From: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 09:16:35 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Re: When they came for the Jews...
Message-ID: <199601110051.TAA10090@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


Sten Drescher wrote:
Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org> said:


AS> As always, the best answer to bad speech is more speech.  Ken McVay,
AS> and his Nizkor project, (http://nizkor.almanac.bc.ca) have been
AS> involved in fighting hate speech, holocaust revisionism, and the
AS> like for long time through archiving the big lies that revisionists
AS> pump out, documenting the bogosity of their footnotes, showing their
AS> contradictions, etc.  Pointing out this, and other net resources
AS> fighting anti-semitism is a much cleaner approach than attacking the
AS> Wiesenthal center.

Isn't this attacking, or at least opposing, them directly?

	Nope; its changing the terms of the debate.  Saying 'you can't
make this happen' is attacking them.  

AS> Someone noted the police stopping skinheads in Oregon-- I'll point
AS> out that there is a substantial difference between talking and
AS> randomly beating the crap out of people.  The later is a fair basis
AS> for action by police, although we may choose to question their
AS> methodology.  There is also a difference between stopping skinheads
AS> and stopping blacks, in that the skinheads decided to wear clothing
AS> and tattoos that identify them as skinheads, and thus may more
AS> fairly be asked to bear the consequences.

=09This is known as the "[S]he asked for it" argument, a widely
discredited defense.  If their _behavior_ doesn't indicate criminal
behavior, and there isn't a report of a crime with suspects meeting
their descriptions, there is no more excuse for hassling them than there
is for hassling blacks, or hispanics, or....  Who knows, they could
actually be a bunch of Marines (depending on the area).

	No, this is not 'she asked for it.'

	If there are skinheads who fit the description 'bald, black
leather, swastikas' attacking people, then stopping people who fit
that description is ok by me, as opposed to stopping people who fit
the description 'black, medium hight, living in Boston,' which were
the criterion here a few years back after Chuck Stewart shot his wife.

	The lead-in was people being attacked on the street at random.
I thought I had hypothosized that they were skinheads.

	The crypto relevance might be getting thin.  I think this will
end my contribution to this thread in public.

Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume