"Noam B. Ascher" wrote:
>
> There are some parts to this which make me go "argh, damn liberals," and
> will do the same for most of you. Still, take out the reformism and there
> are some good hints on how to discuss these issues with libertarians,
> dot-commers, and other groups for which most leftists have the wrong
> approach towards (in my opinion).
>
What percentage of the population are dot-commers or libertarians? And do you want to "approach" everyone all at once? Do you think that leftists should spend their time talking to the people that are least apt to listen to them (regardless of what they have to say)?
Back in the early 1950s I was in the USAF attached to NSA, a cryptanalyst in the Czech section. I was working on Border Guard traffic, most of the messages being fairly short (up to around 20 groups of text). The encipherment system was one-time pad (i.e., the key was never reused), which is undecipherable both in principle and in practice. Such an encipherment system, however, creates a problem for the user, that of producing enough key. In the case at hand they apparently had typists sitting at desks type away 8 hours a day creating what was _supposed_ to be random key. (The key was numerical, in groups of 5 digits each.) Now apparenly if you sit there all day typing away random numbers your fingers are apt, quite often, to fall into certain rhythms and produce key which fits a regular pattern. And that gives the cryptanalyst a wedge in. He/she can make guesses of text, generate the resulting key, and look for patterns. And so forth. Now sometimes one would pick up a message and it would just fall apart in one's hands. Other times one could try guess after guess and no pattern would appear. And a particular humorous episode will help draw the moral here.
Someone decided to do a time-and-motion study, and two people with stop watches and various forms sat down next to this co-worker in the unit. Now usually one could tell in about 30 seconds whether a message was going to be easy or impossible. So my friend first picked about 10 messages in a row that were very simple, and polished them off. Then he picked one which was difficult. Now we spent a reasonable amount of time on such posts, hoping that we might get lucky and discover a new key "family" as we called them (the pattern of a particular typist), but usually after a few minutes we would just put them aside. This time my friend just kept laboring away at that message for almost an hour. When the time-and-motion study people left for lunch, he told them, you better bring a calendar instead of a stop watch.
The point is, of course, that as long as there are millions and millions of people who are _not_ dot-commers or _not_ businessmen who know what it means to keep a payroll or _not_ libertarians, why should we ignore all those more accessible people to waste time talking to dot-commers? When we run out of Walmart clerks and students with an interest in social justice and union members ticked off with their bureaucracy and welfare (now more and more non-welfare) mothers, maybe we can give a few moments of a lazy Sunday evening to a dot-commer or two, who by that time will be ready to listen to us because of those tens of millions of others we have reached while ignorning dot-commers.
Geez! Don't you have any sense of priority?
Carrol