Re: CryptoAnarchy: What's wrong with this picture?

[Snow <snow@crash.suba.com>]

On Sun, 28 Apr 1996, jim bell wrote:
> At 08:21 AM 4/28/96 -0400, mkj@october.segno.com wrote:
> >Although they will almost certainly try to extract as much as possible
> >from the poor, you can't get blood from a stone.  Hence the size of
> >U.S., make the prospects of a sucessful popular uprising dubious.
> 
> Quite the contrary, I think that a "successful popular uprising" will 
> require only a very small investment in time and money, in which some of 
> they key players in government are targeted and the prospect exists for 
> easily and cheaply getting the rest.  At that point they will resign in droves.

	Damnit, I KNEW I was gonna wind up agreeing with him. ;)

> avoid taxation, the vast increase in information communicated by the 
> Internet is taking a huge amount of power away from the traditional media, 
> backer of the government in most cases.  In addition, this information flow 
> is making it ever more difficult to pass abusive laws; if the government 

	On the contrary, just as the increased communications let 
opponents know about the legislation, it also lets the proponents know, 
and they supposedly send faxes and email in support. 

> does something stupid in the morning, by noon they are being flooded with 
> faxes and emails.  And the whole concept of having a "governement" tends to 
> be based on the assumption that people are incapable of making decisions for 
> themselves.  That's an increasingly unrealistic position.

	Literacy rates are dropping, the High School Dropout rates are on 
the rise. Hell, listen to talk radio for a while, and you tell me if 
these are the people YOU want running the country. They are motivated 
enough to call in and/or vote, but they aren't motivated enough to 
actually stop and think about the subject, much less learn about it. 
	I am not saying that the average person can't make good 
decesions, only that many of them are not equipped to sort out the 
complexites, nor are they willing to think long term about things. 
Unfortunately this is also true of our leadership. 

Petro, Chistopher C.
petro@suba.com <prefered>
snow@crash.suba.com