| From: | "M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org> |
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| Date: | Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:03:22 -0700 |
| Subject: | Re: Fw: Re: [WDDM] I spit in your face |
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Georges, Was your "To the WDDM owner" - see below,. meant to me? First, from the headers below, it seems that you have not sent that e-mail either to me, nor to the list, but only to Ron White, who forwarded it later to the list. So without him, I would not get it. Also his e-mail with that very crazy and indeed racist article by Mark Glen was initially not sent to the list but directly to you by Ron White, and so nothing could have been filtered by this list (even if we were set up to do it, which we are not - see more below). Second, rest assured that I understand your feelings about the denial of holocaust, and smearing the memory of all the millions of its innocent victims. The fact that Jews were discriminated for centuries in Europe, that they were subject of pogroms which culminated in Nazi holocaust is well documented, and no decent person would deny that and belittle the horrors through which their victims went. Third, you are lucky that I am responding right away this time because I have had little time to follow the discussion in this list in the past year, for which I sort of apologize. I am still planning to read most of the last year's e-mail soon. But I have been reading all the mail addressed directly to the webmaster, and checking on the site from time to time. No requests in there. So please if you have something urgent, please send it to wbm@world-wide-democracy.net or to may personal address, Fourth, there is no particular owner of the WDDM. I do not consider myself an owner, I am just an ordinary member and a servant, too. We all are supposed to be the collective owners - in the spirit of the DD that we profess to support or promote. As I understand it, the discussion about how to organize ourselves ended up some years ago in the consensus that everybody who shows some interest in DD will be automatically accepted as a member, there is no waiting period, no other criteria. The more recent experiment with an elected board has not changed that so far. I am checking the WDDM home pages of the newly signed-up members and all of them are expressing some interest in DD. If you have not yet seen it, the WDDM home page of Ron White is this one: http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/Wiki/kissycheeky There is nothing racist on it.. As for this list, it is not moderated. That is, the postings of the members are not moderated, if they send them from the e-mail address they used to register at WDDM. Only the contributions from the non-registered addresses need to be approved by me. These are mostly from spammers which have been recently denied mostly by default because if I do not have time to react to such posts within a week, they are automatically denied. However, if I found something at least somewhat valuable among all those lapsed posts, I salvaged it and sent it into the list with some delay as you may have noticed. So at least such basic maintenance of this site and list I am always trying to do. If I missed some important decisions about WDDM made recently, please let me know. Fifth, here is my personal position: I do not see see how banning certain, even very crazy, types of speech will bring any solution to the problems of mankind, how it will clarify all the misunderstands we have about others. Only intelligent discussion can bring us to a better world. Banning somebody, even somebody who is very wrong, may only convince them even more that they are right. It is easy to ban anything you don't like in a hierarchical society, from the position of power. But this is supposedly a gathering of people who believe in Direct Democracy, who believe that the society can self-organize as a society of absolutely equal members. So here you have a real-life situation: in DD there will be all kinds of both reasonable but also "crazy" people trying to live together. Including people like you and Ron White. All these people will need to find ways how to live together or at least live side by side without getting on each other nerves too much. Could we try here to find some ways of more intelligent interactions? One possibility would be to limit exchanges on subjects on which irreconcilable differences are found (state your position clearly once, but do not waste resources in angry prolonged debates that do not lead anywhere for the time being) , and try to find what we have in common, and maybe later try to return to those touchy subjects and see whether we can make some progress on them? Regards, Mirek Ron White wrote:
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