Re: [Anon newsgroup posting "censorship"]

[Steve Schear <schear@lvdi.net>]

At 1:19 PM -0400 12/31/97, The Sheriff wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>[snip]
>
>>My cancelled Usenet article offered a reward for killing the spammer:
>
>[snip]
>
>>This is fucking censorship!  I'm putting the notice of the CAUCE reward on my
>>web home page at [snip], right next to the pictures of the
>>pre-teen kids screwing.  Fuck you, Zorch, you're next after C, P, and G Lewis.
>
>Ok, tell you what.
>
>Let's post YOUR address, YOUR phone number, and that of YOUR family.
>We'll post that information to every newsgroup and mailing list we
>can think of.  We'll offer a $50,000 AMERICAN reward for the quick
>extermination of you and your family.  And if some kook takes us up
>on it, we might even be good enough to warn you.
>
>It's not censorship, you idiot.  The dude who clipped out your post
>was trying to keep some fucking psycho from killing somebody else for
>some imagined (or not, who knows?) $50k reward.
>
>It's common sense, in other words.

Here, here.  Making threatening statements or calling for someone's harm are not to be tolerated.  However, predicting someone's continued good health (as a psychic) and wagering on that prediction against other (psychics) who have different predictions is a contest of skill and not a threat or illegal in any way, even if these wagers, psychics and payouts are anonymous.

--Steve