Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:28 AM -0500 on 2/14/03, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
> How would you distinguish the actions of the Royal Navy from those of
> ordinary pirates?  Just prettier uniforms, better weaponry, and a bitch
> back in London with a crown on her head, or what?


British privateers weren't supposed to attack you if you were British,
just if you were supporting the French or whoever else,
and the Royal Navy was especially not supposed to attack you unless
you were an enemy of some sort.
Ordinary pirates, on the other hand, weren't supposed to attack you
if you didn't have something worth stealing,
but didn't mind if you were British, unless of course there were a
bunch of Royal Navy ships loitering nearby.

Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[Patrick Chkoreff]

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 05:45 PM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:


Heck, go read some Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey Books. The Royal Navy
earned its own keep with prizes, etc., until long after the
Napoleonic wars...

Come to think of it, the rise of book-entry settlement cooincides
nicely with the end of war for profit.


How would you distinguish the actions of the Royal Navy from those of 
ordinary pirates?  Just prettier uniforms, better weaponry, and a bitch 
back in London with a crown on her head, or what?

-- Patrick
http://fexl.com

Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 10:28 AM -0500 on 2/14/03, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:


> How would you distinguish the actions of the Royal Navy from those of 
> ordinary pirates?  Just prettier uniforms, better weaponry, and a bitch 
> back in London with a crown on her head, or what?

Sounds about right to me.

:-)

Seriously, just chalk it up to emergent phenomena, and you're not too far from the 
truth.

Cheers,
RAH
"A prince is a bandit who doesn't move." -- Mancur Olsen, 'Power and Prosperity'
-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere."  -- Persian proverb

Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[lcs Mixmaster Remailer]

These guys were probably CIA. Now, since they are non-uniformed 
and not carrying arms visibly, and not engaged in hostilities 
qualifying under the Geneva Convetions, they are enemy 
combatants. They don't fall under the Geneva Conventions since 
they were not in qualifying hostilities. The torture and 
"detention" until they turn to fragments of dust, will begin 
now. Nice example the US govt sets. May God have mercy on them.

"BOGOTA, COLOMBIA

A U.S. government plane with five people on board crashed 
Thursday in rebel territory in southern Colombia, and those 
aboard may have been taken away by leftist rebels, a Colombian 
official said.

The Cessna had been headed from Bogota to the Florencia area, 
235 miles (380 kilometers) to the south, when radio contact was 
lost eight minutes before its scheduled landing, said a 
Colombian Civil Aviation official, speaking on condition of 
anonymity.

The official told The Associated Press that he had received 
reports that Colombian army troops had located the plane but 
found no one on board, and that it was feared they had been 
taken by rebels.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman told the AP that the U.S. government 
plane, a single-engine Cessna 208, "crashed near Florencia 
during an attempted emergency landing shortly before 9 a.m. this 
morning. The cause of the crash was apparently engine failure."

The embassy spokesman said the fate of the pilot, co-pilot and 
three passengers aboard was unknown. The Colombian Civil 
Aviation official said all five aboard were believed to be 
American, but the U.S. Embassy spokesman said he was unable to 
confirm the nationalities."

Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 10:05 AM -0500 on 2/13/03, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:


> Is it possible to pull off a project like this in a
> crypto-anarcho-capitalistic society?

It's easy to imagine, whether it's possible, maybe you need bearer
transactions :-), a swarm of privateers, someday.

> Don't get me wrong -- I think the more Burger Kings in Baghdad the
> better.  I'm just wondering if the grand and literally top-down
> project  you describe can only be accomplished by an authoritarian
> state?

Nah. Think India. An entirely private operation until they merged it
with Headquarters a hundred years later.

"Your Majesty is now the Empress of India. One hopes you are
amused..."


Heck, go read some Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey Books. The Royal Navy
earned its own keep with prizes, etc., until long after the
Napoleonic wars...

Come to think of it, the rise of book-entry settlement cooincides
nicely with the end of war for profit.
 None *dare* call it conspiracy


Just unwind the ball of string, boys and girls, and see what's
inside...


Cheers,
RAH


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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and
cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.'"
 -- Patrick O'Brian, 'H.M.S. Surprise'

Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 1:21 AM -0800 on 2/12/03, Lucky Green wrote:

> And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the
> Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the
> minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising
> up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself
> with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating
> and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities?

Apropos of nothing, here's what I wrote yesterday about the entire
article, remembering that Charles Rangel claims to want the draft
back, straw man or not:

At 12:14 PM -0500 2/11/03, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> Wherein we witness the spectacle of Paul Krugman fairly begging
> George Bush to colonize Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> Amazing.
>
> Almost as amazing as "liberal" democrats begging for a return to
> the draft.
>
> "Liberal" logic continues to implode.
>
> "'Round the bowl, and down the hole..."


I wrote the above yesterday because I'm possessed lately by this
goofy notion that "liberals", and "social democrats", and
"progressives", and all the other refried Marxists out there will
collapse like degenerate electrons against their political opposites
into some kind of statist neutronium someday, resulting in something
with the political prayerbook of the modern small-l (as in
lipservice) libertarian "right", with aisles patrolled the usual
knock-you-on-your-head bluenose-and-busybody deacons of
authoritarianism.

Someday.

This was brought on by a Bartley editorial in the Wall Street Journal
a little while ago that observed that Bush & Co. are displaying all
the hallmarks of an emerging establishment, operating under the same
implicit rules, the same leaderless ability to turn setbacks into
opportunities, that the original "liberal" elite was able to do after
the cryptosocialists took over the Roosevelt agenda in the 1930's.


Probably just wishful thinking, internet millennialism, and all that,
but, if it does happen, the technology this list advocates be what,
paradoxically, brings that collapse about. Ubiquitous bandwidth,
cryptographic privacy and authentication and so on, pretty much kill
closed societies, especially those who calculate their prices instead
of discover them with markets.


In such a world, actual Big-L Libertarians, as the political
inheritors of that technological and economic whirlwind, will become
the only logical political opposition to that strange-matter amalgam
of refried Marxism and muscular Christianity, both of which, you
notice, *are* pretty much theocrats.


Like modern neocons had to do under the last 70 years of intellectual
occupation, Libertarians will have to considerably sharpen their
arguments and organization, and do so under a deluge of criticism
that will make the recent liberal pulsar sound like background
radiation.


That is, if we don't all just collapse past degenerate neutron
pressure into the event-horizon of crypto-anarcho-captialism, right?
:-).


Cheers,
RAH
Who -- until whatever degenerate political pressure takes hold -- is
still voting for the muscular Christians, thank you very much, and
who, as a consequence, thinks rather highly of the idea of paving the
entire fertile crescent, after pounding certain political features of
it to rubble, and replacing it all with a giant concatenation of
freeways, strip malls, franchise restaurants and nudie-bars from one
end of the Tigris/Euphrates valley to the other. Albuquerque. That's
it. Albuquerque on the Euphrates. I *love* Albuquerque. Heck, I even
like Walnut Creek (maybe even Concord, too :-)). Yeah. Pave the
cradle of civilization. Who *says* you can't go home again?

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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation 
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'