for the List [was neo-Nazis on the Net]

[Alan Westrope]

On Sat, 12 Jul 1997, Vaska <vaska at geocities.com> wrote:

> >Ah yes, the poisoning of minds:  A capital offense, for which Zundel has
> >earned the gallows!  And then to hunt down the other Great Poisoner, the
> >blaspheming infidel Rushdie!

> >Seriously, I think there's quite a difference between posting to
   ^^^^^^^^^ [emphasis mine -- AW]
> >alt.baseball groups that "Marge Schott should be shot!" and shooting
> >her.  I have no problem with Zundel's thugs posting their idiocies to
> >Usenet; I will likewise have no problem with shooting them if they try
> >to put their goals into practice.

>Alan, why on earth do you equate Rushdie, who as far as I know has never
>encouraged or *incited* enyone to go out and take out a few people of
>"wrong" colour or religion, with Zundel and his buddies who have?  Are you
>really incapable of seeing that there is a world of difference between the two?

Sorry.  I thought you were quite literate and able to appreciate sarcasm,
or I'd have appended a moronic "<GRIN>" or some such.  (Jeepers, Vaska,
do you also think Swift really advocated selling those Irish babies to
Cannibals?)  And the parallel I was sketching is not between Rushdie and
Zundel, but rather between you and the Inams:  so threatened by Mere Text.
Perhaps the village barber could join you in purging local libraries of,
oh, _Mein Kampf_, _The Turner Diaries_, mebbe _Huckleberry Finn_...

>You quote bits of my post strategically, to get a cheap little sneer out of
>the phrase "poisoning people's minds"

*You* chose that phrase, and it's quite offensive to me -- goes deeper than
"a cheap little sneer."  It's an activity many people have been killed for,
from Socrates to some of the people involved in publishing _The Satanic
Verses_.

Vaska, why on earth do you equate Writing, which as far as I know has never
killed anyone or made a building burn down, with murder and arson? Are you
really incapable of seeing that there is a world of difference between the two?
I see a *huge* gulf between offensive speech and physical acts, and I remain
an absolutist where free speech is concerned.

> >If their newsgroup vote fails (and I hope it does)

>And why do you hope it fails, as you keep your hands clean of what you so
>derisively call "political correctness" while gleefully smearing those who
>will try to make it fail with fascist shit?

Simply because it would be an additional waste of bandwidth, and Usenet is
goddam near unusable as it is.  Besides, people can (and do) spew this kind
of racist garbage anonymously all over the net right now -- why add Yet
Another Newsgroup for it?

>And why do you think this by no
>means stupid lot of people are so eager to get control over a rec.music
>usenet group of all things?

OK, here we have a real bone of contention:  I *do* think this lot of
people are abysmally stupid, and I don't object to seeing their stupidity
displayed in the full glare of the Net, where they would be foils for the
intelligence and wit of people like the ones on this list.  I would
love to see Jules, for example, hand 'em their pathetic ass!

And I have no doubt that these morons are far too technically clueless
to deal with the spate of forged rmgroup/cancellations that would ensue!
h0h0h0...like shootin' fish in a barrel...:-)  My point is that they
wouldn't have any more bloody "control" than the $cientologists had over
at alt.religion.scientology.

> >[...] people have gone to
> >a helluva lot of work to bring free, easy-to-use, military-strength
> >encryption to anyone who takes the trouble to use it. Check out www.pgp.com
> >and www.ifi.uio.no/pgp, or visit the privacy links on my web site.

>Military-strength, you say?  Fifteen-year olds can crack those codes before
>breakfast, and a few of them have done so a number of times already.

Citation, please.  Be specific:  did the kids utilize the general number
field sieve, or perhaps the double large prime variation of the multiple
polynomial quadratic sieve, as discussed by Caron and Silverman, "Parallel
Implementation of the Quadratic Scheme," Journal of Supercomputing, v. 1,
n. 3, 1988, pp. 273-290?  Your information will come as a godsend for
FBI Director Freeh, who last week mentioned PGP and DES when he told
the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, "I think it is a matter of life or
death in years to come that law enforcement have some access to this
technology...Law enforcement is in unanimous agreement that the widespread
use of robust non-key recovery encryption ultimately will devastate
our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism."  Puh-leeze, Vaska!
The Free World, Motherhood and Apple Pie are in your hands!

On second thought, since you've chosen to close your response with this
display of staggering innumeracy, and since this thread of yours was off-
topic to begin with, I'll let you join the twit brigade in my killfile.
<plonk!>  Pity...you *are* quite literate...get thee to a library and
check out, say, Hellman's "The Mathematics of Public-Key Cryptography,"
Scientific American, August 1979, or Schneier's _Applied Cryptography_.

Off to poison a few minds,

-- 
Alan Westrope      PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop
<awestrop at crl.com>                  also via keyservers & finger
<awestrop at nyx.net>
PGP 0xB8359639:    D6 89 74 03 77 C8 2D 43   7C CA 6D 57 29 25 69 23