From: dave@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Dave Hayes)
Subject: Re: Not violating First Amendment! Get a clue, noisy person!
Reply-To: dave@jato.jpl.nasa.gov
Organization: Jet Propulsion Lab - Pasadena, CA
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 20:46:33 GMT

merlyn@ora.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
>   >	Freedom of the Press does not mean that everyone gets a Free Press.
>   Then what good is freedom of the press?
>I didn't see the smiley.  I looked.  So I'm going to presume you need
>a serious answer.

In all seriousness, I'm not so serious. This is still food for thought,
but don't get the idea that I'm going to jihad in your back yard. 8)

>Freedom of the Press restricts *government* from passing *laws*
>restricting the *content* of speech (or "speech acts").  

and then

>True, I'm held responsible for the net effect of the
>message, like printing something libelous or something that incites
>property damage (Tom Metzger got canned in Oregon for this with his
>pin^H^H^Hskinhead videos and newsletters last year).  

Let's deal with my question first. The *intent* of freedom of (the press,
speech) is to allow air time for ALL opinions, treating each equally, 
without regard to content. Why? 

Because as soon as you start to judge opinions worthy or not worthy of 
expression (by any means), you create a standard that judges the ideas
that people exchange. If you then enforce this standard with law, pretty 
soon it makes it possible for those who control the standard (the judges) 
to control and even supress peopel who's ideas do not conform to that
standard. 

So the *intent* of the law (and the *intent* IMHO of all human rights
issues) is to keep the law from controlling what ideas people exchange,
and by extreme extension what ideas people have.

Thus my comment "What good is freedom of the press if everyone does
not have freedom to press?"

>How does this apply to Usenet?  

Glad you asked. 8) 

With USENET, it is uniquely possible for EVERYBODY to have freedom
to press. That is it's strength and it's weakness...ANYONE may post a 
message and have it reach thousands of sites worldwide. This is a
Real Good Thing for those of us who's opinion it is that freedom
of the press means FREEDOM. 

Freedom has no standards, no guidelines, no ethics, and no bounds. 
This is a good thing if the article you have has been rejected by every
"print media" company in the world. This is a bad thing if some jerk
gets it in their head to post 19,000 copies of "BIFF interprets WAR
AND PEACE". 

With advanced news readers (killfiles, threading, etc), even that latter
event is only a headache for news admins who's spool files fill up.
I've been on USENET about 4 years or so. Most offensive messages do not 
and never did deserve the power that they were given by many people
choosing to be offended and responding. Just look at the "Fuck You All"
mega-crosspost that is STILL reverberating (and yes, I was guilty of this
too) because people chose to give it power and RESPOND to it. 

Yet time and time again, it is not those people who are blamed for the
massive flames and post wars we have here...it is the originator of a
*single message* that gets all the heat. Why? I don't understand...I 
look in wonder that a single message causes so many people to go off the 
deep end...for what POWER that person must have to incite so much response!! 

To summarize, I'm not saying that some sort of ettiquette isn't nice to 
follow, for it does grease the wheels of communication. I'm just saying 
that the benefits of truly free press far outweigh the negativites that 
are created by the frequent usenet-sociopath. And we can all work to minimize 
the effect of the latter by really ignoring them for a change. 

-- 
Dave Hayes - Network & Communications Engineering - JPL / NASA - Pasadena CA
dave@elxr.jpl.nasa.gov       dave@jato.jpl.nasa.gov         ...usc!elroy!dxh

Community (n.) - 1. Irrationals unified by hope of the impossible.
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