Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 13:10:27 -0600
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: Fight the Communications Decency Act


Luciano:

>I wonder what the feelings towards the CDA are among the less insane militia
>members in the USA.

I would guess violent opposition. I have looked at times into the whole
spectrum of what you can find on the Internet, from left to right to
mainstream to libertarian and even something of the corporate presence.
There seems to be almost uniform opposition to censorship, even among lots
of people who would as soon kill us as look at us. In that regard, a sad
story: A friend of mine wrote a story on Net censorship, using as a primary
example the page of Joe Bunkley, a truly pathetic neonazi type around whom
there was a major censorship flap involving the Simon Weisenthal center. He
was going to publish it in Bad Subjects, a leftist e-zine at
(http://english.hss.cmu.edu/BS/BadSubjects.html). He thought it would be a
good idea to include active hypertext links to the KKK and some Holocaust
revisionist pages since they were a large part of the subject of the
article. The Bad subjects editorial collective had a major problem with
this, and finally settled on the feeble compromise of providing the
information but not making the links active. In a different vein, we hear
about SocNet's decision to censor certain people (I don't know who is
comprehended in this, since everyone has a different version). I can
certainly understand the desire to censor the author of the "Shit Bag Hall"
trilogy, but leftists are setting a very dangerous precedent. There have
always been many people who identified themselves as "leftists," but were
afraid of free speech -- witness the numerous speech codes passed by
universities as a response to pressure from PC fanatics. This simply gives
right-wing zealots the opportunity to make ridiculous comparisons, as
embodied in the ludicrous talk of "left-wing McCarthyism" that is so
common. The situation now is even worse, because the Internet has created a
large number of people who realize that they have an intense personal stake
in freedom of speech and are willing to fight for it. How sad it would be
if the left were to lag the rest of the Internet community, or even act as
a brake on them. That seems to me a real danger.

Rahul




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