[Seattle-editorial] Dennis Bejin

[jonathan lawson]

The noise level is rising with this guy, his posts, the flame responses to 
them and his consequent dissing of the IMC and increasing 
self-referentiality... should we open a conversation about intervening?

I've been ignoring his posts because we have no mechanism for removing 
posts based on objectionable content unless it's REALLY objectionable--i.e. 
its perceived offensiveness to a group of people would chase people away 
from the site if left unchecked, and that concern would have to outweigh 
our goal of opening publishing privileges to everyone.

I haven't thought DB's posts have risen about that bar. Provocative, yes, 
maybe repugnant, but prudishness is not a valid reason to remove a post.

However, the sheer magnitude and repetitiveness of the posts is clogging up 
the newswire. His literally daily posts are generally not duplicates of 
each other (that would make removing them easy) not are they usually just 
links (also an easy call to remove)... but I think a suggestion MIGHT be 
made that they are all basically the same thing over and over 
again--pedophiles are victims of discrimination, pedophilia is normal, 
pedophiles are people too, yada yada--and that the ceaseless repetition is 
less of a get-the-word-out journalistic effort than it is a conscious 
attempt to jam our site. THAT would be a violation of our policy, as a 
newswire poster actually pointed out yesterday (see 
http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=16508).

We have made decisions twice to remove en masse "classifications of posts" 
by a particular author --not banning them per se, but defining a class of 
their posts which were verboten past and future. We discussed carefully the 
decision and them posted it on the website for purposes of transparency. 
This was effective, long term, in dealing with the J.C. and Robert Meade 
"Bobby" "Israel" Deaf Messenger problems, and the same thing might be done 
here even though this guy's schtick isn't as insane as Bobby's or as 
virulent as J.C.'s.

My comments are mean to provoke discussion. Thoughts?

[his posts recently have gotten more self-referential, and contain more 
attacks on the IMC and other posters.. maybe giving him a little more rope 
will make an eventual decision easier.]

jl