At 10:23 AM 8/27/96, Jonah Seiger wrote:
This is an important debate that unfortunately seems to be dividing the net.community when we most need to be united. All of us working on net-policy issues share a common vision and goals - promoting the free flow of information, preserving and enhancing First Amendment values and protecting individual privacy. There are, for better or worse, many different views on the best way to accomplish those objectives, and the debate over who has the right tactics seems to frequently escalate in to religious war.
Not an unusual thing online (Windows! Mac! Windows! Mac! Linux!).
Meanwhile, our opponents are well organized, determined, and do a much better job of keeping their internal strategic differences to themselves. Perhaps this is part of the reason they keep kicking our butts all over town.
I swer I had this conversation somewhere recently, and those of us involved in it came up with one reason this rift seems to come up so often and get discussed so publically, especially in comparison to our "organized, determined" opponents. I would hazard a guess that those people working within the cause of electronic freedoms tend not to be the simple order-following, authority-heeding sort (compared to, say, followers of the Religious Right). It's easy if you're Ralph Reed to send out a flyer or get the telemarketters working and tell the troops what to do. It's not as easy if you're, say, Jonah Seiger. Not because of Jonah (or Shabbir, or Declan, or whoever), but because of his audience. It's not a push-button response with us. And I'm still not convinced (as I wasn't last year when I was more heavily involved in some of this) that these differences of opinion have to somehow be kept behind-closed-doors. That has always stuck me as the way -they- do it (if I can stoop to using a Them for a moment), and never as a way that was inherently required. It's like the Gulf War or something. "Hey, we're at war, stop criticising, we need to be united!" Hogwash. -----------------------------------------------[ Christopher D. Frankonis ]--- --------------------------------------------------[ baby-x@cyberpolis.org ]---