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Letters
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 12:00 AM

Debunking anti-Obama e-mails

Error-filled chain e-mails designed to scare voters away from Barack Obama are circulating widely on the Internet. Salon deconstructs a pair, one smearing the candidate, the other his wife.

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  • Wednesday, August 20, 2008 10:22 PM

    Thank you miss Mo for your kind words.

    Censorship in the context of these forums would involve someone in a position of authority screening every post submitted to a thread and deciding which ones fit the Salon "standards" and allowing only those to be published.

    What I proposed was that Salon give me a tool similar to the one I have on my satellite TV receiver that lets me pick and choose which channels are listed and which are not when I scan through the listings for something to watch.

    Instead of having to scan through literally hundreds of channels that seldom if ever offer anything of the slightest interest to me in order to discover what's on the few channels that fairly regularly have something on offer that amuses or informs me, I can set it up so that the one's I'm interested in are the only channels I have to scan through to perhaps find something I'll want to see.

    When I decide I don't want to have to skim through, say, the Military channel and something called "Speed" and a half-dozen cooking channels to go from Animal Planet to BBC America, my removing them from my list doesn't take them off the air. If you like those channels and want to watch them at your house, they're still there.

    That's all I proposed; a tool to help me get to what I think might be worth my time without having to wade through a bunch of posts from people that I've decided don't have anything of value to offer me. Removing those "channels" from my menu doesn't make them unavailable to anybody but me. That would be censorship.

    As the Limbaugh fan base has become more active on the progressive web sites, more and more sites are offering an "ignore this person" option on their discussion forums. This is absolutely no different from the SPAM filter I'll bet you, yourself, have on your email account. It gives you control to choose what mail makes it to your inbox and what doesn't.

    Review: Censorship = one person/body preventing another from having access to information. Choice = one person deciding for themselves what appears on their monitor and what doesn't.

    If you still don't get it and think that choice is censorship, I give up.

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