What is a cypherpunk?

Steve Thompson steve49152 at yahoo.ca
Tue Feb 15 10:20:14 PST 2005


 --- ken <bbrow07 at students.bbk.ac.uk> wrote: 
> James A. Donald wrote:
> 
> > The state was created to attack private property rights - to
> > steal stuff.  Some rich people are beneficiaries, but from the
> > beginning, always at the expense of other rich people.
> 
> More commonly states defend the rich against the poor.  They are 
> what underpins property rights, in the  sense of "great property" 

More of the usual bullshit, SOP for the quasi-anonymised defenders of
local trvth.

State _workers_ attack property rights; state _workers_ act to aid 'the
rich' in consolidating and concentrating property and property rights
against 'the poor'.  In exchange for a little job security, state
_workers_ have passivly evolved a neat little system which may be
exploited by knowledgeable insiders for their own malign purposes.  

Congratulations to the defenders of Truth, Freedom, and Democracy for in
effect rolling back property rights (to say nothing of human and civil
rights), in effect cancelling the legal advances brought about by the
Magna Carta and succeeding documents.  It is a testament to the success
and current fashion of reality simplification that state agents may
arbitrarily employ the tools of terrorism, appropriation and confiscation,
arbitrary detention, and not insignificantly, micromanage _de facto_
slaves according to their whims, or at least those of their privilaged
benefactors.  This is accomplished by the strategic use of pretexts --
some secret, others validated by tenets of pop culture; none of which may
be assailed by reasonable means -- to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the
acts of violence.  And in this vein I should not need to remind anyone of
the fact that theft, as much as a boot to the head or back of the neck, is
an act of violence; and no matter if it is perpetrated by seeming
officiousness by way in some farcical one-sided and secret legal process,
or by dint of a convenient and contrived necessity.  

> - until the industrial revolution that was mostly rights to land 
> other people farm or live on. Every society we know about has had 
> laws and customs defending personal property (more or less 
> successfully) but it takes political/military power to defend the 
> right to exact rent from a large estate, and state power to defend 
> that right for thousands or millions of landowners.

Uh-huh.  And what of the state of affairs where rights of property, for
example, may be subverted by fraud and the means of legal redress (no
matter how unjust, inefficient and ineffective they may be for practical
purposes) are closed off, one by one, so that the victims of state
violence are allowed NO OPTIONS or RELEIF, perhaps to start again from
scratch, but more likely to whither and die on the vine, ignored except
when it is necessary to reinforce the conditioning to ruin by the
application of a periodic boot to the back of the neck.
 
> > Again, compare the burning of Shenendoah with the Saint
> > Valentine's day massacre.  There is just no comparison.
> > Governmental crimes are stupendously larger, and much more
> > difficult to defend against.
> 
> True.
> 
> The apposite current comparison is 9/11 the most notorious piece 
> of private-enterprise violence in recent years, and the far more 
> destructive  US revenge on Afghanistan and Iraq. Which was 
> hundreds of times more destructive but hundreds of thousands of 
> times more expensive, so far less cost-effective - but in a a war 
> of attrition that might not matter so much. Of course the 
> private-enterprise AQ & their friends the Taliban booted 
> themselves into a state, of sorts in Afghanistan, with a little 
> help from their friends in Pakistan and arguable amounts of US 
> weaponry. Not that Afghanistan was the sort of place from which 
> significant amounts of tax could be collected to fund further 
> military adventures.
> 
> States can get usually get control of far larger military 
> resources than private organisations, and have fewer qualms about 
> wasting them.  Not that it makes much difference to the victims - 
> poor peasants kicked off land wanted for oilfields in West Africa 
> probably neither know nor care whether the troops who burned their 
> houses were paid by the oil companies or the local government.

And you all may cluck cluck safely in your ivory towers at the sorry state
of others affairs, pontificating (again, safely) at an intellectual remove
from the ground that is in conflict and at issue.  Obvioulsly the best way
to seem comitted to change and a solution to difficult problems without
actually risking engagement with the core matter.


This list is becoming a chore to read.  Would someone find out where Tim
May and Detwellier (for a start) are hiding, and please recommend them
back to Cypherpunks?   When such as they were active, we could be assured
of lively and entertaining debate.  These days, the air is rather too thin
to support vigorous and sincere exchange.


Regards,

Steve


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