Pursuant to the conversation we had at 3 AM, I am leaving in place the latest posting by the person signing himself as “Bendis” (usurping the name of noted comic writer Brian Bendis.) This posting appears toward the end of the responses on previous blog entry entitled “DID ANYONE ELSE NOTICE?” (update: we removed them when we just migrated to new software to cut down on the problem; the original material can be found here.) I am pleased to hear that you will be able to identify this individual and throw him off AOL because of his deliberately disruptive behavior and repeated violation of Terms of Service.
In order to simplify the AOL team’s job, I will ask everyone else on this board not to post anything further on the previous blog entry. “Bendis,” if you want to post another profanity-laded message here, be aware you’ll just be making AOL’s job easier. We’ve been keeping records of the exact times and ISPs through which you’ve been posting.
PAD
• 
I’d guess that being dead, Douglas Adams apparently merits no such courtesy from owner of this unauthorized website.
The people that do these kinds of things could care less if the author is living or dead.
Peter,
Has your request to abstain from posting further posts on the previous blog entry been reversed? I ask, because people are still posting on it.
“Re: Lewis Black’s aneurysm…what if the girl in question had been inspired to try to get into veterinary medicine by a favorite horse from her childhood? One that had died of an illness or something?
“OR, OR…she had a scholarship for that school’s equestrian team, but had to leave after one year…”
I do believe the man said, “Don’t think about that sentence for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out your nose.”
Your efforts are appreciated, and now that you have likely suffered an anneurism, a nice fruit basket will be sent to your survivors.
PAD This isn’t censorship, deserved or not. Censorship involves the smothering or restricting of an exchange of ideas.
I thought we covered this on the last censorship discussion.
Censor: To examine and expurgate.
To remove or prevent something (an idea, a person, an expression) from something else (a discussion, a print media, your own behavior) is to censor. I know; you’re talking about ideology, not definition, but that’s like saying this isn’t a case of someone expressing something. Well, yes he did express something. It’s something of little to no obvious value, but it is decidedly saying something, even if that something is just “*, N-word, C-word, *” with no underlying message.
Is it speech? Yes. Is it Federally protected speech? No. Unless Bendis comes back and tries to tell us it’s performance art or some crap.
Back during your crisis of ideology, you asked if one who espouses Free Speech as you do has an ethical conflict censoring what someone else has to say. I said you did not, and Bendis’s post is a perfect example of why.
What you are doing, Peter, is censorship. It may not be art or literature; it may lack redeeming social value, and may actually have a hand in deconstructing the community in which it is expressed (in this case, crashing your server). That doesn’t matter because it’s not a semantic issue; you are censoring Bendis. You are right to do so, just as you would be right to have the police arrest a houseguest who tries to knock out the supports in your basement as a means of expression, especially if all he’s expressing is “I want to knock the supports of this house out.”
You can do both without fear of being labelled a bad host.
Nekouken, I fail to see how booting Bendis would be censorship. Is it censorship to arrest someone who knocks over your mail box with a baseball bat or smashes your car window? Bendis didn’t just post naughty words, he filled up quite a bit of space with just asterixs (sp?). If he was trying to make a valid point, he should explain it, but it seems pretty clear by his lack of point and the amount of space he tried to take up that his intentions have been to cause problems. Arresting or kicking out the person who is trying to knock out the support beams of your house isn’t censorship, it’s arresting or kicking out a person who is trying to knock the support beams out of your house. I don’t think free speach covers intentionally distructive behavior.
Just my opinion, I guess.
Monkeys
Basically, freedom of expression stops when it causes others harm or infringes upon their rights and freedoms. You can’t express yourself at the expense of others (and I’m not talking about just offending someone, because that’s too subjective).
Monkeys.
Nekouken, I fail to see how booting Bendis would be censorship. Is it censorship to arrest someone who knocks over your mail box with a baseball bat or smashes your car window? Bendis didn’t just post naughty words, he filled up quite a bit of space with just asterixs (sp?). If he was trying to make a valid point, he should explain it, but it seems pretty clear by his lack of point and the amount of space he tried to take up that his intentions have been to cause problems. Arresting or kicking out the person who is trying to knock out the support beams of your house isn’t censorship, it’s arresting or kicking out a person who is trying to knock the support beams out of your house. I don’t think free speach covers intentionally distructive behavior.
Actually, it’s possible, I see from this, that I’m misunderstanding the issue a bit.
My perspective on it was, if someone causes harm as a means of expression, it is unprotected speech, thus acceptable to censor — by this I mean expressing one’sself through a means that does quantifiable damage, such as crashing the server or destroying the supports of the house, not simply saying things that “damage the moral fibre of our whatever.”
I assumed that it the message conveyed had something to do with the issue; it was non-constructive, blatantly offensive (things like that are the reason I believe obscenity laws should be reformed rather than outright revoked), and threatened to damage something quantifiable through its expression.
I see that perhaps the message itself is not relevant to this issue, and that if the posted message had been the same only with less of everything present (and I would at least pose the notion that the same would be gleaned from the post had it not been so ridiculously long as to endanger the stability of the server), this thread wouldn’t exist, and the steps taken would not have been taken. If this is the case, I retract my previous post; I failed to separate in my mind the message from the medium.
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
My s/n got TOSed and I did nothing wrong except have a fight with a friend on AOL, I didn’t curse or be rude…we just fought without verbal insults
It’s weird because my sibling’s s/ns also got reported…but why?
I keep getting these TOS on my screen everytime I turn on my computer .. what shall I do?? Change my Master Screen Name and the other rest of my other names along with my passwords?? I need help in this .. because I really do not know who is doing this to me and I want it to be clear of this violation.