Re: A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

James Donald writes:
>[in reply to strata]
>> Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers 
>> of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised
>> very recently.

At 05:03 AM 2/16/96 -0500, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:
>Large numbers of able people with good communications very recently exercised 
>their putative "very real power" against the passage of the CDA. They had no
>substantial impact AFAICS. (I intend no slur against the effort.)  Could you
>name some examples, and add some qualifications that made the difference in
>those cases ?

1.  President Clinton declared CDA unconstitutional and directed 
the Justice department to refrain from enforcing it.

2.  The normal course of events, when a new medium starts 
competing against an old medium, is for the new medium to 
be censored to an utterly ludicrous degree, analogous to 
the law requiring a man with a red flag to walk in front 
of horseless carriages, while the old medium has censorship 
radically relaxed.  In the normal course of events one would 
expect a strict ban on pictures of women in clothes cut 
below the neck or above the ankles, and a ban on any 
unpleasant or disturbing subject.  (For example the comics 
code, and the TV rule that married couples had to have 
separate beds)

Instead alt.pictures.binaries.erotica.children is still 
going strong.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
              				|  
We have the right to defend ourselves	|   http://www.jim.com/jamesd/
and our property, because of the kind	|  
of animals that we are. True law	|   James A. Donald
derives from this right, not from the	|  
arbitrary power of the state.		|   jamesd@echeque.com

jamesd@echeque.com said:

j> 1.  President Clinton declared CDA unconstitutional and directed
j> the Justice department to refrain from enforcing it.

	Then why is the Justice Department defending it?  Sorry, but
unless you can give us a citation, I can't buy this one.  I believe
that Clinton did, however, direct the Justice Department to not
enforce the abortion gag rule that got tacked on at the very end, so
maybe that's what you are thinking of.  But that wasn't part of the
CDA.

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