Since I have no idea who you are, since you are using a remailer, I doubt the Feebs know either.On Fri, 14 Feb 2003 15:29:57 -0800, Tim May wrote:About Byrd's speech, he is protected by the same Bush doctrine. If a less powerful person made these charges, he'd face a "talking to" by the FBI. And after PATRIOT II passes with an overwhelming majority, but after no debate, he'd face having his DNA removed with extreme prejudice at the least, deportation as the middle option, or a life sentence for violations of the Reich Protektion Act as the most severe (assuming he wasn't simply disappeared).
We live in fascist times.
--Tim May
Well Tim, you are my canary. If the feebs ain't working you over, they sure as hell ain't coming for me yet. I mean when you write about people who need to be killed and lather people up with talk about fascists and stuff like that, you at least work your way above me on the list, if you know what I mean.
Besides, remember the Bully Doctrine: only pick on the weak.
A lot of the vocal critics I know--not all on this list!--are of the mind that the public nature of their criticisms gives them better protection than being, for example, unknown to the "community."
Whether people agree with my views or not, I expect that if I am arrested and charged with something I'll get coverage in some parts of the press, and maybe even some support from the commies and socialists in the "civil rights alphabet soup" around D.C.
Of course, having perimeter lights, some alarms I won't discuss, and a loaded 7.62 mm rifle at the ready is a help. I would be honored to kill any intruder I find in my house: self-defense is the essence of our liberty. I might die, but hey, I'll die someday anyway.
Wiping out only a few intruders is sort of a waste, though. I would be more honored if there were a practical way I could exterminate thousands at a time. But I am not a military or explosives expert of any kind, so this is not really possible. I will, however, cheer if a thermonuclear weapon exterminates millions of burrowcrats in D.C.
For the Thought Police who monitor this list, this is completely my right as a real American to advocate anything I wish, to cheer on anything to wish. I don't lard up my posts with the kind of unnecessary quasi-legalistic bullshit that Geraldo Rivera, for example, uses. I don't watch much of him anymore, but he used to preface his mildly-critical remarks with phrasings like "And in my constitutionally-protected opinion, what John Ashcroft is doing is establishing a police state." As a lawyer, he should surely know that the Constitution doesn't require him to couch his views with weasel phrases like "In my opinion" and "It is my judgment that." I can say "Congressvarmints ought to be gassed" as I wish. A hundred years ago it would have been a comment like "Hang them all from the nearest tree." Today, such sentiments usually involve suggesting they be converted to a plasma in a few miliseconds.
One of the few exceptions to this freedom to speak plainly is the official law that makes it illegal to express even vaguely similar comments about a certain dolt who operates at a level above the Attorney General and that ilk. About He Whose Name May Not Be Spoken About in Certain Critical Remarks, all we can hope for is that the nuke goes off before Marine One can be vectored to Andrews to transfer him to the E4B or whatever is currently the flying command post.
When I was accused of planting a bomb to blow up President Clinton, I told them to "prove it." They backed down. They like bluffing, threatening. They use threats and bluffs to try to get the sheeple to burst into tears and confess or blubber about lesser crimes, to try to cut a deal. Someone who they think will mount an active defense in a court room they can't scare as easily.
Orwell had their number. And the technological powers have made the ever-expanding power grab more and more enticing, all in the name of "protecting the homeland."
I don't think Ashcroft or Ridge or Cheney or Bush are bad or evil people. I think they would even recoil in horror if a Democratic Administration were to be proposing the police state measures that came in recent laws and are coming in spades in PATRIOT II. But power is seductive, and technology makes it _S-O-O_ easy to simply add more data fields in the data bases, to demand I.D. in more and more places, to expand covert bugging to more and more people.
It's the power of the state, enhanced by modern computer technology (as Orwell saw, even though computers were not even really known about outside a small circle), that is the problem. The Panopticon of Bentham and others, the inclination of the bureaucrat to collect every bit of information that comes his way.
This is what we need to fight. And this was, and perhaps still is, the promises of unlinkable credentials, of untraceable digital cash, and of "True Names." Crypto anarchy is needed now more than ever.
--Tim May
"The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." --Frederic Bastiat
