Re: The Net and Terrorism

[snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>]

On Tue, 2 Jul 1996, John Deters wrote:
> At 03:44 PM 6/30/96 -0700, you wrote:
> >in reality. it seems to me no nation-state has ever experimented with
> >trying to take away the root causes of violence and discontent. 
> But here in the U.S., we ARE trying to take them away via the educational
> system.  About the only thing we can effectively do is to provide more
> educational opportunities that denounce violence, racism, hate crimes, etc.
> However, you cannot eliminate discontent without eliminating greed; which is
> simply not possible.

     <snort> Bullshit. The root causes of violence and discontent are not 
persistent "us against themism". The root causes are situation dependent,
but would fall into 3 areas:

	1) boredom.
	2) lack (of food, housing, land, etc. Also includes perceived lack)
	3) Response to the perceived threat against the 2).

    It is my opnion that the education system in this county is a breeding 
ground for violence and discontent for in several ways:

	1) By almost totally failing to prepare students for "Real Life"
           while at the same time telling them what wonderful intelligent
           humans they are, it sets them up for 1 & 2 above. 

        2) Given the revisionist teachings often presented in schools, and 
           the current practice of "blame the white man", certain ignorant
           (see 1) individuals feel threatened leading to 3 above. 

	As I said in an earilier post, IMO one of the things that has
kept the levels of terrorism down in this country (unless you count things
like the KKK as terrorism...just thought of that hmmmm...again caused by 
the 1 & 3 as well as occasionaly 2 above). 

> The countries that sponsor terrorists have not been noted for their
> successful educational systems.  And they certainly are not going to listen
> to Western discussions on how best to solve their "problems".

      They have also not been known for their freedoms. The USSR 
supposedly exprted quite a bit of terrorism, especially by proxie. They 
have a decent educational system, but free thought is discouraged. 

> My point here is that this behavior is explicitly protected by the Bill of
> Rights.
> So, do you not accept that we have the environment right here that can breed
> violence and discontent?
> For the most part, I see kids today being educated with much less "hatred"
> than even my age group was brought up with (I'm 34).  We're moving in the
> right direction by incorporating diversity in education, entertainment and
> the workplace, but we can never hope to erase it all.  And if even one
> person retains the seed of violence, they can employ the "warfare of the
> weak" -- terrorism.

     Agreed. 

> psychological profiles of people who commit acts of terror.
> >the "problem" of terrorism will be solved when we take the view
> >that insanity and violence is *not* 
> >a natural aspect of human behavior (as TCM tends to suggest), 

	I'd say they _are_ natural. It is natural and healthy to act
violently at times, and insanity is simply a broken [mind brain] shit
happends. 

> >and that
> >there are specific environmental conditions that breed it. like
> >malaria, if you take away the swamplike breeding grounds, you will
> >largely remove it. such a thing is a radical hypothesis, but one that
> >nonetheless has never really been tested in practice.
> As I said above, we can reduce some of the breeding grounds, but we can not
> eradicate them all.  And if one were to conduct a study correlating racist
> attitudes with education with numbers of acts of terror, we might find a
> direct correlation.

	I doubt it. THere are quite a few well educated racists. 

> away.    The point of Tim's essay was that, yes, the net can be used by the
> evil monsters, and yes, the evil monsters are here, and no, the evil
> monsters are not going away any time soon.  Why did you feel it necessary to
> try to slam his fairly well-researched and quite obvious conclusion?

	The monsters are in our heads. They are us. 

Petro, Christopher C.
petro@suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff>
snow@crash.suba.com