OT: Celebrity advice

[Alex Martelli]

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:

> Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote previously:
> |No, you're not taking the word "ultimately" far enough.  First the
> |state tries to get painful on your ass, so you resist.  Then they get
> |really violent, and still you resist.
> 
> Just as a question of biology, a person can be locked in handcuffs, or
> in a metal cage, and be neither dead nor have the power to kill others.
> This limit comes not out of the compromise and will-power of the
> detained person, but simply out of physics and anatomy.  In most
> "ultimate" cases of state-sponsored violence, this is what happens...
> not someone being killed.

That depends on the determination of said person and his friends to
resist arrest -- with what means and to what extent.  If the state's
power to arrest is not to be merely theoretical, it must be backed by
military ability (and will to exercise it) which exceed those of the
people's meant to be arrested.

People who do not understand this may not have lived their lives in
the land of the Mafia, I suspect -- when the prospect of a group of
organized criminals commanding armed power [[which is admittedly a
mere fraction of the state's, a limitation which however is partly
compensated by far higher readiness to use it in lethal ways]] is 
not a theoretical conumdrum, but a living and vivid reality.  And as
a consequence the corps of Carabinieri, midway between the normal
Police (also armed and quite ready to kill, but not a full-fledged
military organization) and other corps such as the Army, Navy etc.


Alex