Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

mudslinging

david you started the mudslinging that is how you got elected face it your libelous and vicious attacks on good people will haunt you the rest of your life clean up your mess kid

hey david

hey david while you are at it tell us about why you did not support mitch for reelection while you are difending riggs and character values

Options Reconsidered

We'd be better off without postings such as the recent classic, ''Get Lost Nazi Shaver,'' which can be found one string down.

It seems more appropriate to clean up something like that and keep it from happening again -- like one of those accidents dogs make on carpets -- than to read it. Our good friend closet philosopher is quite right about the toxic waste risks such things pose. They should only be handled with gas masks and rubber gloves.

It's hard to imagine that we actually live with people who can do things like that. Yet there are people among us -- grown ups, if you can imagine -- who actually used to do such things under their own names. Incredible!!

But what can we do about it?

1. We could shut down this website entirely, to deny these human bedbugs an outlet for their whatever it is. It's doubtful that they'd ever again find as good a place for this stuff. No newspaper would ever publish it -- even though some of these folks, I understand, have actually tried. But then we'd probably never find as good a place to share our ideas about local government and whatever else. I think that, on balance, our flawed PATA website we have is better than none at all.

2. The webmasters could delete postings like ''Get Lost Nazi Shaver.'' That, however, would impose quite a burden on the webmasters -- a burden, moreover, that they are unwilling to assume. Moreover, how do we draw the line?

It's like the famous saying of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when asked to define ''obscenity'' -- I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it. I feel that way about stuff like ''Get Lost Nazi Shaver.'' The First Amendment does not protect stuff like that, any more than it protects raw obscenity. But it would be quite a task to actually draw the line, by setting down rules for posters. I don't know if anyone of us could do it.

3. The webmasters could warn authors of filth like ''Get Lost Nazi Shaver'' not to post anything of that sort again. After two or three strikes, the webmasters probably could block their e-mail addresses. That way we would hear nothing further from them until they obtained new e-mail addresses. You can see the weakness in that approach already.

4. We could all agree, in our own postings, to act as if we were talking to friends, and to ignore postings (and, to the degree we can identify them, posters) who post things like ''Get Lost Nazi Shaver.'' There probably are enough thugs patrolling this site to pile onto postings like that but, after twenty or so entries, they usually will tire and move on to something else. Maybe, when they discover they can't get a rise out of us, they will quit this stuff entirely, and go back to eating insects, or whatever it is that suchlike do.

Besides, there are some of us who know who some of them are, and who know that they are not worth the bother. I'd have to say that, all things considered, this probably is our best course. We'll probably have to suffer through a few more postings from the perps in response to this one, until they expell the latest dose of venom from their systems.

But what do the rest of you good people think?


By Yosemite Pam

one more

lisa,
if you think back there was one more time a posting was deleted