Monday, December 09, 2002

A parable on evil dictators

Let us say that there was a poor child in our community. We found out that this poor child and his friends were mugging people and breaking in to our homes, and vandalized our property. So once in a while we tried to punish him. But finally we realized that our punishments were cruel and we tried a different approach.

Completely out of our desire to stop the vandalism and muggings, we decided to give this child some money. We paid for an education, bought him his own laptop, clothing, and made this child a lot better off in many ways. The child goes through college and leaves college with a number of skills. One of those skills is the ability to maliciously hack in to computer systems.

One night this person goes on line to his home computer and steals money out of the bank accounts of those who have been supporting him for the past few years.

Who is to blame here for this child's behavior?

(For those who do not get the moral here, it is as follows: For all those people who blame the US for funding Saadam/bin Laden/Fidel/... and say that we deserve whatever we get because we funded these people to start with, I ask you what the difference is? All it means is that in addition to being depraved murderers, they are also ungrateful poster children for abortion.)