Against Moderation writes:

I believe homophobia is a great way to bring out the censors in people. However, inducing censorship is only part of fighting it.

You assume that it is an enemy to be fought. While censorship is clearly undesireable, making it an enemy only strengthens it.

You also need respectable people to some in, argue cogently against the dangers of censorship, perhaps even get some extremely reasonable articles suppressed, and then spread the word about it. I find the freedom-knights tactics' extremely lacking in this second, "clean up and analyze the mess" phase.

Part, if not all, of that lack is due to our knowledge of the subjective standard of "respectability" that human beings have. That's the same differentiation used in many censorship attempts, and if we made or supported such differentiations this would undermine any anti-censorship actions we could take. The meta-points are: - What is reasonable to you may or may not be reasonable to me. That is why we refrain from censoring others, since we have no absolute standard of reasonability. - You appear to be concerned with convincing others. We are not concerned with that, since we know that the default for most others is to be invincibly unconvincable. We are simply here to be living models for an arbitrary code of behavior...that behavior being outlined in the Freedom Knights FAQ. - Please remember that you have to judge who is and is not a Freedom Knight by their -actions- and not their claims.

censorship on cypherpunks. However, I think most peoples' opinions didn't really turn, or at least people didn't realize how serious things were and didn't really care, until Tim May [someone the many freedom-knights hate] started criticizing this censorship in extremely reasonable messages that were suppressed from both the -edited and -flames mailing list.

Assuming that is true, that people do not care about censorship until a person with an arbitrary reasonability says something, I would say that such a group cares not about free speech...even if they think they do. ------ Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave@jetcafe.org Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet Two men were fighting outside Nasrudin's window at dead of night. Nasrudin got up, wrapped his only blanket around himself, and ran outside. As he tried to reason with the drunks, one snatched his blanket and both ran away. "What were they arguing about?" asked his wife when he went in. "It must have been the blanket. When they got that, the fight broke up."