Martin Pool's blog

More on pay-for-email; orkut categorizations

aj continues our discussion about email postage as a solution to spam/viruses, pointing out that “from someone whose Orkut profile lists him as a "libertarian", this seems odd”.

[digression] I don't see any category on Orkut I'm really happy with (so perhaps I should choose Other/None.) I'd rather be called a "liberal", perhaps, but that's not an option and anyhow the term has been degraded in different directions in both the US and Australia. Given that they had "Very Libertarian" I choose the weaker one as indicating just a leaning in that direction.

Spam is fraud and theft of service on an industrial scale, activities which are already illegal. I think it's completely consistent with moderate liberalism/libertarianism to want existing laws to be enforced either by the government or by civil suit. You have to go pretty far out on the scale of libertarianism to say that the government shouldn't take a role in preventing trespass, theft, fraud, etc.

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