On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 09:05 AM, Michael Motyka wrote:
Jim Choate wrote :
This list, at least in the Fraunhoffer region, does on some level emanate a Punk attitude, and tolerating the presence of a crypto-fascist or two is something of a consequence. But I'm sick of seeing the Tim May cops come out every time someone suggests a different political notion.
'Tim May cops'? Not a very punk attitude you have there. You give Tim way! too much credit.
I don't see much apart from anarchy and capitalism - the system is in place and running WOT ( Wide Open Throttle ). Tim just doesn't like some of the players.
Silliness. The name "cypherpunks" was a pun on "cyberpunks," a pun suggested by Jude Milhon, a woman writer for "Mondo 2000" at the time. Being that there is no body which "decides" what our group is called, or even that it _is_ a group, saying that someone's pun on top of someone else's pun means some political ideology attached to degenerates like Sid Vicious, the Dead Kennedy's, etc., is pure silliness. Whether even "cyberpunks" had anything substantive to do with the so-called punk music scene is debatable, but cypherpunks certainly did not. The political ideology of all musical "punks" I have met is decidedly leftist, and not in the way libertarians often like. Rather, the leftists of British socialism, of American Democrat statists, and of Trotskyites in general. It was a pun on a pun, so to speak. Had someone come up with a funnier pun, something better than officious names like "Crypto Rights," that's probably what the loose association of folks would have been called. But no one did, so Jude's name stuck. That Jim Choate is carrying the banner for leftie punkism is not at all surprising. --Tim May "Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001