From: gypsy@alembic.acs.com (cupid's six-guns)
Subject: Re: Ken vs Gypsy, CJ and others
Organization: the rain dogs
Distribution: world,public
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1992 04:44:34 GMT

In article <FVuNiB17w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (From A to B) writes:
>
>Goodbye disaster jokes.  Goodbye morbid humour.  Goodbye war jokes.  I
>suppose we can all sit around talking about bunny rabbits and being nice to
>people.

mathew, you stupid, ignorant, clueless fucking weenie.

here's what *I* am talking about; i have NO idea what
you're talking about either.

i am talking about making fun of one individual's personal
anguish, regardless of its connection to reality.

i'm not talking about disaster jokes, i'm not talking about
rape jokes, i'm not talking about any other kind of joke.  i
am talking about singling out INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE and publicly 
abusing them because you think there's a chance they might 
not be telling the exact truth.

the pain caused by jokes that cover a group of people is
lessened by the fact that the hearer knows the joke is not
aimed specifically at himself.

accusing a person of lying is a personal insult.  accusing a
person of lying with NO basis for the assumption but your 
own prejudices, in public, in the sarcastic manner that ken 
did, is absolutely despicable.  

he implied that several people were lying about rape experiences
that seemed perfectly believable to me.  he made light of their
statements with comments like the following:

In <6344@skye.ed.ac.uk> ken@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Ken Johnson) writes:
>Cut it out, asar.181.  Children and those of a nervous disposition may
>be inclined to believe that this sort of thing happns in real life. 

and

In <6322@skye.ed.ac.uk> ken@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Ken Johnson) writes:
>What strange fantasy lives some young women (?) lead.

(i would be glad to mail you copies of all the posts of this
kind i have copies of, if you haven't seen them.)

that's not funny, mathew; no matter how hard i try, i see no
humor whatsoever in these comments, even in the context of the
quotes he took out of context.  all i see is a man who is so 
pissed off about some people who falsely accused others of 
sexual abuse that he thinks that every accusation of sexual 
abuse is false. 

>> and people who wilfully upset other people must learn to cope with
>> the anger and pain of the people they have upset.
>
>Indeed.  They apparently must learn to cope with 'upset' people threatening
>their job and threatening to harass them, all because of words on a computer
>screen.

yes, absolutely.  if ken is so moronic that he doesn't know 
better than to post potentially inflammatory material from his
school (?) account, then yes, he certainly does have to cope 
with that.  if i sent hate mail out on my company's stationery, 
i wouldn't be especially surprised if people complained and my 
boss told me to stop.  would you?  think about it.

and remember, mathew:  USENET is not a right.  the school has
no obligation to allow him to distribute things they feel could
harm the school's image using their equipment.  look at the rep
PSU has earned on the net because of the intolerance of what
must surely be a minority of their students.

i post from a friend's home machine, but i wouldn't be surprised
if he told me he would yank my account if i posted anything else
with the word "spoon" in it.  it's his computer, and he can do
what he wants with it.

>> you go around hurting people, eventually one of them is going to
>> bite back.  
>
>An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  Usenet as playground.  "Why are you
>punching Ken?" "Because John over there hit me last week and Ken just
>reminded me about it!"

okay, let's use that analogy.  say john hit you last week,
and ken comes up and says, "stop whining, john didn't really
hit you, you're only making it up to cause trouble."  say
ken wasn't there, and has no way of knowing whether john hit
you or not.  say you sustained serious internal injuries and
nearly died when john hit you, and you are only beginning to
recover from the trauma.

would you "sit back and take it"?  or would you defend yourself?

m
-- 
minerva burst from joves head with a helluva yell but that does not prove 
that we should stand in awe of every case of mastoiditis            archy
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