On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 11:18:22AM -0700, Matt Beland wrote:
Why are you upset about it?
I mean, there are two possibilities. Either this mailing list is for useful discussion, or it's not.
I don't think Tim is upset (not speaking for him of course but his message had more the tone of boredom and mild curiosity). Yes, this mailing list is for useful discussion. Remember, going over the same old arguments does get stale after a while. There is also an unspoken assumption that folks who hope to be interesting list posters will share a common vocabulary and literature. Books that seem to influence cpunks include Applied Crypto, Heinlein's earlier stuff, Vinge, Ender's Game, Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (a little recent, but still), Road to Serfdom, David Friedman, some of Murray Rothbard and von Mises' work. Lately I've been rereading some of the original public choice theory work out of George Mason (and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy," a great read). I'd guess that except in die-hard lefty cases, it's somewhat difficult to read those kind of volumes and still remain enthusiastic about tax rates that exceed, say, 50 percent and the accompanying regulatory structure. Perhaps more to the point, this list has always been about (at least I discovered it in late 1994) the social and political impacts of crypto and related technologies, and those are probably not incredibly friendly to a hyper-regulatory state. So, yes, the "Klansmen, feminists, nazis, Libertarians of any sort, Democrats, Greens, Republicans" are welcome. But may we ask in turn that they appreciate the vocabulary and literature? -Declan