Re: Br'er Tim and the Bug Hole

Dumb of me to get in the middle of this, but the bloodlust's
up:

Tim's statements are gutsy and right: there's no gain
in self-censoring, shading one's anger to appease
the goons of whatever firepower. (Bob, go to end.)

Most massive firepower can't focus on or hit exclusively
small targets, that's what's a lie about "surgical" strikes. 
Waste the countryside, yes, hit one rabbit and not the
beloved dog and fellow hunter, little chance. What it
takes is sharpshooting: a one shot, one target, one
pig, one sticker.

True, Horushi's snipe worked, it nailed an innocent, though
a couple of others died to set him up for his own nailing.

True, Waco worked, it charred a crowd of innocents, though a
few others got plugged setting up the roast, and the 2nd roast.

True, firebombing works, as does mass weaponing --nukes, 
chemicals and germs -- but indiscriminately, by terrorism
of the masses, at the price of also terrifying the citizenry 
paying for the megadeath heritage.

All standoff firepower is limited against the individual by 
imprecision of the killing machines and cowardice of the
operators -- artillery, planes, ships, satellites, take your
pick. They savage territory to save the operator's ass,
who, as anyone knows who been around these candyass
strutters, aint got what it takes to cut the guy's throat
who's stabbing your eye.

What's my point? Well, for lack of a better word, it's personal
courage, going nuts when the time's right, the guts to not shut 
the fuck up when you're told to by those who're a whole lot 
bigger, who've got more armaments and thinks they're smarter 
and more ruthless and meaner and have the troops, rank and 
medals to back it up. Just remember that most of those strengths 
are for getting somebody else or a machine to do what is too 
fucking terrifying to do yourself directly.

Do this when the monster accosts: pull your forelock, say sorry 
sir, then upstab the fucker's groin, as he doubles, hack the cord, 
he'll go down quivering, then cut out his liver, kick up his green 
face, squat close, show him the blob, take a bite, chew, savor, 
swallow, put lip to dying ear, whisper, "tasty."

Go home, get a beer, stare the tube, sharpen your tool. Or as
maddog Tim sez, lock and load.

But look, I'm with Bob, too, my tool's philosophy gone berzerk,
trash words, wags, gags, alliterations, mouth shooting. My steel 
weapons are locked from burglars who scare the shit out of me just
by looking like ordinarily ugly wall streeters, that is, like my maddog 
neighbors eyeing me for junk IPO sales.

Sure glad my war's long over, happily getting dimmer, easier to forget
the godawful. Hey, it's veteran's day, anybody want to croak and limp 
to glories past?

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At 6:31 pm -0500 on 11/11/97, Tim May wrote:


> One need only think back to the words of Patrick Henry, Jefferson, Thomas
> Paine, and all the others. No doubt Bob H. would have argued that they
> should cool their anger, silence their words, and not give King George a
> "good reason" to crack down on the Colonies.

No. I'm saying something more on the order of hanging together and not
hanging separately, if we have to hang at all. I suppose I was too obscure
earlier, when I said:

> > Even Patrick Henry had
> > um, common sense, about such things.

Meaning of course, when Patrick Henry... --- Oops, Thomas Paine, sorry,
transposed my patriots there -- first stood up to be counted, he did it with
a pseudonym.

> Or tell Eugene Debs to stop talking about the illegality of the draft and
> stop talking about the mistake of entering the Great War to support some
> duchies and satrapies. (Debs was jailed for his _speech_...so much for the
> First Amendment, even back in the 1918 time period.)

Yes. He was jailed. And we still had the draft. And your point is?

Mine was that free speech is frequently honored in the breach in this
country. Debs, and all the others you're talking about, are proof of that.

Frankly, waving your Glock at the local sherriff and daring him to come
shoot you out of der MayBunker is not just free speech, it's, charitably,
grandstanding. Making a threat on the life of a judge, or even begging for
Washington to be nuked -- something you can't possibly do yourself -- is in
the same catagory of "will someone rid me of this priest",  or "but that
would be wrong", or the Castro assination exhortations which inspired Oswald
to kill JFK. In this country, it's all free speech, but that doesn't keep
you from getting impaled, "accidentally" or otherwise, on the pointy end of
the state, or public opinion, when you piss it off.

> And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their mind.
> And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local prince, to not
> rock the boat.

No, Tim. Your analysis is too simple, here. My point is, all John Brown &
Co. did was get shot up one afternoon in Harper's Ferry. They didn't help
the cause of abolition one whit. Same goes for Gordon Call, or even Timothy
McVeigh, and what they were trying to achieve.


In other words, standing in front of the bug hole all by yourself and
saying, "c'mon, put 'em up" doesn't usually work. Even with the guys on the
rude bridge at Concord, or the people massacred in Boston, or the "nest of
traitors" at the Old South Church, the American revolution wouldn't have
happened without the Continental Congress to raise money (questionable
methods or not) to pay the army. Hanging together, and all that, and more.
It was the only way at the time to organize force in such a way as to assure
success (however tenuous that assurance was when given).

And, I think, when *this* revolution comes, it won't be between the first
real nation-state and its aristocratic colonial power. It will be between a
new kind of power structure and the concept of the nation-state itself. It
*won't* be "give me liberty or give me death".  It'll be the nation state
devolving into a ceremonial entity, violently or not, just like the
aristocracy did before it, with all the real decisions being made in
efficient internetworked markets for anything which can be digitized --
which, of course, will be the only things that matter. Markets with perfect
pseudonymity, anonymous cash settlement, and all the other things you and I
both agree are coming. You call it cryptoanarchy, Duncan calls it
MarketEarth, I call it a geodesic economy, but we're all describing the same
elephant. :-).

> While I don't necessarily put myself  in their class, it's clear to me
that
> America stands for basically libertarian principles, of letting people say
> and read whatever they damned well please. This can include denying the
> Holocaust, preaching the Gospel of Satan, calling for certain judges to be
> taken out into the parking lot and executed by firing squad, or even
> calling for the overthrow of the government.

Right. And you can expect that the government, as a self-perpetuating
entity, and not something which actually has morals and obeys even its own
laws, will come out onto that parking lot and squash you like a, um, bug, in
order to shut you up.

> When we let the spectre of crackdowns by Louis Freeh and Janet Reno cause
> us to self-censor ourselves, then they have well and truly won.

Amen. However, the beauty of strong crypto, and tools like remailers, --
tools which you inspired the creation of -- is that you can yell as loud
about injustice as you want, including calls for extreme rectification of
that injustice, with a modicum of confidence in your personal safety. After
all, the object is to make something happen, not just to kill yourself.

On the net, reputation is orthogonal to biometric identity, as we both say
here all the time. You don't *have* to go sit on a mountaintop and wait for
the powers that be to come up there and shoot you off of it in order to
speak your mind.


Now, Tim, if you want to make yourself St. Joan of Corralitos, or the John
Brown of Santa Clara, you're perfectly welcome to do so. I just don't think
it's going to get you anywhere, except maybe famous and dead. I also think
I've said all I can to you on the subject without repeating myself. I'm sure
you're in the same position yourself.


I suppose it's my own respect for you, because of the rest of what you say
on this list and elsewhere, and the things we do agree on, that causes me to
try to talk you out of this particular bad idea. I think a lot of other
folks agree with me. People who agree with you about everything but getting
yourself killed on principle when nothing tangible will be the result.


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>

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on or about 971112:1136, in <v031107ccb08f6fe1522b@[139.167.130.248]>, 
    Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> was purported to have 
    expostulated to perpetuate an opinion:

>tcmay said:
>
>> And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their mind.
>> And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local prince, to not
>> rock the boat.

>No, Tim. Your analysis is too simple, here. My point is, all John Brown & Co.
>did was get shot up one afternoon in Harper's Ferry. They didn't help the cause
>of abolition one whit. Same goes for Gordon Call, or even Timothy McVeigh, and
>what they were trying to achieve.

    yeah, well, my old lady just told me that (having been born in
    in the same small town as John Brown) John Brown's younger sister
    was my great-great-great-grandmother...

    I guess that gives me the right to express the thought that 
    anybody pushed far enough into the corner will behave like
    any other cornered animal --and some of us will just react
    a little sooner... and a great deal nastier.

    I never picked a fight, but I have more than finished a few.

    remember:  revenge is best served up cold.

        attila out...

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At 4:33 PM -0700 11/11/97, John Young wrote:
>Dumb of me to get in the middle of this, but the bloodlust's
>up:
>
>Tim's statements are gutsy and right: there's no gain
>in self-censoring, shading one's anger to appease
>the goons of whatever firepower. (Bob, go to end.)

One need only think back to the words of Patrick Henry, Jefferson, Thomas
Paine, and all the others. No doubt Bob H. would have argued that they
should cool their anger, silence their words, and not give King George a
"good reason" to crack down on the Colonies.

Or tell Eugene Debs to stop talking about the illegality of the draft and
stop talking about the mistake of entering the Great War to support some
duchies and satrapies. (Debs was jailed for his _speech_...so much for the
First Amendment, even back in the 1918 time period.)

And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their mind.
And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local prince, to not
rock the boat.

While I don't necessarily put myself  in their class, it's clear to me that
America stands for basically libertarian principles, of letting people say
and read whatever they damned well please. This can include denying the
Holocaust, preaching the Gospel of Satan, calling for certain judges to be
taken out into the parking lot and executed by firing squad, or even
calling for the overthrow of the government.

When we let the spectre of crackdowns by Louis Freeh and Janet Reno cause
us to self-censor ourselves, then they have well and truly won.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221   | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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on or about 971111:1833, in <1.5.4.32.19971111233358.00a03ac8@pop.pipeline.com>, 
    John Young <jya@pipeline.com> was purported to have 
    expostulated to perpetuate an opinion:

>Dumb of me to get in the middle of this, but the bloodlust's
>up:

    the beast, John, remember the beast...

>Tim's statements are gutsy and right: there's no gain
>in self-censoring, shading one's anger to appease
>the goons of whatever firepower. (Bob, go to end.)

    yes, Bob, go to end, before I inflame you even more.
    that goes for the candy-ass left-wing Hallam-Baker, too.

>Most massive firepower can't focus on or hit exclusively
>small targets, that's what's a lie about "surgical" strikes. 
>Waste the countryside, yes, hit one rabbit and not the
>beloved dog and fellow hunter, little chance. What it
>takes is sharpshooting: a one shot, one target, one
>pig, one sticker.

    known fact, wipe 'em out one by one, including their pets.

>True, Horushi's snipe worked, it nailed an innocent, though
>a couple of others died to set him up for his own nailing.

>True, Waco worked, it charred a crowd of innocents, though a
>few others got plugged setting up the roast, and the 2nd roast.

    govt. instigation, to validate their need for more 
    suppressive laws on speech and firearms.

      "And the Clinton administration launched an attack
        on people in Texas because those people were
        religious nuts with guns.
       Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts 
        with guns." 
            --P.J.  O'Rourke.

    Ditto, Oklahoma City. classic case of burying the evidence, 
    literally.

>True, firebombing works, as does mass weaponing --nukes, 
>chemicals and germs -- but indiscriminately, by terrorism
>of the masses, at the price of also terrifying the citizenry 
>paying for the megadeath heritage.

    the zealot does not care. there has never been mercy in
    war, but only the losers stood for "war crimes" --until
    Lt. Calley.

>All standoff firepower is limited against the individual by 
>imprecision of the killing machines and cowardice of the
>operators -- artillery, planes, ships, satellites, take your
>pick. They savage territory to save the operator's ass,
>who, as anyone knows who been around these candyass
>strutters, aint got what it takes to cut the guy's throat
>who's stabbing your eye.

    real easy for the candystripers to send troops they've
    never seen to their deaths --they're just numbers and 
    statistics. the 30 day wonder boy 2nd lieutenant has a
    better than 50% chance of dying with a bullet in his
    back.

    then they send the more blatant and visible ones to
    spec-ops where we can all get down to some serious killing.

    look the killer in the eye --tap him upside the head to
    see if the light is still on, and you can read the writing
    on the back wall of the cranium. reality check.

    I'll take 500 more of those over 50,000 Marines, thank you.

>What's my point? Well, for lack of a better word, it's personal
>courage, going nuts when the time's right, the guts to not shut 
>the fuck up when you're told to by those who're a whole lot 
>bigger, who've got more armaments and thinks they're smarter 
>and more ruthless and meaner and have the troops, rank and 
>medals to back it up. Just remember that most of those strengths 
>are for getting somebody else or a machine to do what is too 
>fucking terrifying to do yourself directly.

    patience, John, patience... let them give the fucking orders,
    then just go and do the job right.  

    dont worry, the strutting bastards will claim the credit for
    your kill anyway.

>Do this when the monster accosts: pull your forelock, say sorry 
>sir, then upstab the fucker's groin, as he doubles, hack the cord,  he'll go
>down quivering, then cut out his liver, kick up his green  face, squat close,
>show him the blob, take a bite, chew, savor,  swallow, put lip to dying ear,
>whisper, "tasty."

    yup, wait until he moves into position, thinking he has his
    way, then put that boot on his gonads all the way to his 
    throat.  patience, patience, kill.

        then toss your calling card on the scene.

>Go home, get a beer, stare the tube, sharpen your tool. Or as
>maddog Tim sez, lock and load.

    I doubt Tim has his tools visible --just handy.

>But look, I'm with Bob, too, my tool's philosophy gone berzerk,
>trash words, wags, gags, alliterations, mouth shooting. My steel 
>weapons are locked from burglars who scare the shit out of me just by looking
>like ordinarily ugly wall streeters, that is, like my maddog  neighbors eyeing
>me for junk IPO sales.

    sure hate to be that maddog neighbor if he rubbed on you, 
    John.  who you kidding?

>Sure glad my war's long over, happily getting dimmer, easier to forget the
>godawful. Hey, it's veteran's day, anybody want to croak and limp  to glories
>past?

    remember 1964.

    my uncle was 40 when he reupped Marines NCO for WWII; he was
    50 when he tried to reup Marines for Korea--they wouldn't
    let him go Marines, but he did go to Inchon as a Navy 
    Seabee...

    in 1950, and even at the beginning of the 60s we thought we
    were doing our duty for God and for country --wrong.
    
    no, and I aint goin' to shut up with those bastards from
    Washington disgracing themselves and pissing away our 
    heritage in the New World Order bullshit --it's them same
    old stories of rape, pillage, and burn by the privileged 
    class --redistribution of wealth, disenfranchise the
    rest of us...  

    nothing new in history; read Catulus or Marcellus from 2,000 
    years ago.

    to the victor goes the spoils? not necessarily.

        to the victor goes the right to [re]write history.

    which is why crypto freedom is our freedom.

   "Giving money and power to the government is like
      giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys"
        --P J O'Rourke

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