At 05:53 PM 7/8/98 -0400, Michael Lorrey wrote:
>Depends. It seems like the 'bad neighborhood' syndrome tends to spread like a
This may be the trend in the U.S., but it doesn't seem to be happening in
Canada. In fact, the inner city area I live in is a lot nicer place today
than it was twenty years ago, and even then it was hardly dangerous. So
from my perspective the trend is hardly inevitable.
>cancer, and only some serious work can turn such trends around. You might
live
>in a nice neighborhood today, but what happens when some pretty bad people
move
>into your neighborhood either because they got scared of the really bad
people
>in their old neighborhood, or are looking for virgin territory to fleece? Are
>you gonna move someplace else? And someplace else again? and again? and
again?
>When do you stop running and start shooting back?
When I run out of neighborhoods ;-> If such a trend did develop, I can imagine situations in which I would buy a gun. I can also imagine situations in which I would do other extreme things, but I'm not going to worry too much about them. It's silly to underestimate risks, yes, but over-estimating them is also a mistake.
>Yes, why is Mutual Assured Destruction a fine policy for nation states but
not
>for individual people? Its worked fine for 50 years around the world, I think
>that a personal policy of micro-MAD is a fine survival policy.
Some societies manage to get along quite well without micro-MAD; perhaps nation states find it it a good policy because there is no real meta-authority to keep them in line, analogous to legal systems within nations.
Ken Kittlitz ken@audesi.com AudeSi Technologies Inc. http://www.lucifer.com/~ken http://www.audesi.com