Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!jik
From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: _Boston Herald_ article on JEDR/Templeton case
Message-ID: <8306@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 88 03:48:11 GMT
References: <8304@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 28

In article <8304@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> sethg@athena.mit.edu (Seth
Gordon) writes:
>JEDR's current position, I believe, is: he doesn't want to deprive
>anyone of their Constitutional rights, but Templeton et al. should use
>better judgement, like the editor of a newspaper would, to exclude
>overtly racist comments.

It's too late for this!  No matter how justified Jonathan Richmond's
complaints and flames were, he's managed to bring the Real World(tm)
(That (tm) is also (tm), but I forget by whom :-) into it.  You
yourself said that it is "out of his control," and how true that is.
I think that we are about to see quite a few sites being forced to
leave the 'net at least temporarily.

To have that happen as a result of a few people being offended by a
joke and making a big enough stink about it to bring in outsiders who
won't understand the intricacies of the Usenet and who will instead
simply take the sites in their control off of the 'net is a real
shame.

I think most of us knew from the start that Jonathan Richmond and the
people who argued on his side of this issue would not be able to get
Brad Templeton out of r.h.f.  On the other hand, many of us also knew
from the start that this would probably be the result.  Perhaps JEDR
et al could have been just a bit less eager and a bit more rational?

  Jonathan Kamens
  MIT Project Athena