From: IN%"llurch@networking.stanford.edu" "Rich Graves" 24-MAY-1996 01:09:35.99 (quoting tallpaul)
Because of the role I played in the campaign to get people to VOTE NO on "rec.music.white-power" many people have sent me e-mail asking about the vote results on several political news groups on the internet. The following is the latest data available as posted in the official USENET news group called "news.groups".
Oh? And were you, tallpaul, behind the mailing to uninvolved mailing lists of politically-biased pleas to vote "no" on that group, sans a copy of the CFV? If I had had time, I would have voted in favor of it on those grounds.
R. Graves was the original proponent of TPN-S. He had opposed the earlier RMW-P group but on technical, not political reasons, and he does, as he once put it, "not consider [himself] anti-racist." Rather Graves opposition centered on whether the nazi news group had demonstrated sufficient interest as a music group, whether it had been properly proposed in terms of proper USENET/uunet electronic paperwork at the like.
I have read over the proposal in question, specifically its latter version. It has a robomoderator that attempts to reach the laudable goal of reducing inappropriate crossposting by persons arguing on this issue. While I have my doubts about how effective this is likely to be (looking for whether approximately identical posts with the same subject line had been posted to the excluded groups would probably be necessary, to prevent spamming tactics from being used), it is a valid goal.
Highly skilled technically, Graves seems quite clueless about the nature of fascism as a political tendency off the internet in the real world. He has opposed individual cybernazi dirty tricks in cyberspace, including some first-class technical tracking of cybernazis using anonymity and other devices to hide their identities. On the other hand, he has announced, for example, that there are only some one-to- two thousand hardened nazis in the entire world.
To my knowledge, Rich has not opposed anonymnity; indeed, he has praised anonymnity as needed on groups such as alt.revisionism. I would be interested in hearing whether tallpaul supports anonymnity; it appears to be on-topic for cypherpunks. (Interestingly, the address from which various non-political mailing lists were sent the aforementioned improper email was either quickly shut down or the product of email header faking, according to the results I got when I emailed the person back with a letter of protest.) I would also suspect that tallpaul may be biased on his estimates of the number of full-blown nazis in existence, although this admittedly depends on definitions; activists are prone, often innocently, to overinflate the problems with which they deal. (I refer interested parties to the statistics on rape customarily used by those promoting action against it; they typically include such occurrences as sexual harrassment - a usage of free speech. While I disapprove of sexual harrassment and tend to regard rapists as proper subjects for the death penalty, I wish activists would be more accurate in their statistics.)
Graves's new view threatens additional ominous organizing by cybernazis on the net as they go for an additional news group even before the results of their previous organizing effort is announced.
Cybernazi organizing is an inevitable consequence of the ability of all minority political groups to organize better thanks to the Internet. They have as much right to organizational activity as anyone else - including anti-fascist activists such as tallpaul. I would suggest reading over some issues of CuDigest with my contributions in them for further discussion on this matter. -Allen