response 382 of 424:

Feb 7 15:15 UTC 2004

Some things on my mind:

1) Someone asked, "If Valerie said she is leaving, why is she still posting
here?"  The answer to that is that I said I was leaving before this kangaroo
court trial of my own integrity started.  I DON'T want to be here now, and I
do intend to go far, far, away after this is over.

2) Jp2 may well be in this for revenge on me, because I locked his account
in December after he sent out 909 e-mail messages.  Cyklone and others who
participated in the baby diary parody (iggy, cross, seldon, and others) may
be arguing so vehemently because I deleted the baby diary as a reaction to
the parody of it.  If they can convince people that deleting the baby diary
was wrong, it de-legitimatizes my reaction to the parody.  That is, they may
be looking for someone to tell them that parodying the baby diary was okay,
and getting people to vote against the deletion is a way of defending their
participation in the parody.

3) I still firmly believe that I acted ethically, to the highest moral
standards, when I deleted the baby diary.  The fair witnesses of the two
conferences were not easily available to be found (even now I've only
managed to locate 4 of the 5, and for some of them it took weeks).  I 
believe that most, quite possibly all, of the fair witnesses of those
conferences would have deleted the baby diaries when I asked.  Time was
critical for getting the baby diaries deleted before parodiers made copies,
and the 4-5 weeks it has taken to locate some (but not all) of the fair
witnesses would have been way too long.  It *is* the role of staff to
help out users who have time-critical problems like this one, where the
fair witnesses are not readily available to fill their roles.  Another
example of staff filling a fair witness's role when the fair witness
was not available: Nobody asked Katie, the fair witness of Agora, who logs
in only rarely, to delete the gaggle of copies of Plato's Republic that
polytarp posted there recently.  A staffer went in and just did it.  And
deleting those items wasn't even time-critical, yet it is okay that a
staffer deleted someone else's postings.

4) Iggy argues that since people warned me not to post personal information
and I did it anyway, people should vote to undelete the baby diaries to make
me live with the consequences of my actions and teach me a lesson.  I find
this argument weird, since so far the only bad consequence of posting
personal information in the baby diaries is that Iggy and other people
parodied it.  If you warned me not to post it, and I did it anyway, isn't
the best solution to delete it, rather than "teaching me a lesson" by putting
the items back on-line?

5) Even if you do think I should be "taught a lesson," please think of my
children.  This is THEIR personal information that we are talking about
putting back online.  Even if I "ought to be punished" for my stupidity in
posting this stuff on-line, my children are innocent.  For their sake, if
for no other reason, I urge you to vote to leave the baby diaries deleted.