Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Riad S. Wahby wrote: 2. Was tim may being filtered from minder, or is he just gone now ? I talked to him a little bit after lne went down; he said he wasn't interested in posting to the list any more. Quite unfortunate, in my view. Apparently he's still to be found posting on various Usenet groups. Unfortunate? I don't know. Tim's gone a little whacko over the last few years, and it doesn't look like his meds are doing crap for him: NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 01:59:43 -0500 Subject: Re: Details Magazine publishes outrageous anti-Asian, anti-gay feature Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 23:59:43 -0700 From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Newsgroups: ba.general,la.general,nyc.general,soc.culture.asian.american,scruz.general,misc.survivalism Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Whitney McNally [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I decided to do something funny and hopefully constructive about the details magazine controversy. www.whitneymcnally.com Nigger, or Thief? Is there really a difference? Thirty years ago, even more, I was prepared to give the negro a chance. Now, so many years later, so many excuses later, so many crimes later, I say we ought to either give passage back to Biafra and Ruwanda and other hellholes for those negroes who request it, or charge those who remain for the benefits of white civilization we gave them over the past few hundred years. And for those who have been on welfare, or AFDC, or WICC, or any of the giveaway subsidies to the negro, they must pay back what they took from working people, with interest, or be sent up the chimneys. Their choice. The negro has stolen from the European for way too long. --Tim May
Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunate? I don't know. Tim's gone a little whacko over the last few years, and it doesn't look like his meds are doing crap for him: [snip] It's true, Tim does seem to harbor an awful lot of anger towards certain groups, but while I don't agree with it, he's entitled to his opinion. The part I find unfortunate is that, along with his less tactful points, gone are his insightful ones. -- Riad Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIT VI-2 M.Eng
Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
Joe Schmoe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. any comments on this level of spam and bounces, etc., I saw from minder - does al-qeada use a more LNE-like processor ? Well, as the list maintainer I see a lot of bounces c, but (unless something is seriously wrong with my setup) no one else does. 2. Was tim may being filtered from minder, or is he just gone now ? I talked to him a little bit after lne went down; he said he wasn't interested in posting to the list any more. Quite unfortunate, in my view. Apparently he's still to be found posting on various Usenet groups. RAH knows more about this than I do. -- Riad Wahby [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIT VI-2 M.Eng
Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
Tim regularly and thoroughly jumped up my ass about my various ideological impurities Well, this was fairly annoying and I think made it harder to dig out the gold from Tim May's poop. And in a way, this was self-defeating from a topple-the-state point of view. My point was (and sometimes is) that our beliefs about Economics, capitalism, and politics are to some extent irrelevant in the light of a techno-determinist point of view (Riad Wahbi pointed this out a few posts ago). In that context, raising some questions about some of the accepted notions about capitalism wasn't (for me at least) necessarily an attempt to fight the crypto-anarchic view/goal/partyline May seemed bent on establishing, but rather to suggest that even groups or individuals with ostenibly very different goals might be able to embrace a crypto-approach towards achieving their aims. In other words, it should be considered a good thing if leftists or liberals or Jihadists utilize well-formed crypto...that can actually only accelerate whatever's down the pike. And opening the discussions up a bit for such not only keeps away the philosophical inbreeding of some lists, it might actually start something amongst adherents of that point of view. And hell, if there's a way to maintain a left-wing stance without that eventually resulting in me having to put in 14 hour days in People's Shoe Factory Number 14, then more power to 'emI think it's probably too late even for some 21st Century hyper-Stalin to sieze control of both wireline and wireless internet now... but again, who gives a crap. Crypto's probably already passed the point of no return, no matter what kind of State George Dubya continues to unleash on us. -TD So...how many years before it's possible for an online group to anonymously fun, order up and drop-ship weapons on a besieged people trying to maintain their national sovereignty? From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ?? Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 15:40:50 -0400 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 3:37 AM -0400 4/11/04, Riad S. Wahby wrote: Apparently he's still to be found posting on various Usenet groups. RAH knows more about this than I do. Obviously, Tim was on usenet long before he, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore started this list on toad.com after the first physical cypherpunks meeting 11 years ago last fall. Because some spam-defense techniques require the absence of usable email addresses, and because Tim has changed his addresses more than once over the last few years, you can go on groups.google.com and just search for Tim May in the author field -- don't forget the quote marks -- and see everything he's posting now. He's usually in the local Bay Area groups, and on Misc.Survivalism, though I haven't looked in about a month or so. As we just saw in a previous forward from usenet, most of the stuff he posts there makes me cringe, like his later stuff here, but, obviously, Tim's as smart and as creative as he's ever been. Even though when I showed up here, 10 years ago sometime in May to learn how to do cash transactions on the internet, Tim regularly and thoroughly jumped up my ass about my various ideological impurities and deep flaws in my character :-) (it was ever thus, I got used to it, and I hopefully learned to give back as good as I got), there was, invariably, something useful in almost all of his posts here. This, in spite of, to me at least, the increasing preponderance of deliberately provocative cruft he trolled around here, presumably in boredom, just to piss people off. Obviously, though more civil, and, frankly, productive, this list isn't the same since Tim left, not the least because this list was, for all intents and purposes, his creation, by dint of the sheer amount of time he put into it, if nothing else. As most people here know, I've long been interested in influence and reputation, and I once introduced Tim at a Mac_Crypto conference in terms of the magnitude of his influence, which is, frankly, much more considerable than people really understand. Tim thanked me for a nice introduction, and, while I was being quite cordial, this being one of the few times we got along, nice was pretty orthogonal to my point. Tim May, whether he likes it or not -- understands it completely or not -- has literally invented, discovered, a new form of emergent social order. More properly, in learning that property can be controlled by cryptography in a manner *independent* of biometric identity, he was the first person to understand that the control and market-auctioned transfer of property could be achieved without the need of the force-monopoly of the state. The result is something which is, by definition, anarchy. Tim called it crypto-anarchy, since it required the use of strong cryptography on public networks to happen, but I don't think even he understood just how far the idea could go
Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Riad S. Wahby wrote: The part I find unfortunate is that, along with his less tactful points, gone are his insightful ones. This is the point I was trying to make (by reposting his latest insight). We all have those ghosts we'd like to see dead. Hell, I've got more than most, and maybe even as many as Tim, but if there isn't - even occasionally - another thought being expressed that Up the chimneys with X, what's the point of listening? CP is certianly less for the missing May. But the currently posting May isn't worth listening to. -- How do you change anything, except stand in one place and scream and scream and scream and then make more people come and stand in that place and scream and scream and scream? Sally Fields
Re: current status of cypherpunks, tim may, etc. ??
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 3:37 AM -0400 4/11/04, Riad S. Wahby wrote: Apparently he's still to be found posting on various Usenet groups. RAH knows more about this than I do. Obviously, Tim was on usenet long before he, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore started this list on toad.com after the first physical cypherpunks meeting 11 years ago last fall. Because some spam-defense techniques require the absence of usable email addresses, and because Tim has changed his addresses more than once over the last few years, you can go on groups.google.com and just search for Tim May in the author field -- don't forget the quote marks -- and see everything he's posting now. He's usually in the local Bay Area groups, and on Misc.Survivalism, though I haven't looked in about a month or so. As we just saw in a previous forward from usenet, most of the stuff he posts there makes me cringe, like his later stuff here, but, obviously, Tim's as smart and as creative as he's ever been. Even though when I showed up here, 10 years ago sometime in May to learn how to do cash transactions on the internet, Tim regularly and thoroughly jumped up my ass about my various ideological impurities and deep flaws in my character :-) (it was ever thus, I got used to it, and I hopefully learned to give back as good as I got), there was, invariably, something useful in almost all of his posts here. This, in spite of, to me at least, the increasing preponderance of deliberately provocative cruft he trolled around here, presumably in boredom, just to piss people off. Obviously, though more civil, and, frankly, productive, this list isn't the same since Tim left, not the least because this list was, for all intents and purposes, his creation, by dint of the sheer amount of time he put into it, if nothing else. As most people here know, I've long been interested in influence and reputation, and I once introduced Tim at a Mac_Crypto conference in terms of the magnitude of his influence, which is, frankly, much more considerable than people really understand. Tim thanked me for a nice introduction, and, while I was being quite cordial, this being one of the few times we got along, nice was pretty orthogonal to my point. Tim May, whether he likes it or not -- understands it completely or not -- has literally invented, discovered, a new form of emergent social order. More properly, in learning that property can be controlled by cryptography in a manner *independent* of biometric identity, he was the first person to understand that the control and market-auctioned transfer of property could be achieved without the need of the force-monopoly of the state. The result is something which is, by definition, anarchy. Tim called it crypto-anarchy, since it required the use of strong cryptography on public networks to happen, but I don't think even he understood just how far the idea could go. His concern was more immediate. Like freedom, privacy is an inherent good, and anything that maximizes both privacy and freedom maximizes the good in the world. All the structural possibilities that resulted were just gravy. It's probable that his hatred of the state came first, long before his discovery of cryptography as a means to that end, but the effect is the same whether, like me, the crypto changed his opinion of the state, or, as was probably Tim's case, his opinion of the state led to his discovery of crypto as a means to get what he wanted. One way or the other, Tim and other early cypherpunks really did discover a way to make physically real the yearnings of libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and other free people throughout the ages, by using, for the first time in more than a thousand years, technology and markets instead of manifestos, politics, philosophy, or, in the case of libertarians, somehow-constrained government and monopolistic force. I think that this didn't happen fast enough for Tim, and he devolved to hoping for some disaster to force his new world into being, and failing even that, he began to advocate more, I suppose, traditional, methods of getting what he wanted: those involving force, without regard, unfortunately, to reason, much less economics. It was upsetting, infuriating, to watch, but, after a while, we realized that Tim was, after all, a free man. He could do what he wanted with his time and resources, and it wasn't our right to tell him to do otherwise, no matter how negative our opinions were of his behavior. As for the more personally repellant of his beliefs, we have to remember that he advocated something that most of us have come around to over time, something that many anarchocapitalists have talked about before Tim May did, that discrimination in transactions and hiring of *any* kind is a *right* of free people in markets, foolish consequences or not, and that it's only wrong when governments force that discrimination onto everyone, like they do in Jim Crow, Nazi Anti-Jewry, or Apartheid
