James Donald writes:

[in reply to strata]

...

Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised very recently.

At 05:03 AM 2/16/96 -0500, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:

Large numbers of able people with good communications very recently exercised their putative "very real power" against the passage of the CDA. They had no substantial impact AFAICS. (I intend no slur against the effort.) Could you name some examples, and add some qualifications that made the difference in those cases ?

1. President Clinton declared CDA unconstitutional and directed the Justice department to refrain from enforcing it. 2. The normal course of events, when a new medium starts competing against an old medium, is for the new medium to be censored to an utterly ludicrous degree, analogous to the law requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front of horseless carriages, while the old medium has censorship radically relaxed. In the normal course of events one would expect a strict ban on pictures of women in clothes cut below the neck or above the ankles, and a ban on any unpleasant or disturbing subject. (For example the comics code, and the TV rule that married couples had to have separate beds) Instead alt.pictures.binaries.erotica.children is still going strong. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com