(RE: Crypto McCarthyism ...thoughts, gentlemen?)

[Ray Dillinger]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Aimee Farr wrote:

>Yes. However, I've been here a while. The dynamics of this community is
>somewhat difficult to grasp, and I can only beg your understanding of the
>same.

One of the crucial things needed to understand what goes on cypherpunks 
is that about three-quarters of the people see half or less of the 
posts.  Having set up spamfilters adequate to give the list a reasonable 
S/N, you wind up having cut out a substantial fraction of the signal. 

Another crucial thing needed to understand what goes on cypherpunks 
are that certain of the regulars are trolls and/or cranks, and will 
say utterly outrageous things simply in order to "tweak" the presumed 
eavesdroppers or scare away people whom they regard as too timid to 
be worth talking to anyhow. It's best interpreted as performance art 
after the style of Andy Kaufmann. 

Regarding the paper you referred us to:  While the author has come 
up with a lot of references as quotes to cite, few or none of them 
bear directly on the central theme of his paper.  He presents a 
number of people who have a number of interesting things to say, 
some of them even on topic, but NO research or study that supports 
his central point of electronic communications as a first cause for 
the development of mass hate. A vehicle, sure.  But not a first 
cause.  And there's nothing really unique about it as a vehicle.

Television, in my opinion, is far more dangerous in that regard, 
due to having fewer available channels.  With TV, it takes only 
a very few people to decide that the airwaves should all be 
saturated with the same lopsided viewpoints.  The internet, by 
comparison, is chaos. 

People uninterested in hate will find no reason whatsoever to visit 
hate sites, and since virtually everything is available (see 
http://www.bonsaikitten.com/ or 
http://www.thecorporation.com/oneoffs/96/kittyporn/
for examples of how weird it can get out there) a call to hate 
can be made by anoyone, but will attract no attention outside the 
limited community that has self-selected as being a priori interested 
in it. 

Even the relatively small set of people who are interested in hate 
find themselves spoiled for choice; Name any group of people, and 
you can find dozens of hate-mongers calling for their extermination 
on the web.  In this environment, it is virtually inconcievable that 
any *one* hate ideology should ever become the dominant hate 
ideology -- this breaks up the process described in the paper at 
the "identification of villains" stage. 

As to the "moral boundaries" issue, I'll have to ask my girlfriend's 
husband about that - his dissertation was about what musical styles 
evolve in cultures whose moral boundaries are in conflict or change.

				Bear