David Gerard said:
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport@bluebottle.com) [050513 17:26]:
Indeed. The first sniff of endorsement of that kind of thuggery and I'll be gone, for one.
Publishing a takedown notice is vigilantism?
No. But soliciting or endorsing a hate mail campaign is, in my opinion.
This touches on my main beef with the reaction to Wollmann here.
For all his grandiose threats, Wollmann is a puny, harmless self-deluding individual with no supporters, but a group of dedicated, obsessed enemies who have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be without scruples or pity. I know these people intimately, I watched aghast as they built the legend, and I did my best to gently tear away the artifice and reconcile them with their bete noir. I misjudged badly. Hatred of Wollmann led to active email mailbombing/spamming campaigns against him (to his credit one Usenet administrator helped Wollmann to deal with and stop these--not that he showed any gratitude). It led to a campaign of denigration in the San Diego University newsgroups, with the result that crossposts from astrology groups, or posts discussing any aspect of the Edmond Wollmann flame war, are now forbidden in those newsgroups. Somewhere in there is a private individual, someone like you and me. Though he is not particularly likeable he is entitled to his privacy. He is trying in his typically misguided, futile, inept way to ask for privacy.