poli-sci (08/03/82)
>From JoSH@RUTGERS Mon Aug 2 20:14:33 1982 Poli-Sci Digest Tue 3 Aug 82 Volume 2 Number 159 Contents: The Guns of San Francisco (2 msgs) Libertarian SF (3 msgs) Habib etc (2 msgs) WIN Loses ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 29 July 1982 16:30-PDT (Thursday) From: KING at KESTREL Subject: San Francisco's gun collection I hear San Francisco has collected about 25 guns so far. Things could pick up, but somehow I doubt that too many people are going to queue up to return their hardware. More seriously, does the city pay for this hardware? If so, how is the price settled? If not, why isn't this an unlawful taking? Proponents of the law were claiming something like 200K or more handguns in SF. If this is true, and they cost $100 each, it would cost the city $20 million to make good. Not staggering, but a tidy sum, to say the least. Dick [One wonders if the Constitutional provision for fair reimbursement in eminent domain applies. Does anyone know if the Morton Grove law has been challenged on this ground? (It has been challenged, but I don't know any specifics, and the case(s) is still in court, and probably will be for a while.) --JoSH] ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 1982 08:55 PDT From: Sybalsky at PARC-MAXC Re: the San Francisco handgun ban: According to the SF Chronicle, only about 15 guns have been turned in since the law was passed a month ago. There are an estimated 70,000 handguns in the city. The police chief, in his benevolence, says that the police will not make house-to-house searches. Gee, thanks; it's comforting to know that any time he thinks it necessary, he can over-ride the fourth amendment. ------------------------------ Date: 29 July 1982 2042-EDT (Thursday) From: Hank Walker at CMU-10A Subject: Weaver stance? Is this where Earl Weaver stands close to an umpire in preparation for slugging him? [As I'm sure you already know, the Weaver stance is the one used all the cops on TV, as it provides for the best semi-profile shot of the jutting, determined, chin. --JoSH] ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jul 82 22:57:57 EDT (Sat) From: Steve Bellovin <smb.unc@UDel-Relay> Subject: Libertarian SF My concern with the book you mentioned is whether it tells a story or it preaches. By coincidence, I just finished reading "The Venus Belt", and was mulling a submission on it to SF-LOVERS. Briefly, I thought it was awful. Now -- I'm *not* condemning the books for its political outlook. I enjoy most Heinlein stuff (though not the more recent ones), and Pournelle is one of my favorite authors. The difference is that Pournelle and Heinlein tell a good story, and get their message across unobtrusively; Smith would periodically forget he was writing a novel and assume he was still writing a political platform. I also didn't think it was a particularly good presentation of the libertarian philosophy, nor do I think it answered the substantive quarrels I have with libertarianism (except by stating that they don't matter). The best explicit example I can cite is at the very end, where Bear questions the effect on the Solar System of Venus being scattered hither and yon. Rather than an attempt at a factual answer, all we get is a polemic on how life *has to* have an effect. Now -- it may be that munging Venus won't harm anyone. Or it may be that the amount of harm is sufficiently small that the good (and the profits and damage payments) more than compensate. But that isn't my point -- everyone else denied the validity of asking the question! (Note: this is a criticism of the book, not libertarianism.) --Steve ------------------------------ Date: 2 Aug 1982 1802-EDT From: JoSH <JoSH at RUTGERS> Subject: Re: Libertarian SF (re "Alongside Night") Read it and see what you think. I personally thought that the references to and explanations of libertarian background material were given verisimilitude by similar references to the Marx brothers, Gloamingerism, old monster movies, Dungeons and Dragons, etc, etc; there are enough gratuitous details of everything that gratuitous libertarian details don't stick out. Have you read "Probability Broach", to which "Venus Belt" is a sequel? The concensus seems to be, even among rabid anarchists like myself, that PB is readable on its own merits, whereas VB is something of a potboiler. Apparently Smith himself realized this, since he gave up on the propaganda and his next novel was a quite serviceable SF murder mystery. The ending of VB is a deliberate slap at those who think that objects have rights of their own which override those of their human owners. Your question of whether blowing up Venus would do any harm, is broken down into two questions: would there be any harm to people and their property, in which case the answer is that any harm must be avoided if possible and compensated if not, and the other question is if any harm would come to things not people or their property, and the answer is that it doesn't matter. The major point Smith tries to make (and doesn't make very clear) is that if Venus is someone's property, and they want to blow it up, no one else has the right to make them stop. --JoSH ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 1982 1108-PDT Subject: Habib & other negotiators From: WMartin at Office-8 (Will Martin) Seeing news reports and reading comments on Habib's activities brings an area of questions to mind: What is the nature of the administrative support for high-level special missions like this? Is there a special office at State that handles all the arrangements, or does the poor guy have to put up with the normal government travel office hassles and nonsensical regulations? Do they charter a plane for him and leave it at his disposal or does the USAF provide plane(s) and crews or what? He certainly can't use commercial flights in the Middle East these days! (And how does anybody fly into/out of Lebanon now, anyway? I thought the airfield(s) were all masses of bomb craters.) Is he operating under special Presidential orders which authorize him to commandeer US resources (or friendly nation resources under reciprocal agreements) to accomplish his mission? [I am reminded here of the CIA "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards, which had text like "The bearer of this document is entitled to aid and assistance from all US forces. He is authorized to wear non-standard uniform, carry special weapons, and enter off-limits areas. Do not detain or question him. If he is killed, do not remove this document from his body...etc."] What sort of staff does he get? Can he choose them? Are they State employees or other civilians, or military, or a mixture of all types? Who determines what the non-government employees are paid? When the Secretary of State does this sort of thing, there are reams of applicable regulations covering all aspects. What about these special Presidential representatives? Are there Executive branch regulations covering this, or do they just wing it each time? [That seems unlikely!] You know, they never cover this stuff in the novels... When did 007 fill out a travel voucher? The eternal bureaucrat, Will Martin ------------------------------ Date: 2 Aug 1982 12:51:12 EDT (Monday) From: David Mankins <dm at BBN-RSM> Subject: Bechtel and conflict of interest >From an \In These Times/ article on the George Schultz confirmation hearings (in the July 10-Aug. 28 issue): There were two issues on which Schultz would have been open to an embasrrassing attack. In 1975, the Ford administration sued Bechtel, when Shultz was executive vice-president, for including language in its contracts with Saudi Arabia that honored the Arab boycott of firms that did business with Israel. The government case was settled out of court, but Bechtel, as Senators Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) and Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) noted, has continued to be the voice of Saudi Arabia in American politics. Pressler stated that during the AWACs-sale debate, Bechtel representatives in South Dakota, where Bechtel has a major project underway, pressured him through the state's governor to back the arms sale. And Shultz admitted that Bechtel's Washington lobbyist had pushed for the sale. Bechtel has even produced a documentary for public distribution that attempts to boost Saudi Arabia's image.... An even more embarrassing issue was introduced by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Ca.). Bechtel, which builds nuclear power plants around the world, played an important role in trying to prevent the Ford administration from stopping West Germany's sale of plutonium and reprocessing equipment to Brazil in 1975. Cranston revealed a letter from a Bechtel official to the Brazilian government offering to sell the fuel if West Germany could not--actions that placed Bechtel squarelyu in opposition to the official U.S. attempt to halt nuclear proliferation. When Shultz claimed that the Bechtel letter had been written by an "over-enthusiastic middle-level official" who didn't represent the company's overall views, Cranston didn't even persue the matter to the extend of asking whether the official was subsequently fired or disciplined. <End of citation> ------------------------------ Date: 31 July 1982 02:50-EDT From: James A. Cox <APPLE at MIT-MC> Subject: WIN loses To: WDOHERTY at BBNA cc: POLI-SCI at MIT-MC I fear that the readers of WIN magazine are sadly misinformed on many subjects if the quotations cited by Doherty are an accurate representation of the entire contents. For example: .... it isn't so surprising that the US government spent one thousand three hundred billion dollars of taxpayers money between 1946 and 1976 on defense while the standard of living and well-being of Third World people declined considerably. Where in the world did that last claim originate? For many years there has been a steady, albeit slow, growth in the per capita incomes of the poorest Third-World countries. Richer Third-World countries have done much better, with an annual increase of about 3.5 % in recent years, matching the performance of the industrialized countries. [Figures above are credited to David Landes, a well-known historian of economic development.]. I don't have the knowledge to contest the data about US nuclear "threats" against Third-World countries. I will limit myself to a few observations. First, assuming what Doherty quoted is correct, it seems strange that the US would feel a need for using nuclear weapons in Nicaragua, in Guatemala in 1954 or in Lebanon in 1958. In those countries, US conventional forces alone were so far superior to any other force in the area that the addition of nuclear weapons would hardly pose any greater "threat." In any case, I do want to point out that no nuclear weapons have actually been used since 1945. In Indochina, we even preferred to lose the war rather than to resort to nuclear weapons. Remember, a weapon which all Third-World countries know we're too fearful to ever employ against them is hardly much of a threat. I also object to the phrasing in the statement that the US contemplated using nuclear weapons against "the people of Korea and Indochina." This equates "the people" with the Communist invaders and revolutionaries, an equation quite dubious in the case of Indochina and ridiculous in the case of Korea. This is probably a consequence of the queer dictionary employed by many leftists, in which the left always represents "the people," no matter what the evidence to the contrary (El Salvador's election is a case in point.) ------------------------------ End of POLI-SCI Digest - 30 - -------