altamira wrote:
>
> There are certain counties in northern CA whose whole economies depend on
> the cannibis trade. The locals make very little effort to enforce anti-drug
> laws, not because they are personally paid to look the other way, but
> because EVERYone's business would suffer if the growers were seriously
> harmed. If you could count on people's self-interest to work this way all
> the time, a bit of payola here and there, plus building up the local economy
> would keep you going; but it DOES seem to be true that there are people who
> live by the creed: "If I can't have it, nobody's gonna have it," who would
> destroy or obstruct out of envy, even though such destruction and
> obstruction have negative effects on everyone's life, including their own.
>
> I think many of the people who call themselves environmentalists fall within
> this category. And I say this as someone who has great concern that the
> human species may be in the process of exceeding the carrying capacity of
> this planet. The most vocal of the "environmentalists" are acting in ways
> that indicate they're concerned with destruction and obstruction per se
> rather than with any love of human-kind.
Actually most active environmentalists are drifting toward an overt
anti-human position. Take the Sierra Club, for example, supposedly a
staid moderate environmental group, advocating the draining of Lake
Powell, which would place a significant power deficit on the Southwest
grid, forcing the construction of large numbers of fossil fuel burning
power plants. This is actually an example of their short sightedness.
While they might be successful in restoring the original habitat of the
canyon, they will be exporting to the rest of the planet the costs of
that effort, in the form of more greenhouse gases, that they are
supposedly concerned about as well, but apparently not enough.
Then take for example the Makah, a small, poverty stricken indian tribe
on the Nortwest coast that has always been shortchanged by the BIA,
living on a small reserveation. The US govt finally stepped up and
honored its treaty commitments protect the Makah's whaling rights, but
now the environmentalists are doing their utmost to interfere with the
Makah religious practices (the whale is the central deity of their
mythology).
If you think Kazinski was alone, you are sorely mistaken. When
universities in California host seminars titled "Kazinski was Right", as
they are now, then its a foregone conclusion that ecotage and
eco-terrorism are now accepted political activities.
>
> Back to the main subject of this post, though--I wasn't thinking of buying
> freedom. Rather, I was thinking in terms of maintaining low profiles.
> Inefficiencies in surveillance, that sort of thing.
Low profiles are good as a first line of defense. I don't keep a
security system on my jeep, it has what I call 'urban camouflage', i.e.
a couple sprayed over rust spots and some peeling paint. When I venture
into the big city criminals look at my car and assume that there can't
be anything valuable there...if and when I buy a new vehicle, I'll
probably spraypaint a patch or two on it just for grins...
THe difficulty with buying freedom is that by conducting the purchase,
you acknowledge that they aren't or weren't yours originally to begin
with.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:14 MDT