreed to be subsumed by their basest nature.

AP is a proposed replacement for the "government protocol" -- 
Its proponents claim that we can cut down on killing in general 
by trading war, genocide, etc for a relatively smaller number 
of paid assassinations.  This is interesting, of course, but 
there is no evidence for the claim.  I believe that it would 
have the very bad side effect of making it impossible for anyone 
to amass substantial capital, simply because having substantial 
capital means you or your property or employees interacts with, 
and pisses off, more people.  So anybody who was rich enough to 
get much of anything done would become a target.  Then you'd 
never get bridges or skyscrapers or large-scale data switch 
centers built.  That makes AP a colossally bad idea, regardless 
of whether it would result in more or less killing.

				Bear