From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Mar 26 2003 - 17:04:36 MST
Lee Corbin asks:
> What is the emotional reaction of those protesting the war
> to American setbacks in the field?
> ...
> I conjecture that reports of American setbacks are received
> with gratification by most war protesters. After all,
> for those who see George Bush as a greater threat and a
> greater enemy than Saddam Hussein, such a reaction would
> be practically inevitable. Wouldn't it?
This does seem to be a common response among some anarcho-libertarians,
as found for example on the cypherpunks list. You can read their comments
at http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/. (Warning, 95% of the messages
are spam now, so you have to learn to scan down to find message threads
with a variety of posters. Takes a few minutes to train the eye, then
it's not so bad.)
For example, one comment reads,
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/current/msg00067.html:
: Hey, this war is looking better all the time. We got our first fragging
: already, and the US troops are finding themselves no real match for the
: Iraqis. I just heard that there's at least 1 million well armed Ba'ath party
: irregulars, plus unknown numbers of "armed Iraqi tribes", besides the 400,000
: strong Iraqi army which clearly isn't rolling over like projected.
: Could it be that the US will actually get it's ass kicked? Unless dimwit
: dubya decides to start carpet bombing the civilian population, there's no way
: they can beat those numbers. The US airpower does them zilch good in the cities
: otherwise.
Tim May, whom some of you know, adds:
: The train wreck is developing nicely.
Cypherpunks had a similar response to an earlier use of American
government power which they opposed, the siege of Waco. The initial
action against the Branch Davidian compound led to significant losses
by the government forces, and those were generally cheered by the
cypherpunks.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 26 2003 - 17:12:44 MST