Defamation

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:44 am, Laura Creighton wrote:

> In a message of Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:09:18 +1100, "Steven D'Aprano" writes:
>>On Tue, 20 Oct 2015 03:28 am, Laura Creighton wrote:
>>
>>> Actually, this one was part of a huge set of defaming articles sent a
>>> year ago we were requested to remove, and did.  European Law may
>>> require us to do so.  I checked, and this article wasn't one on
>>> our list, which is why we missed this one.
> 
>>Today we're removing allegedly defaming posts because European law may or
>>may not apply (probably doesn't); tomorrow we're removing posts because
>>they fall foul of unreasonable laws anywhere in the world.
> 
> No, we are removing them because we want to.

Who are "we"? You're not talking about *you and me*.

According to Ralf, python.org is hosted in the Netherlands, so I think EU
law does apply, in which case my comments are irrelevant. I'm not
suggesting that the python-list maintainers ignore applicable law.

But I'll reply to your comments anyway:

>>The point is, obeying laws that don't apply, even if well-meaning, opens
>>us to a dangerous precedent that we shouldn't go near.
> 
> Pointedly not doing something you want to because it might make us
> obedient to some law we don't have to obey seems a matter of
> cutting off ones nose to spite one's face.

On the contrary, I think avoiding something that you want to do because you
know that it will be bad in the long term is a very adult thing to do.

I want to buy peanut butter, but I don't, because I know that when it comes
to peanut butter I have no self-control and would eat the entire jar in a
single sitting. So I simply don't buy it in the first place, and the
problem is solved.

If there is something I want to do, whether it is "eat the entire
cake", "spend all my money on books", or "delete archived emails I don't
approve of", before I do it I try to think about the consequences first.

We could have a long and interesting debate over the issue of where and when
folks should obey laws belonging to other countries, but here is not the
right forum, and if Ralf is right it's not even relevant in this case, so
I'll move on.

>>There's another reason to try very, very hard to avoid deleting archived
>>posts: until such time as python.org moves to Mailman3, deleting a single
>>posts breaks the permalinks for *every single post* for the entire month.
> 
> No, I think we were smarter than that in the script.

If that's the case, that would be fantastic, but are you *sure* it works
like that? Skip Montanaro made it clear that removing posts from the
archives regenerates URLs for the whole month:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/1176035



-- 
Steven