re urgent ted frank wanted for killing aj teel in article apr eff org mnemonic eff org mike godwin writes in article c bvqy fld dscomsa desy de hallam zeus desy de writes but punishing the person for posting such a thing smacks of authoritarianism it s a deliberate act of fraud intended to cause harm you seem to be unclear about the legal meaning of fraud mere misrepresentation is not fraud your comment here is meant as a put down it fails for several reasons you have edited out the context of the action under discussion i never brought the legal definition up i use the english language and not the legal dialect the legal definition of fraud changes from one country to another in any case the context of the discussion is morality of censorship how does a posting from your site do any such thing especially if your site is a university do you know any person who believes that a university endorses every comment made from a university site that is why i refered specifically to a company good now do you know any person who believes that a company endorses every comment made from a university site you are extrapolating from the statement i made concerning a circumstance in which such an act of censorship would be permissable to the teel case if you had bothered to read the post instead of trying to prove how stupid you thought me you would have done rather better the mode of argument i was using was a form of rhetoric argument by example i describe a wide set of circumstances in which an action is permisable and demonstrate that they do not apply thus the action is not permisable obviously a company posting from a university adress would be squashed it would be contrary to the internet comercial use usenet does not distribute letterhead organization desydeutsches elektronen synchrotron experiment zeus bei hera i suggest strongly that if you mean for this to be taken as letterhead you get a better stationery designer now you are clutching at straws in the context of the discussion it was the fact of association between the company and the post that was important the typeface etc is inconsequential there are people on the net who are openly supporting the murder of members of my family sigh if you are implying that i am lying i suggest you read mark holohan and ulick staffords posts into soc culture british if you are suggesting that advocating murder is a trivial matter i would prefer that you state it directly certainly i oppose the right of dr sidiqui and the ayatolah khomenhi to call for the murder of salman rushdie incitement to murder is not part of what i consider legitimate freedom of speech as for your notion that employees can argue their different political views at their own expense could you explain precisely what expense you re talking about internet is not free the connection charges are quite expensive for comercial concerns could you give me a cost breakdown for the expense to your company attributable to an employee s posting a political view in disagreement with yours numbers please that is irrelevant the case is not the incremental cost but the facility cost if i decide that a company i am associated with should subscribe to usenet that usenet connection is the property of the company it is quite legitimate for a company to have a political or other agenda and regulate the use of its property in accordance with its policy for example if a microsoft employee were to post windows nt is crap don t buy it from a microsoft machine i would consider it reasonable for microsoft to sack that employee in the same way if a company decides that it has political objectives it might wish to regulate postings in a political manner this is no worse than rupert murdoch using his papers as a political platform for his views i was refering to the arrogance of your position quoting the words written by slave owners at me in the cause of freedom which words written by slave owners did i quote i don t recall quoting anyone ah yes you did not quote them merely refered to them your constitution is not considered sacrosanct in other parts of the globe nor have i assumed it is i don t consider the first amendment to have talismanic value you might just as well have attempted to argue from the king james bible to a muslim i was pointing out that your reasoning is parochial when with little effort you could have made a substantive point i made the effort apparently you made a certain effort to misunderstand me your article consisted of a reference to the first ammendment your signature and pretty well damn all else for an example of a uk publication that understands this try index on censorship i used to subscribe i would still if i was not moving index regularly publishes opinions by non americans who believe the first amendment represents appropriate free speech principles for all open societies see e g the opinions of the dissenting law lords in the spycatcher case are you refering to the initial hearings on an injunction or the judgments on the substantive case the initial hearings that the government won were judged on the not unresonable judgment that assertion by the government that the national interest might be harmed would be grounds for prior restraint the second set of hearings on the substance judged that the government had no case and that the official secrets act could not be used to suppress information in thwe public domain already the part that they won was over the copyright issue which is rather separate here again the issue of censorship is rather different in the case that information is divulged on the understanding that it will not be communicated to third parties the first ammendment certainly does not apply in this case as the numerous prosecutions of spies in the us proves the crux of the spycatcher affair was extrateritoriality of british law the censorship aspect of it arose as a result of the government s ludicrous attempts to prevent summary of the case in the book you haven t any reason to believe that anything i ve said has been reached unquestioningly only most of what you write for someone who purports to be opposed to argument from assertion you certainly get by on assertions a lot funny i saw that as a rejection of an assertion that you had made of course in rejecting an assertion i have to make a contrary assertion since this assertion is unprovable i left it at that so far i have not seen you demonstrate a command of the contrary opinion to your own you are attacking my anti censorship view because i dare to accept the validity of some pro censorship arguments while rejecting their conclusions plus i am not an absolutist i have this funny idea that the solution to this problem was not decided in by a group of white male gentry in secret session and sumarized in a single line furthermore i don t think that the issues are half as simple as you imply you may think that i am being anti american in disallowing recourse to the first ammendment it s just that this argument has no currency in the parts of the world where there is state censorship such as iran kewait and israel i don t pretend to have geared my discourse for all conceivable audiences i don t think that you have geered your discourse to any audience save that of proving that you are the only person wearing a white hat phill hallam baker
