From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 18:33:24 +0800
To: Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: Negative side-effect of the coderpunks split
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960514135114.773T-100000@chivalry>
Message-ID: <199605150443.AAA00194@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Simon Spero writes:
> Ever since most of the hard crypto content moved to coderpunks, there have 
> been a lot of totally non-crypto political postings that make my skin 
> crawl.
[...]
> I kinda miss the Perrygrams :)

Well, there aren't going to be any more of them. Lots of people
complained.  "You're a fascist" they said. "We can post whatever we
want, and you can't stop us. Nya Nya Nya." The intellectual level of
of the counterarguments was more or less that possessed by six year
olds, but it didn't matter -- they not only claimed their right to
piss in the communal coffee pot if they wanted to, but they went on to
exercise this right. Well, now they all get to drink it.

Some of the people who couldn't help but take a leak in the well
whenever they passed it by got upset that coderpunks drew off all the
crypto talk. Well, actually, there was no crypto talk left.  It would
have been nice to keep one list, but some people insisted on
exercising their right to be stupid in public over and over again and
it got to be too much.

It used to be that I turned to cypherpunks first to get news of
breaking cryptography policy interest and breaking cryptography
information. Now there doesn't seem to be anyone left here who gives a
damn about cryptography -- even big news like MD5 getting nuked
doesn't make it above the noise levels.

I'm expecting that I'll unsubscribe from this thalidimide parody of a
cryptography mailing list within a few weeks. Perhaps I'll start an
alternative place to discuss cryptography policy that explicitly has
the policy of tossing off people who want to post irrelevancies.

I suppose then the rest of the crowd can just turn the filters up or
whatever it is claimed one is supposed to do to find something worth
reading in the cesspit.

Perry