Against Moderation wrote:
dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) writes:
I believe homophobia is a great way to bring out the censors in people. However, inducing censorship is only part of fighting it. You also need respectable people to some in, argue cogently against the dangers of censorship, perhaps even get some extremely reasonable articles suppressed, and then spread the word about it. I find the freedom-knights tactics' extremely lacking in this second, "clean up and analyze the mess" phase.
Yes but the process is a very long term one--you seemed focused on this specific instance. I'm especially interested in the demise of plug pulling sys admins for example--they should be hung by their balls from the highest pole--the kind of net.slime EFF protects. As for analysis and cleanup that's a bit easier to contain on a list as opposed to the usenet at large.
As a recent example illustrates well, Vulis did a nice job of inducing censorship on cypherpunks. However, I think most peoples' opinions didn't really turn, or at least people didn't realize how serious things were and didn't really care, until Tim May [someone the many freedom-knights hate] started criticizing this censorship in extremely reasonable messages that were suppressed from both the -edited and -flames mailing list.
And for that to happen vivid examples of such censorship had to occur and a snake was exposed as being a snake. Seems like it worked extremely well to me. It also appears that the cleanup you rightly refer to is happening as a natural progression--same will be true hopefully on a broader scale on usenet when others personally get a taste of the censorship that is lurking behind every corner. And for those who jumped on the bandwagon because Mr. May was being censored as oppossed to Dr. Vulis--they are sad people indeed. Steve