> I'm really curious Jim. Why do you post US military propaganda with no comentary of your own?
> Every time you post US military propaganda, I think the default position is to assume that you believe it?
Apparently you remain clueless. Even if it is propaganda (and I'm not denying that it is), that doesn't mean that we, the readers of the Cypherpunks mailing list, shouldn't become aware of it. Should we only post things that make us all feel nice and comfy??
While I wasn't reading the CP list in 1993 (I wasn't even aware of its existence) I'm sure that there was extensive discussion of the Clipper chip, that government-proposed encryption chip with its famous government-controlled backdoor. The ostensible need for such a thing was inherently government propaganda, yet it was discussed here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip×
Secondly, I did in fact comment. See the reference above to the movie, Dr. Strangelove. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y&t=94s At 4:13. Maybe you (maybe even the large majority of you?) are just way too young to have seen this movie. While I didn't see it in the theater (I was 6 years old in 1964), common practice on TV in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was to show old movies, often late at night. ("The Late Show") I believe I saw this movie at least a few times by 1980, and probably later as well.
The "mine-shaft-gap" comment was in fact a parody of the "missile-gap" warnings of the late 1950's and early 1960's. The USSR had famously orbited the Sputnik satellite well before America did, and there was some degree of paranoia over the question of whether the USSR was way ahead of America in the area of nuclear-tipped missiles. (It emerged in the news, decades later, that there was no "missile-gap", at least not in USSR's favor. The opposite was true.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap