In article <51ruvugf13tjvckf95lmetoo14417ul...@4ax.com>, Constantinople

   The threat was obviously in jest.
   Amusing that on this one I agree with Constantinople
but come on! Nobody who can't even summon the courage
to use his own name on the internet is actually going to
call a graduate committee and the claim that he would
was obviously facetious. Personally, I think that
"zztop"'s facetious claim is far less offensive than
Russil's hypocritical efforts to pose as the guaradian
of reasonableness and ethics. He's not. His past
behavior - particularly his systematic blind eye to
Kamm's net abuses and sudden intervention in Kamm's
favor when people started a campaign to make it harder
for him to carry them out effectively - shows him to be
systematically biased in favor of the net abusers;
his claims to even-handedness, like this, now are simply
efforts to make this bias seem more legitimate.

   As I've pointed out, the key feature of the
internet is the absence of any way of monitoring
the attitudes of the audience.  A tiny proportion of
those who read post; a tiny handful of aggressively hostile
 posters make sure that  anyone who comes to a group like
alt.fan.noam-chomsky because they are actually interested
in and sympathetic with chomsky's ideas will be the subject
of endless vicious personal attacks if they do so; part
of the strategy (a classic fascist strategy, incidentally;
I've seen fascist types do this in person frequently) is
to try to provoke a poster into behaving intemperently;
if they do, a wolf-pack of allied right-wing posters will
immediately swoop in to declare their behavior
outrageous, systematically pretending it wasn't a
reaction to a prolonged effort at provocation but an
abuse in itself. The key element, then, is the presence of
apparently even-handed, calm, reasonable, voices - the
Russils, the Matts, the David Friedmans - who
then play along and pretend the aggressors are being
just as reasonable as the other side, or more so.
These people masquerade as the audience, since the
real audience has been terrorized and silenced. If
applied by a group of fanatics willing to post daily
for years, it can completely neutralize the usefulness
of a newsgroup for the purpose for which it was actually
created.

   On the other hand, as I've pointed out, since this
is one of the only victories the "anarcho-capitalist"
movement which provides so many of the aggressors
has ever actually had, it's pretty small potatos. So
me, I'm bored of this. Back to real politics.
   DG