At 2:33 pm -0500 on 11/17/97, Monty wrote:
I am of the opinion that Hettinga still has some value, but he should work on his style and do a little more homework before posting.
Homework is for wimps. :-). I work from memory almost all of the time, and everything I say here can be classified as my opinion, and nothing else. Most of the things I state as fact are correct, when you root around on them a bit, like Choate did with the Great Awakening stuff. When I'm wrong on my memory, like the Aurora stuff, I freely admit it. Usually, I try to write myself in some wiggle room, which I should have done with Aurora, because I clearly didn't know what I thought I did about it. And, frankly, I'm too lazy to go look it up when I'm just spewing a rant to cypherpunks for my own entertainment, and the occasional witch trial. :-). If we were doing science around here, Tim, or I, or you, wouldn't have anything to say. Check the archives :-) for Tim's comments on how thought out a post on this list should be. :-). Actually, I'm very serious. Go look.
I think what he is trying to convey is relentless positive energy and friendliness.
I appreciate your charity. I *am* friendly, for the most part, as people who've met me will probably attest.
He also doesn't seem to be aware that a good portion of his articles are insulting.
Nope. I know exactly when I'm insulting, and, when I write it, I don't care if some people are insulted. See above. I do like to poke at people, a bit, just for fun, though I try to let people know that I'm kidding them somehow. I may feel cause to moderate myself later, of course. Which is a good thing, too, because I *like* to shoot from the hip, and I *do* take out people in friendly fire accidents on occasion.
It's somewhat understandable if he is a recovering Democrat.
A little more complicated than that. I was born a John Birch Republican (Pop helped found the El Paso chapter). Mom was one of those Republican women who volunteered for, and finally ended up running, other people's campaigns. She ran Alaskan Congressman Don Young's phone bank in his first campaign almost 30 years ago, and he's still there. Teenage rebellion in the mid-70's made me a liberal in high school, and in college, I've joked about being a LUG (acronym overloading noted): Liberal Until Graduation. (Yes, Wolfe and Thompson were my favorite authors, at the time, and it shows, Heinlein, E.E.Smith, Pournelle, and other right-libertarian science fiction authors are my other writing influences, mostly in childhood.) Working for a living, particularly for Morgan Stanley when the market took off in the early 80's, cured me fast of confiscatory government and spending other people's money for a living. I've spent most of my time working for, as Tim puts it, "hoity-toity" financial institutions, like Fidelity, and Citicorp, though for the past few years, I've devoted most of my time to thinking (which means writing, which is how I think, most of the time) about the effects of financial cryptography on the net, and, as Tim rightly says, not actually having a *real* job. :-). I credit this list, and the eloquence of people like Tim, and Eric, and Perry, and Duncan, and John, and Nick Szabo, and all the other people I can't but should remember right now, for driving the last nail in the coffin of my belief in any government at all. I think, eventually, that the state will have the same power the church has now. Which is only as much as we want it to.
I've seen cases like this before and they are treatable.
Thanks for your extensive wisdom, Dr. Freud. Sheesh. Maybe *you* need a job, yourself? ;-). Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>