dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (08/29/87)
Re: Recent discussion of censorship.
Censorship is done by government.
Magazine and newspaper editors routinely decide what will and will not
be published. This is not censorship.
Censorship occurs when one is prevented from exercising one's legal right
to use a medium of expression. When a magazine editor deletes a
paragraph from an article, that is not censorship. It's editing.
It doesn't matter why the editor chose to delete it.
When a government agency forces that magazine editor to delete a
paragraph, that's censorship. It doesn't matter why the government
agency chose to require that paragraph to be deleted.
Usenet is owned and operated by a collection of independent sites.
Each site is free to transmit or not transmit anything it receives. If
a site chooses not to transmit specific newsgroups, or articles about
specific subjects, or articles posted by specific individuals, it is
emphatically not censorship. It's simply selective retransmission.
It doesn't matter on what basis the site makes the selection.
The ice gets a bit thin if a site that selectively deletes articles is
funded by government. Then, if the deletion occurred because of
political content, you might be justified in calling it censorship.
But even government agencies have a mandate to use their funds in a
responsible manner, so you would still have to show that some
irresponsible use of funds occurred.
--
Rahul Dhesi UUCP: {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesichen@gt-stratus.UUCP (08/30/87)
Would you people stop discussing this? Or at least move it out of this newsgroup? Your "votes" don't mean a thing in this case and your suggestions on censoring Mr. Nobody (assuming we even find the person) carry about as much weight as Mr. Nobody's suggestion that we censor Cheryl. If all the news administrators feeding batcomputer decided to shut Cheryl off, there'd be nothing she could do about it. And if the powers-that-be at Cornell decided to restrict her account from posting to the net there'd be nothing we could do about that either. I seriously doubt any news administrator will implement Nobody's suggestion. Otherwise we would have started long ago, probably with Rich Rosen :-). (Does he still post or have I been avoiding the right groups? :-) So give all the news administrators some credit. (Hi, Greg. :-) Knowledge of how to selectively nuke people's postings/mail has been around for a long time and "let's kick so-and-so off the net" has been tried many times (anyone still remember rjv and Jeff Sargent? A truly masterful flame.) and has always failed. Once upon a time, a school tried to shut down Tim Maroney. If Tim Maroney can still post to the net, I think Cheryl's safe. So y'all go on home. Ray Chen chen@gatech (A news administrator.)
chen@gt-stratus.UUCP (09/01/87)
BTW, lest there be misunderstandings, I am *not* the news administrator for gatech. I'd have to be paid a lot more money than I am now (being a grad student) before I'd even consider taking on that job. Ray Chen chen@gt-stratus
gsmith@oreo (Gene Ward Smith) (09/04/87)
In article <864@gt-stratus.UUCP> chen@gt-stratus.UUCP (Ray Chen) writes: >I seriously doubt any news administrator will implement Nobody's >suggestion. Otherwise we would have started long ago, probably >with Rich Rosen :-). (Does he still post or have I been avoiding >the right groups? :-) Yes he does, and is pretty calm and reasonable these days to boot. >Knowledge of how to selectively nuke people's postings/mail >has been around for a long time and "let's kick so-and-so off >the net" has been tried many times (anyone still remember rjv and >Jeff Sargent? A truly masterful flame.) and has always failed. Has it? It seems to me I've seen it work. >Once upon a time, a school tried to shut down Tim Maroney. If >Tim Maroney can still post to the net, I think Cheryl's safe. If Tim Maroney can still post then nobody is safe, because if he doesn't like you he will mail your boss with threats of lawsuits. This is no joke, I am afraid. Matthew Wiener is gone to Philadelphia in high dudgeon, his math/stat accounts (but not violet.berkeley.edu) terminated with extreme prejudice. Even I, his long-time office-mate and partner in crime do not know the whole story, but the rumor is that Tim Maroney's paranoid ravings were at least partly the cause. So I may be next. Meanwhile, Tim just posted an article abusively flaming someone and boasting that the use of LSD has raised his IQ. One might ask, how can such things be? The answer seems to be that not all sites are equal, and Tim in hoptoad has a very liberal site. Ours is not so liberal. >So y'all go on home. ... and wait for Tim to go after *you*. Matthew will probably be most annoyed to see me wash all this in public, but C'est la guerre. The notion that censorship is not attempted and sometimes succeeds is a pleasant delusion, but it is a delusion nonetheless. Gene Ward Smith/ Borrowed Time@Berkeley/ bosco.berkeley.edu, I hope ucbvax!brahms!gsmith Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 Fifty flippant frogs / Walked by on flippered feet And with their slime they made the time / Unnaturally fleet.
rhonda@chinet.UUCP (Rhonda Scribner) (09/12/87)
In article <1218@cartan.Berkeley.EDU> gsmith@oreo.UUCP (Gene Ward Smith) writes: >>Once upon a time, a school tried to shut down Tim Maroney. If >>Tim Maroney can still post to the net, I think Cheryl's safe. > > If Tim Maroney can still post then nobody is safe, because if >he doesn't like you he will mail your boss with threats of >lawsuits. This is no joke, I am afraid. Matthew Wiener is gone >to Philadelphia in high dudgeon, his math/stat accounts (but not >violet.berkeley.edu) terminated with extreme prejudice. Even I, >his long-time office-mate and partner in crime do not know the >whole story, but the rumor is that Tim Maroney's paranoid ravings >were at least partly the cause. So I may be next. > > Meanwhile, Tim just posted an article abusively flaming someone >and boasting that the use of LSD has raised his IQ. There's a not so subtle irony here, because I am the person Tim Maroney abusively flamed, and because Gene and Matthew some months ago thought nothing of doing that exact same thing to me over an equally ludicrous net debate. I had asked Matthew to stop being so obnoxious to those of us posting in sci.philosophy.tech, a newsgroup he seemed to consider his own. Over the next few months my mailbox was filled with nasty rude letters from Matthew Wiener (plus a couple from Gene Smith and other members of the brahms gang fan club). In addition to the usual barrage of insult that came with these letters, he bragged about "twitting morons," a pastime he professed to take great pleasure in. It involved baiting people into argument and then being rude and obnoxious to them until they responded in kind and were made to look like fools. Or until they got really ticked off and responded the way Tim Maroney did. (He also said that he got a great deal of amusement out of reading private mail letters from the people he flamed to his friends as a laugh. I can't imagine this man's behavior being something worth defending.) This is the second time Gene has used the argument Tim and I have been having to denigrate Tim. Don't believe for a minute that this is my knight in shining armor coming to save me from the abuses of Tim Maroney. I neither need nor want Gene Ward Smith's help in this affair. His only motive here is to make Tim look enough like the villain that people will envision his friend Matthew as a martyr to the cause of free speech. How someone who only a few months ago was an "idiot" according to the brahms gang suddenly gets Gene Ward Smith rushing to her defense sounds suspiciously like a matter of opportunistic convenience. >>So y'all go on home. > > ... and wait for Tim to go after *you*. It used to be we had a bigger selection to choose from. We could have had Tim go after us, or we could have had Matthew, or even Gene. I'm kind of glad that our choices are now more limited. It seems Tim has been quiet either of his own accord or at the urging of his benefactors on hoptoad. I think we are all the better for all of this. It wasn't free speech that was being complained about, it was abusive insulting and obnoxious behavior. If Gene was genuinely complaining about the curtailing of free speech, why did he feel Tim didn't have a free speech right to complain himself? Gene's been posting pleading articles to a number of newsgroups in an effort to gather support for Matthew. He even posted one to soc.culture.jewish, mentioning Tim as a person who has said negative things about Israel in an effort to sway readers to Matthew's side. I find this a very low tactic. The general thrust of these articles is that Tim was engaging in a vindictive effort to suppress Matthew's "free speech" on the net. While Tim is no choir boy, what he was complaining about was not "free speech" but rudeness. Anyone who has seen the brahms gang in action knows that they often boast about being rude. Tim, for all his own faults, had a right to complain about their rudeness. Lord knows, if Matthew's abusive letters continued to pour in for much longer, I probably would have done the same. And of course Berkeley has a right to choose who can and can't use their machines. I would guess that Tim's was just the last straw in a long series of complaints received by brahms administrators. >>I seriously doubt any news administrator will implement Nobody's >>suggestion. Otherwise we would have started long ago, probably >>with Rich Rosen :-). (Does he still post or have I been avoiding >>the right groups? :-) > > Yes he does, and is pretty calm and reasonable these days to boot. Perhaps there's a lesson there a few people can learn. If you trade rudeness and obnoxiousness for calmness and reasonableness, maybe you stand a better chance of retaining your network access in the long run. --Rhonda
allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) (09/15/87)
As quoted from <1538@chinet.UUCP> by rhonda@chinet.UUCP (Rhonda Scribner): +--------------- | rudeness. Lord knows, if Matthew's abusive letters continued to pour in for | much longer, I probably would have done the same. And of course Berkeley | has a right to choose who can and can't use their machines. I would guess | that Tim's was just the last straw in a long series of complaints received | by brahms administrators. +--------------- As I understand it, UCB tried to kick the Brahms Gang off the net once before. I'd say someone noticed that they hadn't learned. -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc {{harvard,mit-eddie}!necntc,well!hoptoad,sun!mandrill!hal}!ncoast!allbery ARPA: necntc!ncoast!allbery@harvard.harvard.edu Fido: 157/502 MCI: BALLBERY <<ncoast Public Access UNIX: +1 216 781 6201 24hrs. 300/1200/2400 baud>> All opinions in this message are random characters produced when my cat jumped (-: up onto the keyboard of my PC. :-)