I finally figured out how to selectively delete comments here.
Now, therefore, I don’t have to turn off all comments in order to rid my blog of certain comments which happened to have contained references to, or the howling ultimatums of, a certain haboob that blew through here recently with a voice out of its whirlwind commanding me to delete all mentions of it on my blog.
Readers are now free and able to leave comments on this blog.
Thanks for your participation.
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7 comments:
Erich
Will you be re-enabling comments @ Hesperado?
Thanks for reminding me -- I will now do that and add that into this post (I had had a couple of spam type comments I never could get rid of, so now will do that).
udge orders man to end Internet attacks on crime novelist Patricia Cornwell
Larry O?Dell, Canadian Press
Published: Thursday, June 07, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A U.S. federal judge in Virginia has ordered a self-published author to cease an Internet vendetta in which he has falsely accused best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell of plagiarism, bribery, anti-Semitism and even plotting to have him murdered.
Those claims are among 45 specific lies that Leslie R. Sachs has spread about Cornwell, Judge Norman K. Moon said in Tuesday's order granting the writer's motion for a permanent injunction.
Moon said the statements were not only false but were "calculated to expose plaintiff to public contempt or ridicule" and were published with actual malice, thus clearing the high bar the law has set for libelling a public figure.
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Sachs has made no direct threats, but Cornwell has said his allegations have caused her fear, anxiety and sleeplessness. She said Sachs' campaign against her was a major reason she moved away from Richmond in 2001. She now lives in Massachusetts, and says she rarely ventures away from her home without a bodyguard.
Cornwell had ignored Sachs for a long time but sued him for libel when the Internet attacks escalated.
"I'm trying to keep a cap on my anger, because anger makes you sick, and I don't let myself get hateful because that just poisons you," Cornwell told The Boston Globe. "But when a schoolyard bully punches me in the nose, I'm going to have to hit back."
Sachs did not immediately respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.
Cornwell, 50, and Sachs first clashed in 2000 when he accused her of plagiarizing from his self-published book, "The Virginia Ghost Murders," in her novel, "The Last Precinct."
She sued for libel, and a judge ordered Sachs to remove from his book stickers calling it "The must-read gothic mystery that preceded Patricia Cornwell's newest bestseller." The judge also ordered Sachs to stop using Cornwell's name to promote his book.
The Internet campaign ensued, with Sachs calling Cornwell a "Jew-hater," a felon under federal investigation and a "neo-Nazi," prompting Cornwell to return to court to seek enforcement of the 2000 injection and an order barring further defamatory postings.
Sachs, 52, grew up in Chicago, and graduated from Harvard in 1975. He did not attend a hearing on Cornwell's motion last month and was not represented by counsel. Court papers listed his last U.S. residence as Woodbridge, Virginia, but he has called himself a "political refugee" who moved to Europe in 2004 to escape Cornwell's legal actions.
Hey "Jake":
Fuck you.
Isn't it funny how those who claim to constantly feel "threatened" and "attacked" are more often than not precisely those individuals doing most of the attacking and threatening themselves?
Since no one here, or on any other blog, would even use their real names, I don't know what the above story, regarding novelist Patricia Cornwell, has to do with this blog.
From the post above:
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A U.S. federal judge in Virginia has ordered a self-published author to cease an Internet vendetta in which he has falsely accused best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell of plagiarism, bribery, anti-Semitism and even plotting to have him murdered.
As far as I know people are allowed to express their personal opinions on the Internet, and since the posters do not use their true identities anyway, no one can be really be accused of a particular crime with any seriousness.
It is allowed to say what we think. Freedom of Speech.
Exactly. This whole episode (as well as dozens of prior episodes on various threads of JW that were, while quantitatively milder, fairly equal in intensity and insanity) demonstrates not only a weird apparently psychopathic transferrence phenomenon (where the supposedly victimized accuser is doing everything he or she is accusing his or her supposed victimizer of doing) but also is fraught with a chilling atmosphere of censorship and intimidation of free speech.
Freedom entails -- must entail -- a certain degree of unpleasantness and imperfection (because humans are imperfect). (This is all the more true to the extent that a free society also believes in organizing, and trying to make life better for, large masses of many different types of people with many different personalities and beliefs.)
Of course, if I stumbled on a blog that had several posts devoted to how crazy and irrational I am (identifying me under any one of the many pseudonyms I might have taken on the Net over the years -- such as Maartin Fairchild or Mulrooney Elliott or Maaddox Eclair -- and presenting an argument for the persuasiveness of my being banned from a certain public Internet forum, I certainly wouldn't like that; but I wouldn't go freakishly postal about it either and try, like a Samson on steroids and LSD, to bring the Halls of Justice down on my "attacker". In fact, what I might do in such a circumstance is post a couple of reasoned counter-arguments on that blog (and hell, who knows, maybe lob a couple of insults back at them too), then ignore it after that, having chalked it up to the fact -- something that clinically psychotic people of course cannot appropriately process -- that in this life many people will not like me or my ideas.
Ten Minute U-Tube...answers the question, 'Is Obama a Muslim?'
"What Did Obama Say?"
Posted Feb 17th - You decide! - reb
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