From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Tue Dec 15 1998 - 05:57:57 MST
Samael [Samael@dial.pipex.com] wrote:
>They want your country?
Which country? I'm an anarchist, not a statist, I don't have a country.
>Great. Have you seen the results fo the dresden Firbombs? The city was
>_gone_.
Uh-huh. So they destroyed a city which was built with no defence against
their attacks. Why should this have anything to do with the future where
cities are designed with defences, and/or where mobility is much easier?
You think they're going to send bombers out to firebomb EvMick's truck?
>You can't dodge them,
Not in a modern fixed house, perhaps. In a future mobile home I just start
up the engine and trundle off towards the next city. If I get stuck in a
traffic queue I set up my radar-guided hypervelocity railguns, dial up
Nuke-The-Bastards, Inc and pledge $1000 for the destruction of the capital
city of whichever country attacked us, then sit back and watch the fireworks.
>and unless you have your own personal shelter (of a damned high
>quality), yoiu're probably better off investing in anti-aircraft gear and
>your own fighter planes than anything else
Again, aircraft aren't the problem, bombs are the problem, and bombs can
be shot down.
>If you look like the sort of person who might pre-emptively nuke people,
>don't you think that everyone else might pre-emptively nuke you, for
>safeties sake?
And where are they going to find me and how are they going to know?
>Most fires threaten whole blocks. And will probably want to use a fire
>brigade to control the fire, as inividual's have neither the training nor
>the equipment to protect their own homes.
You're really stuck in the 20th century, you know. Hasn't it ever occured
to you that an anarcho-capitalist society might, like, be a little bit
different to a modern society?
>Sorry, I thought you wanted to be a libertarian now.
Libertarians think that defence is hard and therefore must be tax-funded
via a central government; this is because most libertarians are too wussy
to accept private ownership of nuclear weapons. I'm sorry to keep
emphasising this point, but as Tim May (a past list member) used to say,
"governments are a target-rich environment"; the only way for a government
to defeat an anarchy is to defeat each individual who's willing to fight
against them... for an anarchy to defeat a government, someone just has to
wipe out the leaders, which is easy when you have cheap mass-destruction
weapons.
This is, for example, one major reason why the Nazis never invaded
Switzerland; in places like France they merely had to get the leaders
to surrender and they had the entire country... the Swiss told the militia
to ignore any orders to surrender and fight to the end.
Mark
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