Should able2know ban people for having untoward opinions?

You better come up with some quick Gallic wit, our limited English resources are fast vanishing in some infinite self-referential regression..

"...The White Rabbit works for the Red Queen, but is also a secret member of the Underland Underground Resistance...."

Alas, my spirit is not blooming, have some black thoughts, it has been (s)oolong that I haven't had a witty sally.

Maybe I need some herbal, mate..

Olga's view is especially tough when she follows it up by announcing that she won't discuss it. Exactly how do we establish norms of civility and reason without talking about what we mean by them? And how do we break them down into simple-enough rules that a computer can detect breaches, lest the hunt for uncivil people overwhelm A2K's all-volunteer workforce?

Just when I resolve to leave this thread alone (really, really this time!) I get tempted with an old post like this:


The response to this is just a variation on JPB's point that "this is the internet, not a clubhouse." But JPB is not around to repeat her point, so let me try my version:

If you let Charles Manson crash on your couch, you put him in a position to murder you. That's a good reason not to let him crash on your couch. If, by contrast, you let Charles Manson post to your website, you don't put him in a position to do anything like that. The worst Charles Manson could do on A2K is ask people to kill themselves, and hope that some of them oblige.

There is hence no reason whatsoever why Craven shouldn't accept Manson as a poster on A2K. He could do no worse here than what you routinely do, Bill.

Setanta has obviously never fed an 8 week old kitten on Catnip.

I wish he would.

Wow, that's pretty harsh, Thomas. What is it that you think Bill routinely does that's as bad as Manson or what he would do? Wow again.

I think that what Thomas meant Mamie is that once you get into labelling people as "trash" it doesn't take long to start treating them as trash. You only need to be making the laws.

hopefully what was mean as well is some condemnation of a person who behaves as if having faults with in us, to include the ability to do evil, disqualifies us from the human race. We all have faults, we all have the ability to do evil, we all have a dark side....idiot Bills black and white only comic book world view is not deserving of serious attention, it is the opinion of one who has so far failed at the task of growing up.

Tell people to kill themselves, seriously hoping that they'll actually do it. Yes, that is pretty harsh. And it's all that Manson could do if, hypothetically, Robert admitted him to A2K.

I think Manson's defence rested on such an idea hawk.

Bill tells people to kill themselves??

By his own admission, yes. I just edited my last post to add a link to his admission--and to his credit, he does recognize that such posts are a departure from civility. But why not post the link again?

http://able2know.org/topic/163156-9#post-4393327

First time I've seen that. It's a bit over the top, to be sure.

PS: My point was not about Bill. My point was that murderous psychotics like Manson (and unlike Bill) can do much less damage over a network connection than they can in real life. Therefore, analogies between letting them sleep on your couch and letting them post on your website are inherently misleading.

I am not aware that Manson's philosophy on life was ever taken seriously by anyone outside of the family, the flaw in his thinking was obvious, and his behaviour was grotesk. Bill on the other hand has until recently been allotted a free pass for his outrageous behaviour, and I sense that he has been considered by many to be a thinker worth paying attention to. It is scary how much support comes the way of moral crusaders of the bible thumping variety like Bill. And this goes for Firefly as well, the lack of compassion that they have for human, their extremely vocal distaste for who humans are, is stunning. I think that a person has to be pretty self hating to follow either of them very far, I sure dont have the stomach for it.

me at least a half dozen time, and a few others as well as I recall..agrote and BillRM come to mind.

Haven't been following those posts, but the one you quote sounds like something along the lines of "Go jump in the lake, you idiot" or "Get lost and don't come back here again" - i.e. standard internet argument fare. Bill didn't say such things to any depressed teenagers, did he? Not a hanging offense.

One of the things about the net is that you HAVE NO IDEA who is out there.

Adolescents with sexual issues are at risk for suicide, and one of my major reasons for not simply ignoring O'Bill on many threads where he advocates that people with sexual attraction towards children should kill themselves is for that very reason...that it is quite likely, given that A2k threads on a subject tend to have very high Google rankings, that highly vulnerable adolescents WILL see such rantings.

It's not a hanging offence...I don't believe in that anyway....but it is not unlikely that O'Bill could have a real effect on real kids.

Edit: Actually, the net is strongly implicated in increasing the likelihood of "cluster suicides" involving more kids than it used to. Cluster suicides for adolescents are where a bunch of kids kill themselves when they hear of a kid in their network doing so. It used to be more or less confined to a school or social group, now it spreads like wildfire over the net. That's anecdotal, by the way....I don't know if anyone has researched it yet...though I think it likely they have...but it was something we were learning to be VERY searching about when assessing adolescents for suicide risk when I was last working with that age group.

That doesn't mean I can prove the possible harmfulness of people like O'Bill etc., because it's a different issue, but I do know the net can be very influential.

Ditto with hawk's and bill rm's.