At 11:42 PM 6/3/97 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
Pickets arise from people getting pissed off about some aspect of their economic life and using their right to free speech to express it.
A solution that doesn't involve legislation (the only kind to promote, IMHO) would be to have a www.socially-aware.org site containing the links to the various businesses, where your picketers can plant their signs, etc. Then, as a socially-aware consumer, I would begin my surfing at www.politically-correct.org, read the union notices, the PETA notices, etc., and then connect to www.beef-n-fur.com via their links. This is a win-win-win type solution. Best of all, there are no legal intrusions being thrust upon anyone. If I'm Joe Sixpack, paid my union dues for the last 25 years, I'm sure as hell going to go through the www.labor.com page to check out the retailers before shopping there. If I'm Jane Greene, I'm gonna make sure no baby seals were clubbed in the making of my hemp shoes, so I'll do my surfing through links from www.green.org's web site. And, if I'm one of the other 80% of the people who don't give a damn about union labor problems, baby seals, or the plight of migrant grape pickers, it'll save me the trouble of ignoring them as I walk by. So what if they only get to preach to the choir? What about the rights of the atheist to not have preaching in their private home, on their modem? (This brings to mind another solution: "The Christian IP Network. Guaranteed to not deliver unto you the E-vil packets of the Demons of Pornographers, Terrorists, Narcotics Traffickers, Money Launderers or Cypherpunks. We're the ISP that delivers only Family-Valued, God-Blessed and Jesus-Approved packets to your customers. Send lots of money now, censors are standing by." Hey, if they want to hide behind a whole firewall full of censors, that's just fine by me.) If Organized Labor or VerdurePax wants to start doing something like this today, they're certainly welcome to do it. For all I know, they might be doing it now. That's the beauty inherent in the system -- if I don't personally care about their issues, they're not sucking up my bandwidth with their propaganda. And say what you like about free speech, since I have to pay MONEY and waste my time on my modem connection, I have the right to not download the bits I don't care about. John -- No one's right to free speech was trampled on by the existence of this e-mail. Either you've voluntarily subscribed to a mailing list that delivers it, or you're voluntarily reading it in a publically available newsgroup or mirror.