On 17 Apr 2001, at 22:05, Russ Hunt wrote:

>I'm struck by how profoundly destructive the spam phenomenon has
>been.  Spam itself is an inconvenience, but the pathological and
>extreme responses to it -- from individuals and ISPs and others --
>has been even worse.

I think the country should just start passing the kinds of laws it has
started passing to rid of us the telephone solicitation pests, but I'm
thinking that won't happen until the anti-spammers and certain ISP's get
done exploiting spammers.  Spammers are bad, and that appeals to our puritan
heritage of beating the crap out of despised minorities, of the sheer joy
of demonizing others when we think we can get away with it.  That good
ol' common sense binary logic that says that anything we do in opposition
to "bad" makes us intrinsically "good".  So now we have armies of geeks in
Walter-Mitty mode telling us how some probably-not-important e-mail getting
trashed now and then is just one of those little sacrifices we need to make
for the greater good.  Idiots who get themselves mail-bombed can label it
SPAM and bully Postmasters into doing things their way, and the ISP's...
like AOL and WebTV, both notorious for overselling their resources, now have
an excuse to throttle back the same bandwidth sucking services they once
used to promote their own growth.
                                                 -Kary