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

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