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From: rhonda@chinet.UUCP (Rhonda Scribner)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Censorship (was Re: I ain't afraid of no Batwoman)
Message-ID: <1538@chinet.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-Sep-87 17:33:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: chinet.1538
Posted: Fri Sep 11 17:33:02 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Sep-87 20:27:43 EDT
References: <1064@bsu-cs.UUCP> <864@gt-stratus.UUCP> <1218@cartan.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: rhonda@chinet.UUCP (Rhonda Scribner)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 81

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