VirgilT7@aol.com wrote:
>You're going to make governments illegal?
No, merely outcompete them. Government is already a serious drain on the economies of the world and cannot last much longer in its present state. Possibly not even eighteen months, if we're lucky.
>Are you kidding? It's not the train or bus ticket (about 35 dollars or so
>every few hundred miles via Greyhound) it's the finding a place to stay and a
>job after one arrives at where ever one is going.
So they can afford to move, they're just scared of doing it? Personally I could have worked as much as I wanted when I was living out of a backpack in 1996, I just didn't want to be programming Windows apps when I had better things to do.
>You miss the point. Instead of merely accepting that millions and possibly
>more will die via terrorist attack, I think that there is a moral imperative
>to take measures to reduce that possibility, ideally to nil.
Indeed; so why are you arguing for police-state measures which are guaranteed to make it worse?
>namely that there will always be
>crazies with the intent to do enormous amounts of damage,
Yes, there will. And the risk to me is?
>and that such
>crazies will sometimes be able to organize into terrorist cells,
And the risk becomes even lower, because otherwise they won't have the power to cause those enourmous amounts of damage for a long time.
>and that no
>matter how free or minimalist we make government, the terrorist threat will
>always exist.
You have evidence of this? That the risk to me from crazies in a minimal state is higher than the proven risk of letting governments take more power (governments have murdered far more people this century than private killers)?
> So it's not a matter of getting blown to kingdom come for
>principle, but a matter of pragmatism: the way to reduce the threat is not
>PRIMARILY by reducing the motivation.
You reduce the threat by *increasing* the motivation? Bizarre.
>As far as, say, being scanned automatically when I enter a
>dense population area, or any public, for nuclear/biologica/chemical weapons I
>can say that I don't regard that as an invasion of my privacy. If I don't have
>any such weapons, the scan will tell them nothing.
And when a new law is passed to scan you for things you do carry, what will you do? Go to jail, I presume. Does the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" mean anything to you?
>If you're referring to terrorists, like McVeigh, frankly I think it
>makes perfect sense to develop such scanning measures BEFORE they lay their
>hands on NBC warfare materiel.
McVeigh was not a terrorist in his mind, but a freedom fighter. Do you seriously expect me to believe that he would have blown up that building if Waco had never happened? Yet you're arguing for more Wacos, while I'm arguing for less. Which will be more successful at reducing the number of attacks by the McVeighs of the world?
>That cult in Japan, the Aum, tried using a
>variety of biological measures against Tokyo and the HQ of the U.S. Seventh
>Flt. in Japan, including the spraying of anthrax spores and the Q fever.
> None
>had any detectable effect
Exactly. No detectable effect, even with the level of funding and dedication that they had... and note that one of their attacks was against the US government, and wouldn't have happened had that government not existed. I don't know what the motivation for the other attack was.
Mark