I forget what I have to do to make a formal policy initiative, but I propose that, in any case of whole items being deleted by valerie and any other staff member during the past week, that these items be restored from back up tapes and individual posters be presented with the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to scribble their posts.424 responses total.
I vote yes.
I agree in principle, but I think this is a touchy issue since valerie is no longer around to scribble her responses if she wants to. Since she's scribbled all her other responses, I think we should take that as a sign of her intentions and scribble her responses in the restored items.
Astonishingly, I'm in agreement with jp2 and willcome, both at once. The sky must be falling.
I think users should only be allowed to scribble new posts. If they posted something a year ago, its part of grex's history, and there is no guarantee that the other users in that item are still around. In which case, you could have old users whose own comments could well be taken out of context by the scribbling and they might not be around to better explain what they were responding to. It is not fair. Everything, every response and every item Valerie deleted should be restored via backups and then she should only be allowed to scribble stuff that was posted a reasonable amount of time (six months? a year?) ago.
Heh, what happens if this passes and no staff member is willing to implement it?
How can users feel comfortable posting on Grex, if staff will not protect the integrity of their posts in the future. And by that I mean not just protecting what users had said, but protecting the context of what they said. Grex is allowing its own history to be revised if it will not firmly protect its old items from this sort of butchery. Why even keep the old conferences and items around if users can do what Valerie did and go back and cut holes in them?
5: We should not attempt to cross that bridge unless we actually come to it.
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p
You can accept changes without resetting the clock.
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Right then. In that case, you're wasting your time because it will never pass, as written. There are too many people here who would rather wait for a more reasonable proposal than force the re-posting of text which users explicitly and rightfully removed for their own perfectly legitimate reasons, even if their methods were messy and collateral damage was (at least temporarily) sustained.
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I urge a "no" vote for this proposal. Additionally, item:76 has a more limited proposal which would conflict with this one. I think anyone who reads this needs to make sure they read that item, too.
Grex doesn't allow editing of items. Why? I was always under the impression that was some old debate back when Grex started, and it was decided that if users were allowed to edit their items, they'd risk taking other people's responses out of context by doing so. But scribbling an item can do the same damage, and if you scribble an old item where the old users are no longer there to scribble, or clarify their old posts, how is that fair?
It's not fair that I only had one set of grandparents while I was growing up. If you can fix that, I'll fix the scribble problem.
Re resp:4: An odd position from someone who's advocated deleting entire old conferences.
YEAH< RICHARD! WHAT KIND (OR SHOULD I SAY MEAN?!?!? ) OF JEW SCHEME ARE YOU TRYING TO PULL ON US?
I keep seeing the most recent response in an item cut off, for instance gull's response ends at the end of a line in 'deleting entire'
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I vote yes. The count is at 6.
Richard, of course it's not fair. Life is not fair. Some really bad things happened this week, and they were unfair. That doesn't mean we can undo them without doing a lot more harm. I wish all of this hadn't happened. But I don't have the heart to force John's or Valerie's items to be put back up, at least not now. So I'll be voting no on this proposal. We need to all calm down and get a little perspective before we try to fix anything.
Re resp:19: There's probably a mismatch between the actual number of lines of your terminal, and what Grex things your screen size is.
I'm voting no.
I'm voting yes, but with the following caveat: Keep JEP's items offline for the time being. Track down all participants and ask them if they would mind scribbling their responses. If none do, don't bother restoring the items. If there's some subset of users who disagree with scribbling their responses, then we can move from there. Otherwise, the effect would be that of every user scribbling their responses, which would be basically the same as just deleting the items in question. Similarly with the baby diary items (though that's a much bigger job, I imagine). I didn't, and still don't, understand the point of deleting the baby diaries. The mnet parody only took *new* material, and there wasn't any new material being added to the items here on grex, so what was the point of deleting them?
#17...gull, I advocated closing old confs and archiving them out of the main bbs. If I said "get rid of them", thats what I meant. I have no problem with those conferences that are no longer active and haven't been active in some time, being kept in some other "museum" area of grex for historical reasons. And Aruba, I would argue that you are being more sympathetic towards valerie and jep because you see them here in front of you, and you don't see any of the many many old users who passed through this place. Users who participated honestly on this board, and who don't deserve to have their old words misconstrued and taken out of context just to satisfy the vanity of a couple of users. If you want Grex to grow, you MUST create an environment where people feel safe posting here, and you can't have that environment if you let old items get butchered like this.
And I know that people won't feel safe posting here if they can't edit or scribble new posts. they should be able to. But NEW posts, where the other users interacting with them are known to be still around. There has to be a point where staff protects old items and old conferences from further modification. And I don't think its unreasonable at all. ./
And if you go back and look at the old Agoras, Agora1 or Agora12 or such,you can see that they are in fact read only. Those items are not open and you can't post to them. But you CAN still alter them if you posted in those items. What is wrong with saying that if an item is closed and archived, and you can't modify it regularly anymore, that you ought not to be able to modify it anymore including scribbling? If Valerie scribbles a post in Agora15, nobody can go back and post again there if they felt the need to clarify themselves. Not that anyone is ever going to read those items again likely, but it is just the point.
Richard, if you want to propose a different policy change, please enter a separate item. I for one am not going to respond to you in all of the current active items in policy, all of which are on different subjects. Thank you.
[I posted this first in the item discussing John Perry's proposal, but then I realized that I should post it here too. So this is a duplicate response.] Wow... it occurred to me that I should come back for long enough to make a proposal for a membership vote on keeping my baby diary deleted, so I logged in to do that, and found that there are at least two such proposals on the table already. A couple of thoughts: At the beginning of Grex, fair witnesses were given very broad powers to do whatever they pleased in their conferences. It was expected that they could delete items and set up their own set of rules for each conference. If you didn't like the way a fw ran a conference, you were supposed to start your own similar conference with a different fair witness, run it your own way, and if it was better than the original conference, then people would hang out there instead of in the original. If that meant that there were 12 cooking conferences, that was cool. I can remember plenty of instances of fair witnesses legitimately deleting items. In the classified ads conference, the fws deleted old ads. In the kitchen conference, the fws (I was one of them) deleted everything and started over, because the conference had gotten big and we wanted it to stay manageably small. In the Enigma conference, John Remmers would change the decor from time to time by deleting old items and adding a "new western look" or whatever style he wanted to try out. Nobody objected. In conversation this evening, Jan said to me that he thinks that the recent discussions about people being allowed to scribble their own responses changed people's ideas of what the role of a fair witness is. I don't know about that -- I sat out from those discussions -- but it could well be true. However, if the definition of what a fair witness can do has changed, I think it is wrong to apply the new rules to old items. My baby diary ran for over six years -- that is, it started long, long, before those recent discussions. Misti says that for sure she would have deleted the baby diaries from the femme conference if I had asked her to. Grace sounds less certain than Misti, but she says that she thinks she would have too. What I'm asking is that if people want a rule that says that fair witnesses can't delete items, don't retroactively apply it to items that the fair witnesses would have legitimately been allowed to delete -- such as my baby diary items or John Perry's deleted items. ---------- Also, I have to say, I thought that the title "Valerie's Baby Diary" made it clear that I owned those items, just like I own the files in my directory and my books in my home. Other people could post to those items, but I viewed them as my own. The title made that clear. I had no idea that people thought that any item in PicoSpan was the collective property of the Grex user community. I'm not sure if this is something that was unwritten and reasonable people made different assumptions, or if it is something that got decided on during the big discussion (that I didn't read) about scribbling items. But to me the idea that if "Valerie's Baby Diary" is in PicoSpan, then it belongs to the community and not to Valerie -- that idea was a surprise to me. The first volume of the baby diary originally had another title, which was changed later, so maybe some case could be made that this does not apply to that volume. But the other five volumes were named "Valerie's (pregnancy/parenting/childbirth/whatever) Diary" from the time when they were entered. If the Grex community decides to make a policy that says that Grex, and not the item author, owns all items, I hope the policy won't be retroactive back to items that were entered before the policy was defined, back when the ownership of items was ambiguous and people came to different interpretations. ---------- Hm... I should post this response in the other proposal item too, since it's much more relevant to that one than to this one.
if you're gonna leave then LEAVE.
*sigh* (I am wondering why you're back... not sure it helps matters)
Jay, does this initiative include the items deleted by mynxcat in the international conference?
As per Val's post, since there isn't any policy, I was fairly within my rights.
I wasn't aware that Valerie was a FairWitness of agora at the time she deleted jep's items. I must have missed that.
34: As I understand it, mynxcat, even if you were "within your rights", this would supercede.
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Not really, as per val's post, it seems that fw's had every right to delete items they thought appropriate and if that had to change now, it should not be applied retroactively to all conferences and items. Theres fore when I deleted the items I was perfectly withing my rights. Also she says that when she created those items the general idea was that the author was the owner and it wasn't a grex collective owned iece of work. Agian, if that were to change now, it shouldn't be applied retroactively. And she says her diaries were named "Val's baby diary" etc. If we were to go with these arguments, then my fat item should be deleted, ang with my piano item and any other item I've ebtered over the last couple of years.
If my name is somehow attached to it, it's mine!!!!! All mine!!!!!! BAHAHAHA
Re. 37: FWs are at least quasi-staff members.
Re #38: I wouldn't cite Valerie as an authority on what people with staff
or FW powers are allowed to do here. People of equal tenure don't
agree.
I agree with you. Let's just say that my post is valid if it is ever agreed that val's post is valid.
I would strongly oppose restoring the items intact and leaving them on-line until jep/valerie got around to deleting their own responses. Grex has recognized the authors right to delete their own posts. To temporarily restore them allowing others to grab copies would be in violation of previously established principles.
And they wouldn't be put back with Valerie's and John's comments still available.
#43...but Jan does it not also violate grex's own previously established principles, if authors delete other people's posts in the act of deleting their own? I think its a question of whether you can infringe upon other people's rights to have their own words posted while in the act of enforcing your own. I posted in some of JEP's items, does he strictly speaking have the right to request removal of my posts just because he has the right to request removal of his own?
re 43 But they would never get around to doing that! They'd stall on purpose!
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I think jep's divorce item has too many valuable insights to disappear. Even if his posts are deleted (which I certainly understand and do not oppose), I believe the benefits others provided in terms of their own opinions and experiences far outweigh the "benefit" of deleting the entire item.
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Naming of an item is irrelevant. In a forum like this, creating an item is an invitation for public discussion, by definition. There is no ownership of a discussion amongst public participants; that's an impossible concept. It's like asking, ``Who owns `speech'?'' If, therefore, there is no owner, then it is inappropriate for one person to decide they have any authority to delete the words of another person. Think of it this way: if someone else had created an item parallel to Valerie's baby diary items entitled something like, `discussion of valerie's baby diary', would Valerie `own' that too? Of course not, it doesn't make any sense. That said, I feel empathy for jep and valerie's emotions in wanting to make their posts go away. I still think my previous suggestion is an acceptible way to go that has the potential to accomodate all parties.
I agree there was value in my divorce items. However, it was all intended for me, and for my situation. There was virtually no drift in those items.
That's not the point. People said what they said, and just because those words were placed in an item you began, and about you, does not mean you own those words. Especially when those words may have independant value for someone other than you.
I regret that that value was lost, cyklone. I wish I didn't think there was a need to remove those items. It is possible someone would have someday come across my items when in a similar situation and with a similar mindset, and could thereby have gotten through the experience a little easier. You see, I do understand that aspect of the issue. What I would have given for an account of that type of experience, while I was going through it... But those items mean something else, too. I wouldn't have entered them, or at least wouldn't have said as much in them, if I'd had appropriate concern for what might come of them some day. I just *didn't care*. It seems to me to be pretty harsh to force someone to have something remain when it was created under those types of circumstances. Also, that they're deleted now is an important fact about them. They can not again be an obscure, past account of my feelings about my divorce. Now they'd be a part of a political storm, a target for people who have no concern about me at all, and also a target for people who don't like that I had them deleted. They're deleted now. That's real, and it has real impact. Undeleting them doesn't put things back to where they were. Undeleting them is a completely new action, which has never been done before on Grex. That is of course true for Valerie's items, and for items all over the conferences which once contained Valerie's responses. Restoring them does not set back the clock. It'd be a whole new type of action, compounding the consequences -- not erasing them -- of what has already happened this week. If I hadn't gotten my items deleted, they might well have gained new usage from a different group of people; those who are archiving controversial items just to show people they can't delete even their own text. It is *not* as simple as "the items were created once, now they should be here permanently". Both because my items were deleted, and because of other events, much has changed here this week.
Richard - nobody is arguing that their deletion was procedurally correct. The person who deleted them has already resigned. We are all willing to agree that that should not have been done in that manner. There is no need to keep debating that point. If I'd had my way, the items would have been deleted with the formal approval of the board temporarily, so that we could have this discussion. If that had happened, then there would be at least a little reason to debate whether or not it was the right thing to do - it would have been an official Grex action, not an accident that happened to Grex. In any case, if they hadn't been deleted, one way or the other, then we couldn't even be having this public discussion of the merits of deleting them. The question here is to weigh the potentials for harm in each course. One way, JEP is exposed to some risks that he has outlined. The other way, Grex might have taken a small step closer to the slippery slope of censorship. The first risks a person (two really), the second risks an institution. None of us can do anything to mitigate the risks to JEP if we restore his item. All of us can do things to prevent Grex from sliding down the slope into routine censorship if we do don't. I think there's no comparison here. It's a no brainer.
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That deleting the items was wrong does not make restoring them right; restoring them is also wrong.
I disagree with jp's assertion that valerie and jep lack moral character. They just made mistakes, as we all do from time to time.
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Jep isn't insisting on that. I believe he'd be fine if his items were restored minus all of his comments.
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His objection to doing that is procedural -- he doesn't want the whole item restored to public view while he removes his posts from it.
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jep, would you argue, then, that the standard for removing whole items should be that the person who entered them regrets having done so and feels their mental state was different when they did? That seems pretty low. Would it also apply to items that the person hadn't entered, but had posted a large number of responses to?
I am not arguing for a standard for removal of items. I am arguing against the idea that Valerie's actions can be undone. They happened. There are effects which cannot be undone now. Overall, it would be better in most ways if no items had been removed at all. If I'd been involved with writing a policy a week ago, I would have tried to influence it against removal of items by staff members. That would, of course, have prevented my items from being removed by staff, too. But circumstances are different now. My expectations for my items is certainly different now than it was a few days ago. Then, they were there and nothing could be done about them. Now, they're gone and it would take a staff action to restore them. That action would be an action to hurt me. That would be it's main effect from my perspective. It would, by the way, hurt me more than it would help Grex. I will not, of course, stand by while something like that is done to me.
OK, Jamie. Let's all decide to delete JEP's items temporarily while we discuss whether we should permanently delete them or not. Thus we magically change their status from "deleted because Valerie was bad" to "deleted because we want to be able to discuss them." This fairly effortless transistion now allows us to declare Valerie bad without being coerced by simplistic logic into instantly restoring the items. Does that serve? David: I think the standard for removing items should be that the risk of harm to the person requesting the deletion if they are left up is substantially greater than the risk of harm to Grex if they are deleted.
That makes it an easy call then, Jan. With the items restored, and all of Jep's comments and Valerie's comments removed, then there is very little left to cause them any harm whatsoever. And Grex is left with the clear understanding that users can't censor other users. Which I find a biggie in terms of what makes Grex special.
And this is going to sound very harsh, but has to be said. Jan, are you quite sure that Valerie doesn't have access to the pumpkin where she could tamper with the backup tapes before this issue is resolved? I'm sorry I have to ask.
re 65 >That action would be an action to hurt me. Don't you agree that the action of censoring other people's text hurt them as well? Or are you as selfish as valerie and refuse to acknowledge other people's feelings?
It's theoretically possible that Valerie could swipe my keys and go to the pumpkin. Actually the key would hardly be necessary. The outside door is frequently open since the remodeling and the inside lock ... well, we should get the deadbolt rekeyed so we can use that to prevent people who sneeze strongly as they walk by from accidentally entering the pumpkin. The question mostly indicates that you don't understand what is going on here.
Jan, you mention considering what is in Grex's best interests. I'd think that insomuch as Grex is in effect publishing what people type onto its board across the web, that there is solid legal reason for wanting to maintain records of what has been typed. In this age of paranoid security fears, and things like communications decency acts (which you shouldn't be surprised if it is reintroduced in some form soon in congress), you have to consider the extent to which Grex may or may not be held accountable in the future for what it is transmitting. Lets say that somebody enters an item on how to make bombs, or discussing where good places are to bomb. Then staff deletes the item. Then somebody sues Grex claiming the item posted actually advocated or promised specific bombing. Grex is hauled into court. Where is the item? Its been deleted. Are old backups kept forever? I believe that allowing wholesale deletion of posts, without the presence of the scribble log, could open Grex up to a potential situation where it can't defend itself against legal challenges. I think when you enter a post on grex it is not speech, it is nor oral communication, it is verbal communication, print communication of which it becomes part of a public record. It is publishing. And Grex needs for its own protection, to have active records of everything it transmits, and to not allow wholesale changes to what it transmits, where posts can be taken out of context or changed and Grex find itself unable adequately defend against outside allegations. If somebody prints a column in a newspaper, and that column is available on the paper's web site, the columnist can't go in the future and revise the words in his column or delete it and pretend it was never published. It was, its out there, and so is everything posted on Grex. You never know who has read, printed, or saved what has been posted here. Once something gets posted, its a matter of public record.
Jim: John has repeated acknowledged that some harm would be done to others and Grex as a whole by the full deletion of his items. But I don't think that it can be argued that that harm is of anywhere near the order of magnitude as what JEP could be exposed to. My memory of the divorce item was that all the most controversial parts of his responses, the expressions of anger and such, could be completely reconstructed from the comments of other users in those items. Exactly the parts that are most likely to be embarrassing to him and most harmful to him are the ones that would still be there if only his responses were deleted. After all, those were the parts that obviously triggered the most discussion. So restoring only other user's comments would be almost as bad as restoring the whole thing. I only made a few responses to that item - it's not a subject I'm too knowledgable about. But if something I said about what JEP had said were used to his harm someday, I would really hate it. So I'm going to request that any responses that I made to those items not be restored, if we make the poor choice of not leaving the whole thing buried.
Richard has a far-fetched theory about what might happen to Grex if this special case became a precident for doing this as a general rule and if we were too stupid to keep an archive copy of anything deleted. Buy as much of it as you like, but it still adds up to much less risk to Grex than keeping the item would exposes JEP to.
I think that it is ok to have special cases and I think jep is going about things correctly. I think that the only precedent this will set is one where it is ok for this system to take special cases into consideration.
Jan, it was just acknowledged by Mary that a staffer with access could alter the backup tapes. Something is only far fetched until it actually happens. I would argue that if JEP thinks he has been damaged by his posts-- which I don't think he has, I thought his posts were heartfelt and anyone could sympathize-- that he can't eliminate that damage by removing the posts now and pretending they never happened. JEP, how do you know that your ex-wife hasn't already made copies of everything you posted here, or her lawyer, or members of her family? I think it is at least as likely that your son might come across these posts from someone who saved them, as he would from someday in the future actually reading these old conferences. In fact your scenario seems quite remote in terms of possibility of actually happening. The fact is that I and others posted in those items, and I believe that your needs don't supercede ours, that we still have the right to see our words posted as we intended. Grex is putting itself in a position where staff has to decide whose rights mean more? And the logical way to answer that is that the rights of the many outweigh the rights of the few. Staff has to act in the best interests of the majority of grexers. I want staff to recognize that my rights and the rights of every other user who posted in those items is as important as JEP's. And Valerie's. I mean how many people posted in her baby diary items and now have no access to their own words?
Actually right now, it isnt staff who get to decide whose rights mean more. It is the members who get to decide. I think that is a good way to handle a situation like this.
I agree. I suspect even some of those most outspoken about restoring these items will *elect* to delete their own responses given the opportunity.
I'm in agreement with Sir Richard's #75.
I keep reading comments like "the harm to jep from reinstating his items, even with his posts deleted. is far greater than the harm to others." Yet know one seems to have any real evidence in support of this premise. For those of us who disagree, we have been denied access to the very text that will enable us to make an informed evaluation as to which position is correct. I swear Grex is beginning to look more and more like the Bush administration, with such "trust me when I tell you about that which you cannot be allowed to know" positions. What I seem to recall, and now cannot confirm, is that jep was cautioned more than once about what he was doing in terms of publishing his thoughts and feelings. Now he says " But those items mean something else, too. I wouldn't have entered them, or at least wouldn't have said as much in them, if I'd had appropriate concern for what might come of them some day. I just *didn't care*. It seems to me to be pretty harsh to force someone to have something remain when it was created under those types of circumstances." What jep calls "harsh" others might call "expected results." I guess he is essentially saying that he was temporarily insane and should therefore be allowed to avoid potentially difficult consequences arising from that insanity. I question that premise as well. There is a lot of "awfulizing" going on here, which is a sign of some pretty distorted thinking. So what if his son someday finds out his dad was distraught over his divorce and that he cared very much about his son. This is not about protecting jep from legal liability. This is apparently about making it easier for jep to avoid a difficult talk with his son. I say deal with it. Jep is going to have to have lots of hard talks with his son if he is to truly be a good father. The remote possibility of one more such conversation should not be creating this kind of controversy. So once again we are back to the real issues: grex wants a warm fuzzy amd therefore favors a feel-good approach instead of free speech. This means that faced with a hard choice, Grex decides to give extreme weight to the feelings of a favored user over all others who could possibly benefit from the words people *other than jep* posted. This is total and utter BS. I like jep, and wish him no harm. However, I do not think he is acting maturely when he causes this kind of harm with such weak justification. Again, I see no liability issues. I see a man too cowardly or embarassed to face the *extrememely remote* possibility he may have to tell his son "we all make mistakes. I make them too. Here's what I learned from this one." Please reconsider jep. This does not reflect well upon you at all.
Whether or not my responses are actually likely to hurt JEP, I would not want them restored if they are likely to make him fear that he will be hurt.
Ah yes. Now we are at the very heart of why grex is becoming a system in opposition to what it once claimed to be. At this point Grex lacks any credible claim to support free speech. Drop the "agora" folks; you make a mockery of the concept. <Oh yeah, "know" in the first para of #79 sb "no">
I doubt keesan reads your responses. Your opinions are too strong.
Cyklone: You complain about the injustice of being denied access to JEPs item so you can decide if it should be deleted. Was that a serious suggestion? We should put JEP's item back on line so that everyone can study it while we have this discussion? And incidentally save copies to post all over the place? I can't imagine that you actually want think that makes sense. But if not then what is the point of your complaining about this? Do you have any suggestion for something practical that could be done to satisfy your complaint, or are you just complaining because you like the sound? Yes, JEP was told many times in that item that it was a very bad idea for him to have such an item. I would guess that having just lost his wife JEP felt a strong need for a support network and didn't have a lot to fall back on besides his on-line community. He wasn't "temporarily insane" but he was way off balance and reaching out for help and not thinking very hard about the long term. I doubt that he actually regrets it. At the time I think it was a huge help to him that did a lot to help him navigate a very difficult time. It was a great item, one of the best in Grex's history. But there has always been a chance that it could someday be taken and used against him. Deleting the item doesn't eliminate the chance. Someone might well have made copies already and may be storing them away to whip out if ever they want to use them against JEP. Why should we increase the chance that this item, which was such a help to John back then, should someday become a weapon to be used against him? The idea of free speech you are pushing is a joke. Not only must people be allowed to talk, but every single thing they said must carefully be preserved in the public record forever. Suppose I had the last existant copy of a pamphlet that was passed out on street corners a year ago. Do you think you could get a court to stop me from destroying it on free speech grounds? I think it's pretty likely that John has a copy of these items. Maybe he'll want to show them to his son some day and maybe he won't. Though we're obviously all bigger experts on parenting than John is, are you sure that it is our place to make this decision for him? You keep talking about what Grex does and what Grex thinks. Have you noticed that Mary and I, for instance, see this completely differently? How exactly have you determined that I'm Grex and Mary isn't?
Actually, I do notice that and probably should come up with a way of making my point clearer. I suppose I could always say "some or most on grex". Again though, the basic point is missed when you say "But there has always been a chance that it could someday be taken and used against him.' I am really beginning to see that *some on grex* absolutely cannot see dysfunctional thinking and behavior when it is staring them in the face. 'Awfulizing" and imaginary harms are NOT a good basis for making any decisions. Maybe I missed something but so far nobody has pointed out any concrete example of how the posts of others could be harmful to jep in any meaningful way. C'mon,janc, tell us exactly what harm we are protecting jep from. Surely you don't mean to suggest when you say "Though we're obviously all bigger experts on parenting than John is, are you sure that it is our place to make this decision for him?" that any user can use his/her status as a parent to request such extreme measures solely based on unsupported claims it *could* harm the children. Otherwise you are saying an addicts item about drug use could also be deleted simply because an addict was going through a hard time and now doesn't want his children to know? Even if the deleted item contained information valuable to other addicts? Please stop with weak red herrings such as the "last flier." We are talking specifically about a long-standing policy in which users understood their posts could not be deleted except under very limited circumstances. Jep's situation was not one of those exceptions. Stop trying to complicate what is a very simple issue. If jep can demonstrate a credible harm I will reconsider my position. However, until then the "default" has always been permanence and jep, or you or someone has the burden of showing the harm. No one has done that. All I keep hearing is bullshit claims something bad might result. I am seeing very little in terms of credible risks to jep. As I said before, this willingness to take extreme action in the face of virtually no real risk of harm is classic dysfunctional behavior (and Bush White House behavior).
There have been a lot of books published over the years. A large proportion of them have been lost. Why should the text here be expected to more long-lasting?
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I disagree. Any way this goes, grex will continue. We may loose some people, we'll probably pick up others. We won't be the same as were a week and a half ago, though. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
I don't really want to go through details of what happened two years ago, but I sought help on Grex and I got it. I owe Grexers enormously. I don't regret what I did then. I don't regret what I've done now, either, in getting those items deleted, though I regret some of the ramifications it may have. re resp:79: Let's just all assume I do what I think is best for my son to the best of my ability, and leave it at that. Nothing I will say about my discussions with him will have any influence on this discussion.
Cyklone: You said yourself that many people at the time cautioned John against posting this material. There are certainly lots of people who thought that this item was dangerous to John. One of the people who said that then and now was Joe Saul. As an attorney he could probably tell you about the risks better than I can. As a person who knows next to nothing about divorce, I think that there is always potential for a joint custody situation to turn nasty in either a legal or personal sense. My recollection is that there was a lot in that item that could be thrown in John's face, though not anything that could be made to stick if he had a good lawyer at his side. You yourself pointed out the possibility that someone might try to embarrass him with it by showing it to his son. That can be a harder situation still, because you can't necessarily hire a lawyer to help you out in a case like that. Yeah, its not a certainty that it would ever be used to harm John. It is also far from a certainty that leaving it deleted will cause any harm to Grex. Maybe I'm "awfulizing" the risk to John, but folks talking about Grex not being able to defend itself in a law suit if it were deleted were doing some rather less plausible "awfulizing". When you say you don't want to complicate a simple issue, what is the simple issue you have in mind? "This is the rule, so we should always follow it?" Oh, yes, it's very important not to think when applying rules. Civilization would collapse if we ever showed any adaptability in the applications of rules. Grex is all about rules.
You missed my point. I agree with the last paragraph and have specically said if you are making a new exceptions you damn sure better make sure you have a good reason. Speculation is not a good reason. If you want to argue law then here's what I propose: Delete all of jep's posts, print them out and have his lawyer review them. If in the lawyer's opinion those posts could cause jep harm, then I would agree to the deletion. Anything less than this is an utter abdication of any concepts of free speech and principled applications or exceptions to the rules. I will even kick in $50 to defray the cost to jep. Feel free to match it.
re resp:90: My lawyer charges $200 per hour. There were maybe 2000 responses in the items. I'm not seeking a lawyer's opinion on the matter because it is not a legal issue. A court can order Grex to recover the items. If it is possible, the staff will then be legally obligated to do so, and I am sure they will comply. I would encourage them to do so. I am not trying to influence or avoid the legal system. Many people cautioned me against saying too much in those items, including (I believe) at least three lawyers on-line. I've acknowledged many times that I was told not to post so much. I keep saying "Yes, I was told" and also "I just didn't care", and also, "I care now". How many times do we have to go over that?
Just a side note: Not having the items around for "study" as was pointed out some time ago, does make it a little hard to discuss legal implications, albeit rather harshly on jep's part.
I'm pretty much in agreement with what cyklone has to say about this.
I missed posting earlier. So am I.
Me too!
jep, if you have copies of these items and thus know who else has responded to them, you may want to consider writing emails to everyone who responded asking for their permission to delete their responses. Then, if the vote goes to restore your items, you can still get most of them deleted. The few comments that would be left probably wouldnt be very damaging to you. I imagine that most folks would be willing to allow you to delete their comments. I know I would.
At this point I'm not sure restoring the items would solve anything. To me the issue isn't the items themselves, it's the decision to remove them. Putting them back won't change that that decision was made.
I still have some copies of valerie's responses, in the cache of my web browser.
Resp:97 - Nevertheless, no one is planning on jumping into their way back machine in order to change that.
re resp:96: If my user proposal to keep the items deleted is turned down, then maybe I'll have to do that. I really don't want to go through those items again at this time. I started to do so, before I requested they be deleted, and I stopped after not long.
Regarding #96; Hey, that was my suggestions! Regarding #100; You don't have to go through them one by one; you can use grep and a sufficiently clever regular expression to pick out who posted to them, if that's all you want to do.
Cyklone says "Delete all of jep's posts, print them out and have his lawyer review them. If in the lawyer's opinion those posts could cause jep harm, then I would agree to the deletion". I'm not clear what you are proposing to show to the lawyer. Only JEP's posts? The entire item? The item without JEP's posts? I'm amazed that you would suggest such a thing, and that John Remmers would agree with it. I don't think I've ever heard any lawyer say "don't worry, be happy." I think Joe Saul would find in John's favor, and he's hardly unbiased. Are you guys saying that if anyone can get a lawyer to say about a response by another person "that statement may be harmful to my client" then it could be deleted? I know my arguments are danged persuasive, but I hardly expected you two guys to jump headlong into the "anybody should be able to delete anything" camp. I'm arguing that if you can convince half the membership of Grex that something is worth deleting, then maybe it's a good idea. No way would I agree to deleting something just because one lawyer can be found to say it. That's setting the bar far too low.
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resp:101 heh. I probably read it and then it took a while to sift through my brain. ;)
To clarify my rather vague #93: I was referring mainly to the sentiments cyklone expressed in his #79.
resp:79 is advising me to deal with the consequences of those items and
not to duck conversations with my son. As I said in resp:88, let me
worry about how I present the divorce to my son. And also how I dealt
with the divorce. Would it really surprise people if I tell you that
it has come up in conversations between him and me?
Do you really think you can force me into being a better parent,
meaning someone who lets (or will let) his son see him as a person with
powerful and often negative feelings, by getting those items restored?
That's what it looks like is being advocated in resp:79.
Would you care to add a timetable for me to use, as well, or shall I
just dump the whole item to my printer and give it to my boy this
evening? Maybe I can find some age-appropriate cartoon pictures to
illustrate it, too? ("Here's Muffy's Dad feeling suicidal. But he's a
good parent who shares his feelings.") Got some "suggestions" on that,
too?
I found resp:79 to be presumptuous, myself. How about telling yourself
that I care about my son, and you don't, and therefore it's a good
thing that I am in charge of raising him?
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pot:kettle;black
"(x)(Cx>~Vx)|-(x)[(Cx&Px)->~Vx]"
Re #102: Here is what I proposed: delete all of jep's posts and print out what remains for his lawyer to review. Your position re the involvement of lawyers is nonsensical in view of *your own* statements that legal liabilities for jep may justify removal. And if you want to approach it from a "let the grexers decide" position, then I think most sane grexers will be more likely to accept an argument based on potential legal liability if a lawyers opinion is actually presented as opposed to your "I am not a layer but I think a lawyer would be bothered by this" argument. Re #106: I'm not going to get into it with you on this jep. If this has all hit such a nerve, then I suspect there are deeper underlying issues you may want to discuss with a counselor. And while I do care about the welfare of children, regardless of whether I know them or not, that is not the main thrust of my argument. I am saying that Grex needs a clear policy as whether a given policy can be over-ridden by a concerned and well-meaning parent. I'm sorry that you are the parent caught up on the controversy. That does not diminsh the importance of the issue being decided, however.
I did say that the items could be dangerous to jep, but that was a long time ago, when there was one item, and it was newer. At this point, his ex-wife undoubtedly has a copy if she wanted one, and leaving it up here wouldn't do any further damage.
Re resp:110: I doubt there's a lawyer out there who would look at the printout and say, 'Yeah, go ahead.' He's being paid (very handsomely) to protect jep's interests. He's going to err on the side of caution. I see no point in shelling out $200 an hour for such a foregone conclusion.
You may make that assumption. I would not. For one thing, there is a huge hearsay issue that may or may not make the entire discussion moot. Your "yeah, go ahead" comment also misses the point. The purpose of the lawyer's review would not be to inquire as to whether or not jep should leave *his* posts readable. The questions for review would be "Can these *other people's* comments cause problems for me? If so, what kind of problems could I expect?" In any case, even if you are right, I consider $200 a small price to pay to justify the extreme notion that a well-meaning parent can request other people's posts be deleted. I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. How about you? It also appears that your views are contradicted by one of the very people janc previously cited (joe saul) in support of deletion.
re resp:113: My lawyer doesn't even use e-mail. Explaining what a conferencing system is should probably be doable in an hour. I estimate reviewing the responses ought to be doable in 8 more hours. Probably.
Let me also make it clear that I don't think the responses of other people are dangerous to John, or that John had anything approaching a right to have them removed. I will not be cited as a supporter of this action. When I talked to him about it in the past, I was speaking about his own responses.
Re #114: You don't have to use the same lawyer. There are plenty who use email and know what a bbs is. There are also plenty who do not charge $200 an hour. In any case, since you are the one requesting such drastic action, I can't get too worked up about the cost. Again what we are getting, at least in my opinion, are excuses and insufficient reasons to justify the extreme action you are requesting
I agree with cyklone. Hire a new lawyer who actually knows something.
What useful purpose would restoring the response, minus JEP's comments, serve?
The same purpose that would be served if an addict wrote an item that received lots of responses about addiction and recovery. Jep himself said he wished there was an item like his already in existence that he could've read during his divorce. There is a considerable benefit to keeping such items readable. Ya'll want to do the easy or nice thing rather than the principled or rational thing, however.
It's so easy to be principled at the expense of someone else.
Its also very easy to lose your principles when you have to apply them to yourself.
I don't consider restoring the item, even without JEP's comments, "principled" or "rational".
I guess that doesn't speak well for you then if you can't see that other people's posts have indpendent value above and beyond the person who initially inspired them.
Someone took an action they had no right to take. That action resulted in the removal of text other people allegedly had control over. Restoring the status quo before the illegitimate action *is* a rational remedy. It's undoing the illicit act. That may not be a remedy you agree with, but it's rational. "Principled" is a value judgement about which reasonable people can disagree, so I don't think there's any point in our arguing about it. I think that restoring the item -- with jep's text, which is the only part of it he ever owned, removed -- is principled. You may not.
Cyklone slipped. But whatever. In a sense, John was right when he said the actions could set a precedent. The precedent, if there is one, will be that if you want an item removed, and you can either find a staff member willing to sacrifice their staff position, or you are a staff member, you can do it. And the items will stay deleted, in order to protect your "rights".
Thanks, Joe. Your first paragraph explains the rational. Don't know why I missed that particular line of argument.
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(Sorry, had a typo in the above.) Re resp:125: I believe my proposal addresses that 'precedent' by setting a formal policy. If your concern is future policy, restoring jep's items is not very relevent. I'm starting to suspect, though, that the goal of doing so is not to get some benefit for Grex, but to punish jep.
See my comment in item #76. I don't consider it "punishment" to ask a user to make amends to the system when that person's extreme actions in violation of system policy harm the system and innocent users.
re resp:128: Are you suggesting it's important to make sure staff members don't sacrifice their positions to delete items, Joe? I think that's pretty silly.
re resp:128: I don't know if I'd say there's an intent to punish me for my wrongdoing. I've very thoroughly outlined what I did,and why I did it. Anyone who reads item:76 would, I think, have to conclude I acted properly. I think there's a willingness from some people, who have no interest in Grex policy other than this issue, to make an example of me. The items weren't being read, and so were important only to me. Deleting them harms no one. I followed every rule and procedure that existed. But none of that matters. There's a principle; it affects only someone else and therefore is terrific for abstract purposes; it's got to be defended, gosh darn it! What's a mere person or two compared to something important like that?
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Cyklone, what policy did jep violate? It was Valerie who deleted the item.
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If JEP wants his responses to stay deleted even if the items were restored, I would also delete my responses to be nice to him, and other people might do the same, in which case what is left is hardly likely to be useful to anybody else getting divorced. It would be too disjointed. I propose we restore the responses only of people who request this specifically, if the staff has enough time to bother with this. And put something at the beginning of the dismembered item explaining what happened to it. Would this satisfy everyone? How many people so far have said they wanted their responses in JEP's items restored, even if his responses stayed gone?
I was going to suggest the same solution. If someone will give me a copy of the items, I will go through and create a file that contains only the responses of people who -ask- to have their responses posted again.
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"Rampant censorship"??? Perspective: we are talking about two items in a database of what, 5,000 or 10,000 items??
I dont think the outcome would be much different if it only those ask to be removed are removed.
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As to my responses - I'll be taking a look at them and making the decision as to whether they'll be censored or not. I guess that means I'm not in the warm and fuzzy club. ;-)
i don't want my words censored at all.
Re #134: WHile you are technically correct, jep is complicit in the violation when he opposes undoing the damage of the violation for his own personal benefit. When a sloppy teller gives me extra money, I give it back. Technically, only the teller is at fault. However, I do have a sense of decency to do the right thing. I am asking the same of jep.
Re #137: I don't think that's a feasible way to proceed. The file you edit would have to be in raw Picospan format (which is quite different from the way the file displays on the screen), and any hand-editing would have to be very careful to preserve that format. This would work and not be excessively labor-intensive: Create a temporary closed conference, restore the items from a backup tape to that conference, run Valerie's scribble script to remove jep's responses and those of anybody else who wants their responses removed, then move the items back to the appropriate Agoras. That way, there's no point in time when jep's responses are visible to the public, and most of the work has been done by software.
Great. I always vote to let software do the tedious, rote stuff.
Has everyone who posted in those two items been reading coop? There might be people who are not following this discussion who don't mind their responses being deleted along with jep's.
Not knowing the names of everyone who responded to JEP's items, I can't answer your question, Sindi.
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Re #130: No, I'm saying that if a staff member goes rogue again, they
should do it with the understanding that all will be for
naught, and any items they remove will be restored from
backup as soon as is practical. I don't believe that what
Valerie did was okay, and as a consequence I don't believe
we should let it stand.
Since I also believe that the person who entered a response
has the right to remove their own words, and since I agree
that this crap has made your items high-profile, I think it's
completely reasonable to take your responses out of the items
before they're reopened to public view. I support that.
re 145 It's not too different. Anyone of average computer skills can figure it out.
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Personally, I'd support a staff member deleting all the items just to force the issue.
remmers idea has merit, but it should be done not just with JEP's items but with valerie's baby diary items as well. That was a long diary and a lot of people invested time and effort in posting to it. They have the right to decide if they want their posts in those items to stay posted. Granted, Valerie's baby diary without Valerie's posts would look a bit strange, but it is still the point of the matter
I think if you invest a lot of time in something you write, you should save a copy yourself and not expect that Grex will always be publishing it for you.
I disagree Aruba, Grex keeps its old conferences online. Up until now, any user should have had the reasonable expectation that their posts would stay posted for so long as Grex maintains its current conferencing system and policies against deleting old conferences. This isn't about users being able to have their own copies of items and posts, its about users taking the time and effort to post thinking their comments would remain publicly posted, and then having other users delete their posts to protect their own personal interests. Its a matter of fairness and not letting one user impose their needs or rights over the needs and rights of others.
Do you expect that Grex will exist forever? Do you expect there never to be a disk crash? Do you think you have a right to always expect that there will be people willing to do the increasingly crappy job of administering Grex, when all they are paid in is vitiol? If it's important to you, if it's such a magnificent work of art, you should keep a copy.
no aruba of course not, but expectations regarding staff and grex's hardware are one thing. Expectations of what individual users will do is quite another. Users posting to Grex have every right to expect that staff will enforce grex's principles of being an open bbs and won't allow other users to delete their posts over their own personal issues.
It was a staff member that did the deleting, not a user.
But the point is, Richard, you keep saying that your valuable work has been ripped away from you. If it was so valuable, why didn't you keep a copy?
No, Grex doesn't have an obligation to publish people's writings forever. Conferences are restarted; old conferences might need to be taken offline to free up disk space. But those things should be done with reasonable notice, so that people have an opportunity to save what they want to keep. That was not the case with the items under discussion.
re 157 As was stated before, this isn't a case of a conference being retired. There was no hardware-related issue that caused the items to be deleted.
Disk crashes don't happen with advanced notice.
(disk crashes [usually] aren't retrievable, either, yet every effort is made to restore when that happens, right?)
Whenever you put anything on Grex, you are trusting the staff not to delete it. That's the simple truth. Grex exists only because of this trust. I make no excuses for what Valerie did. I'm pretty angry at her for it. Not because I think the text in the items she deleted was essential to Grex, but because she damaged the relationship of trust between the users and the staff. I think the loss of her, and of all her past responses, is a much bigger blow to Grex than the loss of 6 items. But you can pass all the resolutions in the world - make a rule against deleting anything, restore the items that were deleted - whatever. It's not going to change the fact that you *have* to trust the staff if you put anything you think is valuable on Grex. I'm starting to think that maybe I made a mistake, all these years, trying to be consciencious about Grex's finances. I think maybe I gave people the incorrect impression that they should expect Grex to be run like a professional organization. And thus they feel righteous indignation when it turns out not to be so. We all feel betrayed - that's what this is all about for those of us who give a damn. (There are others here who are just playing games - I don't care what it's about for them.) We learned that one of our staffers was human, and had a limit to how much abuse she could take before she cracked and did something bad. I guess that's a hard lesson to learn - kind of like a little kid finding out his parents aren't gods after all. Keep in mind that the only reasons to do work for Grex are a) out of a sense of duty and obligation, b) because one feels appreciated and useful, and c) because one believes in the charitable mission of Grex. When Grex seems to be mostly a forum for people yelling at each other, it's hard to believe in the charitable mission. So if one doesn't feel appreciated, that leaves only a sense of duty, which will only get you so far. Because we all have duties to lots of different things. So keep in mind, when you're making rules and demands that basically say, "we can't trust the staff", that you *have* to trust the staff. The only alternative is to never put anything valuable on Grex. And if all anyone ever put on Grex was crap, what would be the point in keeping it going?
Damn! They ARE turning Grex into M-Net!
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My primary purpose in posting to jep's items was to help jep. If he thinks it will help him to delete my postings, that is fine with me. Are there people who posted there for some reason other than to help jep? If not, why would they object to having the entire items deleted? Valerie's items are a different case and I think the non-Valerie parts of it could be restored without hurting anyone. But if they make her feel bad, I also think people should be willing to delete them. But not required to do so.
My posts in jep's item were not just for his benefit but for others in similar situations. I object vehemently to their removal. However, I would probably be willing to edit any portions that contain quotes ascribed to him, if in fact I did so.
I dont think they'll be of much benefit to anyone after jep's posts and the posts of those people who are willing to have them removed have been purged from it. I would really hope that you would reconsider your position about voluntarily removing your posts. Sure, your position that things you wrote shouldnt be removed without permission is totally correct. I completely agree with you on that. However, there are real people involved here. And even though their reactions might seem extreme, I still think that there is no harm in respecting their wishes here. Perhaps you would consider deleting your posts from jep's divorce item and then re-posting them into an item of their own that doesnt reference jep's particular case. That way it really can be a benefit for others in a similar situation. I dont remember specifically what you wrote, cyklone, but I seem to remember that you did have some good things to say.
re 165 >take before she cracked Patently false. She was not crazy or psychotic with anger when she deleted those items. In fact, her husband was more angry about it than she was. Read the items and do some research, for a change. re 166 There are plenty of users who ouse both systems, dipshit.
I can't even remember if I ever posted anything to jep's items. I think if none of this had happened and jep had asked me to scribble my responses because he thought they were damaging, I probably would have. So if they items are restored and he asks me to do so, I'll consent to have my responses removed.
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#171 "ouse" should read "use".
resp:173 Yes, it promotes self censorship which is ok as far as I am concerned. I think the real reason you dont like that solution is that it solves the problem in a fair way.
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The proposal in #0 specifically says that individuals should be given control over their own posts. from resp:0 - "...these items be restored from back up tapes and individual posters be presented with the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to scribble their posts." I am merely asking cyklone to scribble his own posts in the jep divorce item. Not only that though, I am also asking him to save his posts and enter them as a seperate item because I agree with him that what he wrote very well may be helpful to someone else.
Wait, if you can't get a staff member to write a simple script, how the hell do you expect a user of GreX to go through all that work?
<donning my voteadm hat...> Since this proposal was made 10 days ago, it's appropriate to review the timelines and procedures regarding voting on it. There's a two-week discussion period prior to any vote. After that, the proposer may post a final wording and ask that it be voted on, or may elect not to bring it to a vote. The vote takes place over a period of 10 days. The proposal passes if a majority of those members who vote cast a ballot in favor. The earliest that voting could begin on this proposal is January 23.
Does allowing a book to go out of print promote censorship?
Bad analogy. What is going on here is more a case of a collected work where some authors would like it to go out of print and the remaining authors wish to continue printing with the unwilling authors' works removed.
So where's the censorship? No one has stopped you from writing anything. If what you wrote a year or more ago had any enduring value to you, why didn't you keep a file copy of your comments? There are large warnings in various places that Grex is not to be relied upon for safe file keeping. I think the "censorship!" charge is way overblown in this situation.
Sir, the staff worked extremely hard to bring back GreX's email, which could have been lost. It seems to me they would work hard if one of GreX's hard disks failed and some of the content on the bbs was removed. But like we said before, this is not a hardware issue. A GreX staffer removed text from the bbs that wasn't hers. How would you like it if the staff removed your mail? Surely, they aren't responsible for it. But the staff won't do this, and for good reason. Just as they won't remove items at random from the bbs. I think the censorship charge is justified in this situation.
Re. 182: It's rather cynical, I think, to delete someone's work because of content years after it was posted and not call it censorship. Do you really think it's reasonable to expect people to keep everything they write and be prepared to republish it when it's deleted? And, of course, censorship isn't reliant on content being of any value, let alone important enough to do what you sugeST.!!
Yeah, krj is ducking an obvious issue by throwing up red herrings. The value of a post does not depend on whether or not the poster chooses to save it. I could have all my items posts saved yet deletion still removes them from the original context which others may find beneficial.
I think Ken's points are very good ones. The fact that some authors of a collected work want some organization to publish it doesn't oblige that organization to comply, nor does letting it go out of print constitute censorship.
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Re #186: It depends on what the practices have been up to that point, and
what the expectations are. I think you'd agree that there was
an expectation here that items stick around.
Even more blatantly disingenuous is to equate allowing staff to violate a professed policy in favor of free and uncensored free speech (while granting a "personal favor to a favored person") with a system crash or other inadvertent loss of text. I also like how suddenly grex is being described as some anonymous "organization" which may or may not have policies about censorship. It's one thing if the New York Times sells out all its back issues and declines to make copies. It is a much different thing if the editor sneaks into the warehouse late at night and torches all the back issues. Guess which analogy more closely fits Grex? Just come clean folks. Quit the mental masturbation and intellectual gymnastics and admit your want to do a personal favor for a favored person.
Don't make the mistake of believing that all the Grexers you're talking to are in agreement on this issue. I might be remembering wrong, but my recollection is that aruba does not think that what Valerie did was okay.
(And others have changed their minds.)
Of course I do not mean to generalize, and I do hope more level heads on grex prevail. I am responding to those who are twisting logic into shapes not even a pretzel would recognize. Unfortunately, some of those posters are people I expect better from . . . . Re #190: But I get the feeling he doesn't want to reinstate jep's item. I strongly believe those items should not get a pass just because he is once removed from the acts of valerie. Again, it's like getting too much money from the teller. I may not have any legal liability but I still give the money back. Jep should not be trying to benefit from valerie's wrongful acts at the expense of free and uncensored speech. The items should be returned to grex.
Yeah I agree. It's actually an insult to the staff to say that if there's a disk failure, they're not responsible for any lost content and won't do anything about it, tough shit, etc. etc., when they worked EXTREMELY hard to recover mail from the failed mail disk. They could have just forgotten about that now, couldn't they? But of course, saying that someone willfully deleting files is the same as a hardware failure is patently ridiculous.
Re#192 and others: Briefly digressing from festivities... Ultimately, the heads that will prevail in this matter are those of the members who bother to vote on the current proposals. Whether they are level will depend on your view of things and on which way the votes go. You amongst several others seem hell-bent on browbeating jep into admitting he is wrong and that all of this is his fault. In the processing of doing so, I think you are confusing the fact that you disagree with his view and the fact that you don't like that he even asked that they be removed with some notion that jep had any authority in this matter or responsibility for them having actually been deleted. jep can ask until he's blue in the face but he is not responsible for them having been removed in any way relevant to official procedures on grex. Valerie made the call, deleted the items and in doing so assumed responsibility for the act. Staff receive ridiculous threats, requests, commands and demands everyday. Part of their job is to try sorting through all of that and make judgement calls on which should be actioned, which should be ignored, and what should deferred to the membership or board for resolution. Now if you are arguing that jep had some moral responsibility to not make the request, he might counter that he has a greater moral responsibility to protect what he sees as a threat to his family. Fine, whatever. Pick your priorities, chose a side and argue away but that's his opinion versus yours and the results of such a debate still in no way makes jep responsible for Valerie's actions.
You are missing the point, then. I do understand the difference between jep's request and valerie's actions. What I would like made clear to voters is that they are participating in an ad hoc process in which a user such as jep can make a request, the granting of which directly contradicts grex's professed dedication to free and uncensored speech. In such cases I would submit the person making the request has a very high burden to show harm that outweighs the harms to grex's professed principles. Jep has not even remotely met that burden. And the "personal favors for favored persons" crowd has been offering up justifications that are contradicted BY JEP'S OWN WORDS!
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I'm impressed with how official-looking it is, at least...
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I would like to ask the Board to clarify the precedent of member proposals before either this proposal, or my proposal as outlined in item:76, are voted on. This proposal and my proposal will be voted on at the same time, and will conflict with one another. I think it is necessary to make it clear which will override the other before either or both are presented to the membership for a decision. I hope jp2 will agree with me on my request, and agree to have his proposal, along with mine, postponed until that determination is made. I hope all participating parties will see this as a reasonable request. My intent is to keep from having to have another round of user proposals, which is what will happen, I think, if two proposals are passed at the same time which directly contradict one another.
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There is no established precedent of which I am aware on Grex for two or more conflicting proposals with simultaneous or overlapping voting periods, so here is the most basic logical approach I can think of: 1) Assuming there is no specific timeline for implementation of the proposal included within it (or any of them) they should be implemented in chronological order of the determination of the outcomes of voting. However, in the interests of resource conservation, implementation should be delayed until the outcome of the final resolution is determined. In other words, if three potentially conflicting resolutions are in process simultaneously, then implementation should be done in order but after all three are determined. This way, the end result is the same as it would otherwise be, but the minimum of doing and undoing is undertaken. 2) If the proposals incorporate implementation timelines, then those timelines should be observed as closely as is reasonably possible considering that such implementation is dependent on the efforts of volunteers whose priorities do not necessarily allow Grex member resolutions to take absolute precedence. 3) If some proposals include timelines and some do not, then the approach should be 2) where applicable and 1) where applicable, though in practical terms it should be expected that the overall end result is likely to resemble 1) a lot more than 2).
Eric, as jp2 mentioned, and the numbering of the items shows anyway, my proposal was entered after his. Would mine therefore modify his and take precedence in that way? Can his exclude mine from passing? Can a user proposal ban further user proposals on a subject? Or will they be concurrent -- the vote start and end at the same time for both? It has been suggested that mine is more limited and would take precedence on that basis. Do you agree? Does the Board and the Staff? (This is what led to my request.) Both his proposal and mine have an implied timeline of "take effect immediately upon passing". My proposal is to *not* take an action. There's no timeline for being inactive on something; you can not-do something today, or next week, or in 2010. I don't think it's clear on what happens if both his proposal and mine pass. I think it's valid to ask that that be determined before the proposals are voted on.
re resp:204: Jamie, it would be in the best interests of Grex that there be no conflicting proposals. Do you agree? It would be best if you and I can agree to merge our proposals so as to avoid conflicting simultaneous votes. The clearest way to do that, in my opinion, is to split the issue of valerie's items from the issue of the items I asked her to delete. Then there can be two unambiguous votes with direct and clear consequences. We'd just have to agree how the one on my items would be worded. It seems to me possible we can do that. What say you?
You are right that it is not clear what happens if both proposals pass. I suggest that people consider that when casting their votes, and vote accordingly. I am aware of a Constitutional precedent for Section 4, but I still think it inappropriate for grex. On that basis alone, I'm inclined to vote against this proposal.
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Each proposal must be weighed on its own merits and implemented within the context of the state of reality at the time it is passed. If the wording of one proposal is mooted by the wording of another, then so be it. The later proposal has the advantage of being modifiable after the earlier is set in stone and being voted upon. The proposals do not carry any weight however, until they are successfully passed.
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Jamie, I am not going to drop my proposal. Your point #4 isn't relevant to my proposal, you know. I've offered a clear way to avoid any ambiguity, any conflict between the two proposals, and to put the issues to the users in the most straightforward way. I don't see any advantage to anyone in making it confusing. I don't see any reason why we can't disagree but be collegial. I'm not willing to give up my proposal just to get along, though.
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It is possible for members to defeat this proposal, and have none of its suggestions go into effect. Just vote no.
I agree.
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There are several things embodied in this proposal. Because it is presented as "all, or nothing", it leaves us with no way to accept the good without also accepting the bad. In my opinion, the good it does is not worth the bad it does.
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Unless you keep it very short and focused on just the restoration of the deleted items I suspect this vote won't get much support at all.
I'm also not happy with section 4. I really don't like the idea of voting to limit what I have the right to vote about later.
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Just keep section three.
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Here is all proposal #76 says: I wish to make a user proposal that my two items recently deleted by loginid valerie not be restored. Since without passage of #75 I don't see anyone moving to restore jep's items even if his proposal fails, I believe the practical outcome is this: #75 passes and #76 passes - only valerie's items are restored #75 passes and #76 fails - all items are restored #75 fails - no items are restored Can we agree to that?
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If no items are restored, does this mean the content on GreX's website regarding free speech will have to be modified? I think we should consider that.
Section 2 is irritating. It is unnecessary vebiage. (Section 1 is also unnecessary vebiage, but it is not as irritating as Section 2.) Section 4 is bad policy.
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I can live with Section 5.
Re resp:228: Makes sense to me. I think that's the most logical way to approach it.
In that case, I would hope someone makes a proposal to reinstate those items, or else staff properly interpret a vote against jep as an implicit endorsement to restore.
(yeah. I like 228, because, at least to me, other's proposal was incomprehensible. did anyone else understand it? perhaps I'll try to reread it when I'm not tired.)
Re resp:235: I don't see why someone couldn't make a proposal to reinstate them. I don't think having something happen because people voted *down* the proposal makes sense, though, unless jep words his proposal that way.
Can we vote whether to restore jep's items including his responses (which he might be given time to scribble first) or without his responses or without his responses and without the responses of anyone else who agrees not to have their responses restored?
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I don't think that kind of fine-tuning is necessary. Should this pass, and assuming that the items can be recovered in raw Picospan format, I'll volunteer to do the item restoration, and will honor anyone's request to have their own responses scribbled before the items are returned to public view. <donning voteadm hat...> Proposal wording that appears in the vote program should be simply a statement of the proposed policy and not include the rationale. In other words, proposers don't get to advocate their proposal while the voter is in the voting booth. This has been past practice, and I think that it is a reasonable requirement. The vote program text always references the associated discussion item and recommends that people read it before voting. That's where arguments for and against belong. </hat>
re resp:214: You're a great American, Jamie, and a true leader on Grex. Please act accordingly. To the extent people don't follow your wise leadership, I am sure you can just outsmart them into doing what you want. I, along with all other Grexers, am hopelessly outclassed and outmatched when it comes to contending with your intentions. It is incomprehensible that you give in to us sheep on policy points when you know so much better than any other what we should do.
re resp:228: If Jamie's proposal fails, the users have not directed an action in any way with regard to Valerie's items in the femme conference. The staff will be as free as they are now about what to do. If his and mine both fail, they're also free to do what they wish with regard to mine. The users won't have decided anything. If his passes and mine passes, Valerie's items will have to be restored, but it's not clear what happens to mine, because the users will have spoken ambiguously. If his passes, and mine fails, then all of the items get restored. That's the only case where all is clear with regard to the user's decisions on these items. If his fails and mine passes, my items stay deleted, but there's been no decision to do anything about valerie's items 75 passes, 76 passes -- valerie's items are restored, jep's ??? 75 fails, 76 passes -- jep's items stay deleted, valerie's ??? 75 passes, 76 fails -- all of the items get restored 75 fails, 76 fails -- jep's items ???, valerie's items ??? I don't think you can confidently state anything beyond that. For items where the users haven't made a decision, the staff could make them available on M,W,F,Su each week if they agreed among themselves that that's what's needed; there's no (new) policy and so there will still be uncertainty.
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(yes, 1(a)(2) and 1(b)(2) should be modified to read "scribbled" instead of "censored," as they refer to software functions, not Jamie's opinion.)
I think 'erased' would also work, since it's the name of the analogous function in Backtalk. It's also probably clearer for people who don't use Picospan.
Personally, I don't see how changing the word would change what's being voted on and about.
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that is forcing staff to do all the scribbling of jep and valerie's items. wouldn't they have to be logged on as "valerie" to scribble valerie's items? I note that when I posted an item from mnet on grex in an agora item where we were discussing whether user's owned their own words, and it was decided to remove that post, that marcus (who took the action) did not scribble it, he went in and edited the post and put xxx's through everything. Can staff actually "scribble" a post of another user without being logged on as that user? If staff would have to use root and edit each individual post and take out the words one by one, that would take a lot of time. Why pass such a proposal unless its clear that somebody on staff is willing to volunteer to take the time to do all that work?
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And John Remmers has volunteered to do the grunt work.
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Please consider removing all but what was part three. That last is more editorial comment and doesn't belong in the motion.
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I'd like to thank naftee for brining this matter to our attention.
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Hi, this is your friendly voteadm person again. The wording in Section 1 of #255 is acceptable, although I don't think Section 2 is necessary and could give a misleading impression. By default, policies take effect as soon as a passing result is announced, and staff is always supposed to implement policies as soon as practical. Having that language in the proposal suggests that those things are not the default. Jamie, are you willing to take that part out? It appears that for the first time in Grex history we might be voting on more than one proposal at the same time. The current vote program can handle that okay with a minor amount of hack-work on my part, but I'm working on a rewrite that will handle parallel votes with different expiration times gracefully, and that will automate some things that I currently do by hand. I'd like to delay the start of voting until tomorrow (Saturday) to see if I can get that operational. If I do, I'll start the vote using the new program; if not, I'll start it using the old one. Hopefully that's acceptable to folks.
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Thanks for the willingness to be flexible. Refresh my memory -- was more that one staff member involved in deleting the items? The proposal refers to "staff members".
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I would also like to thank willcome and jp2 for their tireless efforts in discussing the matter with the users of GreX.
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Re #261: You can avoid naming names and still be factually accurate.
To clarify: I think the wording in #259 is okay except that the phrase "by staff members" is contrary to fact. Simplest fix would be to leave it out. Once that's fixed, I'll start a vote whenever Jamie says. Other things came up this weekend that slowed down work on the new vote program, and I doubt I'll have a chance to work on it again until next weekend, so in the interest of expediting a decision it may be best to start the vote under the old program.
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(That only works if the bill is sure to pass, jp2. You know that. Except in the case of "poison pill" riders, which are added to ensure the basic bill does NOT pass.)
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When I start seeing some kickbacks for my efforts, I'll give more serious consideration to imitating shady legislative practices. But darn it, Jamie didn't offer me any bribes at all. You get what you pay for. :) Okay, I'll start the voting either later today or first thing tomorrow.
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That ought to buy you some creamer for your Starbucks latte, James.
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I request, once again as I did in resp:203 on Wednesday, January 21, that the Board resolve the questions that have been raised by myself and others about what happens if both proposals pass, before the proposals are placed before the voters. I think otherwise the voters can not know what they are voting to decide, and that therefore the outcome of the two votes will possibly be moot. I don't know of a procedure for bringing this request into the decision making process. I hope someone on the Board can take charge, though.
It is my understanding that the most recent proposal takes precedence. Since jp2's proposal was made first, your proposal would be the most recent. So, if jp2' proposal passes and yours passes, only the baby diary items will be restored. If jp2's proposal passes and yours doesnt, then the baby diary items and the divorce items will be restored. If jp2's proposal fails and yours passes, then the staff could decide to restore the baby diary items but they would not be allowed to restore the divorce items. If both proposals fail, the status quo prevails. I am not sure we need a board action to clarify this officially.
Here's how it works: Each proposal is voted upon as it is, as if it were the only one on the table. In case of direct conflict between successfully passed proposals, the later one takes precedence (assumed to be a change of mind/heart on the part of the membership -- it makes no difference if the time lapse between conflicting proposals is minutes or years). How much more simplification/clarification do you need?
slynne slipped in
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"It would be best to avoid an unpleasant situation." Too late. ;-)
There should be a time lag between the beginnings of the voting periods for the respective proposals roughly equivalent to the lag between their originations. I would be in favor of making that lag one day at minimum, in order to make it easier on the voteadm, and to make it easier for the membership to treat the two proposals individually.
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Of course you would, since that would let your proposal override his.
heh
According to the minutes of the most recent board meeting, the votes are to be run concurrently. The only conflict is if both initiatives pass, which would quite clearly indicate that the membership wants the items restored but agrees that the divorce items should not be restored. The consensus appears to me to be that if both initiatives fail, no action should be taken.
I was busily setting up the vote program this morning and getting ready to start the voting, since Jamie had given me the go-ahead. Then I decided to catch up on Coop. Big mistake. :) According to the rules, once the discussion period on a proposal is over, the proposer has control over when the vote starts. From Jamie's response #282 it sounds like he's reconsidering the timing, so I'll wait until I get clarification from him on that before starting the voting on his proposal. However, once the vote starts, there's no turning back....
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:-0
"I'm coming up, so you better get this voting started."
I apologize for the confusion, but there was really no consensus a week ago on how this situation ought to be resolved. It appears there is now. That being the case, I have no objection to the voting on both items commencing.
Okay, I'll start the vote tonight.
Thanks, remmers!
THANKS jremmers!
The polls are now open. Type "vote" at a Unix shell prompt, "!vote" just about anywhere else. You get to choose which of the two propositions to vote on. When done with your first choice, you get to choose again. You can vote more than once; your last vote overwrites any previous one. Therefore, it is appropriate to continue discussing the proposal here during the voting period.
Thank you, remmers. My votes have been cast. :)
I don't like the way proposal B is phrased. It makes it seems as if it was a typical staff action to delete items on request.
Even though I'm not excited about this whole affair, I guess I recommend a "Yes" vote on this proposal. That would ostensibly restore things to where they were before the "unauthorized" item deletions took place. I'm sorry that staff will have to spend time on this should it pass, but that is not the fault of the membership - the fault lies elsewhere.
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I voted no on this proposal.
I definitely don't agree with jp2 that the Grex staff has any contempt for the users. I've never seen any indication that any of the users feel that way -- until jp2 said it. Like cmcgee, I voted against this proposal.
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Logic and precedent are not the only criteria for making decisions. One of my favorte "Bill of Rights" lists is in a book on independent thinking. VIII You have the right to be illogical in making decisions. A common way for people to manipulate others is by claiming that you cannot do anything illogical. They try to force you to go against your own values, which may place a higher priority on relationships and feelings, by insisting that you must be "logical". Logic and precident are simply -one- way to make good decisions.
ROckon, McGEe
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"Personal favors for favored persons"
I voted in favor of this.
May I draw your attention response 124, above?
Re 298: The membership is obviously divided on this question. Is it really any wonder that the staff is awaiting instruction from the membership? It seems to me that the real contempt would be pre-empting the membership's decision.
Jamie, being a dick about it may convince some people to vote against your proposal just to spite you.
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I read it.
Yeah it's about as polite as you can get.
I voted "no" on this proposal.
I voted yes.
I voted "no".
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(It's a form of campaigning, jp2.)
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Glad to be of help. :)
Actually, if you go back and look, it's not in the least uncommon for people to announce how they are voting or have voted.
I'll sometimes announce how I intend to vote, but I rarely announce how I *have* voted. And I always reserve the right to change my mind.
I've seen people announce their vote on previous elections/initiatives. I voted "no" on this.
I don't announce my vote for candidates for Board seats, or endorse candidates. I don't have any similar reservations about proposals, though.
People put election signs in their yards so that prospective neighbors will know whether they fit in. Jim's street has a lot of flags, relative to the rest of his area of town (pro-war).
(That is a different perspective on yard signs.)
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I've been told it does.
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That's the vibe I've gotten from listening to Bush...
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No, he joined the Reserves and then skipped out on the meetings.
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> Date: 29 Jan 2004 05:45:09 -0000 > From: valerie@unixmama.com > To: xxxxxxxxxxxx@cyberspace.org > Subject: a request > Hello. I'm writing with a request that is very important to me. > I deleted my online baby diary from Grex. There is a vote that has > just started, to undelete it, against my wishes. Please, even if > you haven't used Grex in a long time, I urge you to log in and vote >to leave the baby diary deleted. The vote also includes John Perry's > divorce diary, which I deleted at his request, and which he wishes > to also stay deleted. I encourage you to log in and vote to leave all > these items deleted. My baby diary items contain lots of personal > information about me and my children that I no longer wish to be > posted on the Internet. Even if my items are restored without my > postings, my baby diary items are still all about me and my children, > and the other people's postings are full of my personal information > that I no longer wish to have posted. > > Here are the details of what happened: Back in 1997, I started > keeping an online baby diary on Grex, logging many personal details > of pregnancy, the births of my children, and many details of raising > them, and about my personal life. I originally posted it because > I thought people who hadn't experienced pregnancy and childbirth > might be interested to read about these things. I figured that > since it was located in a back corner of Grex, the only people who > would wade through my baby diary were people who were interested > enough in parenting to wade through hundreds of postings about messy > diapers and other topics of interest only to people who were truly > interested in parenting issues, and also to people who were very > patient friends of mine who wanted to keep up with my life. > > A few weeks ago, I discovered that a parody of my baby diary had > been running on M-Net for the past 2 1/2 years, without my knowledge. > (If you would like to see it, it's item 39 in the "Agora" conference > on M-Net.) Some of the postings there are funny, some are nasty. > Finding the parody explained a lot about why the real baby diary > had, in the past 2 1/2 years, acquired a number of people who didn't > really seem to be interested in parenting, as you could tell by > their postings. They were visiting my baby diary to acquire > material to parody on M-Net, or better yet to post my words verbatim > and laugh about how outrageous or personal the information was. > The rules of the parody game in M-Net's Agora conference say that > anything posted anywhere on Grex is open to parodying. There is > no way to opt out of being parodied. That is, if you post anything > on Grex, the people in M-Net's Agora conference take it as an open > invitation to parody you. I wished to opt out. So I deleted my > baby diary. I used my Grex staff access to do it, just as I would > have done for any user of Grex who asked staff to delete an item that > was full of his or her personal information that they no longer wanted > to have online. > > When I deleted the baby diaries, someone started a discussion > in the co-op conference, claiming that my deletion of the baby > diaries was "root abuse". User jp2 started a vote, this vote that > I am writing to you about, to undelete the baby diaries. His > reasoning is that since there were other people's words in the baby > diaries, he claims it was censorship for me to delete their words > without their permission. I find this claim bizarre. The information > in those baby diaries is all about me and my children. If someone > else had posted my credit card numbers, it would clearly be appropriate > to delete that posting, because it contained my personal information. > Most of the postings in the baby diaries are likewise all about my > personal information. I no longer wish to have this personal > information online. > > So, if you would log in to Grex and vote "no" on proposal "A", > I would very much appreciate it. > > To vote, log in to Grex, and, type !vote from a menu, or > vote from a shell prompt. Then follow the menus from there. > > -Valerie
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And she doesn't even mention my username. I'm just a "someone". What a bitch. (btw Thanks, cyklone)
If Va1erie were a member, it's clear how her vote would go.
resp:333 Again and again, the message seems to be-- cyberspace is pretty open, so be wary of posting personal information; people can and will exploit it. Be knowledgable of how secure the forums are that you post to. Can you trust the folks you're sharing information with? And who might those folks be? Of course, a lot of those ideas and questions seem moot... moot to be asked or applied, at least to that particular situation. Yes, the issue at hand now is policy. But that's just a matter of symptom... I think the concerns described above probably are matters of prevention. Policies do guide decision-making. But people have to put thought in those choices-- and should, each and every time.
va1erie. heh
I vote no to the restoration of deleted items or posts from tape. I feel perfectly okay with the risks I take posting on Grex. One of the risks is that the item could be deleted at any time, including all of my posts. If I write something I particularly care for, it's my responsibility to keep a copy of it. Not Grex's. I also reserve the right to delete every post I ever made on Grex, without regard to the "damage" that action would cause to the context of other people's posts. I have no expectation that my posts on Grex are guaranteed against anything, including deletion. Same with anything I write anywhere online, unless I personally signed a contract giving me that guarantee. I posted a great deal in Valerie's baby diary and don't care one whit that my posts there are gone. If that item is restored, with or without her posts, I request my posts there be deleted.
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(sarahlee is not a member, BTW)
i'm ejaculating on your tits.
!members >> fags.on.GreX
From M-Net: #7 of 7 by James Howard (jp2) on Tue Feb 3 11:14:55 2004: I think the vote ends on Saturday. Regardless, be warned now, under any circumstance but A passing and B failing, the initiative for A will be re-entered and Grex will continue voting on it every ten days until they get it right.
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Sorry, I don't think so. 8-) There is no provision for repeated voting on something that fails. I voted yes on A and no on B, FWIW.
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The censored log issue sat for a long time -- over a year? -- before being revisited. Maybe it'll be necessary to have a bylaw change to dictate a waiting period before revisiting an issue that's been voted on.
There is a by-law amendment on the table right now, which I would consider amending specifically to allow the voteadm to exclude system- abusive, repetitive proposals.
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Sure thing, Diebold!
For the record, the response jp2 wants removed quotes a posting he made on m-net [#7 of 7 by James Howard (jp2) on Tue Feb 3 11:14:55 2004] declaring that his initiative, should it fail, will be re-entered repeatedly (every ten days) "until they get it right."
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By the way, Jamie, can you prove that the text posted in resp:344 was originally written by and is owned by you? Pointing to its origination on m-net alone would not constitute proof without some verification that the account jp2 on m-net is owned by you, which cannot be verified by grex staff unless they also have sysadmin privileges on m-net, or unless the m-net sysadmin vouches for the accuracy of any origin- specific log data...
Quoting someone, with full attribution, isn't going to be deemed copyright infringement to begin with.
Re. 354: According to 352, you already know jp2 owns it.
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Prove it...
jp2 really do *not* want this resolved in his favour. If it is, then there is another can of worms opened: how to track down all of the other copies of his words that exist on the Internet. Of course, it is not _his_ problem to track down all the copies of the baby-diary and divorce items, but it becomes attractive to some to try. While parody is protected, I wonder how much was directly quoted in m-net's parody conference, and what relation the quotations bear to the totality of the original work. This really isn't something you want to start, jp2.
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(this is coop, not agora).
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HEY DIDSOMEONE METION THE DMCA?
As long as we're mentioning things, somebody should mention "fair use", which I believe #344 to be.
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It's a paragraph, Jamie. It was quoted directly, in context, from a public site, and with the intention of conveying information relevant to an ongoing policy discussion. But by all means, take legal action if you find it necessary. Please.
What about the fair use rights of people who posted in your item?
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LOOK WHO"S TALKING, MR " I HAVE THE TIME TO TRY TO BAN ALL OF CANADA FROM ARBORNET YET WON'T GET OFF MY ASS TO PURSUE A LOUSY LITIGATION" . HAHA YOU"RE WORSE THAN TWINKIEASS.
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Presumably, ten days and around three hours after it began. If you're going to take us to task for not specifically allowing for the voting period to fluctuate for purposes of convenience in the by-laws, then you're wasting your time. If you think it's a problem, propose an amendment to solve it.
As the motd says / alludes to, end of the day Feb. 7 (i.e. 11:59.999...pm ET)
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The Treasuerer cannot check the mailbox on Saturday, to see who might have joined that day. So the results cannot be certified before Monday. Reporting tentative results before the membership list is certified compromises the secret ballot, by allowing of 'traffic analysis.'
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re 374 Not exactly; a day is really only 23 hours and 56 minutes long (approx).
Except if you're moving.
Voting will end at midnight tonight (Saturday, Feb. 7). I'll report the results as soon as Mark can certify the list of eligible voters, which as Joe pointed out might not be until sometime Monday.
I CAN'T WAIT !!!&**&(*(&
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.
2) Right. It's impossible for anyone to argue anything without having ulterior motives.
Just so you know valerie, if you read my numerous posts on the issue, I have personally much more invested in jep's item. My belief you acted improperly has zero connection to my parodies. I certainly have no intention of digging through your diaries for material if they are restored (as they should be). And I certainly don't need your items restored to feel any sense of "vindication." Just thought I'd clear that up, since there seems to be a great deal of unsupported speculation going on. I am curious, though, how you believe your children would be harmed by restoring your items. Finally, it seems to me you are muddying up the issues when you try to compare your deletions with those of the multiple large files posted by the polyboys. It is my understanding that those items were impairing system performance and therefore were well within the purview of staff to take immediate action. Your items did not impact system performance, and you were therefore out of line to take staff action of any sort. The same applies to jep's items.
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No, I'm not looking for validation that the parodies were okay. I didn't participate in them much, and I felt bad about posting the direct quote, so I scribbled it. Your reactions here have reduced my sympathy for you, but whether the parodies were okay, and whether your deletion of other people's responses was okay, are independent questions My reaction to your abuse of your Cfadm privileges is completely consistent with my reaction to similar actions by FWs on M-Net, and my support of allowing posters to control their own text. (Not item authors, the people who actually wrote the text.) Abuses of staff privileges shouldn't be rewarded by allowing them to stand.
I hope the m-net parodists have also 'learned a lesson' and will restrict their artistic efforts to dead authors, or to people (like me) who are not easily offended. People who never make fun of other people or themselves (like Valerie and Twila) are not good choices for parodying.
The above is an excellent choice for a parody.
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I filter your mom
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Re 382, where Valerie comments on the deletion of the items quoting Plato's Republic: In fact, staff _did_ contact the fairwitness and _did_ wait for her to remove the items. There were one or two staff members who were willing to act, but most of us felt the right thing to do, in light of the current controversy, was to wait of Katie. So we did.
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valerie, you lose more credibility and respect with every additional word you write. Your reaction to something done elsewhere and overt action (negative, IMO) against grex do not demonstrate justification one iota. I acknowledge that those you feel wronged you are also participating in the issue here on grex. But you did not take the high road. And that is something you will not admit, and that is what I dislike the most about this whole thing.
Re #387: For better or worse, people who have no sense of humor about
themselves are excellent targets for parody.
resp:382 #4 & #5 Good God. Have you read *anything* concerning what has been written say, in the discretion of blogging? What has been written there could well be applied to a situation such as yours. The point is not so much "punishment" but that personal information should be handled carefully on public forums, be they bbs, weblog/live journal, etc. We've said that a number of times now. I think what the big issue has been with the deleted items is that people replied to them. Their responses were deleted without their permission. Anything else, other arguments, I believe, are lesser-- arguments that the items had value for others besides the authors, etc. What do people want from Grex? This is a public forum-- personal information is going to be subject to some scrutiny. Policy is always a band-aid/tailpipe solution at best. People will either have to be comfortable with the fact that such words can be exploited, or they maybe shouldn't share-- or share so much. I think we said there are forums a little less public than this-- a little more secure.
Your 'big issue' is correct.
Re 395 - by 'excellent targets' do you mean for the purpose of hurting people?
Re #398: No, I mean that people with no sense of humor about themselves are
usually extremely funny to others. (If they had a sense of humor
about themselves, they'd know how funny they are, and could either
change their behavior or accept it as humorous and move on.)
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"wont somebody please think of the CHILDREN? My poor innocent babies?" um.. were the excruciating details of your personal life entered under duress? Was someone forcing you to not thinkk of your own words or how they would affect your own children when you entered them? Really, If it was harmless to them THEN, it is harmless to them NOW.
...even if she entered them in some sort of OCD spaz-out she still ENTERED them. YOU CAN'T TAKE BACK WHAT YOU SAID, VAL, EVEN IF YOU WERE FLORIDLY PSYCHOTIC WHEN YOU ENTERED THOSE ITEMS. you stole from me, vandal.
She violated you, did she.
*sniff*
:(~~~
The treasurer has informed me that the voter list is up to date.
With 52 out of 82 eligible members voting, the results are:
yes 15
no 37
The motion fails.
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Thanks for eating your own children, Jews.
Nazis.
Pussies
Whores.
Now that's a mature response. And so mysogonistic too.
Yeah. Whores.
Penises.
Are churls.
re411: you are right. fatso foureyes.
re 415: What in the world brought that on? *blink* I don't believe that anything I've said merits schoolyard insults.
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"Now that's a mature response" does not parse to "you're being totally immature". It does parse to I think those are rather odd insults to be letting fly in the coop conference (or anywhere, actually).
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My exposure to Cartman is nearly nil, so I don't recognize any quotes.
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BATMAN
UYEAHmM ANDROBIN>
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: