At 10:37 AM -0700 11/14/97, Fisher Mark wrote: ...stuff elided...
I dunno... Sometimes, Bob, I think that you and Tim have so much trouble because you are in such violent agreement about the importance of cryptography...
I had no "trouble" with Bob recently until he launched a major attack on one little phrase, and chose to buttress it with over-the-top foamings about "snot running down his barrell" and allusions to me being a hermit, being a fool, styling myself as a freedom fighter, and various other metaphors about The Old Man of the Mountain, and other stuff I can't quote exactly because I chose to delete Bob's rants after glancing at them. (I found one I hadn't deleted yet, the actual kick-off of this campaign: "Tim's Way Cool Latter-Day Farnham's-Freehold in the Santa Clara mountains.... a bunch of "freedom fighters" like the one you fancy yourself to be these days... instead of shoving your favorite Mac-10 up the nose of every statist treehugger you bump into out there in lotusland.... you won't have to clean the snot off the end of your gunbarrel so often...) A charming way of making his point, eh? Some would call it "clever" writing. I call it just a string of insults. And not even as creative as Detweiler used to pull off. His general writing style, liberally laced with what I think of as "New Wave Journalism" metaphors, is not my writing style, and I usually don't have the patience to wade through his verbiage to find his actual points. Fine. His style is not mine. Neither is John Young's. Or Toto's. Or even Bill Stewart's. Such is life. But overly personal attacks which concentrate on Bob's apparent intense dislike of _my_ style (despite his overuse of disingenuous smileys, like ":-)"), is a different matter. As Monty noted, "Physician heal thyself! Much of your discussion consists of ad hominem attacks with little content such as the paragraph quoted above." I've tried to keep my replies to him brief. It delights me that many of my brief replies have generated long, overwrought replies from him. Delights me as I skim them to get the gist of his insults, then send his missive into oblivion. If Bob has objections or differences of opinion, fine. But he should not squander his reputation capital by foaming about my personal choices, by referring to snot running down my barrel, by claiming I said I was going to kill a judge, and other such lies. And he really ought to tone down his "Hunter S. Thompsen wannabee" style of writing. It was old a couple of years ago. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."