From: Toto <toto@sk.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 22:59:18 -0800 (PST)
To: Jane Jefferson <gotagun@liii.com>
Subject: Re: Dr. Vulis' social engineering experiment
In-Reply-To: <199701210535.AAA05654@oak.liii.com>
Message-ID: <32E484AD.7B39@sk.sympatico.ca>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jane Jefferson wrote:
> 
> If Dr. Vulis is indeed an adjunct professor at Fordham
> University, I think that perhaps he has been hanging out and drinking
> too many beers with my former philosophy professor Quentin Lauer. ;-7

  All the good computer people have degrees in Political Philosophy,
and the like. People with actual computer science degrees, etc., 
seem to be more astute at office politics, however. It's a strange
world.

> And fiendishly, it is the very chaos and anarchy and random chance
> espoused by proponents of the cypherpunk philosophy that allows these
> people to gain this power, unchecked!

  I think that the 'cypherpunk philosophy' is history, now. It seems to
me that many of the CypherPunks have gotten their piece of the pie and
are mostly concerned with big business Cypher, and wish that the Punks
would just go away.
  There is always an essential element behind every movement, and those
who are active in espousing the tenets of that movement, be they the
'suits' or the 'jeans', are seldom any more than mouthpieces for
those who continue to work toward essential goals no matter what
the surface manifestations of a group seem to indicate.

> Thus, the real problem ends up being not "how to control the government
> so that the government doesn't control us", but "how to deal with the
> government when it goes into control-freak mode".
> the deadliest person alive - the toughest and
> the meanest, and the most effective in the face of all the chaos, would
> not be the person who was capable of preserving their privacy. Rather,
> it would be the one who was capable of surviving in it's complete
> absence.

  It might well be that the purpose of evolution is to weed out those
who cannot
survive in both scenarios.
 
> This is not to denigrate the efforts of the cypherpunks, but merely to
> point out an area that they may not have thought of as a method to
> battle the trend towards fascism.

  Many haven't, some have.  Between the Hermit and the Fool, stand many
who are merely occupying a space.
  There are those who theorize that genius' and the insane are the 
forerunners of the new directions humanity will take. I subscribe to
the CypherPunks list so that I can monitor both at the same time.

Toto