John Bokma harassment

[P.L.Hayes]

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling at hotmail.com> writes:

> "P.L.Hayes" <paul at wolfbone.ath.cx> wrote in message 
> news:87slmwbhx5.fsf at wolfbone.ath.cx...
>>
>> I agree. I have already written to Dreamhost and I hope more people
>> will do so. I have found some of what has been posted here quite
>> astonishing and the actions of certain people to be reprehensible: by
>> far the most serious violation of netiquette I see here is this
>> thoroughly wrong-headed campaign to try to censor Xah by appealing to
>> his service provider.
>
> No one that I know of is trying to censor Xah.  It's the form his postings 
> take that cause problems, not the content.
>

Having read through the threads in question, I cannot agree on either
point. If form alone had been the problem, Xah's sporadic
cross-posting to a handful of related newsgroups would presumably be
the sole cause for complaint and yet that hardly seems to me to
justify complaining to his ISP or to Google, let alone to his
_web_hosting company. But that is not what has happened anyway:
complainers have referred to Xah's posts as being off-topic - in some
cases, "drivel" and "rants" - an opinion not shared by many more
than half those who have posted to the threads. Fair enough - one is
entitled to one's opinion - but it would be a mischaracterisation of
what the complainers have actually written in their posts and have
claimed to have written in their complaints to Dreamhost to say that
form alone has been the issue.

If you believe that what Xah has done was such a serious breach of
netiquette and caused such serious problems that the appropriate
course of action was to demand that his ISP and even his website host
deny him access to the Internet, then having done so would not,
strictly speaking, have been an attempt to censor Xah. But to maintain
such a premise is, as others have opined, rather eccentric and
overblown and if those who have written complaints about Xah to his
ISP or to his website host have not deliberately meant to censor him,
that is beside the point and no good reason to support their actions.
I find it rather difficult anyway to believe that there is no
deliberate attempt at censorship in the light of threads such as this
one:

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/browse_frm/thread/8fec378b74263f25/29458dc7da626a27?lnk=st&q=Bokma+Xah+Lee&rnum=3#29458dc7da626a27

"I rather account kill by ISP :-D." 

>> In my opinion it is that, not anything Xah has
>> done, which comes any where near deserving any sort of termination of
>> access to the Internet.
>
> Bringing facts to their attention?  If Dreamhost has given him notice of 
> termination, it's for violating their policies, not because people have told 
> them "I don't like him".

Exactly. Such underhand and manipulative behaviour is what makes this
whole business so distasteful and why I find the actions of those who
have tried to remedy perceived 'problems' in this way quite despicable.

>> Since Xah's website is hosted by Dreamhost,
>> the unwarranted censorship will be compounded by an act of gratuitous
>> vandalism, potentially depriving people of useful resources:
>
> He's free to find another ISP and *not* violate their rules. 

Oh! Well that's okay then.

Paul.