Background : soc.culture.irish has been buried under a blanket of hate posts, calls for terrorism, and the like.

No, I don't go out and dispute the right of the authors to make these posts. I merely suggest something called a "Kill Clean Fest", which is a voluntary cooperative effort in which the participants



  1. Agree to abstain from making certain types of posts in the group.


  2. Agree to never respond to such posts.


  3. Agree to killfile those who violate rules 1 or 2, once the fest gets going.


  4. Make a periodic post, explaining the fest to newcomers, naming the participants, and inviting them to join.



End result : (If this takes place).

The posts are still up, but no longer cluttering our screens. There is no longer a need to wade through a list of hundreds of posts calling for nailbombings in order to get to a post about Yeats' influence on contemporary Australian poetry, for example.

Others, whose preferences differ, are still free to look at and make the posts we're cooperatively keeping off of our screens - and only our screens.





The response?


  1. Aside from a sane few people, the group went insane in a manner curiously similar to the way in which another crowd was to a few months later, though the brand of extremism pushed was exactly the opposite of that of Tim Skirvin (someone we will meet). It was more akin to Boursy's (one of Tim's enemies).

    click here for the response I gave


    This brings us to a point that Tim will seem to have a hard time getting. You're going to see him come in with demands that the previous brand of Netiquette be discarded, and replaced with one of his own choosing. This is his constant stance - "I am right, so I do not need to discuss anything. Do as I say, or I'll attack your reputation, and hassle you until you do."

    But his is not the only cabal, and the others, which will disagree with his, frequently, are offering the exact same line. So, aside from the offensive nature of an announcement that will you let him do your thinking for you on this subject, or else, we have the reality that thanks to Tim and others like him, often one will be harassed, no matter what one does online.


  2. There was some ugly racial stuff. It was known there, that while I was part Irish, and had some curiosity about that portion of my heritage, I was also part Spanish, and part French, and was a practicing Jew instead of a practicing Catholic. I thought of this as being just a slightly unusual aspect of my background. Some, though had a real problem with this, suggesting that my racial impurity made my input irrelevant, and had a great enthusiasm for explaining this to me, in varying degrees of coarseness.

    Yet another reason why I keep the mailbox closed.



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