From: Dave Hayes <dave@kachina.jetcafe.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 13:24:43 -0800 (PST)
To: freedom-knights@jetcafe.org
Subject: Re: Moderation experiment almost over; "put up or shut up"
Message-ID: <199702162124.NAA07767@kachina.jetcafe.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Against Moderation writes:
> I believe homophobia is a great way to bring out the censors in
> people.  However, inducing censorship is only part of fighting it.

You assume that it is an enemy to be fought. While censorship is
clearly undesireable, making it an enemy only strengthens it.

> You also need respectable people to some in, argue cogently against
> the dangers of censorship, perhaps even get some extremely reasonable
> articles suppressed, and then spread the word about it.  I find the
> freedom-knights tactics' extremely lacking in this second, "clean up
> and analyze the mess" phase.

Part, if not all, of that lack is due to our knowledge of the
subjective standard of "respectability" that human beings have.
That's the same differentiation used in many censorship attempts, and
if we made or supported such differentiations this would undermine any
anti-censorship actions we could take.

The meta-points are:

- What is reasonable to you may or may not be reasonable to me. That is
why we refrain from censoring others, since we have no absolute
standard of reasonability.

- You appear to be concerned with convincing others. We are not
concerned with that, since we know that the default for most others is
to be invincibly unconvincable. We are simply here to be living 
models for an arbitrary code of behavior...that behavior being
outlined in the Freedom Knights FAQ. 

- Please remember that you have to judge who is and is not a Freedom
Knight by their -actions- and not their claims. 

> censorship on cypherpunks.  However, I think most peoples' opinions
> didn't really turn, or at least people didn't realize how serious
> things were and didn't really care, until Tim May [someone the many
> freedom-knights hate] started criticizing this censorship in extremely
> reasonable messages that were suppressed from both the -edited and
> -flames mailing list.

Assuming that is true, that people do not care about censorship until
a person with an arbitrary reasonability says something, I would say
that such a group cares not about free speech...even if they think
they do.
------
Dave Hayes - Altadena CA, USA - dave@jetcafe.org 
Freedom Knight of Usenet - http://www.jetcafe.org/~dave/usenet

Two men were fighting outside Nasrudin's window at dead of night. Nasrudin 
got up, wrapped his only blanket around himself, and ran outside. As he 
tried to reason with the drunks, one snatched his blanket and both ran away.
"What were they arguing about?" asked his wife when he went in. "It must 
have been the blanket. When they got that, the fight broke up."