I think it's too scary to be tolerated, if someone declares themselves to be a "Nazi", especially when publicly e-mailing a person of Jewish ancestry. It's an implicit threat, if one takes "Nazi" as one who wishes or intends to kill as many Jews as he can lay his hands on.
Let's come up with a policy for this.
Ed Poor
--- "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
I think it's too scary to be tolerated, if someone declares themselves to be a "Nazi", especially when publicly e-mailing a person of Jewish ancestry. It's an implicit threat, if one takes "Nazi" as one who wishes or intends to kill as many Jews as he can lay his hands on.
I think that's way overboard. This "threat" would be laughed out of court. A real threat is when someone says "I'm going to ..", or "watch your back", or "I know where you live", or a similar formulation. If someone made such a real threat on WP then the appropriate response would be to call the cops. Just saying "I'm a Nazi" is not a threat without additional words that suggest action towards the "threatened" person.
Actually I find the idea that calling oneself a Nazi is a worse offence than calling someone else a Nazi to be astonishing. This is also true in law, as calling someone else a Nazi is libel but calling oneself a Nazi is perfectly legal.
Let's come up with a policy for this.
Obviously personal threats cannot be tolerated. Nor can criminal libels. Both should be capital offences. If some litigous person one day decides to sue WP for publishing a libel against him/herself, just the costs will close us down even if the case is weak.
Zero.
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
zero 0000 wrote:
Obviously personal threats cannot be tolerated. Nor can criminal libels. Both should be capital offences.
That's an extreme penalty for that. To be consistent with my general objection to the death penalty, I would need to oppose that.
If some litigous person one day decides to sue WP for publishing a libel against him/herself, just the costs will close us down even if the case is weak.
They'll do that where many people would so no libel, and often without any reasonalble cause whatsoever. We can do nothing to prevent that. Censoring ourselves to conform with libel chill is a siaervice to free speech. If something is true and factual we should not be afraid to say it. We do still need to be able to know the difference between fact and opinion.
Ec
zero 0000 wrote:
Obviously personal threats cannot be tolerated. Nor can criminal libels. Both should be capital offences.
That's an extreme penalty for that. To be consistent with my general objection to the death penalty, I would need to oppose that.
If some litigous person one day decides to sue WP for publishing a libel against him/herself, just the costs will close us down even if the case is weak.
They'll do that where many people would see no libel, and often without any reasonalble cause whatsoever. We can do nothing to prevent that. Censoring ourselves to conform with libel chill is a disservice to free speech. If something is true and factual we should not be afraid to say it. We do still need to be able to know the difference between fact and opinion.
Ec