tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,866-867-5245,866-867-5245 tod Mar 28 tod Mar 28 19:09:44 2004 Todd,Seattle,163 responses total.
Todd, have you asked Valerie for your responses back? Sent a polite email and asked her to send them to you? (I am assuming here that she has copies of her own baby diaries.) Wouldn't that be the first line of defense, and best, if all you want is your words back?
AHAHAAHA TOD" SINCE I ACTUALLY INITIATED THE ACTION AND YOU USED "WE" DOES THAT MEAN THAT YOU"RE PART OF MY "GROUP" ?? OH MAN I HOPE YOU DON"T GET RAW TOMATOES THROWN AT YOU OR SOMETHING
re 0 (The baby diaries were deleted over a month and a half ago, btw)
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staff sucks
Staff does what what the membership and the board request of them. I.e. maintain the system and keep it running and available for all of us to use. They do a damn good job of it. In this instance, the staff has done exactly what the membership has requested of them. Valerie did something else, and Valerie is not on staff.
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Yup. Couldn't have said it better myself.
I cannot dispute #8. However, what you seem to be failing to acknowledge is that those are, and always have been, the rules under which this system operates.
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YEAH<> WHERE"S THE MEMBERSHIP FOR ME< HUH?
YEAH< HUH?
Re #10: Perhaps you could point me to the rules (in effect at the time I posted in jep's items) that said my own words could be removed by a deliberate act of staff abuse or by a vote of the membership. Both those things were incredibly sleazy and I do not believe either was supported by any rules.
When Valerie wrote such an effective scribble program, I'm a little baffled why she didn't originally do that initially (delete her responses) instead of deleting the entire items. Fact remains-- when she deleted her items and jep's, she squelched a lot of what other people wrote. People can argue all day long whether it was censorship or not, but other people's writing was deleted without their permission.
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re 15 I'm baffled too, as I've pointed out countless times.
The one rule that supercedes them all is that the membership makes the rules. That's how it has always been on Grex. No policy is immune to overrule by the membership. 14: As for a "deliberate act of staff abuse," no rules apply, because by definition, none can.
Only if you're a technocrat. I'm pretty sure staff can abuse the system, if you're a humanist.
Re #18: That's not true. You could make a rule that, if staff commit an
abuse, the system will be restored as closely as possible to the
state it was in before the abuse. While you can't prevent staff
from being irresponsible, you can make it clear that whatever they
accomplish by doing it will be futile, because the rest of the
staff will undo it within days.
Unfortunately, that isn't what happened.
Re #18: Your statement can be read two ways. The first is that the members vote on policies, which means any policy can be changed as of the date the members vote to change it. The second is that members can vote to essentially nullify the effect of policies that others thought were in effect at the time they acted in reliance on those previously established policies. The second example, by reaching back in time, is far more extreme and, I'm sorry to say, what grex voters endorsed with their anti-restoration votes.
21: Both are legitimate readings. The membership is the ultimate arbiter of what happens here. I can certainly imagine decisions which might result in the immediate en masse resignation of the board and staff, or with other equally disastrous results but those decisions would be legitimate within the parameters of this system anyway. The danger in a democratic society is that the majority of the society can at any time vote to destroy it, and they'd succeed.
Or possibly by masturbation, don't you think?
Re 20: I don't know that what valerie did was an act of abuse. Many disagree with it, and I have come to agree that it shouldn't have been done, but that doesn't make it abuse. It occurs to me that *this* is the basic disagreement. Were it abuse, it should be undone. If it were not abuse, the appropriate action is not clear and so the membership must decide what to do.
It was abuse.
Denying me access to MY WORDS was, and continues to be, abuse.
How is denying you access to your words an abuse when deleting the 'greek week' items was not?
(because we all know Greek Week was wrong. cyklone didn't do anything was wrong.)
(you should english speak-write before greek )
Re #27: The words I posted in no way abused the system.
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sleip.
Re #24: Use of staff powers for your personal benefit is clear abuse.
(Valerie's deletion of the baby items.) Use of staff powers
unilaterally, when you know the staff is trying to make a
collective decision about that very action, is abuse. (Her
deletion of the divorce items.)
The vote results were less an endorsement of her actions than a
statement that people were tired of the controversy, and wanted
it to stop. Grexers don't like confrontations.
Unfortunately, the net result is that she abused her staff
privileges twice, and got everything she wanted out of it.
That's a bad precedent -- and it *is* a precedent in the context
of how staff misbehavior is handled, even if it isn't a precedent
about non-staff getting items deleted. The precedent is that
staff misbehavior is rewarded by allowing your actions to stand.
(And before anyone claims that she was punished by getting thrown
off staff, remember that she was tired of being on staff anyway.)
We know that the vote result was not to restore the items. We can speculate as to why people voted that way, but since voters aren't required to reveal their reasons, we don't really know. Most of the people who voted weren't active participants in the discussions.
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Re #34: Yes, guesses as to the reasoning behind votes are speculative.
Grex has always had a strong tendency to vote to keep things the
way they are and not rock the boat, however, so it's a reasonable
speculation.
My main point, though, is that the end result was to give Valerie
everything she wanted -- which is not the way to discourage staff
abuse in the future.
One of the things I'm most sure about here is that Valerie's actions will NOT encourage other staff members to do the same.. Think about it, Grex, the community, took a big hit. It will take a long time for hard feelings to heal. Valerie is off staff and even if she wanted her status returned I profoundly doubt that would happen. She is off the system and is probably aware her returning here, for the near future at least, would be a mistake. If there was any confusion as to who has the right to remove another's text it's probably been made a whole lot clearer. So I'm not particularly worried about some staff member deciding to follow in Valerie's footsteps.
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How many of you?
I guess it depends on whether anyone currently on the staff has as poor impulse control as Valerie had, or is as tired of being on staff as she was.
I am profoundly scared of the staff.
I agree.
(#39 slipped. I'm not especially afraid of the staff, but I would have been happier if Grex had taken the stance that they'd undo abuses instead of letting them stand.)
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Re #37: I think we are on the same side in this controversy, so don't take this the wrong way: My hard feelings will probably last until my words in jep's item are returned to my control. They don't have to be returned in the context of restoring his item, although that is the correct solution. What I am refering to is the ADDITIONAL insult of not having control over my own words even when NONE of the reasons for non-restoration apply to denying authors access to their own words.
Part of being an adult is realizing you can't always have it go your way no matter how badly you want it and how "right" you feel you are. It's time to move on. Doing so doesn't diminish what you value and it just might mean next time you want to be part of a discussion, that folks will still be listening to what you say.
Realizing he can't always have it his way isn't the same as knowing he SHOULD have it his way when he's correct, Mary. You know that.
I *knew* that when I was four.
Why don't you know it now?
Re #44: People being the flawed creatures that they are, I don't know of any way of conferring authority that does not entail risk. If Jamie knows of some successful real-world enterprise that proves otherwise and that Grex could emulate, I'd appreciate a pointer to it.
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Of course not. And I'd hope that Grex staff would take reasonable steps to correct any damage, intentional or otherwise, inflicted by anyone, staff or not. In fact, the staff does that all the time, mopping up after users who fill up the disk or do other harmful stuff. Having a staff member do a baddie like that took us by surprise. I'd like to think that the staff would have ultimately decided to do the right thing by way of correction. But remember that you are the person who decided to move right away to a member vote, effectively taking the decision out of the staff's hands.
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REMEMBER: They were still "discussing " it.
Re #52: I would have hoped that too, prior to this incident. Now, I have
my doubts.
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Re #53: I'm a staff member, and I'm on record from early on as opposing what Valerie did. When the issue came to a vote, I voted in favor of restoring the items and believe I am not the only staff member who did so. In terms of the appropriateness of staff taking action, though, I think the significant point in time is not when the voting started but when the motion was made. At that point, knowing that the issue was likely coming up for a vote by the membership, I don't see how staff could have taken action without subverting the concept of member control of policy.
I agree that the staff was pre-empted from doing anything the moment a member made a motion about the issue. I expect staff in -any- organization to wait for direction if they know there is a controversy AND that the appropriate decision-making group is making a decision. If AATA staff took action on a controversial issue that they knew the BoD was meeting about, there would be very serious insubordination issues to contend with. If staff here had done anything, knowing the decision process had been set in motion and was moving at its fastest pace, I think the issue of "who's on staff, and who's not" would have been the next item to consider.
I agree with remmers too. Once the motion was made, it would have been inappropriate for staff to act. Personally, I think this stunned everyone and the staff were wise not to act too quickly. I also think that with an issue like this where a lot of people's emotions are involved, it was appropriate to let the membership decide. I can live with that even though the decision didnt go the way I would have wanted it to go.
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While I can possibly buy the notion that once the motion was made staff was reticent to act on their own, I think the major reason for inaction is that this situation had never come up before, and it wasn't clear exactly what should be done or how & who to do it. If jp2 had known that the staff were ending deliberation once the motion was made, he could have said something like "the staff is free to do what it would have done had the motion not been made", and that to me would not have resulted in any inappropriate action having been taken. I.e. if the staff already had a policy of restoring mistakenly deleted items, then they would have proceded to do so, regardless of any motion being made to do so (and in fact not requiring such a motion). This all goes under the category of "live and learn".
Yeah, learn that GreX sucks.
So... the next time this happens, all that's necessary to prevent staff action to restore the items is for some random member to make a proposal in Coop? Are you sure that's the way you want it to work?
No, I hardly think we'd want it to work that way. Kevin's #62 is pretty close to my own thinking.
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And you're not absolved of your mental breach over this whole dragged-out affair.
Re 66: If anybody is having ethical problems, it's you.
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STICK 'EM UP
Re #65: If this ever happens again, you can expect to see a repeat, I'm
sure.
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Sure, Jamie, just as soon as you've provided proof for your #66 accusation.
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Sorry, Jamie, you can't get off that easy. As the prime mover behind a lot of wasted bandwidth and member votes you've got a lot to explain.
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re 73 It's a tough deal in his case. Since he sometimes doesn't log on in the span of a couple days, we can't really be sure if he's lying when he said that he'd publically announce valerie's item deletions were I not to have entered those items.
Re 78: Oh yes, one of your other unfounded, unproven, wild accusations.
Maybe this is irrelevant to the hubbub, but I still fail to "get" the concept that free speech requires that one's words be preserved on the system forever. In the course of ordinary maintenance, restart and deletion of conferences, etc., I'm sure hundreds of thousands of my words have been deleted from M-Net and Grex (not to mention other systems) over the years. And there are certainly some of those I wish I could have back. But it would be ludicrous for me to charge either system with violating my rights because it was time to repaint the wall I scrawled my name on. The items shouldn't have been deleted. But they were written months or years ago; Grex doesn't (and shouldn't) promise a permanent archiving service. If your words are so important to you, download and archive them yourself!
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Re 82. I was just making the point that the free speech argument was nonsense.
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Re #84: Putting aside the private v. government distinction, do you honestly believe the ACLU would sit idly by if the Congress passed a law requiring all newspapers to destroy back issues from the Nixon era?
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The definition of censorship as a concept depends on the act being performed before the information being censored has the opportunity to propagate to the society. The information in question here was patently NOT censored, because it was available to be read copied and distributed (without regard to the legality of that activity) for a very extended period before it was made unavailable. If you choose not to read a book before the publisher stops printing and distributing it, then it is up to you to locate a copy of it on your own if you still wish to read it, and if you can't do that, then too bad, but it isn't censorship.
Regardless of whether or not you call it censorship, it was wrong.
I agree, rational. I don't see the point in constantly arguing about definitions, when what something is called has nothing to do with whether it's right or wrong, and doing so is almost like suggesting people who don't have words for a certain thing would be unable to argue whether or not it was right, or that a dictionary would somehow be an arbiter of morality. I wonder if this habit of arguing definitions might be related to our common legal system, where strict definitions rule. But, regardless of that, we don't need to argue formal definitions. Simply use intuition to understand what people mean, and consider this in relation to what actually happened, instead of running abstractedly around censorship.
But, you see, it's the people running around screaming censorship who get other people's backs up. I've said all along that it's prior restraint (if that's the correct legal term?) that makes it censorship -- if Valerie had prevented you from posting because she didn't like your words, for exampl,e that would have been censorship. But deleting something that has been read and around for a while so that everyone who was reading that particular thread had been able to read it doesn't equal censorship. It may be something else, and wrong, but it's not censorship. So calling it that prejudices your case. I do think that people have very strong feelings about their words on here and that a lot of this is a clash of visceral impressions about how and what the system is. To me, and to a lot of people like me, it was a not-quite-real-time conversation, so the words I type are not "published" per se, but simply written as part of the conversation. It's not expected that one would keep a conversation around forever. To others, it was being "published" and they expected it to be kept. And for others to read it, even years after the conversation that had sparked it had gone. I admit, I have a hard time understanding the other point of view, because it is so alien to the way I relate to the computer. But I can see that if you expected it to be around and archived, that would be frustrating. Of course, given the typos, etc. that are endemic to on-line communication, I'm not sure *why* anyone would want them around forever and as a public record of what you were thinking on any given day. :-)
For me censorship implies a primary intent to keep someone elses' ideas out of public discourse. As I saw it, Valerie's actions were primarily intended to remove her own ideas from public discourse (and later, at jep's request, jep's ideas). A secondary effect was that other peoples commentary on valerie and jep's ideas were also removed.
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God dammit. Didn't you guys read what I wrote?
Why bother?
Because what I said discounted all the responses between it and what I just LAST said.
Todd, much of what I posted WAS commentary. It was only in response to what Valerie was talking about -- it wasn't like I suddenly woke up and decided "oh, I'm going to talk about why I named my kids what I did in Valerie's diary item today" -- Valerie would muse on names, or whatever, and people would respond. And there would be repetition, if the subject came up again -- I would say much the same thing again because, well, if I'm talking about why I named my kids, there are really only two responses possible for that. (One for Rhiannon and one for Gareth.) And in JEP's items, it was the same. I didn't come up with a new theory and just post it. Nor did anyone else in either item, as far as I can recall. It was response, not initiation. As well, so freezing an item is censorship? So are we going to ban freezing, too?
That's a little off the mark. Someone else can always start a new item and grab text from the old frozen items. But in the case of these baby diaries or jep's items, there was only one copy, and it was mercilessily destroyed.
Re #93: csmcgee wrote: For me censorship implies a primary intent to keep someone elses' ideas out of public discourse. As I saw it, Valerie's actions were primarily intended to remove her own ideas from public discourse (and later, at jep's request, jep's ideas). A secondary effect was that other peoples commentary on valerie and jep's ideas were also removed. Actually, Valerie's stated intent was to keep other people's responses from being read. I'm not sure that I can find the post where she said that any more, because she may have scribbled it -- but she made it very clear that she was removing the items entirely rather than just scribbling her responses because she did not want people to have access to other people's responses in those items. Specifically, she did not want the parodists to be able to read those responses. That was her primary intent in removing the items. I'll see if I can find the post.
cmngee and twila are simply playing word games to avoid the real issue, which is that users were denied control over their own words as part of doing personal favors for favored persons. They both fail to see that the reason there are absolute principles about censorship before *or* after the fact is because otherwise expression (words) is lost when the twilas and cmgees of the world start making value judgments like "those weren't really ideas, they were just commentary." What a boatload of bullshit. Shame on both of you. And FWIW, my words were not commentary, they were ideas posted to benefit everyone, not just jep's sorry ingrateful ass. The ignorance and/or intellectual dishonesty shown by the likes of cmgee and twila is stunning. BTW, prior restraint is just one form of censorship. The actual definition in my Webster's unabridged is "to examine, review, *expurgate* or change as a censor." A censor is defined as "a person whose task is to examine literature, motion pictures, etc. to *remove* or prohibit anything considered unsuitable." Note that prior and post publication actions are covered.
So if your words were so important, why didn't you save a copy? At this point we're all beating our favorite dead horses over this, and I can't think of a mutually agreeable way out either.
I hope someone copies verbatim their previous answer to that comment.
Okay, Stupid question, here. Have you asked anyone if they had a copy? If there is in fact a copy in someone's hot little hands, archived, then it's not lost and gone forever. As I said before, if you really want your words back and nothing else (if that's the important thing to you), then why don't you ask and see if someone saved them? That would get you what you say you want, your words back. If instead what you want is to make a fuss, then it'd be nice to know that, too.
Isn't there a copy in gelinas' house?
Listen, you sons of bitches, I'll stop posting if you don't realise you're just arguing in word games.
re102: why should he have to make a copy to have them
preserved? you are defending the actions of
a cowarly vandal.
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Well, she didn't ENTIRELY destroy the items, as far as we know. There could still be copies on the GreX pumpkin backup tapes
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Mnet was down for a month from vandal activity. Grex backups are rare at best. By not keeping copies of your works given what you know about the reliability of unsecured, open Internet sites, you've pretty much proven that you don't care that much about your words. Whether the loss was due to a staff abuse or any other source is irrelevant.
That is absolute and utter bullshit Scott, and I expected you of all people to be smart enough to see the difference between an accidental loss of text due to system failure and a deliberate act of staff misconduct. Like I've said before, by your logic there is no difference between murder and death by old age since the result is the same. You cannot possibly believe your "logic" is in any way valid. I agree with tod in #110. Twila: If you would bother to keep up with this discussion and recall what I've written, you would know I have already made a request in this cf for the copies of my dbunker entries. Let me say it again for those that missed it the first time. IF ANYONE HAS COPIES OF THE DBUNKER POSTS IN JEP'S DIVORCE ITEMS I WOULD VERY MUCH APPRECIATE A COPY. YOU CAN EITHER GIVE ME THE ENTIRE COPY, AND I PROMISE NOT TO POST OR OTHERWISE USE ANYONE ELSE'S POSTS, OR YOU CAN JUST COPY OUT THE DBUNKER POSTS AND SEND ME ONLY THOSE. IF THERE IS A LOT OF LABOR INVOLVED, I WOULD EVEN BE WILLING TO COMPENSATE FOR THE TIME.
My logic is just as good as yours. You valued your words that much, you should have done something to protect them. You KNEW that Grex was not a guaranteed safe place for data - doesn't matter how the damage was done.
(M-Net wasn't down from vandal activity, though I'm not surprised a technocrat like Scott would fall for that myth.)
Scott's logic is defective in many, many ways. He also fails to recall my very detailed arguments as to why the the "safeguarding" of one's posts is a complete red herring (here's a reminder scott: what if a poster died?). The words have value regardless of the permanence of storage or the safeguards to retain them. Censors are people who make value judgments about the texts based on the qualities they attribute to the words and/or the authors. Scott seems to think words are not worth preserving if the original authors take no steps to preserve. If he wants to live in his fantasy world, great, but I have lost all respect for his intellectual capacity. Using Scott's twisted "logic" if a person didn't attend to their health, it would be OK to murder them because they didn't plan to live long anyway.
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Re 115: So it's not about the value of your own words, then? That would explain why you hadn't even posted them under your own name. Look, you could go ahead and just say you've changed your mind, given the way those items were removed. Just don't try to argue logic here, or present any more faulty analogies. It's very hard to take you seriously when you essentially saying that your words are important, but that you didn't care enough to preserve them yourself.
I wonder if it's possible they were over the threshhold of something he'd want to save, but not over the threshhold of something he'd go out of his way to save.
Scott & Cyklone: Read item 75, responses 155 - 167 . Thanks.
The COOP conference is eternally wise.
Re #117: " It's very hard to take you seriously when you essentially saying that your words are important, but that you didn't care enough to preserve them yourself." So even if words have value to a third party, the should nevertheless be denied access to those words simply because the author for whatever reasons did not to take your required steps to designate those words worthy of preservation? Get a clue, moron. You don't even realize that by piling value judgment upon value judgment you are engaging in the very behavior free speech prinicples seek to avoid. You also have a wonderful way of blaming the victims for Valerie's abusive behavior and to justify the shamefully unprinciple vote of the grexers who supported personal favors for favored persons.
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I'm not blaming the victim, actually. I'm saying that you are making yourself out to be the abused and aggrieved victim, when your (lack of) actions previously seem to say otherwise. As I said a couple responses ago, I would accept that once the deletions occurred you suddenly found yourself much more concerned about the survival of your words than before, and that in retrospect you would have made your own backups. BTW, calling me a moron is not helping your logic any. And it would help if you could decide once and for all whether you're concerned about your own access or a hypothetical "third party" access to your words. Hmm... didn't we have yet another huge argument here a while back about what sort of license was being given/loaned to Grex to keep a copy of people's words online? This was part of the scribble log debate.
Didn't you guys read the item?%!
YEAH?
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LOL
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The members voted not to restore.
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Rer #123: Scott, if you had been following the debate with any careful consideration, you would have seen that I was making two parallel points. My first (and initial) point was that grex had no principled basis to deny authors, including myself, the right to control our words (other than the "personal favors for favored persons" prinicple). What happened next was that the anti-restorationists, unable to deny my compelling logic, began to seek alternative grounds to justify removing user control over their words. The main basis was the benefit to jep and valeried outweighed the harms to the posters. I stated at the time that while I did not consider that a valid argument to justify censorship and the removal of user control over their words, even that flimsy argument was highly suspect. My basis for that claim was that jep and valerie made no supportable claims of harm, prefering instead to "argue" on the basis of innuendo. I also made very clear the point that the words had value independent of the author and even beyond the value the author ascribed to said words. One of the key pieces of evidence in support of my argument was that JEP HIMSELF said he wished a similar item had existed when he was so unable to cope with his divorce. I'm sorry you can't remember all that. However, I made my points consistently and repeatedly. I am sure you are quite smart when it comes to electronics and computing. But when it comes to following the history and the arguments in this debate you are clueless. Hence my moron comment. And yeah, if it makes you feel better or believe you've won some sort of argument, then I admit I probably would have backed up my posts if I had any idea grex staff and its members would act in such a reprehensible manner. In terms of the principles at stake, and the unsupportable anti-restoration arguments, though, whether or not I or anyone else made a back-up is entirely irrelevant. I'm amazed you can't see that.
Um, just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I don't understand your arguments.
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If you want the blue ribbon removed, submit a proposal to that effect for vote. Otherwise, it ain't gonna happen.
We should submit a memeberer proposal to remove Grex's underwear.
Re #135: You *say* you understand my argument. However your continued focus on whether or not an author chooses to back up his/her text demonstrates no understanding whatsoever of my point: Words have intrinsic VALUE all by themself, and that value doesn't increase or decrease simply because of an author's decision to save or not.
I don't think I believe that words have value in and of themselves. As an editor, I change people's words all the time. As a writer, editors change my words all the time. I see words as tools rather than anything set in stone.
Right, they're changing your words to make them less valuable.
Re #140: You have unwittingly described your problem in a nutshell. Your *JOB* is to make value judgments about the words of others! Thus, you are comfortable supporting censorship on grex. You can't see the difference between words subject to editing and free and unedited speech. Maybe you haven't noticed there are no editors on grex. Each person is responsible for their own words (or at least was until the Valerie/jep fiasco). And it is extremely presumptious of you to suggest words have no intinisic value and imply that editors such as yourself add or create value. Shame on you! My words certainly need no input/modification/censorship from the likes of you.
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The next time you read an unedited book and notice the problems, remember what you've just said. *Everyone's* words can use a lookover for typos, mistaken grammar, and the like. (Previous response scribbled for typo, in fact.) Even Homer nods, sometimes, and can use a hand. As I said, words are tools. They are not sacred.
Nice dodge, twila. The issue in grex has never been one of grammar or typos. You are simply creating a red herring to justify your predilections to act as an editor/censor on grex. And you again fall into that ignorant binary either/or trap so many grexers fall for. Words can be sacred *AND* tools, so stop trying make it one or the other.
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Well, actually, words are tools for communicating. If they don't do that, then they should be changed. If they don't do it effectively, they should be changed. However, I'm not offering to edit Grex. Eeek! That would be a totally thankless task. And I don't want to censor it. No, what I'd like is if people were thoughtful and acted civilly and with respect to each other. I have never written anything that couldn't have been improved by a careful look-over and rewrite. I certainly don't do that for Grex. Grex is a much more immediate and ephemeral creation. This is where I'm differing from you -- in my definition of what kind of speech it is here. If it's for publication, then one should be very careful and correct in order to ensure that it's as clear and communicates everything that one wishes. If it's "speech", then it's enough to write what one thinks at the time in a very immediate style. I don't expect anyone to preserve and archive my speech. I suspect that this is the very nub of where we differ. I don't see Grex as anything but a facilitator for my "speech". It's not publishing per se. Once I've typed this and hit the period, and it's been read and responded to, I don't care if it is erased in a day, or two days, or a month, or whatever. I've had the effect I wished to have at the time I wished to have it. Just as if I'd called you on the phone and said these things.
Yeah, but just because you feel that way does not make your standard
correct. You admit that speech is involved and then you try to make
distinctions based on what you perceive to be different types of speech.
If you knew anything about free speech you would know it is exactly that
sort of parsing ("good" speech v "bad" speech/"effective" speech v
"ineffective" speech) that opens the door to censorship. It is the reason
free speech only works when it is absolute (except for one or two
well-defined exceptions like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater).
You need to recognize that true free speech cannot flourish when you make
the distinctions you are making. Until you can accept that fact you are
the poster girl for why grex sucks.
re 147 So would your "editing" of GreX include the killing of entire items because of their content?
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I don't believe you know what I voted (or if I voted). As for editing or censoring Grex, nope. That's not what I'm saying at all.
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Typical. Apparently some grexers have no qualms about "editing" the speech of others because they so often find themselves "editing" their own.
I can support something without voting for it or against it. I don't believe I have said that I voted one way or another.
re 151 But surely you can see, that's just what happened with the valerie and jep items!!
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Holy Focken' Shite! I think I have seen 3 year olds with more maturity than salad, soup, rational, and jp2! They are words, it is a BBS, if you are going to post here, think first. weinies.
Where's crouton when you need him!
Get that bread over here!
poohman!
resp:158 I dunno-- if you don't like it, you can always simply ignore it, too. resp:161 tiggerroo!
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: