Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
James A. Donald writes: Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. Chris Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] What does it mean for Symbian to be genuinely secure? How was this determined and achieved? There is no official definition of genuinely secure, and it is my judgment that Symbian is unlikely to suffer the worm, virus and trojan problems to the extent that has plagued other systems.
Re: Return of the death of cypherpunks.
-- James A. Donald: Since cryptography these days is routine and uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong reason for the cypherpunks list to continue to exist. John Kelsey The ratio of political wanking to technical posts and of talkers to thinkers to coders needs to be right for the list to be interesting. These days, if one is seriously working on overthrowing the state by advancing to crypto anarchy (meaning both anarchy that is hidden, in that large scale cooperation procedes without the state taxing it, regulating it, supervising it, and licensing it, and anarchy that relies on cryptography to resist the state) it is not necessary or advisable to announce what one is up to. For example, Kerberos needs to be replaced by a more secure protocol. No need to add And I am concerned about this because I am an anarchist And so one discusses it on another list. (Kerberos tickets are small meaningful encrypted packets of information, when they should be random numbers. Being small, they can be dictionary attacked.) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y068Cy3Zv9GExXRbP24QJP5WmHGLz5VKyqNYFKbx 45fkOIGeiTkFnaM7p/URjB/kgn+0mcg8fMsMLmDy7
Return of the death of cypherpunks.
-- From: Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] While I don't exactly know why the list died, I suspect it was the fact that most list nodes offered a feed full of spam, dropped dead quite frequently, and also overusing that needs killing thing (okay, it was funny for a while). The list needs not to stay dead, with some finite effort on our part (all of us) we can well resurrect it. If there's a real content there's even no need from all those forwards, to just fake a heartbeat. Since cryptography these days is routine and uncontroversial, there is no longer any strong reason for the cypherpunks list to continue to exist. I recently read up on the Kerberos protocol, and thought, how primitive. Back in the bad old days, we did everything wrong, because we did not know any better. And of course, https sucks mightily because the threat model is both inappropriate to the real threats, and fails to correspond to the users mental model, or to routine practices on a wide variety of sites, hence users glibly click through all warning dialogs, most of which are mere noise anyway. These problems, however, are no explicitly political, and tend to be addressed on lists that are not explicitly political, leaving cypherpunks with little of substance. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AnKV4N6f9DgtOy+KkQ9QsiXcpQm+moX4U09FjLXP 4zfMeSzzCXNSr737bvqJ6ccbvDSu8fr66LbLEHedb
Re: Any comments on BlueGem's LocalSSL?
-- R.A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] Intel doing their current crypto/DRM stuff, [...] You know they're going to do evil, but at least the *other* malware goes away. I am a reluctant convert to DRM. At least with DRM, we face a smaller number of threats. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ctySJF5hgF1q9fil61pohBVLfj/aT4jWZ/KUf29x 4GuXiNXRF+nY3+3LFo8YpvV4w1S5dwf+LcuAsZWWe
Re: [fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems
-- Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yes, but unfortunately it is not clear at all that courts would find the opposite, either. If a lawsuit names the currency issuer as a defendant, which it almost certainly would, a judge might order the issuer's finances frozen or impose other measures which would impair its business survival while trying to sort out who is at fault. It would take someone with real cojones to go forward with a business venture of this type in such uncharted waters. Anyone can sue for anything. Paypal is entirely located in the US, making it easy to sue, has done numerous bad things, but no court orders have been issued to put it out of business. If a business's main assets are gold located in offshore banks, courts are apt to be quite reluctant to attempt to shut it down, as issuing ineffectual or difficult to enforce orders makes a judge look stupid. People fuss too much about what courts might do. Courts are as apt, perhaps more apt, to issue outrageous orders if you are as innocent. as the dawn. Courts are like terrorists in that there is no point in worrying what might offend the terrorists, because they are just as likely to target you no matter what you do. Government regulators are a bigger problem, since they are apt to forbid any business model they do not understand, but they tend to be more predictable than courts. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG CY46prGSdN80nLrJL5G79zdH2Uu2lRjQHD9mlSsf 4JTEpYw1dnco9AMX6Fvv3Uce0bPsG1TJYg+qpwG5n
Re: On the orthogonality of anonymity to current market demand
-- John Kelsey What's with the heat-death nonsense? Physical bearer instruments imply stout locks and vaults and alarm systems and armed guards and all the rest, all the way down to infrastructure like police forces and armies (private or public) to avoid having the biggest gang end up owning all the gold. Electronic bearer instruments imply the same kinds of things, and the infrastructure for that isn't in place. It's like telling people to store their net worth in their homes, in gold. That can work, but you probably can't leave the cheapest lock sold at Home Depot on your front door and stick the gold coins in the same drawer where you used to keep your checkbook. Some of us get spyware more than others. Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. While many people are rightly concerned that DRM will ultimately mean that the big corporation, and thus the state, has root access to their computers and the owner does not, it also means that trojans, viruses, and malware does not. DRM enables secure signing of transactions, and secure storage of blinded valuable secrets, since DRM binds the data to the software, and provides a secure channel to the user. So secrets representing ID, and secrets representing value, can only be manipulated by the software that is supposed to be manipulating it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3CepcQ59MYKAZTizEycP1vkZBbexwbyiobaC/bXS 44hfxMF4PBKXmc5uavnegOFFCMtNwDmpIMxLBcyI3
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Wikipedia Tor]
-- From: Tyler Durden [EMAIL PROTECTED] A very subtle attack, perhaps? If I were so-and-so, I consider it a real coup to stop the kinds of legitimate Wikipedia entries that might be made from Tor users. And if this is the case, you can bet that there are other obvious targets that have been hammered through Tor. In the long run, reliable pseudonymity will prove more valuable than reliable anonymity. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wE/La87xersBx39sShMCS6TkdqJr6DSYslVdXZkf 4GY6BRCS/b8OBic0E/U36X+dc1UIs2oNAkWyXXCQB
Re: Fwd: Re: MIT talk: Special-Purpose Hardware for Integer Factoring
-- Steve Furlong [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Not that I'm particularly fond of the Prez, but I'm not one of the LLLs who say he's worse than Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Ronald Regan combined.) (Stalin doesn't go into that equation because he was, you know, a good guy whose actions have been misinterpreted.) No no, Stalin was a very bad man - yet, not however, as bad as Ronald Reagan et al. Furthermore the five year plans involved no bloodshed whatsoever, well only a teensy weensy little bit, nothing like what General Motors does in its well known slave labor camps, and the liquidation of the kulaks was self defense against a vicious attempt by the peasants to starve the proletariat. :-) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ikKvUYkvyBE7ikT3WsIGcsxLztiI6VjO7F+lbUPi 43u1MspIR5iABmysKM+9wkz7R+H7AgDDsuhTSZJ4A
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
-- James A. Donald : So when I buy coffee, that is political? Damian Gerow Is it organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee? Locally grown? Locally roasted? Purchased through StarBucks or a local coffee shop? Do the growers use their profits to help the growth of coca plants? Or perhaps to fund research into genetically modifying said coca plants to make them resistant to pesticides? You're damn right it's political. like Ben and Jerry's rainforest crunch, where by buying overpriced and extra fattening icecream, you were supposedly saving the rainforest and preserving indigenous cultures . --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 4C+hXHkc3y/UsCUMCx1hWWfk7CYoEIBHyDzVmvQs 4B8YupK7ecImNY+39UMmwbfxBouJu/1U4cVELH+JQ
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
-- From: ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of Marxism, what exactly do you mean by Marxism? Marxism reinterpreted history as class war, though in fact workers tended to cooperate with bosses and make war on competing workers, and similarly for capitalists. Marxism also reinterpreted the doctrine of inevitable progress as leading to a classless utopia, though somehow the intellectuals would be more equal than others in that utopia - note Marx's contemptuous and snobbish mistreatment of actual workers, and the striking lack of contact that Marx and Engles had with actual workers. Engles writings about the condition of the working class in England are based entirely on what one can see through the window of a coach and four horses while being driven from a luncheon party to a dinner party. Since we had inevitable progress, the past necessarily had to be demonized and made alien, and the further back it went, the greater the demonization and more strange and alien the past had to be, requiring an ever greater rewrite of history. Well time passed, and actual proletarians never showed much enthusiasm for the war effort, so by and by Marxists started looking for new wars, pouring the old wine into new bottles, the old wine being leadership by enlightened intellectuals, group warfare justifying the most horrifying misconduct, massive rewrites of history, and synchronized lying (I heard this from the three different people, so it must be true) - and of course, far from oppressed intellectuals supposedly identifying themselves with distant groups they don't like very much. Observe all the diesel dyke feminists supposedly passionately seeking to protect attractive heterosexual women from date rape. These various isms are not marxism, not exactly, but they bare a striking resemblance to their parent. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG JTnG7EwKWGBKCLMjy9fEelUGWOaNVelhzQKnyKWj 4KYcVP6IOe2k/gw1LLqwMfH5ioyRfGUAvNrJFj/2o
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
-- From: ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? I'd have thought the opposite is true. Most states actively prevent most people participating in politics. The more authoritarian the state, the more in compells people to participate in politics, making eveything they do or think political, for example the endless meetings in Cuba and Mao's china, Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all the time, and all public acts are overtly political. So when I buy coffee, that is political? Surely the non state area of our lives is the non political area of our lives. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG OHqLH7EFCEVGI5CkHzpWzDH3Iyd7w5T1TSE3dyUB 4HvAcBSrD8JQfPtYDs3hHfuCbQWprTcJhov+r6b1+
Re: The ghost of Cypherpunks
-- Did the Cypherpunks have their heyday and that's it? That is it. This is the ghost of cypherpunks. Cypherpunks always was a self contradiction - a political group pushing a fundamentally non political attack upon the state, and thus upon the very existence of politics. This made some sense when the state was attempting to ban and regulate encryption. It no longer attempts to do so, thus cypherpunks today has no real function. Our former evil arch nemesis is now quietly doing government do gooding to make sure that everyone has strong cryptography. Now the cypherpunks project is advanced by more boring stuff: standards, software, and business. Excessive mention of the ideological implications of certain standards and software would be counterproductive. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG SmFa4oMi36RAKGxsYaqtmROD3IFtA0joUvzs+ROw 4XxJQayZH7Q+T8hHbWUkebTqtPmxEnIlz+j/Dt1kG
Re: Private Homes may be taken for public good
-- Bush's favorite judges are radical activists when it comes to interference with most civil rights For the most part, it was conservative judges, judes hated by the democrats with insane extravagance, that voted for against this decision. Bush's favorite judge is probably Thomas, who voted against this decision. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG OATUYUUD6X16QdQnFd2ZgGItmw0TrkkNoR5SYYAZ 4HZTgkPgkgTwPSGrDGUeYo6QjGZU5psCanKPMN479
Re: Lions and tigers and iraqi minutemen
-- James A. Donald: While it doubtless would have been better to behead the Saudi monarchy rather than the Iraqi dictatorship, nonetheless American troops seem to be finding an ample supply of Saudis in Iraq. Major Variola (ret) In what imaginary universe? In the universe where Saudi arabia is concerned about the number of Saudis held in Iraq. http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Region2.asp?ArticleID=127086 --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG lHwkZ3mj6O+XGR8qR2CrktYKElaLqBN+o8xE7dZJ 4sW5xvskkwfx3HMCFhjQD3j0EuXuLI9X9TOx2bUH7
Re: Len Adleman (of R,S, and A):
-- On 21 May 2005 at 15:55, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Please explain what Bush's invasion of a soverign nation had to do with the Saudi 9/11 Theatre? While it doubtless would have been better to behead the Saudi monarchy rather than the Iraqi dictatorship, nonetheless American troops seem to be finding an ample supply of Saudis in Iraq. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG UB064U/DafELO1g1L+J1elpcp4Rm0O4oDPOO5uH+ 4rzwuJwOGk4RYWsWPOFN78tEmJamA31vLTloe7Rnv
Re: WebMoney
-- On 22 Apr 2005 at 16:20, Bill Stewart wrote: Last time I wanted to use an online gold system, I used pecunix as the currency and goldage.net as the payment handler. That was partly because of the fees for the size of transactions I was doing (for small transactions, the minimum fee is more important than the percentage), but partly for convenience - one way to pay Goldage in the US is to go to a bank where they have an account and make a deposit - Wells Fargo is one of their more widespread banks. A procedure that was, of course, anonymous. You probably made a deposit in cash. In the cypherpunk vision, internet transactions should be blinded, so that the adversary cannot do connection analysis. If Ann pays Bob, the adversary can detect this, and perhaps suspect that Ann actually is Bob. We do however have anonymous deposits and withdrawals from internet transaction services, and weakly nymous providers of accounts. Many foreign banks go through the motions of verifying foreign account holders true names, but not all them try all that hard. E-gold goes through the motions, and sporadically enforces its acceptable use policy, which requires you to submit true name information, but really does not try at all for the most part, unless the shit hits the fan. Pecunix does not require true name information - merely an email account at which you are capable of receiving mail - preferably PGP mail. WebMoney does not even require an email account. If you use their classic security system, their client just generates what I assume is a private key on your computer, and that is your identifier. Though these systems permit governments to do connection analysis, most governments are not terribly interested in doing connection analysis on foreigners, and governments do not work well with other governments. Not that I suggest that any of this is an adequate substitute for true Chaumian blinded transactions, but it is a substitute, and also foreshadows demand for such transactions, and a profitable business model based on such transactions. The real obstacle is that 99% of customers cannot understand WebMoney's security, or use Pecunix's PGP based interface. If you try to sell them Chaumian blinded transactions, the average mobster is going to be seriously boggled. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG /rjlkisXJqOtx4zr4jGWmDeW6blJQ6vawOmxFssX 4BiPlDhZsJ7G0P6TTWXEwYNbNs1ylu/oofbIhlUrv
How email encryption should work
-- In my blog http://blog.jim.com/ I post how email encryption should work I would appreciate some analysis of this proposal, which I think summarizes a great deal of discussion that I have read. Here is how email encryption should work: * The user should automagically get his key and certificate when he sets up the email account, without having to do anything extra. We should allow him the option of doing extra stuff, but the default should be do nothing, and the option to do something should be labeled with something intimidating like Advanced custom cryptographic key management so that 99% of users never touch it. * In the default case, the mail client, if there are no keys present, logs in to a keyserver using a protocol analogous to SPEKE, using by default the same password as is used to download mail. That server then sends the key for that password and email address, and emails a certificate asserting that holder of that key can be reached at that email address. Each email address, not each user, has a unique key, which changes only when and if the user changes the password or email address. Unless the user wants to deal with advanced custom options, his from address must be the address that the client downloads mail from as it normally is. * The email client learns the correspondent's public key by receiving signed email. It assigns petnames on a per-key basis. A petname is also shorthand for entering a destination address (Well it is shorthand if the user modified it. The default petname is the actual address optionally followed by a count.) * The email client presents two checkboxes, sign and encrypt, both of which default to whatever was last used for this email address. If several addresses are used, it defaults to the strongest that was used for any one of them. If the destination address has never been used before, then encrypt is checked if the keys are known, greyed out if they are unknown. Sign is checked by default. * The signature is in the mail headers, not the body, and signs the body, the time sent, the sender's address, and the recipient's address. If the email is encrypted, the signature can only be checked by someone who possesses the decryption key. * If user is completely oblivious to encryption and completely ignores those aspects of the program, and those he communicates with do likewise, he sends his public key all over the place in the headers, signs everything he sends, and encrypts any messages that are a reply to someone using software that follows the same protocol, and neither he nor those he corresponds with notice anything different or have to do anything extra other than that when he gets unsigned messages, a warning comes up an unobtrusive and easily ignored warning if he has never received a signed message from that source, a considerably stronger warning if he has previously received signed mail from that source. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG VvdTZKUxpdfcDRAGwBSupIYVIUGAAE5orXRkJl8q 4y7qVNj7u/H3nJLgyAs5pGM2tDFOcyCyC9L+vbbpa
Re: Golden Triangle Drug Traffic Arbitrage?
-- On 23 Mar 2005 at 10:27, Tyler Durden wrote: China pegs it's currency to US currency. With the dropping dollar, this means that there's going to be a larger and larger gap between 'reality' (as measured in the true cost of goods in a free market) and the pegged rate. On Cypherpunks do I need to explain the idea that this difference will inevitably give rise to a big black market to exploit that difference? There will be no black market as long as the chinese government is prepared to buy US dollars from all comers at the official rate. The black market can only happen if they start saying well, you are just a regular person, not a proper registered business, so we will not buy your dollars, unless you give us a good explanation of how you came to have them. In my opinion the official chinese rates are pretty much in line with reality, are reasonable and realistic. The chinese government is prepared to buy and sell unlimited dollars at the official rate, because it thinks that dollars are reasonably cheap at the official rate, and they are reasonably cheap, because they can be used to buy stuff that chinese want, and stuff that the chinese government wants. And if the official rates are not reasonable and realistic, there will be no black market until the chinese government is simultaneously unwilling or unable to buy unlimited dollars at the official price, and also unwilling to change the official price. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG HsbCTO3R0hDvTi4O2HOi/0Y0UtIUZ/LWAkI3C0Wg 4aRr/HrQ9ZtcE0cqgSbp57xoZ1X3xpgldD4zNHi5M
Re: Golden Triangle Drug Traffic Arbitrage?
-- On 23 Mar 2005 at 20:19, Anonymous wrote: If the yuan is actually cheaper than it should be because of being pegged to the dollar, there's a much easier way to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity: simply buy goods in China and sell them in America. And guess what, thousands of Chinese export companies do just that, making money off the economic downhill slide that China has erected spanning the Pacific. This effectively forces Chinese workers to be paid less than they are worth, decreasing their savings and acting as an economic stimulus for China as a whole. Your economics is entirely sound, but I disagree with you on one minor question of fact. I doubt the yuan is cheaper than it should be. Seems to me that the fundamental reason why chinese are working cheap and providing us with their excellent goods in exchange for our rather dubious and shaky dollars so abundantly printed by the Bush administration, is that the chinese banking system is even more dubious and shaky. Chinese prefer to stash their wealth in America, rather than in China. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG yC4wWPvE9H0XZCRKPMW6PqvlRX3vgMVfysKz8u6u 44OJ9qSkTtN7rlOcXnJVAQ7CsuzdGN9MlipEX1/yY
Re: [p2p-hackers] good-bye, Mnet, and good luck. I'm going commercial! plus my last design doc (fwd from zooko@zooko.com)
-- On 9 Mar 2005 at 12:14, Eric Cordian wrote: Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating. Bittorrent, alone, starves users who leach without reciprocating, but only in certain very limited ways. As a result of that and swarming Bittorrent has far more bandwidth available than any other file sharing network. You can download big files faster. If you want to download big files, use Bittorrent, or hell will freeze over before your files complete. But it does not have more files available, indeed it has fewer, because there is no reward to users for making a wide range of files available. The enormous success of bittorrent, and its limitations, should tell us that the principle of rewarding uploaders and storers, and starving leachers, is pretty much central to the success of a protocol and its software. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MHH97gJAm7xaefDsVkckpP3M1T3kFYcHHE4T6q6e 4sy0PVrzWWflVPEeAHnZN9+Cf4YNPT7P4feuRNy00
Re: I'll show you mine if you show me, er, mine
-- However, techniques that establish that the parties share a weak secret without leaking that secret have been around for years -- Bellovin and Merritt's DH-EKE, David Jablon's SPEKE. And they don't require either party to send the password itself at the end. They are heavily patent laden, although untested last time I looked. This has been discouraging to implementers. There seem to be a shitload of protocols, in addition to SPEKE and DH-EKE A password protocol should have the following properties: 1. It should identify both parties to each other, that is to say, be secure against replay and man in the middle attacks, in particular, strong against phishing.. It should be secure against replay and dictionary attacks by an evesdropper or man-in-the-middle. Such an attacker should be able to no better than someone who just tries repeatedly to log on to the server with a guessed password 2. It should be as strong as practical against offline attacks by the server itself. The server operators, or someone who has stolen information from them, should not know the users password, and dictionary attacks should be sufficiently expensive that a strong password (not your ordinary password) is secure. Can anyone suggest a well reviewed, unpatented, protocol that has the desired properties? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG A8bCmCXDTAX2Syg907T7uRpajs77l9CqLEii+ezP 42zQDcP3xJXtcLPSgCVa55kew+ALkrQ/I50PFm9lC
Re: I'll show you mine if you show me, er, mine
-- On 24 Feb 2005 at 2:29, Peter Gutmann wrote: Isn't this a Crypto 101 mutual authentication mechanism (or at least a somewhat broken reinvention of such)? If the exchange to prove knowledge of the PW has already been performed, why does A need to send the PW to B in the last step? You either use timestamps to prove freshness or add an extra message to exchange a nonce and then there's no need to send the PW. Also in the above B is acting as an oracle for password-guessing attacks, so you don't send back the decrypted text but a recognisable-by-A encrypted response, or garbage if you can't decrypt it, taking care to take the same time whether you get a valid or invalid message to avoid timing attacks. Blah blah Kerberos blah blah done twenty years ago blah blah a'om bomb blah blah. (Either this is a really bad idea or the details have been mangled by the Register). It is a badly bungled implementation of a really old idea. An idea, which however, was never implemented on a large scale, resulting in the mass use of phishing attacks. Mutual authentication and password management should have been designed into SSH/PKI from the beginning, but instead they designed it to rely wholly on everyone registering themselves with a centralized authority, which of course failed. SSH/PKI is dead in the water, and causing a major crisis on internet transactions. Needs fixing - needs to be fixed by implementing cryptographic procedures that are so old that they are in danger of being forgetten. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Dn3N69hcbr+mL/HUTw8OhGtKmD9rHYOMN4NTBkIY 47AOCXrb7e35xm5QBsHbFVr/jfm+XwTUvzdiytKpG
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- James A. Donald As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property. Steve Thompson Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English? Justin [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights Where we have historical record, this is not the case. Romulus was made King in order that the Romans could abduct and rape women. William the bastard became William the conqueror by stealing land and enserfing people. After George Washington defeated the British, his next operation was to crush the Whisky rebellion. You could say that he defeated the British in order to protect property rights, but his next military operation was to violate property rights, not uphold them. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG h5r7X0d4z7lq2vVpAOdecOCy2txrOnv9O/ymDY+3 4VE2saGBeSH+48fFJ9nuHVOypb45jH6pBBteu3f+Z
Re: SHA1 broken?
-- There is however a huge problem replace SHA-1 by something else from now to tomorrow: Other algorithms are not as well anaylyzed and compared against SHA-1 as for example AES to DES are; so there is no immediate successor of SHA-1 of whom we can be sure to withstand the possible new techniques. Second, SHA-1 is tightly integrated in many protocols without a fallback algorithms (OpenPGP: fingerprints, MDC, default signature algorithm and more). They reduced the break time of SHA1 from 2^80 to 2^69. Presumably they will succeed in reducing the break time of SHA256 from 2^128 to a mere 2^109 or so. So SHA256 should be OK. 2^69 is damn near unbreakable. 2^80 is really unbreakable. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG IQqit8pqSokARYxy1xVLrTaVRSKMAGvz2MXbQqXi 4DAQZgw0sbP3OcD3kgO+x7f+VfsPD4E8EBsB96d/D
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- On 16 Feb 2005 at 0:30, Justin wrote: Judging from social dynamics and civil advancement in the animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and property rights were an afterthought. Recently existent neolithic agricultural peoples, for example the New Guineans, seldom had kings, and frequently had no form of government at all other than that some people were considerably wealthier and more influential than others, but they always had private property. This corresponds to the cattle herding people we read depicted in the earliest books of the old testament. They had private property, wage labor, and all that from the beginning, but they do not develop kings until the book of Samuel, long after they had settled down and developed vineyards and other forms of sedentary agriculture: Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes Thus both our recent observation of primitive peoples, and our written historical record, shows that private property rights long preceded government. Our observations of governments being formed show that governments are formed primarily for the purpose of attacking private property rights. You want to steal something like land or women, you need a really big gang. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG of/pZSLkKATIjG0fWzPvEZnxIsBE/Q0Se80Gx178 4LGYWiIfc2+Us4l38hwPX8mK0CR7hBpVkJ952v8/D
Re: What is a cypherpunk?
-- On 6 Feb 2005 at 19:18, D. Popkin wrote: Yes, but Big Brother governments are not the only way such wisdom gets imposed. Bill Gates came close to imposing it upon all of us, and if it hadn't been for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, we might all be suffering under that yoke today. There is nothing stopping you from writing your own operating system, so Linus did. If, however, you decline to pay taxes, men with guns will attack you. That is the difference between private power and government power. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG IQOesrdAqVhLdsZtGiFJzVPm4eKemvE0rvMznIRG 4e37sO5HcxzRajhvHvVBldBgvI0YdW75A0FNQwWi9
Re: Dell to Add Security Chip to PCs
-- On 3 Feb 2005 at 22:25, Anonymous wrote: Now, my personal perspective on this is that this is no real threat. It allows people who choose to use the capability to issue reasonably credible and convincing statements about their software configuration. Basically it allows people to tell the truth about their software in a convincing way. Anyone who is threatened by the ability of other people to tell the truth should take a hard look at his own ethical standards. Honesty is no threat to the world! The only people endangered by this capability are those who want to be able to lie. They want to agree to contracts and user agreements that, for example, require them to observe DRM restrictions and copyright laws, but then they want the power to go back on their word, to dishonor their commitment, and to lie about their promises. An honest man is not affected by Trusted Computing; it would not change his behavior in any way, because he would be as bound by his word as by the TC software restrictions. The ability to convincingly tell the truth is a very handy one between people who are roughly equal. It is a potentially disastrous one if one party can do violence with impunity to the one with the ability to convincingly tell the truth. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 6B7i0tiB4vUHqQnAP6nXT2z+B+zLB8624+K6+ENU 47fFHg6cY0KInzxMe/l+L2c7LqmPZyrwOSZepYIR3
RE: Ronald McDonald's SS
-- James A. Donald: Note that the main enemy it is aimed against is the CIA, and it's existence was successfully kept secret from the CIA for this time. (For had the CIA detected it, they would have instantly leaked the information, the same way they have leaked so much other stuff.) On 24 Jan 2005 at 19:43, Steve Thompson wrote: I rather doubt that anyone outside of the CIA could really say what they would or would not do in such a situation. They would do what they always done in recent decades - suck up to the Democrat party. (Which is a major improvement on the state department which sucks up to America's enemies.) --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xXYVRz8r4ISHikxse8xuVwxMzucHB3T/3oeeirPa 4RMOddYiQx7wKxSQrA36cczivHFYNiqG4Zrxha+SM
Re: Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States (1997)
-- James A. Donald wrote: Oh wow, let us expand our current highly popular and successful Iraqi operation to embrace a quarter of the world. Wouldn't it be nice? No, come to think of it, it would not be nice. J.A. Terranson Since Mein Fuhrer Bush is preparing to escalate to Iran in a few months, you'd better get used to it. After the unpleasant experience of nation bulding in Iraq, I hope that for the next round, he will stick to nation destruction. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wgw43gq8A2g53kCdBjoluX54Qwjxi4g0gYergxL2 4ZpJWmU7pyS7BAOC50oFHVaTl4jAtT7gJJlwH4E14
Re: Spotting Trouble Identifying Faltering and Failing States (1997)
-- For these reasons it seems to us that military planners and decision makers should be interested in considering new approaches toward aiding failing and faltering states. 4 [...]The cure they propose is conservatorship, under which the United Nations would directly supervise or actually take over the government of a failed state until it became fully capable of administering its own affairs. 7 U.S. military and political leaders should immediately understand, these authors warn, that such a conservatorship would inevitably involve American military participation in some form or another. Oh wow, let us expand our current highly popular and successful Iraqi operation to embrace a quarter of the world. Wouldn't it be nice? No, come to think of it, it would not be nice. The problem is not failed states. The problem is states like North Korea, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, which are not failing, but damn well should. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KZbrHZ/MYP584OnYd7NsjZjmUpn8Srn0ydIoe269 4ATqczLXXya6Ei6jVdqfx7nHh1/Fdp6s6+VCLrdwO
Re: Feral Cities
-- James A. Donald: Terrorists, as we discovered in Afghanistan, tend to piss people off. They need a government that is strong enough to intimidate the locals to refrain from killing them. Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Since when did a few remote Al Q boot camps piss people off? Al Quaeda's job in Afghanistan was to perform the massacres that the Taliban could not trust Afghan troops to do. As reward, they got to do lots of rape. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG XS+RbeI9x56+eGEJSL0XpRb/V4lhlvJ+9hIFdozX 4U+LELZqarYEsN76W5PxOcuYS8LCrTCW7z5upagAP
Re: Feral Cities
-- Feral cities would exert an almost magnetic influence on terrorist organizations. Such megalopolises will provide exceptionally safe havens for armed resistance groups, especially those having cultural affinity with at least one sizable segment of the city's population. Yet Mogadishu did *not* provide an exceptionally safe haven for terrorists On the contrary, terrorists hang out where there are strong governments to protect them, extremely strong governments, govenments that attempt to exercise totalitarian control over every aspect of every person's life, speech, and thought. They hung out in Taliban Afghanistan, and today they hang out in Syria. Terrorists, as we discovered in Afghanistan, tend to piss people off. They need a government that is strong enough to intimidate the locals to refrain from killing them. This hand wringing about failed states is nonsense. We would be a lot better off if more regimes failed - starting with Saudi Arabia, which is at present walking both sides of the road on terror, and speaking out of both sides of its mouth. We should send arms to those that hate the current Saudi regime - and worry which of those who received our arms are good guys and which are bad guys after the regime falls. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG lYYew1mXLqlqClNWre3iWNTQSdUjC3dM+wojwWKP 4ZzkUnYtfu/tX/c5VsLePUrbbJ15Ww5uBlRvLj+Ut
Re: Talking Back to Power: China's 'Haves' Stir the 'Have Nots' to Violence
The title of this post is misleading: The protest is anti government, and pro property rights. For example: [...] People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat, said Mr. Yu, reflecting on the uprising that made him an instant proletarian hero If he was a proletarian hero, he would say the capitalists. Instead he said the government. [...] Last month, as many as 100,000 farmers in Sichuan Province, frustrated by months of fruitless appeals against a dam project that claimed their land, took matters into their own hands. [...] Gee. They took the defense of their own property rights into their own hands. I work like this so that my daughter and son can dress better than I do, so don't look down on me, They are rioting for economic mobility, not for a classless society, but for a society where classes are not hereditary. I heard him say those exact words, said Wen Jiabao, another porter who says he witnessed the confrontation. It proves that it's better to be rich than poor, but that being an official is even better than being rich. The bad guys are not the rich, but those who obtain wealth through poliical power. Cai Shizhong, a taxi driver, was angered when the authorities created a company to control taxi licenses, which he says cost him thousands of dollars but brought no benefits. The bad deeds of the bad guys are economic regulation Peng Daosheng's home was flooded by the rising reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam. He was supposed to receive $4,000 in compensation as well as a new home. But his new apartment is smaller and less well located, and the cash never arrived. The bad deeds of the bad guys are violation of property rights without fair compensation. Li Jian, 22, took part in the plunder. A young peasant, he had found a city job as a short-order cook. But he longed to study computers, said his father, Li Wanfa. The family bought an old computer keyboard so the young man could learn typing. He wanted to go to high school but the school said his cultural level was not high enough, Mr. Li said. They said a country boy like him should be a cook. Again, the call for social mobility, equality of opportunity, not equality. They did not attack any of the restaurants or department stores along the government square, focusing their wrath on symbols of official power. A riot against the state, not against the rich.
Re: Finally, the Killer PKI Application
-- http://sys-con.com/story/print.cfm?storyid=47592 (SYS-CON)(Printview) Finally, the Killer PKI Application Web Services as an application - and a challenge December 22, 2004 Summary Enterprise PKI has a bad name. Complex, costly, difficult to deploy and maintain - all these criticisms have dogged this technology since it first appeared. Because PKI sucks. To the dismay of so many CIOs, few applications have stepped up to make effective use of PKI. Because PKI sucks. A Role for PKI WSS goes to great lengths to remain flexible and not to specify a particular encryption/signing technology. Or in other words, due to the fact that PKI sucks, they have left the door open for a replacement. now the investment may finally be realized. I don't think so. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wBk2DrWHeXk89xcxEqBeSgid7cCLVSNvu1z47YJW 4VzhTnreELC1p4yrs3eDjP2/svE8kzr6HxxP9ToWm
Re: Mixmaster is dead, long live wardriving
-- On 11 Dec 2004 at 8:29, J.A. Terranson wrote: Looking out of my fifth floor window I can connect to ~20 802.x nets *without* directional antennas or high powered cards. With extra gear, I can hit almost 50, and in both cases, roughly a third are completely open, another third are trivially protected, and the remaining third have done the best they can under the circumstances This may explain the lack of wardriving. Why bother to drive? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG GZxQHl5Ys94JIEGFGqHzFIw0CwTw+cJrG2kcpVuC 4om0VpAEKeFBIkSSAJXTDq0ocurOXkmRwScqZa3fV
Re: punkly current events
-- James A. Donald: The reason that taliban caught in Afghanistan, and people with the wrong accent caught in Afghanistan, tend to wind up in Guantanamo Bay is not because Afghan warlords are taking orders from US overlords, it is because Afghan warlords are fighting a holy war against the same people who are our enemies. Bill Stewart: But the Taliban were the US warlords' *friends* Learn some history. The current holy war was going at a slow burn even during the war against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union fell back, any pretense of alliance was dropped, and the flames were in plain sight. These terrorists have been bugging various muslims they deem insufficiently muslim long before they were bugging the west. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wUajaZLtoiBjJKFNy8BqbXfYOsgcNOgbhUPRDpeN 4bqrDBnbVHsw8K/4rUF8UkC0k60jpoqzZoKNYpz03
RE: Blinky Rides Again: RCMP suspect al-Qaida messages
-- On 9 Dec 2004 at 16:15, J.A. Terranson wrote: (3) The other camp believes that stego is a lab-only toy, unsuitable for much of anything besides scaring the shit out of the people in the Satan camp. I have used stego for practical purposes. The great advantage of stego is that it conceals your threat model. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG aV25L9tGoz00uU3bzcY+rbFDV5nX9BCkK67CRwcd 4mBXnVakFBPiPRCdugeDolUdtnd8iueWgYFwR3Pch
Re: punkly current events
-- On 9 Dec 2004 at 19:47, Joseph Ashwood wrote: In short, except for those few people who have some use for MixMaster, MixMaster was stillborn. As one of those few people who have had some use for Mixmaster, it does not seem stillborn to me. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Ro+kP9M7vm+5D5reA+LsRnc0ZS0gmtCx5gMXfF1C 4b44ZbduosEwPf20ABp+i55nWmvT0qNthPt1OryTC
Re: Mixmaster is dead, long live wardriving
-- On 10 Dec 2004 at 21:47, Joseph Ashwood wrote: Wardriving is also basically dead. Sure there are a handful of people that do it, but the number is so small as to be irrelevant. I regularly use the internet through other people's unprotected wireless networks, simply for convenience while travelling, not for any stego or anonymity purpose. So do lots of other people. I only target places convenient to tourists and likely to be rich in unprotected networks. Maybe your network is located someplace where it is not worth the trouble to find it. Sometimes I go down the street and steal some bandwidth just because I find it a change to work in the open air. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG hOnTAnMFC4mbjwvyxYfLSmvpUXtw2xutPOvdyU0k 4Jx3r8szirxwjD/2L68Q0/BDk3jSlebytG9a9+2IQ
Re: punkly current events
-- On 10 Dec 2004 at 6:53, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Name a place which is not subject to US juridiction? Ok, Iran, N Kr, until we pull a regime change (tm) on them. Yeah, they have a lot of 'net bandwidth, right. If Afghanistan was subject to US jurisdiction, it would not have a bumper opium crop. If Saudi Arabia was subject to US jurisdiction, they would not be funding terrorism. If Israel was subject to US jurisdiction, they would be less cavalier about murdering American trouble makers. The reason that taliban caught in Afghanistan, and people with the wrong accent caught in Afghanistan, tend to wind up in Guantanamo Bay is not because Afghan warlords are taking orders from US overlords, it is because Afghan warlords are fighting a holy war against the same people who are our enemies. Similarly Sistani is busily subverting the US favored parties in Iraq, at the same time he is busily subverting US enemies in Iran. He has his own agenda, which on some matters agrees with the US agenda, and others contradicts the US agenda. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 2c9x3EgsLT44LpYQQUlGud/yFuYB783XVxKtOPRY 4FmUuq0u9cIG0iHSOk5xjllcON90ZXsAI+IcJG7X8
Re: geographically removed?
-- Major Variola: Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch. This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems. James A. Donald: The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters. We have a long way to go before police states are the problem. Steve Furlong Heh. When the stasi come a-callin' tell them they'll have to wait because you've got bigger problems. Wonder how well that would work? The stasi are not a callin yet on ecash, and have not been particularly effective against people publishing bittorrents. I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a mature system make use of trusted intermediaries? People issuing e-cash systems want to be irrevocable and anonymous, in part because the market niche for revocable payments is occupied by paypal and credit card companies, but they are running into trouble from fraudsters. They also have trouble from states, but as yet the trouble from states is merely the usual mindless bureaucratic regulatory harassment that disrupts all businesses, not any specific hostility to difficult-to-trace extranational payments. The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary is responsible for making the buyer whole. Is there some reason this wouldn't work? If not, why hasn't anyone tried it yet? Not enough cash flow to make it worth their while? Lots of people have tried it, with varying degrees of success. Not much demand for it yet. A big problem is that whenever any such a website achieves some degree of acceptance, a storm of fake websites appear imitating its name, its look and feel, with urls that looks very similar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y34+Yhj/+imvS+mJMNI1gisrEu1m1KVnVZ1XWcQC 4IiGQ9ui1sYZ89OBlTxmM6HA8I+qJa2Q8CwcRJu3c
Re: geographically removed?
-- On 27 Nov 2004 at 6:43, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch. You assume the police state is competent, technically skilled, determined, disciplined, and united. Observed police states are incompetent, indecisive, and quarrelsome. This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems. The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters. We have a long way to go before police states are the problem. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG j/Q7ovPCBpocpAweY6EuWipd1SYuu09GuF0FDGs4 4F1phVigtAvUzPhC0QjPDP/3SKkY4KUtZc5hRUL9a
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- On 25 Nov 2004 at 10:10, Tyler Durden wrote: More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door to the like of the Taliban, Those who used to mindlessly chant commie propaganda now mindlessly chant islamist propaganda. Just as it was supposedly capitalist oppression and injustice that makes the oppressed masses supposedly warmly embrace their communist liberators, in the same way we infidels supposedly endlessly fight among ourselves. Supposedly that part of the world not under Islamic overlords is Dar Al-Harb (Abode of War), thus leading us to gladly submit to the peace provided by becoming second class citizens under islamic overlords. Dar Al-Islam (Abode of Islam) The violence of which you speak was not warlords fighting warlords, but the Taliban and its predecessor attacking men women and children, for example the shelling of Kabul. The relief that people expected to obtain by submitting to Taliban rule was not relief from fighting each other, but relief from indiscriminate Taliban attacks. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Telq5NhpCgCZDEO1lcOKsyieFYCXtJtqz9XFpas 4FPfkxCbsSj5U8v+827Yg0Rx1b1I/8QU/qUAvToxa
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A Donald wrote... And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? Tyler Durden And the answer is: 9/11 sucked. Oh wait, I guess I have to explain that. After the Soviets were pushed out of Afghanistan the place became a veritable breeding ground for all sorts of virulent strains of Islam, warlords, and so on. Nothing wrong with warlords - right now they are doing a fine job of keeping the Taliban down. What made it a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11 The trouble was that the government abandoned our allies. We should have sent them enough aid to sustain permanent major civil war against the Taliban. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PKHY56Lv+tILn2Qq0fJACuoHr5UrnHsCHuFRofC7 4B3ZCczFe/KNkguYoDENJrgFm5KZ6pJTV/sIRh7wY
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? John Kelsey At least three: a. The pottery barn theory of foreign affairs--we'd be blamed for making things worse. And if we do nothing, we are also blamed for making things worse: Observe, for example 1. the French assist the Hutus to commit genocide against the Tutsis. Capitalism and America get blamed. 2. The Indonesians massacre infidels. Capitalism, Americans and America get blamed. 3. Saddam massacres his people. The CIA, Americans and America get blamed. 4. Syria invades Lebanon. America and Israel get blamed. 5. Africans massacre each other in the Congo. America gets blamed. (Oddly, for once, the CIA, capitalism, and Jews, are not involved.) (I don't know how much this matters long term, but it would certainly have made life pretty hard on Tony Blair and the rest of the world leaders who actually supported us.) The dogs bark and the caravan moves on. b. We would one day like their oil back on the market. They would like that also. Fortunately all the oil is Kurds, or Shiites - the first areas to be secured once the civil war burns down a bit. c. We would like to make sure that the next regime to come to power there isn't someone we also feel obligated to get rid of, as even invasions done on the cheap cost a lot of money. But it is easy and cheap to remove people. It is installing people that is hard, bloody, and expensive. If the dice turn out badly, just roll them again. Nobody teaches soldiers nation building in basic training. They do however, teach them nation smashing. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG cE8rYUZGiDSDZk4yFeEBDqa3go99WSWJnoTURH4R 4L1KruhmMXw4gVFrzipYHod+HL0bAKAEvFpvwCdUV
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A Donald wrote... What made [Afghanistan] a breeding ground for terrorism was not civil war, but diminuition of civil war. The problem was that the Taliban was damn near victorious. If the US government had maintained the relationship with our former anti communist allies, and kept on sending them arms, we never would have had 9/11 Tyler Durden Well, that's not particularly convincing. First of all, even during the Taliban's reign there were plenty of warlords that ran some regions of Afghanistan. I seem to recall you lot claiming that the Taliban had successfully restored order - (you see the Taliban being able to massacre civilians unoppose as order) There was some truth in that claim. They controlled 95%. Had their been less truth, the Taliban would have had less ability to make trouble. More to the point is that a long term period of chaos and turbulence causes the locals to be willing to open the door to the like of the Taliban, as long as they offer some kind of peace. So we should therefore make sure they cannot offer some kind of peace. In Iraq, the Pentagon cannot supply peace. Why then should we allow those who wish to destroy us provide peace? If we cannot have peace, no one should. The period between Soviet withdrawal and the Taliban was uglier than practically anything imaginable...one batch of warlords would take over, killing the men loyal to the previous batch and raping the women, Nonsense. The ugly thing about the period before Taliban rule was that the Taliban, or people of much the same ideology, would persistently destroy murder and rape in order to get people to submit to their rule. When opposition largely collapsed, their massacres did not cease, though their rapes became more discrete. Instead, they decided to expand their terror onto a wider stage. The war was not warlord vs warlord, it was radical Islamists vs the rest, the rest being warlords and conservative Islamists. The radical Islamists won, but victory did not appease their appetite for terror. and then another batch would take over and do the same thing. All the big crimes were committed by the Taliban or their ally Hekmatyar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG iMxmau6gQqD0z0pAMUXMXDaFhYeKeIIMk+RxXM7G 4oThdqbZEnQ5o4UXBwjhmlFI92anV7zx78zQop+f4
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald: And the problem with a civil war in Iraq is? On 24 Nov 2004 at 2:42, Bill Stewart wrote: Well, once you get past the invalid and dishonest parts of Bush's 57 reasons We Need to Invade Iraq Right Now (WMDs, Al-Qaeda, Tried to kill Bush's Daddy, etc.) you're pretty much left with Saddam tried to kill Bush's Daddy and Replacing the EEEVil dictator Saddam with a Democracy to protect the Iraqi people. Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq, though considerably more reliably. Chances are that after fair and free election, the majority will vote to screw the minority - literally screw them, as in rape being unofficially OK when members of the majority do it to members of the minority. Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach people the virtues of religious tolerance. That is, after all, how Europeans learnt that lesson. And the worst comes to the worst - well today the Taliban are busy kiling Afghans instead of Americans. Wouldn't it be nice if Al Quaeda was killing Iraqis instead of Americans - well actually they are killing Iraqis instead of americans, but wouldn't it be nice if they were killing *more* Iraqis? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PwjZ4PipCdWr8EC4cLgzxV3SAw0bWUhhvejdGR8/ 4XrnLDT2Ed8fBlZ0wGPU0dQOOH2GeZ5kbh7h8N4QF
Re: Fallujah: Marine Eye-Witness Report
-- James A. Donald: Seems to me that permanent civil war in Iraq provides Americans with the same benefits as democracy in Iraq, though considerably more reliably. Steve Thompson You might be more accurate to say that a permanent [civil] war in Iraq benefits miltiary leaders and civilian contractors with a variety of benefits. Permanent holy war in Iraq would keep them busy and out of mischief WITHOUT permanent large involvement from American military. Plus, of course, they would be pumping oil like mad in order to fund it. Finding Al Quaeda is hard. Nation building is even harder. Military training covers nation smashing, not nation building. But arranging matters so that Al Quaeda is busily killing those muslims it deems insufficiently Muslim, and muslims are killing Al Quaeda right back, seems astonishingly easy. It is like throwing a match into a big petrol spill. Why are American soldiers getting shot putting out the fire? Why are Americans dying to stop arabs from killing arabs? We *want* arabs to kill arabs. When arabs kill arabs, we fear that the wrong side might win - but whichever side wins, it usually turns out to be the wrong side. If no one wins, no problem. Nothing like a long holy war with no clear winner to teach people the virtues of religious tolerance. That is, after all, how Europeans learnt that lesson. You're dreaming. People simply do not learn from history. But we learnt from history. Europe, and Europeans, did learn from the European holy wars. Many things would be nice if [group A] were busy killing [enemy B] instead of [group C]. Sadly, this is not a perfect world and the people who need the most killing do not, generally speaking, get it. Perhaps it is a bit of a shame that the kind of broken person who ends up becoming a suicide bomber, a Ted Kaczynski, a Timothy McVeigh, or even a Jim Sikorski, First: Three cheers for Timothy McViegh. Secondly, the people who organize large scale terror can be identified, particularly by locals and coreligionists, which is why they have been dying in large numbers in Afghanistan. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG G5IWMfReu/by3/JCAyrz14Fcz3P/3Cx5EC8D4Nds 4uM10QNnx/FK6otz8rAXMHEfD++OcHoiD5mO/tqBW
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
-- On 14 Nov 2004 at 12:33, Tyler Durden wrote: When it comes to China, even some of the Han-dominated areas are incredibly difficult to get to, and when you start talking about Southern parts of Yunnan, most parts of Tibet, and places like Qinhai and Xinjiang, the idea of a lightening-fast and efficient despotism starts to sound dubious. I have never suggested that any despotism was lightning fast or efficient, and totalitarianism, such as that of Mao and Qin, is even slower and less efficient. It is not travel distance that makes for slow reactions, but the fact that everything has to be cleared with the top, the fact that low level people are forbidden to think. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 56D0bYHQzFhVoqs5hSQzS0qvgik5OwJHVAMVGSfz 4FvsMZXY2Yed7To20MoGIPJ3rszxf79ZaE6XvYlpG
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
-- James A. Donald: Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father. Tyler Durden: You are apparently simply unaware of the real size and terrain of China. There were villages in remote parts of China that were unaware of Mao's death into the early 1980s. Bullshit. Everyone knew that which the regime decided they must know. And if true, which I very much doubt, you are not only arguing that Qin's legalism was a different thing than communism/nazism, you are also arguing that Mao's communism was a different thing than Stalin's communism. It was a lot harder to get to Afghanistan from Moscow than to get to any place in China from Peking, yet every Afghan child knew in painfully excessive detail what Moscow commanded them to know, and the regime was partially successful in preventing them from knowing what it wished them to not know. When, during the great leap forward, Peking commanded unreasonable grain requisitions from the provinces, *all* provinces contributed, and *all* provinces suffered starvation. It is often said that Mao's famine was an unfortunate accident, while Stalin's famines were intentional, but any differences are merely a matter of greater self deception. Both did the same things for the same reasons, but Stalin justified his actions by anti peasant rhetoric - liquidation of the kulaks, whereas Mao justified his action by pro peasant rhetoric, but this is a mere difference in the emphasis in the rationalizations and propaganda, not any difference in means and ends. Both used ruthless terror to establish extraordinary control over a far flung empire that had formerly been ruled by relatively light hand, and then used that extraordinary control to extort extraordinary resources from the peasantry. The difference between Stalin's frequent references to the poor peasants (who were supposedly carrying out the liquidation of the kulaks in revolutionary zeal) and Mao's similar references is merely that Mao was more thorough in creating the simulation of a mass movement. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xGYJrVMJ5Hx9Dgyly/Lt7Vk6TKJAugVqAcp3+7mq 4rvMXJ51mdk2UqHkU40M50T9s5aAMzX99JW0hQGT/
Re: Gettin' Our Scots-Irish Up
-- On 16 Nov 2004 at 10:17, Bill Stewart wrote: The music that I associate with National Review is distinctly not country-western - it's Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto, used as the theme music for Bill Buckley's program Firing Line. They may be putting on country-boy airs, but they're still elitists... Perhaps, but it is characteristic of american conservatives to claim to be rednecks or hillbillies - and characteristic of american leftists to condemn their opponents as trailer park trash, rednecks, hillbillies, and sister fuckers. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KvBpkRgMY1EaRdittHLTuKxpXHzlpZNo6UE55J9v 4c1dfn1oWWGKl5Zmmwoij539ww8jvi8JqwMuasWVW
Re: Iraq II, Come to think of it (was...China's wealthy)
-- James A. Donald: Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug. Tyler Durden Well, this was difficult given that there were probably a good number of Qin Shr Huang's 'subjects' that didn't even know they were subjects until well after Qin Shr Huang died. That seems improbable: Qin had a cult of personality, in which every single person subject to his control had to participate. A subject of Qin, like a subject of Mao, was more aware of Qin, than he was of his mother and father. The proposition that the chinese emperors ruled with a light hand is historical revisionism. Some of them ruled with a moderately heavy hand, some of them with an extremely heavy hand, and Qin was as heavy as it gets. However, the nature, reasons, and byproducts of any particular instance of despotism very hugely...trying to pack them all into one simplistic grid is a formula for. I did not pack them in to one simplistic grid - I said that legalism was much the same thing as communism/nazism, whereas Confucianism is a mixture of that, and also of rule by social conservatives. The rule of Qin was very similar to commie nazi rule. The rule of Qianlong was substantially different. Both were despots, but Qianlong was no totalitarian. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k6s+2bFmGHKlU9v6wCbmGCo+6m4eAEfjtEfJ3b3W 4EcgDCvx/77or2uD2Vhx/20HURcJ8XVeRylOk8puI
Re: The Full Chomsky
-- On 11 Nov 2004 at 14:21, John Young wrote: Chomsky, [...] He makes no apology for his attacks on apologists for the powerful, he is merely better at it than they are. Wherever the master's boot smashes into the face of a child, we can rely on Chomsky to deny the master's crimes, while simultaneously justifying those crimes, and demonizing the child as a CIA agent. Always Chomsky is on the side of evil, of hatred, of the torturer, and against the torturer's victim, as he was on the issue of Pol Pot's Cambodia, when he spread and endorsed the lies of issued by Pol Pot's regime. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG w8wf5p0VKgycj9Ld3q9wBJikPRDq7/6mG2fem3Oi 481l46Enne+sD9gu1SutixMgpaZcYscUEn7FHAJPG
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- James Donald: However Confucianism vs Daoism/Taoism is rather different from what you would get in the west. Confucianism is somewhat similar to what you would get if western cultural conservatives allied themselves with nazi/commies, in the way that the commies are prone to imagine conservatives have supposedly allied themselves with nazis. Taoism somewhat similar to what you would get if anarcho capitalists allied themselves with pagans and wiccans... Enzo Michelangeli [EMAIL PROTECTED] Actually, that doesn't apply to any century. The ancient philosophical school that inspired Mao Zedong was actually Legalism, which provided the theoretic foundations to the absolutist rule of Qin Shi Huangdi In my original post, I said that legalism was pretty much the same thing as communism/nazism, so you are not disagreeing with me, merely re - raising a point I had already raised. However, whereas legalism is much the same thing communism/nazism, confucianism is legalism moderated by conservatism (to whom Mao liked to compare himself). Mao, as many other Chinese reformers and writers of the early XX Century, hated Confucianism as symbol of China's ancien regime and decay. And the commies hated the nazis, as well as other commies slightly different from themselves, and the nazis hated other nazis slightly different from themselves. The conflict between confucianism and legalism does not imply the difference betweent the two is very large, though it is a good deal larger than the miniscule difference between communism and nazism. By comparison, Confucianism was remarkably enlightened, by comparison. Well most things are pretty enlightened by comparison with communism/legalism/nazism. I am less impressed by this fact than you are. Confucianism is despotic and oppressive. Even if confucians do not bury scholars alives, they suppress their opponents by means less spectacular, but in the long run comparably effective. China stagnated because no thought other than official thought occurred. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG HNIR6uGQUMyllJLev2ryOe5xvv1qtUyvgvnFXy4J 4HfiAds3UvnSj3hJTTbW4uTzwvqIlszbh7H0gilkM
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 11:12, Tyler Durden wrote: However, blaming the Chinese response to the Meiji restoration on officially unsanctioned thought illustrates a complete cluelessness about China. During that time Chinese intellectuals (which at the time meant practically anyone who had any kind of an education) regularly debating notions of Ti Yung, or the tension between what is esentially Chinese vs what's useful from the Western World (and by the 1860s it was starting to become clear that the west had some advanced ideas). This is far more than a top-down dictatorship in the Stalinist sense, That is the revisionist version - that china was a free and capitalist society, therefore freedom is not enough to ensure modernity and industrialization - a proposition as ludicrous as similar accounts of more recently existent despotic states. China during that period was the classic exemplar of oriental despotism, the place on which the idea is based. just as the Cultural Revolution was far more than a bunch of teenagers obeying orders. But the Cultural Revolution was merely a bunch of teenagers obeying orders, merely the simulation of a mass movement, with mass compliance instead of mass initiative. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG A3r+IPhnwM5iwqn01H7AuV9g1K9PgqLsYSmZVb6P 4ewsr2ejzouasJCmgOSl3a3j3FucBkMACrPcAsosX
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- ken wrote: And when was this stagnation? R.A. Hettinga wrote: Two words: Ming Navy For those who need more words, the Qing Dynasty forbade ownership or building of ocean going vessels, on pain of death - the early equivalent of the iron curtain. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Iw7Wkew4KTQWmS2lvvIMd7+fR3rWAWagnqJ4cF0k 4Ee4DcVaw474VQFVRrwVAXR4XZSXiaNtRuKXYpsBo
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 15:08, Tyler Durden wrote: The Qing were 1) Manchus (ie, not Han Chinese)...they were basically a foreign occupation that stuck around for a while; and 2) (Nominally Tibetan) Buddhists. Although they of course adhered to the larger Confucian notions, they in many ways deviated from mainstream Confucian beliefs. The mainstream Confucian belief, like the mainstream legalist belief, was that the emperor should have absolute power. The Qing dynasty was successful in giving effect to this belief, and justified that effect on confucian grounds. This makes them more confucian, not less confucian, than the Sung dynasty, for the Sung were confucian merely in intent, much as the current chinese regime is communist merely in intent. Also, you need to get more specific about WHEN during the Qing dynasty you believed this occurred. During the 19th century this is most certainly NOT true, and there are many famous naval battles that occurred between the British and the Chinese navies (in fact, the famous Stone Boat in the Summer palace was built using funds that were supposed to pay for real ships). The Qing dynasty prohibited anyone other than themselves from owning seagoing boats - that is why I called it the equivalent of the iron curtain. But this has nothing to do with Confucianism per se, but is more directly related to good old traditional Chinese xenophobia. The prohibition was not against foreigners sailing, but chinese sailing, so the intent was not fear of foreigners, but as with the iron curtain, fear of chinese wandering outside government control and being contaminated with unauthorized foreign thoughts. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QpsnWCawMTxeL36my3kdz4SvKVqTYqmGh2nPCY2E 4vCwJru3POMcSWlMD2yDlvSJWTIOuNvDNItpg37fe
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 14:29, Tyler Durden wrote: OK, Mr Donald. You clearly imagine the China of 2,500 years ago to operate like a modern 20th century nation-state. You need to rethink this, given a few simple facts: My delusion is evidently widely shared: I did a google search for legalism. http://tinyurl.com/56n2m The first link, and many of the subsequent links, equated legalism with totalitarianism, or concluded that legalism resulted in totalitarianism. 1. There were no telephones during Confucious' time. Pol Pot's goons mostly murdered people by killing them with a hoe, and mostly tortured people with burning sticks. Does this make Pol Pot's Cambodia not a modern nation state? What made the Ch'in empire a modern despotism was total centralized control of everything, and a multitude of regulations with drastic penalties for non compliance. Telephones are irrelevant. It was the liberal use of the death penalty for non compliance, not the telephone, that made it centralized. 2. Several provinces of China are larger than all of Western Europe. Even a very high-priority message could take months to propagate. 3. Control' of China 2500 years ago was almost nonexistent. When a provincial commander marched fresh conscripts from place A to place B, he would do it in the time alloted, and be there on the date specified, or the Ch'in emperor would cut his head off. It is the cut-his-head off bit, and the minute and overly detailed instructions concocted by a far away bureaucracy, that made it a modern totalitarianism. Analogously, in the recent war, Iraqi troops failed to blow several bridges because they had to wait for orders from Saddam. Wireless and telephone did not help. It was a geographically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse set of quasi-nation-states. So was the Soviet empire. Law in early China was NOTHING like what you imagine it to be, and was a higly decentralized affair. So was Stalin's Soviet Empire, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, in the highly unusual sense of decentralized that commie/nazis use. Pol Pot's Cambodia was, like Ch'in dynasty china, decentralized in that they had twenty thousand separate killing fields, but was, like Ch'in dynasty china, highly centralized in that the man digging a ditch dug it along a line drawn by a man far away who had never seen the ground that was being dug. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG kIKFSkaq39tHojTf6+FAu2WFT3X6iHJMyTUNi7kx 4kLyg7PvSEfnbAOwjYFVGCmxNpP52VH6X9inrj6cM
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- James A. Donald. China stagnated because no thought other than official thought occurred. On 12 Nov 2004 at 15:40, ken wrote: And when was this stagnation? Started soon after the Qing dynasty And what were the reasons China did not stagnate for the previous thousand years? When the Song dynasty attempted to appoint important people, they did not necessarily become important people, and when it attempted to dismiss important people, they did not stay dismissed - The Song dynasty was unable or unwilling to give full effect to Confucianism. The local potentates conspicuously failed to behave in a properly confucian manner towards the emperor. The Song emperor could not reliably make local authorities obey him, which mean that his confucian mandarins could not reliably stop anyone other than themselves from thinking - much as today the communists are unable to stop anyone other than themselves from banking - in part because they are reluctant to apply the rather drastic measures that they have frequently threatened to apply. China prospered under Song Confucianism for pretty much the same reasons as it is today prospering under communism. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Yv20dIxJj7Vr+GPh5ImGfq9c3N7OLh5qda5/qc+9 49HxvL6pJJ1duyj3afDTLVoAjtWFWKz322go1DD9I
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- On 12 Nov 2004 at 9:51, Tyler Durden wrote: As far as I'm concerned, what Kung Tze does ca 5 BCE is really consdolidate and codify a large and diverse body of practices and beliefs under a fairly unified set of ethical ideas. In that sense, the Legalists were merely a refocusing of the same general body of mores, etc...into a somewhat different direction. One might call it a competing school to Kung Tze de Jiao Xun, but I would argue only because, at that time, Kung Tze authority as it's known today was by no means completely established. But in a sense, the early legalists weren't a HECK of a lot different from Confucious. Which is a commie nazi way of saying that the the Confucians were not a heck of a lot different from the legalists - and the legalists set up an early version of the standard highly centralized totalitarian terror state, which doubtless appears quite enlightened to the likes of Tyler Durden. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG k9Dumf7XMAhNCRDuxNd2aKQtrN2PqD2p2l3TDcjw 4SMVqw0LGnr3oZKU5v0WQpooJ4tKHdZvNiokzj2e9
Re: The Full Chomsky
-- Tyler Durden wrote: What a fucking idiot. The 3000 were already dead, the 'famine' was about-to-be. A Chomsky nut could say Chomsky helped avert complete catastrophe [...] But this misses the point. Mr Donald will no doubt chime in yammering on about Chomsky's lies, but that also misses the point. Chomsky makes very strong arguments supporting a very different view of world events, and he often quotes primary and secondary sources. No he does not quote primary and secondary sources. He purports to paraphrase primary and secondary sources, When he actually quotes, as he rarely does, he quotes only very small fragments in elaborate and contrived false context, often using made up quotes which resemble, but differ from the original in vital ways. The famine in Afghanistan is a case in point, which has already been discussed in the newsgroups. The sources in original context did not make the claims he attributed to them. I have provided a paragraph by paragraph comparison of source materials with Chomsky's claims about source materials for the issue of the Khmer Rouge - see http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm, but the same story could be written, and indeed has been written, of everything he writes. If you complain that his lies in support of the Khmer Rouge are old news, I will do a similar number on his more recent lies about the Afghan famine. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 7d/sRxIb8lHa8J3zbt56pbk45oa+nV8y90GgLfGL 496eTnLDCz/ALgUZmdM3tMRnhmRw8AcO00m0wSerI
Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
-- Tyler Durden wrote: Fascinating. And typical of the unusual Chinese seesaw that has occurred throuout the aeons between hyper-strict centralized control and something approaching a lite version of anarchy. There's no good mapping of this into Western ideas of fascism, marxism, and economics. Maps near enough. The Chinese concept of legalism is barely distinguishable from German concepts of communism and nazism. However Confucianism vs Daoism/Taoism is rather different from what you would get in the west. Confucianism is somewhat similar to what you would get if western cultural conservatives allied themselves with nazi/commies, in the way that the commies are prone to imagine conservatives have supposedly allied themselves with nazis. Taoism somewhat similar to what you would get if anarcho capitalists allied themselves with pagans and wiccans, in the way that conservatives are prone to imagine that they have, though in reality the pagans and wiccans line up with the greenies and nazis, for the most part. This is the result of a Chinese heritage of politicide and mass murder, whereas the west has a heritage of compromise and negotiation. So in the west, we have ordinary people forbidden from doing banking stuff, but a pile of loopholes in that law, and we do not have the death penalty for unauthorized banking, whereas in China, they do have the death penalty, and despite the death penalty, massive defiance of the law. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG NWin7CjdJuYCUBbj9jwfYAiCHobTuUO1Bw3DLogP 4Unpss2ukPbY+HeKKDTu441IpswCXzfXLuU2FCphs
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: Nobles expected to surrender to other nobles and be ransomed. Commoners didn't respect this, and almost never took prisoners. Henry's orders didn't make that much difference, at best they were a we'll turn a blind eye notification to his troops. The english army was well disciplined, and in battle did what it what it was told. About half way through the battle of Agincourt, King Henry decided he could not afford so many troops guarding so many prisoners, and told them kill-em-all. Nobility had nothing to do with it. It did not matter who took you prisoner. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QwzmnNSSaHhQhQItWATHwnWB7cLchcXDK+wV1pDP 4p0FRureqYrveRbFxz5h7VDonlv9au7JlTFdp/2BL
Re: The Values-Vote Myth
-- J.A. Terranson wrote: The fact is that those who did not vote effectively voted for Shrub. You are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem. Inaction is not good enough. Voting is not a solution. Voting only encourages them. If you vote for a candidate, and he wins, he will then proceed to commit various crimes, and you, by voting, have given him a mandate for those crimes. Further, suppose you think, as I think, that candidate A is a lesser evil than candidate B, but the difference is not much. If you vote for the lesser evil, you will start to rationalize and excuse all the crimes he commits, identifying with him, and his actions. Nor is Kerry a solution. I cannot understand why you Bush haters are so excited about this election when on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Kerry promised to continue all Bush's policies only more effectually. You vote for Kerry because you think he is a liar? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG EDbRclDc5acD10EGJi0ScHZfE2IslIbsawTQvj54 4jjneZ53XniQe2NYlNlFO5PGLTN5vTyDLI5okTjKv
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: That's the traditional Agincourt interpretation. More modern ones (backed up by actual tests with arrows of the time against armour, in which the relatively soft metal of the arrows was rather ineffective against the armour) I find this very hard to believe. Post links, or give citations. (There were other problems as well, e.g. the unusually high death toll and removal of ancient aristocratic lineages was caused by English commoners who weren't aware of the tradition of capturing opposing nobles and having them ransomed back, rather than hacking them to pieces on the spot. Wrong French nobles were taken prisoner in the usual fashion, but executed because the English King commanded them executed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG R2tc27UGwjykTsUjBSVNU/VakHCZzthZfJpceSzP 49ifULPODBC+M+WzhF3jxg1W5+UV7ABaMjvVW7R8b
Re: Why Americans Hate Democrats-A Dialogue
-- James Donald: I routinely call people like you nazi-commies. Eugen Leitl wrote: How novel and interesting. Cut the rhetoric, get on with the program. Cypherpunks write code. I also write code, unlike people like you. See for example www.echeque.com/Kong --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG iRF6jCg0M9tIDOFv9wmxaZxcMi0N2C6vQn8oF4IO 42OhxMux7d4g+wGUgQBqxmiP8H6QXmmOGpbq5bqCd
Re: In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: That's the traditional Agincourt interpretation. More modern ones (backed up by actual tests with arrows of the time against armour, in which the relatively soft metal of the arrows was rather ineffective against the armour) You have this garbled. According to http://www.royalarmouries.org/extsite/view.jsp?sectionId=1025 by the fifteen hundreds, the very finest armor could deflect almost all bodkin arrows - but very few could afford a complete set of the very finest armor - and the battle of Agincourt occurred well before the fifteen hundreds. Presumably the armor improved (and became heavier and more expensive) in response to the battle of Agincourt. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG wY4Gt1+GdEkqgNLQxKrMduPJSg/k6DEUpWEGeADc 48Orz+xAb/+RsojnqG7H/GLzb+Ll5QWvCCvF9MkuG
Re: This Memorable Day
-- Nomen Nescio wrote: To label any argument that points out the obvious circumstance that injustice feeds hatred as communist propaganda, is really only ridiculous, even if it's also dangerously incompetent and as such no real laughing matter. Why do you mention Bin Laden anyway? There are thousands of bigger and smaller groups around the world (they exists in every country more or less) that we'd label as terrorists in the western part of the world. And all of them are instruments of the affluent and well connected. For example Shining Path was not poor peasants, but academics and students. For the most part using terror are not those suffering injustice, and all of them are those inflicting injustice. This is particularly the case with Islamic terror. For the most part it is not those suffering Dhimmi status that engage in terrorism, but those who in their native countries are successful in inflicting Dhimmi status on those of the incorrect religion, and who apply terror in the hope of expanding this success. Al Quaeda attacked westerners because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Afghans. Jemaah Islamiyah because of their considerable success in murdering and raping Timorese and Ambionese. Today's Islamic terrorism, like yesterday's communist terrorism, is the actions of evil men whose considerably privilege and comfort arises from the injustice and oppression that they have successfully inflicted, and that they intend to inflict a great deal more of. Back before the fall of communism, wherever the master's boot smashed into the face of a child, you lot would loudly praise the master, and demonize the child as a CIA agent. Now, after the fall of communism, you are still at it, even though the masters no longer even pretend to be acting to defend the poor and oppressed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG QeJ5sNOExxqx0Vq7NTG0bDDnwEip8vKbsX9+9d8i 4IDiep3tuDmwKA77n4H3u9nHRV2g6oqOWQkRYfFcW
Re: This Memorable Day
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: Well it wasn't the point I was trying to make, which was comparing it to predictions made by (the propaganda division of) another super-power in the mid 1940s about winning an unwinnable war because God/righteousness/whatever was on their side, and all they had to do was hold out a bit longer. Compare the general tone of the WSJ article to the one in e.g. the first half of http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documen ts/htestmnt.htm. But it is hardly a matter of holding out. So far the Pentagon has shattered the enemy while suffering casualties of about a thousand, which is roughly the same number of casualties as the British empire suffered doing regime change on the Zulu empire - an empire of a quarter of a million semi naked savages mostly armed with spears. As quagmires go, this one has not yet got shoelaces muddy. The enemies are the one's that have heroic fantasies of holding out against hopeless odds, as for example Fallujah. The question is not whether the terrorists keep Falljah, but merely whether Pentagon gets a city or a pile of rubble. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 9M6CeBC9wwBisQe3JNJvnnu758kvx8Rq2e2KM9b2 41XkwhnPAbRy29/XaMnNedLxI40PWmNEk4y2tUdn7
Re: This Memorable Day
-- Peter Gutmann wrote: Fighting an unwinnable war always seems to produce the same type of rhetoric, It is a little premature to call this war unwinnable. The kill ratio so far is comparable with Britain's zulu war. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 9YCccdHmWgBxj3a1UFFKM7Xyl1qKvkQYJoNuuZEw 4pOgjIzTXDiWQ1xXvdwBxCk93EgSXiZfQ29ag+5sW
Re: This Memorable Day
-- This post gave me a big laugh. So naive. There are a few basic forces feeding extremism and terrorism around the world and those are inequalities and injustice anywhere. You are quite right, it is unjust that people like Bin Laden are so immensely rich with oil wealth. To remedy this problem, Bush should confiscate the Middle Eastern oil reserves. You are using stale old communist rhetoric - but today's terrorists no longer not even pretend to fight on behalf of the poor and oppressed. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG hB70Rn/r/Izz2zUYn/rVfOyEDZVqu1UUzdNLVJJe 4inRuB429RCVLG1VVfP9Z5CBGfL+mE/dNmP+GZvcb
Re: This Memorable Day
the Northern Alliance. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Jyneib4EqTRVeeBY0/BjpjdEidDWCmp8YSQkckag 47p0ym1TCnknVRDL2q1wHz9ykyIr4wMdZjZBin9s/
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
-- John Young wrote: There is a decreasing chance the US can apply its military might to defeat an unconventional enemy. That kind of enemy is not what long-standing military strategy and most tactics are aimed at. Rumsfeld was hoping to revise that when yet one more mighty military war appeared to head off changing military policy. The US never intended to use its military might to defeat an unconventional enemy. It intended to use its military might in the entirely conventional way to destroy or deter governments that foster terrorism, as was accomplished very successfully in Afghanistan. Regime change in Iraq was supposed to deter Syria and Iran, but they have not in fact been deterred. Saudi Arabia and Libya have been deterred. Indonesia has changed its policy on terror, but it is unclear whether this was the result of the spectacle of Saddam and his bullet ridden sons or honest soul searching. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG nVs3V7urdcH8GOjfhlNYzb0/JWqCDKupA3RE8WE3 4YdwLgC/LWPMsXcHeSFlqJW/NrcK/eDjuprNNcJok
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
-- At 05:09 PM 10/30/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote: The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the struggle. Major Variola The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not an option.. Why not? You keep assuming that Muslims unite, escalate, etc, but if they do, US will escalate also. In fact, there is not much the Islamicists can do to escalate beyond their current extremes. There is a great deal the US could do to escalate beyone its current measures. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG odq504QOMD1tmYFgnLderv0nS117FbcIG83t4MIX 4GzccezZIfj7BfeEbPLrXimv+SU42yCuvTxkLS+Rn
RE: Geodesic neoconservative empire
-- On 29 Oct 2004 at 10:20, Tyler Durden wrote: We're not reducing the quantity of government, just consolidating under a single growing Borg-like government, namely the US. This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq, which is manifestly false. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG TCB2vWoGyhVihGigpgZNddyxcR+FX8/hDPZankmv 4jNqo70KLA5nfPvXptDt0z6bJGMJ0LDIX5iVsCD/p
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: Moral equivalence, the rationale of those who defend tyranny and slavery. Roy M. Silvernail Moral superiority, the rationale of both sides of any given violent conflict. The winner gets to use the victory to proclaim the correctness of their interpretation. A claim that presupposes that the west is just as totalitarian as its enemies, that well known reality is not to be trusted, that newsmen and historians are servants of the vast capitalist conspiracy, so in place of obvious truths, we can substitute any ridiculous fantasy that we find politically conforting, for example Tyler Durden's fantasy that the US attacked Korea, and attacked to impose poverty on Koreans so that the US can be rich, or the widely popular fantasy that the CIA trained Osama Bin Laden. Seeing as Bin Laden's contribution to the revolutionary war against the Soviets was merely roadbuilding, did they train him in roadbuilding? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AErjoTRu9URKg4L+F5xjlOq35GQBD2reuyMhDJ5b 46ur5/+9ZCqnZu8EDgtmmeUH93ImKPyfT6+Pj/QUE
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- R.A. Hettinga This is actually the running fantasy in Marxism since the 1950's, when it turned out that that, instead of the workers eating the bourgeoisie by the firelight or some Glorious Revolution or another, would instead be come bourgeoisie themselves. John Kelsey I think this bit gets at the heart of why the Islamic fundamentalists are hard to deal with. For most people I know, some notion of peace and prosperity is the thing we want from our governments. [...] The Islamic fundamentalists can't offer that. [...] No peace, not much prosperity, but a lot of capital-P Purpose. A place in history, a part of the Jihad. In this sense, it's a lot like Marxism was, back when it had serious adherents; it's a mass movement, like Eric Hoffer talks about. Mass movements of this kind require the promise of inevitable victory. When communism suffered one decisive, uncomplicated, unambiguous defeat, the dominos fell one after another all the way to Moscow. The remaining communists have made some psychological recovery - see for example Tyler Durden's peculiar version of recent history, where in his universe the communists actually won and are still winning, and similarly the Islamists have made a considerable psychological recovery from Afghanistan, but the ideal of date with destiny tends to lose its appeal when you keep picking yourself off the dirt with a bloody nose. In Iraq we face a guerrila movement, and discover, yet again, that guerrilas can only be defeated by local forces - and the boys from Baghdad are not all that local. This gives the Islamicists renewed hope. So what do you do, if, like Israel, you face terrorists embedded in a local population that supports thems sufficiently they can melt into the people? Withdrawal did not work, for the terrorists keep sending car bombs and the like from their stronghold, as in Fallujah. What worked in Afghanistan was to find some local warlord we could live with, someone in no hurry to get his six pack of virgins, someone who might want to put sacks over the heads of the women of his town, but had no grandiose ambitions to stuff all the women of the world into bags, and then we cut a deal with him - we help him his slay his enemies, he helps us slay our enemies. Unfortunately the US plan to bring democracy to the middle east, and to preserve Iraq as a unitary state, keeps getting in the way of this sort of deal. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG o32eoG4KhmccNjDBkOW9upEtn8Lka3zsooGJn8lY 4dMgCNOmt5z/S3km7vma/L6RECrRaVEmnhEZ4E2hb
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 27 Oct 2004 at 9:55, Tyler Durden wrote: There are plenty of counter-examples to the benefits of US interventionism, particularly throughout central America. We saw that when the Soviet Union fell, the US lost interest in central America, and peace and democracy broke out in central America with the victory of those forces that had formerly received US backing, and the defeat of those forces that had formerly received Soviet backing, showing that US meddling in central America, was, as it was claimed to be, a defensive response to Soviet meddling, a defensive response that had the support of the people of central America, and that the suffering of central America was in substantial part caused by Soviet meddling. But apparently, the locals are not particularly happy about the unilateral decisions we've been making in their benefit. Of course, you might chalk this up to fanaticism/Islam or whatever, but I suspect they just don't trust us (Abu Ghraib), Sure they don't trust us, but observe that in the Afghan election, Karzai got 56% of the vote, and the soft-on-the-taliban guys got much the same vote as the supposed representatives of the oppressed masses in Central America - down in the asterixes. I predict a very similar election outcome in Iraq. Sadr may get a dangerously large vote, possibly as large as the Nazis got in the Weimar republic, but anyone who looks aligned with the car bombers will be down in the asterixes. and remember the fact that it was the US that propped up Saddam as long as he stuck to the script. Another tale from your odd parallel universe where the US attacked Korea. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG zEWlCJhdBBReeJ2Tnl5midyyezqcb0uz+y18EzpX 4OAEBY/Hw5iw7juSxIfTFKJsXQRt7junqQKOiLZ07
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: The remaining communists have made some psychological recovery - see for example Tyler Durden's peculiar version of recent history, where in his universe the communists actually won and are still winning, Tyler Durden Again, you live in a world that's evenly divided between black and white. Since I'm not white you figure I must be black. Whatever you are, you have told us a story of the world where the Koreans bravely repelled the evil capitalist American attack, and enjoyed prosperity and progress thereby. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG EqHk0rek72pGIAIvZCiBmJDtn1yvQHDXnJ/0n/ks 4jknM3llghisRUJE2X+8tiw6yn8yqEdesC8+Fy4HC
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 25 Oct 2004 at 21:03, Tyler Durden wrote: The point is this: Almost and side in this world that has committed or commits atrocities can find a true-believing apolegist. Moral equivalence, the rationale of those who defend tyranny and slavery. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 9UPtpcIvFgtu2JFnBNLIA/QPpXk7MkK68mtvmQya 45I4CX0wox3d7YrExie7R1Q+2YFGk2ao4amh5DlM6
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 23 Oct 2004 at 23:37, Adam wrote: You know, the more I read posts by Mr. Donald, the more I believe that he is quite possibly the most apt troll I have ever encountered. Why don't you pick one particular factual claim, for example that Bin Laden was a CIA agent, and defend it, instead of confidently asserting all this wild baloney, and deffending past baloney with an endless stream of new baloney, pronounced with equal confidence? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG xOlAusokL6372cJOfxYIKssrD7fRmaOORj2kjput 4y6M4TN/NDS5VmHOHQML2KCnZmUaNTCeosglcxYJE
Re: Give peace a chance? NAH...
-- James A. Donald For all that is wrong with the US government, remember the condition of people under the great majority of the world's governments: poverty and fear, where the political privilege of a few shatters the economy and forces the vast majority into poverty, for example India, Burma, Nigeria, Vietnam, Pakistan, Cuba Indonesia, and all the rest. J.A. Terranson: You forgot to list the US. You have shown many signs of psychotic loss of contact with reality. The proposition that the government of the US causes similar effects to the government of Burma is over the top even for you. James A. Donald If we were subject to the power of those governments that compose the majority of the world's governments, we would be as poor, unfree, and frightened as the subjects of those governments. J.A. Terranson: And we are not? Uh, no. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG e0paVHj/6w7mGUq7SxSrbVSLTQLi5dWgOYMAlHSF 4w1k4b0rDwMkdMVwrQc2sFCweO4HqwGhhOQDKA3Q7
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: Bin Laden's intent was to make anyone in America afraid - thus the use of airliners, rather than truck bombs. McViegh's intent was to make BATF afraid. J.A. Terranson: This is idiotic. You're claiming that the definition of terrorist is dependent not on the act, but on why the act was committed. Analogously, the definition of murderer depends on why the act was committed. So if I was to go out tomorrow and spread 2000 curies of Ci into the local subway system As payback for Ruby Ridge, this would not be an act of terrorism? That would be terrorism, because regardless of what you *said* your intent was, you would not be targeting those responsible for Ruby Ridge. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG VD3OmstfdjDi423472WFnOcF4OoAi0gOL2FZR45Y 4G2LCL/l1ZIVyRLfDcdladNssQtPhB0PR3mZs2VbO
Re: Give peace a chance? NAH...
-- Adam: This brings up thoughts of prior debates on whether or not US citizens are subject to the International Court. We (the US) are making a habit of forcing our laws on other countries, but yet we are not subject to the laws of an established INTERNATIONAL court; one who's laws are created from a consensus of people of many nations and backgrounds. The hypocrisy of the Bush Doctrine is simply mind-boggling. The same consensus as runs the international human rights commission that condemns Israel while blessing Sudan? The ICC and the world court have a track record that resembles the lowest common demoninator of the governments that sponsor it - They support tyrrany, terror, and slavery, and shattering confiscation of property. For all that is wrong with the US government, remember the condition of people under the great majority of the world: poverty and fear, where the political privilege of a few shatters the economy and forces the vast majority into poverty, for example India, Burma, Nigeria, Vietnam, Pakistan, Cuba Indonesia, and all the rest. If we were subject to the power of those governments that compose the majority of the world's governments, we would be as poor, unfree, and frightened as the subjects of those governments. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG FIkvqRtdx4mKda8MY0+7FCzRw09CvdTSH2IjDCV3 4H7vUDccMZaaLjHdsx+DkMirimYrUgLbOx8ZpmAjm
Re: Airport insanity
-- James A. Donald wrote: You guys just keep making up facts. There were no branches of the armed services in the towers. You are just spouting bullshit, like the story that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that Saddam was installed in a CIA coup, and all those similar lies made up to rationalize terror. J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] OK - I'm out of this discussion. This is either just the worlds most elaborate troll, or Donald's brain is dense enough to used when we finally run out of depleted uranium. In other words you are not willing to either disown or defend any of the claims listed above. Like Chomsky, you want to imply they are obviously true, without quite committing yourself to say in so many words that they are true. Nail your colors to the mast. Pick one of the above and defend it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Z+DB496uVoR/FHJetoWJv6cYEL8yFUDYet7Av/Hs 4SdfwHFAFX9A0KROEm1bmE/hxcqwo480srRy24zrC
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- James A. Donald: McViegh did not target innocents. Bin Laden did target innocents. Roy M. Silvernail I'm confused. Is Mr. Donald saying McVeigh did not surveil his target sufficiently to know that there was a day care center in the damage pattern? Bin Laden's intent was to make anyone in America afraid - thus the use of airliners, rather than truck bombs. McViegh's intent was to make BATF afraid. Analogously, in Iraq, the murder of schoolchildren for accepting candy from Americans, the use of children as human shields. If group A, acting as an organized cohesive entity with single central will, makes people belonging to group B rationally afraid by violent and evil acts, and someone in group B strikes back at group A in order to make group A afraid to do wrong, this is not terrorism, even if innocents happen to get in the way. If instead he goes after the guy who washes the windows for someone in group A, and the friend of the little sister in someone in group A, and the child who smiled at someone in group A, this is terrorism. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 9z/D+14dhYWqJz3LanaRzjhsYSdPrA+GrFSJrVNJ 4lnTkcOSZD+o/0b5hjEfABYlF305Ice+SWzVDUsTs
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- J.A. Terranson: So if I was to go out tomorrow and spread 2000 curies of Ci into the local subway system As payback for Ruby Ridge, this would not be an act of terrorism? James A. Donald: That would be terrorism, because regardless of what you *said* your intent was, you would not be targeting those responsible for Ruby Ridge. J.A. Terranson: And if the station I chose just happened to be the one servicing ATF? If your intent was to nail passing BATF employees, surely hitting closer to their office would be more effectual. Spray some radioactives in the entrance lobby. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG KWVunJBmZ52AZSOdaQb2Q5Zoz2Crn5g0U31NRSlo 4iLTYoVpo0AgmiEow46ObxjN4dPkqPP6I0kKDTG+9
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 22 Oct 2004 at 11:12, Bill Stewart wrote: James - Many, perhaps most, of the POWs at Gitmo weren't foreigners, they were Afghans. Many of the POWs at Gitmo probably were Al-Qaeda or other organized paramilitary groups. But many of them were described by the US propagandists as Taliban fighters - the military arm of the local central government who were legitimate to the extent that any group of warlords who are the current king of the hill are legitimate, Firstly, much of the Taliban is Pakistani, not Afghan. Secondly, if the Taliban were legitimate, their enemies may lock them up for the duration of the war as POWs, Since some elements of the Taliban have not laid down their arms, Taliban prisoners may held for the duration, as POWs, even if they fought in a manner equivalent to fighting in uniform. The Taliban were illegitimate, not on legal grounds, but because they were evil. If someone was in the Taliban, then those threatened by the Taliban have a strong case for locking him up, just as we locked up nazis. Thirdly a government that systematically depopulates large areas of the territory it supposedly rules is not as legitimate as warlords with genuine local roots and traditional authority, who for the most part came to power through religious or military leadership in a spontaneous revolution against tyranny. No one in the Northern alliance ever controlled territory though ethnic cleansing. I can easily imagine circumstances where ethnic cleansing is a legitimate response to an intransigent enemy with strong roots in the local population - but the fact that the Taliban used such measures shows they did not have strong roots in the local population. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG CDUSjXr1dmDzlVeda1332HqM96GZ31CTX2n8IhAm 4Cc7h7PYP1ZhoxEDC8UNo32CFcXQrpBdEEegTPYZ1
Re: Airport insanity
-- John Kelsey I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing. James A. Donald: The pentagon did not have a branch office in the two towers. BATF had an office in the Murrah building. J.A. Terranson Bzzzt! Try again. There were a number of federales in the towers, INCLUDING atf, all the various branches of the armed services, and a large number of spook proxy points. You guys just keep making up facts. There were no branches of the armed services in the towers. You are just spouting bullshit, like the story that Osama Bin Laden was trained by the CIA, that Saddam was installed in a CIA coup, and all those similar lies made up to rationalize terror. Just a few posts ago someone posted that old one that the US started the Korean war by attacking North Korea, in order to make the US rich by imposing poverty on Koreans, despite the fact that we now have the records of Stalin ordering the attack, and despite the obvious and dramatic difference in wealth everywhere between the two sides of the line where the iron curtain used to be - and still is in Korea. The same people spout the new lies in the same breath as they spout the old lies. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG dvBfWIZqEu161Mjru/y6SQOfX5yCTWwAzV2e8e/N 40oki+XXmhK7vuYZqXY+Sr2pWASXQo+gx9TqdXW7/
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 23 Oct 2004 at 19:25, J.A. Terranson wrote: There are all givens to the rest of us - I am trying to fit these arguments into Donald's Reality Distortion Field. Is it also a given to you, as it is to Tyler, that the US attacked North Korea, and that the reason for this attack was to make Koreans poor so that Americans could be rich? Is it also a given to you that the CIA trained Bin Laden? Is it also a given to you that the CIA installed Saddam? Is it a given to you, as it is to Tyler, that the countries on the communist side of the former iron curtain were more successful economically than their neighbors or countrymen on the other side? Is it a given to you that Jews did not turn up for work in the two towers the day they fell? Is it a given to you that Arbenz was democratically elected, and that the guerrilas in Guatemala were an indigenous popular movement that could have won free and fair elections had they been permitted? Is it a given to you that Alger Hiss was framed? Perhaps you need to check some of these givens. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 2xBHaKKtew47vYubi0WVdchRmiM1osWLaPLEM3IJ 4th8Ep6rf2PcPWOoYxyby9cpMSlFehq6Z+8yzjPuc
Re: Airport insanity
-- James A. Donald: The Taliban were illegitimate, not on legal grounds, but because they were evil. J.A. Terranson Using this line of reasoning, Shrub is ripe for that overdue case of high velocity lead poisoning. Doubtless he is, but to suggest that he is comparably evil to the taliban casts doubt on your sanity. James A. Donald: Thirdly a government that systematically depopulates large areas of the territory it supposedly rules is not as legitimate as warlords with genuine local roots and traditional authority, who for the most part came to power through religious or military leadership in a spontaneous revolution against tyranny. J.A. Terranson And if the local warlords are also participating in a vast depopulation, then what? But the Warlords are not. Under the Taliban, huge numbers of people fled Afghanistan, under the Northern alliance, they returned. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG qMEkoNR+blkRZmztAFF4sDeSBoKW6Qe4JhwStmV 4j0SHTtKdNY/S/nI2Tmj5ngKX5y1hL7JFg7xma9t5
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 23 Oct 2004 at 22:58, Adam wrote: I am curious, Mr. Donald, how exactly you define the word terrorist. I request that your definition be generic; i.e. not a definition like anyone who attacks the US.On 23 Oct 2004 at 22:58, Adam wrote: I am curious, Mr. Donald, how exactly you define the word terrorist. I request that your definition be generic; i.e. not a definition like anyone who attacks the US. Terrorist: One who uses terror as a means of coercion. The word was originally coined to describe the committee of public safety created by the french revolution, and was subsequently used to decribe similar regimes, most of them revolutionary, for example Lenin's. However it is equally applicable to non government groups who use similar measures. The difference between guerrilas and non government terrorists is that terrorists target random innocents - for example blowing up schoolchildren for accepting candy from US soldiers, as recently happened in Iraq. Similarly the deliberately capricious executions by most communist regimes, intended to produce a sense of fear and helplessness in their subjects. McViegh did not target innocents. Bin Laden did target innocents. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Kiq2Py/gfRNvDbIgFETkSh12S9ilsTHs1STZ0G+i 4YtWt9FfhBsS+aa3NSU17iXdsABNEuxtdCDwkYKjY
Re: Airport insanity
-- James A. Donald All of the terrorists came from countries that were beneficiaries of an immense amount of US help. Saudi Arabia was certainly not under attack. If they were Palestinians, and they hit the Pentagon but not the two towers, then they would be defending themselves. John Kelsey I'm still trying to understand the moral theory on which you differentiate hitting the two towers from the Oklaholma City bombing. The pentagon did not have a branch office in the two towers. BATF had an office in the Murrah building. So they killed a whole bunch of people, most of whom had nothing to do with what they opposed, but surely including people who were doing business with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Was McViegh targeting people who do business with BATF? Besides which the terrorists did not target them for doing business with Israel, but for World Trade - globalization and all that. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG F1A5ubUDIrbSNLUuleFdhNEKrRgGGTlY3WAjUS9V 4IOaq8sP0KR47YXUJterj5PKXQM9mYdBplIzlApRI
Re: US Retardation of Free Markets (was Airport insanity)
-- On 22 Oct 2004 at 21:08, Tyler Durden wrote: Taiwan is a particularly odd example...it definitely has started forming a modern economy, but then again it had many decades of oppression. It also had swiped billions upon billions of dollars of gold and other substances that backed the Chinese monetary system prior to 1949, so arguably that money had to go somewhere. liar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Ctgvg/767xVvEfZle9c/+vxKC3xtkjiX3R4NVIxk 4EMcaYvfC/Hefr1mG/wP4lnapr70KOuFu4ofYdQSC
Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
-- Tyler Durden The US was in Vietnam trying to fight their way up. So it would have been pretty evident to anyone watching that the US was trying to undermine the PRC. James A. Donald: You live in a world of delusion. Your dates are all wrong, your events are all fiction. Tyler Durden So there was no Vietnam war? The US was not involved? It didn't occur in the 60s? Are you saying that the cultural revolution didn't begin in approximately 1966? That the Sino-Soviet split didn't occur in the late 1950s? Your claim was that the Vietnam war represented the US trying to attack China. In fact it represented the Soviet Union trying to conquer Indochina, as was demonstrated in the bloody and horrifying events that unfolded when the US fled. other countries in the world? Why is it always us (and not other countries) meddling in foreign affairs? In your version the war in Korea was a US attempt to attack China, but in fact we know the war was ordered by Stalin to expand communist domination - the records of his directives came into our hands when the Soviet Union fell. When Pakistan creates the taliban, funds it, arms it, and sends it from Pakistan to Afghanistan to attack Afghans, this is non interference according to you, but when the US arms the Northern Alliance and gives it air support, this is interference. Similarly, when the Soviet Union fell, it swiftly became apparent who had been causing all that trouble in South America. Doesn't that strike you as odd? Yes, I find your delusions extremely odd. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG DN7cdnmrH9zX3nRagGm67SiI6pLZnOIjYLToV2Wa 4C5cyR+u2DuxdY3674t5KX11ODbCXHXaK5XIjMrho
Re: Airport insanity
-- On 21 Oct 2004 at 13:41, Sunder wrote: No you imbecile, I'm telling no one anything, other than you to get a clue. Where did I tell people who are under attack to suck it up? When you tell us it is horrible to lock up in Gautenamo people who show every sign of trying to kill us , and that we deserve their past efforts to kill us, efforts that some of them promptly resumed on release. We are under attack, and you are telling us to suck it up. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG bsIXWc4h29VIJkgExpNjUGgUXb/7oelyrYSTY5hy 4z2stYnmTb7JHw3AHWCBnz9grbOob/owyJwY6xDJS
Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
-- On 21 Oct 2004 at 18:33, Will Morton wrote: The US missed a real trick when Khatami got into power in 1997; he had a huge swell of popular support behind him, and with significant US backing he could probably have outmaneuvered the conservatives and made some real changes. A truly democratic Persian state would be a huge boost to stability in the Middle East How could the US have given him support, short of violent means, such as bombing Tehran, which he was reluctant to accept? Instead, we had the 'axis of evil' hogwash, and lo: the conservatives marginalise Khatami, and we're back to abayas, beards and jihad. You have this back to front. Khatami was marginalized by the mullahs, and BECAUSE he was marginalized, because democracy in Iran was suppressed, the US government THEN included Iran in the axis of evil. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG bOnKco+tbdVSGb2A96fIOzqUlk5hPdfyqVii+Kw6 4n8dzssBv4gYRUzzCUZUGZRnJ7jaPM6R5ewts5h7t
Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
-- James A. Donald: But Khatami was knackered shortly after being elected, so any aid would be aiding the terrorists. We saw how well that worked in Fallujah and Sadr city. June 2001: Khatami re-elected A few months or weeks thereafter, Khatami knackered. Will Morton Either you're trolling, in which case I salute you as a master of your art, or you are wilfully ignorant. BBC June 6 2001, a few days after Khatami's election http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1373476.stm : : Much of the press that backs Mr Khatami's reforms : : has been silenced, and many of the president's : : supporters have been jailed or face charges Had the US supported Khatami, it would have in fact been supporting not Khatami, but rather those who imprison his supporters, and who seek to murder people like me. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG q7pyxdArlCfDAnZE5d3/+IxkWI7iTjT8piFY8Z9P 4EqVTUwRFAWA5KaO8hX5bsicPYMeirjqN7jA2dTqy
Re: Airport insanity
-- James A. Donald wrote: We are under attack, and you are telling us to suck it up. J.A. Terranson No. We are under attack by those DEFENDING THEMSELVES. All of the terrorists came from countries that were beneficiaries of an immense amount of US help. Saudi Arabia was certainly not under attack. If they were Palestinians, and they hit the Pentagon but not the two towers, then they would be defending themselves. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG TazBQdvcQ8iq915Dug3d8ZVm8QLxZw7X3TzUYyIl 4DkboB4fOyw1vcB2E48rceVjwQYN583Qs6efqDL8Z
Re: Seld-defeating US foreign policy
-- James A. Donald wrote: How could the US have given him support, short of violent means, such as bombing Tehran, which he was reluctant to accept? Will Morton Money. Push it through your favourite UN department. Schools and hospitals == goodwill. But Khatami was knackered shortly after being elected, so any aid would be aiding the terrorists. We saw how well that worked in Fallujah and Sadr city. You have this back to front. Khatami was marginalized by the mullahs, and BECAUSE he was marginalized, because democracy in Iran was suppressed, the US government THEN included Iran in the axis of evil. June 2001: Khatami re-elected A few months or weeks thereafter, Khatami knackered. January 2002: Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech February 2004: Rigged parliamentary elections lead to conservative majority --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG awTWa50VppXAeloD/WWVz2J1joqO+pSreygahZBW 4jOiLYK/ThEv65/df4FnAeG1XfpolTTv2+g9uXCPU
