From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 95 17:57:56 PDT
To: starrd <starrd@iia2.org>
Subject: Re: ON OFF-TOPIC
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSD.3.91.950907173758.22454D-100000@usr2.primenet.com>
Message-ID: <199509080057.UAA05313@frankenstein.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



starrd writes:
> On Thu, 7 Sep 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > 
> > Was this really needed?
> 
> Yes, it is my bet that there are some patriots in this list.

Pardon, but I don't care. There are also several socialists on this
list. Shall I help them out by posting a long tract on the labor
theory of value? There are several religious christians here. Shall we
begin to discuss the divinity of Jesus? There are also some Jews here
-- we could have a bunch of religious debates, and the atheists could
kick in some mud, too. There are lots of folks here who wear shoes --
perhaps we could discuss the merits of different brands.

> The desire 
> to protect one's privacy is a very "patriot" thiung to want to do.  

But this isn't a list for "patriot"s.

> CyPherpunks appears to be a lot of peole who are against big brothert 
> government, and quite probably for restoring the constitution...am I right?

Cypherpunks is a list for people interested in cryptography and its
impact on privacy, law, society, etc. It is not a list for people to
discuss libertarianism, socialism, constitutionalism, whether the
president has just flown over you ranch in a black helicopter, whether
the CIA was responsible for brainwashing your pet rat Algernon,
whether David Koresh was the messiah, or how many members of the
Federal Protective Service it takes to change a paper shredder.

There are lots of places to discuss these topics on the net. There is
only Cypherpunks for discussing the overall impact of cryptography on
society, and this is a fairly good place to discuss crypto algorithms
and the like because it is (amazingly) fairly high s/n compared to,
say, sci.crypt. Please help out by not polluting one of the few places
to discuss these issues with stuff you can talk about anywhere.

Perry