Re: Br'er Tim and the Bug Hole

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 4:33 PM -0700 11/11/97, John Young wrote:
>Dumb of me to get in the middle of this, but the bloodlust's
>up:
>
>Tim's statements are gutsy and right: there's no gain
>in self-censoring, shading one's anger to appease
>the goons of whatever firepower. (Bob, go to end.)

One need only think back to the words of Patrick Henry, Jefferson, Thomas
Paine, and all the others. No doubt Bob H. would have argued that they
should cool their anger, silence their words, and not give King George a
"good reason" to crack down on the Colonies.

Or tell Eugene Debs to stop talking about the illegality of the draft and
stop talking about the mistake of entering the Great War to support some
duchies and satrapies. (Debs was jailed for his _speech_...so much for the
First Amendment, even back in the 1918 time period.)

And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their mind.
And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local prince, to not
rock the boat.

While I don't necessarily put myself  in their class, it's clear to me that
America stands for basically libertarian principles, of letting people say
and read whatever they damned well please. This can include denying the
Holocaust, preaching the Gospel of Satan, calling for certain judges to be
taken out into the parking lot and executed by firing squad, or even
calling for the overthrow of the government.

When we let the spectre of crackdowns by Louis Freeh and Janet Reno cause
us to self-censor ourselves, then they have well and truly won.

--Tim May


The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
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