Matthew Gaylor wrote:
>Just as a point of information. It should be pointed out that Phill
>is a proud lap dog to the police state. Phill's a proponent of
>Clinton/Gore, gun control, bigger government etc. My favorite quote
>from Phill on libertarians: "All the libertariacrap is just that,
>prattling of a bunch of blinkered idealogues who know diddly squat
>about the net, their ass or their elbow."
> Phillip M. Hallam-Baker wrote fight-censorship:
>>It has been correctly reported that during 1997 and 1998 I acted in an
>>advisory role providing security advice in connection with a number of
>>computer installations at the Whitehouse.
Yikes, FreeMatt!
You condemn Hallam-Baker -- a Brit who was one of the original web
development team from CERN, I believe; then with W3 Consortium at MIT,
before he joined VeriSign -- for helping to secure the White House web servers?
Surely being willing to provide technical advice to dot-gov info
providers, and being (as any European is) for c0nstraints on public access
to guns, does not equate to being a "proud lap dog to the police state??"
"Police state?"
Jesus, Matt -- ya gotta get out and travel the world a bit. (A
visit to a place like, say, Syria might offer some useful perspective;-)
Labelling even an active political supporter of Gore (or Bush) as a
proponent of the Surveillance State is pretty damn simplistic. European
culture, while overwhelmingly social democratic in political persuasion, is
diverse, relatively free, and full of debate. (And it would take a lot of
chutzpah to proclaim that everyone who calls themselves a "libertarian" is
against censorship... or even coherent;-)
Surely it is useful to leave some (rhetorical) room in your
zeitgeist for a political spectrum that is a little more complex than the
fascists, on one hand, and righteous clones of yourself on the other.
That's a formula for a theocratic state. It reduces political
discourse to witch burning. (Not to mention the risk that you might refine
an idea or change your mind about something and end up with faggots piled
around your knees.)
The "FreeMatt" mailing list raises a lot of open and disturbing
questions; surely you don't want to preclude healthy debate about them with
name-calling or formal excommunication rites.
Surete,
_Vin
