DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age

[Arun Mehta]

At 10:35 31/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

> If discussions of Lee Kwan Yew's dynasty are considered illegal, then
>Singaporans will have to choose not to carry the various newsgroups into
>which *I* post such messages!

How long do you propose to carry on doing that? Soon, the others
in the newsgroups will be asking you very impolitely to stop,
just as you would if someone kept on and on posting such stuff to cypherpunks.

>At 6:35 AM 8/31/96, Arun Mehta wrote:
>>Then again, inappropriate postings are the bane of the Internet: the consensus
>>on which the Net functions relies heavily on people not posting
>>inappropriately.

>This works imperfectly, as all long-time surfers of the Usenet will attest!

True, but Usenet only functions because it works most of the
time. To the extent we subvert this consensus, we damage Usenet,
make it less useful. It shouldn't happen that in trying to save
or spread Usenet, we have to destroy it...

>And _never_ has it involved determinations of "inappropriate" by
>_governments_!

There I'm with you -- I'm merely suggesting that you find a way
to protest Singapore's actions in a manner that would be less
objectionable to most Internet users, in Singapore and outside.

>The point of being sometimes "impolite" (*) is to "force their hand."

I never said anything about politeness -- the appropriateness I
was talking about was in the context of what the people posting
to a discussion group consider proper material for them to
receive, not what the government of Singapore thinks.

In any case, I think we may be slightly going off track as far as
the current Singapore problem is concerned. They are blocking
access to certain web sites from mid September -- Usenet isn't
part of the current discussion, far as I know.

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta at cpsr.org
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta at cerfnet.com for public key