Armed Blowfish wrote:
On 20/09/2007, William Pietri
<william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
We should fight false accusations with truth, not
censorship. By acting
like a false accusation is a terrible, horrible thing, we conspire to
make it shameful. Instead, we should be conspiring to make it a non-event.
Your argument reminds me of a debate about whether
or not the names of rape victims should be published
in the news. [...]
You can read about it here:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3677/is_199904/ai_n8831490
Interesting article. Their broad point seems to be that their study
shows neither positive or negative changes in attitude from strangers to
the victims of rape based on leaving names in or out of news reports.
And that since rape victims generally don't like being named, the choice
should generally be to leave the name out. That seems sensible to me.
I think our circumstances here are different in that we are an
intentional community of people choosing to work on a high-profile
public project. In our case, the question is much trickier. When some
random person on the street is assaulted, their identity is irrelevant
to reasonable public interest. The BADSITES cases, though, seem to all
center around accusations of malfeasance and the legitimacy of
discussing those accusations.
A better real-world analogy is probably how we handle it when criminals
accuse cops of bad behavior. A lot of those accusations are sure to be
false. Some are sure to be true. Who do you favor?
The BADSITES approach seems to be equivalent to what you see in [[The
Thin Blue Line (documentary)]] in that it favors solidarity with the
in-group over investigation of complaints from known or suspected
miscreants.
Personally, I'm more of the "sunshine is the best disinfectant" approach.
William
--
William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri