Re: Los Angeles Times article on Helsingius and anon.penet.fi

[hallam@ai.mit.edu]

>I and you may well choose to do so, but the vast majority of the human
>beings believe just anything that is repeated loud and long enough.
>Otherwise, nobody would hire PR and pay for advertisement, politicians
>wouln't be fedwith taxpayer's money, Bosnians would trade goods instead
>of gunshots, etc. I'm personally not interested in conjuring up the latest
>utopia for a minoritarian sect of illuminati: I need to live in the real
>world, and push for viable solutions that change it for better, now.

The question is not whether defamation is a problem but whether the
courts make the problem better or worse. I think that any analysis
of the behaviour of the scientologists would indicate that the courts
make the problem worse. Similarly the English libel laws have been used
by a long line of crooks and swindlers to extort money. Robert Maxwell
being an extreeme example.

The thing about the Internet is that it is possible to make a reply.

This does not help of course in the example cited, but I don't think
that the Mutlu/Serdar flamebot could have been dealt with through
the court system. (For those of you who don;t know, a poster calling
himself first Hasan B Mutlu, then Serdar Argic used to make insulting
responses to anyone who made a USEnet post about the middle east. Mutlu
was in fact a perl script run by an agent of the Turkish intelligence
services, the objective being to discredit all mention of the Turkish
massacre of the Armenians through use of counter propaganda. Mutlu
dissapeared from the net at the same time that the sysop of the system 
he was posting from was deported for overstaying his visa.


		Phill