jwalsh@bbn.com (Jamie Walsh) (12/06/88)
I called to get permission from the Herald to post this, and was told to
mail a written request. Not wanting to wait for snail mail, I am posting
the text of the Herald article without permission.
The Herald's reputation ranks right up there with the New York Post,
so the innaccuracy of the article comes as no surprise to me.
--jamie
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The Boston Sunday Herald December 4, 1988
page 2
Student raps 'racist' computer jokes
by Paul Sullivan
An MIT graduate student has started a one-man campaign to pull the plug on
an international computer network that has been sending what he thinks are
racist jokes to thousands of subscribers.
"I'm extremely angry that anybody would consider it legal to make fun of 6
million people murdered in cold blood by the Nazis. It's obscene," said a
furious Jonathan Richmond.
Richmond, 30, said he had contacted the FBI and the Jewish Anti-Defamation
League to help him get a computer network called USENET either censored or
off the air.
USENET is a computer service subscribed to by about 20,000 people
worldwide, most of whom live in the United States and Canada.
It is used for information on various subjects by students, computer
programmers, large corporations and anyone with a home computer who wants
to pay a fee and hook into USENET.
The system also features a joke file, a collection culled from the
subscribers and edited by Brad Templeton, who owns Looking Glass Software
in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
He's the man responsible for programming the several jokes--which appear
several times a week--that Richmond thinks are racist.
Richmond, a native of London now living in Cambridge, first became aware of
the jokes when he turned on his computer on Nov. 8 and picked up this on
his screen:
"Kill 6 million Jews and the rest of them lose their sense of
humor."
"I was truly shocked," said Richmond, adding that the "joke" had been
transmitted on the screen on the eve of Kristallnacht--which marked the
50th anniversary of the night 1,100 synagogues were set on fire in Germany
and Austria as a prelude to the Holocaust.
"Each one of these types of jokes would be preceded by the key word,
'racist,'" Richmond said.
He said he first decided to tackle the problem with his computer and he
sent out messages that the "racist" jokes "were unnacceptable and must
stop.
"An argument ensued and I got back the justification on my computer, 'Can't
you laugh at yourself?' and 'Freedom of speech,'" Richmond said.
"Then, I was threatened when someone sent out the message, 'My ultimate
goal is to eliminate Jonathan Richmond.'"
Templeton was unavailable for comment, but in an interview with a Canadian
paper he defended himself by saying: "It's my belief that it is better to
have a world in which we can laugh at the evil things that are in the
world, than a world where we must carefully consider whether or not
anything can offend someone."
Asked about the Holocaust remark, Templeton said, "Mostly, I was just
making fun there. That line was sarcasm. A lot of people wrote back to
say that was tremendously funny," Templeton said.
"The idea of what you are laughing at is the absurdity of the line; the
absurdity of suggesting that killing 6 million Jews was something to be
taken lightly," he added.
------------------------------------------
-- jamie (jwalsh@cc6.bbn.com
!harvard!bbn!jwalsh)
"There's a seeker born every minute."drp@lll-lcc.llnl.gov (David Preston) (12/06/88)
In article <33080@bbn.COM> jwalsh@cc6.bbn.com writes: >I called to get permission from the Herald to post this, and was told to >mail a written request. Not wanting to wait for snail mail, I am posting >the text of the Herald article without permission. > >The Herald's reputation ranks right up there with the New York Post, >so the innaccuracy of the article comes as no surprise to me. It comes as a surprise to me, even with this warning! I've never seen that many Gross Factual Errors in one article! Practically every line was wrong.... Is this thing a major paper in Boston?
greenber@utoday.UUCP (Ross M. Greenberg) (12/07/88)
Please be aware that, when trying to win a war in the press, violating their copyright might not be the best means of winning said war. If they asked for a written request, I'm sure they would have granted the copyright rather quickly -- it is in their best interests to have their name associated with any piece, regardless of the audience before whom it appears. There was nothing in that article that was so seriously out of wack (from my understanding) that a few days wait would have hurt anything. When trying to speak about the ethics on the net, to get people who are not on the net to understand what the net is, perhaps breaking the law is not the best way to get started? Ross M. Greenberg UNIX TODAY! uunet!utoday!greenber