Zombie Patriots and other musings

[Major Variola (ret)]

(resend) 
At 11:52 AM 12/13/03 -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
>At 09:19 AM 12/12/03 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>...
>>You need to think about the "lone warrior" scenario that the Gang
>>worries about.  McVeighs and Rudolphs.
>>They were influenced by memes which were not immediately suppressed.
>
>One interesting property of the lone warriors is that they can't
actually
>make peace.

Good points, but not entirely true.  For instance, we could stop the
Jihad (tm)
(including future Jihads by other parties) by stopping all foreign aid,
following the good general's advice,
"Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign
entanglements."

If you take yourself out of the game, you are not seen by a player which
can be influenced.
Or which influencing would do any good to a given cause.

A government can take itself (and thus the proles that fed the NYC
rodentia the second week
of Sept 01) out of the game,  while individuals (corporations) continue
to trade freely, and at their
own consensual risk.

The point is that while the soldiers are independent, their motivations
are not.  So you can
reduce the cost of the lone warriors to you by not annoying them any
more.


>Of course, there's a more fundamental problem with surrendering to the
lone
>warriors.  Imagine that there's such a wave of pro-life terrorism that
we
>finally agree to ban abortion.  You're a fanatically committed
pro-choice
>activist.  What's your next move?

Rudolph bombed clinics, not random people because the govt allowed the
clinics.  Contrast with a distributed jihad which attacks citizens to
sway a govt.

If the US went neutral, whether Halliburton was in Arabia would be
entirely an economic
question, involving the cost of paying off widows or hiring Islamic
workers, or buying the
goods through a third party.  Instead its a policy question, the only
way to influence it
is to bring it home ---"the only language the American people understand
is
dead Americans." -EC

---
"Can you hear me now?" -UBL, 11.9.01