CDR: Can we PLEASE discuss free speech instead of content?

[Ray Dillinger]

>On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 01:52:54AM -0400, Jodi Hoffman wrote:
>> And more from this "only TEENAGERS and adults" website...

<MASSIVE SNIP>

Ms. Hoffman, please stop posting this crap to the Cypherpunks 
list.  It won't help.  It is damned insulting to everyone here 
that you seem to expect us to confuse content with context. 

Although you seem to demand it, and although several people 
have allowed themselves to get dragged down to that level 
by your hyperbole and your refusal to talk about anything 
else, the content of the site is utterly irrelevant to this 
discussion.

Please understand, the content of the site is NOT what the 
argument is about, and you constantly dragging it back into 
the discussion is unproductive, not to mention infuriating. 

The argument is about context -- whether it is tolerable to 
have laws that constitute prior restraint of speech.  It is 
NOT.  The content of the site is utterly irrelevant to this 
question, and posting chunks of it as though it were is only 
insulting the other subscribers of this list.

Speech MUST remain free, even if the actions it advocates are 
both odious and illegal.  Speech is not action.  Suppressing 
speech on the basis of content, as though it were action, is 
intolerable.  Content is not Context. 

				Bear
---
"And even though I say 'Fuck you', enthusiastically 
enough, it's not as though I ever would, not in a 
million years... Well, maybe if I was stoned off my 
ass, but that doesn't count...'

			Hunter S Thompson