So, have you guessed yet, which one of Fred's enemies I was in the
preceding account? Like a lot of people, I suspect, I got pulled into
Fred's little world by replying to a post of his before I knew of his
background.
One day, I'm looking through the articles in soc.singles. I come across
a post of Cherry's entitled "NAMBLA needs
psychiatric help". "Wow", I think, "an off topic post in s.s. How ever
will I deal with the shock?" So, I wander off to alt.mens-rights and
there it is again, as it is in soc.culture.israel as well. "Is there a
place where this hasn't been posted?" Apparently not, or at least not
very many, it's beginning to seem.
When I first came online some years previously, and would encounter
something like this, I'd dive right in and ask people to remove the
thread. This got me flamed an awful lot and I learned not to do that,
especially, and most recently, in
soc.culture.irish.
One argument that I kept getting by e-mail was, that if I were a
non-participant in the discussion, then it would be none of my business
where it took place. On a purely mechanically rational basis, this made no
sense to me. If something is disrupting a forum by its presence, shouldn't
we be trying to move it elsewhere as quickly as possible? But human
beings aren't purely rational creatures anywhere, especially on Usenet,
and if one wishes to work with them, one does have to take their quirks
into account, yes?
Question: Why should one make concessions
to an illogical attitude?
Answer: Click here.
At this point, I had never even heard of Fred Cherry, though I had
heard of NAMBLA, and had to agree with the sentiment of the title.
Further, it wasn't as if Fred had been the first to go off topic in
these groups. Sexually oriented posts had already started popping up
(um, so to speak) in a wide variety of groups, and the first post of Fred's that I saw was far from being
the most unreasonable of the ones that I had seen so far.
To his apparent credit (I did not yet know of his conspiracy
theorizing), he introduced a side topic of general relevance - the
increasing tendency of people to be silenced on Usenet, either by being
harassed until they quit, or, failing that, by their system operators
being harassed until they terminated the online dissident's access. This
was leading to a situation where Usenet was becoming one of the most
heavily censored media in existence, dominated by the most unstable and
the most manipulative of its participants. This was something that needed
to be talked about. It never really was, and Usenet went on to become the
desert that it is, today, almost devoid of intellectual content, or
entertainment value.
So, here's what I had to say to Mr.Cherry, initially after my first
post in response to his.
"Aren't you following up on your own posts?", is a response that I heard a few times.
One thing that one should notice is that, after making a mild
concession to a bit of netiquette that I didn't invent, I made an attempt
to steer the discussion away from the off topic NAMBLA business, and
toward the more generally relevant topic of online harassment. Having done
so, going on to politely ask Fred to move the NAMBLA discussion elsewhere,
suggesting a number of groups to consider removing from the Newsgroup
line. I started getting mailbombed, and would be, again, repeatedly,
in the future, as long as I remained with MCS. Some documentation is
given, in the second link following, in the commentary following a latter
flamewar.
"That Fred Cherry is one crazy son of a bitch, isn't he ?", was a
common response, on hearing of this. Yes he was, and yes he is. But Fred
didn't do the mailbombing. It was a collaborative effort, and as near as I
can tell from the letters that got through, before mailfiltering went into
effect, Mr. Cherry was not one of the participants. Guess who was.
Your choices ...
