Re: Seeing Both Sides

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

<Nice to see I'm back out of TCM's killfile. He apparently figured out he
can run, etc.>


At 12:41 am -0500 on 11/23/97, Tim May lobs a low, slow one, right over the
plate:

> Oh, and as for your typically Hettingian "writing code instead of putting a
> few hundred rounds a week through their ARs and Glocks" insult, you'd be
> surprised to know who I ran into at the Los Altos Gun Range this afternoon.
> And to think he was shooting an AR when he could have been coding "for the
> Cause"!

Actually, <insult> ya yutz </insult> :-), it's exactly *why* I wrote it, if
you notice the time of my posting.

Shooting is a good skill to have. I wish I had it myself. However, I have a
lot more respect for Vinnie, putting in practice at the range -- a firearms
instructor who shoots not only for self protection, but because he likes it
*and* is good at it (as you probably noticed) -- than I do for you, someone
who's on the verge of joining a militia somewhere, though not because
you're shooting per se. There's a difference between being ready for a
confrontation involving gunfire and going out and causing one, which you
clearly seem to be trying to do lately. The former is good sense. The
second is, of course, the act of a loon -- oops, "Freedom Fighter".

Interestingly, those people who are most interested in starting a
revolution are also the people who want to be in charge when the revolution
is over. cf., Townsend's "Don't get fooled again", and Radovan Karadzic. Is
that *you*, Tim?...

Nawwww...


If attacked under the proper conditions, like, say, at Concord, fighting is
a real good idea. :-). If you read interviews with people at the time, and
not, say, 50 years later after several historical revisions, those folks
defended themselves more because an occupying army was marching up the road
straight at them, threatening their lives, limb and property, than for any
political consideration.

That and the fact that they actually had the military wherewithall to slow,
and apparently stop, that army. :-). Being a near-frontier society, where
people still used a, um, geodesic, force architecture :-) to fight bandits,
and had at least a memory of dealing with marauding indians that way, paid
off handsomely. Texas and the Texas Rangers were an analogous situation
with the Commanches, for instance.

Concord is clearly proof that Britain didn't understand that they couldn't
control America anymore and acted on that misinformation. It was *their*
problem, as the revolution bore out.


And, frankly, as a member of a congregation whose church was broken up for
firewood as a "nest of traitors" during the occupation of Boston, and,
having done some myself once in a while, I'm no stranger to the fun and
games of good old fashioned rabble-rousing, something this list seems to
excel at these days. But, the point is, if someone went out alone, in the
middle of, say, occupied Boston, and started shooting, they'd die, and
everyone would call them a fool. And, no, I don't think that modern
Corrolitos, much less Boston itself :-), is the equivalent of occupied, or
even pre-revolutionary war, Boston, either.


Finally, as far as code is concerned -- or even *talking* about
cryptographic technology and what it can do anymore -- the irony of what
*you* do all day, Tim, versus what Vinnie does, is of course, rather
immense.


I'll answer the rest of your post when it crawls to the top of the dreck
pile, like all the rest of them...


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga



-----------------
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/
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