X-Message-Number: 28769 From: Kennita Watson <> Subject: An open letter to Kevin Q. Brown and the Cryonet community: ... Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:01:11 -0800 As I understand it, the "poster's reputation too low" filtering that is done on Cryonet only keeps the posts from appearing in their entirety on the nightly digest; they still are archived on the Internet site. Kevin, I entreat you to completely remove Jonathan Despres from the list of allowed posters to Cryonet. As a private entity, you are not required to provide complete freedom of speech, especially where it involves a pattern of documented falsehoods. I wonder what might be motivating you to continue to allow this behavior. I can only imagine that you made some sort of promise, to yourself and/or to others, that you would never censor the list. By now you may be seeing what has been demonstrated in fact and fiction over and over again: the fates and some people conspire to make those who make such rash promises regret having made them. Your half-measures have only made Despres more clever: when you instituted reputation, he learned to condense his messages into a single subject line. When you limited the length of the line, he learned to post URLs and provocative subject line text. To me it looks like a battle of wills. I beseech you to stop essentially giving Mr. Despres what he wants, which is free forum for his ideas, and to stop him from on this list. By any reasonable measure of incorrigibility, Mr. Despres has demonstrated same. Giving someone three strikes is one thing; Mr. Despres has had well nigh three hundred. I for one tire of seeing even subject lines with his name attached. Please, Kevin, remove Mr. Despres from the list so that he no longer has this long-standing forum as a platform. Real-world situations like Iraq and too many fictional situations to count should have taught you that absolutist declarations like "never" and "always" and "stay the course" are bound to cause more trouble than they're worth someday. Anyone, including you, who says they will never forgive you if you ban him, courts the same trouble. This is the 21st Century. Mr. Despres has many places to voice his ideas that he didn't have when Cryonet was created -- almost literally no end of places. Please don't have Cryonet continue to be among them. Sincerely, Kennita Watson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=28769