Letters to the Editor
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Damn...
...does it always have to get ugly around here, counselor?
-- Orwellian ManPig
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Le Castor Ben has absolutely no history of lying
He really DOES have 2 MBA's from Yale and Duke respectively - along with all those different homes in different cities. He works so hard it's a wonder he has time to post so often on this board.
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dubious technical qualifications?
Ben Dover wrote:
... snip ...
The issues here are that Kathy Sierra, a woman of dubious technical qualifications (though she has been a physical trainer!) cries wolf and the hens circle their wagons and automatically presume she is telling the truth and they offer no substantiation for their claims.
I program for a living and would hardly call Kathy Sierra "unqualified." She doesn't need a graduate degree to write books on Java that are geared toward entry-level audiences. She does, however, need a thorough grasp of her subject matter; the popularity of and critical acclaim for her books should speak for itself. Ben Dover, perhaps you are a person of "dubious qualifications", as I'm sure the women you've encountered have informed you.
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NNG
I think Ben Dover also has an MBA from Princeton, a university which doesn't actually award MBAs.
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salon shouldn't allow anonymous comments either
I wonder how different the boards would be on here if people had to stand by their name.
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Troll Baiting
One of my favorite pastimes is to provoke angry and violent reactions from rightwing creeps. It might be scary to meet these guys face to face, but on the internet their ridiculousness is laugh out loud funny. It's great fun making like LeCastor and getting wankers like Ben Dover all riled up. Of course I always use a pseudonym. Ben Dover if you're reading this, Sonofabastard isn't my real name so don't bother trying to look me up.
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Stepping back
I read both Sierra's farewell letter, the Computerworld article and RageBoy's response. I don't see where RageBoy said that Sierra was making this stuff up, he said that he PERSONALLY did not make the threatening post or photoshopped picture of Sierra, but he never said that those threats and picture weren't posted on his sites. If you read some of those posts and saw that picture, there was nothing remotely funny about them. Those were explicit threats of violence. If those along with other more personal threats were being made, I would not fault Sierra for going to police, which is what she did. As far as if there was the intent to take action based on those threats, only the person that made them knows that. But that's the problem with anonymous threats. So should a person ignore them or not? I think it really depends, obviously in this case it wasn't one anonymous person making threats at another unknown person, but it was one person hiding in behind anonymity to make threats to a person they knew the name, face and whereabouts of. If someone here on Salon said "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob" (exact quote of what was said about Sierra) I really wouldn't care. But if that threat was addressed to me personally and I was a known person in small community...yeah I'd be freaked out. If someone photoshopped my head into that picture Sierra shows on her page and that was posted into a forum where my name and location are well known, along with the other threats that were posted and send to me, I'd take action. At that point you are no longer just another person on the Internet, but you are Suzy Smith at 101 Elm St with an unknown person threatening your life and that person knows exactly what you look like. (Yes, celebs get threats all the time and people know what they look like but they have security!) With that information, I think a person could reasonably feel that they are in danger and that contacting the police is the correct step to take. What is the difference now between what happened online to someone calling my home phone to make death threats or stuffing magazine letter cutout death threats under my door? Of course the person that posts online could be across the world and there really isn't any likelihood of that threat being acted on, but they could also be across the street. So what does someone who is threatened online do?
As far as the RageBoy vs Sierra feud, I don't see anywhere where she accuses him of personally posting the threats/pictures. However he does admit himself that they were hosted on his site. And I think it's splitting hairs of him to say that he's not involved since he didn't actually post those items. He admits that he was aware of it and blows it off as "bad taste". A post detailing how how you want to repeatedly beat someone (in very graphic terms) goes quite beyond BAD TASTE. And even after the first instance of the threats on his first site, he agreed to take that site down (how nice!) and start another one where the same thing occurred. He can deny all he wants that he personally didn't type out those threats, but abdicating all responsibility here is ridiculous.
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Perhaps someone could correct me, say LeCastor
But I recall in my Constitutional class that death threats are not protected speech. So I see no reason, other than blatant misogyny to allow graphic death threats to stay on your website. Hey death of a human is funny or in poor taste, especially when she's good at her job and I'm some tool calling myself Rageboy.
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re: I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man
This woman is full of shit - anyone who would cancel a gig based on what we've seen is a moron and a chickenshit.
She just needs a man to protect her, I guess...
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Death Threats
I really think that a death threat is considered and act, rather than just speech, and is therefore not protected. Like conspiracy -- it's just talking, right? But it's also planning a crime, and it is a crime in itself. I really don't think the First Amendment has anything to do with it.
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Backstory?
Can anyone explain to me exactly what Kathy Sierra has done to attract such a negative reaction? Technorati is not yielding any answers.