Re: Tim May's offensive racism (was: about RC4)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 12:52 pm -0500 on 11/14/97, Tim May kept shovelling it out:

> Big deal. Nothing Tom Clancy hasn't talked about in his novels. (And recall
> Clancy's delicious description of a Japanese 747 loaded with jet fuel being
> crashed into the main hall of Congress during a joint session, with the
> President and cabinet in attendance. It was clear that Clancy was vicarious
> relishing this vermin removal effort. Gonna suggest that Clancy has
> committed a crime? No doubt Hettinga would.)

Nope. It was fiction. Jingoistic :-) fiction, but fiction nonetheless.
Helps if you've sold 100 million books or something before the fact.
Frankly I didn't get that far into the story, because the way Clancy
planned to take Wall Street out made me laugh out loud.
Blow-milk-out-your-nose funny, especially if you have even the most
rudimentary financial operations experience, which is all I have. Financial
science fiction written from the viewpoint of an insurance salesman is
always funny, I guess, as we'll learn in a product announcement around here
someday, I bet...

You, on the other hand, Tim, have not sold tens of millions of books, but
you did say that war was at hand, and, in the very next breath, you
threatened a very specific federal judge by saying he committed a "capital"
crime. Whatever "capital" means. Not that it matters, of course, after all,
it's just "vermin control", right?


And, no, Tim, not once have I suggested that what you did was a crime at
all. In fact, I have consistantly said it could just be *treated* as one by
anyone with sufficient motivation to do so, whether you were apprehended,
or jailed, or tried, or convicted -- or not. And "not" in this case, as Jim
Bell shows us, can be an interesting set of results...


Finally, and to the point, I don't say that what you said then is
immediately going to get you a stay in Club Fed somewhere, but that your
continued escalation of this kind of stuff makes that a probability, and
that it looked to me like you were doing it on purpose in order to provoke
a confrontation of some kind, God knows why. I still believe you'd still be
escalating that bizarre silliness, instead of backpedaling with all this
equivocation, if I hadn't called you on it at the time.


And, finally, I *don't* believe the world's going to end in some
state-sponsored cataclysm, for you, for me, or for your favorite official
vermin, just because the technology of strong cryptography over ubiquitous
networks makes vertically integrated hierarchical entities like
nation-states economically obsolete someday.

Even if it happens all at once, which it can't. Even if that day is maybe
sooner rather than later, which would be nice but probably not anytime
soon. Even if it's the Millenium, or even Thanksgiving: a day which, of
course, is ludicrously too soon for anyone's revolution anyway. :-).


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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