(Parrthenon) wrote in message ...
But he is not a criminal.

Clearly he is. By his own mouth, he hasn't paid taxes, since... what
was it? 1974?



And odds are that he is, even at this writing, undergoing beatings
and torture at the hands of our boys in Japan. He does not deserve
that in a legal sense, though a few good whacks might help him in
other ways.


The fact that one must invent imaginary crimes against him in order to
defend him just shows how indefensible Bobby really is. By this game,
I could just as easily claim that Bobby personally aided the 911
attacks, tack on the qualifier "the odds are", and use that as an
excuse for jailing him. Except that I would know better than to do
that, and don't really NEED to do it anyway, as the case against him
is much stronger than the case for him.



We should be fighting to help Bobby NOT for his sake but for our
sake. The State has grabbed a man who played chess. It is not
charging him under the internal revenue code,


It may not be charging him, as of *yet*, yet by his own admission he's
guilty of that.



but it is charging him under laws that in another time would have
automatically been ruled unconstitutional because they transfer
legislative authority to the president.


The time is a lot farther removed than you might think. The Executive
Order, right or wrong, goes back at least as far as Andrew Jackson.
Here's a little link you might enjoy about its checkered history:

http://www.sonic.net/sentinel/gvcon5.html

The problem is that, in your case, it's impossible to regard this as a
principled attack on the idea of the Executive Order. I did a quick
Google search on you. You've NEVER on Usenet mentioned this in any
other context but to defend Bobby Fischer (and very rarely even for
that purpose). This is not an issue of yours that you're using the
Fischer case to illustrate. Quite the reverse. Defending Fischer is
your real purpose here, and attacking the Executive Order **in this
one case** is simply a means to that end. If you really cared about
the issue, you'd pick a neutral example to rally around. One in which
you had no personal interest in the outcome. Perhaps even an example
where you were motivated *against* the person you were defending. I
know that you're aware of this problem and tried to get around it by
claiming not to like him since the Brad Darrach book, but when every
word you write about Fischer is designed to aid him, just how credible
is that? In what meaningful sense of the word are you against him?



Bobby is not a criminal, and he remains the only person in the world
charged with having violated an executive order re the embargo against
Serbia.



You undercutting your argument even further here. If you wanted to
protest the Executive Order, why argue around a case that only affects
ONE guy? Why not pick a case that actually affects people, if
attacking the EO is your real goal here?

Has it occurred to you that the reason that nobody else has violated
this may be because they were in *fear* of the consequences, and were
*dissuaded* by the knowledge that, if they were charged, they
themselves wouldn't have a cadre of fans ready to rubber stamp any
wrongdoing that they might commit?



It is a political act by our government.

As an opinion, this is not *untrue* exactly, but it's certainly
misleading to try to imply that this ruling was made to "get" Bobby
Fischer, when in fact it was made before he ever violated it. As Tim
Hanke pointed out, Fischer's lawyer asked for a ruling on whether he
could go, Fischer got the thumbs down, then went anyway, with the full
knowledge and intent of breaking the UN sanctions.



There was once an idea that criminality -- what defined it -- was
based on norms rather than the convenience of the State or the will of
legislators who decide to declare a given act, which was perfectly
legal on Monday, to be illegal on Tuesday, though it may become legal
again next year on a Wednesday.


Now, we know that criminality is based on whether or not you can put
Taimanov away in 6 games, and if you can, you shouldn't have to follow
the rules that mere mortals do. You've admitted yourself that this is
a case that affects ONLY him. If you cared about the EO, you'd have
picked an example that wasn't geared towards protecting just your one
fair-haired boy. I'm sure you're far too intelligent to have set out
to protest the Executive Order, and then *deliberately *chosen an
example that carries with it such a large credibility hit. The
purpose here is simply to help Fischer, nobody else, and this was the
only way that was remotely (very remotely) plausible.

And that's what offends people about Fischer Fans. Though Fischer has
never shown any difficulty in speaking for himself, when he demands
something outrageous, his fans take it on themselves to come up with
some reason why it's not really outrageous, and usually based on
arguments that he never made himself. When he demands 10 wins and a
tie clause for the '75 match, or he's not playing, he never took his
case to the USCF membership. Instead it was left to Charles Kalme to
make up a mathematically tortured and logically challenged explanation
of why Fischer's demands were the only fair thing. Funny, we'd never
noticed it before, but now that Fischer has demanded it, it just HAS
to be right.

And in this case, Fischer never said Word One about protesting the
existence of the Executive Order. That's something that was made up
after the fact to justify him. Quite the reverse, Fischer himself
said he was doing it, specifically to protest the UN sanctions, not
the Executive Order, and listed the UN's support of Israel as his main
reason for disliking them. When asked at Sveti Stefan, "Do you
consider yourself in violation of the United Nations sanctions?",
Fischer replied simply "Yes."

You can say he's innocent all you want, but the fact that he himself
doesn't agree with you ought to present a major problem.



This is a dialectical, Bolshevik understanding of law that denies
the existence of norms.


The idea of playing favorites and excluding those you like while going
after others is hardly much better. Notice the disdain with which
people talk about the tax issue (when they talk about it at all).
"Oh, they MIGHT get him for tax evasion", they sniff, as though it
were somehow distasteful that someone as important as Fischer might
have to answer for something that's really meant only for the mundane
folk. Fischer IS a criminal and a tax evader. He's not somebody who
made an innocent mistake on his return and might get rooked for it,
like the people you OUGHT to be defending. He's somebody who
deliberately and consciously refused to even file a return for almost
20 years.

Yes Virginia, Bobby IS a criminal. The only real question is whether
his chess skills excuse that. Really, I think you should have to have
at least a 3000 rating to be above the law, don't you?



We are all criminals if one defines this status as having broken
some
portion of the federal codex. Not one of us would survive a search of the
codex; not one of us would serve less than 20 years if a bureaucrat
looked for something to nab us.

Sorry, I know this is a bit ad hominem, but it's simply impossible to
believe you really mean what you're implying here. That anybody
should be allowed to violate any rule at any time simply by deciding
for himself that it's unfair. If one is going to protest an unjust
law, (though again, there's no evidence that Fischer actually DID
that, that's something that his friends read in retroactively) one
must be prepared to take the hit for doing so himself, in order to
make it safe for others later. Breaking it yourself in order to
*benefit* from it yourself is a conflict of interest that invites
anarchy. Nobody could ever be punished for anything if we did it that
way. Really, to follow your argument to its logical conclusion,
Fischer himself MUST be punished. We can talk about abolishing this
unjust Executive Order thingy later, but Fischer has to take the hit
in order to make this protest you've assigned to him have any meaning.



So, Bobby has been nabbed for the "crime" of playing chess in
circumstances that did not suit the president of the United States.


I thought he got nabbed for using an invalid passport a full 7 years
after it had expired. The hypocrisy of this guy never ceases to amaze
me. Even after all his Death to America and support for 911 ranting,
he was still travelling around on a US passport. A bogus one, at
that.

You've also muddied the waters (again), by claiming that Fischer got
nabbed for playing chess. He got nabbed for playing chess *for
money*, a small but important point that you left out. For bringing
commerce to an area that was being restricted by UN sanctions. You
may think that trivial, but Jezdimir Vasiljevic did not agree with you
when he said "What I have done just for Serbia and Montenegro is
incomparably greater than just chess or just the chess match alone.
By bringing Fischer to Yugoslavia we have broken the blockade in a
most spectacular manner. The world hit us with all its force and I
think that in this way we have returned at least one punch."

So there we have it. You say it's just about chess, Vasiljevic says
it isn't. You say Bobby is innocent, he says he's not. Before you
can fight your enemies, you've got to fight your friends here. A most
sticky situation to be in, but one which Fischer supporters find
themselves in with uncomfortable frequency.


If we take chess seriously and if we value our own liberties, then
we should be defending
Bobby Fischer.


Well, hopefully you've seen now that that's not the case.