ip: Re: summary of/rant about PFF event. [an other point of view

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

From: Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>
Subject: Re: summary of/rant about PFF event.
To: stahlman@radiomail.net, farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber)
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 1995 18:21:33 -0400 (EDT)


>By acceding that we are indeed in a "digital revolution"
>(WIRED's vacuous editorial stance and EFF's cynical rallying
>call) and that Newt "get's it", the political reality of Newt


I'm not aware of any cynical rallying call issued by EFF, and almost all
EFF statements go through me at one point or another. To what are you
referring?


Anyway, I thought your summary of the event was interesting, and I tend
to agree with you on a lot of points, as most of the readers of that
screed do, I'd bet.  Newt is not a revolution, and neither is the shift
in Congressional power to the right, etc.


But I don't find what you wrote very helpful.  All of the fact and reason
is occluded by insults, unsupported and unsupportable guesses, reams of
flowery prose with no apparent point other than being creative and
clever, etc.


I'd suggest in the future avoiding name-calling, or asserting things you
have no evidence of (e.g. why Barlow participates less on the net now
than he used to, why EFF or any other people happened to be at the event,
etc.)  You simply don't know these things, and it harms your arguments
severely - everyone knows you don't know them, and this casts into doubt
all of the material that you probably DO know.  Getting to the point
would help too.


Also, I think you make a major error is assuming that people attending an
event of this sort are representing anything but themselves. Many aren't
even doing that, they're just observing, having nothing better to do,
I'll wager.  Same reason people go to parties or gallery openings:
passing the time, hob-nobbing, that sort of thing.


As I've noted before, when EFF people get invited to things, they often
go, because it gives them another opportunity to spread their own memes,
to introduce ideas others may neglect.  Sometimes EFFers do this as EFF
reps, as in the case of numerous legal presentations by Mike Godwin and
Shari Steele, while at other times they do it as strictly individuals, or
as representatives of other organizations (you might not know it, but
most of our board are board members of other organizations, from Cygnus
and Sun and the Well, to various publications, non-profits and other
entities.)


Launching diatribes at us because you don't like Newt and PFF is like me
launching diatribes at YOU and NMA and RadioMail and anything
else you are vaguely associated with, because I don't like Newt and PFF,
and you spoke (albeit briefly) at their "summit".  It's just not a
logical approach.


And things just simply are not as black and white as you seem to think they
are.



--
http://www.eff.org/~mech/";>          Stanton McCandlish
mailto:mech@eff.org";>        mech@eff.org

http://www.eff.org/";>         Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://www.eff.org/1.html";>   Online Services Mgr.