Re: Br'er Tim and the Bug Hole

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

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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/
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